Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series

by Douglas Phillips

  “Our newest colleague,” said Daniel, gesturing to Marie, who had caught up and was breathing heavily.

  Marie reached out to shake hands with Janine. “Hi, Janine. Marie Kendrick, NASA Operations. You’ll probably need my info to book flights?” She pulled her government badge from its clip and offered it to Janine.

  Janine held up her hand. “Not really needed, thanks, Marie. I’ll get you both on a military flight. Much faster and no boarding passes. You’ll like it.”

  “That’s okay?” Marie asked. “Didn’t Dr. Bradley just say—”

  “Pay no attention to what the boss actually says,” Janine laughed. “I know what he really means when he says ‘quick,’ and it doesn’t include having you wait in TSA lines.”

  The two women exchanged a look, acknowledging their common experience. Daniel was oblivious to the female connection happening right in front of him. One of the unspoken wonders of the world is the ability of women to identify allies, five seconds after they’ve met. Daniel was thinking of more mundane things.

  “Janine, this trip is short notice—well, no notice at all, really. I hate to ask, but is there any chance you could locate someone to feed Darwin again for me? I’ll leave a key.”

  He got the answer he was hoping for. “I’ll do it myself,” Janine said, looking directly into Daniel’s eyes. It was a sweet look, bordering on romantic. She held out her hand, and Daniel handed over his house key. “Don’t worry about kitty cat,” she continued. “As I recall, he likes me.”

  Daniel squinted. Was she reminding him that she had been at his house before? A suggestion of interest? You’re reading too much into it, he thought. She’s offering to take care of your cat.

  “Thanks, I owe you one. More than one,” he said. The quick exchange was all they would get as Bradley stepped out of his office with a glare that made it clear their time for pleasantries was up.

  Marie leaned into the desk. “Nice to meet you, and thanks for your help.”

  Janine flipped the key a few times in her hand. “My pleasure. Have a good trip.” Marie and Daniel disappeared into Bradley’s office and the door closed.

  The office was relatively small for a top advisor to the most powerful person on the planet. Just a desk, a bookcase and a few chairs, with a view out the window to traffic on Seventeenth Street below. Working for the government didn’t come with luxury.

  Bradley swiveled his chair around and wrote on a notepad as he talked. “You’ll need to be at the airport soon, so I’m just going to get you started. When you get to Fermilab, you’ll be meeting with the director, Jae-ho Park, and he’ll give you more. Park is an enigma, but nothing a bit of strategy can’t overcome.”

  “Difficult?” asked Daniel. He had seen it before. Science facilities around the nation were in regular communication with Washington, but resentment at being audited could still be strong.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Bradley countered. “He’s cooperative enough, but highly protective. I can help grease the skids, but I want you two already on a plane when I make that call. Otherwise he’ll spend the entire call arguing about why you don’t need to be there.”

  “Do we need to be there?”

  “Yes.” Bradley sighed heavily. “Yes, you do.”

  “Something tells me this is no ordinary story. Spence, I realize my knowledge of every government program is not one hundred percent.” Daniel raised an eyebrow. “But it seems my exclusion from this particular program is intentional.”

  “You’re right on that, but don’t feel bad. Until this morning, even the vice president was an outsider. The security is tight. I’ll catch you up. It’s fascinating stuff, but it transitions into the realm of science fiction pretty quickly. When Shea mentioned they make things disappear, she wasn’t kidding.”

  “Okay,” Daniel chuckled. “Tell us all about the invisible ray gun.”

  “We’ll get there. But first, particle physics. Marie, are you familiar with Fermilab?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” she answered. “It’s near Chicago?”

  “Yes, Batavia, Illinois. It’s the principal laboratory in this country for high-energy particle research. They have a long history of major discoveries, mostly related to quarks and neutrinos.” Bradley’s eyes darted between them. “How about string theory?”

  Daniel answered. “Well, it’s the idea that all matter is made up a fundamental building block, even smaller than a quark. It’s just a mathematical idea, though, not yet proven. Proponents say that string theory could unite the Standard Model with the Theory of Gravity, giving us the so-called Theory of Everything.”

  Marie raised both hands. “Sorry, I don’t suppose you might have a copy of Particle Physics 101 that I could borrow? My background is in space operations. Very much Newtonian physics, velocities, acceleration, orbital mechanics. A smattering of Einstein. We don’t have much need for anything more exotic.”

  Daniel knew the feeling. His scientific education was deep, but his career had wandered across multiple disciplines, and there was always a situation where his subject knowledge was thin. It was natural to feel intimidated when everyone else in the conversation seemed to be an expert.

  “No problem,” Bradley continued. “Space operations… that’s dealing with the logistics of space flight?”

  Marie sat up higher in her chair. “Well, it’s a lot of things—training, planning, people and hardware. In my case, it’s all human spaceflight. For example, recently I’ve been working with engineers on some ISS design improvements. We have a lot of private companies involved these days, and frankly their engineers don’t have the same level of experience that you see in the NASA family.”

  “Family?” asked Daniel.

  “Yeah, it really is,” she said. “Astronauts, their spouses, their kids, their parents. It’s surprising how close you get. We think of ourselves as an extended family.”

  “And the guys in Soyuz? Jeremy Taylor?” asked Bradley.

  “Yeah, both Sergei and Jeremy,” she said, looking down. “We’re pretty close.” The emotional connection was obvious. Daniel wondered how she might be handling the real possibility that both men were dead, or soon would be. He hoped she was ready for whatever lay ahead.

  “Everyone is doing their best to help,” Bradley said as carefully as he could. Marie stared at the floor and nodded.

  She lifted her head, and her eyes fixed on Bradley. “I know they are,” she said, her voice steady. “Thank you, Dr. Bradley. If you can help with the physics, I’ll be in a better place to contribute.”

  “I can do that,” Bradley replied. “I’ll give you the thirty-second summary of string theory, and I’m sure Daniel can fill in the rest later. Okay?”

  Marie nodded.

  “Let’s start with atoms. Protons and neutrons with orbiting electrons, right? But as small as they are, these particles are composed of even smaller bits. Quarks and leptons. They’re like Lego blocks; put a few quarks together and you have a proton.”

  Bradley gestured as he talked. “That’s the matter side of the universe. In addition, there are four fundamental forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. In quantum physics, forces are represented by a particle called a boson. For example, a photon is a type of boson that transmits the electromagnetic force. The Standard Model pulls all of this together into one theory of matter and force.” He paused and raised both eyebrows quizzically.

  “Keeping up so far.” Marie smiled.

  “Okay. Now, here’s the twist. Gravity, one of the four forces, seems to be different, and physicists have struggled for years to understand why. This is where string theory comes in. It resolves the question by suggesting that gravity is not different and can be integrated into the Standard Model like the other three forces.

  “According to string theory, quarks and leptons and bosons are all made up of an even tinier bit, a one-dimensional string that vibrates in different ways to represent each partic
le. If string theory is right, then gravity combines with the Standard Model and forms what they call the Theory of Everything.”

  “Very nicely explained,” said Marie. “I’ve read about some of those concepts, but you do a good job of putting it together into a coherent story.”

  Bradley momentarily stopped and rubbed his shiny head. “Very kind of you. At my age, I’m glad I can still communicate. But now the story gets strange. Do you recall the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012?”

  “At the CERN facility in Switzerland?”

  “Right. It was big news at the time, transcending the scientific world and spilling out into public journalism. There was plenty of excitement, even though the average man on the street had no idea what a Higgs boson was. But the discovery wasn’t just Higgs—there was more, much more.”

  Bradley paused, eying Daniel and then Marie as if he was ready to spill the beans. “It wasn’t well reported or even understood at the time, but on top of the Higgs boson, the CERN project team found the elusive string itself. No longer just a mathematician’s dream, it suddenly became real. String theory, and all that it implies, is real.”

  The jumble of science, ever-present in Daniel’s head, made a connection. “Spence, that’s huge. It’s the dimensional mathematics in string theory, right? If there’s evidence that strings are real, then the dimensional mathematics would have to be real too.”

  Bradley smiled broadly. “It’s your specialty, Daniel, finding the relationships. Precisely why you’re the right person to lead this inquiry. The quantum world can get very strange. Location becomes a probability not an exact coordinate, and particles can become entangled like twins that think alike. String theory has its own bizarre world because the mathematics only work when string vibrations occur in more than three dimensions.”

  He turned to Marie. “You’ve probably heard of extra dimensions? A fourth dimension?”

  Marie shrugged. “Well, I know physicists sometimes use time as the fourth dimension.”

  Bradley nodded. “They do, yes. But string theory involves mass, energy and space, not time. So, when physicists talk about extra dimensions, they’re talking about space. We’re all familiar with a three-dimensional world, right?” He gestured towards the sides of the office. “We say that this room has three dimensions, walls and ceiling, each perpendicular to the other. If we talk about a position on Earth, we use three descriptions, north and south, east and west, up and down. In mathematics, we use the x, y, and z axes. Now, what if there was a fourth dimension—a fourth dimension of space?”

  Daniel shifted in his chair. He started to say something, but held back. Bradley was walking straight off the crazy cliff. If it was coming from anyone else, Daniel might have laughed it off and walked out. But coming from Bradley, even crazy could start to sound plausible. He watched to see how Marie might react as Bradley continued his plausibly crazy explanation.

  “What if there were another dimension, perpendicular to the existing three? I can’t point to this direction, because I’m a three-dimensional person and can’t move my arm into a fourth dimension. I can’t see it because my eyes are also stuck in this three-dimensional world. But mathematically, it’s a simple matter of just adding a fourth axis. In fact, string theory doesn’t stop at four dimensions. It postulates a world of ten dimensions, three of which we see and seven that are hidden to us.”

  “Mysteriously hidden dimensions? To tell you the truth, it sounds more like some religious cult,” Marie said earnestly.

  “Reality doesn’t always conform to our idea of what’s normal,” countered Bradley. “The evidence uncovered in 2012 demonstrated that string theory is the true representation of particles at the quantum scale, including the bizarre notion that strings support ten quantum dimensions.”

  “Why do you say quantum dimensions? Are they submicroscopic?” she asked.

  “Precisely. Strings are unimaginably small. If a single electron were enlarged to the size of the Earth, a string would still be a speck of dust too small to see. These seven extra dimensions that I was talking about? For all practical purposes, they don’t exist, they’re too small. But at quantum scales, they’re as real as anything else.”

  He paused, looking around the room as if strings might be floating in the air. “The universe is often stranger than we expect and sometimes stranger than we can imagine.”

  Daniel sorted through the concepts Bradley was presenting. Physicists had long speculated that string theory might be real, yet no more than a curiosity. The quantum world often stipulated rules that applied only to infinitesimals. Even still, confirmation of string theory would be an enormous achievement. His natural skepticism kicked in.

  “Spence, I get it. But if strings were found in 2012, how come it’s not big news? Come on, that’s huge. I read a lot of science journals, and nobody’s mentioning it.”

  Bradley nodded in agreement. “Just as the universe is mysterious, so are governments. The initial evidence was incomplete. Scientists discussed among themselves, but before any results were published, both the US and Europe decided to classify all projects. They instructed project scientists at CERN and Fermilab to continue to study but not publish until further directed. There were a few leaks to journalists, but without confirmation, those stories died quickly. I think everyone expected the classification to be lifted, but so far that hasn’t happened.”

  Daniel put the pieces together. “So, Christine Shea thinks that this classified work on string dimensions has somehow caused Soyuz to disappear? What does she know that you haven’t told us?”

  “She’s speculating,” said Bradley. “Let’s be cautious about this. There are other more conventional explanations, and we’d all be wise not to jump immediately to the craziest idea. Let’s pursue this rationally and see what we find. It may amount to nothing.”

  Something flashed on Bradley’s computer, attracting his attention. “It looks like Janine has you on a military flight out of Joint Base Andrews. A car will pick you up out front. We’ve only got a few minutes… but hang on, something else… it’s from Shea.” Bradley clicked and read aloud.

  “She says: ‘Attached are recordings from Goddard and Australia. No radar contact, voice only. Unusual, to say the least. Continue your investigation with all speed.’”

  He clicked again, and his computer speakers came to life. Bradley turned up the volume. The sound was mostly static. Faintly in the background, a few Russian-sounding words could be heard.

  “The voice might be Sergei,” said Marie. “It’s hard to tell with so much static, but it does sound like him. From what I could hear, he’s saying ‘contact… lower frequency… world… repeat.’ Not terribly meaningful.”

  “You speak Russian?” Daniel asked.

  Marie nodded. “Well enough.”

  Bradley replayed the audio again, and all three strained to hear anything else in the recording. Marie shook her head, still uncertain. “If Soyuz is the source, it must be Sergei.”

  Bradley nodded. He clicked again, and they listened to a second audio file. Daniel stepped closer, and Marie pulled her chair up to the edge of Bradley’s desk. The audio was still broken by static, but the words were crisper, and this time in English. The voice was American, and the man’s tone was clearly distressed.

  “… not receiving, but we will continue to transmit until…”

  “… orbital decay likely to continue as we are…”

  “… all three discs come into view at times…”

  “… Mission Control, Soyuz, repeating at…”

  Marie gasped as the last statement was spoken. She looked at Daniel. “It’s definitely Jeremy Taylor,” she said, beaming. “I’m sure of it.”

  Bradley pounded his fist, and pencils bounced on the desk. “They’re alive.”

  Marie’s expression changed. Her eyes cast down and she shook her head as if something was still wrong. “Two different transmissions picked up on both sides of the planet,” she said slowly. “It
shows that Soyuz is still in orbit. So, why no radar contact?”

  “Maybe they landed in Australia?” offered Daniel.

  She shook her head. “Even a landing would have produced a radar track. We’ve got pretty much worldwide radar coverage, even out over the Pacific. I don’t see how we could have missed it. And the Australia transmission proves they made another orbit. It blows away the theory that this was just a Russian radar failure. The Australians couldn’t find them either.”

  “Going forward,” Bradley said, “I think we have to assume they’re still in orbit. This is looking like a rescue mission—NASA and Roscosmos will take the lead. But our task hasn’t changed. We still need to know if the Diastasi program at Fermilab had anything to do with this. If we’re lucky, we’re chasing down a dead end, and NASA will find Soyuz the old-fashioned way. But if we’re dealing with something more bizarre, it’s our job to figure that out, and soon.”

  He picked up a pencil and poised over a pad of paper. “Marie, how much time do you think they have? Oxygen-wise.”

  Marie shook her head slowly. “There’s the rub. They separated from their service module hours ago, so… the air in the cabin plus a few emergency bottles. Twenty-four to thirty-six hours, at least that’s what the Soyuz manuals will tell you.”

  “Could they stretch it?” asked Daniel.

  “Maybe, a little. But the longer they stretch, the more carbon dioxide build-up becomes an issue.” She exchanged a serious look with Daniel. It was clear there were several ways this could end, and few of the outcomes were positive.

  Bradley wrote a few numbers on the pad and punctuated them with the pencil point hitting the paper. “The clock is ticking.”

  Janine opened the door. “The car is here to take you two to Andrews.”

  “On your way,” Bradley said with the wave of a hand. “I’ll send a few more documents about the program by email, and I’ll make sure that Dr. Park is ready for you when you arrive. Good luck, and let me know if there is anything I can do on this end. Remember, you have the full resources of the president at your disposal.”