Daniel set his bag on the table with a noticeable clunk. “Perfect.”
“What? Did you bring your free weights with you?”
He laughed. “Just as heavy. Something very unusual we found in South Dakota.” He pulled out his laptop and turned it on. “Soyuz landed there.”
Her head spun. “Landed? Are you kidding me? That’s huge.”
It was huge, and he hated to let her down. “They weren’t in it. The capsule was empty.”
She shook her head. “Wait a second… the capsule landed, but without its passengers?”
Daniel nodded. “We don’t know what happened. We’re working on it.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in South Dakota, figuring this out?”
“My partner is still out there. I came back because I think some of the answers we need are right here.” He reached into his bag, pulled out the silver teardrop-shaped plate and handed to her.
She took it in one hand and added a second hand. “Heavy, what is it?”
“We’re not sure. We’re calling in the yin. There’s a similar one back in South Dakota, the yang. These things were inside Soyuz.”
Nala squinted and shifted the thick plate in her hands. “Mysterious. No people, but heavy metal returning from quantum space.” She looked up with a worried expression. “You sure Soyuz was empty? I mean, really empty?”
Daniel nodded. “Yeah, I thought the same thing. They searched for human remains. Somehow those guys got out. Personally, I’m suspecting a fourth-dimension-style exit. You know, where they jump right past the metal walls of the capsule like they weren’t even there? The usual stuff that you deal with every day.”
She tilted her head. “I’m not sure how that would work. They were already in 4-D space. Expand a fifth dimension? It’s either that, or solve the problem of anything alive returning to 3-D space. I don’t know, this is quickly getting beyond my experience.”
“It’s possible the Chinese have advanced well beyond Fermilab.”
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t put so much faith in Wah Xiang’s abilities. This stuff is not easy. It took us years to get to where we are. They’ve only had our software for a couple of months, and right away they fucked up. They may be good hackers, but in my opinion they’re crappy scientists. Don’t expect them to unfuck this mess… if that’s a word.”
“But their Higgs Factory came online faster than anyone anticipated, and we agree they’re targeting at much greater distances.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, but those are really just the same thing. Bigger accelerator means greater energy, which helps the neutrino beam stay coherent to greater distances. I grant you they’ve built a larger accelerator. But I’d still say they don’t know what they’re doing with it.”
It was good to get her view, even if neither one of them knew exactly what the Chinese could or couldn’t do. “I’m just looking at the possibilities,” he said. “Unfortunately, the competing explanation takes us out on a limb. Technology not of this world. Alien. Some of the people out in South Dakota are taking that option seriously.”
Nala straightened. “Really?”
Daniel took the device from her and set it on its tip in the center of the table. “Watch this.”
Her eyes grew wide as the yin stabilized in a vertical position. “Holy… it does a hell of a good en pointe.”
“That’s just a warm-up.” He spoke the Russian phrase, the device clicked once, and the circular image snapped into view.
Nala leaned in close. “Wow!” She positioned her head to the left and then the right of the object. The flat image floated in the air like a piece of paper glued in place. “This is real?” He nodded. She reached out to touch it, and suddenly the image grew larger. She held her hand in the path of the projection, moving it slowly and watching the image resize.
“I love it. I want one, to put on my coffee table.” She looked back at Daniel. “Personally, I’d go with your alien hypothesis. This thing ain’t Chinese.”
“It’s not my hypothesis.”
“But you’re leaning that way.”
“No, I don’t think so.” He tried to sound convincing. “Look, this is my professional background. I started my career thinking I would be involved in a SETI group or follow the trailblazers of the Kepler program and search for habitable planets beyond Earth. But I learned quickly what it takes to declare you’ve found life elsewhere, and it’s a lot more than we have right now.”
“But you’re holding physical evidence.” She pointed to the yin. “Diastasi never had that—we only speculated what we might find.”
“What do you mean, you speculated?”
She lowered her head. “Daniel, Daniel. You’re living the dream. Around here, we’ve talked about this for the past year and a half.”
“What, aliens?”
Her expression was serious. “Yeah, first contact, all of that.”
She was heading down a path that had been lingering in the back of his mind ever since their meeting in the bar. He’d pushed it to the corners of his thoughts, probably to avoid dealing with it. But he really wasn’t surprised at her disclosure. “It’s the compression, isn’t it? We’ve opened a door.”
Nala grinned. “It’s finally sunk in, eh? I did try to tell you. Compression is the crown jewel. It’s what this discovery is all about. Spatial compression, reducing real distances to almost nothing. You bet it opens a door.”
“And you… or the Diastasi team, have been talking about what you might do with it?”
“Jan Spiegel laid out this exact scenario more than a year ago. He knew, we all knew, there were dangers with compression—getting too close to a star or a black hole. But there were also opportunities. If you can compress space in any chosen direction, you’ve got a pretty good tool for scouting the galaxy by remote control. Send a camera out there. Who knows what you might see?”
Daniel took a deep breath. It was good to know he wasn’t the only one with these thoughts. “And now it’s happened. But instead of a camera, living, breathing astronauts became unwilling guinea pigs.”
Nala swiveled her chair and they sat face-to-face. “Daniel, I have no idea how far those guys were pushed in the kata direction. We’ll have to ask the Chinese about that. But if it was more than a thousand kilometers, then some other direction of real 3-D space compressed by a factor of a billion, maybe more. This is at the bottom of the Spiegel curve—a small tweak in kata and you can bring stars into your backyard. These guys may have been sent to a place where Earth was on one side and who knows what… the Orion Nebula… was on the other.”
Daniel unclenched his fists, not having noticed how they had gotten into that position. The idea was disturbing. She was disturbing, probably because she might be right. All his training as a scientist told him to be very careful, but his instinct was leaning the other way.
Nala slid a finger along the curved edge of the yin. “And you say there’s another one like this inside Soyuz?”
“Similar. It has two colored sockets on the front and a panel with characters printed on it—at least we thought they were printed. My partner, Marie, is studying it as we speak. She says the characters have been changing.”
“Changing, how?”
“I’m not sure. She sent a text just before I arrived. What looked like black paint might be more like a computer display. She’s still trying to figure it out.”
Nala returned her attention to the floating image. Three circles of different colors, nested one within another, with many smaller circles inside. Amazingly sharp and clear. “What do you think it is?”
Daniel put both elbows on the table and brought his face close to the image. “I don’t know. Marie thought it might represent a planetary system. The shading makes the circles look spherical. Plus, the little yellow moons across the top.”
Nala nodded. “They do look like moons… well, sort of. They’re not so much crescent-shaped as they are…” Nala stopped an
d covered her mouth. “Holy shit.”
Daniel turned. “What?”
She touched her forehead and stared intently at the image, her mouth open.
“Holy. Fucking. Shit.” Her index finger tapped in the air, counting. “Four sets of three, grouped, it’s all there.”
Daniel looked at the image and back to her. “What!”
She turned to face him, her expression a mix of surprise and joy. “Daniel… it’s the Standard Model.”
He was slow on the uptake, or maybe he hadn’t heard her right. “Our Standard Model? The components of the universe? That Standard Model?”
“Yes, our Standard Model. That’s exactly what it is.” The excitement of discovery poured out of her, and she spoke quickly. “Daniel, I’ve seen dozens of versions. Every particle physicist has their own way of drawing it. I’ve never seen one quite as circular as this, but still, it’s got all the particles. Look at it.”
She pointed. “Six white circles at the top. Six quarks. Grouped two by three, just as we do. These yellow moons, they’re not crescents at all. Daniel, they’re pies. They’re showing two-thirds of a whole. Two-thirds! That’s the electrical charge for the top row of quarks.”
She pointed again. “And the green half circle below? That’s got to be the spin. Each quark has one-half spin. Do you see it?”
Daniel stared intensely. The shapes were as she described, but how had she determined their meaning? And so quickly?
Her words came rapidly. “Look, the second-row pies are all black. And the second row of quarks has what charge?”
“Um… negative one-third? I think.”
“Correct, minus one-third. Doesn’t that look like one third of a pie? And look at it. It’s a black interior with a yellow border. Opposite colors from the top row pies. A pretty good way to indicate a negative number.”
She leaned back. “Daniel, those first six circles are quarks. There’s no doubt about it.”
He was stunned, mostly because he could tell that she was right. “How could you possibly see this so quickly?”
She laughed. “Daniel, I live this stuff. I could recite the details of the Standard Model in my sleep. I’ve seen this diagram a million times. Well, not with circles.” She looked back at the image. “But you know, now that I’ve seen it, I kind of like this version. There are no numbers at all, but it gets the point across perfectly.”
“What about the rest of it?”
She studied the image again. “The white circle with the full green inside? That’s got to be the gluon. It binds quarks together and has a spin of positive one. And see? The green circle is a full pie, representing one.”
She rapidly dissected the rest, like a kid unwrapping Christmas presents. “Look at the next group inside the blue circle. Three leptons, with negative one charge and one-half spin. And three neutrinos inside the gray circle. No charge at all and half spin. Daniel, it’s all there. Compare it to any diagram we’ve ever drawn.”
She laughed. “Oh my God, this is great! Z and W bosons at the bottom. They’ve even got the Higgs. That plain white circle inside the gray. Zero charge and zero spin, and that’s exactly where most physicists draw it. But…” Her eyes scanned across image. “What’s this other thing?” She pointed to the white circle that contained a full green circle and another half-circle. “A graviton? That can’t be right.”
“Maybe they discovered gravitons, even if we haven’t.”
Nala shook her head vigorously. “Theoretically, gravitons have a spin of two—if they exist at all. This shows one and a half, so it can’t be a graviton. But what else is there? There aren’t any other forces.”
“Well… none, that we know of.”
Nala bounced in her chair like a little kid. “Holy shit, I’d love to talk to these people. Two questions right away: where’s your graviton, and what’s this extra boson?”
These people. It was a leap into the fantastic, but she was going there willingly. Daniel didn’t blame her. She had uncovered meaning and there was no question she was right. While she was pointing, he had noticed something else about the diagram. “Look at the symmetry,” he said softly. “Six quarks, six leptons, and now six bosons. We only had five.”
“Feels complete, doesn’t it?” Nala broke into a huge smile. “Daniel, this is monumental. Somewhere out there is my counterpart. Some other man-woman-thing living on some other planet. Someone who knows all about quantum physics just like I do. You have no idea how thrilling that feels.”
Daniel took a deep breath. The battle of fact versus fantasy had played itself out. This was a first communication. “They sent something they knew we’d understand. They sent science. It’s not the Chinese.”
Nala looked at him and their eyes connected. “No Sir, it’s definitely not the Chinese.”
She jumped up out of her chair as if she could no longer be constrained by furniture ever again. She almost bounced around the room. “Wow, am I glad you came back to Fermilab. That thing is amazing. I feel… honored to see it. To be a part of your investigation.”
“It may not be my investigation much longer,” he said. “It’s bigger now. But that’s the way science works, isn’t it? You look for one thing, and you find something else entirely.”
“Do you think this is a test? You know, to see if we’re literate?”
Daniel shrugged. “If it is, we’re only halfway there. I haven’t even shown you why I came here. Flick your finger through the projection.”
She reached out, waving a finger in and out. The yin clicked and the image changed. She broke into a huge smile. “Oooh.”
“We’ve been calling this one oranges and blueberries.”
“Very interesting. Three-D!” She leaned to the left to view the side of the projected image.
Daniel let her absorb the view. It was impressive technology. “I have some ideas about this one.”
“Do tell.”
“It may be a star chart. But I’m not sure which stars. That’s the next step.”
“They don’t really look like stars. Why two different colors, and sizes?”
“It could be representational. Their size is exaggerated. And all stars aren’t the same size or color anyway. The orange ones might represent red giants.”
“Like Betelgeuse?” Nala asked.
“Exactly,” answered Daniel. “And the blue ones might be white dwarfs, which are really the same star type, just at a different point in its evolution. Red giants eventually become white dwarfs.”
“So why are they orange and blue?”
“Yeah, good question. Astronomers often make up names that don’t quite match the object. Red giants are actually closer to orange in color, and white dwarfs tend to be bluish-white.”
Nala shrugged. “Wow, this really is a test. You’ve been handed a map to the stars. What do you think happens if you follow it?”
A sly smile crept across Daniel’s face. “There’s more. A text message, and writing too.”
“Daniel, you’re just full of surprises, aren’t you? Any minute now, you’re going to pull a Wookiee out of that bag, I just know it.”
“Too ordinary. You already know what a Wookiee looks like. The unknown is always more interesting, and scarier too. But that’s where this is leading, and I need your help to get there.”
“Well, that’s clear as mud. Last night you accused me of being vague.”
He pointed to the yin. “Nala, I think there’s more to this device. Something we can’t see.”
She looked at the yin and the 3-D star map hanging in the air. A faint flicker in her lips gradually turned to a smile and her eyes lifted to Daniel. “Oh… Mr. Scientist, you are so clever.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nala led Daniel down a long hallway and turned into a large, brightly lit room. A long curving desk was covered with computer displays and electronics equipment. At one end sat a man with long hair pulled into a ponytail. He studied a complex set of graphs on the displays in front
of him.
The man turned around as they approached. “Nala, how are you? Long time, no see.”
“Hey, Tony. Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy over in Diastasi. I should drop by more often. You guys have all the best late-night snacks.” She motioned to Daniel. “Tony, this is Daniel Rice. We’re working together.”
Tony stood up and they shook hands. He quickly returned his attention to Nala. “Somebody said there was trouble over at Stetler. I hope it didn’t affect you.”
Nala laughed. “Touch and go for a while, but I think I ended up better off.” She glanced at Daniel and caught his eye. “I got some help from high places.” Daniel smiled and lowered his head in a small bow.
“Hey, Tony,” she continued, “we need some protons tonight. Can you make it happen?”
He studied his computer display. “Yeah… should be okay. Maintenance was cleaning the NuMI horn a while ago, but they’re done now. You need anything special?”
“Nope, just the usual. A few trillion protons at light speed. Give me that and I’ll take it from there.”
“No problem,” Tony said with a grin. “Magic coming up. Give me about thirty minutes.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks. Have a good shift. I’ll bring the donuts next time.”
They left the control room and went back into one of the many long corridors of concrete. “You have surprisingly easy access to some impressive power,” Daniel remarked.
She nodded. “It takes a big crew to keep this place running, but the acceleration and test benches are all computer-controlled. Tony gives me protons, I smash them into graphite atoms. Voilà, we have a focused beam of neutrinos.”
“It can’t be that easy.”
“It’s not. Tony will be busy. Security and safety protocols, electrical pretests, power up. It’s not quite like starting your car.”
“But still, all you had to do was ask. You have full command of one of the most advanced scientific instruments ever created.”
Nala beamed. “Yeah. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” They turned a corner and climbed some stairs. “How about you? You like what you do?”
Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series Page 21