Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  He was standing before the goat-headed form. Under the event serial number engraved on the pedestal he added new text, writing with a white-hot finger. He carved “Snark => Talk to Jake!” into the milk-white marble. Another gesture sent him into blackness. He was lying in bed in his room at the SSC Hostel.

  He removed the magic glasses and data cuffs and put them into the briefcase beside the bed, then walked through the dimness to the room window and raised the blackout blind installed for day sleepers like himself. He blinked into the early afternoon sunlight that now streamed through the window. Then he stretched, took off his pajamas, and went to the bathroom for a shower.

  The warm water felt wonderful. He turned his body slowly under the stream, thinking. He would need to talk to someone about this Snark thing very soon. Alice was fine, it had been nice having breakfast with her and discussing the Snark. She was excited and acted almost proprietary about the thing, and she was going to come to his office this afternoon to discuss it further. And they had another dinner date for tomorrow night. But at the moment George needed to talk to someone who knew some physics. Preferably, more physics than himself, which narrowed the choices considerably. Who ...?

  Then he remembered Roger Coulton, the new member of the SSC Theory Group who had just arrived from CERN. Roger had struck him as a person who had the flexibility and playfulness to be interested in a problem like this. The Theory Building wasn’t far from the Hostel. Yes, he’d look up Roger as soon as he dressed and grabbed a bite of lunch.

  CHAPTER 4.7

  Booster Shot

  AN UNDULATING surface of many blended colors was displayed in 3-D on the workstation screen, a fairy landscape of red-topped broad rolling hills and blue-violet shadowed valleys. Toward the right end of the slowly changing surface, however, it disintegrated into a jungle of wild fluctuations. Roger stared at the screen of his workstation and pounded his desk. The damned perturbation series had diverged again. Surely God must have it in for QCD!

  The basic problem with quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of quark behavior, was that the forces were simply too strong. All the mathematical tricks developed by generations of theoretical physicists, all the dodges and gimmicks and work-arounds that had worked with weaker forces, were useless. The color force was the strongest in the universe, and it stoutly refused to be perturbed.

  While he was still at CERN, Roger had invented a new approach, a convoluted expansion based on canonical variables that became smaller as the strength of the force increased. He had been so sure that it was the key to making reliable QCD predictions. But the lousy series wouldn’t converge!

  The calculation on the screen had been his final hope, one last straw to be grasped at. Several months of work was down the drain. It should have worked, dammit. He couldn’t understand why it hadn’t. He combed his fingers through his thick brown hair. The trouble with taking on difficult problems that no one previously has ever been able to solve, he thought, is that you feel like such a fool when you can’t solve them either.

  Roger’s father had been a baker in King’s Lynn. It had been his custom to spend much of his free time and earnings at the corner pub near their terrace house. Roger had three older sisters, and it seemed that the family had never had enough money. At least, many was the evening that he fell asleep listening to his mother and father arguing about it.

  Roger’s grandmother, he learned later, had intervened to change his life. She had never approved of her daughter’s marriage and had always kept her distance. However, she was fond of Roger, whom she said resembled her late husband. She had recognized his intelligence and arranged for him to take competitive examinations which had won him a generous scholarship to Harrow. When he was admitted she had arranged to pay for his uniforms and the other costs out of her modest savings.

  When Roger went up to Harrow it had seemed a miraculous escape from a dreary and constricted life. For the first time he had classmates with interests somewhat like his own. Classmates who read books. Who, when they weren’t yammering about sports, could talk intelligently about astronomy and rockets and chemistry and electronics and computers and particle physics, all in the course of an evening. Harrow had computers and an enormous and venerable library. For the first time in his life Roger found that he had more interesting books available to him than he could read.

  Of course, there were the “initiations” and the bullying and the snobbery. Roger had been tall for his age, but painfully thin. It was well known that he was one of the “dole” students, there on charity because his working class family could not afford the standard tuition. And there was also his East-Country accent which marked him as different more clearly than a brand on the forehead. The several bullies among the older boys had turned some of their attention in his direction. At first he had accepted it as inevitable unpleasantness and had learned to avoid certain people and places and times.

  But then one rainy evening Greg Rutlege, a senior boy who was on the school rugby team and who seemed to have it in for Roger, had caught him as he was leaving the rooms of his maths tutor. Roger was carrying a beautiful book on projective geometry, just lent by his tutor. It contained vivid pictures along with the equations for projecting any three dimensional object onto the two dimensional plane of a computer screen. Roger was hurrying back to his quad, his head full of ideas that he wanted to try, when he found Greg blocking his way on the dark path. Greg had shoved him several times and then knocked the book from his hand. It tumbled with a splash into a puddle.

  Roger became very, very angry. Through a red haze of rage, he saw that he was now holding a brick from the walkway in his hand. It was as if he was watching from a distance the actions of someone else, someone who was bent on homicide. That person fully intended to kill his adversary. However, due to a general lack of coordination, he managed only to place a two inch split in Greg’s scalp, just above the hairline.

  It was sufficient. The quantity of blood was most impressive to both of them. So were the six stitches that were used to close the wound after Roger had helped Greg to the sick bay.

  Roger had been quite surprised when the other boy had calmly explained to the school physician that his good friend Roger had been demonstrating a new wrestling hold when they slipped, so that he accidentally banged his head on the stone portal of the quad. The doctor was skeptical, but he finally entered the explanation in his report.

  Later, Roger carefully cleaned the book with a towel and sponge, put blotting paper between the wet pages, and even ironed them to remove some of the swelling and wrinkles. But despite his best efforts, the book looked terrible. His tutor, however, seemed not to take much notice when Roger sheepishly returned the book, perhaps because the man was so fascinated by the graphics program that Roger had made using the equations in it.

  After that incident, the older boys had called him “Killer Coulton” for a while, but had kept their distance. The “Killer” nickname had stuck, but it took on a new meaning during his years at the public school. Roger became an academic aggressor.

  The red-lit image of a brick raised high in the act of braining the enemy, within the convoluted pathways of Roger’s cerebral cortex, had somehow been transmuted into a strategy for success. He sought out what were considered the hardest subjects, particularly in the sciences and maths, then ferreted out the tricks and gimmicks that would allow him to understand them better than his classmates, to bludgeon his way to the top of the heap. He consistently outscored the others on examinations, sometimes by such a large margin that it was embarrassing.

  The scholarship to Oxford had followed, almost as his due. It was not until he went up to Oxford that he finally managed to shed the “Killer” nickname. Oxford had been good for him in other ways too. He had learned enough about physics and women there to know that he simply had to learn much more about both.

  He set about doing so. He
had somehow intuited, through the haze of academic self-satisfaction that overlay the British academic scene, that diversity was important and that the inbreeding he saw around him might be avoided by moving to another institution where the learning might be different enough to cover the gaps that he sensed in his present state of understanding of physics.

  Lincoln Jeffries, his Oxford tutor, had been annoyed when Roger announced that he had decided to take his Ph.D. at Cambridge. Old Linc had carefully explained that such a switch was the sign of a misfit, and that it would seriously compromise Roger’s chances of securing a permanent position at either institution. Linc’s implicit assumption that the life of an Oxford don represented the pinnacle of western civilization had convinced Roger, as much as anything else, that he was making the correct decision.

  Roger had put his Cambridge thesis supervisor, a Nobel laureate, on notice from the start that he intended to do a first-rate thesis in theoretical particle physics. And it had happened just that way. Roger had stumbled onto a subtle aspect of quark-gluon interactions that no one had ever looked at before in the right way. His omnivorous plundering of the literature had turned up enough seemingly unrelated clues to show him the direction he needed to proceed. He could actually have finished his thesis in two years, but some unfinished business with a certain young lady who was doing her thesis in Medieval History had made him decide to stay the extra year and to do a more thorough job.

  The thoroughness had paid off. His thesis research became two papers in Physics Letters, a long review article in Physics Reports, and three invited papers, special invitations to present his work before large audiences at physics conferences at Snowmass, Catania, and Les Houches. These had made something of a splash. Roger had turned down several job offers, including an Assistant Professorship at Princeton, to take a postdoc job in the CERN Theory Group. And that, along with the other theoretical triumphs which followed, had led to his present job at the SSC, presently the premier high energy physics laboratory in the world.

  Which, the way it looked now, might be as high as his rocket would rise. Roger looked around his new office, the walls already decorated with colorful graphs, cartoons, and travel posters. What the hell was he going to do? This was Wednesday. He was supposed to give a Theory Group Seminar on Thursday afternoon describing progress on his brilliant new approach to QCD, the technique that in the past weeks had turned to ashes. He had nothing to discuss except a handful of mathematical tricks that hadn’t worked. As he thought about it, he realized that in truth he hadn’t really had a workable idea in many months.

  He was good, dammit. He knew that he was good. He was now supposed to be at the peak of his creativity and intellectual power. He was working in theoretical particle physics, the toughest, most competitive, fastest moving, most intellectually demanding field of endeavor in the history of the human race.

  But somehow his timing was off. Of late the ideas that his instincts told him were good, after months of effort, had turned out to be blind alleys. Other ideas that he’d originated and then rejected as obviously flawed had been re-invented later by someone else, and often those ideas had brought them recognition and even fame.

  This job in the SSC Theory Group was supposed to be his stepping stone to a secure tenured faculty position at a top-of-the-line university or institute in the US or Europe. But his stepping stone was rapidly sinking into a quicksand bog.

  He looked again at the broken surfaces on his workstation screen. The bloody thing refused to converge. There had to be some way, another trick, if only he were smart enough to find it.

  His eye drifted to his open desk drawer. He could see the black plastic box there. In it he had placed disposable diabetic syringes and the four vials of synaptine. Last night he had on impulse taken them ... correction ... stolen them from Susan’s laboratory. Even as he was doing it, he’d felt rather surprised at himself, as if it was someone else performing the act. Someone less honest than himself. He wasn’t in the habit of stealing from his friends, after all. He was bloody well not in the habit of stealing from anyone.

  But Susan had discovered a drug that promised to significantly raise the level of human intelligence! And she was planning to squander it for years to come on the treatment of hopeless retarded children and Alzheimer’s patients. She and her colleagues would administer the drug and take careful note of whether the poor souls that received it remembered not to pee their pants or drooled less or recognized one of their relatives unexpectedly. And meantime the rest of humanity, which was barely clever enough to find its shoes in the morning and keep from annihilating itself in the evening, must muddle along as best it could.

  He now knew Susan well enough to understand that she was a very stubborn and dedicated woman. There was no way he could persuade her to let him test synaptine on himself as a “volunteer.” He’d hinted at this and had encountered a stone wall, receiving a canned lecture on medical ethics and the strictness and fairness of the rules concerning experimentation on human subjects.

  He looked at the black box again. In most human endeavors high intelligence was useful but not really essential. Motivation and persistence worked almost as well, sometimes actually better. Roger remembered the friend at Cambridge who got rent-free rooms for serving as part-time manager of a block of flats. Once he’d had to pick a new maintenance person for the complex from a large number of applicants. So he’d given them all intelligence tests copped from the Psychology Department and selected the applicant with the lowest score. Claimed the person had made the best maintenance super ever.

  But in theoretical physics, if you weren’t the brightest chap in the quad, the cleverest, trickiest, sharpest, most imaginative bastard in the business, then you were the dog’s breakfast. The difference was just a bit of extra intelligence, just enough to put you out in front of the pack. You knew it when you had it. And he’d had it, dammit. Before he’d left Geneva for Waxahachie, he’d had it.

  But here, now, he was definitely the canine’s morning repast. And perhaps he would remain canine cuisine. From now on ...

  Perhaps he’d simply set his sights too high. Only one person could be the brightest particle theorist of the generation. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t him. Perhaps he could go back to England and get a nice faculty job at some red-brick university with large teaching and administrative responsibilities and less pressure on research. He could become a gentleman lecturer who met with fawning undergraduates over coffee each afternoon to discuss the Nature of Structure. Roger grimaced, recalling a few of those.

  Or perhaps he could get a well-paid programming job and move east to Wall Street or west to Silicon Valley, as some of his friends at Cambridge and CERN had done when they couldn’t make it as particle theorists. He thought of the prospect of driving his Porsche for an hour on the San Jose freeway or the Long island Expressway to a job where he made clever improvements to programs that drew better pie charts for business leaders.

  No, by God! He rather die than do that. He had to wield the brick again, he needed to pound on a first-rate new problem, beating on it with an avalanche of ideas until it yielded results that came so fast he hardly had time to write them down. He had to.

  Roger got up and closed the door of his office. He pulled up his trouser leg past the knee. Then he took the black plastic box from the drawer and placed it on the desk. He knew well what needed to be done. One of his girlfriends at Cambridge had been a diabetic, and many times he’d watched her give herself an insulin injection as she explained how it was done.

  Susan had given Elvis an intramuscular injection. The protein was stable enough, she said. The effect lasted longer if it was injected into muscle tissue rather than directly into the circulatory system. He stripped the wrapper from the hypodermic, fitted on the needle, selected one of the vials, and punctured its latex cap.

  Then he paused. Susan had used half a milliliter on Elvis, he recalled
. Should the dose be scaled by body weight or cortex area? That determines if I should use half a vial or the whole thing. Better play it safe and use cortex area, he thought, drawing half the contents of the vial into the syringe. Using his left hand, he wiped a patch on the inside of his left thigh with alcohol, then injected the protein. It was done. He withdrew the needle. A yellow droplet beaded its tip, a red droplet dotted his thigh. He wiped the spot with alcohol again and rolled down his trouser leg.

  Roger breathed a sigh when his paraphernalia was safely placed in the black box and locked in the lower drawer of his desk. He sat, considered what he had done. He had injected himself with an untested experimental drug with completely unknown side effects. He could feel a slight tingling sensation spreading upward from his left thigh and minute twitchings of the muscles near the injection point.

  Suppose he had an adverse reaction, perhaps convulsions requiring hospitalization. He could visualize them carrying him out of the building on a stretcher while his colleagues looked on. He could not tell them what he’d done. He’d been very stupid to inject himself with a drug that had only been tried on rats and monkeys. Perhaps he was feeling a bit ill. He extended his hand and studied it to see if it was shaking. It was, a bit.

  There was a knock at his closed office door. Roger jumped, feeling he’d been caught in some unclean act. He glanced at his watch. It was 1:50. Who could it be? He stood, now feeling a bit shaky, and walked to the door. He opened it carefully, hoping that he looked more calm than he felt.

  Roger was surprised to see George Griffin, the chap he’d met at CERN a few weeks ago. They’d had lunch at the CERN Cafeteria and later gone to dinner at the Pizza d’Oro in Meyrin. They had ended the evening trading beers, jokes, philosophy, and personal histories.