Mysteries on mysteries, Henry thought, puzzled by Mike’s reaction.
When he went up to the Seat, he found Blue and Jane waiting for him.
“I see you found each other.”
Blue was grinning so wide his teeth were twinkling. “I see you found each other,” he said.
“Knock it off.”
Jane said, “I was over with the cultists—”
Blue giggled. “She saw me sniffing the rocks.”
“So I knew he had to be something to do with you.”
“I’m glad you two are getting along,” Henry said dryly.
“I’ve been telling her all about your past,” said Blue.
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah,” Jane said. “Blue tells me his hotel is okay, but they are—what did you say?”
“Skinning me like a country chicken.” Blue cackled.
She said dryly, “So which part of Arkansas are you from?”
“Come on, Blue,” Henry said. “We’re here to work.”
Blue nodded. “We need to get closer. The young lady—” he nodded at Constable Decker “—will allow us through the tape.”
“She will?”
“I vouched for you,” said Blue.
They lifted the tape and ducked underneath it. Cautiously, they approached the edge of the summit dust pool—which, once more, had spread since Henry last looked. It sprawled, ragged, over the lumpy rock.
Blue threw lumps of turf into the pool—they disappeared immediately, without so much as a ripple—and he kneeled down, a little stiffly, to sniff the air.
Blue said, “It might be liquefaction.”
Jane said, “What’s liquefaction, exactly?”
Henry said, “Where earth tremors shake up certain kinds of soils. Seismic shear waves passing through a saturated granular soil layer distort its structure, and that causes some of the void spaces to collapse—”
“In English.”
“For a while, the soil acts like a liquid.”
“But,” Blue said, “liquefaction is only found when the sands and silts were deposited recently.”
Jane said, “Recently?”
Henry shrugged. “Say, less than ten thousand years ago.”
“Even then,” Blue said, “you need ground water within thirty yards of the surface…This is an ancient volcanic plug. I can’t believe this is liquefaction, as we understand it.”
“Then what?”
He spread his frail hands. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Congratulate me,” said Henry. “A new geological breakthrough.”
Blue drawled, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.”
But the banter was, Henry thought, on autopilot. Blue seemed to share some of his own sense of dread, as he stood here and studied this unclassifiable phenomenon.
“So,” Jane said, “what are you going to do now?”
“I think we should bring the portable lab out here,” Blue said.
“What portable lab?”
Henry said, “He means the VDAP’s. That’s the Volcanic Disaster Assistance Program. A kind of volcano SWAT team run by the U.S. Geological Survey. They have a portable lab for studying geological disturbances which—”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Why don’t you get your ex-wife to beam it down from the Space Shuttle?”
“Jane—”
“This isn’t the Third World, you know. Even if it was, you would still be a patronizing arsehole American.”
Henry eyed Blue. “Of course she’s right. Everything we need should be here.”
“Okay,” Blue said. “So we wire the mountain. We need seismometers. A network of them, at the rim, on high-gain rock sites. They will have to be moved regularly as the pool progresses, I suppose…We’ll need volunteers for that. The seismos will be linked by radio telemetry to a central point.”
“We’ll use my lab,” Henry said. “We’ll need a war room.”
“Why a network of seismometers?” Jane asked. “Why not just one or two?”
“Because we have to triangulate,” Blue said with gracious patience. “We must locate the movements of the ground in three dimensions.”
Henry said, “What else?”
“We should do some real-time and spectral seismic analysis, to understand the growth of this phenomenon.”
“Deformation monitors?” To Jane he explained, “When magma builds up beneath a volcano the ground distorts.”
“Yes,” Blue said. “Whatever you can find. Ideally laser based EDMs—”
“Electronic distance meters,” Henry told Jane.
“And GPS receivers.”
“Global—”
“Positioning System?” she said with some satisfaction.
“A cospec for gas emissions,” Blue said.
“Yeah.”
“Henry, I’d really like BOB here.”
Jane said, “Who’s BOB?”
Henry smiled. “A VDAP computer program. For rapid analysis of time-series data in crisis situations. Okay. And I’d like to order up regular aerial surveys to map the changing extent of the thing. My shoe-leather metrics really aren’t good enough. Later we should think about acoustic flow monitors if there are lahars, microbarographs—”
Jane said, “That sounds like it detects changes in atmospheric pressure.”
“So it does.”
“Why that?”
“Because it’s a good predictor of a volcanic explosion.”
“…Oh.” She was looking at the pool rim. “Look at this,” she said. She pointed to a patch at the rim of the pool, where bare rock showed through the grass.
A foot-wide patch of rock was—Henry thought, shielding his eyes against the sunlight—glowing.
The rock flashed. Henry jumped back. He’d felt heat on his face.
When he looked again, the rock was changed. It had turned to the fine silvery dust, characteristic of the rest of the pool.
“Holy shit,” Henry said. “Did you see that?”
Blue said, “At least we know how it spreads now.”
Jane looked from one to the other. “I can’t quite read you two,” she said. “You are interested in all this. Fascinated, even. But, underneath that…You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
Henry and Blue exchanged a glance.
“Why?” said Jane. “Do you think this is a volcanic event? Arthur’s Seat has been dormant for a third of a billion years. Do you think it’s becoming active now?”
“We don’t know. This isn’t like any volcanic event we’ve faced before.”
“Then what is it?”
“We don’t know that either.”
She nodded. “And that’s what’s frightening you.”
“Yes,” Blue said. “that is what is frightening us.”
“The growth rate has been maintained for weeks,” Henry said. “The pool is still pretty small now, but it’s not going to stay that way.” He regarded Jane. “We have to be ready to face that.”
“I understand.”
Blue was studying the air. “It is blowing away.”
“What?”
“The dust. Spreading in the breeze.”
Jane asked, “Is that important?”
“I don’t know.”
Blue was glaring at the dust, his face a sour mask.
“So,” Henry said. “What do you think, old friend?”
Blue sniffed. “This is something which should not be here. It is like a cancer, on the face of a good friend.”
Yes, Henry thought. That was exactly it.
Something new. And unwelcome.
Bad news.
They made their slow way down the Seat.
13
One more time to make love. Maybe the last time.
I have to stop thinking like this, thought Monica Beus. I’ll finish up doing a countdown…
But still, here was dear old Alfred, as tender and gentle as he ever was, and, in the cool mountain air that filled Monica’s ap
artment here in Aspen, they coupled like two elderly spacecraft gingerly docking.
Athletics, it wasn’t.
But it hadn’t hurt as much as she had expected. Maybe the quacks were right; maybe their new, “natural” chemotherapy regime really was a little less brutal.
And afterward, they shared the post-coital cigarette they were both too old to ever give up—and what would be the point anyhow?—and then they sat up in bed, blankets around their bony shoulders.
And they pulled their computers to their laps and went back to work.
Alfred got online to the International Astronomical Union nets, and Monica skimmed through the latest entries to the electronic preprints library being maintained by the National Laboratory at Los Alamos.
The papers on string theory, since the Venus incident, had become a blizzard. The excitement seemed to crackle out of the screen at her.
But Alfred had found something new on the astronomy nets and was becoming excited too.
Now people had started looking—NASA had hastily thrown up a couple of new satellites—they were starting to find signatures like the Venus event’s all over the sky. Alfred tapped the screen to show her. “Like these. Gamma ray bursts. Called GRBs by those who study them. Flashes of energy, emanating from explosions that lasted a few seconds…”
Huge explosions, he told her. By some estimates, radiating more energy in a few seconds than the sun does in ten billion years. There were lots of candidate explanations, none of them particularly satisfactory. Maybe asteroids were crashing onto the surfaces of neutron stars. Maybe neutron stars were colliding. Maybe giant helium stars were imploding.
“Or maybe,” Alfred said feverishly, “some interstellar cousin of our Venus killer is at work…”
She found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, given the buzz on the Los Alamos nets.
She tried to summarize for him what had been going on in the world of theoretical physics, galvanized as it was by the natural laboratory which Venus had somehow, magically, turned into. “Alfred, string theory is the best way we have to describe the kind of extremely high energy density events we’re encountering inside Venus…”
String theory was a candidate Theory of Everything—which, if successful, would be a simple theory whose corollaries would describe a universe that was unmistakably ours: with quarks and electrons, gravity, nuclear forces and electromagnetism, three space dimensions and one of time, a universe of atoms and babies and stars.
“According to string theory,” Monica said, “the most elementary object in the universe is a loop of string. Unimaginably tiny. Ten to minus thirty-three centimeters…The string has different modes of vibration. Like a violin string. Each mode corresponds to a particle, a quark or an electron. And the laws of physics correspond to harmonies between the strings’ tones.”
“Ah.” He smiled. “The Universe as a symphony. Rather beautiful.”
“But,” she said, “there’s a complication. String theory only works in a ten-dimensional space-time.”
Alfred rolled his eyes. “I always hated theoreticians.”
“Now, the missing six dimensions are there, but they are crumpled up. Like garden hoses, rolled around themselves.”
Alfred struggled with that. “So these dimensions are there. But too small to see.”
Monica hesitated. “Something like that. Yes. The trouble is, there are tens of thousands of ways for the six dimensions to crumple. Each of those different ways generates a different internal space, as we call it. And in each internal space, the strings adopt a different solution.”
“A different solution?”
“One internal space describes our universe, with three types of electron, and one photon. Another might have two photons. Or something even more exotic. And so on.” Monica leaned forward. “Now. The theoreticians are suggesting there is a—tear in space—at the heart of Venus. Or what Venus has been made into.”
“A tear?”
“A way into another internal space. You see, when a string enters a new internal space, it adopts a different configuration.” She cast around for an analogy. “Like ice. Take it from the Arctic to the Sahara, and it melts. Vaporizes. It adopts a configuration that’s suitable for the environment.”
“And so…”
“And so, at the heart of Venus, we think we’re seeing strings being ripped apart. Literally. Maybe even being expanded to macro lengths before collapsing back down to new configurations.”
“Hence, the exotic particles we’ve observed.”
“Elementary particles as massive as bacteria. Yes.”
“A tear in space, in the heart of the Solar System,” he mused. “A pocket universe…Strange days indeed.”
“Certainly we’re looking at a release of energy more than enough to overcome gravitational binding energy.”
“Umm. But why?” Alfred asked. “What’s it for?”
“Since we’ve no idea how this is being done,” she said, “we’re nowhere near an answer to that.”
She scanned through more preprints. A flood of them, a kaleidoscope of theory, scattered shards of calculation and insight and speculation. Too much for anyone to read, let alone review. “Makes me wish I was young again,” she said.
“Umm?”
“The excitement out there. String theory describes the high energy stuff. Energies of up to ten to power nineteen giga-electronvolts. Which is ten million billion times higher than anything we could create in any conceivable accelerator. So much was hidden from us, in this low-energy world we inhabit. Like trying to deduce the nature of a lion, after being given a glimpse of his tail.”
“And string theory is a description of the rest of the lion.”
“With about as much guesswork involved. Yes. But now, it’s as if Venus has conveniently transmuted into the biggest particle accelerator in the universe. We can see the stuff we struggled to describe before. Now, even the skeptical types are saying we might reach a true Theory of Everything in five, ten years at most. The excitement is extraordinary…”
But now Alfred had found something else on the IAU net. Evidence of more Planckian cosmic radiation, just a trickle of it, coming—not from a remote planet, not from exotic sources that lay maybe beyond the Galaxy itself—but a lot closer to home.
He pulled up a sketchy diagram from a new preprint: a circle centered on a schematic Earth, two points picked out on the orbit of the Moon. “L4 and L5. Gravitationally stable, like shallow pits in spacetime: the places in the Moon’s orbit, ahead of it and behind it, where you’d expect debris to collect. Dust, whatever.”
She looked at the closely printed text, tried to follow it. “What are they saying? That the Venus killer is there?”
“No. Just that, on a small scale, the processes we’re observing on Venus are replicated there, on a much smaller scale.”
She frowned. “How so? Something working on the raw material there? But what?”
“I don’t know.”
“And how did it get there? Did it start on Venus, and come here, to Earth-Moon? Or…” Or did it start here, on Earth or Moon, and spread out across space, to Venus?
There was, of course, no answer: merely new pieces of the puzzle, fragmentary glimpses, imperfectly described by the staid, passive language of technical papers.
Glimpses of something monstrous.
She wondered how she was going to express this to the Administration.
Something had turned Venus into a kind of giant particle accelerator, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything humans had ever conceived. But that great experiment had wrecked the planet, literally disassembled it, from the core outward, blowing its surface and atmosphere into space over a timescale, as far as anyone could tell, of no more than a few months.
Something had done this. Or someone.
But who? How? Why? And what, if anything, was going to protect the Earth from a similar cosmic visitation?
If, she thought bleakly, it isn’t already
here.
…And in the dark and warmth of an Edinburgh night, Henry tried to explain to Jane what they were finding, in the lab.
“There are two aspects to this. Two structures, if you like. 86047—”
“The Moon rock.”
“—is coated in a layer of quicksand dust.”
“The same as the Arthur’s Seat stuff?”
“Presumably.”
“Are they connected, then?”
“I don’t know. It would be kind of a coincidence for this stuff to show up in two places independently. We’re not running a clean facility in there. Maybe there’s been some kind of—breach of quarantine.” Quarantine. The word disturbed her, and she tried to figure out why. He said, “Even the surface dust is like nothing we’ve seen before.”
His matter-of-fact tone chilled her. “What do you mean?”
“Each grain has a structure. On the outside there’s a shell of silicate—a rock—although even that’s a mineral we haven’t seen before. Super-quartz, we’ve been calling it.”
“And inside the shell—”
“We don’t know. Whatever is there is beyond the level of resolution of our techniques. Certainly subatomic. Its structure changes with time. Its primary resource is olivine. Mantle rock. Whatever is inside the super-quartz shell is presumably the active agent, whatever starts the transformation of the rock the dust settles on.”
“You make it sound like a machine.”
“Maybe it is. Lots of tiny machines, eating olivine, using forces we can’t identify to tweak crystal structures.”
“Machines, inside tiny eggs of rock.”
“The Moon rock as a whole has a greater structure. Silicate again, at first, on the surface, but the density and complexity seems to increase, beyond what we can resolve, toward the center…It’s a kind of funnel, I think. In three dimensions.”
“A funnel?”
“Building regions of successively greater density and pressure, toward the heart of the rock. I think it has a purpose.”
“What?”
“The compression of matter and energy. Jane, the way to make a new element, to turn matter from one element to another, is to go to high energy density. Atomic nuclei can fuse or fission—”
“Like in a nuclear weapon.”
“Or the heart of the sun. Right.”
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