by John Ringo
“Yes, sir,” Weaver said, nodding. “The thing is they take really high levels of energy to form. CERN in Switzerland’s been working on them for forever and couldn’t get one. But the other thing is, there’s another theory that when it formed it might just… supercede this universe.”
“Supercede?” the president said. “As in replace?”
“More or less, Mr. President,” the physicist said. “That’s why I said: Not as bad as it might have been. We might not have even known anything happened, just all been gone. Moonshots to the Mona Lisa, gone as if we never existed. And anything or anyone else in the universe. Biggest argument against that happening is that it hasn’t and something, somewhere in this big wide universe must have made a Higgs boson before.”
“I see,” the President said.
“Or even, and I think we might be onto something here, open a hole into another universe. You see, they don’t last for long, even if you make one. Now, within the universe, it’s all the time of the universe which might be, well, the whole thing. In the couple of nanoseconds they exist in this universe, in that universe they’d have the Big Bang, us making the universe so to speak, universal cooling, star formation, planet formation, the formation of life, contraction and then erasure. Billions and billions of years in that universe compressed to less time than it takes a computer to calculate two plus two in this universe. I know you’re a God fearing man, Mr. President, but with Higgs boson theory, God might have been Ray Chen pushing a button as he said: ‘Let’s see what happens.’ ”
“So you do understand what happened?” the President asked. “If this was a possible result, why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Well, the recognized negative results were very low order probabilities, Mr. President,” Weaver said. “They’d been studied over and over again and they were dismissed. I dismissed them and I still think I’m right. What would happen if you made a Higgs boson the normal way is a brief flash of light, some secondary particles and then it would be gone. Might not even be able to tell you’d done it. But that’s the normal way, which involves great big linear accelerators.”
“They had one in UCF,” the FBI briefer said, glancing at his notes. “We’d first put the explosion down to an accident with that.”
“Shows you don’t know high school physics, much less this stuff,” Weaver said in an equanimible tone. “Couldn’t get anything like that out of even a big collider much less the four meter or so that they had at UCF. And you can’t get a Higgs boson out of one normally at all. What we really needed was the super conducting supercollider they were building in Texas. That was one of the scheduled experiments. But Ray Chen wanted to make a Higgs boson.”
“Why, in God’s name?” the President asked. “If it was possible that it would erase all life on earth?”
“Why did you want your baseball team to win the World Series, Mr. President?” Weaver shot back. “Besides which, forming one and then watching it degrade would tell us a lot about how our universe really works. Understanding physics is the basis to everything, Mr. President. Everything from cellular telephones to the MOAB. And Ray was good at it. Very bright, very crazy in that way you have to be to understand quantum mechanics. And he thought, I’ve read the papers, that there was a way to shortcut to a Higgs boson. I won’t get into what it is, but he thought that under certain conditions it was possible to change physics in a very limited area. And with the physics changed you could make a Higgs boson. And I think that it was his shortcut that went wrong.”
“You think he changed the physics in a small area?” the national security advisor asked. “Would that have caused the explosion?”
“Possibly,” Weaver said. “But probably not. What we have now is some sort of gate. Bear with me here, and I’ll say that this is informed speculation, also known as a wild guess. But what we might have had was a universal inversion; we turned outside-in.”
“What?” the president said.
“Think about a balloon, Mr. President,” Weaver said, frowning as he tried to convert very complex theory into reasonable analogies. “You put a hole in the balloon and the air goes out. But you still have the balloon. Now, reach in and pull the balloon inside-out. We were actually the outside, now we’re on the inside.”
“That’s…” the Homeland Security director said, then stopped.
“Crazy, right,” Weaver replied. “The point is that if a Higgs boson was formed, it would be a universe. If the conditions were wrong, we’d be sucked into that universe and it would become the ‘outer’ universe. I could imagine some secondary effects would occur.”
“Such as a nuclear explosion,” the NSA said, dryly.
“Such as a very high end kinetic energy release,” Bill Weaver said with a nod. “Which would look an awful lot like a nuclear explosion. And at this point we get into pure speculation because there is no theory to support what we’re looking at. That big black ball could be a boson, but it does not meet the theory of a Higgs boson particle or its effects. Yes, something came through, that might have been from a Higgs boson universe but, again, it doesn’t fit the theory. Shouldn’t be able to get in or out of the universe. Also, its physics should be different, so different that it would have either died right away or, more likely, exploded. Like, another nuke type explosion but larger as the full mass of the creature converted to energy. Didn’t. What we’re looking at is a gate or a wormhole. Obviously to another planet. Maybe, probably, to a planet in this universe. Might be to the future, probably not. The big question is: is it stable? Is it going to just go away? Is it going to release energy from that planet or universe into this planet? Is it expanding? Contracting? And, most interesting overall, what’s on the other side? Another world? A world of gates maybe? Now I’m into skyballing which is the other side of speculation.”
“Okay, so we have a gate and no theory as to why it formed?” the national security advisor said.
“No, ma’am, but I do have an idea how it might have been formed, based on some of Ray Chen’s last papers, engineering rather than physics, and we might be able to figure out the physics before long. Once you know something’s possible, especially if you can study it, that’s nine tenths of the battle. Might, probably would, get the same explosion, though.”
“The explosion we can handle,” the defense secretary said, nodding. “Assuming it occurred somewhere like Los Alamos. On the ranges, not in the lab, obviously.”
“I’m going to say something,” the President intoned. “I do not want this followed up until we have a better handle on it. Not at MIT, not at California, not at Los Alamos. We have enough problems with terrorism. I do not want our cities popping like fireworks. I do not want another quarter of a million dead on our hands.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Weaver said, “if I was out of line.”
“Not at all,” the President said. “I just want that to be made clear.”
“Dr. Weaver, may I ask a question?” the national science advisor said. “Dr. Chen’s papers were open source, were they not?”
“No, sir, they weren’t,” Weaver said, shaking his head. “If they were, the President’s order would, obviously, be impossible.”
“Where did… ?” the science advisor said then stopped at a raised eyebrow from the defense secretary.
“Dr. Weaver, though his association with the Department of Defense, has access to restricted files…”
“Are you saying this was a DOD project?” the Homeland Security director asked, his fleshy face turning ruddy in anger. “That it actually was a bomb project?”
“No,” the defense secretary said, definitely. “Let’s try to leave the rumors to the press, okay? Dr. Chen had funding from the National Academy of Sciences,” he said, gesturing at the science advisor, who blanched. “From at least three nongovernmental agencies and from the DOD. Most of it was private funding. But for the DOD grant, and we pass them out for quite a few things, he had to make his reports and projections classifie
d. I’m not sure that there’s no open source but everything in the last year or so is black. I don’t even, frankly, know why or how he got funding from us. But we fund quite a few purely theoretical projects because, sometimes, they pay off.”
“And it was these classified documents you saw?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir,” Weaver replied. “I was interested in the physics. If you can change physics in a limited area you might be able to do a lot of things, Mr. President. I hadn’t anticipated this sort of explosion or I would have rung the alarm bells. But there are other applications. Change gravity in a limited area and you’ve got a much better helicopter. Not to mention lightening the load on infantrymen. Change the physics another way and, yes, maybe you get a bang. I’d been thinking about some uses for the people who pay my salary, Mr. President. Besides being fascinated with the math. But I didn’t anticipate this at all.”
“Okay, so we have a gate and physics we don’t understand but might eventually,” the national security advisor said. “And since we don’t understand the physics, we don’t know what the eventual outcome might be.”
“No, ma’am.”
“But there’s clearly a world on the other side,” the President said. “Dr. Weaver, would you be willing to go to that world? Assuming it’s survivable for a human?”
“Sir, it would take a platoon of marines to keep me away from that gate.”
“Funny you should say that,” the defense secretary said with a slight smile.
* * *
“I’m Spec… Sergeant Crichton, sir,” Crichton said, saluting the Navy officer in desert camouflage. “I was the NBC guy that did the initial evaluation.”
“Lieutenant Glasser,” the SEAL said, returning the salute and then shaking his hand. “I saw the approach; good work.”
“Thank you, sir,” Crichton said. He knew he was getting a swelled head but didn’t know what to do about it. The battalion commander had passed on good words from the Chief of Staff for God’s Sake. His evaluation, that it wasn’t a nuke, that it wasn’t an asteroid and that it was a gate, had been ahead of FEMA’s, the national science advisor and God Knows who else. And now he was being complimented by a SEAL.
Glasser just nodded his head and looked into the hole. The team had been at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, home of the Special Operations Command, doing a dog and pony show, read briefing, for the incoming commander. It was the sort of shit that SEALs normally managed to avoid but the new SOCOM commander was a Green Beanie, Army Special Forces, Green Berets, who had limited experience in commanding or managing SEALs or most of the other forces that fell under his command. The team had been chosen because it was in country, not doing anything important and it had a wide range of experience from Command Master Chief Miller, who had been a SEAL since Christ was a corporal and had been in every land and sea action since Grenada, to Seaman First Class Sanson who still didn’t have the Coronado sand out of his boots.
And lo and behold they never even got around to shining those same boots before they were loaded in vans and, preceded and followed by a police escort doing about a hundred and eighty, driven up to Orlando and dropped off in a howling wasteland that looked suspiciously like Beirut. They’d caught just enough on the tube to have some idea what was going on but there wasn’t much to see at the moment except a bunch of national guardsmen standing around drinking coffee under klieg lights.
That and the globe.
“If there’s a penetration of the globe, from our side that is, we’re tasked to do it,” Glasser said. “There’s no SOP for this; we’re into science fiction. Do you read science fiction?”
Crichton wasn’t sure how to answer; most military officers were death on SF. But Glasser didn’t seem to mind.
“I used to,” Lieutenant Glasser mused. “Used to read a lot. I’m dead worried about biological or chemical contamination from that side. What happened to that bug?”
“Well, sir, it’s two bugs now,” Crichton answered, gulping. “Sergeant Grant and I got them both up out of the hole. We wore our protective gear and decontaminated afterwards.”
“Decon foam might not work on bugs from another world,” Glasser pointed out. “As I said, no SOP.”
“Yes, sir, but we also used bleach,” Crichton said, stubbornly. “Sir, if it can stand up to bleach, I don’t think it can bond to anything in this world.”
“Where are the bugs?” the SEAL said, ignoring the comment.
“The sergeant and I trussed them up with duct tape and then dumped them in the back of a Humvee with all the windows rolled up and big signs on it not to open it. But they’re both dead, sir. They just stopped twitching after a while.”
“I guess something on this side is poisonous to them,” Glasser said. “Which is the first good news I’ve had today. And bad, for that matter, it doesn’t mean the other side isn’t poisonous. Any idea what?”
“No, sir,” Crichton responded. “They were moving fine and strong as bejeezus. Sergeant Grant helped me because he usually works in an alligator farm wrestling gators. And it took both of us on them to get the tape on them. They didn’t attack us or anything but it was like riding an elephant if you know what I mean; they just didn’t seem to feel the weight, even the smaller one. If I’d make a guess, sir, I’d say that it’s a higher gravity world on the far side and that something in our air, carbon dioxide or oxygen, is probably what killed them. Too high or low of oxygen or too high carbon dioxide. Just a wild-ass guess, sir. I’ve gone up by the globe and taken readings but the instruments I’ve got don’t show anything harmful coming out of it.”
“You do read science fiction,” the lieutenant said, smiling at him. “Crichton, right?”
“Yes, sir. I did. Still do for that matter when I’ve got the time.”
“My boys can kill anything they can see,” the SEAL said, reflectively. “They can move like lightning, go anywhere, do anything. But with the exception of the command master chief, who reads Starship Troopers once ritually before every overseas assignment, I don’t think any of them have ever read an SF novel. Or thought about how an alien world could be different. Comments?”
“You’d better brief them carefully, sir.”
“That is we, Sergeant. We had better brief them carefully. Believe it or not, SEALs are willing to listen to people who know what they are talking about. And, also contrary to popular opinion, they’re smart. Which may matter one hell of a lot. Or not at all.”
* * *
Orlando International Airport’s call-sign was MCO, which stood for McCoy. It had previously been McCoy Air Force Base back when the security of the United States against the Soviet nuclear arsenal rested in Mutual Assured Destruction and intercontinental bombers were one leg of the triad that assured the Mutual.
As Orlando grew in size and importance from a small cow town with a few defense firms to an entertainment and research center, MCO had grown as well, adding flights, adding congestion and eventually adding runways. But the main runways were the same that had been laid down in the 1950s and they were more than adequate to handle an F-15. Which was how Dr. Weaver arrived after a flight from Andrews Air Force Base he would remember for some time.
FAA regulations prohibited military jets from breaking the sound barrier over inhabited areas. Jets which were supersonic, therefore, were limited to training over water or uninhabited desert areas.
Bill Weaver had flown in F-15s before, including aerobatics to try to make him sick. They hadn’t. But this was radically different. The F-15, carrying conformal wing tanks, had climbed for altitude at what was called “maximum military thrust.” Since an F-15 is one of the very few aircraft in the world that has more thrust than mass, that meant virtually straight up for a minute and a half. It was very much what he imagined being in the shuttle would be like, if you were able to look around in every direction. When it reached its optimum altitude, 65,000 feet, it had turned south and the pilot had pushed the afterburners to full. From that high it is n
ormally hard to notice the change in motion relative to the ground at all. Just as high jets look as they are moving slow from the ground, from the air the ground itself tends to look stationary. Not at darned near Mach Three. It had taken thirty minutes from when the pilot turned south to when he flared out for a landing in Orlando. And the earth, which from their altitude had a very distinct roundness to it, looked as if it had shifted rotation from west-east to north-south. Even at their height Bill was pretty sure they’d left a string of broken windows behind them.
There had been very little conversation. Ground crewmen had helped him into a G suit, hooked him up, explained the two switches he was permitted to touch, pointed out the ejection system which he was not permitted to touch except in obvious circumstances and climbed out. The pilot had, if anything, less to say.
“Can I ask who you are?” the pilot, a lieutenant colonel, said when they reached cruising altitude and the bone crushing acceleration had eased off.
“I’m an academic egghead,” Bill said, glorying in the view out the window. The sun was down in the west on the ground but they were still in sunlight at altitude. Despite that they were high enough that the sky was purple and he could see stars. It was as close as he’d ever been to space, the one place he’d wanted to go since he was a kid.
“Pull the other one,” the pilot said.
“No, really, they’re sending me down to look at this thing in Orlando. I’m a physicist.”
“I figured that they weren’t sending you to Disney World, but you don’t look like any academic I’ve ever seen.”
“You need to hang out at the Hooters in Huntsville more often.”
Bill had heard it before. If you had a Southern accent and looked like a track and field coach everyone assumed you were a jock. But at the level of physics which was his specialty, you could get as much “work” done working out, or mountain biking, or SCUBA diving, or rock climbing, as you could sitting in a darkened office with the door looked and your clothes off contemplating your navel. Which was what one academic of his acquaintance swore by. It was all in the head until it came time to sit down and start drawing equations, which if you’d done the head work in advance practically drew themselves. And if you grew up with a body that only required two hours of sleep a night, a mind like an adding machine and the energy level of a ferret on a pixie stick, you had to find some way to burn off the energy, physical and mental. So he mountain biked, consulted with the DOD, went to national level Wah Lum Kung-Fu tournaments and, occasionally, stood in front of a white board for a few hours and then stayed up for three days writing a thirty-thousand-word paper which he sent off to the National Journal of Physics and Science serene in the knowledge that it would both pass peer review and be published.