Wormholes

by Dennis Meredith

  “DAMN!” he yelled, as the idea hit him like a physical object in the face. He swerved off the road, skidding on the long wet grass. A car honked angrily as it passed him. He took his hands off the steering wheel and sat staring straight ahead. “Wow … yeah!” he breathed to himself. His mind a tumult of ideas, he looked around. There was a store up ahead, a market with gas pumps. He gunned the van onto the road toward the store. Outside, a young man in a windbreaker and backward baseball cap was pumping gas into a small truck. Gerald pulled up and leaned out the window, his hair askew, his eyes wild.

  “Uh … can you tell me what state this is?”

  The young man looked at him strangely, then said. “It’s Illinois. You lost?”

  “Which way to Oklahoma?”

  The young man thought a second, then pointed down the road. “Well, you wanna get forty-four, so you go down that way—”

  But Gerald nodded, thanked him and was gone before he could finish.

  • • •

  Dacey’s office was once more a mess, as it had been before the Deus Foundation man’s visit. But it was a necessary mess. Multiple glowing display screens, paper charts and maps, photo prints, and rock samples covered every flat surface and festooned the walls, even taped to windows. She needed the sprawling mess. She needed to be able to grab a rock from China, or scrutinize a topo map of the Atlantic seafloor, or a photo of the San Francisco hole. She was sure that they were all somehow puzzle pieces, and maybe by having them splashed across her office, she would understand how they fit into a scientific picture.

  She sat at the desk in her usual jeans, t-shirt and flannel long-sleeved shirt, sorting through the latest seismic sounding maps of the Gillard cavern.

  After ten days back in the office, she’d finally gotten a chance to really concentrate on the maps, which revealed a giant undulating tunnel that suddenly opened then closed. Like the object in China.

  She spent the first days back catching up with her teaching and her graduate students. Then she’d had to deal with the university bureaucracy over the Deus Foundation grant. She’d almost given it back, but finally decided to keep it. The chance to understand these phenomena was too important to let her qualms about accepting money from Gerald’s foundation get in the way.

  Besides holding classes and going over grad students’ research progress, she’d been pestered by the university grants office about the bureaucratic process of taking the money. And a university fund raiser had shown up to ask pointedly whether more money might be squeezed out of the foundation. For forty million, they could name a building after the foundation, for example.

  Through all this, she wondered what the hell had happened to Gerald. He’d been quiet during the whole return trip from China. At the airport in LA, where they parted, he promised he’d let her know what was going on. She had kissed him on the cheek again and given him a sisterly hug, which he returned — with a sort of subtle catch in the rhythm of letting go, hinting he wanted to make it more.

  Then he’d evaporated. She phoned his mother, but she’d only heard that he’d bought another van in California and was driving back. She mentally shrugged and immersed herself once more in the data.

  Then, Gerald suddenly materialized in her doorway, grinning and haggard. She’d never seen him grin before.

  “I’ve got it!” he breathed excitedly, his expression glowing with triumph. She’d also never seen the usually placid Gerald so exorcised. “I’ve got it!”

  “Well, take a pill and get rid of it.” She stood up and gave him an exasperated grin, shaking her head. “Where the hell have you been? You look really grungy.”

  He ignored the insult. “Driving. Thinking. Talking to some people I know. Listen, I know what’s going on!”

  “The appearances and disappearances? The other …” She hesitated. It was weird to talk about these things. “… universes, dimensions?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve still got a lot to work out. I wanted to tell you.” He looked at his palms, on which something was written in ink.

  “What’s all that?” Dacey rose and took his hands, examining a series of equations penned in blue ink. Gerald peered at them slightly embarrassed.

  “Uh, well, it’s a bad habit. I sometimes forget paper, and I have ideas, and I have to write them somewhere.”

  “Well, here’s a pen and paper.” She found a scribbled-on yellow pad, tore off the used sheets and handed it to him with a pen. “Write them down, wash your hands and we’ll go eat dinner and you can tell me.” He did so and they walked downstairs to his van, parked at her building’s loading dock. He said he would drive her to her Range Rover parked in the nearby faculty lot. At first she planned for them to have dinner at one of the restaurants on the main drag near campus. But as she watched him hunched over the wheel, bleary-eyed and haggard from his day of driving, she decided that a dinner at home was better. She had some hamburger in the refrigerator that was probably still good, and maybe some buns. She needed to get some food into him.

  They reached her Range Rover, and he followed her through the surface streets to her townhouse. Gerald parked at the curb and followed her in with a sheaf of notes.

  He began to tell her about his theory, but she admonished him that his seminar would have to wait; that he looked like he needed some food first. So she went into the small kitchen and opened two beers, handing him one and beginning to put together a dinner of hamburgers and fried potatoes. He sat at the bar between the kitchen and dining room, and they talked about what they had done since they saw each other last. He enjoyed watching her move about the kitchen, making patties, sprinkling on Lawry’s salt, frying onions and potatoes, pausing occasionally to take a drink of beer.

  The aroma of food was making him hungry, and he needed to stretch after the day of driving, so he wandered into her living room. Her brown corduroy overstuffed sofa and matching easy chair were made to be used, and they had been. The sofa was scattered with bright, print pillows, two of which had been piled at one end, under a large, brass reading lamp, where Dacey, no doubt lay in the evening and read from the pile of books, magazines and scientific journals on the light oak coffee table and end table. Bookshelves held a few travel books and a large collection of rocks and a few seashells, with some framed pictures of what Gerald took to be Dacey’s sister and mother. On the walls were a couple of Gauguin prints, some posters of Yosemite, and near the door a collection of children’s scrawled drawings taped in a jumble at child-height off the floor. Beside the door was a backpack and a pair of bedraggled hiking boots that had walked many miles.

  He went up the narrow stairs to use the bathroom, whose shower curtain was imprinted with lyrics to rock ’n roll songs. He washed up in the sink, next to which was her hair brush with long light brown hairs in it, a small bottle of Charlie perfume, some silver earrings, and a used bar of Zest soap.

  When he came downstairs, he heard her say, “Okay, old buddy, let’s get you fed,” as she brought out into the dining room two plates with hefty hamburgers and piles of fries.

  He took a bite of the juicy hamburger and was glad she had insisted that he eat. They were halfway through the meal, when he said, “I’ve just got to tell you about this. It’s really incredible.” She smiled, rolled her eyes and made a face that indicated she had relented. He quickly spread out his notes on the dining table and she moved around beside him, bringing her plate. “I haven’t figured it all out yet.” He consulted the notes. “Now, remember about all these holes. The holes in China and at the ship. Those were holes into stars. And the vacuum holes in Gillard and San Francisco. Those opened up into outer space on the other side and sucked stuff out.”

  Dacey nodded and chewed a bite of potato.

  “I knew these might be space-time holes opening up, but they couldn’t be black holes, because they just suck everything in and it never comes back out. And black holes have incredible gravitational forces. They would rip everything around them apart. They couldn’t be the reverse, so
-called ‘white’ holes that just spew stuff out.” He found the yellow pad with his latest scrawled equations.

  “Then what?” asked Dacey.

  He held up his equations in triumph. “They’re wormholes!”

  “And what are they?”

  “They’re wrinkles in space-time so extreme that they tear the fabric of space-time; they open up holes into other universes … or maybe to another part of our universe.” He held up the yellow pad. “Like punching a hole through two pieces of paper that are next to each other. But theoretically, wormholes couldn’t exist without huge masses of exotic stuff called negative-mass. We think that’s the case here.”

  “So, why here, why now?”

  “Well, I think the solar system is passing through a region of the galaxy where physical laws have glitched a little bit. The quantum foam — the stuff that makes up space-time at a subatomic level — is flawed. It provides negative-mass.”

  “But why do they open up in Oklahoma, or China, or under the Atlantic? Why not everywhere?”

  “I think it has to do with the magnetic field. If there’s a magnetic field like the magnetic field of earth, a dimension of space-time unravels, linking two universes … or maybe another part of ours. That explains why there are star-holes. The stars on the other side blast right through the holes. And the outer-space holes open into a vacuum!” Gerald smiled at his theoretical triumph.

  Dacey was stunned. She sat back and tried to digest what she had heard. “Will we all die? Will we be swallowed up into another universe?”

  Gerald’s expression grew somber. “Well, I think … I hope I’m right … that there’s a size limit. I think in this region of space, the flaws are such that the holes can only reach a maximum size. Like soap bubbles can only reach a maximum size. If the holes just kept growing, we would have seen other stars in the sky just disappear.”

  “Look, this just seems so … weird … exotic. It seems that things this strange just couldn’t happen.”

  “Yeah, well, we wouldn’t believe that tornadoes and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes could happen, unless we’d seen them happen. They’re weird, too.”

  “Okay, so explain why they’re so different. Y’know, Gillard just sucked stuff up, but in San Francisco it went through like a bullet.”

  He sat back and picked at the label on his beer. “They were both the same kind of vacuum hole … into the vacuum of outer space on the other side. But the San Francisco hole opened way outside Earth. It was carried along by Earth’s magnetic field. It had this incredible velocity relative to Earth and so it zipped through like a bullet.”

  “So, we can expect some that just sort of move along slowly and some that come through like bats outta hell.”

  “I guess.” He raised his eyebrows and took a drink of beer, leaving a few flecks of the amber liquid on his moustache. “Anyway, I’m going to call some of the people I work with and bounce it off them. There are a couple who won’t let it out; who know enough about these theories to tell me whether I’m right.” He took a bite of his own cold hamburger and chewed for a while. “But I am right.”

  They finished their food, put the dishes into the dishwasher and sat in the living room, still talking about his theory. She peppered him with questions. What made the holes disappear? Does the solar system eventually leave the affected region? Can we predict them?

  He had some answers, but mostly, he had to think about it. After a while, he seemed to begin to sink into the sofa and his eyelids became heavy. She considered that he planned to sleep in the van and decreed that he would stay in her spare bedroom. She showed him upstairs to the room. Most of it was taken up with an office, but there was a foldaway couch that her sister or mother slept on when they visited. She supplied him with a pillow and blankets and showed him the trick of opening up the sofa. She patted him on the shoulder and bid him good night, leaving him standing tiredly beside the bed, shutting the door behind her.

  She turned on the television set in the living room and sank onto the sofa to watch the evening news. At the end, there was a joking piece about a peculiar hole in the ground that had been discovered in New York. Dacey perked up. The hole had gone unnoticed for quite a while, because it was in a slum. But now, the city of New York was trying to figure out who’d dug this perfectly round, glass-smooth hole that was so deep, the city engineers hadn’t figured out its true depth yet. They wanted to fill it up, but some scientists from Columbia thought it needed to be studied. That there was something strange about it.

  “Maybe it’s the famed rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, right here in the Big Apple,” joked the TV reporter.

  Dacey remembered Gerald’s strange comment about the Cheshire cat. She went upstairs to go to bed, but stopped in the hall for a long moment beside the closed door to his bedroom. She thought about going in and telling him about the New York hole. She also knew she was thinking about going in there for another reason. Since he’d appeared at her office door, she’d felt a stirring beyond friendship. She knew how Gerald had looked at her; the growing chemistry between them. How odd it was, this chemistry. She knew she admired his spirit, his devotion to this idea, however oddball, that there was some alien phenomenon out there he had to know about. But it was more; she found herself attracted to his gentleness, wanting to nestle herself within it, and she knew why. Then a pang rose within her, one that she did not want to deal with. She was beginning to care about this man. She liked men. But she couldn’t let herself care for one man. After what she had gone through, she had decided not to do that anymore.

  When she woke up the next morning, his door was still closed. She showered and washed her hair, but decided not to dry it. The hair dryer might wake him. She combed it out and pulled it back in a ponytail, put on jeans and a sweatshirt against the morning coolness and fixed herself coffee and a bagel. Hearing the kids noisily gathering at the bus stop nearby, she decided to go sit on her front stoop in the warm morning sun and watch them play. Next door, Nancy opened her screen door to let Sammy out, saw the van and gave Dacey a significant look that asked, “New boyfriend?” Dacey returned it with a dismissive shake of her head, and Nancy volleyed back another look that said, “Oh, yeah?” Sammy was much too busy to give her a hug, as he passed by on the way to the bus stop. Little Karen had engaged his attention, and they trundled off together with their kid-sized backpacks. Maybe Sammy would make up for it by making her another drawing that he would tape up in the gallery beside her door.

  As she watched the bus arrive and the kids climb onboard, she decided the plan for the day. She didn’t have any classes or appointments that morning, so she’d head for the store. If Gerald was going to stay a couple of days, she’d need supplies. She smiled at herself. Maybe if she bought lots of food, he’d stay longer and she could fatten him up.

  She took a sip of the strong, black coffee and thought about his theory. Surely the terabytes of data on her computer and the papers festooning her walls must support or refute this idea of wormholes into other dimensions. These holes must have some properties that would be revealed in the seismograms, photos, satellite data, and chemical tests. She mentally rummaged through her computer files and her office papers, trying to picture all the data on all the events: the Gillard Hole, the supertanker disaster, the holes in San Francisco and China.

  The Gillard hole data. The images of the underwater slag furrow on the bottom of the Atlantic, which was piled on the work table. The data on the hole in San Francisco also on the work table, and the stuff on the China solar hole on the desk.

  Finally, she shrugged and went inside. Gerald’s door was still closed, so she checked her wallet for funds and climbed into the Range Rover. As usual, she didn’t have a list, so she’d wander up and down the aisles pulling things into the cart that looked good. That was how she came to own a jar of pickled pig’s feet and one of jalapeno jelly. She resolved to be careful.

  The supermarket wasn’t crowded, with only a scattering of people buy
ing morning orange juice, pastries, and cigarettes. She took a cart and started up and down the aisles. Visions of the data rolled through her mind. She absentmindedly walked up one aisle and found orange juice and started down another aisle to find bread. Eggs were at the end in the dairy case. She started up a third aisle, looking for jam. Three aisles. Parallel aisles. She stopped at the jam section before the shelved jars and stared, as a glimmering of realization dawned. All the maps of the events arrayed themselves before her in her mind. The maps. She arranged them side by side in her mind. The maps! Trajectories! Paths! Magnetic fields! She picked up a jar of something without even looking at it.

  “Damn! Wow! Cool!” she exclaimed, making a middle-aged lady down the aisle eye her suspiciously, wondering how anybody could become so enthused over jelly.

  She hurried to the checkout stand and paid for her purchases and burst from the store, jumping into the Range Rover, automatically negotiating the morning traffic, again mentally flipping through and examining the maps and charts, one by one. She was certain her idea was right! She parked illegally in front of her office and ran up the stairs. Nobody was in yet, so she didn’t have to stop for greetings and morning banter. She tore through the office, pulling out maps and diagrams that her mental office tour had pinpointed. She rolled them and put a rubber band around them and was back in her Range Rover just as the thin, hawkfaced campus cop arrived in the little traffic shack, cocking his eye at her to remind her that he’d been lenient because he liked her. She waved as she left.

  Back at her condo, she plopped the groceries onto the coffee table and went upstairs to bang on Gerald’s door. “Get up! Gerald, I’ve got something to tell you!”