by Bill DeSmedt
But what event was that? The countdown included the phrase vysshaia tochka. Marianna puzzled out the Cyrillic again. She’d been studying Russian off and on ever since starting with CROM, but day job demands made it slow going. Let’s see, tochka was a dot or a point, and the other word—a quick check with the handheld—was “higher” or “superior.” “Superior dot” ? Try “higher point,” “highest point,” something like that. Like, say, the cusp of one of the ellipses in the display? Marianna glanced at the wireframe diagram again. If that little yellow marker were going to hit the high point on the red ellipse in ten hours time . . . But, no, it was moving way too fast; it had shifted position visibly while she was standing here and would be at the top of its current arc in minutes, not hours. Maybe only some of the arcs counted?
She shook her head—no time for this now. Save it for the postmortem. Marianna turned and continued down the narrow aisle between the workstations, heading for the far end of the lab.
Where she found the one thing that seemed out of place amid all the electronic gear: a small steel box, about the size of a wall safe, but bolted onto the outside of the bulkhead rather than built into it. It looked for all the world like a microwave oven, even down to the rotisserie platform visible behind its glass door and the potholder gloves hanging beside it. How homey. The oven was empty, though, and its door was locked.
She did a one-eighty and began her return sweep.
Finally, she struck pay dirt: a previously-unnoticed display, bearing the ubiquitous AHТИПОД legend, held a schematic of what looked like an airlock. Could Antipode be a space station? But, no, an accompanying chart entitled vneshneye davleniye vody was displaying numbers in units of . . . what looked like an abbreviation for “atmospheres.” Vody, she knew, was the genitive for “water,” and, prompted by the fact that they were measuring something in atmospheres, Marianna guessed what the handheld confirmed: the phrase meant external water pressure. Lots of water pressure—hundreds of atmospheres—judging by the readout.
Antipode wasn’t in outer space. It was miles below, at the bottom of the ocean.
Just as she was mulling the implications, something gave out an ear-splitting, fingernails-down-a-chalkboard shriek.
Marianna whirled and crouched. What the hell is that? Her gaze darted round the room. Nothing there. The sound was coming from . . . from everywhere, it seemed.
She was getting ready to hightail it on the chance she’d triggered some alarm, when she caught a flicker of movement behind the glass door of that strange little wall safe. At the same instant the shriek cut off and, in the sudden silence, she heard the safe make a small popping sound, as if venting air. There was something in it now, something silvery. She could see it dimly through the glass, rotating slowly on the little turntable. It hadn’t been there before; the rotisserie hadn’t even been moving.
She walked over and inspected the safe where it joined the wall. Just as she’d thought, the box was a sealed unit. No way anything could’ve gotten in from that side. So, where had whatever-it-was come from?
For that matter, what was it? She couldn’t make out more than a hazy shape—the glass door was fogged with steam or cold. The little safe, or oven, or whatever, still felt cool to the touch, but she couldn’t be sure through her gloves, and she wasn’t about to take them off.
One more mystery for her collection.
“With utmost respect, Pyotr Fillipovich, why now?” Grishin’s words were civil enough, but his tone belied them. It said he would gladly have reached out and wiped that insolent grin from the ferret face floating in the darkness of Rusalka’s headquarters suite.
Regrettably not possible: Pyotr Fillipovich Karpinskii was a good thousand miles away in his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, and a videoconferenced persona makes a poor substitute for the real thing when intimidation is the purpose at hand. In the end, Grishin was reduced to glaring at the datawall and mouthing empty formalities. “With all due respect, how can you propose to reopen this question now, with implementation at most only weeks away?”
Karpinskii matched Grishin’s glare with one of his own. “Comrade Director, I consider it my duty to give the full Council one last opportunity to rethink its decision, before it is too late.”
“And the rest of you are in agreement with this?” Grishin’s gaze swept the other five faces, each framed in its own window on the wallfilling display. Vlasov, Parkhomenko, Batkin, Tikhonov, Zaporozhtsev—all the members of the Council for National Resurrection had heeded Karpinskii’s call for one last teleconference, one last thrashing through, one last second-guessing of the Selection. All of them save Prilukov, who had begged off pleading indisposition . . . meaning he was drunk again.
“We have agreed only to hear, Comrade Director, only to listen. In a spirit of collegiality.” Batkin slurred his words, but not from inebriation. The drooping mouth that marred his distinguished, if elderly, good looks was a reminder of the stroke he had suffered at the beginning of the year.
“Forgive me, but there is nothing to listen to, Andrei Romanovich.” Here, at least, Grishin need not feign civility; Batkin, with his long years of service, had more than earned it. Still, some things needed saying all the same. “The alternatives have all been ruled out. Those closer in are suboptimal in the extreme. Those further out, well . . .”
He turned to the man who till now had been sitting quietly in the suite’s second most comfortable chair, watching the proceedings with an air of detachment. “Sasha, explain it to them. Again.”
“Uh, comrades,” Sasha began, “It is as Arkady Grigoriyevich says: the further back we go, the more protracted the target acquisition, and the slimmer the safety margin. Worse, the uncertainties multiply. Theory suggests that many otherwise promising hinge-points are simply unexploitable.”
“Theory!” Karpinskii spat the word out. “Precisely my point. Three and a half billion American dollars down the drain. Twelve years of effort. And even now all we have is theory?”
“Not theory alone, Pyotr Fillipovich,” Grishin said. “You are forgetting the probes.”
“Probes? Puzzles you mean! Riddles which only Bondarenko here claims to understand. You give us paradoxes, when what we need are results.” Karpinskii’s fist, out of frame, could be heard to thump the table. “Permit me to suggest, Comrade Director, that perhaps you are not pressing your research cadres hard enough toward attainment of those results!”
“Calm yourself, Pyotr Fillipovich. This is Nature herself with which we deal. She will not click her heels and snap to attention simply because you command her to.” Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed Sasha’s nod of approval. But that was small consolation when the Council itself remained unconvinced.
He faced them down, one by one. “Whom then would you propose? Beriya? That drunken butcher?” His temper, held in check till now, flared at the thought of the old NKVD chief. “You know as well as I, he spent his days on his knees licking the excrement off Stalin’s boots, and his nights cruising the streets of the capital in that black ZIL of his, looking for adolescents of either sex to molest. Is that your exemplar for the New Russia we seek to build? Khrushchev did us all a favor by having him shot.”
Grishin lowered his voice. “Now, Andropov, on the other hand,” he began, then broke off as his wristtop computer emitted a mellow tone.
His irritation at the interruption gave way to anticipation: another probe had arrived! Perhaps even the one they had all been waiting for. But he couldn’t drop off the call, not with the Council still sitting on the fence like this.
“Excuse me a moment, comrades.” He muted the voiceline, then turned so his lips were shielded from the videocam: “Sasha, I must remain here and put this issue to rest once and for all. Will you go and retrieve the message for us?”
With a nod, Sasha rose and fumbled his way through the darkness in the direction of the door.
Grishin pressed a call button. “I will have Yuri join you there.”
Sash
a paused with his hand on the knob. “That should not be necessary, Arkasha. I can be there and back again in no time.”
“Indulge me, Sasha. Safe is safe.”
Knox was entertaining the mate with reminiscences of other midnights in Moscow, when who should come tripping up the main stairway to the bridge, but . . . “Sasha? Good evening.”
Sasha spun at the sound of his name. “Dzhon?” he asked, peering into the gloom, “Is that you? They keep it so dark up here by night.”
“What brings you up here so late?” What indeed? Sasha had been headed in the direction of the chartroom when Knox had hailed him.
“You will excuse me, Dzhon. There is something I must attend to.” Sasha turned back toward the passageway.
Knox took a deep breath and hit Marianna’s panic button. After a brief pause, the unit in his ear whispered, “Jon? I’m here. What’s up? Can you talk?”
Knox cleared his throat, trusting the miniature mike to pick up what he said next. “Uh, Sasha? As long as you’re going in to check out the maps anyway, would you mind showing me how to operate the zoom on that position display?”
Down in the lab, Marianna let out the breath she’d been holding. When the panic button went off, her first thought had been that Rusalka’security had somehow detected her presence in the off-limits area. But it was only Sasha out for an evening stroll. She was still safe. Grishin wouldn’t send his second-in-command to do his wetwork for him, would he?
On the other hand, Jon had said something about maps. That meant the chartroom. If Sasha was headed that way, he could have business down in the secret lab. It might have nothing to do with her, but that wouldn’t help if he caught her flatfooted.
She shrugged and resumed her recon sweep. But she mentally added one more item to her to-do list: see if there’s a hidey-hole in here somewhere, just in case.
After all, safe is safe.
Three decks above her, Sasha had paused at the entrance to the passage. “The zoom, Dzhon? I fear I do not know myself. Perhaps one of the mates can assist you.” He turned away again.
“Um . . .” Knox’s mind raced, trying to come up with something, anything to stall with. “You know, Sasha—” He broke off at the sound of someone else clumping up the stairs. What now?
Midnight’s perfect, Jon, Marianna had said. The next check-in’s not for hours yet. The place’ll be dead—no one in the wheelhouse but the watch. Yeah, right. Grand Central Station’s more like it.
The new arrival hove into view at the top of the stairs . . .
Knox hit the panic button. Hard.
Marianna’s second sweep had fetched her up in front of the wall safe again. The glass of the door had cleared by now, and through it she could see . . . what?
The vaguely cylindrical thing lying on the now-motionless turntable had the sheen of stainless steel, but there was a strange, half-melted look to it, as if it had been pulled like taffy. Marianna thought she could see distorted symbols embossed on the gleaming surface, but the angle was all wrong; no way she could make them out.
She was debating whether to risk jimmying the door’s lock mechanism, when Jon’s second alert of the evening sounded in her earphones. He shouldn’t play with that panic button; it was making her nervous.
Not nearly as nervous as what came next.
“Yuri!” Jon said, extra loud for her benefit. “What a pleasure to see you again!”
Oh, shit! Marianna swallowed and moved the search for a hideaway to the top of her agenda.
This had just turned serious.
Sasha was on the point of entering the chartroom proper by the time Knox had gotten over the shock of Yuri’s sudden appearance. “Hey, Sasha,” he called out, “wait up!”
“Was there something else, Dzhon?”
“No, nothing much. It’s just that—you know, it occurred to me we never did finish our talk. About your career change, I mean.”
“Yes, what about it?” Sasha glanced at his watch.
“Do you ever miss it? Astrophysics, I mean?”
“Ah, well. But of course. Now is a very exciting time for cosmology. I try my best to follow the most interesting developments, in what leisure I can spare from my duties.”
“So, what’s grabbing you at the moment?”
Sasha thought it over, but not for long. “A joint Indian-Canadian proposal to use the Hubble’s successor for experimental verification of the Smolin hypothesis.” Behind him, Yuri shifted his bulk impatiently. Sasha held up a hand and the disturbance stopped. “You know of the Smolin hypothesis, Dzhon?”
“No. But it must be a pretty big deal to catch your attention this far from launch. That new Webb space telescope isn’t scheduled to go up till—when is it?—fall of 2010,1 think.” He took a step back in the direction of the wheelhouse, willing Sasha to follow.
“Spring of the year after. Launch date has slipped again.” Sasha still wasn’t budging from the chartroom doorway. “And, yes, the Smolin hypothesis is a ‘big deal’—a theory of cosmological natural selection.”
“Must be the engine noise, Sasha. It sounded like you said ‘cosmological natural selection.’ ”
Sasha nodded eagerly.
“What, you mean like: ‘A1 Einstein, meet Chuck Darwin’ ?”
“Yes, only without the silly nicknames, Dzhon.” Sasha wagged a finger at him. “Survival of the fittest—among universes.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It is very simple, really. Smolin—must be of Russian descent with such a name, nepravda-li?—Smolin theorizes that our current universe is the product of evolutionary processes. And he begins with a good, solid astrophysical question:
“Why is the universe full of stars?”
Marianna had to grin in spite of herself. English or Russian, Jon was never at a loss for words. His stock-in-trade, he’d no doubt say. Good thing, too—he was buying her precious minutes in which to find concealment.
And that was proving more difficult than anticipated. The cramped space of the lab combined with the glare from the overheads to leave Marianna-sized shadows in short supply, and her refractive jumpsuit was useless in direct light. No handy broom closets or storage lockers. Not even a large cardboard box. C’mon, c’mon!
“This is sounding like the sort of discussion that goes down better with a cup of tea,” Knox was saying. “I think there’s still half a thermosfull up forward.”
“Oh, very well.” Sasha chuckled and followed him. He paused at the entrance to the wheelhouse and looked back. “Yuri, would you please see to this business for me?”
Shit! Out of the frying pan, into the thermonuclear holocaust.
Knox retrieved his thermos bottle and swished it round. “Um, no, this is going to be cold,” he improvised. “Think we could ask your friend here to trot down to the galley for a refill?”
He crossed back to the passageway and held the thermos out to Yuri. The Georgian regarded it as he might a live snake, then shot a questioning look at Sasha.
“Please, Yuri, oblige us. I can handle matters here.”
Yuri looked for a moment as if he might protest. Then he glowered, yanked the thermos from Knox’s hand, and set off down the stairway.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Knox said when they were alone again. “Why is the universe full of stars?”
“Simple, simple question,” Sasha said, half to himself. “Too simple for astrophysicists to trouble their heads over. But the answer? The answer turns out to be not so simple.”
“It’s just basic physics, right? I mean, pack enough hydrogen together, you get a star.”
“Ah, Dzhon, but how basic is that physics? Many parameters in the fundamental equations appear arbitrary, yet they must all be tuned to just the right values to yield a cosmos full of light and life.”
“Such as?”
“Take your own example of packing hydrogen together to make stars. For gathering matter into star-sized clumps, the gravitational constant must be set just so. Too weak, and the whol
e universe remains just thin gas. Too strong, and it recollapses again into a Big Bang singularity before any stars have a chance to be born. Either way, the universe is dark and dead.”
“Well, okay,” Knox conceded.
“Many such parameters are left undetermined by the Standard Model of quantum theory. String theory, too. Value of nuclear-binding force, masses of subatomic particles, relative strengths of fundamental forces. All of these must be fine-tuned, in complete independence of one another, for ‘basic physics’ to support star formation. No, Smolin calculates probability of a star-filled universe coming into existence by chance at one in 10229!”
“So, the odds are googles to one against?” Knox whistled. A one followed by two hundred twenty-nine zeroes. That was way, way more than the number of atoms in the known universe! “Definitely not the way to bet. What does that leave—the Hand of God?”
“Hah! In the old days, we would have unmasked you as a bourgeois apologist of crypto-mystical false consciousness!” Sasha’s parody of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy sounded almost as clunky as the real thing.
“Well, what’s Smolin’s alternative, then? If it couldn’t have happened by chance, and you don’t want to hear about divine intervention, what does that leave?”
“Evolution. As I said.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you say it. But evolution of what?”
“Go back close enough in time to the moment of the Big Bang, and what do you find? A singularity. Dive to the center of a black hole, you find the same thing. Cannot, can not be coincidence.”
“So every black hole singularity is actually the birth of a new universe somewhere else?”
“Exactly! And survival of the fittest then dictates that there will be many more universes able to produce black holes than universes that cannot.”
“And producing black holes takes stars, right?”