Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Later I was moved, within my sac. I was taken through tunnels and elevators from one room to another. The tunnels varied in length, but ended usually with doorways into brightly lit, dome-shaped rooms.

  After a time my fluid was drained and I was taken out of the sac. It was uncomfortable and dry and my head hurt. I was pinned to a table. I was undressed. I did not seem able to resist, or even help in any way, had I wished. I was in a big bright room.

  I seemed to lose consciousness.

  I was standing outside my house again. The craft, the aliens with their sac, had gone. A moment before I had felt comfortably warm, inside my sac, and now I was bitterly cold and dry. It was the worst feeling I have ever had, that feeling of abandonment and rejection, for I knew they had only intended good.

  It was now after dawn. It was full daylight, in fact. Some hours had passed …

  His name was George Holland.

  It was pretty much as she’d expected: a farrago of misunderstood cosmology and relativity, with a lashing of Richard Dawkins, and promises of more missives to come. And the heart of it, of course, was the UFO abduction account: run-of-the-mill stuff with psychological origins, for such a sad loner as George Holland, which seemed lucidly obvious to her.

  What wasn’t clear was what he expected her to do in response. Perhaps it was enough for him that he was communicating.

  She read through half of the letter, then folded its several sheets and put them carefully into her course folder. She knew how offended he’d be if she simply discarded the letter, at least before her six weeks was up.

  She fixed herself a drink, and tried to relax by watching the TV news. She wondered afresh why she put herself through this, even to the extent of running risks of encounters with oddballs like George Holland.

  But she knew the answer to that. For Sheila Pal, teaching was an itch she had to keep scratching.

  After taking a PhD in theoretical physics, and much against the advice of her parents and colleagues, she’d become a teacher, of maths and physics to A-level at a sixth-form college. She’d had no illusions about the challenges she would face – she’d done some supply teaching while taking her doctorate as a way of eking out her meagre grant – and in fact it had been that experience which had hooked her on education as a vocation.

  Still, she’d soon been ground down: the absurd workload, the ill-suited and ill-advised students, the out of date and restrictive syllabuses, the inadequate funding and equipment. She lasted three years. The decision to quit was forced on her after a double lesson on vectors, the most graphic topic of her A-level maths syllabus, held first thing on a Monday morning in a twenty-year-old ‘temporary’ wooden annexe whose rat-chewed walls were so poor at keeping out the damp that none of her visual aids would work: even the blackboard was covered by a layer of dew so thick not a particle of chalk would adhere to it …

  Perhaps the young George Holland had endured lessons in conditions like that. Perhaps things would have been different, for him, if he’d had a good teacher, decent educational opportunities. A teacher like herself, she thought.

  She reached for his letter again, and read a little more.

  … It all made sense to me after reading Brief History of Time – in so far as I could follow it, and the technical references I went into after that.

  According to Hawking, there was no Big Bang.

  Conventional physics says that if we could wind Time back to the Big Bang, the moment when the Universe began, we would see the world – the whole Universe, all of matter and energy, even Space and Time themselves – falling down a sort of funnel, compressing down into a point of unimaginable density and energy. And before the Big Bang there was nothing, nothing at all, not even Time.

  But there are problems with that model. Infinite density, zero size? Even I know enough mathematics to know we can’t handle such concepts. And the idea that there was another region where not even Time existed seems bizarre.

  Hawking made it all clear to me – up to a point.

  Hawking says there was no Big Bang. This is the concept of Imaginary Time, which is all a matter of quantum mechanics, but what it boils down to is this: the Universe isn’t like a funnel at all. It’s more like a Sphere, which folds over on itself in Imaginary Time, complete and closed. The Time we experience is just a Line of Longitude on that Sphere, among many such Lines. And the Big Bang – our Big Bang – is just a Pole on the Sphere, an arbitrary point. If you looked along different timelines, you would see back to different Poles.

  Think about a globe of the world, with all the Lines of Latitude and Longitude. At the North Pole and the South Pole, all the Lines of Longitude come together. If we were at a Pole of Space and Time, the Lines of Longitude would spread out from here, so everything more than a little bit away from here would be smeared out and flattened.

  But you could have the Pole somewhere else, and the Lines would come together there. It’s a Pole to one person, but just another place to someone else. It’s all how you see it.

  And that’s why the ships, and their crew, look distorted to us. They are from somewhere else: a different place, on the Sphere of Imaginary Time. Perhaps this is their Big Bang, which they’ve come back to observe. Of course there’s no cosmic explosion going on here. But there doesn’t have to be. It’s all a sort of illusion, no more real than the convergence of Lines of Longitude on a globe.

  When I read Hawking, all this became clear to me …

  Stephen Hawking, she thought bleakly, had a lot to answer for.

  There were a few odd points about the letter, she mused. Of course the subject matter was bizarre. But Holland did show a reasonable lay understanding of Hawking’s arguments. And it was, at least, a novel rationale for the UFO phenomenon: those spacecraft which moved like no material object, viewed only in enigmatic glimpses…

  The tone of the letter wasn’t as self-obsessed and cranky as some she’d read – no invented cod-scientific terms, for instance – and the letter seemed to be addressed outward, to a person living independently of the contents of Holland’s head.

  It was as if, she thought, Holland truly had endured these experiences, and, bereft of guidance, was trying to find a framework to understand them, and to communicate them to others. Much as she might do herself, if she were to experience – or believed she had experienced – something so far out of the ordinary.

  But then, what did she know of craziness? And why was she, alone in her flat in the middle of a winter’s night, musing over George Holland’s damaged psyche?

  Because, she told herself, he’s my student.

  Leaving the teaching profession hadn’t been easy. Aside from the emotional wrench and the feeling that she was betraying her students, she found she had to give a full term’s notice, and so she ended up trapped for a further nine months. She’d hoped for a return to academia, but even short-term research contracts were as precious as gold dust, and the chance of a secure tenured post was effectively nil.

  In the end, she took a job as a technician in a lab at the Open University. She was overqualified, but the job was actually more secure than an academic position, and not much worse paid, and she even got to do a little teaching.

  The one good thing about the whole experience was that she had proved to herself, at least, that she’d been right in her choice of career. She was a born teacher. She’d enjoyed every lesson where the resources had by some chance been adequate for the job. And she knew her students had found her work enriching, beyond the narrow needs of the syllabus; she enjoyed the way she was able to get inside her students’ minds, to see the material from their point of view, to overcome its difficulties and obscurities.

  She’d even found the space to plug some of the more lamentable gaps in the syllabuses she was handed. The physics particularly seemed to pay no attention to the developments of the twentieth century; her students struggled with Victorian-standard science apparatus while the watches on their wrists and the calculators in their desks r
elied on the most advanced quantum-mechanical technology. So she put together simple demonstrations of ideas from quantum theory, relativity and cosmology, and was gratified by the understanding her students showed. Relativity, for instance: you could go a long way, at least with the special theory, with no more mental equipment than the geometry of Pythagoras’s Theorem and the stark, startling fact that the speed of a photon was constant, no matter how quickly you moved, for space and time themselves – and your measuring rods and clocks – adjusted themselves to make it so …

  Well, despite her failed career, she knew she’d been right in her life choices. It was society, in Britain in the 1980s, which had been out of step with her.

  Still, the teaching itch remained strong. So she began a little work on various adult-education courses. Too often she came up against the old restrictions of syllabuses and recalcitrant students, but she appreciated the WEA particularly for the freedom and encouragement it gave her.

  Even if it did bring her into contact with the likes of George Holland.

  She shouldn’t think like this. Holland was an oddball, but, she reminded herself, he was still a student, and showing enthusiasm for the subject in the only way he knew how …

  Maybe she ought to learn to be more tolerant.

  But on the other hand, she’d been warned before that her excessive sympathy for her more difficult students might one day lead her into trouble.

  The next week, Holland gave her another letter.

  … But if all points in Space and Time are really equivalent – if they are all Poles, if you take the right point of view – why can’t we see it that way?

  Relativity teaches us that Space and Time are malleable things. Space and Time adjust themselves to make the Speed of Light come out constant, for instance. And if so, perhaps we can train ourselves to see the world differently.

  I’ve been running a series of experiments. I intend to train myself to think my way to a Pole. The experience would be wonderful, of course – to see those golden ships I can only glimpse now, distorted and compressed! – if it can be controlled.

  I’m not at liberty to divulge the details right now – it would be far too dangerous to do so – for surely at a Pole one would be isolated: utterly alone, in a small lens-shaped area of Space and Time, in a way unprecedented in human experience.

  And if the new way of seeing were to start to spread among the population, it could be disastrous.

  Space and Time would be inverted. Instead of humans being as we are – crammed close together in Space, and fixed to a small duration in Time – we would be scattered: each of us isolated, in limitless Space and Time, alone for all eternity.

  And the danger of such contamination is real. Of course I subscribe to Richard Dawkins’s theory of the meme: the mental infection which leaps from mind to mind, enslaving whole populations in the manner of a religion, or a scientific paradigm. I would hate to be responsible for bringing such a meme into existence – for spreading the infection of loneliness and isolation to a single other person – perhaps even initiating the collapse of our consensual shared reality altogether.

  That is why I must be careful.

  But I have become convinced that I am on the right lines. Already, I am sure I have transported myself, mentally, closer to a Pole. For I can, you know, no longer see the sun. Or the stars, or Moon. The sky to me is a washed-out neon blur, grey and empty. It is as I expected. I am seeing the increasing divergence of the Lines of Longitude, as I migrate to the Pole …

  George Holland didn’t turn up for the fourth lesson. Nobody in the class knew where he was – in fact, none of the other students had troubled to learn his name. She was rather relieved, guiltily, to be spared the weekly letter.

  And somehow it came as no real surprise to her when, a few days later, two policemen came to her flat. It was late on a clear, frosty night, and, tall and sombre, the police were both dressed in heavy black overcoats.

  George Holland, they said, had been found dead.

  It was in the house he shared with his mother. In fact his mother had discovered him, after returning from a long visit to relatives.

  He had died of thirst, hunger and cold. The house was emptied of food. The police suspected it was a particularly bizarre form of suicide.

  He had left behind one last letter, addressed to Sheila. The police watched as she opened and read it.

  … I found the girl the day after the rest of the world folded away. I was disappointed; I thought it might be the spaceships.

  I reached the Pole about lunch time on a Tuesday. Not that the time is important – or is it? I suppose I should record every detail …

  This is how it happened.

  My mother was away at her sister’s. I remember standing at my bedroom window and looking out over the quiet street. There was a girl in a scarlet coat standing at the bus stop just along the road from our house. (This was the girl I would find later.)

  Then I moved to the Pole.

  It was extraordinary. The houses across the street started to flatten out, smearing like wet Polaroid photos. They became reddish streaks along the ground, and then the rest of the town beyond them squashed down to a line of colour. Even the air, the sky itself, was crushed down into that line.

  I walked out of the house. It was quiet as the middle of a fog. I was in a dome of air about a hundred feet across. Our house was intact but the terraces to either side were melted out of shape; they looked like plastic models with one side melted and crushed down. I walked out past the twisted bus-stop sign. The next house along was about three feet high. I could look down into its chimney pots. And the next was just a brown smear on the ground.

  I tried to walk out further but it was like walking through sticky oil, and it started getting harder to breathe. The ground was smooth as glass. I ducked down into the top of the atmosphere and peered ahead. I could see a brown line topped with blue. Sometimes I could see a hint of movement along that line, perhaps an aeroplane.

  It was just as I had anticipated, from my studies of Hawking.

  I walked back. That was a lot easier, like walking downhill. I felt exhilarated at my affirmation. I’d done it. I was at the Pole, a lens-shaped region of Space and Time, centred on myself. This was the place where all the Lines of Longitude meet, the place where the ships were. If I could see them, no doubt they could see me, and would take me back. All I had to do was wait for the ships to come and find me.

  I walked all around our house, stepping over the roofs of the ones next door. I hoped I’d find the ships waiting already, but they weren’t there. I supposed I’d have to be patient.

  I made myself a supper from a snack bar. Chocolate sandwiches. There wasn’t much food in the fridge, but I didn’t suppose it mattered. I won’t be here much longer, once the ships arrive. I wrapped up the rest of the chocolate bar for the next day.

  I was a bit surprised when it got dark. I can’t see the sun; there’s only a sort of pearly neon light over everything, but the light goes down in the evening. The electric lights won’t turn on, though, and the TV is dead. I’ve got a radio that works on batteries but there’s only a mush, even at the highest volume.

  It got quite cold, that first evening, so I went to bed. I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I kept hearing noises, little scratching sounds.

  It was light but still cold when I got out of bed, so I put my coat on over my pyjamas and went down to the kitchen. There was a trickle of water dripping out of the fridge. I opened it up. There was a stink of spoiled milk in there, but the chocolate was gone. Even the paper had vanished.

  So it couldn’t be mice. What mouse would eat foil wrapping? There had to be another person with me, here at the Pole.

  I tried to get washed, but there was only a brownish trickle of cold water out of the taps. And I couldn’t shave because there was no power for my razor.

  I searched the house from top to bottom, walked around and around, stepping over the roofs again. Nothing.
r />   Then I went out into the street and started to shout, making as much noise as I could.

  Eventually she came running out of the front door and stood in the middle of what was left of the street. It was the girl in the red coat I’d seen at the bus-stop the day before. She held her hands to her ears and she was crying. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Tears splashed down onto her coat, of shiny plastic.

  I stood in front of her. ‘Did you take my chocolate?’ My throat was scratchy after all the shouting.

  She nodded, and then lowered her hands and looked up at me, dabbing her eyes with the back of her hand. She had blonde hair but it was all over the place, a real mess. And her mascara had been washed over her face. ‘I was hungry,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t care.’ And I didn’t. Once the ships arrive, I won’t be hungry again. I started walking back to the house.

  ‘Wait!’ She ran after me, but stopped a few yards away, trembling. ‘Please …’ She opened and closed her mouth a few times, like a fish. She was no more than twenty, I suppose, and she had nice teeth, like a row of little pearls. ‘What’s happened? Where are we? Do you know?’ She waved her hand around vaguely, pointing to the blue-and-brown line all around us. ‘Has there been a war?’

  ‘A war?’ I laughed. ‘No. No war. We’ve moved, that’s all. To the Pole. I thought it was just me, to tell you the truth. I didn’t know you were here too. I don’t suppose it matters.’

  She had a small face that creased up now as she tried to work it out. ‘What Pole? What do you mean?’