Analog SFF, July-August 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Hey, Brian, I think I found a glitch. One of your guys got sent over here somehow."

  Since the support groups were always undermanned, Brian was immediately enthusiastic. At least, he was enthusiastic until I told him the name.

  "Nuts! It's got to be two different guys with the same name. We've got our Elmer Colby and frankly, we'd all be happier without him."

  My spirits plummeted. “Yeah, I was kind of hoping to get rid of ours. He's nothing but trouble."

  "They must be related. Ours is an ugly drunk and a troublemaker. Sorry, can't help you."

  I rang off and turned back to the paperwork. I was just about to file it all away when I noticed something. Our Elmer Colby's service number was RA52903257. The one assigned to the 312th was RA52903258. Probably one or the other was a typo, but it was still a pretty big coincidence. So I read further. They both had the same date of birth, both enlisted on the same day, and their social security numbers were only two digits apart. That was stretching coincidence, or bad typing, beyond the limits of probability.

  It bothered me so badly that the next day I hitched a chopper ride up to Tuy Hoa. In addition to my two main jobs, I was also the PIO clerk. That's Public Information Office, which was supposedly an internal news service run by the Army but which was actually designed to produce puff pieces, human interest stories, and mostly profiles of soldiers that could be sent back to their home town newspapers. I was supposed to turn in one story a week, and the officer in charge—a second lieutenant who got stuck with all of the annoying little jobs—gave me a free hand so long as I kept him out of trouble. So I told him I was running up to Tuy Hoa to do a couple of stories about how units in the field were supplied and he nodded and approved my request without even listening to it.

  * * * *

  The Huey that brought me was going to return in about four hours, so that's all the time I had. I stopped to see Brian, told him my cover story, and asked for suggestions. He gave me some names.

  "What about that Colby guy you were telling me about?” I tried to sound casual.

  "Him? Trust me, you don't want to interview him. He's a jerk.” Brian expanded on the subject, and mentioned that his Colby helped maintain their fleet of trucks.

  I had to ask someone else for directions to the motor pool, a sprawling area behind a low hill nestled up against the corner of the local minefield. There were a dozen or so mechanics at work, but I didn't have to worry about identifying which one was Colby. He looked just like mine. I figured that was the explanation. They were identical twins and had the same birth date. Of course their social security numbers would be almost consecutive, and if they enlisted at the same time, their service numbers would also be close.

  I returned to my own unit, resigned to the fact that coincidence had been playing with me, but coincidence wasn't quite done. One of my duties was to process service awards and in the batch that arrived the following day was an Army Commendation Medal for Elmer Colby. Except it wasn't my Elmer Colby, nor was it the one working at the 312th. This one's service number was RA52903255, and his social security number was only a couple of digits away from the two Colbies I already knew about. I called my contact at awards distribution, gave him the RA number, and he apologized.

  "Sorry, some kind of mix-up. Colby is with the 14th Armored Brigade. Just send it back to us and we'll forward it."

  Up until now I'd been doing my utmost to avoid Elmer Colby. My Elmer Colby, that is. Suddenly my attitude changed. I was so curious about him—and his alter egos—that I decided to investigate. I didn't throw caution to the winds, exactly, but I did let the breeze push it around a little. I sat near him in the mess hall, trying to eavesdrop on his conversation. Unfortunately, there wasn't much conversation to overhear. My Colby worked as a menial in helicopter maintenance, so I asked some of his co-workers about him. They didn't know much more than I did. “He's okay, I guess. I never really talk to him.” “Colby? I try to stay out of his way. He's got an ugly temper.” He had no close friends, drank alone, had no obvious hobbies or interests, never went to the enlisted men's club. I also found out that he had never once received mail since joining our unit.

  Then I got careless. I spotted Colby from a distance one evening, walking along the company road from the PX toward Hooch country. Curious, I decided to follow him. This part of the compound was generally deserted in the early evening; the last seating was still underway in the mess hall, the enlisted men's club had just opened, and tonight's sentries had already been trucked out to the guard towers along the perimeter. Most of the time it was clear at night, but there'd been a storm that day and the clouds were still pretty thick overhead. Thick shadows washed over the buildings, barely retreating before the handful of subdued and very widely spaced lights strung from our generators.

  I looked away at just the wrong moment and Colby was gone. I was stupefied for a second or two; it was as if he'd melted into a shadow himself. I quickened my pace and closed to where I'd last seen him.

  Colby stepped out of the darkness. “Thought that was you, Kramer. You and I have unfinished business."

  The worst part was that there was absolutely no emotion in his voice.

  Now this might have been a very bad few minutes for me, but I got lucky, though at someone else's expense. Down at the end of the unpaved road, another uniformed figure stepped out into the dim light, an M-16 held at his side, muzzle pointing toward the ground. I didn't recognize him, but there was something about his stance that set off alarms in my head. Involuntarily I turned and looked behind me. Another figure, similarly equipped, stood at the opposite end of the street.

  I was smack in the middle of an imminent gunfight. Like I said, more of us were killed by fellow GIs than by the Vietnamese. I was facing Colby and I started in his direction. Better a beating than a bullet. Colby smiled and stepped forward. Much of what happened then I only reconstructed later. The two strangers were PFC Manuel Cristobal and Specialist Fourth Class Arthur Rand. Rand didn't like Hispanics, words had been exchanged on several occasions, and something had triggered this confrontation. No one ever did find out exactly what. All I know is that I heard both weapons start up simultaneously, the chatter of semi-automatic fire, and I ducked and ran for cover. Colby smiled and reached for me.

  Several rounds hit him, walking up his chest, making a small, dark hole in the center of his forehead. I guess it must have been Rand's errant fire, because Cristobal's burst castrated the hulking Spec 4 and sent him flying backwards, screaming in agony. Cristobal himself was never touched.

  Colby staggered back a step, looking vaguely surprised, then collapsed without making a sound. I passed him in a running crouch and kept right on going. There were shouts all over the encampment and I knew the MPs would be there within seconds. I had no intention of letting them find me. Witnesses to fights inside the compound often had “accidents” if they talked too much.

  I hid in my hooch and pretended to have slept through the whole thing.

  Cristobal was shipped off to Long Binh Jail the following morning. Rand had been medevacced out during the night. No one said anything about Colby and I was afraid to ask directly, so at lunch I wandered over to the maintenance hangar to see what I could find out. Colby was there, lugging boxes into one of the storage sheds. He looked just as he always did.

  I requested a transfer that afternoon and left Phu Hiep two days later.

  No, I didn't say anything to anyone. Look, I was nineteen years old, working with people I didn't like and who didn't like me, surrounded by others who spoke a foreign language and wanted to kill me. I'd been taught by experience to avoid officers whenever possible, and senior NCOs as well, and never to volunteer. All I wanted to do was forget all about Elmer Colby. I ended up at a small Signal Corp outfit in Da Lat. They had no one on the roster named Elmer Colby; no Colbies at all in fact. I spent the rest of my tour with them, then a year at Fort Sill winding up my enlistment. I thought about Colby at times, sure. I wondered if it was s
ome kind of secret government project; robots maybe, or if they'd cloned a whole bunch of him and had replacements stockpiled somewhere. But who and how and why weren't any of my business.

  * * * *

  About twenty years later, I was living in Wallingford, Connecticut. My neighbor was a really nice guy named Romeo Bolduc. We had almost nothing in common but somehow we managed to enjoy each other's company. Romeo worked in a foundry and spent most of his leisure time hunting, fishing, and playing cards. The only time I went out into the wilderness was with paint, canvas, and easel, and I wasn't sure if a straight flush beat a full house. Romeo had never married, which was probably just as well.

  He invited me over one day to take some of the venison out of his freezer. “I'll never eat half of it and I hate to have it go to waste.” I knocked on the screen door and heard him yell a welcome from somewhere in the basement. I walked downstairs and found him painting wooden ducks. Well, they looked a little bit like ducks anyway. They were roughly duck-shaped and duck-sized and even pretty close to duck-colored.

  "I didn't know you were into art,” I joked.

  "Yeah, I'm the Picasso of duck decoys."

  I squinted my eyes. “I guess if the duck was really nearsighted and wasn't paying attention, he might think this was another duck."

  Romeo kept a second fridge in the basement. He opened the door, extracted a beer, and tossed it to me. “Danny, my boy, you look too close at things, that's your problem. Most of us, we don't sweat the details, and that includes ducks.” He picked up the nearest, smearing still wet paint all over his hand. “See, I float a string of these babies out on some likely piece of water and sit back and wait. Now from way up above, they look like they might be ducks, and if they're safe, then it's safe to come down and join them. But maybe we have ourselves a really careful duck. It circles a little lower. The shape is right, the color is right. It doesn't have to walk like a duck and talk like a duck to be a duck, at least not to other ducks it doesn't."

  "So it settles down in the water, but it doesn't get too close to my ducks, because that would be rude. Maybe it does notice that these really aren't exactly ducks, but whatever the hell they are, they aren't getting shot at. So the duck relaxes and I stand up and POW! Fresh honker for supper."

  I shook my head and drank some of the beer. “I guess ducks just aren't long on brains."

  Romeo laughed. “Oh? You think you're so much smarter than a duck? Let me tell you something, Danny. People are just the same. They don't look close at the people they follow, and sometimes they follow them into some pretty nasty scrapes. That's how most wars get started, you know?"

  I hadn't thought about Elmer Colby for years and I didn't think about him in Romeo's basement, but I did think about him about two months later, and Romeo's little lecture rolled back into my mind about the same time.

  Politics bore me, frankly. I vote in the general elections most of the time, but I've never bothered with the primaries and I'm not a member of any party. I've always thought they were all pretty much the same, when I thought about it at all. But I was waiting for a football game one Sunday and I turned on the television early because Doreen was visiting her family for the weekend and I was feeling lazy. I sat on the couch, drinking fresh brewed coffee, and watched as one of the talking heads introduced their next guest. I wasn't really paying attention until I heard the name. It was Elmer Colby, senior senator from West Virginia and one of the leading candidates for his party's nomination as President of the United States.

  I sat up and the coffee grew cold in my cup. The commercial break seemed to stretch on forever and then they were back and a man about my age was sitting at the table and it wasn't hard to recognize my old nemesis. He rarely smiled and answered in short sentences. At times he seemed almost angry. He wasn't a candidate, he insisted, but if he decided that he should be, it would be because he felt an obligation to help lead the people of the United States into a new future.

  I couldn't help wondering just what kind of future he had in mind, and who or what might be sitting out there waiting for us to come into range.

  Copyright © 2009 Don D'Ammassa

  * * * *

  "The world's big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark."—John Muir

  "Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."—Susan Ertz

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: TWO NEW KINDS OF WORMHOLES by John G. Cramer

  Wormholes are shortcuts through space-time, constructs of general relativity (GR) that appear to offer a physics foundation for faster-than-light travel and even for travel back in time. They first appeared in the physics literature in 1935, when Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen discovered that implicit in general relativity is a tunnel-like structure in the topology of space-time connecting two separated regions. Einstein and Rosen were actually trying to explain fundamental particles like electrons and protons. They suggested that if lines of electric flux were threaded through such a structure, the flux would be trapped and one end would appear to be an isolated positive charge and the other end would appear to be a negative charge. Later, however, general relativity was used to calculate the masses of such “particles” and it was realized that they would have a mass of at least a few micrograms, far heavier than the mass of an electron or proton.

  The motivation for the Einstein-Rosen work thus proved wrong, but the mathematics survived as a curiosity of general relativity that was for a time called an “Einstein-Rosen Bridge.” Later, John Wheeler changed the name to “wormhole,” and that is the designation that has stuck. The mathematical description (or “metric") of a wormhole portrays a curved-space object that is a shortcut through space-time itself, connecting two regions of space-time in the same universe or even connecting two separated universes.

  Wheeler demonstrated that simple wormholes are so unstable that if one opened up spontaneously, it would close again before even a single photon of light could pass through it. However, in 1988 Michael Morris and Kip Thorne of Cal Tech showed that stable wormholes are possible (see my AV column “Wormholes and Time Machines,” Analog, June 1989). They described how a stable wormhole might be constructed by an “advanced civilization” (i.e., not us) by placing a region of negative mass-energy in the wormhole's “throat.” The requirement of negative mass-energy is something of a showstopper, because at present we are able to produce negative energy only in very tiny amounts between the conducting plates of a capacitor using the Casimir effect.

  Wormholes are, of course, of great interest for the underpinnings of science fiction, from hard SF to space operas, and over the years I have written many Alternate View columns in this magazine about them. The wormhole solutions come from a non-standard way of using general relativity, an approach sometimes described as “metric engineering.” General relativity is normally done by considering a particular arrangement of mass and energy and asking what metric would result, how space-time would be warped, and what effects would be produced by such an arrangement. In metric engineering, we do it backwards. We specify how we want space to be warped in order to produce desired effects (e.g., a wormhole or a warp drive), and then ask what arrangement of mass and energy would be required to accomplish this. The usual outcome of this kind of GR solution, at least in the cases of wormholes and warp drives, is that a sizable quantity of negative mass-energy would be needed.

  In this column, I want to present two new solutions to the equations of general relativity involving wormholes that do not require negative mass energy for stability, and that thereby avoid the objections that have been raised against the other wormhole solutions.

  The first of these is the cylindrical wormhole. “Standard” wormholes usually have spherical symmetry, and can be thought of as two spherical surfaces in separated regions of space that have been “stitched together,” so that an object passing through one surface emerges from t
he other. However, the sphere is not the only possible geometry for a wormhole.

  Cosmic strings (see my AV column “Strings and Things,” Analog, April 1987) are strange massive objects that may (or may not) be present in our universe. They would have formed shortly after the Big Bang when the energy-saturated space of the early universe was being replaced by the more normal space in which we now live. If they exist at all, cosmic strings would be infinitesimally small in cross section but very long, perhaps forming loops that encircle an entire galaxy. And they would be quite massive, producing strong and very odd gravity fields. Cosmic strings can be loosely described as “seams” or “cracks” in space, long closed-loop tangles in the fabric of space itself. In cosmology they are geometrical imperfections in the topology of space, produced as the universe was unfolded out of the Big Bang.

  Recently, Bronnikov and Lemos have considered the possibility of a wormhole that surrounds a cosmic string, with the geometry of a very long cylinder instead of a sphere. What they found is that wormholes are much better behaved in this geometry. They do not require negative mass-energy for stabilization and do not violate the weak or null energy conditions (see my AV column “Outlawing Wormholes and Warp Drives,” Analog, May 2005), violations of which have been used to label solutions of general relativity as “unphysical."