Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  Abruptly she saw that the thought had crept unbidden into the flow: John as The Future. She reflexively stepped on the brake, blinking. A horn blared behind her. Brakes screeched. Somebody sped past, swearing.

  She had even felt elation when her mother, calling the day after they’d had dinner, had expressed guarded approval of John. Five years ago Claire would have regarded that as a strike against him.

  She shook her head. No, she couldn’t think of that. Not now.

  The cement lab floor seemed to suck heat downward, chilling her legs as she crossed the remaining vacant space in the bay, her clacking footsteps reflected back by bare gray walls.

  John was sitting on a lab stool, staring at the artifact. Abe puttered moodily with his electronics. “Who died?” she asked.

  “My hypothesis,” John replied.

  “About it being a singularity?”

  “No, not that. I thought the situation was steady, though, and it’s not.”

  She bent over, hands on knees, feet demurely together, and peered at the snaking light tube where it entered the plug. “What’s wrong?”

  “Abe can see blobs, tiny grains of x-ray emitting stuff. They’re falling into the core, along those diagonals.”

  Alarmed, she straightened. “The cube is falling in?”

  “No, don’t worry, we’re talking about a few grams of matter. Stuff that’s caught in the singularity’s gravitational well and is slowly oozing inward.”

  “How slowly?” she asked suspiciously.

  “That’s the interesting part. Abe’s resolved those grains for two days now, and they’ve moved about four millimeters.”

  “What? That’s nothing!”

  “True ’nuff,” he said lightly. “What do you know that falls in slow motion?”

  “Feathers.”

  “Yup. What else?”

  “Uhhh…”

  “I’ll give you a hint.” His eyes sparkled. “Relativistic effects.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly. This thing’s a damned grab-bag of theoretical physics. We’re seeing matter, heated up by friction, plunging into the singularity. But it’s so deep in the potential well that it looks slowed down to us.”

  She said guardedly, “You mean, that sort of thought experiment, where one twin goes away in a rocket, and when he comes back, he’s younger than the one who stayed on Earth? Because he moved so fast?”

  “That’s special relativity, and this is general relativity, curvature of space-time—but yes, basically there’s an analogy.”

  Abe shuffled over to them. “How long to fall all the way in?”

  John became less easy-going. “Months, if it fell from the inner surface of the cube.”

  “We could test that, then. Drop something in.”

  “I suppose so. Sure, why not?”

  Claire said, “Haven’t we already done that?” The two men looked at her. “When John bored the hole. The vacuum sucked in some of the dust.”

  Abe snapped his fingers. “Of course! When was that, precisely?”

  “Around four in the afternoon.” John motioned. “I entered it in your lab book, there.”

  “Good. However, it does not explain this increase in gamma-ray energy.”

  Claire asked, “What increase?”

  Abe stuffed his hands into the pockets of his lab jacket. “The gamma-ray flux has been rising steadily for days now. At first I thought perhaps an error, perhaps merely a fluctuation. But no, it is real. We’re installing shielding.”

  “That’s the gammas coming out through the plug, right?” John asked. When Abe nodded he said, “Couldn’t it be due to the rock we took out, from the drilling?”

  Abe shook his head. “No, it increases steadily, not just one jump. My idea was, perhaps it is from the dust, falling in, as Claire said. It heats up, emits radiation, we see it.”

  John said, “But the infall time is long, weeks at least—”

  Abe said bluntly, “Perhaps your calculation is wrong.”

  “Not that wrong,” John replied testily.

  Claire sensed that the two of them had been going at each other earlier. Probably the uncertainties of their situation were wearing on them. It was not easy living and working with a puzzle that got worse every time you learned more about it. That was what research was like. But never this bad, never so long without some sense of the fog clearing.

  And she had her own questions. Why had the ancients carved the cube? How did the singularity get inside? Had they simply discovered it that way? And why mount the amber cone? Some ritual value? Or did they look through the murky amber, peer inside?

  She shrugged and put in, “Oh, I’ve got the report on that plug dust, by the way.” She fished the papers from her large, ruddy leather handbag. “The BU lab found carbonized vegetable matter in it. Otherwise, it’s just rock that’s been heated, so the stratified layering is mixed up. The only interesting point is that the vegetable matter is current.”

  “They dated it with the radio-carbon method?” Abe asked. Claire nodded.

  “What does ‘recent’ mean?” John asked, standing up from the lab stool.

  “For archeologists, within the last century or so. Could be yesterday, for all the chemists can tell.”

  “So someone tampered with the cube,” Abe said sourly. “This complicates—”

  “Why someone?” Claire suddenly brightened. “Couldn’t that—that singularity have done it?”

  Abe said slowly, “I see no reason to suppose—”

  “That would do it,” John said rapidly. “Maybe when we, ah, dropped it. Dislodged the singularity a li’l, maybe?”

  “Made it eject some hot matter?” Claire asked.

  “And absorb some rock, too,” John went on. “Which fell in. And took this much time to get close to the core, because of the time dilation.”

  “Warped space-time,” Claire said. Then, ruefully, “Or warped imagination.”

  “No, it fits,” John persisted. “Something shot out—clean out the back of the cube!”

  “And melted the cube rock?” Abe frowned.

  “Yep. Maybe incinerated some pollen or moss or something in that cave. Mixed it all together. Then the rock cooled. We see the residue as that plug.”

  “Which is why it’s different in composition from the limestone?” Claire wondered.

  Abe muttered, “You are asking detailed questions about something of which you know nothing.”

  “It’s all we can do,” Claire said sharply.

  “If you ask me, you are pursuing minutae when the real mystery is immense, beyond what we can handle,” Abe persisted. “I spoke again with Zaninetti, he thinks we should call in an entire team, get help—”

  A loud and instantly recognizable voice said across the bay, “There!”

  Claire turned, gulping for a breath in astonishment, her throat tightening, and saw Colonel Alexandros Kontos striding toward them, anger flushing his face a sullen red.

  With him there were three men and a woman. All five wore Greek Army uniforms. Claire recognized sergeant’s insignia on everyone’s sleeve except, of course, Kontos’s, who had added some braid across the brow of his high-peaked officer’s hat since she had last seen it. The four followed behind him a step, all headed for the artifact. Out of the corner of her eye she saw John move to his right, shielding the cube. Abe stood still, not understanding.

  “You have been very busy, you little thieves,” Kontos said bitterly as he approached.

  John put up a hand. “No more.”

  Kontos stopped. “You have a Greek national treasure. I demand to take it back.”

  The four behind him stopped and looked around, as if sizing up the situation. Claire saw with relief that they were not armed.

  John said evenly, “Abe, call 4999.”

  Abe said, “What? Are these, is this—”

  “Yeah. Go.”

  Abe blinked and stepped back into the small office. Claire realized that 4999 must be the cam
pus police.

  Kontos stepped forward, back stiffened. “You, get out of the way.”

  “No.”

  “You could be hurt.”

  “I’m terrified.”

  “You wish another beating?” Kontos asked, icily casual.

  “Just a rematch.”

  “In a laboratory,” Kontos said scornfully.

  “Don’t worry, plenty room for you to fall.”

  Kontos bristled, his jaw clenching. Claire sensed a crackling tension between them. John seemed to be deliberately taunting him. She understood John was delaying them, but surely they knew that, too, and meanwhile he was provoking them. Maybe his pride demanded that. Claire could not seem to move. She took a half step forward and stopped.

  “I see you brought some help,” John said. He hooked his thumbs into his belt on each hip, deliberately casual. It seemed a strange strategy, talking tough and giving posture signals of relaxation.

  The woman near Kontos stepped forward and said in Greek, “He is swine.” She was sinewy and held herself almost like a man, crouched and ready. Her black hair was pulled back in a single coiled braid.

  Kontos gestured toward her, watching John. “Sergeant Petrakos likes your attitude even less than I. And she is a forceful woman.”

  “What’s she do for the Ministry of Antiquities, knock down walls?”

  “She has less patience than I.” Kontos was enjoying this, Claire saw.

  “Kontos, we’ve got possession for at least a few more days. Hampton agreed to that.”

  “We will see. Do not forget that a government is a great thing and you are a small thing.”

  “Gee, you’re a reg’lar Delphic oracle.”

  Kontos said angrily, “And you—a boy.”

  Abe put in, “Your guards here—”

  “They are assistants, diplomatic personnel. We have come—”

  John said sarcastically, “Diplomats in uniforms?”

  “Many of our state functions are under the Army now. But I did not come to explain to a thief.” He stepped forward again, studying the cube. John moved to block him. They were still five feet apart.

  “Why didn’t you report the find to Hampton?”

  “What find? It was gone.”

  “You didn’t know that. You hid it.”

  “You are lying.”

  “Do you want me to explain it to your Ministry?”

  “This is wasting of time.” He pointed with a jutting finger. “I want to look at it.”

  “You want to take it.”

  “No. My task is to see that it is intact. If you have caused harm.”

  “We haven’t.”

  “If you have, there come even greater consequences.”

  “What’ve you got in mind?”

  “We throw you in prison.”

  “You’ll have to extradite us.”

  “We will!”

  “The USA isn’t going to deliver up a citizen to your toy-soldier regime.”

  Claire’s throat tightened.

  Without warning Kontos stepped forward and struck John in the chest. The blow staggered him and John twisted away, taking Kontos’s second punch on the other side, grunting. Kontos shuffled closer, agile, and John blocked another blow with his forearm. Kontos was driving him back.

  All the Greeks moved at once. Claire stepped forward and Sergeant Petrakos barred her way, snarling something in guttural Greek.

  Kontos sent a fist into John’s face, glancing off his cheek-bone. John flinched away and then set himself. Kontos came on. John feinted with his left and with sudden speed sank his right fist into Kontos’s middle, twisting to put all his weight behind the punch.

  Kontos stopped, eyes glittering. The punch did not seem to have damaged him. John was plainly on the defensive.

  Kontos struck again and rocked him back, then followed with a chop to the ribs. John gasped. Breathing heavily, John swiped at Kontos and barely caught him on the shoulder.

  “Hey! Hey there!”

  The campus police.

  They swarmed into the lab, brown uniforms separating the two men and warning the Greeks to stay away.

  She had ignored the other Greeks during the fight, and they seemed to have watched without any doubt that Kontos would provide an amusing show. Now the campus police tried to straighten out what had happened. Kontos loudly proclaimed diplomatic immunity. Abe accused him of starting things. John stood silent, rubbing his ribs, panting.

  Claire said, “Alexandros, we will return the artifact and share all our results.”

  He turned glittering eyes on her. “It is too late for that. We will have that, yes—and more. From you.”

  His cold ferocity nearly made her flinch. “But you don’t have to—”

  “We will have justice!” The sight of her seemed to have brought the rage back, congesting his face, flaring his nostrils. “And no American will work a Greek site again.”

  “That’s too much—”

  “Ever,” he said harshly.

  “Look—”

  Smoothly, Kontos turned to the police and said, “I lodge a diplomatic complaint. Against this man—this boy—and your university.”

  John said sourly, “What nonsense.”

  Kontos’s eyes danced and his mouth twisted into a knowing, superior smile. “We are not finished, you and I.”

  CHAPTER

  Five

  John’s ribs ached. The doctor said they weren’t cracked, just bruised. Still, he felt lousy—beaten, frustrated. The next morning was Saturday and he went for a walk before meeting Zaninetti for their work session. The crisp chill helped dissipate his shamefaced irritation.

  Kontos was fast. He fought well. He always seemed to catch them off guard. He knew how to make a lot of trouble. John hadn’t the slightest idea how to stop the man.

  So, as he had so many times before when faced with real-world problems, he buried himself in mathematical physics.

  Zaninetti was as quick as a whip. John saw that immediately. He had perceived the importance of the two main facts—the lightness of the cube, and its complicated gravitational field. However, Zaninetti had concentrated on the particle physics aspects, rather than start from classical relativity, as John had.

  “Why that?” Zaninetti demanded. His scholarly style was combative, always demanding that people explain themselves, keeping them off balance as they tried to placate his scowling skepticism. “The clue is the quadrupole, yes? Start from there, look for particle symmetries. Pick the right group theory, you have it!” He ended with a grand opera gesture of triumph.

  John decided to be distant and casual. Otherwise, he would have to out-shout the man, and that wouldn’t be easy. “You can get the symmetries straight out of the classical gravitational equations.”

  “You have the particle spectrum calculated, then?” Zaninetti was mock-incredulous.

  “Well, I can’t get the masses, no, but—”

  “Then it is nothing! The mass, we must get a mass that is small.”

  “Sure, smaller than a mountain. But I think my solutions—”

  “That way, you cannot find a crow in a bowl of milk!”

  “I got the quadrupolar field out,” John said adamantly.

  Zaninetti instantly dropped the extravagant manner. “What symmetries? Gravitation, it is not easy to get complicated fields from that.”

  They began filling the blackboard in John’s office with equations. Zaninetti swiftly saw the utility of using soliton solutions. Within an hour they had convinced each other that the other’s approach was not wrong, only different. John had started by considering tiny black holes, while Sergio had begun with particles in a flat, uncurved space-time and worked up to larger masses, using the wide range of mathematical techniques he commanded.

  In a sense, the merging of these points of view was inevitable. Zaninetti’s quantum-mechanical attack rested upon regarding particles as wavelike. The characteristic wavelength of a particle was related to its momentum, and
very high energy particles had very small wavelengths.

  Taking a different tack, John had begun with the necessary radius of a black hole, the Schwarzschild radius. For a black hole with the mass of a mountain, the Schwarzschild radius was invisibly small. No one would ever directly see such a small object; they could only watch matter fall into it and be heated up, and measure the resulting radiation.

  When a particle’s wavelength became smaller than the Schwarzschild radius, the disciplines of gravitation and particle physics merged. The minimum mass where this occurred was scarcely a thousandth of a grain of sand. Still, for fundamental particle physics this was incredibly huge, a million million million times the weight of a uranium nucleus.

  The crucial point was that approaches developed for gravitation blended into those used to describe tiny particles. John termed his solutions “twists” with an added force, from the “fashion” quantum number. Zaninetti used particle jargon and different mathematics. The two men spoke different languages but came to the same conclusion.

  “Is still funny,” Sergio said pensively. “Cubic twisting of space-time. Uh!” He grunted aesthetic disapproval.

  “Any matter that falls in, it has to travel around the edges of this cubic folding.”

  Zaninetti scowled. “Sprangle sees that, yes? The cubic structure, it looks like a square to Sprangle, because he is seeing it along a symmetry axis.”

  “Right. If the twists carry some currents, it also explains that multipolar magnetic field I found.”

  “Ummm.” Zaninetti looked unconvinced.

  “So what bothers you?” John put down his chalk and awaited the onslaught. Sergio’s style was to speak quietly, then to explode an objection with rapid slashes of the chalk across his opponent’s neatly written equations, obscuring them completely.

  “I don’t like this feature,” Zaninetti said bluntly, pointing to an equation describing the force between John’s “twists.”

  “So? There’s an attraction between them.”

  “It is like quarks, see? In the laboratory quarks are always bound together by this force, tight.”

  “Sure, but this force isn’t so strong.”

  “Sí, that is some help. But what keeps these twists, these singularities apart?”