“John, I—I—”
He woke and saw instantly. He held her for a long time, stroking her, and listened to the disconnected images pour from her. Falling on the roller-coaster blended with the swinging, terrifying descent down the shaft. And her panicky, whistling plunge ended at a mouth, the gaping hole with gleaming horns above and snorting scalding breath—bellowing, teeth sharp and rasping, eyes flared and white-hot with devouring rage.
“They’ll come for a while longer,” he said quietly. “They’ll go away, though. I’ve had them, too.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
“You never said.”
“We’re not supposed to. It’s the price of owning a penis.”
She laughed. “Idiot.”
“Only where you’re concerned.”
The next day the chairman of the New York meeting of the American Physical Society took them to lunch at a new vegetarian restaurant, the decor in opulent contrast to the stern, sparing menu. Claire gathered that the place allowed businessmen an opportunity to chasten themselves with a morally uplifting lunch. Each vegetable was brought with a flourish, as if it was a new course. Over the entree—a chicken-shaped thing of mashed nuts—the chairman asked John if he would consent to a press conference after his invited talk.
“Nope.”
“It wouldn’t have to be very long,” the thin-faced man said anxiously.
“Good. Let’s take that to the asymptotic limit of none at all,” John replied cheerily.
That afternoon, waiting while John prepared his viewgraphs in a side room, Claire roved among the physicists. In several large rooms standing panels formed corridors, and each long board had papers and graphs pinned to it. Men and women stood in front of them, framed by the papers they had authored, answering questions, handing out preprints, defending their ideas. It seemed very far from the meetings of archeologists, who tended to hold forth in lengthy verbal talks illustrated by slides in darkened rooms, answering questions only briefly at the very end. That bull-moose-like pattern, trumpeting one’s position from a lordly lectern, had always irritated her. The physicists, with their unassuming posters, flatly displayed to lure an audience by snagging their curiosity, seemed more honest and democratic than the humanists.
John’s talk went well. He spoke with a perceptible Southern drawl, underlining highlights in viewgraphs already crammed with equations. He had formalized his approach to the singularity problem, using mathematical entities of his own invention, their dizzying complexity belied by a simple, subscripted notation. She had seen a poster paper on these compacted symbols, described as “Bishop functions,” in the hall outside; here, too, word of mouth had attracted science’s necessary army of detail-worriers.
The reunited singularity pair had been carefully carried back to the United States, insulated from any shocks and cupped in overlapping traps. A few months of study at MIT had clarified some of their properties, but the question of the stability of the configuration remained. John’s mathematical model was a simplified approximation, leaving out several local distortions, such as the Earth’s gravity itself. John and Sergio had labored to improve the model, with limited results.
The nettlesome problem of stability eventually got booted up to the National Security Agency. No one knew precisely how good the magnetic trap was. John and Sergio were reasonably certain that the twinned singularities were no danger because they no longer had any binding energy to yield up. “They’re as safe as two ordinary rocks,” John had said when he appeared before a secret session in Washington.
The National Security Agency preferred caution. They ordered that the magnetic traps be improved by encasing them in an added layer of close-knit magnetic bottles of greater strength. This done, they decreed that further research would be carried out in the High Orbit Laboratory only recently assembled. Of the particle physicists consulted, most thought this an unnecessary and cumbersome precaution. There was no evidence that the pair would break out, and having them handy would surely speed research. None of these arguments convinced the NSA. The shuttle launch had gone off easily the previous week, and the high orbit tug was slowly towing the multi-layered package up to the laboratory dock now.
Carmody had urged this precaution. He had enjoyed a certain notoriety, for the first time in his career, because of the Greek incident. Overall, Claire was surprised at how little initial furor the raid caused. NSA reflexively said little, and the Greeks showed no desire to trumpet a defeat. They were busy with the uneasy truce struck with Turkey, under U.S.-Italian auspices. War still threatened fitfully, but both parties were content for the moment to lick their wounds and fire salvos of words. Most of their energy was spent acquiring more advanced weapons from whomever would supply them, in preparation for what many parties predicted would be merely Round Two.
The hall was packed for John’s talk, and the applause afterward kept up for what seemed to Claire an unusually long time for an academic audience. She and John left soon afterward. Three reporters were near the entrance, one with a videocam team shooting over his shoulder. John waved them away. The video team man called, “Dr. Bishop! Dr. Anderson! May I ask you just one question?”
“You just did,” Claire replied. Chuckling, John ushered her out into Manhattan’s bristly heat.
That night she was restless and awoke quickly to the retching sounds coming from the bathroom. The strangled gurgle echoed from the tiles, amplified, and she swam up from sleep in sudden fear. John was on his knees, his face compressed and red, eyes glazed.
“My God! Are you…”
He shook his head weakly and threw up again. He had been this way for a week after Greece. The specialists at the hospital in Wiesbaden said they could not easily estimate how much radiation he had received; unlike Arditti and the others, he had not been carrying a dose badge. The vomiting and drop in corpuscle count indicated a moderate exposure, but these things were not certain; they swam in a gray margin of unknowns.
“I…lost it all.” He gasped, tears sliding down his nose, mouth yawning for air.
“Do you…think…” She hovered on the word, not knowing how to express the swelling knot in her.
“That damned phony chicken at lunch. Rotten stuff. Knew it’d get me.”
These words threw open a window upon sunlight; she sighed, realizing that she had been holding her breath. “You’re…sure?”
He got to his feet unsteadily. His skin, pallid from a northern winter, was given an ivory grain by the fluorescent radiance reflected from the tiles. “Science isn’t certainty, y’know.” He made a broken grin. “It’s just probabilities.”
The doctors had given him a host of tests, taken samples, fretted over the unknown spectrum of radiation from the singularity. Their fractional uncertainties, stacked atop one another, mounted to a tottering edifice of prediction. His effects might be short term, easily flushed from the body. Longer term damage was difficult to assess. Certainly there was increased cancer risk. If certain symptoms recurred, the prognosis was not good.
She bit her lip and decided to hide nothing, to let her own fear come out. “How long ago did you have one of those blood tests?”
“Just last week.” He bent and threw cold water into his face, snorting. “The count was normal. Agh! I can still taste that damned chicken.”
“That’s…good.” It seemed suspiciously late to be getting sick from lunch. “I mean…”
He smiled. “I know. Always ask me, Claire. Always unload your feelings onto me. That’s what I want.”
“I…” She blinked back tears. “Thank you.” She put her arms around his shoulders.
“Let me brush my teeth first,” he said gently. “Or you’ll love me less in the morning.”
She grinned. “Come to bed and I’ll give you a present.”
“Gee, I always liked presents when I was a kid. Tell me what it is. Can I ride it?”
“As much as you want.”
Two hours later the tele
phone rang. When Claire drifted up from a contented warm place, John was talking.
“I see. What kind of motions?”
She propped herself up against the pillow. It was 4 A.M.
“So the paired singularities act together? This isn’t driving them apart?”
He bit his lip, concentrating.
“Good, at least whatever’s happening isn’t disturbing the stability of the pair. But what could make them do that? I mean, they should drift around the cabin, same’s any ordinary matter.”
She gathered they were talking about the pair up in the high orbital satellite. The tug craft must have reached the big laboratory.
“No, I don’t understand it. Can’t they control them? Keep them from slamming into the wall?”
He listened, shaking his head. “Well, I can’t think of anything right away. Hell, you know what time it is?”
John listened for a long time. “No, I can think about it, sure, but I’m not going anywhere.”
More talk. Finally, “No, Sergio, ’fraid not.” He hung up.
“Sergio? What was his news?” Claire asked.
“The team got the singularities into the lab, or rather they tried to. As soon as they were free to move, the contraption they’re in started hugging the walls of the lab.”
“What? Moving around?”
“As nearly as I can tell from what he said, the whole rig—singularities, magnetic traps, insulation, the works—has pinned itself against the interior wall.”
“One wall? It’s not moving?”
“It’s settled down, he says. It got stuck against the wall closest to down—I mean, the side closest to Earth.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Sergio says Carmody called him. Didn’t know where to reach us, so wondered if Sergio would know where we’d gone.”
Claire frowned. “Sergio must’ve called my mother.”
“Right. Carmody wants me to hustle down to Florida. The next shuttle flight is three days away.”
“What?” Claire sat up straight, alarmed. “They want you to go into orbit?”
“All the way out to the High Orbital Lab.”
“To supervise experiments. To figure it out for them.”
“Right. Only I’m not going.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“On my honeymoon? Not likely.”
They talked further, drowsy, and John fell asleep before Claire did. Still, two hours later the telephone rang again John answered it again. As she revived, she saw he must have been already awake, because he held a yellow lined pad in his lap and had covered it with squiggles of equations.
“Yes ma’am, I know that ma’am, but—”
A pause.
“I’d reached much the same conclusion myself, just now. Both the singularities must be attracted by a very long range force. They’re being drawn to something on Earth. Or in the Earth, it doesn’t matter.”
Another pause.
“Of course, it does imply some further interaction, something we don’t understand yet. They’re being pulled back toward Earth, that’s right, so they preferentially get pinned on the inner wall, and—”
The voice on the other end became louder.
“Yes, I agree it’s potentially very important. No, I don’t see the implications immediately, not fully—”
More argument from the other end.
“But I’m on my honeymoon, for Chrissake—”
Claire snuggled close to him. Tension came into his voice.
“I’m afraid not, ma’am. I won’t.”
His lips compressed as he listened and a set, adamant look came into the bunched muscles of his jaw.
“I’ve been here before. No thanks.”
He listened only a short time and then said loudly, “I said no and I meant it,” slamming the phone down. He puffed dramatically with exasperation.
“Who was it this time?”
“The President.”
“The president of MIT? Why would—”
“No, of the US.”
“What?”
“I told ’em I wouldn’t go.”
“John…you…hung up on the President of the United States?”
“Yeah.” He thought a moment, staring into the distance. “I really did, didn’t I?” He chuckled with pleasure. “She just plain wouldn’t take no for an answer. Strong-minded lady. But I figured I had no more to say.”
Though they talked about it for another half hour, John saw no reason to reconsider. He peered moodily into space, thinking.
“You know,” he finally said, “those twins must not be the basic unit, the fundamental bound system. Our equations say they are, but this attraction to Earth means we’ve been too simplistic, assumed too much.”
“Your theory is wrong, then?”
He grinned. “The tragedy of science is the heartless murder of beautiful theories by ugly facts.”
“How wrong?”
“Too early to tell. Ever since Greece, I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head chopped off. No time to think. But I have been mulling over one thing, an oversimplification. Sergio and I did a theory of singularities in flat space, with no overall gravitational curvature of space-time. Thing is, over distances as big as the space station orbit, that’s not a good approximation. The change in the gravitational curvature due to the Earth is substantial. We should include that.”
“How hard is that?”
“It shouldn’t be so all-fired difficult. Maybe that’ll change the basic equations enough, and some new force term will pop out.”
“What’s attracting the pair to the Earth?”
“Other pairs. Or maybe singles, unmatched singularities. I bet this is the first time there’ve been a pair off the surface of Earth for a very long time. If there is some attractive force between all singularities of this type, an aspect of the whole force law we’ve missed—then the ones on Earth are going to be drawn up to the surface, trying to reach that satellite.”
“From below?”
“If there are any down there, burrowing their way around. And there must be. It takes an enormously high energy collision to make these things, granted. But Sergio integrated the rate equations for cosmic ray events that could yield massive singularities like ours, and he calculated there should be at least a few hundred produced inside the Earth’s volume, since the planet formed. Cosmic rays come booming in, smack into nuclei in the Earth, and you get a singularity.”
“Deep in the Earth?”
“Well, except for your dead King, nobody’s found any on the surface. The rest must be wandering around down there.”
“Then…they might pop out at any time. Pairs…”
“Right. Or singles.”
“That would be terrible.”
“Sure would.”
“What can we do?”
“I’m not sure. I hadn’t considered possibilities like long range forces. The equations…”
“Do you think you could find some way of, well, pacifying them? Some more complex configuration, a new bound state?”
John smiled. She recognized the look now, a turning inward. He was remembering the way the howling thing had devoured Kontos, and the legacy it had left him in his own blood and body, leaving him with an uncertainty, a precarious hold on life itself. For them both, that night had been the end of the long summer of youth, an end of bright assurance—all lost without real regret, for they now sensed a new need that could be met only in each other. From the comfortable small compass of their academic lives they had been sucked into the raw world, a window thrown open on the whistling abyss. Yet in that fact there was a curious maturing freedom, a restful bittersweet glade. Their lives were now touched by freshening unknowns, like science itself, provisional and personal and evolving.
“Sure,” he said. “For a while.”
A TECHNICAL AFTERWORD
Our relations as experimentalists with theoretical physicists should be like those with a be
autiful woman. We should accept with gratitude any favors she offers, but we should not expect too much or believe all that is said.
—Lev Artsimovich
In fiction about science, it is difficult to loft into the realms of high theory without risking a nosebleed. My mood in constructing this book has been playful, as if to say, see how odd the world could be? I include this afterword to answer, for the reader who wants to know a bit more, the salient question: just how imaginary is this dragon I have introduced into a relatively real garden?
Quarks On a Human Scale
A crucial property of the artifact is that the force between it and its twin is constant, independent of distance. It is just as strong when they are 5000 kilometers apart as it is when they are mere centimeters away. This is odd, indeed, for everyday objects, but not at all in the world of particle physicists.
In 1964, hundreds of new particles were being discovered. They were all subject to the “strong interaction,” the force that holds protons together in a nucleus. Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig suggested that this zoo of particles could all be made up of more fundamental building blocks, called quarks. Only three quarks, suitably combined, would account for the hundreds of apparently different particles. This was aesthetically pleasing, and everyone liked the notion.
Better, it was successful. The theory predicted particles which hadn’t been seen before, and experimenters duly found them, with all the right properties. There was a serious problem, though, hinging upon what is called Pauli’s Exclusion Principle.
Simply said, the Principle commands that no two particles with spins of 1/2 (say, electrons) can be identical. All that identifies a particle is a set of quantum numbers which describe energy, momentum, spin and other properties. This means that no two electrons in the world can have exactly the same numbers. To differ by at least one quantum number, they can be located in different atoms; that takes care of Pauli’s requirement for nearly all electrons. For electrons in the same atom, though, the Principle introduces a very important bit of new physics.
A helium atom, for example, has two electrons. The Principle, which has been well verified, says that since they have many properties in common (mass, energy, charge, orbital angular momentum), they must differ in spin. And indeed, they do.
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