“Some would be lost along the way, because they’d be annihilated by interactions with other particles. But some would have to strike the shell. Sure, the shell is made of some exotic material, but at its core, whatever material it is still consists of protons. Due to their negative charge, antiprotons would be attracted by the positively charged protons. When they met, they’d annihilate each other, leaving no trace of each other. Or, maybe better stated, they’d be converted completely into energy. The shell couldn’t withstand that forever.”
“Where would they strike the shell?”
“We could control that. The field lines meet the Earth at both poles. But if we placed the iridium in a geostationary orbit over the South Pole, most of the antiprotons would also strike the South Pole.”
“And that would then create a bigger and bigger hole there?”
“No, not quite. The geographical South Pole is the north magnetic pole, but they don’t line up perfectly—they’re about 9.6 degrees apart. The antiprotons would always head toward the north magnetic pole, which rotates around the geographical South Pole once a day. So, as time passed, the antiprotons should form a ring, and when this ring is completed, the part of the shell inside the ring will no longer be held in place and should be flung off.
“It’d be like chopping off the top of an egg. Sunlight would flood onto the Earth again at the South Pole. If my theory is right, we could use the antiprotons to cut out an area with a diameter of about 2,100 kilometers from the shell. That’s also why I’d select the geographical South Pole, because it has a large land mass underneath it. The South Pole could become the new future center of humankind.”
“Maybe we could use gigantic mirrors to distribute the light over the entire planet,” Judith said. “Since the shell is such a good reflector, maybe we could even use it to our benefit.”
“Many things might be possible,” Kenjiro said. “Of course, it all depends on whether my dream was just a dream, or if we can turn it into a practical idea.”
“Thank you, Ken, you’ve managed to raise my spirits and my hopes.”
“And I must thank you, Judith, for listening to me. I need to think through this idea a bit more, and then tomorrow I can present it to everyone else.”
February 13, 2036 – Mars Ship ARES
The ARES appeared to be floating over a giant salt lake. They would need another two orbits before they reached the surface of the shell, but already the shell that was wrapped around the Earth looked gigantic. Jonathan couldn’t imagine how they could hope to do anything to break through it, but Yue had told him that Kenjiro had an idea and was planning on telling them all today.
It was a strange mood on board because, in reality, they hadn’t achieved anything yet. All they knew was that not everyone was dead down there under the shell.
And humankind was still capable of mustering enough resources to get something 120 kilometers above the Earth’s surface to knock loudly against the shell. That required a certain amount of organization and ability to obtain the necessary materials and invest in an experiment that certainly wasn’t going to improve their position immediately.
Whatever method humankind had managed to use to knock against the shell, the supplies, fuel, energy, and equipment they had used to do it surely could’ve also been used to help them survive. Perhaps it was just due to humankind’s short-sightedness, but maybe it could be taken as a good sign too. Maybe there was at least one person down there who was in the position to think about long-term problems.
Jonathan wished he could hold his nose. There hadn’t been much time for personal hygiene recently, especially in a ship initially designed for a four-person crew that was now occupied by ten. They normally didn’t have to be so close to each other, but because the ARES was now braking, the force of gravity was pushing all of them against the floor, and it was a damn tight fit for all of them in the command center.
“Quiet, please!” Judith was trying to make herself heard.
Jonathan finally saw her when she started climbing up on some piece of furniture. The others continued to talk. The positive energy among them was palpable. Where was Michael? Jonathan couldn’t see him anywhere in the room.
“Please, quiet!” Judith yelled.
Finally, it grew quiet.
“We’ve got to decide how we’re going to proceed,” she continued.
“We send a response. I thought that was obvious,” Wayne said. “If you need a volunteer who knows Morse code, then I’m your man.”
“Thank you, Wayne. But what should we say?”
Nobody said a thing.
“Confirmation that we got the message,” Yue said finally.
“Very exciting,” François remarked.
“Do you have anything better?” Atiya asked.
Silence.
“Can they even hear us? Does this discussion have any purpose?” asked Michael from the doorway.
Had he decided to no longer play the sore loser? Jonathan looked at him skeptically. Had the mood in the room just dropped considerably?
“Yes, I’d assume so,” Giordano said. “There’s no sense making an attempt to communicate if communications aren’t possible using the selected medium.”
“What?” Wayne asked.
“More simply, a blind person wouldn’t try to start a conversation using sign language.”
“But what if the blind person knew that we could see those gestures, Giordi? What if it’s just a call for attention, for help.”
“I’ll admit my comparison is lacking. But we’ve also got to consider that this communication attempt must’ve been costly for the people down there. They’d have to somehow apply physical pressure against the shell at an altitude of 120 kilometers—that’s already in space according to common definitions. So, a flight would cost millions of dollars.”
“I think what Giordano is saying makes sense,” Judith said. “The next thing we’ll do will be to first try to send a message using sound waves. If that doesn’t work, we can always try something else.”
“None of this is going to do any good,” Michael said.
“I’m sorry that Mars has to wait, but we’ve got to figure out what is going on down there,” Judith said. “I, for one, am delighted that we didn’t start our journey earlier.”
There was a quiet muttering of agreement. Then it became quiet again.
“Kenjiro, do you want to share a little bit about your idea?”
“Yes, Judith, if you think it might help.”
“Please.”
Kenjiro told them about his dream, in which he’d gotten stuck in a tunnel. At first Jonathan was confused and skeptical, but then Kenjiro came to his actual idea, a linear particle accelerator in space. It sounded so fantastic that he was sure that it just had to work, somehow. Jonathan was not a physicist, but the principles upon which the idea was based sounded doable to him.
“Are there any objections?” Judith asked.
Nobody said a thing. Not even Michael.
“It’s important that you express your concerns,” Judith said. “It’d be a complicated project, and we also don’t want to unfairly raise anyone’s hopes down there.”
“I’m not a physicist,” Giordano said, “but the concept seems very logical to me.”
“I think it’s a great idea. I’m just asking myself why none of us thought of it before,” Wayne said.
“Yeah, I’ve been asking myself that same question since yesterday. I guess because we were all so fixated on using LISA as a gravitational wave detector,” Kenjiro said.
“It’s not going to help anything to wallow in the past,” Judith said. “I propose sending the following message.”
The commander was obviously well prepared.
“Unity to Earth. Message received. Working on solution. Hole in the barrier at the South Pole. Antiprotons generated with LISA, steered by Earth’s magnetic field. Unity end.”
The giant disk outside the porthole brought him back to reality. Th
at thing was the shell, the barrier, which kept an unknown number of people under eternal night. Whoever or whatever created such a gigantic structure wouldn’t just let a few primitive creatures like themselves break apart its work, would it? But that was the wrong way to think about it. Jonathan imagined a chimpanzee armed with a club. If the club hit him, he’d fall to the ground, and it wouldn’t have mattered or helped at all that humans had invented the Internet or the atom bomb. Maybe the weapon that Kenjiro had thought up would be primitive from the perspective of the shell’s creator, but it might still be effective. An atom is just an atom.
A slight rumbling ran through the ship. The landing capsule had just detached. Judith, Wayne, Kenjiro, and Giordano were on board. They would place the hammer that they’d built in the workshop on the shell. The hammer was made from a heavy metal pipe that would be raised with muscle power. This would tension a spring that would hold the pipe in place until it was released, accelerating the pipe downward to strike against the shell. They hoped the resulting force would be strong enough. Wayne would give the commands, since he knew Morse code.
They wished they would receive an answer. But even if nobody heard them, they’d start their test for knocking a hole in the shell. Humans had always been very good at destroying things. Perhaps the builders of the shell didn’t know that.
February 17, 2036 – Mars Ship ARES
“Ow!” Yue cried out. “Now it’s the other thumb!”
“Let me see,” Jonathan said.
Yue, sitting next to him, turned halfway toward him and then gave him her right hand. A red, completely round drop of blood had beaded up on the ball of her thumb. Jonathan blew on it. The drop detached from her thumb and started to float away. Maybe that wasn’t a very good idea, he thought. The drop could find its way into some electronics somewhere and cause a short circuit! Quickly he reached for a cloth and caught the drop of blood.
He looked at Yue’s delicate skin. A wire had pierced a hole in it. That had to have hurt, especially at the tip of her finger. It wasn’t the first injury of that type today, which was why he already had Band-Aids in a place where he could get to them quickly. He took one from his pants pocket, removed the wrapping, and put it on Yue’s thumb. Then he carefully kissed it.
“All done,” he said.
“Thank you.” She smiled at him and then continued her work.
Almost the entire crew had come to the workshop. Kenjiro had developed a design for an open accelerator coil to be patiently made, with good old-fashioned manual labor, from parts of the radio telescope. They needed at least twenty coils. Solar panels from the moon’s solar power plant would supply the necessary energy.
So that the coils would stay in their correct positions in space, they would be given small propulsion systems. To do that, they had to sacrifice the thrust jets from their spacesuits—as well as some spare parts from storage. The suits were still functional, but they would no longer be able to fly around freely in space without the jets.
Kenjiro himself was not in the workshop. He and Judith were going over the plan one more time. They had to position the coils so that they optimally accelerated the protons. To do this, they would be pulsed—whenever a proton arrived at a coil, that coil would impart thrust to the proton in the direction of Earth.
Right then, Giordano was supposedly writing the control software for the entire process. Jonathan didn’t envy him the responsibility. Giordano’s work wasn’t as boring as the manual labor they were doing, but the burden he bore was much heavier. It was similar to his responsibility, as a doctor, for the life of a patient. But Giordano’s program and Kenjiro’s idea would affect the lives of billions of people—in one way or another.
“Jonathan?” Suddenly, Wayne was floating upside down in front of him. The mechanic held out a part of a coil to him.
“Yes?”
“Look at the different spacings of the coils. We need you to be more careful and work more precisely.”
Wayne was right. He hadn’t been paying attention. His cheeks started to feel warm, like a school kid caught cheating.
“I’m sorry, Wayne, I’ll be more careful from now on.”
“Thanks. I’ll go through and inspect everything again, but all it would take is one coil to fail and this whole beautiful plan could crash and burn.”
February 25, 2036 – Mars Ship ARES
“Do you have everything?” Judith asked.
“Looks good,” Kenjiro replied from the airlock.
Jonathan crossed his fingers.
“Now opening the outer lock,” Kenjiro said.
In the camera image, they saw a shape in a spacesuit floating toward the LISA satellite—a container in tow.
“Installing the ion source,” the astronaut said.
The resolution of the airlock’s camera was too low to see Kenjiro’s hand motions. He had explained before that the container held a pressurized vessel filled with hydrogen gas that was ionized by an electric field to produce hydrogen ions, which would be the protons they needed for their cutting tool. The solar wind already contained some ions, but not at a sufficient density. LISA would then give the protons their initial thrust, propelling them toward the coils that would increasingly boost their momentum on their way toward the Earth.
“I... the thing’s jammed shut,” Kenjiro said.
“Do you need help?”
“No, Judith, it’s loosening up. Okay, now I’ve got it. Yes, all good now.”
Jonathan snapped his fingers. It was difficult for him to watch without being able to help in any way, as Kenjiro performed a procedure that they all hoped would go down in the history books. But that was only if he succeeded—would there even be any more history books if he failed? Nobody could say for sure. The calculations looked promising for success, but there was a high factor of uncertainty. And even if they could send enough antiprotons to the shell’s surface, nobody knew how it would react.
“That was very well done, buddy,” Wayne said as he slapped Kenjiro on the shoulder.
The impulse sent the Japanese man floating across the room. Kenjiro was only able to stop when he contacted the wall. “Not so rough,” he said.
“Sorry,” Wayne apologized. “I’m just happy that we have such a brilliant physicist on board.”
“Brilliant, or crazy. That’s still to be decided,” Kenjiro said.
“Optimistically, what are our chances of success?” Yue asked.
“Eight to one,” Kenjiro answered. “Eight to one, favoring the shell, of course. And that’s using the most optimistic assumptions.”
Yes, that was what Jonathan had expected. Nevertheless, he’d often heard worse numbers from Ken, numbers that he hoped would work out this time so that he’d be able to hear from his family soon.
“Is there anything else we need to do to get LISA ready?” Judith asked.
“No.”
“Well, thank you, Ken. Everyone, please prepare yourselves for a braking maneuver. We’ve got to position LISA and the coils along the L4 potential on the Earth’s orbit around the sun. They’ll be able to hold their positions there with the least number of corrections.”
April 13, 2036 – Mars Ship ARES
He never imagined that he’d start thinking of the moon base as luxurious accommodations, but he wished they were back there. Ten people in a space that was designed for four—it was worse than any prison cell. When he tried to imagine spending three months on a trip to Mars in these confined rooms, he was pleased that the trip had never started, even though Michael was still pushing for it.
Since they decoded the SOS, Judith had assigned Maxim to be her second in command, because Michael only made appearances now to demand their immediate departure for Mars. Jonathan didn’t understand him. Didn’t he have any friends or family who might still be down there on Earth?
There was a knock on the plastic door that separated the toilet from the workshop. “Yeah, yeah, I’m almost done,” he said.
“Hurry up,�
�� Wayne said. “Judith’s about to make an announcement.”
Jonathan stood up. His backside was already very cold from the stream of air flushing away any waste. There probably wouldn’t be any more today. His digestion system always seemed to go into hibernation in zero gravity, at least for the first 48 hours. So, it had been very unfortunate for him and his bowel movements that they kept approaching the Earth in a stop-and-go manner, stopping again and again to release and position another one of the coils. But starting today, they were finally going to make a beeline for the formerly blue planet.
“Starting the linear accelerator,” he heard Judith’s voice announce over the loudspeaker in the workshop.
Shit, he’d missed the historic moment. ‘Where were you when the ARES started the proton stream,’ his grandkids might ask him someday. ‘On the shitter,’ he’d have to answer. How embarrassing! But who knew if that day would ever even come? The accelerated particles would reach the Earth’s magnetic field long before the ship did. They would strike the iridium film that they’d installed over the magnetic North Pole close to the geographic South Pole, which would produce antiprotons that would eventually break open the shell.
At least they hoped so! That is, if the antiprotons didn’t meet other molecules first. And if the coils were able to stay in position long enough. And if the conversion into antiprotons worked efficiently enough. And if LISA’s ion source supplied enough protons. And so on, and so on. The list of ifs seemed endless.
The only thing he was sure of was that if he wasn’t able to shit tomorrow, he’d have to take a laxative. And if he didn’t get away from this putrid odor of sweat, oil, food remains, and shit and urine, he’d completely lose it. Ha! Maybe he should volunteer for an EVA soon. That was a brilliant idea! Then at least he’d only have to put up with himself, which sometimes still felt like too much.
The Wall: Eternal Day Page 24