“Good luck with your meeting, mister,” the taxi driver called after him before the slamming door muted the last few syllables. Montgomery straightened his shoulders and strode across the weed-framed concrete paving, past the students, and through the glass doors.
The reception area was crowded with dozens of students and professors, all chatting, so he had to clasp his briefcase to his chest and force his way through the press of people.
“Excuse me. I have to get through, thanks.”
He reached the door to his small department’s auditorium, only to find two large men standing there in black suits and sporting earpieces. Bodyguards. So the undersecretary was already here! He cursed and glanced at his wrist, fighting to suppress a howl that was already battling its way up his windpipe to escape. He was late, only ten minutes, but he was late.
“Ah, hello! Doctor Montgomery Reed, the undersecretary is waiting for me,” he said, introducing himself to the two gorillas. He held out for inspection the pass he had received from the Secret Service a week after being interviewed by them.
“The meeting has already begun, Doc,” one of the men said, after taking his pass and briefly glancing at it, while the other man patted him down for weapons, then waved him through.
“Thanks,” he said curtly, opened the wooden door, and was slipping through when something abruptly stopped him. He noticed that the shoulder strap of his briefcase had caught on the doorknob. He exasperatedly shook it free and finally managed to enter the room.
It was an auditorium with space for perhaps 200 people. There was only a single long table on the stage with a dozen people sitting around it. One was Undersecretary of Defense Timothy Green, a tall, middle-aged man with graying temples and the penetrating gaze of a former FBI attorney. The rest of those present were doctors and professors from across the country, who had all more or less made themselves presentable, and were all now staring at him, the latecomer.
“Sorry I’m late, Mr. Undersecretary,” Montgomery said contritely, as he went past the empty row of seats to the only free chair, right next to the politician. “There was a jam on the interstate and—”
“Okay, Doctor... Reed, right?” Green smiled noncommittally, then gestured to the empty chair.
Montgomery nodded to everyone and tried to avoid the glares that came with being forced to beg for public funds. “Yes, Mr. Undersecretary.”
“Please,” Green made a dismissive gesture. “You don’t need to keep using my title. We’re not British.”
Restrained laughter spread around the table, more from tension than because what he had said was funny.
“Thanks, Sir.”
“You’re from LIGO, right?” The undersecretary folded his hands over a substantial stack of documents and gazed at him with interest. “What does that stand for again?”
“Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory,” he quickly explained, but stopped as he saw the laughter in the politician’s eyes. He was obviously just making fun of him. His hope fading, he decided to go on the offensive. “Sir, I know it must all sound awkward and theoretical, but additional financing for both LIGO observatories has many advantages.”
“Okay, Doctor, I didn’t want to make you angry. I still have,” Green glanced at his watch, “twenty minutes. Your peers are suggesting that the research money should go to various stem cell projects, and they obviously don’t know what the little red elephant on my pin means. The last twenty minutes are all yours.”
Muttering broke out around the table. Montgomery gulped, half in surprise and half prompted by the wave of antagonism that broke over him from the left.
“Thank you, Sir. Thank you very much!”
“I have a question before you begin. You measured the first gravitational waves in 2014. What good has that actually done us? Excuse me, but I haven’t noticed any great revolution in science or in public life.”
“It was 2015, Sir,” he reflexively corrected the politician, and then swiftly continued talking in the hopes that the undersecretary wouldn’t notice or take offense, “and that is a good and sensible question. The direct evidence of gravitational waves is not only another confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but it has also given us a new insight into the universe. You can compare it to Galileo’s invention of the telescope in the early seventeen hundreds.
“Before 2015, we observed the universe using infrared, microwaves, radio, and ultraviolet, which only revealed a tiny section. We could only ever see anything indirectly, as a simulation, you could say. You have to understand that the telescope revolutionized our view of the cosmos because we could show that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and demystify the true nature of the stars and galaxies, allowing us to take the step from a religious understanding of the world to the modern scientific method.
“Since then we have kept developing the telescope and can now see all kinds of electromagnetic radiation. We have put together our picture of the universe using all this data.”
Green looked at his watch, and Montgomery nodded eagerly.
“Okay. So, gravitational waves have fundamentally changed this view of the universe, because we can see beyond electromagnetic radiation. The part of the map that was black can now be discovered, you could say. Gravitational waves do not move through space the same way light or bodies do, for example. Instead, it is a part of space itself that the waves move through.
“This is important for the observation of all massive objects in our neighborhood, just to give one example. It is difficult to use electromagnetic radiation to work out the composition of a planet or planetoid because it is radiated and absorbed by normal matter. But gravitational waves are hardly influenced by them. They simply spread out through space as waves and carry the information about objects and events that caused them.”
“Like a tsunami?”
“Yes, something like that,” Montgomery nodded, although he hated that kind of comparison. Why couldn’t people just use the names of things? Why did they keep looking for ever more clumsy metaphors?
“That sounds like science fiction, Doctor, but what do you want me to tell the secretary that is going to persuade him to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars for your project? What does the U.S. taxpayer get out of this?” Green asked.
Can we use it to make weapons? Will it be the new Google? How can we use it to gain an advantage over other nations? How will it increase our economy? Montgomery thought to himself. He allowed his mind to follow the same lines as the man he was talking to and managed to suppress a tortured smile. It would kill him to have to tell his students that they would have to look for a new project.
“Look at it this way,” he said with a deep sigh as he tried a new approach. “We can use gravitational-wave observations to investigate the fundamental nature of space-time, and to compare the results with existing physics. These detectors are throwing open an entirely new window on the universe, with a potential cornucopia of possibilities and discoveries.
“Think about quantum mechanics. Thanks to Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and quantum mechanics, an entire chain of theories and observations came into being that revolutionized technology. Today more than half of the world’s economy is based in one way or another on the discoveries of quantum mechanics. Including all of medical scanning, monitor screens, mobile telephones... The list is endless. Maybe gravitational-wave observations will also allow us to see and understand things entirely anew, things we lacked the tools to see before.”
Montgomery was scrutinizing the face of the now-tired undersecretary, and could see him slipping away, so he bit his tongue. He didn’t have many more aces up his sleeve, and the game was almost over. The way Green was looking at him, it was a wonder that he wasn’t outright yawning.
“Take CERN as an example. It has swallowed up billions and billions, and using the Large Hadron Collider to look for fundamental particles doesn’t sound like it’s going to have much in the way of practical applications for th
e economy, right?”
Montgomery attempted a polite giggle, but abandoned it almost immediately as he glanced at the grim faces around him. “Well, they invented the internet, pretty much as a side project, and touch displays, just to mention two.”
“That’s impressive,” Green admitted, nodding pensively.
Montgomery felt a glimmer of hope and started nervously waggling his right foot.
“Yes, Sir, if we use the LIGO—”
“Jog my memory, Doctor,” the undersecretary interrupted as he leaned a little closer. With his slack jowls, to Montgomery he looked a little like an owl peering at him from his perch on the stack of documents. “Where is CERN located?”
Montgomery gazed at the man in front of him in confusion, searching the politician’s face for some sign that this was a joke, but didn’t find any. “Erm, in Europe.”
“Right,” Greene said, and nodded as if having a confusing mystery cleared up for him. “Now tell me, Doctor, who today is making the most money from the internet and touch displays?”
“Well, we probably make the most from the internet, if you think about our big players in data and the South Koreans are famous for their touch display technol...” Montgomery’s words trailed off and his face darkened as he saw the wolfish grin spread across the face of the second most powerful man in the Department of Defense. He suddenly felt stupid for so easily being caught out by this empty suit, and that was what he was. The hate-filled glares from his peers from various universities and research institutes left no doubt about that.
“Okay, so now that that’s cleared up.” Green gathered his papers together, closed his file, and put a small tablet on top of the pile. He stood up, along with the others around the table, and Montgomery hurriedly did the same after a moment of being frozen in place.
“Thank you all for your suggestions, ladies and gentlemen. I will talk with the secretary and give him my recommendations. Now, if you would excuse me, I have another appointment to get to.” Green nodded and left with bodyguards in tow. Montgomery hadn’t even noticed them lurking in the shadows near the curtains.
The others gradually left the room as students came in to clear the table of the glasses and water pitchers, like ants returning the room to its normal state.
“I’m sorry, Monty,” he heard somebody say some time later. He raised his face from his hands and hesitantly looked up to see Melissa Goldstein, a tenured experimental physicist at MIT who was gazing sympathetically at him. She was tall, taller than himself, and her curly mane of black hair made her appear taller still, which he always found intimidating. But at the same time, he appreciated that she was very friendly and discreet, even if her straightforward manner was sometimes annoying.
“Oh, Melissa,” he said with a tortured smile. “I didn’t recognize you, sorry.”
“I was sitting to your left, behind the guy from Stanford.”
“Oh, it’s easy to disappear behind him if you don’t puff yourself up.”
“Yes, but even if he lost weight, there would still be his huge ego to get around.” She winked and casually sat down on the edge of the table. “It’s shitty dealing with these politician assholes, right?”
Her words made Monty glance around as if he’d been hit by lightning, but none of the students seemed to have heard her. They simply continued clearing the table and taking away the last of the chairs.
“Erm, yes.”
“What did you even have planned for the LIGO.”
“I wanted to upgrade the interferometer, to get over one thousand five hundred watts out of our laser,” he frankly explained. Now that his project was dead, there was no point in keeping any secrets. Who could blame him for throwing his weapons down after such a defeat? “We’ve been using the same hardware for twenty years, and we urgently need to increase the sensitivity of the system.”
“Didn’t you lengthen the arms in Hanford recently?” Melissa asked, a little surprised.
“No, the funding fell through on that, too.” He shook his head in disappointment and sighed. “We’ve been running in place for twenty years. First came the Nobel prize, but now all we get is an exhausted smile because there isn’t an immediate new economic application.”
“There used to be some vision, but now all people have in their eyes is dollar signs,” she agreed, rubbing invisible coins together between thumb and index finger.
“I have to go back to Hanford and tell my students that the project is dead.”
“I guess that means back to teaching for you?”
“Right.” He nodded in frustration and suddenly stood up. “And, my daughter has caught the measles, so if I haven’t slit my throat with a paper cut from the giant stack of research objectives by tonight, I’ll have to take care of a kid with a fever.”
“But you’re researching humanity’s future. Your daughter is part of that, after all,” Melissa countered, with a wide grin, no trace of malice in what she said.
“That’s true.” Monty smiled widely as he thought about his little Tullaby, with her deep dimples and chubby cheeks. Maybe this was all good for something. Perhaps it would be good if his ambitious research plans were pulled back a little so he didn’t miss his kid’s entire childhood. There was a reason that in recent years he had often struggled with himself and reproached himself over losing custody to Erica, and along with it, his daughter. He had always been married to physics, and that had cost him his marriage and his daughter, which hurt more than he liked to admit.
“Okay, Melissa. It was nice to see you!”
“Same here, Monty. Stay strong.”
He gave her a last nod and went to the exit, where he lowered his head and forced his way through the press of students. He made it outside and immediately felt cold again as he called a taxi via the Yellow app.
While he waited in the cold of the first day of January, he started to think about what his students would say. They were all in Hanford, waiting anxiously to hear from him, and they had almost certainly bought some champagne to celebrate the good news. How was he going to tell them?
The project was dead—it hadn’t been given the coup de grâce. But without more research funds, it would slowly expire like a mortally wounded animal, and all his plans and the high hopes he’d had for them over the last ten years along with it.
The Wall: Eternal Night hard-sf.com/links/1841895
Copyright © 2021 by Brandon Q. Morris
All rights reserved.
hard-sf.com
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Translator: Will Knapton
Editing team: Marcia Kwiecinski, A.A.S., and Stephen Kwiecinski, B.S.
Cover design: César Pardo using images by Comfreak (Pixabay), Skeeze (Pixabay), PTNorbert (Pixabay), TBIT (Pixabay)
The Wall: Eternal Day Page 33