COSM Page 18

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “What can you predict with this exponential curve of yours?”

  “That inside that other universe, visible through the little window of this Cosm, galaxies should start clumping together within a short while.”

  “How long?”

  He ran his finger along the straight line of expansion and squinted at the time axis. “About nine weeks from now, we could see galaxies form.”

  Well, at least he wasn’t afraid to make a prediction.

  “This really is a leap.”

  “Yeah.” He sat down at last, relaxing from the tight, semi-fighter’s stance he had adopted. “But it smells right, y’know?”

  She could see the lines of anticipation in his face, deepened by fatigue. He had been frustrated and now thought he saw a solution, so he was following it.

  Fair enough. Physicists often discovered things by getting frustrated. As a boy, Einstein thought of seeing himself in a mirror as he sped ever-faster, approaching the speed of light. He sensed that as he reached light speed his reflection would not vanish, that light would still be able to reflect from the mirror and reach his eye—and so discovered special relativity.

  Nineteenth-century physicists thought about building perpetual motion machines and so devised the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Trying to pin down a particle’s position and velocity simultaneously led Heisenberg to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

  So now apparently physicists had made something out of nothing—made a whole universe, in fact. An accident, of course. But she had laid vehement claim to it all along, skirting the boundaries of scientific ethics. Would history judge that she had done it out of some deep, restless vexation she did not know?

  She slept reasonably well for a few hours that night but as usual woke up and brooded about Brad and all the rest of it. She tossed and sweated as she listened to the traffic come booming in from the canyon and rumble to a stop at Coast Highway, the rustle of insect energies beneath the steady pale stars. Finally she mulled over Max’s theory and then Max himself and what he had said there outside the bay, before she had gone in to face the detectives about Brad. Something about her having a smart mouth and “It’s a cover, of course.” “For?” she had shot back and he had said, “I wonder.”

  He had seen how close to the edge she was and his words had been sharp, cutting through her inner fog. It had seemed to make a lot of sense she could not quite describe, which meant that she could not explain it to herself, not even now.

  She wondered if that meant that he had seen the Big Problem. Was it that obvious? The jagged nature of so many of her collisions with men implied that, even for a standard-issue obsessional neurotic, she was hard to get along with. Men rebounded from her as though from some unseen repulsive force. Or most men, anyway, though she did not get on famously with women, either. Most women had too much small talk and too little of everything else. She was perfectly aware that many of the physicists she knew felt something like that toward women as well. This had not been a happy fact to discover.

  She had heard a lot of maxims for women scientists: Tenure Before Children; Marry a Fellow Workaholic; Smile but Dress Severely; Lace Underwear for the Inner You, but Jeans Outside. All these helped within the university but hobbled her outside.

  The catalog of lovers scattered away by that strong, negative force was sobering.

  Jonathan, a man of burnt pecan complexion which became caffè latte when he got irked, as he had after going through the obligatory Black Bourgeoisie dating code, following his ritual peacocking around: three dates got you to “heavy petting” (and where did that awkward term come from, somebody’s mother?), then screwing on the fourth or fifth, usually on a weekend getaway to an upscale bed-and-breakfast (in New England for the East Coasters, Catalina for the West; definitely not Vegas). Somehow that weekend did not jell.

  Frank, who lived up to his name in their last fight, calling her a “dick lick,” and while she could scarcely deny the charge, clearly in his conceptual universe it was not a compliment.

  Jonathan had just faded like a red dwarf star guttering out, certainly no supernova food-fight blowup in a restaurant, as with Ruben the Red. Ruben—she had left him with her virtue intact, but it was quite a struggle; she had almost won.

  In all these collisions her difficulties rotated around sex, that alleged road to love. Jill had once said while only mildly drunk, so she might have meant it, that Alicia maybe had more personality than needed for one person; too intense. True enough; wasn’t that what these late-night self-seminars were about? Even her self-doubt was overdone. She had waited in vain after adolescence for this pattern to abate: one mood was the swell dinner, the next mood was the bill.

  Friends told her she had to understand herself better, which meant more talk, but she preferred to define herself by doing something. Chat she found claustrophobic. She thought of analysis as cutting off your head and counting the rings from all past years and the occasional forest fire. No, she would just tuck her head down and butt her way through her problems.

  At college the predictable white sympathizers had ascribed most of her troubles to refracted racism, but Alicia had never bought that victimology, tempting though it was. Sure, if you’re blonde and blue-eyed and lanky, things just showed up on your plate. But ugly black women of minimal talents made it to the top, too, or else how to explain Maya Angelou? Not that she was whining about being large of ass and bust and thighs and especially mouth. No victim, she; her defects were self-made.

  So all right, maybe Max did see the Big Problem, or at least some version of it viewed from outside—and wasn’t that what she was trying to do, find a way to see herself objectively?

  Max the observant. She had made a crack to him about Gary Cooper quite automatically, an old line for her, really, and he had said that bit about her mouth being her cover, or something like that; it was getting sort of mixed up now. She wondered why, and then about Max again, something odd about that man, and suddenly felt the weight of all the rest of the empty night fall upon her yet again.

  PART IV

  A KING OF INFINITE SPACE

  I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

  —Hamlet

  1

  Moving the Cosm to the observatory seemed simple but took over four weeks in all. Alicia told Jill it was like swimming through mud, except that mud might help get rid of wrinkles; paperwork added them.

  Bureaucratic measures sopped up a week all on their own. Safety wanted lots of time-consuming measures, of course. There were plenty of electronic diagnostic devices to pack up and redeploy in the more crowded floor of the observatory, with all their cables and cases.

  Then came the moment when a crane lifted the U-magnet and Alicia held her breath as the Cosm seemed to wobble for just a moment in its magnetic trap. But then the crane whined away and took the massive assembly out to the loading dock and onto the back of a special UCI flatbed truck. The transfer took a whole day in which she did not eat or take phone calls or do anything except nervously triple-check every detail. When the U-magnet finally sat in its niche, surrounded by a cohort of electronic diagnostics like a fat king at court, she collapsed. Jill and Max took her out to dinner and they all went a bit giddy together.

  She and Jill fell into reminiscence, regaling Max with tales of long-dead fashions; sitcoms whose characters they still remembered by name and felt that they knew better than their own classmates; ludicrous haircuts they had tried and then hoped would grow out over a weekend; dweebs who chewed tobacco or bubble gum; girls who slept around and got pregnant and then suddenly became sanctimonious about abortion; strapless gowns that gouged them unmercifully; Helen, who affected a walk with her nose in the air and paid for it by falling into a swimming pool at a big party; pulling all-nighters and wasting most of it going out for food and giggling from sheer fatigue. All these elements seemed in retrospect soft and warm a
nd far funnier than they could possibly have been.

  Max bore up under it well, throwing in some of his own. Yet beneath it all they knew that these weeks had been a hiatus; she and Max were saying goodbye to the UCI-imposed pause in their work. If they were right and the Cosm was some kind of window, then there would be so much more to see in the coming weeks, with no time to relax.

  She did her best on her Physics 3-B lecture the next morning and then faced the day. Her office displayed the disarray that was almost a style, Basic Working Scientist: all horizontal surfaces were fair game for conversion to informal filing space, using the classic fossil-bed ordering, and no matter how computerized, there was always too much paper. She had not opened her mail for weeks, much less answered it. Still, the embossed Brookhaven National Laboratory stationery got her attention.

  Professor Butterworth:

  We are proceeding against you in the matter of the missing portions of the experiment you recently performed here, April 24-30, using uranium isotope 238…

  Yours sincerely,

  Jessica Farbis

  Legal Division, BNL

  There was a lot of legalese. A big battle was going on up in the levels where everybody dressed for success and had offices with carpeting, but she heard surprisingly little of it. She made a mental note to call the lawyer her dad had urged her to get, knowing that she would just put it off again. To submerge such thoughts she filed the letter, knowing she was going to hear from Lattimer about it. She turned to e-mail.

  Over eighty messages were waiting, but most were UCI’s ZOT Mail internal memos or other forgettable stuff. One of the reassuring aspects of being Out of It for a while was the realization that so much of the day-to-day routine was utterly pointless, plus the less-reassuring awareness that the world went on perfectly well without her. When she saw Rucker on the list, though, she immediately looked:

  Dear Alicia:

  The legal types don’t want me to talk to you anymore, but they said nothing about e-mail. We’ve got several hotshots here who want to run with uranium again to see if they can produce what you made off with. There’s a lot of anger over this in the Lab, I suppose I don’t need to tell you. Your staying out of touch hasn’t helped. So the admin types are behind the uranium guys and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.

  The upshot is plain. If you don’t give it up, they’re going to start running uranium and specifically at BRAHMS.

  I don’t like this and I appeal to you one last time.

  Dave Rucker

  She liked Dave, but it was far too late to consider handing the sphere over to Brookhaven. They would take a month or two to ponder matters, giving it the full bureaucratic scrutiny with committees and the like, while the Cosm developed, unobserved.

  But this bit about running with uranium again. Hadn’t her damaged Core Element been enough of a warning? She hit REPLY.

  Dave:

  We’re following up some exciting physics here, really a sensational discovery, we believe. I’ll try to get something written down soon and off to you, including latest data.

  The sphere we took away is some kind of space-time closed geometry, utterly crazy, but you can rap your knuckles on it. And we can get tiny bits of radiation out of it, which seems to say it is looking at *another* space-time. I really think this is the true scoop.

  But it came about by accident. We think something made it stable, but it has expanded a centimeter or so since we started measuring.

  That’s why you *shouldn’t* do anything right away attempting to make another. We don’t know beans about this thing. It could be dangerous.

  You heard about my student who got killed. Doesn’t that make a strong point? You have *got* to stop them from running with U-238 again. Wait until I get a summary to you. Please?

  Alicia

  She didn’t like the pleading question mark, but it might be effective; this was a male/female negotiation, after all. For long minutes she stared at the glowing words. Probably there was some way to make a big noise here and have the upper echelons at UCI wave to their counterparts at Brookhaven, but something told her that would be slower and less convincing. Physicists should clean up their own messes.

  She made a hard copy of Dave’s e-mail and her own, then punched SEND and hoped for the best.

  Finals were coming, coming, then suddenly they were upon her. And upon Max, who retreated to Caltech for a week.

  She had to take time out to make up an elaborate exam for Physics 3-B, with three different versions photocopied on differently colored paper. It was by now routinely canny to write exams so similarly that students copying from each other would be unable to tell what the other was doing. She took this further, arranging several problems that looked the same but had vastly different answers to penalize cheaters. This also thwarted ringers, who would take exams and write another student’s name on them. The usual defense against this was to demand a photo ID with the turned-in exam. There were many Asian students at UCI, adding a twist: supposedly Caucasians couldn’t tell Oriental faces apart, and some ringers advertised their services based on this. To counter this Alicia had specifically asked for Asian teaching assistants to proctor the exams. Coaching her teaching assistant proctors, judging the proper balance between written-out problems and multiple choice—it all took time.

  At the end of the two-hour final, students came up to her asking about a new science fiction film that was doing big box office, wanting to know how much truth there was behind its fantasies. As nearly as she could tell from their descriptions, very little. She had not even heard of the movie.

  Indeed, she had tried to follow books and films about science, but they featured rugged, style-conscious folk who transacted their work in ornate bars, atmospheric dens thickly mired in a high-contrast noir underworld future where bizarre ornamentation passed for any sense of newness. She had never known anybody who could design an experiment or do a calculation on table napkins, sipping hip drinks while guitar riffs wailed in the smoky background, but in movies and TV this was standard, apparently to make matters more interesting to a weary public with the attention span of a commercial. Scientists were either aggressively hip, often clad in tight leather, or else pitiful, hopeless nerds, obsessional neurotics nobody would trust for a moment with the discoveries they had, quite implausibly, ushered into the world while anxiously trying to get laid.

  She had Zak making measurements on the Cosm, and Max was off at a conference, so she threw herself into getting the final exam graded immediately. On one of the simple qualitative questions in thermodynamics a student explained: Water is melted steam. Another wrote: You can listen to thunder after lightning and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don’t hear it, you got hit, so never mind. These the teaching assistants read out with glee around the grading table. Another related how a student had come to him, exasperated, saying, “My calculator keeps making the same mistake.” At least the job had a few laughs along the way.

  She left her office at sunset, having filed her grades by e-mail well before the deadline. There was a feeling of quiet satisfaction in it, she found. Certainly having momentarily drained the energies of the brightest of their generation, in pursuit of some solid knowledge, was an attainment.

  Graffiti of the Hispanic regional cause marred a wall in the physics quad: a poorly drawn map of the Western United States sectioned off and united with Mexico to form a free territory for the flow of dollars and pesos and people. She stared at it and the ideas seemed light-years away.

  See the scenic photons fall, she thought and realized that she was woozy with fatigue. But she biked up to the observatory to check on Zak. He was his usual quietly earnest self, never happier than when he could slug away at a tough experimental measurement. “What’ve you found?” she asked.

  “Not much,” he said. “The flux is dying fast.”

  She studied the curves of light intensity, descending by the hour. The trickle of light that fought its way out of the Cosm h
ad shifted steadily down from the UV into the visible frequencies. They had caught images with the weak photons that came through, but got only a dim, uniform haze, no structure. Now the emission frequencies were sliding into the infrared and she and Zak had been forced to go scavenge more gear from Walter Bron to stay on the trail of the pale fading glow.

  She wished Max had given them more guidance about what to look for. She knew the famous Enrico Fermi quotation: “Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.” But even such matters were minor, compared with what was at stake here. They were sailing utterly unknown waters.

  “Nothing in the visible?”

  Zak had shrouded the sphere carefully and mounted a whole new battery of optical sensors around it. “Still nothing. Peak’s definitely in the IR now.”

  She fretted. It was easy to let your experimental acumen blind you. In the 1930s experimenters who bombarded elements with neutrons thoughtfully designed their experiment so that their Geiger counters switched off when the neutron beam did, to minimize sources of error. They missed the striking aftereffect; some elements gave off radiation as they then decayed, rendered unstable by the neutrons. This artificial radioactivity soon earned a Nobel for a less-fastidious experimenter.