COSM Page 19

  “Let’s look at this on-screen,” she said. It was a simple matter to take some elementary cosmology, which she had been learning at breakneck pace lately, and apply it to Zak’s measurements of the waning UV flux.

  “Here.” She used a simple plotting routine to take his data and turn it into a graph. “I translated the temperature of your UV counts into Cosm time.”

  “Time seen inside, you mean?” Zak was still having trouble following all this, not because he was not bright but because it was so bizarre. “How do you get time from temperature?”

  “Using standard Big Bang cosmology. It says that temperature drops with time—in fact, inversely with the two-thirds power. I just transform that into our time, and—no surprise—we should see the temperature decline exponentially.”

  Zak nodded. “Because the two-thirds root of an exponential is still an exponential, just a slower one.”

  “Check. See?” His temperature data dropped exponentially. “The idea that the Cosm’s time runs exponentially faster than ours still works.”

  “Y’know, the temperature we’re getting now is about 300 K.”

  “Room temperature?”

  The thought made her shiver. Inside the opaque sphere Creation’s strange engines were speeding ever-faster toward a shadowy destination. The rate of time difference itself between the two increased exponentially, a cosmic roller coaster plunging for the bottom. Already the light that had fried Brad was no warmer than this observatory.

  “Yeah, I’m getting counts only in the infrared. Even that’s getting hard.”

  “You have to take longer and longer to get enough counts to measure?”

  “Yeah. I’m integrating for about two hours a go now.”

  “It’ll get worse, too. Weaker.”

  The photons inside the Cosm were still acting like a gas trapped in an expanding box—the prison of the Cosm universe. The walls in there drew apart steadily in time, just as they did in the “real” universe—she still thought of the Cosm that way—an effect that we saw as the Hubble shift, galaxies seeming to speed away from each other. Yet each galaxy was fixed in its own local space-time. Space-time itself was stretching like a rubber sheet.

  She had always found this a bit hard to follow. The universe kept growing larger and photons responded to this by losing their energy, red-shifting down. The “gas” of light then cooled, its once-blazing glory now eroded to an ember’s dull red.

  In our universe the sole ancient remnant of the time when light dominated the universe was now the sputter of microwave photons spread across the sky, the 2.7 degree radiation which proved that an earlier, hotter era had in fact once held sway. The chill of that low temperature was a measure of how much the universe had swollen since it was a brawling newborn.

  The universe at the other end of the Cosm “tunnel” was stretching itself, too. She tried to envision it spreading into an unimaginable separate direction that she and Zak could not see; it was literally beyond their ken.

  Or so went her still rather amateur understanding of cosmology. She was paying for her single-minded concentration on particle physics as a student. In the required cosmology course she had dozed off pretty regularly.

  Still, she was rather happy that the temperature data came out exponential, just as Max’s time-shift equation said it would. Fermi wasn’t quite right; it felt reassuring to find something that checked.

  “What’ll I do next?”

  “Measure the diameter lately?”

  “Yeah—looks to be about two millimeters smaller.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Really? Smaller?”

  “Looks like.”

  “So it’s growing like crazy in its own space-time, but it can even shrink a little in ours,” she said wonderingly.

  “Funny, huh?”

  “Ours is not to reason why, ours is to measure and report—the experimenter’s credo.”

  Zak grinned. “Yes, ma’am. Your orders, ma’am?”

  “Keep at it” was all she could say.

  “Y’know, you kind of look like you could use a break.”

  “Could be.”

  “I can look after things here.”

  She felt a warm thankfulness at his concerned expression. She had steeled herself to plunge back into work, but part of her was worn down. She needed time to sleep, sure, but more important, to think. She nodded mutely and left.

  Since the rig they had assembled in the observatory was nearly automatic now, she left Zak in charge and allowed herself an escape. The next morning she climbed into the Miata and zoomed up to Idyllwild in the mountains for two days of hiking. She had been a team sports fanatic in high school and college, playing basketball and volleyball pretty well. But as her social isolation increased and she burrowed into physics, she took up loner sports: swimming, hiking, even workouts on the exercise machines that made her feel like a lab rat in somebody’s perpetual experiment.

  Hiking suited her perfectly now. She climbed Mount San Jacinto and ate heartily in a steak restaurant and slept as though in a coma. She kept to herself and thought about the Cosm and did not even read a newspaper.

  2

  She sat sipping coffee in Espresso Yourself on Forest Avenue, the morning after her late-night return, and casually flipped over the Los Angeles Times. Her eyes flicked down through the usual scandal, gossip, and politics, noting that there didn’t seem to be much difference between them anymore. The item that snagged her attention ran below the fold on the front page. Not important enough for the headline.

  EXPLOSION AT LONG ISLAND LABORATORY

  (AP) A large blast at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has damaged the nation’s newest high energy physics facility. The accident occurred during experiments involving uranium moving at very high energies. Though there is no report of radioactivity at the site, environmental groups demanded the right to send in their own teams, officials said.

  An entire segment of the ring-shaped particle accelerator appears to be split. Helicopter observers reported a “shiny substance” visible through the upthrust beams and girders of the ruptured ring structure. The site is being searched, with one staff member reported missing.

  The cause of this devastating accident, already estimated as costing tens of millions of dollars to repair, appears unknown…

  She got up and ran out, leaving her corn pancakes steaming where they had just been served.

  Warm summer rain ran off the gleaming silver dome. It shone under the arc lights in early evening as rivulets snaked across the pure smooth curve beneath fitful gusts of a sea breeze. She had grabbed a flight bag and a windbreaker at home and gone straight to John Wayne Airport, catching the first available flight for JFK. All her fidgeting worry on the way had not prepared her for this.

  “Anybody hurt?” she asked.

  “One technician killed, head crushed in,” Dave Rucker said at her elbow. “We were damn lucky nobody else was. It blew a hell of a lot of steel around.”

  She felt a sickening lurch in her stomach. Brad first, now another… “Let me see it up close.” She started up the berm of the RHIC ring.

  “Ah, Safety doesn’t want anybody—”

  “Tell them I’ll sign a release.”

  There were Brookhaven Lab guards and chicken-wire fencing all around it, but with a nod from Dave they let her pass. Soggy mud made the way tricky. The chrome globe protruded from the ruins of the accelerator ring, a skirt of broken concrete and girders rimming it.

  “How big?”

  “About sixteen meters across. As nearly as we can tell, it pushed everything out of the way—the beam line, BRAHMS detectors, the works.”

  “It didn’t absorb anything in the lab?”

  “Apparently not.” Dave sighed. “Just pushed everything aside—wham—sounded like a bomb.”

  “Just like ours, only bigger.”

  “I’m glad you came right away. When you didn’t call—”

  “I didn’t check in at UCI,” she said, dist
racted. The rain was coming harder now and she peered at the object with narrowed eyes. “It’s a sphere all the way around?”

  “Seems to be. A team went into the tunnel and said it looks that way.”

  “Turn off the spotlights.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  “I need to know why.”

  “I’m not sure. Just a hunch.” She waited, then said, “Please.”

  He took a while to get permission from some men in yellow slickers standing over by some hastily erected tents. Without asking permission anymore, Alicia walked right up to the dome. No steam where the rain fell on it. She touched the hard unyielding skin of it, no warmer than the ground. The spots winked off then and she let her eyes adjust to the gathering darkness. The globe was as dark as the night. The talking below had stopped, so she heard only the dripping of soft rain from branches and the patter of drops on her hood. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

  Dave came squishing up the slope behind her. “They said okay, just for a minute—”

  “See anything?”

  “Uh, no. Should I?”

  “It’s not emitting anything visible. Do you have UV detectors here?”

  “Getting a whole battery of gear set up. The director ordered it. No radioactivity, we know that. First thing we checked.”

  “When did you measure for it?”

  “Within an hour of the blast.”

  “There were plenty of nuclear processes going on in the early universe. I thought maybe some particles would come through and leave residual decaying nuclei here, induced radioactivity.”

  “None that we found,” Dave’s voice sounded worried in the wet blackness.

  “That’ll help with the environmentalists.”

  Dave chuckled without mirth. “Guess so.”

  “How far into the run did it happen?”

  “Two days.”

  “The uranium fluence was good?”

  “Yeah, it was a fine run.”

  “You were lucky,” she said, running her hands over the smooth surface she could not see. “I don’t know what sets the size of the thing, how it appears in our space-time, but evidently it’s fairly sensitive. You could’ve gotten an even bigger one.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  He had been holding back, she sensed, not knowing how to treat her. Obviously the Lab people disliked her, but now she was the expert and they had egg all over their faces.

  “A universe, I think.”

  “Huh?”

  “Obviously the precise manifestation of it in our space-time depends sensitively on conditions in the quark-gluon state,” she mused in a whisper. “Details like how big it looks in our frame of reference. Maybe in the time shift…”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Ours is ten weeks older than this, but there’s probably no reason to expect this one’s evolution to march along just the same.”

  “That student of yours—”

  “Exactly. Better clear this area.”

  “You think—”

  “I don’t know. On the other side of this—hell, that’s not the right term, maybe I should say at the other end of it—there’s a hot plasma of elementary particles, expanding and cooling and deadly as hell. The evolution of this thing might let some of it through at any time.”

  “Any…?”

  “There’s something special about the recombination time, when atoms form, but we don’t know why.”

  “You think it’s going to blow?”

  “I’m guessing. Let’s get out of here.”

  She walked quickly down the slope of the ring berm, slipping once in the mud and falling solidly on her rump, feeling the presence of the massive silvery sphere at her back like an aimed weapon.

  She stayed at Brookhaven just long enough to talk to an assembly of physicists and managers—no press or media. She owed them that much, but she did not want to pretend to be an oracle. Nor endure the glares and mutterings of people who didn’t even know her but plainly had heard a lot of rumors.

  So be it. Particle physicists did not consider themselves so much an elite as a priesthood. The director introduced her with minimal formality, citing only her UCI connection to BRAHMS. “Perhaps Dr. Butterworth can cast some light on our accident,” he said and sat down. Gentlemen of the jury, be seated.

  She stood before the jammed crowd in the Lab’s biggest auditorium and told them everything she could, clearly and directly, as it happened, skipping nothing about her own actions at Brookhaven. Her taking it away, her slow-dawning perceptions, the works.

  Mutters drifted up from the crowd, sour talk, but she continued steadily, through the first experiments, sketching the same list of mysterious traits she had drawn for Zak. Their first work now seemed a long time ago. From this point on the audience received her testimony as if from a pilgrim, back from a hitherto unknown land.

  Suddenly she had stepped into a limelight cast by an unimaginable event, a revolution that arrived without the slightest warning, and many did not know whether to cheer her or scorn her. She had to admit that she probably would not have known, either.

  The auditorium was utterly silent as she got to the UV blackbody spectrum and then the recombination emission. Brad’s death was merely another data point. The time-shift effect she now regarded as a pretty solid idea, so she then had to sum up Max’s ideas about what the spheres might be, and this got her into the theorists’ arena. She gave them nuggets from her understanding, all the while protesting that this was not her area of expertise. The continued rapid cooling of the infrared emission from the sphere got her back on solid ground again, so she finished with that. Her sphere was now ten million years old, give or take a million.

  Silence. Then tentative clapping, others joining in, and the issue finally decided as the whole room rang with it. She recalled some famous wit remarking that applause was the echo of a platitude, but no, this was the real thing, and suddenly it felt good.

  Then came questions.

  Why had uranium collisions done this, and not gold?

  “Well, maybe the greater total energy matters? And perhaps something about uranium’s oblong nuclei, so they occasionally slam into each other along their extended axes.”

  How come cosmic rays, which collided in outer space all the time, didn’t make such spheres? There were uranium nuclei in the cosmic rays.

  “First of all, how would we know? But maybe something about the RHIC conditions, especially aligned uranium nuclei, made the spheres stable. Random impacts in interstellar space might make unstable spheres, too, so they would not survive.”

  A voice from the back called out that even stable spheres could be coasting around between the stars and we would never know. If one fell into our atmosphere, it might very well not survive impact at 10 km./sec. She nodded, adding, “This stuff is out of my ballpark.” Smiles; she would have to remember using sports talk more often.

  Did she seriously think this thing was some portal to another space-time?

  “Well, yes. Other ideas would be welcome. I am sure the theorists will have plenty more by tomorrow morning.” That got a laugh.

  Okay, if this sphere was a passageway, into what kind of universe? Einstein-de Sitter? Minkowski?

  She had no idea. “Dr. Jalon spoke of modeling the first sphere, assuming it had close to the critical density, which would cause it to eventually stop expanding and then contract. As I understand it, that’s one of the Einstein-de Sitter class of models.”

  This seemed to satisfy them; she was going to have to brush up on this cosmology stuff. A noted theorist stood up and made a long rambling statement about how a real space-time deformation would look like a black hole and vanish, so these spheres must be something else.

  “I read some of the theory on wormholes, and I believe you’re neglecting the possibility that exotic materials could hold open a space-time throat.” Max had made her read the papers, though they had put her t
o sleep; now she was grateful. “There’s even a book by Matt Visser.” Always good to end with a pointer to the literature, implying that your questioner was less informed.

  Alicia was getting tired, edgy. The next question asked her to describe the exact properties of her sphere.

  She sighed with relief, able to simply recount her measurements and their results, free of the carapace of hobbling theory. She wished she had thought to make up some viewgraphs for an overhead projector. The details popped into her head anyway and she got them down on a big green blackboard; she had no trouble remembering the numbers. She sketched the UV temperature changes with time and the recombination era with quick, deft moves. It felt good to deal in concrete matters, not the airy issues of interpretation.

  She had worn her professional persona through the whole ordeal. Like many, she had gotten ahead by displaying the required attitudes: competent, slightly daring, a touch haughty. The standard joke was that a particle physicist had to “act British, think Yiddish, but not the other way around.” Be a blunt, bright bastard—or, in her case, bitch. This paid off well when the questions started, sometimes shouted from the back of the auditorium in sharp voices hoarse with barely controlled anger. Taking criticism, deflecting it, and especially dishing it out were admired. You had to show that you would expose inferior work no matter who did it. Subtlety was wasted; she had fathomed early how to highlight her own work, distract attention from others’, and coax senior figures to advocate her side.

  After the first two hours, they called a coffee break. She refused to go out into the foyer, not wanting to be confronted one on one; there were bound to be people angry that she had taken the first sphere away from here. Only then did she realize that nobody had denounced her for that from the audience. Were they being polite? Or was it that, now they had their very own sphere, they could treat her cordially again?