COSM Read online

  “That I’m probably a size nine,” Alicia said grimly.

  “Having any luck?”

  “I wish people wouldn’t steer the black men over to me. They have a trapped look in their eyes as they approach.”

  Jill nodded. “I’ll put the word out again. I just wasted half an hour on a guy who thought the Styrofoam cooler was as great an invention as the wheel.”

  “Veins in the nose?”

  “Yup, a drinker.” Jill frowned. “Why do I attract them?”

  “These socials are like climbing Mount Everest in a cocktail dress. The party carnivores smell weakness.”

  “Maybe the telltale beads of perspiration on the upper lip give us away?” Jill eyed the crowd.

  “That, and we’re not Class A lookers.” Alicia had never thought of herself as even Class B. “Beautiful women know less about men than us, the uglies. They treat us differently.”

  Jill’s mouth twisted sardonically. “It doesn’t count that I can whip up a quick meal, nothing fancy, say, veal aux champignons, in two minutes?”

  “Only after you’re married, when of course it’s too late.”

  “Why do we always come here full of optimism and leave depressed?”

  Alicia said thoughtfully, “Because the men don’t fit our dreams. We keep trying to see into them at first glance—”

  “And instead we think we see through them.” Jill sipped some wine and made a face. “See that guy? If I was in a mean mood, I’d say just from the expression on his face that he probably thinks a Volvo is part of a woman’s anatomy. But he might be just fine.”

  “So go talk to him.”

  “See who he’s chatting up? The black leather skirt and nose ring? Too bad Henry Ford put the buggy-whip makers out of business. They didn’t stick around long enough for the recent lucrative market in S&M.”

  “You’re not in the mood for this, are you?” Alicia said gently, hopefully.

  “Okay, I’ll go hit on him. As soon as the nose ring goes for another appetizer.”

  This took another quarter hour, but within another Jill was giving Alicia hand signals, smiling furiously, and ended up going off to dinner with the man. Alicia had no such luck. She stalled a bit, then left, stomach soured on cheap Chardonnay. She wasn’t any good at this at all, she realized yet again. Something in her did not fit with the usual academic sort of man, so she succumbed to Jill’s unsubtle poking and went to these awkward affairs.

  A severe mismatch indeed. She was seriously out of step. Evolution had designed primate thought for effective socialization, the biologists said, but she was a dead flat failure at it. It was a marvel, really, that the same minds which caught the intricacies of mating and avoiding predators could fathom reality at all. Science was a recent human invention, difficult for all but a few; why was it now her principal refuge from a world she could barely understand?

  6

  Brad Douglas blinked and said with genuine shock, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “The fewer who knew, the better,” Alicia said. Inevitably, Brad had wandered over to the U-magnet area in search of a tool, gotten interested in what was going on under all the tarps and screens, and seen what was up.

  “Why? We could’ve studied as a team—”

  “That’s what we are doing,” Zak put in.

  “Brookhaven isn’t a place to do open-ended research,” Alicia said mildly. Zak had found Brad puzzling over the sphere. Without saying a word to him, Zak had called her in her office, and she had come right down. “It’s a big tool made for a specific purpose.”

  “Yeah,” Brad said, “particles. Plenty of people to help—”

  “And get in the way,” Alicia said.

  “We had—you had—an obligation to show the other members of the BRAHMS team,” Brad said firmly.

  “Our agreement is to share data. This thing wasn’t detected—it destroyed a detector.”

  Brad’s hands cut the air in exasperation. “A lawyer’s argument.”

  Alicia felt startled. Friends of the Earth, lawyers, mounting frustration, her first run as principal investigator, the safety shortcut, the smashing of the Core Element, the sphere—all linked, bringing her to this.

  “I’m principal investigator on this research grant and I set policy,” she said, hearing a wobble in her voice. Be firm. This guy is just a graduate student, after all. But her throat wasn’t working right.

  Zak came to her rescue. “We were thinking this through, didn’t want to look stupid, making a big deal out of nothing.”

  Not really, Alicia thought, but okay—that element was there, too. She nodded.

  Brad shook his head, a not-having-any expression hardening his face.

  Zak persisted, keeping his voice light and casual, “Hell, we thought it was a fresh steel bubble.”

  Again, not really, but she could live with that. “Our working hypothesis, yes. An interesting solid-state effect. No big deal.”

  “Then why not just toss it?” Brad eyed her defiantly.

  “We had to move it out of there anyway. It’s heavy, hard to get a grip on. The magnet seemed a good way to handle it, keep it isolated.” The logic sounded weak even to her, but her voice was firming up now.

  Brad looked skeptical. “Hum. So… what is it?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing about it makes sense.”

  “It’s not iron, though,” Zak said. “We did a spectral reflection analysis using the gas laser.”

  “So what is it?” Brad’s tone was still flat, no-nonsense.

  “Nothing clear. No lines for any metal I know.” Zak bobbed his head, a gesture she recognized as mild modesty, one he must have picked up to conceal his own confidence in his ability. She recognized something of herself in that small nod, a nominal bow.

  Brad’s mouth twisted with frustration. “What if it’s dangerous?”

  She allowed herself a small smile. “Why would it be?”

  “It blew open the beam line, didn’t it?”

  “Perhaps. Maybe this sphere wasn’t the cause but a side effect.”

  “Of what?” Brad shot back.

  She shrugged. “We don’t know. It’s important not to jump to conclusions when you haven’t a clue what’s going on.”

  “But caution—”

  “Research is when you don’t know what you’re doing.” Alicia took refuge from his intent gaze in an ancient cliché.

  Zak said, “It’s probably no big deal. Plenty of things turn up that are hard to explain but not exotic.”

  “Were there any others?” Brad asked and Alicia saw that he was stalling for time, trying to figure out where he should go with this.

  “No,” Zak said.

  “You looked?”

  “Hey, it was right at the focus of the Core Element, where the beams intersect.”

  “So?”

  Alicia said crisply, “Occam’s razor—prefer the least hypothesis. At the focus, because that’s where the energy was to drive the formation process. We’d seen a drop in collisions for more than an hour before we finally shut down and went to look. Probably the sphere formed and blocked most of the beam flux. One sphere alone explains that. Plus, with people checking everything out on BRAHMS, they’d have noticed another even if we didn’t.”

  Brad twisted his mouth again, as if taking distasteful medicine. “I still think you should’ve told the rest of them.”

  “That’s a policy decision. I make those.”

  Brad sat on an assembly table and shook his head. Time for some carrot. Stick won’t do it alone, she thought. “Zak, thanks for your help. I’ll handle it.”

  “Huh? Oh.” Zak had been shuffling uncomfortably from one foot to another and now looked relieved at a plain invitation to be missing. He left by the side door.

  “Brad, I wanted to clarify the problem before I took up your time with it,” she said mildly.

  “I suppose I can understand that,” he said guardedly.

  “As well, you are vitally important
in rebuilding the Core Element.”

  “Yeah, but it’s, well, getting kind of boring.”

  “Tedium goes with the territory.”

  “Well, there’s more interesting stuff…”

  Was he hinting at something? “Let’s get you some more pay for doing it, then.”

  “How?”

  One of the minor features of the University of California system lay in its rituals and examinations, whereby a student working on a doctorate could pass his candidacy examination and then be eligible for a higher grade of research assistant. Brad had finished all the required course work and was doing research full-time now, supported by her Department of Energy grant. Usually graduate students delayed taking the candidacy exam until they were very nearly through with their thesis, out of a mixture of stage fright and laziness. The closer one was to a solid result, the less the chances of flunking the exam.

  She explained this to him, trying to not make it sound like any kind of payoff for keeping quiet. Though, of course, it was for his doing as he was told. To her surprise, he shook his head. “I’ll take the exam, sure. Point of it will be what?”

  “I was thinking that your thesis would be a description of the technical problems in building the Core Element.”

  “I want some more physics in it than that.”

  “We’ll get more data at Brookhaven—”

  “Sure, if they let us come back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That.” He pointed at the U-magnet. “It could mean a lot of trouble, for all we know.”

  “You’re exaggerating—”

  “I’d like to work on it with you. Do something different for a change.”

  So, the exam and the sphere. The kid knew how to bargain. Fairly subtle, too. “We can use the help. But that doesn’t mean you can slack off on the Core Element.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” Brad said with sudden eagerness. His cagey reserve vanished and he peppered her with questions about the sphere. The list of experimental points she had chalked on the board three days before was still there—a startling lapse of security, she realized ruefully. She took him through it and could see the fire of curiosity kindle in him as she spoke.

  “Wow, this is strange.”

  “Strange and secret,” she said carefully. “We want to have a clear understanding of whether this is something truly new before it, well, gets away from us.”

  He took it metaphorically, but she meant it literally. A note from Hugh Alcott in her e-mail, when she got back to her office, sharpened the issue.

  A review of the video monitor tapes shows you and a postdoc doing something with a permanent magnet. Could you explain this? It looks like you’re lifting something out of the beam line. Nothing in your report about this.

  Hugh

  She went and got some tea and generally milled around the department, chasing details and paperwork, letting her jittery mind subside. Best to answer fast, she saw. Casual, dismissive.

  I think you’re looking at Zak Nguyen and me freeing debris from the beam line. There was Core Element debris in it. We decided to pull it out with the permanent magnet, since some of it was heavy and we didn’t want to waste time taking it all apart.

  Best to Tom and the gang,

  Alicia

  There, that might put them off. Might. Those damn cameras! She had completely forgotten about them. Better not try to start a sideline holding up banks.

  7

  Zak twiddled with the knobs on the computer display, then typed commands into the keyboard. “This dashed line is the newest data, from several days of data accumulation. Our earlier result is the solid line.”

  Alicia bent closer. The two curves were very similar, to her relief; at least they hadn’t made some foolish mistake. Zak had run the experiment for five solid days, carefully capturing every glimmer of ultraviolet from the sphere, allowing no contaminating light in.

  But there were differences. The newer, dashed curve was shifted slightly down toward the red end of the spectrum and was shorter, too. “Something wrong with our first curve,” Alicia muttered to herself.

  “I don’t think so,” Zak said.

  “It’s offset from the later one.”

  “The difference is real.” He looked at her intently, as if he had to quell her doubts with a steady stare. “I checked into the sources of error. None is big enough to explain this.”

  “The whole second curve is moved to lower frequencies. Lower temperature.”

  Zak gave her the believe-me stare again. “It’s real. I’ve got it all here.” His lab notebook lay open, offering meticulous inked entries in several colors: blue for data, black for calculations, red for conclusions, a few crossouts in an ugly bile green.

  “Suppose it’s true. The temperature of this black body distribution is falling?”

  “Yes,” he said, pacing despite his obvious self-control. He wore a neat checkered shirt and ironed blue jeans. Had he spruced himself up for this moment? “It’s cooling down. But it could be red-shifted, too.”

  “A red shift?” The words hung there between them. An object moving away gave off light that seemed to lose a fraction of its energy, reddening all colors. Atoms coming toward one emitted bluer light.

  But Zak’s result said that the entire hot object was either cooling off or was moving away from them, away from the laboratory, at a speed— She shook her head. “Can’t be. That would mean the source is moving away from us at two percent of the speed of light.”

  “Right. But I think my measurement is right,” Zak said adamantly. He followed her technical judgment in nearly everything, but he knew when to defend his own work; good professional style, she thought. “It’s not warm to the touch. But inside it there’s a black body at 40,000 degrees K.”

  Some blunder, she guessed. “I’ve got to go over this.”

  He relaxed, sagging onto a work stool. “Nothing could make me happier.”

  She smiled. “Thought you were crazy for awhile?”

  “Something like that.”

  She felt a burst of affection for him. “Living with ambiguity, Zakster,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “Sometimes it’s a bitch.”

  The shift in the curves was real. She spent two days going over the data, sometimes calling up the raw returns from the counters and counting photons one at a time, looking for some mistake. Maybe in tabulating the individual counts far out in the wings, where the effect was largest but the flux of light was smallest? This was where an error would hurt them most.

  She looked hard, then looked again. There were none.

  Zak worked beside her and said little, but she could sense his rising excitement. Finally he said, “That’s all the data.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I would feel better if I understood anything.”

  “Sometimes understanding is the booby prize. Having found it, that’s the thing.”

  They both knew that and for a moment they simply stood and looked at the two curves. She gestured at the list of puzzling results, still on the board. Brad had come in and kibitzed but knew that this was, for the moment at least, their show alone. Nobody had ventured any explanations.

  “Y’know, this could conceivably be a red shift. There’s the Hubble shift, of course…” she said distantly.

  “But that’s a cosmological shift.” Zak sat on the edge of their work table beneath the pale luminesce of the high bay lamps. “Caused by the expansion of space-time.”

  “Maybe this has some such explanation?” she ventured.

  “A ball that’s cosmological? If it were something like a black hole, well—” He strode to the blackboard and scribbled an equation for the size of a black hole below their list.

  “See, a black hole with a mass of 100 kilos would be smaller than a proton!” Zak tossed the chalk from hand to hand. “Nope, nothing cosmological here.”

  Alicia had considered the same idea and rejected it, but it was good to let Zak run through the s
ame logic. “We need help.”

  “I am afraid so.” His elation was burning off, his face sobering.

  They had also tried to get an image out of the accumulated light, getting only a smooth glow. That was consistent with a hot object with no features.

  Alicia said, “What was it Newton said? ‘I frame no hypotheses.’ Good advice when you haven’t got a clue.”

  “Who can we ask? I mean, we don’t even know what field to ask about. I’d say it must be some weird condensed-matter phenomenon.”

  She ran through the list of her colleagues at UCI. Good, solid physicists, true. But a trifle too conventional for this weirdness. Some, she knew from departmental politics, instinctively awaited all new ideas with three nails and a hammer. More important, she didn’t want word of this to get around.

  “Think I’ll take a little ride to clear my thoughts,” she said.

  8

  Shortly after she had first moved out from the East, one morning without thinking she went down to the beach to watch the sunrise. As the truth literally dawned on her, she saw how far she had come, to a place that was the end of America. It had taken awhile to get the feel of this raw land lying compliantly in alkaline, probing light. L.A.’s horizontals mocked and oddly mimicked New York’s verticals, each framing humans in pressing, insistent geometry. The only true constant here was the rate at which California disappeared beneath concrete, ushering in its own sequels. Classic strategy: subdivide and conquer. Maybe it was no accident that just as the frontier closed, the movie studios opened their doors, taking possession of the national imagination, the future.

  Now the slumbering natural world lay hidden beneath the hurry-scurry. Driving up the 5 Freeway, she dodged off on the 57 and carried out a flanking movement toward Pasadena along the 10. Not direct, but fast. She ran into jams, even though it was only early afternoon. On part of the 10 that looked like an infinite parking lot stretching to the Pacific, she slid down an off-ramp and onto a “smart street” that monitored flow and intricately adjusted traffic lights and freeway-entry meters. She did not have one of the “pathfinder” systems inside cars that gave drivers the latest data on jams ahead; half of all congestion came from accidents or breakdowns. All effective, she supposed, but nobody had figured out where to park all that traffic once it arrived.