COSM

by Gregory Benford

  Brad would be the key here. He said little, but she noticed that he casually dropped by each laboring figure and buoyed up spirits. He was the best of the graduate students, quiet and ambitious, but good at handling people. In fact, better than she was. He had been the obvious choice to go with her and Zak to Brookhaven.

  After two hours, during a break, she took Zak into the separate space where the big crate stood. They made quick work of the wooden frame. The gray U-magnet had foam packing sheets and bubble wrap around it. Gingerly, they peeled it off. The sphere was still there.

  “Came through okay,” Zak said.

  Alicia stuck her head into the magnet gap and eyed her warped reflection in the mirror spherical surface. The fizzy quality of the reflected light was… gone.

  “Zak, does it look the same to you?”

  His head poked into the other side. “Um, pretty much.”

  “There was a kind of, well, coherence to it.”

  “I remember. Maybe the lab light at Brookhaven was different?”

  She pursed her lips. “That smell again.”

  Zak sniffed. “Ozone. We smelled it back in the Brookhaven prep area.”

  “Must be the sphere itself.” She backed away and the smell faded. “That’s the source, all right.”

  “Funny. Takes a lot of energy to make ozone, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but how can a solid object do this?”

  “Ozone forms around transformers and power lines.”

  “Electrostatics?” She frowned. “If there’s a big potential on this thing—”

  “How would it get charged?”

  “Who knows?” She got a shielded cable and brought it over, using work gloves. “If this discharges to ground…”

  But it did not. “Okay, no electric effect.” She wrinkled her nose at the smell. Was it stronger than it had been at Brookhaven?

  Zak frowned. “How can a metal bubble…?”

  Time to be frank. “Zak, you’ve been pretty quiet about this.”

  Discomfort flickered in his normally impassive face. He shrugged. “I figured you knew best.”

  “I took this because I think it may be important, very important. Some new physics may be going on and this is a big, fat clue. But I know what I did—and I’ll take the blame here, not you—is out of bounds. I just… had to.”

  Zak nodded. “I didn’t come to UCI on a postdoc because my parents live nearby. I came because of you. You’re a really good experimentalist. Everybody says that. I’ll go with your judgment.”

  She had wondered a bit at Zak’s silent compliance. By now she would have filled the air with questions. They were both outsiders in the scientific community, but of quite different personalities—so be it.

  “Anyway,” Zak said to fill the silence between them, “we should get something back in return for losing the Core Element.”

  “A kind of cosmic balance? Yeah, I kinda feel the same way.” They smiled at each other, some unspoken understanding passing. Alicia sighed and stared again at their reflections, two quizzical frowns. “I wonder if that surface is solid.”

  “Well, sure it is.”

  “Let’s check.”

  They got a drill from the machine shop and mounted it on an equipment frame. Zak fished a diamond tip from the rack and put it in the chuck. He advanced the whirring tip as Alicia watched from the side. It met the sphere. Nothing gave. A high thin scream of metal in agony, but the tip did not advance.

  “Good grief,” Zak said, pulling the tip back.

  “Wow,” Alicia said, rather an understatement of her feelings.

  “A tip like this should cut steel, even a really tough alloy. I can’t get it to advance any.”

  There was no mark on the sphere. “Let’s try to chip it.”

  That failed as well. Zak snorted in exasperation. “What kinda super-hard material can this be?”

  “Maybe it’s not material?”

  “Huh?”

  “Just a thought.”

  Irked, Zak jabbed a finger at the offending sphere. “Sure feels solid. More likely, we’re doing something wrong.”

  Maybe so, she thought, but not in the way you mean.

  For the first time she felt a cold trickle of apprehension, peering into her deformed reflection, which seemed to be leering back at her.

  2

  Laguna Beach was the sort of town where a stack of tiny apartments clinging precariously to a hillside on the Pacific Coast Highway could call itself The Villa and nobody would laugh. Alicia slipped her blue Miata into the last long-term parking space left on Lower Cliff Drive as dusky fog edged in from Main Beach, only a hundred meters away. She had taken a two-bedroom, the largest in The Villa, because she wanted to live in the middle of the village. Most people fled here from the Orange County sprawl to hole up in the narrow, steep canyons, living on streets where it was impossible to walk but crawling might work.

  She had wanted just enough urban pulse to remind her of Northern California, where she had done her graduate work, but without the People’s Republic of Berkeley upscale slum atmosphere. On an assistant professor’s salary most chose to live in the university-run condos on campus. Alicia’s skin itched at the idea. Rents would have been cheaper inland, but there lay the lairs of cotton-topped elders wearing fruit-colored comfort clothes, the men with legs ghostly pale above the black socks they always wore in their sandals, and the women in pastel golf visors with super-size sunglasses.

  She made her way down the tricky steps, letting the flowers welcome her home. Sweet jasmine layered the moist beach air as it climbed up the trellises at doorways. As she teetered down steep steps between jocular blue-and-white tile walls, a hummingbird darted around some fuchsias in baskets. It paused and gave her a look and then moved away so fast it just vanished. On the next level petunias cloyed the mood with their thick sweetness. The apartments here were tiny and The Villa joke was they were reserved for New Yorkers so they would feel at home. The petunias alone would have driven her away. But just further along, between narrow tiled walls, the air gave way to the cutting acidic aroma of golden marigolds. On the left her apartment had a commanding view of Broadway and the Pacific Coast Highway with the whitecaps beyond, all wreathed in a halo of magenta bougainvillea, mercifully scentless. She was feeling better already, putting the lab puzzle behind her, when she noticed that her front door was ajar.

  She went in cautiously. There was a heavy lilac smell in the living room. “Come out or I start shooting.”

  “My my, you’re so butch,” came a light voice.

  “Jill, that’s a new lock.”

  “Yeah, took me maybe thirty seconds with a dull nail file.”

  “The new perfume is overpowering.” Alicia walked through the archway into a room of spare rattan furniture covered in tweedy gray. Jill lay on the couch reading Natural History, feet up, open-toed sandals off, blue silk shirt tucked into white duck slacks, her blonde hair spread around her head like a halo.

  Jill grinned. “Giving it a trial run. A guy at work likes it.”

  Jill had been famous for picking locks at university, some kind of high school prankster talent. “They teach that as part of investigative journalism?” Alicia dropped her briefcase in a corner and Jill bounced up and hugged her.

  “Just in case I get assigned to the White House and hear about some funny stuff at the Watergate. Got my special tools all ready.”

  Alicia smiled wanly and eased into her bare mahogany rocker—good for the ache in her back. “Girl, I’m pure, plain, kicked-dog tired.”

  “Hey, we’re supposed to celebrate your experiment, remember?” “It crashed.”

  “Like, bang?”

  “Big bang.”

  Jill blinked. “Then you really weren’t kidding in that phone message.”

  “You keep thinking everybody’s as ironic as you are.”

  “It really crashed? Why?”

  Alicia launched into the story and within a solid minute Jill got the famili
ar blank look, so she capped off the tale with a quick reference to the sphere and then just rocked a bit in silence. Jill respected her work but had little interest in its intricacies. Come to think of it, Alicia thought, maybe that was one of the reasons they got along.

  Jill looked relieved. “Uh, save the details for the appetizers. Ready?”

  “Lord no. I’ll open something. Red or white?”

  “Go for white. I’ll probably spill it.”

  Alicia fished a sauvignon blanc out of her tiny refrigerator in a kitchen only marginally bigger. The small kitchen had appealed to her, a ready excuse for not whomping up five-course dinners. She came back out under the archway, poured the wine, and plopped back down in the rocker.

  Jill eyed her and said, “Y’know, that’s your best frame. When you have a guy over, always sit there.”

  “It’s good for my aching back.”

  “No, really, it sets off your skin very well.”

  “Mahogany lady? My ambition is to be thought of as what my dad calls a ‘high yella.’”

  “Yellow? How can black people be yellow?”

  “Mix in some white, which is really pink.”

  “Ugh. Don’t take up oil painting.”

  “In this town I’ll be the only one who doesn’t.”

  Jill flexed her fingers and Alicia knew she was thinking about a cigarette. Well, they both were. Three months now and not an hour passed without the urge; they were helping each other quit. A flicker of a frown, then Jill said brightly, “Three guesses.”

  “New guy.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “C’mon, we’ve served together through a decade of the Sex Wars. You were going out with that computer guy—”

  “Him? Turned out he had a rag for a gas cap.”

  “So spill.”

  Jill rattled off name, job, physical highpoints, all with an accountant’s speed and accuracy. Alicia interrupted with: “So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?”

  “No, just Mr. Right Now.”

  Alicia shook her head. “The utilitarian approach. Maintenance sex.”

  “Hey, I’m just voyaging through the six stages of life: Birth, Childhood, Hideous Adolescence, Midlife Crisis, Plastic Surgery, Death or Whatever.” Jill nervously flexed her fingers again and her upper teeth bit into her cardinal-bright lipstick, as if searching for the filter tip that wasn’t there.

  “Those are the choices? Think I’ll sit this one out.”

  “Oh, you’re infuriating!” Jill leaned forward toward Alicia. “You said after this experiment’s up and going, you’d get back in the game.”

  “No finger-pointing. There’s trouble with the experiment—”

  “Sheesh! Look, as far as your romantic life goes, don’t bother thinking for yourself. Get a pro to do it.”

  “Like you?”

  “I’ve been around the track a lot more times.”

  “A real Olympic athlete.”

  “As I recall, that’s called judgmental.”

  “Factual.”

  “Hey, drop that. This is Jill. I’ve seen you with your dress caught in your panties, ‘member?”

  Alicia smiled wanly. “Okay, okay. Maybe I need some encouragement.”

  Jill eyed her meditatively. “A remake is more like it.”

  They had met in Berkeley. Jill was two years younger with a master’s in Communications and a law degree, which meant that she freelanced in what she called TV Land and got big-time bucks for it. Fast-track stuff, compared with Berkeley’s Lite Granola and Birkenstocks. Alicia could see the effects. Still, it beat UCI, where one could appear in an outfit with just the perfect muted shades and downright witty tailoring and the academics would look right through it. Of course, the secretaries would say something, a little awkwardly because she was a professor, but that was thin gruel indeed.

  Alicia sighed and finished her wine. “Where’s for dinner? Someplace we can walk.”

  “Don’t change the subject! Look, I’m not saying make this a major campaign or anything, doesn’t have to be the Normandy invasion.”

  “Last time you got me so dolled up, I had that hundred-dollar hairdo ruined by a ceiling fan.”

  Jill held up both hands, palms out. “Okay, a tactical error. I was trying for the retro Diana Ross look.”

  “The Eva Peron look, you mean.”

  “Okay, but you’re wearing it hopelessly short now. With just a bit more length—”

  “Look, I got reasons not to date right now. Work—”

  “No work, not allowing work anymore. You’ve used that one up.”

  Alicia smiled. The only way to get Jill off her favorite topic, Let’s Save Alicia, was something in her own style. “Okay, reasons not to date.” She ticked them off on her fingers: “I can’t make myself share in Chinese restaurants. My ideal man hasn’t been invented yet—in fact, may be anatomically impossible. I need to be in bed, asleep by 10 P.M., or I become quite cranky.”

  “You’re cranky already.”

  Alicia nodded. “Woman need dinner.”

  “You need a date. I may have mentioned this a few hundred times before.”

  “Date? Could you spell that?”

  “Hey, is no man an island or what?”

  “Most of them should be.”

  “Don’t go insulting the prey.”

  “And I’m the cranky one?”

  They went to Las Brisas, both liking the feeling of making a virtuous, healthy choice with the soup, ignoring the dollop of artery-clogging buttery potatoes that made it delectable. Already nearly packed, it was a Southwestern Mexican joint, upscale touristy in a nice way, pricey but still reasonably hip. No interesting guys loitering at the intense singles’ bar, which is how one knew it was a real restaurant and not a watering hole with appetizers.

  Jill displayed her full range of neurotic restaurant behavior, ordering everything on the side, asking for her food on smaller plates to make it look bigger, hauling out her own ultralite salad dressing, counting calories with a calculator at the table, pretending to find sprouts just yummy. Once on a double date Alicia had listened to her long soliloquy on whether to eat just a little something before they got to the restaurant, so the guys won’t think she was a pig.

  The menu listed every single ingredient in the dishes, the full cinnamon-apples-drizzled-with-clover-honey-crème-fraîche sort of thing. They were most of the way through a shared entrée (a delicately negotiated point) of chicken mole with white asparagus, an unlikely combination that didn’t quite work out, before Alicia could get a word in edgewise about the sphere. Jill listened intently, nodding and snapping off chunks of celery sticks.

  When Alicia’s tale finally dribbled off into details about diagnosing the sphere, Jill yawned and poked a finger at her. “So what can Brookhaven say? You took something that ruined your experiment. Well, you were owed.”

  “Physics doesn’t work like that. It’s not horse trading.”

  “You’ll have to split it some way?”

  Alicia chuckled loudly. Maybe it was the wine. “We tried that. It won’t split.”

  “You can say you didn’t know what it was.”

  “True. But spiriting away an important result from an experiment—”

  “You don’t know it’s important.”

  Alicia found that her hand had knotted into a fist. “I can feel it in my gut.”

  “Your honor, witness is unresponsive.”

  “Okay, I don’t know. But if they ask, truth is, I had a feeling from the beginning—”

  “Just say, ‘your honor, I refuse to answer on grounds of insufficient database.’”

  Alicia shook her head and said nothing.

  Jill frowned and leaned across the narrow table, pushing aside her decaf espresso to hold Alicia’s hands. “You’re worried more than you let on.”

  “Yes. I… I don’t know what the hell this thing is and I’ve done this crazy thing on impulse and I can’t really turn to anybody or word will get out
and I’ll have to answer—”

  “I’m no rocket scientist—God, don’t you hate that phrase? As if engineers who launch rockets are real smart? Try sleeping with one of them!—but listen, having a consuming curiosity and following your nose is what people like me expect a scientist to do.”

  Alicia looked surprised. “From the outside it doesn’t look like I’ve committed a cardinal sin. I like that.”

  “You’re absolved, kid. Doesn’t the Pope get his ring kissed? I’ll have another espresso.”

  They went along the sloping beach. Jill narrowly escaped a big wave hissing up to and nearly over her new green sandals. Alicia walked her to her top-of-the-line BMW, which, because the tourist season was already picking up, was parked on Legion Street.

  Walking home, Alicia looped by the beach to listen to the crash and slither of the waves some more. Sitting on the rocks for a while made her feel better about everything. Coming back along Coast Highway, the town lay like strings of Christmas lights wrapped around looming hills of coal.

  She yawned and then saw another black woman coming toward her. Jill’s pressure was working; she instantly began sizing up the woman as competition. Not bad, no, but not that good, a little hefty and certainly not in her class of looker. Then she blinked and saw that she was looking into a store window reflecting her own backlit image. She walked the whole rest of the way home unsuccessfully trying not to think about it.

  3

  Most scientific research flows along well-charted channels. Within a recognized framework it seeks to discover minor eddies and byways, expanding knowledge without breaking boundaries. It strums with the tension between the known and the half-seen.

  Alicia had always scorned such conventional, safe approaches. RHIC, after all, was a bold stab into new terrain; its failure to yield any eyebrow-raising discoveries so far did not deny its initial ambition. But she had worked within a community, using time-honored approaches. She saw now the comforts of those boundaries. At this juncture she had to voyage into territory wholly unknown.

  Of course, this thing hovering a few feet away from her could be a mere oddity of explosive metallurgy. Zak still thought so. And making a fuss about a poorly understood result could be fatal.