COSM

by Gregory Benford

  Zak shook his head. “Crazy. Got to be wrong.”

  “Ummm, probably. Let’s inspect everything again.” She was quite sure nothing was wrong with the spectrometers or the rest of it; this was a standard measurement, after all, nothing more than standard Advanced Lab 320 fare. But there was always some chance of error, and it would give her time to think. They reversed their usual procedure, following the logic backward from the computers, and it all looked right. Puzzling…

  Alicia set everything up to do another integration over time, checking the light hood, and started the experiment again. Then she led Zak to one of the small assembly rooms, cluttered with odd elements of the Core Element. She gazed at the parts as if they were from an archaeological site, far back in her past. One wall held a blackboard covered with fragments of old chalk talks. She erased it all and noted down their results:

  BLACKBODY, T = 40,000

  FAINT EMISSION

  REFLECTS AMBIENT LIGHT

  DIAMETER 37.8 CM.

  MASS ~ 100 KG.

  “We’ve got a shiny ball that seems to emit in the ultraviolet. As if it were very hot, but very weak,” she said. “It can also reflect our light back at us, so it’s more like a mirror than a window.”

  Zak’s face twisted skeptically. “You know I’ll follow your lead, I trust your judgment, but—come on!”

  “You’re not following my lead here—it’s Nature’s.”

  He stiffened a little. “Okay, then assume that same property, high reflection, is true for the ultraviolet we’re seeing. That means we’re getting only a tiny fraction of what’s emitted. How come?”

  She shrugged. “Somehow the radiation can’t get out.”

  “Come on,” Zak said reasonably. “At 40,000 degrees?”

  She nodded. “But put your hand on it, it’s room temperature.”

  “So the radiation’s from whatever’s inside?”

  She fidgeted, trying to enumerate possibilities. “I suppose so. Radiating at us, very weakly, through this… window?”

  “A window we can’t see through.” Zak paced, face twisted with concentration.

  “In visible light. The ultraviolet comes through, for some reason. It reflects ninety-nine percent of the visible light we give it, remember? And it’s not a metal.” She folded her arms.

  “It refracts, too—hell, it does everything!” Zak was agitated. “We must be getting just a tiny fraction of the ultraviolet that’s emitted from inside, or otherwise this ball would burn everything up in the lab. That makes no sense!”

  “And it weighs as much as a person,” she added. “A fat person.”

  “What’s that imply?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s another fact.” Alicia plopped down in a lab chair, laughing at herself. “Usually making a list suggests something.”

  “Not this time,” Zak said laconically.

  “Anything this hot…”

  “Yes?”

  “Should be glowing, burning a hole…” Her hands fluttered uselessly.

  “Well, it is, sort of. Burning a hole in the air, I mean. Making ozone.”

  “Hole. Right, I left that out.” She got up and wrote on the board:

  REFRACTION PROPORTIONAL TO PENETRATION DEPTH

  She explained her earlier observations to Zak. “It looks like light coming in at slightly different angles to the sphere penetrates to different layers and gets refracted more strongly the farther in it goes.”

  “Huh,” Zak said.

  “Exactly.” They sat some more and stared at the list and agreed that little of it made sense. She remembered hearing once that research types had a tolerance for ambiguity, for not knowing where they were headed while still keeping going. A curious view, she thought, for this was the part she most enjoyed: the mystery.

  Usually in particle physics the biggest puzzles were Why doesn’t this damned thing work? or How can we get any meaning out of this confusion? but beneath those lay deep imponderables. Was this thing such a fundamental object? She felt a tingling, pulse-quickening expectation.

  When in doubt, sharpen the data. “Let’s clear up the uncertainty in that blackbody measurement,” she said, slapping her hands on her thighs to break her drifting mood.

  “That’ll take a darker lab.” Zak looked around at the bay. “We’re getting leakage.”

  “Agreed. Probably means running at night.”

  “I can set that up.”

  “Good. Let’s sketch out what to do and then I’ve got other business. I was thinking, too, that perhaps we should look in the journals, see if any anomaly like this has ever turned up.”

  Zak’s mouth twisted skeptically. “I doubt it.”

  “Me too. But we should look. I’ll do a quick literature search.”

  Particle physics postdocs seldom read the journal literature except to find out whom to talk to and get the real dope. In seminars they rarely asked questions, not wanting to seem out of it. If they knew the subject well, though, they would challenge and probe. Talking about their own work convincingly was crucial, and a bit of bluster often worked. Nearly all experimenter postdocs had a favorite story about how they made a piece of gear or software by unstinting labor, just in time to keep the experiment going. Even as they told their tales, a rueful note crept in, for mere skill was not enough to get them up the next ascent in the profession; for that, they had to show independence, insight, intellectual grace. Nobody told them so, of course; it was part of the unspoken subculture of particle physics. Some never quite realized this; others caught on after their grunt labor went unrecognized, while a risk-taking postdoc got all the smiles.

  Zak was different. Her grant could afford only one postdoc; he had stood out because, while he had many typical traits, he also showed intense loyalty. To succeed at RHIC demanded that a small outside team function like a well-oiled machine, quick with the ideas and ready to work harder than others.

  She left the lab and headed for her office. Students thronged the physical sciences plaza, in their faux-casual, pricey splendor: sweatsuits, tube socks, glossy windbreakers, big-heeled white marathon shoes, warm-up jackets advertising designers’ names, tank tops, baseball caps worn in the new style, bill forward. Mostly gear for working out, not as in working out a problem but as in sweat. She wondered why this generation knew terms like deltoids, pectoralis major, and triceps better than the names of the outer planets, while they walked little, thronged the campus elevators and escalators, and packed the parking lots with comfortable cars.

  The Asian students were the best-dressed—or at least the most expensively. Often now the simple, hand-lettered signs stuck to campus walls and kiosks were in foreign, usually Asian, languages. Advertisers wanted only their own ethnicity, especially in the ads for rooms for rent and houses to share. She had heard UCI sourly referred to as the University of Indochina. “Diversity” had come to mean Balkanization.

  But in the divisions among students lay a deeper strategy. The administration practiced tactics of divide-and-conquer, turning each student faction into a client, supplicants to the ever-expanding executive corps who thought of themselves as “management,” of faculty as workers and students as captive customers. In this they merely mirrored the national political style, a legacy of the Twen Cen.

  She got to the fourth floor as the department afternoon tea began. She meant to snag some cookies and a cup of tea and keep going, but several of the particle experimenters wanted to hear about how the Core Element blew. She gave them the standard story, using the opportunity to feel out their reaction. A circle formed around her. They were sympathetic and probing, seeing it as a new unsolved problem, i.e., fresh meat. Postdocs and faculty joined in equally, but graduate students kept quiet.

  The particle group considered itself an elite, a meritocracy in which everybody had a fair start. Underscoring that were their similar offices, use of first names even for the senior figures, and rigorously informal dress code. When she once pointed this out to a full professor, h
e shrugged and said, “Well, sure, naturally,” in a tone implying that to think of social and psychological forces was un-physicist-like. Nobody spoke of such matters, but everybody learned the fine structure of the profession well before they took their final places in it.

  Jonas Schultz, the grand old man of the experimenters, took her aside and asked, “How’s this going to affect your observing schedule?”

  “I’ll try to make the next run, six months away.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” He was a handsome, graying, mild-mannered New Yorkish man, from the more genteel days of the field. She had a momentary impulse to tell him about the oddity she had in the lab, but caution prevailed.

  “My team seems up to it, but thanks for asking. I might need to borrow some equipment.”

  “Just let me know,” he said warmly. “We don’t want this to hurt your progress toward tenure.” The flip side of particle physicists’ intense competition was their tribal loyalty.

  Tenure: the Holy Grail in an age of dwindling science funding. To venture into particle physics in such an era was to court ceaseless anxiety. Undergraduates secretly feared that they weren’t good enough compared to the giants of yore. Grad students feared burning up their time on experiments which would only marginally work out. Postdocs had to peer several years ahead, guessing the rewarding questions upcoming, then betting with their hours. In such rough weather she had (surprisingly, to her) gotten a faculty position. Not a single sniff from Stanford or Harvard, of course, so she had interviewed at three less prestigious universities, getting an offer from UCI alone.

  Once here, Alicia had found that her anxiety level increased. The next height to scale was the wall of tenure; fail and there was nothing left but to quit, or try for a slot at a national laboratory. Even if she made tenure, beyond it lay the long climb through the ridges and crevasses of funding, getting your share of beamtime, and, as always, pursuing chances to network, network, network. Of course, she had liked every step of the way. Anybody who didn’t would not be as good at the game and so was by now pursuing a productive career in stock analysis or routine technology.

  Ignoring knocks on her door, she hammered away on her office computer, writing the report for Hugh Alcott. His questions seemed a long way off, somehow, the entire matter fading into the past, in comparison with the sharply outlined mystery she faced in the lab.

  She quit halfway through and got some more tea from the cart on the fourth floor and came back, sat down, stared at the screen. She had learned while writing her doctoral thesis to back away when she got blocked writing, so she called up the UCI library data services menu. For an hour she negotiated through the labyrinth of reference sources, emerging triumphantly empty-handed: there were no references in the published physics literature to an eccentric object remotely like hers.

  Yes, she thought, hers. Might as well be possessive about it. Then she got back to work on her report, e-mailed it to Alcott, and went back to the lab.

  5

  She wanted to stay home, read, maybe veg out before the TV, but Jill wasn’t having any of that.

  “You said you’d go to this mixer.” Jill plopped down on Alicia’s couch and tossed her microscopic abalone shell handbag aside. “I’m going to sit here and fume until you get ready.”

  “But I’ve got work to do and I’m tired and—”

  “If you’re tired, you shouldn’t work. Boy, you intellectuals have to have everything spelled out for you.”

  “This is another singles’ meat rack,” Alicia accused.

  “An unfortunate choice of phrase. We’re just trying to meet likable strangers.” Jill jabbed a polished maroon fingernail toward the bedroom. “Cover your body.”

  Alicia spent fifteen minutes searching for some clothes that did not Make a Statement until Jill intervened. She ended up in a blue dress, complaining, “But it’s not really my best color.” To which Jill shot back, “Who cares? It’s men’s favorite color. Don’t you read anything? You’re not trying to date yourself.”

  Alicia then dithered over jewelry, a choice not helped at all by her being unable to find most of it. This seemed like a general law: as soon as you moved something to a more logical, orderly place, the only thing you could remember was where it used to be and that you had decided to move it to a much better, really obvious place.

  She finally “got herself presentable,” as her father used to say, and Jill inspected the result. “Black shoes? You have a good red pair.”

  “Those are my fuck-me shoes. Not the signal I want to send.”

  “Ummm, granted. Let’s go.”

  Alicia said, “Remember when gals we knew took condoms to these things?”

  “That was way before our time, a mid-Twen Cen thing. Now I just rely on my personality. Keeps that dangerous semen where it belongs, in its container.”

  “Containers.”

  “I keep forgetting, there are two. I wonder why? They make a gazillion each.”

  “A guy thing. Always carry a backup.”

  They got to the mixer in good order. The social whirl south of L.A. was strung along the power ZIP codes of coastal towns, from Huntington Beach’s 92649 to San Clemente’s 92672, with Newport’s 92660 the surest path to favor, and Laguna Beach’s 92651 holding the All-County title for collective weirdness, artists, and media fame. Tonight’s collision of anxieties was at Fashion Island, just inland from Newport Harbor. Lining the drive in from the Coast Highway were spindly phoenix palms with blue-tinged floodlights buried in their boles. The radiance picked out their green fronds swaying like great hula skirts in the salty, ocean-flavored breeze. A pus yellow searchlight poked up into the usual marine layer fog that hovered like gauze over the Four Seasons Hotel. They handed Alicia’s Miata off to the valet and made their way through the usual obstacles, a sign-in barrier with stick-on name tags, singles’ organization tables, and—as they rounded a corner—a body. The man lay faceup, shirt disheveled, something splashed over his hair.

  Alicia gasped. “My God, is he dead?”

  “Only socially. Drunk, I’d say.”

  Without hesitation Jill stepped over him. Alicia followed, and by the time they got down a long corridor, some men were trying to get the man to his feet. Apparently none of this excited much comment.

  “Wait a sec.” Alicia stepped out onto a patio.

  Jill followed. “Classic anxiety smoker” was all the criticism she would voice, though her slanted mouth said the rest.

  Alicia waved away the objection. She could feel the phenols and pyrenes raping the tender epithelial cells and the laboring cilia of their bronchi, the carbon monoxide and cyanide latching hungrily onto innocent hemoglobin, her virtuous hardworking heart heaving and lurching in chemical panic. They sang fruitlessly of her body’s fragility in a world of malicious molecules, but she needed it, and who, after all, was in charge here?

  Alas, it evaporated into the dry air all too quickly. She closed her eyes, sighed. Into the fray. Alicia had been to several of these, though not lately. This gave her some separation, and she found herself sitting back, two centimeters behind her eyes, taking in the show.

  Women greeted each other in high-pitched, singsong voices, stretching their words into extra syllables: Hi-i-i-i-e-e-e, h-o-o-o-w-w are yo-u-u-u? Men reversed this, dropped into basso profundo, staccato grunts with curt nods: Hey, hey. How ya doin’? Women tried to connect, emoting and overshowing emotion. Men meeting each other were setting the pecking order, maybe throwing a mock punch or friendly insult. With their handshakes men overcame their urge to defend personal space; after all, centuries ago it came from showing that you weren’t carrying a weapon. Alicia got both barrels as she came into the big, babble-filled reception.

  “Alicia, where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

  “Missed you, kid.”

  “My God, I figured you were either married or dead!”

  “Or both,” she replied flatly, but nobody paid any attention. The longer women had been
apart and the closer they were, the higher their greeting tones. They leaned toward each other, talking face-to-face. Alicia saw the pattern, all right, and muted her own, but the strut and howl carried a compelling pleasure.

  Men watched this as if witnessing a banshee ritual. Pointedly, they stood at angles to the greeting pairs, glancing around the room, hunters alive to the game.

  Greetings done, everybody reverted to approximately normal tones. It made sense, she realized abstractly. Greetings were anxious, so the defensive move was to go back to your gender role. Women infantilized their voices, saying, I won’t harm you, while men’s deep tones said, Don’t make trouble.

  She surveyed the crop. Men in Orange County too often came in bright blazers, beltless slacks, shiny loafers, and cheerfully colored socks. Or else the George Will look. Mostly Caucasian men, of course, with a sprinkling of Asians. Some Brahmin-style Indians, a bit out of place. Three black men she could see from here, near the door. They all looked away from her when they noticed, the usual signal. They were patrolling for Caucasian women; if they’d wanted black, they would have gone somewhere farther north, maybe all the way to L.A., where there was a bumper crop.

  “Hey, good to see you again,” a reasonably well-dressed man two inches taller than her said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember…” Which was the truth, but it at least served to get her off into a predictable conversational trajectory. In the first five minutes his conversation was quick, bright, easy. In the next twenty minutes his conversation was like somebody trained to sound very good for five minutes. His polished quips made you think he was quoting somebody else—and he probably was.

  Suddenly hungry, she worked her way through some appetizers and swore that she could feel the blue dress get tighter. Jill was working through the crowd, but loyally circled back every quarter hour to check on Alicia’s progress and give mini-pep talks. About the blue dress, which now seemed to be inching up Alicia’s thighs like a sentient fungus, she said sardonically, “Look, men say, ‘I wear a thirty-four,’ but we say, ‘I am a size eight.’ What’s that tell you?”