COSM

by Gregory Benford

  She parked illegally and walked into the heart of Caltech. Spanish galleries framed the long grassy promenade. The stretching perspective was dotted with pepper trees sighing in a hard dry breeze that whispered in from the desert baking to the east. Two Californias collided at the end of the grassy ribbon, where a rectangular library reared like an exclamation point above the nostalgia of early days, announcing with its severe Euclidean smoothness the no-nonsense present. Inside a long Moorish building marked east bridge the arched motif continued in high white segments above floors of big brown tiles. She passed under wrought-iron gratings that accented the atmosphere, framing a room of the latest journals. The ceramic scent of aging plaster and tile, with its absorbing hush, reminded her of a chapel. She needed some fresh illumination, all right, but not the kind that comes through the west window of a church.

  At Caltech physics was about attacking fundamental problems. Useful, correct, but ultimately unsurprising work was scorned. This was the citadel of Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann; legends stalked the halls. She stopped, teetering on the brink of retreating to UCI. What if the sphere was just some metallic oddity? She could have made some simple mistake somewhere, a dumb way of fooling herself. To bring in others could open her to harsh derision.

  Get a grip, girl. She walked on.

  Just beyond the Theoretical Astrophysics Interaction Room, with its coffee machine and stacks of recent preprints, lay the offices of well-known physicists: Thorne and Blandford and the rest. She hesitated. Bright types, authorities, but what would they make of her story? Implausible on the face of it, and with her quick-and-dirty at Brookhaven on top of it all… She had jumped in her Miata and zoomed up here without thinking it through.

  Maybe somebody a bit more humble? At Caltech that would be hard.

  Rooms were clogged with big computing systems. Every profession now had its “quants,” people who could handle the dizzying digital wilderness, interpret it for their peers. “Crossover” was the hot buzzword. Computer hackers worked with organic chemists to study molecular structure. Medical school graduates worked with electrical engineers to design neural networks that worked something like the brain. The new technologies dissolved disciplines.

  From the corridor she could hear people talking to their computers in customized pidgin. At its best, the new tech devoured complication and delivered simplicity. Telephone answering machines were so programmable and “smart,” they now projected the listeners’ style, not the machine’s design contrivance. They could sound like a stodgy British butler’s reserved politeness or a brisk secretary asking snappy questions—or even like a robot, which it was.

  She walked around some corners, into the section where Thorne held sway. Two-to-an-office postdocs peered out at her curiously, probably wondering what a black face was doing here, she thought. Beyond was an assistant professor’s office, Room 146, Max Jalon.

  She peeked around the doorjamb and saw a thin, tall man in steel gray slacks and soft, button-down blue shirt. Wire frame glasses perched on a narrow nose and he absently brushed long brown hair back from his high forehead as he wrote on a yellow pad. The office was not the usual piles-of-paper theorists’ haunt. Magazine boxes held crisply labeled papers on STRING TH, MATH BKGND, and OBS.

  Well, at least he knew something about style. She had always rather liked men who were neater than she was, though that was not difficult. At UCI she had taken a moment to look up the Caltech catalog, which listed Jalon’s specialty areas as “gravitational waves, cosmology, astrophysics.” OBS probably meant observations, a sign that he was not another totally abstract math type. Okay, stop dithering. Take the plunge.

  “Uh, Dr. Jalon?”

  He didn’t even look up. “Go away.”

  “I have something that might interest you.”

  “Ten minutes.” When she stepped inside the door, he added, “I’ll see you then,” eyes still on the page, hand scribbling.

  She spent the ten minutes irritably stalking the corridors, touring the journal library, taking in the obscure joys of recent published papers displayed on gray steel racks. By the time she came back she was fuming but made her voice say dryly, “Do I get ten for ten?”

  He finally glanced up at her, then glanced back. Surprise at seeing a black woman here? His mouth broadened into a half-smile. “You’re a student?”

  “Thanks for the unintended compliment. No, I’m a professor from UCI.”

  They got through the usual sniffing-out of each other in a few minutes. Her edgy opening move, “Can you keep a secret?” he countered with “Can you keep a promise? Tell me all of it.”

  She had opted for a here’s-a-mystery strategy, showing him pictures of the sphere, listing the same properties she had on the blackboard at UCI, finally springing where she got it. He sat with his Doc Martens-clad feet up on his desk the whole time, hands behind his head, asking nothing until she got to the uranium collisions. Then he quickly sucked the relevant facts and assumptions from her with clipped questions, finishing with a small smile. “And you got this away without telling anybody?”

  “I figured it for a metal bubble or something, just an oddity—”

  “Nope, that story won’t play.”

  “What?”

  “You smelled something interesting and swiped it. ‘Fess up.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions without—”

  “Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll apologize.”

  Despite herself, she laughed. “My God, you’re annoying.”

  He abruptly sprang to his feet in one fluid movement, Doc Martens slamming down on the tile floor. She looked up into an amused face with one sardonically arched eyebrow. “Then I have my answer. Come on over to the Greasy for coffee and then let’s have a look at this thing.”

  9

  She had imagined this moment, when she would whip away the shrouds—presto!—and show the disbelieving world her, well, whatever it was.

  Max did not play to the drama of the moment; in fact, he seemed unaware of it. He simply peered at the sphere and snapped off a long series of questions: “What did you measure? How accurate are these numbers? What sources of error might there be?” Only then did he tap the sphere thoughtfully and nod.

  “You’ve ruled out everything ordinary, so…”

  “Yes?” she asked quietly.

  “So it’s extraordinary.” He grinned. “Just as you said. That doesn’t mean it’s significant, just that it’s interesting.”

  “I hope there isn’t something simple I’ve forgotten.”

  “Doubt it. What’s that smell?”

  “Oh, the ozone. I forgot to mention that.”

  She told him and he leaned in between the magnet poles, looking closely at the sphere. “That ultraviolet you’re detecting, it’s very weak. And this thing”—he rapped on the sphere—“it feels hard, like glass. So whatever’s giving off the ultraviolet isn’t heating it up.”

  “No, the sphere is the same temperature as the lab.”

  “Damned funny. Notice how the air, well, feels different right next to it?”

  She leaned in from the other side. “How so?”

  “I don’t know, just a sensation, like a… well, a rippling, as I do this.” He passed his hand over the sphere.

  She moved her right hand carefully in the space and moved it slowly between the big magnet poles. She did feel something, a faint tug as she pulled her hand away. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”

  “Maybe it’s new.”

  “I would have felt it before.”

  “How long has it been since you stuck your hand in there?”

  She realized it had been at least a week, maybe more. The strangeness of the thing had made her wary, she suddenly saw. Brad and Zak, too, used distant diagnostics to study the sphere, careful not to disturb the photodetectors and electronics once they were set up. Controlled experiments led to detachment. Had they all missed this small deviation?

  She frowned. If this thing were c
hanging, all her measurements might alter, too. “The high temperature, we found that weeks after the first UV measurements.”

  Max looked blank. “Yes?”

  “What if it wasn’t there before?”

  He grinned. “Experimenters hate things that won’t sit still. But the world doesn’t, usually.”

  She was thinking this through when he started for the door, calling back to her, “I think best in the library.”

  “Me, the lab.”

  “Good. See you later in your office, okay?”

  This result she had not expected: very nearly a brush-off. She policed up the lab a bit, irked, straightening the usual tossed-aside tools and clearing the working surfaces of trash. This was automatic—therapy.

  Max had annoyed her with his usual theorist’s mannerisms. Most theorists were pavement people, city types, and experimenters were more outdoorsy. He dressed to type, favoring the classic tight button-down look. (And herself? At home she had to make herself get out of jeans every month or two. Without Jill as Fashion Cop, she would give way utterly, wearing clothes mostly because nudity was illegal.) Theorists gained status young, like genius musicians—noted as wizards at the blackboard, advancing in the field with collaborations that changed faster than movie stars divorced. Experimenters were more monogamous, working in long-lived teams clustered around their detectors. Not true of her, though; she was a loner and knew it.

  Among the particle theorists the highest status attached to the field theorists who developed new models to bring more order to the particle zoo. Below them came the even more mathematical types, whose work often seemed abstruse and not intuitive, to her; it lacked the Right Stuff of gut-sure physics. Below them came the phenomenologists, which merely meant those who tried to fit existing theory to the bewildering thicket of experimenters’ data. Max was of that tribe, as nearly as she could gather.

  Experimenters usually avoided theorists and vice versa. “Theorists believe anything on graph paper” was a common putdown. If an experiment’s data contradicted an existing theory, usually experimenters thought that probably something was wrong with the experiment. Theorists would think the error lay in the theory. But only if left in their own groups; put members of both tribes in the same room and they would act as if the reverse were true.

  There were odd little tribal patterns, too; experimenters’ daughters often married theorists, for example. Nobody could explain this, but nobody thought it remarkable, either.

  She shook her head, glanced again at the sphere, and turned off the lab lights. Max was a waste of time, she was suddenly sure of it.

  She went back to her office in the gathering gray twilight. The telephone was ringing as she fidgeted open the sticky lock on her door. It was Dave Rucker from Brookhaven. She glanced at her wristwatch; nearly 9 P.M. there.

  “Alicia, Hugh Alcott wanted me to make this call.” Tight, controlled, no preliminaries. “His review panel just finished. It’s pretty late here, but I wanted to get to you about a serious problem. Hugh’s panel thinks you took something important out of the accident area.”

  “Sure, just broken—”

  “No, more than that. I’ve looked at the tapes and I have to say I agree with him. There was something in that magnet assembly, wasn’t there?”

  “Uh, well, yes. We’re studying it. I don’t really think it was the cause—”

  “That’s for Hugh’s guys to decide.”

  “I thought it was just an interesting piece of debris.”

  “Debris? A ball?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “That’s for Hugh to decide.”

  “Look, Dave, I have to admit you’re right—the thing is odd. When I took it, I had no idea how odd.” That much at least was quite true.

  “Even more reason why—”

  “I figure we won’t understand why the pipe blew, or why the uranium counts started dropping off, without understanding this thing first.”

  “Exactly why we want it here.”

  “We’re right in the middle of extensive studies to—”

  “Whatever it is, it’s Laboratory-owned. Alicia, I can’t block for you on this.”

  She thought furiously. Counterpunch. “How about my data?”

  “What?”

  “Remember? The uranium data must be partially processed by now. I want to see it.”

  “I’m not sure it’s done.”

  “Then make sure.”

  “Stick to the point. The rules, our contract, they make it clear. Whatever that object is, it’s Lab property.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t give it up right now, Dave. I’ll be happy to confer with you guys—”

  “The hell with that. I can’t let you walk off with—”

  “The Core Element is UCI property, and this thing was smack in the middle of the wreckage.”

  “That doesn’t matter a damn. It’s vital to figuring out—”

  “Can’t we compromise on this? I’ll share data—”

  “You aren’t on an equal footing here, Alicia. There’s the earlier violation of the safety review procedures.”

  She bit her lip. “Okay, maybe I forgot to fill in all the paperwork.”

  “It’s a lot worse than that. Hugh says your calculations, the numerical simulation of radioactive decay products, the charts—it’s all bogus.”

  First rule: admit nothing. “That’s his view. Look, even a back of the envelope calculation shows that there won’t be enough residual radioactivity to fry a fly.”

  “I know, we all know—but the lawyers don’t. That’s why we go through these motions, Alicia. But you endanger the entire process if you, well”—she could hear him teeter on the verge of the next word—“fake the safety analysis.”

  “I’ll stand behind the final result.”

  “Safety reviews aren’t about final results, they’re about the process.”

  “I’m a results type, Dave.”

  “Look, Alicia, I’m trying to be the diplomat here. Hugh, he wants your scalp.”

  “I’m willing to cooperate on scientific issues. But I must finish my own study.”

  “Hugh’s climbing the walls.”

  “Let him. Maybe build a spiderweb while he’s up there.”

  “Sarcasm isn’t the way to—”

  “And pressure tactics aren’t, either. I’m in the middle of delicate experiments here right now and I don’t have time for—”

  “I’m instructed, then”—his voice had suddenly turned stiff, cold—“to inform you that we shall go through your superiors.”

  “Let me know when you find some,” she said and hung up.

  10

  The safety review. She had forgotten to get back to it.

  She sat at her desk as night fell outside, the soft yellow glow of the coastline seeping through the ivory haze. She fumed at herself for forgetting her simple paperwork dodge, the damned safety forms, allowing Hugh a handy lever to pry up the lid on this. After all, a vague blur on a videotape was suggestive, no more. But to the heart of a true bureaucrat, a paper infraction was raw meat.

  She played over in her mind the possible avenues Brookhaven would use to get at her and did not hear the first knock at the door. She opened it and was startled to see Max, beaming happily. She had completely forgotten him.

  “You found something,” she guessed to cover her surprise.

  “A long shot, but a shot. I saw a talk about something like this a few years ago and tracked down the author. Turns out he has a whole book on the subject.”

  “Huh? People have seen this before?”

  “No no, this was all theory. I think”—he paused for effect, half-sitting on her desk, arms folded, head tilted up at a rakish angle—“you’ve got an Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

  “What’s that?”

  “In popular culture it’s a wormhole. But the class is more general. Any deformation in space-time that is Lorentzian—that is, transforms like special relativity—fits the bill. I
think you’ve found a stable form.”

  “Wormholes are shortcuts through space and time. This isn’t a hole, it’s solid.”

  He nodded happily. “That’s what makes it even better. I got the idea from that funny ripple effect, when you slide your hand around. That’s a tidal effect.”

  “What? How could it be? The thing’s small, weighs maybe a hundred kilograms.”

  “Whatever holds it together is strong stuff. It curves the space-time around it.”

  “That’s crazy.” Her hopes for this guy were fading. Nonsense stuff about wormholes wasn’t what she wanted.

  “I looked around in the literature. There’s a good book, Lorentzian Wormholes by Matt Visser. Theorems, discussion, everything. He doesn’t know how to make them, of course—that’s your department. They might be formed in regions of intense gravitational fields, since there the highly curved space-time manifold might allow nontrivial topologies to form.”

  “Might,” she said soberly. No stopping a theorist on the wing, so she let him run while she kept her thoughts to herself. He went on about how the uncertainties in all this came from the crucial crackup of Twen Cen physics: attempts to merge the century’s two great theories, Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics, yielded a tantalizing, trackless wasteland of puzzles, messy inconsistencies, and flat-out incalculables. But Visser showed that to hold up at all—and be of reasonable size—the bridges envisioned by Einstein and Rosen had to have exotic building materials. Matter with negative energy density, whereas ordinary matter had positive energy.