COSM

by Gregory Benford

  “Its expansion is into its own space, not ours. The sphere in her lab isn’t going to swell, swallowing everything—or it would have already done so by now. But this other universe we can see through that sphere, that will evolve—and faster than ours did.”

  “How come?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know.” Max sat back, his hands making a neat little helpless gesture.

  “Something about the, uh, wormhole connection itself?” Tom asked, this time not as a maneuver, she could see. Alicia blinked. He had never before ventured an idea when discussing physics with her. Not that they talked physics all that often.

  Max nodded. “Could be, could be. We have no theory to guide us here, Mr. Butterworth.”

  “Tom. So… this is really important.” He seemed impressed, gravely scrutinizing Max’s sketches of drooping space-times. “And killing that boy, it was an accident? Can’t happen again?”

  Max said awkwardly, “Well, nothing’s ever for sure…”

  Tom chuckled. “Don’t ever tell that to a judge.”

  “Look,” Max counterattacked, “this other universe is cooling off very fast. No danger it’ll be hot again.”

  Tom looked at her. “You’ve really tied into something here, Aleix.”

  Max asked about her name and Tom told his usual story about it. She had heard this approximately a thousand times, of course, and he did a funny version, so she used the moments to think about why Max had excited Dad’s interest in the sphere while she had not. The outside expert syndrome? Somebody from Caltech who isn’t your own daughter? A man?

  Yet this same graying dad had also ushered her along the path to this moment, into fields he could not glimpse. She had always wondered why a whirling top slowly nodded, as if thinking to itself like an old wise man, rather than toppling over, like a child. Why soap bubbles made wobbly spheres, what the sun was burning all the time (and where was the smoke?), why chalk squeaked on blackboards, did the stars go on forever beyond what she could see, why did clouds sail high and not fall to the ground—all these were huge, consuming puzzles. And few adults, not even her dad, had seemed to have more than a vague guess about the answers. But he had seen to it that she found out.

  She gave up and said, “Say, don’t you guys ever get hungry?”

  This was the right move. When guys were finally starting to get along, feed them and matters will improve. They would hunker down around the campfire and gnaw on seared meat and laugh and tell lies and forget whatever had gone awry before. She had Jill come over—calling Dad had been her idea, after all—and they went to a steak place. It was the usual upscale Orange County: glossy touches to the familiar pricey carved woods, leather wing chairs, cut glass, glazed lacquer, glints and glows highlighting the tastefully understated money. It worked out just fine.

  5

  The next day she knew it was trouble when Onell asked her to come up to his office on the fourth floor. The chairman’s lair commanded a sweeping view of the inner park, now burgeoning in late spring. UCI recycled its water and had plenty to spare for grounds; already the surrounding hills were turning a seared tan, but the campus would be green all summer.

  Onell wore a gray suit with blue shirt and a somber muddy brown tie, not a great combination. He looked pained, fiddling with his pen as he got through the preliminaries about how the UCI safety review people had made their recommendations, and he had conferred of course with Executive Vice Chancellor Lattimer, and everybody understood that serious precautions were needed, so “We believe you above all understand this and will therefore cooperate fully in what must be done.”

  Something impish in her made her reply to Onell’s dour tone with “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Safety—that is, Environmental Health and Safety—feels that until the cause of Brad’s death is clear, your lab should be isolated.”

  She had expected this, of course. “I’m pretty sure the sphere was the cause. If our ideas are right, it’s safe now.”

  “I’m going to have to appoint an ad hoc department committee to consider the physics aspects of the issue,” he said gravely. “For the moment, Safety has to be satisfied that the lab is not a threat.”

  “What’s their idea of a precaution?”

  “A concrete barrier around the sphere.”

  “Pointless.”

  “If you cannot be sure of the cause—”

  “Also, a lot of time-consuming trouble.”

  “Time is not the essence. Preventing another death is.”

  “Listen, we all feel badly about Brad’s death. But I have to follow my own professional instincts in investigating what is a bizarre object—”

  “Which you have not controlled thus far. And whose origin is, shall we say, problematical.”

  She had always been amused by this particular nugget of academic jargon, but here “problematical” seemed to veil something else. “You’ve been talking to Brookhaven?”

  Onell kept his stiff, sober face, but his hands fingered his pen with renewed ardor. “They heard; it was in the news back in New York.”

  “And they put two and two together.”

  “The executive vice chancellor tells me that they are taking legal action to retrieve what they feel to be their property.”

  “Will UCI defend me?”

  “That remains to be seen. First we must react to Safety.”

  “I hate the concrete bunker approach. How long would that take?”

  “A month, perhaps. Time is not the—”

  “Issue. I heard. Only I think it is.”

  Onell blinked. “Why?”

  “The sphere is changing. We’re not sure why, but it is. What killed Brad won’t happen again, if our thinking is correct, but something more might—” To Onell’s raised eyebrows she held up a palm. “Nothing dangerous, I assure you.”

  His eyes took on a canny look. “What do you want? Remember that you have no power here, that safety is all-important. The university has received undesirable publicity from this incident and there will undoubtedly be further inquiry into culpability and liability. Certainly Brad’s parents will sue. We must—”

  “Counterpropose to Safety. Let’s move the sphere out of that lab entirely, to an isolated location.”

  “Ummm, possible, I suppose. Where?”

  “The observatory.”

  She had plucked that out of the air, but it might work. Anything to stop safety minions from clomping around her lab and interrupting work for weeks.

  Onell stopped fondling his pen. “It’s an active research site. Others—”

  “They use it by remote.” The astronomy group ran the observatory by computer, taking data in the infrared, as per design; background light from Orange County loused up optical seeing. The observatory dome sat on the hill above the campus, hundreds of meters from anything else. “The best shielding is one over r squared.”

  This was a typical physics joke, referring to the falloff of intensity of anything, from light to explosions, with the square of the distance. Onell looked wary, not cracking even a diplomatic smile. “I doubt that’s good enough.”

  “Okay, we’ll put sandbags around it, too. They’re quick, easy to move, cheap.”

  “How can you move the sphere itself?”

  “Keep it in the magnet, haul the whole assembly up the hill.”

  “Ummm. I can speak to Safety, but—”

  “This is a fast solution. If they’re worried about risk, getting the sphere off to a remote site should come first.”

  His lips twisted in a lopsided ironic curve. “You think quickly.”

  “I’d better. I want to keep working on that thing, Martin.”

  “I understand. If something good can come out of this…”

  “Yes.” She just nodded.

  Onell rose, his usual signal that a meeting was over, and then snapped his fingers. “Oh yes, I forgot to mention—Detective Sturges called. He is passing the case as an accident.”

  “Really?” A trem
or of relief ran through her, surprising in its strength. “What… what took them so long?”

  Onell shrugged. “It’s an odd death, burning with no obvious source. They asked a lot of questions in the department and looked at the physical evidence and thought it over—”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “About Brad, his friends, you, the lab.”

  “Looking for a murder motive?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that harshly. They were polite when they questioned me and did not seem to have any particular line of inquiry.”

  She had known the police must be doing something and now realized she had simply not let herself think about it. Instead, she had focused on the physics. It had worked; Sturges had not even crossed her mind in days. The subconscious had its own methods, she was discovering.

  6

  The safety people were fumbling around near the apparatus and there was no one else allowed in the lab, by edict of the local Safety Nazi. They were taking elaborate pictures, working with some people from the legal office; more of their endless documentation. Alicia had been polite and distant and had gotten away from them as fast as possible when Max appeared. She had to argue with the legal types just to get him into the facility.

  “The good news,” Max said, “is that your assurance to Onell was okay. If I’m right, there is nothing further to worry about from the sphere.”

  “And the bad news?” she asked automatically, settling into a lab chair.

  He looked puzzled and a bit bedraggled, in black jeans and a blue cotton work shirt. “Not much bad news, except that we’re going to have to work fast to check out any of this.”

  “What’s the scoop?” She was resolutely keeping matters light today. She did not want another sleepless night like the last one. No need to spiral down into a self-inspired depression.

  Max was reluctant to discuss further his speculations of the night before, but she could see which way his thinking was going. He seemed a bit timid, maybe still rankled by how the wormhole idea had been received by her and Brad. And certainly he must feel some contrition for not having guessed what was coming. Pointless guilt, but she felt it in him. They had spoken of it in halting phrases, she unable to deal with hers, just as he was with his.

  “Here. This says it all.” He plunked down some graph paper.

  The vertical axis showed OUR TIME in units of weeks. The bottom axis was INTERNAL COSM TIME in units of YEARS. The diagonal line cutting across the page had points labeled RECOMBINATION ERA and NOW and then kept going up. “Explain,” she said, though a suspicion was forming.

  “The trick here is to buy our assumption—that at the other end of that sphere over there, is another universe. One that formed at the Brookhaven Collider.”

  “So it’s a little over five weeks old, right? This data point here, marked ‘now.’”

  “Exactly. We have the blackbody spectra from the last few weeks, so I went to standard cosmology and asked a simple question. If that universe on the other side behaves like ours, at what age would it be the temperature we observe here?”

  She thought quickly. “By looking up how fast we think our own early universe cooled off.”

  “Right!” His enthusiasm hid insecurity, she guessed; maybe his idea was really crazy and even he knew it. He went quickly on, “So then I could track the temperature of the expanding hot plasma over there and see how long it took as we see it.”

  “How come it’s not the same time?”

  “Stick to the data for now, okay? I found that the temperature you guys found is declining fast—exponentially, in fact.”

  “As we see it.”

  “Check—but now let’s suppose the other universe isn’t really behaving exponentially.”

  “But you just said it is.”

  “No, the temperature you measured is how it seems to us. That doesn’t mean it looks that way on the other side.”

  She shook her head. Yes indeed, this was starting to look crazy, all right.

  Her silence only made him talk faster. “See, this is the simplest way to go at it. Assume the other universe is like ours, only this wormhole—or whatever you want to call it, tunnel or tube or pipe or anything you like—distorts what we see.”

  “Why should I want to look at it that way? Makes no sense.”

  “Simplicity, as you’ll see. Also, I’ve got some theory that says it should.”

  She much preferred talking about real data, not more mathematical abstractions. “Okay, simplicity.”

  “Occam’s razor, y’know.”

  She froze, a sudden memory: explaining to Brad why there probably weren’t any more of the spheres in the debris back at Brookhaven. Occam’s razor—prefer the least hypothesis, she had trotted out the maxim with professorial superiority, never guessing what was coming…

  “Alicia?”

  She was gazing off into the distance and had to haul herself back into real time. “Uh, yeah.”

  “Suppose instead that the light from it is coming to us in a time-accelerated fashion. That lets us keep the same Big Bang model we already have for our own universe and apply it to what happens on the other side. The simplest approach.”

  “What distorts how we see the time on the other side?”

  “I’ll get to the theory later. I went to the data first, so let’s follow my own fumbling, okay?”

  He seemed to be urging her along and she realized that she must seem distracted, moody. She made herself concentrate. “Fair enough.”

  “So I took the temperatures you and Brad and Zak found, and I assumed those temperatures occurred in the other universe at the same time they did in ours. That gave me a mapping from your measured black body temperatures to the time on the other side. I just plotted it up on this lower axis.”

  She traced along the axis from left to right. “That’s our first measurement: 5.2?”

  “I didn’t label this real well; that axis is the logarithm of time on the other side, expressed in years.”

  “Then the first time we took a spectrum, the other universe was already…”

  “It’s a log scale, see? So the universe on the other side was 1052 years old.”

  “But that’s over a hundred thousand years!”

  He spread his hands, palms up. “That’s the way it works out.”

  “It’s absurd.” Relativity theory was full of time distortions and the like, she thought, but this…

  “That’s what the data leads to, Alicia. Stick with me.”

  “Impossible.”

  “As ol’ Sam Treiman at Princeton used to say, ‘Impossible things usually don’t happen.’ It’s important to keep the ‘usually’ part in mind. You’ve got to be prepared to be surprised.”

  “Isn’t that a contradiction?”

  “I suppose so.” He was eager to go on.

  She chuckled despite herself. “Okay, show me some more impossible stuff.”

  “You’re over the hump, believe me.” He went on to explain the graph. The data points were all crowded down in the lower left hand of the plot. The straight line carved out the logarithmic relationship between time in their lab and time at the other end of the connecting tunnel. “See, recombination into hydrogen starts here, at about four hundred thousand years in the Cosm’s history—that’s a bit over four weeks, for us.”

  “Ah…” Best not to laugh at him anymore; he was looking fragile. “Very interesting.”

  She had learned to drop such empty praise whenever she read one of her father’s columns in his presence. At least it was better than one time when she was a teenager and he had proudly shown her his first collection of essays; she had looked it over and said, “Nice paper.”

  “I plotted all the data you’ve got, to determine the slope of this line. I can write it out as an equation, too.”

  He neatly wrote on the board:

  COSM TIME = 64,800 YEARS [EXP(OUR TIME/2 WEEKS) – 1]

  He had a figure printed out and hand-labeled, as was hi
s habit. A smooth exponential curve rose.

  He had crosses for data points in the third and fourth week of LAB TIME, with BRAD marked. At the top were questions, GALAXIES? STARS? The vertical axis was Cosm time in years, most multiplied by 106, a million.

  He stood there beaming at her while realization dawned. “So… in the first two weeks the Cosm aged by… good grief, over a hundred thousand years.”

  “Right! So by now it’s really taking off, maturing. The clocks in the Cosm run faster all the time. They exponentiate every two of our weeks.”

  “If they form. How do we know this universe is like ours?”

  “We don’t,” he said cheerfully. “But we’ll be able to find out.”

  “How?”

  “Look for enhanced visible light while this UV we’ve recorded goes away.”

  “That visible light would come from stars, if they form,” she guessed.

  “Right!”

  “Um.” She stalled. Seldom was it a good idea to agree with a theorist; best to cultivate a skeptical reserve, bordering on disdain. “This exponential scaling you found, it comes out of the theory? I want to see the calculation.”

  He started to show her and very quickly she saw it was the kind of argument she did not like. He started from some symmetry principles in a twenty-three-dimensional space, which then caused all but five dimensions to collapse into regions of space-time so small they could never be measured. She asked him how that could happen physically and he showed her some more scaling relations which she could not see any physics in at all. It went downhill from there.

  “So how can you put much trust in that?” she asked abruptly.

  “It’s one plausible model.”

  “How many other models are possible?”

  “Let’s confine it to plausible; the possibilities seem unbounded, provided that space-time is unbounded as well.”

  “I don’t understand that, either.”

  He went on but she began thinking of a story about Paul Dirac, the English field theorist who had in the early 1930s formulated a theory of elegance, describing the electron beautifully. From it he deduced a solution with the same mass as the electron but of opposite electrical charge; all other quantum numbers they had were identical. He knew of no such particle but speculated that perhaps it was the proton, though the mass was conspicuously wrong, off by a factor of 1,836. Thus his failure of trust had led him to miss predicting the positron, which was discovered shortly afterward. But she respected a theory like that, a mathematical mind trying to forge its airy truths into concrete terms. Maybe, she realized as Max kept speaking, this could be like the Dirac case. Hold to the vision, hope to be vindicated. Maybe he should simply run with it.