COSM

by Gregory Benford

  “Apparent mass,” Max said. “The balance between positive mass energy and negative gravitational potential energy must be readjusting all the time. That’s disquieting.”

  “Why?” Zak asked, his black hair unruly. He needed a haircut and looked as though he had not seen a mirror for days. Maybe he hadn’t, she mused.

  “As the universe on the other end of this neck ages, the connection gets, well, stretched. Fluctuations in the total energy of the connection—the Cosm we see—get bigger.”

  Alicia guessed, “And if it can get lighter, it can get heavier.”

  “Right. And big enough, it’s dangerous.”

  Zak said wonderingly, “If it goes up by a factor of ten—”

  “Or a hundred, say”—Max nodded—“it could get out of control, sink into the Earth.”

  “This is just theory,” Alicia said uncertainly.

  “Your measurement isn’t,” Max countered.

  “You’re worried about danger, but what if it keeps getting smaller?” Zak asked.

  “Then it will dwindle away. End of experiment.”

  Alicia sat up, alarmed. “How can we stop that?”

  “We can’t.” Max shrugged—almost guiltily, she thought. “I found solutions that also have the mass shrinking in time. Apparently that’s what this one is doing. But the steadiness of the total energy is very tricky, like a pencil balanced on its point.”

  Alicia felt a spark of irritation, for which she then chastised herself. To physicists the universe was particles and waves, or more deeply, the interplay of fields. To a theorist it was deeper still, the unfolding of symmetries that God the Mathematician ordained would be obeyed, or broken, at various inscrutable energy levels. They shared a rather chilly vision of an abstract seethe, prickled by radiation, space-time warped and puckered by blunt mass. But she felt physics as a gut, hands-on experience, not an airy labyrinth of disembodied ideas.

  Zak nodded earnestly, hiked up his fashionably oversized pants. “So we should be careful…”

  “And alert,” Max added. “I can’t really predict much here, I’m afraid.”

  “Then let’s study the hell out of it while we can,” Alicia said.

  Publication of their paper in Physics Letters unleashed a storm. It was as though the entire scientific community, primed by the disaster at Brookhaven, were in a metastable state, like a laser, ready to emit a burst of glossy light at the slightest resonant tickle.

  Immediately theorists sent in papers explaining the spheres, posting to the high-display showcases on the Internet. The advantage of pseudo-publishing there were considerable: nailing down credit for an idea, while not waiting for the reviewing process. That came later, if ever; sometimes papers disappeared, their errors caught offstage.

  Herbert Himmel of the University of Chicago then Net-published a paper interpreting the spheres as “a class of solutions in N-dimensional string theory.” He did not even specify the number N—theorists worshipped at the altar of Greater Generality—but presented analytical solutions that cast doubt on Max’s interpretation. Alicia could not follow more than two lines of the argument and quickly tuned it out. Max fought it out with Himmel, giving five seminars around the country in a single week to defend his ground. Academic trench warfare.

  Her fellow experimenters followed quickly enough. Frank Lutricia of CERN in Geneva attacked her for “obviously incorrect” measurements; his argument seemed to be that the results were simply too, too incredible, and therefore wrong. She did not reply, but she steamed in silence.

  The vice chancellor and then the chancellor himself asked her to “be cordial” to the media. Bernie Ross told her it was worthwhile doing, as a good-faith gesture. He had been stalling the legal issues.

  “The bad news is that Brad’s parents have filed a wrongful death suit,” he told her one afternoon over coffee in the Phoenix Grill, her favorite eatery on campus. Here, at least, she did not get pointed out by strangers.

  “They’ve got grounds,” she admitted.

  “Of course. But UCI isn’t going to hang you out to dry.”

  “How’d you arrange that?”

  He grinned. “Magic.”

  “Meaning, I’d better be nice to the press.”

  “Let’s say there’s no point in leading with your chin.”

  Despite the sports metaphor, she agreed. So she did the obvious interviews with the big newspapers and a little TV, provided they stayed away from Brad’s death beyond a bare mention. The process was “enlightening,” as she put it to Max.

  “We’re looking for human interest here, not just facts,” the man from the Los Angeles Times said right away. His expression spoke volumes about what he thought of facts. At least UCI had arranged them in groups, so she did not have to repeat herself into catatonia. She “sat” for TV interviews, too. Max came in on some of them, to her relief. Often she had the feeling that they were really talking to each other, despite all the other people in the room. In the big PBS interview for Nova, she told herself she would give these people an hour and whispered to Max, “Already it’s seeming like a long time.” He glanced meaningfully at his watch. There were still forty-two minutes to go.

  Worse were some who sneaked in. One woman began, “Just start with the five W’s, you know, who, what, why… uh, which… you know.” In this interview Alicia began to wonder when had it become acceptable to answer a “Thank you” with “No problem.” Prolonged exposure to journalists made her distrust any news report; they got matters wrong so casually, even the simple ones. A supposedly major media figure she had never heard of came to ask scowling, abrasive questions focused on how she got the Cosm away from Brookhaven. The man had a tapered nose descending to a tight, pouting mouth, the combination a fleshy exclamation point. He commanded TV Minicams that stared in cyclopean stupor at her, unwavering even when she blew her nose—or maybe because she did. She never watched the final product but heard enough to write a fuming letter of complaint—which nobody answered.

  But these were mere passing irritants. Deeper were the systemic troubles. She stressed the many unknowns; the media wanted sharp answers to huge questions, preferably in a compact one-liner. She tried to emphasize the progressive questioning of her method and how all answers were provisional, awaiting confirmation; reporters liked zippy adventure and exciting guesses with, of course, striking visuals in primary colors.

  As the results began appearing, she started to perceive by a sort of radarlike reflection how the vast audience beyond saw her world. The barely awake public, trained to the attention span of a commercial, thought that science had two children: either consumer yummies, served up by the handmaiden of technology, or else awesome wonders like the beauties of astronomy. The unsettling side they largely ignored, unless for the momentary shock value of, say, swollen insects doing disgusting things. But the root promise of science was of a world unshaped by humans. The expanses of time and space that stretched out from the human community were terrifying, and most avoided even thinking of them.

  She recalled that polls showed over half the American population thought astrology had scientific principles undergirding it. Many believed in clairvoyants, faith healers, palm readers, and everyday para-scientific notions like energy halos, mystical pyramids, UFOs, and ESP. The Cosm seemed like more of the same to them.

  She was checking out at the Glenneyre Market when she saw the National Enquirer’s headline:

  GIRL WHO MAKES GALAXIES

  Is Shiny Bowling Ball A Universe?

  She yanked all the copies out of their wire rack and stuffed them behind another tabloid. Two days later somebody sent her anonymously, through interdepartmental mail, an even worse rag:

  THIEF OR GODDESS?

  Is ‘Brilliant But Driven’ Scientist A Swindler?

  “Ummm,” Max said, finding the whole matter funny, while she fumed. “How come you can’t be both?”

  The melancholy clouds in her mind she increasingly dispelled with long walks with M
ax on the beaches north of Laguna. They were being swallowed by housing tracts from inland, an upscale fungus. She had not been at UCI long, but the feeling of constriction, even along the besieged beaches, alarmed her.

  How did we lose all this? she wondered. By inches. The developers, the eager immigrants, the boundless plenty of sunlight and sharp air—all conspired to wedge in just one more condo, another street, a minimart to shave seconds of convenience from myriad lives. As the universe expanded, humanity seemed to outrace it, filling it with their numbers, with riotous life’s unstoppable growth.

  Her fame in the larger world rose exponentially. She even began getting invitations to receptions, evenings at the opera, dinner parties, and the like from people she did not know. She went to some, sometimes straight from the lab, not changing out of her work clothes. They reminded her of why she had never cultivated the usual university crowd and preferred people like Jill.

  To Alicia it seemed that academics often tossed around political topics, showing no more understanding of them than any amateur would. Beneath the arch contempt for the powers in business and government, she sensed envy. Most professors had once been the brightest people on their horizons: valedictorians, scholarship students, honors graduates, fellows here and there. Now they saw the real power going to the sort of people they never even noticed; the world was run by B students, at best. This distorted their political views, which ill concealed a longing for power—at least to straighten things out, as if a tweak or two could do the job, administered by the right (their) hands. As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player. What they really wanted was somebody to set fire to the whorehouse. Academics wanted to run it.

  To all this she said nothing. Her style was not theirs, she reminded herself, sitting at neatly arranged dinner tables. Even tiny matters differed. In the humanities buildings office doors stayed solidly closed, whereas in the sciences doors hung open on often deserted rooms, as if inviting casual ideas. Or perhaps both were advertising: the humanists, that they might be there, the scientists, that they certainly were but were probably off in the lab right now.

  At a special reception presided over by the chancellor, she met a major figure from an avant-garde wing of the philosophy department. She had heard that he was behind a whispering campaign, complaining that UCI was handling her altogether too gently. He had sounded formidable, but the man himself had a big barrel chest that, in distracted moments, would slide down to reveal itself as a momentarily levitated stomach.

  She knew he had maligned her to other faculty and yet here he was, cordial and loftily smiling, white wine held at port arms. She thought of saying very quickly something like “You duplicitous phony-pal, hiding behind etiquette when everyone knows you slandered me. What, exactly, are your standards of propriety that you lack even the convictions of your petty gossip and now dare address me with your insipid salutation?”

  But she didn’t. She deployed the Cold Hello Defense and turned away. It didn’t help, though.

  After came the doubt (Why didn’t I say…?), pathetic excuses (I didn’t want to give hint the satisfaction)—to which the doubter subprogram in her shot back: Oh, I see, you didn’t want anyone to know that you’re a sensitive, feeling, open woman despite being a physicist, who has been gouged by negative, cheap-shot gossip… so you’ll grow a tumor instead? So she fumed and ate too much of the finger food and felt like an ugly piece of work, a hypocrite herself.

  Her stress levels mounted. Jill had talked her into “seeing someone to talk all this through” a month before. She had to admit it was at least a relief to yammer on to someone who would not laugh in her face or repeat her more humiliating revelations, who might even smile and nod. She had even managed to get around to discussing Max, a major subject about whom she felt much but could say nothing, not even to loyal Jill.

  So after the reception she called her therapist and unloaded. The therapist said very calmly, “You should use this anger. As long as you’re sounding so out of control, ah, your insurance denied my billing because I forgot to preauthorize. It would really help if you called them right now while you’re this upset and they could hear in your voice how much you need this therapy.”

  She slammed the receiver down, but that didn’t do much good either.

  7

  Max said happily, “I beat the crap out of that guy Himmel.”

  “Literally, I hope?”

  She scooted her rump up onto a lab bench, the only seating room left in the observatory since she and Zak had brought in more detection gear. They were gathering plenty of data, of stars simmering into ruby birth, great masses of inflamed gas swirling in grand gavottes, strange sprinklings of momentary light in the black immensities—all from the sphere, which continued to lose mass. They were working sixteen-hour days now, overlapping schedules so that every moment of the Cosm’s development got logged into the stacked hard disks of big cylindrical hard drives.

  Max grinned, nodded. “Seminar battles, real trench warfare.”

  If there was anything she disliked more than sports analogies, it was war metaphors. “How nasty?”

  “He’s shown up at all the biggies—MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton—and I’ve come along right behind him. I arranged it that way, quick rebuttals right down the line.”

  “Great. And…?” She beamed at him, surprised at how pleased she was just to see him walking through the lab door again. It had been a lonely week.

  Max was quietly proud, indeed, pumped up. “The tide’s running my way. Every major figure in particle theory has jumped into the arena. There’ll be more papers on this than you and I will have time to read—just you watch—within a month.”

  “Even one is more than I want to read,” she said wearily.

  “You’re going to have to do some selling yourself, too,” he said gently.

  “Huh?”

  “This guy at CERN, Lutricia, he’s going around saying this is all bad experimental technique.”

  “What!”

  “I know, I know. But he’s saying it. Part of it’s personal ambition—he’s notorious for walking over people—and part is CERN’s rivalry with the United States generally.”

  There was no lasting class system in science unless there was a lasting, convincing upper class. The particle physicists had for so long assumed that they were the natural candidates, the obvious Brahmins, that to find themselves suddenly part of the unruly mob vying for research bucks was a profound shock. Manners were changing.

  “He says right out that I’m wrong?”

  Max reached out and held her hand and she felt both a tingling from the touch and a rising dread. “He’s hinting that maybe you’re faking some points for the publicity.”

  “What!”

  She made herself count to ten, a well-worn trick her father had taught her when she was eight years old; but it did work. Scientific integrity demanded little things, like not misleading funding agencies about how likely your research was to yield useful results, and publishing data even if they didn’t support your pet theory, and giving the government advice they might rather not hear—day-to-day matters, proceeding on up to the crucial matter of not fooling yourself about whether you had designed your experiment to give truly unambiguous results. Making doubt primary, not just proof, was the essential. Learning how to not deceive yourself was never specifically taught in courses; physicists just assumed students absorbed it by osmosis. But this—

  “The son of a—”

  “He’s being delicate about it. Hints, little remarks about how much press you’re getting, no more.”

  She groaned. “He can’t do this!”

  “He is.”

  “I’m being honest, scrupulously—”

  “I know. But you’ll have to go out there and slug it out with him. And with others. There’s a lot of skepticism.”

  �
��Why?”

  “Well, it’s pretty damn fantastic. And you haven’t let anybody come here and see the thing.”

  “We’ve been too busy—”

  “Sure, sure.” Placating hands, palms out, a warm smile. “But people wonder why you’re stuck up here on a hill like a hermit.”

  “The safety people—”

  “I know, I know. Still, see how it looks?”

  “I don’t want a lot of visitors in here.” She swept the cramped dome of the observatory in a grand gesture. “Look around. How many could we wedge in?”

  “You’re right, of course. But—”

  “You know I’m no diplomat.”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Well, hell, you didn’t have to agree so fast.”

  They both laughed suddenly, pressures equilibrating.

  She knew he was right. She was not tactful or smooth. What had her therapist said? “Well, you’re not a classic monomaniac, but…”

  “This CERN guy, tell me what to do.”

  Fundamental physics drew smart, strong personalities; milder types faltered and left the field. Such personalities saw physics differently, of course, and were not shy about saying so. Through half a century of increasingly sharp competition—and especially since the budget cuts started—the community had learned a basic rule: when food gets short, table manners change. The particle physicists developed a social method to make decisions when strong personalities disagreed: the slugfest.

  To win a slugfest meant digging through the library, marshaling all the lore surrounding the subject, and using it to shore up support for your views. Then prepare viewgraphs and slides, using the latest full-color technology—not old-style pie charts and flow diagrams, but 3-D exploded views and overlayered sections. Rehearse the talk carefully. Show the audience implications they hadn’t thought of, presented in razor-sharp detail. Come back fast and decisively to hostile questions. Make doubters look preposterous if you can, but avoid making fun in any way. Remain solid and factual; avoid rhetoric. The best practitioners could draw a laugh from an audience while responding with an absolutely deadpan, factual remark.