This was an old issue, whether the great billowing bulks of dust congealed into galaxies before making stars, or the reverse. The sort of issue that mattered to astronomers and few else, but Alicia felt a pleasurable surge to see the answer, uncover a secret for the first time. They had been measuring infrared emission from dust for weeks now, first cooling as the Cosm universe expanded, now heated again by the birth of blazing blue-white stars. The Cosm was waking to its possibilities.
“Thing is,” Zak said, “it’s dead easy to see things now.”
“The dust is condensing, clearing the way?”
“No, we’re just plain getting a hell of a lot more light, straight across the spectrum.”
“Ummm. The Cosm is brighter?”
“I think more light is coming through.”
Careful study of the flux measurements showed that Zak was right. The visible emission was still too faint for eyes to make out, but quite enough for their instruments. Carefully they went over everything that could be wrong, but Zak had made no apparent errors.
She nodded. “Good work. Somehow the stuff that holds the Cosm neck open is letting more electromagnetic waves through.”
Zak nodded. “I’ve never really understood that part of Max’s theory. The exotic matter, negative energy density and all, that’s hard enough to get a feel for—”
“No kidding.”
“But why does it let through some light, but not matter?”
She shrugged, smiling wanly. “Why is it losing mass? The super stuff that holds the neck open is thinning out, so more light gets through? But matter, no; it’s still a window.”
“Sounds reasonable…”
“Max has some involved picture, but I don’t follow it. Let’s just measure and let the theorists worry about how to make models, okay?”
“Yeah.” Zak grinned, punching in commands for more data-taking.
She felt a burst of affection for Zak, his tenacity and quiet support. The bonding between people who worked long hours on hard problems was one of the unspoken emotional struts of any science. She remembered how her advisor had taken her and the other students and postdocs out for a few beers, following the customary mode: he told tales of past glory and mirth; they joked with him, but respectfully, often throwing in a note of self-deprecation. Scientists learned how to work hard under men and women for whom it was the true center of their lives. Students copied the advisor’s role and ended by reproducing the person they wanted to be, a collaboration between mentor and self.
There was a steady traffic in students and especially postdocs between the major experimental groups, resembling the exchange of brides among tribes, fostering kinship networks. Not that the exchange was always among equals. The maxim was: knowledge trickles down; students percolate up. The best people got to the best places, so low rank meant low merit. Such was the faith of the field. UCI’s reputation would rise because of the Cosm work; she was already receiving inquiries about postdoc positions, and visitors who wanted to get into what would probably become a whole subfield.
“Say, did you see the piece in The New York Times about Brookhaven?” Zak interrupted her thinking.
A sinking feeling. “Uh, no.”
“They saw the recombination flash. It lasted about ten minutes, started fires, burned up some trees.”
“They didn’t tell us?”
“It was on the TV news this morning. I figured you saw.”
She was irked but just said, “Ummmm.”
“They’re calling it a ‘micro-universe,’ too, saying they’re doing the first ‘systematic’ work on it.”
“Oh really. And what are we? Chopped liver?”
She and Zak exchanged lopsided smiles. “They sure do want to beat us in the media arena.”
Getting the jump on your competitors was an old game in particle physics, the most competitive and time-sensitive science of all. In the 1970s, she recalled, a Brookhaven group led by Sam Ting had named their newly discovered particle the J. A rival group at Stanford had found the same particle and named it for the Greek letter psi because their computer graphics produced a pattern resembling that character. Which symbol one used in later papers implied a position on which group was the true first discoverer. Eventually, given the choice between a symbol for a pattern and one for a man, the diplomatic used J-psi and let it go at that. With delight the Stanford group pointed out that J resembles the Chinese character for ting, so Ting had covertly named the particle for himself.
“We’re ahead of them in the Cosm’s development,” she said. “No way they can—wait…”
A few minutes’ calculation showed that the Brookhaven recombination era had taken a week less than their Cosm’s. “Theirs is running at a different time shift,” Alicia said.
“Faster. They’ll catch up.”
“If our Cosm is even around by then. It’s losing mass steadily.”
Zak frowned. “I wonder if that’s related to our getting more light from it.”
“Probably.”
Zak went to check some details among the diagnostics. The day had slipped away and she did not look forward to a night poring over their results at home. Her thoughts drifted back to her time in grad school when she had felt this way, exhausted by the work yet strung so tight she could not truly rest. That was probably why she had gotten through with her thesis work more quickly than her cohorts. All around her the male graduate students had married and settled down, supported in their late nights and drudgery weekends by sympathetic wives whom they would certainly, the field’s traditions taught, never divorce. Did they make damned sure their prospective wives were suitably impressed with the importance of particle physics and would not expect too much of their husbands’ time? Those men unmarried by the postdoc phase could expect a perpetual probing interest; a successful physicist was a married physicist. Once she had heard a postdoc remark that he wanted to get married so that he would not have to bother with a distracting social life.
Zak came back and they finished a few details. “Come on, Zakster,” she said, hugging him, “I’ll buy you a beer.”
2
The kidnapping haunted her. She glanced around warily whenever she left a building. At night she avoided going out at all. Approaching her parked rental car, she kept her key poised in hand for stabbing if someone should grab her. Strangers she eyed suspiciously. Hang-up phone calls left her a seethe of anxiety, unable to concentrate for hours afterward. Once she actually jumped at her own shadow.
Zak noticed and in his own quiet way did what he could. Max’s method was more systematic, making sure to escort her around campus whenever he was down from Caltech. Jill sat and listened to her endless river of talk, which helped a lot. She had a few nights of heavy drinking and paid for them with wracking headaches.
The police “hit a wall,” as one of them put it. The kidnappers had been careful and left few clues. Her work was well known and the suspects many, in principle.
She thought about getting a gun and rejected it; they spooked her, too. After a few days of free-floating anxiety, the effect seemed to wear off somewhat, but she was never again to be unconscious of her exposure.
UCI had put an armed security guard outside the observatory. This helped a lot. Matters calmed down and she got some solid work in. Still, she gasped in fear when she came in early one morning and found a lanky, smiling man standing inside the observatory.
“What? Who’re you?”
“Just a member of the public. Wanted to look around.”
“How did you get in?”
He grinned. “Ever’body gotta sleep.”
Images from her kidnapping sprang to mind, tightening her throat. This man did not seem threatening, but her heart was thumping hard. The awful black moments in the trunk— Some of the stored anger from that now came to her aid. She slammed down her briefcase and gestured at the door. “Well, you can just get—”
“The secret is your mass here, right?”
“What
?”
“No, hey, I understand this, see? You don’t have to hand me the line you give the TV.”
He was big but did not look dangerous. She tried to think of a quick way to get him out of there. “Sir, you can see—”
“Your thingy in there, it’s got a lot of extra mass, right? But your trick is, you’ve squeezed it into that ball. Smart! Only, I”—a canny wink—“know how you did it.”
“Really?” She edged casually away from him, getting some gear between them.
“Magnetics, is how. Am I right?”
“Magnetic fields don’t affect mass—”
“So you say! But you’ve trapped this thing and I say you know more than you’re telling.”
“Such as?”
“It’s not a space-time thingy at all, right? Look at it!” He whirled so fast that she thought he would trip over himself. Instead, he jabbed a finger between the magnetic poles. “It’s all shiny. A spaceship, that’s what it is.”
How could she get him away from the Cosm without herself getting close to him? “Look, the reflection of light is—”
“It’s a UFO. No need to be covering it up, miss. You’ve finally captured one of the aliens.”
“I’d appreciate it if you would simply leave us alone to—”
“Perfesser, you’ll be famous! Think! The aliens, they’re trapped in there. They’ll pay you anything if you’ll just let them out.”
She backed toward the door, her anger dampened by this burst of looniness. He didn’t seem threatening anymore, just pathetic. “I’ve had enough. I’ll call Security unless you—”
“Oh, I see. You want to keep the aliens for yourself, just snow the rest of us, is it? Well, we been working on this UFO problem a lot longer than you have, Perfesser. We won’t let you just walk in and take over, even if you have got a magnetic trap here—”
The man’s face congested with words and ideas he seemed unable to get out through his tight, angry mouth. It took several more minutes to call the guard, get the man outside, and close the door. The click of the lock brought a shuddering sigh of relief from her.
He was merely the first.
In a way, the cranks were the comic relief her anxieties needed. It was hard to be fearful of intruders when they so often were laughable.
They thronged to the physics department office, which resolutely refused to direct them to her office or lab. Since the downstairs directory gave her office number, it quickly became a bad idea to hang around there. Her lab was a bit harder to find, but the more shrewd found her in the bay. She took to locking the lab doors, which helped all but the truly crafty. One of them even got in carrying a pizza delivery. She and Zak—and eventually Max too—developed economical methods of brushing them off, up to and definitely including a stick she had sharpened.
Many brought their own manuscripts, which would explain, if she would just spare them a few minutes, all that she had discovered. She fell for this once, while distracted, only to find that what the particular character wanted was a chance to lecture her on his overall theory of the universe, or rather, the “megaworlds” of which ours was but one rather minor example. He had cobbled together enough terms from newspaper articles on cosmology to unspool an almost-plausible line of science chat. Many excoriated Einstein to her face, maybe believing this brave stance would intrigue her. Those she successfully drove away sent her their ideas printed in pamphlets or even bound books, all published by private presses, usually sent in thick packaging, as though the ideas inside were fragile, and by overnight delivery, for time (or maybe space-time) was of the essence. Somehow she did not have the heart to throw these away; they spoke of a twisted earnestness that resembled the true scientific impulse. She gladly turned them over to anybody who noticed the growing stack in a corner of the lab. Inside their stiff covers were jargon-choked claims, equations of odd symbols, but none of the worked-out examples that a real theory could be judged by. Indeed, high-blown rhetoric plus uncheckable consequences were the two sure signatures of the crank. They claimed to have a complete theory that could explain everything—and if you read far enough, just about anything. Their theories were ramshackle edifices, some several hundreds of pages long in monograph form.
Humor was wasted on them, subtlety impossible. The earnest religious types at first tried to sidle up to the topic, but if joshed at all would quickly shift to accusations of hubris (though none of them seemed to know that specific word) and atheist arrogance. These she used the stick on.
A subspecies of the generic crank interpreted her quick dismissal as evidence that she would somehow steal their ideas. A bulky man from Encinitas proudly presented her with his red-leather-bound “Treatise on the Giga-Universe,” then quickly snatched it back, sputtering that she was just the sort who would publish this wonderful stuff without giving him due credit.
Most tried to reach her by telephone—so many that she finally gave up answering it, except in the lab. Visitors got screened by the valiant department staff; Jim, who manned the front desk, got into a fistfight with a particularly ardent sort.
She took him to lunch in apology. “There’re so many,” he said wonderingly. “And they all read the tabloids.” Indeed, they believed in a sort of eyewitness truth, the dominance of the odd event, which they took the Cosm to be. They were innocent of the scientist’s worldview, founded on a web of interconnected logic and experience.
Most amusing to her were those who tried repeatedly to reach her, and if successful, usually began with a sober, sad expression and the dignified announcement that if she did not give them the necessary time to discuss their ideas and, of course, tour the experiment, they would have to unleash their secret weapon: they would denounce her on television. Since TV was to them the ultimate arbiter, and they had seen her exalted momentarily by it, surely she would not risk losing it all before the piercing gaze of the cameras.
Her colleagues in the department found the traffic of wandering pilgrims at first amusing, the stuff of afternoon coffee jokes, and then-irritating. She regaled a few with stories of the odd theories and twitchy behavior of her unwanted visitors, but after a few weeks the joke soured. The more traditional faculty disliked attracting such attention, their unblinking scowls holding her responsible.
3
The next afternoon, in the middle of routine work, she noticed something different about the Cosm. She and Zak were changing some of the optical diagnostics and she reached in to adjust some of the feeds and saw that the sphere was black.
“Good grief,” she said.
“It’s gone transparent,” Zak whispered.
It also seemed a little smaller. Zak’s eyes bulged. Instead of metallic reflection, the surface seemed obsidian black, with grainy smudges here and there. They spent several minutes carefully pulling back the equipment beneath which the sphere was nearly hidden. Peering into the deep black, she saw faint streaks and gleams.
“Time-blurring,” Zak said. “We’re seeing into it!”
“Why?”
“Like you said before, the mass loss may mean it’s weakening.”
She calculated quickly in her head. “If Max’s time-rate equation still applies… Wow, with every second here, centuries are passing by on the other side.”
That was a continuing problem. After the dying away of the primordial light as the Cosm’s space-time expanded, there was no reliable clock on the other side. Max had tried to figure out a way to use the complicated Doppler shifts they kept getting, in the spectra of the stars they could make out on the other side. But there seemed to be nothing like a simple Hubble shift, the rate from a universal expansion. Max thought this was because the neck connecting them was getting stretched, adding a red shift all its own. More complication.
Such deliberations did not detain them. Zak started swinging their optical array back into place. She understood without a word. The IR and other gear could come later; right now they wanted to see.
Within half an hour, they were watchi
ng framing camera photos. Ruddy blurs that seemed to be glowing reefs of dust in the distance. Traceries that resolved into handfuls of crystalline points in sapphire and orange—globular clusters of stars like bee swarms.
They turned out all the lights and sat in the darkened observatory. Absolute silence descended. The Cosm worked with quick, darting turquoise incandescences against background ruby glows. The intimate workings of stars. Labors of millennia. In all the tangle of equipment, in their indirect ways of study, there had never come a moment like this, when they saw directly and cleanly into the living abyss of another entire Creation and felt it in their bones.
“Alicia?” It was Onell, the department chairman, one of the few who had the number of her portable phone. “I was wondering if you could stop by?”
“I’m pretty busy. What is it?”
“Something I would rather not discuss this way.” Onell’s voice was a bit stiff, guarded.
“Wait’ll I finish an observing run.”
“Anything new?” Even Onell could not disguise his curiosity. She had long since decided against issuing bulletins.
“We’re still gathering.” She liked using that phrase, because it could also imply “gather” in the sense of infer or conclude, which was certainly true.
She got back up to her office by midafternoon of a simmering hot day, grateful for the deeper chill of the building compared with the cramped observatory. She had not seen her desk for a week and indeed could not see it now; letters and packages covered it. In the wake of her aborted kidnapping, UCI had taken to checking all packages in case they might be bombs. The physics department no longer accepted phone messages, since she never answered them anyway. She had quickly discovered that the latest generation of new, hip journalists did no homework and believed their most important research tool to be the telephone. She had changed her e-mail address, giving the new one only to Brookhaven, Max, Dad, and Bernie Ross; not that she checked there very often, either.
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