Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  He laughs. “Probably true, having been a physicist as well. Given the absence of God, I guess I’ve made it as high as I can.”

  “Looking down from the ivory tower?”

  “Academia? No, no, no, no. No, I do government work. Top secret.” He smirks. “I put in my time at Princeton, but they’re a bunch of…insular idiots, scrapping over…turf and tenure. They wouldn’t recognize a good idea unless…some undergrad came up with it and they had a chance to steal it.”

  Finally the postman speaks: “You think the government is the place to get away from thieves and idiots?” His uniform is ratty and disheveled, and beside him, there’s a sack that looks like undelivered mail.

  The suited man hoists his sherry. “Who’s the bigger idiot? The man in government who makes decisions that shape the world, or the lowly schmuck who has to live in that world?”

  “Don’t forget, I’m a government man myself,” the postman replies. A woman materializes, from the bathroom, perhaps, an ugly woman with enormous breasts and barely enough clothing to hold them in; she sits next to the postman, and he places his hand on her thigh, far higher and more inward than would be acceptable in polite society. “And it does have its perks.”

  “Well that’s charming,” the mathematician smirks. “I’m not one to judge, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Are you supposed to be whoring around in uniform?”

  “What are you saying, you fink?” the postman asks angrily. “Gloria here is a respectable housewife. I met her on my route.”

  “Delightful,” the mathematician says, and lifts his glass again. “Here’s to the seediness of the common man, ever mistaking craftiness for intelligence.”

  “Just what are you saying?” The postman rises as if to fight.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.” The mathematician drains his drink.

  “Just remember,” the postman continues. “Whatever your big ideas, they depend on people like me to actually make them happen. I am the front line of the United States government, I am the representative, I am the one people actually see.”

  I turn to the mathematician. “So what is your big idea?” I ask.

  He shakes his head at the postman and turns back my way. “Oh, I’ve done some work in game theory, nuclear strategy and all that, but my favorite work is still back in physics.”

  “Ahh. Lemme guess, you’re one of these modern physics types? Collapsing functions, electrons orbiting in a probability cloud, the dual wave and particle nature of light depending on the observer…”

  “There is no observer!” He’s suddenly irate, truly and profoundly angry. “How can it all work, if there is an observer? A man is watching a double-slit experiment, he observes a photon behave a certain way. But what if there’s another observer, observing that observer? Does he see the same thing? Yes. If Bohr is correct, if it is the observation that pins down that quantum event, for that moment, it is that observation that collapses the wave function, and all these other possibilities cease to exist. So how can he, this other observer, if they’re observing independently, how can he see the same thing, all the time?”

  “But everyone does see the same thing.”

  “Sometimes it seems that way,” he says.

  “No! Everyone sees the same thing.” Now I’m the one getting testy. I’m no longer the disinterested observer, but something uncomfortably more like a participant. “How do you explain that?”

  “Multiple universes.” He takes a satisfied puff on his cigarillo while the bartender replaces his drink.

  “Multiple universes? How many? One for every person?”

  “No. Infinity.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “That’s the only way to make sense of it all nowadays. At every decision point, there is another universe born. Or, not born, but…it splits, like an amoeba. Both parts are the same as the original, but they go on to different things. The same history, different futures, even though the source material is identical...it’s a universal wave function, and it never collapses. What’s a decision you made today?”

  “I decided to come here.”

  “Instead of?”

  “Instead of staying in the hotel room and calling it a night.”

  “So there. There is another universe where you DID stay in, where you are sleeping soundly right now.”

  “But that decision, it isn’t all an either/or thing. I could have stayed in my hotel room asleep, I could have woken up my roommate, I could have left the room at 9:30, at 9:31, at 9:32, at 9:32 and 16 seconds, 17 seconds, 18 seconds…I could have gone for a drive, I could have ended up at a different bar, I could have gone and bought a gift for my wife, I could’ve driven my car off a cliff…”

  “Yes. All decision points. That is what modern physics demands. There is a universe for all of these things, with you in all of them.”

  “That’s insane. There would be so many universes from my decisions tonight alone. An infinite number just from me, tonight.”

  He laughs. “Do you understand how big infinity is?”

  “Well…”

  “Obviously you don’t,” he says. “You could drive a spaceship along an infinite line at the speed of light for the entirety of your life, and have your children and grandchildren do the same when you die, for a hundred thousand generations, and there would still be as much ahead as there was when you started. If there was an observer, which there isn’t, they could see the before and after and they wouldn’t think the spaceship had moved at all. And that’s just one line, one direction, one dimension. There are infinities that are still subsets of other infinities. All the odd numbers, 1, 3, 5, and on and on to infinity, and all the even numbers, and together they’re another infinity, and that’s still just integers, so they’re still subsets of yet another infinity. 1.000000 and 1.000001 and 2.345498 and 2.3454981, and on and on. Pi itself goes on for infinity, and that’s just one infinity in an infinite number of infinities, and that’s just among real numbers...”

  I give him a look: how can I believe this? “Do you even believe what you’re saying?”

  He laughs, like it’s all a big game. “All the precious modern physics, everything the hallowed Bohr worked for, that is the inevitable corollary, if you carry the ideas through.”

  “That’s insane. How did you come up with this?”

  He gives a nod down at the book. “Borges helped me a bit.” Then he raises his snifter of sherry. “Along with copious amounts of alcohol.”

  “How does your consciousness not know all of these other universes, then? Wouldn’t these other versions of me still know they’re me?”

  “You are only conscious of the one that keeps you alive.”

  “So everyone that’s dying in my universe, is living in their own?”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  “Like…Star Trek or something,” I mutter.

  He snickers. “This is so much bigger than Star Trek.”

  “All right. So am I in your universe, or are you in mine?”

  “You probably think I’m a bit player in yours,” he says. “But you’re playing a walk-on role in mine.” He sips his sherry, self-satisfied.

  “Jesus Christ, like life isn’t…lonely enough already. No wonder you need to drink. So…everyone, really? The bartender? The postman?”

  “I’m not a bit player in your universe,” the postman says, suddenly attentive and angry again.

  “Oh, I’m sure you think you’re not,” the mathematician replies.

  The postman stands up. “Just because you…think you’re the center of the universe doesn’t mean you are. This beer is real. Why can’t you just shut up and enjoy it?” He grabs the woman, moves toward us. “Gloria’s tits are real. My fist is real. Your face is real.”

  With a start, I stand up, backing out from between them. “Look, is all this necessary?”

  “He does this all the time,” the bartender mutters. “Take it out back!” he says to the postman. />
  “Look, this is absurd,” the mathematician replies. “You’re too drunk to fight anyway.”

  “I’m drunk enough to feel no pain, which means I’m drunk enough to kick your ass,” the postman responds, and stumble-lunges forward, falling against the barstool and the bar while grabbing at the other man.

  In a flash, the bartender’s coming around the bar to separate them. “Take it out back, Chuck!” he shouts.

  “I will, if he’s not afraid,” the postman says.

  “If this is your universe, you should win, right?” I tell the mathematician.

  At this, he stands, removes his jacket and vest and his glasses, and lays them neatly on the bar.

  I have the sense that no good could come of this, so I hang back as they head out back, the postman practically falling over, the mathematician with a barely perceptible wobble. Gloria shakes her head in disgust as they pass, and comes over to sit next to me. We drink. I steal a glance at the paperback the mathematician was reading: The Garden of Forking Paths.

  The other two are out there for a while. We hear muffled grunts and a clattering of trash cans.

  They come back in, arms around each other’s shoulders, both disheveled now.

  “Well, there will soon be an infinite number of other universes where I kicked your ass,” the mathematician says.

  “It’s alright, I had you at a disadvantage,” the postman replies. “I’m not worried about my face looking any worse.”

  “You can say that again,” the mathematician says.

  To which the postman responds with a sucker punch.

  The bartender comes around to pull them apart. “Come on, guys, knock it off!”

  “Jesus, get me out of here, will you?” Gloria asks, and before I know what’s happening, she has her hand on my thigh.

  I jump like a scalded cat. “Oh, look at the time. I really should be going. I have to work tomorrow, in my universe.”

  But the postman’s seen enough. He lunges.

  At her.

  He shouts: “You ugly whore!”

  I deflect him away, and he clatters to the floor between the stools and the bar, and I think I hear something like “…no-good stuck-up prick,” and now at last he’s trying to come up off the floor after me, but the bartender’s holding him back as I back off, and it’s clear there’s no longer any value to being here, so when the bartender says: “You might wanna leave, buddy,” I say “Yeah,” and peel off a twenty and set it down and head out.

  •••

  The next day I ask Ed again: “Do you think everything’s how it’s supposed to be?”

  We’ve spent the morning working with the quality assurance types, a bunch of serious-looking young go-getters in ties and short-sleeve-shirts, studying blueprints and using gauge blocks to compare tolerances to design specs. And now Ed and I have broken away for a quick lunch at the executive cafeteria, the so-called “golden trough.” (We make it a point to eat there often, to talk about the issues we’ve seen with the people powerful enough to address them, all those executives living high on the hog.)

  “It’s getting to where it’s supposed to be,” he says. “These guys are sharp. And the test sounds like it’s going…”

  “No, in general. LBJ. Vietnam. Life. Everything.”

  “Compared to what?” he asks. “It’s not like there’s a…set of gauge blocks you can put together to check it all out. Make sure the world’s manufactured according to spec…”

  “If there was a portal, like in the show, would you go back and change something? Stop the fire, keep all this from getting off track?”

  “Still thinking about that, huh?” He grins. “Well, there isn’t, so it doesn’t matter. Like you said, there’s no point even trying to go backwards.”

  “Yeah.” I survey the room anew. All the while, executives are trickling in, all these bright men, the brains of the body that’s building the machine that will take us to the moon. “I guess you always have to assume there’s a path forward from disaster.”

  VENUS MISSION

  PART III: CME

  Disaster strikes a little over a month after the flyby.

  Nobody feels it, not right away. I’m the first one to see it, but that’s only because I’m the one on the telescope, staring at the sun. And I don’t recognize it for what it is.

  Disaster looks like opportunity at first.

  “All right, there’s a large spot in active region 107,” I say for Houston’s benefit, even though they’re over six light-minutes away now. We’re looking through x-ray filters; the sun’s a violent maelstrom, and yet it’s a strange refuge from all the craziness back home, the news reports about the massacre in Munich, and the airline hijacking in Detroit, and bombs in Belfast, and the fall of Saigon.

  “Got something good?” Kerwin asks.

  “Yeah. Think it might be a flare. Very high PMEC count here. I’m going to start the JOP.”

  “Careful on film,” Shepard says from the other side of the deck.

  “I’ve got a feeling this one’ll be worth a few frames,” I reply. I think I have the chance to capture the whole solar flare cycle. Or to recapture it, I should say.

  “You said that about the last one, too.” Shepard snips.

  I want to get mad. But he’s right. I have burned up frames on flares that fizzled out. And my thinking has been…fuzzy. My post-EVA funk only lasted a couple days; I’d spent most of the time down in the sleeping chambers, on sick call of sorts, until the morning I’d finally grown disgusted with my own lethargy, at which point I’d floated upstairs to heat up the breakfast trays, gingerly stepping back into my routines as if nothing had happened. I waited to see what the others would say, but they said nothing.

  Since then, I’ve been eager to make up for lost time, eager to make up for everything. But there’s some vague uncertainty permeating my mind like a fog; I have been relying on the lists more and more, double- and triple-checking as I go.

  “I…no…this might actually be the most intense event we’ve seen so far.” I snap away happily: pictures across the visible spectrum, through the hydrogen-alpha filter, images from the x-ray telescope and the ultraviolet spectroheliograph. The spot gets bigger and bigger.

  “Boy who cried wolf, here,” Shepard doesn’t even look at the monitors.

  “Umm, the PMEC is over 800.”

  Kerwin floats over and glances at the small TV monitor in the console. “Wow. That does look like it’s worth a few pics.” (He has, of course, already taken pictures of the full solar flare cycle, but those photos are floating in space now, along with the rest of our pre-flyby telescope film.)

  “PMEC is still climbing,” I say. “This is really intense.”

  “That…there’s a loop building up, out of frame,” Kerwin says, pointing to the tip of a jagged scar on the monitor near the edge of the flare. “Zoom out for a bit.”

  “I’m…uhh, I’m in the middle of the flare JOP. I want to make sure we’re getting all of it.”

  “Buzz, zoom out,” Shepard snaps, even though he’s floating over by the DSKY and still hasn’t looked over to see what we’re looking at.

  I snap one more flare pic and then dial down the telescope magnification so the sun’s whole disk is in view. The scar we’d seen is part of something spectacular, a massive S-shaped slash across the sun.

  “Is that a coronal mass ejection?” Kerwin asks, amazed.

  “This is a lot bigger than any we’ve seen,” I point out. We’ve seen looping prominences before, smaller ones, relatively speaking, although still large enough that you could roll the planet Earth underneath them. But this dark area stretches across the sun’s entire diameter. “This is almost like those pictures from December.”

  “What happened in December?” Shepard asks.

  “That thing they talked about in training,” Kerwin explains.

  “What satellite was that?” I ask. “OSO-7?”

  “Yeah. They took a grainy picture on its coronograph.
Looked like a flash. Huge. Really bright, so much so that they thought it was an error with the instruments at first. On the second image, they saw it had moved, like this huge mass had lifted off the sun. But they still had a hard time making sense of it.”

  “Well I guess now’s our chance to get some better pictures,” I point out.

  I switch over to our coronograph so we can get a good look in visible light at the growing body of solar material. Over the next twenty minutes or so, we can see it swell visibly. It’s hard to get a really good shot, because the slash is rising towards us edge-wise. This is when it occurs to me that I should be concerned.

  I key the radio mike and speak into my headset, a voice into the void: “Houston, Explorer, we are going to put some imagery over on the TV downlink. Hope you’re monitoring it. This is…unlike anything we’ve seen up here.” Then to Kerwin: “It does look like those…uhh…magnetic mechanisms are at work.”

  “Yeah. Almost like…rubber bands or something.”

  “Rubber bands?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “Yeah. All the magnetic field lines. Like the sun’s a ball of rubber bands, and because the middle’s rotating faster, they’re stretching, and eventually they snap, but since they’re magnetic, they stick back together to others.” Kerwin sounds a little off lately, too.

  “Magnetic rubber bands?”

  “I guess…I think. And they’re throwing off material when they snap. You get the idea.”

  I’m dubious. “And the material they throw off still stays in a big loop.”

  “And there’s radiation.”

  “Magnetic looping radioactive rubber bands.” It does sound odd. I’ve been studying the sun for months, and I know what he’s getting at, and it still sounds odd. “Too bad we don’t have any regular magnetic rubber bands on board. Might make for a good filmstrip.”

  “That might be why that flare was so big…there’s a lot of activity happening at the same time.”

  It occurs to me that I’m getting a little uncomfortable. My weak bladder’s caused its share of hassle in my life; right now it’s telling me to turn the console over to Joe and go take a leak. But I don’t want to be robbed of this. Nobody’s photographed anything of this sort, not with instruments as good as ours. Whatever I’ve done wrong so far, this is a chance to make up for it. I force myself to ignore myself, my body’s sad limits; I lose myself in work, and time dissolves for a while more: ten minutes? Twenty?