Class Fives: Origins

by Jon H. Thompson

  Vernon’s expression began to mirror that of a curious dog.

  “What do you mean, all? Space junk? Satellites? Stray nuts and bolts?”

  Marvin was nodding as he plucked up the thought, carrying it along.

  “And asteroids,” he added, “And planets and comets and the Ort cloud. Anything that gets anywhere near the plane of the solar system and might represent a catastrophic threat.”

  Vernon stared at him a long moment.

  “Everything? That’s how much stuff? How many individual objects?”

  Marvin smiled.

  “Billions.”

  Vernon’s face blanked for a moment as he considered this.

  “Where’s the data come from?”

  “Everywhere,” Marvin replied. “Any data source on the planet. Every observatory, radio telescope, receiver dish. Everything. It all gets fed to our facility.”

  Vernon’s expression seemed to tighten, his eyes fixed on some intense point outside the world.

  “What happened? Why do you need to detect Dark Matter?” he said, his voice tense.

  “We – Well, I, detected an anomalous orbital pattern in a particular asteroid. And I used the Deep Look software to backtrack it and found something, some force, knocked it out of its normal orbit a long time ago.”

  He paused for Vernon to comment but the other physicist seemed rooted and miles away.

  “I also found,” Marvin continued, “That in that same location a number of other objects also got bumped. None of them are on trajectories that present any threat, but they all got bumped at the same time, from the same thing. It’s like someone threw a baseball through a window. Only there was no baseball. No physical object, and no energy force we can detect caused it. So I thought Dark Matter is tied somehow to gravitational fields – “

  “Oh my God,” Vernon breathed, his body suddenly slumping, growing unsteady.

  Marvin flinched, already reaching out to grab his arm and help him to the side of the walkway where he eased him to the grass.

  “Are you okay? Should I call 911?”

  Vernon flapped an arm dismissively and sagged over to prop himself up, sucking in deep, quick breaths.

  “Nothing,” he gasped. “Anxiety attack.”

  Marvin remained half crouched, his arms extended, as if the ability to suddenly grab the other man would be of any use.

  “Do you need a paper bag to breathe into or something?”

  Again Vernon lifted a warding-off arm and seemed to focus on controlling his breathing. After a few moments, it was deep but regular once more.

  “This event,” he gasped. “When did it happen?”

  Marvin was momentarily confused.

  “Thirty five years ago.”

  Vernon nodded.

  “And the location?”

  Marvin hesitated.

  “Russia. Somewhere in the Bilyarsk region.”

  Vernon sucked in one final deep breath and shifted himself around to draw up his legs and wrap his arms around them.

  “Karillan,” he said in a harsh rasp. “Alexander Karillan.”

  Marvin stared down at him for a moment, then lowered himself beside him on the grass.

  “Who is Alexander Karillan?”

  Vernon took a final few seconds to settle himself before speaking.

  “He’s the basis of my work. His experiments.”

  Marvin waited, allowing the other man to calm himself enough to speak clearly. At last Vernon turned to look at him.

  “He’s not well known. Most of his work was kept top secret. He never collaborated with anyone, he was funded out of some covert Russian thing.”

  “What was he doing?”

  Vernon sighed.

  “He was attempting to find what was on the other side of the quantum field, at the fundamental level of existence.”

  Marvin raised a hand.

  “Wait. Other side of the quantum field?”

  Vernon nodded briskly.

  “Right. Atoms made of protons, neutrons, electrons. Protons, neutrons and electrons made of quarks. Quarks made of Mezons, Bozons, you know the drill. Way down at the bottom, the quantum field. No mass, just energy.”

  Marvin nodded.

  “Right, beyond that, nothing.”

  “No,” Vernon said sharply, “Beyond that is outside. Beyond the canvas.”

  “What canvas?”

  “It’s this analogy I use. Reality is like a painting. The matter is the paint. The canvas is what holds it all together, in our case, space-time.”

  “Okay,” Marvin said slowly.

  Vernon turned awkwardly to confront him.

  “We have never been able to get down to the canvas,” he said, his voice tightening. “We can’t even touch it. But what if we could? What if we could scratch a hole in it, peek really close, see what was on the other side?”

  Marvin stared back at him.

  “Another universe?”

  Vernon shook his head sharply.

  “No. Outside what we think of as the universe. Outside all universes. The thing all the multiple universes are inside of.”

  “Extra-dimensional space?” Marvin asked.

  “No, not extra-dimensional. Beyond dimensions. Something else entirely.”

  “What?”

  Vernon smiled, almost wickedly.

  “Where the Dark Matter actually is,” he said. “Where gravity is leeching from.”

  He fixed Marvin with a strange, passionate, frightening look.

  “Where God lives,” he added quietly.

  Marvin stared back at him in silence, not sure whether he was being bathed in the faintest reflection of some brilliant new human insight, or witnessing the first flickers of a complete mental breakdown.

  Vernon finally pulled his eyes away.

  “But I didn’t know…” he muttered.

  “Didn’t know what?” Marvin prompted.

  Vernon sat thoughtfully for a long while before replying quietly.

  “He said he just wanted to fund my research and get it to the experimental stage.”

  “Who did?”

  “He gave me Karillan’s work. His notes. I don’t know how he got hold of them but it was exactly along the same path. He’d already cracked a few of the equations that had been stumping me, and filled in some gaps on some things that weren’t connecting for me. Ultimately it allowed me to figure out how to get substantial matter to interact with insubstantial matter. To get the fundamental forces in the universe in which we all exist to interact with what’s outside.”

  Marvin pondered this for a long moment.

  “So, that’s a good thing, right? A whole new area gets opened up. That’s what we want as scientists.”

  Vernon’s face screwed up and he shook his head sharply.

  “Not like this. This man, my patron, the one who gave me Karillan’s notes. He wanted me to work out a way of detecting an undetectable energy emission.”

  “And did you?”

  Vernon sighed and nodded.

  “Yes. Based on what I read of Karillan’s notes I was able to work out that direct contact of certain subatomic particles, if excited to a certain frequency, would become repellant to every other kind of matter. They’d push every other subatomic particle and every frequency of energy away violently. They’d be so repellant that they could, theoretically, rip open space-time. We’d rip a hole in the canvas. Just a tiny hole, but enough for a bit of whatever’s out there to come through.”

  Marvin felt a sick churning start in his stomach.

  “And Karillan actually did it. Thirty five years ago.”

  Vernon nodded.

  “I knew he had done some sort of experiment at some secret particle accelerator somewhere in Russia, but then it supposedly had a power accident and blew up. Flattened the whole area, created this huge sinkhole. The whole facility was underground.”

  “Like Chernobyl,” Marvin prompted.

  “No, Chernobyl emitted huge amounts of ordinar
y radiation, they were able to read that in a couple of days just from air sampling. Nobody read anything from Karillan’s goof. They just put the devastation down to an earthquake that damaged the facility and caused the explosion. The ground above it collapsed, caused this massive forest fire. But it was in the middle of nowhere, so who cared?”

  “I think I heard about that once, when they were about to turn on the CERN collider in Switzerland. It was somebody’s evidence that the things are unsafe. But there were no details.”

  Vernon nodded, thoughtfully.

  “I’d heard about it too,” Marvin said. “But I thought it was just an accident. You know, Russian engineering. But I didn’t know that it had caused any kind of emission. Nobody ever detected one.”

  “I did,” Marvin said quietly. “Well, the aftereffects of it. But it happened long before Deep Look came on-line. I only found it by backtracking the trajectories of multiple objects with one Hell of a piece of software.”

  “My patron said,” Vernon continued, as if he hadn’t heard, “Something had gone wrong that first time. Karillan had missed something, or done something wrong, and the whole facility just blew.”

  He let his mind shuffle rapidly through the multiple calculations and equations stored in his memory, fixing on one operation, leaping to another.

  “But it didn’t go wrong,” he finally whispered. “It worked. He actually did it.”

  “Did what?” Marvin asked, breathlessly.

  Vernon turned to stare at him.

  “Poked a hole in the universe,” he said, his tone almost awed. “He actually did it. Probably just a tiny hole, maybe only a couple microns across, but – “

  “But what came through,” Marvin interrupted, “Was enough to knock celestial bodies millions of miles away out of their orbits.”

  “Like a quasar,” Vernon muttered thoughtfully, referring to the super-dense dark stars that release incredible streams of radiation in narrow beams shot from the poles of the mass.

  “And only for a very short time. Maybe just a fraction of a second,” Marvin concluded.

  They sat there, beside one another, on the grass at the edge of the walkway outside the science building in the middle of the campus, each gathering up the new mounds of concepts that had just been dumped into their brains, and trying to shuffle them around into a sensible mass.

  “The detector,” Vernon finally said. “I gave it to him a couple of months ago.”

  “How exactly does it work?” Marvin prompted.

  Vernon shrugged.

  “It reads the ambient background radiation and filters out everything except a certain narrow range of energy signals caused by these very light, almost massless particles. Those signals are highly susceptible to gravity, so if there were a fluctuation in the overall gravitational field they’d be pulled down, you wouldn’t see many of them. The detector just looks for places where those particles are missing.”

  “What would that indicate?” Marvin encouraged.

  Vernon thought a moment.

  “That there had been a change in the gravitational field in that location. Like a tiny leak in something.”

  He turned to Marvin once more.

  “I figured that if gravity really is an aftereffect of Dark Matter leeching into our universe, then if there was a pinprick somewhere and whatever it was became able to actually get in, the gravity around it would go off the charts.”

  “So,” Marvin said, “You’ve built a device that can detect actual fluctuations in the gravitational field. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” Vernon smiled, but the light quickly dropped from his face.

  “And the only reason he would need that kind of detector,” he went on, “Is if there was a continuing emission that was keeping the gravitational field in flux.”

  Marvin regarded him sharply.

  “A leak?”

  Vernon nodded.

  “To continually reinforce the emission. Otherwise it would dissipate and levels would drop back to background normal. Anyway,” he continued, “My work is generally theoretical. I’m basically a cosmologist. I can guess how things are and try to prove it with the mathematics, but if you wanted to do actual experimentation you’d need – “

  He stopped suddenly, his eyes narrowing in thought.

  “He’s got to have others working on this,” he muttered. “Engineers, technicians.”

  “Working on what?” Marvin said.

  Vernon turned back to stare at him.

  “He’s rebuilding Karillan’s work,” Vernon replied. “He’s taking it experimental.”

  “He’s going to try and recreate the thing that blew up before?”

  Vernon nodded.

  “And if he has Karillan’s blueprints and technical notes… with my equations…”

  “He could do it,” Marvin said flatly, feeling a sudden chill.

  Marvin fixed on the thought.

  “And if he succeeds, what would happen?”

  Vernon swallowed.

  “Karillan could only have punched a tiny hole for a fraction of a second. He didn’t understand about having to clean the canvas first. If you could actually rip a sizable hole…”

  He fell silent as Marvin realized that an almost infinitely small puncture had emitted something powerful enough to punch asteroids out of their orbits. If a sustainable opening of any appreciable size was created…

  “It would destroy the planet,” he whispered.

  Vernon nodded gravely.

  “But he’d need an incredible power source.”

  “How much power?”

  Vernon thought a moment.

  “All of it.”

  Marvin’s mind quickly retreated to the well-known equations governing the flow of energy, and felt a little better. A supercollider would require incredible amounts of energy in order to accelerate the tiniest particles of matter in the universe to speeds approaching those of light itself, so that they could be slammed head-on into other tiny particles fast enough to overcome the repulsive force that kept atoms from slamming into one another in nature, and explode them into the even smaller bits of which they were constructed. The old, standard analogy was slamming a pocket-watch into a wall hard enough to split the case, so you could sift through the tiny cogs and wheels that would scatter all over the floor.

  “So we don’t have to worry, then,” Marvin said quietly. “There’s not enough power to get the thing to work.”

  Vernon considered this a moment.

  “Unless,” he finally said, “He’s found a way to use the leak itself.”

  “In which case…” Marvin mused uncomfortably.

  “He could do it.”

  Both men watched the inescapable conclusion loom up in their thoughts, darkening them.

  Thirty five years ago, a Russian scientist had tried to punch a hole in the very fabric of reality. His work was so secret, so closely protected, most likely by a government who perhaps were hoping they had a chance to obtain the true ultimate weapon, that hardly anyone in the scientific community had ever heard of it. But not too long ago someone had discovered the long-dead scientist’s notes, perhaps everything the Russian had learned, and was now trying to recreate it. But why? What possible use could it be to anyone? Such a power, unleashed into a reality unprepared for it… what could that do? Rip it apart? Blow vast chunks of it away, like a hard breath of pure air in a room full of smoke?

  And what if it didn’t close? What if, like a canvas, once torn it was permanently torn?

  “My God,” Marvin breathed, stunned.

  “So,” Vernon said from beside him on the grass, “What do we do?”

  Marvin turned to glare into the other physicist’s eyes, and Vernon saw he was, for the first time, looking into a face void of all but intensely focused resolve.

  “What was his name?” Marvin said. “Your patron?”

  “Montgomery,” Vernon replied. “Doctor Walter Montgomery.”

  White didn’t even
turn to where Jones was seated at his own computer, just scanned the report briefly.

  “Our officer witness requested an identification of a vehicle plate an hour after he was off duty. Received the owner information but no follow up since.”

  Jones stopped his own typing to turn and regard the older man.

  “Date?”

  “Same date as the event.”

  Jones considered a moment.

  “First thing tomorrow,” he said, and turned back to his own researches.

  Vernon gripped the phone, listening to the sharp artificial ring repeat itself.

  This was not what he had agreed to, he told himself. He was not one of those idiots who took reckless chances in the pursuit of some distantly sensed truth. Hell, he told himself, if he’d been around for the Manhattan project he’d have probably done what he could to prevent it, war or no war. For him the quest for pure knowledge had to be limited to what was not only possible, but possible without the risk of doing harm. And now he chillingly realized this research was not.

  Certainly he longed to reach beyond what was known and pluck up some tiny sliver of the vast remaining mysteries that were the universe, even if that truth would, in some way, diminish our view of ourselves as human beings even further. Because that was our right, as conscious creatures: to know, to discover, to understand. But when obtaining that understanding required the destruction of the searcher, and perhaps even more, then it was a point at which one had best turn back or risk their sanity and, perhaps, their membership in the species.

  Well, it was time to make a decision, and he needed one final portion of data to weigh the scales.

  He would assume as a premise, that Dr. Montgomery had no knowledge about the displacement of the asteroids Karillan’s experiment had caused. It had, after all, only recently been discovered, and as part of a high security project, it would not have been widely circulated. Vernon would tell him, let him make the inevitable connection between that effect and the work that had been its cause, work which must now be abandoned to prevent another failed outcome.

  Would Montgomery be shocked? Would he stutter in amazement and immediately agree to shut down his researches?

  Or did he already know?

  The handset clicked and a moment later the voice rattled in his ear.

  “Yes?”