Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  As for the guns opposite the entrance to the tent, they were all loaded and served as a defensive precaution. Guns in the front rack were non-lethal, and had rubber bullets and tranquilizer darts. The guns in the rack further back had white stocks and were loaded with lethal ammunition. Everyone had received firearms instruction and was required to attend weapons training at least once a month. Finally, as the ultimate line of defense, Edwards Air Force Base was only a few minutes of air time away. There was an always-live phone in the auditorium that was a direct line to the air base should the unthinkable happen and Pueblo itself needed to be quarantined or, to use a euphemism, “sterilized”.

  Dr. Rys waited a few moments. When he saw that his new quantum physicist was still there, eager to work, a look of relief spread over his face. He then welcomed Dr. Marshall to US-395 and after a team lunch at a nearby diner gave him his first assignment testing and calibrating the sensors that were directed at the tent. The team had conjured up a fairly exotic array of instruments to detect, among other things, particles generated by sending objects through the Allen field. In fact, the floor of the sending room itself sat directly on top of a sensor. The room was kept as cold as would still be comfortable to enhance the sensors’ ability to identify energetic events. Having just gathered some preliminary data, the next round of trial runs would involve sending a probe to get additional telemetry.

  For his part, Dr. Rys was immersed in every facet of the project, especially regarding the probe. In addition to helping design it, he determined the necessary components, drafted its circuit diagrams, built prototypes, and oversaw the fabrication of its circuit boards, as well as any one-off pieces such as the housing. Apparently he’d acquired his voluminous knowledge of electrical and mechanical engineering as a hobby, which he likened to doing crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. After hearing his overview of the probe, Dr. Marshall asked why it didn’t record visual telemetry.

  “Good question. Actually, we’ve sent a small movie camera, but it recorded nothing. We modified it to account for the cleaning process, so it wasn’t that. Something seemed to have disabled its optics.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “We don’t know yet. Until we do, the probe will only collect non-optical telemetry.”

  He paused then added, “Of course, I also want to find out where exactly the objects go. To do this, we can eventually use a system of government satellites, which might be operational within a few years. Using signals from those satellites, we’ll be able to determine the probe’s location almost instantaneously. Until then, we’ll have to use a radio beacon instead.”

  Dr. Marshall never heard those final few sentences because his mind was fixated on what Dr. Rys had said before that: He didn’t know where the objects went. Once again, though, Dr. Rys seemed to anticipate his questions.

  “The objects go somewhere, Jeremy. Regarding this, there is no doubt. Nevertheless, not knowing that destination is a source of some embarrassment, which is eclipsed by the fact that something incontrovertibly is happening. I assure you we’ll eventually get at that something and learn where the objects go. Until then, it’s an obvious gap in our understanding that needs to be remedied.”

  At that Dr. Marshall nodded then continued working. Like most of the team, he stayed in the auditorium until past nine in the evening. Calibrating and troubleshooting the sensors was an engrossing task and he got a lot done. Before he left, he was given keys to the facility, the combinations for each of the doors in the chamber, as well as a parking permit. His first day at work had gone well. After memorizing the combinations, he spent most of that night in bed restless, however, wondering what the probe’s first run would reveal.

  The Probe

  With a long-term objective of eventually sending human passengers through the Allen field, the immediate goal was to determine the environmental conditions that would await them. To do this, the probe would measure the amount of light on the other side, the presence of breathable air, as well as temperature and air pressure. It was codenamed “Gizmo” and resembled an everyday shoebox. Simple, lightweight and tough, the probe was nevertheless an impressive piece of engineering. Gizmo’s exterior was comprised almost entirely of photovoltaic cells bolted onto a metal housing. On each of its six surfaces were sensors wired to an internal thermometer and barometer, as well as breathable apertures covered by steel mesh. These led to an internal clock, as well as a time-delayed vacuum connected to a small bag designed to collect air samples.

  In addition to its array of sensors, the probe was also “rugged-ized”, for lack of a better term. Its housing was fireproof, waterproof and highly impact-resistant. As a precaution, attached to its casing was a translucent parachute, which would deploy if the level of ambient light hitting the probe’s surfaces indicated it was in free-fall. Should Gizmo have materialized in mid-air at any substantial height, this would hopefully prevent any serious damage or harm to whatever had the misfortune of being underneath. To minimize complexity, the probe only stored the highest and lowest values of telemetry recorded during its voyage. So, if the maximum temperature it experienced while it was sent was 95ºF and the minimum was -20ºF, those would be the values its circuits would record.

  Aside from running diagnostics on the probe and putting the finishing touches on the sensor array around the tent, Dr. Marshall’s second day at work was spent doing drills to accustom the team to handling various contingencies such as biological hazards inadvertently being brought into the sending room via the Allen field. Once the drills were done, everyone continued preparing for Friday’s trial run. The rest of Tuesday, and most of Wednesday and Thursday were spent field-testing Gizmo to make certain it worked as designed. Based on the results, the probe could withstand being sent into any foreseeable environment, from the Arctic tundra to the heart of Death Valley, all the while dutifully recording mission time, its six environmental measurements and breathing in a gulp of the surrounding air.

  By Friday, everything was ready for a send time of 9:30am. Dr. Marshall had arrived at just past six that morning to make certain everything was alright. He found Dr. Rys and a few others already there doing the same. As for the Maytag, it took about an hour to warm it up and run diagnostics. Its controls, the metal box Dr. Marshall saw bolted onto the table facing the chamber, were very simple. It had three switches, a numerical keypad and a keyhole. One switch was on the left of the 10-key, one was on the right and one was above; the keyhole was situated just below the numerical keypad. Entering a seven-digit code then flipping the center switch activated the Maytag’s electrical and mechanical systems. Inserting the key, turning it, flipping the left switch then the right one would send. To retrieve an object, the right switch needed to be flipped back followed by the left switch. The two switches each had labels reading “Home” and “Away”. To further protect against an inadvertent send or retrieve, each switch had a spring-loaded plastic cover that needed to be lifted open to access it. Like most of US-395, the Maytag’s controls were simple yet effective.

  The trickle of people into the auditorium began growing at around seven that morning so that by nine, the entire team was present. They’d voted to have Guy Pool do the honors and place Gizmo in the sending room. He went at his usual deliberate pace through the chamber, spinning combinations into the doors along the way. Once he got to the sending room, he set the probe down, turned on the intercom and recited something:

  Two roads diverged in a wood and I,

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  He then turned off the intercom and began making his way back out. The team had requested that he choose something to say and based on the silent nods of approval around the tent, he’d chosen well. After closing the entrance to the chamber, he took a seat along with the rest of the team behind Dr. Rys.

  By that point, all eyes were glued to the closed-circuit television monitor, which showed an image of the probe
in the sending room. Dr. Rys uncovered the left switch and toggled it to “Away”. Eyes focused on the monitor’s built-in clock, he then uncovered the right switch and readied his thumb over it. As the clock on the monitor hit 9:30am he flicked the right toggle and Gizmo was sent.

  To Dr. Marshall’s eyes, it was amazing. Looking at the closed-circuit television monitor on the Maytag desk, the probe was gone. It had happened without a flash of light or any other energetic phenomena that he could discern. There wasn’t a hum or a boom like the ones made by the supersonic jets that sometimes streaked overhead from Edwards Air Force Base. Simply put, one moment Gizmo was there and in an instant, it wasn’t. To account for peculiarities in the sending process, the screen had switched to thermal imaging; and instead of the probe, he saw a complete absence of matter and energy that precisely matched its dimensions. The void was apparently one of the eerier byproducts of the Allen field. As for the mission, Gizmo would be gone for a half hour.

  Dr. Marshall found the ensuing wait nerve-wracking. He wasn’t married yet, but it was how he imagined parents felt waiting for their kids to come home from a date or a party. Knowing so little about how sending actually worked only made it worse. He imagined Gizmo materializing hundreds of feet underground, sinking into a pool of molten lava, sitting in the path of an oncoming car on Pacific Coast Highway causing a pileup, and so on. The range of morbid scenarios was only limited by one’s imagination; and like everyone else on US-395, Dr. Marshall was exceedingly imaginative.

  To occupy his mind and help pass the time, he joined the team physicists, who were excitedly sifting through some newly gathered data. After his tour during his first day, Dr. Marshall learned that beneath the sending room sat a particle detector, a Cherenkov counter. It was a water-tank that measured 100 feet in diameter, was just as tall and was ringed with photo-multipliers designed to detect energetic events. The team was poring over output from the detector to see whether anything had passed through the water-tank as a result of teleporting the probe. The answer was an emphatic “Yes”. The charts showed unmistakable spikes of activity immediately after Gizmo was sent. What exactly passed through the water wasn’t yet clear. Nevertheless, the data were heartening. Like Dr. Rys said, something was happening when they sent things. Of course, he was right. Those objects had to end up somewhere or be converted into some form of energy. Otherwise, the fundamental laws of physics would be violated. Looking at the particle detector results turned out to be a good idea because before Dr. Marshall knew it, the mission timer showed only five minutes remaining.

  Aside from the physicists, he saw that everyone else had already returned to their chairs. The three-person retrieval team had donned their hazmat suits and stood waiting at the door to the sending room. One team member had a rifle with a white stock and another had a Geiger counter. Per protocol, the third team member was a physician. Dr. Rys lifted the right switch’s cover then brought it back to the “Home” position. Looking at the clock on the closed-circuit monitor, he then reached for the left switch. At 10am on July 11th, 1958, he toggled the switch back, bringing the probe home.

  Once it was clear that it was indeed Gizmo that’d been brought back and not an angry elephant or charging rhinoceros, Dr. Rys directed the retrieval team to enter the room. Seeing that the light above the sending room door had changed from red to green, they went inside, closed the door behind them and started reporting through the walkie-talkies built into their hazmat suits. After running the Geiger counter through the entire room, they found no radioactivity. The sending room was then heated to 300ºF for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, a visual inspection of the probe showed that it was undamaged and that its chute hadn’t deployed. They then took Gizmo and worked their way back through the chamber until they reached the door just before the clean room. After placing the rifle into a covered metal container filled with chlorine bleach, the space between the Pyrex walls was then heated to 300ºF for fifteen minutes and subsequently cooled. Once temperatures returned to normal, they spun a combination into the door and finally stepped through into the clean room where there was a tub filled with chlorine bleach. They lowered Gizmo into it, changed out of their hazmat suits and joined the celebration that had already begun outside.

  Reflecting the team’s general comportment, the get-together was understated. The radio was quietly playing, some food had been laid out potluck style on the large table just outside of the tent; and people were chatting amiably with one another. Whatever the telemetry, the trial run was already deemed a success. Once the probe had been lifted out of the tub and dried off, Dr. Rys excused himself from the gathering then brought it from the clean room to one of the lab benches flanking the entrance to the chamber. He then carefully removed the probe’s casing to reveal the mission timer and three toggle switches, which allowed access to the temperature, air pressure and ambient light readings that Gizmo took. Beside the cluster of toggles were a couple of small terminals to which he connected banana-clips from an analog multimeter on the bench. The probe’s circuitry was designed to output electrical current readings that corresponded to what Gizmo measured on its journey. It also scaled the readings to account for possible negative telemetry, the probe’s limited power supply and the fact that the multimeter’s scale only went up to 200 milliamps. Everyone gathered around Dr. Rys as he toggled through the measurements, doing the units conversions in his head. As the needle on the multimeter swayed, he jotted the readings down onto his clipboard:

  Temp: Low=20ºF, High=23ºF

  Bar: Low=970 mb, High=980 mb

  Light: Low=1 lux, High=4 lux

  Duration: 30 minutes

  Once he finished writing, the crowd went utterly quiet. Dr. Rys was fairly certain he knew why. He was no meteorologist, but looking at the telemetry, he was tempted to conclude that on the other side of the Allen field lay a snowstorm.

  Dr. Rys

  Alberto Rys was born in Bogotá, Colombia where his father taught physics at the National University. He was ten years old when his father accepted a teaching position in the United States at the California Institute of Technology and moved his family to San Marino. Young Beto, as his parents called him, eventually attended South Pasadena High School where he demonstrated a nearly uncanny facility with mathematics and the sciences. This led him to Caltech, which by then had grown into an institution of some renown. It was during his sophomore year there when he met his wife, Abigail Svoboda, who was a doctoral student in biology. By the time he’d begun his own PhD, they already had two sons, Pedro and Juan. For his dissertation he studied the Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen paradox, which seemed to expose a fundamental contradiction within quantum mechanics. After corresponding with his namesake to better understand their critique, he completed his thesis defending an aspect of quantum theory known as non-locality, which quietly anticipated work by John Stewart Bell some twenty years later.

  Dr. Rys was in school during most of World War II; and his desire to contribute to the war effort once he’d earned his doctorate brought him to Los Alamos in New Mexico. He worked under Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge, the physicist overseeing the development of the bomb design ultimately used on Nagasaki. Dr. Rys considered himself a reasonably brave man; however, when he witnessed the destructive power of what they’d created during a test detonation in the New Mexico desert, he genuinely feared for the human race. This sobriety would guide his approach to science for the rest of his life. Once the euphoria of the war ending was over, he returned with his family to Pasadena to teach and do research alongside his father as an associate professor at Caltech.

  For Dr. Rys life in Pasadena was idyllic. He enjoyed teaching and his students in turn enjoyed going to his classes. He never tired of watching each new class enter, learn, grow and then move on, often to accomplished careers in the sciences themselves. If pushed, though, he would’ve admitted that his first love was research. Professor Rys had spent years trying to reconcile aspects of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity
. Unlike many in the physics community, he was a realist. This wasn’t related so much to his outlook on geopolitics or people’s motivations as it was to his conviction that things like the lecture halls he taught in and the particles that comprised them existed independently of quantum events ostensibly triggered by observing them. He justifiably felt that most outside of the scientific community would’ve been surprised to learn that his was a brave and increasingly unorthodox point-of-view to adopt and defend. Some even considered it antiquated.

  To many physicists, quantum events boiled down to probabilities and the act of observing. Rather than having a definite position as objects in the macroscopic world of classical physics did, particles at the quantum scale were often conceptually represented as clouds containing a multitude of possible locations. Each location in turn had a certain probability of actually being where the particle was. The act of observing resulted in all of those possible locations collapsing into the observed one. It was like dropping a feather in a dark room. In the quantum mechanical world, the feather occupied the room’s entire floor all at once upon landing. It was directly beneath from where it fell, it was in the corner many feet away, it was also in the other corners of the room, etc. It was in all of those places at the same time. The act of turning on the lights and observing the result “collapsed” that superposition of locations into the feather definitely being in one place and not any other. This act of a particle’s characteristics changing from a probability function to a known quantity was often referred to as de-coherence. At least that was one widely held interpretation. The experiment he was developing involved inducing what he thought of as “localized observational amnesia” to bring the particle back to the state it had before being observed. Essentially Dr. Rys set out to find a way to de-observe the feather and de-turn-on the lights, so it could again be in all of those places in the room at once. Frankly, he doubted whether such a thing was conceptually possible in any theoretical framework in particle physics, much less experimentally achievable. However, never having been one to back down from a challenge, he felt the possibility was worth exploring.