by Mark Alpert
Chapter Eleven
SIMON KNOCKED BACK ANOTHER GLASS OF STOLI. HE SAT in the living room of a modest house in Knoxville belonging to Richard Chan and Scott Krinsky, two of Professor Gupta’s former students. While Gupta used the telephone in their kitchen, Richard anxiously poured vodka into Simon’s glass and Scott offered him a revolting tuna fish sandwich. At first Simon had assumed that the men were lovers, but after his second drink he realized that something more unusual was at work here. Richard and Scott were physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where they built equipment for generating high-intensity proton beams. They were pale, gangly, boyish, and bespectacled, and they treated Professor Gupta with a reverence bordering on the fanatical. What’s more, they weren’t at all surprised when Simon and Gupta showed up at their doorstep. The two young physicists were clearly co-conspirators, recruited by Gupta long ago. Although they didn’t look very intimidating, Simon saw in them the essential quality of good soldiers: they would do whatever their leader ordered. Their devotion to the cause was as strong as any jihadi’s.
As soon as Simon set his empty glass on the coffee table, Richard jumped up from the couch and filled it again. Not bad, Simon thought as he leaned back in his chair. He could get used to this sort of thing. “So you gentlemen work with beam lines, correct? Guiding the protons as they go ’round and ’round in the accelerator?”
Both of them nodded, but neither said a word. They obviously weren’t too comfortable chatting with a Russian mercenary. “It must be a complicated job,” Simon continued. “Making sure all the particles are targeted properly. Determining the ideal conditions for impact. Some strange things can happen when the protons smash together, eh?”
Richard and Scott stopped nodding and exchanged glances. There was some surprise in their faces, and a bit of confusion, too. They were probably wondering how this hired killer had learned about particle physics. “Yes, very strange,” Simon went on. “And maybe very useful. If you had a unified theory that specified exactly how to set up the particle collisions, you could produce some interesting effects, no?”
Their eyes showed alarm now. Richard nearly dropped the bottle of Stolichnaya. “I’m…I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Don’t worry.” Simon chuckled. “Your professor has taken me into his confidence. At the very start of the mission he told me all about the possible applications of the Einheitliche Feldtheorie. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what information I needed to extract from Herr Doktor’s colleagues.”
This reassurance failed to put the physicists at ease. Richard tightened his grip on the Stoli bottle and Scott rubbed his palms together. Perhaps they didn’t want to know too much about the methods used by their esteemed leader.
At that moment Gupta finished his phone call and stepped into the living room. Richard and Scott turned their heads simultaneously, like a pair of loyal Irish setters fixing their eyes on their master. The professor rewarded them with a kindly smile, then pointed at Simon. “Come with me. We have something to discuss.”
Simon waited a few moments to make it clear that he was nobody’s lapdog. Then he rose from his chair and followed Gupta into the kitchen. It was an ugly, cramped alcove with sagging cabinets. “Was that Brock on the phone?” Simon asked.
The professor nodded. “He’s got Swift’s wife and son. Now he’s driving south as fast as he can. This could prove to be a useful bargaining chip.”
“That’s assuming Swift has the unified theory. We don’t know that for certain.”
“Of course he has the theory. Don’t be stupid.”
Once again Simon felt the urge to decapitate the old man. “Swift did more than simply stop our download. He deleted everything from the server. Maybe that was his intention all along, to erase the theory. Maybe that’s what Kleinman told him to do.”
Gupta shook his head. “No, impossible. That’s the last thing Kleinman would’ve wanted. I’m sure he instructed Swift to preserve the theory.”
“Well, maybe Swift will think twice about following those orders once he sees the equations.”
The professor kept shaking his head. He seemed completely unconcerned. “Trust me, he has the theory. And he couldn’t delete it even if he wanted to. The next step in humanity’s ascent is inevitable. Nothing can stop us from staging our demonstration.”
Simon let out a snort. He was growing tired of Gupta’s messianic pronouncements. “All right, let’s assume Swift has the theory. We still have to find him before the American soldiers do.”
Gupta waved his hand in a dismissive way, brushing aside all difficulties. “That’s also inevitable. Within a few hours we’ll know where Swift and his companions are.”
“And how exactly will that happen?”
The old man grinned. “My daughter is with them. She’s a methamphetamine addict. And by now I’m sure she’s getting a little desperate.”
IN A REMOTE CLEARING IN the Cherokee National Forest, Graddick gathered dead leaves and branches for a campfire. This mountain man, as it turned out, was the perfect guide for the fugitives; all those years of smuggling serpents across the Appalachian states had made him an expert in dodging the law. After the escape from Fort Benning, David had wanted to head for Mexico or Canada, but Graddick argued that too many of Satan’s minions stood between them and the border. Instead he drove into northern Alabama, steering his station wagon up the sinuous roads of Sand Mountain. By nightfall they’d crossed into Tennessee and reached the Great Smokies.
Graddick seemed to know every hill and hollow in the area. At a crossroads called Coker Creek he went down a dirt path and parked the station wagon behind a thicket choked with kudzu. Then he started to build the campfire, whistling “Amazing Grace” as he collected the kindling. David couldn’t help but marvel at the man’s generosity. They’d met him just the night before, and now he was risking his life for them. Although David hadn’t told him a word about Einstein or the unified field theory, Graddick clearly understood that something enormous was at stake. He viewed their situation in a religious context: they were engaged in an apocalyptic struggle, a battle against a demonic army that was trying to overthrow the Kingdom of God. And this view, David thought, wasn’t too far from the truth.
The crescent moon, a bit thicker now than it was the night before, gave a pale glow to the pleated hills around them. David sat in the clearing with Michael, who’d propped his Game Boy on a tree stump. His mother was asleep in the station wagon; she’d grown increasingly agitated during the long drive into the mountains, cursing and shivering and demanding that they let her out of the car, but eventually she quieted down and dozed off. Monique had spent half her time comforting Elizabeth and the other half studying the laptop she’d purloined from the VCS lab.
The good news was that the flash drive did indeed hold a scientific paper written by Albert Einstein more than fifty years ago. The bad news was that the paper was in German. The title was “Neue Untersuchung über die Einheitliche Feldtheorie,” which David could sort of translate—a new understanding of the unified field theory, most likely. But that was as far as he could go. The paper contained dozens of pages of equations, but the symbols and numbers and subscripts were just as bewildering to David as the German words surrounding them. These equations didn’t look anything at all like the ones he’d seen in Einstein’s other papers. Herr Doktor had obviously ventured in an entirely new direction, employing a very different kind of mathematics. It was insanely frustrating: they had the answer in their hands, but they couldn’t interpret it.
Monique now sat alone on a grassy patch in the clearing, still staring at the laptop’s screen. David had looked over her shoulder for a while, but she complained that he was disturbing her concentration, so he’d retreated to the other side of the clearing. Shit, he thought, if only he knew German! But even if he were a native speaker, he’d still have trouble with the math. No, Monique was the better person for this. She was adept in many
branches of mathematics, and she’d already told David that several of the equations looked familiar.
After stuffing a few wads of newspaper into the woodpile, Graddick set it alight with a match. He went to the station wagon and returned with five cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, which he opened and placed near the fire. Then he sat down on the grass next to David and Michael. “We’re in luck,” he said, pointing at the starry sky. “Ain’t gonna rain tonight.”
David nodded. Michael kept playing Warfighter. Graddick pointed at the moon, which was just above the eastern horizon. “We’re gonna head in that direction tomorrow,” he said. “Over to Haw Knob. We’ll drive along the Smithfield Road until it ends and then we’ll hike up the mountain.”
“Why there?” David asked.
“It’s a good place to hide. They got limestone caverns up there, and a mountain spring not too far way. And you can see for miles around, which gives you some warning if someone’s coming after you.”
“But what will we eat? I mean, after we run out of Dinty Moore?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep you supplied. Satan’s men ain’t looking for me, so I can come and go. You can hole up at Haw Knob till the end of the summer. By then the heathens will give up the hunt and you’ll have an easier time getting to Canada or Mexico or wherever you want to go.”
David tried to picture it, spending the summer in a limestone cavern with Monique, Michael, and Elizabeth. The plan was worse than impractical—it was hopeless. No matter how long they hid in the mountains, the army and the FBI wouldn’t stop looking for them. And even if, by some miracle, they managed to elude their pursuers and make it across the border, they still wouldn’t be safe. Sooner or later the Pentagon would track them down, whether they were in Canada or Mexico or the Antarctic Peninsula.
After a few minutes Graddick stood up and went to the fire, which was burning well now. Wrapping his hand in a gray handkerchief, he retrieved the heated Dinty Moore cans and distributed them to David, Michael, and Monique. He also handed out some plastic spoons he’d found in the glove compartment of his car. The stew was barely warm but David started to eat anyway, hoping to forget his troubles for a little while as he shoveled the viscid beef out of the can. Before he could take a second bite, though, he looked up and saw Monique looming over him, not more than three feet away, with the laptop and attached flash drive tucked under her arm. Even in the darkness he could tell she was agitated. Her mouth was open and she was breathing fast.
“I got something,” she said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
David set the can aside and rose to his feet. He led Monique to a withered pine tree at the edge of the clearing, about twenty feet away from Michael and Graddick. He’d assumed he would feel exultant at this moment, but instead he was full of foreboding. The flickering firelight illuminated the left side of Monique’s face, but the right side was in shadow. “Is it there?” he asked. “The unified theory?”
“I didn’t think so at first. The equations looked like gibberish, to tell you the truth. But then I remembered what we talked about last night. The geon theory.”
“You mean there’s something to it?”
“It took me a while to see the connection. But the more I looked at the equations, the more they reminded me of the formulas you see in topology. You know, the mathematics of surfaces and shapes and knots. And that made me think of geons, the knots in spacetime. Here, let me show you.”
Monique opened the laptop and stood next to David so he could view the screen. Squinting, he saw a page with a dozen equations, each a long string of Greek letters and odd symbols: pitchforks, pound signs, circles with embedded crosses. It certainly did look like gibberish. “What the hell is this?”
She pointed at the top of the page. “This is the unified field equation, expressed in the language of differential topology. It’s similar to the classical equations of relativity, but it encompasses particle physics, too. Einstein found that all particles are geons. Each particle is a different kind of twist in spacetime, and the forces are ripples in the fabric!”
Her voice rose and she clutched David’s sleeve. She pulled him closer so he could inspect the equations, but he still couldn’t make heads or tails of them. “Hold on, hold on. Are you sure this is real?”
“Look, look here!” She moved her finger down to the bottom of the page. “This is one of the solutions to the field equation, describing a fundamental particle with a negative charge. It’s a geon, a minuscule wormhole with closed timelike curves. The solution even specifies the mass of the particle. Do you recognize the number?”
Just beneath Monique’s fingernail was this:
M = 0.511 MeV/c 2
“Jesus Christ,” David whispered. “The mass of an electron.” Although the mathematics was way beyond him, he knew that one of the hallmarks of the Theory of Everything was that it would predict the masses of all the fundamental particles.
“And that’s just the start. He’s got at least twenty more solutions for particles with different charges and spins. Most of these particles weren’t discovered until long after Einstein died. He predicted the existence of quarks and the tau lepton. And he’s got solutions for particles that haven’t even been found yet. But you can bet your life that they exist.”
Monique scrolled through the file, revealing page after page of topological equations. As David stared at the laptop’s screen a burgeoning joy filled his chest and began to spread throughout his body. The only thing he could compare it with was the elation he’d felt when Jonah was born. It was the ultimate triumph of physics, a classical theory that incorporated quantum mechanics, a single set of equations that could describe everything from the inner workings of a proton to the structure of the galaxy. He turned away from the screen and smiled at Monique. “You know what? This isn’t too different from what the string theorists are trying to do. Except the particles are loops of spacetime instead of strings of energy.”
“There’s another similarity. Take a look at this.” She scrolled down a few more pages and tapped her finger on an equation that stood out from the others:
“That’s the equation I saw in Warfighter!”
Monique nodded. “It’s called the holographic principle. The S stands for the maximum amount of information that can be jammed into a region of space and the A stands for the surface area of that region. Basically, the principle says that all the information in any three-dimensional space—the position of every particle, the strength of every force—can be contained in the two-dimensional surface of the space. So you can think of the whole universe as a hologram, like the ones you see on your credit cards.”
“Wait a second, I think I’ve heard of this.”
“String theorists have been talking about the principle for years, because it offers a way to simplify the physics. But it turns out that Einstein came up with the idea half a century ago. His unified theory is built around it. He used the holographic principle to map out the whole damn history of the universe. It’s in the second section of the paper, right here.”
She pointed at another odd-looking equation. Beside it was a sequence of computer graphics; Dr. Kleinman had apparently reproduced three sketches that Einstein had drawn by hand long ago. The first image showed a pair of flat sheets moving toward each other. In the second image the sheets bent and rippled as they collided, and in the third they pulled away from each other, now pock-marked with newly born galaxies:
“What are those things?” David asked. “They look like sheets of tinfoil.”
“In string theory, they’re called branes. They look two-dimensional in the diagrams, but each actually represents a three-dimensional universe. Every galaxy and star and planet in our universe is contained in one of those branes. It’s more like flypaper than tinfoil, because nearly all the subatomic particles stick to it. The other brane is a completely separate universe, and they’re both moving through a larger space called the bulk, which has ten dimensions in all.”
“Why are they colliding?”
“One of the few things that can leave the brane and travel through the bulk is gravity. One brane can gravitationally attract another, and when they collide they get twisted and generate shitloads of energy. I’ve worked on this idea myself, which is why I recognized the diagrams right away, but nothing I’ve done comes even close to this. Einstein worked out the exact equations for our brane and how it evolved. His unified theory explains how everything got started.”
“You mean the Big Bang?”
“That’s what these diagrams are showing. Two empty branes collide and the energy from the crash fills our universe, eventually turning into atoms and stars and galaxies, all of them hurtling outward in a gigantic wave.” She grabbed his sleeve again and looked him in the eye. “This is it, David. The answer to the mystery of Creation.”
He studied the drawings, bewildered. “But where’s the proof? I mean, it’s an interesting idea, but—”
“The proof is here!” Monique stabbed at the formulas below the diagrams. “Einstein predicted all the observations that astronomers have made for the past fifty years. The expansion rate of the universe, the breakdown of matter and energy, it’s all right here!”
Overwhelmed, David gazed at the topological equations. He wished he could read them as easily as Monique could. “So what’s the problem?” he asked. “Why did you say I wasn’t going to like it?”
She took a deep breath and scrolled down to yet another page of esoteric symbols. “There’s something else that can travel out of the brane and into the extra dimensions of the bulk. You remember what a neutrino is, right?”
“Sure. It’s like the electron’s kid brother. A particle with no charge and very little mass.”
