Final Theory

by Mark Alpert

  As he reached for the cart he heard footsteps behind him. Simon was charging down the tunnel with his Uzi. He didn’t pull the trigger, though; shooting from a distance was too risky because of the chance of a ricochet. The bastard held his fire, giving David a precious second to act. Clutching the front of the yellow cart, he pulled with all his might. But it didn’t budge. The cart was heavy, at least four hundred pounds, and its undercarriage rested on a heap of twisted metal. David pulled again, but it was no good. The damn thing was stuck.

  When Simon came within ten feet he raised his Uzi and took aim. David let out an animal yell, a scream of defiance. The mercenary fired, but David crouched to make one last pull and the bullets whizzed over his head. And in the same instant the cart finally yielded to his will and slid into the tunnel.

  The vehicle bucked like a bull as soon as its rear wheels touched the floor. Simon abruptly lowered his Uzi and hurtled forward. He dove toward the cart, reaching for its steering wheel, but at the last moment one of his boots slipped on a piece of broken glass. He fell into the path of the vehicle just as it barreled toward the beam pipe.

  David leaped over the broken gate and rolled to the side, behind a concrete wall. Then there was a flash of white light and a deafening bang.

  PROFESSOR GUPTA HEARD A DISTANT POP. A moment later the hum of the superconducting magnets subsided. Within a few seconds Collision Hall was silent. The Tevatron had shut down.

  Crouched in the corner of the storage closet, Gupta could hear his heart thumping. He closed his eyes and saw a wrinkled, undulating sheet, the same sheet that had appeared in the computer simulation he’d created. He saw a swarm of sterile neutrons break free of the sheet and run between its folds like a trillion white-hot cinders. And then he collapsed and saw nothing but blackness.

  He was awakened by the shrill cries of his students. They were fairly close, shouting “Professor! Professor!” in anguished voices. Forcing himself up, Gupta crawled to the front of the closet and pounded his fist on the door.

  The voices came closer. “Professor? Is that you?”

  Someone found the key and opened the door. The first ones Gupta saw were Richard Chan and Scott Krinsky, who rushed into the closet and knelt beside him. The others followed right behind, crowding into the small space. Gupta’s mouth was so dry, he could hardly speak. “Richard,” he rasped. “What happened?”

  Richard’s cheeks were wet with tears. “Professor!” he sobbed. “We thought you were dead!” With childlike abandon, he flung his arms around Gupta.

  The professor pulled away. “What happened?” he repeated, louder this time.

  Scott came forward, his glasses askew. An Uzi hung from a strap over his shoulder. “We were following Simon’s instructions, but a few seconds before impact there was an explosion in the E-Zero sector of the beam tunnel.”

  “So the collisions never started? There was no spacetime rupture?”

  “No, the explosion disrupted the beam line and the Tevatron went down.”

  Gupta felt a warm rush of relief. Thank heaven.

  “We started looking for you after the shutdown,” Scott added. “We were afraid Simon would kill you like he said.” He bit his lower lip. “He killed Gary and Jeremy. We found their bodies outside the F-Two tunnel entrance. I took one of their Uzis.”

  Gupta stared at the ugly black gun. “Where’s Michael?” He looked past Scott and Richard, searching for his grandson’s face. “Didn’t he come with you?”

  They looked at each other nervously. “Uh, no,” Scott answered. “I haven’t seen him since we left the control room.”

  The professor shook his head. His students stood around him like a band of helpless children. They’d failed him miserably and now they were waiting for forgiveness and their next instructions. Gupta’s anger at them put new strength in his limbs. He stretched his hand toward Scott. “Help me up,” he ordered. “And give me that gun.”

  Without hesitation Scott helped him to his feet and handed over the Uzi. Gupta cradled it at his hip as he stepped out of the closet. “All right, we’re heading back to the control room,” he announced. “We’re going to find Michael and restart the experiment.”

  Richard stared at him in dismay. “But there’s major damage to the beam line! The readings showed that half a dozen of the magnets are down!”

  Gupta waved his hand dismissively. “We can repair the damage. We have all the necessary equipment.”

  He marched through Collision Hall toward one of the exits, his students anxiously straggling in his wake. It wasn’t too late to make another attempt. It might take several hours to fix the beam line, but with a little luck they could accumulate another particle store by the end of the day. This time they would target the neutrinos at the original coordinates, five thousand kilometers above North America. The burst would spread its gorgeous rays across the sky just as night fell.

  As they stepped outside Scott caught up to him and gently gripped his elbow. “There’s another problem, Professor,” he said. “The lab’s security guards know we’re here. We saw three of them heading for the control room right after we left.”

  Gupta kept going, striding across a parking lot toward the ridge that ran above the beam tunnel. “It doesn’t matter. We’re going to fulfill our destiny. We’re going to remake the world.”

  “But the guards have guns! And more of them are coming!”

  “I told you, it doesn’t matter. Humanity has been waiting for more than half a century. The Einheitliche Feldtheorie can’t stay hidden any longer.”

  Scott tightened his grip on Gupta’s elbow. “Professor, please listen! We have to get out of here before they arrest us!”

  The professor shook off Scott’s hand and raised the Uzi, pointing the barrel at the fool’s chest. The other students stopped in their tracks, bewildered. Imbeciles! Couldn’t they see what had to be done? “I’ll shoot anyone who tries to stop me!” he yelled. “Nothing in the world can stop me now!”

  Scott raised his hands but he didn’t back away. Instead the fool took a step forward. “Please be reasonable, Professor. Maybe we can try again sometime, but right now we have to—”

  Gupta shut him up by firing into his heart. Then he shot Richard, who tipped backward to the asphalt. The others just stood there, wide-eyed. They didn’t even have the sense to run away. Enraged by their stupidity, the professor continued shooting, sweeping the Uzi across their stunned faces. They jerked like marionettes as they died. Gupta fired several extra rounds to make sure they were all dead. They were worthless anyway, a waste of breath. He would go back alone and fulfill his destiny.

  He headed for Wilson Hall, marching beside the ridge, but now a black SUV pulled off the road and three men in gray suits jumped out of the car. They crouched behind the vehicle, pointing their pistols at him and shouting indecipherable nonsense. More stupidity, the professor thought. There was an endless supply of it today.

  Annoyed, Gupta pivoted toward the men and raised his Uzi, but before he could pull the trigger he saw a yellow muzzle flash from one of their pistols. A nine-millimeter bullet sped through the air, moving as straight as a high-energy proton although not nearly as fast. The collision splintered Gupta’s skull, ejecting particles of skin and blood and bone. And then the professor’s mind broke free of our universe and melted into the cloudless sky.

  AN AMBULANCE AND A FIRE truck idled beside the F-Two tunnel entrance. David quickened his pace, hobbling as fast as he could toward the cinder-block building. He’d blacked out after the explosion in the beam tunnel, so he had no idea how much time had passed since he’d left Monique. Twenty minutes? Thirty? He remembered the terrible wounds to her stomach, the blood spurting from both sides. He hoped to God that the paramedics had gotten to her in time.

  When he was about twenty yards away he saw a body on the ground with a sheet covering it. Two firefighters in full gear stood nearby, looking down at the corpse. David stumbled to a halt, his legs quivering. His chest tightened a
s he spotted a second sheet-covered corpse a few feet to the left. And then, still farther to the left, he saw two paramedics in blue jumpsuits heaving a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. He caught a glimpse of a brown face with an oxygen mask over the mouth. “Monique!” he cried, bounding toward the stretcher. She was alive!

  A third paramedic, a tall kid with a black mustache, intercepted him before he reached the ambulance. “Hey, slow down, buddy!” the kid said, grasping his arm and looking him over. “What happened to you?”

  David pointed at the stretcher. A blanket of gauze was wrapped around Monique’s midsection. One of her hands was also bandaged. “How is she? Is she going to be all right?”

  “Don’t worry, we stabilized her. She’s lost a lot of blood, but she’ll be okay. And the surgeons can reattach the severed fingers.” He stared with evident concern at the gashes on David’s forehead. “It looks like you could use some help, too.”

  Tensing, David stepped backward and pulled his arm out of the paramedic’s grasp. He’d been so concerned about Monique, he’d forgotten what he’d just gone through himself. Although he’d rolled behind a concrete wall before the beam pipe shattered, he knew that high-energy protons could generate all sorts of nasty secondary particles. “Don’t touch me,” he warned. “I was in the beam tunnel, so I might be hot.”

  The kid’s mustache twitched. He backed away and turned to one of the firefighters standing by the corpses. “Alex! I need a radiation reading, quick!”

  Alex rushed over with a Geiger counter, a thick metal tube connected to a handheld monitor. If David had been exposed to the shower of particles from the beam pipe, the counter would detect some radioactive material on his clothes or skin. He held his breath as the firefighter waved the tube in front of him, tracing a convoluted pattern from his head to his feet.

  The man finally looked up. “Nothing detectable,” he reported. “You’re clean.”

  David whistled in relief. He might have absorbed some radiation, but not enough to kill him. Thank God for concrete shielding. “You should send a unit to the E-Zero entrance,” he told the firefighter. “That sector of the tunnel needs to be secured. There’s another fatality down there. Not much left of him, actually.”

  Alex shook his head. “Jesus! What the hell’s going on this morning? We got people shooting each other with Uzis, we got a wacko teenager going on a rampage, and now you’re saying we got another dead body in the—”

  “Hold on. A teenager?”

  “Yeah, some nut job screaming in the parking lot by the control room and bashing all the equipment inside the trucks and…hey, where do you think you’re going?”

  David started running. While the firefighters yelled at him and reached for their radios, he dashed past the cinder-block building. This was the last leg of his journey, the last five hundred yards. He was alone now and exhausted to the point of collapse, but he had just enough strength left to scramble along the curving ridge, past the Main Injector and the Antiproton Source and the Booster and the Accumulator, until he reached the sprawling complex that housed the Tevatron’s control room.

  He charged full speed into the lot where Gupta’s trucks were parked. First he noticed the black Suburbans positioned at both exits to prevent anyone from leaving. Then, to his delight, he saw Karen and Jonah, sitting on the hood of one of the SUVs. A couple of FBI agents stood nearby, offering Jonah a breakfast bar and handing Karen a cup of water. These agents seemed remarkably tame; neither pulled out his gun as David jogged toward them. One of them even smiled as Jonah slid off the hood and jumped into David’s arms.

  After waiting for father and son to finish hugging, the agents took David aside and patted him down. Then their commander, a cheery, gray-haired gentleman with a Notre Dame pin in his lapel, came over and shook his hand. “I’m Agent Cowley,” he announced. “Are you all right, Dr. Swift?”

  David eyed him warily. Why the hell was he being so nice? “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Your ex-wife’s already told us about the ordeal you’ve been through. You’re a very lucky man.” Turning serious, the agent lowered his voice. “Nearly everyone else is dead, I’m afraid. Professor Gupta and all his students. It was a bloodbath.”

  “So you know about Gupta? And what he was trying to do?”

  “Well, yes, in a general sense. I got a rundown from Agent Parker on the way over here. We still have a few questions, though. We’d greatly appreciate it if you could come back to our office and help us fill in the blanks. After we get you bandaged up, I mean.”

  The agent smiled in a grandfatherly way and squeezed David’s shoulder. None of this fooled him, of course; the FBI was still after the same thing. This false politeness was just a change in tactics. Their previous attempts had failed, so now they were trying something new.

  David smiled back at him. “All right, I can do that. But I’d like to see Michael first.”

  “Michael? You mean Professor Gupta’s grandson?”

  “Yeah, I want to see if he’s okay. He’s autistic, you know.”

  Agent Cowley thought it over for a second. “Sure, you can see him. The boy’s not so talkative, though. He was screaming his head off when we found him, but now he won’t say a word.”

  Placing his hand on David’s back, the agent led him to one of Gupta’s delivery trucks. As they came closer David saw a heap of broken computer equipment that looked like it had been tossed from the back of the truck. The FBI agents had roped off the area with yellow crime-scene tape, but it seemed unlikely that they’d be able to recover anything useful from the debris. All the computers Gupta had used to simulate the spacetime rupture had been pried open and the hard drives removed. Shiny splinters of the glass memory disks were scattered across the parking lot.

  Michael stood just outside the crime-scene tape, flanked by two more agents. His hands were cuffed behind his back, but he didn’t seem perturbed. He was grinning at the pile of shattered equipment as if it were a birthday present. David had never seen the boy so happy.

  Cowley gave a signal to the agents guarding Michael and they stepped back a couple of feet. “Here he is, Dr. Swift. He made quite a mess of things, but now he’s settled down.”

  David gazed in wonder at the damaged circuits, chips, and disks that had held, at least for a brief time, the unified field theory. He realized now that he’d seriously underestimated Michael. Although the boy had fallen prey to his grandfather’s wiles, David felt certain that Michael would never reveal the theory to the FBI, no matter how much they interrogated him. He was, after all, Einstein’s great-great-grandson. Just as Hans Kleinman had kept the vow he’d made to Herr Doktor, Michael would keep the promise he’d made to Hans.

  David smiled at the boy and pointed at the heap of debris. “Michael, did you do this?”

  The teenager leaned forward, bringing his lips close to David’s ear. “I had to,” he whispered. “It wasn’t a safe place.”

  Epilogue

  ON A WARM SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN OCTOBER IT WAS hard to imagine a better place to be than the school yard on West Seventy-seventh Street. Within a rectangle of asphalt fifty yards long, about two dozen kids tossed footballs, dribbled basketballs, waved lacrosse sticks, and swung baseball bats. Their parents mostly sat on the park benches along the perimeter, reading newspapers or eating barbecue chicken from the take-out place across the street. But David stood in the center of the yard, right in the middle of all the action, and played catch with Jonah and Michael.

  Rearing back, David hurled the baseball way up in the air, at least fifty feet high. Jonah snagged the ball in the webbing of his glove, then threw a grounder to Michael, who scooped it up and fired it back to David. The ball made a satisfying thwack in his mitt. Not bad, he thought. The boys had been playing baseball every weekend since August and the practice showed. If you play any game long enough, he thought, you’re bound to get good at it. The same was true for chess and piano and physics.

  Karen sat on one of the park bench
es with Ricardo, her new boyfriend. Ricardo was a bassist in a jazz combo that performed in several small clubs around Manhattan. The guy had long Jesus hair, never wore socks, and was practically penniless, but Karen was crazy about him. And to tell the truth, David liked Ricardo a lot more than her old boyfriend, the geriatric lawyer, Amory Something-or-other. David couldn’t even remember the old fart’s name now.

  Monique sat on a neighboring bench, reading the New York Times. She and Michael had been coming into the city pretty regularly ever since she gained custody of the teenager. Monique had bonded with the boy during the two weeks she was at the University of Chicago Medical Center, recovering from her gunshot wounds and the mutilation of her hand. The FBI had let David and Michael visit her every day; at that point, the agents were still playing nice, still hoping to wheedle some information out of them. When the Bureau finally gave up, the agents tried to release Michael to his mother, but Beth Gupta wouldn’t take him. After two weeks in detention, she was itching to get back to Victory Drive. So the head of the FBI task force—Lucille Parker, the same woman who’d interrogated David—surprised everybody by recommending that the boy live with Monique in Princeton.

  David tossed another high pop to Jonah. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how lucky they were. Agent Parker could’ve kept them in detention for months, wearing them down with daily interrogations, but instead she went easy on them. David got the sense that she regretted the whole affair and just wanted to get it over with. But she may have also seen the risks of digging too deeply. From the evidence at Fermilab she’d probably surmised that Einstein’s theory had fallen into the hands of a madman who nearly did something catastrophic. The fact that neither David nor Monique would say a word about the theory clearly indicated how dangerous it was. And maybe Agent Parker came to the same conclusion that Einstein had reached a half century earlier: the Theory of Everything had to stay hidden. Even the government couldn’t be trusted with it.