The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  He grunted a thank-you, then went to stand awkwardly near one of the vinyl waiting area couches, pausing to knead his eyebrows and temples in a futile attempt to ward off the headache he already knew was inevitable. When he looked up a moment later, a fortyish woman stood before him, wearing a loose blouse and pleated grey skirt.

  “Inspector Lagrange?”

  Short black hair framed a slightly roundish Kewpie-doll face: button nose, cherub mouth, dark red lipstick, touch of rouge. Lagrange thought her just short of pretty. “I’m here to see Dr Elizabeth Parkes,” he said.

  “I am she.”

  Apparently, his expression did not sufficiently conceal his reactions.

  “I do not fit your conception of a nuclear physicist?”

  He smiled back. “No, no, it’s just . . . the receptionist said they were sending somebody. I assumed –” He waved his hand. “It’s of no importance.”

  She stared at him bemusedly. “Well then, shall we?” She motioned toward a doorway. “I assume you’d like a look at the experiment first?”

  “That would be fine, yes.”

  She held the door, and he stepped through.

  The hangar area was vast; they padded along a blue steel catwalk past a dozen rows of huge, thrumming machines. “Generators,” said Elizabeth, over the din. “They feed the superconducting magnets for the accelerator.”

  “They give me a headache,” shouted Lagrange. He now had pain in his head and his ass; he supposed somewhere along the way he’d stub a toe. They emerged finally into the rear half of the building, seemingly empty except for a giant overhead crane suspended from a heavy steel girder. But as they approached the far end, Lagrange suddenly saw that a huge section of floor simply vanished into a cavernous rectangular pit. He fought off vertigo as they stared over the edge.

  “Six storeys deep,” said Elizabeth.

  At the bottom, amidst scattered pieces of equipment, tools, and ladders, was a structure that looked like two piggy-backed railroad cars. Thirty-centimetre-diameter ropes of cable, numbering in the hundreds, ran from the cars up the sides of the pit and disappeared into boxes of electronics that lined the walls.

  Lagrange pointed to a circle on the roof of the top car. “That’s where Monsieur Parino entered?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “A hatch. Hard to tell from up here.”

  “And you’re absolutely certain there’s no other way into or out of the experiment?”

  She shrugged. “You should know, Inspector. Your people have been over that structure about a thousand times.”

  “Not my people.”

  “You’re Swiss? I’m sorry, I just assumed you were French. I know there was some sort of a jurisdictional dispute because the tunnel straddles the border and –”

  “I’m with Europol.”

  Her eyes rose in feigned admiration. “Ah, Europol. Yes, someone said they were sending an expert.”

  “Hardly an expert,” said Lagrange. “Far far from it. But I suppose, relative to my local colleagues, I am perhaps ever so slightly more educated in the area.”

  “Would you like to go down to make an examination?” she asked. “I’m sorry, but there are no elevators, we’ll have to use the ladders.”

  Immediately, Lagrange felt his buttock spasm in anticipation. “That won’t be necessary, I’ve studied the reports.” He indicated an aperture in the side of the pit, five storeys below. “That’s where the beams emerge?”

  “That’s the opening into the collider tunnel, yes, but ‘emerge’ is perhaps not the right word. In operation, of course, the tunnel is continuous through the experiment. An extremely high vacuum must be maintained.” Somehow, she seemed to sense his discomfort. “Would you be more at ease in another area?”

  “That would be fine, yes,” said Lagrange.

  They exited the building by a rear door, emerged into bright sunlight. Almost immediately, he tripped over a raised section of concrete walkway, winced as he regained his balance.

  “Are you okay?” She reached out to steady his arm and momentarily, quite against his will, he became aroused.

  How pathetic, he thought, that the mere incidental touch of a woman could do that to him. “I’m fine,” he said. “I strained a hamstring while I was jogging the other day. A warning from nature, I suppose, to stop trying to interfere with her course.”

  “Now you sound like Giorgio.”

  “Really? In what way?”

  “He was always talking about death. Well, alluding to it, anyway. That is, when he wasn’t talking about physics. He seemed to feel he was racing against a timetable. He wanted to get the Nobel while he could appreciate it.”

  They entered a narrow two-storey building that connected at an odd angle to two other identical structures.

  “He was disappointed he didn’t get it for the Higgs . . .”

  “You know about the Higgs?”

  They walked down an asbestos-tiled corridor. “Not much. I know it’s the name given to fields of some sort and also to the particles that presumably transmit them. Higgs bosons, I believe they’re called. Goldman found the first one right there and got the prize – when was it? – about fifteen years ago.”

  “Two thousand three,” she said. “Giorgio felt it should’ve been his.”

  They entered a small cantina. Candy and Coke machines on one wall. Ten tables and chairs. Microwave oven. Coffee stand.

  “This okay?” she asked.

  “Anything,” he said. “As long as I don’t have to hear those generators.” They sat at one of the tables, and she brought over some cafe au lait. He sipped at the Styrofoam cup. “So Giorgio was bitter.”

  “Oh, of course,” she said quickly. “Isn’t that de rigueur for world-class physicists who feel they’re being overlooked? Bitter, driven, obsessed, callous” – her voice deepened, her gaze drifted off – “manipulative, cold, self-absorbed –”

  “But you were in love with him.” Her focus abruptly returned. “As I said, I’ve seen the reports,” he added, almost apologetically. “It was in the interviews.”

  She shrugged. “I was at one time, yes. I suppose it was common knowledge. Physicists gossip like anyone else.”

  “And was the love reciprocated?” He could see the hurt ripple across her features, and he leaned forward. “Mademoiselle Parkes, I am truly sorry for what I realize must seem like an outrageous intrusion into your personal life, but I beg you to try to understand my position. Giorgio Parino was perhaps the world’s greatest experimental physicist. His disappearance under the conditions of the experiment –”

  “Some of us would not call it a disappearance.”

  He nodded stiffly. He was not quite ready for semantic scientific nitpicking. “Nevertheless, the pressure from the authorities and the public and the press for a complete explanation –”

  “Fuck the authorities!” said Elizabeth. “And the public. And the press. And –”

  “And the police. Of course,” filled in Lagrange, grinning.

  She softened, grinned back. “Of course.”

  He drained his cup. “Tell me about the Higgs.”

  She pursed her lips. “As you said, a type of field. Still far from being understood. The Large Hadron Collider we have here was meant to investigate it. Current ideas have been expanded from theories first developed in the 1980s and ’90s to explain how the electroweak force, which is transmitted by four zero-mass particles, could be transformed into two separate forces, one of which has massive particles as its carrier. The thinking was – is – that there’s some kind of a field, the Higgs, that permeates all of space and that gave particles their masses when the early universe congealed.”

  “And the collider is able to re-melt that field.”

  “You smash together two beams of protons at seventeen teravolts, you get a hell of a lot of interesting effects.”

  “Including travel through time?”

  Again, she smiled. Then stood up. “Let’s walk. You feel like walking?”

/>   He didn’t. “Fine.”

  “I’ll show you the Megatek room.”

  “Okay.”

  They emerged from the cantina, turned down the corridor. “You know, Lagrange is a famous name in physics,” she said.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” he responded. “So my mother used to inform me practically every day. Even at one time claimed he was my ancestor, although I doubt it. If he was, I’m afraid I’d have been a terrible disappointment to him.”

  “You were not a good student?”

  “I barely managed to eke out a master’s at Columbia.”

  “Ah, so that explains your excellent English: You went to school in the States.”

  “As I said, my family had hopes. Fortunately, the experience demonstrated quite clearly that I’d never be any more than a third-rate physicist, if that.”

  They turned a corner. “You must not let others’ opinions of you become your own,” she said with unusual intensity. “I had to constantly fight with Giorgio.”

  “He considered you third-rate?”

  No answer.

  “Was it because you’re a woman?”

  “He said . . .” She swallowed. Muscles worked high in her jaw. “He said I was very good on the details, but that I didn’t have the vision to be truly insightful. He said he realized it sounded sexist, but that all the women scientists he’d known seemed to have the same restricted perspective. ‘Tunnel vision’, he called it, and then he’d laugh, because of – I don’t know – some private double entendre. He said I was wonderful at poring over data and attending to minute individual tasks and that I shouldn’t beat myself to death trying to be something I was not.”

  “And you didn’t, I presume.”

  “No.”

  “Did you beat him to death?”

  They came to a room marked “Megatek”, and she paused at the door. “Am I being charged with a crime, Inspector? Is this an official Europol interrogation or a casual conversation?”

  Lagrange shrugged. “The answers are respectively, mademoiselle, ‘Not yet,’ and ‘Official interrogation.’ I apologize if my manner has been too informal.”

  She frowned, but Lagrange could see that the gesture was theatrical. “Perhaps I should have an attorney present.”

  He nodded slightly. “With all due respect, Dr Parkes, this is not America. There is no Miranda law here, nor any direct equivalent of habeas corpus.”

  She unlocked the door. “Whatever Giorgio did, he did to himself.”

  Inside the room were a half dozen scattered computer terminals, a shelf-lined wall filled with black notebooks, a bulletin board sprinkled with particle-collision photos, and finally, in the centre, two large machines that looked like 3-D video games. It was in these, the Megateks, that computer-enhanced, three-dimensional re-creations of the experiments in the collider pit could be displayed.

  “Some people say you could have stopped him.”

  “I tried. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “But it was you who threw the switch.”

  “At his order. At his insistence. Does that make me a criminal?”

  “Perhaps. There are several dependencies.”

  “Such as . . .”

  “Such as what exactly has happened to him. Such as whether you knew the consequences of his order.”

  “He was Director General of CERN, my immediate supervisor.”

  “Nevertheless, if your direct superior commands you to fire a loaded gun at his head and you do it” – he held out his hands – “the law says you are guilty of murder. And no matter that he is an arrogant, patronizing, womanizing bastard.” He paused. “Now, did you know the consequences of throwing that switch?”

  She inhaled deeply. “I . . .” She shook her head. “Giorgio had so undermined my confidence I couldn’t be sure of anything. I doubted my own mind.”

  “So you weren’t certain?”

  “No.”

  “But you are more confident now.”

  “I am more confident now, yes.”

  He sat down at one of the Megateks, fiddled with the joystick. “How did Giorgio first get the idea about time travel?”

  She leaned over one of the computers, began punching a few keys. “Here, better to show than tell.”

  A moment later, at the centre of his machine’s holographic projection volume, a schematic display of a detector appeared: cylinder for the central portion, larger cylinder for the electromagnetic calorimeters, rectangle for the hadronic calorimeters. She punched another button and, instantly, thirty or forty multi-coloured spaghetti tracks shot through the display.

  “A reproduction of event 1431,” she said. “The detector assembly surrounds the location where the protons collide.” She hit another key, and all but a half dozen of the tracks disappeared. She moved a joystick to enlarge the display. Three-inch-long traces fanned outward from a single point.

  “A jet,” said Elizabeth. “Not that uncommon. The energy was 11.3 teravolts. Now” – again her tapered fingers flew over the keys – “let me show it to you as time passes.”

  The traces slowly extended in length.

  “Each inch on the display scale takes about .2 picoseconds.”

  Suddenly, at about four inches, each trace seemed to double, joined by an adjacent twin, which streaked alongside it for about an inch and a half before disappearing.

  Lagrange turned, brow knit, palms up. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “No one did,” said Elizabeth. “Particles identical in every Fermi number – I know it’s impossible – had appeared from nowhere alongside the originals. Giorgio finally made the mental leap.”

  Lagrange’s mouth opened in a silent Ah. “There were no new particles. The originals simply moved back in time to join themselves at an earlier instant.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “The Higgs field had melted, mass had disappeared – and popped back about .3 picoseconds. The calculations confirmed there was a chunk of energy missing; Giorgio called it tau-sub-e, the temporal component.”

  “A totally unexpected effect.”

  “Totally. And, of course, Giorgio immediately recognized the macroscopic ramifications.”

  Lagrange shook his head.

  “The effect had occurred over a linear extent of nearly a millimetre, but there was no reason why that could not be expanded arbitrarily. Apparently – Have you read his 2017 Physical Review paper?”

  Lagrange said he had, but with very limited comprehension.

  “Apparently,” she continued, “as the universe cooled, the Higgs field congealed into microscopic domains, separated by walls like, mmm . . .” As she searched for an analogy, a tiny crevice appeared between her eyebrows; despite himself, Lagrange found it charming. “Like that plastic bubble paper they use to wrap gifts. The colliding beams popped the bubbles, releasing their energy.” She raised her eyebrows. “Anyway, Giorgio did the calculations for how to scan the beams so the bubbles would coalesce into a volume of arbitrary size.”

  “And inside the volume,” ventured Lagrange, “whatever was there would move backward in time?”

  She nodded. “Giorgio said they would have to give him two Nobel prizes, one wasn’t enough.” She grinned. “I suggested he should hold the prize a few minutes, then move back in time and stand alongside himself.” The grin vanished.

  “He took you seriously.”

  “Not immediately. His first priority was to go around the world, giving speeches. You understand, he was an incredible hero to physicists everywhere. He must’ve visited a hundred different countries.”

  “While the rest of the staff . . .”

  “Eighty of us. Studied the effect, repeated it, tried to understand it, tried to extend it. Eventually, we built a six-cubic-metre test chamber, used a magnetic field to suspend and levitate it in a vacuum – and sent it back approximately 3.3 picoseconds.”

  “You must’ve been ecstatic.”

  She gave a little snort. “I was disturbed. I felt there was somethin
g fundamental we were missing.”

  “And that’s when you gave the speech.”

  She nodded. There had been an assembly of the entire staff to discuss recent events in time travel. A conference room. Ninety-six yellow chairs in six even rows, blackboard in front, TV monitors lining one wall. Giorgio had taken a sub-orbital from Tokyo to attend.

  Seven or eight of the physicists had gotten up to speak, discoursing on this or that arcane area, making recommendations, complaining, fending off Giorgio’s staccato questions and comments. Finally, it was Elizabeth’s turn. She took the low podium, hesitantly began to talk, showed several prepared slides. Unfortunately, she could not quite conceptualize what was bothering her, and when you could not quite conceptualize, Giorgio jumped down your throat.

  “So the photographs were fuzzy,” he rasped. “So what. Clean your camera lenses.”

  A chuckle rippled through the audience.

  “They were clean, Giorgio. And the focus was checked.”

  “So what is your point?”

  “There . . . there is some spatial effect associated with time travel. Perhaps it is second-order, but –”

  “With all due respect, Elizabeth, your data hardly justifies the conclusion. Frankly, I wouldn’t even call it data.”

  “But the chamber . . . My measurements show it shifted nearly a millimeter –”

  “Oh, so we’re measuring distances now? Very good. Did you use a wooden ruler or a metal one?”

  More laughter, much of it strained.

  “I used a laser calipers.”

  “Ah, pardon me. I underestimated your technical ability.” Openly, savagely patronizing now. “Elizabeth, we are talking about a six-cubic-metre volume, subject to quite substantial forces here. Why are you surprised by a minuscule movement? Why do you think it’s important? Have you checked the magnetic field servos? Have you checked the uncertainties in the energy budgets?”

  “I tried, but I couldn’t –”

  “Have you done any supporting calculations? Any maths at all? Any thinking at all before you came up here with these details? Details are fine, Dr Parkes, but really, can’t we just get a little perspective on what is not a waste of time?”

  White-faced, choking, Elizabeth had croaked “Sorry” and fled the stage.