"That's good news," said Harvey. He tossed back another slug of bourbon. "I don't suppose you have any idea when we'll actually start all this enjoying?"
Jerry met Harvey's melancholy gaze. "It could be another eighteen months, if we want to do this right. Can you hold out that long?"
"Do I have any choice?" Harvey asked.
"Yes. We could bring in a silent partner, a money man. It would make our lives easier. But we lose control—whoever pays the piper calls the tune."
"I can hold out," Harvey said. "I just feel bad about sponging off you all summer."
Jerry laughed. "Listen to yourself. You've let me in on the greatest scientific discovery since Al Gore invented the Internet, and you're worried about a few bucks for meals and rent?"
"I wish you wouldn't do that," Harvey said.
"What?"
"Pretend this discovery is all mine. You always say, 'Harvey's discovery,' 'Harvey's invention.' I just did the theory. You built the machine. If you hadn't shown up at that horrible talk I gave.…" They both began to laugh, remembering the day they first met.
"I'll hold out," Harvey said.
He returned to his lonely motel room and played blues guitar, but the equations kept going around and around in his head. For the first time, a Greek letter—kappa, representing curvature—began to show up in the equations, and he could not make it go away. The more he thought about it, the more excited he got. This could change everything. He didn't need to tell Jerry about it; the idea was all his own. Jerry would be impressed. The money would come rolling in. Hadn't Jerry said that if he didn't do it, somebody else would? As soon as he returned to the lab, he would give his idea a try.
* * *
Harvey's face was white. "I've destroyed the world," he said.
Jerry felt a pang of fear. "What happened?"
Harvey was almost crying. "I didn't think. I didn't think! I'd been fooling around with an idea. And everything has been going so well. And the field generator was right there. I just changed a few of the connections."
Jerry paid him the compliment of taking what he was saying very seriously. "What have you done?"
"I made a sphere."
There was a long moment of silence. Then Jerry jumped up. "Show me."
There was a hole, about the size of a pea. It had cut through the metal ring, through the equipment on the shelf below, and on down through the cement floor.
"Oh, God!" Jerry said.
"It will fall right through the Earth," Harvey said, "consuming everything in its way—cement, dirt, rock, nickel, iron, molten magma, everything will go into the field. And nothing will come out. It will get more and more dense until it reaches the other side of the Earth. Then gravity will slow it, and it will come to a stop somewhere in the Indian Ocean. All the water it passes through will enter the sphere. None of it will ever come out. Then it falls back toward us. And it will keep doing that. Back and forth. Forever."
Harvey could feel the panic building. He became hysterical. He started to shout. "Don't you understand? The one-way sphere offers no resistance to matter going in. Atoms slip between the interstices of the atoms inside. It gets so dense there is a thermonuclear reaction—a fusion bomb the size of a pea. And it can't get out. No matter how great the pressure inside, nothing can ever get out. The one-way sphere just keeps eating everything it touches, until it swallows the Earth."
Jerry's voice was steady. "After it gets to the other side of the Earth and falls back toward us—can we stop it?"
"How? It will weigh tons. And even if we could work out how to stop it—what would we stop it with?" Harvey asked. "You're asking me to find a bottle for a universal solvent. It can punch through anything we try to use to stop it."
"Will it come back here?" Jerry asked.
"If it falls without friction, and I think it will, then in effect it's in orbit around the center of the Earth. It should return to its starting place, right here," Harvey said.
"The Earth turns," said Jerry.
"True. Okay, taking that into account, when it fell it already had momentum from the rotation of the Earth. It's been in free fall ever since." Harvey grabbed a legal pad and started to scribble equations. "Freshman calculus! Who would have thought freshman calculus might actually be useful?"
There was a long silence as Harvey scribbled and Jerry paced.
After what felt like forever, Harvey said, "Well, I've got some numbers."
Jerry held his breath.
"That thing I created will be coming back this way from the other side of the Earth in about an hour. It won't return to the exact point of origin, but it should still be somewhere inside this warehouse. And we don't want to be standing where it comes up. When it gets here, it'll be the same size it was when it started, but weigh millions of tons."
"How do we stop it?" Jerry asked.
"We can't."
"We've got to." Jerry reached up and put his hands on Harvey's shoulders. "Harvey, you're the most brilliant person I know. Think. Figure a way out."
"There isn't any way to stop it. It will take a long time, but eventually the entire planet will be inside that tiny sphere." Harvey felt numb. He wanted a drink.
"Think of the pressure! That much mass in so small a space! Your field can't possibly hold back that much pressure!"
"The field doesn't even feel the pressure. It just doesn't let anything out." Harvey paused, his face tight. "Remember when I asked, 'Where is everybody?' They're gone. They did this experiment and it killed them."
"Stop it! That kind of thinking doesn't help. You're wasting time. Listen to me. Harvey. Listen. You are on your way to being hailed as the greatest scientist in the world. Your discovery is going to bring cheap energy and clean water to billions. That is how you should go down in history—as humanity's great benefactor. Or do you want to be remembered as the man who destroyed the world? Now think! Is there any way to turn the field off when it pops back up out of the ground?"
"Oh, you wouldn't want to do that." Harvey shook his head. "Millions of kilograms per cubic centimeter—that means fusion. I don't know how to turn a spherical field off. I don't think it can be turned off. But I certainly don't want to turn it off this close to New York City."
"So what do we do now? You know the problem. Solve it!"
Sam came in. "What up, guys?"
Jerry took Sam over to the other side of the warehouse to explain.
Harvey went back to his legal pad. Then he looked up with a puzzled expression on his face. "I know how to stop it. We stop it with a one-way field that opens upward. We need to cover the floor of the laboratory with the field. The sphere will pass through the field from below and then fall back down. When it tries to go through the wrong way, it should stop."
"A million tons?" Jerry asked.
"It should stop. We've got to hurry. We don't have long."
"If we miss it on this pass, can we catch it the next time it comes around?"
"Maybe," Harvey said. "But we don't know how far away from the starting point it will move on each pass. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that it will come up outside the laboratory, where we can't find it."
Sam said, "All right, then. We need a bunch of eye screws, a soldering iron, lots of wire, and a drill with a long extension cord."
The field generator sat on a wheeled, metal cart, plugged into a power strip built into the cart. A heavily insulated cord hung down. Jerry gathered up the slack in the cord and tied it off, so it wouldn't drag on the floor. Then he examined the generator. "It looks fine. All the damage was to the ring, off to the side." He pulled the broken ring free from two set screws at the base of the generator and threw it away, then held out his hand. "Soldering iron." Sam handed him the tool and a roll of solder. It only took Jerry a few minutes to make the necessary repairs. "Okay, move the cart over to the door. How much time have we got?"
"I don't know," Harvey said. "Not long."
Jerry said "Be careful not to bump the cart
. That repair is fragile."
Gently, Jerry and Sam lifted the cart over the door sill while Harvey stood by helplessly. The three of them were in a dark alley. Traffic sounds came from the street. The Jersey sky was pale gray, crisscrossed by wires overhead.
Jerry picked up a large roll of insulated wire. He uncoiled a few feet, shaved the insulation off one end, and carefully inserted the wire into one of the two set screws that carried the output of the field generator. He then doubled the wire and tied it tightly to one leg of the wheeled cart, between the lower shelf and the wheel. He locked all four wheels in place. "Hand me the drill," he said, and Sam complied. "Eye screw." Harvey passed him one large eye screw from a full box.
The electric wire now ran from the generator down the leg of the cart and across to the inside wall of the warehouse about six inches above the floor. "I'll drill holes in the wall and put in eye screws," Jerry said. "Harvey, you keep tension on the wire and hook it through the eye of each screw. Sam, you start on the other side of the door and put in screws where we'll need them."
Harvey squatted down next to Jerry, then found it hard to breathe. He had chest pains. He sat on the cold cement floor. The drill made a deep grinding noise as it bit into metal, then a high whine as it punched through. Jerry screwed in the eye screw by hand and moved on. Harvey hooked the wire into the eye.
Jerry ran on ahead, pushing or kicking obstacles out of the way, lifting the drill's bright orange extension cord over obstructions.
There was a stitch in Harvey's side by the time they reached the second corner. They were near the old wooden desk, and Harvey thought how much better he'd feel if he had a drink. He put the thought out of his mind and unreeled more wire from the roll.
Harvey's imagination trembled back and forth between how good a drink would taste right now and fear of the million-ton bullet coming his way. He told himself that the odds against actually getting hit by the one-way sphere were astronomical, but there was still fear in the pit of his stomach and cold sweat on his brow.
In the third corner was the bathroom. The privacy walls of the bathroom were wood, about five feet high, bolted to the warehouse walls.
"Sam!" Jerry said. "We need you. Bring the circular saw."
Sam helped Jerry switch the orange extension cord from the drill to the saw and soon the wooden walls fell away. Harvey sat down on the cement floor, squeezed the roll of wire behind the pipes where they rose up out of the cement, and passed it to Jerry, who was crouched awkwardly in the corner behind the toilet.
As he stood, Harvey stared down at the cement, as if he expected the one-way sphere to come shooting up through the very spot where he had been sitting.
The drill noise from behind the toilet stopped and Jerry handed out the roll of wire. The three men ran for the fourth corner.
Sam said, "When the field is turned on, it's going to cut through those pipes. We'll have water all over the place."
"Worry about that later," Jerry said.
Stringing the wire along the last wall went quickly. Sam had already put the eye screws in place. Now the wire ran all the way around the warehouse, just above the floor. Harvey, holding the roll of wire, felt the muscles in his arm jump. It was hard to think. His chest pains were worse.
Jerry said, "Run the wire through that last eye screw next to the door and pull it as tight as you can."
"What if one of the screws comes lose?" asked Harvey.
"We don't want the wire to sag. If it's not more or less level, the field won't start."
"Right," said Harvey, and pulled.
Jerry tied off a double loop of wire on the same cart leg where they had started, completing the circuit. Then he measured off a length with his arm and passed the roll up to Sam, who cut it off, shaved the insulation, and made the final connection, wrapping the shaved section of wire around the set screw in the generator and pulling it tight. "Tighten the screw," he said.
Harvey fumbled for a screwdriver and tightened the screw with all his strength.
The three men stepped out into the alley. Jerry plugged the table's electrical cord into a plug just inside the door and halfway up the wall, flipped the switch and a blast of air came up through the field. From the far corner they heard the sound of gurgling water. Air rushing into the narrow gap below the field drew litter from the alley, which popped up through the one-way field and was tossed about in the uprush of air. The one-way field was now self-sustaining.
"How long have we got?" Jerry asked.
"I don't know," Harvey said. "It may already have come up while we were too busy to notice and gone down again. It may come up somewhere else entirely. It may not come up at all. We've done everything we can. All we can do now is wait."
"It will work," Jerry said. "Everything I've ever built to your specifications has worked."
"If that's true, then I suggest you find something to stuff in your ears," said Harvey. "Because when that sphere falls onto the field, it's going to make a very loud noise."
* * *
The President of the United States stood between American flags on a platform outside the warehouse, facing a large crowd. All of the nearby buildings had been torn down. Along each side of the warehouse, below ground level, mammoth air intakes had been installed. Power lines led from the warehouse roof to a row of towers that marched off into the distance.
The President had to shout to be heard over the roar of the turbines inside. "I am honored to designate this site, the original Gold Power Station, a National Monument. Inside this very warehouse, in a vacuum chamber protected by balanced, one-way containment walls, is the famous Sphere, a constant reminder that this great boon of cheap electricity comes with the price of eternal vigilance. It is up to the citizens of New Jersey, of America, and of the world, to always ensure that power is used as a force for good. And now, the men you've all been waiting to meet—Harvey Gold and Jerry Morgan."
Jerry looked boyish and couldn't stop grinning as he stepped out onto the platform to a thunderous wave of applause. When Harvey joined him, the applause grew even louder. Harvey felt young again, a hot-shot professor at the top of his game. And why shouldn't he feel that way? He was at the top of his game. If they thought the one-way shield was something, just wait until the news got out about what he was going to do next!
* * *
Dunnage for the Soul
By Robert Reed | 7755 words
Story ideas aren't always born instantly and fully formed. Sometimes they take a while to gestate. Sometimes, they take a very long while. Robert Reed tells us that he discovered the word "dunnage" around 1980 when he was working in a factory after college. "It felt very highbrow," he confesses, "written on the outside board in a stack of Abitibi/Masonite, and I thought up this title on the spot." More than thirty years and hundreds of publications later, he discovered the story that goes with the title.
Reed's latest project is an epic alternate history novel in four volumes called The Trials of Quentin Maurus, which you can find at Amazon.
I KNOW WHAT LOVE MEANS.
Not fucking much, that's what.
My parents, for example. I always thought I loved those people, and they certainly seemed to adore me. Except our little family didn't realize what I was. A complicated, sometimes clever machine living in their house, and they were fools wasting their warmth on the likes of me.
A person gets used to trusting his emotions. But what right do I have to emotions?
None at all, some people will claim.
And while that's not the worst part of this, it cuts. Do I even exist? Outside a sequence of electric impulses lazily following the habit avenue, I mean. Empirical evidence says, "Who the hell knows?" Nobody knows. But I can't stop asking the question. Life involves explaining yourself. To others, to yourself. And while I don't know any of your minds, I assume that everybody here is trying to answer the mystery inside me. Right?
So let's get started.
There was this couple who loved each other e
nough to make a boy. Except existence is easy enough. One squirt and a willing egg, and there you are. He was their only child, as it happens, and they gave him a home and gifts and loving words. Which speaks of love. But it bears mentioning that raising a child and dropping the occasional gift under the Christmas tree don't mean that much. Parents go to jail if they won't feed and clean what belongs to them, and gift-givers eventually receive their own packages.
Tell me I'm wrong.
Show me that the world is good and cynicism is misplaced.
To me, the best evidence of love is affectionate words. Sure, accomplished liars can pump out a lot of adoring noise. But lies have this way of building, acquiring chinks and fractures as the project grows. And if the boy is raised to believe that he is magnificent, a treasure in those old people's eyes, then I think he's entitled to be convinced by the love.
I used to be magnificent.
And to the best of my knowledge, I loved those people, too.
Don't tell me you understand.
You don't understand.
And never claim that you know me.
You haven't a fucking clue what this murderous machine understands.
* * *
As a rule, people hate tests.
On the other hand, I have always loved tests. Sitting tall in a bright sterile classroom, filling in ovals with pencil lead. The intellectual pressure bearing down, my future turning vivid and near. That was a joy for me. And it didn't hurt that I'm an excellent test-taker. That's a skill that helped me earn a scholarship to a quality university. But scholarships don't pay for everything, which was why I offered my body and my patience to any well-funded study that gave away cash.
During my junior year, for instance. An entire weekend and some blood was surrendered, and I endured every kind of psychological examination, and in thanks, I pocketed quite a lot of beer money. Most of the details are forgotten, but one moment felt peculiar, and that's why I remembered it. A grad student showed me a deceptively simple device. Three minutes to boot up and ten seconds to run. It resembled a dentist's X-ray wand, but was smaller and obviously handmade, right down to the packing tape over the seams. And instead of aiming at jaws and teeth, the tube was pointed at the back of my skull.
Fantasy & Science Fiction - JanFeb 2017 Page 12
