Through the Reality Warp

by Donald J. Pfeil

  “You mean that info about alternate time tracks, different levels of space giving different continuums, and so forth?”

  “No, not those. They’re from fiction and the ’shine. I mean the theory about our universe being encapsulated, and that there are other universes, likewise encapsulated.” Although Billiard had been expecting one, he could detect no lecturing tone in Hall’s voice.

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t,” the former mercenary said with a shake of his head.

  Hall paused for a minute to relight his pipe, then continued: “Experimentation has indicated—not yet proved, but indicated—that there are more than one of what we think of as the universe. Not just more than one galaxy—that’s been recognized for hundreds of years—but more than one ‘totality,’ if that makes any sense. Which, I admit, it doesn’t—in English. Mathematically, though, it makes perfect sense.”

  “To a computer I suppose it’s perfectly clear,” Billiard commented.

  “A computer programmed according to conventional cosmological theory would find it perfectly impossible, since it wouldn’t have the data to formulate logical laws regarding the other universes and their relationships to us. In effect, it was only through intuition that the groundwork was laid for the encapsulated universe theory; and that was before the drain—which seems to prove the theory—began.”

  “I’m afraid this still isn’t completely clear to me,” Billiard insisted. “Perhaps what I need is the math necessary to understand the theory in its original language.”

  “Yes, that might help,” Hall said with a smile, “but unfortunately we just don’t have the time to give you the necessary grounding. Let’s see if I can make it a bit more comprehensible in English.

  “Our universe contains a tremendous, but not infinite, amount of mass. That mass generates gravitational fields. But it also seems to be generating another sort of field: a field of binding energy which is encapsulating the universe, holding the mass that makes up our universe together, and at the same time keeping our universe totally separate from other—encapsulated—universes. Indeed, our encapsulated universe seems to exist inside another encapsulated universe, and undoubtedly there are other universes encapsulated within ours.”

  “You mean there are possibly two universes occupying the same space at the same time?” Billiard asked in a completely serious tone, although there was a twinkle of humor in his eyes.

  “Yes and no,” Hall said with the same touch of humor. “According to the theory, they’re occupying the same space, but with no points of contact, no common reality—or at least that’s the way the original theory read. It postulated that the encapsulating field totally cut off a given universe from any other universe.

  “There is, furthermore, one other property of the field which is quite important, in light of all that has happened since the theory was formulated. The strength of the binding force field seems to be directly proportional to the mass of the universe. Now, we’ve known for some time that the universe, as a whole, is expanding. Originally we believed the universe was expanding through infinite space. Many theories postulate that, in expanding, the universe is creating the space to expand into. That’s another story, however, and not really germane to our problem here. What is germane is that the rate of expansion is inversely proportional to the strength of the binding force field, which means that the size of a universe is inversely proportional to the amount of mass making it up.

  “As it turns out, Nature torpedoed our earlier theory. There are common reality points. Points where different universes meet.”

  Again Hall paused to relight his pipe, and in the moment’s silence Billiard glanced at the three officials who had brought him into this. The guild general was obviously trying to follow what Hall had been saying, but without much success. The representative from the Federation was scribbling on a pad in front of him, but Billiard was certain it had nothing to do with the lecture being delivered by Hall. The politician from Earth was, without pretence, asleep.

  “To continue,” Hall said, interrupting Billiard’s casual survey, “the original theory did postulate that there was no connection between universes. I studied the theory, read the papers done on it in the scientific journals, but it didn’t seem to have any connection to the work I was doing at the time, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.

  “I was working on a new black hole theory, trying to describe, mathematically, where the mass and energy being sucked into the black holes were going. Quite by accident I discovered the connection between black holes and encapsulated universes.”

  “The matter and energy are going from our universe, through a real black hole and into another universe,” Billiard guessed.

  “Correct—to a point.” Hall was patting his pockets again, searching for the lighter, and Billiard was beginning to wish he had brought a set of nose filters with him. “What made the connection in my mind,” Hall said, giving up relighting his pipe for the moment, “was the offhand mention, by a friend, of Garth’s work on quasars. Using a five-hundred light-year baseline for parallax observations, Garth had been able at last to prove that quasars were not nearly as far away as many theories indicated, that they were much smaller than had generally been assumed, that all quasars were to be found in the gulfs between galaxies, and that they were putting out slightly less energy than had been thought.”

  “I know,” Billiard interrupted again, “that quasars were once felt to be exploding galaxies. Galaxies with chain-reaction supernovae going on in the core.”

  “That was one theory, yes. Garth proved otherwise. He showed that instead of being galaxy-size, most quasars were more of the order of cluster-size or smaller. Well, my work on black holes and the fact that I had just read a paper on the encapsulated universe theory and the comments about quasars came together inside my head—about three inches back of my nose, one inch up, and a quarter inch to the right—with a click. Or perhaps it was a clank.

  “I reprogrammed my computer and came up with some pretty interesting results. First, that quasars, which I was beginning to call ‘white holes’ in my mind, were only found in areas where magnetic and gravitational flux is extremely weak—areas where, according to theory, that binding force which encapsulates, and also pervades, the universe is also weakest. And second, that, in any given volume of space large enough to contain a statistical sample, the amount of matter and energy disappearing into black holes is very close to the amount of matter and energy being ejected by the quasars in the surrounding extra-galactic spaces. In other words, we aren’t losing or gaining anything—we’re trading matter and energy with another universe.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Billiard asked. “If everything’s balancing out, if we’re getting back as much as we’re losing, I can’t see where there’s any big danger—through you do say, I recall, that our universe is losing matter and energy…”

  Hall leaned forward, poured himself a glass of water from the carafe in front of the Federation representative, drank deeply, then settled back into his chair. “There wasn’t any problem up until about a year ago. In the space we’ve explored, and in the contiguous spaces belonging to races we’ve made contact with, we’ve pretty well mapped out the locations of all the neutron stars, dust clouds, black holes, and other possible menaces to interstellar navigation. Then, a few years ago, a couple of new but small black holes just suddenly appeared over toward M’lawmi space. Planetary-size holes. One of them captured an entire caravan of M’lawmi traders.

  “It’s been a standard assumption that a black hole, regardless of what it’s a hole into is created by the total collapse of a star somewhat larger than Sol. These ‘holes,’ though, just popped into existence—or perhaps non-existence might be a better word—where there had been no stars. It took about six months for someone to realize that something very unusual was going on, and another three months to put together a study unit. I was picked to head that unit.”

  “And you found out someone was cre
ating these ‘black holes’?” Billiard asked incredulously.

  “No, not at first,” Hall answered, twisting his pipe in his hands, all thought of lighting it forgotten now. “We were still trying to form a theory which would account for the sudden presence of those holes, when a tremendous hole, over a million miles in diameter, suddenly appeared. Within a matter of weeks the systems of five suns were disrupted totally as the fantastic gravitation warped space in its vicinity. Over a hundred million people have already died, half of them when one sun went nova.”

  “How can such a thing happen?” Billiard asked. “I can’t believe that any race could create something that big, that powerful.”

  “We couldn’t either,” Hall answered with a shake of his head. “But before long we began to understand how it could happen. However, to start with, the size of the thing had us fooled. It was so large we couldn’t see how it could possibly have been artificial—that is to say, done by some sentient beings—so we were looking for natural explanations. Then someone brought up the encapsulated universe theory, and it became obvious that just because it is an enormous hole to us doesn’t mean it’s that large to someone else, say, in another universe.”

  “Sorry, you lost me there,” Billiard said with a shake of his head.

  “Remember when I said that the comparative size of a universe, when relative to another, is dependent upon the masses of the two universes? Well, let’s suppose that our universe is encapsulated within a universe with a much smaller total mass, that is, the other universe would be much larger than our universe. Or, from another viewpoint, to a being living in that other universe, our universe might be very small. Perhaps only a matter of feet across.”

  “That seems pretty hard to believe, and it still doesn’t explain how the pseudo-‘black holes’ came into existence.”

  “You first have to make the assumption,” Hall said, “that the beings in the other universe are a bit ahead of us in the field of encapsulated universe theory.”

  “Why?”

  “Well… assume for a moment that they are ahead of us in this field. Next, assume that they have developed some sort of encapsulated-universe detector: some way of finding another universe—even though there is, as far as we know now, no way of building such a detector.”

  “If we can’t, then what makes you think they’ve been able to build such a thing?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s assume they’ve been able to locate an encapsulated universe within their own. One with so much mass, in relation to that of their universe, that it’s only a matter of a few feet across, to them.

  “Once you’ve managed to locate something, prove it actually exists,” the scientist-mathematician went on, “whether it’s a subatomic particle or a miniature universe, it’s only a small step to the development of tools to work with that discovered something. And once they had found a way to work with the encapsulated universe they’d located, it was only a matter of time before they were able to force a hole through its encapsulation. A hole that would provide them with a virtually unlimited source of power.”

  “The entire energy potential of our universe, draining out into their universe…” Billiard said, awe in his voice.

  “Right,” Hall replied, now searching for his lighter once again.

  “But how do you know that’s what has happened?” Billiard asked.

  “We don’t—not for sure,” Hall answered. “Or at least we aren’t sure the details are correct. The overall picture is accurate, though. We know, because we managed to send a probe—a robot ship—through the big ‘black hole.’ Through into that ‘other’ universe. And one of the surprises we got was that the ship exited from the black hole into that other universe with no relative size difference, which made it possible for our telemetry equipment to work.”

  “Huh? You lost me again.”

  “As closely as we were able to determine after we brought the probe back—brought back what was left of it, I mean—the basic subatomic particle is acted upon directly by the encapsulating field. If the basic particle expands or contracts, so does everything which it makes up: electrons, protons, atoms, molecules—matter! Although the other universe is incredibly larger than this one, when the ship entered it after passing through the black hole, it was the same size relative to that universe as it had been to this one.”

  “What did you mean when you said you brought back ‘what was left of it’?” Billiard asked.

  “The probe emerged from the ‘white hole’ in their space, and must have met quite a team of scientific observers on duty around their created ‘quasar.’ Along with the observers must have been a pretty good-sized military contingent. The probe, we judge, was attacked almost immediately with a wide variety of weapons, and only the tremendous emergence velocity of the probe kept it from being totally destroyed.”

  “What else did you learn?”

  “We picked up quite a few of their transmissions, both audio and video. And the most important thing we learned was that if you passed one of them on the street outside here, you probably wouldn’t even look twice.”

  “What?” Billiard yelled, sitting forward suddenly in his seat. “You mean they’re Earth-humans?”

  “No,” Hall said, holding up his hand. “I didn’t say that. I said they would not attract notice on the street outside. They definitely aren’t from Earth, however.”

  “I thought for a minute—”

  “Yes,” Hall said, “the same thought occurred to us as soon as we saw the pictures—that they might have been accidentally sucked through a hole into that universe, and that they’re actually from Earth stock. The information we got, though, indicates they’ve been there for a long time. And the technology needed to get a ship—like our robot—safely through a ‘black hole’/’quasar’ into their universe didn’t exist until just a few years ago. Before that, any ship trying to transfer from one universe to another could possibly have made it—but only in the form of totally disorganized energy.”

  “So what do we do about it?” Billiard asked.

  “There’s only one thing we can do,” Hall answered, staring at the floor as if suddenly unwilling to meet the ex-mercenary’s eyes. “We must send a man through to find and capture the equipment they’re using to punch the holes through our encapsulation. We… we believe,” he searched for words hesitatingly, “that the large hole—and the earlier, small ones—will fall in on themselves, disappearing once the equipment is disconnected. Their ‘white hole’ will likewise disappear. And… and we hope we may never have to worry about them poking more holes through, into our universe, again.” Hall closed his eyes momentarily, as if in silent prayer.

  “What about our pilot, how does he get back—?”

  Hall continued quickly: “We—that is, the pilot—must stop them permanently, because it’s unlikely that the happy coincidence which put the hole near us would happen again; if they should happen to poke a hole through the encapsulation in a part of our universe without intelligent life—or without life sufficiently advanced to work out the solution to the problem—the entire universe would be destroyed in a matter of years.”

  “Years?” Billiard exclaimed. “Surely the energy drain from our universe into theirs can’t be that large!”

  “No, it isn’t—at this point. But the simple fact that they’ve created a hole is putting a strain now on the very fabric of our space that will, if allowed to continue, destroy us. This strain, in a very short time—probably not more than two decades—will suddenly turn the big hole into a tremendous ‘tear.’ Our calculations show that, in that case, a substantial fraction of the matter and energy in our universe would be injected into their universe in a matter of microseconds. Needless to say, neither universe could survive such an explosion.”

  Billiard simply shook his head. For a moment at least, until he had time to digest what Hall had told him, he would simply have to accept the problem without trying to understand its many ramificatio
ns.

  Hall cleared his throat, looked around the room, then at the floor, still refusing to meet Billiard’s eyes. “There is another slight problem,” he said timidly.

  “Which is?”

  “We have no theories to explain it, but the probe discovered that there is a temporal ‘interface’ between the universes, and that there is some distortion caused by that interface. The rate of time flow within the two universes seems to be the same, despite their size differential. But when passing through the interface against the direction of energy flow—that is, back from their universe to ours—there seems to be a slight, ah, displacement.”

  “How great a ‘displacement’?” Billiard asked, assuming that this was a catch Hall had been hiding, for fear he would reject the mission out of hand.

  “The factor seems to be roughly two hundred million to one.”

  “What?”

  The scientist-mathematician looked straight at Billiard for the first time in quite a while. “It took a few minutes for the probe to poke back through the encapsulation into our universe, and the time-flow distortion seemed to give a displacement at that rate, in a positive—that is, up-time—direction.”

  “All of which means exactly what?” Billiard asked quietly.

  “In round figures,” Hall answered, “it took the probe three minutes to punch back through into our universe—against the energy flow. And during those three minutes in the interface the probe aged eleven hundred and forty-one years.”

  “In other words, whoever you send won’t be coming back.” Billiard said in a flat, unemotional voice.

  “I’m afraid that’s true. He’d die of old age before completing reentry into our universe. Even if we could develop some sort of suspension unit to keep the man alive through the interface, he would be coming back to a world with a completely different culture, which I doubt very much he would be able to fit into.”

  “Okay, let’s table that for a minute. I need more time, a lot more time, to think about it. Suppose someone does go through, does capture and disconnect—even destroy—their machinery, what’s to keep them from building a new punch to put more holes through to this universe?”