Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “He says you’re stuck on old ideas because they’re new to you. He says you should come up with something original.”

  “He’s being most helpful today.”

  “You asked.”

  “But no content; he really has nothing to say. Which may be why he didn’t stick around to elaborate.”

  “He said you weren’t ready to hear what he had to say.”

  Peter twisted in his chair, watching the table across the courtyard where the string theorists were holding court, four of them squeezed around a table the size of the one he was sharing with Anne-Marie, plus another half a dozen kibitzers—a couple of the gray eminences included—all crowded as close as they could get, clutching their plates to their chests, everybody yakking at once.

  “I should have known better, about Minakis,” Peter said. “You’ve got to watch out for these New Age geezers. One good idea in their life; then they can’t get a decent job for forty years, and they turn into little maharishis.”

  Her skin grew hot. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “It’s exactly what happened to David Bohm,” he said, heedlessly cutting her off. “The Zen of the Tao, or whatever. Woolly Dancing Masters. All that metaphysical New Age crap.”

  “New Age is the last term I would choose to describe Manolis Minakis,” she said.

  “Old Age would suit you better?” Peter asked.

  “Don’t be a shit.”

  “All right, let’s just drop the physics gossip.” She leaned away from him, furious. He leaned away too, as if they were repelling magnets. “Sorry I said anything. Forget it. How much more time do you have to spend on this Minakis story?”

  “Not much longer.”

  “What about Jenny?”

  “Jenny’s fine for a couple of days,” she said defensively. “Mama may have ratty wallpaper, but she loves her granddaughter.”

  “That’s a fine evasion. We were supposed to be on vacation. Does the vacation move to Paris now?”

  “I don’t know. Why not?” She stared around, distracted. “You’ve got to meet Mama sometime.”

  “I look forward to it.” With an effort, he relaxed his shoulders and softened his voice. “If she’s as fierce as you claim, she’s a natural phenomenon.”

  Anne-Marie smiled tightly. “A little more time, please.”

  They ate the rest of the meal in silence, and afterward Anne-Marie said she was feeling dizzy and needed to take a nap. In other words, leave me alone…

  He let her go. He didn’t want to hang around the villa where his wife and everybody else seemed to be signaling how much they wished he’d go away, so he decided to oblige the crowd and take a walk in the hills.

  Not a good time for a walk, the hottest hour of the day, everything shimmering in the rising air: the dusty roads, the stone walls, the dry fields, the blue sea discolored by coppery reflections. He passed whitewashed towers with crisscross openings under their roofs and stones projecting like spear points from their ridgelines, exotic structures that wobbled in the radiant heat like visions from the Arabian Nights. But they were only dovecotes.

  His mind wavered and swerved, one by one to the people he thought he knew but couldn’t make sense of, from his new wife, so passionate and prickly—and lately so vague and evasive—to old Minakis, as smug and imposing and out-of-date in his own way as the rest of the seniors in the crowd, to his junior colleagues who lived in the immediate futures of their careers, constantly fretting that the fashionable questions were becoming passé. And thence to his tiny stepdaughter, Jenny, who lived only in the moment…and finally to his first wife, Kathleen, someone he hadn’t talked to in almost two years.

  Kathleen had been a colleague, a mathematician, who’d left him because he’d become obsessed with questions of physics that he couldn’t bring himself to discuss with her. By the time he was willing to share them it was already too late for their marriage. It was a long time after that, when he thought he was a different person, freer, less obsessed, someone who had learned to care about other people, a better person, that he’d asked Anne-Marie to marry him.

  What he hadn’t realized and should have was that he was still in thrall to physics—to its motives rather, to a quest for the nature of nature, of the world itself—and that wherever his current obsession led him, no matter what he came up with this time, there would be no acclaim from his peers, no reward in this lifetime. Nor could Anne-Marie, however much she wished him well, share his passion.

  Equally what he hadn’t realized and should have was that Anne-Marie was herself obsessed and unwilling to share her obsession with him, except that it had something to do with her determination to gain full custody of her son. Peter had never met her ex-husband, Charlie Phelps. He’d spent a lot of time with Jennifer, a happy child whom he adored, if in a distracted way. He’d spent a bit of time with little Carlos too—well, a long weekend at Disneyland, anyway—and they’d gotten along, as far as any boy with sorrows to bear and a well-developed sense of self-preservation would allow a strange stepfather to get along with him, but Peter knew he would never share the fierceness of Anne-Marie’s determination to have Carlos around the house.

  Unable to communicate to each other what gripped them separately, the first months of their marriage had been filled with more tension than all the months that had gone before. And somehow Minakis had come along at just the wrong moment, pushing himself between them.

  Minakis. The thought of him made Peter switch mental channels; he found himself rehearsing what he should have said when Minakis challenged him in the lecture hall at noon.

  Because Minakis was right: most of Peter’s musings on reality could be reduced to Kantian cant. The Bell-inspired experiments stopped woefully short; having all but proved that reality was nonlocal—that at the quantum level, the past and the future were intimately tangled, because the effects of quantum measurement were not “timelike” but “spacelike,” meaning simultaneous—they hadn’t so much as hinted at why this was so.

  Reality was deeper than quantum mechanics, deeper than space and time. At the ultimate substrate, everything was connected. Peter even thought there might be a way to prove it, and last night Minakis himself had hinted at a similar view of things. Too bad neither of them had had the guts to spell it out in front of the lunchtime crowd.

  Causality was the rub: if information could be transmitted instantaneously, effects could happen before their causes. If that were so, the world should have dissolved into chaos. Not structured mathematical chaos. Real yawning chaos, the black throat that swallows everything.

  Peter balked at that. If all events are connected before and after they happen, part of a seamless multidimensional field, cause and effect are simply labels for sets of coordinates. Einstein wouldn’t have objected to such a worldview, though Heisenberg certainly would have. On this view, if causality is an illusion, then uncertainty is too. What if we cling to the uncertainty relations because they give the comforting illusion that causes don’t have necessary effects, that the ordering of events is not, after all, determined…?

  Peter was walking faster and faster, along a dirt track that crested the island under the sky’s pale dome. A stone in the road stopped him; he paused to nudge it with his loafer—beneath his trouser cuff the white skin of his bare ankle caught the light—and seeing that, he laughed, and suddenly he found himself back in the world of ordinary and quite extraordinary things, switching mental channels again.

  Thinking of Anne-Marie.

  He was high on the dry ridge above Mykonos, looking down on the white town and the blue harbor. A big private yacht was moving out into the strait, a steel vector on the water.

  The guest cottage at the villa was empty. He’d thought Anne-Marie was here to chase Minakis around the island, to record her interview and take her pictures. But she’d never completely unpacked her suitcase, and now her luggage was gone; she hadn’t so much as sat down on the freshly made bedspread.

  A
business envelope lay in the middle of the bed, with Peter’s name printed on it in neat block letters. He ripped it open and stared, uncomprehending, at the photocopied pages of notes and equations handwritten in a minute hand, at the ink sketches drawn freehand with an artist’s precision.

  He picked up the telephone. “Peter Slater, Mrs. Thanatopolou. Would you connect me with Professor Minakis’s room…? He did? I see.” He almost hung up, then said, “My wife and I discussed travel arrangements last night, but I’m afraid I was a bit distracted and…yes, that would be helpful.”

  He waited. “Was that to the harbor or the airport?” It was as much as he dared ask without making it obvious that his wife had run away.

  Mrs. Thanatopolou did not know where the driver had taken Anne-Marie, and the driver, busily ferrying scientists away from the villa on the last day of the conference, would not be back for at least half an hour. Peter thanked her and hung up.

  He turned his attention to the inked notes and sketches. There were references to a 1931 paper of Erwin Schrödinger’s; there were references to a 1986 paper of John Cramer’s; there were references to more recent papers of Gunther Nimtz. There were diagrams of an optical device with beam splitters and a test-pattern reference, some kind of interferometer that included a unit labeled “black box.” Maybe that was supposed to be funny.

  But when he looked more closely at the details of the so-called black box, Peter lapsed into the kind of creative narcolepsy that had occasionally led his parents, when he was still a child, to be concerned for his mental well-being. He saw the possibilities…

  The black box was a magazine of crystalline channels, each of so fine a dimension that it was narrower than the amplitude of a photon of the laser light Minakis’s device was designed to shine through it—in essence forming a barrier to that light. But quantum theory allows particles to occasionally tunnel through barriers; the transit time is constant for a given setup, and if the barrier is sufficiently wide, a particle tunneling through it can apparently get from one side to the other faster than the speed of light. No one knows why; some argue the effect is an illusion. It’s a tiny effect in any case, but Minakis’s black box was designed to amplify it many times.

  Unlike Bell-type experiments, there need be no randomness in a signal communicated via the black box. If Minakis’s setup worked, even on a minor scale, it could topple the traditional notion of causality.

  Peter had often speculated on what it might take to prove that there was an implicate order to the world—David Bohm’s term for a connectedness deeper than classical cause and effect—but he had never gotten this far. In these handwritten pages were some of his own half-baked experimental ideas, ideas he had never shared with anyone, because he had supposed he would need an accelerator as big as CERN or TERAC to test them, here laid out and referenced and refined, the necessary apparatus boldly specified—and it would fit on a bench-top.

  He stood up abruptly and began to pace. Minakis’s name appeared nowhere on these pages, no signature, no self-reference, but Peter had no doubt that this was Minakis’s work. He opened the door of the stifling bungalow to the blaze of the afternoon. In the full heat of the sun he knew plainly that to find Anne-Marie he needed to find Minakis. He badly wanted to find them both.

  16

  When Delos and Mykonos were smudges on the northern horizon, framed by the yacht’s spreading wake, Minakis came up to the bridge. La Parisienne was 160 feet long, built in Holland as a whaler tender but refitted for luxury; its deep draft, meant to take on the monstrous swells of polar seas, made for a smooth ride in the Aegean, which was often choppy if rarely monstrous. Today the sun was hot and the air was serene; only the yacht itself disturbed the surface of the water, and glittering dolphins played in its bow wave.

  “What time do you expect to put in, Captain?” Minakis asked.

  “Shortly after seven, sir.” The captain was a youngster from Hydra, late of the Greek coast guard, who had come along with the boat when Minakis purchased it from its previous owner.

  “Everything went well in Athens?”

  “Customs made noises, but I showed them the documents from FORTH. That was good enough.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think about putting the pieces back together after their meddling.” Minakis watched the horizon, unsquinting, his dark eyes proof against the glare of sea and sky. “I’ll stay aboard tonight and go up to Limnakaros tomorrow. Meanwhile, no interruptions.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  In his cabin on the main deck, Minakis pulled linen curtains over the portholes to cut the glare and settled himself in the mahogany armchair at the built-in secretary. From his briefcase he took the originals of the notes and drawings he had left for Peter Slater. Critical parts of the apparatus were stored in the captain’s safe at this moment, handcrafted optical units benefiting from two years of trial and error with his former assistants.

  But would Peter be on hand for the next stage? Minakis leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, feeling the long waves of the boat’s movement through the sea. Since Delos, since his carefully plotted ambush of Peter had been interrupted by the early arrival of Peter’s wife, nothing had gone quite as he’d planned.

  For one thing, he hadn’t planned to spend the whole morning telling his life story to Anne-Marie. For another, he’d surprised even himself by lashing out at Peter’s naive assault on the limits of the Copenhagen interpretation. Among theorists under thirty, that battle was won; Copenhagen was assumed to be seriously deficient. What to do about it was the question, and a sophisticated redefinition of reality was not the answer.

  Minakis had intended to tantalize Peter, to persuade him that Minakis was on the verge of a breakthrough and that Peter could help him find it. He had never intended to bolt and run, leaving raw notes and drawings, mere unsupported documents; instead he’d envisioned philosophical arguments under the olive branches and the stars—arguments he would win, of course. Now he worried whether the papers alone were enough to entice Peter to seek him out…

  Why had he fled to Crete? Because of Anne-Marie. But that was no answer; it was an enigma. Before yesterday she had been a case history, a piece on his chessboard. If he could give her an urgent need to visit him on Crete, she would overcome any reluctance Peter had to come along. That was his plan.

  Then he’d seen her, descending the stony hill of Delos.

  This morning she had flattered and coaxed him with innocent lies, without a hint of guile. Charming, but no mystery; he knew what she wanted, so why did she affect him so? In her pale eyes, he sensed depths he could not fathom.

  For half a century he had shunned love. His only liaisons had been short affairs, never devoid of calculation. Only two women had ever deeply engaged his desire and his imagination—both when he was so young as to have been a different person. With the first of these he had never even held an intimate conversation.

  His fantasies had been too long suppressed, and suddenly they bubbled up. Anne-Marie—the partner he might have imagined for himself, if he were Peter, if time were more flexible, if events were not so firmly tied to their space-time coordinates, if anything could happen…

  If one could live one’s life again.

  In the spring of 1936 John and Hilda Pendlebury began excavating a cave in the cliffs on the eastern edge of the Lasithi Plain. On Manolis’s first holidays from school he went to join them, starting from Kastro before dawn, walking across low ridges and through broken ravines as the sun rose higher, then up the sheer north scarp of the mountains on a switchback kaderimi, one of those roads whose foundations, Pendlebury claimed, had been laid by the Romans. “On Crete, knowing the distance is useless,” Pendlebury was fond of saying, grandly. “Times alone matter.” Manolis didn’t need to be told that; he did the twenty-six miles to Lasithi in six hours without ever breaking into a run.

  In the spring sunshine Lasithi’s circumscribed plain was a quilt of blue and yellow wildflowers, of fields of scarlet poppie
s and new green wheat, every field with its windmill, thousands of white canvas sails turning atop squat strap-iron towers, facing into the northerly breeze and creaking merrily as they turned. Walking through the plain with the smell of new growth drenching the air, with the windmills singing in the wind and snow-crested Dikti serene against the sky, Manolis felt a rush of unfocused joy.

  He came to Tzermiado, which a year ago would have seemed a metropolis to him but after Kastro was only another village. He asked directions to the cave of Trapeza and walked a few hundred yards farther, to a tabletopped bluff that rose above the village. A narrow path climbed steeply between low walls shaded by carob and olive and oak; a scramble at the top took him to a ledge in front of the cave’s narrow entrance.

  The ledge was surely busier than it had been for several thousand years, with village men squeezing past each other in the entrance, those going in carrying empty baskets, those coming out carrying baskets full of mud, which they dumped in front of two women seated on camp stools, who sorted through it, pulling bits of bone and pottery and carved stone from the filth.

  Hilda Pendlebury was one of the women; beneath her kerchief a few wet strands of hair were plastered across her brow. “Manoli! We didn’t expect you so soon.” She stood, wiping her muddy hands on her long apron. “Do you know Miss Money-Coutts?”

  The younger woman, equally drenched in sweat, nodded acknowledgment but remained seated and did not break her concentration.

  “Oh yes, from last summer,” Manolis said. “She helped ton kyrio Pendabri catalogue the sherds.”

  “For which history will remember me,” said Money-Coutts, sparing him a wry glance as she pawed through a handful of mud, “if for nothing else.”