“Okay, okay.” Izzie rubbed her lower lip, looking around the room. “Maybe it’s more than a coincidence. And clearly all of this meant something to Fuller. But it’s like a jigsaw puzzle without the box, so you don’t know what picture it’s supposed to form.” She waved an arm at the mess sprawling out over the table. “Just a bunch of tiny little pieces, and us with no way of knowing how they’re meant to fit together.”
Patrick dropped the map back onto the table. “I don’t know, maybe we just find two pieces that fit and then start from there?”
Izzie took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh. She leaned forward, palms resting on the edge of the table, and glowered at the confusing mess.
“Well, Fuller was a scientist, right? And a respected one, at least until he wigged out and got fired.” She picked up one of the scientific journals. “And based on the legibility of his handwriting, I think all of this”—she nodded, indicating the table—“started with these.” She held the journal up beside her head and pointed at it with her free hand.
“What do you have in mind?” Patrick rested his knuckles on the table.
Izzie leafed through the journal, looking at the impenetrable printed text and Fuller’s neatly handwritten commentary. References to hidden dimensions and other spaces, dark matter and negative energy, membranes and Planck scale … all of which were equally incomprehensible to her, but which Fuller referred back to again and again in his notations in the margins of different books as his writing became increasingly crabbed and erratic.
“We don’t know what any of this means. But I’m guessing a scientist would.” A slight grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. “So why don’t we find a scientist and ask them?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Walking onto the campus of Ross University was almost like entering a nature preserve. The blocks of Ross Village that surrounded it on all sides were filled with coffee shops and bars, bookstores and boutiques, and the roads were rivers of cyclists and cars ebbing and flowing while crowds of pedestrians jostled on the sidewalks or periodically flooded the intersections at diagonal crosswalks. But the university campus itself was tranquil and serene, white limestone buildings connected by a network of paved paths, dotted here and there with fountains and monuments to past luminaries. After the bustle of the surrounding streets, it was as quiet and still as a garden. Or a cemetery.
It had been springtime when last Izzie visited the university, and the well-tended lawns of the campus had been brilliant green, vibrant, and alive. Now in the last days of fall, the grass had gone to sleep for the winter, tawny brown accented here and there with the last remaining tufts of emerald, crisscrossed with muddy scars left by students too impatient to use the paved walkways. The whiteness of the Oregon limestone from which the buildings were constructed had seemed gleaming and bright against the lively springtime hues, but the autumnal drear instead brought to mind headstones marking a grave.
In the northeastern corner of the campus was a Brutalist bunker of glass and steel and concrete the color of onyx, a relatively recent addition dating from the mid-seventies. In contrast to the ivory white of the older buildings it was a rotten tooth, joyless and stark against the slate gray sky. Metal letters affixed to the black stone above the entrance spelled out the words “Department of Physics,” surmounting an abstract bas-relief vaguely suggestive of electrons orbiting a nucleus.
As cheerless as the exterior of the building might have been, though, the man who was approaching the reception desk was as bright as a sunbeam.
“Margaret, you said there was someone here to see me?” He smiled broadly, snowy white hair falling just past the collar of his Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow revealing a faded tattoo on his forearm. He wore a university ID clipped to his breast pocket, and cartoon characters cavorted on the silkscreened fabric of his necktie.
The receptionist covered the mouth of the phone that she was speaking into and nodded. “They said they had some questions for someone in your department, Dr. Kono, and you were the only faculty member whose calendar was free.”
“For the thousandth time, Margaret, there’s no need to be so formal.” He turned to Patrick and Izzie and, glancing at their badges, raised an eyebrow quizzically. “So, is there some problem, officers?”
“Dr. Kono? I’m Lieutenant Tevake, Recondito PD.”
“Please, call me Hayao,” he answered, still smiling, eyes twinkling in his lined face. Then he turned to Izzie. “And you are?”
“Special Agent Isabel Lefevre, FBI.” She shook his hand.
“Special agent? How official.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “A little intimidating, even.” Then he laughed.
His smile was infectious. “You can call me Izzie, if that helps,” she answered with a slight grin.
“I think it might!” The professor clapped his hands once, then rubbed his palms together as if to warm them. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”
Izzie glanced at Patrick, and he nodded, indicating that she should take the lead.
“We’re investigating a case that is potentially connected to a man who used to be on the faculty here.” She paused, reaching for the folder tucked under her arm. “His name was Nicholas Fuller?”
The professor’s smile evaporated like a snowflake in the summer sun.
“Oh. My.”
Izzie searched his face. His reaction was not that of someone who had simply heard the name before. “Did you know him?” “Yes.” Dark memories clouded the professor’s expression. “Yes, I did.”
“Would you be willing to answer a few questions?” Patrick asked.
The professor seemed to be staring at something in the middle distance, lost in thought and unspeaking.
“It could potentially be a big help to our investigation,” Izzie added.
The professor gathered himself again, returning to the present moment. He blinked a few times, then nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. I’d be happy to help.”
He turned and gestured for them to follow as he headed down the hallway.
“We’ll talk in my office.”
Patrick and Izzie exchanged a glance as they trailed after him. She knew that he was thinking the same thing she was. They’d come seeking insight into the things that Fuller had written, but now it appeared they might be getting insight into the man himself, as well.
Hayao Kono’s windowless office was cramped but comfortable, with three monitors arranged like changing room mirrors atop a standing desk, shelves along two adjoining walls stuffed to the brim with textbooks and scientific journals, and on the third wall a long, low display case in which vintage tin toys were carefully arranged—rocket ships, ray guns, wind-up robots, and more. Above the display case was mounted an antique brass astrolabe, around which were hung framed prints of cosmological majesties like nebulae and swirling galaxies and other more puzzling mundanities like Romanesco broccoli and ammonite shells. And along the fourth wall near the door was the only item of furniture in the room other than the desk, a love seat upholstered in a floral print that looked like it would be more at home in the parlor of an old-fashioned spinster aunt than in the office of a physicist.
“Please, sit.” Hayao motioned towards the narrow couch. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Izzie sat, though she wasn’t sure comfort was a viable option. The florid embroidery of the love seat’s upholstery rasped against her skin when she touched it, and the couch cushions were thin and unforgiving. She perched awkwardly on the edge of the seat, the folder she’d brought with her resting on her knees.
“Thanks for agreeing to speak with us,” said Patrick, who didn’t seem to be faring any better on the couch than she was.
The professor nodded, distractedly, and flickered a smile that faded as quickly as it had appeared. It was as though his usual genial demeanor was a shell beneath which darker thoughts were now bubbling up and threatening to break through.
“Such a promising young mind
.” Hayao had a faraway look on his face. “Such a terrible waste.”
He trailed off, looking over at the wall of framed prints surrounding the astrolabe.
“This is Nicholas Fuller you’re referring to?” Patrick pulled a small notebook and pen out of the inner pocket of his suit coat.
The professor glanced over at him. “Nicholas was a graduate student of mine and later, when he’d finished his postdoctoral studies overseas and returned to Recondito as a member of the faculty, we were colleagues.” He paused, remembering. “I would have even said that we were friends, once upon a time. Of course that was before … before …”
A pained look clouded his face for a moment and then passed.
Izzie opened the folder on her lap and pulled out one of the scientific journals. “These were found among Fuller’s possession after his death, and we believe that he was responsible for the notes written in the margins.” She held the journal out to the professor. “We were hoping someone here might be able to explain their significance?”
Hayao stepped forward and took the journal, then opened it and began to flip through. “Oh, certainly, I remember this paper.” He chuckled slightly, idly turning the pages. “Chilton’s conjecture caused a considerable amount of controversy at the time, but later findings refuted what he …”
The professor paused, narrowing his gaze. He ran a finger along a line of handwritten commentary, intently. Then he continued on, reading the notations on the next page, and the page after, the lines on his face deepening in concentration.
“But he couldn’t possibly have …” He turned another page. “Could he?” Then he kept on reading.
“Dr. Kono?” Izzie said after nearly a minute had passed in complete silence, the professor completely absorbed. “Hayao?”
The professor seemed not to hear, but instead stopped short on the last page, disappointment in his face. “Oh, Nicholas.” He slapped the journal shut with annoyance, and looked back to Izzie and Patrick. “It’s just nonsense, plain and simple. I thought maybe that he’d worked out a solution … but no, it turned out to just be more of the same pseudoscientific gibberish he was spouting when he was last here. Before … you know …”
He trailed off and gave Izzie and Patrick a meaningful look, as though there were no need for him to go on.
“What solution did you think he’d worked out, professor?” Patrick’s pen hovered above his notebook.
Hayao sighed wearily. “Nicholas possessed a brilliant mind and a keen sense of curiosity, but he was a little too eager to find answers, I always thought. A little too willing to accept correlation as causation, or to cherry-pick data that supported a hypothesis he preferred while dismissing anything that didn’t.” His tone became somewhat professorial. “You can regard any hypothesis as a question, and the scientific process as a way of testing out potential answers.” He held up the journal. “Nicholas was sure that he had the answer to this particular question, even if the evidence didn’t always agree with him.”
“And these?” Izzie handed the professor the other journals.
“Mmm.” Hayao rifled through the others, nodding as he went. “These are all different aspects of the same question, really. It was Nicholas’s primary obsession throughout his career. A mania, really, in the technical sense of the term.” He handed the journals back to Izzie. “Ultimately, I think that obsession was the thing that pushed him over the edge.”
“So what is the question?” Izzie asked.
“In layman’s terms,” Patrick added a little sheepishly. “If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” The professor chuckled. “It’s pretty simple, actually. It all starts with the problem of gravity. Namely, why is it so weak?”
He clearly could read the confusion in their faces.
“There are four fundamental forces that govern the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Everything from the energy levels in a single hydrogen atom’s electron to the orbital movements of entire galaxies is governed by the interplay of those four things. Out of all four, gravity is by far the weakest, by orders of magnitude, but we’re not sure exactly why. It’s sometimes called the ‘hierarchy problem,’ and there have been any number of possible explanations put forward that …”
Patrick had his hand up like a student in a classroom.
“Yes?” Hayao defaulted to professorial mode.
“What do you mean, gravity is weak? Like, on the moon? Or weightless in space?”
“No, not really.” The professor shook his head. “Although that’s certainly an illustration of one of gravity’s limitations, in a way. It takes an enormous amount of matter to begin to exhibit significant gravitational effects—like a moon or a planet for instance—but compared to gravity we see a disproportionately larger effect produced by the interactions of individual electromagnetic particles, and the same is true of the nuclear forces, as well. Gravity is the outlier, and one possible explanation is that it isn’t entirely here. Maybe part of is missing. That’s one of the hypotheses that the Undersight project was designed to test.”
Izzie and Patrick both perked up at the mention of the name.
“You see, Undersight was primarily intended to function as a detector for dark matter, which might be composed of non-baryonic matter or WIMPs.”
“Wimps?” Izzie quirked an eyebrow.
“Weakly Interacting Massive Particles,” Hayao explained. “Stuff that has mass but doesn’t interact the same way that normal matter does, but which could help account for discrepancies in calculations about how much stuff we should see in the universe based on our best models of how things work, and how much visible stuff there is out there to see. In much the same way, ‘dark energy’ has been proposed to account for similar discrepancies in the amount of energy that has been calculated to exist based on things like the rate the universe is expanding, and the amount of energy that we can actually detect.” He paused, clearly in his comfort zone discussing such matters, even in such simplified terms. “That ‘missing’ matter and energy are really out there, we just can’t detect them. So maybe they’re down here with us, too, and we just don’t realize it.”
“And how did Undersight figure into this?” Izzie asked.
“Well, people have put detectors deep underground to search for various things that are hard to detect on the surface of the Earth, like neutrinos. And the Undersight team adapted a similar strategy to search for dark matter and dark energy, instead. But it was Nicholas who suggested that the apparatus could be tasked with searching for something else, as well. Namely, that missing gravity.”
The professor had started to pace slowly back and forth across the small space, punctuating his words with broad sweeps of his arms and precise gestures with hands, depending on the circumstance.
“There are a number of theories that account for the hierarchy problem by proposing that there are extra spatial dimensions beyond those we perceive, and that gravity is in essence ‘leaking’ into one or more of these additional dimensions. The force itself is operating on the same scale as the other three fundamental forces, but the effects are not noticeable since most of the effect is occurring elsewhere.”
Izzie could not help but be reminded about what Fuller had said towards the end, that night in the lighthouse’s lantern room, about gravity leaking into other spaces. And what was it he had said about doors? That they “swing both ways”?
“There are similar hypotheses that account for dark energy in much the same way, using additional spatial dimensions to account for that discrepancy. Nicholas felt that all of these—dark matter, dark energy, the hierarchy problem and the weakness of gravity—are all the result of our universe existing in a higher-dimensional space, but further of our universe interacting with other universes that are also part of that higher-dimensional space, though ones in which the relative strengths of the fundamental forces are different. And like water finding its own level between two contain
ers, the forces ebb and flow until the strengths are equalized between two or more universes that are in contact.”
Hayao sighed a little wistfully.
“An elegant hypothesis in a lot of ways, and one that accounted for a great many unanswered questions. But Nicholas took it even further, and suggested that the different universes ‘orbit’ through higher-dimensional space just like planets or galaxies. From time to time, he argued, connections between two or more universes can be broken and other new connections form. And when that happens, he was convinced, the relative strengths of the fundamental forces could undergo rapid change.”
Now it was Izzie’s turn to raise her hand. “You mean gravity itself could get even weaker?”
“Possibly.” Hayao shrugged. “Or grow stronger. Or effectively disappear entirely.” He paused, shaking his head. “The possible ramifications were profound. But again, it was still an untested hypothesis, not backed up by data or verified through experimentation. But Nicholas would not be deterred. He was convinced that the findings from Undersight would prove him right.”
“So what went wrong?” Patrick asked.
Tension crept back into the professor’s posture as his face closed off. “He never even tested his hypothesis. There were three other teams who were scheduled to run experiments using the Undersight apparatus before Nicholas, and so once the technicians and engineers had finished setting up the equipment down in the mine shaft, the teams started to go down to calibrate the sensors for their needs. Since everything would need to be completely reset in order for Nicholas’s tests to run, he didn’t even go down into the shaft for the first eighteen months of operation, but instead stayed in his office working on his calculations when he wasn’t teaching a class.”
Hayao began pacing again, but with an urgency to his step now, not a breezy stroll but more like the anxious steps of a caged animal.
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