“Do you realize exactly what you’re risking?” she demanded.
“Yes, I do.”
“And you believe it’s worth it? You really think that if you succeed Zavgorodny will just fold up his tents and slink away?”
“No, he won’t do that,’, I said. “However, if my speculations prove correct, then I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve contributed something unique to man’s understanding of the universe.”
Karla regarded me with silent contempt for five seconds or so, before saying, “That’s utter bullshit.”
I was taken aback. “What?”
“You heard me. I said you’re full of crap. The real reason you’re doing this is because you want the thing named after you. Admit it. You can’t stand the thought of your precious new element being forever known as ‘zavgorodium.’ That’s the only thing motivating you. You’re going to risk your health—maybe even die—just so your name will be attached to a—a lifeless chemical!”
Karla began to cry. I said nothing. I noticed with an irrelevant precision that her first few tears were held in a little pool by surface tension at the corners of her eyes. I always had been observant. It’s simply part of my job.
When she was done, she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve and said, “Well, tell me. Am I wrong?”
“No,” I said. “You’re not wrong.”
June 11
Thirteen months ago, at the Joint Nuclear Research Institute at Dubna, U.S.S.R.—and simultaneously at the facility which I head, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California—element number 131 was synthesized.
(In these private notes, I refuse to call it “zavgorodnium,” despite the slight precedence those at Dubna had, and I dare not dub it “chiltonium”—yet. So a simple “element 131” it must remain, for now.)
Element 131, this substance never before seen on earth, proved to be the first member of the predicted “island of stability” in the periodic table: that group of superheavy elements higher than number 103 which proved to have a half-life longer than thirty-five seconds. As of this writing, it is still the only stable SHE to be created.
Element 131 has a half-life of approximately twenty-five days. Given this stability, element 131 lends itself to detailed and extended observation. We have been able to perform more tests and assays and analyses on this new material than on any other synthesized element.
The most curious property of element 131 is an effect akin to piezoelectricity.
In common cases of piezoelectricity, mechanical stress on a crystal produces an electrical charge.
Element 131 exhibits a continual—albeit fluctuating—electrical charge in a rest state. Shielded from obvious forces, without apparent mechanical deformation, element 131 produces a trickle of electricity.
Various theories have been adduced to explain this anomaly.
I am certain that none but mine is correct.
There is only one force which could produce the fluctuating electrical charge. One force which it is impossible to shield against.
That force is gravity.
It is my view that element 131 is extremely sensitive to gravity. Its inherent atomic structure makes it responsive to every passing gravity wave, every mass over a certain theoretical threshold.
I know this to be a fact, as surely as I know anything.
However, there is no way of proving it in the laboratory.
According to the mathematics of my theory, the masses needed to influence the production of electrical current in element 131 are of stellar or planetary proportions.
Obviously, not something one could manipulate in the lab. Current science has no way of producing gravity waves, nor can a sample of the new element be isolated in some imaginary “gravity-free” container and examined for cessation of the effect.
Until a recent inspiration of mine, there appeared to be no way of proving my contention. For all anyone knew, Zavgorodny’s idiot theory of “quark oscillation” was as plausible as mine, and the various international committees debating over a name for element 131 had no reason to favor either him or me.
But now I have hit upon a method of fully proving that element 131 does indeed register the presence of gravity.
An associate of mine at a certain biological lab (which, for fear of adverse publicity, must remain nameless until the eventual success of my project, at which time his firm shall share in the glory), has developed a tailored molecular vector-agent which is intended to carry element 131 through my bloodstream and into my eyes, where the vector will bind its cargo to the photopigment rhodopsin in my retinas, hopefully converting them to gravity receptors.
In short, I intend to see gravity.
The half-life of element 131 insures that the effect should be temporary.
The injection is scheduled for tomorrow.
June 12
Karla left early this morning, a Saturday. I saw her off at the airport. She boarded a plane for New York, where she and her troupe of dancers have a series of performances scheduled, next week at Lincoln Center.
“At least promise me you won’t do anything until I get home,” she asked, holding my hands in hers.
“I promise,” I said.
As soon as her plane was in the air, I got into my car and headed for the biolab.
Karla simply doesn’t understand science.
Mark was waiting for me in his office. He is a friend of longstanding—we spent our undergraduate years together—and he was risking his reputation and his position at the firm to help me.
The first thing he said when he saw me was, “Are you sure you want to go through with this, Alex?”
It seemed everyone was more solicitious of my welfare than I was. I had expected this attitude from Karla, but thought that Mark at least would comprehend my motives.
“I wouldn’t have put you through all this just to back out now,” I said.
Then we were in one of the weekend-empty labs and Mark was removing an ampoule from a refrigerator and I was rolling up my sleeve and the inside of my elbow was getting swabbed and the needle point had found my vein, all before I quite realized what was happening.
“My only consolation,” said Mark as he removed the needle and discarded the tip, “is that you won’t die of radioactivity. That small amount of chiltonium you gave me was only as hot as an average tracer injection.”
“Please don’t call it that. Not yet.”
Mark shrugged. “Whatever. Listen, are you sure you’re going to be all right on your own? Don’t you want someone to stay with you?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ve arranged a leave of absence from work, and I’ve got all the food I need for a month—although I don’t really imagine any effect will last that long. I won’t even have to leave the house while my eyes are—different. And if something should come up, I won’t forget your number.”
Mark escorted me from the building, gripping my elbow as if I were handicapped somehow.
“All right. But just be careful.”
“I will,” I said, wondering if this promise meant any more than the one I had just made to Karla.
I got in my car and headed home.
My vision seemed perfect during the drive.
Midnight, and I’m going to sleep. Tired of waiting for a change. I’ve neither felt or seen anything different.
Perhaps the whole experiment will be an anticlimactic waste.
June 13
Woke this morning to patchy vision. It’s as if tenuous veils and no-color clouds drift lazily across my field of sight. Unlike common “floaters,” these patches have amorphous outlines. They are not translucent, nor are they opaque. I have the oddest feeling that there is nothing behind them. They seem more negation than substance. Wherever they materialize, they seem to wipe out the whole universe we take for granted. It’s as if they are holes in the fabric of time and space, revealing utter nothingness behind.
This cannot be the visual analogue of gravity. The adaptive process m
ust be incomplete.
I imagine that something like the following must be happening.
As the molecules of element 131 bind to the rhodopsin in my retina—that miraculous film literally as thin as a razor—the process whereby infalling photons—mundane light—are converted into nerve impulses is interfered with. This results in the disturbing migratory lacunae. At the same time, the molecules of element 131 have not yet been fully integrated into the neural signal-processing system, and so there are no new images to replace visual ones.
Gravity—as any first-year physics student can tell you—is a force mediated by gravitons. My eyes are not yet sensitive to gravitons. This must be the case. Surely this depressing nothingness cannot be an image of such an all-pervasive, noble force as gravity…
June 14
When I opened my eyes this morning, I was completely blind.
I am continuing this journal on cassette.
I took some small consolation in the fact that my blindness was the conventional kind, or at least what I assume conventional blindness is like. An utter blackness unobtainable by the sighted eye even with lids shut in a lightless cavern (for even under those conditions, the phenomenon known as “dark light”—false signals spontaneously generated in the retina—would occur). It seems as though my brain has completely shut down its optic links, rejecting whatever new signals element 131 is producing, under the influx of gravitons.
I can only hope that the links will be re-established soon.
Later in the day. A new, somewhat reassuring thought occured to me. I recall the simple, yet classic experiments done with inverting lenses.
Subjects were asked to wear glasses with lenses that rotated images 180 degrees, for twenty-four hours a day. Trees seemed to have the crowns downmost, people to be walking on air. After some days of this disorientation, their brains spontaneously accomodated to the imposed inversion, and their vision miraculously became “normal.” When the glasses were later removed, they saw the world upsidedown! After a similar period of adjustment, their eyes finally returned to normalacy.
Perhaps my own brain is undergoing just such a transition period.
June 15
Still blind.
June 16
My hypothesis was correct!
Today, though still technically blind, I have “seen” the sun and the earth and the moon without leaving my chair, and without raising my eyes to the heavens, or lowering them to the ground.
I hardly know where—or how—to begin to describe what I have experienced.
Perhaps in a cool recital of theory may lie sanity.
Consider gravity. A force varying inversly with the square of the distance, mediated by gravitons, particles analagous to the photons which transmit electromagnetic radiations. Completely oblivious to this flux, never thinking of our weight as a function of a stream of particles, we live immersed in a sea of gravitons, a sea replenished from an infinite number of sources.
Some of these sources—by virtue of mass or closeness—are more important and prominent than others. Continuing the sea analogy, they are bigger rivers.
All of us are lashed to the planet beneath us by ropes of gravitons.
Above our heads, the moon whips the oceans with flails of gravitons, raising the tides.
Far away, the Sun, largest single source of gravity in our system, has the earth 1assoed by gravitons, and is swinging it in its clockwork ellipse, along with every other orbital object, from Jupiter down to the smallest pebble.
My eyes can now apprehend some of this. The molecules of chiltonium (I now feel entitled to call element 131 by that name), bonded to my photopigments, are putting out fluctuating signals tied to gravity, which my brain is just learning to interpret.
It is an indescribable sensation.
My sleep was broken this morning by a sense of weightiness, an almost kinesthetic, rather than visual, impression. I lay in bed with my eyes shut, trying to determine what I was experiencing.
First, I sensed an enormous presence directly beneath me. The signals coming in through my optic nerves had a pseudo-visual component. There was no conventional coloration to the object—at least nothing I could put a name to—but my brain tried to represent it, as best it could, as a darker center shading off to lighter edges in all directions. I assume now that this is an image of the dense core of the planet surrounded by the lighter mantle.
The object seemed to pulse, almost as if alive.
It occurred to me then that I was sensing the earth’s gravity beneath me, even though I lay on my back and my eyes were closed. In my haste to prove my theories, I had never even considered that if I succeeded I would possess a new sense that worked in 360 degrees—in a complete sphere of perception, in fact. Photons might need the easy path of the iris to register, but gravitons were more determined. Neither flesh nor bone could stop them from impinging on my chiltonium-tinged retina, and I could detect masses behind me as easily as those in front.
Somehow, my attention became distracted from the inage of the earth. We know from infancy how to instinctively focus our vision, but I was having trouble focusing my new sense. Still, I persisted, and was able to discern two objects above me: the moon and sun. Both were roughly circular presences, with dark centers fading outward toward their edges. The moon because of its proxinity, radiated gravitons which seemed inexplicably more vibrant than those from the massive sun, and so formed a “brighter” image. A stunning reversal of visual input.
I lay for a while, savoring my triumph. I got up, visited the toilet, then began making breakfast in a clumsy way, fumbling for the utensils and pans I could not see.
Determined to see what I could accomplish, I embarked on a series of mental gymnastics. I began to flick my attention back and forth between the trio of massive astronomical objects—earth, moon and sun—hoping to gradually becone able to hold all three of then in my mind simultaneously.
Around noontime, it happened.
The moment was like falling over a threshold into miles of empty space. I realized with a start that it was now impossible not to let all three impinge on my consciousness. My brain had adapted to the omnidirectional input, and now was able to process all the signals simultaneously.
I felt dizzy and had to sit down, for the three objects moved in relation to one another, the moon performing a slow pavane about the earth, and the earth revolving on its axis and waltzing with the sun.
The vertigo subsided after several hours, and I was able to get up and move about. However, as of this recitation, the nausea has still not ceased entirely.
It’s after midnight now, and I have not been able to fall asleep yet. Closing my eyes does nothing to shut out the influx of gravitons. I now have the bulk of the earth between me and the sun, and their images have fused into one massive entity which weighs on my consiousness more strongly than the two separate ones. The moon is more gentle, but still a presence demanding attention. Although I know that my eyes are not in reality subject to any new forces, somehow I feel that the gravitic pull has increased on them, threatening to suck them from my orbits. I hope that when I get tired enough, I shall be able to fall asleep, just as one does amid noise.
I wonder if tomorrow will bring any new developments.
June 17
The ringing of the phone shattered my uneasy sleep around nine this morning. I had not dropped off until after five, my head aspin from the dance of the masses.
It was Karla, calling from New York.
“Alex? What are you doing home? I just called your office, and they said you were taking a few weeks off. Are you okay?”
I mumbled something I hoped was reasurring. I’m afraid I succeeded only in conveying my confusion. However, I was too preoccupied with the new display which had leaped into my attention the minute I became conscious to really concentrate on what Karla was saying.
I do remember she sounded worried about me. She said something like, “I’m sorry I haven’t called sooner, Alex, but
it’s been really hectic here. Rehearsals, publicity events… Listen, I won’t pry into what you’re doing. I trust you to keep the promise you made. But if you need me back there, just say so, and I’ll come.”
“No, no, that’s not necessary.… Karla—what day is it?”
“Why, Thursday the seventeenth.”
“Thank you. Goodbye,” I said, and hung up on her. Only the sixth day since I was injected with chiltonium. It seems like so much longer. The effect should be decreasing daily, as the chiltonium decays to lesser elements.
Instead, the new impressions are stronger than yesterday.
All the while I was listening to Karla, I was “looking” around me.
No longer were yesterday’s three massive celestial objects the only entities I could detect.
I was now sensing the masses of common items all around me, and with more definition than yesterday.
As before, I had them all in my attention simultaneously.
Chairs, tables, doors, walls—even the mass of the house itself—all were discrete objects with distinctive shapes which I could hold in my mind. Could not, in fact, dismiss by any kind of willed act.
And of course, they flooded in from all angles, regardless of the direction I was facing.
I fell into a chair I sensed behind me. I had only gotten a few hours sleep, and my mind felt thick and slow.
Something had been wrong with my math. I had postulated that only astronomical-sized masses, with their significant gravities, would be able to register on the chiltonium. Instead, now I was sensing the tiny—yet nearby—gravities of everyday objects. How could that be?
Everything that has mass has gravity, emits gravitons that strike my altered retinas. The threshold of reaction for the atoms of chiltonium must be simply lower than I calculated.
Or else—this thought occured to me in a flash—the extra sensitivity lay in my brain. The synergy with my body was what I had not anticipated. The process of adaptation that I believed had occured must have continued overnight, at an accelerated pace. My brain, in some sort of feedback loop, was learning to process and filter the signals it was receiving more efficiently, to extract the maximum information from them. It was as if the bandwith of the channel down which the gravitons flowed was steadily increasing.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 25
