The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “And now David, here, wants to do exactly that.”

  “As it turns out, her worries are pointless,” he says. “There are plenty of energetic objects in the universe that would trip such a transition. Quasars, black holes, Seyfert galaxies. If the universe were a false vacuum, it would have transitioned billions of years ago.”

  “Have you ever wondered about the Fermi paradox?” she asks. “How it is that we’ve never seen any signs of other intelligent life in the universe? I can tell you the answer. If any alien civilizations more advanced than ours existed, they would have already found the secret to extracting vacuum energy. Sooner or later, they’d try it, and, wham! The end of the universe. So the universe wouldn’t exist, unless we’re the first.”

  You notice that they are both waiting for you to say something. You scuffle your feet against the rough concrete floor. You’ve figured out why they called you here, and are desperately trying to thing of what to say. “So you have cold feet? You want me to tell you whether you should do the experiment?”

  “No,” he tells you. “We already have started the experiment.” He gestures at a digital read-out. “I turned it on when you first walked in the door. The field is building up now. When it hits ten thousand tesla, the generator is programmed to flip on automatically.” You look at the LED indicator. 9.4, it tells you, in a cheerful cherry-red glow.

  “But,” says the other.

  “But?” you say. David takes your hand, and wraps it around the handle of a switch, a large old-fashioned knife switch, the kind that you privately think of as a “Frankenstein switch”. You briefly pretend that you are the obsessed doctor, with life and death subjugated to your power. You’ve watched too many old monster movies. “This turns it off?”

  “In a matter of speaking,” he says.

  “I doubt anybody else will reproduce what we found,” she says. “This may sound like boasting, but it took a few pretty radical insights – and more than a bit of luck – and it’s not at all the direction that other theoretical physicists are searching. Not the idea of getting energy from the vacuum – plenty of people could think of that. It’s our way to do it that’s the trick.”

  “I disagree. What one person discovers, no matter how esoteric, another will duplicate. Maybe not for a long time, maybe not in our lifetimes, but sooner or later, it will happen.”

  She smiles. “Again, it’s a question of philosophy. I’ve been playing the game long enough to know that real science doesn’t work the way the science books pretend. It’s not like making a map, unless you think of it as creating the land as we map it. The very shape of science is created by the scientists who first make it. We think in their metaphors; we see what they chose to look at. If we let go of this discovery, it won’t be duplicated in our lifetimes, and by then the flow of science will be elsewhere.”

  “In any case,” he says, “there isn’t enough money in the grant for us to do it again.

  “The switch you’re holding breaks the circuit in the superconducting magnets. There’s about a thousand amps running through the coils now. Quench the magnet and the superconductors heat up, transition back into ordinary metal. In other words, they become resistors. All that current . . . it’ll create a lot of heat. Throw that switch, and ten million dollars worth of equipment melts into a puddle of slag.”

  “Not to worry too much, though,” Celia adds cheerfully. “It’s only grant money.”

  Suddenly your lips are dry. You run the tip of your tongue over them. “And you want me to . . .”

  “We’ve agreed on this much,” she says, exasperated. “If you stop the experiment, we’ll abide by your decision. We won’t publish. Nor even hint.”

  “But why me?” you ask. “Why not bring in an expert?”

  “We are the experts,” he says. “What we need is somebody from outside, somebody with an unbiased opinion.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says, speaking to you. “We wanted somebody who couldn’t understand the details. If we called in a bunch of experts, do you think they could possibly keep it secret, after?”

  “And besides,” he adds, “committees are always conservative. We all know what they’d say: wait, let’s study it some more. Well, damn, we’ve already studied it. If she’d told me we need to have a committee discuss it, I’d have just snuck in one midnight and run it myself. No, we have to do it this way. Whatever you decide, that’s it. No dithering. No second thoughts. We go for it right now, or forget it.”

  “If I’m right,” he continues, “then the stars are ours. The universe is ours. Humanity will be immortal. When the sun burns out, we’ll create our own suns. We will have all the energy of creation at our fingertips.”

  “And if he’s wrong,” she says, “then this is the end. Not just the end of us. The end of the universe.”

  “Except that I’m not wrong.”

  “If you are, we’ll never know. Either way.”

  “Still, I’d risk it all. This is the key to the universe. It’s worth the risk. It’s worth any risk.”

  She looks back at you. “So there you have it.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “On the one hand, infinity. On the other, the end of everything.”

  He looks over at the digital readout, and your eye follows his. As you watch, it flicks from 9.8 to 9.9. The handle of the switch is warm, faintly slick with sweat. In your hand it seems almost to vibrate.

  She looks at you. You look at him. He looks at the switch. You look at her. They both look at you.

  “You’d best decide quickly,” he says, softly.