The Raphaella Ramirez Gonsalvez Kornacki, otherwise known and the Rapha, blinked out at the ingress point, but never arrived in Utopian space. The ship literally disappeared.
Suri arrived soon after at Jack’s office in the Embassy building. She looked like she’d been crying for a while, which, in fact, she had, off and on. Mostly on.
“They were volunteers, Jack, all retired, three were terminally ill.”
Jack picked up the list. He read: “Mackenzie Johns, Elsbeth ‘Bitzy’ Carruthers, Jossleen Chong, Matthew Donald Andronovich, and William Lionell Pigford.
“All dead and gone,” Suri said. “Well, gone anyway.”
“You’ve no idea where they went?”
“None. We were getting readings, and suddenly, nothing. They could be anywherewhen in the Infinite.”
“So you don’t think they’re dead?”
“We’re clueless.” She started to sniffle again.
Jack stood up and walked around his desk, picking up a box of Whiffs as he did. He sat on the edge of his desk and handed her the box.
“Thank you,” she sighed, dabbing. “I’m exhausted, Jack, all those monitors we put on the Rapha must have screwed up something, or interfered with the destination coordinates. Something went badly wrong. Maybe we killed them all.”
“They understood what they were getting into. They were all good deputies.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what now?”
Suri took a deep breath and exhaled. “Well, we retrieved a lot of data to analyze. We did get readings for a moment after the ship exited the ingress point. There was a slight lag.”
Exited the ingress point. She couldn’t just say ‘disappeared’, or ‘jumped’, or ‘bounced’. How about ‘left our space’. Jack felt annoyed, though not at her, and he would be careful not to take his frustration out on her in either words or tone. She was terribly fragile at the moment.
“I’m annoyed,” he announced. Suri glanced up quickly.
“I’m sorry I’m crying so much, Jack. I don’t usually kill people in my line of work.”
“Not at you, Suri. Silly. Not even about their deaths, if they even died. I hope they’ll live out the rest of their lives in some paradise somewhere, or even in the ship. Like I said, they knew what they were getting into going in. They volunteered. Who wants to linger and die slowly of disease or old age, anyway? Most once-active deputies aren’t graceful retirees. Lots of suicides. They get bored and feel useless, and the memories can haunt you. It’s hard to socialize.” He began to pace the room, gazing at the artworks which helped him to focus his thoughts.
“What, then?” She asked.
“We didn’t get much info on how the damn ships work!”
“We got plenty, Jack, but the volume of data will take forever to analyze. We’ve reviewed the data from the few moments right before they disappeared, but it hasn’t helped much, yet. All the scientists are feeling pretty badly.”
“You’re gonna have to go back and put your foot down on them, then.”
“Why?”
“Can’t you can find out where they went and get them back? Send another ship out to them?”
“No, Jack. We checked. We’re not aware of an egress point. There’s no destination logged. The destination was supposed to be in Utopia’s outer space. The data just stops. There’s no way to trace or find them. They’ll have to get back on their own, if they can, but if they’re in a regiontime they don’t recognize, or the ship doesn’t, there’s no way for them to plot a path home. They need to use their egress point as their ingress point to reverse the trip, but they won’t know what it is. We were only given local coordinates by the Odoks.”
The com bonged overhead and the silky voice announced a private call for Suri from one of her scientist. She walked to the farthest wall unit and conversed with him privately. She went to and opened the door, asking Jack’s secretary, Neil, for some orange juice. Jack looked quizzically at her.
“Low blood sugar. I’m afraid I’ve been running on all cylinders.”
“Ghee’s got you doing it now, too, hasn’t she?”
“What?” she asked.
“Speaking in those funny old sayings of hers.”
“Was I? I hadn’t realized. Yes, I guess they’re catchy. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, the other scientists at the lab are, too. The phrases are an inexact way of speaking, yet everyone knows what you mean.”
“I understand you two went to the theater and out to dinner the other night,” Jack said.
“She’s really good company.”
Jack nodded, and smiled. ‘Yep,” he agreed. He walked to the door and asked Neil to bring some food with the orange juice.
“We’d planned to go up to the Trakennad Dor together tonight, but I’m not up to it,” Suri said.
“Do you need to call her?”
“No, I left a message for her before I came here.”
Neil came in with a tray. He placed it on the low coffee table between the sofas. It had a small carafe of orange juice and one of water, and glasses. Rhonda followed with small plates and a tray of breads, Philippa cheeses and cold cuts, and condiments.
“Thank you,” Suri said gratefully, and Rhonda departed. Neil went to the cooker, disguised as fine wood cupboarding, and ordered fresh coffee. He placed the coffee carafe on the table with mugs, Philippan cream, Utopian sugar in plain and several flavors, spoons, and some vanilla biscuits. He received a nod from Jack when he glanced up, and then he left too, closing the door behind him.
Suri dug in and Jack joined her, seated on the opposite sofa. They munched their sammiches for a while. The small meal seemed to help Suri regain her composure. Eventually, she sat back with a sweetened cup of coffee and stared out the big picture window. Jack waited.
“Well, my team lead, Jackson Muder,” she said, “says we didn’t find any evidence of particle conversion, though that is not conclusive. Just because we couldn’t observe or measure any doesn’t mean none happened. But for now, we’re going with the Bekenstein-Hawking Radiation theory. Are you familiar with it?”
“No. Tell me.”
“Okay. Well, in the twentieth century, the British physicist, Stephen Hawking, was working off Israeli physicist Jacob Bekenstein’s earlier work on black holes. Hawking thought twin particles could be created just beyond the event horizon of a black hole. One supposedly comes out into the galaxy, and one goes into the black hole.
“Some folks didn’t like the theory, because it’s been proven, repeatedly, in every reaction, that information - matter and energy, you understand?” Jack nodded. “Information is never lost. To give you a simple idea of what I mean, in old style light bulbs, the kind Einstein created - you’ve seen them?” Jack nodded again. “Electricity goes in and heat and light come out. What goes in is equivalent to the sum of what comes out. Nothing just disappears, and this is true for every reaction.
“However, you must have the know-how and the equipment to measure the inputs and outputs. With a black hole, and frankly, these damn ships, everything we think up is hypothetical. We didn’t and still don’t have the equipment, knowledge, or, frankly, the comprehension to measure what is going in to and coming out of the singularity, if there is one. We don’t know how these ships are hopping about.
“Ever since we heard Ghee’s explanation of the Infinite recycling itself,[5] we realized the information which is thought to disappear into a black hole is not actually being lost, but is being transported across the horizon and through the phenomenon to another placetime. The Odok ships could be using this phenomenon, manipulating it, somehow generating an instantaneous, small, event horizon, singularity, or otherwise causing the ship to cease to exist at ingress and begin to exist at egress.”
“Like a wormhole?” Jack asked. He’d enjoyed viewing the restored movies Ghee had found.
“Yes, but you’ve traveled in the Odok vessels,” Suri smiled. She’d been watching them, too. “There’s no
experience, no sense of travel. It’s instantaneous and motionless. No time is gained or lost; you feel no sensation of any kind…”
“Yes,” Jack agreed.
“I think… did we discuss this before? All the alpha and omega destinations we got from the Odoks are in this time. Possibly they traveled not only to other places, but to other times as well. The trick would be to have the coordinates to a known destination. This has to be plotted, you can’t go willy-nilly; you might end up anywherewhen, even inside a planet or star, or at the end or beginning of time, if those exist.
“The ships don’t go without a plotted destination. Did the Odoks plot the destinations they use by traveling to them normally first? How does one travel ‘normally’ to a different placetime? Or did they predict the egress points mathematically? Can we do the kind of math required? For that matter, where and when are the Odoks from? Our future? Our past? They could have come to maturity as a species before or after our galaxy ever existed. I’ll admit it, I’m terribly curious about them.”
“If they’re so advanced,” Jack asked, “how did they run out of the fungus they needed for digestion? And why did a fungus Earth grew in abundance happen to fit the bill?”
“Oh, well, biology, you know. Possibly their vats became polluted, or some mutation had occurred and their fungus stopped producing whatever protein, or enzyme, or whatever it made that they needed. Sometimes these things happen so quickly the damage is done before you realize something’s gone wrong. Maybe they only needed an infusion of new material, or they took ours apart and selected some genes to splice in to their fungi’s DNA to strengthen their own stock, correct the mutation, or whatever. I don’t know.
“Anyway, we’ve decided we like the recycling black hole working theory because this would take significantly less ship energy than any of the particle-conversion-propulsion scenarios, but honestly, we don’t know much more than we did before the experiment. We may never figure out their drive. It’s far too advanced for us puny humans to comprehend.”
Jack chuckled. Suri smiled.
“I keep thinking about quantum tunneling, too, though,” Suri mused. She sipped her coffee, which had cooled, took a bigger sip, and then refreshed her cup from the insulated carafe. She spooned three heaps of sugar in and stirred.
Jack listened to the sound of the spoon ringing on the inside of the cup.
“It’s possible something in the hull material attracts the ship to the omega destination, and all you have to do is input the information into the computer. The ships don’t travel through space without those coordinates. I mean, they use propulsion for local travel, but…”
“What about those engines? Have you figured them out?” Jack asked. He refreshed his coffee, too. “What kind of fuel do they use?”
“They scoop fuel out of the space they travel through, when whatever they need is available, but this shouldn’t be nearly enough for spacetime travel, unless those engines have efficiencies we can’t even imagine. Hydrogen would work for everyday travel, and is plentiful in space. Other fuels are out in space, too, if you use an engine capable of utilizing them, maybe adapt and refine them onboard, like Buster’s ship. Buster’s ship could be some kind of precursor. But if this is going on in the Odok ships, we can’t find where, although we still haven’t figured out yet quite a few of the mysterious pieces of machinery.
“How ‘bout this? What if the engines are pulling in fuel from other placetimes? We just don’t know. We can’t find the exhaust, either. Maybe they’re sending the exhaust to other placetimes.”
“Didn’t we build those ships on Earth, with their help? Why don’t we know how they work? Weren’t there blueprints or something?” Jack licked a bit of Philippa mayo off his finger.
“I looked back at what’s left of the records. They built the propulsion systems themselves, and didn’t use human help. Perhaps they wanted to be prudent to protect their technology, which is far too advanced for our ignorant minds to embrace.”
“I’m sure we would embrace all the practical aspects if we could figure them out,” Jack picked up another slice of the cold cuts, rolled it, and pushed it into his mouth.
Suri laughed. “Maybe that’s what they didn’t want. It’s one thing to share, it’s quite another to create your own competition. Also, we don’t yet comprehend the dangers I’m assuming they have the experience to deal with.” She sighed and changed the subject.
“Sometimes I guest lecture in the sciences classes at the schools. It’s fun and I’m hoping to do more of it. If I give you a short lecture, it might make it easier for me to explain what I know. Have I told you my story about theories?”
“No. Tell me,” Jack smiled. Suri seemed to be getting past most of her melancholy.
“Okay. Here goes. So, once upon a time, in the early nineteen hundreds, on Earth, a woman named Henrietta Leavitt became fascinated with a type of star called a Cepheid variable. She found them by studying photographic plates of the Large and Small Megallanic Clouds. These stars pulse, becoming brighter and dimmer, over and over. Each time they become brighter and dimmer is called a period. She studied several of these stars and plotted their brighter-dimmer periods on graph paper, depicting light curves. She discovered the period-luminosity relationship, which states that Cepheid variable stars having longer periods are more luminous, meaning they make more light than Cepheid variable stars with shorter periods.
“Next, a Danish astronomer named Ejnar Hertzsprung calculated the approximate distance to a Cepheid variable star from Earth using the star’s periods and light curve.
“I don’t go into the math, which is too complicated for the students at this level. The ones with aptitude who go on to study astronomy get into those equations later.
“Mr. Hertzsprung then calculated the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud using his data on some nearby Cepheids he had studied, along with the Cepheids visible in the Small Megellanic Cloud.
“Next, an American astronomer named Harlow Shapley determined the period-luminosity relationship and the light waves of a larger number of Cepheids to recalibrate the distance to the Small Magellanic cloud. It is always important to measure lots of your objects to get the right average or mean measurement to use in your calculations, or someone will come along later and do a better job and show that you didn’t do enough work and got the wrong answer. Back in the day, though, each of these discoveries was a step in the right direction, and they were working with primitive instruments. Their work was groundbreaking.
“In 1917, still on Earth, the astronomer Albert Einstein was thinking about space and time, and his new Theory of Relativity. He thought time must be affected by mass.
“In fact, when we started flying planes high in the atmosphere and sending rockets and satellites into space, we found the further away we got from the planet, the slower time moved, compared with how the devices moved on Earth.
“Called time dilation, it affected satellites, plane travelers, and the timing of communications from the space station. Mr. Einstein was right, and he figured this out with mathematics and thought experiments before we became able to fly planes and launch rockets and put satellites into space!
“I always like to pause and look into the eyes of the kids who show mathematical aptitude at this point. I ask the teacher to tell me who they are in advance.”
She continued her lecture. “Since Mr. Einstein thought space would be affected by mass, he calculated the warping of space by a force called gravity around bodies like the Earth, the moon, the sun, even galaxies.
“Now, gravity pulls masses toward each other, and if gravity was the only force, all the planets and suns and galaxies would collapse into each other. But they don’t, so Mr. Einstein hypothesized a repelling force, which he called the ‘cosmological constant’. He thought the cosmological constant would balance things out and keep everything from crashing together into a big mess.
“Now I look at the math students again. There’s usually only one
or two with exceptional ability in any class. Sometimes they’re pretty awkward kids, so I want to encourage them. I was pretty awkward, too.
“But the math didn’t add up. Mr. Einstein thought the Universe was static - a certain size, and the size wasn’t changing. But this isn’t true, which was why his math wasn’t working.
“Just a few years later, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble decided to determine a standard measure of light. He used the previous research on the Cepheid variable stars to do this. Mr. Hubble mathematically developed and used his ‘standard candle’, which is basically the average frequency of light measured from multiple Cepheid stars; in other words, one certain frequency of starlight seen from Earth at a certain distance. He used this ‘standard candle’ to measure the distance from Earth to objects he observed in space.
“Today, there are many standard candles calculated on the luminosity of different classes of objects, such as supernovae and even galaxies, with which we can measure the distance of objects from Earth.”
Jack poured himself some more coffee and selected a cookie.
“Now, light is made of particles called photons, and photons travel in waves, like sound, and light travels perfectly well in empty space, unlike sound.
“Light waves come in different colors. If you’ve taken art class, you know about the color spectrum, or Roy G. Biv: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Light appears to us as different colors because each color consists of photons vibrating at their own unique frequency.
“Frequencies are the amount of waves passing a point, like our eyes, in a given time frame, say, one second. Higher frequency waves pass the point faster, or more often in our second of time, and lower frequency waves pass more slowly.
“Since each color vibrates at its own frequency, the color red is at one end of the spectrum because its waves are a lower frequency, passing our point less frequently, and violet is at the other end of the spectrum, because its waves pass our point more frequently.
“All the colors in between have their own frequencies; each successive color’s frequency is a little higher than the previous if you start at red and move across the spectrum to lavender. Alternatively, if you start at lavender and move through the spectrum to red, each successive color’s frequency is a little lower than the previous. The light comes into our eyes, and our eyes see the different frequencies of light as different colors.
“So Mr. Hubble used his measurement of the ‘standard candle’ to compare the frequencies of light coming from different galaxies. He found galaxies which seemed reddish, or what we call red shifted. What did this mean? Well, the light from the red looking galaxies was coming into his eyes at a lower frequency than if they’d been any other color.
“Since Mr. Hubble was on Earth, and, from his perspective, stationary, he decided this meant those galaxies were moving. He decided the red shift indicated those galaxies were going away from him, because the frequency of light was slower. The light from the red shifted galaxies was taking longer to get to Earth to be observed by Mr. Hubble. Some of the galaxies seemed redder than others, which meant they were even farther away.
“Measuring the distances to these galaxies from Earth against his standard candle, he found that in fact the entire Universe was expanding, or moving away from Earth. The redder-looking galaxies were farther away, and seemed redder because the light waves were coming to him more slowly than the less red galaxies, which were closer. The closer the galaxies’ were to Mr. Hubble, the faster the waves came to him, and the color moved into the blue hues, a blue shift.
“This was a big, huge, discovery! Remember, Mr. Einstein thought the Universe stationary, now Mr. Hubble had found that no, in fact, it was expanding. The math then worked!
“All the scientists thought, well, if it’s expanding, it must have once been smaller, so they came up with the Big Bang theory. They decided that at one time, long ago, the Universe had been infinitely small, expanded rapidly outward, becoming extremely hot. Chemical reactions occurred. Atoms and molecules were attracted to each other by electromagnetic force. Gases, minerals, and composite materials formed by electromagnetic attraction as the Universe continued expanding and cooling. The spinning of the masses of these materials created gravity - the attractive force. Collisions formed asteroids, comets, planets, solar systems, and galaxies.
“The early nineteen hundreds were exciting times in science, but Mr. Einstein was troubled. He thought he’d made a blunder in his proposal of a cosmological constant, because he’d thought the universe was stagnant, or constant. Remember that afterward, Mr. Hubble found that the universe was expanding, and the math describing the Universe finally worked.
“Later scientists, however, decided Mr. Einstein had been nearly correct. They found a force working in opposition to gravity, but a little harder, causing the Universe not to maintain the same size, but to actually expand. They called this force ‘dark matter’, and although they couldn’t detect it, they observed its effect on everything out in space.
“Human beings are interested in the world around them and make observations. They say, ‘I think this explains what I’m seeing’, which is called a hypothesis, or thesis, for short. Then other people look around, do tests that we call experiments, and say they either agree or they don’t, based on the results of their tests and observations. If they disagree, someone else might say, ‘I think this is what’s going on instead’. That’s another hypothesis. Then they all test this hypothesis, and if a majority can reproduce his or her results and they agree, they say ‘this hypothesis seems to be correct’. This is when the hypothesis becomes a theory.
“Often, advances in equipment allow us to make new measurements of old or new information, or a different person has come along who thinks and sees things in a different way, and advances science.
“Scientists are a competitive, disciplined group. They all want to do the experiments and see the new results for themselves. When a general consensus occurs, meaning most of the scientists agree, they’ll adopt the new theory.
“Dissent is considered if someone doesn’t agree. Scientists who disagree may say, ‘Wait a minute, what if it’s like this instead?’ This is good, because you always want people to doubt and search for better explanations. Otherwise the scientists may all agree to some untrue idea, or a theory true only because they’re missing some information which they haven’t yet been able to detect with their equipment yet. They may not be able to proceed until more advanced equipment is developed.
“Of course, they must prove their theories with experiments and equations that back up their claims, and submit these for peer review. As a group, they all work with the new theory until new evidence is discovered which changes the equations, an experiment shows different phenomena, a new hypothesis is presented for testing, and a different theory emerges. Sometimes they just keep proving repeatedly a solid theory. This is how science advances, and this is called the Scientific Method.
“And that’s the end of that particular speech.”
Chapter Twelve
Infinite Recycling