“Portobello?”
“Probably not. You’d jack socially with members of your platoon, your ex-platoon.” He shook his head slowly. “Can’t you see? That wouldn’t be good for you or for them.”
“Oh, I see; I see. From your point of view, anyhow.”
“I am the expert,” he said carefully. “I don’t want you to be hurt and I don’t want to be court-martialed for negligence—which is what would happen if I let you go back to your platoon and some of them couldn’t handle sharing your memories.”
“We’ve shared the feelings of people while they died, sometimes in great pain.”
“But they didn’t come back from the dead. Come back and discuss how desirable it might be.”
“I may be cured of that.” Even as I said it, I knew how false it sounded.
“One day, I’m sure you will be.” That didn’t sound too convincing, either.
* * *
julian endured one more day of bed rest and then was transferred to an “observation unit,” which was like a hotel room, except that it only locked from the outside, and was always locked. Dr. Jefferson came in every other day for a week, and a kindly young civilian therapist, Mona Pierce, talked to him daily. After a week (by then, Julian was convinced he was going to go insane) Jefferson jacked with him, and the next day, he was released.
The apartment was too neat. Julian went from room to room trying to figure out what was wrong, and then it hit him—Amelia must have hired someone to come in and clean. Neither of them had any instinct or talent in that direction. She must have found out when he was going to be released and squandered a few bucks on it. The bed was made with military precision—a dead giveaway—and on it was a note with today’s date inside a heart.
He made a pot of coffee (spilling both water and grounds but scrupulously cleaning them up) and sat down to the console. There was a lot of mail stacked up for him, most of it awkward. A letter from the army giving him one month’s leave at reduced pay, followed by a posting right on campus, not a mile from where he lived. The title was “senior research assistant”; it was TDY, so he could live at home, “hours to be arranged.” If he was reading between the lines correctly, the army was pretty well through with him, but on principle wouldn’t just discharge him. It would be a bad example, being able to get out of the army just by killing yourself.
Mona Pierce had been a good listener who asked the right questions. She didn’t condemn Julian for what he did—was angry at the military for not seeing it and discharging him before the inevitable happened—and didn’t really disapprove of suicide in an absolute way, giving Julian tacit permission to do it again. But not over the boy. A lot of factors caused the boy’s death, but Julian had been present against his will, and his part in it had been reflexive and appropriate.
If the personal mail had been awkward to write, it was doubly awkward to answer. He wound up with two basic replies: One was a simple “Thanks for your concern; I’m okay now” brush-off, and the other was a more detailed explanation, for those who deserved it and wouldn’t be too bothered by it. He was still working on that when Amelia came in, carrying a suitcase.
She hadn’t been able to see him during the week he was incarcerated in the observation unit. He’d called as soon as he was released, but she wasn’t at home. The office said she was out of town.
They embraced and said the obvious things. He poured her a cup of coffee without asking. “I’ve never seen you look so tired. Still going back and forth to Washington?”
She nodded and took the cup. “And Geneva and Tokyo. I had to talk with some people at CERN and Kyoto.” She looked at her watch. “Midnight flight to Washington.”
“Jesus. What is it that’s worth killing yourself over?” She looked at him for a moment and they both laughed, an embarrassed giggle.
She pushed the coffee away. “Let’s go set the alarm for ten-thirty and get some rest. You feel up to going to Washington?”
“Meet the mysterious Peter?”
“And do some math. I’m going to need all the help I can get, convincing Macro.”
“Of what? What’s so damned . . .”
She slipped out of her dress and stood up. “First bed. Then sleep. Then explanations.”
* * *
while amelia and i sleepily dressed and threw together some clothes for the trip, she gave me a rough outline of what to expect in Washington. I didn’t stay sleepy long.
If Amelia’s conclusions about Peter Blankenship’s theory proved correct, the Jupiter Project had to be shut down. It could literally destroy everything: the Earth, the solar system; the universe itself, eventually. It would re-create the Diaspora, the “big bang” that started everything.
Jupiter and its satellites would be consumed in a fraction of a second; Earth and the Sun would have a few dozen minutes. Then the expanding bubble of particles and energy would muscle its way out to consume every star in the Galaxy, and then go on to the main course: the rest of everything.
One aspect of cosmology that the Jupiter Project had been designed to test was the “accelerated universe” theory. It was almost a century old, and had survived in spite of inelegance and a prevailing skepticism over its “ad hoc”–ness, because in model after model, the theory seemed to be necessary in order to account for what happened the tiniest fraction of a second after creation—10−35 of a second.
Simply stated, during that tiny period, you either had to temporarily increase the speed of light or make time elastic. For various reasons, the elasticity of time had always been the more likely explanation.
All of this took place when the universe was very tiny, growing from the size of a BB to the size of a small pea.
In the cab to the airport and during the flight, Amelia slept while I skimmed the field equations and tried to attack her method, using pseudo-operator theory. Pseudo-operator theory was so new I’d never applied it to a practical problem; Amelia had only heard of it. I needed to talk to some people about applying it, and to do it right required a lot more computing power than my notebook could muster.
(But suppose I did demonstrate they were wrong, and the Jupiter Project went ahead, but it turned out to be me and my new technique that were in error. A guy who couldn’t live with killing one person would wind up destroying all life, everywhere.)
The danger was that the Jupiter Project would focus furious energies into a volume much smaller than a BB. Peter and Amelia thought that this would re-create, in reverse, the environment that characterized the universe when it was that small, and, an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, precipitate a tiny accelerated universe, and then a new Diaspora. It was bizarre to realize that something that happened in an area the size of a paramecium could trigger the end of the world. Of the universe.
Of course the only way of really checking it would be to do the experiment. Sort of like loading a gun and testing it by putting the muzzle in your mouth and pulling the trigger.
I thought of that metaphor while I was setting up operator conditions, typing on the plane, but didn’t pass it on to Amelia. It occurred to me that a man who had recently tried to kill himself might not be the ideal companion for this particular venture.
Because of course the universe does end when you die. From whatever cause.
Amelia was still asleep, her head against the window, when we landed in Washington, and the change in vibration didn’t wake her. I touched her awake and took down both our bags. She let me carry hers without protest, evidence of how tired she was.
I bought a pack of speedies at the airport newsstand while she called to make sure Peter was up. As she suspected, he was up and speeding, so we put the patches behind our ears and were wide awake by the time we got to the tube. Great stuff if you don’t overdo it. I asked, and she confirmed that Peter was living on it.
Well, if your mission is saving the universe, what’s a little sleep deprivation? Amelia was taking a lot of it, too, but coming down (with sleepies) to sleep three
or four hours a day. If you don’t do that, sooner or later you’ll crash like a meteorite. Peter needed a complete and ironclad argument ready before he could allow himself to sleep, and knew he would pay for it.
Amelia had told him I was “sick,” but hadn’t elaborated. I suggested we call it food poisoning. Alcohol is a sort of a food.
He never asked. His interest in people began and ended with their usefulness to “the Problem.” My credentials were that I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut and had been studying this new corner of analysis.
He met us at the door and gave me a cold damp handshake while he stared at me with pinpoint speedie pupils. As he led us to the office he gestured at an untouched tray of cold cuts and cheese that looked old enough to give you actual food poisoning.
The office was a familiar-looking mess of papers and readers and books. He had a console with a large double screen. One screen was a fairly straightforward Hamiltonian analysis and the other was a matrix (actually one visible face of a hypermatrix) full of numbers. Anybody familiar with cosmology could decode it; it was basically a chart of various aspects of the proto-universe as it aged from zero to ten thousand seconds old.
He gestured at that screen. “Identify . . . can you identify the first three rows?”
“Yes,” I said, and paused long enough to gauge his sense of humor: none. “The first row is the age of the universe in powers of ten. The second row is the temperature. The third row is the radius. You’ve left out the zero-th column.”
“Which is trivial.”
“As long as you know it’s there. Peter . . . should I call you—”
“Peter. Julian.” He rubbed two or three days’ worth of stubble. “Blaze, let me freshen up before you tell me about Kyoto. Julian, familiarize yourself with the matrix. Touch to the left of the row if you have any questions about the variable.”
“Have you slept at all?” Amelia asked.
He looked at his watch. “When did you leave? Three days ago? I slept a little then. Don’t need it.” He strode out of the room.
“If he got one hour of sleep,” I said, “he’d still be down.”
She shook her head. “It’s understandable. Are you ready for this? He’s a real slave driver.”
I showed her a pinch of dark skin. “It’s in my heritage.”
My approach to the Problem was about as old as physics, post-Aristotle. First, I would take his initial conditions and, ignoring his Hamiltonians, see whether pseudo-operator theory came to the same conclusion. If it did, then the next thing, probably the only thing, we had to worry about was the initial conditions themselves. There were no experimental data about conditions close to the “accelerated universe” regime. We could check some aspects of the Problem by instructing the Jupiter accelerator to crank up energies closer and closer to the critical point. But how close to the edge of a cliff do you want to push a robot when it might be forty-eight minutes between command and response? Not too close.
The next two days were a sleepless marathon of mathematics. We took a half hour off when we heard explosions outside and went up to the roof to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the Washington Monument.
Watching the crash-bang of it, smelling the powder, I realized it was kind of a dilute preview of coming attractions. We had a little more than nine weeks. The Jupiter Project, if it went on schedule, would produce the critical energy level on September 14.
I think we all made the connection. We watched the finale silently and went back to work.
Peter knew a little about pseudo-operator analysis, and I knew a little about microcosmology; we spent a lot of time making sure I was understanding the questions and he was understanding the answers. But at the end of two days, I was as convinced as he and Blaze were. The Jupiter Project had to die.
Or we all had to die. A terrible thought occurred to me while I was twanging on speedies and black coffee: I could kill both of them with two blows. Then I could destroy all the records and kill myself.
I would become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, to paraphrase a nuclear pioneer. With a simple act of violence, I could destroy the universe.
A good thing I was sane.
It wouldn’t be difficult for the Project engineers to prevent the disaster; any random change of the position of a few elements of the ring would do it. The system had to line up just so in order to work: a circular collimation over a million kilometers in circumference that would last for less than a minute before gravity from Jupiter’s moons pulled it apart forever. Of course that minute would be eons long compared to the tiny interval that was being simulated. And plenty of time for the accelerating surge to make one orbit and produce the supercharged speck that would end it all.
* * *
i was growing to like Peter, in spite of himself. He was a slave driver, but he drove himself harder than he did me or Amelia. He was temperamental and sarcastic and blew up about as regularly as Old Faithful. But I’ve never met anyone so absolutely dedicated to science. He was like a mad monk lost in his love of the divine.
Or so I thought.
Speedies or no, I’m still blessed and cursed with a soldier’s body. In the soldierboy I was exercised constantly, to keep from cramping up; at the university I worked out every day, alternating an hour of running with an hour on the gym machines. So I could get along without sleep, but not without exercise. Every morning at dawn I’d excuse myself from the proceedings and go off to run.
I was systematically exploring downtown Washington during my morning jogs, taking the Metro down and going in a different direction each day. I’d seen most of the monuments (which might be more moving to someone who’d actually chosen to be a soldier) and ranged as far afield as the Washington Zoo and Alexandria, when I felt like doing a few extra miles.
Peter accepted the fact that I had to have the exercise to keep from cramping up. I also contended that it cleared my head, but he pointed out that his head was clear enough, and the only exercise he got was wrestling with cosmology.
That was not entirely true. On the fifth day I got almost all the way to the Metro station and realized I’d left my card behind. I jogged on back to the apartment and let myself in.
My street clothes were in the living room, by the fold-out bed that Amelia and I shared. I took the card out of my wallet and started back to the front door, but then heard a noise from the study. The door was partly open; I looked in.
Amelia was sitting on the edge of the table, naked from the waist down, her legs scissored around Peter’s bald head. She was gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles were bone-white, her face to the ceiling in a rictus of orgasm.
I closed the door with a quiet click and ran out.
I ran as hard as I could for several hours, stopping a few times to buy water and choke it down. When I got to the border gate between D.C. and Maryland, I couldn’t get through because I didn’t have my interstate pass. So I stopped running and slid into a dive called the Border Bar, icy air sharp with tobacco smoke, legal in D.C. I drank down a liter of beer and then sipped another liter with a shot of whiskey.
The combination of speedies and alcohol is not entirely pleasant. Your mind goes off in all directions.
When we first started going together, we talked about fidelity and jealousy. There’s a kind of generation problem: When I was in my teens and early twenties, there was a lot of sexual experimentation and swapping around, with the defendable basis that sex is biology and love is something else, and a couple could negotiate the two issues independently. Fifteen years earlier, when Amelia had been that age, attitudes were more conservative—no sex without love, and then monogamy afterward.
She agreed at the time to go along with my principles—or lack of same, her contemporaries might say—even though we both thought it was unlikely we would exercise our freedom.
So now she had, and for some reason it was devastating. Less than a year ago, I would have jumped at the opportunity of having sex with Sara, jacked or
not. So what right did I have to feel injured because she had done exactly the same thing? She’d been living with Peter more closely than most married couples live, for quite a while, and she respected him enormously, and if he asked for sex, why not say yes?
I had a feeling it was she who had asked, though. She certainly had been enjoying it.
I finished the drinks and switched to iced coffee, which tasted like cold battery acid, even with three sugars.
Did she know that I’d seen? I had closed the door automatically, but they might not remember having left it slightly open. Sometimes the current from the airco cycling on and off would ease a door shut.
“You look lonely, soldier.” I did my running in fatigue uniform, in case I wanted an unrationed beer. “You look sad.” She was pretty, blond, maybe twenty.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’m all right.”
She sat down on the stool next to me and showed me her ID, professional name Zoë, medical inspection only one day old. Only one customer had signed the book. “I’m not just a whore. I’m also a professional expert on men, and you’re not ‘all right.’ You look like you’re about to jump off a bridge.”
“So let me.”
“Huh-uh. Not enough men around to waste one.” She lifted up the back of her wig. “Not enough jacked men, anyhow.”
Her off-white shift was raw silk, hanging loosely on her graceful athletic body, revealing nothing and everything: This merchandise is so good I don’t have to advertise.
“I’ve used up most of my entertainment points,” I said. “Can’t afford you.”
“Hey, I’m not doing any business. Give you one for free. Got a dime for the jack?”
I did have ten dollars. “Yeah, but look. I’ve had too much to drink.”
“No such thing, with me.” She smiled, perfect hungry teeth. “Money-back guarantee. I’ll refund your dime.”
“You just want to do it jacked.”
“And I like soldiers. Was one.”
“Come on. You’re not old enough.”