Moon Flower (5 page)

For Shearer this was pure physics at its most exciting and intriguing — the chance of being the first to gain a new insight to how a part of the universe worked. By comparison, he was unable to muster much enthusiasm for the thought of being a development physicist concerned with devising practical applications in some field where the basic discoveries had already been made. It didn’t matter how well it might pay, or where it ranked on the totem pole of what was conventionally recognized as “success.” The regular rewards followed precisely
because
the most fascinating and challenging part was already accomplished. Shearer had tried explaining it to Fay, but there were some things that some people would never understand. That was why it had been better to let things take their course.

The apparatus occupying the small basement room in the Physics faculty of the State University at Berkeley looked like a regular piece of laboratory optronics that could have been anything from a holophotometer for analyzing the geometry of proteins to a test rig for a neurally controlled music synthesizer. It comprised a couple of racks of circuitry and crystalogic arrays in a floor-standing frame, some bench-mounted optics and holoware, and an adjacent desk doubling as a control console, sporting a main display and several smaller ancillary screens.

Shearer sat at the desk, entering settings for the next test, while Rob Vowley, a postgrad who had also been there since the time of Evan Wade, read parameters off the schedule sheet from a lab stool pulled up on one side. Merritt Queale, their young, petite, dark-haired technician of several months now, tidied the bench of tools that she had been using to fix a minor coolant leak.

“We’ll use the same offsets. I’m taking the range up to two seconds,” Shearer said.

“Check,” Rob acknowledged, and made a note in a column on his sheet.

“And keep the correlation filter at five-point-six.”

“Gotcha.”

Shearer hadn’t told them about Fay yet. There was a time for bringing up personal matters, and a morning with a busy work schedule wasn’t it. They worked well enough, sharing either through temperament or as a result of circumstances, a resignation to life on the fringes of the physics world.

Rob had idolized an older brother who bought a military recruiter’s line at age eighteen and had been butchered in one of the central African interventions. Grief and anger had driven him to activism against overseas aggression, as a result of which he was officially listed as “subversive,” which effectively debarred him from any regular employment above janitor. Most of what he made went to keeping his disabled mother, whose compensation payments from the military had foundered on a technicality that the state authorities showed no inclination to investigate. Yet underneath it all, Rob had the same kind of dedication as Shearer to wanting to know what was true. If it hadn’t been diverted into campaigning for political truths, he could have made a first-rate scientist.

Merritt was a very private person and divulged little about herself beyond domestic details and day-to-day trivia. She lived to high personal standards and distrusted large, powerful institutions of any kind, governmental or corporate. Shearer’s assessment was that while she could no doubt have made the grade for many more highly paid and prestigious callings, she preferred a low-profile existence that didn’t involve endless interrogations and background checks, which she looked on as being treated like a criminal suspect. But she was precise and competent in her own unassuming way, and had proved totally dependable. Shearer had little time for loud people who were always telling the world how good they were. The ones who really were good, he had found, were those who, when the facts spoke for themselves, didn’t interrupt.

For his own part, Shearer, at thirty-three, was on the young side of average to be heading such a project. But Wade’s departure had left no other likely successor with knowledge of the work that came anywhere close to Shearer’s, and none at all who shared Wade’s confidence in the outcome. For Shearer, that in itself was reward enough.

Rob glanced across at Merritt. “How’s that joint looking?”

“It’s back up to full pressure. Seems okay.”

“Let’s roll it, then,” Shearer said. “We’ll make this the last one before lunch.”

“Fine by me,” Rob agreed. Merritt moved around to stand behind Shearer’s chair, where she could watch.

A set of coordinate axes marked by scale graduations appeared down the left side and across the lower part of the main screen, with the graphing area showing as a lighter-toned panel. What made this different from other laboratory setups was the tiny configuration of molecular-scale fibers embedded in a cryogenically stabilized crystal matrix housed within the cookie-jar-size aluminum cylinder in the lower section of the floor-standing frame. The device was a modified form of one of Evan Wade’s attempts to design a detector of A-waves — waves of “something” that traveled backward in time. He had dubbed such a device an
adtenna
, from “advanced wave detector-antenna.”

Shearer checked the status indicators showing on one of the smaller displays. The procedure they had developed was somewhat more elaborate than Wade’s original trials, but still conceptually straightforward. A set of random number generators, which could be varied with regard to how many generators were employed and the range of numbers that each could produce, sent their outputs via a delay circuit to a device that produced a complex wave function from the collapse of a superposition of quantum states. The particular combination of quantum states to create the superposition would be determined by whatever numbers happened to be generated. Hence, until the delay had elapsed — in the present case Shearer was making it two seconds — there was no way of knowing what form the resultant complex function would take: It didn’t yet exist, and the numbers that would define it hadn’t been produced.

However, according to the theory, the function, when it did come into existence, would send an A-wave back in time, which the adtenna would pick up. The output from the adtenna was then merged in a holographic-like process with a reference signal derived from the original random numbers to produce an interference pattern that could be decoded as a frequency spectrum and displayed. The spectrum would result from combining two inputs: the set of random numbers, and the A-wave coming back from quantum function that the numbers would cause to be generated two seconds in the future. As such, it would contain information pertaining to a situation that had not yet come into existence. At least, that was the idea.

Shearer touched a key to initiate the run. Rob turned on his stool to watch the screen. A countdown window opened and ticked off the seconds from five down to zero. A pale violet fuzz, like the bristles of a wide brush but irregular in height and shimmering and shifting, appeared above the horizontal bar, extending from left to right across the screen. A ghost. But not the ghost of anything gone; a ghost presaging something that was yet to be.... Then, suddenly, a solid, blue trace consisting of irregular peaks and troughs added itself. The image froze. And that was it.

“Logged,” Rob murmured matter-of-factly. Merritt straightened up and moved away to sit down on another chair near the desk, while Shearer went through the routine of verifying that the record had been annotated and filed.

Theoretically, the initial violet trace showed the wave function that existed in the future — not a prediction computed from a model or a probability forecast, but a
physical manifestation
generated from the backward-propagating A-wave. That state of affairs had persisted for two seconds. Then the delayed numbers had been delivered to the quantum superposition device, causing the function to happen, and the blue trace was the result. But if a precursor of the blue waveform did indeed exist within the violet fuzz, it was so buried in noise and uncertainties as to be far from readily apparent. The only indication would come from complex statistical analysis of the signals. Shearer and the others had seen this many times now, and at best the results were marginal. Technically, the correlations they were getting were significant. But convincing the rest of the world was another matter.

Other scientists had read the papers describing the project; some had even come to see the experiments for themselves. But it quickly became apparent that their motivation was to debunk and discredit, not to evaluate, and the reports they subsequently wrote had not been favorable. Shearer often wondered if that might have been the real reason behind Wade’s sudden departure — as if Wade had kept up a brave face outwardly, reassuring them through his infectious enthusiasm that it would all work out in the end, but all the time harboring a growing disillusionment inside, until one day he decided that he just wanted out.

And so the project had limped along on shoestring funds that the administrators had managed to wring out of an office of the state defense intelligence apparatus on the strength of deliberately exaggerated accounts that Shearer, following the precedent set by Wade, had written into the renewal applications, intimating the imminence of a method for “seeing into the future,” with juicy implications for military intelligence and political decision making. But that kind of deception was standard practice that researchers were forced to follow if they hoped to attract any attention at all. The funding authorities knew it too, and so a senseless kind of game ensued in which neither side believed the claims that were written, each knew that the other didn’t believe them, but both were required to act out the farce with straight faces and due solemnity. When the tune being called for was one that the piper couldn’t deliver, if he wanted to eat, he had little choice but to promise that it would be learned by tomorrow.

And so they had carried on, and the experiments continued to deliver their marginal results. With Wade gone, Shearer had found himself gradually losing heart in the whole business too, and asking himself more frequently if they were reading more into what they were seeing than was there, and if the reality was as inconclusive as the skeptics said. One of the biggest pitfalls in science was the ease with which wishful thinking could distort the vision of true believers.

Then, about a month previously, he had received a terse message from Wade saying that he wanted Shearer to come out and join him. However, this would have to be framed as a request for an assistant, and university regulations relating to equal opportunity didn’t permit someone of Shearer’s grade to be stipulated by name. Hence, Wade would have to go through the regular channels of putting through a request for a slot to be approved and applications invited; but he would make the description such that only someone with Shearer’s background would fit. Details of an opening on Cyrene had duly appeared in the professional situations-available lists, and Shearer had put in his bid. Although he hadn’t fully admitted it consciously to himself, he knew deep down that it signified his acceptance that the project at Berkeley was as good as over. He was open to the thought of starting again with something new elsewhere. He knew too that his mood had communicated itself to Rob and Merritt. None of them had come out and said so, but he could sense that they all had the feeling of living on borrowed time.

“Got any thoughts about lunch?” Rob asked, turning around on the stool to address Shearer.

“Not really.... Sammy’s?” It was a deli along the block from the campus, one of the regular haunts.

“Could do, I guess.”

Shearer looked over at Merritt. “Coming with us?”

“I brought something in today. No reflection on the company, but it means I get to read for an hour on my own in peace and quiet too.”

“What are you reading?” Rob asked her curiously as she got up and went over to unhook her duffel bag from the rack behind the door.

“An old Victorian novel. English.” Merritt came back and sat down again, taking out a plastic lunch box secured with a rubber band, and a flask. She rummaged some more and handed Rob a battered-looking volume with faded red covers and worn edges. “Besides, I don’t like the security hassle of getting back in again. So I only go out if I have to.”

“Original?” Rob inquired, thumbing through the pages.

“No, a nineteen-twenties reprint.”

“That’s practically the same to me. So what’s it got? Swooning heroines, cads, and decent chaps with character and breeding that tells?”

“At least they were written by authors who knew their own language,” Merritt replied. “And, you can be facetious if you want, but you’re not that far off the mark. Sure — characters with style and taste. Where else are you going to find it these days?”

“Do you know, there used to be a time when there wasn’t any security to go through to get into a place like this?” Shearer said. “Or most places, in fact.” He inclined his head up at one of the cameras covering the lab area from opposite ends. “Or any of that. The staff would never have put up with it. Universities were public places, funded with public money. They took a pride in being open to anyone who wanted to walk in off the street. No tracker chips in everything you own. No bio-ID profiles.”

“Times sure change, don’t they.” Rob snorted and rose to his feet, passing the book back to Merritt.

“It sounds like another world,” Merritt said dreamily.

“That’s just what it was,” Shearer told them. He got up too and retrieved his jacket from the hook next to Merritt’s bag. “Airports as well.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Really. Everywhere. My grandfather told me he could remember just walking through to the gates where they boarded the old flat-takeoff jets. Sometimes there wouldn’t be any agent or anyone there. The door of the plane was open. You just got on, found your seat, and waited for the crew to show up.”

Rob was staring fixedly when Shearer turned back toward the door. “You know, Marc, every time I listen to you, I end up thinking about something in ways that never occurred to me before,” he accused.

“That’s because you’re not supposed to think about it,” Shearer said, and then threw back, “See you later, Merritt.”