Wormholes (17 page)

“As you know, when matter and antimatter come in contact, immense energy is released. And as you also know, gamma bursters are incredibly huge, unexplained bursts of gamma rays, detected coming from somewhere in space. These gamma bursters reflect explosions large enough to obliterate entire solar systems. But there must also be smaller gamma bursters. I think this is what happened on Neptune. I think a wormhole opened on Neptune into an antimatter galaxy, and the resulting energy release devastated the planet.” He paused again, looking around the room. If the physicists were eager for the question-and-answer session before, they would be almost rabid after what he said next. This was the statement that would echo around the world.

“If the theory I am proposing is correct, such a wormhole could open up into an antimatter universe near earth. If even a small amount of antimatter leaked through and touched matter, it could destroy the planet. A large amount of antimatter could create an explosion that would end the solar system.”

The room erupted in chatter as the moderator called for quiet and asked questioners to line up at microphones in the aisles. There was a rush of people, and the line grew to the length of the room. The first question set the tone of what was to follow. It was from a graduate student of Loeb’s. Gerald recognized that he was merely a stand-in for the famous physicist.

“Sir, frankly, I’m standing here wondering if you haven’t got another theory that links the Loch Ness Monster, Elvis’s death and the sinking of the Titanic.”

A wave of laughter swept the room. It was a time-tested way to dismiss new theories. Ridicule them.

“Do you have a question?” asked Gerald evenly.

“Well, yeah, I guess it’s about this huge variety of phenomena you’ve tried to fit under this one umbrella of some really exotic theory. I mean there’s geological phenomena, astronomical phenomena—”

“They all fit,” interrupted Gerald. “Look …” He walked to the front of the platform, staring down at the young man. He decided an attack was the best defense. “… if you just go over the data, you’ll see that these phenomena are just too exotic to be explained by commonplace theories.” He emphatically ticked off the points of his theory, touching a tip of each finger as he listed them.

But the graduate student was still in the hunt for a coup-de-gras. “Okay, then why don’t one of these holes just expand and swallow the earth? Why are we even still here?”

“My calculations show they’re self-limiting,” Gerald shot back. “Like soap bubbles. Bubbles don’t keep growing to the size of houses. They pop. And these holes collapse above a certain size.”

The tone had been set. The battle joined. The questions continued to be argumentative, some sarcastically so. A few scientists respectfully asked him to explain technical points, but most of the questions showed overt derision, mocking. Gerald didn’t care. His anger rose. He periodically glanced over at Dacey, sitting indignantly erect in her chair, and at Voigt, Cameron, Gaston, and Cooper. They all had similar annoyed expressions. They knew the truth. They had seen the stunning reality.

Gerald glanced over to the microphone in the right aisle and his nervousness rose again. Aaron Cohen stood patiently in line. He was among the best in theoretical physics, a perennial candidate for a Nobel Prize. Gerald continued to take questions, aware of Cohen, the short, intense older man, coming closer and closer to the front of the line. Finally, he was there and Gerald pointed to him.

“I’m having a bit of trouble reconciling your theory with the data,” he began modestly, his hands casually stuffed in his pockets. It was the classic posture of a confident academic about to demolish a flawed piece of reasoning. “I mean, there are perhaps more parsimonious ways to explain these things.” With that, Cohen launched into an elegant discourse, detailing how each of the strange occurrences could be explained by underground water, or volcanoes, or meteors. Cohen masterfully wielded his deep knowledge of geology, astrophysics, and a range of other fields. There was a smattering of applause as he ended his discourse with a sly insult. “Now, don’t such explanations seem more reasonable than these magic gateways you postulate? These rabbit holes?” The now-cliched reference to
Alice in Wonderland
still brought a few chuckles.

Gerald decided to attempt the impossible. To lecture one of the world’s greatest physicists.

“I’m very surprised at you, Dr. Cohen. I would have expected you above all others to be willing to go where the data led, no matter how strange the path seemed. I’ve just got to say that intellectually, you appear to be living complacently in a Newtonian universe. For Newtonians, the planets are all neat billiard balls that obey neat Newtonian laws of physics. They orbit neatly around one another and do all those nice things we’re used to. But that’s not the way the universe really is. As you should well appreciate, there really are black holes out there. Really are other dimensions, other universes. Really are gamma bursters. Now, this is a case of the real universe coming to our quiet little cosmic neighborhood. This real universe of phenomena that could cause our destruction. We’d better figure out what we’re going to do! And we’d better keep our minds open!”

A stunned silence settled over the room except for a few people letting out low, amazed mutters. Cohen was unfazed, demanding an answer to his question. And Gerald once more listed the basics of his theory and how they fit the data.

He took three more questions after that, but they were anticlimactic. Gerald Meier was famous now, the audience members would agree later around dinner tables and in bars. Some would brand him an insolent crank, others as an extraordinarily courageous thinker willing to risk the establishment. The consensus was decidedly mixed.

The session over, people crowded around with more questions. He was exhilarated, as one who’d just made his first parachute jump or run a marathon. He gave interviews to the media, summarizing his theory for television cameras. After an hour, he extricated himself and made his way back toward the hotel bar, where he’d agreed to meet Dacey and the others. He began to deflate. He realized that the battle would be immensely difficult. Around a small table, amidst the chatter and clatter of a bar, they reviewed the event.

“I couldn’t believe it,” fumed Dacey. “They weren’t even listening! They had their own preconceived notions!”

“You did okay,” said Cooper, with a deadpan expression. “You almost had me convinced.”

Gerald smiled as the other three repeated congratulations, but then quizzed him about his stunning revelation about Neptune and the possibility of antimatter galaxies. Dacey noticed that he had adopted that distracted expression she had seen before. It told her he was lapsing into the absent-minded musing when he was grappling with a theory.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I just feel that this has to be settled quickly. So much needs to be done. So much. But they’re just not going to believe, maybe, until it’s too late.” The others began to talk around him. Dacey tried to involve him.

“Jesus, it looks like the only way they’re going to believe is if you catch one of the damned holes and present it to them. Right?” Gerald said nothing. “Right?” Dacey repeated with more emphasis. She bent down and looked directly into his face. “
Hello in there!
” He looked up. He seemed to stare right through her. She became worried, even more so when a strange smile bloomed over his face. He stood up and took her face in his hands and kissed her full on the lips. The others laughed at his daring act and her shocked expression.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear, grinning. Dacey jumped as if an electric spark had touched her ear. She stammered, perhaps for the first time in her life, and before she could recover, he turned on his heel and strode out the door without looking back.

“What the hell kind of answer was that?” she demanded after him. “What the hell kind of answer was that? I mean, somebody asks you a perfectly good rhetorical question and you give an answer like that! Come back here and say that again!”

But he was gone.

T
he office phone rang while Dacey was in an advising session with an undergraduate, a girl who wanted to go into geology. The girl saw Dacey’s brow furrow, her mouth purse in annoyance, as she heard the voice on the other end. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in three weeks. Dacey politely — perhaps overly politely — asked the student to excuse her. But once the student closed the door behind her, the anger erupted.

“Where the hell are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing! You go and walk out and disappear for weeks and leave me to deal with the reporters and everybody else who’s looking for you! I called Norm Mankiewitz to find out where you were. Hell, even your mother called me to see if you were here!”

“Look, I’m sorry; I just had to do some thinking.”

“Some thinking? Some thinking! Well, pal, screw you and anybody who looks like you!” She stopped herself, surprised at her vehemence. There was silence on the line. Then he laughed and she couldn’t help but smile herself. “I mean, Jesus, what kind of weird guy am I dealing with here?”

“I still love you.”

Again, a long pause. She decided to try to ignore it. “Yeah, well … you are peculiar. Let’s just deal with what the hell you’ve been doing.”

“I understand.”

“You understand what?”

“That you have to come around at your own pace.”

“Where were you? Answer the question,
Gerald
.” She spiced his name with a large dollop of sarcasm.

“You gave me an idea. An incredible idea. I knew I could never work it out with all the confusion going on … the calls from reporters and everything. I needed to disappear.”

“Okay, you disappeared. You’re back. So did you work it out, whatever it is?”

“Can you come up to Boston? I want to show you.”

“Not a chance, unless you tell me what idea I gave you. And maybe not even then.”

“We’re going to catch a wormhole.”

• • •

Dacey felt a little foolish. Actually, she felt really foolish — on the ride to the Oklahoma City airport; on the flight to Boston; during the taxi ride to the address Gerald had given her. She felt dumb because she’d really stretched her rationale for coming, stitching together a couple of too-weak reasons. There was their possible relationship. Weak, because of her past history of avoiding relationships. There was his nutty idea. Weak, because of her scientific skepticism. But she somehow managed to make two semi-lousy reasons into one good one.

After the swerving ride from the airport over the maze of old freeways, the battered taxi rattled along the patched streets through a bleak industrial section outside Boston. Finally, it creaked to a stop before an old red brick building that had probably once been a factory. Its painted metal multi-paned translucent windows were propped open slightly, and the whine of machinery and the clank of metal on metal issued from them.

“Want me to wait, lady?” asked the cabbie, scanning the deserted street. Dacey nodded and went to the metal door and knocked on its surface, dislodging a few flakes of the peeling gray paint. The faded sign on the door said Megamag, Inc. After a moment, the door opened, and a round-faced man with a pug nose and a scruffy beard peeked out. He wore a thin, short-sleeved plaid shirt whose tightness suggested it had been purchased when he was many pounds lighter. His worn jeans also held onto his paunchy figure for dear life, hanging below the round belly and threatening to slip from the nonexistent hips altogether. He had on scruffy gray Nikes, spattered with stains and well broken-in to accommodate a wide, short foot.

“You Dacey Livingstone?”

“Yes. I’m looking for Gerald.”

“Great! He’s been waitin’. Good to see ya!” He grinned eagerly and opened the door, putting out a stubby-fingered hand. Dacey hesitated, until she saw Gerald striding lankily toward her across the gray-painted concrete floor from the back of the large machine shop. She waved the cabbie away and stepped in. They embraced only perfunctorily, in deference to the formality of the occasion and the fact that Dacey was still ticked at Gerald.

Gerald introduced the hefty ebullient little man as Andy Mullins. “He used to work for the Magnet Lab at
MIT
. Then he started his own company to make experimental magnets for research groups. This is his company.”

“Yeah,” said Andy, “C’mon. Show you the place. It’s great! My toy store!” He trundled solidly and vigorously toward an office at one end of the shop, his baggy-butt jeans still threatening to yield to gravity. As he went, he jovially pointed out the machines, explained the projects, and introduced them to engineers dressed in the same uniform of old shirts and jeans. Dacey had seen the uniform before. These were hands-on engineers who got grimy building machines themselves. The huge room smelled of oil, metal and electricity, and echoed with the sounds of workers using drill presses and other machine tools to produce huge ovals of metal wound with wire and festooned with piping.

“We do superconducting magnets,” said Mullins over the racket. “All kinds of configurations. Special experiments. Fusion, magnetohydrodynamics, stuff like that. Got a contract with the University of Florida. One with
MIT
. Another with the Japanese. We’re doin’ pretty great. Gotta remember to send out the bills, though!” He laughed probably only half in jest.

“Andy figured out a more cost-efficient way to make the magnets and it made sense for him to start a company,” said Gerald. “He’s a genius.”

“Awww,” said Mullins modestly, as they entered the cluttered offices and turned left to go past a large computer room into a conference room. Dacey was surprised to see a seemingly odd couple — the sandy-haired young oceanographer/oil company consultant, Brendan Cooper, and the dapper elderly doctor, George Voigt — sitting around a large walnut table. Mullins closed the door and the sounds of the shop receded.

“Yes, he talked me into coming here, too,” said Cooper, anticipating the question. “I just couldn’t resist seeing this.”

Voigt clasped her hand and bowed slightly. “I find this all just fascinating,” he said. “A real challenge. At my age, I thought I’d seen about everything.”

Gerald sat at the head of the table. “I asked Cameron and Gaston, but they couldn’t get away. But they still want to be involved.”

“Involved in what, exactly?” asked Dacey.

“Like I said, catching a wormhole.” Gerald paid little mind when Cooper rolled his eyes. “I wanted us all to work together on this. We’ve all been involved with these holes. I thought everybody would like to be in on catching one. I mean
really
catching one. Imagine actually having a stable aperture into another universe!”

“Gerald, I’ve got to say this sounds just too far out,” said Dacey.

“I don’t want to be too dramatic, but it could be one of the greatest technical achievements in history,” said Gerald.

“Gee that sounds too dramatic to me.” Dacey smiled wryly and Cooper chuckled. Her sarcasm was only partly in jest. She didn’t plan to make it easy on Gerald, given their relationship, whatever the hell that was.

“I know I’ve got to prove all this,” Gerald admitted. “Well, first I’ll say that my calculations show it is possible to form a stable magnetic field around these holes to secure them in place. That done, we can actually enclose them and transport them wherever we want.”

“Show me,” said Cooper, adjusting his glasses. “You said on the phone you had a demonstration.”

Gerald nodded to a grinning Mullins, who opened the conference room door and led them back out onto the shop floor and toward a separate laboratory.

“Got it pretty much figured out,” he said, as they struggled to keep up with his short, pumping legs and decipher his shorthand sentences. “Still some bugs. Few technical glitches. But pretty much. Nothin’ major.”

Entering the cluttered old laboratory, they passed through a wide aisle of electronic test equipment to a steel chamber with thick windows. Andy waved his stubby fingers to direct them to take up stations along the windows. They peered into the chamber to see a golf-ball-sized sphere suspended from an almost invisibly thin wire.

“Magnetically isolated chamber,” said Mullins, cheerfully waving his hands. “Use it to test magnet designs. Julio, do it!” He nodded at a skinny, curly-haired technician, who sealed the chamber door and began typing commands into a computer terminal whose cable led into the chamber. A hum issued from the chamber and the ball began to swing upward, hanging from the wire at an angle.

“Okay,” said Gerald. “Now, we’ve put a magnetic field in there that simulates the earth’s and this magnetized ball is being attracted northward, just like one of the apertures. … the holes.”

Julio pressed a few more computer keys and moved two joysticks, causing a pair of large, clear basketball-sized hemispheres to extend on long arms from either side of the chamber toward the ball. Covering the outside of each hemisphere was a complex arrangement of metal windings attached to electrical cable that ran down the arms. The hemispheres approached the ball, easing closer and closer.

“Okay, now we’re gonna see somethin’!” said Mullins, his eyes gleaming. “Watch for it, guys.”

The ball seemed to come under the influence of the spheres, wobbling and jittering, jerking back and forth. It slowly settled down, hanging vertically from the wire between the hemispheres. Mullins waved at Julio, who touched the joysticks, bringing the two hemispheres together, sealing the ball inside, with the wire sticking through the top. Although it was suspended most of the time, periodically the ball would jerk back and forth inside, clicking against the side of the sphere as if trying to escape.

“Okay, that’s cute. What did we see?” asked Cooper.

“We saw a system of automatically controlled electromagnets,” said Gerald. “They adjusted to the earth’s field and the position of the ball to create a magnetic field shaped to trap the ball inside the sphere. And the field held it suspended inside. We just caught a wormhole.”

“You mean almost,” said Dacey. “That little ball was bouncing around pretty good in there. Y’know, I’ve seen what those holes do … the ones that have vacuums,” said Dacey. “That happens with a real hole, you’ve got a disaster. It’s one thing to catch a little metal ball; it’s another to catch something that’s pulling a hard vacuum … something that can eat a house!”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Mullins, knitting his brow. “You’re right. Got some work to do. But we can do it. We can.”

Gerald nodded his head. “We improve the automatic controls. Then scale it up. We put one hemisphere on each of two mobile vehicles, say a couple of surplus tanks or bulldozers that’re heavy enough not to get sucked in. Then we’ve got a hole-catcher.”

“Excuse me,” said George in his typically polite tone. “But those holes can cut through about anything. I saw the results and so did the two gentlemen from San Francisco. That control has to be absolutely perfect. What if a hole escapes when you’re trying to persuade it to be captured?”

“It’s risky. We’ve just got to reduce the risk as much as possible. Listen, I think it’s important enough that I’m willing to be in one of the vehicles.”

“Okay, so you’ve got two hole-grabbers. But there’s another tiny problem,” said Dacey. “These things don’t come to you. I mean they pop up all over the place. You got some sort of hole-attractant?”

Gerald frowned. “I don’t know. Only thing I can figure out is to go where we have the best shot of finding out about them the minute they pop up. In major cities.” He looked expectantly at Mullins, who shrugged in resigned agreement. “So, we just build enough of these systems to place in some major cities, where we know we’ll hear about them.”

“Gotta be a better way,” said Dacey. “You’ve got to have some kind of warning. I can just see a couple of tanks with these big dish doohickies on the front, trying to get through a bunch of downtown streets when there’s some disaster like the one in Gillard.”

Mullins folded his beefy arms and leaned against the window. “Well, maybe one of these holes pops up in some big city, they’ll be happy to let us try to catch it. Give us right-of-way, like an ambulance or something.”

“Next big question.” Dacey looked through the window at the large sphere and the small metal ball visible inside. “How much money? Where do you get it?”

“That’s two questions,” said Gerald. “The answers are a couple hundred million dollars and a high-tech company that wants to control the most incredible phenomenon in the world. Deus can provide
R&D
funds, but nowhere near that amount. But I think some smart company would go for it. The holes might prove an unlimited energy source; maybe a way to dispose of hazardous waste, maybe a path to new physics. We can’t even imagine the possibilities.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t imagine any company I’ve dealt with going for it,” said Cooper. “The
CEO
would say ‘here’s this guy with this theory that was ridiculed by the best physicists in the business. And he wants millions of dollars to put tanks in the streets of American cities to catch something that probably doesn’t exist.’”

Gerald’s face took on an expression that Dacey had never seen before — an odd mixture of smoldering anger, determination, and reverie.