SWNOVELS Chapter 3: The Puzzle
Jerry was asleep on the couch in front of his vid-wall. The last remnants of a glass of Tuber-rye was on the coffee table, and both bowls of leaf strips had turned a deep brown. He was snoring, one of a long list of faults that Ball was glad to leave behind when she left him once and for all, but which in this case was not disturbing, mostly because there was no one in the dome to be disturbed. The wall had gone silent for the night, and was now showing a test pattern. The lights were still on, and the dome windows showed simulated night.
It turns out that on this part of the planet there is always daylight, and the dome window things help keep humans on a reasonable sleep schedule. We spend an unfair amount of time here learning about biological clocks, and how humans had a hard time adjusting to the different patterns of day and night on other planets. Finally, we discover, humans learned to fake it by building dome things that could keep our internal clocks sane by simulating day and night while indoors.
This is part of an ongoing attempt to create a scientifically based and justifiable world – to prove that this world could, under the right conditions, come to be. We are, after all, a suspicious lot, and although we are generally anxious to believe in the highly improbable, we need at least a modicum of science to justify our beliefs. Unfortunately, although such a trickle of science would be welcome, it is not to be, and rather, the waters rise until we are in the midst of a flood that leaves nothing but a devastated barren wasteland in its wake.
Nevertheless, we do ultimately dig ourselves out, and, the justification complete, we accept the repercussions of a world without darkness, and fall back into the story.
The vid-wall began flashing on and off with a bright red light and an accompanying alarm. The light and sound permeated the dome, and turned it into the inside of a pinball machine following a double bonus and multi-ball. No reasonable person could continue to sleep through such cacophony, but as we are about to find out, Jerry was not, at present, a reasonable person. The substances he had ingested earlier that evening in a misguided attempt to numb his emotional pain had worked with a vengeance, and it was going to take more than a vid alarm to bring him out of his stupor. He rolled over, which cut the noise down by the amount of snoring he had previously been producing, but which left the alarm otherwise unimpeded. In the morning, when he really would have to get up, the couch would literally shake him out of bed with a mechanical alarm of his own devising. The communication alarm, however, was not so sophisticated, and this hurricane of noise and glare was the best it could do.
Now even the strongest and most stubborn men, among whom Jerry often counted himself, are eventually worn down by persistence, and the alarm was nothing if not persistent. Eventually Jerry started to awaken, barely realizing what was happening, and instinctually avoiding the moment where asleep becomes awake, took the pillow from under his head and put it over his ears in the vain hope of avoiding the waking effect of the alarm.
To Jerry’s immense relief, the noise of the alarm was soon replaced with silence, and he took the pillow, and put it back under his head. He gently allowed himself to float back into some semblance of the dream from which he had been so rudely ripped, and felt himself slipping back into nocturnal bliss. But no good thing can last forever, and what had formerly been an alarm, now became the voice of an old acquaintance.
“Jerry, you there?”
Jerry remained sloth-like, but could now feel the dreaded awake creeping up on him.
“Jerry, wake up!”
This time, we know Jerry had heard something, because he took his pillow from under his head and placed back over his head, squeezing down hard on his ears. “Go away! I don’t want any,” he eked out. Jerry had intended for this to be a scream, but he did not yet have the energy he imagined, and what energy he did have was absorbed by the pillow.
“Jerry, it’s me. Wake up. I don’t have much time”
“Aw, leave me alone, will you?” And then it happened. Jerry was awake, pretending to asleep, instead of experiencing the real thing. Intellectually, he wasn’t yet ready to give in, but physically, the waking had come.
“Jerry, I’m serious. Do you think I’d risk my job to call you if it wasn’t important?”
“Go to hell.”
“Jerry,” and here Peter Elbert paused, either for effect or out of sheer terror at what he was about to say. “It’s Fisher’s paradox.”
And Jerry awoke. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and stared at Elbert’s oversized image on the screen. Then he sat back, drank what was left of his final cocktail of the night before and heaved a deep sigh.
Peter Elbert had changed over the last 12 years, Jerry thought. He had lost most of his hair and had bags under his eyes. Jerry remembered Elbert as a sort of lost puppy, but now he looked more like a beaten down dog. He tried to suppress the thought of how he might look to Elbert, but it hounded him. There are times when looking into the face of an old friend can be even worse than looking into a mirror, and Jerry saw himself more clearly than he had in years. It was not a pretty sight, but at least he had the excuse of being woken up in the middle of the night. He wondered what the time would be on Earth right now, but had no idea where his charts were.
We’ll learn all about how time differences work in this world later on. Or maybe we’ll skip it. All that really matters is that they exist, and they are very complicated.
As the fog cleared from his head, he remembered something important. Something this guy he barely recognized had just said. What was it? Something about a paradox. On the vid-wall, this giant old version of Elbert gave no indication that he was going to repeat himself.
Paradox. Paradox. He willed himself fully awake. Fisher’s paradox?
“Well,” Jerry managed to say at last, “we knew it would happen eventually.” The sound of his voice surprised him, and he had to clear his throat a few times to feel normal. Water. Water would be good.
“Jerry, did you hear what I said? Fisher’s paradox. It’s happening. Right now, in sector 47b. A crack the size of Penteus 2, and growing.”
“I heard you, Pete.” He cleared his throat again, and then coughed in earnest. “If that’s all you’ve got to say, you might as well go back to work, and let me get some sleep. My shift starts in 4 hours, and I need about 6 more hours of sleep.” Jerry dragged himself up and walked to the wall to shut it off for the night. No. Water is not worth the effort. Sleep is better.
Elbert saw him coming toward the camera and became desperate.
“There must be something we can do.”
Jerry bristled. Of all the nerve. To wake me up in the middle of the night, to use his security clearance to force communications without my permission, to demand my help for the one problem he had refused to solve when he had the chance, after all that he had done... It was more than he could bear. He sat back down on the couch and slouched deeply. With his head tilted back, he looked up at the artificially black windows in the dome.
“No, Pete, there isn’t. We’re doomed.” Suddenly Jerry came to his senses. He was talking with a man who had at one time held in his hands the power to save his career, his marriage, his life. This man, this shell of a man had utterly destroyed him with his cowardice. His lack of action, lack of solidarity when it was needed most had sealed Jerry’s fate, and his memory of that brought a swell of anger in him. He went for the water after all.
As he returned from the Kitchen unit, he finished his thought. “But you’ve known that all along, Pete. You knew when he promoted you. You knew before he sent me to this hell-hole. Before I lost the only thing that ever mattered to me. When there was still something we could to about it. Before it was too late. You could’ve backed me up when it mattered, Pete, but you didn’t, and now it’s your mess.” Then Jerry did the same thing he always did when his anger got the better of him. He took his half full glass of water and hurled it at the vid. Elbert flinched and jumped back. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Whatever courage Elbert had come in with was visibly diminished by Jerry’s act of violence, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. This vid-call was the boldest thing Elbert had done in 12 years, maybe in his whole life, and he forced himself to move forward. “That’s, uh, not how it was...and...well...I think maybe you know it. Jerry, when you discovered Fisher’s paradox it...it was nothing more than a math exercise.”
“An exercise?!”
“Well...I mean...um...basically yeah. You didn’t really have...um...any y’know... proof, and you...well...you expected the Old Man to shut down the whole...well... operation.” Elbert was well up into his high voice and clearly nervous about confronting his former colleague, especially when he needed his help. But after all these years, he too had something on his mind, and needed to clear the air.
Elbert continued, “He would have lost everything he had built and worse, because...well…” At this point Elbert looked over his shoulder, then back at the camera and lowered his voice. “I mean…he doesn’t really have any friends, does he? Without the power of RTI, he’s just a…a freak in a human shell. You knew he was never going to accept it, regardless of the consequences. You could have, well, I guess… taken your time, y’know… worked on the math with me, brought me in, “ Elbert seemed to grow some resolve. “But you didn’t, you…you rushed in and…damn it, you sealed your own fate. And for what? A theory. A bunch of numbers on paper that… barely added up.”
“Barely added up? Barely added up?” Jerry was furious in a way he usually hated himself for later, and tried to calm himself down. He picked an empty glass up off the floor and hurled it at Elbert. This time, however, Elbert saw it coming and didn’t even flinch, which had a profound effect on Jerry. He sat back down on the couch and sighed. “Ok, they barely added up,” he at last conceded, “but they added up. What does barely have to do with it?”
“You had no proof!”
Jerry and Elbert stared at each other through their vid-walls for awhile.
There was a time when Elbert had looked up to Jerry as a mentor even though he was Jerry’s senior, and Jerry had encouraged the relationship. They had been close, worked together on tough problems, brainstorming together and bonding they way only scientists working together on tough problems could. It was, above all else, what made the betrayal so damning.
Meet the flashback. As a device for getting out exposition, it is unparalleled. Of course, like most common devices, this one will be overused, but it does allow the story to move forward while giving us a bit of background at the same time. The jump back in time admittedly comes abruptly, and for that reason feels a bit jarring. Nevertheless, the payoff is that we actually get to see what happens, rather than just hearing about it.
So back in time we go, to the time known everywhere as “before the story begins”.
The time was roughly 12 years ago, and Jerry was working at a chalkboard in the lab he shared with Baker and Elbert. The chalkboard was covered with mathematical symbols, with some areas dense with chalk dust where formulas had been erased and rewritten dozens of times since the last washing. Jerry had just erased one of these areas, and was changing it once again.
The room had a scattered look about it, with messy piles of paper adorning almost every horizontal surface, and dozens of cups, half filled with cold coffee. Many of these surfaces had built in terminals with vid-screens with the rest looking more like lunch tables than anything else. One corner of the room appeared to be dedicated to electronic work, with radio kits in various states of disarray, connected to unusual devices never used in their current configuration before. A section of the room on the opposite wall had a long table with sinks and burners, and what appeared to be a chemical experiment in process. In short, the room looked like a high school science lab abandoned to the students.
Jerry finished rewriting his equation and turned to Baker. “Does that solve your concern?”
Baker, who had been studying Jerry’s expression as it appeared, chimed right in. “Well, I’m not sure I would use the word ‘solve’ in any way connected with this mess, but it definitely accounts for the anomaly.” Baker studied the board closely. “However, I think you’ve just inadvertently introduced a lateral field loop that might turn proximate carbon into plastics. I wonder if we can use that to our advantage.”
“Oh…” Jerry said as he noticed the problem. “That’s just a…oops.”
While Jerry was erasing again, Elbert entered the room, shuffling as usual. “Hey guys. What are you...uh... doin’?”
As Jerry finished rewriting the equation once again, he turned to Elbert. “Oh, hey Pete. I think I’m very close to nailing this. Have you been following?”
“Well,” Elbert said, “I spent some time staring at it before I went home last night. I think I follow the basic premise, but…”
Jerry and Baker exchanged glances. They knew what was coming, but it was traditional to let Elbert speak it for himself. It was part of a confidence building routine, and they knew if they spoke Elbert’s concerns for him, which they always dismissed in the end, Elbert would continue to sink into a spiral of low self-confidence. It was not that they took him seriously – they didn’t. But they knew that he would never rise to his potential if they shut him down without giving him a chance. At least Jerry did.
“But?” Jerry asked.
“But the whole thing is sort of sloppy. I mean, I know you guys hate to hear this and everything, but none of the potential for noise in the system is accounted for.”
No surprises there. Elbert’s response was exactly the one Jerry and Baker had been expecting. Jerry looked down at his cold coffee and answered patiently, “Ok. You’re right, Pete. Introducing a series of expressions to account for that potential would certainly make the argument stronger. But before I take up that kind of space, before I confuse the issues with formulas that will grow this equation tenfold, before I do that kind of work, I have to ask myself, is it worth it?” Jerry tried to gauge Pete’s reaction. Would he go along, or continue to affirm his pedantic integrity?
As much as he wanted Elbert to learn to stand up for himself, what he wanted most of all was for him to stop bogging them all down in detail, and move forward with them as a team. Elbert, of course, not at all unexpectedly, let him down.
“Of course it’s worth it. Why don’t you let me do it, if you think it’s a waste of time? I don’t mind.”
Jerry sighed. “I’ll think about it, Pete. But you and I know it could add as much as two years to this project. And I’m not sure we have that kind of time. Besides, you’ve got your own work to do. You’re making good progress with your calculations on the mass modeling, but you’ve got a long way to go, and the Old Man’s chomping at the bit.”
Baker jumped in to lighten the mood. “Sounds like something your wife would say.” And indeed, they all laughed. Elbert got the coffee.
Here we get a description of the problem in detail, but in the interest of not bringing ourselves to a level of tedium beyond which we won’t bother to continue reading, we’ll sum up.
It turns out that if you could push certain particles at certain speeds through certain areas of space, you would create a temporary hole into another universe. This had been known for some time, and the Old Man had taken advantage of this bit of science to create the galaxy’s largest waste disposal conglomerate: Robo-Trash Incorporated, better known as RTI. He trucked garbage off planets, created these temporary holes, and dumped as much garbage through as he could before they closed. Cheap, efficient, and lucrative. There were other benefits as well, unknown to the public at large, which we shall hear about later in the story.
Our heroes, while employed at this organization as scientists, are working a problem to do with these holes, and the tendency they have to close at slower and slower rates of speed under certain conditions. Followed through to its natural conclusion, Jerry discovers something he calls Fisher’s paradox, named for his goldfish, in which rather than closing up, a hole continues to open instead, eventually creating a vacuum through which our entire universe will be pulled through, putting an end to life as we know it.
All three scientists agreed on the premise, but science without proof is mere philosophy., and their arguments with each other involved the quality of the proof.
With the purpose of the flashback served, namely a slightly improved understanding of the relationship between Jerry and Elbert as well as of the basic scientific problem that forms the central core of the story, we move back to the present, where Jerry, a little groggy but at least half vertical is still arguing with the image of his former colleague on the vid-wall thing.
“And now?” Jerry asked derisively.
“Now,” Elbert sighed, “you have your proof.” Elbert held a copy of the log up to the camera so Jerry could see it.
The log now covered the entire vid-wall and if not for the layers of dried tuber-rye splashes on the wall and the overgrown hair falling in front of his eyes, Jerry would have seen it in every detail. He forced himself to move past his emotions, his tiredness, all but the one thing that could actually put him past all that: the science.
“Ok, ok. Tell me what I’m looking at.”
Here, Jerry’s former student dives in. He reminds Jerry of the basic layout of the logs, and spends a lot of time explaining how they have changed over the last ten years, which only serves to push our patience to the limit. He talks about a sort of high resolution telescope thingy that has changed everything, and how the data from the thingy was laid out in the log.
Once again, there seems to be more interest in trying to show an understanding of the science and its implications than actually getting on with the plot. It is, perhaps, a disease reserved for space stories like this one, the need to over-explain the reasoning behind nearly everything, in a misguided attempt to defend the plausibility of it. It is as if the plausibility is some requirement, which if not provided will make the book unreadable, rather than the other way around.
After stumbling through yet more techno babble, we finally discover that the log shows a sort of gravity problem which could only be produced by the crack hole thing they’ve been talking about. Namely, the Fisher paradox.
“I don’t know what to say, Pete. It looks like RTI has been exploiting the same sector since before I was even there. I can’t believe this thing hasn’t been growing for at least three years. Have they evacuated, yet?”
“I have no idea, Jerry. You know the Old Man would never share something like that with me.”
“No. I suppose he keeps his business as close to his chest as ever. I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with you, Pete, the last time I….” Jerry stared at the screen with his mouth open, while his empty glass fell to the floor and bounced. “What in God’s name?”
“Jerry, what is it?”
“Pete. I can’t…what the…I don’t…”
“Jerry, what are you talking about?”
Jerry walked right up to the vid-wall, and started looking at a particular section of the log, now about five feet off of the ground, and on the far right side of the wall. He touched his hands to the wall and traced some of the figures, and then skirted over to the left side where he looked at another set. As he moved back and forth between the two, he said,
“Why is the log all out of order?”
“Out of order? What do you…Oh Christ, someone’s coming.”
And like that, the screen was a test pattern once more. Jerry went to his table, found some paper and started writing. He wrote fast and furiously, terrified he had missed something, or worse yet, seen it but forgotten. Before the artificial morning came, Jerry had covered five pages, front and back, with reproductions of the log, variations of sections he was not sure about, and notes. Mostly notes.
This business about the log being out of order is another small taste of the time and time travel themes that will inundate the story shortly. It doesn’t seem to matter that anyone of serious scientific background considers time travel to be impossible. Almost any science story can be aided by time travel, which not only solves a lot of story telling problems, but yields great fodder for philosophical discussion, something which our story has an unusually high propensity for.
When the time comes, we will be tempted to put down the book forever, regardless of our now more significant investment in the story, with a six page diatribe on the dangers of time-travel and the effect it was bound to have on the modern man of the future. To avoid this temptation, we will skip that section altogether in favor of more interesting plot development.
For now, we will dive headlong into the pool of time themes, and acclimate ourselves to this world where time travel is not only possible, but is institutionalized.
We also come to another milestone in the book, something we’ve been waiting for since we first met Jerry: the introduction of our heroine, Jerry’s ex-wife.