Class Fives: Origins (7 page)

“Well, I find it difficult to believe that, because your car was seen at a liquor store where a man was assaulted.”

“My car?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

Dan’s brows knitted.

“Sorry?”

“How do you know it was my car?”

“The clerk saw it.”

“At the liquor store.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible, since I wasn’t there.”

“What if I told you we have the video surveillance footage from the store?”

“Do you?”

“Answer the question.”

“Why? You didn’t answer mine.”

“What are you, a smartass?”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Look – “

“Please, just tell me. Am I under arrest or not? Because if I am, I’m going to want a lawyer before I’ll say anything more, and if I’m not, then I’d like to leave.”

Dan stared at him a long moment, then sighed.

“Look. If it was you who assaulted the guy, I don’t think you’d get in much trouble. The guy was an ex-con who’d just got out after doing time for sticking up a liquor store. The weapon he was hit with belonged to him, not whoever assaulted him. And the very fact that he was carrying it was a violation of his parole, so he was already committing a felony by the time he walked into the place. For all we know, the guy who took him down prevented something nasty from happening. We just want to find out, that’s all.”

John stared back at him for a long moment, and Dan thought he could see the resolve and fear begin to crack, to soften slightly.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“I mean all you wanted to ask me?”

Dan saw he was losing the guy, he was shutting down. And there was nothing he could do to reverse that.

“Okay,” he said at last, “We’re done here.”

He rose, reaching into his uniform pocket to extract one of his cards and place it on the table before where John sat.

“Here’s my number. If you think of anything you want to tell me, just give me a call, okay?”

John nodded and reached out to pluck up the card, and stared down at it a moment.

“Officer?” he said, quietly.

“Yes?”

John remained silent, his expression one of a man quickly trying to process an avalanche of random thoughts.

“Nothing,” he said at last. “Sorry.”

He rose and shoved the card into his pocket.

“And if I think of anything I’ll call you.”

Dan nodded and allowed himself a small smile.

The guy was scared, that’s what it was, Dan told himself. And who could blame him? And really, he wouldn’t be in that much trouble if he just fessed up about it. And he really had done everyone a favor, maybe really stopped something worse from going down. Hell, Dan would probably be able to ease him through how to explain what he did so it looked like it was self-defense. But that wasn’t up to him. He was supposed to be neutral, not take sides, even if one of the sides was occupied by a real scumbag like Peter Morales.

“We’ll be in touch if we have any further questions, all right?”

John nodded and moved from behind the table. Dan stepped over to open the door and stand aside, allowing John to pass him and enter the drably painted hallway beyond.

He did it, Dan thought to himself. This was his guy. But was it worth it to upset the guy’s life when all he’d done was a big favor for everyone? He’d tell the Lieutenant he’d gotten nothing out of him, said he wasn’t there, and raise the speculation of a fake license plate on the car, or maybe a bad memory or lousy eyesight on the part of the clerk. And that would be that. Case closed for lack of evidence.

But he couldn’t help wanting to know what it had all been about. How had this guy known about Morales. And what was that about him jumping across the room just as the store’s video security system went down?

It was a puzzle, Dan told himself yet again. One he would very much like to unravel. But there were other cases to deal with and not much time to do it. Maybe he’d come back to this one sometime, just poke around it a bit, see what turned up. After all, it had an element of creepy, and he was so fascinated by creepy.

He turned to snap off the lights before he stepped out and closed the door.

3

Revealed

Dr. Vernon Jenkins, Professor of Physics at the large, exclusive, New England-based Ivy League university, stepped up behind the podium in front of the massive screen still displaying the projected logo of the conference, even before the moderate applause had begun to die away. The fact that he had been allowed to speak on the final day, immediately after the expansive and elegant lunch, was a mark of his status within the physics community. Like anyone else, scientists liked to save the best, most exciting presentations for a big finish. In a way it was almost as political as a carefully structured fund-raiser, though its purpose was to be a forum for the first public presentation of scientific principles and discoveries that had reared their heads throughout the prior year, and had been toiled over to the point where, if they could not be proven, at least provide a tantalizing hint that they were possible. It was at this same conference many years ago that Stephen Hawking had first admitted publicly that his early postulations about the basic nature of black holes had been in error. He had then stunned and confused the assembled experts and researchers with a disjointed, rambling and not-quite-sensible explanation for what he then believed was actually happening within the super-massively dense, mysterious objects scattered throughout space. The applause that followed that lecture had been hesitant, at best.

Vernon expected a similar reaction to what he was now about to disclose. But that was the nature of science. New principles are discovered, pored over, picked apart, subjected to complex study. Then new formulas are written to explain the mechanics behind the new idea and, invariably, those members of the scientific community who had focused their own studies on earlier principles will balk, challenge, even complain until eventually the evidence is collected to either support the new theory or discredit it irretrievably. What he was about to present would surely end in many loud arguments.

He let the applause die down to a bubbling, expectant silence, then began.

“Some time ago,” he said, hearing his own voice magnified by the microphone and echoing dully off the distant walls of the large room, “I was standing in an art gallery, staring at a painting. I like paintings. In a way I think of them as organized, aesthetically improved versions of the world around us.

“The painting was a landscape by one of the Old Masters. Nothing particularly special. A wide, sunny field with trees here and there, a horizon shaded with mountains, a sky flecked with clouds. There were a few buildings tucked on the edges of the scene, and some figures, going about ordinary, mundane tasks.

“As I stood there, enjoying the imagery, a thought occurred to me. How different was the image presented in that painting from the actual world in which I was standing? In all its elemental essentials it was virtually the same.

“If I were to take an object, any object, a piece of paper, for example, and peer at it closely enough, I would not see a collected total mass that my mind would interpret as a piece of paper. If I managed to get close enough, I would see molecules. And if I could look even closer, I’d see atoms, and beyond that, the tiny specks that make up those atoms.

“If I were to do the same thing with any one of you, I would not see you as an eminent colleague, a rival explorer into the nature of the universe. I would see first individual cells, then closer, the molecules that made up those cells, then the atoms, and finally the quarks that made up the protons, neutrons and so on. I would not see a person or a conscious mind. I would instead simply be looking at ordinary matter, moving and reacting to stimuli in pre-determined ways, according to the principles of physics as we understand them.

“I realized that, in its essentials, as viewed by physics, there was no difference between the universe in which I existed, and the universe inside that painting. Certainly, the painting had only two dimensions and the universe has three… that we can be reasonably sure of…”

This drew some quiet chuckles from the audience. Vernon smiled and continued.

“…but in all other respects they followed the exact same laws and principles. Subatomic particles conjoined into atoms, atoms conjoined into molecules, molecules collected into objects. On the micro and macro levels, both were identical.

“That was when it struck me that, in fact, there was a singular, basic and radical difference between the world in which I stood viewing the painting and the world of the painting itself. That difference was the canvas.”

He paused to sweep his eyes over the audience.

“I realized that the existence of that painting depended entirely on the existence of the canvas onto which those molecules of pigment had been adhered. Take away that canvas and you would be left with merely unanchored, drifting globs of formless, shapeless paint, with no meaning beyond their own occupation of a location in what we have come to call reality.

“We think we can break down the universe into layers. On the macro level we have everything we can see, everything we can interact with. Stars, planets, molecules, atoms of matter and bursts of energy. Beneath us is the quantum level. We are painted onto that, made from it. But what, I asked myself, was the quantum level painted on?”

He paused again, trying to sense a change in the concentration of the assembled audience.

“We already know,” he continued, “That the visible universe actually makes up only a tiny portion of what is. What exists. The vast majority, over six times more, is composed of something we can’t see, can’t hear, can’t detect in any way. Light passes straight through it, uninterrupted. And we and any mechanism we might construct to extend our senses to see more, hear more, capture more data, would be useless to detect it, because both we and those mechanisms are composed of matter to which that… whatever it is, cannot interact in any way."              

“The only way we are even aware of its existence is because of the gravitational effect it exerts on the motion of the most massive objects in the universe, stars and galaxies. It pulls on them, coaxes them, nudges them. It causes them to behave in ways that our mathematics predict they shouldn’t be able to. It is only when we change certain numbers in the mathematics related to the effects of mass on the motions of these bodies in space, that the formulas correct themselves. Our only possible conclusion is that there is something there, something real and palpable that is simply beyond our ability to ever see or directly experience.

“But what if we could experience it? What if we could strip away the paint that is the matter composing our observable universe and make actual contact with the very canvas itself? What would we find?

“Would it be the basic place out of which our universe sprang at the Big Bang? Some substantial, actual location onto which our universe of matter and energy was superimposed? That perhaps our entire universe burst out of it back at the beginning of what we call time?

“Is it infinite, going on forever, existing everywhere, but outside what we have always thought was the sum total of all that is, was and ever will be? Could this entire universe be nothing more than an immeasurably tiny blob of something stuck to this cosmic canvas, of absolutely no more significance to it than a speck of dust?”

Once more he paused, giving the assembled minds a moment to absorb the concept.

“For years, we knew of the existence of neutrinos, having seen their effect on the universe we could observe. But they were so small, their mass so insubstantial, their speed as they shoot through the universe so great, that they literally pass through the entire volume of the planet without ever interacting with a single atom of it. Yet we could not capture one, witness one, make it stand still long enough for us to examine its properties.

“Now we can. Experiments located in deep mines, using the miles of mass above them, strip away much of the radiation that normally hides these neutrinos and we are at last able to detect them as they zip through the planet.

“I intend to create an experiment that will, hopefully, allow us to isolate, capture and actually interact with that unseeable portion of the universe we have labeled Dark Matter. If my current calculations are correct, it should be possible to construct actual mechanisms that will allow us to not only observe the effects of this mysterious substance, but actually, physically interact with it.

“It is my belief that it may be possible to touch that untouchable realm. Perhaps even affect it. Change it. Manipulate it.

“Some people I’ve discussed this with already have had the graciousness to politely point out that while it would certainly be a major breakthrough in terms of our understanding of the universe, it would be mind-bogglingly expensive to accomplish. They also questioned whether or not it was necessary. Surely, they said, as long as we can understand enough to determine the mathematical and physical principles of how we interact with it, would we not have enough knowledge to at last solve the one great mystery that has ruled physics for more than a century? Would we not be able to tie together Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and the quantum universe in a single unified theory of the basic functioning of all existence?

“I believe we would. But I am seeking something more. I believe that if we can open up some kind of transition to that realm where Dark Matter exists as a substantial thing, enough to observe it, study it… then it would be possible to take an even further step.

“I believe that what we would find on the other side of that impenetrable veil is the one thing all human beings have been longing for and seeking since we first developed the capacity to recognize our individual existence as conscious creatures.