Wormholes (16 page)

“So, we can expect some that just sort of move along slowly and some that come through like bats outta hell.”

“I guess.” He raised his eyebrows and took a drink of beer, leaving a few flecks of the amber liquid on his moustache. “Anyway, I’m going to call some of the people I work with and bounce it off them. There are a couple who won’t let it out; who know enough about these theories to tell me whether I’m right.” He took a bite of his own cold hamburger and chewed for a while. “But I am right.”

They finished their food, put the dishes into the dishwasher and sat in the living room, still talking about his theory. She peppered him with questions. What made the holes disappear? Does the solar system eventually leave the affected region? Can we predict them?

He had some answers, but mostly, he had to think about it. After a while, he seemed to begin to sink into the sofa and his eyelids became heavy. She considered that he planned to sleep in the van and decreed that he would stay in her spare bedroom. She showed him upstairs to the room. Most of it was taken up with an office, but there was a foldaway couch that her sister or mother slept on when they visited. She supplied him with a pillow and blankets and showed him the trick of opening up the sofa. She patted him on the shoulder and bid him good night, leaving him standing tiredly beside the bed, shutting the door behind her.

She turned on the television set in the living room and sank onto the sofa to watch the evening news. At the end, there was a joking piece about a peculiar hole in the ground that had been discovered in New York. Dacey perked up. The hole had gone unnoticed for quite a while, because it was in a slum. But now, the city of New York was trying to figure out who’d dug this perfectly round, glass-smooth hole that was so deep, the city engineers hadn’t figured out its true depth yet. They wanted to fill it up, but some scientists from Columbia thought it needed to be studied. That there was something strange about it.

“Maybe it’s the famed rabbit hole from
Alice in Wonderland
, right here in the Big Apple,” joked the TV reporter.

Dacey remembered Gerald’s strange comment about the Cheshire cat. She went upstairs to go to bed, but stopped in the hall for a long moment beside the closed door to his bedroom. She thought about going in and telling him about the New York hole. She also knew she was thinking about going in there for another reason. Since he’d appeared at her office door, she’d felt a stirring beyond friendship. She knew how Gerald had looked at her; the growing chemistry between them. How odd it was, this chemistry. She knew she admired his spirit, his devotion to this idea, however oddball, that there was some alien phenomenon out there he had to know about. But it was more; she found herself attracted to his gentleness, wanting to nestle herself within it, and she knew why. Then a pang rose within her, one that she did not want to deal with. She was beginning to care about this man. She liked men. But she couldn’t let herself care for one man. After what she had gone through, she had decided not to do that anymore.

W
hen she woke up the next morning, his door was still closed. She showered and washed her hair, but decided not to dry it. The hair dryer might wake him. She combed it out and pulled it back in a ponytail, put on jeans and a sweatshirt against the morning coolness and fixed herself coffee and a bagel. Hearing the kids noisily gathering at the bus stop nearby, she decided to go sit on her front stoop in the warm morning sun and watch them play. Next door, Nancy opened her screen door to let Sammy out, saw the van and gave Dacey a significant look that asked, “New boyfriend?” Dacey returned it with a dismissive shake of her head, and Nancy volleyed back another look that said, “Oh, yeah?” Sammy was much too busy to give her a hug, as he passed by on the way to the bus stop. Little Karen had engaged his attention, and they trundled off together with their kid-sized backpacks. Maybe Sammy would make up for it by making her another drawing that he would tape up in the gallery beside her door.

As she watched the bus arrive and the kids climb onboard, she decided the plan for the day. She didn’t have any classes or appointments that morning, so she’d head for the store. If Gerald was going to stay a couple of days, she’d need supplies. She smiled at herself. Maybe if she bought lots of food, he’d stay longer and she could fatten him up.

She took a sip of the strong, black coffee and thought about his theory. Surely the terabytes of data on her computer and the papers festooning her walls must support or refute this idea of wormholes into other dimensions. These holes must have some properties that would be revealed in the seismograms, photos, satellite data, and chemical tests. She mentally rummaged through her computer files and her office papers, trying to picture all the data on all the events: the Gillard Hole, the supertanker disaster, the holes in San Francisco and China.

The Gillard hole data. The images of the underwater slag furrow on the bottom of the Atlantic, which was piled on the work table. The data on the hole in San Francisco also on the work table, and the stuff on the China solar hole on the desk.

Finally, she shrugged and went inside. Gerald’s door was still closed, so she checked her wallet for funds and climbed into the Range Rover. As usual, she didn’t have a list, so she’d wander up and down the aisles pulling things into the cart that looked good. That was how she came to own a jar of pickled pig’s feet and one of jalapeno jelly. She resolved to be careful.

The supermarket wasn’t crowded, with only a scattering of people buying morning orange juice, pastries, and cigarettes. She took a cart and started up and down the aisles. Visions of the data rolled through her mind. She absentmindedly walked up one aisle and found orange juice and started down another aisle to find bread. Eggs were at the end in the dairy case. She started up a third aisle, looking for jam. Three aisles. Parallel aisles. She stopped at the jam section before the shelved jars and stared, as a glimmering of realization dawned. All the maps of the events arrayed themselves before her in her mind. The maps. She arranged them side by side in her mind. The maps! Trajectories! Paths! Magnetic fields! She picked up a jar of something without even looking at it.

“Damn! Wow! Cool!” she exclaimed, making a middle-aged lady down the aisle eye her suspiciously, wondering how anybody could become so enthused over jelly.

She hurried to the checkout stand and paid for her purchases and burst from the store, jumping into the Range Rover, automatically negotiating the morning traffic, again mentally flipping through and examining the maps and charts, one by one. She was certain her idea was right! She parked illegally in front of her office and ran up the stairs. Nobody was in yet, so she didn’t have to stop for greetings and morning banter. She tore through the office, pulling out maps and diagrams that her mental office tour had pinpointed. She rolled them and put a rubber band around them and was back in her Range Rover just as the thin, hawkfaced campus cop arrived in the little traffic shack, cocking his eye at her to remind her that he’d been lenient because he liked her. She waved as she left.

Back at her condo, she plopped the groceries onto the coffee table and went upstairs to bang on Gerald’s door. “Get up! Gerald, I’ve got something to tell you!”

There was a loud thump and some rustling. The door opened and Gerald stood there, hair wild, eyes glassy, holding his jeans as if undecided about whether to put them on. He wore briefs, she noticed.

“Huh?”

“Gerald, get dressed. I’ve figured out something really cool about your wormholes!”

“Oh. … yeah. … okay.” He tried to focus his eyes. Gerald was not a morning person. “Be right there,” he mumbled. He closed the door, and she went downstairs to fix more coffee. After a while, she heard the toilet flush and the water run. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs, hesitating as if trying to remember where he was.

“I’ve got coffee. Come sit down.” She sat down at the dining room table, and he obediently sat beside her, staring at the coffee blankly for a long moment before picking up the mug and taking a sip.

She unrolled and spread out maps and diagrams of the three events. “I just couldn’t find any reason for how these events fit together. But you said they had to, so I kept looking. There was no pattern in their location … above ground, below ground, underwater. And none in their behavior. They were sucking matter in or blasting energy out. I just couldn’t figure it out. Then I was in the grocery store and I was going up and down the aisles. They’re all in the same direction.”

“So?” His brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“So, look at the maps! All the trajectories of these things are in the same direction. Magnetic south to north!”

The puzzlement was replaced by his best skeptical scientist face, his lips pursed. “Hmmm, well …” He scrutnized the maps. “Maybe just coincidence.” He took another sip of coffee, rubbed his beard and began to examine the diagrams, his gaze moving acutely from one to another, reading the notations on each.

“Couldn’t be coincidence,” she said. “They follow the magnetic field lines of earth. They’re affected by magnetic fields! But not by gravity. This links them all together!”

He stood up and paced beside the table, beginning a nod. “Yeah! Yeah! It does!”

“Remember, you said the force of a magnetic field opens them? Like the magnetic field of earth. But gravity doesn’t seem to affect them. They just float around like bubbles.”

“Yeah, because they’re not objects. They’re
holes
.”

“But holes that don’t move randomly,” she said. “Now we can predict their movement, and we can ask how they close. If they’re opened by magnetic fields and they follow the field lines of earth, does this mean that maybe a glitch in the magnetic field closes them? Or maybe a weakened magnetic field? Or something like that?”

“I’m not sure,” Gerald took another sip of his coffee. He was fully awake now. “Could be lots of things. But better figure it out.” He stopped and sat down again, looking at her, now fully awake, dead serious. “I’ve just got another feeling. I’ve had it for a while. A huge disaster could happen from all this. More than just a solar hole. I just don’t understand what.” He leaned over and began to shuffle through the maps again, as if seeking the answer buried in one of the scribbled equations.

“So, what now?”

He looked at her with worry in his eyes. “I’ve thought about what to do. I guess it’s time to present this thing. It’s time to see whether it’ll stand up in the scientific community. In December is the American Physical Society meeting in New York. That’s when I have to present the theory.” He fiddled with his coffee cup. “I just don’t know if I can.”

“What do you mean? Of course you can.”

“Well, I’ve got to admit something. This whole business terrifies me. Jesus, standing up there in front of this crowd of physicists … and the reporters … and trying to convince all of them that I’ve found some radically different phenomenon that’s going to change some basic paradigms about physics.”

“Well, y’know, if paradigms are to be shifted, kiddo, you’re just the guy who can shift them.” She knew that, he must be feeling very close to her to be able to tell her these things. “You can do it. You just gotta have the confidence to get out there.” She smiled and patted his arm and left her hand there for a moment. Then she caught herself, got up briskly and fetched the groceries from the coffee table. “You want eggs? I got eggs.”

He didn’t answer, but took another healthy sip of coffee and stared at the maps.

G
erald answered the door to his hotel room, and Dacey stood there grinning. He was wearing a clean white shirt and an unaccustomed tie, neatly tied, although it was definitely out of style.

“You look official, Gerald.” She looked beyond him to see the room’s desk, low dresser, and bed strewn with maps, photographs, computer printouts and piles of notes on yellow legal pad paper. His laptop displayed a Powerpoint screen, with an array of slides. “I see you’ve been busy. You ready? You’re gonna be the main event, y’know.”

Nodding shyly, he backed up and opened the door wider to let her in. He raised his eyebrows slightly at her attire. She wore a beige linen pants suit that accentuated her hips, and a white silk blouse that showed off the emerald-green obsidianite crystal from Mount St. Helens that she wore around her smooth neck. Her hair was done up in a braid and she wore delicate, dangling silver earrings. She noted his appreciative look. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“This hobby of yours is making you famous,” she said. “I saw the story in the
Times
. Who leaked it?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t talk to them. Somebody at the center, I guess. I’m inundated with email requests for copies of the paper.” He swept the materials on the bed into a pile so she could sit down. Prominent among them was a page from
The New York Times
with a story headlined “Scientist to Reveal Holes into Other Universes.”

“So, at the risk of spoiling the surprise of your talk, what’s been going on for the last few weeks? You mentioned on the phone that you had a surprise.”

“Well, one surprise is that I’ve just about decided not to do it.”

“
What
!” She leaned forward searching his expression.

He sat down in the desk chair alternately rubbing his hands together and rubbing his face. “God, Dacey, I’d be getting up in front of a couple of hundred physicists and all those reporters, basically throwing my professional life away. I’ve got enough trouble … well … I’m just not up to it. Not up to facing this. Maybe it’s why I’m a research associate not a faculty member.”

She watched him for a moment. He really was in trouble. She made a decision. “You can. Look, I have.”

“You? You’ve always had confidence in yourself. You’ve been the one who’s made me get this far.”

She took a deep breath. It was going to take all her courage to say what she had to say. But he needed her to say it. “Y’know, I haven’t always had confidence. I’m going to tell you something only my mother and my sister know. It’s about my marriage.”

His attention moved from himself to her. He slid the chair closer. They were not touching, but they could feel an intimacy. “Your marriage to … Robertson?”

“Yeah … Bill. We didn’t just have a falling out. He was … abusive.” She stopped for a moment and stared down at her hands. “He first slapped me about a week after we were married. It was just a slap and he apologized, and he felt so bad that I sort of let it go. But then there were more slaps over the next year. Then punches. He told me it was because I kept talking back. I believed him.”

“But you’re so strong.”

“Well, I was weak then.” A long pause became a silent prelude to telling her secret. “I got pregnant.”

Gerald’s eyes widened. He saw in her drawn tense face a hint of what was coming and he didn’t want to believe it.

“One night he wanted to go out and I didn’t. We started to argue. We were standing at the top of the stairs to our apartment and he hit me. I fell and I swear he meant for it to happen. I went down the stairs. When I woke up, I was in the hospital and the baby was gone. All I really remember were sirens and blood.” Dacey’s lip trembled and tears filled her eyes. “The hospital called the cops. They talked to me and they decided to charge him and they arrested him.” Gerald took her hand. She took a deep breath and composed herself. She wanted to finish. “Bill got out on bail and came to see me in the hospital. He was crying, but I saw through him. I told him we were done. He didn’t accept it. After I left him, I got my own place, but he began to stalk me. I got a restraining order, but he was smart. I never really saw him, but I knew he was there. I decided I was going to be strong. A counselor helped me understand that I was worth something. So, I took lessons in how to protect myself. One night he caught me outside my apartment and he was drunk and he said he would end me.” She paused again. “I put him in the hospital. The cops knew his history, so they said it was self-defense. Since then, I’m determined that I’m worth something.” She looked at him, a tear rolling down her cheek, her voice breaking. “Gerald, you’re worth something, too. You just have to understand that. You can do what you need to do.”

“So that’s why you whacked me when we met?”

She suddenly straightened and smiled, tears still running down her face. “Yeah, that’s why I beat the hell out of you. Nothing personal, y’know.”

Now
he
smiled and she knew her story had worked. “So, sweetie, I want you to go out there and gut it out. You should know deep down inside you can do it.”

He stood up. “Only if you’re out there in the audience.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They looked at each other appreciatively. Maybe this friendship might become something else. But the talk loomed.

“Besides, y’know, you’ve got one person who thinks you’re a hero.”

“Who?” asked Gerald gathering his notes and his laptop.

“Anita Lafferty. The woman whose husband disappeared in Gillard. I went out to see her. She feels like you’ve settled the mystery. Now, she and her kids can get on with their lives. Think about that, Gerald.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s a good thing. That’s a really good thing.” He’d regained his confidence. They walked down the carpeted hallway and took the elevator down to the hotel’s ballroom level. His talk was part of a symposium on “Physics of Natural Phenomena.” The abstract of his talk in the program only said that he would present a physical theory that sought to explain “recent natural disturbances.” But the newspaper article had made it clear what his purpose was. He’d tried to stay clear of science reporters, not answering their emails, texts and phone messages, to avoid the appearance of being a publicity-seeker. He’d seen such men at other meetings, oddballs with absurd theories about perpetual motion machines or the origin of the universe. He’d watched them pass out
DVD
s to reporters and try to buttonhole prominent physicists. He didn’t want to be lumped with them.

They reached the ballroom, and Gerald politely put off two television reporters who asked him for interviews. It was a harbinger of things to come. They entered the ballroom to find the cavernous hall, filled with hundreds of physicists, old and young, as well as a dozen or so reporters with laptops open and small digital audio recorders. His talk would be instantly Tweeted and blogged. Their low chatter seemed to have an expectant edge to it. He was to be the entertainment that night. Gerald stopped, but Dacey squeezed his arm encouragingly. He looked at her, took a deep breath and walked on, encountering a courtly-looking elderly man in a herringbone sport coat and bow tie. The man was someone he wanted to see.

“Dacey, this is George Voigt,” said Gerald. “Dr. George Voigt. He’s the pathologist who examined the arm that came out of the sky.” Gerald explained who Dacey was, and George’s eyes lit up.

“Dear, it’s such a pleasure to meet you.” He took her hand warmly. “We must talk about your experience.”

The San Francisco pathologists Ralph Gaston and Jimmy Cameron emerged from the crowd milling at the back of the room, much to Gerald’s relief.

“I’m glad you came.”

“Hey, we wouldn’t have missed this for anything, even if that foundation hadn’t given us bucks,” said Cameron. “Everybody in San Francisco is all over our butts for not figuring those holes out. Of course, I blamed it on Ralph.”

Gaston smiled. “Please get me off the hook, will you?”

Brendan Cooper entered the hall, making his way to them and being introduced around. “Well, you’ve certainly got a tough crowd,” he said, scanning the audience. “Hope you’ve got your shit together, Gerald.”

The six of them threaded their way down the center aisle toward the front row. Murmurs from the crowd accompanied them, as the people recognized him. Gerald decided he felt okay as he switched on his laptop to bring up the slide show. He thought of Dacey’s revelations. He could be strong, too. He mounted the platform and took his place at the white-cloth-covered table. The table sat five, but he was alone. He was first on the morning program. He looked out over the crowd sitting beneath the massive, gleaming crystal chandelier of the ballroom, and his confidence evaporated.

Filing in to sit down were some of the leading lights in American physics, along with members of their research teams. Mitchell Cadey and Randall Klebbs of Harvard. Aaron Cohen of Caltech. Frank Loeb and Leo Washington of
MIT
. He knew why they’d come. They were members of an informal scientific hit squad. It was not organized, not scripted. But they’d read the
Times
story that some unknown physicist was going to try to foist a half-baked theory on the world, and they were there to stop it. They’d had to deal with the fallout from such theories in the past. They had let the climate change doubters go too far before they scotched their ignorant criticisms, but they planned to nip this theory in the bud.

Gerald was introduced by the moderator, a portly, elderly professor at the University of Chicago. As he stood to take the stage, waves of abject fear tore at every fiber of his being. He felt as if a cattle prod had been applied to the base of his skull. He plugged his laptop into the projection system, leaned against the large walnut lectern, shuffled his notes and coughed. The screen showed the simple title, “Evidence for Terrestrial and Solar System Transdimensional Apertures.”

He looked out and saw Dacey. An eerie calm came over him. He realized that this information was critical for the world to know. The scientific bombshell he would drop would reveal that his theory was critical for its survival.

He began haltingly by outlining the many strange occurrences. He showed images of the phenomena — the holes in San Francisco and Oklahoma, the melted tanker far beneath the Atlantic and the violently erupting heat in China, the venting on the moon, and the New York hole. He showed images of the continuing multitude of inexplicable astronomical events. The glowing “asteroids” that appeared and disappeared. The strange whirlpool “storm” on Jupiter. But he would save the most shocking image for last. As he got into his presentation, his dread simply evaporated. His evidence fit together so well, it gave him confidence.

Then, Gerald began to outline his theory to explain the evidence. His confidence grew as he showed the intricate equations he had developed to support what would be a stunning conclusion.

“These equations predict that scattered through the universe are concentrations of negative mass,” he said. “These deep wrinkles in the fabric of the universe could create weaknesses in its space-time. My theory also builds on existing theory that there could be a vast number of parallel universes, each occupying its own three dimensional space … what physicists call a membrane. Each of these universes is separated from others by yet another dimension that is curled into an infinitely small size. So, these weaknesses could allow other dimensions to uncurl, popping open passageways into universes that exist in other dimensions …”

He paused, both to add drama and because he knew the effect that uttering the next phrase would have.

“… in other words,
wormholes
.”

A collective dark murmur arose in the audience, with some members shaking their heads in exasperation. Others began to raise their hands, itching for the question and answer session. And the keyboards of the bloggers and reporters began quietly clicking, posting real-time reports of his outrageous assertion.

The murmuring and clicking only increased when Gerald asserted that, “My calculations show that matter and energy can pass unchanged through these wormholes. And the phenomena we are witnessing show that the earth is passing through a region of space peppered with the space-time wrinkles that are giving rise to wormholes.”

Then he paused again. Now he presented the bombshell evidence for the incredible danger of the wormholes. He’d told no one. It hadn’t been in the
Times
. He flashed a slide of Neptune taken through the Hubble Space Telescope. It was not the bright blue marble they had seen so many times before, but a shattered planet with bright chunks of debris orbiting above it.

“The Space Telescope Science Institute has provided these new images and spectra that, taken together, indicate that an intense burst of electromagnetic radiation emanated from Neptune.” Before announcing his conclusion, he showed other Space Telescope images, as well as the graphs of gamma ray and infrared data. He carefully explained what they meant. Then came a second bombshell.

“I have concluded that these data show that Neptune experienced a violent gamma burster produced by the collision of matter and antimatter. This antimatter has come through one of these wormholes.” Now gasps were added to the murmuring from the crowd. He continued.