I Remember the Future (Empty Spaces)

Empty Spaces

A

t one o’clock sharp, the phone in Anita’s office rang. Shepicked it up before it had a chance to ring a second time.“Hello,” she said, “this is Dr. Zahn.”“Ah, good. Dr. Zahn. Right on schedule.” The personon the other end didn’t identify himself, but Anita recognized the voice anyway, from repeated conversations. It belonged to BobLeigh, a deputy director at the Department of Energy. Bob servedas the current overseer of the Superconducting Supercollider projectand all its affiliated projects.Including, of course, the Gate. Anita sniffed, annoyed at the tone of Leigh’s voice. “I don’tmiss any appointments, especially not the telephone ones.”“Of course, of course,” Leigh mumbled. “So, doctor, let’s getright to it, shall we? How are things going since last week?” Anita desperately wanted to lie, to tell him that the Gate wasfixed, that they had reestablished contact with Universe Beta andthat everything was fine. But, of course, she had no real option.“There’s no real progress,” she said. “The Gate is still exhibiting the same strange behavior.”“Hm. Ever since you lost Universe Beta—” Anita heard Leighflipping pages “—exactly four weeks ago.” Was it Anita’s imagina-tion, or did Leigh emphasize the word “you”?Probably her imagination.“Exactly so,” she said.“And you still have no explanation yet for what’s going on?”“Actually, now we do. Dr. Volin came up with something just afew days ago.”

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Anita paused long enough for Leigh to ask, “Would you mindsharing that with me?”“We think that the Gate’s oscillatory behavior is due to a contin-ual change in its quantum resonance patterns.”“Uh-huh,” Leigh said, and Anita heard the scratch of a pen.“Now would you mind explaining that? In English?” Anita let herself smile. What she said was basic to her, and would be to anyone else working on the project. It pleased her tothink that Leigh was simply an unknowledgeable bureaucrat whodidn’t really understand on the simplest level what they were doing. Then she remembered that this unknowledgeable bureaucrat was the one making recommendations on the disposition of theproject. Her smile became a frown.“It’s like this, Mr. Leigh. Before we attempted to stabilize theGate, we knew it was connected to only one universe because of a certain pattern in all the atoms in that particular universe. Youcan think of it as if they all share a frequency, and so we assignedthat frequency to that whole universe. Now, when we take read-ings off the Gate, we discover that this frequency is constantly changing.”More flipping of pages. “So that’s how you know that the Gateis connected to something rather than nothing.”“Um, yes. Put simply, it means that the Gate is changing universes all the time. Which is why we have avoided sending anything through. It would be lost forever.”“Forever? Do you mean that these frequencies never repeatthemselves?”“Um, well, sometimes the frequencies do repeat. But it’s more aquestion of the rate of change.”“What do you mean?”She wasn’t sure how much he would understand, but she ex-plained anyway. “We managed to record the different resonant fre-quencies of the Gate, and at first the pattern didn’t make any sense.It was changing frequencies at an incredible rate, about one pointthree times ten to the twelfth times a second.”“One point three times ten to the twelfth?”“Approximately a trillion. Then Dr. Volin had an insight, and herealized that the second wasn’t the unit of time we should be con-cerned with. So he went back to how we define the second, in termsof the vibrations of a cesium atom. He divided the rate of flipping

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by the number of vibrations of a cesium atom in a second. And itturns out the Gate changes universes about 137 times per vibration.”“What’s the significance of the number 137?”“It’s the inverse of the fine structure constant,” she said, “whichis a unitless number called a ‘coupling constant.’ It came out of Quantum Electrodynamics. It’s basically the measure of the strengthof the electromagnetic force, if you apply the theory of quantummechanics to electromagnetism.”“So?”“Well, it’s also a fundamental constant of the universe. It’sbased on c, the speed of light; h, which is Planck’s constant; and e,the charge on an electron. The constant, alpha, is equal to e squareddivided by h-bar times c.”“H-bar?” Leigh asked.“Oh, that’s just how we write h divided by two pi. It comes upoften enough.”“Uh-huh. So what’s the significance of this constant?”“Well, it’s one of the minor mysteries of science, why this numberhappens to be 1/137 and nothing else. So a red flag went up when wefound that number associated with the Gate. There seems to be some-thing here, something deep and fundamental about the Gate, and if we can just have the time to look for it, we could find it.”Leigh sighed. “I don’t know, doctor. This whole thing seemsrather abstract to me. Do you really think this has any relevance?”

No

, Anita thought.

Of course it doesn’t have any relevance, damn it. It’s just an incredible coincidence. Oh, it may point to something, but the probability is lower than that of the Sun exploding in the next five seconds. But it’s our only lead so far, and the only progress we can show.

“Yes,” she said. “We believe this has relevance.”“Hm. It’s still not much progress.” Anita kept her emotions in check. “Actually, it’s quite a discov-ery, and one that we were only able to make because the Gate isopen. We wouldn’t be able to make much more progress if the Gate were shut down.”“You know as well as I do that the progress you make has to bebalanced along with other factors.”“Such as?”“Well, publicity, for one.” Anita finally let some of her exasperation show. “Oh, come on! This entire project review is due to bad public relations?”“It’s not every experiment that kills a civilian,” Leigh said.