Anomaly (3 page)

“I like answers,” said one of the Asian boys sitting next to him.

Teller laughed. “We all like answers. But there are some things in life for which there are no answers, just lots of questions. So how can science help us with this question? What do you think the scientists are doing down there?”

“Are they scanning it?” asked one of the pretty Indian girls.

“Hmm,” thought Teller. “I'm sure they are scanning it with something. In the movies, they'd have a fancy scanner that could tell them all about the anomaly, but for real scientists, things aren't quite so simple.”

“What else?” Teller asked, provoking some thought among the children. “What else do you think they're doing? What do you think we can learn about the anomaly?”

Johnny stood up. “We can't learn anything, because we don't know anything about it.”

“Well, not quite,” said Teller softly. “There's a lot we know about it already.”

That got everyone's attention. Teller looked around the classroom. Several of the kids were leaning forward on their desks, their elbows on the tabletops, their heads resting on their palms. He had them eating out of his hand.

“So we know how big it is. Whatever this anomaly is, it has a diameter of roughly 130 meters, that's about 425 feet. Can anyone tell me why we describe its diameter in meters instead of feet?”

There was silence. No one wanted to offer an answer.

“We use meters, or metrics in science rather than miles, yards, feet and inches because metrics work in units of ten, making it easy to calculate. Everyone knows how to multiply by ten, right? Scientists are weird creatures. They're really smart, but being smart they know how easy it is to make dumb mistakes, so instead of using old style measurements, they simplify everything. Isn't that clever? They use a simple measuring system to make hard calculations that little bit easier.”

Heads were nodding.

“So if the anomaly has a diameter of 130 meters, what is its radius?”

Teller could see the kids thinking, within a few seconds one of them blurted out, “70.”

“65,” he replied. “But 70 is a good approximation. So the diameter is the width of a circle, whereas the radius is half of that. Why is it so important to know the radius? What is it about the radius that makes it important for us to understand?”

Frowns appeared on brows around the room as the kids fought conceptually to see where he was leading them. Susan knew. Her arm was outstretched in a flash, but Teller kept her waiting. He wanted to see who else would figure it out. After a few seconds, he pointed at Susan. She jumped to her feet again.

“The radius is the distance from the center of a circle to the edge.”

“And why is that important when it comes to our wonderfully curious anomaly?”

“Because it shows us where the center of the anomaly is?” Susan ventured, going out on a limb with her answer.

“Exactly,” said Teller. He paused the time-lapse video and pointed roughly at the middle of the open air, between the flags, the building fragments, and the concrete slab.

“And look at that. The center is somewhere high above the ground. It's in this area right here. Everything is revolving around an invisible axis running right through here. On the news, everyone talks about the flags or the concrete slab because you can see them and they look impressive, but the really important part of the anomaly is right here, in this empty bit, because that's the center around which everything revolves.”

The kids were hanging onto his every word.

“So you see,” he continued. “This is all the math and physics we were doing in the first semester. If the anomaly has a diameter of 130 meters, then its circumference is its diameter times pi, making it almost 400 meters round, so it would take quite a while to walk around the edge. It would be like walking the length of four football fields.

“Oh, and our anomaly isn't a flat circle, is it? Although we can't see most of it, as it is mostly made up of air, it is a sphere. We can't see all of it, but it's in the shape of a giant marble or a giant soccer ball. And objects in three dimensions are much bigger than those in two dimensions. Our anomaly has a surface area of over 50,000 square meters, so if you wanted to wrap it up for Christmas you'd need an awful lot of fancy paper.

“Remember the concept of volume? That's how much stuff something can hold. Well, our anomaly holds over a million meters cubed.”

There were blank looks on the faces of the children. Although it was an impressively large number, it meant nothing to them in practice.

“How many of you have been swimming in the Olympic pool over near the FDR on-ramp?”

Hands went up all around the classroom.

“Well, it would take over four hundred of those swimming pools to fill up our anomaly.”

The scale of the numbers surprised and fascinated the children. They laughed and giggled at the thought. That put a million meters cubed in perspective for them.

“Wouldn't it leak out?” asked Susan rather seriously.

Teller smiled and said, “Yes, it would. But if it was a sealed container it would hold all that water, and that tells us something important about its capacity. It tells us how large it is. And one of the first things the scientists would have looked for was to see if it was growing, if its capacity was increasing, but it's not. It has stayed the same for several days now. You see, all of these small details help us build up an accurate understanding of the anomaly, they help us to understand the nature of what we're dealing with.”

“And we also know how fast it is moving,” he continued. “Who can tell me what speed is a measure of?”

One of the quieter boys at the back raised his hand. Teller nodded.

“I know that one,” said the boy. “Because it's like a car, isn't it? It's miles per hour, or how many miles you would go after driving for one hour.”

“Very good,” said Teller, complimenting the young boy. “Whether we are talking about miles per hour or kilometers per hour, speed is the distance an object moves over a certain period of time.”

“Our anomaly is actually moving very slowly. Its circumference is 400 meters, and it takes one full day to turn around, so it is turning at 400 meters per day or only 16 meters in an hour. That's about the length of this room in one hour. So in the time you're sitting in this class, that's how far the anomaly has moved.”

Almost in unison, the kids all looked from the back of the room to the front. Having a visual yardstick helped them put things in context.

“I can ride my bike faster than that,” cried one of the kids.

“I can walk faster than that,” added another.

“I could wiggle on my belly faster than that,” added a third.

“Yep,” said Teller. “As impressive as our anomaly is, it isn't actually moving that fast at all, is it?”

“No,” the class replied.

“But do you want to know what is the most interesting fact about the anomaly?”

The classroom was quiet with anticipation, watching as Teller switched computer programs, bringing up a high-resolution image of the concrete slab. It was taken as the slab reached its zenith, while it was tilting down at the road. He zoomed in on the floodlit gutter.

“Look at the litter. Look at the scraps of paper, the leaves and the small twigs. Oh, and there's an empty McDonald's shake and a coke can.”

The kids all looked, unsure of the importance of some trash lying in a gutter.

“Look at the leaves of the tree and the traffic light. They're all hanging up instead of swinging down. The most amazing thing about our anomaly is that the trash hasn't fallen. Our anomaly is defying gravity.”

There were smiles as a sense of wonder and awe dawned on the children.

“So what would happen if you were standing there?” asked one of the girls. “Would you fall off? Would your hair hang down?”

“I expect you'd stand there thinking you were the right way up, wondering why the rest of the city was on such a silly, topsy-turvy angle.”

The children laughed.

“There's a lot of other interesting things we can know about our anomaly, and all of them help make it not-quite-so-scary. We can calculate the force with which it's moving. We can calculate the angle on which it is moving, because it's not turning completely upside-down as it flips over the top, so it is moving on a slightly different plane than what we'd expect.”

“But we still don't know what it is,” Johnny insisted as Teller started handing out parent permission slips.

“No, we don't,” replied Teller. “But we know it's interesting. And tomorrow, we're going to go and see it for ourselves.”

And that put a smile on all their faces.

Less than half of the class brought back permission slips allowing them to go on the field trip to see the anomaly first-hand, which disappointed Teller, although it seemed it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the kids, who were all still enthusiastic, pleading with him to let them go. Teller couldn't take them against their parents’ wishes. He was pleased to see Susan got permission from her mother. Susan said something about her uncle being there, but Teller missed it in all the commotion.

With eighteen children and two adults, they set out for Midtown East using public transport. News reports said the best viewing spots were along 45
^th
Avenue, particularly from some of the adjacent buildings, like the Millennium Plaza, which told Teller that this was the place to avoid. Sure enough, as the bus moved north along 3
^rd
Avenue, he saw that large crowds had formed, blocking the streets approaching the anomaly from the west. The kids all peered from the windows of the bus, hoping for a glimpse of the anomaly as they drove by, but Susan was more interested in playing with the gyroscope Teller had brought along.

They got off the bus at 50
^th
Street, walked three blocks east and followed the back streets and alleyways south to the rear entrance of the park beside the UN building.

Already, the media circus had halved. Five days in and nothing else even remotely sensational had happened. The anomaly was still newsworthy, but only as a curiosity. It was no longer leading the news, which was fine by Teller as it made it easy to move through the park and over toward the intersection. He was even more excited than the kids.

Walking into the park just after 11am, they could see the United Nations General Assembly building through the trees. Apart from the gash on the top corner, marking where the building had been ripped open, there didn't appear to be anything too much out of the ordinary. The slice out of the State Department building was visible above the trees, but it looked like some exotic modern art display jutting out from the main building.

A large crowd milled around on the grassy field. The concrete slab with its lone maple tree and traffic lights, along with the flags and building fragments inside the anomaly were all set to align briefly around noon so they sat low, drifting slowly toward their original positions.

There were hot-dog stands, clowns, corporate marquees, vendors selling balloons and cotton-candy, along with the occasional beggar asking for money. Most of the kids seemed more interested in the sideshows than the anomaly, but Susan kept peering into the distance, staying close by Teller, eagerly looking forward to seeing the anomaly for herself.

A couple of the kids wanted to buy balloons, and it wasn't hard to see why. In a testament to capitalism and the speed with which niche marketing can corner an opportunity, helium-filled balloons depicting the anomaly were for sale from numerous stalls.

The balloons were transparent, with the image of the concrete slab on one side, the building fragments just a bit further around and the disembodied flags on the other side. Teller was impressed. It actually wasn't too bad a representation and would make a handy prop when talking about the anomaly back at school, so he bought one along with a couple of the kids.

Susan didn't have any extra money. She had a packed lunch and a water bottle, but no pocket-money for treats. Her eyes lit up when Teller handed her his balloon. She held the string tightly, determined not to let it go. Ah, well, he thought, it was worth it to see the look of joy on her face. He could never take it back, but there would be plenty of them to go around in the days and weeks ahead.

Teller tied a loop in the string, allowing her to have the string loosely around her wrist so the balloon wouldn't float away. Susan was so excited she jumped for joy, proudly showing off her anomaly to the other kids.

A couple of the kids pestered Teller for balloons and he lamented what was quickly turning into an expensive exercise. There were four others who didn't have any additional money and they all wanted a balloon. At five dollars a balloon, Teller decided he wouldn't fall for this again, but he smiled, paid for more balloons and handed them around.

The school group came up to the police barrier, almost a hundred feet away from the outer edge of the anomaly. Security was tight with police and security guards standing just ten to fifteen feet apart behind the wooden barricade, with their backs to the anomaly as they looked out at the crowd. There were hundreds of them, which surprised Teller.

Beyond the barricade stood the official research trailers and the various observation posts, all blocking the kids’ view of the anomaly. But, Teller pointed out to the students that if they stood in one spot for a while and looked carefully they could just make out the motion of the anomaly. There was a tree on a strange angle, a traffic light with a slight lean that seemed to slowly straighten, and the building fragments appeared to be moving back together.

Teller pulled out his small gyroscope. It was a kid's toy. He set the center of it spinning and started fiddling with the outer hoops. He began explaining to the kids how gyroscopes always point in the same direction no matter which way they are turned.

A reporter came up to him, having seen him talking with the kids. She introduced herself as Cathy, while her cameraman mumbled something about finches from behind the camera lens. Cathy apologized for her cameraman, explaining that his name was Finch, and that they were looking for a human interest story now that the initial excitement surrounding the anomaly had died down.