Mercury Rises (31 page)

This is one phenomenally well-stocked garden department, thought Jacob. The contrast with the barren landscape outside the dome was jarring. They hadn't gone more than twenty yards before Jacob completely lost the sense of being inside a structure. The dome's ceiling was seamless and seemed to have been painted a pale azure. It was difficult to tell whether the dome was translucent, letting light pass through from outside, or whether it was artificially illuminated. Very little of the "sky" was even visible, as it was obscured by the mammoth and prolific vegetation. The sides of the dome were covered to a height of over a sixty feet by a fiberglass latticework, to which clung a copious array of vines. A few paces from the base of the dome, massive trees sprang from the jungle floor. The floor of the dome, too, was nearly completely obscured by ivy and exotic flowers and bushes. The entire structure was suffused by a constant buzz of insects and the fluttering of wings, occasionally punctuated by a rustle of branches or a high-pitched call of some strange bird.

A narrow path meandered from the entrance into the thick of the forest. The vegetation blotted out nearly all light, and Jacob wondered that the guards escorting him hadn't thought to bring flashlights. They seemed to have a pretty good idea where they were going, though, and before Jacob had gotten up the courage to complain, he found himself in a small clearing populated by a several bamboo cottages. The guards ushered him to door of one of the cottages.

"This is where you'll be staying," said one of the guards.

"For how long?" asked Jacob.

"For as long as Finch needs you," came the reply. The guards turned and left. Jacob stood for a moment at the door, wondering if he should make a run for it. He was fairly sure he could find his way back to the airlock, but he was less sure that he'd be able to get the doors open. And what would he do if he got outside? The nearest town could be hundreds of miles away.

Jacob opened the door and walked inside. The cottage was simply but comfortably furnished; the generic hangings and décor suggested it was a sort of guesthouse. Sitting on couches in the main room were two men. One of them he recognized as Alistair Breem, his quantum mechanics professor at MIT. Alistair was a tall, wiry man, whose spine was permanently arched in such a way as to give the impression that he was constantly having to stoop to the level of lesser men. He had less hair than Jacob remembered, and what hair he had left was now a dirty gray. Dark rings framed his eyes. The other man was a stranger, tall and lanky, with silver hair.

"Who's the new guy?" said the tall man. "I already called the top bunk. You're going to have to take the sofa."

"Allie?" said Jacob.

"Hello, Jacob. They told me they were bringing in a replacement. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting
you
." Alistair spoke with a crisp, but somewhat indeterminate accent---the result of the Queen's English being gradually worn down by prolonged exposure to Americans, Australians, and Canadians.

"I'm as surprised as anyone," replied Jacob. "How long have you been here?"

"Like,
forever
," said the tall man.

Allie glared at the man. "I've been here for seven years. Mercury got here about twenty minutes ago."

"Mercury?" asked Jacob, turning toward the stranger.

"Hi!" the tall man exclaimed, jumping up from the couch. "Name's Mercury. I'm an angel. "What's your deal?"

Jacob shook Mercury's hand. "Finch seems to think I can get his collider going," he said.

Mercury chuckled. "A lot of men his age have that problem," he said.

"Please," said Jacob wearily. "You're about six hours late with the Viagra jokes."

Mercury sat down, looking a bit put out. He had regained consciousness while being carried over Gamaliel's shoulder down the path to the clearing. Gamaliel had dumped him on the floor of the cottage and left, without explanation. Mercury had spent the next twenty minutes trying to engage Alistair Breem in conversation about something other than quantum physics, which Mercury understood about as well as Allie understood the infield fly rule.

"So is this chrono-collider device for real?" Jacob asked Allie. "Can it do what Finch says it can do?"

"Reveal the deepest secrets of the Universe?" Allie asked. "I have no idea. What I do know is that Horace Finch is a dangerous socio-path. This was supposed to be a six-week gig for me, consulting on the creation of a physics program at a new multinational African University. Next thing I know, I'm in the middle of the Kenyan wilderness, working on a secret particle collider. When I told him I wanted to leave, he faked my death and told me that if I didn't keep working, he was going to have my wife killed. So here I am."

"That's nothing," said Mercury. "You should hear what happened to
me
. My friend Christine and I went to get the Attaché Case of Pestilence from the Who, but these two cherubim who work for Lucifer showed up and I got struck by lightning!"

Ignoring Mercury's outburst, Jacob turned back to Allie. "So maybe we should just go along with Finch and get his CCD up and running."

Mercury opened his mouth to say something, and Jacob turned to face him. "We get it," Jacob said. "Penis joke. Ha, ha."

This time Mercury looked genuinely hurt.

Jacob went on, without missing a beat, "I mean, what's the worst that could happen? We tear the Universe in half?"

"Hmm," replied Allie.

"That was a joke," said Jacob.

Allie sighed. "I wish I could be as blasé about it. The fact is, there's a reason Finch kept this a secret. Why he funded this whole thing himself and didn't involve any governments or universities."

"Yes," said Jacob. "Because he's a couple of strings short of a unified field theory."

"Maybe," replied Allie. "Or maybe he's just twenty years ahead of his time. I don't know what he told you exactly, but he's planning on doing more than isolating a handful of chrotons. He wants to capture them and control them, like fireflies in a jar. As you know, part of the reason the existence of chrotons---or gravitons, as they are usually called---is so hard to prove is that they aren't detectable by the methods we use to observe other particles. The best that the Large Hadron Collider in Europe can do is to provide very indirect evidence of their existence. And any gravitons they produce only stick around for the slightest fraction of a second, and then they are gone forever. It's hard to conduct experiments on something like that. So Finch's plan is to do one better than the researchers at the LHC: he wants to capture the gravitons and hold onto them. He doesn't want to just
produce
gravitons; he wants to
control
them."

"Why?" asked Jacob. "Is he trying to create artificial gravity? Some kind of tractor beam?"

"No, no," said Allie. "He doesn't care a whit about gravity, remember. These aren't gravitons to him; they're chrotons. He wants to control time itself. Which is to say, he wants to control the Universe."

They were silent for a moment.

Mercury cleared his throat. "Just so we're on the same page here," he said, "When you say 'chrotons,' you're talking about the little crunchy things you put in soup, yes?"

Jacob turned to face Mercury. "Who are you anyway? What is your role in this?"

"I told you," said Mercury. "I'm an angel. My friend Christine and I were assigned to recover the Attaché Cases of the Apocalypse, but my boss double-crossed us, so I had to create a diversion so Christine could get away. And man, what a diversion! You guys ever been struck by lightning? That'll wake you up in the morning."

Jacob and Allie exchanged meaningful glances. Jacob said, "Great. As if we weren't being punished enough, Finch gave us a lunatic for a housemate."

"Hey," objected Mercury. "This is no picnic for me either. My agent told me I was going to be rooming with Natalie Imbruglia and the guy who played Skippy on
Family Ties
."

Jacob shook his head. "I don't know which one of you sounds more nuts."

Mercury rubbed his chin, pointing his finger surreptitiously at Allie.

"It isn't as crazy as it sounds," said Allie. "If the theory is correct, then chrotons are all around us, all the time. But you can't just reach out and grab a chroton, because most of these chrotons are what you could call 'virtual' chrotons. They are, from our point of view, static and therefore invisible. We can't detect these 'virtual' chrotons, but we can detect 'free' chrotons. Now it's difficult to define the exact difference between virtual and free chrotons, but the situation is analogous to that of photons: although photons make up electromagnetic fields, you aren't going to see any light from a static electromagnetic field. You can, however, see
disturbances
of electromagnetic fields."

Mercury's eyes had glazed over completely, and even Jacob was having a hard time keeping up.

"Think of it this way," Allie continued. "You have a pond. The surface of the pond is completely dark except for where ripples on the pond's surface reflect light. The 'free' gravitons are like the ripples and the 'virtual' gravitons are like the invisible surface of the lake. The water is there either way, but it's completely undetectable except for the ripples. From our standpoint as observers of ripples on the pond, the water's existence is completely theoretical, except for the ripples, of which we have some experience---limited and indirect as it is.

"What they are trying to do at the LHC is to throw pebbles in the pond in order to observe the ripples, in an attempt to figure out the nature of the water in the pond. Finch, on the other hand, basically wants to submerge an empty glass in the water, with the opening of the glass level with the surface. He's going to throw rocks in the water in the hopes of splashing some of it into the glass."

"And then what?" asked Jacob.

"Well," said Allie, shrugging apologetically, "that's where the analogy breaks down a bit. You obviously can't literally remove a glass of Universe-stuff from the Universe and hold it in your hand. But clearly this is dangerous stuff. If you could channel a significant number of chrotons, you could conceivably warp space-time itself. It would take an awful lot of them, but once you've got control over time, lots of seemingly impossible things become possible. For example, what if the chrotons warp space-time enough to send the collider a nanosecond back in time, to just before the chrotons were captured? During the next nanosecond, the same chrotons would be captured again, from a previous state in their existence. Then it goes back another nanosecond and catches them again, and again and again. This would become a self-replicating process---call it a space-time virus if you like."

"So time would be frozen in this area?" Jacob asked.

"That's one possibility," replied Allie. "But that would only happen if there were exact parity between the amount of time needed to cause the reaction and the amount of time the collider was sent back each time the reaction occurred. More likely, the effect would be more subtle, such as the reaction occurring a millionth of a second before it should. In other words, the effect would slightly precede the cause."

"That's impossible," said Jacob.

"Not necessarily," said Allie. "Although it's hard to fathom, certainly. Another possibility is that the affected area would be sent infinitely far back in time, essentially blinking out of existence. And when I say 'the affected area,' understand that I'm being deliberately vague. I don't know the spatial range of the phenomena any more than I know the temporal range. In other words, maybe Finch's experiment will just send a few chrotons back in time. On the other hand, maybe the whole Universe will blink out of existence. It's hard to say. The point is that while I don't condone Finch's methods, the basic concepts are sound. There's no solid evidence to indicate he's right about any of this stuff, but there's no evidence to indicate he's wrong either."

Jacob shook his head. "Allie, come on. You know full well that isn't how science works. We don't accept every crackpot theory that comes along until it's disproven. Every hypothesis is tested based on how well it explains known phenomena, and by that standard the Jell-O universe theory is a resounding failure."

"Don't lecture me about the scientific method, Jacob," Allie snapped. "This isn't an abstract scientific problem we're discussing over bad coffee in the faculty lounge. If this machine works, it could literally destroy the Universe. Not just destroy it,
annihilate
it. It could destroy time itself, erasing everything that ever existed or ever will exist. I will grant you that the odds of it working are slim. But what if there's a one percent chance it works? We simply don't know what will happen if Finch succeeds in capturing a chroton."

"I know for certain that we're going to get fed to the lions if we don't get it working," said Jacob. "And since I don't have a clue how to do that, I guess our lives are in your hands."

"I'm sorry, Jacob," said Allie. "I can't risk it. I thought I could work out the unknowns well enough to make the activation of the CCD safe, but I just haven't had time. It will take years to do the necessary background work, but Finch insists on conducting the experiment as soon as possible. I just don't know what's going to happen, and I'm not willing to risk the existence of the Universe to save my own skin."

"So you worked on this thing for seven years and now you've decided, at the last minute, to develop some scruples?" Jacob asked.

"It's not that simple," said Allie. "Like you, I initially thought this whole thing was a joke. It was an interesting theoretical exercise, but I never actually expected it to work. And even now, I'm not exactly sure how he expects to capture the chrotons. That is, the device is constructed to channel them into a receiving chamber, but without something in that chamber capable of absorbing and holding onto the chrotons, they'll just disappear."

"Like a chroton battery!" interjected Mercury.

"Yes, more or less," said Finch. "I assume that Finch had someone else working on the battery, but frankly I don't know of anyone capable of building such a thing. I've done a few preliminary calculations, and the mechanics are so unworkable as to make it a near impossibility."