The Model Universe And Other Stories Read online

  THE MODEL UNIVERSE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  By Christopher Bunn

  Copyright 2010 by Christopher Bunn. All rights reserved.

  This collection of stories is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any mechanical or electronic means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover illustration by Josh Addessi (http://joshaddessi.blogspot.com/).

  Other books by Christopher Bunn

  The Tormay Trilogy

  The Hawk And His Boy

  The Shadow At The Gate

  The Wicked Day

  The Model Universe and Other Stories

  The Mike Murphy Files and Other Stories

  THE MODEL UNIVERSE

  Tommy Graves first thought about the stars in Mr. Flynn’s fifth grade class. It was the last day of September, and the nights were brilliant with stars and a brooding yellow moon. But the thing on Mr. Flynn’s desk was even more brilliant.

  Mr. Flynn was a quiet man with gray hair and glasses so thick it seemed as if he were peering at the world through a microscope. He ruled the fifth graders with a kind hand and they bumbled through the Mayflower Compact and Leonardo da Vinci and advanced multiplication with his dry voice prompting them along the way.

  Tommy ambled into the room that morning, knapsack over one shoulder. The windows were open and a robin trilled outside. He saw the thing right away. A glowing sparkle of tiny jewels suspended over Mr. Flynn’s desk, each point of light revolving around the others in a perfectly balanced dance.

  “Mr. Flynn! What’s that?” Tommy veered toward the teacher’s desk.

  “All in good time, Thomas. Take your seat, please.”

  Tommy slouched to his seat and sat down. Mr. Flynn turned to the chalkboard and began writing. The classroom buzzed with the usual chatter. Some girls giggled to each other and cast sidelong glances at Hank Ketchum and his friends lolling in the back row. A paper airplane sailed through the air. Tommy looked around in amazement. No one else seemed interested in the thing on Mr. Flynn’s desk. Tommy propped his chin on his hands and stared at it.

  The tiny lights crept around and through each other with clockwork precision. There were dozens of them. Hundreds. Maybe even more. It was impossible to tell. And what were they suspended on? He couldn’t figure it out. Probably fishing line of something like that.

  The bell rang and the class fell quiet. Mr. Flynn turned from the chalkboard.

  “This month, class, we are going to study astronomy.”

  An automatic groan went up from the class.

  “Can anyone tell me what astronomy is? Yes, Amy?”

  “Um, stars? It’s about stars?”

  “Good. Astronomy is the study of the stars. Not just stars, but planets, galaxies, the universe.” Mr. Flynn adjusted his glasses and stepped closer to his desk. “Here is a model of our universe. It portrays the movement of the stars and other bodies.”

  “I have a body,” snickered Hank Ketchum from the back row. The class laughed. Mr. Flynn coughed and the class stopped laughing.

  “An astute observation, Henry. Now, can you tell me what a star is?”

  “Sure. It’s…uh…it’s in the sky at night.”

  Tommy raised his hand.

  “Thomas?”

  “It’s a fire. A huge fire. Like a nuclear bomb.”

  “Not exactly, but that is a good answer.”

  When the last bell rang that day and the class had trooped out, Tommy lingered behind. Mr. Flynn opened his battered leather briefcase and began to fold the universe model up. At least, that’s what it looked like to Tommy. The shining jewel-like stars compressed together until the teacher held a compact mass of color and light in his hands. He placed it in the briefcase and shut it.

  “How many stars are there, Mr. Flynn?” asked Tommy.

  “In the universe, Thomas?” Mr. Flynn smiled and shook his head. “Science has guessed. They make their calculations, but they don’t know. Trillions upon trillions. A number so large it wouldn’t mean anything to you. It would be, let us say, difficult to imagine.”

  “I could try,” said Tommy.

  Mr. Flynn looked down at him. His eyes seemed to sharpen behind their thick lenses.

  “Have you ever considered being a scientist, Thomas?” he said. “I think you have the right mind for it. In fact, I'm sure of it.”

  Tommy went home thinking about stars and scientists and numbers bigger than what he could imagine. He wasn’t sure what being a scientist really meant. He could find out. He would ask Mr. Flynn more. It sounded wonderful, though, if it meant anything to do with stars. The stars! Maybe he could be an astronaut and travel to the stars.

  He chattered about stars to his parents all through that autumn. He talked about black holes over a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. The subject of white dwarfs came up during an unfortunate dinner of okra and pork chops. He spoke about galaxies through the peas and sweet corn and yams of October. He ate his Thanksgiving plate clean and tried to explain red giants through a last mouthful of pumpkin pie. His parents smiled. His visiting Uncle Simon and Aunt Kate looked impressed. His little sister threw a carrot at him from her highchair.

  The years passed and Tommy Graves went to high school. He did well in physics, algebra and trigonometry. His dad bought him a telescope for his sixteenth birthday. It was expensive, but, as Mr. Graves remarked to his wife, what else are we going to spend the money on? A trip to Hawaii? His wife sighed, as she had been dreaming about a vacation, but they both were pleased with their son.

  Occasionally, Tommy saw his old fifth grade teacher in town, bicycling to the grammar school, his old briefcase dangling from his handlebars. Once, he encountered him in the local grocery store, peering at apples in the produce aisle.

  “Ah, Thomas,” said Mr. Flynn, straightening up with a Fuji in his hand. “How is school?”

  “Good, Mr. Flynn,” said Tommy, feeling like he was back in the fifth grade. “I’m, uh, going to be valedictorian.”

  “Oh?” Mr. Flynn examined him from behind his thick glasses. “And have you picked a college?”

  “Yes. MIT. I was accepted last month. I’m going to study physics.”

  Tommy Graves went to MIT on a scholarship. He studied theoretical physics and astronomy. He was a quiet fellow, given more to spending time with a book or in a laboratory than the normal activities of other college boys.

  “C’mon, Tom,” said his roommate. “Last game of the year. A couple beers, hotdogs. Paula’s got a friend who wants to meet you.”

  “Maybe next time,” said Tommy, distracted. “I want to finish this. I kinda think deuterium is the wrong place to start. Or maybe not.”

  The door slammed shut behind his roommate, but Tommy didn’t even hear him go.

  Tommy graduated with a double major and honors in both. His senior thesis was titled “Isotope Anomalies in the Coulomb Barrier.” Several professors in the physics department understood it when they read it. Several professors did not. His advisor, Dr. Berlinski, gave a copy to a friend of his who worked for the government.

  That summer, Tommy was hired by the Department of Energy. He told his family and friends, in vague terms, that he had been hired for an alternative energy project. Hydrogen fuel cells for cars, is what his dad told his poker buddies. Ethanol, or some kind of new gasoline, is what his mom told her friends at the quilt
ing club. Solar power, his sister Dana told her friends.

  Tommy packed his belongings in an old Pontiac his dad had given him and drove west to California. It took two days. He slept in the car at a truck stop near Denver. Not because he wanted to save money, but because it was comfortable enough and he was still young. By the time he reached Interstate 15, the front seat was littered with hamburger wrappers and empty water bottles. He drove through the night toward Las Vegas, marveling at the lights of the city as it grew in his windshield. It looked like a crude copy of the Milky Way. Garish, but lovely. He stopped to fill up the Pontiac and buy some chocolate bars. Then he drove on.

  He drove through the Mojave Desert in the small hours of the morning. The road was deserted except for the occasional semi rolling along with its red lights shining. The stars were brilliant. A thick scattering of diamonds thrown across the sky.

  By the time the sun was up, Tommy had reached Highway 101. He drove through hills bleached golden by the sun, relieved here and there by the green rows of vineyards. Just south of Santa Maria, after a last consultation with the map, he turned off on an unmarked road and bumped along for several miles until he came to a gate. A soldier emerged from the guardhouse and walked over to his car.

  “Identification, please,” said the soldier. Tommy handed him his drivers license and a card the man from the Department of Energy had given him. The soldier inspected them both and then gave them back.

  “Welcome to Vandenburg, sir,” said the soldier.

  Tommy Graves had been hired as the newest and final member of the Lemonade Ice Project. It was more secret than top-secret. Even the President only had a vague idea of what it entailed. The funding for the project was funneled from a Department of Energy appropriations budget that no one in Congress knew anything about, as well as several different Defense budgets lying dormant since the end of World War II.

  The Lemonade Ice Project was run out of a handful of buildings situated by themselves at the end of a road in the north side of Vandenburg Air Force Base. Guard gates manned by Marines blocked the road at several intervals. The buildings were nothing special to look at, just drab, 1960s era concrete and steel piles. Things inside, however, were different.

  Colonel Lachlan Hull was the director of the Lemonade Ice Project. He sat behind his desk and regarded Tommy. Hull was a short man with a round, cheerful face.

  “Tell me, Graves. What did Ericsson tell you about Lemonade Ice when he hired you?”

  “Well, sir, he said it was doing research on cold fusion.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “To be honest, sir, I’m not sure. He mentioned the five previous hires, all people I’ve heard of. Two of them don’t make sense with cold fusion. Oren Barringer and Ronit Prelutsky. They took degrees in quantum physics, and they both specialized in space-time symmetries.” Tommy shook his head. “You wouldn’t need people like that working on cold fusion.”

  Colonel Hull smiled. “No, you wouldn’t.”

  He stood up from his desk. “Come with me, Graves.”

  They walked down a hallway. Tommy had to hurry to keep up with Colonel Hull. The little man seemed to bounce along like a rubber ball. At the end of the hallway was a door.

  “Thumb on the plate, Graves,” said Colonel Hull. “All the doors in here are keyed to personnel.”

  The door slid open.

  “Welcome to Lemonade Ice,” said the Colonel.

  It was a cavernous room. One side of it was taken up with banks and banks of supercomputers. Stacks of hard drives arrayed together, towering up to the ceiling, blinking and crunching their data. Three people sat at consoles, their faces intent on screens.

  The other side of the room was walled off with what looked like glass. Foot-thick glass interrupted in several spots by robotic arm assemblages mounted in the glass wall. Each robotic arm had a bank of controls on the side of the glass wall nearest to Tommy and the Colonel. The arms themselves reached through the glass wall to the other side. Two people stood at the controls of one of the robotic arms.

  One thing occupied the space beyond the glass wall. A long cylindrical object variegated by nodes and panels and tubes. It looked like an ice cream cone dipped in alloys and composites and then tilted on its side in a cradle of steel struts.

  A bluish light filled the room, intensifying and receding at indefinable intervals. Tommy was not sure, but he thought he could hear a quiet hum, though it was difficult to tell due to the other sounds that filled the room: conversations, the click of keyboards, and the whine of the servos powering the robotic arms.

  “That looks like…” Tommy’s voice trailed off. He stared and then turned to the Colonel. “That looks like the theoretical design of Cambrousi’s cold fusion reactor. I read his paper my freshman year in college. At least, it looks almost like it. But that means…”

  Colonel Hull nodded. “That means, Graves, you’re looking at a cold fusion reactor. We’ve had it running for almost a year. That’s Cambrousi over there, next to the Charlie Two arm, arguing with Prelutsky. He looks like he’s going to punch her, doesn’t he, but she can take care of herself. Ex-Israeli Army.”

  “A cold fusion reactor! What on earth? I can’t believe it!”

  “Believe it, son. You can run that thing for a month on a cup of water.”

  “But…”

  “Lemonade Ice isn’t about cold fusion. It’s about what we can do with cold fusion. More specifically, it’s about the anomalies the reactor’s been generating. Bends, Graves. Bends in the space-time continuum, right on the outer edge of the Coulumb repulsion. Not just bends, but hops, skips, and jumps.” Colonel Hull smiled. “Almost like we’ve got a strange game of hopscotch going on here. And that’s the aim of the Lemonade Ice Project, Graves. We’re gonna figure out how to hop, skip and jump our way to the stars. Oh, we’ve sent a few missions into space. The moon, Mars, the Jupiter probes, the two Pylos missions. But to really get to the stars? For that we need cold fusion, or we're stuck in this solar system forever.”

  Tommy dreamed that night of his fifth grade teacher, Mr. Flynn. He could not remember what the old man looked like. The teacher’s face was a blur wearing a pair of glasses. But the dream was clear in one aspect. The model of the universe on the teacher’s desk shone in all of its fascinating glory. The tiny stars crept about through the darkness on their clockwork courses, glowing in scarlet, azure and amber fire. The vague blob of Mr. Flynn’s face hovered over the model. At the end of the dream, and right before Tommy’s alarm rang, the teacher’s hands reached out and folded up the model.

  All through that long and hot summer, and into the mellow fall, the six members of Lemonade Ice worked and theorized and discussed and argued and quarreled and fought. Besides Oren Barringer and Ronit Prelutsky, the team included Gino Cambrousi, the mathemetician Wilbur Cho and Benny Lane, the CalTech electrical engineer and computer genius who achieved notoriety and a deferred prison sentence his junior year of high school by hacking the NORAD satellite system. And, of course, Tommy. Colonel Hull ruled them with a benign hand and did not mind the fighting, as long as it led somewhere productive. Their world was the barren gold of the hills around their isolated compound, the linoleum hallways, the cafeteria (with its menus that became more boring with each passing week), the supercomputers and, of course, the operations room with its reactor and the robotic arms of Charlie One, Two and Three.

  Due to Colonel Hull’s remarks, the team had taken to referring to the reactor as Hopscotch. And there was a strange similarity to the game of hopscotch in how the fusion anomalies presented themselves. They came in quick jumps, sudden leaps that went further than expected, as if launching over an invisible barrier that must be avoided at all costs. Time jumped and leapt around the edges of fusion.

  The data piled up and began to suggest tantalizingly predictable outcomes. Benny Lane talked Colonel Hull into adding a thousand more terabytes to the hard drive array. Oren and Ronit got into an argument about classical music v
ersus progressive rock that lasted for eight days, after which they refused to talk to each other for another eight days. The cafeteria cook bought a Thai cookbook and turned out meal after meal of rice noodles, fish curries and coconut soups. A man from Washington showed up unannounced and was given a tour of the facility by Colonel Hull. The man said nothing, observed everything with cold eyes, and then disappeared just as abruptly as he had arrived.

  It began raining in November. The dreary, grey days blended into night so smoothly that clocks became indispensable in order to properly keep track of time. Tempers frayed and Wilbur Cho stole all the Hostess cupcakes in the cafeteria, locked himself in his room and refused to come out for three days. When he did emerge, two Marine guards bundled him into a waiting van. He never returned. He was replaced a week later by another mathematician, a lean, suntanned girl named Meg Bowes. She was polite and quiet, and showed no interest in Hostess cupcakes. Tommy had read her dissertation and figured he had been lucky to understand, perhaps, a third of it. Quantum chromodynamics and the vector potentials of black holes were not his strong points.

  November sixteenth started like any other day. Tommy opened one eye at 6am and stared at the clock. The shower failed to wake him up. He somehow got himself to the cafeteria. The second cup of coffee woke him up and he dug into the scrambled eggs with enthusiasm. The operations room was uninhabited when he got there, except for Ronit working at Charlie Two. Hopscotch hummed behind its glass wall.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  “Up?” She glared at him. Her green eyes had dark circles around them. “I haven’t been to bed yet. Get me some coffee.”

  He got her a cup, nodded at her grumbled thanks, and then drifted over to Charlie Three. The servos whined as they warmed up. The robotic arm swung over to the reactor. Tommy flipped down the viewing lens and dialed up the magnification. The pincers on the end of Charlie Three began moving in micromillimeters. He hummed to himself.

  “Where’s the magnetometer?” he said, after a while, not looking away from the viewing lens.