The Model Universe And Other Stories Read online

  “In Charlie One’s kit,” said Ronit.

  “Can you get it for me, please?”

  “Get it yourself.”

  “I got you coffee.”

  “Oh, alright,” she mumbled.

  Tommy spoke again after several minutes. “Ronit?”

  “What?”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Such as beat your head in with this ion capacitor?”

  “Can you divert the feed from Charlie Three to a free mainframe? Please? I’ll bring you a donut later. You’re the best.”

  “Shutup. I’ll do it. You’re giving me a headache.”

  She clattered around in the warren of computers for a while.

  “Alright. Done. I’m going to bed.”

  “Thanks!”

  But the door had already slammed shut and Tommy was alone. He fiddled with Charlie Three’s controls. Data blurred through the readout screen on the edge of the viewing lens. He initiated the mainframe and slaved it to the robotic arm. Somewhere behind him in the stacked hard drive arrays, a couple hundred terabytes began crunching. The output read steady at 0.93 gigawatts.

  Tommy pinched the bridge of his nose. He needed another cup of coffee. The viewing lens was acting up. Seeing double. At least, the infrared translation of the repulsion barrier was showing up as double. Two blurred lines shimmering back and forth. Two lines? He rubbed his eyes. An anomaly. The second line was flickering. There was something between the lines. No. There was nothing between the lines.

  Nothing?

  Absolutely nothing.

  He didn’t say anything to anyone about it for a day. He ran the data again, hunched over a keyboard in a mainframe carrel. He skipped lunch and spent the time staring at numbers flashing over the screen. There it was. The mathematical representation of nothing. Not zero. Something profoundly else. Something physical and definable, but precisely nothing. He took a deep breath and then went in search of Colonel Hull.

  “How many times you run these numbers, Graves?” asked the colonel. The little man stared at the screen.

  “Twice, sir. Same outputs each time.”

  “We’ll run them again, but I think this is it,” muttered Colonel Hull, almost as if he had forgotten Tommy was still in the room. “This is the real deal.”

  “What’s next, sir?”

  The colonel smiled and said nothing.

  If the preceding months had gone by slowly, the next few months vanished in one beat of a hummingbird’s wings. The entire project packed up, from personnel and Hopscotch, to the cook and the colonel, and then redeployed several miles away in another installation. It was similar to their old location except for several differences. First, there were new additions to their team in the form of two Air Force pilots, looking alike in crewcuts, broad shoulders and irrepressibly cheerful spirits. Second, the runway angling to the west from the edge of the complex. Third, the hangar beside the runway. The first day they were there, Colonel Hull took them to the hangar. A guard unlocked the door and stood to one side as they filed inside. There was a moment of silence, and then Ronit swore in Hebrew.

  “That’s a rocket!” she said. “It looks like the Pylos generation.”

  “A spaceship,” whispered Tommy to himself.

  “Yes, a rocket of sorts,” said Colonel Hull, nodding. “Not exactly Pylos, but close. You didn’t think Lemonade Ice was going to cease with the discovery of space-time manipulation, did you?” He looked around at the six scientists. “You weren’t chosen for this project just for your specializations. You were also chosen because of personalities, physical aptitudes, psychological makeup. I admit the test never foresaw Wilbur’s love of cupcakes. Meg, though, has proven an excellent replacement. Ladies and gentlemen, along with our two pilots, you comprise the first truly interstellar expedition of the United States. Interstellar travel through space-time manipulation. One jump across the galaxies, and one jump back. Data gathering on the jumps. Prove spaceflight to this country. Fail, and no one will ever know. I’ll just tidy things up here and send vague notes of condolences to your nearest kin. No one in Washington will be the wiser, except for three men in the Pentagon."

  There was a stunned silence after this pronouncement. Somewhere across the tarmac, up in the eucalyptus trees, a sparrow warbled.

  “But what if we don’t want to go?” mumbled Oren.

  “Of course you do. Your psychological assessment says you do.”

  That day brought another addition to the operation. An unwelcome addition from the point of view of the scientists. USMC Sergeant Atticus Sarbanes. He considered five in the morning the normal time to be up. Not just up, but running through the gloomy gray of the hills nearby. The six scientists stumbled along behind him, grumbling and swearing and devising ways to get out of their contracts. One by one, they all made their way to Colonel Hull’s office, cursing the sergeant, cursing the project and demanding early termination. His response was always the same.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You want to go to the stars, don’t you?”

  And so they ran in the mornings, they lifted weights, they did push-ups, they sweated and cursed in English, French, Hebrew and Italian. They attended lectures on the current space program – limited so far to a handful of solar system missions, the space telescope orbiting Jupiter, and two manned missions that had cleared the solar system five and ten years ago, respectively, and were still going strong. They sat through seminars on aeronautics, gravitation, and astrophysics. The two Air Force pilots – the commander, Captain Gavin Surrey and the navigator, Lieutenant Peter Cole – spent a week lecturing on the Pylos missions.

  The afternoons, however, were devoted to the rocket. It was named the USS Haley – a Ceres-model, generation five, similar in infrastructure to the Pylos I and II spacecraft that were currently halfway to Alpha Centauri. There were two serious differences between the rocket and the two Pylos crafts. It was bigger. The Pylos crafts shipped crews of four apiece. The Haley housed a comfortable ten. The other difference was the propulsion system. The Pylos crafts were powered by double engine arrays run on nitrogen tetroxide and meticulous gravitational slingshot routes. The Haley was powered by Hopscotch. Cold fusion.

  The team didn’t incorporate the original Hopscotch reactor, but used it as a model to construct larger reactors. Dual reactors powering three magneto heatsink thrusters. A smaller version was constructed for the escape module, a miniature of the enormous Haley. A team of engineers was brought in and they set up shop in a nearby hangar to fabricate and weld and produce according to whatever specs the team came up with.

  The work took three months and then the Haley was finished. The engineers packed up their equipment and left. The cook baked a Black Forest cake. Colonel Hull showed up that evening with champagne. Sergeant Sarbanes made a toast that somehow ended up saluting the Marines who died on Iwo Jima.

  Without any fanfare or observers except the cold-eyed man from Washington and Sergeant Sarbanes, the USS Haley lifted off on a foggy February morning. Colonel Hull’s voice whispered from the intercom. “Smooth sailing, people. Over and out.”

  “Roger that, sir,” said the commander.

  The sky blurred into blue, into light, and then faded into the darkness of night, speckled with stars. The ship was silent, other than the hum of the reactors and the quiet rumble of the engines. Tommy unbuckled his harness and maneuvered out of his tiny cabin. Benny was already strapped into one of the mainframe consoles.

  “How’s she holding?” asked Tommy, pulling himself down into another chair.

  “Smooth as silk,” said Benny. “Steady at 5 gigawatts, minimal inputs, and nothing’s escaping the heatsink. The engines are pulling about 15% off the reactors.” He shrugged. “I don't know anything about flying, but Surrey seems happy. He could open it up another 80%, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “The anomalies are exhibiting as mapped,” said Tommy. He fiddled with the keyboard. “Still at 99.3% probability. That's what I first calculate
d. Did I ever get a bonus for this?”

  “What about that extra .7%?”

  Benny and Tommy turned to see a green-faced Ronit.

  “Here,” said Benny. “Try some ginger candy.”

  The navigator floated down through the central passage.

  “Twenty-eight minutes counting to jump, folks,” he said. "Better strap down."

  They returned to their cabins. Tommy buckled in, his hands trembling. Punched in the life support protocols. The interface hummed into life, checking his vitals, re-checking, calculating, and extrapolating, examining him in comparison to the wealth of data it had in its hard-drive concerning the person named Thomas Graves. Tommy tried to relax as the tiny needles slid into his veins. The mask folded out from the ceiling and clamped around his face. Oxygen sighed.

  In each cabin, pulses slowed. Heartbeats slowed. The air gained weight and pressed down. They waited. Asleep or dreaming they were awake. The minutes slid past like the black sky outside the ports. The engines growled, drawing on the full output of the reactors.

  And then they jumped.

  Time blurred around them. Time and light became one. For a second, for an hour, perhaps it was for a day? A year? There was no way to tell. Thought moved at the same speed. Synapse velocity at the speed of light. But light’s velocity changed, was changing, had changed, would change.

  Tommy blacked out. He came to with the restraining straps still on him. The mask felt heavy on his face. The ship was quiet around him. He keyed the release. The mask slid away. His wrists and neck itched as the needles vanished back into the chair. He floated free. The port was full of stars. Stars he had never seen. The spiral of a galaxy in purples and blues displayed on sharp angle. A strange sky. A beautiful sky. A sky that had never seen a sunrise.

  He maneuvered out of the cabin and floated across the deck to the mainframe. The place was silent except for the reactor hum. He strapped himself in. His fingers danced over the keyboard. Numbers hurried across the screen. Data pouring through. His mind gathered it in. Processed it. The reactors were holding steady. Someone settled into the chair next to him. Meg.

  “How’re we doing?” she whispered.

  “Like cruising down Highway 1 with the top down.”

  “We’re a long way from California.” But she smiled.

  They were silent for a while, gazing at the procession of numbers on the screen. He could smell her scent in the air, a touch of summer and flowers. He realized he didn’t know where she was from. Had never asked. He opened his mouth to ask, but the cheerful voice of Benny Lane suddenly filled the air.

  The others appeared then, smiling, dazed, staring out the ports at the strange sky stretching away into the depths of darkness and stars. They chattered and laughed and spoke of many things, but their words were unequal to the sight. The commander and the navigator emerged from the flight deck. Champagne flowed from little plastic squeeze bags. Globules of the liquid floated free into the air and then vanished into the air scrubbers set into the walls.

  “One hour and counting for return,” said the commander.

  “Is the navsat up to the job?” asked Benny, jealous of the navigator’s computer.

  The man nodded. “Crunching the last star points. We might end the jump several light years off.” He shrugged. “Close enough for government work.”

  “Or we might end our jump in the middle of a star,” said Oren.

  The navigator shrugged again. “Statistically impossible. Anyway, I’m sure everyone has good life insurance.”

  The view outside the ports changed in slow motion as the ship spun on its axis. The stars crept by in their shining formations. The reactors hummed.

  “What the hell?”

  They all turned as one. Benny was staring at the mainframe screen.

  “The unmapped anomalies,” he said. “That last seven tenths of a percent. They’re displacing more energy than they should. More than the determined ratio. More than's acceptable.”

  “Greater than a percent?” asked Ronit.

  “Closer to two. Give or take a few trillionths.”

  “But the engines need all the output to jump,” said the commander. “Ninety-six percent for the apogee. Are the reactors malfunctioning?”

  “No,” said Benny. “They’re working fine. No problem there. But something’s changed. Something’s different here. Maybe laws don’t exactly behave the same everywhere? Give me a couple years and a few million terabytes, and I might figure it out. The remaining mapped anomalies should be able to provide what the engines need. But, there’s one problem.”

  “The life-support systems,” said Ronit. “They require a fraction of that output. For eight people.”

  “And the navsat and flight computers,” muttered the navigator.

  Everyone considered this in silence.

  “Benny?” said Meg.

  Benny’s shoulders hunched. “One person,” he said quietly. “Just one person is all it would take.”

  The stars slid by the ports as the ship turned. Tommy released his grip on the back of one of the console chairs. His hand ached. He drifted over to the nearest port and looked out. The clarity was stunning. A cluster of stars like a handful of pearls blazed in harmony. Azure and amber and scarlet tints. Strange constellations. Hundreds, thousands, visible to his eye. Never seen before. Motionless, but surely turning and revolving around each other, around some distant, hidden center. He smiled. But then the ship spun a few more minute degrees. The stars slid down. He stared. There, at the top of the visible sky, revealing itself in a widening arc of space, there was simply nothing. Blackness. A whole swath of sky without any stars. Just blackness. At least, he thought it was blackness. He rubbed his eyes, looked again. He turned to the others, to say something, but could not.

  “Me,” growled Cambrousi, breaking the silence. His accent was thicker than it usually was. “It was my damn design in the first place. The goddamn reactor is my fault.”

  Benny stirred in his chair. “The reactor’s working like it should. It’s just that, out here, I'm starting to think one and one might not necessarily make two.”

  “Still, it should be me.”

  “No,” said Tommy, speaking before he had even thought it through. “I’ll do it. You’ve got a wife, don’t you? And Oren, you and Ronit, maybe you have something if you can stop fighting long enough to figure it out. Besides, the Colonel’s going to need you to refine the implications of the Hopscotch symmetry. Benny, you’re the youngest here. You're just a kid, for God’s sake. You still need to waste a few days surfing down in Ventura. And we can’t get this bucket of rust back without the two of you, commander.”

  “What about me?” said Meg.

  “You’re going back with them,” said Tommy.

  She stared at him, her face expressionless, and then she nodded.

  “What about the escape module,” said the navigator suddenly.

  “Better than what I was thinking,” said Tommy, his voice shaky.

  “It has a Hopscotch reactor, a heatsink. I can upload the nav data into its mainframe, along with the jump coordinates. No reason why you can’t just follow along with us.”

  And that was that. Time was short, as it was, as the jump protocols needed to begin. The hatch to the escape module hissed open. They all shook his hand. Ronit kissed his cheek. There were tears in Benny’s eyes. Meg squeezed his hand until his fingers hurt. She grinned at him.

  “See you at Vandenburg,” she said.

  “Whoever’s back first buys a round,” he said.

  “Done.” She smiled.

  The navigator hurriedly went over the controls with him, explaining the jump protocols and the navsat orientation. It was simple enough. Simpler than driving the 405 during rush hour. Then, one last handshake and the hatch hissed shut. The reactor hummed into contented life. The heatsink rumbled in anticipation. The little ship fell away from the USS Haley. Tommy floated free in space, staring out into the darkness studded with stars and f
ull of silence. His throat was dry. The navsat screen glowed in readiness next to his chair. He hit the control toggle and the keyboard slid out and locked into place over his lap. The jump protocol blinked into life on the screen. The numbers flickered, rearranging themselves to reflect the ship’s drift through space.

  Earth. Home. Hamburgers and French fries. Driving down the coast highway toward Santa Barbara in the warm evening light. The surf rolling on the sands below the road. Meg.

  The ship turned on its axis. The stars slid by the port. He watched them disappear, revealing an expanse of blackness. The swath of nothingness. No stars. No light. Blankness.

  Tommy hit a key and the jump protocol vanished off the screen. The engine rumbled. The thrust pushed him back into his chair. Hard. His vision blurred and then cleared. The little ship flew through the darkness, stars on either side, above and below him. But before him, the immense stretch of sky was simply blank. Nothingness.

  Yet it did not come closer as the hours passed. A needle slid into his wrist and the life-support computer clucked in solicitation. The nothingness was no closer. Perhaps light years away. Perhaps only a million miles. Perhaps less. Perhaps much more.

  Tommy zeroed out the jump coordinates the navigator had set. Swallowed hard, trying to moisten his dry throat. And then punched in new coordinates relative to ship position. Began the protocol. The reactor hummed louder, ready to supply more power. The needles slid into his veins, his neck. The mask unfolded, drifted down and clamped on his face.

  The ship jumped.

  Time slowed. Or sped up. He blacked out.

  Tommy came to. A minute later. A year later. He wasn't sure. The stars blurred by the port window in a scream of color. He could not breathe, did not need to breathe, The needles and the mask did it for him. The darkness grew before him. A massive wall. Looming, growing closer, at the rate of a light year a millisecond, a million miles compressed into one inch, a thousand days compressed into one day, or one day compressed into a thousand days.

  The edge of the universe.

  The ship met it. Still in the apogee of its jump. The reactor humming. The engine growling. Tommy caught up in one single blink of his eyelids that had lasted for three hours. And then there was nothing. Unexistence. The absence of color, thought, being. A perfect harmony of what was not. Time stopped. It remained with the stars, behind him, in another place. Matter was undone. Tommy blinked, finally. One last blink. His eyelids opened.