He gestured at that screen. "Identify ... can you identify the first three rows?"
"Yes," I said, and paused long enough to gauge his sense of humor: none. "The first row is the age of the universe in powers of ten. The second row is the temperature. The third row is the radius. You've left out the zero-th column."
"Which is trivial."
"As long as you know it's there. Peter... should I call you – "
"Peter. Julian." He rubbed two or three days' worth of stubble. "Blaze, let me freshen up before you tell me about Kyoto. Julian, familiarize yourself with the matrix. Touch to the left of the row if you have any questions about the variable."
"Have you slept at all?" Amelia asked.
He looked at his watch. "When did you leave? Three days ago? I slept a little then. Don't need it." He strode out of the room.
"If he got one hour of sleep," I said, "he'd still be down."
She shook her head. "It's understandable. Are you ready for this? He's a real slave driver."
I showed her a pinch of dark skin. "It's in my heritage."
My approach to the Problem was about as old as physics, post-Aristotle. First, I would take his initial conditions and, ignoring his Hamiltonians, see whether pseudo-operator theory came to the same conclusion. If it did, then the next thing, probably the only thing, we had to worry about was the initial conditions themselves. There were no experimental data about conditions close to the "accelerated universe" regime. We could check some aspects of the Problem by instructing the Jupiter accelerator to crank up energies closer and closer to the critical point. But how close to the edge of a cliff do you want to push a robot when it might be forty-eight minutes between command and response? Not too close.
The next two days were a sleepless marathon of mathematics. We took a half hour off when we heard explosions outside and went up to the roof to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the Washington Monument.
Watching the crash-bang of it, smelling the powder, I realized it was kind of a dilute preview of coming attractions. We had a little more than nine weeks. The Jupiter Project, if it went on schedule, would produce the critical energy level on September 14.
I think we all made the connection. We watched the finale silently and went back to work.
Peter knew a little about pseudo-operator analysis, and I knew a little about microcosmology; we spent a lot of time making sure I was understanding the questions and he was understanding the answers. But at the end of two days, I was as convinced as he and Blaze were. The Jupiter Project had to die.
Or we all had to die. A terrible thought occurred to me while I was twanging on speedies and black coffee: I could kill both of them with two blows. Then I could destroy all the records and kill myself.
I would become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, to paraphrase a nuclear pioneer. With a simple act of violence, I could destroy the universe.
A good thing I was sane.
It wouldn't be difficult for the Project engineers to prevent the disaster; any random change of the position of a few elements of the ring would do it. The system had to line up just so in order to work: a circular collimation over a million kilometers in circumference that would last for less than a minute before gravity from Jupiter's moons pulled it apart forever. Of course that minute would be eons long compared to the tiny interval that was being simulated. And plenty of time for the accelerating surge to make one orbit and produce the supercharged speck that would end it all.
I WAS GROWING TO like Peter, in spite of himself. He was a slave driver, but he drove himself harder than he did me or Amelia. He was temperamental and sarcastic and blew up about as regularly as Old Faithful. But I've never met anyone so absolutely dedicated to science. He was like a mad monk lost in his love of the divine.
Or so I thought.
Speedies or no, I'm still blessed and cursed with a soldier's body. In the soldierboy I was exercised constantly, to keep from cramping up; at the university I worked out every day, alternating an hour of running with an hour on the gym machines. So I could get along without sleep, but not without exercise. Every morning at dawn I'd excuse myself from the proceedings and go off to run.
I was systematically exploring downtown Washington during my morning jogs, taking the Metro down and going in a different direction each day. I'd seen most of the monuments (which might be more moving to someone who'd actually chosen to be a soldier) and ranged as far afield as the Washington Zoo and Alexandria, when I felt like doing a few extra miles.
Peter accepted the fact that I had to have the exercise to keep from cramping up. I also contended that it cleared my head, but he pointed out that his head was clear enough, and the only exercise he got was wrestling with cosmology.
That was not entirely true. On the fifth day I got almost all the way to the Metro station and realized I'd left my card behind. I jogged on back to the apartment and let myself in.
My street clothes were in the living room, by the fold-out bed that Amelia and I shared. I took the card out of my wallet and started back to the front door, but then heard a noise from the study. The door was partly open; I looked in.
Amelia was sitting on the edge of the table, naked from the waist down, her legs scissored around Peter's bald head. She was gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles were bone-white, her face to the ceiling in a rictus of orgasm.
I closed the door with a quiet click and ran out.
I ran as hard as I could for several hours, stopping a few times to buy water and choke it down. When I got to the border gate between D.C. and Maryland, I couldn't get through because I didn't have my interstate pass. So I stopped running and slid into a dive called the Border Bar, icy air sharp with tobacco smoke, legal in D.C. I drank down a liter of beer and then sipped another liter with a shot of whiskey.
The combination of speedies and alcohol is not entirely pleasant. Your mind goes off in all directions.
When we first started going together, we talked about fidelity and jealousy. There's a kind of generation problem: When I was in my teens and early twenties, there was a lot of sexual experimentation and swapping around, with the defendable basis that sex is biology and love is something else, and a couple could negotiate the two issues independently. Fifteen years earlier, when Amelia had been that age, attitudes were more conservative-no sex without love, and then monogamy afterward.
She agreed at the time to go along with my principles-or lack of same, her contemporaries might say – even though we both thought it was unlikely we would exercise our freedom.
So now she had, and for some reason it was devastating. Less than a year ago, I would have jumped at the opportunity of having sex with Sara, jacked or not. So what right did I have to feel injured because she had done exactly the same thing? She'd been living with Peter more closely than most married couples live, for quite a while, and she respected him enormously, and if he asked for sex, why not say yes?
I had a feeling it was she who had asked, though. She certainly had been enjoying it.
I finished the drinks and switched to iced coffee, which tasted like cold battery acid, even with three sugars.
Did she know that I'd seen? I had closed the door automatically, but they might not remember having left it slightly open. Sometimes the current from the airco cycling on and off would ease a door shut.
"You look lonely, soldier." I did my running in fatigue uniform, in case I wanted an unrationed beer. "You look sad." She was pretty, blond, maybe twenty.
"Thanks," I said, "but I'm all right."
She sat down on the stool next to me and showed me her ID, professional name Zoe, medical inspection only one day old. Only one customer had signed the book. "I'm not just a whore. I'm also a professional expert on men, and you're not 'all right.' You look like you're about to jump off a bridge."