Where was the tungsten and osmium going? Where was the plutonium coming from? Above all, how was it possible for a plutonium isotope whose atoms had only 92 neutrons in its nucleus to exist even for a fraction of a fraction of an instant? Plutonium was one of the heavier chemical elements, with a whopping 94 protons in the nucleus of each of its atoms. The closest thing to a stable isotope of plutonium was plutonium-244, in which 150 neutrons held those 94 protons together; and even at that, plutonium-244 had an inevitable habit of breaking down in radioactive decay, with a half-life of some 76 million years. Atoms of plutonium-186, if they could exist at all, would come dramatically apart in very much less than one seventy-six millionth of a second.
But the stuff that was turning up in the chemistry labs to replace the tungsten-186 and the osmium-186 had an atomic number of 94, no question about that. And element 94 was plutonium. That couldn’t be disputed either. The defining characteristic of plutonium was the presence of 94 protons in its nucleus. If that was the count, plutonium was what that element had to be.
This impossibly light isotope of plutonium, this plutonium-186, had another impossible characteristic about it: not only was it stable, it was so completely stable that it wasn’t even radioactive. It just sat there, looking exceedingly unmysterious, not even deigning to emit a smidgen of energy. At least, not when first tested. But a second test revealed positron emission, which a third baffled look confirmed. The trouble was that the third measurement showed an even higher level of radioactivity than the second one. The fourth was higher than the third. And so on and so on.
Nobody had ever heard of any element, of whatever atomic number or weight, that started off stable and then began to demonstrate a steadily increasing intensity of radioactivity. No one knew what was likely to happen, either, if the process continued unchecked, but the possibilities seemed pretty explosive. The best suggestion anyone had was to turn it to powder and mix it with nonradioactive tungsten. That worked for a little while, until the tungsten turned radioactive too. After that graphite was used, with somewhat better results, to damp down the strange element’s output of energy. There were no explosions. But more and more plutonium-186 kept arriving.
The only explanation that made any sense-and it did not make very much sense-was that it was coming from some unknown and perhaps even unknowable place, some sort of parallel universe, where the laws of nature were different and the binding forces of the atom were so much more powerful that plutonium-186 could be a stable isotope.
Why they were sending odd lumps of plutonium-186 here was something that no one could begin to guess. An even more important question was how they could be made to stop doing it. The radioactive breakdown of the plutonium-186 would eventually transform it into ordinary osmium or tungsten, but the twenty positrons that each plutonium nucleus emitted in the course of that process encountered and annihilated an equal number of electrons. Our universe could afford to lose twenty electrons here and there, no doubt. It could probably afford to go on losing electrons at a constant rate for an astonishingly long time without noticing much difference. But sooner or later the shift toward an overall positive charge that this electron loss created would create grave and perhaps incalculable problems of symmetry and energy conservation. Would the equilibrium of the universe break down? Would nuclear interactions begin to intensify? Would the stars-even the Sun-erupt into supernovas?
“This can’t go on,” Fletcher said gloomily.
Hammond gave him a sour look. “So? We’ve been saying that for six months now.”
“It’s time to do something. They keep shipping us more and more and more, and we don’t have any idea how to go about telling them to cut it out.”
“We don’t even have any idea whether they really exist,” Raymond Nikolaus put in.
“Right now that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the stuff is arriving constantly, and the more of it we have, the more dangerous it is. We don’t have the foggiest idea of how to shut off the shipments. So we’ve got to find some way to get rid of it as it comes in.”
“And what do you have in mind, pray tell?” Hammond asked.
Fletcher said, glaring at his colleague in a way that conveyed the fact that he would brook no opposition, “I’m going to talk to Asenion.”
Hammond guffawed. “Asenion? You’re crazy!”
“No. He is. But he’s the only person who can help us.”
It was a sad case, the Asenion story, poignant and almost incomprehensible. One of the finest minds atomic physics had ever known, a man to rank with Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi, Meitner. A Harvard degree at twelve, his doctorate from MIT five years later, after which he had poured forth a dazzling flow of technical papers that probed the deepest mysteries of the nuclear binding forces. As the twenty-first century entered its closing decades he had seemed poised to solve once and for all the eternal riddles of the universe. And then, at the age of twenty-eight, without having given the slightest warning, he walked away from the whole thing.
“I have lost interest,” he declared. “Physics is no longer of any importance to me. Why should I concern myself with these issues of the way in which matter is constructed? How tiresome it all is! When one looks at the Parthenon, does one care what the columns are made of, or what sort of scaffolding was needed to put them in place? That the Parthenon exists, and is sublimely beautiful, is all that should interest us. So too with the universe. I see the universe, and it is beautiful and perfect. Why should I pry into the nature of its scaffolding? Why should anyone?”
And with that he resigned his professorship, burned his papers, and retreated to the thirty-third floor of an apartment building on Manhattan’s West Side, where he built an elaborate laboratory-greenhouse in which he intended to conduct experiments in advanced horticulture.
“Bromeliads,” said Asenion. “I will create hybrid bromeliads. Bromeliads will be the essence and center of my life from now on.”
Romelmeyer, who had been Asenion’s mentor at Harvard, attributed his apparent breakdown to overwork, and thought that he would snap back in six or eight months. Jantzen, who had had the rare privilege of being the first to read his astonishing dissertation at MIT, took an equally sympathetic position, arguing that Asenion must have come to some terrifying impasse in his work that had compelled him to retreat dramatically from the brink of madness. “Perhaps he found himself looking right into an abyss of inconsistencies when he thought he was about to find the ultimate answers,” Jantzen suggested. “What else could he do but run? But he won’t run for long. It isn’t in his nature.”
Burkhardt, of Cal Tech, whose own work had been carried out in the sphere that Asenion was later to make his own, agreed with Jantzen’s analysis. “He must have hit something really dark and hairy. But he’ll wake up one morning with the solution in his head, and it’ll be goodbye horticulture for him. He’ll turn out a paper by noon that will revolutionize everything we think we know about nuclear physics, and that’ll be that.”
But Jesse Hammond, who had played tennis with Asenion every morning for the last two years of his career as a physicist, took a less charitable position. “He’s gone nuts,” Hammond said. “He’s flipped out altogether, and he’s never going to get himself together again. “
“You think?” said Lew Fletcher, who had been almost as close to Asenion as Hammond, but who was no tennis player.
Hammond smiled. “No doubt of it. I began noticing a weird look in his eyes starting just about two years back. And then his playing started to turn weird too. He’d serve and not even look where he was serving. He’d double-fault without even caring. And you know what else? He didn’t challenge me on a single out-of-bounds call the whole year. That was the key thing. Used to be, he’d fight me every call. Now he just didn’t seem to care. He just let everything go by. He was completely indifferent. I said to myself, This guy must be flipping out.”
“Or working on some problem that seems more important to him than tennis. “
“Same thing,” said Hammond. “No, Lew, I tell you-he’s gone completely unglued. And nothing’s going to glue him again.”
That conversation had taken place almost a year ago. Nothing had happened in the interim to change anyone’s opinion. The astounding arrival of plutonium-186 in the world had not brought forth any comment from Asenion’s Manhattan penthouse. The sudden solemn discussions of fantastic things like parallel universes by otherwise reputable physicists had apparently not aroused him either. He remained closeted with his bromeliads high above the streets of Manhattan.
Well, maybe he is crazy, Fletcher thought. But his mind can’t have shorted out entirely. And he might just have an idea or two left in him
Asenion said, “Well, you don’t look a whole lot older, do you?”
Fletcher felt himself reddening. “Jesus, Ike, it’s only been eighteen months since we last saw each other!”