David nodded. “I suppose so. Most science is just grunt work. Repetitive slog; endless testing and checking. And because false hypotheses have to be pruned away, much of the work is actually more destructive than constructive. But, occasionally — only a few times, probably, in the luckiest life — there is a moment of transcendence.”
“Transcendence?”
“Not everybody will put it like that. But it’s how it feels to me.”
“And it doesn’t matter that there might be nobody to read your papers in five hundred years’ time?”
“I’d rather that wasn’t true. Perhaps it won’t be. But the revelation itself is the thing, Bobby. It always was.”
On the ’Screen behind him there was a starburst of pixels, and a low bell-like tone sounded.
David sighed. “But not today, it seems.”
Bobby peered over his brother’s shoulder at the ’Screen, across which numbers were scrolling. “Another instability? It’s like the early days of the wormholes.”
David tapped at a keyboard, setting up another trial. “Well, we are being a little more ambitious. Our WormCams can already reach every part of the Earth, crossing distances of a few thousand kilometres. What I’m attempting now is to extract and stabilize wormholes which span significant intervals in Minkowski spacetime, in fact, tens of light-minutes.”
Bobby held up his hands. “You already lost me. A light-minute is the distance light travels in a minute… right?”
“Yes. For example, the planet Saturn is around a billion and a half kilometres away. And that is about eighty light-minutes.”
“And we want to see Saturn.”
“Of course we do. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a WormCam that could explore deep space? No more ailing probes, no more missions lasting years… But the difficulty is that wormholes spanning such large intervals are extremely rare in the quantum foam’s probabilistic froth. And stabilizing them presents challenges an order of magnitude more difficult than before. But it’s not impossible.”
“Why ‘intervals,’ not distances?”
“Physicist jargon. Sorry. An interval is like a distance, but in spacetime. Which is space plus time. It’s really just Pythagoras’ theorem.” He took a yellow legal notepad and began to scribble. “Suppose you go downtown and walk a few blocks east, a few blocks north. Then you can figure the distance you travelled like this.” He held up the pad:
(distance)2 = (east)2 + (north)2
“You walked around a right-angled triangle. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of -”
“I know that much.”
“But we physicists think about space and time as a single entity, with time as a fourth coordinate, in addition to the three of space.” He wrote on his pad once more:
(interval)2 = (time separation)2 — (space separation)2
“This is called the metric for a Minkowski spacetime. And -”
“How can you talk about a separation in time in the same breath as a separation in space?. You measure time in minutes, but space in kilometres.”
David nodded approvingly. “Good question. You have to use units in which time and space are made equivalent.” He studied Bobby, evidently searching for understanding. “Let’s just say that if you measure time in minutes, and space in light-minutes, it works out fine.”
“But there’s something else fishy here. Why is this a minus sign rather than a plus?”
David rubbed his fleshy nose. “A map of spacetime doesn’t work quite like a map of downtown Seattle. The metric is designed so that the path of a photon — a particle travelling at the speed of light — is a null interval. The interval is zero, because the space and time terms cancel out.”
“This is relativity. Something to do with time dilation, and rulers contracting, and -”
“Yes.” David patted Bobby’s shoulder. “Exactly that. This metric is invariant under the Lorentz transformation… Never mind. The point is, Bobby, this is the kind of equation I have to use when I work in a relativistic universe, and certainly if I’m trying to build a wormhole that reaches out to Saturn and beyond.”
Bobby mused over the simple, handwritten equation.
With his own emotional whirlwind still churning around him, he felt a cold logic coursing through him, numbers and equations and images evolving, as if he was suffering from some kind of intellectual synaesthesia. He said slowly, “David, you’re telling me that distances in space and time are somehow equivalent. Right? Your wormholes span intervals of spacetime rather than simply distances. And that means that if you do succeed in stabilizing a wormhole big enough to reach Saturn, across eighty light-minutes -”
“Yes?”
“Then it could reach across eighty minutes. I mean, across time.” He stared at David. “Am I being really dumb?”
David sat in silence for long seconds.
“Good God,” he said slowly. “I didn’t even consider the possibility, I’ve been configuring the wormhole to span a spacelike interval, without even thinking about it.” Feverishly, he began to tap at his SoftScreen. “I can reconfigure it from right here. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of metres, then the rest of the wormhole span is forced to become timelike…”
“What would that mean? David?”
A buzzer rang, painfully loudly, and the Search Engine spoke. “Hiram would like to see you, Bobby.”
Bobby glanced at David, flooded with sudden, absurd fear.
David nodded curtly, already absorbed in the new direction of his work. “I’ll call you later, Bobby. This could be significant. Very significant.”
There was no reason to stay. Bobby walked away into the darkness of the Wormworks.
Hiram paced around his downtown office, visibly angry, fists clenched. Kate was sitting at Hiram’s big conference table, looking small, cowed.
Bobby hesitated at the door, for a few breaths physically unable to force himself into the room, so strong were the emotions churning here. But Kate was looking at him — forcing a smile, in fact.
He walked into the room. He reached the security of a seat, on the opposite side of the table from Kate. Bobby quailed, unable to speak. Hiram glared at him. “You let me down, you little shit.”
Kate snapped, “For Christ’s sake, Hiram.”
“You keep out of this.” Hiram thumped the tabletop, and a SoftScreen in the plastic surface lit up before Bobby. It started to run fragments of a news story: images of Bobby, a younger Hiram, a girl-pretty, timid-looking, dressed in colourless, drab, outdated fashions and a picture of the same woman two decades later, intelligent, tired, handsome. The Earth News Online logo was imprinted on each image.
“They found her, Bobby,” Hiram said. “Thanks to you. Because you couldn’t keep your bloody mouth shut, could you?”
“Found who?”
“Your mother.”
Kate was working the SoftScreen before her, scrolling quickly through the information, “Heather Mays. Is that her name? She married again. She has a daughter, you have a half-sister, Bobby.”
Hiram’s voice was a snarl. “Keep out of this, you, manipulative bitch. Without you none of this would have happened.”
Bobby, striving for control, said, “None of what?”
“Your implant would have stayed doing what it was doing. Keeping you steady and happy. Christ, I wish somebody had put a thing like that in my head when I was your age. Would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble. And you wouldn’t have shot off your mouth in front of Dan Schirra.”