“Where can I find these glasses?”
“At the Capital Planetarium. We made more than twenty pairs.”
“I must get my hands on a pair before five.”
Sha picked up the phone. The other side picked up only after a long while. Sha had to expend a lot of energy to convince the person awakened in the middle of the night to go to the planetarium and wait for Wang’s arrival in an hour.
As Wang left, Sha said, “I won’t go with you. What I’ve seen is enough, and I don’t need any more confirmation. But I hope that you will explain the truth to me when you feel the time is right. If this phenomenon should lead to some research result, I won’t forget you.”
Wang opened the car door and said, “The flickering will stop at five in the morning. I’d suggest you not pursue it after this. Believe me, you won’t get anywhere.”
Sha stared at Wang for a long time and then nodded. “I understand. Strange things have been happening to scientists lately….”
“Yes.” Wang ducked into the car. He didn’t want to discuss the subject any further.
“Is it our turn?”
“It’s my turn, at least.” Wang started the engine.
An hour later, Wang arrived at the new planetarium and got out of the car. The bright lights of the city penetrated the translucent walls of the immense glass building and dimly revealed its internal structure. Wang thought that if the architect had intended to express a feeling about the universe, the design was a success: The more transparent something was, the more mysterious it seemed. The universe itself was transparent; as long as you were sufficiently sharp-eyed, you could see as far as you liked. But the farther you looked, the more mysterious it became.
The sleepy-eyed planetarium staffer was waiting by the door for Wang. He handed him a small suitcase and said, “There are five pairs of 3K glasses in here, all fully charged. The left button switches it on. The right dial is for adjusting brightness. I have a dozen more pairs upstairs. You can look as much as you like, but I’m going to take a nap now in the room over there. This Dr. Sha must be mental.” He went into the dim interior of the planetarium.
Wang opened the suitcase on the backseat of his car and took out a pair of 3K glasses. It resembled the display inside the panoramic viewing helmet of the V-suit. He put the glasses on and looked around. The city looked the same as before, only dimmer. Then he remembered that he had to switch them on.
The city turned into many hazy glowing halos. Most were fixed, but a few flickered or moved. He realized that these were sources of radiation in the centimeter range, all now converted to visible light. At the heart of each halo was a radiation source. Because the original wavelengths were so long, it was impossible to see their shapes clearly.
He lifted his head and saw a sky glowing with a faint red light. Just like that, he was seeing the cosmic microwave background.
The red light had come from more than ten billion years ago. It was the remnants of the big bang, the still-warm embers of Creation. He could not see any stars. Normally, since visible light would be compressed to invisible by the glasses, each star should appear as a black dot. But the diffraction of centimeter-wave radiation overwhelmed all other shapes and details.
Once his eyes had grown used to the sight, Wang could see that the faint red background was indeed pulsing. The entire sky flickered, as if the universe was but a quivering lamp in the wind.
Standing under the flashing dome of the night sky, Wang suddenly felt the universe shrink until it was so small that only he was imprisoned in it. The universe was a cramped heart, and the red light that suffused everything was the translucent blood that filled the organ. Suspended in the blood, he saw that the flickering of the red light was not periodic—the pulsing was irregular. He felt a strange, perverse, immense presence that could never be understood by human intellect.
Wang took off the 3K glasses and sat down weakly on the ground, leaning against the wheel of his car. The city at night gradually recovered the reality of visible light. But his eyes roamed, trying to capture other sights. By the entrance of the zoo across the street, there was a row of neon lights. One of the lights was about to burn out and flickered irregularly. Nearby, a small tree’s leaves trembled in the night breeze, twinkling without pattern as they reflected streetlight. In the distance, the red star atop the Beijing Exhibition Center’s Russian-style spire reflected the light from the cars passing below, also twinkling randomly….
Wang tried to interpret the flickers as Morse code. He even felt that the wrinkles in the flags flapping next to him and the ripples in the puddle on the side of the road might be sending him messages. He struggled to understand all the messages, and felt the passing of the countdown, second by second.
He didn’t know how long he stayed there. The planetarium staffer finally emerged and asked him whether he was done. But when he saw Wang’s face, sleep disappeared from the staffer’s eyes and was replaced by fear. He packed up the 3K glasses, stared at Wang for a few seconds, and quickly left with the suitcase.
Wang took out his mobile and dialed Shen Yufei’s number. She picked up right away. Perhaps she was also suffering from insomnia.
“What happens at the end of the countdown?” Wang asked.
“I don’t know.” She hung up.
What can it be? Maybe my own death, like Yang Dong’s.
Or maybe it will be a disaster like the great tsunami that swept through the Indian Ocean more than a decade ago. No one will connect it to my nanotech research. Could it be that every previous great disaster, including the two World Wars, was also the result of reaching the end of ghostly countdowns? Could it be that every time there was someone like me, who no one thought of, who bore the ultimate responsibility?
Or maybe it signals the end of the whole world. In this perverse world, that would be a relief.
One thing was certain. No matter what was at the end of the countdown, in the remaining one thousand or so hours, the possibilities would torture him cruelly, like demons, until he suffered a complete mental breakdown.
Wang ducked back into the car and left the planetarium. Just before dawn, the roads were relatively empty. But he didn’t dare to drive too fast, feeling that the faster the car moved, the faster the countdown would go. When a glimmer of light appeared in the eastern sky, he parked and walked around aimlessly. His mind was empty of thoughts: Only the countdown pulsed against the dim red background of cosmic radiation. He seemed to have turned into nothing but a simple timer, a bell that tolled for he knew not whom.
The sky brightened. He was tired, so he sat down on a bench.
When he lifted his head to see where his subconscious had brought him, he shivered.
He sat in front of St. Joseph’s Church at Wangfujing. In the pale white light of dawn, the church’s Romanesque vaults appeared as three giant fingers pointing out something in space for him.
As Wang got up to leave, he was held back by a snippet of hymnal music. It wasn’t Sunday, so it was likely a choir rehearsal. The song was “Come, Gracious Spirit, Heavenly Dove.” As he listened to the solemn, sacred music, Wang Miao once again felt that the universe had shrunk until it was the size of an empty church. The domed ceiling was hidden by the flashing red light of the background radiation, and he was an ant crawling through the cracks in the floor. He felt a giant, invisible hand caressing his trembling heart, and he was once again a helpless babe. Something deep in his mind that had once held him up softened like wax and collapsed. He covered his eyes and began to cry.