Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 25: High Splits

The trip to Kurtowski's lab was without incident. With the coaxial cables and the microwave towers knocked out, the machines on the Eastside were no longer possessed by a malignant intelligence . . . they were simply machines.

The loaches had left most of the apparatus in the laboratory untouched, and Oily Allie was like a kid in a toy store. She soon settled down to fool with the Professor's matter degenerator, a device which made small black holes. You threw whatever was handy into the hopper, switched on the power and WHAM . . . gravitational collapse would hit whatever you'd thrown in. All the props which hold matter "up" would be knocked out, leaving the mutual gravitational attraction of the mass particles as the only operative force.

The end-result of gravitational collapse is a singular point in the spacetime manifold, inevitably veiled by a dark sphere—our friend the black hole. Although the notion of star-sized black holes in outer space was commonplace, it had only been a few years since Kurtowski's experiments had led to the laboratory creation of small and relatively stable black holes, such as those which powered Oily Allie's sky-suckers.

Oily Allie was delighted to have the opportunity to monkey with the machine which produced these small black holes. She was trying to figure out how to turn it into a portable weapon . . . enclosing your antagonists inside a one-way event horizon would certainly be an efficacious way of getting them off your back.

Mick had settled down to another session with the music of the spheres. He'd cranked the galactic signal analyzer to full, and crouched near the machine with the earphones on, occasionally exclaiming when he recognized something he'd seen from the scale-ship.

Vernor and the Professor sat on a battered couch near where the VFG had been before the loaches took it to the EM building. "Vernor," Kurtowski was saying, "I might as well tell you, I have no idea what the VFG really does."

"It makes things shrink," Vernor answered.

"Ja, but what is shrinking? There are many ways of looking at it. A viewpoint which does not seem unreasonable to me is that the shrinking is accomplished by moving in a direction perpendicular to every direction we can point to in our three-dimensional space. You get smaller because you are further away."

Vernor looked puzzled and the Professor tried again. "If you are looking through a window, and you see a man getting much smaller, what do you conclude?"

"That he's walking away from the window."

"Right. My idea is that our three dimensional space is a window on four-dimensional space. When the VFG makes something shrink in our 'window,' it is doing this by moving it away in the direction of a fourth dimension."

There was a peevish moan from Oily Allie, followed by a high singing note that faded into silence. "Shit," said Allie quietly.

The Professor chuckled appreciatively. "What happened?" asked Vernor.

"I dropped one through the floor," Allie responded.

"Dropped what?" Vernor said, going over to see. It looked as if someone had drilled a hole in the floor next to Allie's boot.

"I made this little tiny black hole and tried to move it with the magnetic clamp, but it slipped," she said, running her hand through her tangled hair. There seemed to be nothing which would prevent the black hole from eating its way straight through the Earth and back again. Anything which it touched would disappear into the singularity at the center.

"Is this going to screw things really bad?" Allie called to Professor Kurtowski.

"No, no," said the Professor. "It's got a built-in instability. It'll pop before it eats more than a few kilotons. Try dropping it on your foot next time."

The crisis over, Vernor returned to the couch and Allie began playing again, but this time with an exaggerated caution.

"About what you were just saying," Vernor resumed. "The VFG made me shrink by moving me in a direction perpendicular to our spacetime? That would fit in with Circular Scale if that new direction was bent into a huge circle."

The Professor was quiet for a few minutes, then finally answered, "Look, Vernor, what makes you so sure that you returned to the same Earth which you left from?"

"There's only one Earth, Professor, and this is it," replied Vernor.

"That's only what you think. Remember how the electron cloud looked to you?"

Mick had finished listening to the space music, and had ambled over to sit on a chair near them. "I remember that," he interjected. "It looked like you thought it looked."

"That's right," the Professor responded. "There is, at certain levels, no objective external reality. There is only a probability function which interacts with your brain-states to produce illusions."

"But wait," Vernor protested. "The one thing that I see is what the real thing is. For me anyway." He didn't like this line of thought.

"But imagine that someone was observing you, Vernor. Perhaps you would have the appearance of existing in many simultaneous states." The Professor peered at Vernor comically. "Remember that the world you find yourself in now was found at a level below the atomic level."

"Remember all those different hyperspheres?" Mick put in. "He's saying that each one of them was an alternate universe!"

The Professor nodded. "Floating in Hilbert space. And...since they were shiny, there was an image of you in each of them."

"Hold on," Vernor interrupted. "Are you saying I came back in many different universes at once? Why do I just see one?"

"You just think this is the only one," the Professor explained. "But you think that in all the others, too."

Vernor felt confused. "Then what are you guys doing here? I mean if this isn't the same Earth that I left how did you get here?"

"Our brain states, my dear Vernor, are coupled," the Professor responded, waving his hand back and forth between their three heads. "As was borne in upon me when you dropped into my lap back in the warehouse. I was alone in there for two weeks, you know."

"Getting uncoupled," Mick suggested.

The Professor nodded. "I had always believed in principle that I exist in many parallel worlds, but by the end of those two weeks, I . . . " He broke off with a smile, then turned to Vernor. "This is your dream, Vernor, are you ready to wake up?"

A chasm seemed to open up around Vernor. For an instant he forgot the names of the things around him. He lost the internal monologue by which external reality is kept unique. There was no feeling of panic, rather an immense feeling of freedom.

An object moved towards him, and he SPLIT took-it/didn't-take-it, he SPLIT blinked/stared, and he SPLIT talked/kept-silent. Which?

In some world he was saying, "Do you feel this way all the time?" to a Professor Kurtowski who responded with . . . what? Every possible answer.

"How do you ever get anything done?" Vernor continued, and received another infinite response, perfectly tailored to the endless nuances that his question took on.

"It takes care of itself . . . " Mick Turner was saying when SNAP, Vernor was back to single vision. Mick and the Professor were on the couch and he was sitting on a chair near them, holding a reefer. Vernor opened his mouth, then closed it.

"So you see," the Professor continued. "It is not at all certain that your trip consisted of going around a circle of scale. I am inclined to think, rather, that what you did was jump out of one window and into another."

"And that would explain why I didn't end up a billion years in the future?" Vernor asked slowly.

"You may have jumped out the window, but you kept your glasses on," Mick suggested with mock sincerity.

"But, dammit, I saw how I went around the Circular Scale," Vernor repeated. "That's the way the universe should be made, anyhow. No matter, just form. No big and no small . . . every level is right in the middle. A galaxy, a person, and an atom are equally important. A billion years fit inside a nanosecond."

"It's a nice universe, Vernor," the Professor said kindly. "It's just not the only one. But you're right. For you, for all of our brain-states coupled together here, scale is circular. Fine. As above, so below."

There was a loud crash and Oily Allie hollered, "Duck!" Vernor turned to see a deeply black ball flying across the room towards his chest. He hit the floor and the object sailed over him, passing through the wall on the other side of the room without slowing down.

"Allie," the Professor said. "You're a walking, talking argument for the revival of the public safety movement."

"That's how we can kill off Phizwhiz," Allie was saying as she walked over. "Just lob black holes through him."

Vernor felt the justifiable annoyance of one who has narrowly escaped being killed. "Phizwhiz consists of about three-hundred linked installations all over the world, you fucking moron."

Oily Allie was unperturbed. "So, we just stand here and throw the black holes in the right direction about three-hundred times."

"And people who happen to be in the way?" Vernor demanded. "It's just too bad for them?"

"Eventually, we're all losers," said Mick with a shrug.

"It's a moot point, Allie," opined the Professor. "It wouldn't be practical to aim with sufficient accuracy. In any case, I've thought of a better way to handle Phizwhiz." He stared at Vernor.

"Don't tell me, let me guess," Vernor said heatedly. "I'm supposed to go back to the EM building and make friends with him even though he wants to kill everyone he sees."

"You don't have to go all the way in there," Mick said soothingly. "There's a terminal in Dreamtown. You and Phizwhiz could probably really get it on talking about your trip."

"But he doesn't talk anymore," Vernor protested.

"So plug in," the Professor said simply. Plug in. Vernor fingered the socket at the base of his skull.

"Sure," he said acidly, "plug my brain into a machine whose express purpose is to kill off the human race. That's really a great idea, Professor K."

But Oily Allie was taken by the proposal. "Shit, Vern, we can put in an impedance block to step down the power surge in case he tries to fry you. You'll be as safe as any of us was in the old days. A heavy guy like you should be able to handle anything, as long as we keep the voltage down."

They were all looking at him. Vernor took a large hit off the reefer Mick handed him. "Why not sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?" he murmured, lifting a line from Dadaism. Out loud he said, "Ask me again in the morning."

 

Back | Next
Framed