Part 32 (1/2)
”Yes, in about 10^34 years,” Patil said. ”But the knowledge of matter's mortality will spread as swiftly as light, on the wind of our transmitter.”
”You are an experimentalist, Dr. Clay, and thus--if you will forgive my putting it so--addicted to cutting the salamander.” Patil made a steeple of his fingers, sending spindly shadows rippling across his face. ”The world we study is conditioned by our perceptions of it. The implied order is partially from our own design.”
”Sure, quantum measurement, uncertainty principle, all that.” Clay bad sat through all the usual lectures about this stuff and didn't feel like doing so again. Not in a dusty shed with his stomach growling from hunger. He sipped at his cup of weak Darjeeling and yawned.
”Difficulties of measurement reflect underlying problems,” Patil said.
”Even the Westerner Plato saw that we perceive only imperfect modes of the true, deeper world.”
”What deeper world?” Clay sighed despite himself. ”We do not know. We cannot know.”
”Look, we make our measurements, we report. Period.” Amused, Singh said, ”And that is where matters end?”
Patil said, ”Consensual reality, that is your 'real' world, Professor Clay. But our news may cause that bland, unthinking consensus to falter.”
Clay shrugged. This sounded like late-night college bulls.h.i.+t sessions among boozed up science nerds. Patty-cake pantheism, quantum razzle-dazzle, garbage philosophy. It was one thing to be open-minded and another to let your brains fall out. Was everybody on this wrecked continent a boogabooga type? He had to get out.
”Look, I don't see what difference--”
”Until the curtain of seeming surety is swept away,” Singh put in.
”Surety?”
”This world--this universe--has labored long under the illusion of its own permanence.” Singh spread his hands, animated in the flickering yellow glow. ”We might die, yes, the sun might even perish--but the universe went on. Now we prove otherwise. There cannot help but be profound reactions.”
He thought he saw what they were driving at. ”A n.o.bel Prize, even.”
To his surprise, both men laughed merrily. ”Oh no,” Patil said, arching his eyebrows. ”No such trifles are expected!
The boxy meeting room beside the data bay was packed. From it came a subdued mutter, a fretwork of talk laced with antic.i.p.ation.
Outside, someone had placed a small chalky statue of a grinning elephant. Clay hesitated, stroked it. Despite the heat of the mine, the elephant was cool.
”The workers just brought it down,” Mrs. Buli explained with a smile. ”Our Hindu G.o.d of auspicious beginnings.”
”Or endings,” Patil said behind her. ”Equally.”
Clay nodded and walked into the trapped, moist heat of the room. Everyone was jammed in, graduate students and laborers alike, their dhotis already showing sweaty crescents. Clay saw the three students the devotees had beaten and exchanged respectful bows with them.
Perceiving some need for ceremony, he opened with lengthy praise for the endless hours they had labored, exclaiming over how startled the world would be to learn of such a facility. Then he plunged into consideration of each candidate event, his checks and counter-checks, vertex corrections, digital array flaws, mean free paths, ionization rates, the artful programming that deflected the myriad possible sources of error. He could feel tension rising in the room as be cast the events on the inch-thick wall screen, calling them forth from the files in his cubes. Some he threw into 3-D, to show the full path through the cage of iron that had captured the death rattle of infinity.
And at the end, all cases reviewed, he said quietly, ”You have found it. The proton lifetime is very nearly 10^34 years.”
The room burst into applause, wide grins and wild shouts as everyone pressed forward to shake his hand.
Singh handled the message to the NSF. Clay also constructed a terse though detailed summary and sent it to the International Astronomical Union for release to the worldwide system of observatories and universities.
Clay knew this would give a vital a.s.sist to his career. With the Kolar team staying here, he would be their only spokesman. And this was very big, media-mesmerizing news indeed.
The result was important to physicists and astronomers alike, for the destiny of all their searches ultimately would be sealed by the faint failures of particles no eye would ever see. In 10^34 years, far in the depths of s.p.a.ce, the great celestial cities, the galaxies, would be ebbing. The last red stars would flicker, belch, and gutter out. Perhaps life would have clung to them and found a way to persist against the growing cold. Cluttered with the memorabilia of the ages, the islands of mute matter would turn at last to their final conqueror--not entropy's still hand, but this silent sputter of protons.
Clay thought of the headlines: UNIVERSE TO END. What would that do to harried commuters on their way to work?
He watched Singh send the stuttering messages via the big satellite dish, the corrugated tin roof of the shed pulled aside, allowing him to watch burnt gold twilight seep across the sky. Clay felt no elation, as blank as a drained capacitor. He had gone into physics because of the sense it gave of grasping deep mysteries. He could look at bridges and trace the vectored stability that ruled them. When his daughter asked why the sky was blue, he actually knew, and could sketch out a simple answer. It had never occurred to him to fear flying, because he knew the Bernoulli equation for the pressure that held up the plane.
But this result...
Even the celebratory party that evening left him unmoved. Graduate students turned out in their best khaki. Sitar music swarmed through the scented air, ragas thumping and weaving. He found his body swaying to the refractions of tone and scale.
”It is a pity you cannot learn more of our country,” Mrs. Buli remarked, watching him closely.
”Right now I'm mostly interested in sleep.”
”Sleep is not always kind.” She seemed wry and distant in the night's smudged humidity. ”One of our ancient G.o.ds, Brahma, is said to sleep and we are what he dreams.”
”In that case, for you folks maybe he's been having a nightmare lately.”
”Ah yes, our troubles. But do not let them mislead you about India. They pa.s.s.”
”I'm sure they will,” Clay replied, dutifully diplomatic.
”You were surprised, were you not, at the outcome?” she said piercingly. ”Uh, well, I had to be skeptical.”
”Yes, for a scientist certainty is built on deep layers of doubt.”
”Like my daddy said, in the retail business deal with everybody, but count your change.”
She laughed. ”We have given you a bargain, perhaps!”
He was acutely aware that his initial doubts must have been obvious. And what unsettled him now was not just the hard-won success here, but their strange att.i.tude toward it.
The graduate students came then and tried to teach him a dance. He did a pa.s.sable job and a student named Venkatraman slipped him a gla.s.s of beer, forbidden vice. It struck Clay as comic that the Indian government spent much energy to suppress alcohol but did little about the population explosion. The students all laughed when he made a complicated joke about booze, but he could not be sure whether they meant it. The music seemed quicken, his heart thumping to keep up with it. They addressed him as Clay, a term of respect, and asked his opinion of what they might do next with the experiment. He shrugged, thinking 'Nother job, sahib? and suggested using it as a detector for neutrinos from supernovas. That had paid off when the earlier generation of neutrino detectors picked up the 1987 supernova.
The atom bomb, the 1987 event, now this--particle physics, he realized uncomfortably, was steeped in death. The sitar slid and rang, and Mrs. Buli made arch jokes to go with the spicy salad. Still, he turned in early.
To be awakened by a soft breeze. A brus.h.i.+ng presence, sliding cloth... He sensed her sari as a luminous fog. Moonlight streaming through a lopsided window cast s.h.i.+mmering auras through the cloth as she loomed above him. Reached for him. Lightly flung away his sticky bedclothes.
A soft hand covered his mouth, bringing a heady savor of ripe earth. His senses ran out of him and into the surrounding dark, coiling in air as he took her weight. She was surprisingly light, though thick-waisted, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like teacups compared with the full curves of her hips. His hands slid and pressed, finding a delightful slithering moisture all over her, a sheen of vibrancy. Her sari evaporated. The high planes of her face caught vagrant blades of moonlight, and he saw a curious tentative, expectant expression there as she wrapped him in soft pressures. Her mouth did not so much kiss his as enclose it, formulating an argument of sweet rivulets that trickled into his porous self. She slipped into place atop him, a slick clasp that melted him up into her, a perfect fit, slick with dark insistence. He closed his eyes, but the glow diffused through his eyelids, and he could see her hair fanning through the air like motion underwater, her luxuriant weight bucking, trembling as her nails scratched his shoulders, musk rising smoky from them both. A silky muscle milked him at each heart-thump. Her velvet ma.s.s...o...b..ted above their fulcrum, bearing down with feathery demands, and he remembered bra.s.s icons, gaudy Indian posters, and felt above him Kali strumming in fevered darkness. She locked legs around him, squeezing him up into her surprisingly hard muscles, grinding, drawing forth, pus.h.i.+ng back. She cried out with great heaves and lungfuls of the thickening air, mouth going slack beneath hooded eyes, and he shot sharply up into her, a convulsion that poured out all the knotted aches in him, delivering them into the tumbled steamy earth-- -and next, with no memories between, he was stumbling with her down a gully... beneath slanting silvery moonlight. ”What--what's--”
”Quiet!” She shushed him like a schoolmadra.
He recognized the rolling countryside near the mine. Vague forms flitted in the distance. Wracked cries cut the night.
”The devotees,” Mrs. Buli whispered as they stumbled on. ”They have a.s.saulted the mine entrance.”
”How'd we--”
”You were difficult to rouse,” she said with a sidelong glance.
Was she trying to be amusing? The sudden change from mysterious supercharged sensuality back to this clipped, formal professionalism disoriented him.