Split Second (12 page)

19

Dan Walsh hugged Jenna briefly and
then slid into the backseat of Blake’s car, parked in a nearby lot. Jenna had
been waiting anxiously for the two to finish their trek through the catacombs
of UCLA.

Finally—finally!—they would be
getting a glimpse of the truth. Jenna hoped this would be a giant leap forward
in their ability to make whoever was responsible for Nathan’s death pay for his
crimes.

“Sorry to pull you into this, Dan,”
said Jenna. “But we didn’t really have much choice. Thank you so much for
responding to my message.”

“Of course,” said Walsh. “But you
should know, Nathan wasn’t murdered last night. What makes you think he was?”

A tear came to Jenna’s eye, which
she wiped away with the back of her hand. “I saw him die, Dan,” she said
softly. “I was right next to him. He was shot point-blank in the head. With no
possibility of mistake.”

Walsh looked both confused and
horrified. “I am so sorry,” he whispered.

He paused for several seconds and
then shook his head. “I can’t even begin to digest a loss this enormous,” he
said. “Nathan was a good friend and colleague. And he was destined for
greatness, making this tragedy all the worse. I still can’t believe it,” he
muttered, looking as though he had just taken a fist to the gut.

Jenna nodded and blinked back
tears.

She had to stop this! she told
herself. She had to compartmentalize this loss and not get maudlin every time
it was driven home to her. “Thanks, Dan. But we need to postpone our mourning,”
she said, as much to convince herself of this as to convince him. “When this is
over, we’ll have a proper funeral and proper eulogies. But we can’t afford to dwell
on this right now.”

Before Walsh could respond, Blake broke
in. “Sorry, Dan, but I have to ask: what made you so sure Nathan
wasn’t
dead?”

“I’ve exchanged two e-mails with
him today. The last one just a few hours ago.”

Jenna shook her head in disgust. “It
was a decoy,” she explained. “Someone pretending to be Nathan.”

“Well, whoever it was, he was very
convincing. Knew things I thought only Nathan knew.”

“The men behind this are
insidious,” said Jenna in disgust.

“But extremely competent,” added Blake.

“Whoever responded to my message knew
a lot of the same math Nathan did,” said Walsh. “I had been stuck on a problem
with tensorial derivatives, which no one is better at solving than Nathan. I
laid out the problem in my e-mail and the reply got me un-stuck. There aren’t
all that many people running around who could have helped me.”

Jenna sighed. “They wouldn’t be
after Nathan’s work if they didn’t understand its implications. Which means
they must have some top physicists working with them. One of these impersonated
Nathan.”

“Speaking of Nathan’s work,” said Blake,
“I can’t tell you how much I need to know what’s in that e-mail. To say I’ve
never been more curious about anything in my life would be an understatement.”

“I could just summarize it for
you,” offered Walsh.

“No,” said Blake. “I’d appreciate
it if you’d read it to us. I want to hear it for the first time from Nathan’s
perspective, word for word.”

Not taking his eyes from the road, Blake
thrust his arm toward the backseat behind him. A tablet computer was in his
hand. “Use this to access the Internet,” he said. “It can’t be traced to us.”

Walsh quickly found the relevant
site in the cloud, entered his user name and password, and retrieved the e-mail
from his archives.

“Here it is,” announced Walsh.
“I’ll read it slowly,” he added, and then, clearing his throat, began:

Dan. How’s life? I hope you
are well. As you’ll be able to see from the time stamp when you get this, I’m
writing at two in the morning.

Why? Because I just
completed work on a discovery that came to me from out of nowhere and crystallized
in less than a week. I just dotted the last i and crossed the last t an hour
ago, and I’ve checked and rechecked this for days now. Despite the late hour
(or early hour, depending on your perspective) I couldn’t contain myself. I’m
dying to tell at least one other person about this, even if you won’t read this
until you awaken. I’m not sure this is how most people spend their Saturday
nights (or Sunday mornings) but this works for me.

So let me begin at the
beginning. Jenna left town for a week to visit her sister (long story), and the
next day I awoke to a eureka moment. Maybe I dreamed about it, or maybe it was
some kind of divine intervention, but I’ve been working around the clock to
develop it ever since.

It’s staggering really.
Although you aren’t expert in all the areas of mathematics I used to complete
it, you’re more expert than I am in two disciplines I used, five-dimensional
manifold topology and hyperbolic knot invariants. I’ve quadruple checked
everything, and I’m certain there are no flaws in the areas of math I’m most
experienced in, but there is a very slight chance I missed something in your areas
of expertise. So I was hoping you could read the final write-up and give it
your blessing before I try to make history. In exchange, I will invite you to
Stockholm when I collect my Nobel Prize. (just kidding, I’m not that
egotistical
—
which is one of the things
that make me so great :)).

But jokes aside, if you
confirm I didn’t make any errors, I’m certain this theory will turn out to be
sound. Profoundly sound. I have the confidence in this that Einstein had in
relativity, even before it was confirmed experimentally, when he famously said
the theory was just too beautiful to be false.

I’m dying to send the paper
to you this second, but I’d rather it not hit cyberspace. I know I’m somewhat
paranoid, but theoretical physicists like us have a license to be a bit
eccentric. And I work hard at not being too normal, for fear of failing to live
up to expectations.

Anyway, I know you have a
night class on Mondays, so I’ll plan to drive up to see you Monday before noon,
and hand-deliver a paper copy of my work. Eyes-only, of course. You can’t
breathe a single word of this to anyone until I publish. I can only imagine
what a shock, what a tidal wave of media coverage, this will cause when I
finally put it out there.

I would drive up later
today, but Jenna is returning home this evening, and I plan to meet her at the
airport with bells on. So I’ll go over the theory one last time, buy some
expensive wine to celebrate my discovery with Jenna, and see you on Monday. If
you’re as enthusiastic as I expect you to be, this visit could well last into
Tuesday.”

“Hold on a moment,” said Blake, interrupting the
recitation. “Nathan obviously didn’t visit you today as planned. I assume he
canceled on you in one of those bogus messages you got. What excuse were you
given?”

“The person posing as Nathan wrote this morning and
said he had found a flaw in his new theory. He said he was going to attempt to
correct it, but he wasn’t very hopeful, and if he did visit it wouldn’t be for
at least a few more weeks.”

Blake nodded and exchanged glances with Jenna. “Nice,”
he said appreciatively. “They found a way to cancel Nathan’s visit, discredit
his work, and put you off for a few weeks, all in one fell swoop. Not only does
this convince you Nathan is alive, but it ensures you don’t try to follow up on
his theory.” Blake shook his head. “I know these guys are ruthless assholes,
but it’s hard not to appreciate their skills.”

“Is this when you wrote back and asked for help with
your work?” asked Jenna.

“Not until a few hours later, but yes. And you’re both
going to find this interesting. As part of the reply, whoever was posing as
Nathan told me Jenna’s computer had been infected with the mother of all
viruses. The virus had invaded her contact list and was periodically sending
out lethal, infected messages to her friends. He told me that I should change
my settings to block any incoming messages from Jenna Morrison’s e-mail address,
until further notice.”

Jenna’s face wrinkled up in confusion. “That doesn’t
make sense,” she said. “If they were monitoring you, they’d
want
us to connect, so you could lead
them to me.”

“Remember,” said Blake, “there are two groups involved
here. Maybe this is an effort by one of them to try to prevent the
other
from finding you.”

“Maybe,” said Jenna.

“Should I continue reading the message?” asked Walsh.

“By all means,” said Blake.

The physicist turned back toward the tablet in his
hands and took up where he had left off:

 
“Part of me wants to wait to spring this on
you in person
,
but there is no way I can contain
myself. If I don’t at least tell someone the punch line, I’m pretty much going
to explode. But even though I’ll ruin some of the surprise, the actual work
contains plenty more. I think you’ll be astonished by how the math all fits
together and by the underlying assumptions and logic. So here it is. The broad
overview, just to whet your appetite.

Drum roll please (wow, that
just gave me an idea for a gag I can do when Jenna gets back).

Are you sitting down?

We’ve both contributed to
the finding that the quintessence field can’t be tamed. Not that we could ever find
a way to even dip a single toe into it, but if we could, we agreed that this
would destroy the Earth, at minimum, and would likely punch a hole in
space-time and create a stable black hole.

Turns out we were wrong
about that. Dark energy can be tapped into, and all of this crazy energy can be
bottled and used after all. But only by using it at right angles to the four
dimensions of space and time. By driving the energy usage through a fifth
dimension.

My calculations have
convinced me that you can tap into the quintessence field, and instead of
releasing these incredible energies thermally and kinetically, you can harness
them safely. But only to accomplish a single thing: send matter back in time.

There, I said it.

To repeat, it should be
fairly straightforward to tap into the dark energy field to send matter,
transdimensionally, back through time
—
without any
explosion or other untoward effects. All of the energy drives the time travel,
with none left over to cause any havoc. It will be absolutely safe. I’m certain
of this.

The first stable platform
for which this occurs is at T minus .00004515 seconds, or 45.15 microseconds. I
am all but positive I will be able to use this theory to, with minimal trouble
really, tap into the dark energy field and send matter back precisely this
amount of time, and this amount of time only: 45.15 microseconds.

Just to be crystal clear and
avoid any possible confusion, I am not saying I can send matter back in time
hundreds or thousands of years
—
but that this matter can
only remain in the past for forty-five microseconds. I am saying I can only send
matter back to forty-five microseconds ago.

One interesting aspect of
this work is that it appears I should be able to go back even farther, at 45.15
microsecond intervals exactly.

Why this interval? I don’t
know, but the math here is beautiful, and this is what the results are. I’m
only 95% certain of this right now, but I think I’ll be able to firm this up
soon and be able to state it with absolute certainty as well.

If this is true, going back
five thousand of these intervals will be just as easy as going back one. But
there is one final catch. After going back a bit over ten thousand of these 45.15
microsecond steps, when you reach about a half-second into the past, you’re
done. No power in the universe can take something back any further.

This falls out of the
equations as a barrier that’s as absolute as the speed of light. I can’t say
why this ultimate limit is what it is any more than I can explain why the speed
of light limit happens to be 186,283 miles per second.

When you see the theory you
will appreciate how revolutionary it really is. It will open up all kinds of theoretical
avenues, and will be a totally new window on reality, like relativity and
quantum physics before it.

I haven’t had a lot of time
to think of practical applications as I’ve been consumed with perfecting the
theory, but quantum physics didn’t have any practical applications either—until
it became the heart and soul of all modern computers and electronic technology.

If this allowed one to send
a stock tip or a lottery number back even an hour, the practical implications
would be obvious. But a half-second doesn’t give you enough time to act on any
information.

At the moment, all I’m certain of is the feasibility—the fairly
straightforward feasibility—of sending something back exactly 45.15
microseconds. I’d say the blink of an eye, but I looked it up, and it turns out
that an eye blink takes almost eight thousand times longer. So this will be
challenging to work with. Even designing experiments will be challenging, but
I’m assuming I’ll figure it out. And this will provide me with a tool that will
enable me to answer so many questions.