Split Second (8 page)

12

“Your friend seems like a great guy,”
said Jenna when they were on the highway once again, now heading directly to
Palomar Mountain.

“Thanks. And sorry that he’s
trying to fix us up. He’s annoyed with me for not dating more. He thinks it’s
unhealthy.” He smiled sheepishly. “Just might be, at that,” he admitted. “But
for the moment, I want to put all of my energy into building a thriving agency.”

“So why did you leave the
military?” asked Jenna. “And don’t answer if you’d rather not. It
is
a very personal question.”

Blake answered, but not with the
vitriol he felt. He just said the powers that be had trouble making up their
minds, the terrorists were even more despicable than civilians could
comprehend, which most would be surprised was possible, and that he had lost
his two closest friends. But he also took a few minutes to describe some of his
experiences, in bloodless, generic terms, and skills he had developed, so she
would know more about his capabilities.

After ten minutes he insisted he
had said enough about himself, and it was time to learn more about the case.

Jenna briefly provided her own
background, something she hadn’t done until this point.

“It’s still hard to imagine
you’re just twenty-six,” he said when she had finished. “You seem too savvy for
a twenty-six-year-old.”

“I get that a lot,” she said
with a sigh. “Not the savvy part, but the disbelief at how young I am.”

“Well it can’t be your
appearance, because you don’t
look
any older.”

“Thanks,” she said. “So that’s
about it. I spend most of my days on the UCSD campus. I take grad courses, read
the genetics literature, and conduct experiments. Oh yeah,” she said, “I’m also
a teaching assistant for a freshman biology course.”

“Sounds pretty demanding,
actually,” said Blake.

They drove in silence for
several more seconds. “I know your wound is still pretty raw,” he said gently,
“but it’s critical that we spend some time talking about Nathan. Are you ready
for that?”

“Go ahead,” said Jenna,
impressed with Blake’s sensitivity, which made her like him even more.

“Did Nathan teach also?”

“Only one course each year,” she
said. “He had plenty of grants, and became a full professor two years ago, at
the age of twenty-seven. When most physicists are just getting their PhDs.”

“What was he like?”

“Wonderful,” she said,
determined to discuss this in an emotionally detached state. She had leaked too
many tears already. “Generous and funny. Thoughtful, but absentminded. Might
order an amazing personalized cake for your birthday and Mylar balloons, and then
totally forget to pick them up. And he was brilliant, of course.”

“You are too, aren’t you? I know
you have to be pretty bright to be getting a PhD in genetics at UCSD. But I
have the feeling you’re even brighter than most in this program.”

Jenna sighed. “Well, at the risk
of seeming immodest, that is probably true. But I’m special-needs compared to
Nathan. His mind was in another realm. I’ve always loved bright people. But at the
same time, I can’t stand intellectual snobs. You know, the type of people who
look down their noses at anything mainstream, because they’re way too smart for
that. The type who have to say everything as pretentiously as possible, using the
most obscure vocabulary every chance they get.”

Blake nodded but kept his eyes
on the road.

“Don’t get me wrong,” continued
Jenna, “I have nothing against people with good working vocabularies. I’d like
to think I have one. And sometimes a less common word needs to be used to
convey a nuance, or achieve a necessary level of precision. But if something
can be said simply, it should be. Using big words isn’t impressive. Getting
points across simply, succinctly, but with great clarity
is
.”

She paused and the flicker of a
smile played across her face. “It’s like that famous quote, ‘If I would have had
more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter.’”

“Never heard that one before,”
said Blake. “But I like it. And I know the type. I’ve always believed that
someone truly brilliant wouldn’t feel the need to show off.” He grinned. “You
know, would simply use the word
use,
rather
than utilize the word
utilize
.”

Jenna laughed. “
Exactly
. That’s my exact point. The
truly brilliant can be subtle about it. Nathan was the
opposite
of an intellectual snob. He never put on intellectual
airs. He was down-to-earth in every way, and so was his language, although he
could dazzle when speaking formally or when he required the highest levels of precision.
He had nothing to prove. So if you met him at a party and knew nothing about
his background, you’d think he was just a regular guy. But before too long
you’d begin to see it. The wit. The depth of thinking. The speed of
assimilating a new situation. The way he could choose words to make the mundane
seem magical.”

She stopped as the ache inside
became nearly unbearable.

They sat in silence for several
minutes, and Blake knew enough to let her regroup. He continued on toward
Palomar, scanning the road ahead for cops since he was heavy on the gas pedal
by nature.

“Go ahead, Aaron,” said Jenna
finally. “I’m good now.”

Blake waited a few more seconds
and then said, “Okay, Nathan’s discovery is at the crux of what’s happening. I
know you have no idea what it is. But it might be helpful if you told me what
problems he was working on.”

“As far as I
could tell, he was working on everything and nothing. His job was basically to imagine
the universe, imagine physics and mathematics that no one had ever imagined
before. He soaked up all fields of math and physics like a sponge. And he enjoyed
creating math that wasn’t tethered to the real world. Really crazy stuff. I
think they call it abstract math. What he created was usually beyond me, even
conceptually.”

She reached up and absently
touched the smooth steel hoop hanging from her left earlobe once again, still
not used to wearing this kind of earring. “Lately, he dabbled a lot in dark
matter and dark energy theory. If I were a betting woman, I’d guess the
discovery had something to do with this.”

“And you know what these fields
are all about?”

“More or less.”

Jenna allowed herself a brief
smile. “Mostly less,” she admitted. “I did read several books on cosmology and
physics for the lay person, so Nathan could at least discuss his work with me.
At least in generalities. And no one could make complicated concepts
understandable the way he could.”

 
“Great. I’m ready to be educated.”

“I really don’t know all that
much.”

 
“Not much is a lot more than I know at this
point.”

Jenna smiled. She gathered her
thoughts and tried to recall how Nathan had first explained this subject matter
to her. “Here’s the gist: up until the 1970s and ‘80s, physicists thought they had
a pretty good handle on matter and energy, and knew exactly how to detect these
things. For the most part, matter was something visible, something we could
see. Even if a hunk of matter was in a dark cave, so we couldn’t see it with
our eyes, or if certain matter didn’t radiate in the visible spectrum at all, we
could still detect it with other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We could
view it with UV light, or bounce radar or radio waves off of it. We could heat
it up with microwaves.”

“Are you saying this isn’t the
case with dark matter?”

“That’s right. The word
dark
is a misnomer, since it implies
that lack of light is the problem, that if you could just shine a flashlight on
dark matter you could see it. But this stuff can’t be detected by our current
science. Period. Not by our eyes or any of our instruments. When Harry Potter
was under his invisibility cloak, you could still feel him if you ran into him.
Not so with dark matter. Like a ghost, it goes right through regular matter. Scientists
have set up dark matter detectors deep underground, to minimize interference,
but after years there is no definitive proof that they’ve detected even a
single particle of it.”

Blake squinted in confusion. “Then
how the hell do we even know it exists?”

“Because it still exerts a
gravitational force. Apparently, it has a profound influence on the movements
of galaxies and galaxy clusters.” She arched an eyebrow. “Any guesses how much
of the universe is composed of this stuff? How much of our universe is totally
invisible to us?”

Blake shook his head.

“Twenty-five percent. But this
number is misleading, because there is something else that physicists
discovered, in 1998. Dark energy. Turns out that while dark matter is an
attractive force within and between galaxies, dark energy is a repulsive force.
We know it’s there because the universe is expanding far faster than it has any
right to. The teams who first discovered this won a Nobel Prize for it in 2011.
To say that this was an astonishing result is an understatement. Nathan told me
it would be like releasing an apple at chest height, expecting it to crash to
the ground, only to watch it rise to the ceiling instead. Chalk another one up
to the universe for having some good tricks up its sleeve.”

Jenna paused for a moment to let
this sink in. “Nathan tells me that dark matter and dark energy are right up
there with the most incredible discoveries of the millennium,” she continued.
“Most cosmologists agree that dark matter and dark energy make up ninety-five
percent of the universe. The parts we can detect, the hundreds of billions of
galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, represent only
five percent
of the total. Five
percent!”

“Do scientists have any idea
what dark energy is?”

“Two theories are most popular.
The first is that it’s a manifestation of something called zero point energy.
Long story, but quantum physics has shown there is an energy field that exists
everywhere, including the vacuum of space, called the zero point field. The
energy produced is too fleeting for us to tap, but it’s there. The problem with
this one is that the zero point field has been calculated as being nearly infinite.
Dark energy’s affect on the universe is incomprehensibly immense, but if the
zero point field were responsible, some scientists believe it would be even
stronger.”

“And the second theory?” said
Blake, appearing to be genuinely fascinated.

“Well, there are four
fundamental forces in nature that we know of. Electromagnetism, which everyone
knows about. The weak nuclear force, which makes possible the fusion that
powers the sun. And the strong nuclear force, which basically holds the nuclei
of atoms together.”

“I’ll take your word
for it,” said Blake dryly.

Jenna winced. “I’m
going into too much unneeded detail, aren’t I?” she said. “Sorry. Nathan can
make this stuff a lot more interesting than I can.”

“No, no,” said Blake.
“You’re doing great. Please go on.”

“Okay. I was going to
say that gravity can be considered the fourth fundamental force, although it is
something like a trillion trillion times weaker than any of the others.”

“Gravity is the
weakest
force?”

“Yeah. I was surprised
when Nathan first explained this to me, but it’s obvious. We tend to think it’s
all powerful because we live on a massive ball of matter, and in a universe
filled with enormous quantities of gravity-producing stars and planets. But if
you think about it, a one-ounce magnet can lift a paperclip from the ground.
Despite the fact that the gravity produced by the
entire Earth
is trying to hold it down. Six thousand trillion tons
of mass being counteracted by a tiny magnet.”

“That’s how much the
Earth weighs?”

Jenna nodded.

“Wow. That must have
been
some
scale.”

Jenna smiled. “So let
me get back to your question. The second theory is that dark energy is a
fifth
type of fundamental force. One
that was previously unknown. One physicists have dubbed
q
uintessence
, a
force that exists throughout the universe in something called the quintessence
field. I’m not sure how this is different from the zero point field, but it is
all-pervasive as well.”

“So the
quint
in quintessence means five, right?
Like quintuplets?”

“Yes. Actually, modern physicists
stole the word from the ancient Greeks. The ancients didn’t know about the four
fundamental forces we know about, of course. But they believed that everything
was made up of a combination of four types of elements, four types of matter: earth,
air, fire, and water. And this belief was widespread in a number of different
cultures. But the ancients often included a fifth element, which they believed
filled the universe beyond Earth. They called this element quintessence. Also
called
ether
in ancient Greece, and
akasha
in India.”

“And in modern English,
of course,” said Blake, “
quintessence
,
and
quintessential
, means the most
perfect example of something. The most pure and essential essence.”

“Exactly,” said Jenna. She
was coming to appreciate that Aaron Blake was far more than just a bad-ass
commando. Like Nathan, he didn’t feel the need to flaunt his depth and
intelligence, but it was there.

“Very interesting stuff,” said
Blake.

“Thanks. But I’m afraid that’s
all I know.”

They were nearing the mountain
and Blake pulled off the road and into a gas station, wanting to fill the tank
so they wouldn’t have to bother for the return trip. He bought a large orange
Gatorade and Jenna bought a twenty ounce bottle of, fittingly enough, Palomar
Mountain Spring Water, and they resumed their journey, and their conversation.