The Dark Spring: Hard Science Fiction Page 6

  “That means the substrate is porous,” said Karl.

  “Yes, or the lander is floating a few meters above the comet. Although, the few particles that are being reflected still possess almost all of their kinetic energy. It’s as though they’re bouncing off a hard wall. Normally they would lose different amounts of energy, depending on the mass of the atoms they hit. I don’t need to explain the conservation of momentum to you, Professor Piras.”

  “You don’t, Professor Stoll.”

  Sylvia nodded. “But that’s by no means all. Thanks to the new findings that Karl obtained at my request, we now know a little more.”

  “Wait. What do you mean, ‘obtained?’ Nothing illegal, I hope?”

  “If I may interject, Professor Piras, everything has gone through the proper channels, of course. A former colleague who now works at Green Bank Observatory granted me access to his resources.”

  “That’s important information for the faculty council. If we publish, does that mean we’ll have to share credit with the NRAO?” He was referring to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operated the facility where Robert Millikan worked.

  “Correct. But there’s no one else,” said Sylvia.

  “Strictly speaking, Neville Youngs from ESTRACK passed on the first evidence of Philae’s resurgence. That is, he passed it on to our colleague Düstermann, not me.”

  “Are you saying Neville contacted my husband, who forwarded his request to you?”

  So, Sylvia, that comes as a surprise to you. Karl couldn’t help feeling a little schadenfreude. He’d known Johannes a little longer than she had.

  “ESTRACK,” said Piras. “That’s not a problem. They more or less belong to us.”

  “Okay, but maybe we should finish baking the pie before we divide it up,” said Sylvia.

  “Of course, Professor Stoll.”

  “So, the COSAC experiment. Cometary Sampling and Composition, the name is self-explanatory. We’ve analyzed some of the material surrounding Philae. It appears to be in its atomic form, and much heavier than hydrogen but lighter than helium.”

  “Impossible,” said Karl. “There’s no element between those two. Or did you analyze a mixture of half helium and half hydrogen?”

  “I don’t know exactly what Philae has in its sampler. Let’s move on to Ptolemy. It’s a combination of gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. The instrument partly told us what we already knew—water, dust, organic substances. But there are also components we couldn’t designate.”

  “Between hydrogen and helium, I assume?” Piras interjected.

  “Correct. But we’re talking about a single fraction. The two substances can’t be separated, at least not by the 26 ovens that heat the analysis material for Ptolemy.”

  “An unknown substance, then. On an interstellar comet like Oumuamua or Waterman—I wouldn’t have a problem with that,” said Piras. “But on 67P? I thought we’d thoroughly examined it twelve years ago.”

  The more astonishing a finding, the harder it was to find a renowned journal to publish it. A completely new substance on a previously-known comet—that screamed measurement error. The scientific community wouldn’t believe them.

  “I’m not finished,” said Sylvia. “Nowhere near. We also produced CIVA images–Comet Nucleus Infrared and Visible Analyzer. In the optical range, everything is black. You could easily believe Philae was surrounded by a thick cloud if it wasn’t for the fact that its solar cells are producing a whole lot of energy. But it gets fascinating in infrared. That’s all black too—deep black, the blackest black you can imagine.”

  Impossible, Karl wanted to say, but held his tongue. Sylvia and Piras already knew the measurements deviated wildly from any known reality. A substance that gave off no thermal radiation and was completely black in infrared didn’t exist, at least not on a comet. This substance must be in its base thermal state and colder than the universe, even though it was on a comet approaching the sun.

  “That’s certainly remarkable,” said Piras.

  The understatement of the year.

  “I’m just afraid no one will believe us,” he continued.

  “But I’m still not finished,” said Sylvia. “And it gets better. We also have CONSERT, Comet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radio wave Transmission. It sends radio waves through the comet’s nucleus and determines from the reflections how dense the nucleus is. Sounds simple, and it is. Now, guess what it found?”

  She paused and looked triumphantly between Karl and Piras.

  Karl shrugged, and Piras cocked his head curiously.

  “There is no nucleus. The radio waves propagate completely unhindered.”

  “And if there is no nucleus?” asked Karl.

  “Where is Philae transmitting from then?” asked Piras.

  “Don’t worry. I inquired directly at the local observatory. 67P still exists. So the nucleus must also be there. It’s just behaving as if it weren’t.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Karl.

  Sylvia laughed. He liked that laugh. He used to be able to elicit it easily, but at some point she’d begun to find his jokes tedious.

  “Is that it?” asked Piras.

  “Umm, no. Two more. First MUPUS, the Multi-Purpose Sensors for surface and sub-surface science. This instrument allows us to evaluate the temperature sensor. It’s at its lowest point, which fits with the CIVA images. And then we used the SESAME conductivity probe—Surface Electronic Sounding and Acoustic Monitoring Experiment. The result? The conductivity of the substrate is significantly reduced. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot ROMAP, which stands for Rosetta Lander Magnetometer and Plasma Monitor. What’s interesting here are the magnetometer values. The unknown substance on the comet doesn’t appear to be magnetic, so it probably has a spin of 0. That rules out hydrogen.

  “Phew,” said Piras. “That’s quite a jumble of information.”

  “Let me summarize,” Karl said. “We have a substance that is electrically and magnetically neutral, very, very cold, and lighter than helium but heavier than hydrogen.”

  “And which doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation,” added Sylvia.

  “There’s no way we can put this forward without a credible hypothesis,” said Piras. “And by that, I mean that we can’t postulate an exotic substance no one’s ever heard of. I can already see the headlines. ‘Darmstadt scientists finally discover Superman’s kryptonite.’ We don’t just need values. We need an explanation.”

  “I’ll take a stab in the dark,” said Karl. “What about helium-2? The two protons in the nucleus would have to align their spins antiparallel so that they have a total spin of zero, and an atom that’s lighter than ordinary helium but heavier than hydrogen.”

  “According to our current values, helium-2 would be too heavy. We’d probably need an atom with one and a half protons,” said Sylvia.

  “Please don’t start with something like that,” said Piras. “No journal would be interested. Fine, then the diproton your colleague suggested. What was your name again?”

  “Stoll, Karl Stoll,” he replied.

  “Ah, the same name as you, Professor.”

  “Yes, quite a coincidence,” said Sylvia with a smile.

  Then she became serious again. “The diproton can’t exist. The powerful interaction which holds the nucleus together would have to be two percent stronger, and that would be the end of the universe as we know it. Nuclear fusion would be mediated by the strong rather than the weak interaction and would happen eighteen orders of magnitude faster. Life wouldn’t have had time to develop.”

  “Thank you for the explanation,” said Piras. “You know I’m a meteorologist, and my undergrad years are far behind me.”

  “No problem, Professor. It just means that, at the moment, we have no explanation that doesn’t boil down to a mysterious new element.”

  “Before you submit that, you at least need to have some idea. Otherwise we’ll just be seen as the lunatics from Darmstadt.”
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  “I completely agree,” said Sylvia.

  Karl admired her patience.

  “Karl and I will think of something. I promise.”

  “It’s so nice to get out of the house alone now and then,” Sylvia said.

  “Johannes is playing the babysitter?”

  “He’ll cope.”

  “Cheers, then!” Karl raised his glass of red wine.

  Sylvia picked up hers and they toasted. “But I don’t want you to misconstrue this. It’s not a date. I’m quite happy with my husband. We’re here to come up with a creative solution to our mutual problem.”

  “Of course,” said Karl.

  Quite happy. That sounded promising. And a mutual problem—when did they last have one of those?

  “Have you decided?” the waiter asked.

  They placed their orders. The waiter repeated everything back to them and then left the table. Silence prevailed. Sylvia often used to complain that Karl never let her get a word in, so he allowed her to take the initiative.

  “A strange feeling,” she said finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything here reminds me of the Italian place we used to go to.”

  That was where they’d first met, because the proprietor had seated them at the same table. But she didn’t say that. They’d had a pleasant conversation, and then they each went back to their own apartments without exchanging numbers. Karl had gone back to the restaurant the following evening, although it was quite expensive, and found Sylvia already sitting there. That night they’d ended up in Sylvia’s apartment.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” said Sylvia. “Don’t forget, I can read your thoughts.” That was another reason she’d said she was bored with him. At first they’d found it exciting.

  “We’re here to work,” said Karl, clenching his fists. He needed to concentrate.

  “Exactly,” said Sylvia. “Where were we?”

  “Diproton,” said Karl.

  “Which doesn’t exist.”

  “I did some homework, and when iron-45 decays, sometimes two protons are emitted simultaneously, which briefly behave like a diproton.”

  “But 67P isn’t an iron asteroid.”

  “But it does contain some iron.”

  “And you think we accidentally measured multiple collisions of alpha particles in this short-lived diproton condition?”

  “No, I don’t think that. But it would be a good hook.”

  “For what?”

  “For the paper we’re going to write. We’ll call it ‘Signs of diproton decay in the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.’ Period.”

  “But it’s highly improbable that—”

  “Yes, but then it’ll be the others, the readers, who’ll suggest fantastic ideas. We’ll be dead serious. We’re more likely to succeed with a peer-reviewed paper than if we postulate obscure theories ourselves.”

  “No, Karl, I don’t feel good about that.”

  She didn’t feel good. Well, really. If you don’t feel good, you should get some fresh air.

  “I just don’t think we should present any theories that we can’t back up. We’d be better off just reporting the figures.”

  “Okay, then that’s settled?” asked Karl.

  The waiter arrived with the amuse-bouche, and Karl ignored him while Sylvia thanked him.

  “Not so fast,” said Sylvia. “We haven’t even eaten yet. I’m sure we’ll think of something else.”

  Karl picked up his fork, impaled a morsel on the small plate in front of him, and put it in his mouth. It tasted oily.

  “We need to start with the basics,” said Sylvia.

  “The base is clearly olive oil,” said Karl, swallowing the tidbit.

  Sylvia smiled. “I like you better like this,” she said. “You’re so negative at times. I find it hard to deal with.”

  Yeah, he was. Sometimes life was shit. But right now it wasn’t. The amuse-bouche wasn’t bad at all.

  “So, the basics,” he said. “What we’re looking for is electrically and magnetically neutral, with a weight equivalent to one and a half protons.”

  “And it barely interacts with electromagnetic radiation,” said Sylvia. “And it’s extremely cold.”

  “The diproton could be a candidate, but it’s too heavy and too unstable.”

  “Exactly. Maybe we should be looking at the next level down.”

  Karl bent down and looked under the table. Sylvia had taken off her high-heeled shoes. Typical.

  “Very funny.”

  “I just wanted to take a look at a lower level.”

  “I mean at the quark level,” said Sylvia. “How do we get to a rest mass of one-and-a-half protons?”

  “Hmm. A proton consists of two up quarks and one down quark. So we need to add one or two more quarks.”

  “Then we’d have a pentaquark. But that gives us an uneven electrical charge. The up has a charge of plus two-thirds, the down a charge of minus one-third. There’s no meaningful combination that gives us an even charge.”

  “You’re forgetting the antiquarks, Sylvia. If we pack another quark and its antiquark into a neutron, the overall charge remains the same.”

  “Well, if you insist on complicating things, we should consider a hexaquark, too, which consists of six individual quarks.”

  “Definitely. And why not hepta- or octaquarks, while we’re at it?”

  “Because of the mass limit,” said Sylvia. “With six quarks, which would be simplest, we’re already at double the proton mass. We can rule out all second and third-generation quarks. They’re far too heavy.”

  It was true. Even the lightest, the strange quark, was too heavy for the measurements. This was both good and bad, because if things were different and the alpha particles had lost significantly less energy, they’d have had to trawl through various exotic quantum states, right down to the quarkonium in which a quark combined with its antiquark.

  “But it’s not that simple,” said Karl, “because you can’t just add up the masses of the quarks.”

  “I know that. Given all the possible combinations, we won’t get anywhere just throwing ideas around. How about you write a small program tomorrow listing all the candidates? Then we can work from that.”

  “Good idea. There are supposedly some stable penta- and hexaquarks. We should be able to get away with that.”

  “Karl, if we publish something, I don’t want to just ‘get away with’ it. It has to hold water and be one hundred percent serious.”

  And that’s why you’re the professor and I’m the engineer. Karl had spent a few years trying to compensate for his lack of ambition with diligence, but had failed. There was simply too much that interested him. Hera and Rosetta were great projects, but the VW in his garage was still waiting to shine, too.

  “Of course, Sylvia. We’ll get there.”

  The waiter stood at their table as though he’d been eavesdropping and waiting for the perfect time to serve their food. Karl laid the linen napkin across his knees and picked up his cutlery.

  “Bon appetite,” he said. “That blouse suits you, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” said Sylvia, smiling.

  They toasted again after dessert.

  “We haven’t talked any more about work,” said Karl.

  “No. But it was nice to remember old times.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “You can stay at my place, of course,” said Sylvia.

  Karl blushed. She’d said exactly the same words on their second evening here. But wait, it wasn’t here, even though it felt that way. And times had changed—unfortunately.

  “Only if it’s not inconvenient,” he said.

  “Not at all. We have a guest room. Then we can drive together to my office tomorrow.”

  And that way you won’t waste any time and will be able to get straight to work. Sylvia didn’t say that, but she was probably thinking it. Of course, she wasn’t having romantic thoughts. That w
as all in the past.

  Karl wiped his mouth and placed the napkin neatly on the table.

  August 21, 2026 – SpaceShip SS1

  Everyone was glued to the portholes that ran like half of a wreath wrapped around the nose of the spaceship. On Earth, when the ship was still sitting on the first stage at the height of 68 meters, Brandon could only imagine what it would look like in action. It was all the more impressive now, floating next to them—almost as though he was looking into a mirror.

  But what was floating next to them wasn’t their reflection, it was a copy. SpaceShip SS2 would never head out into the far reaches of space. It was a tanker, currently providing their ship with fresh methane and oxygen from its cargo bay, so they could head to the moon, and beyond, if they wanted to. KK had insisted on this for safety reasons, in case something went wrong. As he was footing the bill, no one contradicted him.

  To Brandon, the voyage still felt like a school trip. And just like in his school days, he was the one who said the least, but was still—or maybe for precisely that reason—considered a genius. When he said anything, he spoke quietly. His voice simply didn’t carry well, and if he talked too much he quickly became hoarse. After the Oscar nomination, his agent had tried to send him to voice training but he’d refused, and there were hardly any press interviews these days, anyway.

  He hadn’t met any of the others previously, apart from KK, of course, who’d probably just followed a tip from an adviser. All the others had some kind of artistic talent. Sophie painted. Vyacheslav from Belarus sculpted, and he also played piano, composed, and sang. He’d brought an ample supply of modeling clay with him, because any other material would be problematic up here. Yunus was a famous Turkish comic artist, whom the Turkish president recently released from prison upon his reelection. Emily, a German acrobat and dancer, was currently practicing the splits in zero gravity. And himself? He wrote, which anyone could do.