The Painful Truth
10th Anniversary 1997 - 2007

I

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."   --Woody Allen

The first thing the woman experienced was a flash at once intensely bright and oddly tenuous, and of an unnatural color. Next she heard a sharp, hollow clap that stirred the pit of her stomach like nearby thunder, only not so loud and without the rumbling afternoise. Instantly the flash burst into a spherical eruption of billions of brilliant points of light in colors different from those of the flash but just as unnatural. Bursting outwards with astonishing speed, the globe was illuminated between the sparks by a pale glow, making it appear that she and her husband and her son were all three about to be swallowed up in a huge balloon of sparkling flame. Standing behind and slightly to the right of her son, she just had time to perceive individual clusters of sparks rush toward them as fast as arrows, on perfectly straight trajectories. When they struck him, she saw him jump and heard him squeal, and then she felt the particles penetrate her own body. The sensations were exquisite.

She was instantly suffused with prickly tingles at once sharp and gentle, hot and cold, like tiny pinpricks of fire immersed in cooling water or tiny pinpricks of ice embedded in a rosy glow. These she could feel in her skin, her muscles, her lungs, her belly—even, she thought, in her liver, her marrow, where at other times she could never feel anything at all. At times one eye or the other would flash suddenly green (or was it red?) and fade to yellow, and then after a second she would blink, and objects around her would appear to have faint white haloes. Her tongue would tingle, then she would taste curious changing mixtures of salt and sweet and sour and bitter, each time different, nearly all delicious. The smells were too fleeting to capture and savor; she only knew she wanted them to last longer. The sounds were strangely flat to be so sharp and crisp: little pings at many pitches, like tiny untuned bells. On the whole, though not unpleasant, they were not so charming as the other effects, but she could ignore them and concentrate on the feelings. Those were the best. And the tastes.

She heard her son laughing as he ran to intercept clusters of sparks. They sped past much too fast to catch, but he chased them nonetheless. He squealed, “Papa, watch this!” Or “Mama, look at me now!” It was hard to see him in the glow, because the light somehow lighted nothing but itself. Everyday objects seemed almost as transparent as air to the strange light.

For a while she turned her attention wholly to the light. In some ways it was the most fascinating part, the way it passed through everything. When it shone through the boy dancing in front of her, his body looked like a puppet made of transparent jelly. It shone through the earth itself. When the blazing globe first erupted and the lower half burst into the earth, it had looked shallower on the bottom, like a ball floating in water, but the entire perimeter of it had been visible; the part refracted from below the surface, though foreshortened, was just as clear and bright as the part in the open air. Now she was standing on solid ground peering at a whole universe of sparks speeding through the transparent soil, deep into bedrock, and her body tingled all over, and her taste buds sparkled lemon-lime and then papaya. She realized she was giggling.

At length, as the sparks rushed away in all directions, getting farther and farther apart, they took on the appearance of a sky full of stars, and as long as she turned and looked directly away from the post where her husband had set the detonator, the receding points of light did not even seem to move very much. The illusion was almost perfect.

Occasionally one of the specks would wink out. When it did, it always continued on its original trajectory in the form of a much dimmer glowing speck, which soon became lost in the gradually fading background glow. She tried to imagine she saw the pinwheel shape of these specks, but she knew they were really much too small and much too fast for the naked eye to discern their shape.

She had stopped giggling. Her husband whooped and laughed. The display was too diffuse now to be much fun for him any more and he was ready to set up another one. The woman gazed fixedly at a cluster of receding sparks. Now she was frowning. The boy ran toward his father and jumped up and down twice in front of him. He held up his arms. “Oh, Papa, it’s just like drinking soda pop all over my body!”

The man laughed. He reached down and grabbed the boy under his arms, tossed him into the air, and caught him. “Why, that’s exactly right!” He hugged the boy. “Did you hear that from somebody, or did you think it up all by yourself?’

“Thinked it up all by myself.”

“That’s good! You’re a pretty sharp kid, you know that?”

The boy grinned down at his father. “Sure I do.”

“You know what you ought to do? Go over and tell your Mama what you just said. She’ll like that.”

He put the boy down. He ran over to his mother and jumped up and down twice in front of her with his arms up. She scooped him up and set him astraddle her left hip, with her arm around him. “Hey, Mama, you know what?”

“What?”

“That big bang, you know?”

“Yes.”

“It’s just like drinking soda pop all over my body!”

She rounded her mouth and widened her eyes in mock amazement, as if she had not heard him say it the first time. “Ooh, that's right, it is!” She turned to scan the shadows for another glimpse of the fading unnatural glow and of the few points of light still close enough to see. Her expression was apprehensive.

The boy twisted around and looked at his father. “Oh, Papa, do that again!”

“Okay, Tiger. Shot number two coming up. Just let me reset the machine, okay?” He trotted out with a flashlight to check the eighty meters of wiring unrolled between the control box and the detonator. He stood at the post for a moment or two, then ambled back. As he approached the boy and his mother, he held the light at chest level and shined it up at his face to make it look grotesque. He made threatening faces at the boy. The boy squealed, then laughed when his father laughed and turned the light off. The man squatted over the control box the wire was connected to and checked gauges and adjusted knobs. He looked up and said, “Got to let her recharge a little longer.”

There was a pause. The woman said, “Couldn’t we let that one be enough for tonight?”

The man gave his wife a sharp, incredulous look. “Why?”

The boy pushed away from his mother, and she slid him gently to the ground. He made no sound. She did not look at his face. He ran toward his father, then stopped partway and looked back.

Again the man asked “Why?” in the same strained voice. “We’ve got two more ingots. I’ve already put one in the detonator. We only get to do this twice a year. Why do you want to spoil the fun? Are you turning into a prohi or something?”

She said, “You know I’m not. I like it just as much as anybody. But I just can’t help thinking—.” She stared in front of her.

He said, “About what?”

"Well . . . about all those little worlds with all the little people on them.”

“Oh, that’s just some theory. Nobody can even prove there’s any such thing as little worlds in these explosions. Even if there are, nobody can prove they develop any kind of little-worldly life, much less little-worldly intelligent life. ‘Little people?’ Nah. These are just harmless pyrotechnics.”

“No. There has got to be intelligent life there. That’s the only explanation for the patterns.”

Four kilometers away they could see a flash and a blossoming bright sphere at the Hummel place. The light shimmered and danced where it shone through the transparent trees. The boy whined, “Bobby can have another big bang. Why can’t I?”

His mother said, “Hush. Your Papa and I are talking.” The boy sat down in the grass and wailed.

The man walked over and picked him up. “Your Mama said hush. Let us talk for a while, okay? You’re a good kid, but you’ve got to be quiet when we’re talking.” He set him down again in the grass. The boy snuffled.

The man turned to his wife. “When you’ve recorded as much data as they’ve got stored, you’re bound to find what looks like bits of patterns here and there, if you look at it right. Take it all together, it’s random. Nothing there, really. I think the people writing those articles are fooling themselves. The only reason they see evidence of intelligence is because they want to so bad.”

“That can’t be it. They’ve found musical compositions. They’ve found things that sound like birdcalls—they may be languages. There’s a lot of other stuff they can’t make sense of, they just know it shows regular patterns. But I heard on public radio today they’ve found pi to the tenth decimal place.”

“See, that’s just what I mean. If you’re searching through a string of random numbers, and that string is long enough, eventually you’re going to find any sequence you’re looking for. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Yes, they explained that on the radio. But this was used in a formula to calculate the circumference of a circle. I’ve forgotten what they said the chances are the whole message could occur by chance. Almost zero. Somebody had to send it. And whoever did is saying, ‘We are intelligent. Please notice us. Please answer us.’”

II

It had been twenty-three years since physics grad student Mark Haverton, working on the government-sponsored Project IMP (Investigation of Material Particles), had produced the first unified force conversion effect, referred to in the literature by the acronym UFCE. The actual effect had not been anything like what physicists’ calculations had predicted; no calculations they had devised after the fact could yet explain it. It simply violated the laws of the known universe. It also violated the laws of all the hypothetical universes theorists had devised, with the possible exception of some made possible by the seven-dimension and eleven-dimension models suggested by string theory. Most theorists had abandoned string theory as untestable early in the century, but thanks to UFCE it was enjoying a revival. Several labs were running computer simulations; the most success these efforts could claim so far was that more than a hundred hypotheses had been ruled out. Skeptics charged that nearly all the thousands that had not yet been ruled out were still viable only because they were still untestable, even given the new data provided by UFCE emissions.

The most striking characteristics were these.

• UFCE particles had not yet been found to collide with any known particle; they penetrated ordinary matter even more readily than neutrinos do.

• They could not be shown to have mass, though theoretically their mass should have totaled that of the original material, less the amount converted to energy.

• The energy given off (at least that which was detectable) in UFCEs was equivalent to only a tiny fraction of the original mass. In Haverton’s first explosion, for example, if all the mass in the original bolt had been converted to energy, it would have laid waste to Bay City. Instead it was about like the flash of a large firecracker. The audible report that accompanied the flash proved to be produced by the apparatus itself, not the UFCE phenomenon.

• Since the theoretical mass of UFCE products was undetectable, the energy should have been undetectable also. Instead, any sort of receptor sensitive to electromagnetic radiation registered some response to UFCE.

• Those responses were unpredictable. What looked like absorption lines in UFCE spectra, for example, were different for different receptors, but about the same for all transmission conditions. The implication was that a significant fraction of the energy remained undetected.

• The energy did not seem to be transmitted in the form of ordinary photons. Photon counters in the Bay City facility regularly registered fractional values; integral readings, which are the only kind possible for ordinary photons, occurred only at rare and random intervals.

What happened was this. Haverton was assigned to Dr. Natalie Rumford’s Project IMP team at the Bay City cyclotron. Their goal was to isolate and describe the particles that (hypothetically) made up quarks; now that the term “strings” was out of fashion to denote these ultimate constituents of matter, the particles were dubbed “wishons,” originally a derisive term for the mathematical constructs that gave string theory its name, but now put to serious use.

In a stroke possibly of brilliance but probably of luck, Haverton had constructed a matrix of medoleite crystals capable of converting an electrical pulse to the Adriewsky force and focusing it to produce a unified force field. Working late into the night on his own time, he placed a 10x50 mm steel bolt at the point of focus, hung a hand-lettered sign on the outside of the unit which read “Crack the quark or bust”, and subjected the bolt and its medoleite matrix to a 275 megawatt pulse of 15 microseconds duration. In so doing, he threw both the science of particle physics and, temporarily, himself into disarray. He also incidentally changed the way people of his continent celebrated the equinoxes.

The reason for Haverton’s personal disarray is easy to imagine. As soon as he realized he was watching the explosion he had set off through the 10 centimeter thick lead radiation shield, without any need to consult the video monitors, he was convinced he was about to die. As soon as he felt the glowing particles penetrate him, he was sure he was dead. As soon as he realized he was not dead yet, he knew he would die within minutes or hours—or within days, at the most. Both he and the doctors at the medical center where he had been admitted to the emergency room were surprised and gratified when he suffered no greater ill effect than a low-grade fever and a pleasant lassitude, both of which went away within eighteen hours. Since that time, the medical effects of UFCE had been studied thoroughly, and no permanent harm had ever been linked to it. Unfortunately, it could not be shown to have any therapeutic effects, either, beyond the intense but evanescent pleasures the explosions bestowed.

The reasons for the disarray in particle physics were much more numerous and much more complex, and they unfolded much more slowly.

As soon as it became apparent that Haverton was not suffering from radiation sickness, Dr. Rumford had, by converting another bolt, determined the UFCE particles were deflected by the magnets in the cyclotron. Immediately she requested and received permission to convert the Bay City facility to a magnetic confinement torus so the particles could be captured and guided past sensors that would make long-term study possible. As soon as data began accumulating, the Project IMP team realized that UFCE products resembled a model universe made up of particles that behaved like tiny quasars and galaxies, except that instead of ballooning outward forever, they raced around and around.

Through all the scientific and philosophical speculation about UFCE, one thread of assumption wove continuously: Haverton had indeed cracked the quark. Most also assumed the quanta of matter and energy in the original material had lost their identity and reorganized on a different scale on a plane or in a dimension that intersects the known universe only obliquely. A few—the ones reviving string theory—hypothesized that the “missing” matter and energy had been shunted out of our three-dimensional universe into one or more of the infinitesimal “curled-up” dimensions string theory predicts, and confined there. Or liberated there, depending on which perspective one chooses. Physicists who favored the “liberated” notion posited that the UFCE Particles did not merely model a universe, but became one. These speculations were the ones seized upon by the popular media, the ones that captured the public imagination.

The scientific paper that had started the most intense media hype was titled “Computer-enhanced time-stretched recordings of selected UFCE radiation frequencies,” in which N. Rumford et al. described how they had managed to “slow down” electromagnetic UFCE pulses. Samples that took femtoseconds to record were played back over a period of months. Real-time playback gave nothing but random noise; time-stretched playback revealed definite patterns. Those displayed by the strongest emissions resembled the unvarying pulses of quasars. That is, they fluctuated at a fixed rate, just as the radiation given off by a quasar flashes rapidly on and off as the quasar’s rotation whirls a focused beam around. Converted to audio, they sounded like a steady whine or hum, depending on how drastically the signal was stretched. That first part of the team’s findings intrigued both cosmologists and particle physicists. What caught the attention of the media and sparked the imagination of the public was the second part, which stated that certain vastly weaker signals exhibited patterned fluctuations in amplitude like those of radio-transmitted messages. Scientists everywhere began analyzing recordings made at Bay City and at labs in other nations that replicated the original experiments. Many scientists became convinced that the popular media were, for once, right. Converted to audio, those emissions sounded exactly like messages. Linguists and mathematicians had immediately begun attempts to decipher them. So far the linguists were stymied, but the mathematicians had enjoyed a few modest successes.

Officially, the IMP team scrupulously avoided making sensational claims. They never said they had captured a universe, only that the assemblage of particles behaved like one in some respects. They downplayed news reports that presented tentative findings and mere speculations as if they were established fact. Among themselves, the team seemed to agree with the media. For example, when a first-year grad student posted on a public bulletin board a story by science reporter Quentin Dix at Newsource Magazine with the headline “Universe in a Bottle,” Rumford and Haverton (now Doctor Haverton) took it down. However, instead of tossing it out, they moved it to a board in the break lounge, out of sight of visitors.

The major spinoff of UFCE, its use as a pyrotechnic display, had begun almost at once. Even before conversion of the Project IMP facility was complete, entrepreneurs had started up companies to develop UFCE for commercial use. According to federal law, patent rights to any invention developed with government funds were retained by the government, which was bound to reassign them to the public domain unless they had some military function. No military function could be found. Thus manufacturers were soon attaching medoleite crystal matrices to condenser units, casting up lead ingots in shapes to fit the matrix in each brand of machine, and selling the machines as permanent replacements for the fireworks traditionally used in equinox celebrations. They were so far superior in almost every respect that old-fashioned fireworks could now be found only in displays sponsored by historical societies and museums.

Leaders of all the major religions lobbied to outlaw UFCE displays. For one thing, they considered them blasphemous parodies of the original creative acts described in their various scriptures. For another and perhaps more important thing, most sects opposed them for the same reason they opposed recreational sex and psychoactive drugs: ministers feared that the distraction of intense physical joys would lead their congregations astray. Celebrants would abandon their spiritual devotion and (what was worse) discontinue their monetary donations. The prohibitionists achieved partial success: displays were strictly against the law except at the equinoxes. Since they were impossible to hide, enforcement of the ban was relatively easy. Those independent preachers who tried to get around the law by incorporating UFCE as a sacrament in worship services were imprisoned, and their followers were persecuted.

III

The man stared at the gauges on the control box. He spoke slowly. “Suppose there are little worlds, with little people on them. What good would it do not to detonate the ingot?”

“I just don’t think it’s right to bring something into the world like that and then not talk to it, or care about it.”

“Look. We’re not creating anything. We’re changing a little lump of matter into another state. If some kind of organic scum contaminates some of the cooler particles of that matter, it’s not our responsibility.” He paused and cleared his throat. “I don’t see a bit of difference between this and making a compost heap. You don’t worry about the bacteria in the compost heap.”

“The bacteria don’t send us messages.”

“Well, those little people aren’t sending messages to us! Each other, maybe. They have no idea we’re even here.” He paused. “And I’m still not convinced they’re even there.”

“Well, I am! And they might suspect we’re here, even if they can’t know it. The thing of it is, we know they’re there—at least I do. And that makes us responsible. We need to answer them.”

“Answer them? The time scales, honey, the time scales! If they actually exist, their whole civilizations only last a few minutes. Any species that sent a message would go extinct before we could decode it and send one back. Assuming we could ever decode it at all.”

“Somebody could get some sort of message ready beforehand, and build it into the detonator itself, with magnetism. It could make their universe vibrate in some particular way, or make their aurora borealis flicker, or something.”

He threw up his hands. “And just what kind of message could we send them that would mean anything? The cure for the common cold? We don’t even know that ourselves!”

“Well...” She hesitated. “We could tell them we care about them and want them to be good to each other.”

“Oh good god!” He sounded as if he were hovering between amusement and disgust. “That’s the damnedest silliest, most sentimental thing I ever heard.”

The boy began to cry again. He jumped up and ran to his mother and buried his face in her skirt, against her thigh. She cupped one hand around the back of his head and pressed the other against his back. She was glad it was too dark for her husband to see her crying. When she could trust her voice again, she said, “Okay. I didn’t say it right. I just don’t know how to say it so it doesn’t sound silly and sentimental.” She had not waited long enough to keep her voice completely steady. She swallowed. “But can you think of any other message that would be more important?”

Her husband did not say anything for a long time. Finally, in a subdued voice, he said, “No.”

He cleared his throat. “I promised the boy another shot. If we’re going to be good to him, I think we’d better do that one. We can save the other ingot and decide later about next spring. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Two flashes went off almost simultaneously in Crampton, fifteen kilometers to the west. They were visible through the hill that hid the ordinary lights of the town.

The man said, “Come on, Tiger, help me flip the switch.”

The boy rubbed his face against his mother’s skirt and ran to his father. He yelled, “Oh goody! Big bang number two, coming up!”

The woman turned and faced the post. She dropped her arms to her sides and spread her hands slightly to catch the full effect.

--9/01/2007

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