The Planck Factor

Chapter 7

Alexis

They found a cheap motel well off the freeway, halfway to Portland. Swede peered out the window between the closed curtains, while Alexis stretched out on the bed and clicked through the ten available channels on the small TV.

"Are you ever going to tell me what this is about?" she asked, stopping on TBS to view what might be a watchable movie.

"I told you," Swede said. "It's about the research."

"Which tells me nothing."

"Like I said--"

"I know what you said." The movie was some cop flick, full of stupid banter and chase scenes. She muted the sound, tossed the remote aside and rolled over to face Swede. "You need to tell me more. I wouldn't have even come this far, if you hadn't freaked me out. But I have to insist on getting a few details. I'm not going any farther with you without them."

"I'm trying to protect you." Swede turned from the window. He looked exhausted. "Please. Just trust me."

Alexis considered this. "No."

"No?"

"I need an explanation. You're disrupting my life. I have a master's thesis to work on and classes to attend. And a limited time to finish my studies, so if you're going to insist that I live my life on the run, I have to know why I'm running."

Swede shook his head. "I had hoped to avoid this."

"Clearly, but if you don't explain now, I'm calling a cab or catching a bus back home."

Swede sighed. "Well, I can't really force you to come."

"They call it kidnapping."

Swede grimaced and glanced out the window again. He froze as the flash of headlights illuminated him briefly, then relaxed as they disappeared.

"All right," he said. "Did Daniel ever explain the theory we were testing?"

"I told you. Daniel didn't explain a thing."

"Well, you did know he was a cosmologist."

"Yes, yes. You were both studying the origins of the universe."

Swede grabbed a chair and turned it backwards. He straddled it and dropped with a grunt, resting his arms on the back, his solid torso settling like a sack of cement. "You've heard of Albert Einstein, of course."

"Gosh, no, Swede. Who's he?"

Swede's mouth quirked up to one side, but the half-smile quickly vanished. "You probably know that under Einstein's theory of relativity, the speed of light is constant."

"Yes, I know. I took basic physics, remember? Even thought about majoring in it, but philosophy was a better match for me."

Swede nodded. "That's right. Remind me. Why did you change your mind?"

"Couldn't hack the math. Calculus was my downfall."

Swede nodded. "There's a lot of that."

"Don't change the subject. You were talking about Einstein and the speed of light."

Swede paused, as if gathering his thoughts. "Have you ever heard of Joao Magueijo?"

"No. What the hell is that?"

"It's a who, not a what." Swede explained it was the name of a Portuguese cosmologist, Joao Magueijo. "He was trying to figure out certain inconsistencies between what we know about the universe and the Big Bang theory.

"Magueijo came up with this notion that maybe Einstein had it wrong. Maybe the speed of light wasn't a constant. To boil it down, if light moved faster than it does now when the Big Bang occurred, it would explain a whole lot of things that hadn't made sense up until then. Like the 'horizon problem.' Are you familiar with that?"

Alexis shook her head.

"Essentially, the background radiation in our universe is too evenly disbursed, too homogenous. The universe is so huge, this shouldn't be the case. The edges of the universe are 28 billion light years apart, but the universe is only 14 billion years old. If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, heat radiation simply couldn't have travelled between the two horizons fast enough to even out all the hot and cold spots and create thermal equilibrium throughout the universe." He paused. "I get the feeling I'm losing you."

"I think I get the gist. Just don't start talking in differential equations or anything."

Swede smiled. A real smile this time. "That part doesn't really matter, anyhow. That's just the background. Suffice it to say, it's a controversial theory. He's been heavily criticized for positing it as a better theory than the ones that square with Einstein's views."

"Okay. And all this is dangerous why?"

Swede hunched his shoulders and leaned into the chair. "Magueijo wrote a book called Faster Than the Speed of Light. In it, he mentions that the research he was doing might end up being used to create a more powerful weapon than the H-bomb, but dismissed this concern in a footnote. Under his theory of VSL--that's variable speed of light--an accelerator used to produce Planck mass particles would create a bomb with half the power of an H-bomb. However . . ."

Alexis waited. Her life felt worse than a Hitchcock movie.

"Magueijo had a footnote to this in his book. It said that this outcome was based on a certain factor in his equations being positive. But if he was wrong and that factor was negative . . . it would actually create a bomb twice as powerful. At least, in theory."

Alexis drew in a breath. "So you've proved this theory? The one that could lead to . . . oh, my God."

Swede's head drooped. "Not conclusively, but our research led us to believe Magueijo's worst-case scenario could be true." He looked up at Alexis. "And I don't think Daniel's death was an accident."