Spacetime Donuts (11 page)

They continued shrinking, and soon it was difficult to make out the snakes which were the molecules of plastic. The flickering became more pronounced. It was like looking out into a crowd of people taking flash pictures in a darkened auditorium . . . only each flash was a different brilliant color.

In general, an atom will emit photons of only one color most of the time, so it was possible to pick out the paths of some of the atoms in the swarm of light flashes around them. They moved in unpredictable zig-zags—like fireflies on an August night.

As they continued shrinking, three atoms came to dominate the visual field. The closest one gave off blue and occasional green flashes and was floating motionless in front of Vernor as he sat in the pilot's seat. The other two atoms were located directly above and directly below the transparent sphere of the scale-ship. These gave off red flashes and seemed to be vibrating towards and away from the blue flashing atom.

"H
₂
O," Mick exclaimed. "Cool, cool water."

"Yeah," Vernor said. "That must be it. The angles look just right for those two reds to be hydrogens bound to a nice blue oxygen. This might be a stray water molecule from our breathing. We're inside a molecule." The blue-flashing oxygen atom was drawing closer as the steady, pulsating dance of the red-flashing hydrogen atoms continued. "Pretty soon we're not going to be able to see at all, though," Vernor concluded, as the flashes grew more infrequent.

"Why not?" Mick asked. "Why shouldn't we be able to see the electrons and the nucleus? They're there, we're still shrinking . . . what's the problem?"

"There's no way we can see them," Vernor said patiently. "For you to
see
something it has to send a signal to you. The smaller we get, the less likely it is that a photon will hit us. Once we're smaller than a photon I don't think it even
can
hit us." He thought for a minute, then continued. "But maybe—"

Turner finished his sentence for him, delightedly crying, "But maybe you're full of shit!" The darkness around them had filled with an even, milky luminosity. The actual particles of the oxygen atom were becoming visible!

"This is impossible," Vernor said as they drifted closer to the atom in front of them. It had now grown to the size of a weather balloon. The blue and green flashes had died out as he had predicted . . . they were so small that the chances of a photon from the atom hitting them were infinitesimal. Nevertheless, he could see the atom.

The electrons formed a sort of cloud or haze around the tiny nucleus, but a haze unlike any he had ever seen. If he glanced at the whole electron cloud there were no lumps, no individual electrons . . . merely the continuous probability distribution demanded by orthodox quantum mechanics. On the other hand, if he focused his whole attention on any limited region of the cloud, a small yellow ball would appear there . . . an electron orbiting the nucleus according to the laws of pre-quantum physics. What he saw depended on what he tried to see! He turned to Mick, "What do you see? Do you see separate electrons or just a cloud?"

Turner gave him a strange look, "I see little yellow balls whizzing around a tiny pulsing thing in the middle. What kind of
cloud
you talking about?"

"The
electron
cloud, dammit. Electrons don't have both a position and a velocity. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You
can't
see a particular electron at a particular spot moving in a definite direction with a definite speed. You just can't!" He broke off as an electron the size of a beachball glided serenely across his visual field.

Mick was silent for a minute, then spoke. "Yeah, I remember that Uncertainty stuff. It was on the Uncle Space-Head Show . . . Tuesday mornings at nine. Yeah. Now that I remember that, I can't see the electrons. That's really weird, as soon as you reminded me it got all cloudy . . . what
is
this?"

But Vernor had no answer. The electron cloud had now grown to the size of a cathedral. The glowing nucleus was a pearl of light in the center. The atom seemed to be moving towards them. As with the plastic molecule before, he had the strange illusion that the atom's behavior was purposeful, that it was moving towards them because it sensed their presence. Was everything they met going to try to
eat
them?

Vernor covered his eyes with his hands to think. How could the atom's appearance depend on what he expected to see? When he put the Uncertainty Principle out of his mind he saw a miniature solar system . . . like now . . . he watched the sixteen electrons circling around the oxygen nucleus. Mick and Vernor were so small now that their time-scale was on a par with that of the atom, so it was easy to watch the electrons as long as you believed in them . . . there was one dropping down to a lower orbit . . . a photon went wriggling away from this event. With a start Vernor realized that his hands were still over his eyes. He opened his mouth, but Mick was already talking.

"Vernor, I can see with my eyes closed! It's like when I took my first acid trip. I just
sense
where everything is . . .
feel
it with my brain!" Without turning his head, Vernor could
see
that Mick was lying on the floor of the scale-ship with his eyes closed . . . and he could easily hear him yell, "Oh, yes!" to the approaching nucleus.

Vernor observed the nucleus only superficially and grappled with the problem of how they could be seeing without their eyes. It must be some type of field acting directly on his brain, he reasoned. Conceivably a field could produce mental images . . . the brain's memory storage was basically holographic, so perhaps the interference pattern between his memory field and some external field could produce these slightly hallucinatory images he was observing . . . the nucleus seemed to glow approvingly . . . but what kind of field would it be? The nuclear boson forces could not reach this far, the electromagnetic field was too coarse, so that left gravitation . . . but, no, gravitational effects would be flattened out by the Virtual Field before they could reach him here. Suddenly the answer popped into his mind. "Probability amplitudes!" Vernor shouted. "The pure quantum field!"

"Man, stop trying to explain it," Mick said quietly. "Get loose while you still can. Look at it."

It was something to look at all right. The oxygen atom had grown to an immense size, and they were drifting in through the electron cloud. The specificity of their presence was introducing violent turbulence and instability in the atom. One minute they were in a swirling probability fog; the next, electrons were rumbling past them like trucks. Several electrons spiraled down into the nucleus, emitting a variety of smaller particles on the way.

Their progress through the electron shells was uneven; they proceeded in jumps, and each jump was accompanied by crashes and showers of sparks.

Suddenly they were through the electrons' domain and the bare nucleus blazed ahead of them, perhaps half the size of the scale-ship. It was growing rapidly as they drifted towards it. A deep rumbling filled their tensegrity sphere, and the smell of sulfur and burnt earth filled their nostrils. Vernor was not surprised . . . if the quantum mechanical probability field could act directly on the memory structure of his brain to produce visual images, there was no reason it couldn't produce the sounds and smells as well. Intellectually he was hardly surprised . . . but on the gut level he was as scared as he'd ever been.

The nucleus was a dusky red interspersed with patches of black and threads of glowing white. Its shape, although roughly spherical, was irregular and constantly changing. There was no doubt whatsoever in Vernor's mind that it knew they were there, and was waiting for them to get close enough for it to make its move. He was repelled at the thought of being sucked into the heart of the fantastically dense entity ahead of them. But surely the Virtual Field would protect them?

A terrible idea struck Vernor. Although the Virtual Field would prevent the nucleus from physically touching them, the spherical symmetry of the VFG field might produce a lens effect . . . a lens magnifying and focusing the fantastically powerful nuclear strong forces upon the interior of the scale-ship. Of
course
the VFG field was acting as a lens, otherwise the intensity of the quantum probability field would have been too weak to affect their brains . . . "Mick!" Vernor screamed. "We've got to stop!" He fumbled for the controls with thumb-fingered hands.

"Stay cool," Mick said reaching over Vernor's shoulder to turn down the power control. They stopped shrinking, and the nucleus stopped growing. It seemed to be hovering fifty yards from them, a balefully glowing eye as large as the scale-ship. There was some kind of tension growing in the back of Vernor's mind . . .

Suddenly Vernor's hand shot out and turned the VFG field up to full. The impulse to turn the power up had come from his brain . . . but what had put it there? The nucleus filled his mind as he clung to the controls, fending off Turner's efforts to turn the field back down.

The laboring VFG cones whined shrilly, and in seconds the scale-ship was a twentieth the size of the huge atomic nucleus looming ahead. The rumbling and the stench grew more intense, and suddenly a chain of sparks shot out from the nucleus and enveloped the scale-ship, inside and out.

Flames covered their bodies as Mick and Vernor watched the nucleus, now several hundred yards in diameter, pull them closer. A series of ghost particles bounced back and forth between the nucleus and the scale-ship—it was hard to say which were the ghosts and which was the scale-ship. A vortex formed and dug a hole in the protean surface of the nucleus. The scale-ship and its ghosts began to spin.

A twisted screaming—scream from each cell of whose? black noise, white flame, wet flesh rent—inside under where? screaming ever never-place, white skin burnt black, crushed taxi bleed—STOP! I me you?

Something shaking him. Was who? Screaming twisting black noise hush? "Vernor, can you see me?" You the was it? Black burn scream who. "VERNOR, come
on
!" Blacker spot talking scream. "ZZ-74, Vernor,
say
it. ZZ-74." See see heavenly door? Seize the empty floor?

"ZZ-74?" Vernor said. The charm worked. Vernor, he was Vernor Maxwell. And the other one? The blackness thinned out to reveal Mick Turner's stubbled face. "Are we all right, Mick?"

"Yeah, I think so," Turner said. "That rush kind of got on top of you. You should have been riding with it . . .
watching
the nucleus instead of thinking about it. It wasn't a lot worse than an overdose of Three-way. And the ship's O.K."

Vernor looked around . . . the only light seemed to be from the scale-ship's cabin lights. "Where's the nucleus?" he asked.

"We're inside it," Turner replied. "You've been foaming at the mouth for a half hour and we've been shrinking the whole time."

"What did it look like? In the nucleus."

Turner shrugged. "You tell me."

On closer inspection, the blackness outside proved not to be total. There were a number of semi-transparent squiggles and blips around them, each so slightly colored as to be almost invisible. "Those could be quarks," Vernor stated, trying to impose order on this incredible reality they had entered.

"
Some
kind of doo-dad," Turner replied. "I think I saw the protons and neutrons a level back."

"What were they doing?" Vernor asked.

"Kept kind of bumping and smearing against each other. Looked like a sex thing. Yin yang. One of 'em came after us as usual, but we out-shrank it. We hit some haze then, and that turned out to be a cloud of these jellyfish."

The squiggles writhed around them, slowly expanding as the scale-ship continued to shrink. They looked like phosphenes, the internally produced patterns you see when you press on your closed eyes. The largest and closest squiggle was pale white. "What do you say we have some food," Vernor suggested.

Mick threw him a tube of green. "I already ate." As Vernor began squeezing the Dreamfood into his mouth, Mick continued. "We should've brought more food, you know. There's only another two days' worth left. How soon do you think this Monad equals Universe change is coming up?"

Vernor finished his food before answering. "Well . . . possibly never. It could be that matter is like an infinitely branching tree, with each particle splitting into smaller particles, and so on forever. If it's like that we could shrink forever and never stop seeing new things." They had drifted inside the large, pale white squiggle. The squiggle seemed to be a cloud of small, shiny balls. Vernor opened the hatch door and threw out his flattened food tube. It had GREEN printed on both sides.

They watched the food tube drift away, growing in size as it distanced itself from the VFG field. It was slowly tumbling end over end. "Look at that," Mick exclaimed suddenly, "the writing is backwards." Sure enough, the writing on the tube was alternating between GREEN and

Sometimes the writing was one way, and sometimes the other, and sometimes the tube seemed to disappear completely.