When Einstein Went Missing

When Einstein Went Missing


The sun, when you looked at it closely, was horrifying: a roiling swamp of gas, with boiling tides and deep, smouldering eddies. It filled the bridge of the Titanium Dragonfly with a malevolent ochre light. Alice could stare at it for hours.

A bleep from the console finally distracted her. She rubbed her eyes. There was a green flicker on the radar. She peered at it.

"There's something here," she said.

Grindleford, the only other inhabitant of the bridge, paid absolutely no attention to her. He continued to work at the console, his spidery hands scurrying over a keyboard.

"What are you doing?" said Alice.

Grindleford hit a final key and sat back. His hair floated weightlessly around him, a rat-tailed gorgon's head.

"I've programmed the computer to calculate how much energy it would take to flip the Titanium Dragonfly to a parallel universe," he said. "Quantum computers can do that kind of thing."

"What's the point of that?" asked Alice, fearing she already knew the answer.

"We might need to flip one day," said Grindleford. "What if spacetime suddenly disintegrates? Some people think it could happen. Then we'd have to do it."

Grindleford was convinced that the universe was going to end. Alice couldn't fault his logic. What infuriated her was the way he worried constantly about it, and the amount of time he devoted to devising escape routes.

"So how much energy would it take?" she asked.

Grindleford scratched his bony chin.

"Quite a lot," he said.

"Well, that's useful," said Alice. "Could you take a look at this now? There's something on the radar. It's about two hundred thousand klicks away. Seems to be approaching quite rapidly, in fact."

Grindleford slid his chair towards Alice. The chairs ran on rails around the inside of the circular console, allowing the crew, who were both strapped in to stop them from floating away, to access any of the instruments. The bridge was round; from the outside it was a blunt cylinder, perched on the shoulder of the Titanium Dragonfly's core module. Its inner walls were covered with dials and panels and bundled cables. There were eight alumino-silicate windows around its circumference, named after the points of the compass; that had perhaps been an attempt to bring a vestige of earthly familiarity to the alien environment of the Dragonfly. It was the north window which faced the sun. On either side of the core module the Dragonfly's solar arrays stretched into space like vast bat wings.

"It's probably just an undiscovered asteroid," Grindleford said. "Nothing very exciting, in the grand scheme of things."

"Let me get it on the screen, said Alice.

She tapped a series of commands into the console and a rocky sphere appeared on a screen. One half was a scorched, pitted rock face, gleaming like a flame in the searing light of the nearby sun. The other half was a ghost.

"That's no asteroid," said Alice. "It's too big. It's huge, in fact." She pointed to a side panel on the screen where there was a column of figures. "Radius of of nearly two thousand klicks. That's a planet. How could we not have known about this?"

"Close to the sun and hard to spot," said Grindleford.

"Even so," said Alice. "I can't believe there's no record of it. Computer, list all known rocky bodies in the solar system. Order by size."

A list flashed up on another screen. Alice peered at it.

"It's not listed," she said. "There's nothing this close to the sun."

Alice had been on board the Titanium Dragonfly for three weeks. She had asked for a break from the extreme cold of Triton. The Dragonfly was in a close solar orbit, at around two thirds of Mercury's distance from the sun. Its mission was to study the sun's surface and atmosphere. The inner solar system still yielded occasional surprises. But Alice hadn't been expecting a surprise as big as this.

"I should call Control," she said

She flicked a switch on the console and leaned towards a microphone on a thin stalk.

"Froggatt?" she said. "This is the Titanium Dragonfly. Do you read?"

"Is that you, Alice?" said a man's voice from the console. He sounded tense. "What do you want now?"

"Charming," said Alice. "I haven't spoken to you since yesterday."

"You called ten minutes ago."

"No, I didn't. You must be getting me mixed up with somebody else."

"Whatever. What can I do for you?"

"There's something here."

"If you mean that big, hot, yellow thing, that's the sun."

"No, there's something else. Like a planet."

"That's probably just Vulcan."

"Froggatt, this is not Star Trek."

"Wait a minute, Alice. There's some kind of glitch. I can see two of you."

"You always did drink too much."

"No, seriously, there are two signals. Wait a minute. I need to try to sort this out."

"Just reboot your system. That solves ninety-nine percent of all IT glitches."

"Hang on."

"Just switch it off and on again. You really don't need to be Einstein."

"I know.... Who's Einstein?"

"Einstein."

"Who the hell is that?"

"This is no time for practical jokes. I've got something on the screen and I don't know what it is."

"I've seriously got no idea who Einstein is."

"Albert Einstein. The physicist."

"Still no idea. You need to get out a bit more, Alice. Look, I need to reboot the system. I'll call you back."

There was a click and the speaker went dead.

"What's his problem?" said Alice. She looked back at the planet on the screen. "It's approaching very fast," she said. "It'll be here in less than an hour."

According to the Titanium Dragonfly's instruments the new planet was in a prograde orbit, like all the other planets in the solar system. It orbited in the same direction as the sun's rotation. The Dragonfly, for some reason which Alice couldn't recall, had been constructed in a retrograde orbit. So it and the new planet were approaching each other at a combined speed of several hundred thousand klicks per hour.

She swung her chair round and looked out of the bridge's east window. "There it is," she said, pointing.

Grindleford looked. They could see a tiny, brilliantly glinting shard hanging in the dark sky.

"We've discovered something," said Grindleford with a crooked smile.

"Maybe, " said Alice. "Although Froggatt seemed to know what it is."

She stared at the planet on the viewer screen.

"Wasn't there a hypothetical planet called Vulcan that was once thought to exist in the inner solar system?"

"I don't know. Was there?"

"I think there was. In the nineteenth century. Mercury was doing something it wasn't supposed to do. There was an unexplained wobble in its orbit. So somebody theorised this planet called Vulcan. The idea was that Vulcan's gravity was causing the wobble. There were supposed sightings of it all through the nineteenth century. Then Einstein published his theory of relativity, which explained Mercury's orbit, so there was no more need for Vulcan."

"I don't see what that's got to do with us," said Grindleford.

"Let's get some data on it," said Alice. She swept her fingers across the touch screen on the console. "Surface composition analysis, please."

Lines of data began to scroll across a screen.

"Iron, magnesium, sulphur," murmured Alice as she read. "It's a bit warm there. Seven hundred celcius on the sunny side."

She sighed and sat back and rested her forearms on the chair's armrests.

"What?" said Grindleford.

"This is impossible," she said. "What did you say you were doing with the station's computer just now?"

"Working out how much energy it would take to flip the Titanium Dragonfly to a parallel universe. Why?"

"What do you think the chances are of that actually happening?"

"Pretty small, I guess," said Grindleford. "Why?"

"Well.... there's this planet which Froggatt called Vulcan. And he said he didn't know who Einstein was. It's as if we've flipped to a universe where the nineteenth century Vulcan really exists. And because Vulcan exists, and Vulcan is causing the wobble in Mercury's orbit, there's no need for Einstein's theory of relativity in this universe. Or for Einstein himself."

"That couldn't really happen," said Grindleford. "Could it?"

"There's something else," said Alice. "Froggatt said he could see two of us. We thought it was a glitch. But maybe there really are two Dragonflies. This one. Ours. And the one that was already here, in this universe."

A long silence fell on the bridge of the Titanium Dragonfly.

"It was just a calculation to see how much energy it would take," said Grindleford finally. "I mean, I wasn't actually telling the Dragonfly to flip. We couldn't really have flipped, could we?"

"I know a way to find out," said Alice. "Computer, search 'Albert Einstein.'"

The familiar face, with its melancholy eyes and halo of wavy, white hair, appeared on a screen. Reams of biographical data scrolled underneath. Born: Ulm, Germany, 14 March 1879. Died: New Jersey, USA, 18 April 1955.

"See?" said Grindleford. "He's still there."

But before he had even finished speaking the screen flickered and then went blank, except for two words: Not found.

"Oh," said Grindleford.

"Let me try something else," said Alice. "Computer, list all known rocky bodies in the solar system. Order by size."

"You already did that," said Grindleford.

Alice ignored him. The list appeared on the sceen again. Alice leaned in and studied it. It was the same as before except for one difference: an entry which hadn't been there. It was eighth from the top of the list.

"Look," she said. "Vulcan is listed now."

Grindleford leaned forward, his lank hair coiling around his cadaverous face.

"It can't be," he whispered. "What's happening?"

"The Dragonfly is changing," said Alice. "It's adapting to this universe, where Vulcan exists but Einstein doesn't."

"That's not good," said Grindleford. "That's not good at all." He frowned. "What if the same thing happens to us? What if we forget about Einstein, and about everything else in our universe? What if we forget where we're from? I think I've changed my mind about flipping to parallel universes. It's not a good idea. We've got to get back. As fast as we can."

"No kidding," said Alice. "But how? You got us here. Maybe you could suggest something."

"We should call Control."

"And say what? 'Hi, we've just blundered in here from a parallel universe. Can you tell us how to get home, please?'"

Grindleford scratched his head and looked out of the east window. Vulcan was larger now. It was a distinct crescent and they could distinguish dark stains, like the moon's seas, on its surface.

"I think it's going to hit us if we don't move out of the way," he said.

The Titanium Dragonfly, of course, had no actual propulsion system. It had been constructed in orbit, right where it was meant to stay, and hadn't been designed to go anywhere else. It had nothing except a few tiny booster jets which were designed only to allow it to make changes to its orientation. It seemed very unlikely that it would be capable of moving fast enough to avoid a large and rapidly appoaching planet.

"How did we get here, Grindleford?" said Alice. "There's got to be a way back."

Grindleford frowned.

"It's got to be something to do with probabilities," he said. "If you calculate the probability of something happening it opens a gateway to that event on a quantum level. In a sense it actually calls that event into being. That must have been what happened when I calculated how much energy it would take to flip the Dragonfly to another universe."

"Alright," said Alice, "so we have to calculate how much energy it would take to flip us back to our own universe. Calculate the probability of going the other way. Reverse the procedure."

"That might work," said Grindleford. "The thing is, though, when I made my calculation I didn't specify any particular universe. I mean, I wasn't expecting us to actually go anywhere. So if we tried to repeat the calculation I wouldn't know how to specify our home universe. It's not as if it has a reference number. We might end up flipping to a completely different universe again. We could end up wandering endlessly through the multiverse, never finding our way home. We could be doomed."

"Let's try to stay positive," said Alice, "We've got to think of something. Fairly quickly. Vulcan's getting closer."

They both looked out of the east window. Vulcan was a tall half-circle now. Its day side was scarred and cratered. The possibility of a swift and violent death suddenly seemed very real to Alice.

"I read somewhere...." Grindleford began, before falling silent.

"What?" said Alice.

"I read somewhere that some kind of awareness of nearby universes is built into the architecture of each universe. It's a theory which has been used to explain paranormal phenomena. Ghosts, and so on. Most of the time, for humans, it's subliminal. But it's there."

"There might be something in that," said Alice. "When I mentioned Einstein to Froggatt just now he seemed to recognise the name at first. It was only later, when he thought about it, that he couldn't pin it down."

"Right, so there is some trace of our home universe here, in this universe, wherever that is. How do we point the Titanium Dragonfly in that direction?"

"We need to signpost it, somehow."

They both thought furiously. On the screen in front of them, Vulcan drew relentlessly closer.

"Einsten!" shouted Alice suddenly. Grindleford jumped.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Einstein is the key," said Alice. "Einstein exists in our universe. So we have to use the quantum computer to flip back to Einstein's universe."

"How do we do that?"

"We'd have to ask it to do something which assumes his existence. Something which couldn't happen without our knowledge of him. That will open the gateway."

"Okay. I see where you're going. But what exactly do we ask it to do?"

"E = mc2," said Alice. "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Einstein's most famous equation. That'll work. We ask the Dragonfly's computer to work out the rest energy of all the mass in every possible universe, using that equation. That assume's Einstein's existence. I mean, we wouldn't even be able to make the calculation if we didn't know who Einstein is. So that should point us in the right direction. Flip us back home."

"Brilliant!" said Grindleford. "Let's do it!"

They worked together, hunched over a keyboard. Grindleford typed. Alice talked. Together they programmed the station's computer. Vulcan raced towards them, filling the window with its sun-blasted surface. Ten minutes passed. A proximity warning began to flash on the console. Finally Alice sat back and breathed deeply.

"I think that should do it," she said. "Go for it."

Grindleford hit the return key. Nothing happened. Vulcan continued to approach.

"It might take a few moments," said Alice. "Its a pretty large calculation. Even for a quantum computer."

They could now distinguish fine detail on Vulcan's surface: mountains and ridges.

"It looks like Nevada," said Grindleford. "Have you ever been to Nevada?"

"Did we miss something out?" said Alice, bending towards the screen again. "We'd better check."

Together they scrolled through the lines of code which they'd just typed in, looking for a missing number or symbol.

"I can't see anything missing," said Alice. "Can you? There's got to be something. We might have - oh. It's gone."

The viewer screen was empty. Vulcan had vanished. There was only empty space.

Alice flicked the comms switch and leaned towards the microphone.

"Froggatt? Are you there?"

"I'm here," said Froggatt. "How are you guys doing?"

"We're great," said Alice. "Do you know who Einstein is?"

"What?"

"Do you know who Einstein is?"

"Alice, we're kind of busy here. Don't mess me about."

"Please just tell me if you know who Einstein is!"

"Of course I know who Einstein is! The theory of relativity. Crazy hair. What's your point?"

"Nothing. I'll call you later."

She flipped the comms switch to off and sat back.

"We're home," she said.