The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [102]
Right. "Why the hell would this fucking Cone be aimed at Earth? We collapsed its wave function with all our telescopes and shit?"
He said, "Finger of God."
Right. "Paulie, let's you and me pretend you're really the atheist you always claimed to be. Why?"
"How fast did you say this thing was moving toward us?"
"Just a cunthair under the speed of light."
He said, "Nice talk, Scott. So. The point of the Cone is moving toward us at close to the speed of light. And then, a Planck-length further away, there's a ring of cone moving toward us at the same speed, but its 'light' is relativisti-cally lagged. Then the next ring, another Planck length..."
I tripped over a root and stumbled headlong, stopping myself against a sticky-sapped tree, pieces of scaly bark coming away on my hand. "So it's not a skinny cone, it's a fat cone?"
He nodded. "Or maybe a flat surface, warped away from us by..."
"What would make a flat wave-front, sweeping across the entire universe, putting out the stars?"
He snorted, stifling a giggle. "I dunno. A bad science fiction writer desperate for a plot?" There was a book we'd wanted to write, years and years ago, about a science fiction writer who got turned into God by mistake. Didn't get written because Paulie thought it was a stupid idea and wouldn't work on it with me. I said, "You know, if this thing has the slightest Riemannian curvature, it's wrapped around the sky, back behind the stars."
"That's stupid. Why would it have directionality then? Why do we see a Cone at all, in any particular part of the sky?"
"Heisenberg? Quantum oscillations?"
We walked on, silent for a while, then, as we were crossing the shaky green metal bridge of the creek, the one that was swept off its footings a while back, during hurricane Fran, he said, "So the point of the Cone gets here in eighteen years, and what? Suddenly a black dot appears in the sky, starts widening fast as the light-rings catch up to each other, stars start going out, and then the Sun-"
Funny to imagine that happening, storyworld become real at last, when I'm sixty-eight years old. If I live that long. "What the hell would happen if the Sun went out?"
"I'd have to think about it. I know Shovatsky was talking about infrared sources inside the Cone. Like the stars weren't going out, maybe being dimmed by some kind of electromagnetic damping."
"Brainwave'?" Like a story. A story full of stars and snow.
He said, "This has got to be some kind of elaborate joke. A game the scientists are playing with each other."
"And if it's not?"
He shrugged, "Eighteen years is a long time."
Time enough for us to die and miss the whole thing.
He bumped into my back when I stopped walking. "What?"
I said, "How far behind the oncoming wavefront of the light we're seeing now will the tip of the Cone lag?"
"What do you ... oh. Yeah. The Cone's going to run up behind its own light waves, moving at relativistic speed. It'll ...I don't ... um. It has to be a while. Otherwise it'd look like a point-source instead of a Cone. No, that's not right. There's no such thing as a point source of non-light. Hell. I'm surprised you didn't see something about that in the newsgroup. Shovatsky group must know."
I'd read fast, not really believing what I saw. "So, what? It'll be here next week? Next month? Next year?" Point source. Interesting. And if the Cone were moving at light-speed, it would've arrived without warning.
He scratched his chin, rooting among loose, wiry beard hair. "If we had some numbers, we could probably figure it out. If we're not too dumb." He stopped and looked away from me for a minute. "How the hell are we going to know if this is real or not?"
"Shovatsky was talking about calling some kind of press conference on Monday."
Next year? The world will end next year? The two of us were looking at each other, like a couple of goofy, lop-eared dogs.
Near as we could tell, sitting at a picnic table in the shady part of the park, using the calculator Paul had in his car, combing through both