//------------------------------// // Chapter 24: Going Back to Trinity // Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Chapter 24: Going Back to Trinity The trio found themselves back on the surface of the Sun, utterly exhausted. Gnosi tried to bring them into Meridiem’s inner sanctum, but found he lacked the strength to do it. “Let’s…let’s just rest a bit here,” Meridiem said, lowering herself down to the “ground” of their little bubble. Gus and Gnosi also sat down, and waited to get better. And waited…and waited. “It’s no use,” Gus said after several minutes. “Why are we even tired?” Meridiem said with as much annoyance as she could muster in her weakened state. “We’re not even in our bodies when time is stopped.” “But we’re still tied to our brains, and those have taken a…a lot of radiation damage,” said Gnosi. Meridiem’s body started slowly swaying. “I…I don’t think I can keep this up. It’s like there’s this big red thing pressing down on my fore…head.” She closed her eyes and began falling over. In desperation, Gnosi reached out and grabbed her, his eyes closed with concentration. Two seconds later, he collapsed. Meridiem opened her eyes and sat back up. “Thanks, Gnosi, I feel much better now. Gnosi? Gnosi!” She shook his body, attempting to wake him up, but in vain. “Professor, I can’t wake up Gnosi!” Gus willed his eyes to go back in focus to look at the pair. “Well, if he’s unconscious, you’d have to start time back up so he can recover, same as with Father Delver on the plane.” “But I can’t start time anywhere! What do we do?” Gus took hold of Gnosi’s limp hand and reached out for Meridium’s. “We go to where this whole business started,” he told her. 5:29:21 am on July 16th, 1945. Trinity, New Mexico. A metal shack, twelve feet by twelve feet by six feet (3.6 m x 3.6 m x 1.8 m), rested on the top of a hundred-foot (30.5 m) tall scaffold. Its oak floor was littered with discarded bits of rope, pulleys and other hardware, and a paperback book, propped against a corner. A dark light bulb hung from the ceiling. The only exit was a door in one wall. In the middle of the floor rested a five-foot (1.5-m) diameter sphere. Its surface was studded with bolts and crossed with electrical cables, all converging in a boxlike enclosure nearby. Sitting cross-legged next to the sphere was a tall young woman wrapped in blankets, her eyes closed and her hands resting on the sphere. Her skin was a slightly pinkish white, and her long hair the colors of pale cerulean, turquoise, cobalt and heliotrope. Despite the scene being frozen in time, she and especially her hair almost seemed to be moving. The sphere had already ruptured on the side opposite the young woman, letting out blinding light in a pattern that resembled raindrops glistening in the sunlight. And then three people materialized out of nowhere and fell right on top of her. For the briefest instant, time started and stopped. This caused the skin of the metal sphere to unwrap itself like a Christmas orange, filling half of the room with light. The white skinned woman looked around her in shock. She stared at the half-exploded bomb, at the red light that bathed the room, and at her fingers as she experimentally wiggled them. Then she turned on the three interlopers in a rage. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Hello, Crystal,” Gus said in a small and nervous voice. “Long time, no see.” The young woman, Crystal, finally noticed the poor physical condition of the visitors. “Oh!” she exclaimed. With a wave of her hand, a crystalline wall appeared, dividing the exploding half of the room from the intact half. She frowned at how much light was still visible through the translucent barrier, and it obediently darkened enough for everyone to see clearly. She then rose out of her blankets. The woman was wearing a simple white tunic dress tied with a sky-blue sash, trimmed with eagle feathers dyed in red and white stripes. Another sash, longer and wider, was draped over one shoulder, decorated in a complex pattern of vertical and horizontal stripes and stepped mountain figures, colored red, white, black and green. A golden pendant depicting her sun mark hung around her neck. She helped Gus to his feet, looking him over in wonder. “Mr. Guiseman?” she asked. “Are you looking for your son?” Gus laughed. “I suppose I do look an awful lot like my father right now, but no, it’s me, and I always told you to call me ‘Gus’.” He took a deep breath to prepare himself for his pitch; one that he had little confidence would work. “I come from—” “The future, obviously,” Crystal interrupted. “And you have this Markist here to help you travel through time.” She pointed at the hourglass applique pattern on Meridiem’s shirt. “And your friend…!” Meridiem remained on the ground, her arms around Gnosi. “We can’t wake him,” she explained. “I wish I could do something,” Crystal said sadly. “But my powers don’t extend to biology. It’s just too complex for me.” “I know what you mean,” Meridiem replied. “I don’t know what I’d do without Professor Guiseman helping me with the concepts.” “So he finally became a professor, huh?” Crystal asked with a smile. Gus decided that Meridiem might have a better chance to convince Crystal to abandon her planned suicide better than he could, so he made the few steps he could away from them as best he could with his damaged hip. Before him was the wall of the shack, where an army blanket had been nailed over an open window. He pushed it out of the way. Outside, he could see miles of barren desert stretching to the horizon, gray and still in readiness for the dawn. Black roads radiated outward from this spot like the hands of a great clock. Alongside one of the roads was a frozen blue and red dot with a dust trail behind it—the ubiquitous roadrunner bird. Even after all these decades, he knew this location so well. He remembered seeing the scaffold being built, the whole business with…ah, there it was. “Jumbo”, a steel jug 25 feet long and 10 feet in diameter (7.5 m x 3 m) with walls 14 inches (35 cm) thick, suspended inside a tower 800 yards (732 m) away. It had been commissioned during a moment of weakness, when it was thought that the TNT part of the test would succeed but the atomic part would not, leading to radioactive (and hard to produce) plutonium being blasted all over the place. So some genius thought to put the entire bomb inside a container strong enough to contain the explosion. It cost $12 million dollars to build, weighed 214 tons (194 t), and brought rail traffic to a halt when it was transported from Ohio to Trinity. By the time it had arrived, Gus and Crystal had already proven that a successful test would have obliterated the shell if it had actually been used, causing far more damage than the naked bomb. Gus remembered finding Jumbo after the explosion, completely intact and nearly a mile away. He thought about having Crystal hide inside it to survive the explosion, but then realized the shock waves would probably still smash her bones to powder. Thoughts of the past turned his eyes north, in the direction of Albuquerque. He was so close…100 miles and exactly one month earlier, his precious Arline was still alive. In his tear-filled eyes he could see his dying wife plain as day, lying in her army bed at the sanitarium, in his arms. To the last, she was only interested in his happiness, in how he would handle her death. He felt a hand rest on his shoulder. “Gus, why are you here?” He looked around to see Crystal staring at him. “I might ask you the same thing.” He sighed. “It isn’t me, is it?” Crystal laughed. “Oh, Gus. You still think you’re the center of the universe.” Her smile disappeared. “I’ll admit I had a crush on you, until that day I followed you to Albuquerque and saw you with your wife. I knew then that I didn’t have a chance. No, I’m here to make up for my mistake.” “What mistake?” asked Gus. “1.8574583621,” Crystal recited. “The thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction. The first equation we ever worked out together. I faked it.” “You…faked it? What does that even mean?” Crystal waved a hand, and the red in the room shifted to white. “No!” Meridiem cried out in terror. “Don’t worry,” Crystal told her soothingly. “Time is still stopped. I was just getting tired of the tint.” “Your power!” Gus exclaimed. “Your special ability as a Celestia!” Crystal shrugged. “I’ve always been able to do this. Nobody explained it to me. Basically, if I can write it out as an equation, I can manipulate it with my mind. I stopped time for the first time when I was ten. I never came up with a workable formula for time travel though, so congratulations on that.” “So the thermal opacity ratio?” prompted Gus. Crystal sighed. “All those formulas from the last decade were right. A successful atomic explosion would have ignited the atmosphere and wiped out all life on earth. If I did nothing and let you discover the correct ratio, the Manhattan Project would have been abandoned. “But we were at war! I may have been safe with my tribe, isolated both from world events and from the prejudice of my fellow Americans, but I couldn’t ignore the stories you and the other scientists told of what was happening in Europe, of gathering armies, of total war…of the concentration camps… I couldn’t allow that to continue. A single bomb, capable of wiping out a city…the death toll would be horrific, but nothing compared to a world where the Axis powers won the war. So I changed the ratio. Every time we did a test, I changed the ratio, and the test worked. “And then we visited Oak Ridge.” She turned to face Meridiem, who was taking this story in with rapt attention. “Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was where the pure uranium was being prepared for us. Gus found all kinds of safety violations. I found a plant on the edge of destroying the world. Because if they had an accident that led to criticality, that would have been an explosion I wouldn’t have known to fix. And that explosion would have ended all life on the planet.” “Well technically speaking, atmospheric ignition only would have taken out all land-based life,” Gus said. “Most life in the sea would have survived.” Crystal shook her head incredulously. “When did you get so morbid?” She didn’t wait to hear an answer. “I knew then that to save humanity from my mistake, I had to set the ratio permanently. And I didn’t know how. “The answer finally came to me in a dream, delivered by a sorrowful white horse with my hair colors: If I died while setting the ratio, then and only then would it stick. I can’t explain to you why, but I just knew that the dream was truth. So that’s why I’m here. I haven’t done anything else of worth in my life, and I can’t really see myself doing anything. The only ability I had that I could tell anyone about had been replaced by machines. And outside the Hopi, women are second-class citizens.” Gus looked discerningly at her for a minute. “You should have told me,” he said finally. “Between us, I’m sure we would have come up with something. Just like I’m going to do right now.” His eyes roved about until he found a broken chalkboard. He propped it up, grabbed a piece of chalk, and started writing. “What you effectively want is something like a Euclidean postulate, the mathematical version of ‘God said this, so it has to be so.’ The easiest way I can think of to do that is to modify the conditions present at the time of the Big Bang—” “The what?” asked Crystal. “Right, it only got that name in ’49. You’d think of it as Lemaître’s Primeval Atom Theory.” “That theory’s true?” “Almost certainly. All fundamental constants crystallized out of chaos in the first millisecond after the ‘primeval atom’ exploded.” He wrote a bunch more equations on the board then began explaining what the terms meant. Crystal’s face lit up. “That is true!” she exclaimed. “Or nearly enough.” She stepped forward to tweak the formula Gus had written. “I can tell when a formula accurately describes reality or not,” she explained. She wrote a final formula underneath. “And if I implement this change, the ratio becomes permanent, without any further input from me.” She put her hands to her temples and stared intently at the formula. Gus suddenly stepped in her way. “Not just yet!” he exclaimed. “There’s still the small matter of why we’re here.” “That sounds pretty simple,” Meridiem said, gently resting Gnosi’s body on the ground and rising to her feet. “We give Crystal here the evidence she needs to prevent our deaths in 1985, as well as that photograph to save Kimiko, and then she can use her own time stopping power to get away from the explosion.” Crystal looked down at her feet. “Yeah, there’s a jeep down there that I could use to drive all the way home, with no one the wiser. I could ask Father Tailor for help.” “That’s not what I meant,” said Gus, gesturing at Crystal’s equation. “We can do more than set up the status quo. Why don’t we end the Cold War, right here and now?” “A ‘cold’ war?” asked Crystal. Before either of the other two had a chance to explain, she started working it out for herself. “Like the confrontation between the British and Russian empires in the last century, as described in the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling. A standoff where the first overt act of war would overwhelm the entire world. Only in this case, between the United States and…the Soviet Union. Everyone knows that there’s a Soviet spy at Los Alamos—the authorities think it’s you, Gus. Because of all of your trips to Albuquerque.” “Actually, it turned out to be Fuchs, my driver.” “Makes sense. And if both sides have bombs, and both sides pursue their respective ideologies regardless of the consequence…a cold war of that magnitude could end just as badly as atmospheric ignition! What do we do?” “We do this,” Gus said, as he made extensive changes to Crystal’s formula. Crystal looked it over for a few seconds. “That inversely ties the ratio to the amount of radiation in the atmosphere. So that every bomb that anybody sets off, whether for war or for testing, radically reduces the yields of all subsequent explosions—” “So by 1985, all atomic weapons are effectively useless.” “What about the sun?” asked an incredulous Meridiem. “Isn’t it powered by one continuous atomic explosion?” “This is only affecting fission, the splitting of heavy atoms,” Gus explained. “The process of fusion, which powers both the hydrogen bomb and the sun, is unaffected. But on Earth, the only way to set off a hydrogen bomb is to use a fission bomb first. By hobbling fission, we stop all man-made atomic or nuclear weapons.” “What about peaceful uses of atomic energy?” asked Meridiem. “Are we just going to give up on that? What about nuclear-powered submarines? Or the unmanned probes we sent out to explore the solar system?” “We’re going to do that?” Crystal asked in awe. “Alright, so we need a containment function,” Gus said, examining his work. He erased the top half of the board. “So how about something like this? It would make it so the reaction shuts down if it goes critical.” “I don’t see how that would work,” Crystal said. “You’d need to make atmospheric radiation levels have an instantaneous effect on shielded uranium or plutonium. How do you propose to do that?” “Sum Over Histories?” Meridiem suggested. “Sum Over Histories,” Gus said with a smile. He twirled the chalk between his fingers before writing once more. & & & Gus and Meridiem stood at the top of the tower, watching as Crystal made her way down the ladder. Meridiem tucked the paperback book she found into Gnosi’s backpack. “More souvenirs,” she said by way of explanation. “More like time travel turns people into kleptomaniacs,” Gus countered with a grin. “I forgot to ask: did any of what we just did work?” “Yes,” said Meridiem. “I felt the tug of altered history pulling us ever since you wrote your first equation on that board. So what’s going to happen to Crystal?” “Look.” As they watched, Crystal reached the ground. Her first act was to take off the class ring she was wearing and toss it straight up. The tiny object flew in a curved arc until it ended up balanced right on top of “Jumbo”. “I knew I should have asked her to join the Los Alamos baseball team. Anyway, that was to trick me into thinking she died when I searched this area in September of ‘45. In reality, she and her priest will be leaving the country, probably to Brazil.” “Does she have to leave?” asked Meridiem. “We thought it best. There was too much evidence that she was at Trinity, so that would have raised too many questions. It was her idea, actually.” “I don’t care what she said about being unable to affect biology. I’m convinced she cured both of us—how else would you be able to do so well with those equations?” Gus smiled sadly at her. “That is the result of an entirely different form of magic: the one known as Hope. So don’t be mistaken: there will be a price to pay for saving the world.” Re-entering the shack, he settled himself down next to Gnosi’s unconscious body. Looking over at the bomb, he reached out his hand to pat it lightly. “Goodbye, old friend,” he whispered. Meridiem took a good look around her. “Yeah, I think I’m ready to go back to the new 1985,” she said to no one in particular. She grabbed hands with her two companions and in a flash, they both disappeared. The crystalline barrier that was dividing the room in half remained intact. & & & A hundred feet below them, Crystal started the jeep and drove for the gates. She then slowed to a halt next to the time-frozen roadrunner. Getting out of the jeep, she picked the animal up, dropped it into the back of her vehicle, and climbed back in and drove westward. “I’m gonna call you Meep!” & & & An immeasurable number of seconds later, time started back up, and the Trinity tower was obliterated. Jumbo was launched into the sky, and a shining ring of silver-plated steel tried to twist itself into an infinity symbol, but at the last moment the end broke open, forming the shape of the Greek letter alpha: the symbol of new beginnings.