Back at Johnson, sixty people had been arguing. A quarter of them sported military uniforms, a few wore their NASA apparel with equal pride. The shouting had died after Colonel Dwight Disraeli demanded they employ cogent argument, or he’d clear the room and ask the cleaners in to make the strategic decisions. Of course they knew it was a bluff, but one that brought their bickering into perspective. Even so, the Army Chief of Staff, Gibbon, made the point that the increasing time shifts would probably end if the spheres didn’t exist.
Kallandra was losing faith in her presumed superiority in arguments. The bullish military had made a powerful case for destroying the spheres, but all she had were gut feelings to hold back.
Derek, sitting next to her in the awkwardly hushed meeting room, leaned to whisper in her right ear. “Aren’t you going to protest?”
She stood and waved her agenda at the Colonel, who nodded at her.
“I take your point,” she said, “that these time decoherences have only occurred since the phenomenon of the spheres, but it might be like saying let’s put out a fire by destroying a box of matches—or the person holding the matches, even though they might also have a hidden fire extinguisher.” She saw blank faces and some leaning to each other, no doubt whispering ‘mad woman’.
She continued. “I see I made no sense to some of you. OK, suppose the spheres have something to do with the timequakes. How do we know they can’t put it right? Maybe we were going to have them anyway, and they are here to correct the situation.”
“You are in cloud cuckoo-clock land, Major,” said Gibbon.
“Fair enough, they probably aren’t,” she admitted. “But my point is, nothing is known for certain about the function of the spheres. If time was running along continuously when the spheres were inside the Earth, maybe that was what they were doing—perhaps inadvertently. Now they are leaving, the Earth-Space–Time discontinuities are returning to a pre-sphere situation? We just don’t know. I cannot see how, by destroying the spheres, we resolve our situation. We might be making matters worse.”
“Major,” said Gibbon, “how could it be worse than, say, if a timequake happens at a nuclear power plant, or a nuke missile finds itself in the air without its plane over LA?”
“OK, that would be disastrous, but it hasn’t happened to that degree, yet. The presence of the spheres so close to Earth might be preventing Time from becoming completely chaotic.”
“Absolute rot,” said Gibbon, to murmured agreement around the room.
“We do have a physicist among us,” said Disraeli, looking at a woman in a mulberry red trouser suit in a corner. She had her head down thumbing her iPaq. To Kallandra she seemed oblivious to the turned faces. Many of those faces had wider eyes, probably wondering why they hadn’t noticed the Sophia Loren—in her younger days—look-alike.
“Doctor Gabriella Avana is a physicist from Milan University, currently on a sabbatical, working for NASA.”
Kallandra smiled at her in a vain effort to ease the poor woman’s discomfort as, on hearing her name, she looked up at the sea of faces.
Realising she hadn’t heard much of the debate, Colonel Disraeli said, “Doctor Avana, what is your take on the time dislocations, slippages or decoherences we’ve been experiencing? Are they caused by or minimised by the spheres?”
Smoothing down her jacket, the physicist stood. Her Italian accent embellished her impeccable English. “The wave function collapses we’ve experienced may have been caused by quantum decoherence, or it could be that leakage into the environment has occurred. Such leakage from the total superposition of the wave function obviously—”
“Excuse me, Doctor,” said Gibbon, “can you put this into English?”
“I’ll try. Basically, the decoherences you mention are theoretical occurrences that could happen, for example when the system’s wave function becomes entangled with the measuring device. Oh, sorry. In the scale of normal experiences on Earth we shouldn’t experience the kind of time distortions we are familiar with for objects near the event horizon of a black hole or the changing relative time associated with very fast space travel. The fact that some extraordinary decoherences are occurring is not inexplicable in theory. It’s just a matter of selecting which aspect of which quantum theory you want to choose.”
“So, are the spheres responsible?” said Gibbon.
“I doubt anyone can be sure, unless you go and ask them,” she said.
Gibbon laughed while Kallandra shouted, “Yes.”
“Doctor,” said Disraeli, “the spheres seem to be not only ignoring us but don’t appear to recognise we exist. But is it possible that the presence of the spheres stabilised time until they started leaving Earth.”
“I suppose if, in some way, the spheres absorbed time decoherences while in the Earth such that time seemed linear and continuous to us until they left…” Her voice drifted off while she tapped on her iPaq. But shook her head. “I can’t say. The spheres, if artificial, are far in advance of us. Who knows what they know—and can do?”
“It is possible, then, for these time problems to get worse?” asked Disraeli.
“I’m surprised it hasn’t been already, if their leaving is creating some disruptions in time on Earth,” she said. “For example, the Earth is orbiting the Sun at…um—”
“Thirty kilometres per second,” said Claude, to murmured agreement.
“Prego—I should have known this audience would know,” she said and looked pleased for the first time. “Imagine then if the time displaced affected the whole planet and instantly pushed time forward for a minute. Instead of merely shifting a few metres onto your lawn when you were attempting to put a key in your front door, you found yourself a hundred and seventy three kilometres above the ground, or into it.
“Luckily, the affected time decoherence regions seem to be very small, say the size of a person or half an airplane. But suppose the Earth’s core was displaced. We could suddenly see it as a fiery ball a thousand kilometres away.”
“So, we need time to be back on track as it always has been,” said Gibbon. “And I think blasting those darn spheres might well do that.”
All whispering stopped while everyone looked at Dr Avana and she looked steadily at him.
“Mi scusi. Suppose, Sir, time was chaotic on Earth before the spheres arrived, and they somehow absorbed the decoherences? Destroying would be catastrophic.”
“Hear hear,” called Kallandra, but Gibbon, as the army Chief of Staff persisted.
“Why would an alien race come to this little old planet and do us a favour by keeping time in order? What’s in it for them?”
“Sir, I am a theoretical physicist, not a treaty strategist, but I assume whatever they were doing was for their benefit with no thought of any future life forms on Earth. I would further assume that merely absorbing time decoherences to make time linear and continuous here wouldn’t be their aim.”
“Are you trying to tell us those spheres were collecting our time? Why would they do that? And now that they’re leaving, they are taking our time bits and pieces with them?”
“I can think of another reason why they might have had an interest in keeping time normal here,” said Claude. “Who and what needs time to be orderly? Life does.
So maybe the spheres have or, sadly, had a need to keep life, started billions of years ago, ticking.”
“You’re not saying they are God, or Angels, are you?” said Fran Hope, the New Earth Creationist.
“I’m not, but you might,” Claude said. “It’s just a hypothesis. After all, it is beginning to appear that, without the spheres, life would have not been sustainable on a planet with time zipping about everywhere or everywhen. Instead of thinking of the spheres as being God, we might consider what you’ve assumed was the Creator, was really the spheres all along.”
As Fran stormed out, muttering: “Heresy”, Colonel Disraeli addressed the gathering again.
“People, we need decisions, not religious arguments or theories about what quantum physics might be.”
“The decision can only be to continue attempting to communicate with the spheres without trying to destroy them,” said Kallandra.
“On the contrary,” said Gibbon, whose aide whispered in his ear as soon as sufficient quiet enabled him to be heard. “The decision can only be to take them out so our planet can return to normality. And if those bastards have stolen our time decoherences, or whatever they are, we’ll have them back,”
“This is ridiculous,” muttered Kallandra. “There must be a protocol for dealing with communications with aliens; first contact and all that. Did you come across any in training?”
Claude shook his head. “There probably isn’t a protocol or, if there is, it was thought up in the sixties and long forgotten.”
“I suggest a compromise,” said Gibbon to the Colonel. “Instead of destroying all the spheres, which, if they really were being used to stop time being fucked up, leaves the others to do that job. Destroying one will show them we mean business.”
“Or drive them away without ever looking back,” said Claude. “And if we weren’t at El Capitan yesterday, one might have been destroyed then. Let’s keep aggression out of it s’il vous plait.”
The Colonel held up a hand. “It’s a possible compromise. I’ll have to put it to my strategic panel and clear it with the Pentagon.”
Derek leant towards Kallandra. “Do you think the President will say no to a strike? You know people who know him.”
“He’s not my country’s President,” said Claude, “but Edsel Cabot will agree to whatever Gibbon says. A function of him being too young. I like him, clever, and our first black President, but overawed—or so I’ve been told.”
“I agree,” said Kallandra, “but at forty two he’s only a year younger than Kennedy was. Cabot was elected as a rejection of Bush, although there are clever people at the White House who’d—hello, what’s going on?”
Disraeli had rushed back into the noisy room clutching his iPaq. His normal ruddy complexion had paled.
“Quiet everyone. Apparently there’s been a pre-emptive strike on the Fiji sphere.”
A moment of shocked silence was chased by Claude shouting out, “Who by? Or need we ask?” he said, looking at Gibbon—as did everyone else.
“Hey,” said the Army Chief of Staff, hardly concealing his delight. “How was I to know some maverick commander decided to take direct action?”
“Gibbon,” said Colonel Disraeli, “I’m in charge of the Spheres Coordinating Group. If I find you had ordered a strike, there’ll be trouble.”
Kallandra stood. “Never mind the posturing, what happened exactly? Has the sphere been destroyed, damaged and—”
“Available for our engineers to investigate?” said Disraeli. “All I know is that three aircraft launched six missiles, resulting in a mix of EMP, fragment and nuclear detonations. After which, the sphere appeared to be vaporized. I have an image of the fireball.”
Kallandra whispered to Derek, “I don’t believe it’s gone. Let’s fetch up a live satellite image of the spot—they’re all being monitored. Can you send it to the big screen behind Disraeli?”
Claude leaned towards Kallandra. “I know we’ve seen spheres survive and, Mon Dieu, ignore being prodded by sticks and sensor rockets, but do you think they’d endure nukes?”
“Claude. I reckon they’re above anything we could do to them.”
While Derek left to play with the relevant buttons, Gibbon continued crowing about the strike, which was clearly at his instigation. “I hate to rub it in to those who wanted to leave those time-stealing bastards alone, but that will show them we have the balls to take them on.”
No one had the energy or words to combat him until the satellite image flickered on, bringing more gasps. The date and time were current and yet the sphere was clearly shining, in place and intact.
Gibbon, in shock, stuttered: “I don’t understand—”
“Nor do I,” said Disraeli. “I apologise if I’ve misled this meeting. Can we replay the last thirty minutes?”
Awkward moments ticked by until his hand went to his earpiece. “There seems to be a technical problem. No, there it is.” The screen showed fighters approaching the sphere, but then they reversed—the time signatures showing nonsense as the picture disintegrated into pixels.
“Colonel,” said Gibbon. “I’ve had a message from…I’ll give you exact details later, but the pilots now report they never took off, but all are unwell—headaches. The jets still have their ordnance, unused. I can’t explain it.”
“It’s obvious,” said Kallandra, glancing at Dr. Avano, who shrank into her seat at the back as if hoping her corner location would protect her.
“Quantum time decoherence has only been detected in the laboratory and at atomic scale. It now seems as if a maxi time decoherence has occurred, especially if we have evidence of the planes being synchronously in the air and on the ground.”
Kallandra addressed her and the meeting, “Dr. Avano, I know you’ll not be able to answer this comprehensively, but before our military antagonise the spheres further, would you say repeated bombardments of, say, all the spheres simultaneously, would only make things worse?”
“We’re not letting inexperienced joy-pilots like you dictate our strategy,” said Gibbon to Kallandra, and waving an arm around the meeting as if appealing for support, but getting little.
“Gabrielle?” said Kallandra, feeling a small victory, but worried at what might happen if Gibbon went for all-out-attack on the spheres.
The physicist stood but fidgeted with her iPaq, and then looked at her audience.
“If the spheres can control wave-functions to affect time—I mean, if what we’ve witnessed isn’t a coincidence brought about by the nature of their existence as opposed to deliberate action—then I feel we should be very cautious indeed.”
Kallandra was fed up with the young woman’s hesitancy. “Doctor, you mean it might be possible for them to change the scale of the time decoherence from a few seconds to take us back centuries?”
A gasp from the others in the room enabled Kallandra to note with satisfaction that more attacks on the spheres would be impossible if that thought simmered.
“I doubt it—the energy required—”
“But not impossible?” Disraeli asked her.
“Very little is impossible in theoretical physics, especially quantum mechanics.
We could all slip into another universe equivalent to a million years ago, or the future.
And then we could—”
“Thank you, Doctor Avano,” said Disraeli. “Gibbon, you’d better attend a meeting with me in twenty minutes. I want details.”