Chapter 6 The Whale #4
“The tests were good,” he says.
“Oh,” Laurel whispers, inflating.
There are no scientists here: Southern is favored by military veterans and heavy-equipment operators, which must be why Eli chose it. Even so, they speak quietly.
“Do you remember the dark matter dilemma?” he asks.
“Of course. You were looking for WIMPs.”
“It was brutal: combing the data, searching for something that didn’t show itself, or didn’t exist. After the separation, I left the Tevatron.”
The separation, he said, not our, as though it had happened to someone else. Or perhaps it still felt too painful—too shameful—to address directly.
“I felt so much like a failure,” Eli said.
“I thought I might take a sabbatical or apply for jobs out of state. But first, I went back to the seed: the asymmetry between matter and antimatter. Every particle in the Standard Model comes in both left- and right-handed versions. Every one, that is, except neutrinos, which only spin to the left.”
Fuelies approach the dartboard. Eli lowers his voice.
“Neutrinos have always been a dark matter candidate,” he says, “just not a very good one. They interact with gravity—that’s good—and they pass straight through solid matter: good again.
But there are too few of them to account for more than a small portion of dark matter.
A right-handed neutrino, though, would have different properties.
It would have more mass, for one thing. More energy, too. ”
“Which is what ANITA thinks they might have found,” says Laurel. She thinks of her early conversation with Eli in the lounge. “But you didn’t believe them.”
“It felt so conjectural. And I remembered the WIMPs. I was afraid to bet big again and be wrong.”
“How do you feel now?”
A dart meets the center of the board with a rubbery thunk, and the fuelies celebrate. Eli shakes his head. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this.”
“Who would I tell?”
“It’s not about that. It’s about confidentiality. Ethics.”
Her first instinct is to ask: How can I not be someone you trust? Then she realizes that she might not want to hear the answer.
The OAE behind the bar brings Laurel’s espresso. When he leaves, Eli sighs, relenting.
“Before I came to McMurdo, I knew that ANITA had found high-energy neutrinos, but I didn’t have access to the data. When I got here, I learned that they’d detected a specific energy signature: 480 PeV.”
Laurel hasn’t thought of that number in years, but the scene comes back to her: Eli’s crowded notebook, her hands in his hair.
“I was still cautious,” he adds. “We ran additional flights. The data was consistent. Which means that this particle—the neutrinos they’ve found—could be dark matter. Pouring out of the anomaly, like sand from an hourglass.”
She sets her coffee down. “From somewhere like your antiuniverse.”
Eli’s mouth twitches. “That’s total speculation. But it would explain the source of these neutrinos: a partner universe, with inverted properties. Here, dark matter would be made of right-handed neutrinos. And the left-handed neutrinos we know would be dark matter there.”
In Laurel is the sense of a huge bird soaring. “And the Arc—?”
“Some kind of hole,” Eli says.
“A portal.” She breathes. “Don’t you think?”
“I couldn’t make that claim,” says Eli. “Not without more evidence.”
“But the place where it leads is leaking dark matter. An inverted universe makes sense.”
She says it like she’s sure. Eli looks taken aback, and Laurel feels embarrassed. Has she forgotten all her scientific training?
“You’re giving me way too much credit. There are plenty of other theories. Even if it is a portal, we have no idea where it leads.”
“It would lead to their Antarctica. Their Arc.”
Eli hesitates. “The chances are so slim.”
Laurel can’t tell whether he truly believes this.
Eli is both a dreamer and a realist. Maybe he’s changed; maybe her grasp of him is as outdated as their marriage.
But if he is still the Eli she knew, then two things are true.
He is too much of a dreamer not to wonder about the Arc—and too much of a realist to wonder without reason.
They look at each other, indulgent with hope, and for a moment, such alignment feels like love.
Then a drunken military contractor sloshes beer onto Laurel’s shoe, and Eli says, “Of course, now we’re talking science fiction. ”
But Laurel walks back to her room like a nun: alone, sober with mission, her purpose like an egg she must not break. Something ecstatic at the edges. Faith.
That night, she emerges in the spaceship of her dreams. As she watches, the edge of something appears in the central window.
In the past, this was how the dream ended, but now the edge continues to rise.
Soon it is a semicircle, like the Arc, and climbing taller still.
Laurel reaches down to feel her stomach, which is round as a globe, and the shape she feels is the shape she sees—for outside the ship is a circle, radiant, whole, and she wakes knowing what to tell Eli, what together they must do.