Gregory Benford by Cosm

Author:Cosm [Cosm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

A KING

OF INFINITE SPACE

I could be bounded in a nutshell,

and count myself a king of infinite space,

were it not that I have bad dreams,

HAMLET

· I Moving the Cosm to the observatory seemed simple but took over four weeks in all. Alicia told Jill it was like swimming through mud, except that mud might help get rid of wrinkles; paperwork added them.

Bureaucratic measures sopped up a week all on their own. Safety wanted lots of time-consuming measures, of course. There were plenty of electronic diagnostic devices to pack up and redeploy in the more crowded floor of the observatory, with all their cables and cases.

Then came the moment when a crane lifted the U-magnet and Alicia held her breath as the Cosm seemed to wobble for just a moment in its magnetic trap. But then the crane whined away and took the massive assembly out to the loading dock and onto the back of a special UCI flatbed truck. The transfer took a whole day in which she did not eat or take phone calls or do anything except nervously triple-check every detail. When the U-magnet finally sat in its niche, surrounded by a cohort of electronic diagnostics like a fat king at court, she collapsed. Jill and Max took her out to dinner and they all went a bit giddy together.

She and Jill fell into reminiscence, regaling Max with tales of long-dead fashions; sitcoms whose characters they still remembered by name and felt that they knew better than their own classmates; ludicrous haircuts they had tried and then hoped would grow out over a weekend; dweebs who chewed tobacco or bubble gum; girls who slept around and got pregnant and then suddenly became sanctimonious about abortion; strapless gowns that gouged them unmercifully; Helen, who affected a walk with her nose in the air and paid for it GRE 3ORY BENFORD ·

by falling into a swimming pool at a big party; pulling all-nighters and wasting most of it going out for food and giggling from sheer fatigue. All these elements seemed in retrospect soft and warm and far funnier than they could possibly have been.

Max bore up under it well, throwing in some of his own. Yet beneath it all they knew that these weeks had been a hiatus; she and Max were saying goodbye to the UCI-imposed pause in their work. If they were right and the Cosm was some kind of window, then there would be so much more to see in the coming weeks, with no time to relax.

She did her best on her Physics 3-B lecture the next morning and then faced the day. Her office displayed the disarray that was almost a style, Basic Working Scientist: all horizontal surfaces were fair game for conversion to informal filing space, using the classic fossil-bed ordering, and no matter how computerized, there was always too much paper. She had not opened her mail for weeks, much less answered it. Still, the embossed Brookhaven National Laboratory stationery got her attention.

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