EDGE (51 page)

“I see. Actually, I still have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, but I kind of see. Whatever. There’s multiple universes, and these wormholes link them. How does this relate to the phase transition?”

“If Washington has included Jack Thorne on their list it can only mean one thing. They’re looking for wormholes. His belief is that a side effect of a phase transition is the simultaneous emergence of wormholes in the fabric of space. Think of wormholes as bubbles that appear when a phase transition in water causes it to boil and turn to its gaseous state. Any organisms in the water will be carried upwards, taken with the water as it makes the transition. Don’t picture these wormholes as tunnels. They’re more like bubbles that resemble black holes.” Isogai raised his finger at the end.

“Okay, and?”

“Washington must have accepted that there’s nothing they can do to stop the phase transition. We’re essentially helpless to stop our universe from undergoing the change. The only course of action left, a last desperate attempt to do something, would be to try and escape. To abandon our universe in search of another.”

“You’re saying that they’re trying to find these wormholes?”

“Exactly. There’s no other way to survive this.”

Hashiba felt that he finally understood the glimmer of hope he had seen in the two men’s eyes when he had first entered the room. “Where will the wormholes open?”

“Only in a few locations. A few, very specific locations.”

“And you think that Washington knows these locations?”

“Washington?” Isogai laughed. “I’d say they have no idea.”

“And you know this and they don’t because …?”

“Because,” Isogai smiled, “they haven’t got an expert on mysterious cases of people gone missing.” He repeated the sentence in English to Chris, who laughed, weakly.

Hashiba and Kato exchanged glances, the humor lost on them. Hashiba felt a surge of blood rush to his head; he was finding it hard to concentrate. Isogai was waiting for a reaction but none came.

“Come on, don’t you see?” he exclaimed impatiently. “We’ve been
standing right next to the pot of gold without even seeing it! Right now, we’re probably the only people in the whole world able to guess exactly where the wormholes will appear.”

Hashiba’s confusion began to clear away, replaced by the beginnings of understanding. He felt momentarily overwhelmed, unable to speak. He clasped his hands in a ball, and his knuckles whitened as his body began to release the nervous tension that had been building up inside him.

“You’ve been following these mysterious disappearances. And where did they go missing? Near tectonic plates, near local magnetic disturbances—all the factors you’ve racked up and linked together.” Isogai rolled up the papers and slapped them against the edge of the table.

“They were all sucked into wormholes? Is that what you’re saying?”

Isogai nodded excitedly. “Although not sucked into, to be precise. More like carried through, into another universe. It’s obvious now. When you tapped me to work as scientific advisor for your program, I read the information you provided and was pretty much in agreement about the combination of physical factors that had resulted in the disappearances. One thing didn’t gel, however. Why was it that only people vanished? The Fujimuras’ house, the convenience store, nothing vanished apart from humans, right? Everything else remained: the building itself, the stock …

“It’s as though something is targeting people and people alone, but even if that’s the case, it still doesn’t make sense. If whatever force at work does somehow only target people, then what happens to their clothing? Surely their clothes would be left behind? If you could differentiate between animate and inanimate objects, then surely it wouldn’t be difficult to work out the difference between person and clothing. So you would expect clothes, watches, anything the people had been wearing to be left behind. But that didn’t happen. Take the people that went missing here in Atami. As tourists they’d have had bags, and phones, but there’s no sign of them.”

“You’re right.” Hashiba had visited the site almost directly after the disappearances and had seen for himself that there were no traces of any personal items being left behind.

“At first I couldn’t get past the apparent contradiction. If some distortion in space had appeared, then why was it that nothing else disappeared along with the people and their belongings? It didn’t make any sense. However, if you postulate that the distortion was a wormhole, then the contradiction is resolved nicely. Why? Let’s say that a wormhole, a gateway to another universe, appeared in front of you. Perhaps whatever
you saw on the other side was so appealing, so tempting, that you couldn’t help but want to cross the threshold of your own free will.”

Hashiba didn’t share the conviction. “A gateway to another world? Why on earth would something like that look appealing?”

“People who’ve gone through near-death experiences are almost unanimous in claiming that the world they saw was one of beauty—so much so, in fact, that it was hard to resist. These people must have been so enchanted by whatever it was they saw on the other side of the wormhole that they felt compelled to cross over. What other reason could they have for going through? They all chose to cross the event horizon. That’s the best way to think of this.”

If what Isogai said was true, it did seem to solve some of the mystery behind the disappearances. Hashiba thought of the geography of the herb gardens, of the many small paths that crisscrossed through the place to that single area in the middle of the park. No matter which route you took, you had to pass through that one point. That must have been where the wormhole appeared. Suddenly, the mystery of how so many people could vanish together seemed clearer. It wouldn’t have mattered if there’d been as many as a few hundred people walking down the paths that day; even a thousand would all have found the wormhole and walked through. Perhaps, if it was as Isogai suggested, there had even been a mad dash like ants leaping into a hole for the promise of honey.

Chris whispered something into Isogai’s ear.

“You’re sure?”

Chris kept nodding in reply to Isogai’s question.

“What’s happened?”

“It looks like we hit the bull’s eye. No question about it now. The President is on board Air Force One, heading to Bermuda as we speak.”

The Bermuda Triangle
. Hashiba knew the area was famous for the many strange disappearances of planes and boats.

“So you understand what I mean when I say time is of the essence, Hashiba. We can’t waste any more time sitting here talking.”

“You want us to go back to the gardens?”

“Of course.”

“Hold on.” It was Kato. Until now he had just stood, listening in silence. “This wormhole thing is like a black hole, right? Is it safe to go through?”

Kato was thinking of what Isogai had said earlier about bubbles in boiling water. Hashiba understood his fear. Black holes were known for
having immense gravitational pulls, the forces inside powerful enough to crush light itself. The idea of going into one was terrifying. Sucked into the darkness, what guarantee was there that they wouldn’t be crushed flat?

“I can’t guarantee anything. There’s no way of knowing what danger this poses for us. And we’re not exactly going to get a testimony from anyone that’s done this before.”

“But surely as a physicist, you could at least …”

Isogai cut Kato off mid-sentence by holding up a hand. “What I’ve told you so far is nothing more than a hypothesis that seems to hold up to the evidence at hand. There’s no such thing as perfect science. All I can say for sure is that if we continue to stand here and debate this, we’ll die. On the other hand, a chance for survival has presented itself. I’ll leave you to decide among yourselves. Chris and I have already chosen where to place our bets.”

Hashiba was torn about what to do. “If a wormhole is going to open here in the park, then one should also open at the house in Takato, right?”

“Takato? Yes, it would.”

Hashiba was in line with Isogai; they had to take whatever chances they had left. The problem was Saeko. She was at the Fujimuras’ in Takato, but a wormhole was likely to open there too. He could try to make it there by car but there was no guarantee that he would make it in time. Moreover, he could only allow himself to go to Saeko if he was sure that the world was really about to end. If there was any chance that they might survive, however slight, he knew he had to opt for his family, his wife and child, as a matter of course. He had to call them to Atami, so why was he even hesitating? He finally felt the force of desire that had built up within him begin to subside.

Would he be able to make his wife understand the situation? First thing, he’d call Saeko and tell her. Then he’d call his wife and explain everything he knew, taking as much time as necessary. Just as he was about to make the call, he thought of one more thing he wanted to check with Isogai.

“I don’t care if you make a blind guess at this point, I just need to know. What do you think this other universe will be like? Could it be a place where we could survive?”

Isogai answered without pause for thought, as though he had already considered the same question himself. “I think it’s likely to be sometime in the past. That’s my gut feeling.”

“You mean it could take us back in time?”

“Don’t picture the kind of situation from a sci-fi novel or movie where you travel into the past on a time machine. We’ve been saying ‘wormhole’ for the sake of convenience, but it’s not like going back to the past through a tube-shaped tunnel. How should I say … Yes, it’s like a journey beyond dimensions.”

“A journey beyond dimensions …”

“Putting aside the axis of time, we humans grasp space in three dimensions. Everyone knows by now that Earth is spherical, after it was gazed upon from our moon 380,000 kilometers away. But before the Age of Exploration, not one person was able to understand the fact experientially. For humans whose realm of activity was limited, the world could only be grasped as a circular, two-dimensional plane that was believed to have an end where the sea cascaded like a waterfall.

“We can’t get a clear view of the horizon due to the bumps and indentations on our planet, but let us say there exists a smooth sphere on which we are inhabitants.”

Isogai paused, and Hashiba exercised his imagination and pictured standing on such a sphere and looking around. The world was a slightly curved disc shaped by the horizon.

Seeing that Hashiba had a mental image, Isogai continued, “One day, you decide to measure how large your world is. Securing one end of an infinitely long rope on the ground, you take the other end and head off toward the horizon. What happens? The farther you advance, the farther the horizon seems to flee. As you try to measure the distance, the end of the world stays ahead of you and the rope keeps extending. If you were walking at first but are running now, then the horizon escapes you only that much faster.

“But note that if you keep going in the same direction, you’ll eventually make a trip around the globe and end up where you started. Standing there, you’ll feel that you’ve seen the place before and perhaps feel nostalgic. Now, let’s say someone had seen you off at your starting point. How would your actions have appeared to him? He gazed at your back as it grew smaller and smaller toward the horizon. You kept on walking and dropped off the horizon, disappearing for a while. From the viewer’s perspective, you vanished from the world. He was surprised, but not as much as when you approached from his back while he waited there for the missing person.

“For someone who mistakes a three-dimensional sphere for a two-dimensional
plane, the world can proffer a phenomenon as strange as that. The same goes for the universe. Let’s say you wanted to measure how large the universe is and boarded a faster-than-light spaceship and headed for the end of the world. Can you picture what would happen?”

Hashiba had imagined himself taking such a journey. Beyond the end, outside of the universe, there was darkness, emptiness … Or was there even any boundary that separated an inside and an outside?

“The same thing happens,” Isogai instructed.

“The same thing?” Hashiba tried to picture himself returning to the same location after heading out to the end of the universe, but he found it difficult.

“Almost without a doubt, we exist on the surface of a multi-dimensional structure. We don’t know if there are five, or ten, but since we’re on the surface and our movement is limited, our spatial recognition is truncated at three. For someone who is affected by the structure without realizing it, the universe would seem to be expanding. If the observation speed and range increased, the rate of expansion at the margins would also appear to increase. The notion of dark energy is just an attempt to tie up loose ends; no such thing exists.

“If you went on a journey beyond dimensions to the end of the universe, just as that horizon would recede, all that would ever present itself is a world with a more than ten billion light-year radius. If you keep your bearing, then just like the traveler on the sphere you’ll return to the same point. If your constraints are somehow removed by passing through a gap in the multi-dimensional structure or a space-time bubble, your journey back to the starting point could be instantaneous. But in that case, there could be a shift. The addition of a temporal axis to the multi-dimensional structure gives it a limitless complexity that we can’t imagine in concrete terms. Time would probably shift.”

“That’s why we’d end up in the past?”

“Yes, the past. From the tip of time where we stand, the future is uncertain and undecided. The past can be described in words, not so with the future. The past, it is.”

“But traveling back into the past and affecting history would change the present …” Even Hashiba was aware of time-travel paradoxes.

“So what if it did? The sort of paradox where killing your grandfather fifty years ago leads to your extinction today is predicated on there being only one universe. When we go through the wormhole, we’ll probably go to a past world, but for that world, the future is unknown and not tied to a
preceding historical path and can be cut out anew.”