Heartlight (4 page)

“That’s all right. I should never have kept it anyway. Couldn’t throw it away for some reason. But the last laugh is going to be mine.”

“I still don’t understand why they’d treat you that way. Why do they hate you so much?”

“They don’t hate me. They’re just frightened.”

“What’s so frightening about traveling faster than light?”

Grandfather laughed. “What’s so frightening? Nothing at all, except that it could alter the whole way we think about the universe! It could destroy hundreds of old theories and build new bridges between relativity and quantum mechanics that now seem impossible.”

“I still don’t think they should have treated you like that,” objected Kate. “If you ask me, the Royal Society is a bunch of royal jerks!”

“Old Ratchet would have agreed with you,” replied Grandfather. “He used to fondly call them ‘brain-dead Neanderthals.’“ He turned to a dusty photograph on the wall of a thin, hairless man in a wheelchair. “Ah, Ratchet! If only you were still around to witness this moment! You never doubted that PCL exists, or that it powers the energy of every star, although I doubt that even you realized what
other
powers it might also have.” Grandfather chortled to himself. “Perhaps it’s for the best you’re not still here. I don’t think you could stand the idea that I—someone you saw as your lowly student—crossed the finish line before you did.”

Kate remembered well the mysterious saga of Dr. Ratchet, which she had heard so often from Grandfather. Suffering from a degenerative nervous disease, which had struck him in his thirties and left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Ratchet had developed an amazing ability to perform four-dimensional mathematics in his head. Ultimately he came to rely heavily on Grandfather, his best student, to translate his visionary theories into practice, which is why the young Miles Prancer had first trained his telescope on a little-known star called Trethoniel. Despite his genius, however, Ratchet remained an embittered and angry man, haunted always by the fear of death. He never missed an opportunity to berate a colleague or squash a student. Consequently, few tears were shed when he died in a mysterious fire that destroyed Oxford’s entire physics complex and left behind little more than the scorched wreck of his wheelchair.

“So you’ve finally proved that PCL exists?” asked Kate.

“Even better,” answered Grandfather, and his eyebrows lifted like rising white clouds. “I have identified all of its ingredients. I now possess the recipe for PCL.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Kate. “But how?”

“Perseverance, Kaitlyn. That’s how. If there is any quality I wish for you, it’s perseverance.” With a swipe of his hand, Grandfather removed the cloth, revealing the gleaming green box. “This box represents my entire life’s work—and Ratchet’s as well. On the day he died, I vowed to find out whether there was any truth to his revolutionary theory about pure condensed light—no matter how long it took. And here I am, fifty years later, still working on it. Until tonight, all my conjectures about PCL and its role in explaining the evolution of stars were nothing but that: conjectures. Until I could actually identify its ingredients, I couldn’t convince anyone it exists. I didn’t have a ghost of a chance.”

The mention of that word caused Kate to glance again over her shoulder at the hallway. Seeing no sign of anything unusual, she turned back to Grandfather.

“Have you tested the box yet?” she asked.

“Not yet,” the old astronomer replied excitedly. “But the time is near.”

“I still don’t get it. How does making some substance that’s found in stars allow you to travel faster than light?”

“Well,” answered the inventor as he studied the humming box closely, “during my years of work on PCL I’ve learned enough about it to predict that it has some rather unusual properties. For example, it ought to melt anything frozen that touches it. But very recently—purely by accident—I discovered that it also has another property. An absolutely astonishing property.”

Kate could feel his swelling enthusiasm and it stirred her own. “What property is that?”

Grandfather straightened his tall frame and looked squarely at her. “PCL has the ability to liberate the part of us most similar to pure light.”

“You mean our souls?” asked Kate in wonderment.

“You could call it that,” answered Grandfather. “People have given it many names in many languages across the ages. I call it our
heartlight
.”

“But how, Grandfather? How does it work?”

“Only God knows the answer to that one, Kaitlyn. But if you keep asking—”

“Perhaps He’ll give us a hint!” finished Kate, grinning. “But what does all this have to do with traveling faster than light?”

“Everything,” replied Grandfather, taking her hands in his own. “When PCL is allowed to react with your inner light—with your heartlight—then you can travel anywhere in the universe, faster than light.”

“I still don’t understand how you could travel into outer space without a spaceship to take you there.”

Grandfather’s brow furrowed. “How can I explain it to you? Think of it like—like your imagination. All you need to do to go someplace in your imagination is to imagine it. Right? Then—presto!—you arrive there, faster than light. That’s how heartlight works.”

Kate leaned against the desk in utter amazement. Even if she didn’t understand how heartlight worked, she finally understood why Grandfather had been working so hard.

“So this is why you wanted to study the wings of the morpho?” she asked quietly.

“Yes, Kaitlyn.” His voice was almost a whisper. “It was the morpho who gave me the first clue that there is indeed a connection between the nature of light and the nature of the soul.”

“You’re saying that our souls and the stars and the wings of a butterfly are all somehow connected?”

“Yes,” the old man agreed, nodding thoughtfully. “They are all part of God’s great Pattern.”

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The only sounds were the humming of the green box, the vibrating of the beakers, and the continuous clattering of the machine in the corner of the lab.

At last Kate whispered: “If you’re right about PCL and how it can free your heartlight to travel anywhere in the universe . . .”

“Where would I choose to go first?” finished Grandfather, his eyes alight. “Let me show you.”

He led her across the room to a massive monitor screen next to his telescope. He switched it on, then began twirling one of the dials. Like a young child playing with his favorite toy, he typed some coordinates onto the keyboard.

With a flash, a highly magnified star appeared suddenly on the monitor. It radiated powerfully, and its shimmering red light seemed to reach right out of the screen and into the room itself. Behind Grandfather, the prisms on the table began to glow dimly red.

As he twisted more dials, the brightly colored gases of a great nebula surrounding the star came into view. They spiraled around it like a brilliant veil of incandescent clouds, finally fading into the deep darkness of space.

“It’s beautiful,” sighed Kate.

“That it is,” replied Grandfather. “No other star is as beautiful as Trethoniel.”

Pressing a button, he brought the swirling clouds into sharper focus, revealing several planets which orbited through the glowing gases of the star’s system. One of them gleamed with a pearly white color. In the center of the spiraling veil, the great red star Trethoniel sat like an imperious queen upon her throne, unaging and untouchable.

“No other star in the sky radiates so strongly, Kaitlyn. And here is the puzzle of puzzles: How can Trethoniel possibly stay so bright, without burning out completely and collapsing into a black hole? Scientists from all over the world—myself included—have failed to answer that important question. All I can say for sure is that it has something to do with its supply of PCL. Trethoniel is more advanced in manufacturing PCL than any star in the known universe. Meanwhile, it continues to flame, so powerfully that you can see it without a telescope even on full-moon nights.”

Grandfather spun another dial, and the seething, scorching surface of the star completely filled the screen. Towers of superheated gases danced thousands of miles out into space. “On our world I am believed to know much,” he said softly. “But one glimpse of this star reminds me how little, how very little, I truly understand. There is so much to learn about the Pattern.”

He turned to the girl standing beside him. Her face, like his own, had been touched with a new and lovely light.

“Someday, Kaitlyn, if I’m right, people will explore Trethoniel and learn some of its secrets.” He touched her braid gently. “Maybe you and I will be the very first to go.”

“Me?” Kate shook her head. “Not a chance! I’m no explorer and I’m certainly no scientist! You’d be a lot better off going by yourself.”

“What if I asked you to join me?” questioned Grandfather playfully.

“I guess I’d have to think about it,” Kate replied with a grin. “But I’d rather you just sent me a postcard.”

Her gaze returned to the image on the screen. “Trethoniel is full of mysteries, isn’t it?”

“Right you are,” agreed the old astronomer. “As Einstein said,
mystery is the essence of beauty.
No one can explain how Trethoniel could swell up like a giant red balloon—expanding to a thousand times its former size—then resist collapsing into a bottomless black hole. Traditional physics says that should have happened long ago. But Trethoniel has done exactly the opposite! Against every law of physics, it’s grown steadily brighter, actually gaining luminosity with time. Its curve of binding energy is beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

Grandfather studied the image on the screen. “When I first started observing you, Great Star, I watched you ceaselessly, like a vulture circling over some near-dead prey. Then, with time, I came to respect you more and more. I came to admire your beauty, your power, your desire to live.”

“I’m glad Trethoniel is alive, too,” said Kate quietly. “Somehow it makes me feel . . . well, hopeful.”

“Yes,” nodded Grandfather. He glanced at his own wrinkled hands, then turned back to the screen. “At least somewhere in the universe, mortality and death have been held at bay, if not entirely beaten.” With a sigh, he continued: “One of the reasons Trethoniel is so intriguing is that it shares some extraordinary similarities with the Sun. Both stars are nearly the same age, probably condensed out of the same original cloud of swirling gases. And, before Trethoniel suddenly expanded and turned upside down all the laws of physics, it was a typical yellow star, just like the Sun.”

At that moment, something new on the monitor screen caught Kate’s eye.

“What’s that dark place on Trethoniel, Grandfather?” she asked, feeling strangely uneasy. “I don’t think it was there just a few seconds ago.”

Grandfather dismissed her question with a wave of his hand. “Probably just a storm on the surface or a simple refraction error, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.” He smiled. “By the way, how are you feeling? I mean, after your encounter with our friendly local ghosts?”

Kate shivered slightly. “They didn’t feel so friendly to me. I’d forgotten about them, so I guess I’m fine now. Except . . . I just can’t shake this feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“I can’t quite explain it. It’s a feeling that something . . . something just isn’t right around here.”

Grandfather gave her a gentle squeeze. “It’s probably just an aftereffect from your fright. Perhaps you—”

Buzzzzzz.

Kate jumped. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s the timer on the astro-vivometer,” declared Grandfather. “My new invention over there in the corner.”

He walked over to the contraption, which was shaped like a large gray file cabinet bearing numerous dials and switches on its face. “It can measure the level of PCL in any star, so I can assess the star’s health and longevity with great accuracy.”

“What was that timer for?”

“Oh, I’ve been doing a test run to make sure it works properly. I set it to work on the Sun, since it’s the easiest star to analyze from Earth. The buzzer says it’s finished the computations.”

With an effort, Grandfather stooped down to pick up a printout that had dropped from a slot in the astro-vivometer. Suddenly, his face went white, and he whispered: “My God!”

“Grandfather!” cried Kate, hurrying to his side. “What is it?”

The old man gave no answer. He continued to scrutinize the printout, trying to check some of the calculations in his head. His expression grew more grim with every passing second.

“It must be mistaken,” he muttered. “It must be.”

“What does it say?” pleaded Kate, seeing nothing but rows of meaningless numbers and symbols crowding the printout.

At last Grandfather raised his head. Deep concern lined his brow, and the light of his breakthrough had vanished from his eyes. He looked at Kate somberly.

“What does it say?”

“It says the Sun is in trouble, Kaitlyn. Serious trouble.” His gaze fell to the machine, still clattering away ceaselessly. “There could be a problem with the astro-vivometer itself . . .”

“But you don’t think so, do you?”

The old man turned again to Kate, and for a long moment they held each other’s gaze. “No.”

“What kind of trouble, Grandfather? Please tell me. What’s going to happen to the Sun?”

Shaking his head sadly, Grandfather replied: “I—I don’t know how to explain it, Kaitlyn. It’s so—so enormous . . .”

“This sounds as bad as nuclear war.”

Grandfather grimaced. With a quivering finger, he pointed to various numbers on the printout. “You see, there’s been no change in the Sun’s temperature, chemistry, density, magnetism, or surface dynamics. Only one factor has changed—the most important one.”

“You mean its PCL?”

“Yes. If these figures are right, its core supply of PCL has started dropping at a precipitous rate.”

“What does it mean, Grandfather?”

He drew his hand slowly across his brow. “If—if nothing happens to reverse it . . . then . . .”

“What? What then?”

“The Sun will eventually lose so much PCL that it will reach a state of catastrophic energy imbalance.” Grandfather seemed to choke on the words as he spoke them. “Without any warning, it will collapse violently, and then—oh, Kaitlyn! The Sun will go out
forever
.”