GRAVITONS

June 10

Karla again today attempted to dissuade me from conducting the trial upon myself. I believe her exact words were: “You can’t possibly go through with this insane plan, Alex.”

“I have to,” I said, in what I hoped was an assured and confident tone. If truth be told—and where else might I tell the whole truth, if not in my private journal?—I was feeling a little trepidation myself. But I was determined not to let Karla see it.

“There’s no other way to prove my theory,” I continued rationally.

“What about animals? You’ve completely skipped that stage.”

“The phenomenon I expect to observe would be impossible to measure from outside. It’s a perceptual alternation, and an animal cannot report on what it’s experiencing. No, animals are useless for my purposes.”

Karla grew frustrated at my insistently logical manner, as she so often did. It’s always been a sticking point between us, she claiming I exhibit an unwholesome lack of emotions—“an unnatural gravity,” she once called it—and I countering by accusing her of flightiness, of being unconnected to the solid earth of reality. So different are our basic personalities that I’m surprised we’ve remained lovers for as long as we have.

“Do you realize exactly what you’re risking?” she demanded.

“Yes, I do.”

“And you believe it’s worth it? You really think that if you succeed Zavgorodny will just fold up his tents and slink away?”

“No, he won’t do that,’, I said. “However, if my speculations prove correct, then I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve contributed something unique to man’s understanding of the universe.”

Karla regarded me with silent contempt for five seconds or so, before saying, “That’s utter bullshit.”

I was taken aback. “What?”

“You heard me. I said you’re full of crap. The real reason you’re doing this is because you want the thing named after you. Admit it. You can’t stand the thought of your precious new element being forever known as ‘zavgorodium.’ That’s the only thing motivating you. You’re going to risk your health—maybe even die—just so your name will be attached to a—a lifeless chemical!”

Karla began to cry. I said nothing. I noticed with an irrelevant precision that her first few tears were held in a little pool by surface tension at the corners of her eyes. I always had been observant. It’s simply part of my job.

When she was done, she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve and said, “Well, tell me. Am I wrong?”

“No,” I said. “You’re not wrong.”

June 11

Thirteen months ago, at the Joint Nuclear Research Institute at Dubna, U.S.S.R.—and simultaneously at the facility which I head, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California—element number 131 was synthesized.

(In these private notes, I refuse to call it “zavgorodnium,” despite the slight precedence those at Dubna had, and I dare not dub it “chiltonium”—yet. So a simple “element 131” it must remain, for now.)

Element 131, this substance never before seen on earth, proved to be the first member of the predicted “island of stability” in the periodic table: that group of superheavy elements higher than number 103 which proved to have a half-life longer than thirty-five seconds. As of this writing, it is still the only stable SHE to be created.

Element 131 has a half-life of approximately twenty-five days. Given this stability, element 131 lends itself to detailed and extended observation. We have been able to perform more tests and assays and analyses on this new material than on any other synthesized element.

The most curious property of element 131 is an effect akin to piezoelectricity.

In common cases of piezoelectricity, mechanical stress on a crystal produces an electrical charge.

Element 131 exhibits a continual—albeit fluctuating—electrical charge in a rest state. Shielded from obvious forces, without apparent mechanical deformation, element 131 produces a trickle of electricity.

Various theories have been adduced to explain this anomaly.

I am certain that none but mine is correct.

There is only one force which could produce the fluctuating electrical charge. One force which it is impossible to shield against.

That force is gravity.

It is my view that element 131 is extremely sensitive to gravity. Its inherent atomic structure makes it responsive to every passing gravity wave, every mass over a certain theoretical threshold.

I know this to be a fact, as surely as I know anything.

However, there is no way of proving it in the laboratory.

According to the mathematics of my theory, the masses needed to influence the production of electrical current in element 131 are of stellar or planetary proportions.

Obviously, not something one could manipulate in the lab. Current science has no way of producing gravity waves, nor can a sample of the new element be isolated in some imaginary “gravity-free” container and examined for cessation of the effect.

Until a recent inspiration of mine, there appeared to be no way of proving my contention. For all anyone knew, Zavgorodny’s idiot theory of “quark oscillation” was as plausible as mine, and the various international committees debating over a name for element 131 had no reason to favor either him or me.

But now I have hit upon a method of fully proving that element 131 does indeed register the presence of gravity.

An associate of mine at a certain biological lab (which, for fear of adverse publicity, must remain nameless until the eventual success of my project, at which time his firm shall share in the glory), has developed a tailored molecular vector-agent which is intended to carry element 131 through my bloodstream and into my eyes, where the vector will bind its cargo to the photopigment rhodopsin in my retinas, hopefully converting them to gravity receptors.

In short, I intend to see gravity.

The half-life of element 131 insures that the effect should be temporary.

The injection is scheduled for tomorrow.

June 12

Karla left early this morning, a Saturday. I saw her off at the airport. She boarded a plane for New York, where she and her troupe of dancers have a series of performances scheduled, next week at Lincoln Center.

“At least promise me you won’t do anything until I get home,” she asked, holding my hands in hers.

“I promise,” I said.

As soon as her plane was in the air, I got into my car and headed for the biolab.

Karla simply doesn’t understand science.

Mark was waiting for me in his office. He is a friend of longstanding—we spent our undergraduate years together—and he was risking his reputation and his position at the firm to help me.

The first thing he said when he saw me was, “Are you sure you want to go through with this, Alex?”

It seemed everyone was more solicitious of my welfare than I was. I had expected this attitude from Karla, but thought that Mark at least would comprehend my motives.

“I wouldn’t have put you through all this just to back out now,” I said.

Then we were in one of the weekend-empty labs and Mark was removing an ampoule from a refrigerator and I was rolling up my sleeve and the inside of my elbow was getting swabbed and the needle point had found my vein, all before I quite realized what was happening.

“My only consolation,” said Mark as he removed the needle and discarded the tip, “is that you won’t die of radioactivity. That small amount of chiltonium you gave me was only as hot as an average tracer injection.”

“Please don’t call it that. Not yet.”

Mark shrugged. “Whatever. Listen, are you sure you’re going to be all right on your own? Don’t you want someone to stay with you?”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve arranged a leave of absence from work, and I’ve got all the food I need for a month—although I don’t really imagine any effect will last that long. I won’t even have to leave the house while my eyes are—different. And if something should come up, I won’t forget your number.”

Mark escorted me from the building, gripping my elbow as if I were handicapped somehow.

“All right. But just be careful.”

“I will,” I said, wondering if this promise meant any more than the one I had just made to Karla.

I got in my car and headed home.

My vision seemed perfect during the drive.

Midnight, and I’m going to sleep. Tired of waiting for a change. I’ve neither felt or seen anything different.

Perhaps the whole experiment will be an anticlimactic waste.

June 13

Woke this morning to patchy vision. It’s as if tenuous veils and no-color clouds drift lazily across my field of sight. Unlike common “floaters,” these patches have amorphous outlines. They are not translucent, nor are they opaque. I have the oddest feeling that there is nothing behind them. They seem more negation than substance. Wherever they materialize, they seem to wipe out the whole universe we take for granted. It’s as if they are holes in the fabric of time and space, revealing utter nothingness behind.

This cannot be the visual analogue of gravity. The adaptive process must be incomplete.

I imagine that something like the following must be happening.

As the molecules of element 131 bind to the rhodopsin in my retina—that miraculous film literally as thin as a razor—the process whereby infalling photons—mundane light—are converted into nerve impulses is interfered with. This results in the disturbing migratory lacunae. At the same time, the molecules of element 131 have not yet been fully integrated into the neural signal-processing system, and so there are no new images to replace visual ones.

Gravity—as any first-year physics student can tell you—is a force mediated by gravitons. My eyes are not yet sensitive to gravitons. This must be the case. Surely this depressing nothingness cannot be an image of such an all-pervasive, noble force as gravity…

June 14

When I opened my eyes this morning, I was completely blind.

I am continuing this journal on cassette.

I took some small consolation in the fact that my blindness was the conventional kind, or at least what I assume conventional blindness is like. An utter blackness unobtainable by the sighted eye even with lids shut in a lightless cavern (for even under those conditions, the phenomenon known as “dark light”—false signals spontaneously generated in the retina—would occur). It seems as though my brain has completely shut down its optic links, rejecting whatever new signals element 131 is producing, under the influx of gravitons.

I can only hope that the links will be re-established soon.

Later in the day. A new, somewhat reassuring thought occured to me. I recall the simple, yet classic experiments done with inverting lenses.

Subjects were asked to wear glasses with lenses that rotated images 180 degrees, for twenty-four hours a day. Trees seemed to have the crowns downmost, people to be walking on air. After some days of this disorientation, their brains spontaneously accomodated to the imposed inversion, and their vision miraculously became “normal.” When the glasses were later removed, they saw the world upside­down! After a similar period of adjustment, their eyes finally returned to normalacy.

Perhaps my own brain is undergoing just such a transition period.

June 15

Still blind.

June 16

My hypothesis was correct!

Today, though still technically blind, I have “seen” the sun and the earth and the moon without leaving my chair, and without raising my eyes to the heavens, or lowering them to the ground.

I hardly know where—or how—to begin to describe what I have experienced.

Perhaps in a cool recital of theory may lie sanity.

Consider gravity. A force varying inversly with the square of the distance, mediated by gravitons, particles analagous to the photons which transmit electromagnetic radiations. Completely oblivious to this flux, never thinking of our weight as a function of a stream of particles, we live immersed in a sea of gravitons, a sea replenished from an infinite number of sources.

Some of these sources—by virtue of mass or closeness—are more important and prominent than others. Continuing the sea analogy, they are bigger rivers.

All of us are lashed to the planet beneath us by ropes of gravitons.

Above our heads, the moon whips the oceans with flails of gravitons, raising the tides.

Far away, the Sun, largest single source of gravity in our system, has the earth 1assoed by gravitons, and is swinging it in its clockwork ellipse, along with every other orbital object, from Jupiter down to the smallest pebble.

My eyes can now apprehend some of this. The molecules of chiltonium (I now feel entitled to call element 131 by that name), bonded to my photopigments, are putting out fluctuating signals tied to gravity, which my brain is just learning to interpret.

It is an indescribable sensation.

My sleep was broken this morning by a sense of weightiness, an almost kinesthetic, rather than visual, impression. I lay in bed with my eyes shut, trying to determine what I was experiencing.

First, I sensed an enormous presence directly beneath me. The signals coming in through my optic nerves had a pseudo-visual component. There was no conventional coloration to the object—at least nothing I could put a name to—but my brain tried to represent it, as best it could, as a darker center shading off to lighter edges in all directions. I assume now that this is an image of the dense core of the planet surrounded by the lighter mantle.

The object seemed to pulse, almost as if alive.

It occurred to me then that I was sensing the earth’s gravity beneath me, even though I lay on my back and my eyes were closed. In my haste to prove my theories, I had never even considered that if I succeeded I would possess a new sense that worked in 360 degrees—in a complete sphere of perception, in fact. Photons might need the easy path of the iris to register, but gravitons were more determined. Neither flesh nor bone could stop them from impinging on my chiltonium-tinged retina, and I could detect masses behind me as easily as those in front.

Somehow, my attention became distracted from the inage of the earth. We know from infancy how to instinctively focus our vision, but I was having trouble focusing my new sense. Still, I persisted, and was able to discern two objects above me: the moon and sun. Both were roughly circular presences, with dark centers fading outward toward their edges. The moon because of its proxinity, radiated gravitons which seemed inexplicably more vibrant than those from the massive sun, and so formed a “brighter” image. A stunning reversal of visual input.

I lay for a while, savoring my triumph. I got up, visited the toilet, then began making breakfast in a clumsy way, fumbling for the utensils and pans I could not see.

Determined to see what I could accomplish, I embarked on a series of mental gymnastics. I began to flick my attention back and forth between the trio of massive astronomical objects—earth, moon and sun—hoping to gradually becone able to hold all three of then in my mind simultaneously.

Around noontime, it happened.

The moment was like falling over a threshold into miles of empty space. I realized with a start that it was now impossible not to let all three impinge on my consciousness. My brain had adapted to the omnidirectional input, and now was able to process all the signals simultaneously.

I felt dizzy and had to sit down, for the three objects moved in relation to one another, the moon performing a slow pavane about the earth, and the earth revolving on its axis and waltzing with the sun.

The vertigo subsided after several hours, and I was able to get up and move about. However, as of this recitation, the nausea has still not ceased entirely.

It’s after midnight now, and I have not been able to fall asleep yet. Closing my eyes does nothing to shut out the influx of gravitons. I now have the bulk of the earth between me and the sun, and their images have fused into one massive entity which weighs on my consiousness more strongly than the two separate ones. The moon is more gentle, but still a presence demanding attention. Although I know that my eyes are not in reality subject to any new forces, somehow I feel that the gravitic pull has increased on them, threatening to suck them from my orbits. I hope that when I get tired enough, I shall be able to fall asleep, just as one does amid noise.

I wonder if tomorrow will bring any new developments.

June 17

The ringing of the phone shattered my uneasy sleep around nine this morning. I had not dropped off until after five, my head aspin from the dance of the masses.

It was Karla, calling from New York.

“Alex? What are you doing home? I just called your office, and they said you were taking a few weeks off. Are you okay?”

I mumbled something I hoped was reasurring. I’m afraid I succeeded only in conveying my confusion. However, I was too preoccupied with the new display which had leaped into my attention the minute I became conscious to really concentrate on what Karla was saying.

I do remember she sounded worried about me. She said something like, “I’m sorry I haven’t called sooner, Alex, but it’s been really hectic here. Rehearsals, publicity events… Listen, I won’t pry into what you’re doing. I trust you to keep the promise you made. But if you need me back there, just say so, and I’ll come.”

“No, no, that’s not necessary.… Karla—what day is it?”

“Why, Thursday the seventeenth.”

“Thank you. Goodbye,” I said, and hung up on her. Only the sixth day since I was injected with chiltonium. It seems like so much longer. The effect should be decreasing daily, as the chiltonium decays to lesser elements.

Instead, the new impressions are stronger than yesterday.

All the while I was listening to Karla, I was “looking” around me.

No longer were yesterday’s three massive celestial objects the only entities I could detect.

I was now sensing the masses of common items all around me, and with more definition than yesterday.

As before, I had them all in my attention simultaneously.

Chairs, tables, doors, walls—even the mass of the house itself—all were discrete objects with distinctive shapes which I could hold in my mind. Could not, in fact, dismiss by any kind of willed act.

And of course, they flooded in from all angles, regardless of the direction I was facing.

I fell into a chair I sensed behind me. I had only gotten a few hours sleep, and my mind felt thick and slow.

Something had been wrong with my math. I had postulated that only astronomical-sized masses, with their significant gravities, would be able to register on the chiltonium. Instead, now I was sensing the tiny—yet nearby—gravities of everyday objects. How could that be?

Everything that has mass has gravity, emits gravitons that strike my altered retinas. The threshold of reaction for the atoms of chiltonium must be simply lower than I calculated.

Or else—this thought occured to me in a flash—the extra sensitivity lay in my brain. The synergy with my body was what I had not anticipated. The process of adaptation that I believed had occured must have continued overnight, at an accelerated pace. My brain, in some sort of feedback loop, was learning to process and filter the signals it was receiving more efficiently, to extract the maximum information from them. It was as if the bandwith of the channel down which the gravitons flowed was steadily increasing.

I held my head, which suddenly hurt. The pain seemed concentrated behind my eyes, as it had just before sleep last night.

Another thought came to me then. Perhaps these images were not real, but simply an artifact of my own disturbed senses. No, that couldn’t be, for when I sensed the chair behind me, it had been there. And what did it matter if they were hallucinations? I still had to deal with them. No, I had to accept the visions as accurate representations of gravity.

I tried to gauge the new strength of my gravity-sense. Somehow, not quite knowing how I was doing it, I cast my perceptions outward.

I sensed mountains bulking massively to the east of me, huge shapes that tugged at my attention. At the same time, I was still cognizant of the household items around me. (When you look at a complicated landscape such as a forest, how many distant objects are you holding in your mind simultaneously? A hundred thousand leaves and twigs? A million?) Then my senses seemed deflected upward, off the mountains and into the sky.

The pulsing orbs of the sun and moon were still there, deeper in character somehow, distinctive, as was the Earth beneath me.

But now there were others.

I intuitively recognized Mars and Venus, as being the closest of the new objects in either direction. In some strange fashion, I was deriving such information as closeness and relative mass now from these inner representations.

Beyond Mars hung two titans, Jupiter and Saturn, pouring out their gravitons in ceaseless exuberance, almost alive. I was unable to sense their moons, or anything beyond them.

I don’t know how long I was lost in this spectacle. Clocks were inaccessible to me now, save perhaps by touch. All I know is that I sat entranced for a timeless period, “watching” the majestic gavotte of the planets around the sun, all the while half-conscious of my immediate surroundings.

An insistent knocking at the front door brought me back to myself. I suddenly realized I had neither eaten nor relieved myself since the phone call awakened me earlier. I went somewhat unsteadily to the door, using my new sense to avoid the furniture I would otherwise have tripped on.

“Hello?” Mark called. “Alex, are you in there? Are you okay?”

For the first time I sensed the gravity­image of a person.

Mark~s image was fuzzed by the gravity of the intervening door, but still recognizable. An oddly biomorphic shape, the same unnameable “color” as all the other objects I had so far sensed, he pulsed with an intensity identical to the sun, as if his personal gravity was asserting its kinship with that faraway orb.

“Mark,” I said haltingly, still bemused by his new appearance. “What are you doing here?”

“Just checking up on you. Can I come in?”

Something inside me found the thought of letting this—this alien shape inside my house too repugnant for words. I knew it was Mark, but at the same time I found myself convinced that it was something unhuman.

“No—no, not today, please. Listen, I’m fine. I don’t need anything. You can leave.”

“The experiment, Alex—is it working?”

I laughed rather crazily, I’m afraid. “Oh, yes, it’s working. The results are unambiguous. Element 131 does indeed register gravity. I’m making careful notes of everything.”

“Wonderful. The committee, is sure to christen it after you then.”

Mark’s comments seemed inane, in the light of what I was experiencing. I realized with a start that I hadn’t thought of that formerly all-important motivation for the last couple of days. How foolish it all seemed now…

Mark said goodbye and left.

My bladder felt like bursting, a sensation monentarily more arresting than the display of gravity. I used the toilet, then went to the kitchen, where I hastily ate something.

The image of Mark’s body had made me wonder why I hadn’t sensed my own personal gravity. After a little thought, I aseumed that my brain was somehow filtering out the constant and immediate signals of my own gravitons, just as the constant presence of one’s own nose is eliminated from one’s sight.

Such questions were idle. I had more than enough to occupy my mind.

Returning to the chair that had suddenly become my observation deck to the universe, I dropped into it and cast my mind out, beyond the Earth.

June 19

Haven’t slept for two days now. I can’t fend off the impressions flooding in on me long enough to lose consciousness.

I find I almost don’t want to.

Where can I begin to tell what’s happened in the last two days?

Start with this Earth, perhaps.

My perception of this globe we inhabit is no longer that of a featureless blob. I can now distinguish variations in its mass down to the smaller mountain ranges. Undersea ones are as visible as those on the surface. The topography of this globe—to a certain scale—is now always present in my mind.

Closer to home, I can sense snaller masses for miles around. My house and its contents are a ghostly schematic. Passing people and cars on the street wander in and out of focus. Nearby cities are concentrations of weight.

All of this stimuli might be manageable, in terms of organizing them in my mind, were it not for the simultaneous flood of data from the rest of the universe.

I am swamped with the weight of our cosmos.

I can now perceive every object of sizeable mass in our solar system. Asteroids of a certain size, moons, the very rings around planets. Speaking of planets—I can now confirm that there is indeed a tenth one. Its gravity perturbs my altered vision as surely as it does the orbit of Neptune. I can sense the dark mass swimming at the end of its long, long sun-tether, not quite as far out as the Oort Cloud.

Some of the topography of our own moon is also visible to me.

If this is all a hallucination, it is incredibly detailed and consistent.

My mind no longer stops at the limits of our solar system, however.

For the past forty-eight hours, I have probed and pushed and almost inadvertantly strengthened my new senses, until I can now pick up signals from lightyears away.

They say there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

I swear I can sense each one.

Oh, not all are individuals. The signals pile up and interfere constructively and destructively with each other, merging, losing their individuality. Still, I believe that somewhere in the welter of the gravitons flooding in on my retinas and stimulating my brain are representatives of every kind of sun.

Pulsars, white dwarfs, black holes, neutron stars, binary systems, cepheid variables, giants off the main sequence—all are tugging at my perceptions, every minute, fron every direction, below my feet as well as above.

The tugging. The awful pulling—that’s what makes this new sense so devastatingly demanding. Vision has never really been characterized—at least to me—by any notion of weight or compulsion, despite the metaphor of being “pulled” by a sight. But this alteration to my eyes has left me with an awful awareness of how we are daily impinged on by gravity.

Of course, objectively speaking, nothing has changed. All my life, this rain of gravity has been pouring down on me, without my taking any notice of it. But now, the ability to “see” it has made me hypersensitive to it.

I feel as if my whole body is being drawn by a team of competing horses in a thousand different directions, as if the universe is attempting to rend me atom from atom. The worst kind of migraine that fades in and out.

I know this is all psychological.

Still, I can’t make it go away.

I don’t know what to do. One minute, holding my head and fighting back tears of pain, I’m praying that as the chiltonium decays, the effect will disappear. The next minute, headache fading, I’m enraptured by the vision of the universe held together by innumerable skeins of gravitons.

Since there’s nothing I can do to rid myself of the talent, I suppose I must utilize it to the fullest.

I will try to see if I can extend my new vision beyond our galaxy.

June 20

No luck yet. I am confident that there are gravitic signals from other galaxies hidden in the mix that I just have not learned yet to separate out. Will keep trying.

Later. Completely exhausted, I managed to drop off for a spell. Woke again to the phone, but couldn’t summon up the energy to get out of bed and answer it. Must have been Karla or Mark. I hope they don’t come over to interfere. I feel I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.

Suppose I really should eat something.…

June 23

It happened today.

I feel like the monk in that ancient woodout, sticking his head through the earthly sphere and glimpsing the hidden machinery of the cosmos.

I can now see other galaxies as compact smudges of gravity. Am able to make out the groupings and supergroupings that they form, patterns of abstract splendor, forming luminous bubbles in the foamy universe, which is revealed to be more vacancy than substance.

I believe the objects I detect at the extreme edge of my sensitivity are quasars, those dwellers at the edge of the cosmos, sixteen billion lightyears away.

I feel like a juggler, holding aloft the entire revolving universe in my mind.

I forced myself to eat something after the triumph, in order to go on.

There’s something more, you see. Something I haven’t quite gotten a handle on yet. It appears to be a kind of modulated pulse of gravity, emanating from a distinct direction.

I have to concentrate on this…

June 24

Someone knocking on my door. I told them to go away. Afraid now my powers will disappear before I solve this last mystery…

June 25

Convinced I have the answer to the origin of the modulated pulse.

It’s an artifact of intelligence.

Some civilization much further advanced than ours is communicating with its peers elsewhere, employing artificial gravity waves.

This signal is all I concentrate on now.

The more I study it, the more I seem to—understand it. I appear to be apprehending it on some cellular level.

What the message is, I cannot put into words.

But my headaches are gone.

June 26

Immense biological changes going on within me. The signal is promoting them, I’m certain. Wish I could see a mirror. Haven’t eaten or had anything to drink in three days, but feel fine. Delusion of a dying man? Can’t be sure of anything anymore.

June 27

Couldn’t move now if I wished to. Luckily, recorder is by the bed, and voice­-activated.

June 28

No diminishment in my perceptual powers, although the chiltonium should be exhausted by now. Understand the signal completely, but cannot put it into human speech.

June 29

The people behind the signal are talking to me down the line of gravitons, calling me to them. They’re incredibly ancient, yet we’re somehow related, as I know from their ability to subvert my biological programming. Their motives are incomprehensible, neither good nor evil. Above all that. Felt an overwhelming urge to heed their invitation. How could I go back to my old life anyway?

June 30

Won~t be able to talk much longer. Have decided to take their invitation, and fall down the well of stars. These people are masters of the universal attractive force. They assure me that my new body—with its altered integument and organs—will respond to their pull, and be able to survive the trip. Goodbye Mark. Karla, goodbye.

Gravity calls.