South Pole Station

God, the fucking inflationists. They hated the name—it was an insult—and although he used it with abandon, Sal knew this was childish. For some reason, he always thought of the inflationists as balloonists—foppish men in top hats gazing down at the rabble as they ascended, their bony hands gripping the side of the basket. Of course, that was ridiculous—most of the men and women who felt the standard model was as close to truth as science could get were just like him. The most passionate among them were his father’s acolytes. And maybe that’s why he hated them—the balloonists—the ones who were able to float away on the winds of a scientifically problematic theory.

He would stay here, rooted to the ice, and do whatever he could to dismantle it. The inflationary theory was unwieldy, made up of disparate parts, and covered with ugly surgical scars. One of the very first things Sal’s father had taught him was that truth was elegant because it was simple. The universe itself was simple—fundamental physics was simple—and the theory could not be more complex than the universe it described. But the inflationists had fine-tuned their theory until it was a Frankenstein’s monster. It was this half-dead thing that his father had expected him and the other bright young minds in cosmology to elevate to natural law.

Sokoloff had taught Sal that the truth does not need fine-tuning. This theory—the Big Bang—was not simple, and so Sal knew it was not true, no matter if they’d found “proof” of the b-modes. His model—the cyclic universe model—was so stunning, so elegant, that when Sal heard Sokoloff and Turner speak about it at the monthly Joint Theoretical Seminar at Princeton, he’d felt woozy. But when he looked around the room at the other physicists, he saw nothing but rolled eyes and open skepticism.

After the seminar, Sal had rushed down to the podium and grabbed Sokoloff by the sleeve. “Doc, it’s a fucking phoenix.” Sokoloff was amused. He even laughed.

“I’ve never heard it put that way,” he’d said, “but you’re absolutely right. Can we sell it like that?”

What Sokoloff and Turner were saying, and what no one in the room besides Sal was willing to at least consider, was that the universe built its own funeral pyre and stepped into the flames, destroying itself only to be reborn. It was engaged in an endless cycle with endless variations, of which this one—this moment, this life—was nothing more than chance, the result of a hip check with the universe on the other side of a minuscule gap.

At dinner that night, Sokoloff reminded Sal of the weaknesses of the inflationary theory—weaknesses Sal’s father had brushed aside as trivial. The standard model could tell us what had happened between the Big Bang and the universe as we currently know it, but it could not tell us what would happen next. Perhaps more important, it could not explain, and in fact even disdained, the very idea of exploring what had happened before. Sokoloff and Turner’s model could. Sal’s father had, somewhat famously, no patience for questions like this. “Let’s leave that to the preschoolers and the Baptists and focus on finding b-modes,” he’d said when Sal returned from Princeton that summer. “Don’t get seduced by contrarians. They exist in every discipline of science.” But Sokoloff wasn’t a contrarian. He’d actually been an architect of the inflationary theory himself. Sal’s father was right about one thing, though—Sal had been seduced.

By this time, Sal was heir apparent at the Kavli Institute for Particle Physics and Cosmology, which his father had spent the last ten years trying to build. What Frank Pavano had seen five years earlier was now an open secret: the mind of the eminent physicist had slowly been spackled with plaques. Alzheimer’s. Pavano, having chosen another university for his doctorate when Matthews retired, was now publishing on wave oscillations in the Midwest.

Sal opposed his mother’s desire to hide the truth from his father’s colleagues and devoted students, though he also understood the impulse. He allowed her to believe he was in agreement, but he knew better. He had to tell—otherwise the changes his father had undergone would become part of his biography rather than seen as the pathologies they were. Especially because it was no longer heterotic string theory that spoke to his father; it was strange pop culture conspiracy theories that sometimes seemed to share the same DNA. They had the resonance of fairy tales, and the deeper they resonated, the more plausible they became.

This was true: at South Pole an enormous telescopic mouth gaped at the heavens, swallowing invisible particles that tiny scientists then examined in the machine’s underground gut. The particles carried information from a place 13 billion years away. They told, or would tell, of a universe sprung from a singularity, where equations break down and energy is infinite.

This was not true: a system of caves and caverns traversed the earth’s mantle beneath the ice of Antarctica—polar voids where an anti-civilization thrived, where, if our civilization were to encounter it, the two would annihilate each other, like matter and anti-matter. Hitler was a believer of the Hollow Earth theory. In fact, some believe he is there now, having been escorted via U-boat by a German sailor, who located the narrow underwater passageway (wormhole?) on an expedition to South Pole.

Both were fabulist tales. Only one was true. Knowing which was which, Sal realized, was the difference between lucidity and dementia, and his father was now on the wrong side. After the now-infamous evening physics lecture, in which Professor Brennan had deviated from a talk on the Calabi-Yau manifold to consider the role that the Argentine naval base at Mar del Plata had played in Hitler’s escape to the German Antarctic city-base buried deep beneath the ice, the provost had asked Sal to come up with a “plan of action.” The “plan of action” was meant to allow Professor Brennan to retire “with some degree of dignity.”

A year later, on the day of the phone call Sal had received from the MacArthur Foundation notifying him that his work at Kavli had earned him a “genius grant,” Sal found his mother bent over the kitchen counter, trying to glue a plate back together. Her hands were shaking. Sal quietly picked up the remaining shards piece by piece and dropped them into the trash, leaving only the one, which his mother still had between her fingers and could not seem to let go.

Upstairs, Sal found his father ensconced in his study, a sun-filled room on the top floor of their California Mission-style home. He was standing at the large window that overlooked the pool, an unintentional infinity symbol filled with sparkling blue water.

“Your mother tells me you have good news,” Professor Brennan said suddenly.

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