The Schrödinger Enigma Read online

  The Schrödinger Enigma

  Greg Krojac

  Copyright © 2017/2018 Greg Krojac

  All rights reserved

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Contact details can be found at the end of this book.

  Please note that this book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Cover image: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

  Schrodinger’s Cat

  Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment about quantum physics. It was suggested by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, stating that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) in two simultaneous states - both "dead and alive".

  DAY ONE

  24 April

  The crew of the F/V Alaskan Mermaid was looking forward to a well-earned rest from the arduous work of trawling in the icy waters of the Bering Sea. The Pollock A season was almost officially over and, like most of the other factory trawlers, the Alaskan Mermaid would normally have returned home before the season’s end, allowing the crew to take a welcome early break and spend quality time with their families. But destiny had played a cruel card and forced the freezer trawler to stay out at sea when it suffered a major failure in the factory freezer equipment, resulting in a partial release of the refrigerant into the engine room. A similar thing had happened to another trawler the previous season, but with far more calamitous consequences - the stricken trawler had developed a list due to an accumulation of seawater on the starboard side. The call to abandon ship had been made and less than half an hour later, the ship had downflooded and slipped beneath the waves, stern first.

  Valuable lessons had been learned from that incident and the inquest’s recommendations rapidly put in place, allowing prompt action by the Alaskan Mermaid crew to minimize the damage, and avoid the same outcome. The result was only a few days loss of fishing while essential repairs were made.

  Now the ship was up and running again and scores of seabirds swarmed above the cold waters, each one peering downward with beady eyes, ready to pounce upon any gift that the sea was forced to give up. Suddenly the murky water erupted and the birds became even more agitated. The water swelled around the centre of the disturbance as a net broached its surface, a heaving mass of fish pushing against the nylon netting from within as the catch gradually made its way towards the stern of the fishing boat. After a couple of minutes, the rest of the net surfaced, an industrial strength fishnet stocking, the foot section crammed with aquatic booty, as the heavy-duty winch hauled the trawl closer and closer to the waiting crewmen, A few birds were picking at the extremities of fish that poked out between the netting, but most of the gulls had dispersed and were taking advantage of other fish that had been brought to the surface by the turbulence.

  This was a good catch, the trawl filled to bursting point with thousands of squirming rusty pink fish. As it got ever closer to the trawler, the net flattened out and some of the fish made a break for freedom. But there was nowhere safe to swim to, and the fleeing fugitives were easily picked off by the aerial scavengers. For those trapped within the trawler net, their fate was sealed and they would surely end up on somebody’s dinner table. As the sea surrendered its grip on the teeming treasure, the netting began to accelerate towards its destination.

  The pulley creaked a little under the weight of the day’s haul, as the struggle to reel in the day’s catch began in earnest. The ship’s captain stood on the bridge, watching the catch as it glistened in the morning sun, pleased with what he was seeing. They would soon be able to head back to port, and see their families again; that’s what kept them all going. Trawling for Pollock was a hard life and everybody on board was eager for respite from the arduous work. Suddenly the trawler’s skipper spotted something unusual in the nets, something that had no business being there. He leaned into the microphone and bellowed an order which resounded around the ship.

  “Stop the winch!”

  The crew couldn’t see why the command had been given, but they knew that he must have a good reason. The winch stopped abruptly, complaining briefly at the unexpected interruption. The captain barked another order.

  “Cut engines.”

  The ship became silent, or at least as silent as is possible for a working factory ship. The deck crew, now with nothing to do for the moment, crowded at the stern of the ship, staring at the now stilled net, the fish within still thrashing about trying to escape. The captain ordered the ship’s engines to restart, and the vessel to edge forward as slowly as possible, so that the trawl net wouldn’t sink back underwater. He passed his binoculars to the Alaskan Mermaid’s first mate, who had been standing alongside him all the time.

  “Take a look, Robert, and tell me what you see.”

  Robert put the binoculars to his eyes and changed the focus so that he could see better what had caused the net retrieval to be paused.

  “It looks like a satellite dish, Skip, but surely it’s too big for that. And what the hell would a satellite dish be doing out here in the middle of the Bering Sea?”

  “Take a closer look, Robert.”

  The first mate refocused the binoculars and took another look.

  “No, it’s not a satellite dish; I think it may be an actual satellite.”

  The captain had been mulling silently through his options while watching the object bob up and down in the water.

  “Agreed. But if it is a satellite, we have no idea who it belongs to. It may be one of ours. It could be from anywhere. But we definitely can’t deal with it ourselves. As much as I’d love to claim it as salvage, I’ve a feeling the authorities will be very interested in what we’ve found. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a finder’s fee for something like this. I’ll get on the sat phone to the Coastguard. They’ll know what to do.”

  Robert grinned.

  “Let’s hope it’s not the satellite we need to make that call.”

  The call was made and then the two of them descended the steps from the bridge to the ship’s deck. Robert called over two of the crewmen.

  “Fancy a swim?”

  The two men certainly did. Normally their task was to make underwater repairs or release a snagged trawl. It would be good to do something different. It wasn’t every day that a satellite got caught in a trawler’s nets, and they were excited at the idea of a close-up view of the day’s celebrity.

  Five minutes later, kitted up in their scuba-diving gear, they plunged into the water and headed to the part of the net where the object was trapped. Each had with them a length of rope which they used to further constrain the object and prevent it from breaking free. Then they checked the area around the satellite and dived underwater to see what was happening beneath the netting. A few seconds later they resurfaced and gave a thumbs up to the captain, who looked visibly relieved. The satellite – and the windfall that hopefully it represented - wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Robert, tell the divers to attach a buoy to it and then come back on board. We can’t afford to lose it.”

  An hour or so later, the chud-chud-chud of helicopter blades could be heard in the distance. The sound got louder as the chopper continued to approach the ship until it was close enough to drop three divers into the water near the net. By now the entire crew, processing workers included, was at the stern watching the adventure unfold; this
was much more entertaining than working. At least two dozen cell-phones were pointed at the scene, recording the event for both posterity and social media.

  Sitara hadn’t been given a chance to prepare for this trip. No sooner had she received the phone call requesting her presence than a car had pulled up outside her aunt’s house in Anchorage, ready to whisk her away to a waiting helicopter at the nearby Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. She’d been enjoying her break from her work as a member of the Voyager Team at the Jet Propulsion Labs at Caltech, but the Deputy Administrator of NASA, had called her personally - so she could hardly refuse. She had grabbed a few clothes, stuffed them into a backpack, and called out to her aunt.

  “I have to go out for a while. Don’t worry if I’m not back tonight – I have to do something for work – but hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Her aunt didn’t worry too much. She knew her niece was a sensible girl, with a good job. Sitara wasn’t a typical Muslim woman; a child of the 90s, she had missed the Islamic dictatorship. This had allowed her certain freedoms of thought and choice, and she had been inspired to follow her dream of a career in science encouraged by the example of Muslim astronaut Anousheh Ansari, who had spent time on the International Space Station back in 2006. Science wasn’t necessarily the career path that her family would have chosen for her – they would have loved for her to be a doctor or lawyer - but Sitara had been adamant that she wanted to break the stereotype and work for NASA. Her parents had given her their blessing and sent her to study at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had graduated. At any other university she would have probably graduated Cum Laude, but she had set her heart on MIT. Unlike some of her friends, this wasn’t a ruse to escape being married off; Sitara had a dream which her family had allowed her to follow. They were very proud of their daughter.

  Sitara knew that something big was going on as soon as she was ushered towards a US Navy helicopter. She climbed aboard and then watched the Alaskan coast fade into the distance behind her. She’d taken a diving course, just for the fun of it, on her days off from the Pasadena based Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in California, and that skill had been added to her personnel file. She was part of the Mission Control team, whose job was to send instructions to and receive data from a space probe that was 13 billion miles from Earth in interstellar space and moving further away at a rate of 1 million miles a day. By pure chance, on that particular day, she was the closest NASA/JPL scientist to the location of the fallen object, and so the task of representing NASA on site fell to her.

  Soon she was being dropped into the icy waters of the Bering Sea, in full scuba gear, flanked by two Navy frogmen whose primary duty was to keep her safe. As soon as she saw the object that she was tasked with examining, she knew it was definitely not a fallen satellite. One of the frogmen cut away a portion of the netting, just enough to provide easier access to the object, and dozens of fish saw an opportunity for freedom and poured out of their nylon cage. Sitara was thankful for her wetsuit; she didn’t mind swimming with fish around her but didn’t much like the idea of scores of frightened fleeing fish battering her naked skin.

  Once she got closer to it, she scanned the surface of the tethered object, looking for anything that could identify it. The ship’s officers hadn’t been too wide of the mark in their assumption that it was a satellite, but some sixth sense was telling Sitara that it was more than that. If she didn’t know better she would have said that she was looking at a space probe, but that would have been patently ridiculous, so she pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. Obviously it was a satellite - she just needed to discover its country of origin. She would have expected to see some kind of identification plaque on the body of the vehicle, but if there had been, it appeared to be missing.

  Looking over the dish part of the object, she identified an approximately four metre diameter High Gain Antenna along with a Subreflector Support Truss and Subreflector, but that didn’t help her much in coming to a conclusion. She dipped underwater, her waterproof flashlight lighting up a ten-sided box, named the Bus, which housed ten compartments, and was attached to the base of the High Gain Antenna. She opened one of the bays, expecting to see radio transmitters or various electronic subsystems and scientific instruments, but was shocked to find that it was empty. She hurriedly opened the other nine compartments, only to find that they too were empty. She wasn’t sure exactly what she had expected to find inside the compartments, but she had certainly expected something to be inside. This didn’t make sense – nobody would send a satellite into orbit without at least some technical purpose.

  On closer inspection, she noticed that there were a number of mountings that had nothing attached to them. She wracked her brains, trying to think what might be missing from those supports, and then it hit her like a thunderbolt out of the blue. She had seen the configuration before, not first-hand admittedly, but she had read enough technical documents and seen enough photos and illustrations that she should have followed her gut feelings about the object. She was so busy trying to prove to herself that the object was a fallen satellite, certain in the knowledge that the alternative couldn’t possibly be true, that she had momentarily abandoned her scientific impartiality. But the alternative was too ludicrous to give any credence to, and she had felt justified in dismissing it. She knew the design of the object like the back of her hand, although she had never expected to see it with her own eyes – it had left Earth over forty years earlier on a one way journey into space, and was most definitely not supposed to be back on its home planet.

  There should have been an arm at the end of which were located a Low-Energy Charged Particle Detector, a Cosmic Ray Subsystem, a Plasma Subsystem, an Imaging Science Subsystem, an Ultraviolet Spectrometer, the Photopolarimeter Subsystem, and an Infrared Interferometer Spectrometer. Was she losing her mind? The spacecraft was supposed to be billions of miles away. She looked again. There had been something else connected to the unit, but it hadn’t broken off - it had been deliberately removed. She moved to the other side of the Bus. Other items had also been carefully removed. She knew what should have been there - an Optical Calibration Target plate, two Planetary Radio Astronomy and Plasma Wave Antennae, three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, and a Magnetometer Boom. She knew exactly what the object was, except that it couldn’t be that object. Her bosses would think her insane. She looked again at the main body of the Bus, desperately seeking anything that could convince her otherwise. Another missing item was conspicuous by its absence; the Golden Record. The plinth was there but they were no longer attached to anything. A chill ran down her spine as she realized the magnitude of what the sea had just surrendered. How was she going to explain this to NASA that one of its Voyager space probes had come home?

  DAY TWO

  25 April – Infected 60 Dead 0

  The NASA HQ conference room in Washington DC looked like many a conference room up and down the country; a horse-shoe of linked desks, the open end of the arrangement providing easy visibility to two wafer-thin large-screen TVs hanging on a wall, a giant one complemented by a smaller one placed centrally beneath it. To each side of the smaller TV was a framed picture of each Voyager space probe, Voyager One to the left and Voyager Two to the right, each image encircled by images of the prime members of its project team. Each individual desk was furnished with its own computer monitor and almost all the blue executive office chairs were occupied. The people seated on those chairs were of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, some in their late twenties and others up to thirty years or so older than their colleagues. Most of the eighteen were male, although six were women, and with the entrance of Dr Sitara Khan, that number was now increased to seven. Sitara had the typical extreme beauty and lighter complexion of her Pathan heritage, coupled with large dark eyes that looked as if they had been drawn by a Disney artist. The majority of the men were dressed formally in shirt and tie, but a handful - the younger ones mainly - were wearing polo-shirts. All, both men a
nd women, had NASA identity cards hanging from blue cords slung around their necks.

  Sitara mouthed hello to several of the attendees as she made her way to a vacant chair, which was positioned in front of the monitors and upon whose desk sat a name plate with the word ‘PRESENTER’ etched in silver capital letters on a black background. She wasn’t going to be the most important person at the meeting by rank – that would be Anthony Healey, the Administrator of NASA, but, as the NASA representative at the scene of the salvage, her input would be the most valuable. The task of chairing the meeting fell to the NASA Deputy Administrator, who, along with the Administrator, and the respective Directors of JPL, the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), the Langley Research Center, and the Independent Verification and Validation Facility (IVVF), were anxious to hear Sitara speak.

  Sitara settled into her seat, and smiled at the three other members of the Voyager One Project Team representatives; the Project Manager, the Voyager Spacecraft Team Chief, and the Telecommunications and Mission Systems Manager, She didn’t normally occupy such a high profile position in meetings, but this time she held a unique position in the chain of evidence. She was a little nervous, in awe of being in the presence of so many high-ranking NASA officials at the same time, but did her best to conceal it. The Deputy Administrator rose to his feet, adjusted his suit jacket, cleared his throat and began to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here at such short notice. However, when you hear what Dr Khan has to say, I’m sure that you will agree that it was well worth the inconvenience. So, without further ado, I would like to hand you over to Voyager Project Scientist, Dr Sitara Khan.”

  The Deputy Administrator retook his seat as Sitara stood up. She had given presentations dozens of times since she had joined the agency, but this particular presentation had been hastily prepared. Fortunately everybody in the room knew this and certainly wouldn’t be judging her on the slickness of her performance. Sitara pressed a key on her notebook computer and the left hand screen displayed a website entitled ‘Voyager, The Interstellar Mission’. To calm her nerves, she took a sip from the glass of water that had been provided for her on her desk. Her throat moistened; she felt more confident.