Jupiter’s Bones

“Ah …” Recognition. “Tall, thin … I think now he sports a beard.”

“Goatee.” Decker tried to hide his surprise. “Does he have a last name?”

“Changes with the wind. When I knew him, it was Robert Ross.”

Decker wrote it down in his notes. “Where do you know him from?”

“From Southwest. We were fellow students—actually dated for a couple of months. He was a fanatic admirer of Emil Ganz the scientist. With my father gone, I was his sole link to the great man. But when Dad was resurrected as Jupiter, Bob went directly to the source. At one time, he had a working brain. By now I’m sure it’s mush.”

“He impressed me as being sharp. But what do I know?”

Europa shrugged. “Maybe.”

Decker regarded her with a swift glance. She wasn’t as separate from the Order as Decker had thought. She had kept in contact with her father via phone, she had dated one of the members, and had been best friends with her father’s woman. Also, she remembered Pluto, albeit not fondly. And this was what she admitted to. Who knew what she wasn’t telling him. He said, “Explain your dad’s whacked-out theories.”

She sighed heavily. “Dad had developed some far-out theories about teleportation and time machines into alternative universes—a combination of H. G. Wells and Beam me up, Scotty.” Again, a sigh. “Not that this bears any relevancy to your investigation.”

“Actually, it may be very relevant,” Decker answered. “Maybe he chose to end his life because he believed that he was transporting himself to a better place with a time machine.”

“Even so, why would that be relevant to the police?”

“Because we have to make sure no one tries to follow in your father’s footsteps. I don’t want another Heaven’s Gate—not anywhere and certainly not in my district.”

“How can you guarantee that?”

“With adults, we can’t. Kids are another story.”

“I see your point.” She held up a finger. “So you are viewing this as a suicide.”

“Everything’s open,” Decker said without emotion. “Especially since your father had enemies.”

“That he did.”

“Getting back to your dad’s theories … did any of them have any scientific bases?”

“Of course. Before my father vanished, he’d been working on superluminal loopholes—things that could scientifically account for instantaneous time travel, backward-in-time travel and faster-than-light travel.”

Decker raised his brow. “Okay.”

“Not a science fiction reader, Lieutenant?”

Decker smiled, “I liked it when Han Solo did that warp speed thing on the Millennium Falcon.” He leaned forward. “What travels faster than light?”

“Undiscovered subatomic particles called tachyons—”

“Undiscovered?”

“They’re out there. We just haven’t found them yet. Also photons coming from the same electromagnetic wave. Subatomic particles called kaons travel backward in time. With them, we see the result of the event before the actual event takes place.”

“I don’t follow you,” Decker said. “I was taught that nothing travels as fast as light. Are you saying that’s not true?”

“I believe you mean that you were taught that nothing travels as fast as electromagnetic radiation. Visible light is only one small part of the spectrum. You’ve got UV waves, microwaves, radiowaves, infrared waves … any of this ring a bell?”

“No.”

She tapped a pencil on the surface of her desk. “All right. I’ll try to sum up twentieth-century physics in a couple of paragraphs.”

“I’m taking notes.”

“Stop me if I lose you.” She finished the dregs of her coffee. “For years, physics was based on Newton’s three laws of motion. The second law deals with the orbits of heavenly bodies. The fact that some of the orbits didn’t comply with Newton’s mathematics bothered no one. They just added a fudge factor, an arbitrary number that makes the math fit the physics.”

“You can do that?”

She chuckled, “It’s not ideal—something akin to smashing a square peg in a round hole—but physicists do it with theories that almost work until someone comes along with a theory that works better. Newton’s theories worked for most cases so why quibble with the few exceptions? Something wasn’t right, but no one knew how to fix it.”

“I’ve known a few cases of that.”

“I’ll bet.” Europa leaned over her desk. “Then along came Einstein, who ushered us into the modern world. His theories on the curvature of space explained the inconsistency in Newton’s planetary laws. But he is best known to the layman for his remarkable theory of relativity. It changed our concept of time from something absolute and immutable to something relative from party to party.”

“Which means?”

She stopped, took in a breath and let it out. It appeared as if she was used to confusing people. “Words don’t do it justice. The mathematics is beautiful, but that won’t help you either. Please interrupt me if I’m going too fast.”

“Oh, I will. Go on.”

“All right. This is the standard model used to explain it. Picture a train pulling away from a platform. To the person on the platform, it appears as if he is standing still and the train is moving, right?”

“Right.”

“But to the person on the train, it seems as if the train is standing still and the platform is moving—”

“But we know the train’s moving.”

“Only because you’ve been taught that it’s the train that moves.”

“But the train is moving. It’s going from place to place. The platform isn’t budging.”

“In space, Lieutenant, you have no way of knowing who or what is actually moving. You always have the option of assuming that you’re moving and other guy is standing still.”

Decker said, “But if you’re moving, you’re moving.”

“Sorry. Motion is relative. So is time, distance and mass. And the faster you go, the more relative it is. Now, at slow speeds, the relativity factor isn’t going to make much difference. Suppose you’re cruising at sixty miles an hour on the freeway and I’m stalled on the shoulder with a flat tire because I didn’t have the time to take my bald retreads into the garage. If you zoom past me at one o’clock in the afternoon, what time will my car clock read?”

Decker said, “It’s not going to read anything because your motor’s turned off.”

She laughed, showing teeth. She had a nice smile when she chose to use it. “It wasn’t a trick question, sir.”

Decker smiled boyishly. “One o’clock.”