(lix)


It was only midnight when she called this time, and I wasn’t asleep. I was doing some research, with a bottle of bourbon and an old Bob Dylan record.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You sound funny.”

“It’s nothing that fourteen hours of sleep and a few hundred thousand dollars couldn’t cure,” I assured her.

“Oh,” she said.

“I’m sure my Fairy Godmother will take care of it in the morning. So what’s happening?”

“Oh,” she said. “I got a postdoc.”

“Really?” I thought about it. “Where?”

“Oh, you know.” She laughed. “In Pasadena.”

“Oh,” I said. “Great.” I thought about it some more. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I have to get some ice.”

“I meant to ask you,” she said when I got back,” about General Relativity.”

“I don’t know much about it.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but I don’t understand about black holes.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “What don’t you understand?”

“If you fall into one, you can’t get out, right?”

“Supposedly.”

“But in quantum mechanics you can tunnel out of a potential well.”

“Right,” I said. I laughed. “You just wrote Hawking’s latest paper. Tell me the rest.”

“Really?” She was excited. “So it can happen then?”

“Apparently. You can’t come out in one piece, though. Information can’t escape. You come out as blackbody radiation.”

“Really?”

“At least in the semiclassical theory.”

She liked this. “But why not in one piece?” she asked.

“You shouldn’t be able to tell anybody on the outside what’s going on inside.”

“Why not?”

“Entropy, apparently. It’s irreversible, when you fall into the hole.”

“I don’t like that.”

I shrugged, though she couldn’t hear it. “It’s not the whole story yet. Maybe it’ll be different, in the fully quantized theory.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’m still not sure that I believe it,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I was figuring anything that was such good science fiction couldn’t be good physics. I’m not so sure now.”

“Oh,” she said. She paused. “I’m still not sure,” she said. “About the tunnelling. Where do you come out?”

“Homogeneized,” I said. “On the surface of the event horizon.”

“But what happens on the inside?” she asked.

“You don’t look at it from the inside,” I said. “You look at it from the outside.”

“But what happens on the inside?”

“I don’t know. Nobody comes back to talk about it.”

“What if you fell in, and there was another hole inside and you fell into that? Would you be on the outside then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“I want to know,” she said.

“Everybody wants to know,” I said. “Everything.”

“Don’t you want to know?”

“Sure,” I said. “But one thing at a time.”

“So what do you want to know now?”

“That’s a tough one,” I said. I finished the drink, and poured another one. “A lot of things, I guess.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“So are you still working?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you getting tired of that?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “I thought you were hustling a graduate student.”

“I was.”

“So how did that come out?”

I laughed. “Ignominious failure.”

She laughed. She sounded relieved.

“It’s easy for you to laugh,” I said.

“You’re young,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”

“Didn’t they say that about the Austro-Hungarian empire?”

“Perhaps,” she admitted.