CONTRACTION

TRANSLATED BY JOHN CHU

The contraction will start one hour, twenty-four minutes, seventeen seconds before sunrise.

It will be observed in the auditorium of the country’s largest astronomical observatory. The auditorium will receive images sent back from a space telescope in geosynchronous orbit, then project them onto a gigantic screen about the size of a basketball court. Right now, the screen is still blank. There aren’t many people here, but they are all authorities in theoretical physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, the few people in the world who can truly understand the implications of the moment to come. Waiting for that moment, they sit still, like Adam and Eve, having just been created from mud, waiting for the breath of life from God. The exception is the observatory head, impatiently pacing back and forth.

The gigantic screen isn’t working and the engineer responsible for maintaining it hasn’t shown up yet. If she doesn’t show up in time, the image coming from the space telescope can be projected only on the small screen. The historic sense of the moment will be ruined.

Professor Ding Yi walks into the hall.

The scientists all come to life. They stand in unison. Aside from the universe itself, only he can hold them all in awe.

As usual, Ding Yi holds everyone beneath his notice. He doesn’t greet anyone and he doesn’t sit in the large, comfortable chair prepared for him. Instead, he strolls aimlessly until he reaches a corner of the auditorium, where there’s a large glass cabinet. He admires the large clay plate, one of the observatory head’s local treasures, propped up inside. It’s a priceless relic of the Western Zhou era. Carved onto its surface is a star atlas as seen by the naked eye on a summer night several thousand years ago. Having suffered the ravages of time, the star atlas is now faint and blurred. The starry sky outside the hall, though, is still bright and clear.

Ding Yi digs out a pipe and tobacco from his jacket pocket. Self-assured, he lights the pipe, then takes a puff. This surprises everyone, because he has severe tracheitis. He’s never smoked before and no one has ever dared to smoke around him. Furthermore, smoking is strictly prohibited in the auditorium, and that pipe produces more smoke than ten cigarettes.

However, Professor Ding is entitled to do anything he wants. He founded the unified field theory, realizing Albert Einstein’s dream. The series of predictions his theory has made about space over a vast scale have all been confirmed by actual observations. For three years, as many as a hundred supercomputers ran a mathematical model of the unified field theory nonstop and obtained a result that was hard to believe: The universe that had been expanding for about fourteen billion years would, in two years, start collapsing. Now, out of those two years, there’s only one hour left.

White smoke lingers around his head. It forms a dreamlike pattern, as if his incredible ideas are floating out of his mind….