“Now, the missing six dimensions are there, but they are crumpled up. Like garden hoses, rolled around themselves.”

Alfred struggled with that. “So these dimensions are there. But too small to see.”

Monica hesitated. “Something like that. Yes. The trouble is, there are tens of thousands of ways for the six dimensions to crumple. Each of those different ways generates a different internal space, as we call it. And in each internal space, the strings adopt a different solution.”

“A different solution?”

“One internal space describes our universe, with three types of electron, and one photon. Another might have two photons. Or something even more exotic. And so on.” Monica leaned forward. “Now. The theoreticians are suggesting there is a — tear in space — at the heart of Venus. Or what Venus has been made into.”

“A tear?”

“A way into another internal space. You see, when a string enters a new internal space, it adopts a different configuration.” She cast around for an analogy. “Like ice. Take it from the Arctic to the Sahara, and it melts. Vaporizes. It adopts a configuration that’s suitable for the environment.”

“And so…”

“And so, at the heart of Venus, we think we’re seeing strings being ripped apart. Literally. Maybe even being expanded to macro lengths before collapsing back down to new configurations.”

“Hence, the exotic particles we’ve observed.”

“Elementary particles as massive as bacteria. Yes.”

“A tear in space, in the heart of the Solar System,” he mused. “A pocket universe… Strange days indeed.”

“Certainly we’re looking at a release of energy more than enough to overcome gravitational binding energy.”

“Umm. But why?” Alfred asked. “What’s it for?”

“Since we’ve no idea how this is being done,” she said, “we’re nowhere near an answer to that.”

She scanned through more preprints. A flood of them, a kaleidoscope of theory, scattered shards of calculation and insight and speculation. Too much for anyone to read, let alone review. “Makes me wish I was young again,” she said.

“Umm?”

“The excitement out there. String theory describes the high energy stuff. Energies of up to ten to power nineteen giga-electronvolts. Which is ten million billion times higher than anything we could create in any conceivable accelerator. So much was hidden from us, in this low-energy world we inhabit. Like trying to deduce the nature of a lion, after being given a glimpse of his tail.”

“And string theory is a description of the rest of the lion.”

“With about as much guesswork involved. Yes. But now, it’s as if Venus has conveniently transmuted into the biggest particle accelerator in the universe. We can see the stuff we struggled to describe before. Now, even the sceptical types are saying we might reach a true Theory of Everything in five, ten years at most. The excitement is extraordinary…”