Yes, there are trade-offs. We discovered that. Trade-offs not only in astrophysics but in life.
I remember Shep became interested in folding planets in half when we were in high school. He got kicked off the tennis team for folding the tennis balls. We’d show up for practice and unfold them. You squeeze them and they pop back out. That was the moment of inspiration—that popping sound. Shep said, “Do you have any idea how much energy is being released?” To me, it seemed like only a modest amount, but he said, “Just one tennis ball, folded in half, could power this watch for almost half an hour!” He was still wearing a windup watch at the time.
Nobody else had his vision. He was the first to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of giant atomic-powered hands. Now you see these hands everywhere, but back then they were unthinkable, revolutionary. We both attended Princeton, and one day I was sitting in the school cafeteria (which we called the Caf) when Shep burst in waving pages of calculations that he said proved you could build these hands. Make them big enough, he continued excitedly, and they would even be able to fold the moon in half, which could produce enough energy to run the entire Tokyo subway system for seven weeks.
We had forgotten that the moon is not a tennis ball, or a basketball (which we had also folded in half, powering an electric can opener for almost a full circuit of the top of a six-ounce can). By then, science had determined that the moon is completely full of matter that is very similar to what is on its surface—i.e., rock. Most of that would have to come out before our giant hands could fold the moon in half.
I was in touch with my foreign spymasters this entire time. One was a short guy named Boris (appropriately enough), and he partnered with a tall Slavic woman, Natasha, who always wore tight black skirts and smoked cigarettes in a long cigarette holder. In return for the information I provided, they promised to teach me how to exist in only two dimensions. We used to meet at the old Horn & Hardart on Fifty-seventh Street.
What I gave them was garbage. Honestly, the documents I went to prison for couldn’t have helped them fold a table saw in half, much less a planet. But that made no difference to a jury—I was incarcerated and, therefore, not around for all the political business involved with folding the Earth in half. The big thing was, after you got all the Earth’s mantle removed, and the molten outer core, and the nickel-iron inner core, two questions came up. First, would the Earth collapse in on itself? And, second, when the Earth was folded in half, what would be the concave part and what part would be convex? On the convex part, life would go on as usual, but on the concave part major changes could be expected. New York would have to be on the convex part, because the whole point was to power Manhattan for a year, and planners wanted to keep it in the most advantageous position to benefit from that.
Boris and Natasha, my old cronies, got a real grilling from the Senate Armed Services Committee when they were nominated to be co-Secretaries of Defense. As noncitizens, they should never have been considered in the first place. Two reporters for the Washington Post, a moose and a squirrel, dug up their recent espionage history, and the nomination was sunk. The news made all the front pages, and even the Saturday-morning cartoons. Of course, my name came up a lot and, predictably, was dragged through the mud.
I am not bitter. I served my time, and reëntered society. It’s kind of peaceful, being a pariah, shunned by all my former colleagues. Like everybody else, I watched from my front yard the night they folded the moon in half. None of us will forget the shadows of the giant thumbs and fingers flickering across the face of the familiar bright disk. Suddenly it was done. The folding occurred, and the full moon became a half-moon. In Tokyo, for almost two months, the subways would be free for everybody. We had entered a new era.
Folding the Earth in half foundered on account of NIMBYism coming from what was expected to be the Earth’s concave side, and eventually the idea had to be shelved. Last year, I saw in an élite magazine that Shep had not lost his enthusiasm for the dream. Now the time may be right to look at it again. I wish him the best. ♦
