"Mr O'Donnell and Miss Winner, I believe we'll unfortunately have to go down on this novel like it's our last meal."

Led only nodded, feeling uncomfortable to say any more. The encounter with Arlene had drowned out his emotions.

"It doesn't say the date or author on the cover," Meddles continued, "but I'm sure we can file an inquiry to the funding agency and get its ISBN if it's a book, or even a DOI if we're lucky."

"I've worked in Cornell from 2004 to 12, but I don't remember this book being in the archive," the sky-blue-eyed chemist from UPenn asserted. He was pale, as the others.

"Then, with all due respect, why should we read it?" Arlene questioned.

"You should see for yourself, Miss Winner,"  Mills answered her. "I assure you once you open the manuscript, you'll understand why we've chosen this work as our basis for the going-out expedition."

"Basis? Indeed? I thought we were to choose Penrose's works, or Einstein's, for that matter. Of course not the initial 1935 paper but the extensions on it, for example W. Leanman's paper on the twin paradox through the Dirac equation," Arlene suggested, absent-mindedly picking up the volume.

Mills stared, surprisedly.

"You sure about Leanman? Her recent works have only concerned topics such as black holes, singularity theorems and bits and pieces of cosmology. She didn't even touch the Eigenvalue or Planck's constant."

"Wasn't her paper about Friedmann in quantum physics published recently?" Arlene asked.

Her query was met with silence.

"No, I guess? Oh well, I must have confused her with some other scientist," she inferred, continuing to flick through the book's friable pages. 

"Well, we must find something to base our arguments upon, so that Led's theory doesn't go to waste. For the next fourteen hours, let us focus on the book in hand and decipher anything we can that would help our situation. All agreed?" Smith asked.

Everyone nodded.

And so the research continued. 

***

After 10 hours of reading, researching and doing anything the goal of which was to induce madness and lethargy, Miss Chaisson's team was positively exhausted. The restless ages spent skimming through articles, discussing each little keyword which just happened to be more than 4, and just thinking, thinking and thinking about any little possibility that crossed their minds and turning it into some kind of theory was weighing down on them, heavily, and very burdensome. The objective of the mission rested buffly on their shoulders; the stress and the tension turned them into tyrants of their own souls, minds and senses; but they never could explain precisely what kept them moving on.

Perhaps it was passion.
Or inner discipline.

But they basked in it, revelled in the vigour, and continued gravelling on, despite any bit of self-doubt engulfing their half-sane minds, most earnestly prompting them to turn to fantasies instead of the usual rigorous of thought. Yet they didn't choose to rest.

For the first time in ages, they were finally working as a team, without unnecessary prejudices, or delayed responses.

"The Ricci tensor wouldn't be an equivalent of this certain eigenvalue of universe #2 passing through #1, we'll have to find a product," Smith stated, in slight unease.

"A vector product of the Ricci tensor? Smith, with all politeness, this won't help the mission. Let's try solving for the Ricci tensor, and then taking the cosmological as the AIP value, write the EFEs for the two universes."

"What do you suggest for the stress-energy value, then?"

Meddles seemed to have slight confusion on his features.

He still gave an answer.

"We can write two Dirac equations in terms of a Dirac spinor field and assume infinitesimal rotation, so that the spinors of each universe could be assumed to behave similarly to a tensor, like the metric one, for example," Meddles said.

"But what about pseudo-Riemannian space? Or just Riemmanian, for that account?" Led asked, lastly butting into the conversation. No one had expected him to voice his thoughts. "It's best to start with the Euclidean, of course, but what will happen when we get deeper into the QFEs? We won't have the equivalence, sadly."

"Then - I'm stumped," Meddles smiled. But in the next instant, his face turned gravely serious. "I don't understand how to solve this problem. Your theory possibly dies."

Led wanted to get fresh air, but he remembered he had no such thing. For a minute, it was as if his heart didn't beat anymore. He shouldn't have fogged up his mind with the personal things. His mind went blank except for that one thought lingering - his theory wasn't correct. The mission was a fail. They were all going to die.

It was 4 am. He sighed and looked up at his dream sky. Then his Sun. His moon. The Columnium. His mother, who did utterly care for him and never kept anything to herself. He recalled his university years, getting an education. Fillng a form for the Chaisson Detroit multidisciplinary research team, and then suddenly getting accepted. His papers published in Nature, Springer. It would truly cost so much for him to never carry on.

It was as if he saw the night shadowed by day in outer space. The Sun gleamed whiter in the extraorbital cosmos, but it was still natural, like a circumferential light at the end of a linked tunnel. It was as if the journey of discovery was never destined to end, but with each milestone the merrier the praise sounded. The merrier life seemed. The more enthusiastic and enthralling more and more discovery was to be made.

For a moment the supernova blinded everything he had seen. But then, the very next instant, the cosmos was moving again, the Earth running around in an elegant plie and the Sun stilling its movements like a careful mother who was strict but also loved her children; everything was good, and back to how it had been again. A hoax? A challenge. Certainly.

"My theory will never die."

"If we combine quantum entanglement," he stood up to the board, hastily scribbling a pointer graph, "and SR Lorentzian space-time dilation, we would see a rip, and not one, only,..."

He wasn't fully there yet, but he did, just as Einstein, intend to find out!