Timescape. Part 18

Christ, what paranoia. He was getting to sound like his mother, always sure the goyim were out to get you."Sorry about that," Gordon said; "I was afraid you wouldn't work on it if I didn't, well ...""Hey, that's okay. No big deal. h.e.l.l, you put me onto a fantastic thing. Really important."Ramsey tapped the photograph. Both men stared at it, reflecting. A silence fell between them. The fish's lips were swollen balloons, the colors horribly out of place. In the quiet Gordon heard the lab outside the small office. The regular chugging and ticking went on unmindful of the two men, rhythms and forces, voices. Nucleic acids sought each other in the capillaries of gla.s.s. An acid smell cut the air. Enameled light descended. Ticktock ticktock.

Saul Shriffer gazed out from the cover of Life with a casual self-confidence, arm draped over a Palomar telescope mount. Inside, the story was t.i.tled BATTLING EXOBIOLOGIST. There were pictures of Saul peering at a photograph of Venus, Saul inspecting a model of Mars, Saul at the control panel of the Green Bank radio telescope. One paragraph dealt with the NMR message. Beside the big magnets stood Saul, with Gordon in the background. Gordon was looking TIMESCAPE.into the s.p.a.ce between the magnet. poles, apparently doing nothing. Saul's hand hovered near some wiring, about to fix it. The NMR signals were described as "controversial" and "strongly doubted by most astronomers."

Saul was quoted: "You take some chances in this field. Sometimes you lose. Them's the breaks."

"Gordon, your name is in here once. That's all,"

Penny said."The article's about Saul, remember.""But that's why he's in here. He's riding on your ...Mocking: "My success."

Gordon tossed the drawing on Ramsey's desk. "Did I give you a copy of this?"Ramsey picked it up and wrinkled his brow. "No.

What is it?""Another part of the signal.""Oh yeah, I remember. It was on TV.""Right. Shriffer showed it."Ramsey studied the interweaving curves. "Y'know,I didn't think anything of this at the time. But ..."

"Yes?""Well it looks like some sort of molecular chain to me. These dots ...""The ones I connected up?"''Yeah, I guess. You drew this first?""No, Saul unscrambled it from a coded sequence.

What about them?"''Well, maybe it's not a bunch of curves. Maybe the points are molecules. Or atoms. Nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorus.""Like in DNA."''Well, this isn't DNA. More complicated."

4 2 Gregory Ben ford'qVIore complicated, or more complex?"

"c.r.a.p, I don't know. What's the difference?""You think it has some relation to those long-chain molecules?""Could be.""Those in-house names. Dupont and Springsome-thing.""Dupont a.n.a.lagan 58. Springfield AD45."

"Could this be one of those?""Those products don't exist, I told you.""Okay, okay. But could they be that kind of thing?""Maybe. Maybe. Look, why don't I see if I can fig-ure this thing out.""How?""Well, try a.s.signing atoms to the sites in the chains. See what works.""The way Crick and Watson did DNA?"

"Well, yeah, something like that."

"Great. Maybe that'll unravel some of--""Don't count on it. Look, the important thing is the experiment. The oxygen loss, the fish. Hussingerand I are going to publish that right away."

"Good, fine, and--"

''You don't mind?"

"Huh? Why?""I mean, Hussinger says he thinks we should publish it together. If you and I want to do a paper on the message and its content; Hussinger says, that's another--""Oh, I see." Gordon rocked back in his chair. He felt worn down."I mean, I don't go along with him on that one, but...""No, never mind. I don't care. Publish it, for Chrissakes."''You don't mind?""All I did was say, look into it. So you looked and you found something. Good.""It wasn't my idea, this Hussinger thing."

TIMESCAPE."I know that."'Well, thanks. Really. Look, I'll follow up on thischain picture you got here.""If it is a chain."'Yeah. But I mean, maybe we can publish that. Together.""Fine. Fine."

The resonance curves remained smooth. However, the noise level continued to rise. Gordon spent more of his time in the laboratory, trying to suppress the electromagnetic sputter. He had most of his lecture notes for the graduate course in Cla.s.sical Electromagnetism finished, so he was free to pursue research.

He abandoned his sample preparation, however, in favor of more time on the NMR rig. Cooper was still digesting his own data. The noise would not go away.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

1998.

HE BANGED THE OUTER OFFICE DOOR SHUT AND.thumped across the old broad-boarded flooring. He had a respectably ancient office, just off Naval Row, but at times he would just as soon have had less oiled wood and more modem air-conditioning. Ian Peterson, returning from a morning-long meeting, dumped a file of papers on his desk. His sinuses had a stuffed, cottony feel. Meetings invariably did that.

He had felt a thin haze descend on his mind as the meeting progressed, sealing him off from much of the tedious detail and bickering. He knew the effect from years of experience; fatigue at so much talk, so many qualified phrases, so many experts covering their a.s.ses with carefully impersonal judgments.He shook off the mood and thumbed into his desktop Sek. First,' a list of incoming calls, arranged by priority. Peterson had carefully sorted out names into lists, so the answering Sek computer would know whether to alert him. The list changed weekly, as he moved from problem to problem. People who a $ had once worked with him on a proiect had an annoying tendency to a.s.sume that they could then ring him up about continuing secondary issues, even months or years later.Second, incoming memos, flagged with deadlines for reply.Third, personal messages. Nothing there this time except a note from Sarah about her b.l.o.o.d.y parey.Fourth, news items of interest, broken down into abstracts. Last, minor uncla.s.sifiable items. No time for that today. He reviewed category One.Hanschman, probably wailing about the metals problem. Peterson deflected at one to an a.s.sistant 'by typing in a three-letter symbol. Ellehlouh, the North African, with a last-gasp plea for more fly-ins to the new drought region. That he routed up to Opuktu. He was the officer in charge of selecting who got the grain and mola.s.ses s.h.i.+pments; let him take the flak. Call from that Kiefer in La Jolla, flagged urgent. Peterson picked up his telephone and punched through. Busy. He stabbed Repeat Call and said "Dr. Keffer" so the tape could add it to the "Mr.

Peterson of the World Council is urgently trying to reach" message which now would try Kiefer's number every venty seconds.Peterson turned to the memos and brightened. He punched for a screening of his own memo, dictated while riding to work this morning and machine-typed.

He had never tried the system before.

--are you certain you---oh, yes, I Isee the light go[sea fore canton for autorite G.o.d why,/can, tthey spell any-Ifour ithere [forething out correctly their certainly is s.p.a.ce {for four.

Iwriteanother letter all right here goes paragraph ah a 6 two.{see [theirhave to hit the b.u.t.ton I isn't /therea ohtoo seacontextual option key, right Summary for Sir Martin on Coriolis ProposalCommittee agrees the logical Isight uh s-i-t-e for the fully'

site deployed system is in the Gulf Stream hope I've got those capital-izations right off the Atlantic coast of Miami period yes. Them isa four not oh special spelling b.u.t.ton. I suppose k-n-o-t, them, afour knot current steady and reliable. Those currants rotate the gi-ant turbine fans, produring enough electricity for all Florida. Theturbines are admittedly huge, 500 meters in diameter However, Iwould paraphrase the technical discussion as saying they am bas-ically Victorian engineering. Large and simple. Their flating hullis 345 meters long and they hang fully 25 meters below the sur-face. That's enough for pa.s.sing s.h.i.+ps to run safely over. The an-choring cables have to go down I that s t-w-o miles m some/two .places. That is minor compared to the cables carrying power toland, but technical branch says that probably has no bad side ef-fects either.Our projections are that the nearest candidatesnatural gasfrom seaweed and ocean thermal energy conversion--am hope-lessly behind Coriolis. The name, as you undoubtedly know and Ididn't, springs from a French mathematidan who had a hand inshowing why ocean currents go as they do. Effects of the earth'srotation and so on.The snags are obvious. Having 400 of these slowing the GulfStream might be dicey. The weather pattern for much of the Atlan-tic Ocean hinges on that current, which sweeps by the US andCanada and then out to sea and back to the Caribbean is that thespelling must be. A full-scale numerical simulation on the omni allcaps OMNI computer shows a measurable effect of one percent.Safe enough, by current guidelines.Negative political impact is minimal. Introducing 40 gigawattsto that area will silence criticism of our halt to fis.h.i.+ng, I should s a ?

believe. I therefore advise prompt approvals. Yours sincerely etcetera.

Peterson grinned. Remarkable. They even a.s.signed.

the most probable h.o.m.onym. He corrected the piece and sent it off through the electronic labyrinth to Sir Martin. Committee flotsam and jetsam was for the a.s.sistants; sir Martin saved his time for judgments, the delicate balancing act above 'the flood of information.

He had taught Peterson a good deal, all the way down to such fine points as how to speak on a committee where your opponents are lying in wait. Sir Martin would pause and breathe in the middle of his sentences, then rush past the period at the end and on for a clause or two into the next sentence. No one knew when to make a smooth interruption.Peterson asked his Sek for an update. He found the Kiefer call still facing the blank buzzing of a busy signal and two underlings leaving recorded messages he would check later.He reclined in his armchair and studied his office wall. Quite an array, yes. Pseudoparchment dtations for bureaucratic excellence. Photos of himself beside various charismatic sloganeers with their buzzword bibles. Pract.i.tioners of leaderbiz, smiling at the camera.The committee meeting this morning had its share of those, along with earnest biochemists and numerical meteorologists. Their reports on the distribution of the clouds were unsettling but vague. The clouds were further examples of "biological cross function,"

an all-purpose. term meaning interrelations n.o.body had thought of yet. Apparently the circ.u.mpolar wind vortex, which had s.h.i.+fted towards the equator in recent years, was picking up something from the re-eOn near the bloom. The unknown biological agents ing carried by the clouds had caused withering of the Green Revolution crop strains. Besides giving uniform high yields, the Green Revolution plants 3 a 8 Gregory Ben fordalso had uniform weaknesses. If one became diseased, they all did. How devastating the strange yellow-tan clouds might be was unknown. Something odd was in the biocycle, but research had not roieced together the puzzle as yet. The meeting had ken up into rivulets of indecision. Belgian biolo-gists argued with plump disasterologists, neither with any hard evidence.Peterson pondered what it might mean, while leaf-ing through some reports. Inventories, a.s.sessments, speculative calculations, order-of-magnitude truths.

Some were in the clunky gingerbread of Cyrillic, or the swoops of Arabic script, or Asia's ant squiggles, or the squared-off machine type of ModEng. A tract on Erdwisenschaft made man a minor statistical nuisance, a bug skittering over a world reduced to nouns and numbers. Peterson was at times entranced by the mix of minds in the World Council, the encyclopedic power they tapped. Voices, a babble of voices. There was the furious energy of the Germans; the austere and finally constricting logic of la bella France; the j.a.panese, smothered now in industrial excess; strangely sad Americans, still strong but like an aging boxer, swinging at sparring partners no longer there; the Brazilians, wandering now onto the world stage, blinking into the spotlight, dazed. Several years ago he had gone on a tour of Ethiopia with a clucking band of international future-seers and watched their calculus collide with life. In dusty red-rocked gorges he had seen men attacking and scattering ant hills to s.n.a.t.c.h away the crumbs of wheat stored there. Naked women, colored like mud and with thin sacks fr b.r.e.a.s.t.s, climbed mimosa trees to clip the green shoots of fresh growth, for soup. Children gathered stuff like briars, to chew for moisture.

Trees were stripped bare of bark, gnawed at the roots. Skeletons baked white and luminous near brackish water holes.The forecasting methodologists had paled and turned away.

3 a 9When he was a boy he had watched the Naffonal Geographic programs on TV and come to think of the almost mythic beasts in Africa as distant friends, ralaying on the horizon of the world. Lions, vast and zy. Giraffes, their stiff-necked lope taking them tee-te rng into the distance. He'd had a boy's dreamy love of them. Now they were nearly gone. He had learned a lesson there, in Africa. Soon there would be nothing bigger than a man on the planet that was not already a client, a housepet. Without the giants mankind would be alone with the rats and the c.o.c.kroaches.

Worse, perhaps, he would be alone with himself. This fuzzy issue had not occupied the futurologists. They cluckclucked over b.u.t.ter mountains here versus starvation there, and supplied their own recipes. They loved their theories more than the world. Forrester, rattling his numerical fantasies like beads; Heilbroner, Urging mankind into a jail so they all could be sure of eating; Tinbergen, who thought one good crisis would shape us up; Kosolapov, whose Marxist optimism sat waiting patiently for the hacksaw of history to cut away capitalism, as though overty were civilization's headcold, not a disease; is opposites, the followers of Kahn, with c.o.c.ky as-surance that a few wars and some starving wouldn't get in the. way of higher per capita income; Schu-macher's disciple, with his shy faith that the hydrocarbon cartels would decide cottage industries were best after all; and Remuloto, the Third Industrial Revolutionist, seeing salvation in our starry satellites.Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Depai:tment of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II.

Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extra]v. olation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fas.h.i.+on. And they were filled with re,c, ipes. Order up more fellow-feeling; y'see, and we II do better. To survive now Man had to be $ o more patient, preferring long-range rational solutions to global problems, while suspending his nasty old irrational demands for short-range local fixes. They all wished some Lockeian dream of the future, a natural law which set forth human rights and human obligations simultaneously. An unwritten law, but reachable by reason. A mythology of stoic endurance would do the job, get us through the pinch. But who had one for sale? The secular faith in the technological fix had trickled away into astrology and worse.

Jefferson's descendants were sucking up whatever liberties they could and leaving for posterity a used-up garbage dump. Au revoir, Etats-Unis! Check your beclouded vision at the door. Peterson glanced at the one item on his wall that was out of place, a century-old sampler: All nature is but art, unknown o thee;All chance, direction, which thou canst not .see;All discord, harmony not understood;All partial evil, universal good;And spite of pride, in erring reason spiteOne truth is clear: whatever is, is right.

He laughed as the telephone rang."h.e.l.lo, Ian?" Kiefer's voice was thin and reedy."Happy to hear from you," he said with artificial friendliness."I don't think you'll be so happy in a minute."

"Oh?" Kiefer had not responded with the expected jovial banter that usually opened executive conversations."We've turned up the underlying process in that diatom bloom.""Good, then you can rectify it.""Eventually, yeah. Problem is, it's a runaway. The process enters a phase where it can take the jacket of the plankton and change that material into the original pesticide-based molecules."

TIMESCAPE.Peterson sat very still and thought. "Like a reli-gious movement," he said to have something to say.

"Huh?""Turns heathen :mto apostles.""Well ... yeah. Point is, that's what makes it spread so fast. Never seen anything like it. It's got a lot of the lab guys worried.""Can't they find an ... antidote?""In time, probably. Trouble is, we haven't gotmuch time. This is an exponential process."'

"How much time?""Months. Months to spread to the other oceans."

"Christ."'"Yeah. Look, -I don't know how ruch pull you've got there, but I'd like this result taken fight to the top.""I'll do that, certainly.""Good. I've got a technical report on LogEx fightnow. I'll transmit it on key, okay?"

"Right. Here, I'm receiving."

"Good. Here it comes."

It was Sir Martin who saw the connection. There was very little transfer of vapor from the ocean's surface into cloud formation. But suppose the impurity in the bloom could convert the cellular jackets of living microorganisms into itself. Then a trivial amount of the stuff, given time, could spread through a cloud.

Transport through the air was quick. Certainly it was much faster than through contact at the biological interface, at the working surface between the bloom and the living sea.

Peterson made his way into the twilight that prevailed inside the restaurant. Or at least it called itself a restaurant; all he could see was people sitting on the floor. Incense curled into his nostrils, making him want to sneeze.

3 s z Gregory Ben ford"Ian! Over here!"Laura's voice came from somewhere to the left. He felt his way along until he could make her out, sitting on pillows and sucking something milky through a straw. Oriental music drifted through the room. He'd known as soon as he set out that it was a mistake to meet some girl he'd had it off with, simply because she was going through some sort of crisis.

The California news and the stir it was causing in the Council had kept him pinned to his desk throughout the night. The technical types were hysterical.

Some senior people wrote off that fact, on the grounds that the technical people had been fairly alarmed before, and were proved wrong. This time Peterson was not so sure that that easy logic made sense."h.e.l.lo. I really would have preferred to meet you at my dub. I mean, this is quite all right, but--""Oh no, Ian, I wanted to see you in a place I knew.

Not some stuffy men's club.""It's really very pleasant, not stuffy at all. We can go round and have a light supper--""I wanted tO show you where I'm working, though.""You work here?" He looked round incredulously."It's .my day off, of course. But it's a job, and ablow for independence!""Oh. Independence.""Yes, it's exactly what you told me to do. Remember?

I've moved out on my parents. Quit Bowes & Bowes, and come to London. And got a job. Next week, I'll start acting cla.s.ses.""Oh. Oh, that's very good."A waiter materialized out of the gloom. "Would you like. to order, sir?""Ah, yes. Whisky. And some food, I suppose."

"They have great curries."

"Beef, then.""I am sorry, sir, we have no meat dishes.""No b.l.o.o.d.y meat?"

s "This is a vegetarian restaurant, Ian. Really tasty.It's fresh, brought in every day. Do try it.""Oh, Christ. A biryani, then. Egg.""Ian, I want to tell you all about my, my escape from my parents, and my plans. And I want your advice on getting into acting, I'm sure you know many, many people who know how to do it.""Not really. I'm in government, you know.""Oh, but you must, I'm sure you do. If you'll just think a bit, I'm sure ..." and as she rattled on Peterson saw he had indeed made a mistake. He had felt he needed a break from the tension at the Council center, and Laura's telephoning had come at precisely the right moment to lure him. He had let the moment dominate his better judgment. Now he had to eat some dreadful meal in a restaurant kept dark because they didn't want you to see the dirt, and into the bargain he had to be hustled by this shopgirl.

Peterson grimaced, certain she wouldn't see him in this light. Well, at least he was going to get a meal out of it; fuel for the work that was certain to come.

And he did need a break from Sir Martin. "Do you have a place nearby?" he asked."Yes, in Banbury Road. A closet, nearly, I'm afraid.""I'm sure I won't mind it." He smiled in the dark ness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

MARKHAM SPREAD HIS WORKING PAPERS OUT ON THE.narrow little drop tray the airline provided. He had hours of boring Atlantic crossing ahead, jammed in next to the window. Cathy Wickham's equations swam before him, tensor indices beckoning to be turned this way and that, a dense notation compacted with promise."Lunch, sir," the professionally blank-faced steward muttered. This echo of politeness was to put a gloss on his casual dumping of a cardboard package on the drop table. Markham pried open the wedged boards. A rain of packets thumped down among his papers. They were the now-universal, easy-for-them modular units of food. He unwrapped one and found it to be the obligatory rubber chicken. He bit in reluctantly. PastT, sur. stuff. The only saving grace in this was the absence of plastic packaging, he thought.

The bombing of the Saudi fields several years ago had brought an abrupt end to that, and a return to humble cardboard. The pulpy gray surface of the 3 $ s.p.a.ckage recalled his boyhood, before hydrocarbons ruled the wo'fld. The humanizing side of paper containers was the simple fact that they accepted the touch of a pen, would carry a message; plastic's sheen rejected the imprint of its temporary users.

Idl6 he iotted the new quantum field equations on the lunchbox. The elegant epsilons and deltas made their stately march across the UNITED AIRLINES block letters. He chewed absently. Time pa.s.sed.

Markham saw a way to separate the tensor 'elements*

into several reduced equations. With descending strokes he paired off field components. He iotted side calculations to check himself. Other pa.s.sengers moved in the distance. In a while the five new equations lay aslant on the ribbing of cardboard. Three he suspected were old friends: the Einstein equations, * with modifications for quantum effects when the length scale became small enough. These were well known. The other two seemed to imply more. A deeper sense of the quantum effects added a fresh term here, a tangle of tensors there. There seemed no way to reduce the system further. Markham tapped idly at them with his pen, frowning."Say, give-a!" the man next to him cried out.

Markham peered out his window. An immense cloud, sulfurous yellow and veined with orange, hung ahead of them. "First I've seen," the man said excitedly. Markham wondered if the pilot would fly through it. In seconds the window was hazed by strands of cloud and Markham realized that they were already pa.s.sing through a lower segment of the yellow ma.s.s ahead. Fresh weight tugged him down; the plane tilted to rise."Right ahead of us, folks, is one of those clouds we've been hearing about. I'm taking us over it, for a better look."This explanation seemed transparently false to Markham. Pilots didn't change alt.i.tude for a lark.

The cloud seemed gravid and somehow more solid than the fluffy white c.u.mulus around it. Threads of 5 a coiling, dark blue wound through its cap, giving it a domed profile.Markham murmured something and went back to his papers. He copied the new equations off the cardboard and studied them, trying to screen out the thin, high wail of the engines. An engineer had once told him the new generation of superfast engines screamed at unbearable levels. Rockwell International had had to go into cost overrun to blunt the Jbagged spikes of sound. Six months had been spent to ury the screech in a rea.s.suring ba.s.s blanket, so thewarm, ticketed bodies carried inside would remain woozy and complacent in the metallic grasp. Well, it didn't work for him. He had always been noise-sensitive.

He found the earplugs in the flap compartment in front of him and inserted them. A blanket sealed him in. The only remnant of' the engine scream -was an acoustic tremor that came up through his legs and settled in his teeth.He spent an hour testing the new equations. They gave sensible solutions to limiting-case problems he knew. Taking the scale length small and neglecting the gravitational effects, he got the standard equations of relativistic particle theory. Einstein's work emerged easily, with a few fluid strokes of the pen.

But when Wickham's equations were taken face on, with no side-stepping onto familiar ground, they became opaque.He squinted at the short, stubby notation. If he sliced through this knot of terms here, just dropped them--but no, that wasn't right. There was more than remorseless crank-turning to be done here. The work had to have the right deft feel, to glide forward on its own momentum. Beyond the logical standards, there were aesthetic questions. New developments in physics always gave you, first, a logical structure that was more elegant. Second, once you understood it, the structure was not only elegant, it was simpler.

Third, from the structure came consequences that were more complex than before. The ever-present 3 s ?trap in seeking. a new path was to invert the steps. It was hard to express this to a philosopher; there was something in the art of mathematics that eluded you, unless you watched for it. Plato had been a great philosopher, and he had decided he wanted the planets to move in sets of circles, all compounded together to give the observed orbits. But as Ptolemy found out, the laws that were needed to give those stacked circles were horrendously complex. That would mean complex laws leading to simple consequences, the wrong way round. So all of Ptolemy's labors gave forth a theory that clanked and groaned, crystalline spheres grinding around, sprockets and wheels and rachets whirring in a doomed machine.On the other hand, Einstein's theory was logically more elegant than Newton's. Subtle, but simple. Its consequences were much harder to work out, which was the right way round. Markham scratched his beard absently. If you kept that in mind, you could discard many approaches before you began, knowing they would ultimately fail. There was no choice between beauty and truth, really. You had to wind up with both. In art, elegance was a wh.o.r.e of a word, bent a different way by each generation of critics. In physics, though, there was some fragile lesson to be learned from past millennia. Theories were more elegant if they could be transformed mathematically to other frames, other observers. A theory that remained invariant under the most general transformation was the most deft, the nearest to a universal form. Gell-Mann's SU(3) symmetry had arrayed particles into universal ranks. The Lorentz group; isospin; the catalogge of properties labeled Strangeness and Color and Charminthey all cooked gauzy Number into concrete Thing. So to proceed beyond Einstein, one should follow the symmetries.Markham scratched equations across a yellow pad, searching. He had intended to spend this time plotting his tactics with the NSF, but politics was dross compared with the actual doing of science. He tried 3 s different approaches, tisting the compacted tensor notation, peering into the maze of mathematics. He had a guiding principle: nature seemed to like equations stated in covariant dierential forms. To find the right expressions-- He worked out the equations governing tachyons in a flat s.p.a.ce-ae, doing the exercise as a limited case. He nodded. Here were the familiar quantum-mechanical wave equations, yes. He knew where they led. The tachyons could cause a probability wave to reflect back and forth in time. The equations told how this wave unction would shuttle, past to future, future to past, a befuddled commuter. Making a paradox meant the wave had no, ending, but instead formed some sort of standing wave pattern, like the rippling patterns around an ocean jetty, s.h.i.+fting their troughs and peaks but always returning, an ordering imposed on the blank face of the churning sea. The only way to resolve the paradox was to step in, break up the pattern, like a s.h.i.+p cutting across the troughs, leaving a swirl of sea behind. The s.h.i.+p was the cla.s.sical observer. But now Markham added the Wickham terms, making the equations symmetric under interchange of tachyons. He rummaged through his briefcase for the paper by Gott that Cathy had given him. Here: A Time-Symmetric, Matter and Anti-Matter Tachyon Cosmology. Quite a piece of territory to bite off, indeed. But Gott's solutions were there, luminous on the page. The Wheeler-Feynman forces were there, mixing advanced and r.e.t.a.r.ded tachyon solutions together with non-Euclidean sums.

Markham blinked. In his cottony silence he sat very still, eyes racing, imagination leaping ahead to see where the equations would fold and part to yield up fresh effects.

The waves still stood, mutely confused. But there was no role left for the s.h.i.+p, for the cla.s.sical observer.

The old idea in conventional quantum mechanics had been to let the rest of the universe to be the observer, let it force the waves to collapse. In these new 3 5 9.tensor terms, though, there was no way to regress, no way to let the universe as a whole be a stable spot from which all things were measured. No, the universe was coupled in firmly. The tachyon field wired each fragment of matter to every other. Hooking more particles into the network only worsened things. The old quantum theorists, from Heisenberg and Bohr on, had let in some metaphysics at this point, Markham remembered. The wave function collapsed and that was the irreducible fact. The probability of getting a certain solution was proportional to the amplitude of that solution inside the total wave, so in the end you got only a statistical weighting of What would come out of an experiment. But with tachyons that dab of metaphysics had to go. The Wickham terms--Sudden motion caught his eye. A padsenger in the next row was clutching at a steward, eyes gla.s.sy. His face was laced with pain. A stretched mouth, pale lips, brown teeth. Mottled pink splotched his cheeks.

Markham pulled his earplugs. A brittle scream star-tied him. The steward got the man down on the floor in the middle of the aisle and pinned his frantically dawing hands. "I can't--can'tmbreathe!" A stewarl murmured something comforting. The man shook with a seizure, eyes rolling. Two stewards carried him past Markham. He noticed an acrid smell coming from the sick man and wrinkled his nose, forcing his gla.s.ses upward. The man panted in the enameled light. Markham replaced his plugs.He settled again into the embalming quiet, conscious only of the rea.s.suring hum of the engines.

Without peaks and valleys of sound the world had a stuffed, spongy feel, as though Maxwell's cla.s.sical ether were a reality, could be sensed at the fingertips.

Markham relaxed for a moment, reflecting on how much he loved this state. Concentration on an intricate problem could loft you into an insulated, fine-grained perspective. There were many things you could see only from a distance. Since childhood he $ 0 had sought that feeling of slipping free, of being smoothly remote from the compromised churn of the world. He had used his oblique humor to distance people, yes, keep them safely away from the center of where he lived. Even Jan, sometimes. You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with--no, not with certainty, but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

Galileo's blocks gliding across the marble Italian foyers, their slick slide obeying inertia's steady hand--they were cartoons of the world, really.

Aristotle had understood in his gut the awful fact that friction ruled, all things groaned to a stop. That was the world of man. Only the childlike game of infinite planes and smooth bodies, reality unwrinkled, cast a web of consoling order, infinite trajectories, harmonic life. From that cartoon world it was always necessary to slip back, cloaking exhilarating flights in a respectable, deductive style. But that did not mean, when the papers appeared in their disguise of abstracts and Germanic mannerisms, that you had not been to that other place, the place you seldom spoke of.He paused in the impacted hush, and then went on.

He wondered distantly if his first guess was right: these new Wickham equations allowed no way out of the paradox, because the whole universe was swept into the experiment. The consequence of setting up the standing wave was to send tachyons forward and backward in time, yes, but also to spray them at superlight speeds throughout the entire universe.

Within an instant, every piece of matter in the universe learned of the paradox. The whole structure of s.p.a.ce-time became woven into one piece, instantly.

That was the new element with tachyons; until their discovery, physics a.s.sumed that disturbances in the 3 !.s.p.a.ce-time metric had to propagate outward at light speed. "Markham realized he had been hunched forward, scribbling mathematical statements of these ideas.

His back stabbed him with small, hot knives. His writing hand protested with a sweet ache. He leaned backward, reclining the seat. Below he saw the slate-gray plain of the sea like a giant blackboard for G.o.d's idle equations. A freighter plowed a wake that curved with the currents, silver in the sun. They were descending toward Dulles International on a gentle long parabola.Markham smiled with serene fatigue. The. problems caught you up and carried you along, unmind-ing currents. Was there any way to resolve the paradox? He knew intuitively that here lay the heart of the physics, the way of showing whether you could reach the past in a rigorous way. Peterson's laconic bank vault note proved something had happened, but what?Markham twisted uncomfortably, irked by the narrow, cramped seat. Air travel was getting to be a rich man's route again, only this time without the perks.

Then he fetched his mind back from these pa.s.sing reminders of the relentlessly real world. The problem was not solved, and time remained.But is the paradox decidable at all? he thought. The German mathematician G6del had shown that even simple systems of arithmetic contained things which were true, but unprovable. In fact, you couldn't even show that arithmetic itself was consistentmthat is, didn't contain paradoxes. G6del had forced arithmetic into describing itself in its own language. He had trapped it into its own box, deprived it of ever proving itself by reference to things outside itself. And that was for arithmetic, the simplest logical system known! What of the universe itself, with tachyons launching through it, threading the cloth of s.p.a.ce-time?

How could all the squiggles on all the yellow pads in the world ever trap that vast weave into the .6 2 old boxes of yes/no, true/false, past/future? Markham relaxed in his br.i.m.m.i.n.g warmth. The plane went clunk and tilted earthward.The point that continued to puzzle him was whether Renfrew needed to send a message at all, to make a paradox. Tachyons were constantly being produced by natural collisions of high-energy particlesthat's how they had been discovered. Why didn't those natural tachyons produce a paradox somehow? He frowned. The plane nosed further, giving the illusion of hanging over the lip of a pit, legs dangling. Natural tachyons ... The answer had to be that it took some minimum impulse to trigger a paradox.

Some critical volume of s.p.a.ce-time had to be tweaked, and then the disturbance would propagate outward instantaneously, with enough amplitude to matter. You could change the past at will, yes, so long as you didn't make paradoxes that had large amplitude. Once you exceeded the threshold, the tachyon wave would have a significant impact on the whole universe. But if so, how could you tell that had happened? What was the signature? How did the universe pick a way to resolve the paradox? They knew they had reached the past--Peterson proved that. But what more could happen?Markham felt a sudden stab of perception. If the universe was a wholly linked system with no mythical cla.s.sical observer to collapse the wave function, then the wave function did not have to collapse at all.

A wrenching thump. Markham looked out in surprise and saw the ground veer suddenly. Ahead were the patient green fields of Maryland. A clump of forest swarmed beneath the wings. In the cabin, a babble of voices. Shouts. A rasping buzz. The forest went whipping by. The trees were sharp, precise, with the clarity of good ideas. He watched them flick past as the airplane became light, airy, a gossamer webbing of metal that fell with him, mute matter tugged by gravity's curved geometry. Skreeeeeee. The trees were 3 6 3.pale rods in the slanting light, each with a ball of green exploding' at the top. They rushed by faster and faster and Markham thought of a universe with one wave function, scattering into the new states of being as a paradox formed inside it like the kernel of an idea.--If the wave function did not collapse ...

Worlds lay ahead of him, and worlds lay behind.

There was a sharp crack and he saw suddenly what should have been.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

PETERSON WOKE SLOWLY. HE KEPT HIS EYES CLOSED.His body told him not to move but he couldn't remember why. There was a murmur of movement around him, subdued voices, somewhere in the distance a metallic clash. He opened his eyes briefly, saw white walls, a chrome rail. A whirling dizziness.

He remembered where he was now. Gingerly he tested his body. A dull, cottony feel. Seeping, cold ache. The rail down the side of a bed came into fuzzy focus. He rolled his head, wincing, and saw a bottle suspended above him. He tried to follow the tubes with his 'eyes but couldn't. Something was plugged into his nose. A tube taped to his arm p.r.i.c.ked him as he moved. He tried to call the nurse. It came out a rattling croak.She had heard him anyway. A round face with gla.s.ses and a white cap leaped into his field of vi-SlOI1."Wakin up are we? That's riht. You'll be all right now."

s 6 $"Cold ..." He closed his eyes. Felt blankets being tucked in around him. The plug was removed from his nose."Can you hold .a thermometer in your mouth?"

the bright brisk voice asked. "Or should we try the other end?"He squinted at her, loathing her."Mouth ..." His tongue felt furry and enormous.

Something cold slipped into his mouth. Cool fingers damped his wrist."Well, coming down nicely. You're one of the lucky ones, you are. Got you some Infalaithin-G before it got to you."'He frowned. "Others?""Oh, yes," she said cheerfully. "We're overrun with them. No more beds at all. They're putt-ing them in Emergency now. That'll be full soon, I'll warrant.

You've got a private room, but you should hear them moanin' and groanin' in Ward E. Sixty beds, they've got in there. All this funny food thing, like you.

Though mostly worse cases. Like I said, you're one of the lucky ones. Now, trne to get some food intoyOU.""Food?" he said in horror. The memory of his last dinner with Laura engulfed him in nausea. "Nurse?"Going to upchuck, are you?" She sounded as cheerful as ever. Deftly she fitted a kidney-shaped basin under his chin and supported his head. He retched miserably. Greenish slime trailed down his chin and left a bitter taste in his mouth. His stomach hurt like h.e.l.l."Nothing in you, see. Just lie still now and don't go getting excited again.""You said food," he rasped accusingly.She laughed merrily. "Well, so I did, but I didn't mean food. Time to change your IV bottle, that's all."He closed his eyes again. His head throbbed. He heard her bustling around. Presently the door closed.