“We’ve seen traces for several days now. Two in Nihon GEACS territory, one Russ and a Han also.”
“And?”
“And six more … much better ones. They’re being set up at the face centers of a cube, a better arrangement than our tetrahedron.”
“Just as I expected.” Manella nodded. “And who else, other than yourself, is capable of building such an array? Who else has such a head start over Russ and Han and even Nihon?”
Silence was his only answer. The answer was obvious.
“So there’s supposed to be an announcement in four days? So the tribunals are to be invoked and all revealed? I must then answer, so what? What happens afterward will still depend on who has the best information and expertise. That is who will be in control. He’ll set the agenda. Rule the world.”
“Spivey,” Teresa said, though clearly she did not want to.
Manella nodded. “He’s almost got a monopoly on data about these breathtaking, intimidating new technologies. But who knows even more about singularities and gravity lasers than his tame physicists?”
They looked at each other. No one in the world understood the gazer phenomenon better than the people in this room.
This is no good, Alex decided. Manella might be right. Dammit, he probably is. But I’m not letting him hypnotize my team.
“Clever, Pedro,” he told the newsman. “Have you also worked out what I’ve decided to do about it?”
“Is that all?” The big man grinned. “You forget that I know you, Lustig. I’d bet my tooth-implant radio and half a year’s pay you intend showing Colonel Spivey just who he’s dealing with.”
Damn you, Alex thought. But outwardly he only shrugged. Looking at the others, he announced—“Anyone who chooses to leave the island may do so now. All civilians will be warned away from a two-kilometer radius.
“As for me, though, I don’t plan taking this—” he hefted the bomb “—lying down.”
He looked again at Teresa, who nodded. She understands. The next few days will decide the future of everything.
Alex watched as the assembled workers, one by one, stepped toward him and the great swiveled bulk of the resonator. Their silent vote was unanimous. “Good,” he said, feeling a wave of warmth toward his comrades. “Let’s get to work then. I had a dream not long ago, and it gave me an idea. A possible way we just might get the good colonel’s attention.”
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546], Special Alert to Members.
There are times for discussion, and other times when only action counts. None of our fancy schemes will help anybody if we don’t make it through this present craziness! So the coordinators of the Worldwide Long Range Solutions SIG hereby suspend ail conference forums. Instead we encourage all of you, as individuals, to seek ways to help solve the crisis many see looming, hour by passing hour.
“But what can a single person do to influence events of such magnitude and momentum?” One answer may surprise you. We’ll shortly hand over these channels, on loan, to the Federation of Amateur Observation Special Interest Groups [ sig BaY, FAO 456780079.876]. Their spokesper will describe how each of you can assist the worldwide effort to track the gremlins down.
It may surprise many of you how much science relies on amateur observers, from bird-watchers, to meteor counters, to hobbyists with private weather stations. But now, with so many weird phenomena taking place worldwide, these amateur networks are truly coming into their own. It’s private citizens, with sharp eyes and ready cameras, who are even now tracing patterns the big boys think they can keep secret from us.
We’ll show them whose planet this is! So stay on-line for a list of groups you can join. Then get off your lazy asses, dust off your Tru-Vus, go outside, and look! You may be the one to catch that vital clue, to help track these gor-sucking gremlins to their source.
• MESOSPHERE
Stan Goldman didn’t have much to do anymore. Others ran the scans now, reduced the data, constructed ever-subtler models of the inner Earth, even traced the involute geometries of that refulgent, renitent entity below … the thing called Beta.
A midget town had sprung up around the lonely Tangoparu dome on. a rocky plain below the vast Greenland ice sheet. High-powered tech types bustled with armloads of data cubes, arguing in the arcane new language of gazerdynamics. Of the original team, only he remained now, the others having gone home to New Zealand long ago.
The NATO scientific commander had specifically asked him to stay. So Stan sat in on all the daily seminars, struggling to keep up with younger, more agile minds, even though his understanding grew more obsolete with each fast-breaking discovery. No matter. They all treated him with utter deference. Hardly a moment passed without hearing the name Alex Lustig spoken with an awe customarily lavished on the shades of Newton and Einstein and Hurt, and as the great one’s former teacher, Stan shared in that glory.
Singularities. There was a lot of talk about singularities, by which the bright young men and women meant the kind you made inside a cavitron—micro black holes and those newer innovations, tuned strings and cosmic knots. Of late, though, Stan had found himself thinking about another kind of “singularity” altogether. It was on his mind as he passed a saluting sentry and left the bustling encampment, swinging his walking stick across the moraine-strewn valley.
In mathematics, a singularity is a sudden discontinuity, where one expression suddenly ceases being valid, and a completely different one takes its place.
You got the simplest kind of singularity—a delta function—by dividing any real number by zero. The result, converging on infinity, was actually undefined, unknowable. That’s where we’re at right now … a singularity in the life history of mankind.
It wasn’t just the present crisis. Oh, certainly he was worried. Would the world’s institutions—or the planet itself—survive the next few hours or days? Stan was as concerned as the next man. Still, even if tomorrow the spectre of reborn international paranoia evaporated like a bad dream, and all the gorgeous, terrifying new technologies were tamed, nothing would ever be the same.
Earlier today, some of the youngsters had been discussing notions about gravitational circuits … equivalent, in collapsed mass and stressed space, to capacitors and resistors and transistors, for heaven’s sake! To Stan it was proof the time had come. The moment he’d secretly been waiting for all his life.
There’s another kind of singularity … having to do with society, and information.
Technological breakthroughs had happened before—when farming was invented, for example. Or metallurgy. Or writing. Each time, men and women gained new power over their lives, and thinking itself changed. With each such naissance, human beings were in effect reborn, remade … reprogrammed.
In early times, change came slowly. But each breakthrough laid a foundation for those that followed. And with the Western breakout of the sixteenth century, it became self-sustaining. Inventions bred wealth, which spread education and leisure to broader masses. Printing dispersed literacy. Transport distributed food. Food meant more people.
He paused near a sandy bank in the wind-shadow of a boulder, and used his walking stick to trace a rough figure. It was the standard doom scenario, depicting the fate forecast by Malthus for any species that outbreeds the carrying capacity of its niche.
The curve portrayed human population over time, and it rose very slowly at first. All through the late Stone Age—when Stan’s ancestors had chipped flint, scratched fleas, and thought fire the final terror weapon—there were never more than five million homo sapiens at a time. This changed with agriculture, though. Human numbers doubled, then doubled again every fifteen hundred years or so—a rapid climb—until they reached five hundred million around the time of Newton.
Impressive progress, achieved by people who had hardly a glimmer of what the laws of nature were, let alone concepts like ecology or psychology or planetary history. But then it accelerated even f
aster! New foods, sanitation, emigration … babies lived longer. Humans reproduced copiously. The next doubling, to a billion souls, took only two hundred years. The next, less than a century. Then, from just 1950 to 1980, two billions became four. And still the curve steepened. Stan recalled the elegant, symmetrical projections proclaimed by pessimists when he was young. No population boom can be sustained forever on a finite world. There must inevitably come crash.
The curve never reached infinity after all. It peaked. Then, like a spent rocket, it turned over and plummeted. The great die-back, that’s where we seemed headed. After all, it happens whenever anchovies and deer breed beyond their food supply.
And we did have little die-backs. But so far we’ve escaped the big one, haven’t we?
So far.
He scratched another rude figure, identical to the first until it reached the top of the curve. At which point the population stopped growing all right, but neither did it fall! Instead of plummeting, this rocket turned sideways.
This is what they say can happen if you add intelligence and free will to the formula. After all, we aren’t deer or anchovies!
Two graphs. Two destinies. Malthusian calamity and the so-called S-curve. On the one hand, utter collapse. And on the other, a chain of last-minute reprieves … like self-fertilizing corn, room-temperature superconductors, and gene-spliced catfish … each arriving just in time for mankind to muddle through another year, eking out a living from one brilliant innovation to the next.
We thought these were the only two possible futures:
—if we prove selfish and short-sighted—mass death,
—and if we bend all our efforts, working together, applying every ingenuity—then a genteel decline to a sort of threadbare equilibrium.
But was there a third choice? Another type of social singularity? Stan’s stick hovered over the sand. When each generation owns more books than its father’s, the volumes don’t accumulate arithmetically or even geometrically. Knowledge grows exponentially.
Stan recalled the last time he and Alex and George had gotten drunk together, when he had complained so about the lack of new modalities. Now he laughed at the memory. “Oh, I was wrong. There are modalities, all right. More than I ever imagined.”
Those youngsters back in the encampment were talking about making gravitational transistors! It was enough to make a man cry out, “Stop! Give me a minute to think! What does it all mean?”
Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.
A third type of social singularity, then, would be a true leap, some sudden, jarring shift to a completely undefined state—where changes manifest themselves in months, weeks, days, minutes.… Still climbing, the rocket attains escape velocity.
With a sigh, Stan wiped away the rude figures. We’re caught up in our own close view of time. A human life seems so long. But try on the patient outlook of a glacier.
His eyes lifted to the white continent of ice, only a few kilometers away and stretching from horizon to horizon. Ice ages are geologically rapid events. And yet we’ve flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children’s children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.
Stan sat down on the convenient boulder, which had been dragged hundreds of miles only to be dropped here by the retreating glacier. It was a good place to watch late autumn’s early twilight usher onstage the gauzy curtains of the aurora borealis. He loved the way the colors played across the glacier, causing its rough corrugations to undulate in time to the sizzling of supercharged ions high above. It was starting to get chilly, even in his thermal coat. Still, this was worth savoring for a while.
Stan heard a soft clunk and saw a stone roll across the sand, coming to rest near his foot. Not far away, two other rocks quivered.
Well, I guess we’re at it again.
But it was more than a typical tremor. He realized this as a deep groan seemed to fill the air … apparently strongest toward the ice. He started to rise, but changed his mind when a sudden trembling made it hard to gain his feet. Whether it was in the ground or his legs, Stan decided to stay put.
After all, what can harm me out here in the open?
Sparkling fireflies were the next phenomenon, dancing within his eyes.
This must be what it’s like to be near a beam when it exits, he thought bemusedly. A level-six harmonic at about twenty kilowheelers should do it, coupling with my own body’s bag of salty fluid. If the frequency dispersion isn’t too …
But then Stan blinked, remembering. No beam was scheduled to exit so near—
He didn’t finish the thought. For at that moment the glacier began to glow directly opposite him, and not from any outside illumination this time. Deep inside the vast ice flow a fierce luminance throbbed. Shapes and dim outlines warped what seemed to be a series of columns, set far back in the frozen mass.
Shafts of brightness pulsed.…
Then the east exploded with light.
Forty years ago, everyone was in a froth over the millennium. Especially many Christians, who thought surely the end of days would coincide with the two thousandth anniversary of Jesus’s birth. I was one who saw portents back in ’99. I, too, thought the time was at hand.
Looking back, I see how foolish I was. I thought the crises of those days were awful, but they weren’t terrible enough to presage the end. Besides, we’d chosen the wrong anniversary!
After all, why should the Time come at the millennium of His birth? The events from Gethsemane to Crucifixion to Resurrection were what mattered then. So must the anniversary of those events! See my calculations [ ref. aeRle 5225790.23455 aBIE] which show beyond any doubt that it must be this very year!
No wonder we see signs everywhere! The time’s at hand! It is now!
• EXOSPHERE
Teresa stared at the display, watching a vivid simulation of events taking place halfway round the world. Glowing numbers told how much mass had suddenly departed the planet. She had to swallow before speaking.
“H-how did you do that?”
Alex looked up from his controls. “How does a musician play?” He cracked his knuckles. “Practice, practice.”
Teresa knew better. Alex grinned, but he had a tremor under his left eye and a pale, bloodless complexion. He’s scared half out of his wits. And who wouldn’t be, after what he’d just pulled off?
“Telemetry coming in,” a tech announced. “Our beam emerged on target, missing the settlement by six point two klicks, with a surface coupling impedance of eighteen kilowheelers … at point oh niner Hawkings, metric. That’s a ninety-eight hundredths match with water ice of surface thickness …”
Another voice cut in. “Beat frequencies on the sixth, ninth, and twelfth harmonics, dominant. Very gentle. Maximum dynamic load during each throb-pulse never exceeding six gees …”
“Target trajectory calculated,” a third worker announced. “On screen now.”
A spot glowed on the map-globe, near the west coast of Greenland. From that point a thread of light speared radially into space. Arrow straight at first, it eventually curved as Earth’s more sedate gravitostatic field grabbed the small mountain their beam had ripped from the ancient glacier. The dot representing the hurtling iceberg still moved very fast, though, and the planetary sphere had to shrink in compensation.
As if impatient with even this fleeting pace, a dashed line rushed ahead of the dot, tracing the frozen missile’s predicted path Earth diminished toward the lower left corner of the tank and into view, at the upper right, a pearly globe sedately swam onstage.
Teresa let out a cry. “You can’t be serious!”
Alex tilted his head. “You object?”
“Whatever for? There’s no one living on the moon.” Teres
a clapped her hands. “Do it, Alex! Get a bull’s-eye!”
He grinned up at her and then turned back to watch as their projectile passed the halfway mark and sped on toward its rendezvous. Teresa unselfconsciously laid a hand on Alex’s shoulder.
No one had ever tried to manipulate the gazer on such a scale. Sure, Glenn Spivey’s people had lain instrument packages where beams were scheduled to emerge. But no one had ever made a beam couple so powerfully and purposely with surface objects. Others were sure to note how closely the beam had missed one of Spivey’s resonators. They’d also notice how accurately Alex had thrown his snowball.
“Phone call from Auckland!” The communications officer announced.
Not far away, Pedro Manella made a show of consulting his watch. “The colonel’s late. They must have dragged him out of bed.”
“Let him wait a few minutes longer then,” Alex said. “I’d rather talk to him after he’s mulled things over.”
Spivey must be watching a display like this now. So, no doubt, were his bosses. The dashed line filled in as the glowing pinpoint converged toward the familiar cratered face of Earth’s dwarf sister. No one breathed as it accelerated and then struck the moon’s northern quadrant, vanishing in a sudden, dazzling glitter of molten spray.
Manella, of course, was the first to recover his voice, though even he took some time to get around to speaking.
“Um, well, Lustig. That ought to give them pause for a day or so.”
Under her hands, Teresa felt the tightness in Alex’s muscles. But outwardly, for the others, he maintained an air of confident calm.
“I expect. For a day or so.”
… Our Mother, who art beneath us, whatever thy name—
You support us, nurture us, bring us the gift of life. Hear the prayers of your children, and forgive us our trespasses.
Intervene on our behalf, and for those other lives, great and small, which suffer when we err.