"But you had an affair, and your marriage broke up," David said.
Hiram eyed David. "How judgmental you are. Just like your mother."
"Just tell us, Dad," Bobby pressed.
Hiram nodded. "Yes, I had an affair. With your mother, Bobby. Heather, she was called. I never meant it to be this way... David, my relationship with Eve had been failing for a long time. That damn religion of hers."
"So you threw her out."
"She tried to throw me out—I wanted us to come to a settlement, to be civilized about it. In the end she ran out on me—taking you with her."
David leaned forward. "But you cut her out of your business interests. A business you had built on her money."
Hiram shrugged. "I told you I wanted a settlement. She wanted it all. We couldn't compromise." His eyes hardened. "I wasn't about to give up everything I'd built up. Not on the whim of some religion-crazed nut. Even if she was my wife, your mother. When she lost her all-or-nothing suit, she went to France with you, and disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or tried to." He smiled, "It wasn't hard to track you down." Hiram reached for his arm, but David pulled back. "David, you never knew it, but I've been there for you. I found ways to, umm, help you out, without your mother knowing. I wouldn't go so far as to say you owe everything you have to me, but—"
David felt anger blaze. "What makes you think I wanted your help?"
Bobby said, "Where's your mother now?"
David tried to calm down. "She died. Cancer. It could have been easier for her. We couldn't afford—"
"She wouldn't let me help her," Hiram said. "Even at the end she pushed me away."
David said, "What do you expect? You took everything she had from her."
Hiram shook his head. "She took something more important from me. You."
"And so," Bobby said coldly, "you focused your ambition on me."
Hiram shrugged. "What can I say? Bobby, I gave you everything—everything. I'd have given both of you. I prepared you as best I could."
"Prepared!" David laughed, bemused. "What kind of word is that?"
Hiram thumped the table. "If Joe Kennedy can do it, why not Hiram Patterson? Don't you see, boys? There's no limit to what we can achieve, if we work together..."
"You are talking about politics?" David eyed Bobby's sleek, puzzled face. "Is that what you intend for Bobby? Perhaps the Presidency itself?" He laughed. "You are exactly as I imagined you, Father."
"And how's that?"
"Arrogant. Manipulative."
Hiram was growing angry. "And you are just as I expected. As pompous and pious as your mother."
Bobby was staring at his father, bemused.
David stood. "Perhaps we have said enough."
Hiram's anger dissipated immediately. "No. Wait. I'm sorry. You're right. I didn't drag you all the way over here to fight with you. Sit down and hear me out. Please."
David remained on his feet. "What do you want of me?"
Hiram sat back and studied him. "I want you to build a bigger wormhole for me."
"How much bigger?"
Hiram took a breath. "Big enough to look through."
There was a long silence.
David sat down, shaking his head. "That's—"
"Impossible? I know. But let me tell you anyhow." Hiram got up and walked around the cluttered cafeteria, gesturing as he talked, animated, excited. "Suppose I could immediately open up a wormhole from my newsroom in Seattle direct to this story event in Cairo—and suppose that wormhole was wide enough to transmit pictures from the event—I could feed images from anywhere in the world straight into the network, with virtually no delay. Right? Think about it. I could fire my stringers and remote crews, reducing my costs to a fraction. I could even set up some kind of automated search facility, continually keeping watch through short-lived wormholes, waiting for the next story to break, wherever and whenever. There's really no limit."
Bobby smiled weakly. "Dad, they'd never scoop you again."
"Bloody right." Hiram turned to David. "That's the dream. Now tell me why it's impossible."
David frowned. "It's hard to know where to start. Right now you can establish metastable DataPipes between two fixed points. That's a considerable achievement in itself. But you need a massive piece of machinery at each end to anchor each wormhole mouth. Correct? Now you want to open up a stable wormhole mouth at the remote end, at your news story's location, without the benefit of any kind of anchor."
"Correct."
"Well, that's the first thing that's impossible, as I'm sure your technical people have been telling you."
"So they have. What else?"
"You want to use these wormholes to transmit visible light photons. Now, quantum-foam wormholes come in at the Planck-Wheeler length, which is ten-to-minus-thirty-five meters. You've managed to expand them up through twenty orders of magnitude to make them big enough to pass gamma-ray photons. Very high frequency, very short wavelength."
"Yeah. We use the gamma rays to carry digitized data streams, which..."
"But the wavelength of your gamma rays is around a million times smaller than visible-light wavelengths. The mouths of your second-generation wormholes would have to be around a micron across at least." David eyed his father. "I take it you've had your engineers trying to achieve exactly that. And it doesn't work."
Hiram sighed. "We've actually managed to pump in enough Casimir energy to rip open wormholes that wide. But you get some kind of feedback effect which causes the damn things to collapse."
David nodded. "They call it Wheeler instability. Wormholes aren't naturally stable. A wormhole mouth's gravity pulls in photons, accelerates them to high energy, and that energized radiation bombards the throat and causes it to pinch off. It's the effect you have to counter with Casimir-effect negative energy, to keep open even the smallest wormholes."
Hiram walked to the window of the little cafeteria. Beyond, David could see the hulking form of the detector complex at the heart of the facility. "I have some good minds here. But these people are experimentalists. All they can do is trap and measure what happens when it all goes wrong. What we need is to beef up the theory, to go beyond the state of the art. Which is where you come in." He turned. "David, I want you to take a sabbatical from Oxford and come work with me on this." Hiram put his arm around David's shoulders; his flesh was strong and warm, its pressure overpowering. "Think of how this could turn out. Maybe you'll pick up the Nobel Prize in Physics, while simultaneously I'll eat up ENO and those other yapping dogs who run at my heels. Father and son together. Sons. What do you think?"
David was aware of Bobby's eyes on him. "I guess—"
Hiram clapped his hands together. "I knew you'd say yes."
"I haven't, yet."
"Okay, okay. But you will. I sense it. You know, it's just terrific when long-term plans pay off."
David felt cold. "What long-term plans?"
Talking fast and eagerly, Hiram said, "If you were going to work in physics, I was keen for you to stay in Europe. I researched the field. You majored in mathematics—correct? Then you took your doctorate in a department of applied math and theoretical physics."
"At Cambridge, yes. Hawking's department—"
"That's a typical European route. As a result you're well versed in up-to-date math. It's a difference of culture, Americans have led the world in practical physics, but they use math that dates back to World War Two. So if you're looking for a theoretical breakthrough, don't ask anyone trained in America."
"And here I am," said David coldly. "With my convenient European education."
Bobby said slowly, "Dad, are you telling us you arranged things so that David got a European physics education, just on the off chance that he'd be useful to you? And all without his knowledge?"
Hiram stood straight. "Not just useful to me. More useful to himself. More useful to the world. More liable to achieve success." He looked from one to the other of his sons, and placed his hands on thei
r heads, as if blessing them. "Everything I've done has been in your best interest. Don't you see that yet?"
David looked into Bobby's eyes. Bobby's gaze slid away, his expression unreadable.
Chapter 4—WORMWOOD
Extracted from "Wormwood: When Mountains Melt," by Katherine Manzoni, published by Shiva Press, New York, 2033; also available as Internet floater dataset:
...We face great challenges as a species if we are to survive the next few centuries.
It has become clear that the effects of climate change will be much worse than imagined a few decades ago: indeed, predictions of those effects from, say, the 1980s now look foolishly optimistic.
We know now that the rapid warming of the last couple of centuries has caused a series of metastable natural systems around the planet to flip to new states. From beneath the thawing permafrost of Siberia, billions of tonnes of methane and other greenhouse gases are already being released. Warming ocean waters are destabilizing more huge methane reservoirs around the continental shelves. Northern Europe is entering a period of extreme cold because of the shutdown of the Gulf Stream. New atmospheric modes—permanent storms—seem to be emerging over the oceans and the great landmasses. The death of the tropical forests is dumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The slow melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet seems to be releasing pressure on an archipelago of sunken islands beneath, and volcanic activity is likely, which will in turn lead to a catastrophic additional melting of the sheet The rise in sea levels is now forecast to be much higher than was imagined a few decades ago.
And so on.
All of these changes are interlinked. It may be that the spell of climatic stability which the Earth has enjoyed for thousands of years—a stability which allowed human civilization to emerge in the first place—is now coming to an end, perhaps because of our own actions. The worst case is that we are heading for some irreversible climatic breakdown, for example a runaway greenhouse, which would kill us all.
But all these problems pale in comparison to what will befall us if the body now known as the Wormwood should impact the Earth—although it is a chill coincidence that the Russian for "Wormwood" is "Chernobyl"...
Much of the speculation about the Wormwood and its likely consequence has been sadly misinformed—indeed, complacent. Let me reiterate some basic facts here.
Fact: the Wormwood is not an asteroid.
The astronomers think the Wormwood might once have been a moon of Neptune or Uranus, or perhaps it was locked in a stable point in Neptune's orbit, and was then perturbed somehow. But perturbed it was, and now it is on a five-hundred-year collision course with Earth.
Fact: the Wormwood's impact will not be comparable to the Chicxulub impact which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
That impact was sufficient to cause mass death, and to alter—drastically, and for all time—the course of evolution of life on Earth. But it was caused by an impactor some ten kilometers across. The Wormwood is forty times as large, and its mass is therefore some sixty thousand times as great.
Fact: the Wormwood will not simply cause a mass extinction event, like Chicxulub It will be much worse than that.
The heat pulse will sterilize the land to a depth of fifty meters. Life might survive, but only by being buried deep in caves. We know no way, even in principle, by which a human community could ride out the impact. It may be that viable populations could be established on other worlds: in orbit, on Mars or the Moon. But even in five centuries only a small fraction of the world's current population could be sheltered off-world.
Thus, Earth cannot be evacuated. When the Wormwood arrives, almost everybody will die.
Fact: the Wormwood cannot be deflected with foreseeable technology.
It is possible we could turn aside small bodies—a few kilometers across, typical of the population of near-Earth asteroids—with such means as emplaced nuclear charges or thermonuclear rockets. The challenge of deflecting the Wormwood is many orders of magnitude greater. Thought experiments on moving such bodies have proposed, for example, using a series of gravitational assists—not available in this case—or using advanced technology such as nanotech von Neumann machines to dismantle and disperse the body. But such technologies are far beyond our current capabilities.
Two years after I exposed the conspiracy to conceal from the general public the existence of the Wormwood, attention is already moving on and we have yet to start work on the great project of our survival.
Indeed, the Wormwood itself is already having advance effects. It is a cruel irony that just as, for the first time in our history, we were beginning to manage our future responsibly and jointly, the prospect of Wormwood Day seems to render such efforts meaningless. Already we've seen the abandonment of various voluntary waste-emission guidelines, the closure of nature reserves, an upgraded search for sources of nonrenewable fuels, an extinction pulse among endangered species. If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well bum the furniture today None of our problems are insoluble, not even the Wormwood. But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.
Still, my hope centers on humanity and ingenuity. It is significant, I believe, that the Wormwood was discovered not by the professionals, who weren't looking that way, but by a network of amateur sky watchers, who set up robot telescopes in their backyards, and used shareware routines to scan optical detector images for changing glimmers of light, and refused to accept the cloak of secrecy our government tried to lay over them. It is in groups like this—earnest, intelligent, cooperative, stubborn, refusing to submit to impulses toward suicide or hedonism or selfishness, seeking new solutions to challenge the complacency of the professionals—that our best and brightest hope of surviving the future may lie...
Chapter 5—VIRTUAL HEAVEN
Bobby was late arriving at RevelationLand. Kate was still waiting in the car lot for him as the swarms of aging adherents started pressing through the gates of Billybob Meeks' giant cathedral of concrete and glass. This "cathedral" had once been a football stadium; they were forced to sit near the back of one of the stands, their view impeded by pillars. Sellers of hot dogs, peanuts, soft drinks and recreational drugs were working the crowd, and muzak played over the PA. "Jerusalem," she recognized: based on Blake's great poem about the legendary visit of Christ to Britain, now the anthem of the new post-United Kingdom England.
The entire floor of the stadium was mirrored, making it a floor of blue sky littered with fat December clouds. At the center there was a gigantic throne, covered in stones glimmering green and blue—probably impure quartz, she thought. Water sprayed through the air, and arc lamps created a rainbow which arched spectacularly. More lamps hovered in the air before the throne, held aloft by drone robots, and smaller thrones circled bearing elders, old men and women dressed in white with golden crowns on their skinny heads.
And there were beasts the size of tipper trucks prowling around the field. They were grotesque, every part of their bodies covered with blinking eyes. One of them opened giant wings and flew, eagle-like, a few meters, The beasts roared at the crowd, their calls amplified by a booming PA. The crowd got to its feet and cheered, as if celebrating a touchdown.
Bobby was oddly nervous. He was wearing a tight fitting one-piece suit of bright scarlet, with a color morphing kerchief draped around his neck. He was a gorgeous twenty-first-century dandy, she thought, as out of place in the drab, elderly multitude around him as a diamond in a child's seashore pebble collection.
She touched his hand. "Are you okay?"
"I didn't realize they'd all be so old"
He was right, of course. The gathering congregation was a powerful illustration of the silvering of America. Many of the crowd, in fact, had cognitive-enhancer studs clearly visible at the backs of their necks, there to combat the onset of age-related diseases like Alzheimer'
s by stimulating the production of neurotransmitters and cell adhesion molecules.
"Go to any church in the country and you'll see the same thing, Bobby. Sadly, people are attracted to religion when they approach death. And now there are more old people—and with the Wormwood coming we all feel the brush of that dark shadow, perhaps. Billybob is just surfing a demographic wave. Anyhow, these people won't bite."
"Maybe not. But they smell. Can't you tell?"
She laughed.
"One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth."
"Huh?"
"Henrik Ibsen."
Now a man stood up on the big central throne. He was short, fat and his face shone with sweat. His amplified voice boomed out: "Welcome to RevelationLand! Do you know why you're here?" His finger stabbed. "Do you? Do you? Listen to me now: On the Lord's day I was in the spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: "Write on a scroll what you see..." And he held up a glittering scroll.
Kate leaned toward Bobby. "Meet Billybob Meeks. Prepossessing, isn't he? Clap along. Protective coloration."
"What's going on, Kate?"
"Evidently you've never read the Book of Revelation. The Bible's deranged punch line." She pointed. "Seven hovering lamps. Twenty-four thrones around the big one. Revelation is riddled with magic numbers—three, seven, twelve. And its description of the end of things is very literal. Although at least Billybob uses the traditional versions, not the modern editions which have been rewritten to show how the Wormwood date of 2534 was there in the text all along..." She sighed. "The astronomers who discovered the Wormwood didn't do anybody any favors by calling it that. Chapter Eight, verse ten: The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—the name of the star is Wormwood..."
"I don't understand why you invited me here today. In fact I don't know how you got a message through to me. After my father threw you out."