The Genesis Machine Read online

  The Genesis Machine

  James P. Hogan

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1978 by James P. Hogan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-3597-4

  Cover art by Patrick Turner

  First Baen printing, March 2003

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Typeset by Brilliant Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  Every child is a born scientist.

  This book is dedicated to DEBBIE, JANE, and TINA—the three young scientists who taught me to distinguish reality from illusion by asking always:

  "Who says so?"

  "Who's he?"

  and, "How does he know?"

  MACHINE POLITICS

  "Once the coordinates have been computed," Clifford stated, "they can be recalled instantly. As for the weapon itself. . . ." He scanned the faces assembled before him, then continued. "We have succeeded in transporting energy from one place to another . . . and we can select precisely where in space that energy will be delivered. Destructive forces of unprecedented strength can be instantaneously directed and focused on any part of Earth's surface or beyond."

  The stares of the Defense Secretary, service chiefs, presidential aides, and defense planners seated around the conference table had frozen into wide-eyed masks of stunned incredulity. The silence, when he paused, was absolute.

  "Furthermore, there is no method by which the system I am describing could be interfered with or countered. Interception is impossible. The ICBM and the orbiting bomb are as outmoded as the battering ram."

  Hughes stared aghast at Morelli as the words came home to him. "What are we getting into?" he asked. "Has Brad gone mad?"

  "First I knew about this," Morelli said, shaking his head. "I knew it was something big . . . but this. . . ."

  On the plane back to Boston that night, Clifford's mood was one of grim satisfaction. Aub, for once, seemed subdued and withdrawn.

  "What's the matter?" Clifford asked him. "It's what you've always said you wanted, isn't it—unlimited government funds and resources. Why doesn't it taste so good now?"

  Baen Books by JAMES P. HOGAN

  Inherit the Stars

  The Genesis Machine

  The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Thrice Upon a Time

  Giants' Star

  Voyage from Yesteryear

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Proteus Operation

  Endgame Enigma

  The Mirror Maze

  The Infinity Gambit

  Entoverse

  The Multiplex Man

  Realtime Interrupt

  Minds, Machines & Evolution

  The Immortality Option

  Paths to Otherwhere

  Bug Park

  Star Child

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  Cradle of Saturn

  The Legend That Was Earth

  Martian Knightlife

  Chapter 1

  The familiar sign that marked the turnoff from the main highway leading toward Albuquerque, some thirty or so miles farther north, read:

  ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS

  RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT

  GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

  ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE

  TO

  UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS

  SHOW PASSES—1½ MILES AHEAD

  Accompanied by the falling note of a barely audible electric whine, the Ford Cougar decelerated smoothly across the right-hand traffic lane and entered the exit slipway. Without consciously registering the bleeped warning from the driver's panel, Dr. Bradley Clifford felt the vehicle begin responding to his touch as it slipped from computer control to manual drive. The slipway led into a shallow bend that took him round behind a low sandy rise dotted with clumps of dried scrub and dusty desert thorn, and out of sight of the main highway.

  The road ahead, rolling lazily into the hood of the Cougar, lay draped around the side of a barren, rock-strewn hill like a lizard sunbathing on a stone. In the shimmering haze beyond and to the right of the hill, the rugged red-brown bastions that flanked the valley of the Rio Grande stood row behind row in their ageless, immutable ranks, fading into layers of pale grays and blues that blended eventually with the sky on the distant horizon.

  The road reached a high point about halfway up the shoulder of the hill, and from there wound down the other side to commence its long, shallow descent into the mouth of the valley beyond, at the far end of which was situated the sprawling complex of the Advanced Communications Research Establishment. At this time of the morning, the sun shone from the far side of the Establishment, transforming the jumble of buildings, antenna towers, and radio dishes into stark silhouettes crouching menacingly in front of the black, shadowy cliffs that marked the head of the valley. From a distance, the sight always reminded Clifford of a sinister collection of gigantic mutant insects guarding the entrance to some dark and cavernous lair. The shapes seemed to symbolize the ultimate mutation of science—the harnessing of knowledge to unleash ever more potent forces of destruction upon a tormented world.

  About a mile farther on and halfway down to the valley floor, he came to the checkpoint where the road passed through the outer perimeter fence of ACRE. A black Army sergeant, in shirtsleeves but armed and wearing a steel helmet, walked forward from the barrier as Clifford slowed to a halt beside a low column. Nodding his acknowledgment to the guard's perfunctory " 'Morning," Clifford extracted the coded card from his pass folder, inserted it into a slot in the front of the box surmounting the column, and handed the folder to the guard. Then he pressed the ball of his thumb against the glass plate located adjacent to the slot. A computer deep beneath ACRE's Administration Block scanned the data fed in at the checkpoint, checked it against the records contained in its files, and flashed the result back to another soldier who was seated in front of a display console inside the guardhouse. The sergeant returned the pass folder to Clifford's outstretched hand, cast a cursory glance around the inside of the vehicle, then stepped back and raised his arm. The Cougar moved through and the barrier dropped into place behind.

  Fifteen minutes later, Clifford arrived at his office on the third floor of the Applied Studies Department of the Mathematics & Computer Services Building. On the average, he spent probably not more than two days a week at ACRE, preferring to work at home and use his Infonet terminal, which gave him access to the Establishment's data bank and computers. On this occasion he hadn't been in for eight days, but when he checked the list of messages on his desk terminal, he found nothing that was especially pressing; all the urgent calls had already been routed on to his home number and dealt with from there.

  So no unexpected panics to worry about before his eleven-o'clock meeting.

  No sooner had he thought it, when the chime sounded to announce an incoming call. He sighed and tapped a button to accept.

  "Clifford."

  The screen showed a momentary frenzy of color, which stabilized almost immediately into the features of a thin, pale-faced individual with thinning hair and a hawkish nose. He looked mean. Clifford groaned inwardly as he recognized the expression of pained indignation. It was Wilbur Thompson, Deputy to the Deputy Financial Controller of M
ath-comps and self-appointed guardian of protocol, red tape, and all things subject to proper procedures.

  "You might have told me." The voice, shrill with outrage, grated on Clifford's ears like a hacksaw on tungsten carbide. "There was absolutely no reason for you to keep quiet about it. I would have thought that the least somebody with my responsibilities could expect would be some kind of cooperation from you people. This kind of attitude doesn't help anybody at all."

  "Told you what?"

  "You know what. You requisitioned a whole list of category B equipment despite the fact that your section is way over budget on capital procurement for the quarter, and without an SP6 clearance. When I queried it, you let me go ahead and cancel without telling me you'd gotten a priority approval from Edwards. Now the whole thing's a mess and I've got everybody screaming down my throat. That's what."

  "You didn't query it," Clifford corrected matter-of-factly. "You just told me I couldn't do it. Period."

  "But . . . You let me cancel."

  "You said you had no alternative. I took your word for it."

  "You knew damn well there'd be an exception approval on file." Thompson's eyes were bulging as if he were about to become hysterical. "Why didn't you mention the fact, or give me an access reference to it? How was I supposed to know that the project director had personally given it a priority 1 status? What are you trying to do, make me look like some kind of idiot or something?"

  "You manage that okay without me."

  "You listen to me, you smart-assed young bastard! Do you think this job isn't tough enough already without you playing dummy? There was no reason why I should have checked for an exception approval against that requisition. Now I'm being bawled out because the whole project's bottlenecked. What the hell made you think I'd want to check it out?"

  "It's your job," Clifford said dryly, and cut off the screen.

  He just had time to select some of the folders lying on his desk and to turn for the door, when the chime sounded again. He cursed aloud, turned back to the terminal, and pressed the Interrogate key to obtain a preview of the caller without closing the circuit that completed the two-way channel. As he had guessed, it was Thompson again. He looked apoplectic. Clifford released the key and sauntered out into the corridor. He collected coffee from the automat area, then proceeded on to one of the graphical presentation rooms which he had already reserved for the next two hours. Since the meeting demanded his presence at ACRE that day, he thought he might as well make the most of the opportunity presented to him.

  An hour later Clifford was still sitting at the operator's console in the darkened room, frowning with concentration as he studied the array of multidimensional tensor equations that glowed at him from the opposite wall. The room was one of several specifically built to facilitate the manipulation and display of large volumes of graphical data from ACRE's computer complex. The wall that Clifford was looking at was, in effect, one huge display screen. In levels deep below the building, the machines busied themselves with a thousand other tasks while Clifford pondered the subtle implications contained in the patterns of symbols. At length, he turned his head slightly to direct his words at the microphone grille set into the console, but without taking his eyes off the display, and spoke slowly and clearly.

  "Save current screen; name file Delta Two. Retain screen modules one, two, and three; erase remainder. Rotate symmetric unit phi-zero-seven. Quantize derivative I-vector using isospin matrix function. Accept I-coefficients from keyboard two; output on screen in normalized orthogonal format."

  He watched as the machine's interpretation of the commands appeared on one of the small auxiliary screens built into the console, nodded his approval, then tapped a rapid series of numerals into the keyboard.

  "Continue."

  The lower part of the display went blank and a few seconds later began filling again with new patterns of symbols. Clifford watched intently, his mind totally absorbed with trying to penetrate the hidden laws within which Nature had fashioned its strange inter-plays of space, time, energy and matter.

  In the early 1990s, a German theoretical physicist by the name of Carl Maesanger had formulated the long-awaited mathematical theory of Unified Fields, combining into one interrelated set of equations the phenomena of the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. According to this theory, all these familiar fields could be expressed as projections into Einsteinian spacetime of a complex wave function propagating through a higher-order, six-dimensional continuum. Being German, Maesanger had chosen to call this continuum eine sechsrechtwinkelkoordinatenraumkomplex. The rest of the world preferred simply sk-space, which later became shortened to just k-space.

  Maesanger's universe, therefore, was inhabited by k-waves—compound oscillations made up of components that could vibrate about any of the six axes that defined the system. Each of these dimensional components was termed a "resonance mode," and the properties of a given k-wave function were determined by the particular combination of resonances that came together to produce it.

  The four low-order modes corresponded to the dimensions of relativistic spacetime, the corresponding k-functions being perceived at the observational level simply as extension; they defined the structure of the empty universe. Space and time were seen not merely as providing a passive stage upon which the various particles and forces could act out their appointed roles, but as objective, quantifiable realities in their own right. No longer could empty space be thought of as simply what was left after everything tangible had been removed.

  Addition of the high-order modes implied components of vibration occurring at right angles to all the coordinates of normal spacetime. Any effects that followed from these higher modes were incapable, therefore, of occupying space in the universe accessible to man's senses or instruments. They could impinge upon the observable universe only as dimensionless points, capable of interacting with each other in ways that depended on the particular k-functions involved; in other words, they appeared as the elementary particles.

  The popular notion of a particle as a tiny, smooth ball of "something"—a model that, because of its reassuring familiarity, had been tenaciously clung to for decades despite the revelations of quantum wave mechanics—was finally put to rest for good. "Solidness" was at last recognized as being totally an illusion of the macroscopic world; even the measured radius of the proton was reduced to no more than a manifestation of the spatial probability distribution of a point k-function.

  When high- and low-order resonances occurred together, they resulted in a class of entities that exhibited a reluctance to alter their state of rest or steady motion as perceived in normal space, so giving rise to the quantity called "mass." A 5-D resonance produced a small amount of mass and could interact via the electromagnetic and weaker forces. A full 6-D resonance produced a large amount of mass and added the ability to interact via the strong nuclear force as well.

  The final possibility was for high-order modes to exist by themselves, without there being any component of vibration in normal spacetime at all. This yielded point-centers of interaction that offered no resistance whatsoever to motion in spacetime and therefore always moved at the maximum speed observable—the speed of light. These were the massless particles—the familiar photon and neutrino and the hypothetical graviton.

  In one sweeping, all-embracing scheme, Maesanger's wave equations gave a common explanation for the bewildering morass of facts that had been catalogued by thousands of experimenters in a score of nations throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. They explained, for example, why it is that a particle that interacts strongly always interacts in all possible weaker ways as well, although the converse might not be true; clearly the 6-D resonance responsible for the strong nuclear force had, by definition, to include all possible lower modes as subsets of itself. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a 6-D resonance. This picture also explained why heavy particles always interact strongly.

  Theory predicted that 5-D
resonance would produce particles of small mass, unable to participate in strong interactions; existence of the electron and muon proved it. Further considerations suggested that any heavy particle ought to be capable of assuming three discrete states of electric charge, each of which should be accompanied by just a small change in mass; sure enough, the proton and neutron provided prime examples.

  If an interaction occurred between two resonances whose respective components on the time axis were moving in opposite directions—and there was nothing in the theory to say this couldn't happen—the two temporal waves would cancel each other to produce a new entity that had no duration in time. To the human observer they would cease to exist, producing the effect of a particle-antiparticle annihilation.

  As a young graduate at CIT in the late 1990s, Bradley Clifford had shared in the excitement that had reverberated around the scientific world after publication of Maesanger's first paper. K-theory became his consuming passion, and soon uncovered his dormant talents; by the time he entered his postdoctoral years, he had already contributed significantly to the further development of several aspects of the theory. Driven by the restless, boundless energy of youth, he thrust beyond the ever-widening frontier of human knowledge, and always the need to know what lay beyond the next hill drew him onward. Those were his idyllic days; there were not enough hours in the day, days in the year, or years in a lifetime to accomplish all the things he knew he had to do.

  But gradually the realities of the lesser world of lesser men closed in. The global political and economic situation continued to deteriorate and fields of pure academic research were increasingly subjected to more stringent controls and restraints. Funds that had once flowed freely dried to a trickle; vital equipment was denied; the pick of available talent was lured away by ever more tempting salaries as military and defense requirements assumed priority. Eventually, under special legislation, even the freedom of the nation's leading scientists to work where and how they chose became a luxury that could no longer be allowed.