Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  He looked up at the sky. She could see nothing, however, of the expression he wore. "They're not weapons, Laura."

  "Right! They're devices, I forgot." Laura heaved a sigh of frustration. "Do you feel threatened by the establishment or something? What would possess you to build nuclear weapons?"

  "You don't sound like you're ready to know the answer to that yet," he replied.

  The weak excuse rang hollow in her ears. But it didn't matter to her anymore.

  "I quit," she said simply. "I can't work like this. I've got to leave."

  "But I need you," he said, his voice low and urgent. In the darkness Laura shook her head and ground her teeth, determined not to be manipulated into staying.

  "That's not good enough," she said, shaking her head again. "And neither is a million dollars, or two, or ten."

  "Why? What is it you absolutely must not have to stay and complete your work?"

  "I've told you! I have to know! I have to know what you're doing, or I won't be a part of it."

  "Why do you have to know?"

  She heaved a sigh of exasperation at the stupid question. "Because! Because if what you're up to is… is wrong, then I won't have anything to do with it! And let me tell you this right now. What I do know doesn't look very good, Mr. Gray."

  "And I have to tell you everything or you'll leave?"

  "Yes!"

  "Then I am sorry. I…" He faltered but quickly cleared his throat. "You were making great progress. I thought you were on the verge of a breakthrough."

  For the very first time since her arrival, Laura suddenly felt confident about something. He was desperate for her to stay. A smile crept onto her face, and she had to suppress it lest it be betrayed in her voice. "Okay, if you won't tell me everything, you've at least got to tell me a whole lot more. Enough for me to decide if I can continue with my work here."

  "And if I do, you'll stay?"

  "Well, that sort of depends on what you tell me."

  "All right then!" Gray responded with obvious delight, and Laura again found herself fighting a smile. "Here's the deal." he said, taking to his feet and standing profiled against the starry black canvas. "I'll grant you unlimited physical access to the facilities. What you figure out on your own — any conclusion you draw — is your business. That means I'll only tell you things I think you're ready for when I think you need to know them. Is that a deal?"

  "No. I want to know at least as much as you've told your department heads. At least as much."

  She waited. It was a test. "Fair enough," Gray replied.

  In the darkness, Laura grinned in silent celebration of her coup.

  "Let's get started," he said, grabbing the lantern. "Dr. Aldridge, I'd like to introduce to you number 1.2.01R — otherwise known as 'Hightop.'" The beam of light swung around to the opposite side of the ledge. There sat an enormous Model Eight robot.

  Laura gasped and grabbed at the ground in panic. One flinch, one twitch from the giant machine would have sent her flying down the hill for the car. But the hulking metal beast sat in a surprisingly human repose, and Laura remained coiled in a four-point stance atop the quilt.

  Gray placed the lantern on the ground and opened a laptop computer beside the robot. Its screen came to life and Gray typed away. Laura kept her eyes fixed on the reclining Model Eight. It was covered in a gunmetal-gray material that reflected none of the light cast by the bright beam. Its "face" was oddly human in appearance despite having lenses for eyes and vented membranes where its mouth and nose should be. It had all the same joints as on a human — elbows, knees, wrists, ankles, et cetera. A shiny black fabric encased the robot's massive limbs in a tight elastic fit, and subtle ridges of hard metal were clearly flexed just underneath. A black cable protruded from an open compartment on the robot's chest. It snaked its way to a port at the back of Gray's computer.

  "Hightop sends his regards," Gray said, looking up from the bright screen, "and he asks that I shine the light on you. Do you mind?" Laura shrugged and shook her head. Gray shined the lantern in her face for a moment, then turned it back toward the reclining robot.

  "Hightop thinks you're pretty," Gray said.

  "What?" Laura asked. "Let me see that."

  Gray held the laptop in front of her. Laura read on the screen.

  She examined the huge machine from close up. "Are you sure this is safe?" she whispered.

  "What? Hightop? He's our star! He's also the robot whose battery ran down. Interestingly, when we reprogrammed him, he learned much more quickly than before. Apparently, a lot of the connections he'd made in his first incarnation remained intact because he scores a good twenty percent higher on aptitude tests than the others in his class. Better even than his original class."

  Hightop sat motionless, its head turned slightly toward the two humans. Laura found it disconcerting that she could get no cues from the robot.

  No body language. No facial expressions. Nothing in its eyes.

  "Okay," she said, "what about the rest of our deal? What about the nuclear devices? Tonight's super-important space launch? The deadline, whenever it is?"

  "It's two days," Gray said, "and are you sure you want to know the answers to those questions?" Laura nodded, but inwardly she doubted her answer. He rose and held his hand out to Laura. She didn't need the help, but she took his hand anyway.

  "Where're we going?" she asked.

  "To answer your questions," Gray said, and he started down the hill.

  "What about all this stuff?" Laura called out, looking at the gear strewn all about. They were obviously skipping the little [garbled] Gray had planned.

  "Hightop'll clean it up."

  "Why do you call him 'Hightop'?"

  Gray stepped back onto the quilt, a smile barely visible in the dim light. "We put the robots in tactile rooms to expose them to everyday items. The idea is they won't then go around crushing things when we let them out into the real world. Well, Hightop fell in love with some size-fourteen triple-E sneakers. He figured out that they went on his feet, and damned if they didn't fit. One of the techs laced them up, and he wore them till they fell apart, which wasn't very long."

  "Did you bring Hightop up here just to show me?"

  Gray regarded the machine in silence for a moment "I didn't bring Hightop here. He climbed up on his own. Startled the hell out of me." Gray caught Laura's eye, then turned to face the dark mass of the island, which was bounded by the slightly brighter glow from the water. "They're getting out of the yard."

  Even in the negligible light his brilliant eyes were the focus of who he was. They were the windows to one of the greatest minds ever.

  "How did you do it?" she whispered. "How did you turn tiny flashes of light into… life?"

  She could see the white teeth of his grin. "From simplicity, complexity arises."

  28

  "This is my media room," Gray said. Laura followed him into a previously unnoticed room just down the hall from his study. He flipped on the lights to reveal what looked like the bridge of a spaceship. The room was completely circular, with walls covered floor to ceiling with high-definition television screens. In the center stood a plush "captain's chair" mounted high atop a sturdy black swivel. All was metal and leather and beige carpeting. The room had clearly been designed by and for a male. Gray ushered Laura not to the big chair but to a sofa sunken into the floor just in front.

  He settled in beside her and powered up the system from an instrument console that took the place of a coffee table.

  "Are we hailing an enemy vessel or something?" Laura asked, and Gray smiled.

  In rapid succession, hundreds of screens lit the walls with spectacular displays, bringing the room alive with five hundred channels.

  Fully one-quarter of the programs were news broadcasts, and a sizable percentage of those had the same still photograph of a trackless section of night sky. They had the same stars, the same blackness of space, and no hint as to what the significance of the pi
cture was.

  "Does this have something to do with your launch?" Laura asked.

  "Indirectly," Gray replied. He picked up a laser pointer and directed a cursor smoothly from screen to screen until it rested on a broadcast whose legend read "CNN-5" in the lower right-hand corner. At the push of a button atop the small device, sound burst from thunderous speakers, and a red box lit the borders of the active channel.

  "… at Mount Palomar still can't say whether the object is any threat to us here. We go now to our CNN correspondent on science and technology to get the latest. Steve?" The picture was now split between the anchorwoman in her studio and a reporter, who stood in front of a messy bulletin board holding a microphone. The reporter stepped aside to reveal a bald man in short sleeves from whose chin sprouted an enormous, bushy beard. "Cathy, I'm here with Professor Lawrence Summers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Professor Summers, I understand the people here at JPL have been doing some rough calculations."

  "O-o-oh," the man laughed, red lips protruding from his beard. "I wouldn't call them calculations. Back-o'-the-napkin kinds of things, really."

  "Perhaps you could explain the problem for our viewers. Why can't we get any firm figures on exactly where this object is headed and whether it poses any threat of collision with the earth?" Laura looked at Gray, whose face betrayed nothing.

  "There are too many unknown variables. The observatory at Mount Palomar picked it up at extreme range by random chance. They were calibrating a new camera, and one of the astronomers noticed that a star was missing from the field. That's the way many of the dark objects in our solar system are discovered — by obscuring a known star — and so they set about looking for another such event in the vicinity. When another star was obscured earlier today, their rough calculations indicated a close pass to the earth, which is all we know right now."

  "And just how close will this pass be? Is there a chance that this thing could hit us?"

  "That's obviously everyone's concern, but it's too early to tell yet. All we know is that there is some object of considerable mass — a comet or an asteroid, probably the latter — that is in roughly the same orbit as the earth. What we would need to know before we could accurately predict its course is its mass, shape, rotation, and material composition."

  "When will you know all that?"

  "Well… we'll never know all of it. We're trying to get some shots with the Hubble, but it's still about ten million miles away and it's no more than a few miles in diameter. There's not too much data you can get out of a dark, cool object like an asteroid at that range."

  "I'm sending them the data now," Gray said without taking his eyes off the screen.

  "Let's assume that it strikes the earth," the reporter said. "What effects could it have?"

  "Oh, my," the scientist said nervously, rocking from heel to toe and shoving his hands deep in his pockets. "Well, that's… I think it's a bit premature to be speculating about that right now."

  "But let's just suppose for a moment the worst-case scenario — that this object is on a collision course with the earth. What would be the type of things that might happen if it hits us?"

  The scientist shrugged and smiled in discomfort. "It could, of course, be catastrophic. But we'd need more data before even preliminary conclusions could be drawn."

  "I hate to belabor the point," the reporter pressed, "but it's the question that's on the minds of most of our viewers tonight, I'm sure. If that asteroid or whatever it is were to strike the earth — understanding that we don't know right now whether that's even remotely likely — what kinds of damage could it do?"

  The scientist again struggled with the question. "We have only geological records of strikes of this magnitude, and extraterrestrial observations of such events like Shoemaker-Levy 9. The earth is constantly bombarded with debris, but objects smaller than about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter explode or burn up in the upper atmosphere. Our current predictions put the chances of an object one mile in diameter striking the earth at about one every three hundred thousand years. That size strike would probably raise enough dust to lower world temperatures for two to three months, which would have climatic effects. We should also, on average, get hit by an object that's five miles in diameter once every ten million years or so. Its impact would boil significant volumes of our oceans, vaporize hundreds of cubic miles of crust, fill the air with burning sulfur, and trigger forest fires with falling cinders all across the planet."

  "And how does the size of the object you're now tracking compare to that,"

  "Oh, it's considerably larger, in all likelihood."

  "It's eight by twelve by six miles," Gray supplied matter-of-factly.

  Laura opened her mouth to ask Gray how he knew, but her attention was drawn back to the screen.

  "And what would an object of that size do if it struck the earth, Professor?" the reporter asked.

  "Well, purely theoretically, I suppose, if a dense object ten or more miles in diameter were to strike the earth head-on — not skipping back off into space in a glancing blow with our atmosphere — at a relative velocity of some tens of miles per second…" He hesitated. "Of course it might break up in the tidal forces of the earth's gravitational field while still some distance away, which is not necessarily a good thing. Then it might pepper a very wide area with large meteorites, some of which would surely impact on populated regions."

  "But what if it didn't break up?"

  The scientist arched his eyebrows. "Well, we would be talking about a multigigaton event." Laura's gaze shot over to Gray. She'd never even heard the word gigaton before. Gray stared fixedly at the screen.

  "Force, as everyone knows, is mass times velocity squared. With a velocity of forty to eighty miles per second…" Again he faltered. "It would be unprecedented, at least on rocky planets like earth which preserve a record of geologic events in the form of craters."

  "What are you saying, Dr. Summers? If an intact asteroid of that size were to strike the earth squarely, what would that do?"

  His pursed lips protruded cherry-red from his beard. "It would certainly cause tidal waves along virtually every shoreline on the planet. But the wave effects wouldn't be limited to the oceans. With forces like the ones we'd be dealing with, liquefaction of the upper crust would occur. The ground would behave like a liquid, and a series of shockwaves would ripple outward from the point of impact. Those waves of solid earth could be a hundred feet or more high, and they would radiate outward like the ripples on a pond at thousands of miles per hour. Buildings can't withstand even a few inches of movement, and no structures ever built by man could survive those waves."

  "Could it possibly crack the earth open?" the interviewer asked.

  The scientist shook his head but said, "A large segment of the crust would probably be tossed up from the point of impact into low earth orbit, but most of that should then rain back down to earth over the next days and weeks. And the shock would clearly set off nearly simultaneous earthquakes along every fault line on the planet, plus produce a multitude of new fault lines like the starring around a crack on a windshield. It might even fracture the crust straight through and create a brand-new plate, which would change the course of continental drift."

  The reporter pressed his earpiece closer. "I'm… I'm being asked by CNN studios to inquire whether that would be the worst of it."

  Another shrug. "Climatic change is a certain. Temperatures would fall, ice would form, water tables would rise, crops would fail as previously fertile zones became less temperate. I would anticipate catastrophic extinctions of species on the order last experienced sixty-five million years ago with the Yucatan strike — the one that killed the dinosaurs. "The fact of the matter is, though, nobody really knows."

  "Could it… could we be dealing with the possibility of… of extinction?"

  The scientist's gaze shot up. "Human extinction? As a species? Oh, good Lord, no!" He shook his head vigorously. "Life is very stubborn. In even the most ex
treme scenarios human life would survive in numerous pockets all around the earth. No, no. I wouldn't worry at all about human extinction." He smiled reassuringly.

  The looks of dread on the faces of the newspeople summed the story up best. It was only when the anchorwoman's lips began to move that Laura realized the television was now muted.

  Laura turned to Gray. "Is that why you have those nuclear devices? To blow that thing up?"

  "No. You wouldn't want to do that. Our calculations show there's a greater danger from getting hit with a bunch of little pieces than with one big blow. Plus, our planet would plow back through the debris year after year, orbit after orbit for generations. That shrapnel would not only increase the threat from meteorites, it would make spaceflight from this planet dangerous virtually forever."

  "Joseph," Laura whispered, a chill rising up her spine, "what's going on?"

  "That object detected by Mount Palomar's an asteroid. Solid iron, shaped like a peanut. No rotation whatsoever. Its velocity relative to the earth is a positive sixty-two miles per second."

  "How do you know all that when even the Hubble space telescope can't give them a good enough picture to make those calculations?"

  "Because it's mine."

  Laura wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly. "What's yours?"

  "That asteroid."

  Her lips curled, but the laugh didn't quite materialize. "What?"

  "I sent a probe out a couple of years ago and began deceleration the winter before last."

  Laura looked from his face, to the pictures on the hundreds of special bulletins from all around the world, then back. "You mean you brought that thing here?" she asked with a growing sense of outrage.

  Gray nodded.

  He was completely insane. She'd known he was eccentric, possibly even dangerous, but she had never presumed that his actions could threaten a level of destruction so vast. She spoke in a low and quivering voice. "What have you done?" Laura bolted from the sofa to pace the room in anger. "My God, Joseph! Who do you think you are?"