In the past three days he had spent every waking hour constructing the car and writing software for it. Ironically, he had constructed the miniature automobile to show that the designs he had found were spurious. Even he struggled to accept the reality of the car circling in front of him.
Shutting his eyes, he visualized the design of the engine. When he first saw the diagram, he had dismissed it as an engineering prank. But when he read the Abstract and how the design was based on the principle of quantum tunneling, he saw the theoretical basis that made it worth a try.
The physical construction of the engine was relatively easy. He had been able to borrow most of the materials from his Physics lab. The hard part was writing the software. Writing the WKB approximations as a series of arrays had pressed him to the very limits of his programming skill.
Huan Lee opened his eyes and stared at the little car as it continued its revolutions. He smiled. The little toy car was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Yesterday it had been a joke; today it was pure magic.
Almost without thinking, he pulled his Blackberry from his shirt pocket and tapped out two messages to his friends Jack and Linda. He smiled again at the thought of how they would react to his accomplishment.
Jack was the first to arrive. Without even saying hello, Huan Lee pointed at the little car, still circling the room.
“What the hell is that?” Jack said, pointing at the small car.
“That’s what I wanted you to see,” said Huan Lee.
“Give me a break!” said Jack, “You can buy fancier shit at Toys “R” Us for $15.95!”
“I don’t think so,” Huan Lee said.
After a perfunctory knock on the door, Linda burst into the room. “This better be good,” she said. “I’m studying for the QED exam.”
“He wants us to see his tinker toy,” said Jack.
“You mean that?” said Linda, with an impatient gesture at the car. “For cripes sake, I’m studying for my QED exam and you interrupt me for this?”
Huan Lee smiled. This was going to be more fun than he had thought. He reached over to his desk and flicked a switch on a four inch square circuit board. The tiny car rolled to a stop.
“Take a look,” he told his friends. “See if you can find the power source.”
“I don’t have time for jokes,” Linda said, hands on hips.
“This is not a joke,” Huan assured her.
Jack picked up the car and placed it on the desk. With its makeshift construction it was easy to take apart. Linda stood by Jack’s side as he carefully disassembled it.
“Where’s the battery?” Linda asked when the small car lay in pieces. All they could find was a small electric motor, which was obviously of standard manufacture, a tiny circuit board and a chassis with four little wheels.
Huan Lee struggled to suppress his laughter. “There is no battery,” he said succinctly.
“Come on, quit shittin’ us,” said Jack. “Where’s the battery?”
Huan Lee laughed. “There’s the battery,” he said, pointing to the four inch square circuit board with a small double-A battery attached.
“Are you telling us that you’re broadcasting power? Now I know you’re shittin’ us.”
Huan Lee’s smile widened. He handed over a sheaf of paper that contained all the designs and the equations illustrating the concept of broadcasting electrical power using a method derived from the quantum tunneling effect.
Linda pored over the equations, while Jack studied the schematics. “Where did you find this?” Jack asked.
“This is the part you’re not going to believe. I should have just told you I invented it.” Seeing that they were both waiting for him to continue, he added, “I found it on the Internet.”
“Get out of here,” said Linda.
Ten minutes later they were viewing the website where Huan had found the specifications. “I tried a few tricks to locate the server for this domain, but I had no luck at all.”
“I don’t see anything about any patents on this stuff,” said Jack. “If you could patent it as your own, Huan, you’d be a billionaire.”
“Look,” said Linda when they scrolled to the end of the document. There were hundreds of links to other subjects, nearly all of them relating to applied engineering.
Over the next few hours the three of them explored many of the links, printing out the specs for the applications that excited them most.
“I’ve got a theory,” said Jack. “There’s some kind of space-time displacement. I think we’ve accessed a server that exists a thousand years in the future.”
Huan did not bother to acknowledge him. He was not interested in theories. He was only interested in applied engineering. He realized that what they had already downloaded could keep him busy for the next twenty years. He also realized that just a few of these applications, including his first discovery, would change the world forever.
Chapter Forty-Two
General Rockaway sat at his station in the Mobile Command Center and drummed his fingers. His cellphone was on the desk in front of him, open and ready for use. He stared at it intently. When it rang he snatched it up with one quick motion. He listened to the tinny voice on the other line and then paused to consider any last minute options. Finally he said, “Alpha delta code 111,” and ended the call.
The code he had given was the flight order for the B-52 bomber loaded with the nuclear warhead. The plane would neither send nor receive messages. It would maintain complete radio and electronic silence throughout its mission and drop its payload twenty miles west of HTPS Industries at the underground location of the enemy in approximately twenty-five minutes.
General Rockaway was uneasy. Something had not been resolved correctly, and it nagged at him.
Logically there should be nothing to worry about. The interrogation of Harry Sale and Jon Graeme had produced a wealth of information, more than they had ever hoped to obtain. It had stopped them from sending troops into the enemy’s underground location. If they had done that, a cascading event would have triggered a global meltdown of U.S. information systems. As a result, they had gone back to their first plan, which was dropping a bunker buster on the site. In the blink of an eye it would destroy the alien complex in its totality and there would be no dangerous repercussions.
He should have felt relieved. The whole nightmare finally seemed to be over. But the fact that it had all gone so smoothly roused his suspicions. Usually the final phase of an intensive operation such as this one was the most difficult of all. It was as though an easy solution had been dropped in their laps.
He knew that the more he tried to isolate the nagging thought, the less likely it was to surface. As a distraction, he picked up a report that had been sitting on his desk far too long. Then he made a few phone calls that were an hour overdue.
By the time an orderly brought him a fresh cup of coffee, he had managed to shove the nagging thought aside. Now, in an instant, it flashed into his mind. Ignoring the orderly and the coffee, he opened the recording of the interrogation from his laptop and fast-forwarded to the water-boarding of Harry Sale.
Harry Sale had proven to be an extremely cooperative witness, much to everyone’s surprise. So had Jon Graeme, despite having comparatively little knowledge.
Despite Harry Sale’s willingness to cooperate, they had moved almost immediately to more rigorous forms of interrogation. It was vital to national security to verify the truth of what they had been told.
Rockaway’s uneasiness had its origin during the water boarding. He had seen such interrogations before and was not squeamish about them. But this time, alarm bells went off. Watching the interrogation through a one-way window, he expressed his concerns to the interrogation supervisor.
The first time Harry’s head was dunked into the water, Ridgeway was taken aback.
“He doesn’t seem stressed,” he said to the interrogation supervisor. “How can that be?”
The interrogation supervisor
gave him a superior smile. “There is no standard measure to how someone reacts. He’s a programmer, a logical type. That’s maybe why he’s so stoical.”
“It looks like the same expression he’d have washing his hands in the sink,” said Rockaway. “Wouldn’t his eyes dilate or his respiration increase?”
“Not necessarily,” said the interrogation supervisor. “I can guarantee that internally he is feeling a lot of stress.”
It’s nice to know that this academic asshole can guarantee what a man is feeling inside, he thought at the time.
General Rockaway enlarged the image of Harry’s head going into the water and then watched a single frame at a time as Harry re-emerged. What he’d picked up on the first time must have registered unconsciously when it actually happened. Now he could see it clearly. When Harry Sale had emerged from the water, he hadn’t even blinked.
His chief aid suddenly ran into the room. “Something incredible has happened,” he blurted.
“Well, spit it out.”
“Harry Sale and Jon Graeme suddenly stopped, just like that,” he said as he snapped his fingers. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open. He was breathing hard.
“Just stopped?” he repeated. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“I mean they both just suddenly stopped dead, rigid as cigar store Indians. They were in separate cells, but they stopped at exactly the same second. No pulse, no heartbeat, no nothing!”
“Did you examine them with an instrument?”
“Yes,” the aid replied. “We had a fluoroscopic system we use for bomb detection. They were completely human in every way … except their brains. Their brains were made of some kind of ceramic material.”
General Rockaway’s hands fell to his side and he sat in complete silence. He looked at his wristwatch. Almost at the same time he felt the earth shake beneath him. It was like a mild earthquake. He realized that, in that instant, the alien installation had been demolished, reduced to nothing but rubble.
“What should I do?” his chief aid asked. Rockaway had no answer and he certainly did not want to tell the man what he was really thinking.
They had lost, completely and irrevocably. Their window of opportunity had opened and closed. The more Rockaway thought about it, the more he realized they’d never had a chance.
Chapter Forty-Three
Harry’s escape plan, like everything else he did, had been worked out down to the last detail. Jon was terrified, knowing that they were about to have a bomb dropped on them. But Harry seemed perfectly relaxed. He stood from his seat in front of the horseshoe-shaped control console and looked out over it.
“I can’t believe I ever designed anything so clunky,” he said. “I’d take an entirely different approach now, more virtual elements—”
“Harry, can we just get the hell out of here? For God’s sake, they’re getting ready to bomb us.”
“We’ve got plenty of time,” Harry said. He stepped away from the console and walked a few yards to a black strip embedded in the floor. “Stand in the middle of it,” he said.
The two of them stepped onto the center of the black strip. Without warning the strip started to move, slowly at first and then more rapidly. In just a few seconds the two of them were flying along at sixty miles an hour. The wind rushed by with a screech. Jon turned toward Harry and saw that his long hair was blowing wildly.
In the distance Jon saw the point where the black strip ended. Its terminal point was the rocky face of a cavern wall. If they didn’t slow down soon, they would slam right into it. When they were just a few seconds away from a collision, they hit a cushion of air. Jon had to step back to catch his balance. A moment later they came to a stop mere inches from the wall.
Harry reached out and touched a protruding rock with his index finger. A section of the wall opened up and Jon could see that they had come to a conveyance of some type. It looked like a two-man bobsled.
“Take the passenger side,” said Harry, “and hold on tight. I’m going to open up the throttle on this baby.”
Even though they were fifty miles away when the nuclear warhead detonated, the shockwave still reached them. As the sled shook violently, Jon wondered if Harry had cut the timing too close. But the heavy vibrations were only transient, and the sled quickly returned to a smooth and stable trajectory.
The two of them sat shoulder to shoulder as the sled rocketed toward the cavern Harry had first discovered below Tartan’s Crag. Total darkness surrounded them and the sled gave off a high pitched whine as it displaced the air in the tunnel. They had to be traveling hundreds of miles per hour. Jon thought of asking Harry their exact speed, but it seemed unimportant compared with all his other questions.
Jon sensed that the sled was beginning to decelerate. The high-pitched whine lessened and was replaced by a metallic whirring noise as the sled met more resistance on the track. After several minutes it came to a stop and Harry stepped out. Jon followed after, adjusting his eyes to the faint light of a cave. As he looked more closely he realized that it wasn’t really a cave. Rather, it was a tunnel, a sort of cul-de-sac at the end of a larger cavern.
The cavern opened onto a gigantic arcade. As they approached, the light grew visibly brighter and Jon observed the same alien technology from before. Row upon row of black crystalline slabs stretched out endlessly before them. He looked at the slab nearest to him and watched with fascination as odd patterns danced across its surface, like phosphorescent creatures rising from the deep.
Harry walked onto the center strip of the huge arcade, which was clearly a pathway. It ran directly through the center of the crystalline slabs. Jon paused but followed soon after.
The sounds of their footsteps echoed oddly, as though they were muted by a dampening field that instantly swallowed them up. He stopped walking when he realized that he could not even hear himself breathing. It seemed that, in this chamber, sound was either absorbed immediately or neutralized altogether.
“Harry, I’ve got a million questions for you,” Jon said as they walked along. His voice sounded flat, totally without its usual resonance. There was no echo or decay.
The curious half-smile appeared on Harry’s face. It was an expression that always made Jon wonder if Harry was laughing at him.
“I don’t think we have quite enough time for a million questions. Could you cut it down to fewer than ten thousand?”
Jon smiled. “I guess I could try,” he said. “First off, what did you mean when you said they are going to kick us out of the nest?”
Harry replied without slowing his progress along the center strip of the arcade. “I guess I used that verbiage because it suggested a lot of different things. I was going to explain, but we got interrupted.”
Harry walked a few paces more in silence before confronting Jon. “You know how it is when a young bird needs to fly. The mother pushes it right out of the nest. Well, that’s the way it’s going to be for us. It’s time for us to take the next step.”
“But how can this machine, or whatever it is, know what’s good for us?”
“Because, whether we like it or not, it’s been with us every inch of the way. It’s both the mother and the father of the human race. And it’s much more than a machine; it’s an advanced life form. But it’s more than that, too. It’s a store house of five hundred million years of information about the galaxy. Even more, it’s the wisdom culled from hundreds of millions of years of fostering species like our own on countless worlds.”
“What about the creatures who built it?” Jon asked. “What happened to them?”
“They migrated to another galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago. They left these machines behind them to repopulate the galaxy with seed races, made in their own image. As far as I can tell, the software for the system does not even reside on a chip. Somehow, in a way I can’t even begin to understand, it seems to be built into the very fabric of space/time. I call their operating system The Infinity Program.”
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p; “You say they made us in their own image. Are they like us then?”
Harry laughed. “They probably resemble us about as much as we resemble a monkey. Maybe in a hundred million years we might look more like them. We’ll write our own infinity program and migrate to another galaxy just as they did.”
“I just can’t picture all this,” said Jon. “The time scales are too vast. What about now? What’s going to happen to us now?”
Harry stopped and looked at his friend, the half-smile expanding into something broader than usual. “By ‘us,’ I take it you’re referring to the human race,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Jon.
“There’s going to be a new dark age. It will last about six months. When the energy giants go down, they’re going to try to take everyone else with them. It won’t be pretty. But after six months, there will be a renaissance that will make the last one look unimportant by comparison. There’ll be a flowering unlike anything else in human history. And it will go on for many generations to come.”
“How is this going to happen?” Jon asked.
“Already, as we speak, the designs and plans for a technological and social revolution are flooding the Internet. Any bright, motivated person will be able to do things that were unimaginable just a few days ago. I almost wish I could take part in it.”
“Why can’t you?” Jon asked. He spoke louder than he intended. Harry’s words filled him with alarm. Was he going away somewhere? Was he in danger?
Harry did not answer. He walked on, pointedly ignoring Jon’s question.
Jon was seized by something close to panic. He knew this side of Harry; his friend was up to something totally unexpected. He began to question him again, this time with more urgency, “Where are you going, Harry?”
“We’ll be there in another minute,” Harry said, as though that was answer enough.
Putting his concerns aside momentarily, Jon asked another question that had been on his mind. “You mentioned other intelligent species in the galaxy. Why is it we’ve never had contact with them?”
The Infinity Program Page 29