by Cramer, John
Einstein’s
Bridge
A Novel of
Hard Science Fiction
John Cramer
Book View Café Edition
Copyright © 1997 and 2013 by John G. Cramer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Inquiries should be addressed to: [email protected]
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cramer, John.
Einstein’s Bridge / John Cramer.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-61138-298-3
I. Title.
PS3553. R2674E39 1997
813’.54—dc20
96-30722
CIP
Produced in the United States of America
Originally published in 1997 in hardcover by Avon
First eBook Edition
August 20, 2013
Book View Café
ISBN: 978-1-61138-298-3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
BOOK DESIGN BY JOHN G. CRAMER
COVER DESIGN BY JOHN G. CRAMER AND DAVE SMEDS
To Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen
who discovered the Bridge
within the mathematics of general relativity,
and to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
who organized the first Snark hunt.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Part 1 - May 23, 2004
1.1 Prey 05/23/0410:00
1.2 Montoisey 05/23/0412:30
1.3 Detection 05/24/0410:00
1.4 Outdoor Lunch05/24/0412:30
1.5 Wagner Publishing 05/25/0410:00
1.6 Flight Home 05/26/0413:30
1.7 Preparations 05/28/0412:00
Part 2 - May 29, 2004
2.1 Texas Barbecue 05/29/0419:30
2.2 Moving On 05/31/0413:00
2.3 LEM Seminar 05/31/0409:30
2.4 On the Road 06/01/0414:00
2.5 Virtual Excursion 06/03/0408:45
Part 3 - June 4, 2004
3.1 Neighbor Talk 06/04/0416:00
3.2 All is Ready 06/05/0412:00
3.3 West Campus 06/07/0413:00
3.4 Drive Across 06/07/0413:30
3.5 LEM Detector 06/07/0414:00
3.6 Counting House 06/07/0416:00
3.7 Texas Choice Steakhouse 06/07/0419:15
Part 4 - June 8, 2004
4.1 Pixels and Speckles 06/08/0414:00
4.2 Elvis Sighting 06/08/0421:00
4.3 Snark 06/09/0403:00
4.4 Bridge 06/09/0403:15
4.5 The Cafeteria 06/09/0407:00
4.6 The Palace 06/09/0412:30
4.7 Booster Shot 06/09/0413:30
4.8 Confrontation 06/09/0415:30
4.9Shootout 06/09/0415:45
4.10 Alice in the Palace 06/09/0416:00
4.11 Theory Seminar 06/10/0415:45
Part 5 - June 11, 2004
5.1 Vigil 06/11/0411:30
5.2 The Desert’s Edge 06/11/0411:30
5.3 Juk’in at P.J.’s 06/12/0422:00
5.4 Into the Pit 06/12/0423:00
5.5 Prime Flashes 06/13/0403:00
5.6 SETI Folk 06/13/0410:00
5.7 Speckles Revealed 06/14/0410:00
Part 6 - June 21, 2004
6.1 Snark Seminar 06/21/0410:00
6.2 Contact 06/21/0413:00
6.3 Snark’s Egg 06/28/0410:00
6.4 Venus from the Waves 06/29/0412:00
6.5 Guinea Pig Stampede 06/29/0414:00
6.6 Reawakening 07/01/0410:00
6.7 Back at the SSC 07/03/0410:00
6.8 Attack of the Hive 07/05/0411:00
6.9 The Ring 07/05/0412:00
6.10 Storm Front 07/05/0412:15
6.11 Timelike Loop 07/05/0413:00
Part 7 - February 3, 1987
7.1 Splashdown 02/03/8723:00
7.2 Conventional Wisdom 06/29/8810:00
7.3 Windfall 11/21/8810:00
7.4 Energy 01/10/8913:00
7.5 Magnet Problems 10/10/9010:00
7.6 The Baghdad Backout 02/25/9110:00
7.7 Alice Again 04/29/9221:00
7.8 DC Underground 07/15/9212:00
Part 8 - July 27, 1992
8.1 Spadework 07/27/9209:00
8.2 Election Night 11/11/9221:00
8.3 Legwork 12/20/9311:00
8.4 Alter Ego 01/29/9311:00
8.5 The Anti-SSC Coalition 06/29/9310:00
8.6 Disclosures 08/06/9309:00
8.7 Battery 09/01/9309:00
8.8 Connections 09/21/9317:00
8.9 Victory Party 10/19/9317:00
8.10 Breakthrough 02/24/9410:00
8.11 Iris Campus 01/30/9510:00
8.12 Epilogue 05/23/1410:00
Afterword
Science & Politics
The Science of Einstein’s Bridge
The Political Background of Einstein’s Bridge
Acronyms & Definitions
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About Twistor
About Book View Café
PART 1
May 23, 2004
January 29, 1987
“Throw deep!”
— President Ronald Reagan, when asked his thoughts on initiating the Superconducting Super Collider Project.
“You’re going to make a lot of physicists ecstatic, Mr. President.”
— Office of Management and Budget Director William Miller
“That’s probably fair, because I made two physics teachers in high school very miserable.”
— President Ronald Reagan
May 11, 1987
“It would be wrong to say I’m against the SSC. It’s great scientifically. In fact, it’s mind blowing. The problem is that over the past five years there has been a slow starvation of what I call ‘small science.’ I say first get small science in good shape and then by all means proceed with the SSC.”
— James Krumhansl, President-elect, American Physical Society
CHAPTER 1.1
Prey
THE sky-filling disk of the dim yellow-orange sun was just rising on the east coast of the northern continent when the new universe was discovered. The Hive Mind’s latest breed of extra-dimensional Lookers signaled the find, triggering rapid transmissions that rose to a screaming pitch on all frequency bands as communications from separated components stitched across the planet. The Hive Mind gave orders. Resources must be refined, machines must be constructed, energy banks must be recharged, a new strategy of conquest must be put into place. Workers all over the planet scurried to fulfill their tasks, refining materials, producing parts, assembling machines, simulating alternate courses of action, making ready for the next great attempt at Hive colonization.
The Hive Mind was immortal, and it was very old. A million years ago it had slo
wly come to awareness of its own existence as an ordered structure overlaying the disorder of its Hive. It had made the leap of self-insight, viewing the instinctual behavior and the stilted, almost random, actions of its components: Workers, Soldiers, Flyers, Queens, and Drones. The Hive Mind smoothed their neural programming, turning their narrow rote behaviors toward a more holistic purpose.
The other Hives were the principal threat to the Hive Mind. Most were much older, larger, and better established. The Old Hive dominated the ecology of the entire southern continent. The Sea Hive had developed Swimmers that extended its hegemony into the ocean, somehow communicating through water with sound instead of normal electromagnetic waves. The North Hive had developed Ice-Workers that could work even below the freezing point of water and could make Nests and tunnels under the polar ice cap. But none of these proved to be a match for the Hive Mind’s new intelligence-directed assaults.
In a few brief millennia the Hive dominated the planet. It had killed off all of the other Hives, along with most of the planet’s other life forms. By exercising choice and vision in its multiplicity of decisions, the Hive Mind found by chance the process of selective breeding. Soon the few surviving non-Hive species of the planet had been modified into domesticated resource gatherers and food processors. Applying selective breeding to its own Queens and Drones, it soon developed fast long-range communication between its components.
The resulting increase in the speed and number of Hive Mind’s constituent parts greatly increased its awareness and volume of sensory inputs. This endowed it with a new attribute: curiosity. Systematically it began to explore its world. It encountered fire and found uses for it. It began to savor the subtle differences in the native materials of the planet, and investigated how they behaved when heated with fire. It discovered refining and smelting, and it learned to use metals and ceramics as structural materials and tools.
Then it discovered the stars. By selective breeding it developed special units, Lookers, with eyes that had greatly increased optical resolution and broadened frequency sensitivity. The Hive Mind discovered that by combining simultaneous inputs of many Lookers, it could gain more information about the mysterious bright objects in the sky.
It began to notice certain regularities in the motions of some of the sky objects. From these regularities, the Hive Mind’s first theories and mathematics emerged, as it deduced the existence of a solar system with planets and a force of gravity that held them in regular orbits.
Its emerging science of astronomy served as a model for other discoveries that followed. Slowly, as the millennia passed, the secrets of chemistry and biology and physics were revealed, as the Hive channeled Workers to perform measurements and experiments that would verify or falsify the theories that the Hive Mind had devised. It developed Workers so small that they were only complex molecules, and used these to experiment and explore. It began to understand the universe in which it lived.
The chain of discoveries ultimately led the Hive Mind to begin a new program, high energy physics. Its tireless Workers constructed a large electromechanical structure that stretched in a long straight line spanning a considerable stretch of flat plains on the southern continent. The machine accelerated electrons from the north and from the south and brought them into head-on collisions at the center of the machine, while millions of specially designed Lookers observed and communicated the results of the collisions before succumbing to radiation exposure and dying, to be replaced by fresh units.
As these investigations were progressing, a remarkable thing happened. A particularly violent collision event opened a communication channel to another universe. The Hive Mind began to exchange signals with another species through the channel. It was a strange and stressful experience, communicating with an Otherness, a non-Self, a non-Hive. It had endured this stress for a time, gaining valuable information and concepts. Then, when the Otherness had seemed to lose some interest in communication, it had used its technology to kill the Otherness.
It found a way to manipulate atoms through the communication channel, producing and controlling molecule-size Worker machines in the other universe. These first made many more of themselves, then began to produce full-size Workers, Soldiers, Flyers, Queens, and Drones in the other universe. Soon a new Hive Mind formed there, eradicated the Otherness, and assumed control of that world. The Hive Mind had a sister, a sibling in another universe with which to communicate. It was an Otherness that was also Self. This was very satisfying.
After this initial success, the Hive Mind sought to reproduce again in this way, using the new technology it had learned from the non-self Otherness. It succeeded in the first three attempts, so that Hives in five universes were in communication.
But then something had gone wrong. Seven successive attempts to reproduce had failed. A wrongness had developed in its basic strategy of contact and assimilation. The Hive Mind carefully analyzed the accumulated data of the failed contacts, applying models and simulations in an effort to understand. The simulations suggested that some opposition had developed in the other universes and that this had frustrated the recent efforts.
Now the Hive Mind had a new strategy, and its extra-dimensional Lookers had just detected another universe on which the technique could be tried. It marshaled its planet-wide resources, anticipating the new apotheosis of Self that it would soon bring to another pristine world.
CHAPTER 1.2
Montoisey
GEORGE Griffin inhaled the scents of pine and sunshine-heated rock, feeling the tensions and stresses of the week drain from his shoulders as he stepped forward to the precipice. Below his vantage point on the peak of Montoisey was a kilometer of steep drop-off. At its base the green and brown Plain of Geneva spread out like an intricately detailed map. He had reached this high platform of bare rock by taking the cable car above the French village of Crozet, riding the chair lift to Montoiseau, then hiking the last 300 meters lugging his 15 kilo backpack, the British Airways baggage tag still attached, that contained his parasail.
He turned to savor the sweeping panorama from this high point of the Jura Massif: the Alps before him dominated by the white spectacle of Mont Blanc, the blue sweep of Lake Léman, and the green richness of the Rhone Valley. This was a beautiful and very special place, a place of power. The bankers, the diplomats, the high energy physicists of the world all came here to do their important work.
The parasail wing, a bright pink horseshoe of polyester and kevlar, lay on the rocky slope behind him. George knew from the feel of the wind teasing at his beard that its velocity was all right. Nevertheless, he checked it with his small wind gauge. The LCD readout hovered around 21 kilometers per hour, comfortably below the 26 danger level that would prevent control.
He was about to do a solo from a cliff, which was reputedly a bad combination. His parasail group in Seattle wouldn’t approve. They considered flights without a partner risky and launches from a cliff-edge downright dangerous. But he didn’t much care what they thought. He was always careful, and he trusted his own skills. If something did happen one day, well, c`est la vie. Nobody lives forever, and the danger gave shape and bite to the experience.
He turned from the cliff edge to face the parasail, grasped its front risers and brake lines, and pulled hard. The wing responded, rising like a great pink kite until it was almost overhead, arching above him like a bright pink air mattress designed for a giant. The polyester cells fluttered and sang as the wind off the Plain of Geneva gave them life and form, tugging at the leg loops and chest straps of his harness, urging him upward. George scanned the thin kevlar lines and the long parallel cells, searching for subtle irregularities or snarls that might kill him. Finding none, he turned and walked to the edge of the precipice. As he reached the edge, the wind rose to meet him and lifted him off. He was flying free, and a rush of exhilaration hit like a great wave.
George reminded himself
that flying and falling have identical feelings, at least for a while. He quickly checked the variometer of his GPS monitor. It was OK, although his rate of descent was a bit too high. He adjusted the speed tabs until the indicated descent rate was where he wanted it. Finally he had time to consider comfort. He moved the molded seat into position, releasing the painful cutting tension of the leg loops, and then deployed the speed bar and moved his feet to it. Now he was relaxed and comfortable and in full control. This was what he had come a third of the way around the world for.
He grasped the thin kevlar steering lines, made a few experimental swings, then angled out over the Plain in search of the thermal, marked by a spiraling hawk, that he had spotted from the chair lift. He soon found it and began to spiral upward too. His variometer indicated that his rate of descent was now a negative 30 meters per minute. The updraft had overcome the pull of gravity, and he was truly flying.
George now had time to look around at the familiar landscape near the CERN laboratory where twelve years ago he had lived and worked. He loved this place, the spot where he had spent most of the best years of his life. He was glad to be back, glad to have a free Sunday here.
He studied the French Alps, seeking peaks he had climbed and climbing routes he had used with CERN co-workers years ago. Looking far to the south-east, he could see the city of Geneva at the edge of long Lake Léman, the city’s famous jet fountain making a white exclamation point in the distance. He remembered pleasant walks with Grace through the twisty streets of the old part of Geneva, exploring the little shops and looking for good but inexpensive restaurants. Closer he could see the Geneva Airport, where he’d arrived yesterday, and the vee-shaped CERN main campus, sprawling across the Swiss-French border and pointing in his direction. To his right he could see the CERN North Area, with its hanger-like experiment buildings and cross-shaped office complexes. Further north he could see the town of Gex spilling down the slope of the Jura, and near it he thought he could make out the buildings above the tunnel that contained the old LEP accelerator and the detector, where he had worked for four years before moving to Fermilab. That tunnel, which burrowed under the Jura Mountains, the French countryside, and the airport, now housed the new LHC accelerator and the ATLAS detector, his group’s principal competition.