by Cramer, John
George pulled on the right control line and stepped on the speed bar, terminating his lazy spiral and angling out toward the CERN campus, searching for another thermal. The view, the solitude, the control, the element of adrenaline-laced danger, it was all wonderful. It made him feel young again.
He recalled that once long ago when he was a student looking for a summer job, a personnel clerk at an employment agency had pointed out that George’s job application form listed his recreational activities as reading, writing, skiing, glider flying, and wind surfing. These, the man advised him, were all solitary activities that branded him as a loner. The major corporations were looking for team players. The man had suggested that George perhaps might want to change his entries to amateur acting, softball, volleyball, and touch football. George had declined.
Dammit, he was a loner. Since adolescence he’d detested team sports. Even paragliding he preferred to do alone, without the bother of arranging to go with a partner or group. He was at his best when he was working on a problem alone, with nobody asking questions or offering distractions, when he could hone his concentration to a white-hot pinpoint focus that cut through the crap and got to the roots of the puzzle.
Yet somewhere along the twisted path of his professional and academic career, he had stumbled into experimental particle physics, perhaps the most over-organized and team-oriented form of experimental science. He did not really mind working with a thousand other people, harnessed together to build and milk data from the largest, most expensive, and most complex experimental hardware in the history of the human race. But every day he endured the frustrations of having to work with a group, unable to make decisions and take actions without consulting others, touching the proper bases.
Loners, no matter how good, did not make much of a splash in experimental particle physics. Loners were not the stars of the field, the guys who went to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize when their group discovered something spectacular. It was the operators, the hyperactive organizers who could put together a team of 800 physicists and 1500 technicians and could badger everyone into working at maximum output for three or four years who rose to the top and got the glory and acclaim.
People like Jake Wang, the spokesman and leader of George’s group at the SSC, the Chinese wild man who offended everyone and was the butt of more jokes than George could count, people like Jake got the acclaim. Somehow he always managed to understand the physics a few microseconds before anyone else in the room and to push hard in the right direction before anyone else had decided what the right direction was. George and Jake had been graduate students working together at the SLAC laboratory in California, long ago.
Jake had been a very green graduate student then, his English not very good, his physics ideas off target, his behavior in confrontations tending toward overt hostility. While George had followed his own planned course with reasonable success, he had watched and noticed as Jake had transformed himself, asking subtle questions in private and remembering the answers, working hard until he became an articulate speaker, demonstrating a consummate mastery of the physics literature, learning to argue and convince without offending, learning how to tell other people what to do and have them do it. A year after George had gone to CERN, Jake had left SLAC with a reputation as the most promising new Ph.D. in experimental particle physics. He had gone on to a good postdoc, a better faculty appointment, and to Jake-initiated research that by a stroke of luck had made quite a splash and had led to his becoming spokesman for the LEM collaboration at the SSC. Jake was probably headed for a Nobel prize. The LEM group would earn it, and Jake would collect it.
George, as a group leader in LEM, was probably as high as he would ever go in the hierarchy of high energy physics. LEM would be his last experiment. For the next twenty years he could look forward to grinding out data, solving technical problems, doing good physics in harness with a thousand others.
CHAPTER 1.3
Detection
WHEN the signal from the summoning appliance arrived, Tunnel Maker was feeling homesick for his clan-herd. Through the transparent station wall he saw the Makers’ Sun, appearing as no more than a very bright star at this distance. An optical enhancer would be required to make his home planet visible.
It was a great honor to be Creator of Bridges, but that honor carried with it the necessity of living in this lonely cometary cloud outpost at the outermost fringes of the great gravity well of the Makers’ Sun. In three more orbits he would be able to return to his home planet.
Responding to the signal, he budded a wall aperture, waited while it dilated, and floated through the opening and into the passage. The signal had interrupted his transtemporal meditation linkage with home and produced a dull ache in his occipital orbs. He flowed along the curving passageway. The summoning appliance, he thought, had probably been activated by a false initiator. It had happened before. For the three orbits he had held his present position, every such initiation had been a false one.
When he reached the equipment enclosure, he addressed the data station, interrogating its status indicators and accessing the neural nodes. The stored data began to flow into his sensorium. He turned the emerging patterns to orthogonalize them and paused to contemplate their meaning. Then he flowed backward in delight and wonder.
His long period of waiting was over. Here, at last, was a true find! The extradimensional scanners had actually detected a sequence of enormous nucleus-scale concentrations of energy in one of the neighboring Bubbles. The concentrations were very close in time, and any one of them would have been large enough to establish a Bridge.
Tunnel Maker’s feeling of depression lifted. He would at last be able to do the work he had been trained to do. If all went well, he would be able to construct a Bridge, contact a new civilization, and exchange information and culture with them. New intellectual riches would flow from the contact, to be enjoyed by every Individual of the race of Makers. It would be a great contribution, and it might allow his return to the home world very soon.
This was important news. It was a true find, the first discovery of intelligence in another universe in two dozen orbits. Tunnel Maker paused. Should he call for the assembly of the Concantation of Individuals immediately, communicate the discovery, and secure the needed resources for attempting contact? No, he decided, he must be more cautious. He would lose considerable status if he called together the Concantation, only to have it revealed subsequently that some natural event or malfunction had produced the signal. First he must be very sure, must perform a careful review of the evidence. Then, he must eliminate absolutely the possibility of a detector malfunction. He linked through one of the neural nodes to his sensorium.
The sensory representation displayed the time stream of data from the candidate Bubble. There was an irregular succession of marginally significant clusters of ultra-high energy concentration. These came systematically from the same coordinates within the candidate Bubble. The time pattern seemed random, sometimes off, sometimes on, but taken as a whole it was clear that the peaks of intensity and their frequency of occurrence had both been increasing with time. The single ultra-high energy event that had triggered the summoning appliance had been large indeed and represented an energy density many orders of magnitude larger than a thermonuclear explosion or supernova. But after that triggering event, the subsequent signals had tapered off and now had stopped altogether.
Tunnel Maker paused to consider the evidence. Was there any possibility that this observation could be the result of some natural phenomenon in the neighboring Bubble? An active galactic nucleus, perhaps, or a pair of neutron stars or black holes orbiting toward merger? The neural circuits of the initiator had been trained to eliminate such irrelevant phenomena, but there was the possibility that they had been confused.
He reviewed the data. First, the transdimensional wavelengths indicated that the concentration of energy was
tightly localized, of approximately the size of a proton. That argued against a phenomenon of stellar, neutron star, or black hole dimensions. Second, the energy was definitely positive rather than negative, eliminating the possibility that the Bubble of interest was an inaccessible antimatter time-reversed universe. Third, the phenomenon repeated again and again at essentially the same general coordinates, but primarily at two specific points within those coordinates. That argued against some phenomenon involving ultra-energetic cosmic rays. And fourth, the intensity pattern showed a tendency to increase irregularly and then halt, as if some tuning and improvement process were in progress. It was difficult to imagine any astrophysical catastrophe that could simultaneously be so energetic, so localized, and so repetitive.
Tunnel Maker, with a rising sense of excitement, decided that the case for a signal from a high civilization was convincing, that no plausible argument could be made for a natural phenomenon. This had to be the work of intelligence! Somewhere a great machine had been fabricated by intelligent beings and was accelerating protons or electrons and bringing them into collision. As the beings gained experience with its use, the machine was being steadily improved and the rate and magnitude of energy densities achieved were rising. In the neighboring Bubble Universe, some alien race was doing high energy physics experiments.
His sense of elation shifted to concern. As well as opportunity, there was a serious responsibility here. There was a high probability that the high civilization in that Bubble was now in grave danger from the Hive. The civilization must be contacted and given aid. The magnitude of the energy density concentrations had been more than sufficient to initiate his summoning appliance, and they were undoubtedly sending transdimensional signals that were attracting attention elsewhere in the Cosmos. The Hive might soon attempt to destroy their world. The race for the survival of a civilization was on.
Tunnel Maker, feeling some urgency now, accessed the neural node that would assemble the Concantation of Individuals. Huge resources would have to be marshaled in a short time scale. A Bridge must be opened. An emerging high civilization was in great danger and must be contacted and helped by the Makers. Time was short, and this opportunity must not be missed.
CHAPTER 1.4
Outdoor Lunch
IT WAS a pleasantly warm Spring day in Meyrin. Roger Coulton had decided to sit outside under the pale green of the trees outside the CERN cafeteria as he ate his lunch. He glanced at the croquet lawn in front of him. The grass had been transformed from an ugly brown to an emerald green in the past few weeks, and later this afternoon the serious CERN devotees would be there playing their quaint game, like Alice and the Queen of Hearts.
Through the trees he could see the upthrust rock slab of the Saleve and behind it other mountains surrounding Geneva. The sun was shining, and there was no wind to disturb his papers.
He frowned at the symbols on the pages of the laser-printed Mathematica notebook before him on the round white table. Neatly type-set in a sub-dialect of the language of mathematics, they laid out the anatomy of a failed idea. For the past two months Roger had felt like a drowning man trying desperately to stay afloat. He had been grasping for some variation of his basic approach that might save his new procedure for calculating particle masses from first principles. He was becoming very sure that his efforts were futile. His new procedure was beautiful, elegant, brilliant, and wrong.
In theoretical physics it was not unusual to spend time exploring a few blind alleys. That was part of the game. But this particular idea had looked so promising. In his recent seminars he had been able to use it to impress his colleagues. He was about to move to a new job, a big upward step, and his newly elevated position was due in no small part to the impression made in his interview seminar discussing his new approach. He still could not quite bring himself to believe that his beautiful idea was wrong.
A shadow fell across the papers and remnants of his meal. Roger squinted up at a tall, broad shouldered figure outlined in the yellow alpine sunlight and the green of translucent leaves.
“Hello,” the man said. “I believe you’re Roger Coulton. I was at the talk you gave at Les Houches last March. Very nice work.” The face was vaguely familiar. He had sandy blond hair, a white-streaked beard, and the rugged tan characteristic of the high-altitude UV-laden sunlight of mountain climbs. His accent marked him as American, probably from the midwest. He was holding a marbled-white CERN cafeteria tray and smiling. “I’m George Griffin. I’m an experimentalist with the LEM collaboration at the Superconducting Super Collider. You’re obviously working, and I don’t want to bother you, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to say hello.”
Roger waved his hand in a gesture of welcome and moved his backpack from the other chair. “Please sit down, George,” he said, feeling somewhat relieved to be distracted from his troubles. “I was not, I regret to say, doing anything useful.” He gathered his papers and put them back into the pack. He glanced around the outdoor seating area of the cafeteria. It was becoming crowded, and he was alone at this table. Roger liked to talk to experimentalists. It was a good way of hearing the news about experimental results early, and they usually didn’t want to discuss the details of his recent theoretical work.
George sat down across from him, poured beer from a brown Kronenberg bottle into a glass, and took an appreciative sip. “It’s a great cafeteria that serves beer at lunch time,” he said. “The good folk of Ellis County, Texas would never permit such civilized customs, even if they were allowed by the uptight image-conscious Department of Energy bureaucrats. Imagine the reports their safety task forces would write about the hazards of Alcohol in the Workplace.”
Roger shook his head. “The UK science bureaucracy stands second to none in the tediousness of their safety,” he said. “I moved here from England as soon as the opportunity was offered, and I’ve lived here for three years. The physics is excellent, the pay is twice what I’d get in the UK, the food is wonderful, and the scenery is beautiful.”
“But you’ll soon be leaving CERN to learn about the Waxahachie way of life at first hand,” George said. “You’ve accepted the Senior Fellow position with the SSC’s Particle Theory Group? I’m surprised that you were willing to move.” He waved his hand toward the south where the Alps, punctuated by Mont Blanc, ringed Geneva.
I was a bit surprised, myself, Roger thought. “It wasn’t an easy decision. But ultimately physics decided it. I realized that the CERN LHC simply does not have enough energy to address the most interesting physics questions. Now that the SSC is at last coming into operation, it’s where the action is for theorists as well as experimentalists, so I’m going there.” And hoping the change will blast me out of my present morass, he thought.
“Are you leaving soon?” George asked.
“I move to Texas in a few days,” said Roger. “My boxes of books and papers are already on their way. It’s going to be an adventure for me, living in the States. Especially in Texas. I misspent my early youth watching old cowboy videos.”
“It’s going to require a certain change in life-style,” George said. “Are you married? Where do you live here at CERN?”
“I’m single,” said Roger. “In the UK I had rooms at Cambridge before coming to CERN.” Roger, felt a twinge that might have been guilt. He never mentioned King’s Lynn, where he’d spent the first ten years of his life in near poverty. “Now I have a nice flat in a housing complex in St. Genis, across in France. It’s near a wooded area with a path beside a stream where I like to walk, and my flat has a pleasant view of the Jura Mountains. As a theorist it would have appealed to me to live in a town named Thoiry, which is just down the road, but I couldn’t afford the rents there. How’s the housing situation at the SSC? Where do people live?”
“Hmm,” George mused. “How can I explain Texas? Let’s consider it as a problem in conformal mapping. Instead of Geneva you have D
allas -- very tall buildings, like Geneva a banking and insurance center, a few small lakes but no big ones, no mountains at all, or even significant hills. It’s very flat, with rich black topsoil over limestone. Good farm land, especially for growing cotton. Can’t say much for the wine.
“Instead of the Genevois Calvinists and the French Catholics you will encounter hard-shell Southern Baptists and other sub-species of Texas fundamentalists. You’ll love them. Narrow minded, gossipy, very strict about the appearance of rectitude, uprightness, and Christian living but somewhat more relaxed in private, behind closed doors. They also have a strong work ethic, which is good for the SSC Lab.
“Lots of evangelists around, moving from town to town and making a big show of hell-fire religion. You’ll drive past their big circus tent revivals, hear them on the radio, and find it difficult to avoid them on the local TV stations. There are lots of small churches in the countryside and some very big ones in Dallas and Fort Worth. Dallas is known is some quarters as the very Buckle of the Bible Belt.”
“Delightful,” Roger said and laughed, then frowned as he considered the prospect of experiencing American-style fundamentalist Christianity at close range. Griffin seemed to be going through a familiar spiel, one he’s probably delivered many times before, but that was good. Roger was interested.
“Instead of Meyrin,” George continued, “you will have Waxahachie, the town nearest the SSC Campus and approximately at the center of the ring. Waxahachie might be best described as Texas-Victorian. It was a cotton boom-town around 1900. It has a wonderful Victorian courthouse, and many lovely old gingerbread houses of that boom period still decorate the town. After World War I, the cotton boom faded and Waxahachie went into hibernation until about 1988 when the SSC came along. Now it’s a boom town again, but this time it’s a physics boom town.”