Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  “I found that I was always buying a certain kind of paperback at the supermarket, the ones with the pictures of crawly creatures and metallic letters on the cover. Whenever I was feeling depressed or over stressed, I’d read one of those and I’d feel better. Then one day, it suddenly hit me that I’m actually a much better writer than the people who were writing those books. I had plenty of source material form my job at the Democrat, so I decided to try writing one myself. The result was ‘A’ as in Arachnids, my first novel, published by Wagner. I adopted the Alice Lancaster pseudonym to avoid embarrassing Steve, but he still wasn’t too happy about my second career.”

  “You implied your husband is dead,” said Janet.

  “Yes,“ said Alice, “Steve was killed in a mountain climbing accident in Switzerland at just about the time when my second novel was coming out.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Janet, looking directly at Alice.

  “It was a long time ago,” said Alice and sniffed.

  Janet nodded. “So tell me about your plans for your latest project.”

  Alice took a cautious sip of the coffee and placed the mug on the desk. She reached into her briefcase, extracted the summaries of her earlier books and the outline of the one presently in progress. She handed the packet to Janet. Then she took a deep breath and started her carefully prepared opening. “You must have read this outline of my new book already, when the new contract was being negotiated last month. You’ll recall that all of my books are techno-disaster thrillers with similar themes involving plagues of dangerous insects and vermin. Arachnids was about spiders from a failed genetics experiment attacking a small isolated university town. My most recent published novel, ‘E’ as in Earthworms, is along the same lines. Earthworms from a worm farm in a small Mississippi town are mutated by a hazardous chemical spill and develop an enzyme that dissolves human and animal flesh. My agent says that Earthworms is my breakthrough book. It’s only been out for a month, but he projects that by the end of the year it could sell over 100,000 copies, provided Wagner is willing to go into a second print run.” She paused, hoping to hear a confirmation from Janet.

  “Just a minute,” Janet said. She rummaged through several drawers of her desk, then stood, cursed, and walked to a file cabinet against the wall. After looking unsuccessfully in two of its drawers, she extracted a folder from the third drawer. She returned to her desk and scanned its contents for a moment. “Yes, it is doing very well,” she said. “So far at least,” she added cautiously.

  Good, Alice thought, she’s noncommittal but positive. Her agent had plans to negotiate next time for a multi-book contract and a much bigger advance.

  “In fact,” said Janet, “it’s doing well enough that for your new one we’re considering a major promotion, with advertising and a big push to the bookstore chains. How would you feel about going on a promotional tour?”

  “I’d love to,” said Alice. “I enjoy talking about my writing, and I think I do it well.”

  “Good,” said Janet, “so let’s talk about what you have in mind for your next book.”

  “Of course,” said Alice. She pointed to the outline she had placed on the desk. “As you will recall, the new novel is called ‘F’ as in Fire Ants,” she said cheerfully. “It’s set in Waxahachie, Texas.”

  “Wax-a-hachie, ...” Janet repeated slowly, “an unusual name for a town, sounds Native American. Why does it sound so familiar?”

  “Perhaps you remember it because it’s been in the news lately,” Alice answered. “It’s a small town south of Dallas, the County Seat of Ellis County, Texas, where the Department of Energy has recently spent over eight billion dollars to build the Superconducting Super Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator. They had some startup problems, but now the accelerator is completed and running. There have been several recent news reports and magazine features about it.”

  Janet frowned and looked suspiciously down at the outline. “Wait a minute, Alice. Your new book isn’t science fiction, is it?” There was a rising note of alarm in her voice.

  “No, of course not,” Alice assured her. “As I told you, it’s a techno-disaster thriller involving dangerous insects, strictly within the genre. Scientists from the SSC laboratory will be characters in the book, but I had scientists in ‘C’ as in Cockroaches, too. Nasty ones. The most important characters are the Waxahachie townspeople and the local cotton farmers. The disaster element comes from colonies of fire ants, mutated by the radiation from the accelerator, that grow to enormous size and attack the community.”

  “Fire ants?” Janet looked puzzled. “Is that something you invented?”

  “Oh no,” said Alice, “they’re quite real. They’re a very nasty pest, an aggressive variety of ant that has been moving north into Texas from Mexico for the last few decades. They’re difficult to kill, they have a poisonous, debilitating bite, and they have a way of coordinating attacks so that a group of fire ants will crawl onto the victim and all bite at the same time. It’s believed that they use some kind of pheromone chemical to signal when it’s time to sting.”

  Just then, Albert Jukes, a newspaper in his hand, opened the door. “Excuse me for interrupting, but you’ve got to see this, Janet. Remember how Promotions decided to go for a full page ad in the Times for the new Bush book? Well, it looks as if they had a minor typo in the copy!” He held up the page of advertising which bore the title “Sodom, Boris, and I by George H. W. Bush” in very large letters.

  “Oh, God!” said Janet, striking her forehead.

  “But think positive,” Alice said brightly. “Perhaps it will boost sales to gays!”

  After Albert left to spread the news further and they had stopped laughing, Janet said, “It sounds like the fire ants of yours would be great at picnics.”

  “Oh, they’ll definitely put in an appearance at a picnic,” said Alice, “but for the purposes of my novel an item of great interest is their tendency to attack electrical devices, particularly those that hum, and to eat the electrical insulation. Apparently they’re the main cause of electrical fires and the failure of large electrical appliances, particularly air conditioners, in the Waxahachie area. Think of that in relation to all the electrical equipment at the Superconducting Super Collider.”

  Janet wrinkled her nose. “Are these big ants? They sound awful.”

  “Actually not,” said Alice. “As ants go, they’re very small but very aggressive. They’ve already killed off most of the larger ant varieties in Texas, along with much of the small animal population like rabbits, moles, and field mice. Perhaps fire ants are so aggressive and poisonous as a way of compensating for their small size.”

  “Uh huh,” Janet nodded, “I know men like that.”

  Alice reviewed the project, going over the outline of the novel and her recent progress in writing and research, and emphasizing her track record of always meeting her book deadlines. She could tell that Janet was growing progressively more enthusiastic. Now is the time, she decided, to bring up her request. She reminded herself that she must not let Janet know how important this was to her. She flashed her most charming smile. “I should mention that there’s a favor I’d like to ask of Wagner in connection with this book, Janet,” she said.

  Janet suddenly looked suspicious. “What’s that?” she asked sharply.

  “As with my other books, I’ll need to go to Waxahachie and do some on-location research and interviews for a few weeks. For that to be effective, I’ll need the cooperation of the people who run the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory. But if I tell them I’m there to do a disaster novel in which the laboratory is attacked by giant mutant fire ants, you can imagine what their reaction will be. I’d be about as welcome as an astrologer at an astrophysics convention.”

  Janet frowned. “Astrologer?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

 
“I’ll need valid press credentials,” said Alice. “The Randolph Corporation, which owns Wagner, also publishes a big line of magazines. One of them is Search, the weekly science magazine. I need you to obtain press credentials for me from Search under my real name of Alice Lang that will get me into the SSC laboratory as a science reporter.”

  Janet blinked, then rolled her eyes heavenward. “My God, I can’t do that, Alice,” she said. “Professional ethics are involved. If any news organization was caught giving out phony press credentials, they’d lose credibility, and nobody would trust their reporters.”

  Nobody trusts their reporters now, Alice thought. “Look, Janet,” she said, “the credentials don’t have to be phony. As I told you, I was a full-time newspaper reporter when I wrote ‘A’ as in Arachnids and ‘B’ as in Blow Flies. It was only after my husband was killed that I used the insurance money as a stake to quit my job and support myself with freelance writing. But I always liked writing science stories, and I found that I could do them better than the other reporters. Even though I don’t have much science training, I think I have a real knack for science reporting.” She didn’t mention that one of the reasons she quit the Democrat was because she wasn’t allowed to do more. They had nailed her to the Lifestyle section.

  “In fact,” Alice continued, “Arachnids was based on a news story I did for the Democrat about a research project at Florida State University in which a lot of spiders escaped from their cages. I could perhaps arrange to do the SSC story for the Democrat, I still have friends there, but I’d get far more cooperation if I had press credentials from a national magazine. Search could commission Alice Lang to write a real story about the SSC laboratory. Perhaps about the women technicians and scientists there, or the effect of the laboratory on the lives of the townspeople. If afterwards somebody named Alice Lancaster writes a successful disaster novel about the SSC, even if they discover the connection it would be, shall we say, just a spin-off of the research for the magazine story.” She felt instinctively that she’d convinced Janet, and she smiled.

  “Hmmm ...,” said Janet, brightening. “That’s not bad, Alice. If they commissioned you to do such a story, they would certainly provide you with press credentials and maybe even arrange some contacts for you. Slipping you into the laboratory would also make a good angle to reveal later when we promote the book. Come to think of it, I used to see a guy who now works for Search in editorial. I haven’t heard from him for a while, but he’s very nice. Perhaps it’s time for me to renew the acquaintance ...” She reached for the telephone.

  CHAPTER 1.6

  Flight Home

  GEORGE Griffin glanced up from reading the Times of London and looked out the window of the 777. The fjords of Iceland were passing by below. Brown and green fingers of land seemed to grasp at the incredibly blue water. He recalled a charter flight from Luxembourg to Washington, DC that had landed at Reykjavik to refuel. He had bought a fluffy gray Icelandic sweater for Grace at the airport shop, but he had not gone into the city. Too bad. He might never have the chance again. He wondered if Grace still wore that sweater.

  He looked at his watch. They were an hour into the ten hour over-the-pole flight from Heathrow to Seattle. It was 1:30 PM, London time and 5:30 AM Seattle time. It was his practice to try to sleep as much as possible on transatlantic flights, but he certainly wasn’t sleepy. Perhaps he could get some work done on his report before British Airways started shoving food and drink at him. He didn’t enjoy writing inconclusive reports, but it was necessary, and he might as well get it over with.

  He opened his briefcase and removed the magic glasses and the data cuffs. He switched on the small computer inside and made that sure that its sensor flap was extended outside when he latched the briefcase lid, then slipped it back under the seat in front of him. He pressed a switch recessed in a thick ear piece of the magic glasses, then put them on. He draped the flesh-colored data cuff around his left wrist, just in front of his wristwatch, and secured it with the Velcro joint underneath. He repeated the process on his right wrist and activated the calibration process, flexing finger, twisting wrists, and bending elbows.

  The glasses produced a display screen presented vertically in front of him and a horizontal keyboard etched in bright lines in mid-air. He reached out, grasped the screen, and moved and stretched it until it filled the full area of the seat back in front of him, then positioned the virtual keyboard to a more comfortable position at the surface of the tray table. He called up the report he’d been working on earlier and began to type and revise.

  The smell of food at last attracted his attention. He realized that he had missed lunch waiting at Heathrow and was very hungry. The flight attendants were rolling the food cart down the aisle, dispensing dinner to the passengers. George saved his file and exited. He was slipping the data cuffs and magic glasses into his pocket just as the male flight attendant placed the food tray before him, exactly where the keyboard had been.

  “What were you doing just now?”

  George turned. The question had come from the older woman seated next to him. Earlier she had asked him to put her carry-on in the overhead rack and thanked him, but otherwise she hadn’t spoken nor had he. George noticed a thick paperback historical novel stuffed into the seat pocket in front of her. She reminded him of his grandmother, although he supposed she was only about fifteen years older than he was.

  He smiled, surveying the food on the tray. “I was using my computer to write a report,“ he said. He opened the zip of a small plastic bag and removed the silverware.

  “That’s certainly what you seemed to be doing,” she said, “except that I didn’t see the computer. There was absolutely nothing in front of you, and you were typing on the tray table. You reminded me of my grandson. He strums away on nothing and says he’s playing ‘air guitar’ while he listens to that loud music of his.”

  George laughed. He’d only had the VR portable a few months, and he enjoyed explaining his new toy. “I suppose it does look weird when you put it that way,” he said. He removed the glasses and cuffs from his pocket. “These are what we call ‘magic glasses’. The name is a joke; they aren’t really magic, of course. They’re linked by infrared, like a TV remote control, to a small workstation in my briefcase. They measure my head and eye positions, and they draw full-color 3-dimensional images directly in my eyes with small diode lasers built into the frames. The laser beams bounce off the inner surfaces of the lenses and write with light directly on the retinas of my eyes.” He didn’t mention that the thing was also a top-of-the line ultra-high capacity UNIX workstation and that its price had removed a big chunk from his Department of Energy research contract funds.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” the woman asked. “I thought one needed eye protection around lasers.”

  “Correct,” said George, “but these are very low power lasers that scan very fast. Even in the worst case, they wouldn’t have enough power to damage a retina. And if a malfunction was obvious to me, all I’d have to do was close my eyes and take off the glasses.”

  She looked interested. “They look like my variable density sunglasses.”

  “They’re similar,” said George. “The lenses are variable density like your sunglasses and they’re non-distorting, so I see the real world through them. I can use the liquid crystal effect to eliminate outside light, but I had them set for full transparency.

  “What do you see when you’re wearing them?,” she asked. “Is the picture small?”

  “The computer images are superimposed on external surroundings, so I can see both the real world and the computer world at the same time. The picture is as big as you want it to be. It can fill your whole field of view, if you want. I was looking at a fairly simple picture, just standard word-processing display screen and a keyboard. My computer can make far more complex three-dimensional images with the right programs, but this is all I
need for word processing.”

  She considered this. “But you were typing. You were behaving as if images drawn by the computer can be treated as real objects. As if, with your magic glasses you could reach into the television, snatch the game show prizes, and deal severely with the irritating host.”

  George laughed. “That sounds like fun. Perhaps I should try it sometime. Perhaps I didn’t explain the hand part of the eye-and-hand operation.” He held up the flesh-colored objects in his lap. “These are data cuffs. They go around my wrists and measure my hand and finger positions by monitoring the movement of tendons in my wrists with Doppler-shift ultrasonics. They send the information to the computer over another infrared link. The glasses were making the image of a keyboard on the tray table. When I typed, the cuffs detected my finger motions, the computer correlated them with the locations of the keys it was drawing, and the words I typed appeared on the computer screen that I saw on the seat back.”

  She thought about this as she pulled the strip of a small red cheese. “It seems like a lot of trouble to do a simple thing,” she said. “Why don’t you just use an old-fashioned laptop computer?”

  George smiled. “Good question. My computer is a new model intended for high resolution interactive graphics and complex data analysis. It can also be used for other purposes, for example, providing maps and navigation information when you’re driving a car. Using it for word processing is like using a jet engine as a hair dryer. However, it’s convenient to use it in a cramped space, and airline seats seem to get more cramped every year.” He picked at the complicated foil wrapping on the butter pat until it opened, then applied some of the good Irish butter to his roll.