Vectors

by Charles Sheffield

  "I've told you before, Jason, we're getting too soft with them. They need discipline. Want me to have Denning picked up?"

  "We might as well let the fence do it, and save ourselves an argument. Ask Power Central to take extra care with the antenna attitude at Satellite Control. We don't want the pick-up team or Denning to get landed with a big dose of microwaves."

  "What about the damned woman? We can't take her to the Processing Center."

  "Don't worry about her, Luis. We'll give her a fright and send her back to Lukon. If she spreads the word that we took Denning, so much the better. We've got to stop our programs being interfered with by a small group of ignorant non-scientists. They are too important for that. I'll handle Sarah Henderson."

  * * *

  The Pass was finally opening out before them into the north-western valley. Standing at a high point, Carl could see a flat, metallic area far to the north. Sweeping south from it ran a broad, dark-green band where the vegetation looked subtly different. It extended to the southern horizon. The Scar. A scattered group of dark-grey buildings stood on the perimeter of the bright, metallic area. Sarah pointed at them.

  "They fit the description. The Processing Center. I don't know what the bright area is."

  "I'd like to look at that, too. Let's keep as far south as we can and work in closer to the buildings. That way we can take a look at the Scar at the same time."

  Two miles further on they came to the first fence and the warning notice.

  'DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT OFFICIAL PASS.' Underneath, in smaller letters, 'Mean microwave intensity 1.0 milliwatts per square centimeter. Check the meters.'

  They climbed the fence cautiously and went on, across a long, cleared belt and to a second fence and warning notice.

  'NO PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT DURING SATELLITE MAINTENANCE PERIODS. IF THE SIREN SOUNDS, PROCEED AT ONCE TO OUTER PERIMETER. Mean microwave intensity 40.0 milliwatts per square centimeter. Authorized repair staff only.'

  Carl motioned to Sarah to let him go on ahead, and swung a leg over the fence. As he did so, he felt the vibration beginning in the metal. He turned to warn her. "No closer, Sarah. I think there may be a current through this."

  He stopped. She seemed to be receding and advancing, mouth wide open but making no sound. Carl began to climb back over the fence, but the metal was dissolving in his hands. He looked down at them and fell through the fence and onwards, into and through the ground. As he fell, the air was sucked from his lungs. He tried to turn his head again to look at Sarah, but there was only blackness there; darkness, breathlessness, and a rushing sound that went on and on and on.

  When the noise finally stopped, light returned and at once he could breathe again. He turned again to look for Sarah, and froze. The fence had vanished and he was sitting by a big window, looking out over an endless array of grey metal wedges. They went on as far as the eye could see, shining and regular. Bewildered, he turned back and found that he was inside a long, carpeted room. Watching him in silence was a fair-haired man wearing the insignia of the Church of Redman.

  After a long pause the man nodded his head to Carl. "Take your time," he said. "Narcogas takes a while. Let me know when you feel up to talking."

  Nausea and confusion were competing for Carl's attention. He swallowed bile, straightened in the chair, and narrowed his eyes against the bright inside lights.

  "I'm all right," he said after a while. "What happened to Sarah?"

  "Don't worry about her. She's fine, and we're looking after her. She'll be on her way back to Lukon in a few hours. The gas protection hit her a lot less hard. You know, you shouldn't have left Lukon without telling anybody."

  Carl looked at the metal array outside the window, correlating it with the flat area they had seen from the Lukon Pass. "This is the Processing Center, right? That's where we were trying to get to."

  The other man smiled. "Then you succeeded." There was something enormously self-assured in his manner—the impression of a man in complete control of the world. "I expect you have a lot of questions to ask us. Our recruits usually do."

  It was all too rational, too open. Carl had been prepared for many things, but not for cheerful confidence and a friendly reception. "What do you mean, recruits? What do you do here? And are you part of the Church, the people who control science teaching?"

  "One at a time. You are a recruit. I think you'll like it. It means that you'll be living now among people who can think the same way you can." He smiled. "No more Mr. Nielsen. No more 'great absolute truths.' We aren't part of the Church—the Church is part of us."

  "Then what are you?"

  "Scientists. Guardians, if you want to call us that. Redman himself was a scientist, you know. He did his basic work on human development by applying science to sociology."

  "And this is a school for scientists?"

  "Not really. More of a transfer point, but it has many functions. Think of it as our Headquarters for this part of the world. The reason we set it out here is because of that." He pointed to the great array of wedges outside the window. "This is the main receiving and control center for one node of the solar satellite power system. We don't like the receivers too near the cities."

  "What do you mean, receivers? What do you receive?"

  "Power. Most of the power we use in this area is generated by a big array of photovoltaic cells, hung twenty-two thousand miles up. In space. You've done mechanics, right? That's the distance where an orbiting body rotates at the same rate as the earth, so it can hang always above one point of the surface. You'll see it for yourself, in a few weeks."

  In spite of his confusion and worry, Carl was fascinated. "But how can you get power that's generated up there down to earth?"

  "It's beamed down as microwave radiation—long wavelength radiation. You know how to solve Maxwell's equations, right? So you know how to compute the energy carried by electromagnetic radiation. It gets received at the antenna there. The array is five kilometers across, and we don't like anyone to get much closer than ten kilometers. Microwave radiation has bad long-term systemic effects on tissue, even at quite low dose rates."

  "So power from here runs things back in Briarsford and Lukon?"

  "That's right." The fair-haired man looked at Carl shrewdly. "You already knew that the conventional explanations of the electrical power supply wouldn't work, did you? That's a good sign for your future."

  "How do you know so much about me—what I know, what I've been taught?"

  "We ought to. We've been watching you since you were ten years old. Now, you're ready to start the training that will make you part of the next generation of real scientists—after you've had a few years of instruction at the Lunar Base and in the Libration Point colonies. We've watched you closely. You couldn't really disappear from the system when you ran away from Lukon."

  "I didn't run anywhere except here—I just wanted to get some answers." He was thoughtful for a moment. "Was Sarah Henderson part of the plan to trap me here?"

  "Don't say you were trapped. You'd have been coming here anyway, at the end of the year."

  "But was Sarah part of the arrangement you made?"

  "Not at all. We got the shock of our lives when we found you were heading over the Lukon Pass—you were lucky to make it. I'd never heard of Sarah Henderson until a few days ago. She's just a teacher in Lukon, nothing to do with us. You can forget about her—I doubt if she knows even the elements of science."

  Carl persisted. "But you are sure she is all right?"

  The priest-scientist showed his first sign of impatience. "Of course she is. I told you, we have a responsibility to serve as guardians. We take that very seriously. Sarah Henderson will be returned, safe and well, to her home in Lukon. We'll keep an eye on her for a while—we still don't know how she learned about the existence of the Center here."

  As he was speaking, a siren outside began to wail. He looked at his wrist unit and snapped his fingers in annoyance. "I might have known that woul
d happen. They always pick the most inconvenient times for the drills." He shrugged. "I have to go to it. It's top-priority. Thirty years ago, they lost attitude control and the beam swung wild for three weeks. You've seen the result. The center of the beam made the Scar. It fried the ground with microwave radiation. We're still estimating the long-term effects on the ecology."

  He stood up, walked over to Carl and handed him a bound report. "Here, take a look at this while I'm away. The control drill will take an hour, maybe two. You'll find in here a few more answers to your questions. See you later."

  There was a further moment of concern for Sarah, a momentary sense of loss. Then Carl opened the report and excitement and anticipation blotted out other emotions.

  * * *

  "A hundred years ago, mankind was in trouble," it began. "The population explosion, anticipated a century earlier as the main problem facing man, had disappeared. Instead, the population was dwindling rapidly. Waves of suicide, indifference, madness and despair swept the human race, and the trends were all downward.

  "There was no shortage of supposed explanations, but solutions were lacking until Jahangir Redman, in 2010, began his study of the correlation between fundamental beliefs and human behavior. He found a series of correlation coefficients, that could propagate scientific and religious doctrines forward in time and allow a quantitative effect on behavior patterns to be calculated.

  "The projections were grim indeed. The course seemed irreversible, down to oblivion and the collapse of society. A philosopher might have stopped at that point; but Jahangir Redman was an activist. . . ."

  Carl read on. Twenty-two thousand miles above his head, the great array of solar panels trimmed its angles like a giant sail to face the full sun. The microwave transmission antenna in the satellite made a series of minute changes in pointing attitude as it responded to the control signals sent up from Power Central. The flow of power continued.

  * * *

  The worst of the winter was over in Lukon. Spring flowers were braving the March winds, and Sarah had picked a bunch of wild daffodils on her way home from the school, east of the town, where she was teaching. They would brighten the house, and that was badly needed. The months since Carl had been swept away by the Church of Redman had been grim indeed, but at last she was coming through. She walked up the drive, unlocked her front door, went through it—and dropped books and flowers. Carl was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, thin and pale as ever, older in the eyes and the set of his mouth.

  The beginning was the physical joy of reunion. Carl was intense and passionate but Sarah could sense the core of sadness and reserve.

  "Carl, what did they do to you?" She was holding him tightly by the shoulders, studying his face. "Did they hurt you? I asked about you when I got back, everywhere I thought there might be information. No one had ever seen you or heard of you, ever admitted your existence."

  "I know, Sarah. The old Carl Denning doesn't exist. Officially I'm not here today, and I'll have to leave early tomorrow morning. I had to make an excuse to get back here for even one day. I didn't want you to think I was in any trouble, and I didn't want you grieving for me."

  "It's two months too late for that wish, Carl. I thought you were dead. Where have you been?"

  "Many places. Come and sit by me, Sarah."

  They settled together by the fire, in the same position as on their first evening. Carl stared deep into the fire, looking for words there.

  "I'm going to break the rules," he began at last. "I'm going to tell you what the Church of Redman does, so you'll believe me when I say that one day I will come back. Not for two years, at least, but I'll be back. Sarah, do you think people you know are happy? Not always, but mostly?"

  She gave the question real thought before she answered. "I think they are. You and I may be the exceptions, but most people are content."

  He nodded. "That's what I've been hearing. Happiness, for the majority, is the goal of civilization. Worry and grief for a minority are a necessary consequence. That's what Redmanism is all about. You'll have to take a lot of this on faith, because you can't check it, but the key is in the forbidden sciences."

  "You found out all about them at the Processing Center?"

  "Enough. It all goes back a long way. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, people believed that the world was really knowable—not simple, but at least capable of being fully understood. All science seemed to be completely definite. So people came to think of things that way, and it looked as though science offered certainty. That was the view of the average man, though he never got around to expressing it."

  He smiled ruefully, still looking deep into the fire. "That's the way things used to seem to me when I was in school in Briarsford. I didn't know when I was well off."

  Sarah was holding his hands in hers, and looking both happy and perplexed. "Are you saying science isn't definite, Carl? We always learned it that way."

  "Oh, it's definite in its own way. You see, at the end of the nineteenth century some mysterious things were discovered. Radioactivity—atoms breaking up of their own accord, into smaller particles—was discovered, and there seemed to be no way to tell which atom would be the one to disintegrate. It seemed to happen at random. Then early in the twentieth century things got worse. The basic description of the world was through something called quantum theory, and that was all based on probabilities, not certainties. The uncertainty principle showed that the probabilities were fundamental, and couldn't be removed from the theory. Finally, a few years later a mathematician called Gödel knocked the final nail in. He proved that whole classes of theorems in mathematics are neither provable, nor disprovable—they are undecidable."

  He looked at Sarah, who appeared dubious and sceptical. "Do you understand me, Sarah?"

  "I understand what you're saying, Carl. I just don't see what it has to do with Redmanism. It doesn't sound like a disaster if things seemed less definite."

  "That's what people thought, before Redman. But it takes a long time for ideas that are very abstract to get down to the average man. Maybe three or four generations. By the time they did, the precise way the uncertainty is involved had been lost. People had come to think that nothing was knowable and nothing was really provable. So by the end of the twentieth century, everything was doubted. Not only that, civilization seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Redman proved—mathematically—that it was all cause and effect. He realized that the only solution was to re-introduce certainty into the average man's view of the world. And he set out to do just that."

  "Are you saying that the Church of Redman isn't really a church at all?" interrupted Sarah. "I can't believe that. It's the strongest religion in the world, and it's driven the other religions underground."

  "It's organized as a religion, Sarah. Redman did it that way to get action on his ideas. He decided that the only way he could operate, without getting involved in revolution or politics, was through a religion. It could spread openly or secretly, across language and geographic barriers."

  "And the Priests of Redman—they are really scientists, controlling which science should be taught?"

  "That's right. Books dealing with uncertainty and undecidability are banned, and you can only find them inside the Church itself. That's where the real science is done."

  "And who controls the scientists themselves?"

  Carl was puzzled by the question. "The scientists are the guardians of everyone, Sarah. What other guardians are needed?"

  She was shaking her head vehemently. "Carl, I know what you're saying. But there's an old saying that the Church of Redman may have forgotten: power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Are you going to become one of the scientists, yourself?"

  "As soon as I've been trained."

  "Then you're going to become part of a bad system. Maybe Redman meant well when he set up the Church, but you can never create a good society based on deception. It's been tried before, and it always fails. The trouble i
s, people won't learn from history. Suppose Redman was just plain wrong. God knows, people have been wrong often enough in the past. Suppose the Dark Ages were some sort of natural event, a natural way of controlling the population?"

  Carl shook his head wearily. The reunion with Sarah was so different from what he had hoped. "I've seen Redman's analysis. Too many others have checked it for it to be wrong."

  "Even so, didn't you tell me that science doesn't accept the idea of absolute theories—that any theory is in time replaced by a more general one? Maybe there could be other cures."

  "It would be a terrible risk, Sarah. You would endanger the whole world."

  "Perhaps. Maybe we have to risk a wound and a scar or two sometimes. One thing worries me more than anything. The people who should be looking for other answers are the ones who know Redmanism the best—the scientists. Do you honestly believe they are doing that? They are an elite now, the chosen few. The rest of us are outside the club. Would they want to change to a system where science might not be the top of the line?"

  Carl was silent, uncomfortable. Sarah's last words had scored a hit. The feeling of absolute self-confidence that Carl had sensed from the scientists of Redman could be seen, all too easily, as arrogance. The work was fascinating, but the people lacked something he could feel in Sarah.

  She easily read his discomfort, and reached to pull his head close to hers. "You are going to be taken by science, Carl. I can see it in your eyes when you speak about it. Science is your true mistress, your only lasting beloved. But I hope you won't forget me, or the rest of us here. When 'first love's impassioned blindness' has faded, look for another answer. Make sure the Priests of Redman share the hardships, and don't have an easier life than the rest of us—otherwise, there will be no search for a different solution."

  She put her hand over his mouth before he could reply. "No, love, no debate. If I've got you for just one night, that's short enough without losing any more time."