Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  Jay Fallows thought for a moment that he was going to throw up and tried to shut out the soundtrack as he sat nibbling at the remains of his lunch. An astronomy book lay propped open on the table in front of him. Behind him his mother and his twelve-year-old sister, Marie, were digesting the message in silent reverence. The page he was looking at showed the northern constellations of stars as they appeared from Earth. They looked much as they did from the Mayflower II, except in the book Cassiopeia was missing a star—the Sun. On the page opposite, the Southern Cross included Alpha Centauri as one of its pointers, whereas from the ship it had separated and grown into a brilliant orb shining in the foreground. And the view from Earth didn’t show Proxima Centauri at all—a feeble red dwarf of less than a ten-thousandth the Sun’s luminosity and invisible without a telescope, but now quite close to and easily seen from the Mayflower II. Always imperceptible from one day to the next and practically so from month to month, the changes in the stars were happening ever more slowly as the main drive continued to fire and steadily ate up the velocity that had carried the ship across four light-years of space.

  Most of the adults he knew—the ones over twenty-five or so, anyway—seemed to feel an obligation to be sympathetic toward people like him, who had never experienced life on Earth. From what he had seen he wasn’t sure that he’d missed all that much. Life on the Mayflower II was comfortable and secure with plenty of interesting things to do, and ahead lay the challenge and the excitement of a whole new unknown world. Certainly that was something no one back on Earth could look forward to.

  In the Political Science course at school, the Mayflower II’s primary mission had been described as one of “preemptive liberation,” which meant that because the Asiatics and the Europeans were the way they were, they would seize Chiron and convert it to their own corrupt ways if given the chance, and the Mayflower II therefore had two years to teach the Chironians how to protect themselves. There were other, more abstract reasons why it was so important for the Chironians to be educated and enlightened, which Jay didn’t fully understand, but which he accepted as being among the many mysteries that would doubtless reveal themselves in their own good time as part of the complicated business of growing up.

  Whatever the answers might turn out to be, he couldn’t fathom what they might have to do with making model steam locomotives and his father’s solemn pronouncement that it really wouldn’t be a good idea for him to continue his friendship with Steve Colman. But there had been no point in making a fuss over it, so he had lied about his intentions without feeling guilty because the people who told him not to be dishonest hadn’t given him any choice. Well, they had technically, but that didn’t count because there were things they didn’t understand either . . . or had forgotten, maybe. But Steve would understand.

  “I’m glad I wasn’t alive then,” Marie said from behind him. “I can’t imagine whole cities burning. It must have been horrible.”

  “It was,” Jean agreed. “It’s a lesson that we all have to remember. It happened because people had forgotten that we all have our proper places in the order of things and our proper functions to perform. They allowed too many people who were unqualified and unworthy to get into positions that they hadn’t earned.”

  “Pay our debt, collect our due

  Each one proud for what we do”

  Marie recited.

  “Very good,” her mother said.

  Little snot, Jay thought to himself and turned the page. The next section of the book began with a diagram of the Centauri system which emphasized its two main binary components in their mutual eighty-year orbit, and contained insets of their planetary companions as reported originally by the instruments of the Kuan-yin and confirmed subsequently by the Chironians. Beneath the main diagram were pictures of the spectra of the Sunlike Alpha G2v primary with numerous metallic lines; the cooler, K1-type-orange Beta Centauri secondary with the blue end of its continuum weakened and absorption bands of molecular radicals beginning to appear; and M5e, orange-red Proxima Centauri with heavy absorption in the violet and prominent CO, CH, and TiO bands.

  “There won’t be a war on Chiron, will there?” Marie asked.

  “Of course not, dear. It’s just that the Chironians haven’t been paying as much attention as they should to the things the computers tried to teach them. They’ve always had machines to give them everything they want, and they think life is all one long playtime. But it’s not really their fault because they’re not really people like us.” The conviction was widespread even though the Mayflower II’s presiding bishop was carrying a special ordinance from Earth decreeing that Chironians had souls. Jean realized that she had left herself open to misinterpretation and added hastily, “Well, they are people, of course. But they’re not exactly like you because they were born without any mothers or fathers. You mustn’t hate them or anything. Just remember that you’re a little better than they are because you’ve been luckier, and you know about things they’ve never had a chance to learn. Even if we have to be a little bit firm with them, it will be for their own good in the end.”

  “You mean when the Chinese and the Europeans get here?”

  “Quite. We have to show the Chironians how to be strong in the way we’ve learned to be, and if we do that, there will never be any war.”

  Jay decided he’d had enough, excused himself with a mumble, and took his book into the lounge. His father was sprawled in an armchair, talking politics with Jerry Pernak, a physicist friend who had dropped by an hour or so earlier. Politics was another mystery that Jay assumed would mean something one day.

  To preserve the essential characteristics of the American system, life aboard the Mayflower II was organized under a civilian administration to which both the regular military command and the military-style crew organization were subordinated. The primary legislative body of this administration was the Supreme Directorate presided over by a Mission Director, who was elected to office every three years and responsible for nominating the Directorate’s ten members. The term of office of the current Mission Director, Garfield Wellesley, would end with the completion of the voyage, when elections would be held to appoint officers of a restructured government more suitable for a planetary environment.

  “Howard Kalens, no doubt about it,” Bernard Fallows was saying. “If we’ve only got two years to knock the place into shape, he’s just the kind of man we need. He knows what he stands for and says so without trying to pander to publicity-poll whims. And he’s got the breeding for the position. You can’t make a planetary governor out of any rabble, you know.”

  Pernak didn’t seem overeager to accept the implied invitation to agree. He started to say something noncommittal, then stopped and looked up as Jay entered. “Hi, Jay. How was the movie?”

  “Aw, I wasn’t watching it.” Jay waved vaguely with the book and returned it to its shelf. “Usual stuff.”

  “What are the girls still talking about in there?” Bernard asked.

  “I’m not sure. I guess I couldn’t have been listening that much.”

  “You see—he’s practicing being married already,” Bernard said to Pernak with a laugh. Pernak grinned momentarily. Bernard looked at his son. “Well, it’s early yet Figured out what you’re doing this afternoon?”

  “I thought maybe I’d go over to Jersey and put in a few hours on the loco.”

  “Fine.” Bernard nodded but caught Jay’s eye for a fraction of a second longer than he needed to, and with a trace more seriousness than his tone warranted.

  “How’s it coming along?” Pernak asked.

  “Pretty good. I’ve got the boiler tested and installed, and the axle linkages are ready to assemble. Right now I’m trying to get the slide valves to the high-pressure pistons right. They’re tricky.”

  “Got far with them?” Pernak asked.

  “I had to scrap one set.” Jay sighed. “I guess it’s back to square one on another. That’s what I reckon I’ll start today.”

&
nbsp; “So when are you going to show it to me?”

  Jay shrugged. “Any time you like.”

  “You going to Jersey right now?”

  “I was going to. I don’t have to make it right now.”

  Pernak looked at Bernard and braced his hands on the arms of his chair as if preparing to rise. “Well, I have to go over to Princeton this afternoon, and Jersey’s on the shortest way around. Jay and I could share a cab.”

  Bernard stood up. “Sure . . . don’t let me keep you if you have things to do. Thanks for letting me have the cutter back.” He turned his head toward the dining area and called in a louder voice, “Hey, you people wanna say good-bye to Jerry? He’s leaving.” Pernak and Jay waited by the door for Jean and Marie to appear.

  “On your way?” Jean asked Pernak.

  “Things won’t do themselves. I’m stopping off at Jersey with Jay to see how his loco’s coming along.”

  “Oh, that locomotive!” Jean looked at Jay. “Are you working on it again?”

  “For a few hours maybe.”

  “Well, try not to make it half the night this time, won’t you.” And to Pernak: “Take care, Jerry. Thanks for dropping by. Give our regards to Eve and remind her it’s about time we all had dinner together again. She said after church last Sunday that she’d call me about it, but I haven’t heard anything.”

  “I’ll remind her,” Pernak promised. “Ready, Jay? Let’s go.”

  Pernak had short, jet-black hair, a broad, solid frame, and rubbery features that always fascinated Jay with their seemingly endless variety of expressions. He had lectured on physics topics several times at Jay’s school and had proved popular as much for his entertainment value as for his grasp of the subject matter, which he always managed to make exciting with tantalizing glimpses inside black holes, mind-bending accounts of the first few minutes of the universe, and fantastic speculation about living in twisted spacetimes with unusual geometries. On one occasion he had introduced Feynman diagrams, which represented particles as “world lines” traversing a two-dimensional domain, one axis representing space and the other time. Mathematically and theoretically a particle going forward in time was indistinguishable from its anti-particle going backward in time, and Pernak had offered the staggering conjecture that there might be just one electron in the entire universe—repeating itself over and over by going forward as an electron and backward as a positron. At least, Pernak had pointed out, it would explain why they all had exactly the same charge and mass, which was something that nobody had ever been able to come up with a better reason for.

  Pernak had a surprisingly long stride for his height, and Jay had to hurry to keep up as they walked a couple of blocks through densely packed but ingeniously secluded interlocking terraces of Maryland residential units. It wasn’t long before Pernak was talking about phase-changes in the laws of physics and their manifestation through the process of evolution. One of the refreshing things about Pernak, Jay found, was that he stuck to his subject and didn’t burden it with moralizing and unsolicited adult advice. He had never been able to make up his mind whether Pernak was secretly a skeptic about things like that or just believed in minding his own business, but he had never found a way of leading up to the question.

  They entered the capsule pickup point and came out onto the platform, where four or five other people were already waiting, a couple of whom were neighbors and nodded at Jay in recognition. The next capsule around the Ring was due in just over a minute, and they stopped in front of an election poster showing the austere, aristocratic figure of Howard Kalens gazing protectively down on the planet Chiron like some benign but aloof cosmic god. The caption read simply: peace and unity.

  “Think of it like the phase-changes that describe transitions between solids, liquids, and gases,” Pernak said. “The gas laws are only valid over a certain limited range. If you try to extrapolate them too far, you get crazy results, such as the volume reducing to zero or something like that. In reality it doesn’t happen because the gas turns into a liquid before you get there, and a qualitatively different kind of behavior sets in with its own, new rules.”

  “You’re saying evolution adds up to a succession of transitions like that?”

  “Yes, Jay. Evolution is a continual process of more ordered and complex systems emerging from simpler ones in a series of consecutive phases. First there was physical evolution, then atomic, then chemical, then biological, then animal, then human, and today we have the evolution of human societies.” Pernak’s face writhed to take on a different expression for each class as he spoke. “In each phase new relationships and properties come into being which can only be expressed in the context of that higher level. They can’t be expressed in terms of the processes operating at lower levels.”

  Jay thought about it for a few seconds and nodded slowly. “I think I get it. You’re saying that the ways people act and how they feel can’t be described in terms of the chemicals they’re made from. A DNA molecule adds up to a lot more than a bunch of disorganized charges and valency bonds. The way you organize it makes its own laws.”

  “Exactly, Jay. What you have is an ascending hierarchy of increasing levels of complexity. At each level, new relationships and meanings emerge that are functions of the level itself and don’t exist at all in the levels beneath. For instance, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. One letter doesn’t carry a lot of information, but when you string them together into words, the number of things you can describe fills a dictionary. When you assemble words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and so on up to a book, the variety is as good as infinite, and you can convey any meaning you want. Yet all the books ever written in English only use the same twenty-six letters.”

  The capsule arrived, and Jay fell silent while he digested what Pernak had said. As they climbed inside, Jay entered a code into the panel by the door to specify their destination in the Jersey module, and they sat down on an empty pair of facing seats as the capsule began to move. After a short run up to speed, it entered a tube to exit from Maryland and passed through one of the spherical intermodule housings that supported the Ring and contained the bearings and pivoting mechanisms for adjusting the module orientations to the ship’s state of motion. For a brief period they were looking out through a transparent outer shell at the immensity of the Spindle, seemingly supported by a web of structural booms and tie-bars three miles above their heads, with the vastness of space extending away on either side, and then they entered the Kansas module where the scene outside changed to animal grazing enclosures, level upon level of agricultural units, fish farms, and hydroponic tanks.

  “Okay, so you track it all back to the Big Bang,” Jay said at last. “Then where do you go?”

  “Classically, you can’t go anywhere. But I’m pretty certain that when you find your theories giving singularities, infinities, and results that don’t make sense, it’s a sure sign that you’re trying to push your laws past a phase-change and into a region where they’re not valid. I think that’s what we’re up against.”

  “So where do you go?” Jay asked again.

  “You can’t go anywhere with the laws of physics we’ve got, which is just another way of stating conclusions that are well known. But I think it’s a mistake to believe that there just wasn’t anything, in the causal sense, before that—if ‘before’ means anything like what we usually think it means.” Pernak sat forward and moistened his lips. “I’ll give you a loose analogy. Imagine a flame. Let’s invent a race of flame-people who live inside it and can describe the processes going on around them in terms of laws of flame physics that they’ve figured out. Okay?” Jay frowned but nodded. “Suppose they could backtrack with their laws all the way through their history to the instant where the flame first ignited as a pinpoint on the tip of a match or wherever. To them that would be the origin of their universe, wouldn’t it.”

  “Oh, okay,” Jay said. “Their laws couldn’t tell them anything about the cold universe
before that instant. Flame physics only came into existence when the flame did.”

  “A phase-change, evolving its own new laws,” Pernak confirmed, nodding.

  “And you’re saying the Big Bang was something like that?”

  “I’m saying it’s very likely. What triggers a phase-change is a concentration of energy—energy density—like at the tip of a match. Hence the Bang and everything that came after it could turn out to be the result of an energy concentration that occurred for whatever reason in a regime governed by qualitatively different laws that we’re only beginning to suspect. And that’s what my line of research is concerned with.”

  Another flash of stars and they were in Idaho, one of the two fixed modules that carried the main support arms to the Spindle. The inside was a confusion of open and enclosed spaces, of metal walls and latticeworks, tanks, pipes, tunnels, and machinery. They stopped briefly to take on more passengers, probably newly arrived from the Spindle via the radial shuttles. Then the capsule moved away again. “It could open up possibilities that’ll blow your mind,” Pernak resumed. “Suppose, for instance, that we could get to understand those laws and create our own concentrations on a miniature scale to inject energy from . . . let’s call it a hyperrealm, into our own universe—in other words make ‘small bangs’—mini white holes. Think what an energy source that would be. It’d made fusion look like a firecracker.” Pernak waved his hands about. “And how about this, Jay. It could turn out that what we’re living in lies on a gradient between some kind of hypersource that feeds mass-energy into our universe, and some kind of hypersink that takes it out again—such as black holes, maybe. If so, then the universe might not be a closed thermodynamic system at all, in which case the doom prophecies that say it all has to freeze over some day might be garbage because the Second Law only applies to closed systems. In other words we might find we’re flame people living in a match factory.”