Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “I wonder if it’ll even stay in the harbor.”

  “Sure. For a while.”

  They came to a group of men laboring with dragging nets. Some were Harbor Patrol; Carmody had been able to muster the entire force within minutes. They were solid-looking and worked steadily. Other than calling instructions or questions, the teams were remarkably quiet and earnest. Claire shielded her eyes against the sun, which had begun breaking through the leaden sky, and squinted at the barge’s cabin. More of the other kind of men were there, most of them in three-piece, pin-striped suits and overcoats, shoes well polished and faces blank, watchful.

  Arditti, still in diving gear, came up to John and said, “Got a little something to the east.”

  “What?”

  “Funny currents, like you said.”

  When Claire looked puzzled John turned to her. “Carmody asked me for some kind of signature and I said look for a disturbance in the water flow.”

  “Why didn’t he ask me?” Claire said.

  John shrugged. “It’s crowded in that cabin. He—”

  “Currents? How much water can get through a hole a few inches across?” Claire asked sternly.

  “Enough, maybe.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to look for radioactive substances being carried away?”

  Arditti said, “We’re doing that too, Doctor.”

  “And?”

  “There’s some sign of them, yes.”

  “Good.” Mollified, she went with them amidships, where Carmody was talking to the men in pin-striped suits.

  “—Want a team of six divers moving toward it, while we get a grappler into position. Everybody uses a Geiger and sends a reading back every two minutes. I don’t want unnecessary exposure. Get going.”

  The men broke into groups, some returning to a radio setup on the aft platform of the barge. Their speed and certainty was unnerving, Claire thought, as though hesitation had been trained out of them.

  Abe was with Carmody and when he saw Claire he said, “Did you hear? They turned up Kontos’s signature at a fishing rental place down near Columbus Park. Only a mile or so south of the beach.”

  “So he did get ashore,” Claire said.

  “Yes, and four others, the rental agent said. The agent’s pretty mad. They didn’t bring his boat back.”

  Claire gazed toward shore. Police had isolated the waterfront areas and she could see cruisers with their winking lights blocking every intersection near the wate.

  Carmody looked older out here under gunmetal-gray clouds, his pocked face like parchment. Claire remembered a quotation from some famous Bostonian, A man of fifty is responsible for his face. Abruptly she asked, “Who do you represent, Mr. Carmody?”

  He peered dourly at the academics, who were standing together. His hands shoved deep into his overcoat pockets, he sucked on his teeth for a long moment and then said gruffly, “National Security Agency.”

  “You look after emergencies?”

  “Bad ones, yes.”

  “Who do you report to?” John asked.

  “The National Security Adviser.”

  “And he?”

  “To the President.”

  “I wondered why everybody was jumping around here,” Claire said.

  “Not just here,” Carmody said mildly. “I’ve been on the phone to Thorne at Caltech and Sherman at Berkeley. They agreed with your results, they said. In principle, anyway.”

  John said, “How’d they find out?”

  “I had Zaninetti write up a summary. We transmitted it last night.”

  “Checking on us.”

  “Of course. Unfortunately, the people we wanted to ask weren’t all American citizens. I didn’t feel I could tell them everything. So we have to go mostly by your estimates.”

  A helicopter buzzed over the barge, as if to underline the forces Carmody could summon up. “Thorne said something about the total energy requirement for this singularity,” Carmody remarked. “He didn’t see how it could come out of cosmic rays, the way you said, Dr. Bishop.”

  “Well, the energy you need to make one of these is large, yes. That’s why they’re dangerous—when they blow, there’s hell to pay. They’re not produced often, no.”

  “How many might be around?”

  John shrugged. “This is the first ever. There can’t be a whole lot, or we’d have seen one before this. But then some highly energetic particle striking the earth—it would penetrate very far. There might be more of them deep inside the earth. They wouldn’t necessarily migrate to the surface.”

  Carmody twisted his mouth in concern. “You think this might’ve come up from below?”

  Claire put in, “Come on, that’s crazy. It was inside an ancient artifact, remember? The Mycenaeans carved the rock around it.”

  “But before that?”

  John shrugged. “They got it somewhere. Maybe found it in a quarry. Claire thinks the fact that it’s a cube is no accident. The optical patterns do look cubic. Maybe the Mycenaeans bored into it, saw something bright inside, and carved the artifact as some sort of container.”

  Claire saw her chance. “That is why retaining as much of the stone artifact as possible is essential. We must understand the history of it. You can’t separate that from the physics.”

  To her surprise, Carmody seemed to accept this. “Dr. Sprangle here thinks it still might be inside the rock.”

  Abe said, “It was eating its way out slowly, remember. Now, Kontos may have jarred it while he was loading it aboard, disturbed the equilibrium.”

  John said, “And it burned away that seal of yours?”

  “It’s a good guess,” Abe said.

  Carmody looked sourly out at the sea.

  “Red buoy!” a man called.

  Half a mile away a red ball bobbed. Carmody said, “They’ve got it.”

  “To the east,” John said. “It must’ve moved at least two miles from the wreck.”

  Carmody hurried off. Arditti was leaning over the radio setup nearby, listening with earphones to the divers’ comm line. When he was through Claire walked over and said, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Doctor. It’s the crate.”

  “They can see it?”

  “A man got in close. Says it’s giving off a lot of blue light.”

  Claire asked, “The cube?”

  Abe said, “That’ll be down-graded radiation, probably.”

  John asked, “From gamma-rays?”

  “They’ll be stopped in water pretty quickly.”

  Claire ignored this. “The cube is still in the crate, then?”

  Arditti nodded. “Guess it was packed in pretty tight. The thing’s dragging the crate with it.”

  “Like a snail and its shell,” Claire said distantly.

  “Kind of,” Arditti said. He was an angular, direct man who clearly was enjoying this chase. His team treated him with automatic respect. “They found it by following a rut in the bottom of the bay. A straight line, they said.”

  “Pointing which way?” John asked quickly.

  “They didn’t say. Look, I got to go.” Arditti moved off. Claire felt the increased tempo around them. She was the only woman on board and there was something fervently masculine about the prickly excitement on deck.

  Carmody looked grim. “Is it going to blow up?”

  John answered, “No, I see no reason why it should. That’s hard radiation they’re running into, though. Should be careful.”

  John began explaining how the in-rushing water probably kept the singularity from leaving through the narrow hole it had opened. It also gave the singularity a powerful new injection of fuel for its central “engine,” which would have drastic implications. Claire listened and nodded and hoped he was right about it staying in the cube.

  She watched as the barge turned laboriously into the quickening wind and made for the spot where now three red balloons floated. Motorboats ringed the site, bobbing in the choppy waves coming in from beyond Nantasket. Dive
rs jumped from the boats and formed groups. From all directions boats converged and the radio beside them squawked with questions. A team of divers maneuvered a large flat sheet into position on the surface. It was slick but not buoyant. They took it down, releasing the supporting flotation tanks.

  “That’s the patch they’ll try to slap on it,” John said.

  Sergio, aroused from his torpor, leaned on the railing with them. “They should spend little time near it,” he said wearily. “Even the water will not stop all the high energy particles.”

  Minutes dragged by. Claire breathed in the salt tang and listened to the squawk-squawk of the radio comm across the deck. The divers’ talk was unintelligible to her but she could feel the rising tension. There were shouts over the comm as men called to each other down in sixty feet of murky coffee-colored water. The barge turned so its bow pointed away from the scene and everyone moved to the aft deck, peering overboard, straining to understand what the teams of divers were doing. Men surfaced over the site and then dove again but it all seemed chaotic to her.

  Then a man on deck cried, “It’s holding! They got it!” and a cheer went up all around the site. There was a zest she had not felt since undergraduate football games, when she had gotten carried away and cheered, forgetting for the moment her firm conviction that such events were essentially pointless.

  “Up to the bow! Everyone!” Carmody’s voice boomed over the ship’s comm.

  They crowded up toward the cabin and she saw why. The grappling tongs and cables were already lowering into the water aft of the barge, directly over the site. Divers were scattering away from the spot. More indecipherable barking came from the deck radio. The men crowded around it seemed able to follow the overlapping babble of hoarse calls.

  The diesel engines below deck began to whine. “Got it! They’ve got it. It’s holding,” a man shouted. Answering cheers.

  The lines tightened, snapping a spray of water into the air. Motors surged powerfully. Cable drums rotated, drawing up the burden. The deck became silent as everyone stopped to look aft.

  Carmody ordered the divers away and without hesitation they scrambled aboard their motorboats. The boats churned away, the divers standing in them, gazing back.

  Arditti approached Carmody. “Got a man with a big reading on his exposure badge.”

  “Bad?”

  Arditti nodded. “Got too close. Says he feels woozy.”

  “Get him treatment right away.”

  It took several minutes before the leading edge broke the oily surface. Cabling and grapples obscured it, but Claire could see the crate was partly there. One face was completely covered by a creamy patch. The patch lapped onto the other faces and she could see where the crate was broken away. Still, it held together. The crate still sheltered most of the artifact. There might be a great deal of the cube left to study.

  Now it was free of the water. The men on deck stood silently. It seemed far less dangerous now, hanging forlornly in air, a bedraggled thing of soaked and muddy wood.

  Then John was saying something, shouting, and Claire wondered what could be so dramatic. The crate was simply hanging there—but no, not quite hanging straight. It made an angle with the vertical.

  “O Dio!” Sergio cried. “I told you! Only we didn’t calculate—”

  “The separation!” John finished for him. “The two twists don’t have to be grouped together. It’s a bound state, but what’s the binding length, right?”

  Claire turned. “What are you talking about?”

  “See that? It’s not hanging straight because something else is exerting a force on it.”

  “Pulling it off to the side, you mean?”

  John beamed. “Yes! The mathematics is right. There do have to be two twists bound together. Only not so close, is all.”

  “So?”

  “There must be another one.”

  CHAPTER

  Ten

  The helicopter’s rotors went whunk-whunk-whunk-whunk, blotting out conversation. With an airy lightness it lifted off the wide foredeck of the barge. Claire looked down at pale upturned faces. Men were bunched up amidships, away from where the crate rested on the aft deck, as Carmody had ordered. A team was covering the muddy brown crate with a tarp and securing cables to the far corners, carefully staying away from the patch the divers had put on.

  “I don’t like leaving Abe there,” Claire shouted.

  Carmody shrugged. “He’s best qualified to carry on the investigation of the physical properties.”

  “How long will that physical sciences group take to get here?” she asked.

  Carmody glanced at his watch. It was a complicated thing with several simultaneous readouts and a schedule monitoring program, the red dot winking that he was late for some appointment; he ignored it. “They’ll be loading at the dock now.” He peered out the plexiglass window and pointed. “There.”

  Claire saw several trucks parked parallel on a long pier beneath them. Police cars blocked the entrance from spectators who clogged the street beyond. Men were offloading large packages from the trucks, using forklifts, and running them onto the deck of a long barge. They moved swiftly, dispersing the packages according to a grid pattern on the barge deck. Also on the pier was a long white house trailer, unmarked, without doors or windows along the sides.

  “Mobile lab and scientific recon group,” Carmody said blandly. As if he saw one every day, Claire thought. And maybe he did.

  “How far off will they take it?” John shouted beside her.

  “The crate? Thirty miles, minimum.”

  “You think that’s safe?”

  “You tell me, Doctor,” Carmody said mildly. “You and Zaninetti calculated that binding energy. That yielded the radius of the fireball, if the thing should go off—right?”

  John nodded. Claire felt a sudden chill at this matter-of-fact acknowledgment of what they were dealing with.

  “That is assuming the entire mass-energy can be converted,” Zaninetti said reassuringly, noting her concerned expression. “Probably is much less than that.”

  The barge carrying the artifact was already steaming out through the mouth of the harbor. Its bow cut a V across the calm outer waters. As the helicopter turned north Claire could barely make out the pale dot that was the tarp over the crate.

  They headed directly into the heart of Boston, over late afternoon traffic jams. New Atlantic Avenue looked like a parking lot, grid-locked. She had never been in a helicopter above Boston, and the chance to survey the entire sprawl, from woodsy Newton in the west to the jumble of Lynn northward, absorbed her. The few hills seemed to rise like bristly beasts above the orderly, patient pattern of streets and homes.

  The landing pad atop the JFK Building appeared suddenly below them. Two armed guards escorted them down to Carmody’s office. There was no one in the corridors they went through; evidently this was an exclusive area, or someone had cleared it of people. The second possibility seemed more likely when she noticed the addition of more communications equipment in the office, including a large-screen projector. Where chairs had been the day before, now a pair of matching couches met at right angles. They were a pleasant brown, picked up by a fresh bowl of chrysanthemums. Between the communications screens there were several tasteful prints of modern abstracts, mostly in subdued icy blues. Someone had taken care that when Carmody returned he would be impressed. The effect went unnoticed, however, for Carmody forged into the office without glancing around.

  There were several men in dark suits in the office, sitting at new consoles, some speaking into hushphones. No one introduced anyone else. People asked Carmody questions and he answered swiftly, coolly, laconically. The big wall screen filled with a still photo and it took Claire a moment to realize the swirls were clouds against the background wrinkled skin of the sea. In mid-frame, half-obscured by a gray mist, was an elongated dot: a ship.

  “The Pyramus,” Carmody said. “She turned south several hours ago.” He listened again t
o an ear plug. “Probably heading for Bermuda. That’s the nearest non-US port.”

  “Why not sail to Greece?” John asked.

  “He’s following the news. The Turks hit some Greek naval vessels about six hours ago. There’s going to be a war.”

  “Damn,” Claire said.

  “Not that it matters.” Carmody put the plug down. “Kontos isn’t important anymore. Compared to what the artifact could do, even the Turk thing isn’t much.”

  “The latest round in a five thousand year long grudge match,” Claire said sourly. “A fresh crop of Agamemnons.”

  “What I want from you two”—Carmody gestured at John and Sergio—“is a clear description of what this, this second object is. And where it is.”

  “Is like a quark,” Sergio said earnestly. “Only, the binding distance, it can be very, very large.”

  “How large?” Carmody asked.

  Sergio shrugged expressively. “In particle physics, usually we mean an atom, that’s already big. But obviously, here we have a different kind of scale.”

  “So?”

  “What he’s saying,” John put in helpfully, “is that quarks—the particles with fractional electric charges—are in principle independent, only we never see them isolated. That’s because they attract each other with a force that’s independent of their separation. So if you tried to pull them apart, you’d have to add more and more energy. You can’t pull two of them apart by more than an infinitesimal distance. That means they always appear to us as larger particles, two quarks clumped together.”

  “I’m not following this,” Carmody said a trifle impatiently.

  “Well, it’s all a little bizarre,” John admitted. “See, the mathematics said this singularity of ours should have the same kind of force between pairs. A force that doesn’t get weaker as you pull them apart.”

  “Like these quarks.”

  “Right. What’s been bothering Sergio and me is, how come we can see a single singularity. Why doesn’t its partner, its—”

  “Twin?” Claire asked.

  “Okay, call it the twin. We asked ourselves, why isn’t the twin attracted to the singularity, and they combine into a new kind of bound state? That could be stable, our mathematics proves that.”