Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  Carmody asked, “How come you know the thing in the cube isn’t two of these things already?”

  “The cubic fields, they are the signature of one singularity,” Sergio said. “Two looks different. Might even be spherical.”

  “Maybe that’s the way they were inside the cube before?” Claire asked.

  “Before what?” Carmody asked sharply.

  “Before we, uh, moved the artifact.”

  “Packed and shipped it?”

  Claire said delicately, “There was an accident. It fell down a shaft in the rock and split open the crate.”

  Carmody asked, “That could dislodge these twinned singularities?”

  Sergio said, “Conceivably, sí. The point is, our mathematics shows that the force between the twins is constant. So the angle the artifact makes with the vertical is a direct measurement of the force. Here—” He walked to a blackboard on a side wall, picked up yellow chalk and began to draw diagrams. “Here at Boston, the artifact feels two forces. One is gravity, down. The other is the twin force, off at an angle, pointing to the twin.”

  “What’s the angle?”

  “I do not know where the twin is, so this angle, it is unknown,” Sergio replied. “If the twin is exactly on the other side of the Earth, then the twin force just pulls down, adds to the gravity. But we know the artifact is swung out about ten degrees or so, correct? So the twin is not below us, in China or something, it is somewhere else.”

  “Somewhere northeast of here. That’s the way the artifact was hanging,” John said.

  “You noticed? Good! Then I draw the twin here, at some point on a circle that goes around the earth.”

  “A great circle,” Claire said.

  “Sí. The twin force pulls your artifact like this, to the side. Say the twin is very close, so the pulling, it is nearly parallel to the ground. Horizontal. Then from the fact that the hanging angle is about ten degrees, we know that the pulling to the side, it is about ten times weaker than gravity.”

  “Not very strong,” Carmody said.

  “Sí, for subatomic particle force it is nothing,” Sergio agreed. “The theory says it should be weak, but how weak is hard to tell. All the time, John and myself, we worry about what keeps these twins from finding each other. We thought, perhaps there is some adjustment to the force. Something that screens it. But the right answer is, we were stupid, and there is nothing blocking the force. It is a weak force and the twin, it is simply a long way away.”

  “How far?” Carmody asked.

  Sergio shrugged. “Kilometers, thousands of kilometers, we cannot say. We have only the angle.”

  A man appeared at Carmody’s elbow and whispered something. “Okay,” Carmody said, and the big screen across the office instantly filled with a picture from the deck of the barge they had just left. Arditti stood in the foreground.

  “I wanted to show you this, sir,” Arditti’s voice boomed from speakers in the corners of the office. A man adjusted the volume. Arditti held up a map. Claire saw it was a navigator’s map of the Boston Harbor. There were a half-dozen big red Xs marked on it, all along a line from Castle Island out toward the mouth of the harbor. “I got some teams to backtrack the path of the crate. It moved straight as you please, see?”

  “Any radioactivity in the track?”

  “Yeah, it’s a kind of groove the thing cut. Gets deeper the farther out you go, too.”

  “Which direction was it headed?”

  Arditti turned the map and looked himself. “Ah, I’d say about thirty degrees north of east.”

  Carmody nodded decisively.

  Arditti added, “Only reason we found the thing was it started spewing out a lot of radioactivity. Must’ve slowed down some at the end. It was nearly buried in the mud.”

  “Heading deeper,” John murmured.

  “What?” Carmody asked.

  “It was burrowing in, moving toward its twin. Look at Sergio’s diagram. The force pulls it sideways and down, see?”

  Carmody’s eyes widened. He turned toward the camera mounted unobtrusively in a bookshelf and asked Arditti, “Can you see that blackboard?”

  “Nossir, I got no visual return unit here. I can get one set up in—”

  “Never mind. Can your divers tell me what angle the cube was making with the bottom? Measure the depth of the trough it left back at Castle Island and then close to where we picked it up.”

  “Yessir.”

  Carmody cut off the image and looked at his watch. “Another hour before the barge nears the safety zone.” He shook his head. “Maybe I should’ve had it flown.”

  “To where?” Claire asked. “Anyplace they could land would still be in danger.”

  “Yes, but the barge is taking it east, toward its twin, right?” Carmody said.

  The others looked surprised. “Right,” Claire said, “but that twin could be a long way—”

  “And it could be right below the barge. We don’t know enough.”

  “I don’t think those depth measurements will tell you a lot,” John put in. “The cube was meeting a lot of drag in that mud. It won’t make a nice clean angle, the way it does in Sergio’s diagram.”

  Sergio grunted assent. “Too messy down there.”

  “Look,” Carmody said impatiently, “this is all hypothetical, I realize, but why should I care about this twin anyway?”

  “Because they are trying to be united,” John said. “They’ll move around until they find each other.”

  “Then we should just let the artifact go?” Carmody demanded.

  “No, I’d say not,” John answered. “It’s too dangerous. Look, now that I understand the theory, I can say that our fears were misplaced. It won’t willy-nilly explode, because it’s a simple particle, not a conglomerate, the way I first thought it was. But when it meets its twin—well, I don’t know.”

  Sergio said, “I expect the reuniting, it might yield a lot of energy.”

  “A lot?” Carmody insisted.

  Sergio shrugged. “Look at the energy you have stored in it already. The airplane that took the cube away from Greece, every meter it went, it was storing energy, like winding up a spring. Separate the twins, you have to do work against their force.”

  “But you said the force was small,” Carmody objected.

  “Yes, small, but the distance! From here to Greece is what?” He looked at Claire.

  “Five thousand miles,” she said.

  “Okay, it is like you took a rock that weighs as much as a man, and you took it five thousand miles out in space, starting from the surface of a planet that has about one tenth of the gravitational pull that Earth does. Then let go. It falls down—five thousand miles—bang!”

  “I see,” Carmody said. “A lot of energy.”

  “You misunderstand,” Sergio said, shaking his head. “That is nothing compared with the energy which can be released when two of John’s ‘twists’ collide. Then some of their mass can be converted to energy. Gently brought together, OK—they make a bound state. But with one smacking into the other—”

  “I see.”

  Claire got up and went to the bookshelf. There were standard reference works on it, neatly arranged. She found a large Rand McNally Atlas and thumbed through it. There was a projection map of the Atlantic basin and she studied it as the men argued about the energy yield if the twin singularities struck each other at high speed.

  Something Arditti had said intrigued her. She fished a pencil from her purse and used the edge of a dictionary as a straight edge. Laying the dictionary at an angle of about thirty degrees, with one corner at Boston, she drew a straight line across the Atlantic basin. It extended up through Newfoundland and across the ocean. Going further, her pencil entered France near Bordeaux and because of the curvature of the Earth then ran southeast. It sliced across the toe of the boot of Italy and plunged into the Aegean south of Athens. She felt an odd chill.

  “It all fits,” she said.

  Carmody, alert, said in
tently, “What?”

  She showed him the atlas. “Even though Mycenae is due east of here, a force acting between two objects doesn’t have to follow the curve of the Earth. It slices through, like so. I took Arditti’s angle and drew it, that’s all.”

  Carmody finished for her, “And it passes through Greece.”

  “Yes,” she said. It was a minor point of geography, but she was glad to have discovered it when the men were throwing around so much high-powered math. “So my idea was right. The twin is in Greece.”

  “Was in Greece,” John said. “It’s been moving ever since, I’ll bet. Drawn by its twin in the cube.”

  Carmody asked, “Then where is it?”

  “Somewhere along this line,” Claire said, tracing it with a polished fingernail. “Inside the Earth.”

  “It can eat anything,” Sergio said. “Tsssuup!—It sucks in all. Rock, water. So it makes its way.”

  “It’s boring a hole?” Carmody asked with disbelief.

  John said, “It must be. The one in the cube will, too.”

  “Why’s it in the cube at all, then?” Carmody wondered.

  “It formed some kind of temporary equilibrium in there, I guess,” John said. “Its magnetic fields were strong enough to keep it cradled inside—I calculated that a couple of days ago.”

  “But it’s getting out now,” Carmody said.

  “Kontos knocked it around, that probably helped,” Claire said.

  “And the inflow of water kept it pinned in the cube, after the wreck,” John added.

  “What’s holding it in now?” Carmody asked.

  Claire saw where he was leading. “The patch. The singularity will eat the patch and break loose.”

  Carmody nodded to an aide. “The barge.”

  Within seconds Abe’s voice, tinny and distant, filled the room. Claire was amazed how quickly the men in the room sensed what Carmody wanted and arranged the complicated communications. Otherwise they kept silent, watching and listening. She had the uncanny feeling that they had been trained for precisely this event, or else adapted to emergencies with amazing quickness. As Carmody asked Abe for an update on the cube she looked at John. He was drawn and concerned, staring at the pencil line on the map.

  “Yes, I am getting more gamma-rays from the patch,” Abe confirmed.

  “Damn,” Carmody said emphatically. “Monitor it. Abandon the ship if—”

  “No, wait,” John broke in. “Have him turn it.”

  “What?”

  “Turn the cube so the patch is facing southwest. That’ll pull the singularity away from the patch, help slow down the damage.”

  Carmody brightened. “Hear that?” he called to Abe.

  “Yes, but I don’t under—”

  “Just do it,” Carmody said briskly. “My men are listening in, give them the directions.”

  “It’d be even better if they rotated the cube slowly,” John added. “That’ll make the singularity work on different parts of the inside of the cube. It’ll take longer to break out.”

  Carmody talked to men at the barge, discussing how to move the cube. He gave orders that any crew not working directly on the cube should be as far from it as possible, crowded into the bow. Most of the men had been sent back into Boston by motorboat already and there were fewer than a dozen left.

  “That’ll buy us some time, if you’re right,” Carmody said, leaning back in his leather armchair. “But how much?”

  “Hard to tell,” John admitted.

  “I’m beginning to think we might be smarter to simply drop the thing overboard,” Carmody said. “Let it tunnel down and find its twin.”

  Sergio said, “And if it does not?”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Carmody asked.

  “This is not a strong force we are talking of here. Remember, the mathematics plainly shows it is like the quark force—constant, but weak. Many things are stronger.”

  Carmody looked less relaxed. “Such as?”

  “Volcanic flows,” Sergio said. “There are many strong mass currents under the Earth’s crust, that is what makes the continents to drift. If a stream of hot rock catches the singularity, it can sweep it along, up, down, anywhere.”

  “Back to the surface?” Carmody asked.

  “There, certainly. Convection cells return deep matter to the surface constantly, on the ocean floors. The singularity may never find its twin.”

  Carmody asked John, “Did you or that guy you were with, George—did you see anything funny? A second singularity?”

  “No. It was dark down in that passageway. I saw faint light from a side passage, but it was just another way down to the sea, I thought.”

  “But you think maybe the second singularity, it got out then-broke out of the cube?”

  John shrugged. “Makes sense. The thing made a lot of noise, sure. I thought it was the crate banging around.”

  “That patch on the back of the cube!” Claire cried. “Recall? There was dirt covering a plug of rock. But when I tested that rock, it was amorphous. That could be melted stone that hardened after the second twin escaped—out that direction.”

  John said, “Out along one of the symmetry axes? Sure, that’s the easiest route out. So it penetrates the center of that back face—sure, because the crate was falling backwards, wasn’t it? Fell on its back, propelled the twin out the back face. Maybe—”

  Carmody waved his hands. “Enough of maybe this, maybe that. I want to go back to Professor Zaninetti’s remark. You feel these singularities could cause a lot of trouble, tunneling around?”

  “Sí. Carve open new volcanic vents, for example. If—”

  One of the advisors deflected Carmody’s attention, whispering. Carmody frowned, nodded.

  “I just heard about that fellow in Arditti’s team. He got a lethal dose. They’ve sedated him.”

  There was a long silence. What had been an abstract discussion suddenly took on a real, human dimension. Carmody let the silence stretch out and then said decisively. “This means we must consider very carefully how to prevent further excursion of these damned things. What are your suggestions?”

  Zaninetti puckered his lips, his face drawn and somber. “If we could be sure the twins will come together safely, deep in the Earth, perhaps that is okay. But if a fall down a hole can knock them apart—as Claire tells us—then I would worry. They will stay free, able to move to the surface.”

  “Okay. What do we do?” Carmody looked as if events were moving too fast, even for him.

  Claire said quietly, “Is there any choice? We have to arrange a quiet meeting of the twins.”

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER

  One

  Mediterranean night wrapped the ship in fog. John Bishop stood on the strumming steel deck of the tender and stared ahead, seeking some sign of land. The Argolic peninsula lay only a mile or two to the north and they should be passing by the island of Spetsae soon. He remembered tramping around that bleak spot of land with George, to convince the captain of the Skorpio that they were merely tourists. Lord, it seemed like years ago, but it was only a little over three months. And then, just as now, he had been preoccupied with what was to come.

  A salty pungency filled his nostrils as he leaned on the railing. The throttled growl of the ship’s diesels vibrated up through his boots. He was alone on deck; Arditti and Carmody and the others were below, having coffee and monitoring the situation. John felt he was jazzed up enough without adding caffeine to his blood. It was, of course, far too late for second thoughts, but he was having them anyway.

  The last nine days had been a confusing rush of ideas, speculations, and steadily narrowing options. Carmody could apparently get any service, command any technical help, right up to the Nobel Prize level, merely by asking. That such men existed in government was news to John, but, once he thought about it, inevitable. Modern crises demanded a broad grasp of many issues. Someone had to know how to slice through interdepartmental jealousies, run down leads, filt
er self-aggrandizing input and keep everyone focused on the problem.

  The crucial breakthrough had come when they calculated the size of a tunnel that would be bored in solid rock by a singularity. The tiny black hole heated the rock nearby, causing it to flow inward, adding to the hole’s mass. It ate a small fraction of the heated rock, leaving the rest behind. That heating generated intense pressures, forcing molten rock into nearby cracks and fissures. This left a glass-walled tunnel a few inches wide in the singularity’s wake. Even miles down, the weight of rock would not close the tunnel immediately. Wherever the twin singularity was now, it had carved a straight line path from the tomb site.

  But where was it? That required not the elegant niceties of mathematical physics, but rather a typically twentieth century welter of grinding tedium.

  With the emergence of pseudo-intelligent computers, a new kind of human intellectual had arisen. Carmody called in a team of them to make an estimate of the twin’s position. They were not men and women who knew any field in detail, though they were skilled at extracting information from ferret-eyed specialists. Instead, they knew how to integrate knowledge without learning every wrinkle. With huge computer programs at their call, the pivotal decision became precisely how to phrase the question. They translated the jargon, syntax, bias and style of many disciplines, so that computers themselves could carry out the wearying numerical grind of getting a firm answer. These “interactive-correlative” savants swarmed over the problem and came up with bad news.

  The twin was probably under France, moving at about three kilometers a day.

  The simplest way to mate the two singularities would be simply to drop the cube into a mine in Bordeaux and let them find each other. The savants tried this in a detailed numerical simulation and found that it didn’t work. Mass currents in the mantle continually deflected the particles. The twins never found each other. Indeed, it seemed likely that a local lava upwelling near the French coast, added to the attractive force between the twins, would eventually force the lower one to the surface.