Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  What it would do there was uncertain. Surely it would give off deadly radiation. Perhaps it would find its twin. Perhaps it would wander through subterranean paths, opening fresh vents for lava, disturbing the balance of geological forces, conceivably setting off slippage among the colliding continental plates.

  Carmody disliked uncertainty. He particularly disliked leaving problems unsolved. So he had asked for something audacious, something that would bring the twin singularity to the surface in a predictable way, where he could deal with it.

  John shivered, despite the black wet suit he wore. The Aegean winter brought biting winds out of the north, curling whitecaps in the ship’s wake. The cutting breeze howled out from the land and ruffled his hair with tantalizing, playful fingers. The sea itself would seem a welcome warmth.

  He left the flying bridge, picking his way around the signal halyard. Antennae circled endlessly above, probing the horizon.

  There were no running lights. The USS Watson wallowed in the long rolling swell, heavy laden. She was a specialty ship of the Sixth Fleet, officially part of Task Force 32. Her belowdecks were crammed with electronics listening gear, VHF and radar and TACAN systems. Her job was to reach out for hundreds of miles and tag hostile “elements” before they could engage US craft. There was a helicopter flight deck aft and a nominal ASROC launcher forward of the bridge. Any concerted attack would surely sink her, but things would not normally come to that. The aircraft carrier Eisenhower was scarcely a hundred miles east. It had jets standing by in catapults on the flight desk if needed. They could be here in minutes.

  In the oppressive dark John carefully retraced his path down side stairs. The weather was perfect, with thick cloud cover and only a thin sliver of moon above that. He hoped it would hold. Before entering the amidships hatch he sniffed the salty, slightly rotten-smelling breeze to see if it had backed into the west, as the weathermen predicted. No, not yet.

  The red light above OPERATIONS was the only illumination in the corridor; they were being careful to avoid leaks through momentarily opened hatches. John went through the doors into the semicircle of consoles surrounding the big communications screens. Carmody sat there, studying his clipboard. Around the man technicians murmured into throat mikes and kept their eyes on their console displays, where color-flagged dots moved. They were not scanning east, out to sea, but rather north, above the Argolic peninsula. John paused and studied one overlay map of the area. There were few dots, all blue, indicating light aircraft. Greek military patrols, or perhaps even private craft. The battle front was hundreds of miles away, after all, and civilian life had to go on. Another console showed satellite images in the infrared. He couldn’t follow the matted splashes of greens, oranges and apricot. Towns stood out a garish scarlet, but understanding the rest was a matter for experts. He slumped into a bucket seat beside Carmody.

  “Any last benediction?” he asked.

  “Do your job and get out.”

  “Don’t worry. Just get that boat there on time.”

  “It’s not a boat, it’s an inflatable transport.”

  “Just so it’s quiet.”

  “It will be. Not that it matters. The chopper will be drawing all the attention by then.”

  John noticed the sketch on Carmody’s clipboard. It was the same one he had drawn two days ago in Boston, outlining the plan.

  “Still believe it?” he asked.

  Carmody shrugged. “Enough to risk some Greek real estate.”

  “And some lives,” John said testily.

  “Yeah.” Carmody was quite unconcerned. He had done such things before, and probably worse.

  The drawing looked innocuous. The twin singularity had carved its tight little tunnel hundreds of miles and now was deep below Europe. Already it had possibly set up minute fractures and shifts that would eventually work their way to the surface, relieving pressure in a quick, snapping jolt of earthquake energy.

  It would creep along, sucking in molten rock. An oddity that the interactive computer team had found resolved a crucial issue—why wouldn’t it fall steadily downward, to the Earth’s core? It was far more dense than rock, so logically it should sink. It was a measure of the team’s versatility that they found an explanation before Abe and John had even noticed the problem.

  Matter fell into the singularity along the diagonals of its cubic gravitational field. Some was swallowed, and the rest of the molten rock was ejected. Added to this was the uniform downward push of the Earth’s gravity. Combining the two gravitational fields led to an uneven ejection of rock downward. This in turn created an oppositely directed pressure upward, cushioning it like a hydrofoil aircraft. This kept the singularity more or less steadily at the same depth. It also contributed greatly to the uncertainty about how two attracting singularities could ever meet.

  “I’d feel a lot better if the numerical simulations had come out clean,” Carmody said moodily.

  “Hell, they only had a couple days.”

  “And a few odd million dollars. For a tab like that I expect clear answers.”

  “All their simulation runs showed the twin returning along its own tunnel.”

  “Yes. But how fast?”

  “Some say a day, some say a week.”

  Carmody shook his head. “Too much latitude.”

  “If you want certainty—”

  “I know, give them another week. Let them include all the mass gradients, and the Earth’s spin, and souped-up particle physics—I got the shopping list.”

  The solution wasn’t elegant. The best way to pluck the twin singularity from deep in the Earth was to make it return along its original path. Calculations and simulations showed that if the attractive force was reversed, pulling the twin back along its self-carved tunnel, it would stay on that track, taking the path of least resistance. To coax the subterranean twin into retracing its path demanded that its twin be back in Greece.

  Elaborate computer programs examined how the singularity reacted to swerves in the tunnel, to partial closing of the path by collapse of the ceiling, to lava flows nearby—and the solutions all came out with the twin working its way up along its own tube, back to the Mycenaean tomb. They differed in the arrival time, because no one knew how much of the tunnel had filled in.

  A majority thought the singularity had reached France. A minority believed it couldn’t have left Greece yet. They differed over fine points of black hole physics, and Carmody regarded their arguments as Talmudic squabbling.

  Still, the minority had a strong, practical point to make. They thought the singularity would burrow through rock slowly, and had moved only perhaps a hundred miles. That, in turn, meant that while the cube was being flown to Greece, the singularity below would not have a chance to work its way upward, trying vainly to reach its brother overhead.

  The majority had considerable trouble with this point. While the jet flew, the burrowing twin could be deflected out of its previous channel. To avoid that, they proposed a complicated flight path flown at top speed, to minimize the excursion of the twin.

  Carmody had decided to go with the majority, even though he was troubled by this difference among experts. He had said to John. “They’re scientists, they’re supposed to know this stuff!” with a genuine sense of outrage.

  The solution was risky. It meant taking the cube back to the vicinity of the tomb, and using its attraction to draw its brother back along the previously rock-cut path.

  Then they could mate the two singularities. The twin would probably come barreling out of its tunnel, moving quickly along the cleared path. If the two met at high velocity there could be an enormous, many-megaton recombination. To avoid that, someone had to keep the cube away from the twin. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to be hard.

  John and Sergio had proved—as nearly as jots on paper could—that the force between the singularities was independent of their separation. That meant that the same steady tenth of a gravity would be trying to pull the twins together, no matter wh
ere they were. But a tenth of a gravity wouldn’t lift a singularity up into the open air, not when full gravity was pushing it down. That meant the twin couldn’t lift off the ground. It could crawl like a mole, but not fly like an eagle.

  To extract it from the tomb simply demanded that the cube be kept aloft, tantalizingly close, while its twin circled restlessly below, dissipating whatever energy it had from its journey through the tunnel.

  Carmody chuckled. “And here I thought science was exact, certain. Hell, it’s as bad as our goddamn foreign policy.”

  “Which doesn’t work either.”

  “You can say that again. Y’know, when the President approved this, they had State send a feeler to the Greeks. Asking for a mutual understanding on this thing, cooperation—”

  “You what?”

  “Don’t get lathered up now. The cable didn’t give away any of our game.”

  “If they suspect—”

  “We kept it vague.”

  “Still—”

  “We just wanted to see what they’d say. Also, of course, to cover our ass diplomatically, once this blows open.”

  “Will it? If we’re careful—”

  “Sure. Has to. No such thing as a secret these days.”

  “What’d the Greeks say?”

  “Their customary surly answer. Accused us of economic exploitation, using Turkey against their interests, interference—the usual shopping list.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “State wants to be able to say we went through ordinary channels and were rebuffed. The Europeans will make a big deal about it anyway for two, three days, no matter what. State’s worried about Japan and China, though—they’re important. That Pan-Pacific trade agreement’s about negotiated; they don’t want anything screwing it up.”

  “Did Athens say anything specific about Kontos?”

  “No, he didn’t sign the Foreign Ministry reply or anything.”

  “Then maybe—”

  “We know he got back home, though. He took a BritAir flight out of Bermuda two hours after the Pyramus docked there. Went through Heathrow to Athens.”

  “If he understands even a fraction of what’s going on…”

  “True, he suspects this thing could be a weapon.” Carmody frowned and sucked at his teeth.

  “And it could.”

  “That’s what that emergency meeting in the Pentagon decided. All the more reason why, if these things are going to go off, let’s do it outside the USA. Symmetric, anyway. Kontos wanted it back, OK, here it is—just like he wanted with the Elgin marbles.”

  “An international game of hot potato.”

  Carmody smiled. “But we’re the only ones who know it’s hot.”

  “He knows enough to interest the Russians in it.”

  Carmody shook his head. “His government doesn’t have time to listen to him. After all, he’s failed. Lost his boat, his prize, the works. And they’ve got a war on their hands.”

  Indeed, that was the Watson’s cover. It was officially cruising the south Aegean as part of Task Force 32, keeping a wary eye on the fighting to the north. The Greeks were holding their own in the sea battle and doing well in the air. They had stopped the Turks in the Aegean Sea, losing many ships and planes in a big engagement off the island of Chios. Their kill ratio was about three to one, principally because of better pilots, but the Turks outnumbered them.

  The crucial issue was who prevailed on the open seas. If the Turks battered the Greek navy to pieces, then they could safely slip amphibious landing craft across the Aegean. They would stage landings in central Greece, near Athens. The war could drag on forever if the Turks could bring their large army across. The Greeks would fight street by street.

  There were already land battles far to the north, where the two countries met along a narrow border, but that would not be crucial. The Greeks could hold in that hilly terrain.

  Diplomats were struggling to get a cease-fire. Turkey demanded that its NATO allies stand aside.

  There were rumors of Russian shipments of a new class of anti-aircraft missiles into Athens. The Greek government was openly calling for support.

  Carmody gestured toward a large wall screen which showed a sprinkling of grouped dots over the north Aegean. “The Turks are maneuvering tonight. That’ll keep the Greeks occupied.”

  “Yeah,” John said uneasily. “For a while.”

  CHAPTER

  Two

  When Claire came into the rec room of the Watson after her nap, the TV was showing a Stateside program. Not the news, or even a football game, as she would have expected of the sailors who lounged back, sipping coffee and gazing at the screen.

  She had to admit that the clichés she had formerly accepted about the kind of men who would be here had proved significantly in error. They were quick, intelligent, and disciplined without being rigid. Even now, glancing slyly at her out of the corners of their eyes, they had a decorous reserve. She was acutely conscious that they had not seen a woman at close range in over a month. It was like a steady undertone on the ship, a thing of body language and stares held too long, nothing she could object to and perhaps not even conscious on their part. But it was there. Still, they kept it contained, as orderly as their crisp blue uniforms.

  They were watching a public television program in which DNA coiled like technicolor dancing bracelets beneath a watchful electron microscope, to an accompanying music-box-like Baroque harpsichord. A voiceover explained how phosphorous and other ions seemed destined for a unique place in our biology, implying an order which the voice quickly traced back to forerunner fifteenth century notions of clock-building and planetary orbits—all intimately connected, in turn, with the development of individual rights in our modern age. The music shifted easily to Beethoven. Darwin made his entrance escorted by the voiceover’s praise, then modernist prints illustrating ennui, and some further nods in the direction of predestination and Freud.

  Science the serene, the clean. Nothing to do with crawling around in a hole in the ground, looking for a mote that spat gamma-rays. Nothing like that, of course. She palmed a cup of awful coffee and left for the deck.

  The night chill did not penetrate the thick jacket she wore. She worked her way aft, moving carefully in the heavy boots the Navy had given her. Radar antennae of several shapes and sizes revolved endlessly above, soundless amid the thrumming of the engines and the steady wash at the bows.

  George Schmitt was helping the men around the helicopter flight deck. She stopped at the ramp overlooking the broad pad that took up most of the stern. Teams were checking the two helicopters while others secured the big cubic object at the side. She thought of the stone artifact sitting inside all the layers of metal and special plastics and adhesives. The dirty-white crating that now housed it had been put together by materials specialists, hoping to contain the singularity inside for as long as possible. A special crew of four men monitored it constantly. As she watched they made another foray around the cube, pressing instruments against its sides. They listened for acoustic tremors, enhanced radiation, any sign of devouring movement within.

  So far there had been no trouble. Still, she was jittery, being this close. The long flight from Boston aboard an Air Force transport had been unsettling for her, until John matter-of-factly mentioned that of course the artifact was not aboard. It was carried separately, in a plane with minimum crew.

  She had assumed their party of Carmody and his squads of specialists was all of the operation. Yet more men came aboard when they landed at the base in Italy, and there were escort craft, and slowly it had dawned on her how large this was. And how seriously they all took the calculations of a few physicists and mathematicians. It spoke worlds about how much the security and defense apparatus was linked to the physicists, who had been the mandarins of science ever since 1945.

  She remembered sitting in a meeting three days before, listening to a detailed study of what would happen if the two singularities recombined deep in t
he Earth. The study was necessary because some people advocated letting the two simply meet beneath the Atlantic, where the effects would be minimal. But if just two hundred pounds of the combined mass was converted into energy, it would produce massive quakes all around the globe, and tidal waves that smashed both Atlantic coasts. The patient, reasonable way the men laid out their numbers and equations and graphs had been eerily convincing and chilling. She was struck by the dispassionate, systematic way they reached huge conclusions. In archeology, every nuance of a site was scrutinized for significance. Scholars knew they dealt with human products, shaped by ordinary impulses which, by assumption, had changed little through the millennia. There was a reassuring, humanistic scale. An unexpected turn could not suddenly thrust you above a tortured abyss, staring down into echoing, cold, inhuman perspectives. The difference in tone was so vast that it scarcely seemed the subjects could both be sciences.

  “Butterflies?” a voice said at her elbow. George Schmitt leaned lazily against the railing. He always seemed relaxed and uncaring, whether working at the tomb or in Boston or even here. It was a gift, she decided.

  “No, just running through possibilities,” she answered.

  When the full dimensions of the plan became clear, she had proposed bringing George in. Only he and she knew the tomb, and he alone had a good idea of the structural integrity of the walls. No one knew what was going to happen, of course, but there was considerable risk of damage to the site, and Claire took her stand on that principle. At first she demanded to go in and oversee whatever destruction had to occur, to minimize it. Carmody had ruled that out, until Arditti and others had brought up how useful having someone along with knowledge of the tomb would be. The plan demanded a minimum of two helicopters, so she had proposed bringing George in to be in the first one, with her following.

  To her surprise, George had readily agreed. Two agents had brought him to Boston. Beneath his casual, cool manner she could tell he was excited by the air of secrecy and power. Carmody’s men were lean, efficient, and clearly going about things that were more exciting than cleaning and processing old artifacts at Columbia University on a postdoc.