“What’s an Alcubierre drive?”
“It is a theoretical mode of propulsion suggested by Miguel Alcubierre, a brilliant physicist. He believes that a spacecraft can be built that can change the geometry of space by creating a wave that contracts space ahead of it and expands space behind it. The ship would then ride this wave inside a warp bubble. The bubble would, of course, travel at faster-than-light speeds but inside the bubble, in normal space-time, the laws of physics would still hold. The theory is elegant. Nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed."
“You’re talking about warp drive.”
“Yes, I suppose you could call it that. I’m sure the creators of Star Trek were astounded when their fanciful ideas found grounding in science.”
“But it’s just a theory, isn’t it?”
“Actually, Alcubierre worked out a mathematical formula that is consistent with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. All that is needed is a power source to create the bubble. It was once thought that an almost infinite amount of power was necessary to alter space. That would be impractical, of course. But recent experiments at Hadron indicate that the kind of exotic matter and anti-matter they are producing with their particle accelerator might do the trick. And some theorists speculate that you wouldn’t even need a spacecraft inside the bubble. In effect, the bubble would be its own mode of transportation. I have to admit I have my doubts about that. There is a fellow at CERN, Klaus Bokamper, who is on the cutting edge of all this. He runs the Hadron Collider facility. I’ve spoken to Klaus numerous times about just this subject. I’m sure you will get to meet him. But enough about space travel! What else do you want to know about particle physics and CERN?”
Sudden spent the next half-hour politely listening to explanations of things that he now found boring. For it was what Dr. Eisler had said about space travel that really interested Sudden.
He now thought he knew why an alien would be working at CERN.
***
Sudden caught the 5:45 PM United flight to Geneva out of JFK. As usual, he traveled light, typically buying most of what he needed wherever he went. As for weapons, they could be provided to him anywhere in the world by the agency. Plus, he’d be working with Rebecca Soul, who, despite her loyalty to the C.I.A., still had many friends in Mossad, which could supply weapons in Antarctica on a moment’s notice if it had to. Exhausted, he slept most of the eight-hour flight. When he arrived in Geneva Sunday morning, he took a cab to Grand Hotel Kempinski at Quai du Mont-Blanc, checking in under the name “Cole Swift”.
Sudden’s room in the five-star luxury hotel had a wonderful view of Lake Geneva, but he wasn’t merely abusing Nigel’s expense account again. He was more interested in the hotel’s first-class spa, where he hoped to mitigate any effects of residual jet lag. A strenuous workout, a couple of gourmet meals and a night’s rest in a good bed would serve him well before his first meeting at CERN headquarters on Monday.
CHAPTER 18 - STUMPED
For perhaps the fifth time, Klaus Bokamper studied the burst transmission that Charles Baker had sent him weeks earlier. By this time he was convinced that Baker was dead. There was no other reason for the total breakdown of communications. He’d checked the normal computer and Internet traffic, including the ball scores, and there wasn’t a sign of Baker since his mysterious disappearance. Even if he was on the run, Bokamper knew, Baker would have found a way to get him some word. Of course, Baker could be in custody. But in that case he was as good as dead.
Bokamper assumed that Baker’s last transmission was important; otherwise he wouldn’t have broken protocol. But for the life of him he couldn’t imagine why. CERN was where the action was. The Hadron Collider achieved particle speeds the lineac in Georgia couldn’t approach. The boosters and magnets in a lineac had only one chance to speed up particles as they went by; in the circular collider they just kept adding to the speed of the particles as they came round and round. The only thing the lineac computations provided was raw data, saving Bokamper time at his end.
Although almost thoroughly assimilated (he liked to use the term “humanized”) Bokamper knew that he was probably the brightest of all the “visitors” — that’s what even they called themselves now — that had been sent to Earth since the 1930’s, approximately 40 years after the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s first radio transmission. Those transmissions, having traveled at the speed of light 240 trillion or so miles in the interim, had been detected on his home planet, arousing both scientific curiosity and military trepidation. The solons on the Supreme Council decided to see what was going on. And they didn’t have to wait another 40 years to find out. The technology Bokamper was trying to duplicate on Earth now allowed his species to send its first representative to Earth in only a few months.
He wasn’t homesick. He had no fond recollections of his life on what scientists on Earth called Kepler Prime, a planet somewhat bigger and a little colder than Earth. It got its name from the Kepler space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-like planets in nearby solar systems. The “Prime” designation was the result of the belief by scientists that of the 3,000 planets associated with the 150,000 stars the space telescope had observed, Bokamper’s home world was the best candidate to support life. If they only knew how right they were, he often mused.
In truth, he much preferred his “adopted” planet. He and the other visitors had been chosen because they did not have any families or close ties in their society, which, while humanoid, had evolved more intellectually than emotionally. They might be mourned, in general, but they would not be missed, in particular. A good thing, Bokamper believed, given their casualty rate on Earth. After all, there are only two of us left, not counting Baker. And when they got back — if they got back — they’d be the last to make the journey.
We now know that humans pose little threat to us, Bokamper mused. They are more a threat to each other. But he had to admit that being “human” made him, somehow, more alive. He thought more and more like a human. Hell, even talked like a human. And, more to the point, he felt like a human. The technicians who altered his original humanoid structure did too good a job, although he had to admit it was probably necessary. The earlier “changelings” were hastily renovated and lacked important human body parts. Bokamper didn’t know what had happened to the visitor who was studying German nuclear physics, but he suspected he’d been caught up in the big war. No one had heard from him since the mid-1940’s. The fucking Nazis had swept through Europe like a plague. As for the second visitor, tasked with investigating if the Americans did indeed have any clue about so-called alien visitations, according to reports in some tabloids that were generally suppressed his end was gruesome.
Bokamper knew that his future wasn’t all that bright, unless he could somehow harness the fantastic energy produced by the Hadron Collider to repair and then safely power the one remaining transit cube left on Earth. It was usually hidden in a closet in his apartment. The other, earlier, cubes were presumably lying around somewhere, perhaps in a landfill, rendered inert by self-destruct mechanisms activated after a certain period of non-use. One didn’t leave working technology like that around for just anyone to find. They were turned into worthless junk, useful, perhaps, only as a door stop or bookend.
Bokamper had disabled his cube’s self-destruct mechanism, but that didn’t mean it was fully operational. All transport cubes deteriorated ever so slightly over time. Quantum relays were delicate. Now, for some reason, his cube lacked the power to contract and expand space for faster-than-light transport. He couldn’t explain it. It might have been compromised by a solar flare, for all he knew. The collider kept Bokamper’s cube in reasonable shape, which was one of the reasons he brought it with him to work on occasion. It was solid black, and not much bigger than a Rubic’s Cube; he passed it off as a paperweight when asked. Just a near proximity to the collider’s streams maintained its quantum integrity. He hoped that in time the
streams, properly targeted at full power, might fully restore it.
Bokamper was itching to put it closer to the collider tubes when the Hadron was running near full capacity, although the last time he tried an experiment a dozen collider relays melted down, leading to a rupture of a liquid helium enclosure. Several tons of helium gas escaped with explosive force, damaging 27 superconducting magnets and their mountings. The contamination of the vacuum pipe delayed operations for almost two months while repairs were made. Fortunately, no one was injured or knew what had really happened. Bokamper led the crisis team and was able to convince everyone that the “accident” was caused by a design flaw. With so many nationalities — and egos — involved, there was considerable finger-pointing, which worked to his advantage. But it was a cautionary lesson for Bokamper. Until he perfected his calculations, there would be no full-powering of the cube. He didn’t want to start World War III by mistake.
Bokamper began to wonder if he wasn’t relying too heavily on the Hadron computer systems. They were powerful machines, and he had almost unlimited access to them. But they had been programmed by humans, after all, who had become, in his opinion, too dependent on them. They thought the computers were actually intellectually superior to their creators. What hogwash. An organic mind, even a human’s, was vastly superior to anything made out of metal and silicon. Moreover, it could evolve in ways that machines never could. Bokamper knew that such evolution had been going on for years. Einstein’s brain synapses were different from anyone’s who came before him, even if his brain was of comparable size. It was the connections inside the brain that mattered. God had programmed the universe well. Bokamper smiled. He knew it would stun many of his Earth colleagues to know that his species believed in a Supreme Being. In fact, they had proved His existence. Or rather, they had been unable to disprove it, which, in their rational culture, was the same thing.
Now, Bokamper knew, there were people born on Earth whose brains had evolved even further, whose synapse connections were wired differently. Thus, they thought differently than other humans. Where some people, even brilliant mathematicians, saw only numbers, these unique people saw numbers as colors and sounds, and were able to integrate all their senses into solving problems. Many of them were ostracized, because their social skills didn’t keep up with their mental capacities. They often acted, and looked, differently.
Some of them became superior chess players, who could not only think many moves ahead, but occasionally created new attacks and defenses. Bokamper knew that the current belief that supercomputers, such as I.B.M.’s “Big Blue”, could defeat any human grandmaster was flawed. True, chess was a numbers-crunching game in which there were more possible moves by the 32 pieces on the 64-square board than there are atoms in the known universe, and computers could calculate millions of positions per second. But a second is still a unit of time, and chess matches have time limits. The only reason Big Blue, in fact, any sophisticated chess machine bought off the rack, can defeat human grandmasters is that the humans run out of time to figure things out. But time is not relevant to some Asperger savants, who can, in effect, see things in more than one dimension, and thus use what Bokamper called “quantum” thinking to arrive at solutions far into the future while a mechanical computer is still running numbers.
Bokamper himself used his brain (actually two) in just such a matter. In fact, one of his backup plans in case his efforts at escape from Earth failed was to become a professional chess player. He was unable to defeat chess computers all the time; if they played black and had the first move, they could eke out a draw. But they never won, and when playing white he always did. He knew he could destroy any human opponent, although he was willing to throw a few games so as not to attract too much attention. Top human players could make millions, he knew.
Whenever Bokamper ran across a high-functioning human with Asperger’s Syndrome or a similar savant skill set, he suspected that they were just the next step in human evolution. Eventually, with luck, they would become the new humans. That advanced species, much as his own had, would figure out a way to the stars. Even given the current brainpower of most of the human race, it should be much further along than it was, in all scientific fields.
True, technology had exploded in recent years, but so much time and effort was wasted on wars and ethnic strife, and political nonsense that real progress was stifled. If humans had spent their trillions on research instead of war and Wall Street over the past 50 years, Bokamper believed, they would have gone far beyond the moon in space exploration. (He was still astounded that the world, in general, and the United States, in particular, had virtually abandoned their space program, antiquated as it was. When the first human to step on the moon, a man named Armstrong, died, his passing went mostly unnoticed. On Bokamper’s home world, entire continents were renamed after the first space explorers.) The least the humans could have gotten for the kind of money they pissed away was a cure for cancer!
Bokamper shook off the maudlin, unproductive thoughts. He had more work to do. He’d eventually figure out what Baker had sent him. It had to be less complicated than chess.
CHAPTER 19 - BENEFITS
As it turned out, Sudden’s last night in his hotel turned out to be less relaxing than he’d anticipated. If more pleasurable.
He had just finished dressing after a post-gym workout and was looking forward to dinner in Tsé Yang, the Kempinski’s world-renowned Chinese restuarant — its signature Szechuan Beef was a distinct possibility — when there was a knock on his door.
“Yes,” he said cautiously, standing to the side of the door out of habit in case someone tried to shoot through it.
“Room service.”
It was a woman’s voice, which he recognized. He opened the door.
“Hello, Rebecca. You found me quick enough.”
“Not very difficult when one knows every concierge at all the five-star hotels in town and you are looking for Cole Swift, the famous American novelist.” Sudden knew that with her C.I.A. and Mossad contacts, Rebecca Soul could have found him even if he were staying in a flea-bag room in Pâquis, Geneva's Red Light District. “Really, Cole. Are you trying to piss off Nigel with your expense account.”
She walked past him and put a small metallic attaché case on a coffee table.
“And, where may I ask, are you staying?”
“The Beau-Rivage.”
“Which makes this place look like a dump,” Sudden said, laughing.
“Not hardly.” Rebecca was laughing, too. “But I deserve it.”
She opened the case to reveal a complete weapons set embedded in gray foam: black semiautomatic pistol, two magazines and a silencer.
“A nine?”
“Yes,” she said. A Kahr. Double-action with an internal striker and locked breech. Polymer frame with a nonslip grip and stainless steel slide. The combat sights are drift-adjustable. The supressor is a Nexus. Best I could do on short notice.”
“Never fired a Kahr.”
“Nice piece. I’ve used them on occasion. Don’t worry about breaking it in or practicing. It’s for close-in work, anyway. And you are one of the best shots in the agency.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
If Rebecca Soul said the equipment was good, Sudden would take it on faith. She knew her guns and would never leave anything to chance where a colleague was concerned.
She took off her jacket and tossed it casually on a couch.
“Do you want to get the other thing out of the way before we head out to CERN and playact not knowing one another?”
Sudden knew what she was talking about. They rarely got together, and hardly ever on an assignment. She wanted to get the sex out of the way.
“I just took a shower and was thinking about dinner,” he said, teasingly.
“I just took a shower myself,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice that he noticed had nevertheless grown a little hoarse. “You can take another shower after you work up an appetite.”
She was already shedding more of her clothes as she headed toward the bedroom. Sudden shook his head. Rebecca Soul was one-of-a-kind. When they’d first met at the unit, she had pretended to be gay, to avoid the advances of the men she worked with. She actually told Sudden she only slept with men she planned to kill. But when Sudden had returned battered from the Fats Boudreau case in need of both physical and emotional succoring, she had gently seduced him. She had made it very clear that she wasn’t interested in a serious romantic entanglement, but also told him that he wasn’t indebted to her; Sudden also filled a need. It was Rebecca who came up with the term “agents with benefits”.
It went as usual. Rebecca was obviously aroused and once in bed, they quickly coupled with a minimum of foreplay. She threw her long, muscular and tanned legs in the air and rested her calves on his shoulders as he sank deep into her. She climaxed quickly, with a loud moan, and then patiently waited for him to finish. Then they lay side by side and talked shop, both looking forward to their second bout, which would be slower and more languorous. Her dark hair lay splayed across the pillows and her piercing blue eyes, which had an icy cast when she was on an assignment, looked less forbidding. It was the sex, Sudden knew. His hands continued to stroke her flank. One of her legs was now draped over his hip.
TWO SUDDEN!: A Pair of Cole Sudden C.I.A. Thrillers Page 27