by Mark Alpert
19
OLAM BEN Z’MAN SMUGGLED THEM INTO THE WEST BANK. FIRST, HIS MEN drove to an empty parking lot where they abandoned the Shin Bet limousine and transferred David, Monique, and Lucille to the black van. Aryeh was already inside, and soon all four of them were seated on the van’s floor, guarded by bearded kippot srugot wearing black clothes and carrying Uzis. For the next hour David couldn’t see anything outside, but he surmised from the frequent turns and jolts that they were navigating the West Bank’s twisting back roads. He started to feel nauseous, partly from all the twists and turns, and partly from anxiety. Although he was grateful to find Olam at last, this wasn’t how he’d expected it to happen.
The van finally stopped and the bearded guards opened the rear doors. The sun was setting and its last rays made David squint. One of Olam’s men grasped his arm and pulled him out of the van, leading him toward a cluster of battered, beige trailers on the summit of a treeless hill. Another guard escorted Monique. More kippot srugot emerged from the trailers, each with an Uzi dangling from his shoulder. A white banner hung from the largest trailer, and painted on it were a pair of Jewish stars and the name of the settlement: SHALHEVET. While the guards led David and Monique toward this trailer, which seemed to be the settlement’s headquarters, other settlers approached the van and grabbed Lucille and Aryeh. David noticed with some dismay that the kippot srugot were taking the agents to a different trailer.
The men with Uzis pushed David and Monique through the doorway of the headquarters trailer and into a windowless room. At one end of the room was a massive steel-gray cabinet, about as tall as a refrigerator and three times as wide. At the other end was an old, battered desk with one folding chair behind it and two in front. The guards pointed at the latter chairs. David and Monique nervously sat down while the kippot srugot stood behind them, training the Uzis at their heads. For a moment David thought they were going to execute them right there. But then Olam ben Z’man marched into the room, his black pants tucked into his combat boots and the sleeves of his black shirt rolled above his forearms.
Because of the man’s bald head and eye patch, David was reminded of Moshe Dayan, the famous Israeli general, but Olam was bigger, at least six and a half feet tall, and he had the shoulders and chest of a weight lifter. He looked like he could pick up Moshe Dayan and throw him across the Jordan River. His face was dark and craggy and showed his age—he was in his fifties, David remembered—but his most remarkable feature was his uncovered eye, which had a brilliant blue iris. This eye blazed as he strode across the room. “Well, well! You’re finally here!”
The muscles in his right arm bulged as he held out his hand. David started to rise, but the guards behind him gripped his shoulders and pushed him back down. So he shook hands with Olam from his chair. “Yes, I’m a friend of Jacob Steele, my name is—”
“I know who you are. Jacob told me about you. You’re David Swift, professor of history at Columbia University. Also president of Physicists for Peace.” He let go of David’s hand and turned to Monique. “And you’re Monique Reynolds, professor of physics at Columbia. Please forgive me for surprising you like this. It’s not very civilized to hijack you off the highway, eh? But I had to make sure no one followed us.”
David felt disoriented. He had so many questions for Olam, he didn’t know where to begin. “Look, we have an urgent situation. We came to Israel with the FBI because—”
“Yes, because someone has killed Jacob and kidnapped Michael Gupta. I have contacts in the Israeli government, you see, and they told me about your investigation. The problem is that our enemies also have contacts in the government. They’ve infiltrated the intelligence agencies in both Israel and America.” He turned around and went behind the desk, sitting down in the other folding chair. “That’s why my men are interrogating Agent Parker from the FBI and Mr. Goldberg from Shin Bet.”
Monique shook her head. “But they’re not your enemies. They’re running the investigation.”
“I’m sorry, but we have to be cautious. We’re fighting the Qliphoth and they have many spies. Look how quickly their assassins found you after you arrived in Jerusalem. They already knew that you and the agents had come to Israel to search for me.”
David looked at him uneasily. “The Qliphoth?”
“In Kabbalah, the Qliphoth are the destructive forces of the universe, the opposites of the Sephirot. Like devils, yes? But please, don’t misunderstand me. Our enemies are men, not devils.”
Shit, David thought. Olam was already giving him a heavy dose of Kabbalah. David needed to steer him back to reality. “So you’re saying that someone in the FBI tipped off these people?”
“Either the FBI or Shin Bet, they’re both compromised. The Qliphoth were hoping to find me, so their assassins followed you to Beit Shalom Yeshiva. They wanted to kill me, but they killed the Rav instead.” His lone eye narrowed. “They’re worried because I discovered their plan. The Caduceus Array detected the disruptions from their test in the Kavir Desert.”
David was relieved to hear him mention the Caduceus Array. Right now he wanted to talk to Oscar Loebner the scientist, not Olam ben Z’man the Jewish mystic. But Monique spoke first. “You mean the space-time disruptions?” she asked. “The ones that occurred when the Iranian nuke exploded?”
Olam nodded. “They spread outward from the Kavir site, hitting my clock first, then Jacob’s. The anomalies were fleeting, each less than a trillionth of a second. Too brief to be detected by conventional atomic clocks, which aren’t as precise as ours. And much too brief to be detected by our nervous systems, which explains why no one felt the disturbance. But during those fleeting moments the spacetime disruptions were extreme. In each instance, time was compressed so violently that it almost ceased to exist.”
“But what caused the disruptions?” Monique leaned forward, balancing on the edge of her chair. “There’s no way a nuclear blast could mangle spacetime like that.”
Instead of answering, Olam opened one of the desk drawers. He pulled out a sheet of paper and placed it on top of the desk so David and Monique could see it. It was a satellite reconnaissance photo showing a concrete bunker in the middle of a desert. The image was so clear that David could see footprints in the sand. There was a dirt road leading to the bunker’s entrance and a truck parked beside it. Between the truck and the bunker was a forklift carrying a silver cylinder.
Olam tapped the cylinder in the photo. “An Israeli satellite photographed this at Iran’s Kavir site last Monday, the day before the nuclear test. None of the IDF’s intelligence analysts could identify the device, so on Monday night they sent me an encrypted e-mail with a copy of the image. Although I don’t work for the intelligence directorate anymore, I still help my old friends there from time to time. I recognized the device and told them what it was—a prototype of the Excalibur laser.”
David leaned across the desk, trying to get a better look at the photo. He noticed that the cylinder had a sliding panel near its midpoint. That was the compartment for the nuclear warhead, the power source for the X-ray laser beams that were meant to shoot down Soviet missiles. “Jesus,” he whispered. “What was it doing in Iran? Are they working on missile defense?”
“I knew the Iranians couldn’t have built it themselves. The technology is far beyond them. So I assumed they stole it. I checked with an old colleague at Soreq who confirmed that the Israeli X-ray laser was still at the lab. But when I called one of my friends at Lawrence Livermore, he said their prototype had been moved out of storage two months ago. He promised he would look into the matter and find out where the laser had been taken.” Olam shook his head. “The next day the Iranians exploded their bomb and the Caduceus Array detected the disruptions. Then I realized what the Qliphoth were doing with the prototype they’d stolen. It has nothing to do with missile defense.”
Monique rose from her chair and began pacing across the room. The guards didn’t stop her. “Were the Iranians trying to use Excalibur as an offe
nsive weapon? Firing the X-ray laser to deliberately alter spacetime?”
Olam shook his head again. “I must be honest with you, Dr. Reynolds. I call them the Qliphoth because I don’t know who they are. They’re obviously working in concert with the Iranian government, but I don’t believe the mullahs know what the Qliphoth are planning. You see, Iran wants to incinerate Israel, and maybe America, too. But the Qliphoth want to incinerate all of Creation, and I don’t think even the mullahs would go that far.”
David’s stomach twisted. He felt the same fear that had welled up inside him when he was in the Shin Bet limo. His suspicions had been correct. “Is it a crash? Are they trying to crash the universal program?”
“So you know about the program? Did Rav Kavner tell you?”
Monique nodded. “He told us as much as he understood. Later we realized he was talking about the It From Bit hypothesis and—”
“Ah, it’s not a hypothesis anymore. Now we know beyond a doubt that It From Bit is true. The universe must be computational because we’ve just seen evidence of an overload. Excalibur’s laser beams were powerful enough to disrupt the program.”
“What?” Monique made a face. “An overload?”
“In technical terms, it was a memory buffer overflow. Every computer has a memory, yes? And the universe is no exception.”
“But how could—”
“Please, let me explain. The memory of the universe is all around us, embedded in spacetime. When we fill a volume of space with particles, we’re adding data to its memory. But every memory has its limits. If you pack too much matter into a small volume, the local spacetime will collapse and form a black hole. You’re familiar with black holes, yes?”
“Yes, of course.” She twirled her hand in a circle, urging Olam to get to the point.
“A black hole is bad for anyone living nearby, but it’s not a disaster for the universe as a whole. The universal program has error-correction algorithms that stop the overload from affecting the rest of the system. The black hole bends the surrounding spacetime with its gravity, but the fundamental disruption is confined to a single point. You see?”
David was struggling to keep up. “Okay, but how does this apply to the X-ray laser?”
“A laser is an unusually orderly phenomenon. All the particles of light in the beam have the same frequency and phase, which means that the information in a laser is very repetitive. And the universal program has specialized memory caches for this repetitive data. But when—”
“Wait a second.” Monique held out her hands. “Specialized memory caches? How do you know they exist?”
Olam smiled. “The universe is not only a computer, it’s a very efficient computer. The specialized caches increase the efficiency of the program by compressing the repetitive data.” He spoke in a pleased voice, as if he were proud of the program’s ingenuity. But his smile quickly faded. “Unfortunately, there’s a drawback. The specialized caches can be overloaded more easily than the ordinary ones. So if you focus intense X-ray laser beams on a very small volume of space, the surge of data can flood the memory. Ordinarily, such an event would be extremely unlikely, because natural processes rarely generate X-ray laser beams. But Excalibur makes it possible to trigger an overload. You can do it by aiming Excalibur’s laser beams so that they converge in the vacuum inside the device’s cylinder.”
Monique stopped pacing and stood by the corner of Olam’s desk. “And the overload can disrupt other parts of the universal computer? The parts that specify the structure of spacetime? Is that what the Caduceus Array detected?”
“Yes, it showed the disturbance in the time dimension, which fortunately was very brief. The disruption at the Kavir site was kept in check by the error-correction algorithms in the universal program, which isolated the memory overflow and stopped it from corrupting the rest of the system. But I fear that another test is coming. According to my calculations, if the Qliphoth exploded a more powerful warhead and made a few adjustments to the X-ray laser, the results could be very different. If the laser beams were more intense and converged in the right pattern, the data would overload too many caches and overwhelm the error-correction algorithms. Then spacetime would collapse at the site of the overload and the system error would spread outward at the speed of light.”
Monique bit her lip. “It would expand like a bubble. And destroy everything in its path.”
Olam nodded. “In a twentieth of a second the earth would be gone. In twelve hours, the entire solar system. But I don’t like the word ‘bubble.’ This isn’t a bubble, it’s a crash. An error freezes the computer and the whole system goes down.”
The room became so quiet that David could hear the breathing of the guards behind him. Oscar Loebner the computer scientist had just delivered some sobering news. More than twenty years ago the weapon makers of the cold war had unwittingly built a Doomsday machine. And now someone had recognized the hidden power of Excalibur, its ability to trigger an event so extraordinary that it had never occurred, not even once, in the long history of the universe. A fatal event, David thought. The ultimate fatal error. “But why would anyone want to crash the program?” he asked. “It’s mass suicide.”
Olam shrugged. “I don’t know who the Qliphoth are, so I can’t tell you their reasons. But I can make a guess. You see, the crash would obliterate all the matter in its path, but it wouldn’t destroy the computer itself. Like when your PC crashes, yes? The screen goes black, but the program can restart. And in the same way, the universe could restart and a new Big Bang would emerge from the vacuum. But the program of this new universe might be very different from the old one. In fact, it might be possible to engineer the crash so that it makes specific changes to the software. You could change the laws of physics. Maybe adjust the speed of light and the other physical constants to create a universe that’s simpler or more efficient than ours. Or you could create a new space-time with a different number of dimensions. Maybe a universe with two dimensions of time, which would allow you to travel back into the past. Or a universe with no dimension of time at all, where everything would exist in eternal stasis.”
Now David rose from his chair. “So you think these people are trying to build a better universe? Maybe their own version of paradise?”
“Who knows? There are so many madmen in the world, so many false Messiahs. It might even be possible to retrieve the stored memory of the old universe and plug it into the new one. Like a resurrection, yes? Everything would be reborn in a new format, like when you convert your computer files from Windows to Mac. It wouldn’t be easy to trigger this kind of restart—you’d have to adjust the angles of Excalibur’s laser rods in just the right way. But if you knew the universal program in detail, you could figure it out.”
David stood in front of Olam’s desk and looked again at the photo of the Kavir test site. He could just imagine some arrogant idiot deciding to remake the universe. It was human nature. But then he remembered something else and felt a flash of hope. He pointed at the silver cylinder in the satellite photo. “But after the prototype from Livermore fired its beams, it must’ve been destroyed in the nuclear blast at the Kavir site. And you’ve already smashed the Israeli device that was at Soreq. So unless these Qliphoth can build a new X-ray laser, we should be safe, right?”
Olam frowned. “You’re forgetting something. Excalibur was developed in the last years of the cold war, when the Americans and Soviets were busy spying on each other. The national laboratories were prime targets of intelligence operations in those days. If one side developed a new technology, the other side could usually copy it within a few years.”
“What are you saying? The Soviets had their own X-ray laser?”
“According to my sources, they built it at the Semipalatinsk test site. But they ran into the same technical problems that stopped the Americans. So in 1990 they gave up and put the device in storage at a military depot in Turkmenistan. When the Soviet Union broke up in ’91, the army didn’t bother t
o take the laser back to Russia. They considered the thing useless, so they left it at the depot with all their other surplus equipment.” He placed his hands flat on the desk and rose to his feet. “That’s where we’re going. Some of my old friends have agreed to lend us a transport plane. It leaves from Ramat David Air Base in two hours.”
“You’re planning an operation with the IDF?”
He shook his head. “I told you, we can’t trust anyone in the Israeli or American governments. The Qliphoth have collaborators everywhere. How do you think they smuggled Excalibur out of the Livermore lab? No, I’m organizing this mission outside the official channels. Look around and you’ll see the members of our strike team.” He pointed at the pair of guards behind David’s chair. When David turned around, he saw that the kippot srugot weren’t aiming their Uzis at his head anymore. “Twenty men are going with us. Most are old comrades I served with in the Sayeret Matkal. The transport plane will take us to Baku, in Azerbaijan, and then we’ll take a chartered boat across the Caspian Sea. The depot in Turkmenistan is fairly close to the seashore.”
Monique looked askance. “You think the X-ray laser’s still there? After all these years?”
“It’s there. I confirmed it with my contacts at Mossad, which has a very good network of agents in Central Asia. And now we’re going to find the device and destroy it.”
David leaned across Olam’s desk. “What about Michael? We have to find him, too.”
Olam walked around the desk and came toward him. He towered over David. His biceps were level with David’s nose, and his body odor was overpowering. “Michael is with the Qliphoth, I’m sure of it. And the Qliphoth will also be looking for the laser, so I suspect we’ll find him in Turkmenistan.”
“Then we’re coming with you,” David said. He raised his chin and looked Olam in the eye. “We have to make sure that Michael is safe.”
For a moment Olam just stared at him. Then he threw one of his massive arms around David’s shoulders. “Of course you’re coming with us! Why do you think we brought you here?” He gave David a look that was half admiring and half amused. “Jacob told me what happened two years ago, how you and Dr. Reynolds rescued the Einheitliche Feldtheorie. Haven’t you realized by now that you’re an instrument of Keter?”
