Blasphemy

by Douglas Preston

  FORD WATCHED THE SKINNY FIGURE OF the pastor striding across the parking area toward an old beater of a pickup truck. A man like that, if he had a following, could do a lot of damage to the Isabella project. He was very sorry Hazelius had provoked him, and he felt that they hadn’t heard the end of this—not by a long shot.

  When he turned back, Hazelius was checking his watch as if nothing had happened.

  “We’re late,” the scientist said briskly, plucking his white lab coat from the hook. He glanced around. “Let’s go.” His eye fell on Ford. “I’m afraid you’ll be on your own for the next twelve hours.”

  “Actually,” said Ford, “I’d like to see a run.”

  Hazelius pulled on his coat and picked up his briefcase. “I’m so sorry, Wyman, that just won’t be possible. When we’re down in the Bunker on a run, everyone has his or her assigned role and it’s very tight. We just can’t have any extra people around. I hope you understand.”

  “I’m sorry, too, Gregory, because I feel that in order to do my job, I have to be present at a run.”

  “All right, then, but I’m afraid it can’t be this particular run. We’re having a lot of problems, we’re all under stress, and until we solve these technical issues, we can’t have extraneous people on the Bridge.”

  Ford said quietly, “I’m afraid I have to insist.”

  Hazelius paused. An awkward silence fell. “Why do you need to see a run in order to do your job?”

  “I’ve been hired to assure the local people that Isabella is safe. I’m not going to assure anyone of anything until I’m sure of it myself.”

  “Do you actually doubt the safety of Isabella?”

  “I’m not going to take someone else’s word for it.”

  Hazelius shook his head slowly.

  “I have to be able to tell the Navajos that I’m part of every aspect of the project, that nothing’s being kept from me.”

  “As the senior intelligence officer,” said Wardlaw suddenly, “I would like to inform Mr. Ford that, for security purposes, he is denied access to the Bunker. End of discussion.”

  Ford turned to Wardlaw. “I don’t think you want to take us down that particular road, Mr. Wardlaw.”

  Hazelius shook his head. “Wyman, I understand what you’re saying. I really do. The problem is—”

  Kate Mercer interrupted. “If you’re worried about him finding out about the malware in the system, don’t bother. He already knows about it.”

  Everyone stared at her. A shocked silence settled over the group.

  “I told him everything,” said Mercer. “I felt he should know.”

  “Oh, now that’s just great,” said Corcoran, looking up at the ceiling.

  Kate turned on her. “He’s a member of the team. He’s got a right to know. I can vouch for him one hundred percent. He won’t reveal our secret.”

  Corcoran’s face flushed. “I think we can all read between the lines of that little speech.”

  “It’s not what you think,” said Mercer coldly.

  Corcoran smirked. “And what is it that I think?”

  Hazelius cleared his throat. “Well, well.” He turned to Ford and laid a not-unkindly hand on his shoulder. “So Kate explained everything.”

  “She did.”

  He nodded. “All right...” He seemed to be thinking. Then he turned and smiled to Kate. “I respect your judgment. I’m going to trust you on this one.” He turned to Ford. “I know you’re an honorable man. Welcome to the group—for real, this time. You’re now privy to our little secret.” His blue eyes were disconcertingly penetrating.

  Ford tried to stop the flush from mounting into his face. He glanced at Kate and was startled by her expression—of what, hope? Anticipation? She didn’t seem angry that he’d pushed the issue.

  “We will speak of this later, Wyman.” Hazelius let the hand slide off Ford’s shoulder and he turned to Wardlaw. “Tony, it looks like Mr. Ford will be part of the next run after all.”

  The SIO didn’t answer. His face remained utterly stolid and expressionless, his eyes straight ahead.

  “Tony?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the strained answer. “I understand, sir.”

  Ford made a point of looking at Wardlaw as he passed by. The man returned the look with cold, empty eyes.

  25

  KEN DOLBY WATCHED THE GREAT TITANIUM door to the Bunker drop down and seal itself with a hollow boom. A damp movement of air played over his face, smelling of caverns, wet stones, warm electronics, machine oil, and coal dust. He inhaled. It was a heady smell, a rich smell—the smell of Isabella.

  The scientists filed past on their way to the Bridge. Dolby caught Hazelius as he passed.

  “There’s a red light on Magnet 140,” he said. “I got a squelch warning on it. Nothing serious. I’m going to check it out.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take?” Hazelius asked.

  “Less than an hour.”

  Hazelius gave him an affectionate pat on the back. “You do that, Ken, and report back. I won’t turn on Isabella until we hear from you.”

  Dolby nodded. He stood in the vast cavern while the others disappeared into the Bridge. The door closed with a clang that reverberated through the hangarlike space.

  Silence gradually returned. Dolby breathed once again the fragrant air. He had led the design team for Isabella—directing a dozen Ph.D. engineers and almost a hundred contractor-designers who were blueprinting specific subsystems and the supercomputer. Despite the many people involved, he had been firmly in charge, his hand in everything. He knew every square inch of Isabella, every quirk and foible, every curve and hollow. Isabella was his creation—his machine.

  The oval opening to Isabella’s tunnel—like a slice taken off the side of doughnut—glowed in soft blue light. Condensation snaked out of the portal in sinuous tracks that crawled this way and that before evaporating. Inside the tunnel, just beyond the opening, Dolby could see the massive blue-gray wall of depleted uranium shielding—behind which was CZero, the beating heart of Isabella.

  CZero. Coordinate Zero. This was the tiny place, no bigger than a pin-head, where the beams of matter and antimatter were brought together at the speed of light to annihilate themselves in a burst of pure energy. When Isabella was running at 100 percent full power, it was the hottest, brightest place in the entire universe—one trillion degrees. Unless, thought Dolby with a smile, there was an intelligent race of beings out there with a particle accelerator bigger than his.

  He was inclined to think not.

  Most of the energy of the matter–antimatter explosion at CZero was instantly converted back to mass, according to Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, and became an awesome spray of exotic subatomic particles, some not seen since the very creation of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

  He closed his eyes and imagined himself as one of the protons circulating in the ring, going round and round, being accelerated by the supermagnets to 99.999 percent the speed of light. He made the forty-seven-mile circuit four thousand times per second, round and round. He saw himself plunging down the curving tunnel at unimaginable speed, getting a kick in speed from each magnet, more than three million kicks per second, faster and faster... it thrilled him to imagine it. And ripping along just half an inch from him in the pipe was the beam of antiprotons, circulating in the opposite direction, whipping by him at the same incredible speed.

  He imagined the moment of contact. His beam was forced into the oncoming beam. Into a head-on collision at CZero. Matter striking antimatter at the speed of light. Riding the particle into CZero, he felt the collision—the pure, absolute, thrilling annihilation of it. He felt his rebirth into strange new particles spraying outward in all directions, ripping into the many layers of detectors that logged, counted, and examined each particle.

  Ten trillion particles per second.

  DOLBY OPENED HIS EYES, RETURNING FROM his reverie, feeling slightly foolish. Checking his pockets
for loose change or other ferromagnetic items, he walked across the staging area toward the row of electric golf carts. Isabella’s superconducting magnets were thousands of times more powerful than the ones used in medical MRI machines. They could pull a nickel right through your body or gut you with your own belt buckle.

  Isabella was dangerous and demanded respect.

  He climbed in behind the wheel. Pressing a button, he engaged the clutch and eased the cart into first gear.

  He had designed it himself, and it was one sweet little cart. Although it could do only twenty-five miles an hour, it had cost almost as much as a Ferrari Testarossa, mostly because it had to be built entirely out of nonmagnetic materials—plastics, ceramics, and low-diamagnetic metals. It came with a communications system, a built-in computer, radar warning sensors and controllers front, side, and back, radiation sensors, ferromagnetic alarms, and a special vibration-damped bay for transporting delicate scientific instruments.

  He sped across the concrete floor and entered the oval opening to the Isabella tunnel. The turn was tight and he came to a full stop.

  “Hello, Isabella.”

  He eased onto the concrete track that ran along the bottom of the tunnel, next to the curving bundle of pipes. Once on the track, he accelerated, the wheels staying in their grooves. Everything was bathed in greenish-blue light from a double row of fluorescent tubes overhead. As he whipped along, he glanced at the biggest pipe, gleaming 7000 aluminum-alloy construction, flanged and bolted every six feet. Inside was a vacuum harder than that found on the surface of the moon. It had to be tight: one loose atom wandering into CZero would be like a horse straying onto the racetrack at Daytona. Crash and burn.

  He accelerated to top speed. The rubber wheels whispered in their grooves. Every hundred feet he passed a magnet wrapped around the pipe like a big doughnut. Each magnet, supercooled to four and a half degrees above absolute zero, wept a fog of condensation. Dolby blew through each cloud, leaving behind a whirl of eddies, the pipes racing past.

  Periodically he passed a steel door on the left side of the tunnel, an opening into the old coal tunnels. Emergency exits, in case something happened. But nothing would happen. This was Isabella.

  Magnet 140 was eight miles down the tunnel.... A twenty-minute drive. It wasn’t anything serious. Dolby was almost glad about it—he liked having time alone with his machine.

  “Pretty good,” he said out loud, “for the son of a grease monkey from Watts, eh, Isabella?”

  He thought of his dad, who could rebuild any car engine on earth. Never made more than the barest of livings—it was almost a crime that a fine mechanic like him never had a chance. Dolby was determined to make up for it—and he did. When Dolby was seven, his father gave him a radio kit. It seemed like a miracle, to screw and solder together a bunch of plastic and metal crap and have a voice come out. By the time he was ten, Dolby had built his first computer. Then he built a telescope, threw in a couple of CCD chips, hooked it to the computer, and began tracking asteroids. He built a tabletop accelerator using an old electron gun from a TV set. With that he achieved the alchemist’s dream, something that had eluded even Isaac Newton himself: he’d smashed a piece of lead foil with electrons, turning maybe a few hundred atoms to gold. His poor father, God rest his kindly soul, had spent every free dollar from his meager paychecks buying him kits, equipment, and parts. Ken Dolby’s dream was to build the biggest, shiniest, most expensive machine ever.

  And now he had done it.

  His machine was perfect, even if some bastard had hacked into the computer software.

  Magnet 140 came into view and he braked hard and came to a halt. He pulled a special laptop out of the instrument bay and jacked it into a panel on the side of the magnet. Sitting on his heels, he worked on the laptop, talking to himself. He unscrewed a metal plate on the side of the magnet’s case, clipped a device with two wires—one red, one black—to terminals in the magnet.

  He consulted the computer, his face darkening. “Well, damn you, bitch.” The cryogenic pump that was part of the insulating system was failing. “I’m glad I caught you early.”

  Silently he repacked the tools, shoved the laptop back into its neoprene carrying case, and got behind the wheel of the cart. He unhooked a radio from the dashboard, pressed a button.

  “Dolby calling the Bridge.”

  “Wardlaw here,” came a tinny voice from the speaker.

  “Lemme talk to Gregory.”

  After a moment Hazelius came on.

  “You can start Isabella.”

  “The high-temperature alarm is still red on the board.”

  A silence. “You know I’d never risk my machine, Gregory.”

  “Fine. I’ll start her up.”

  “We’re going to have to install another cryogenic pump, but we’ve got plenty of time. It’ll last at least another two runs.”

  Dolby signed off, put his hands behind his head, and kicked back, propping his feet up on the dashboard. In what at first felt like utter silence, Dolby began to make out faint sounds—the whisper of the forced-air system, the humming of the cryogenic pumps, the hiss of liquid nitrogen moving through the outer jackets, the faint creakings of the golf cart engine as it continued to cool, the cricks and ticks of the mountain itself.

  Dolby closed his eyes and waited, and then he heard a new sound. It was like a low, low singing, a humming, rich and dark.

  Isabella had been turned on.

  He felt that ineffable shiver of wonder, of awe that he had designed a machine that could peer into the moment of creation—a machine that actually re-created the moment of creation.

  A God machine.

  Isabella.

  26

  FORD DRAINED THE BITTER DREGS FROM his coffee mug and checked his watch: close to midnight. The run had been one long bore, endless adjustments and tinkerings stretched out over hours and hours of time. As he watched everyone work, he wondered: Was one of them the saboteur?

  Hazelius strolled over. “We’re bringing the two beams in contact. Keep your eye on the Visualizer—that screen in front.”

  The physicist murmured a command and, after a moment, a bright point of light appeared in the center of the screen, followed by a flickering of colors that radiated outward.

  Ford nodded at the screen. “What do all those colors represent?”

  “The computer translates the particle collisions at CZero into pictures. Each color represents a type of particle, the bands represent energy levels, and the radiating shapes are the particles’ trajectories as they exit CZero. It’s a way for us to see at a glance what’s going on, without having to crunch a bunch of numbers.”

  “Clever.”

  “It was Volkonsky’s idea.” Hazelius shook his head sadly.

  Ken Dolby’s voice tolled out, “Ninety percent power.”

  Hazelius held up his empty coffee mug. “Get you another?”

  Ford winced. “Why don’t you get a decent espresso machine in here?”

  Hazelius went off with a low chuckle. Everyone else in the room was quiet, focused on various tasks, except for Innes, who paced the room with nothing to do, and Edelstein, who sat in a corner reading Finnegans Wake. The boxes from the frozen pizzas they’d eaten for dinner spilled out of the trash bin by the door. Coffee rings marked various white surfaces. The bottle of Veuve Clicquot still lay by the wall.

  It had been a long twelve hours—long stretches of crushing boredom, punctuated by brief bursts of manic activity, and then more boredom.

  “Beam steady, collimated, luminosity fourteen point nine TeV,” said Rae Chen, hunched over a keyboard, her glossy black hair spilling in an unruly curtain over the keys.

  Ford strolled along the raised part of the Bridge. As he passed Wardlaw, who was at his own monitoring station, he caught a faintly hostile glance, and smiled coldly back at it. The man was waiting and watching.

  He heard Hazelius’s quiet voice. “Bring it to ninety-five, Rae.”

  The fai
nt clicking of a keyboard sounded in the hushed room.

  “Beam holding steady,” said Chen.

  “Harlan? How’s the power?”

  St. Vincent’s leprechaun-like face popped up. “Coming in like a tidal bore: smooth and strong.”

  “Michael?”

  “So far so good. No anomalies.”

  The murmured catechism went on, Hazelius asking for a report from everyone in turn, then repeating the process. It had been going on like this for hours, but now Ford could feel the anticipation finally beginning to build.

  “Ninety-five percent power,” said Dolby.

  “Beam steady. Collimated.”

  “Luminosity seventeen TeV.”

  “Okay, folks, we’re verging into unknown territory,” said Chen, her hands on a set of controllers.

  “Here there be monsters,” intoned Hazelius.

  The screen was awash in color, like a flower forever blooming. Ford found it mesmerizing. He glanced over at Kate. She had been working quietly on a networked Power Mac to one side, running a program he recognized as Wolfram’s Mathematica. The screen displayed a complicated infolded object. He went over and looked over her shoulder.

  “Am I interrupting?”

  She sighed, turned. “Not really. I was going to shut this down and watch the final run-up anyway.”

  “What is it?” He nodded at the screen.

  “A Kaluza-Klein eleven-dimensional space. I’ve been running some calculations on mini black holes.”

  “I hear that Isabella will investigate possibility of power generation using mini black holes.”

  “Yes. That’s one of our projects—if we can ever get Isabella online.”

  “How would that work?”

  He saw a nervous glance back at Hazelius. Their eyes met for just a moment.

  “Well, it turns out Isabella might be powerful enough to create miniature black holes. Stephen Hawking showed that mini black holes evaporate after a few trillionths of a second, releasing energy.”

  “You mean, they blow up.”

  “Right. The idea is that maybe we can harness the energy.”