by Cramer, John
When she thought about it, however, this wasn’t a problem for her novel. Her readers believed that radiation easily produces mutations, everyone knew it was true. So even if it wasn’t, it didn’t really matter, at least for the purposes of her novel. She felt a guilt twinge and pushed it aside. She was writing a book to be read for entertainment, not a textbook.
She was approaching a tall advertising sign featuring a giant hot dog that was mounted atop a fast food place near the upcoming freeway exit on the right. Giantism was a similar kind of problem. If you took a creature like an ant and made it bigger, its weight increased faster than its strength did, and its breathing and metabolism also got out of whack. The biologist had tried to explain it by talking about surfaces and volumes and scaling laws, but she hadn’t really followed the details. However, his conclusion was clear. Scientifically speaking, you couldn’t make a big ant by, say, boosting the quantity of growth hormone in a small ant. Even if it magically grew to the desired size, it wouldn’t be able to stand up and would probably die on the spot.
However, this probably wasn’t a problem either. There had been innumerable sci-fi movies and books about giant insects, so her readers knew that giant ants were possible, and they wouldn’t be dissuaded by the quibbling of a few scientists.
Alice put the recorder back on the seat, considering what she should do next. Perhaps she should dial 1-800-33-GUMBO and ask what they knew about giant mutant fire ants.
CHAPTER 2.5
Virtual Excursion
GEORGE put the briefcase down on his desk and walked to the window of his office in the Physics-Astronomy Building. Beyond the south campus of the University of Washington he could see the morning boat traffic on the Montlake Cut waterway. Further on, the Roosevelt Bridge connecting the northern and southern halves of Seattle across the Ship Canal stood erect as a two-masted schooner and three smaller boats moved westward under it in the direction of Puget Sound. It was a clear day, and there was a nice breeze from the northwest. Ideal weather for a bit of sailing, he decided.
George thought of his neglected sailboat, tied up over at Shilshole Marina, ready to take him out to the beautiful hidden coves and island beaches of the Sound. He sighed. Not today, too much to do. He glanced at his watch. It was 8:45. There was enough time for a little virtual excursion before he had to prepare the graphics for his 10:30 class. This was his first opportunity to have a closer look at the new results from the radiation damage tests.
He walked across his office to the Swedish black leather recliner next to the tall bookshelf. The recliner, which he used for teleoperation, was his own. It was quite comfortable, unlike the standard university issue.
Switching on the graphics processor, George lifted the data cuffs from the wire-mesh bin beside the recliner. He put on the flesh colored bands that always reminded him of the wrist weights used for exercise. With duly cuffed hands, he lifted the magic glasses to his eyes and adjusted them for a snug fit at the nose and temples. Unlike those he had used on the airplane, these were the “full-view” model that resembled wrap-around sunglasses. They fitted tightly against his forehead, cheeks and temples. The glasses were in transparent mode, and he had a clear view of the room.
With the smooth coordination of long experience he moved his hands through the standard cuff calibration gestures: point index finger, thumb up, thumb down, clench fingers over thumb, clench fingers thumb up, spread fingers, extend arm, touch nose with fingertips, touch top of head with palm, and so on. His gestures followed graphic cues provided by the glasses. Then he inserted the molded sound tubes in his ears and rotated his head up, down, right, and left in response to more calibration queues.
Finally he leaned back in the recliner, adjusting the chair so that it gave his back good support while leaving his head free to “look.” He blinked twice, and the glasses switched opaque. Involuntarily his eyes moved from side to side, seeking to penetrate the near total darkness. He relaxed in the dark, considering what should be done next, feeling a slight warmth as the infrared beams of the glasses scanned his eyes, locating his pupils.
He blinked his eyes three times in rapid succession, and the darkness vanished. He hung above a landscape. To the east he could see a mountain range, and to the south a vast desert. He turned his head. Northward was a lush green forest, and to the west a broad body of water. This virtual reality desktop had been done by a Berkeley programmer with too much time on his hands. To some extent it reflected his Northern California world-view. Even at this distance George could see stylized whales, sea monsters, and the suggestion of an island in the blue water, several pyramids and a green palm-ringed oasis out in the desert, smoke rising from the chimney of a cabin in the forest, and a Gothic castle perched high atop one of the tall mountains.
George knew intellectually that the scene was only an electronic illusion that was being painted directly on his retinas by the quick color-modulated laser beams of his glasses. But the illusion was so seamless, so well synchronized with the motions of his head, so vividly there, that the vision center of his brain had already been taken in and was completely convinced. He could not doubt that this world existed, within some immediate definition of existence.
He raised his hand before his face. His right hand, as represented by a structure of pink shaded polygons, hung before his field of view, drawn in considerable detail and texture but supported by an arm that was shown only in pink wire-cage outline. Since he did not expect to meet anyone else here, he usually saved processing power by not wearing much of a body in virtual space. He pointed his index finger toward a gleaming white building far to the south where the desert joined the green plane below, touching his thumb to his middle finger to control his speed.
The flight took him above a meadow dotted with clumps of wild flowers. He dived until he was very close to the surface of the meadow and could examine the flowers as they passed by. They were generated with some fractal algorithm, and each flower was distinctly different in its intricacies.
George found this exhilarating, almost as if he were really flying. He loved paragliding and flying rigid-wing gliders. Since moving to Seattle he had spent many hours searching out the powerful updrafts in the foothills of the Cascade Range. Now he angled downward toward the white building, watching as it grew in size and complexity. He halted on the green lawn before the entrance and looked upward.
The Palace filled the scene before him, unchanged and unchanging. He tilted his head back, looking up at the magnificent edifice. On the foundation of massive gray rough-hewed stone blocks stood an edifice of tall grooved columns of grainy milk-white marble that supported a high pedimented roof. The vast construction stretched away to a hazy vanishing point in the desert to the south. Over the arched entry, engraved in majestic gold letters, were the words:
LEM DATA ANALYSIS SYSTEM
VIRTUAL DESKTOP - VERSION 2.1A
GIVE UP ALL SLEEP, YE WHO ENTER HERE
George pointed upward and flew inside the Palace, moving smoothly up the broad marble stairway, pausing for a moment on the floor of broad milk-white marble slabs veined in brown and black. The many-hued statues stood before him like a vast army, rank upon rank, file upon file, and each was different. Some of them were of abstract shapes that teased the eye with their curves and intersections, some showed graceful or warlike human figures, some depicted fabulous monsters or human forms with the heads of beasts, some depicted fairy-like creatures embodying a standard of beauty beyond the compass of the human form.
George loved the Palace. It was like having your own Uffizi or Louvre to work in. Pietro, LEM’s VR programmer and the “architect” of the Palace, was another computer jock with a hyperactive imagination, but his aesthetic sense was on the mark. The Palace was great human-engineering. Pietro had found a holo-ROM containing 3-dimensional representations of the world’s greatest statuary and had used them to produce the ic
ons for the Palace. The result was user-memorable and certainly aesthetically preferable to the comic-book VR scenes that other SSC groups used, and the flat desktops and primitive directory tables preferred by some of the more backward members of his own group.
The fourth row of statues were icons related to LEM tests and checkout procedures. George flew along the row until he came to a white marble statue of a beautiful woman with piercing eyes and trifold tentacles where her arms might have been. It was a suitable symbol for the death of electronics under mysterious circumstances.
George made a gesture, and a glowing three-dimensional network appeared in the air before him, a lacework of interconnected solid icons labeled with short phrases. He reached out with yellow-sheathed hands and turned the network until he found the symbol he was seeking. He touched it with a yellow fingertip, and it expanded to fill his universe.
The members of George’s vertex detector group at Waxahachie, working with Wolfgang, had been busy. Test pixel detector slabs of the LEM and ATLAS designs had been mounted in approximately the LEM geometry at a test station at the West Campus where surplus beam from the SSC injector synchrotron was available for testing equipment and components. Collisions were occurring, particles were passing through the detectors, and data was accumulating.
George examined the poster-size blowups of two detector slabs suspended in the space before him. One was a LEM design and the other was from ATLAS. Both had a few dead pixels, random failures of the intricate fabrication process. But as a function of time there was no increase in dead pixels in either device. The problem that was plaguing LEM was not being reproduced in the test setup.
Interesting, George thought. It was not just radiation damage, then.
“George,” said a smooth synthetic female voice. “Your class begins in one hour. This is your first warning.”
“Damn!” said George. This was his last lecture of the quarter, and he wanted to make it a good one. He made a gesture in the air, and the Palace vanished.
It was replaced by the user interface for the interactive graphics application he used in his teaching. He began selecting multicolor illustrations and equations from the electronic version of the textbook used by his graduate class, modifying them to emphasize the points he would make in the lecture, and adding new diagrams and material.
Not radiation damage, he was thinking. What, then?
PART 3
June 4, 2004
January 15, 1989
“The SSC is another Spindletop oil gusher. With the oil running out, Texas is going to leapfrog into another economic revolution by exploring the frontiers of knowledge and producing high technology. We call it ‘High Tex.’”
— Senator Phil Gramm, (R - Texas)
February 3, 1989
“(The SSC) represents a national commitment to excellence and leadership in research ... (The Space Station) is an investment in neither excellent science nor excellent technology. ... It is the past brought forward.”
— George (Jay) Keyworth, The Hudson Institute,
Former Reagan Presidential Science Adviso
April 7, 1989
“If (the SSC) is worth $5 billion to us, then the innovative technology that would flow from it should be used to the benefit of Americans and not given away to other countries.”
— Representative Bryant, Texas State Legislature, (R - Dallas)
CHAPTER 3.1
Neighbor Talk
ALICE stood in the front yard of the furnished house she had rented sight unseen before leaving Tallahassee, a Waxahachie gingerbread belonging to an SSC physicist who had gone on leave for two months to organize a summer physics workshop in Aspen, Colorado. She liked the house; after three years in a small apartment, she enjoyed the extra space. It was turning out to be a pleasant environment for her writing, too.
She held her notebook in one hand, surveying the roof line of the house for sagging gutters or loose shingles. She had heard about the sometimes spectacular weather patterns of central Texas and did not want any roof-leak water on her computer equipment and papers. The house, however, appeared to be in good condition.
“He’p you ma’am?”
Alice turned and saw a man leaning on the white picket fence that separated her house from the one next door. He was about her age, tall and slim, his pleasant face crowned with a shock of unruly white-blonde hair.
She smiled. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Alice Lang. I’m a writer. I’ve rented this house for two months. Are we neighbors?”
“Sure are, ma’am,” the man said. “I’m Whitey Buford.” He indicated the building behind him. “I was born in that there house, and m’ Grandma and I still live here. I’m a master electrician. Been workin’ at the Super Collider for the last few years.”
Alice looked at him with interest. He wore soft jeans and a western shirt. He held himself like someone in a Frederick Remington painting, and his speech pattern was a distillation of the local Texas dialect she’d been immersed in since her arrival. She noticed that his pale blue eyes had a hidden glint of sharp intelligence. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Buford. I’m doing a story for Search magazine about the people who work at the SSC. I’d like very much to interview you for my story.” She meant it. In the past she’d gotten some of her best material from smart folksy locals, and Whitey seemed to be another one.
“Call me Whitey, ma’am. Everybody does,” He looked suddenly shy. “Don’t know what I could tell you, though, compared to all those scientists out at the site. They’re the ones that know what’s goin’ on. They tell me what needs to be done, and I do it.”
Alice nodded. She had planned to see more of the Laboratory before she began interviewing the Waxahachie townspeople, but Whitey was a source worth cultivating. “So, Whitey,” she said, “you’re from around here. What are the good restaurants in the area? You know, where one might go for a special occasion?”
Whitey stroked his sideburn. “Well, now,” he said, “there’s the Texas Choice Steakhouse on the left side of Interstate 35 north o’ town near De Soto. They have pretty good steaks and barbecue. The K-Bob Steakhouse in town ain’t bad, neither. It’s part of a chain. The little Cafe on the Square has real good chicken-fried steak. And that fancy restaurant at the Denim Ranch Inn is supposed to be good. Never been there, myself.
“Course, if you want the real fancy eatin’ round here, you have to drive up to Dallas. There’s just no end to how much money you can spend on food up in Dallas. They have cooks there that came from France and waiters that wear those tuxedo suits, like they was in a weddin’ or a funeral. Saw a friend of mine in the oil bidness pay two hundred dollars for a bottle of wine once in Dallas. For wine! Can you feature that, Ma’am?”
Alice shook her head in mock-incredulity, thinking of the special bottle of ‘82 Chateau Margaux still lying within its protective wrappings in a box in her living room. She paused. “And what’s a good place for having a few drinks and perhaps some dancing? Know any good places for that?”
Whitey looked at her appraisingly. Then he smiled slyly. “Well, Ma’am, you have to understand that you’ve plunked yourself smack in the middle of Dry Country here. There’s lots’a Hardshell Baptists in these parts who don’t take to drinkin’, except maybe behind the door, and who don’t want nobody else drinkin’ neither. And that goes for dancin’ too. But it’s a free country, you know, and everybody understands that, so around here we have what’s called the Local Option.”
Alice blinked. Yesterday she’d been at a nice restaurant in Dallas that sold wine and mixed drinks, and she hadn’t noticed anything unusual about it. “How does that work?” she asked.
“Well, ma’am, any votin’ unit ...”
“Wait, Whitey,” she interrupted, “what’s a voting unit?”
“You know, like a city, or a county,
or a town, or a local improvement district. Any group of a few dozen folks that live in the same area and know how to do the paper work. A votin’ unit can pass their own liquor laws. Make it wide open, or tee-totally dry, or anything in between. Mostly in these parts, ‘though, they’re either completely dry or they just allow drinkin’ at private clubs.”
“What’s a private club?” Alice asked. “You mean like the Elks or the Moose or some country club?”
“Well, there’s them,” Whitey nodded, “but there’s also the little ones out in the country and the ones that the restaurants run. Like, say, you was up at the Texas Choice Steakhouse up on the Interstate, and maybe you wanted to have a nice cold bottle of Lone Star with your dinner?”
Alice nodded.
“Well, real sorry, Ma’am, you just couldn’t have it. It’d be against the Law. But suppose you told the waiter you had a mind to join their private club, and you paid him five dollars? Then he’d write your name on a little membership card that’d be good for a year and give it to you, and then it’d be OK. You could have your cold beer and buy one for your friends too. They’d be your ‘guests’ at your ‘club’, y’see? That’s the way it works ‘round here.”
Alice closed her mouth, which had been gaping open. “Why, that’s simply incredible!” she said. “They make laws against drinking alcohol, and then they leave huge loopholes so anyone can get around them for five dollars. Why would the voters put up with such a stupid hypocritical system?”
Whitey grinned. “Cause they like it, Ma’am,” he said. “The Hardshells like it cause they’ve voted against drinkin’, just like their ol’ preacher told ‘em to last Sunday. The restaurants like it cause they get their membership fees, and their club members keep on comin’ back again and again once they’ve joined. And the drinkin’ folks like it cause they get their beer, and it’s kind’a exclusive and high-tone, you know, belongin’ to a private club? So everybody’s just as happy as pigs in shee-it. And the out’a state folks that are just passin’ by on the Interstate, well, they pay their five dollars, and they don’t vote anyhow. Ya’ understand, Ma’am?”
