by John Ringo
The picture that he slid back to Bill was… incomprehensible. There was a complicated group of figures at the center with another figure in an oval off to the side. There were three more symbols spaced around the central symbol. Overall, it looked like a Chinese charm or a mystic spell and Bill wasn’t sure what they represented.
“What is this?” he asked, looking at Admiral Avery.
“He says it’s a drawing of an atom,” Avery replied. “Look, Bill, some things are intuitively obvious to humans because our societies evolved in connection with each other. I have no idea what that’s saying, exactly; we haven’t gotten that far. For all I know, it could be saying the same thing as yours. What is a… singlet transition?”
“The energy necessary for an excited electron to jump from one orbital level to another. It’s a base energy equation.”
“Try something else?” Robin asked. “Calories? That’s just the energy necessary for one gra… damn, we’d have to get measurements for a gram, right?”
“Right,” Bill said, leaning back and steepling his hands. Then he leaned forward and tapped the symbols. “Does this represent an atom? Are we sure of that?”
“Yes,” Admiral Avery said. “They consider it a transitional state, which is interesting. But it’s definitely an atom.” He spoke to Tchar for a moment and then shrugged. “Tchar said it’s the smallest possible atom.”
“Hydrogen, good,” Bill said. “What amount of energy is released when one of these atoms fuses into the next largest atom?”
Avery translated that and the Adar got a distant look. Admiral Avery explained that he was accessing their datanet.
“I wonder if it’s like ours,” Robin said. “One-third data, two-thirds pornography and singles sites?”
Tsho’futt made a hacking noise and translated the question. Tchar continued to look distant but the third Adar, who had not been named, said something.
“Announcements of tcheer,” Tsho’futt said in not bad English. “And much announcements of herbal remedies to prevent loss of youngness.”
“Tcheer is the reaching of bonding age of a sexual transfer intermediate,” Avery said, tightly. “Nonsentient. I suspect we just discovered what their pornography is.”
“The wonders of science,” Weaver replied.
Tchar spoke and Avery paid rapt attention.
“Tchar says that he can see where we are going and he thinks we can come to some conclusion on energy level translations,” Avery said. “When we have those, we might have a measurement of their weapon’s yield. And he’s willing to let us know what theirs are if we tell them what ours are.”
“Ouch,” Bill said. “We’ll get the materials but the rest we’ll have to kick upstairs.”
* * *
Three hectic hours later they had a measurement.
“Ten megatons, give or take,” Bill said, looking up from the calculator on his laptop. “I wonder if it’s straight geometric progression or nonlinear or what?”
He and Tchar had spent most of the time, with Avery as an interpreter, discussing the formation of bosons and boson gates and their characteristics. They had come to a mutual understanding of muons, neutrons, neutrinos and quarks. Because they weren’t generated by inactive bosons or nuclear weapons, quarks had been a little harder, but Bill was pretty sure they were talking about the same particles. They’d also discussed, badly, quantum mechanics. Bill got the impression it was as insanity causing for Adar as for humans.
The French physicist, Dr. Bernese, had turned up and had joined in the discussion for a while and then politely excused himself as it turned to weaponry. He was a firm member of the nuclear disarmament committee and while he appreciated the current necessity he deplored actually discussing them.
Bill, on the other hand, had, without getting into anything that would violate security, discussed them with wholehearted abandon. The Adar, it turned out, did not use fission-fusion devices but something else. Tchar was somewhat reluctant to specify what it was but he noted that the results that Bill described from the gate room might, in fact, have been the same thing. Bill was pretty sure that the thing in the gate room had been an antimatter containment system, but when he brought up the subject of antimatter, after having a tough time explaining it, Tchar had been more than happy to discuss the material. Ergo, it was not their weapon system.
Antimatter was the reverse of normal matter; at its most basic a positron was an electron that had a positive, instead of a negative, charge. Antimatter that was placed in contact with regular matter would explode, violently. Both it and the regular matter it encountered immediately transmitted into energy. It had been produced, in minuscule quantities, in the big matter-accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. Minuscule being individual antiprotons and antihydrogen. Producing it wasn’t actually all that difficult, but storing it for any amount of time used up so much energy that the final output was a negative.
Bill had postulated that the thing in the gateway had been a carrier for antimatter. Positrons could be kept from contact with regular matter by inducing a magnetic field around them, generally called a containment bottle. The thing had looked like some sort of containment bottle, if such was made by a species that used biology instead of mechanical devices.
But Tchar had hinted that there was something else, something more powerful as an explosive than antimatter. And the Adar had it. In sufficient quantity to use it as a weapon.
“Something like that would be a tremendous fuel source,” Bill said, dangling for information.
“It was what I was working on before we opened the first gate,” Tchar said, then changed the subject.
The Adar had formed the bosons with the purpose of creating gates for transportation on their own world. They had just about exhausted their easily worked areas of fossil fuels and relied heavily on nuclear fission power to provide motive transport. Even the suborbital rockets that they used instead of most aircraft were powered by nuclear fission. But it had the same byproducts that it did anywhere; spent fuel rods that even when recycled left behind unusable radioactive byproducts that had to be stored for centuries. The Adar did not seem to have the, often irrational, human fear of nuclear power and its byproducts, however. Or, at least, Tchar wasn’t letting on if they did. The one thing Bill had decided in the three hours was that, besides being a crackerjack physicist, Tchar would have made one hell of a poker player.
But finally the measurements were completed as were the calculations.
“They used the same weapon, every time?” Bill asked.
Avery did not seem to have minded three hours of translation, sometimes very esoteric translation. The old admiral was as fresh as when they had started. If anything, he looked more enlivened by the conversation.
“They did,” he said to Tchar’s reply. “The suggestion was made after the first to vary the power to determine if the portals stayed down for more or less time but the Unitary Council, their Cabinet if you will, did not want to take the chance.”
“And we don’t know what the output was on the Dreen side,” Bill mused. “Okay, Tchar, Tsho’futt, Mr. Unintroduced, I thank you for your information. Can I tell you anything we’ve missed?”
Avery translated this and then shrugged. “I don’t think we have anything they want in the way of information. Except data about boson formation beyond what we can translate.”
“I’ve got one more thing to cover,” Bill said. “But, with the permission of the Adar, I’d like to only discuss it with Tchar and for him to be willing and able to keep it to himself for the time being. It does not relate directly to security of either of our worlds but to… the philosophy of physics.”
Avery frowned but translated the request. There was a discussion among the Adar and then Tchar spoke.
“The one who has not been introduced,” Avery said, “requires that he stay. Are you familiar with the Japanese method of negotiation?”
“No,” Bill said. “I’ve dealt with Russians before…”
“Scientist,” the unintroduced Adar said, suddenly. “And linguist.”
“I want to express that the following information is known to very few people,” Bill said. “Our President, his national security advisor and the secretary of defense. Besides those persons, I have told no one else. And despite the fact that it appears that it has security implications because of the personages involved, I’m certain it does not. It does, however, I believe, relate to the physics of boson formation and gates. And I would be willing to discuss it with you. If you understand the importance of securing the information carefully.”
The Adar discussed this again and then Tsho’futt got up and left the room.
“Your artass will leave or stay?” Tchar asked, pointing at Robin.
Avery looked confused for a moment then chuckled, dryly. “It had been assumed that since Bill was doing all the talking, Robin was his… control.”
“I hope not,” Bill said, looking over at Robin. “Got anything you want to tell me?”
“Only that I hope I get to find out what you’re talking about,” Robin said.
“Robin, you’re a great person, but…”
“The answer is no,” she said, shrugging. “I’ll figure out a way to drag it out of you. One day.” She picked up her materials and left.
“Does your artass wish to do the translation?” Avery asked, carefully phrasing the question to Tchar.
Tchar responded with a head motion that indicated negative.
“Admiral Avery,” Bill said. “I have to ask one technical question. What’s your clearance?”
“Sonny boy,” the admiral answered, tartly, “I was doing nuclear negotiations with the Russians when you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye. My clearance is higher than yours. You can judge for yourself the need-to-know but I don’t even talk in my sleep.”
“Sorry,” Bill said, chuckling. “Okay, here goes. The first thing to understand is that humans are subject to hallucinations.”
“I don’t have an Adar word for that,” Avery said then spoke to Tchar for a moment. “Okay, they have something similar. I think I can work with it, anyway, but it has religious connotations.”
“Well, so does this,” Bill said and then launched into a repetition of his experiences in Eustis during the gate malfunction. He didn’t leave out the fact that he had been tired at the time, up too long and wired to the max, perfect conditions for hallucination. He pulled out notes and referred to them, notes he had made shortly after his experience against letting anything get in the way of the memories. They were as close to verbatim of the exchange he had experienced as he could manage. Stuffed children’s toys were a bit of a problem but he had a picture of Tuffy and Mimi on his laptop.
When he was done the as yet unintroduced artass sat forward, turning his head from side to side and examining him critically with his third eye, which was high on the head as if to check for overhead threats.
“Wonder if you dream,” the artass said. The words were dragged out and hollow.
“Yes,” Bill replied, looking into the weird alien face and wondering what was going on in his mind.
The artass started to say something then spoke a word at Tchar who spoke at length to Avery.
“Human scientists try to separate science and what we would call philosophy or religion,” Avery said. “The Adar do not. They said that the one thing in your ramblings that made true sense was that, at our level, science and philosophy are brothers. To them, science, philosophy and religion are intertwined.”
Tchar looked over at the artass, who made a head motion. Tchar continued.
“Our greatest saints,” Avery translated, “experienced visions just such as yours, visions that asked them to open up their mind and explore what is reality. What is the universe? If bosons can contain a universe, who is to say that we are not experiments in some cosmic laboratory? Are we the result of one of the stuffed Tuffy dolls saying: ‘Let’s see what happens.’? Is God one? Is God omniscient and omnipotent? Or is God many researchers, searching to understand Their own reality? Are we made in God’s image as lab rats? Or are we, too, researchers, furthering Its quest for understanding? At our level of physics, these are viable questions, not to be dismissed. As you apparently dismiss them.” Tchar made another head movement as Avery completed the translation and then said something quietly.
“He grieves that you do not open your mind to the wonder of the universe.”
Bill, who felt that he had spent the better part of his life doing just that, was taken aback.
“Actually,” Bill said, shrugging, “what you’re saying sounds about right. But it’s less a question of the scientists than the religious persons. Most scientists at my level, who work with advanced physics, are just fine with God as researcher and us as assistants. Perhaps it is the way that God is portrayed among my people. Very few of the religious are scientific and vice versa. In early science, many of our discoveries were made by religious persons. But as time went by the belief structure of religion seemed to interfere. To most of our religious persons, if they think about it at all, things either are or are not. God made gravity pull to keep people from flying into space. That’s good enough. That attitude creates a good bit of friction, but the friction for physicists is simply that they won’t bow their heads to the unthinking and say ‘yes, you’re right about God and I’ll stop researching since it’s pointless.’ ”
Tchar looked over his shoulder but the artass was simply watching Bill.
“Then, perhaps,” Tchar said, carefully, “we should be talking to your religious leaders.”
“Good luck,” Bill laughed, hollowly. “Hope you don’t get lynched.”
Avery winced but translated the statement.
“This would happen?” Tchar asked.
“Probably not in the United States,” Bill admitted. “But if you went to Mecca and preached your word of God, you’d have your head taken off. And I don’t think the Reform Baptists would be really open-minded, either.”
This required a good bit of back and forth between Avery and Tchar, each explanation requiring more explanation. Finally the artass spoke to Avery and Avery nodded.
“They, too, have religious sects,” Avery explained. “But very few are antiscience although some are militant to a degree. One sect provides the bulk of their fighting forces. In fact, as they seemed to indicate, science and religion among the Adar seem to go hand in hand. I think, once they get the language down, they could have a very instructive time talking to some religious leaders I know.”
“I will consider your words carefully,” Bill said, wondering if he could get his mind around God as a researcher. It certainly made more sense than “in six days he created the earth and then kicked Adam out of the garden for simple curiosity.”
Maybe that was it. From the very beginning, curiosity among the religious had been degraded. “Don’t eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or you, too, will be thrown from the Garden.”
He knew that early science had been heavily supported by religion. Even some of the urban legends surrounding “religious bigotry” about science were false. Galileo, for example, rather than being a victim of religious bigotry had been a victim of simple failure to rigorously base his conclusions. The theory of planets going around the Sun and the Moon going around the Earth required a theory of gravity and calculus to explain it. Since Galileo could not show conclusive proof of why his theory worked, the best scientific minds of his day, admittedly supported by false theories that had built up starting with Aristotle, dismissed his work as fraudulent. But it had been his inability to show a method, rather than pure religious bigotry, that had doomed him. That and the fact that he was a revolting son of a bitch.
The pope of the day had protected him from his detractors, but that was all that he could do. Galileo, himself, made it impossible to do any more.
For that matter, it was not those who believed that the world was flat who argued most vehemently against supporting Columbus’ mission that had found the “New World.” It was, instead, the best scientific minds of Isabella’s court, who pointed out that going west, instead of around Cape Horn, was an impossible distance, with the technology of that day, to India. They had determined the size of the globe and the distances involved and realized that Columbus would be out of food and fresh water before he was halfway there.
Fortunately, before he was a third of the way there he landed in the Caribbean. But they didn’t know that was there. And Isabella, the poor dear, was too stupid to understand their math.
Nevertheless, religious bigotry against science did exist. The Scopes Monkey Trial and continuing bills to try to enact “Creationism Science” as being on the same order as evolution. The hysteria about the current boson formation which was being supported and exacerbated by religious leaders.
He wondered if one of the first people to convert to the Church of Adar or whatever might not be William Weaver.
“I’ll think about it,” Bill repeated.
“Do,” the artass said. “Open your mind. Or we all may fail.”
Admiral Avery accompanied him out of the meeting room where they picked up a visibly curious Robin and headed back to the gate. When they were on the other side, and out of hearing, Avery touched Bill’s arm.
“I just figured something out,” Avery said.
“What?” Bill asked, wondering if Tuffy was really God. The Church of Tuffy. Somehow, it just didn’t have that ring. Tuffy’s Redeemed Church? Nope. He remembered the interview with Mimi’s aunt and thought about what that good woman would have to say if he tried to tell her Tuffy was holding God.
