Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Younger noticed her dilemma. “Don’t offer them anything. Gifts, money. A lot of people come here and try to give the shirt off their backs.”

  “Guilt.”

  “I guess. But you give one money, they all want it. They have no ambition, these fellows. They sit around with their beer and their four wives. They’re happy, in their way.”

  She remembered that Younger had talked about the baboon in the trash in exactly the same tone of voice.

  Mindi, the slim girl-child, now returned, carrying a plastic bowl of fresh water. She looked anxiously to Younger, and would not meet Emma’s eyes.

  If she was thirteen, Emma thought, the girl was of marriageable age here. Maybe Stef Younger was finding more compensation in his life here than mere altruism.

  It was a relief to climb into the car, to sip cool water and brush ten-million-year-old Kalahari dust out of her hair.

  That night, she had trouble sleeping. She couldn’t get the image of those bright-button village kids out of her head. Mute inglorious Miltons, indeed.

  On the way here Emma had done some more digging into the Milton Foundation.

  Milton turned out to be a shadowy coalition of commercial, philanthropic, and religious groups, particularly Christian. The Foundation was international, and its Schools had been set up in many countries, including the United States. The children were in general separated from their families and homes and spirited away to a School perhaps half a world away. In fact — so some journalists alleged — children were being moved from School to School, even between countries, making monitoring even more difficult.

  Not everybody welcomed the arrival of a School full of children labeled as geniuses. Nobody likes a smart-ass. In some places the Schools and children had actually come under physical attack, and there were rumors of one murder; the Foundation, she had learned, spent a remarkable amount of its money on security, and almost as much on public relations.

  And there were darker stories still of what went on inside the Schools.

  Emma’s doubts about associating Bootstrap with the initiative continued to grow. But she knew that until she came up with a stronger case for pulling back she was going to be overruled by Malenfant himself.

  She wished she understood Cornelius and his shadowy associates better. She didn’t yet grasp how this program fitted in with Eschatology’s wider agenda: the end of the world, messages from the future. She had the intuition that what they were seeking wasn’t just smart children, but something much more strange.

  And she wondered if that was exactly what she had found here in Africa.

  She stepped onto her balcony.

  Looking up at the stars, Michael’s stars, she could tell she was far from home. She recognized Ursa Major. But the familiar childhood panhandle shape was upside down, and its pointer stars were pointing below the horizon. And when the Moon rose, it climbed straight up into the sky, heading for a point somewhere over her head. Not only that, it was tipped up sideways; the Man in the Moon’s forehead was pointing north.

  But it wasn’t the Moon that was tipped; it was herself. She had flown around the belly of the planet, which was thereby proven to be round. It was a startling thought.

  I should travel more, she thought.

  How was it possible for a kid on the fringe of the African bush to figure out so much fundamental physics?

  If she and Malenfant had had kids, she supposed, she might have a better instinct on how to handle this situation. But they hadn’t, and the whole world of children, damaged or super-intelligent or otherwise, was a mystery to her.

  On a whim, she unfolded her softscreen and looked up the properties of gold.

  She learned that relativistic effects, the strange and subtle effects of very high speeds and energies, determined the color of gold.

  In light elements, electrons orbited the nuclei of atoms at a few hundred miles per second — fast, but only a few percent of the speed of light. But in elements with massive nuclei — like uranium, lead, or gold — the electrons were dragged around at a large fraction of the speed of light, and relativity effects became important.

  Most metals had a silvery luster. But not gold. And that was because of the strange high-speed phenomena Michael seemed intuitively to understand: relativity time-dilation effects operating deep within the gold atoms themselves.

  She took off her ring and put it on the balcony before her. The stars were reflected in its scuffed surface. She wondered what Michael had seen as he stared into her ring.

  When she got back to the States she discovered that Malenfant had found out about the accelerator project clearances and had holed himself up at Fermilab — where Dan Ystebo claimed, almost immediately, to have results.

  She flew straight on to Illinois.

  New York Times:

  From an unpromising grade school in a run-down neighborhood at the heart of New York City has come what may prove to be the most striking example yet of the recent wave of brilliant children ‹background›.

  A group of children here — average age just eight — seem to have come up with a proof of the mathematical statement called the Riemann hypothesis. This is concerned with the distribution of prime numbers ‹click for detail›. The hypothesis is something that generations of professional mathematicians have failed to crack — and yet it has opened up to a bunch of children, in a few weeks of their working together at the school in their lunch breaks.

  The result has electrified, terrified, astonished, according to temperament. The children at this New York school may the first to attract serious attention from the academic and business communities and the federal government as a potential national resource.

  And they have also become the first to require round-the-clock armed guards.

  The news of this obscure mathematical result has crystallized the fear some people seem to be forming over these superkids. Police were forced to head off a mob that marched out to the school: angry, scared, evidently with ugly intent, a mob that had even included some of the parents and older brothers and sisters of the children themselves.

  Emma Stoney:

  Fermilab turned out to be thirty-five miles west of Chicago, close to a town called Batavia. From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns. Disoriented, jet-lagged, she glimpsed Fermilab itself, the perfect circle of the collider ring set amid green tallgrass prairie, presumably replanted.

  She wasn’t sure what she had expected of a superscience lab like this. Something futuristic, maybe: a city of glass and platinum where steely eyed men in white suits made careful notes on super-advanced softscreens. What she found was an oddly parklike campus littered by giant constructions, like the abandoned toys of some monster child.

  This artificial landscape, the huge constructions, made a startling contrast with the bare bleakness of Africa. But the concrete was cracked and streaked with rust and mold. This was an aging, underfunded place, she thought, a lingering dream of a more expansive age.

  But here and there she saw the sleek, cool curves of the Teva-tron itself, a three-mile-wide torus within which subatomic particles were accelerated to a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

  The main hall was called Wilson Hall, a surreal sixteen-story sculpture of two towers connected by crisscrossing bridges. Inside there was a gigantic atrium stocked with trees and shrubs. Malenfant was waiting for her there. There were black stress rings around his eyes, but he was agitated, excited. “What do you think? Quite a place.”

  “It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.”

  “They rebuilt the prairie afterward, you know. They even have a herd of buffalo here.”

  “We’re not here for the buffalo, Malenfant. Shall we get this over with?”

  He grinned. “Wait until you see what we got here, babe.”

  He led her deeper into the complex, and into the cramped and jumbled technical areas. She found herself squirming past gigantic, unrecognizable pieces of apparatus. There w
ere steel racks everywhere, crammed with badly packed electronic instrumentation, and cable bunches over the floor, walls, and ceilings; in some places the cables were bridged by little wooden ladders. There was a smell of oil, shaved metal, cut wood, cleaning solvents, and insulation, all overlaid by a constant, clamoring, metallic noise. There was none of the controlled cool and order she’d expected.

  Malenfant brought her to what he called the muon laboratory. This was some way away from the accelerator ring itself; it seemed that beams of high-speed protons were drawn off from the ring and impacted into targets here.

  And here they found Dan Ystebo, wearing a smeared white coat over a disreputable T-shirt, hunched over softscreens spread out on a trestle table. The screens were covered with particle-decay images and charts of counts, none of which Emma could understand.

  Dan’s broad face split into a grin. “Yo, Emma. Have you

  heard?”

  “One step at a time,” Malenfant said. “Tell her what you’re

  doing here, Dan.”

  Dan took a breath. “Making neutrinos. We’re slamming the

  Tevatron’s protons into a target to make pions.”

  “Pions?”

  “A pion is a particle, a combination of a quark and its antiquark, and it is unstable. Pions decay into, among other things, neutrinos. So we have our neutrino source. But it should also be a source of advanced neutrinos, neutrinos coming from the future, arriving in time to make our pions decay.” “Backward ripples,” Emma said.

  “Exactly — hopefully modified, and containing some signal.”

  “How do you detect a neutrino?”

  Malenfant grunted. “It isn’t easy. Neutrinos are useful to us in the first place because matter is all but transparent to them. But we have a full-scale neutrino detector: a ton of dense photographic emulsion, the stuff you use on a camera film. When charged particles travel through this shit they leave a trail, like a jet contrail.”

  “I thought neutrinos had no charge.”

  “They don’t,” Dan said patiently. “So what you have to look for is a place where tracks come out but none go in. That’s where a Tevatron neutrino has hit some particle in our emulsion. You get it? You have a mass of counters and magnets downstream of the emulsion, and you measure the photons with a twenty-ton lead-glass detector array, and the results are storedon laser discs and analyzed by the data-acquisition software.”

  He talked on, lapsing continually into jargon she couldn’t follow.

  But then they started talking about the neutrinos themselves. Neutrinos, it seemed, barely existed: no charge, no mass, just a scrap of energy with some kind of spooky quantum-mechanical spin, fleeing at the speed of light. Spinning ghosts indeed. Most of them had come out of the Big Bang — or the time just after, when the whole universe was a soup of hot subatomic particles. But neutrinos didn’t decay into anything else. And so there were neutrinos everywhere. All her life she would be immersed in a sea of neutrinos, a billion of them for every particle of ordinary matter, relics of that first millisecond.

  At that thought she felt an odd tingle, as if she could feel the ancient, invisible fluid that poured through her.

  Now humans had sent waves rippling over the surface of that transparent ocean. And the waves, it seemed, had come reflecting back.

  Dan talked fast, as excited as she’d ever seen him. Malenfant watched, rigid with interest. “Essentially we’ve been producing millisecond neutrino pulses,” Dan said. He produced a bar chart, a scrappy series of pillars, uneven in height. “Anyhow, up until yesterday, we were just picking up our own pulses, unmodified. Then… this.”

  A new bar chart, showing a long series of many pulses. Some of the pulses, now, seemed to be missing, or were much reduced in size.

  Dan picked out the gaps with a fat finger. “See? On average, these events seem to have around half the neutrino count of the others. So half the energy.” He looked at Emma, trying to see if she understood. “This is exactly what we’d expect if somebody downstream has some way of suppressing the advanced-wave neutrinos. The apparent retarded neutrinos then would have only half the strength—”

  “But it’s such a small effect,” Emma said. “You said yourself neutrinos are hard to detect. There must be other ways to explain this, without invoking beings from the future.”

  “That’s true,” Dan said. “Though if this sustains itself long enough we’re going to be able to eliminate other causes. Anyhow, that’s not all. We have enough data now to show that the gaps repeat. In a pattern.”

  “This is new to me,” Malenfant growled. “A repeating pattern. A signal?”

  Dan rubbed his greasy hair. “I don’t see what else it could be.”

  “A signal,” Malenfant said. “Damn. Then Cornelius was right.”

  Emma felt cold, despite the metallic stuffiness of the chamber.

  Dan produced a simplified summary of several periods of the pattern, a string of black circles and white circles. “Look at this. The blacks are full-strength pulses, the whites half-strength. You get a string of six white. Then a break of two black. Then an irregular pattern for twelve pulses. Then two black, six white, and a break. Then another string of twelve ‘framed’ by the two black and six white combination. I think we’re seeing delimiters around these two strings of twelve pulses. And this is what repeats: over and over. Sometimes there are minor differences, but we think that’s caused by the experimental uncertainty.”

  “If it’s a signal,” Malenfant said, “what does it mean?”

  “Binary numbers,” Emma replied. “The signals are binary numbers.”

  They both turned to her.

  Malenfant asked, “Huh? Binary numbers? Why?”

  She smiled, exhausted, jet-lag disoriented. “Because signals like this always are.”

  Dan was nodding. “Yes. Right. I should have thought of that. We have to learn to think like Cornelius. The downstreamers know us. Maybe they are us, our future selves. And they know we’ll expect binary.” He grabbed a pad and scribbled out two strings of 1 and 0:

  111D101010D1

  0111110DD010

  He sat back. “There.”

  Malenfant squinted. “What’s it supposed to be?”

  Emma found herself laughing. “Maybe it’s a Carl Sagan picture. A waving downstreamer.” Shut up, Emma.

  “No,” Dan said. “It’s too simple for that. They have to be numbers.” He cleared his softscreen and began tapping in a simple conversion program. After a couple of minutes, he had it running.

  3753

  They stared. Malenfant asked, “What do they mean?”

  Dan began to feed the raw neutrino counts through his conversion program, and the converted signals — live, as they were received in the film-emulsion detector — scrolled steadily up the screen.

  1986

  3753

  1986

  3753

  1986

  “Someone should call Cornelius,” Dan said.

  Emma didn’t share Malenfant’s evident glee at this result.

  She felt dwarfed. She imagined the world wheeling around her, spinning as it carried her through darkness around the sun, around the rim of the Galaxy — while the Galaxy itself sailed off to its own remote destination, stars glimmering like the windows of a great ocean liner.

  Messages from the future. Could it be true that there were beings, far beyond this place and time, trying to signal to the past, to her, through this lashed-up physics equipment?

  Was Cornelius right? Right about everything? Right, too, about the Carter catastrophe, the coming extinction of them all?

  It couldn’t be true. It was insanity, an infection of schizophrenia from Cornelius, that was damaging them all.

  Malenfant, of course, was hooked. She knew him well enough to understand he would be unable to resist this new adventure, wherever it took him.

  And how, she wondered, was she going to be able to persuade him to do any work at all, after this”?r />
  3753

  1986

  3753

  1986…

  Reid Malenfant:

  The puzzle of the Feynman radio message nagged at Malenfant, even as he threw himself into his myriad other projects. He would write out the numbers on a pad, or have them scroll up on a softscreen. He tried taking the numbers apart: factorizing them, multiplying them, dividing one by the other. He got nowhere.

  Cornelius Taine was equally frustrated. He would call Malenfant at odd time-zoned hours. Mathematics, even numerology, must be the wrong approach.

  “Why?”

  What do you know about math, Malenfant? Remember the nature of the signal we’re dealing with here. Remember that the downstreamers are trying to communicate with us — specifically, with you.

  “Me?”

  Yes. You’rethe decision maker here. There has to be some simple meaning in these numbers for you. Just look at the number, Cornelius urged. Don’t think too hard. What do they look like?

  1986

  3753

  “Umm, 1986 could be a date.”

  A date?

  It had been the year of Challenger and Chernobyl, a first overseas posting of a young pilot called Reid Malenfant. “It wasn’t the happiest year in history, but nothing so special for me… Hey. Cornelius. Could 3753 also represent a date?” His skin prickled. “The thirty-eighth century… Christ, Cornelius, maybe that’s the true date of the Carter catastrophe.”

  Cornelius’s softscreen image, slightly blurred, showed him frowning. It’s possible, but any date after a couple of centuries is very unlikely. Anything else?

  “No. Keep thinking, Cornelius.”

  Yes…

  And Malenfant would roll up the softscreen and return to his work, or try to sleep.

  Until the day came when Cornelius, in person, burst into a BDB project progress meeting.

  It was an airless Portakabin at the Mojave test site. Malenfant was with George Hench, poring over test results and subcontractor sign-offs. And suddenly there was Cornelius: hot, disheveled, pink with sunburn, tie knot loosened, white gypsum clinging to the fabric of his suit pants.