Pierce spoke. “Polly, get me Base Air Traffic Control.”
CHAPTER IV
A helicopter took Pierce and Wigner from a remote comer of O’Hare to Fermilab, twenty-five miles west. From just under the early morning overcast, they could look down and see the burned-out neighbourhoods, the ruins of last summer’s riots. Strange, thought Pierce, that advanced scientific research could still go on under these conditions.
Wigner had said nothing about the purpose of the journey, but the spark in his eyes and the quickness of his step suggested his excitement. Pierce shoved his hands deeper in the pockets of his overcoat. The helicopter was cold and noisy. Wigner seemed not to care.
Fermilab looked superficially normal, but Pierce soon spotted the army posts scattered along the perimeter of the huge site. Roadblocks were up as well. Whatever was happening here, the military wasn’t being very discreet about it.
The helicopter settled onto a parking lot beside a drab concrete building, evidently built long after the lab’s glory days as an architectural showplace. Pierce and Wigner walked quickly to a side entrance to the building, a glass door guarded by a squad of riflemen and four dogs. A Green Beret captain, no less, inspected their passes and IDs before saluting and allowing them inside.
“What’s up, Eric?” Pierce demanded quietly as they walked down a corridor past locked office doors.
“Maybe the best news we’ve ever had. And certainly the strangest. I just know the outlines. My boss sent me to pick up some details, and I thought you ought to be in on it, too.”
The corridor opened into a foyer outside a lecture hall. Across the foyer was the building’s main entrance, its glass doors now painted over with whitewash. Six Green Berets in combat gear stood at each of the two entrances to the lecture hall; they watched the two hundred men and women in the foyer with dispassion. No doubt, Pierce thought, more soldiers patrolled the outside.
The people in the foyer drank coffee and ate pastries; Wigner lighted his pipe, though few others smoked. A hum of conversation filled the room: the noise made by alert, and intelligent people under stress. Too many people laughed.
The foyer lights blinked, as if this were some theatrical performance about to begin. The audience filed in past the Green Berets. Pierce recognized most of the faces: major scientists, mostly in physics, some electronics engineers, a few senior military officers with their T-Colonels beside them, and some of the most important people in the Civil Emergency Administration. Maybe half the people were Trainables, and some of those were part of the wailing-wall network. A few glanced at Pierce with curious smiles: What are we doing here?
Pierce and Wigner sat near the back of the lecture hall. The audience took up fewer than half the seats, creating an odd air of anticlimax — as if, thought Pierce, an important new play was a failure on opening night.
The stage at the end of the steeply tilted room was bare except for a couple of chairs and a lectern off to one side. A projection screen hung at the back of the stage. Without ceremony, a rumpled-looking man in a green cardigan stepped out of the wings and spoke into the lectern microphone.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Hans Neumann, and I am the director of this facility. I welcome you to Fermilab, and I have been asked to remind you all that this briefing has been classified Top Secret.” He glanced at a card in his hand. “Discussion of this briefing with unauthorized individuals will result in severe penalties under Section III of the Civil Emergency Act.
“Having said that, I must now be frank with you. We appear to have stumbled upon an absolutely new phenomenon here, a phenomenon that will have enormous impact on our understanding of the universe.”
Pierce’s eyebrows rose. Neumann did not have a reputation for that kind of language.
“The first part of this morning’s conference will be a briefing by the discoverer of the phenomenon,” the director went on. “After that we will discuss the implications, and you are invited to take an active part. Here is Mr. Richard Ishizawa.”
A patter of applause rose from the audience as a young man came onto the stage and shook Neumann’s hand. The young man wore an undistinguished grey suit and maroon tie, and carried a folder of notes under his arm. He looked a little nervous as he settled his notes on the lectern and adjusted the microphone.
“Thank you, Dr. Neumann. Good morning. I should explain that I am a doctoral student doing research here. We have been working on ways to isolate quarks more readily, but I will not go into the details of my project, especially since it seems beside the point now.”
Pierce found himself mildly disappointed. Ishizawa’s age meant he was un-Trainable, or at least un-Trained, and had, therefore, been toiling away on a single degree while people like Pierce and Wigner had already accumulated several. One had to avoid patronizing people like Ishizawa; they were bright and able enough, but inevitably handicapped.
Ishizawa explained how he had set up a hyper-magnetic field in Cave 9 of the Superconducting Supercollider, and showed a couple of slides of the apparatus. Pierce could make out only a jumble of cables and magnets in a small concrete room. The generator of the hyper-magnetic field was a shiny metal ring perhaps two meters in diameter and ten centimetres thick.
“On October 22,” Ishizawa said, “we activated the field for the first time. The beam was to be diverted into Cave 9 and focused through the field to the target. Instead, the experiment was aborted. Next slide, please.”
The concrete room was full of flying dust and dark scraps, and the light seemed different. Pierce saw that the circular arch of the field generator was now the frame of an irregular sequence of light and dark verticals.
“The vacuum in the cave was implosively breached by air at normal pressure,” said Ishizawa. “We were lucky that the equipment wasn’t damaged more seriously than it was. I saw what happened on the monitors and shut down the experiment at once. We went to the cave to see what had happened, and found it heavily contaminated by biological materials — chiefly soil, tree branches, and vegetation.
“I looked at the photographs that had been taken at the moment of activation, and I saw these.” Ishizawa took a couple of steps toward the projection screen and used a pointer to tap within the circle of the field generator. “I realized that they must be trees.”
Pierce caught his breath, furious with himself for not having noticed it before.
“Well, we looked at all this stuff on the floor of the cave — dirt, leaves, bits of bark and stuff — and we realized something else. It was summer vegetation. And it was fresh. It couldn’t have been some practical joke or hoax. Something had happened when we turned on the field.”
He took a sip of water. Pierce saw that he was not just nervous. Another emotion held Ishizawa: exaltation.
“We decided to tum on the field again, without evacuating the cave, just to see what would happen. I had a Polaroid with me, and I took some pictures. Next slide, please.”
Within the circle of the generator stood a dense grove of trees. Sunlight was filtering through them, turning leaves into patches of gold. Several trees showed freshly broken branches, and the nearest had patches of bark missing.
Ishizawa called for three more slides; each was of the same scene, from slightly closer than the shot before. The last showed a human hand gripping the stump of one of the severed branches.
“We kept the field on for about forty seconds,” said Ishizawa. “At the end I took that last picture of my own hand holding a branch on the other side of the field. Then we started running out of power, and I closed down.”
The screen went dark and attention returned to Ishizawa.
“We weren’t sure what we’d discovered,” he said. “First, we called it a topological singularity, since it certainly didn’t seem to be part of the local topology. Then we decided it was a phase of reality that’s out of step somehow with ordinary reality, but just as real. A kind of temporal incongruity. When I looked at the pictures I’d taken, and I
thought about what we’d seen when the held was on, I thought it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen, and it deserved a beautiful name. So, I called it Beulah.”
Ishizawa looked at his listeners’ blank faces and patiently spelled the word. “It’s a name from the Bible, but I got it from the poetry of William Blake.”
Pierce was annoyed. Poetry was a minor part of most people’s Training, including his, and he knew Blake only as a name and a set of dates and titles. Yet this un-Trainable knew Blake well enough to quote him.
“Well,” said Ishizawa, “I took my Polaroids to Dr. Neumann, and my team and I explained what they meant. I’m grateful that he didn’t kick us out of his office.” Laughter rippled around the theatre. “Instead, he authorized us to pursue the phenomenon with all the resources he could give us. We moved the field generator into a lab and did a lot of planning. Then we conducted our first serious probe of Beulah.”
The screen now showed a holotape. The camera had been mounted, Ishizawa explained, on a robot tank borrowed from the Chicago SWAT team. The activation of the field was shown in sharp and dizzying detail. The cement-block wall of the lab, painted off-white, stood a couple of feet beyond the generator. Suddenly the wall vanished; within the circle of the generator, colours shimmered like the film of a soap bubble. Then they, too, were gone. The light in the lab changed. Inside the circle was a view of trees again, their branches swaying as air pressure equalized, but they were illuminated only by the lights in the lab: it was night on Beulah. A ramp had been built up from the floor of the lab to the lower rim of the field generator; whether by luck or calculation, the ramp met the Beulan surface almost perfectly. When the field was fully stabilized, the tank turned on its lights and rolled forward.
“The next part’s kind of boring,” Ishizawa apologized, but the audience sat uncomplaining through fifteen minutes of floodlit trees and underbrush slowly moving past the camera.
“The tank was on its own. We kept the field on for just a few seconds. The tank was programmed to seek out any clear space it could find, and then to return.”
The clear space turned out to be a recently burned-out patch of woods: a few blackened trunks stood amid grass and wildflowers. A porcupine stared at the tank for a moment, then turned and scuttled away. The camera panned through a full circle, then tilted upward and scanned the sky. Computer enhancement was evident here: the stars were unnaturally bright and numerous despite the half moon. Pierce saw the Big Dipper at once, although enhancement cluttered it with stars normally not visible.
“We were hoping to get a shot like this,” Ishizawa said. “The terrain and vegetation looked like temperate zone, probably North American, but we couldn’t fix the location until we got a look at the night sky. Then it looked crazy. We seemed to be right on this latitude, except that some of the stars were out of position. Finally, we gave it to the computer and asked it to make sense of it.”
He paused, evidently looking forward to what was coming next. “The computer said it was looking at the night sky over Batavia, Illinois, at 3:45 A.M. on July 6, 1787.”
Wigner evidently knew this much already; he grinned at Pierce, looking for a response. Pierce ignored him. Like most of the audience, he concentrated on the speaker.
“So, Beulah is like our own world, but over two centuries younger,” Ishizawa went on. He would have gone on, but a broad-shouldered old man stood up in one of the front rows. “Yes, Dr. Johnson.”
The Nobel laureate ran a hand over his bald scalp. “Richard, you seem to be telling us you’ve built a time machine and travelled into the past.”
“No, sir, not exactly.” Pierce admired Ishizawa’s coolness; Johnson was a famous scientific cross-examiner. “I said Beulah is like our world, the way two beads on a string are like each other. But going to Beulah isn’t really traveling in time, because it doesn’t affect our own past. If I went to Beulah and found one of my ancestors and shot him, I wouldn’t disappear or anything. I’d still be here — or there. But when Beulah’s timeline reached the late twentieth century, two hundred years from now, no one named Richard Ishizawa would exist.”
“So you’re suggesting that a complete universe, over two centuries behind us, exists on the other side of this field of yours. With everything just as it was when our world was back in 1787.”
“Pretty much so. We’ve kicked around the implications a little, and it seems likely that Beulah isn’t exactly the same as our universe. The uncertainty principle might occasionally cause subatomic events to go in a slightly different direction on Beulah, but in most cases we’d never notice. Maybe one of those trees had a slightly different genetic makeup than its equivalent on Earth. We’d have to do a lot of research to find that kind of difference.”
“But you could get a cascade effect, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir. If enough subatomic events went a different way, you might end up with a whole new individual here and there, and that could change the course of Beulah’s history. So far we haven’t found any examples of such a change. Of course, we’ve been aware of this phenomenon for just a few weeks.”
Johnson was still standing. “We’ve been using hyper-magnetic fields for a couple of years now, and no one else has obtained your results. Why not?”
“Our generator is defective.” More laughter, slightly nervous, erupted from the listeners. “We looked it over very carefully and found a failure in one of the microcircuits. A lot seems to depend on precise field intensities as well. By sheer luck, the generator was calibrated to the exact intensity signature of Beulah. Otherwise, we probably would have had nothing but a failed experiment.”
“What else have you done besides send a tank through?” someone called out.
“I’ve gone myself, with my colleague Dave Emerson.” He pointed to another young man in the front row, who stood smiling to receive a round of applause that began tentatively — the audience was still absorbing the implications of Ishizawa’s answer — and ended with a roar.
The next holotape showed the two men, in hiking gear, stepping through the field into a sunny morning. Emerson carried a holocam and used it well. The sounds of Beulah were perfectly clear: a birdsong, the men’s laconic comments, the splash of a brook over stones, boots scuffing through underbrush. They passed through the clearing where the tank had stopped, and continued for several minutes until the woods ended on the bank of a slow-flowing creek. On the opposite bank trees were sparser, and open meadows gleamed in the morning sun.
“It’s even more beautiful than it looks,” said Ishizawa. “Clean, peaceful, green. We didn’t want to come back.”
When the tape ended, silence fell for a moment. Ishizawa cleared his throat. “Actually, we’ve sent people through to Beulah four — no, five times, now. Dave spent three days there on one trip. We can give you the details if you want them, but it’s pretty much the same as what you’ve already seen. No one’s gone far enough to make contact with people, but Dave’s seen smoke from their campfires. And he found a deserted camp with some broken pottery. Made in Birmingham, England, and definitely made in the 1760s.”
A short, plump man raised his hand. Pierce recognized him as a senior bureaucrat in the Civil Emergency Administration.
“So, there’s a whole new world, clean and empty, just waiting.”
“It’s clean, but it’s not empty. The natives include people like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. George Washington will be elected president in two years.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Ishizawa. Compared to today’s population levels, your Beulah is virtually deserted. We could put millions of people into it without even disturbing the natives. We could grow crops in land that hasn’t been poisoned, drill for oil and hit it every time because we’d know where it was. If the natives objected, I think we could negotiate mutually satisfactory agreements. Good heavens, we can cure most of their diseases, offer them advanced technology. They’d be fools not to agree.”
Pierce saw
the men and women in the lecture hall begin to stir uneasily. The bureaucrat had said what they had already realized, but to hear it spoken made them uncomfortable. In less than two hours, they had gone from ignorance to astonishment to rapid calculation of how to exploit this windfall. Yet they did so also knowing how the empires of the past, struggling to sustain themselves on a path of mindless growth, had destroyed simpler societies. Ishizawa had said one could not go back and murder one’s ancestors, but in a sense one could. The infant American republic on Beulah was strong and would eventually grow into an empire mighty even in decay, but contact with the future would kill the republic almost instantly. How could Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton function, knowing what their fates would have been, knowing the verdict of history? How could Beulan social institutions survive the onslaught of advanced technology and newcomers determined to impose their own values?
Pierce shared the uneasiness of the others. No doubt the un-Trainables were feeling the political equivalents of filial piety and parricide; for himself and his Trainable colleagues, that was not the issue. Patriotism was a fool’s religion, a crude social bonding device that defeated itself by inciting violence and inviting reprisal. If Beulah could give Pierce a chance to save his people, he would seize that chance and let the Beulan Americans cope as best they could. What made Pierce uneasy was the quickness with which he had come to that conclusion.
“I understand your feelings,” Ishizawa said quietly to the bureaucrat. “It may be a little premature to see Beulah as an escape hatch. First of all, we could fill it with people to our present population levels in a very short time, and then we’d be back where we started. What’s more, Beulah may have some unexpected hazards. You mentioned supplying the Beulans with cures for disease. I’ll bet we lack immunity to many common diseases there, diseases that are brand new as far as our immune systems are concerned because we only have to deal with the evolved versions of them. We could spread those diseases awfully quickly and give the Beulans our diseases as well.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 5
