The Genesis Machine

by James P. Hogan

  "That's okay," the caller said, grinning again. "No need to demolish the furniture on my account." His tone became more businesslike. "My name is Al Morelli—Professor Al Morelli. I'm a very old friend of somebody who, I understand, you've only just gotten to know—Heinrich Zimmermann."

  "Yes . . . ?"

  "I thought there were two of you." Morelli frowned slightly. "Isn't there a Dr. Philipsz there too . . . spells it funny?"

  "I'm right here." Aub moved round to join Clifford.

  "Great. Hi." Morelli thought for a second. "Heinrich has been telling me something about the work that you guys have been doing on k-physics. Sounds pretty staggering, to say the least. I was especially interested in the part about gravity impulses—you've actually checked that out?"

  "Not exactly," Clifford answered. "But Aub ran some experiments while he was at Berkeley that verified the predictions of sustained rotations. The gravity-impulse conclusion ties in closely with that part, so the signs are encouraging. That's about all we can say for now."

  Morelli looked back and nodded slowly as if satisfied about something.

  "Well, there's no need for us to go into all the details right now," he said. "Heinrich gave me a pretty good run-down, and if he's convinced, that's good enough for me." He paused for a second, then went on. "You've probably guessed why I'm calling. I understand you two guys are looking for jobs and are having a pretty tough time getting fixed up. That right?"

  "Yep. That's about it," Clifford told him.

  "Okay, I know about the reasons," Morelli said. "And I don't blame either of you for acting the way you did. I think maybe I'd have done the same thing. Anyhow . . . I run a research project for ISF. It's located in Sudbury, Massachusetts, at the Institute for Research into Gravitational Physics. You may have heard of it."

  "Heard of it . . . I sure have." Clifford sounded impressed.

  "Gravitational physics . . ." Aub sounded intrigued. "So that's why you were particularly interested in the gravity pulses, right?"

  "Right," Morelli confirmed. "But in more than just a casual way. From what Heinrich said, it sounds as if the work we're doing here could have a direct bearing on it."

  "What kind of direct bearing?" Clifford asked. "You mean you're working on something that ties in with the gravity aspects of my theories? That's fantastic."

  Morelli held up a hand to caution him.

  "Well, it's a bit early to say yet. Let's just say for now that I'm pretty certain you'd find our work at Sudbury interesting. Now, obviously, I didn't call just to talk about academic stuff. It so happens that I'm looking around for people who are suitably qualified and experienced in our particular field, and from what Heinrich said, I think you two might just fill the bill. I'd be interested in talking to you about it. Also, if you're in the kind of jam he says you're in, then . . ." He left the sentence unfinished but his expression said the rest. "Well, how about it. Interested?"

  "You mean there's a chance we might get into ISF?" Clifford sounded incredulous.

  "That's about it."

  Aub was gaping unashamedly.

  "Yes," he said after a few seconds. "We're interested." It was a masterpiece of understatement.

  "Fine." Morelli looked pleased. "How about two days from now? Could you get here by then? Don't worry about the cost or anything—ISF will fly you here and back, naturally."

  Clifford and Aub looked at each other, nodded, and turned toward Sarah. She nodded back vigorously.

  "Seems fine," Clifford said. "No problem there."

  "Fine," Morelli declared again. "I'll get my secretary to log in a couple of reservations and call you back with the details. See you both Thursday then, huh? Have a good trip."

  That night Clifford, Aub, and Sarah had another wild celebration out on the town. They drank to the future of ISF, to the health of German astronomers, to the ghost of Carl Maesanger, and to network freaks wherever they might be. But most of all, Clifford and Aub toasted the pure, unsuspected genius of a certain young English lady.

  Chapter 11

  Clifford and Aub caught the early-morning suborbital shuttle from Albuquerque to Logan Airport, Boston, where they landed just under thirty minutes after takeoff. Sarah was needed at the hospital that day and was unable to accompany them. They received a smiling welcome from Morelli's secretary, who flew them the rest of the way to Sudbury in an ISF airmobile.

  The Institute for Research into Gravitational Physics comprised an aesthetically pleasing collection of functional buildings, all clad in a mix of pastel plastics to add a splash color to the browns and drab greens of the surrounding pine woods. A large lake bordering one edge of the Institute's grounds appeared like a pool of liquid sky among the trees as they descended toward the landing pad. But better still than all these things, there were no wire fences and no armed guards.

  Morelli was a stockily built, energetic, and purposeful man, endowed, as had been evident from his image on the Infonet screen, with a swarthy complexion and deep-brown eyes that had evidently been handed down to him along with his name. By midmorning Aub and Clifford were seated in his spacious and comfortable office overlooking the lake, while Morelli told them something about the kind of work that he and his researchers had been engaged in for the past few years. He had described to them how, through the 1990s, he had worked in many areas of particle physics, his main specialty being the phenomenon of particle-antiparticle annihilation. Near the end of that decade he had discovered to his astonishment that he could set up an experimental situation in which particles could be induced to self-annihilate—to vanish without the involvement of any antiparticle at all. Even after Morelli had spent some time explaining how this was achieved, Aub still found it amazing.

  Aub leaned back in the deep armchair and gazed at Morelli with unconcealed awe. "I still can't get over it," he declared, shaking his head. "You mean you can actually produce conditions in a lab that cause particles to vanish—not just to annihilate mutually with an antiparticle—to do so on their own? I've never heard of anything like that."

  Morelli looked back across his desk with evident amusement. "Sure we can," he said, as if making light of it. "We do it every day. After lunch I'll take you to have a look at how we do it."

  "But it's fantastic," Aub insisted. "Nobody at Berkeley ever talked about that kind of thing. I never read about it. . . . How come the results have never even been published? Surely that kind of thing should have been published all over."

  "I was working in a government-controlled research program at the time," Morelli explained. "The whole project was subject to strict security. The details are no doubt filed away somewhere where nobody can get at them . . . you know the way it is."

  "And yet you can work on the same kind of thing here at ISF . . . where you're not under federal control." Clifford spoke from a chair beneath the window. "Seems kind of . . . strange."

  Morelli pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, apparently weighing his reply before speaking. "Well . . . we don't exactly go out of our way to broadcast what we're doing here. That was the first thing that I learned when I made the move—if you want to be left alone these days, don't attract attention."

  "But people can just walk in and out of this place," Clifford said in mild surprise. "I'm amazed word never leaked out. I mean . . . what about the people who work here; they never talk to anybody outside?"

  Morelli smiled the curious smile of somebody who knows more than discretion permits him to say.

  "You know, in World War II the English sometimes sent absolutely top-secret information through the ordinary mail, especially when they knew that the enemy was making great efforts to get their hands on it. It's a funny thing, but when something's sitting there right under somebody's nose and there's no attempt made to hide it, he often walks right on by . . . particularly if he's been conditioned to be neurotic about security. I suppose you could say that we operate along that kind of principle . . . in an informal kind of way. As for the people here . .
." Morelli shrugged as if to indicate that the point did not require elaboration. "Oh, they're pretty smart. If they weren't, they wouldn't be here." After a pause he added in a quiet voice: "You'd be surprised at some of the work that goes on around the world inside ISF."

  Clifford got the message that further questions on that subject would not be in order. It was time to get back to the main topic of conversation.

  "You were starting to tell us about your experiments here," he said.

  "Right." Morelli sat forward and cleared a space in front of him for his arms. "We've been running experiments on induced annihilation on a large scale for about a year now. The building you came past after you landed—you may have noticed the big storage tanks by the wall outside it—houses the equipment."

  "The whole building?" Aub asked.

  "Yes, it's pretty big machinery; as I said, we're working on large-scale annihilation here, not just small lab tests. Anyhow, the setup is essentially as I described a few minutes ago—we project a beam of particle matter into a reaction chamber where the annihilation takes place . . . induced by the principles I've described. Our main work at present is to measure everything associated with the process and to try to understand the physics of it better. I won't go into too many details right now—you'll see it all for yourselves before you go." Then he grinned. "You can see how hung-up we are about security."

  "What kinds of things are coming out of all this?" Clifford asked.

  "This is where I think you'll start to get interested, Brad," Morelli replied. "And Aub, of course. You see, since we've been running large-scale tests, we've discovered a remarkable thing—we can generate a gravity field artificially!" He paused and looked from one to the other to invite comment.

  "You mean that when you annihilate large numbers of particles, you detect a gravity field?" Clifford spoke slowly and thoughtfully; the implication was immediately clear. Aub stared incredulously at Morelli for a moment and then swung sharply round to face Clifford.

  "Hey, Brad!" he exclaimed. "That's fantastic. It's just what you'd expect from your theory. It's a part of it that we didn't even think there was any way to test." He gestured toward the professor. "And he's already tested it!"

  Morelli quickly confirmed what Aub was saying. "The particle beam is induced to annihilate inside a fairly small volume in the reaction chamber. When we wind the beam up to a relatively high intensity, we detect a well-defined gravity field around the annihilation volume. It's exactly as if there was a large, concentrated mass present there . . . which, of course, there isn't. In other words, the process simulates the gravitational effect of mass."

  Clifford and Aub were stunned when they recognized the connection between Morelli's work and their own. Clifford had already concluded from purely theoretical considerations that what appeared to be an annihilation of a particle was really a rotation in k-space—a rotation that shifted the particle fully into the unobservable hi-order domain of k-space. This event would generate a k-wave pulse that, projected into normal lo-order space, would be detected as gravitation; lots of annihilations together would add up to an apparently continuous field.

  Aub had already produced conclusive evidence of such k-rotations and his example had shown the sustained rotation—in effect, the continual annihilation and re-creation—of just a single, isolated particle, which constituted far too tiny and insignificant an event for there to have been any hope of detecting its supposed gravity pulse. Nevertheless, it had furnished positive support for the theory.

  And now Morelli, pursuing a completely independent track, had discovered a way to force annihilations in enormous numbers. Sure enough—just as would be expected from the theory—he had found that an apparently smooth gravitational field was produced in the process. Surely this could be no mere coincidence; Zimmermann must have known exactly what he was doing.

  "It's the theoretical aspects that have been holding us up," Morelli told them. "When I first stumbled on the way to make the thing work, I was trying to do something else entirely; it was mainly an accident. Since then, here at ISF we've refined the process, but we're still not too sure of what's behind it. We know how to make it work, but we don't know why it does." He threw his hands out and shrugged unashamedly. "I guess you could say it's been largely trial and error, a few inspired guesses, and more than a fair share of luck. Anyhow, it seems to work okay." He glanced from Clifford to Aub and stated what was by that time clear. "So when Heinrich told me about what you two have been doing, naturally I was interested . . . to put it mildly. He could see the connection too, which is why he got in touch with me. The rest you know."

  "That's what surprises me," Clifford said. "Zimmermann spotted the connection straight away, and yet nobody from the government—the Bureau, for example—has even followed it up, not even recently." Morelli pulled a face and inclined his head to one side.

  "I know what you're gonna say," he nodded.

  Clifford said it anyway. "They're getting all worked up about the paper I wrote, especially where I talk about annihilations. Also, they must have details on record of the work you did before you came to ISF—work on inducing annihilations. Yet they never put the two together . . . ? Seems crazy. They've got thousands of asses warming chairs all over the country. What do they do all day?"

  "It figures," Aub interjected.

  "They don't have records that talk about the gravitational simulation though, remember," Morelli pointed out. "That only turned up in the work we've been doing here. So they'd have nothing to suggest that the connection between matter annihilation and gravity pulses that your paper predicted might actually have been demonstrated experimentally."

  "Yes, but even so . . ." Clifford waved his hand in the air to indicate despair.

  "I agree," Morelli nodded. "You'd have thought somebody would have been on the ball. But . . . I guess I don't have to tell you anything about the way those balls of fire zip around the place." The irony in his voice raised brief smiles. "Anyhow, to change the subject back again, I seem to have been doing most of the talking so far. I'm supposed to be interviewing you about possible positions here, so why don't I shut up and let you tell me some more about yourselves and the work you've been doing together. It already looks to me as if you're just the guys to fill in where we seem to be falling short, but let's go through the thing properly. After that I'll take you along the corridor to meet Peter Hughes, who wants to talk to you both individually. He's Director of the Sudbury Institute, and nobody gets hired without talking to Peter. After that I've fixed lunch for the three of us."

  For about the next half-hour Clifford and Aub explained in detail the nature of their own work and its relevance to Morelli's experiments. As they spoke, Morelli became excited. From his comments, there seemed little doubt what the outcome of the interview would be. By the end of the discussion Morelli was speculating on a whole new branch of science that might grow from the pioneering at the Sudbury Institute.

  "In a way, I suppose you could say it's analogous to what happened before," he said, settling back in his chair once the serious talk was over.

  "How do you mean?" Clifford asked.

  "Well, take those guys in Europe around the beginning of the nineteenth century—Faraday and the rest—when they first worked out the connection between magnetism and electricity . . ." Morelli glanced from Clifford to Aub and explained: "Before then the only kind of magnetism that anybody knew about was the kind that occurred naturally—in certain types of rock, such as lodestone. Well, don't you think we're doing exactly the same kind of thing all over again, but with gravity?"

  "You mean they couldn't manufacture magnetism before then," Aub replied. "They couldn't turn it on and off or control it in any way. It was just . . . there."

  "Exactly." Morelli nodded. "It was just there—inseparably tied up with a chunk of matter. If you wanted magnetism, you went out and you dug it up. There was no other way." He paused and shifted his eyes toward Clifford. "But . . . when people started pla
ying around with electrical currents and coils of wire and that kind of thing, they found they could make their own magnetic fields artificially, and they could then control them—make them bigger, smaller, turn them on and off at will. . . ." He threw his arms out wide. "And out of their work we got the whole science of electrical engineering—and later on electronics."

  "And you think this could go the same way?" Clifford followed what Morelli was saying but this was the first time that his mind had been fully opened to the long-range possibilities. Morelli's enthusiasm for his work was irrepressible, his optimism, unbounded—which almost certainly explained how the project at Sudbury had advanced as far as it had without any firm theoretical understanding on the part of the researchers. It provided a stimulating contrast to the environment that Clifford had so recently left. He became aware suddenly of his keen desire to become part of ISF and of Morelli's team. It wasn't just the work that attracted him; he knew that here was something to which he could belong.

  "Yes, I think it easily could," Morelli told them. "Like I said, the analogy is pretty close. Gravity has always just been there—inseparably tied up with a chunk of mass, hasn't it? We've only known it in its naturally occurring form; if you want gravity, go find a big mass. There's no other way . . . or there hasn't been up until now."

  "But now you can make your own artificially," Aub completed.

  "That's right. We can make our own and we can control it . . . and we don't need big bulky lumps of mass to do it either. We can do it in a lab and in a way that's relatively easy to handle," Morelli said. "To me that adds up to all the beginnings of a whole range of solid, down-to-earth engineering applications. How does that grab you guys? Interested?"

  "Interested!" Aub turned to Clifford and back while he sought suitable words. "Just show me where I start."

  "I can't add anything to that," Clifford said. Morelli grinned and held up a restraining hand.

  "I wish it was that easy too, but let's wait and see how your interview goes. Peter's the guy you have to convince now, not me." He glanced at the clock on the wall opposite the desk. "In fact, we'll have to make a move in a minute or two. But before we go, I'll just tell you a bit about our latest experiments here—just to whet your appetites some more." The sudden change in his tone hinted that he had saved the best until last. The other two became instantly attentive.