The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  Morelli’s questions were to upset Hammond, however.

  They weren’t so much questions, in the event, as a fundamental, reasoned declaration of opposition. The Italian may have been brooding Father Luis’s words too, reflected Richard, as an alternative to raking over last night’s embers—yet it was plain that he’d done his scientific spadework before ever arriving in Mezapico. Now he addressed Hammond as an equal—as though they were co-participants in the Seattle Conference—an approach that plainly dislocated Dr Paul’s mental schedule. Recalling Paul’s dismissal of journalists as “uninformed”, Richard felt savagely amused.

  “I am thinking, Dr Hammond,” Morelli began his indictment primly, “about the value of believing in reality. You are in effect denying authenticity to the Universe, correct? Yet doesn’t modern Physics say that the observer plays a role in creating the reality he observes? That he is by no means neutral? I’m wondering if, let’s say, the Schrodinger Cat Paradox isn’t necessarily true of the universe as a whole? The paradox that we—the human race, as a consensus of observers—are every moment engaged in choosing the type of universe we inhabit. We must choose, and what we choose will come into being, so!” He snapped his fingers. “At every moment of every day we are collectively free to choose, so it is human practice that makes the world what it is. We participate. This isn’t marxism or mysticism, Dr Hammond—but physics, surely?”

  “You mean that crap about biological factors selecting the physical constants of the universe? To observe a universe at all, you need living observers—life—so a universe has to be compatible with the evolution of life. Otherwise no observers, hence no universe? The universe is as-it-is because we’re here? Yes, I know the idea. It’s a logic loop. It hasn’t got anything to do with the daily running of the universe. I don’t see what you mean by us choosing our universe every moment. Do vow, for that matter?”

  “Yes, I think so. There’s a very queer interface between reality and ourselves, let’s be honest. Things are by no means as plain as common sense might suggest. We participate, right? But what if the human race decrees an illogical, irrational choice? And our choice is incompatible with life and common sense? Then life can’t have arisen in such a universe, to observe it. We would be lost then, indeed! Erased by our own folly. For observable ‘universes’ are not illogical. Suppose we become irrational, will we simply vanish, leaving the owls and otters, deer and monkeys of the Earth to sustain reality, till a new higher intelligence arises? Or can we pull all reality down with us? This rare, beautiful reality!”

  His gesture took in the sun-battered landscape of Mezapico—the rocks, the scrub, the smoke on the plain, the sword-gleam of the sea. Briefly it seemed to Richard that this desolation was indeed transfigured, given a fresh coat of varnish.

  “What nonsense!” Hammond snapped angrily. “You’re confusing two entirely different things in the typical way of amateurs—Probability Theory, which only deals with the behaviour of individual atomic particles, and some Cosmic Theory of Parallel Universes, which is sheer mathematical speculation…”

  Be honest, there’s more to it than that, Paul, thought Richard…

  “Well, the Universe may reflect our own existence, okay,” Paul conceded, seeing how a bad impression was being made on the other journalists, who rather relished the baiting of a Great Man, though they resented the mauling of one of their own number. “But only in the sense that we wouldn’t see it, if we weren’t here. But that doesn’t mean we create the damn thing!”

  “No, I don’t think I am confusing things, Dr Hammond,” the Italian insisted, the thin passion of his voice a worm boring through stone with acid bites. “Probability Theory and Cosmic Theory have to be united, surely? The Universe is a unity, you agree? Your own theory—this Footsteps thing—is a unified theory, isn’t it? It dismisses atomic particles and galaxies alike into the same limbo, for the same reason!”

  Dr Paul nodded brusquely, half turning away.

  “Think of Schrodinger’s Cat, Dr Hammond!”

  “It’s hardly the place or the time, Signor Morelli, to speak of cats! I may be something of an authority on catastrophes, but I’m afraid your humble pussycat leaves me cold.”

  His joke failed to raise a laugh.

  “But this is the time, sir!” Morelli protested. “You have chosen to announce your news this way. And my readers don’t wish to wait another whole month for the proper scientific account. No indeed, sir, other reporters may prefer a glib dismissal of the Universe, not I!” Morelli glared at the blond, scarred reporter, who looked bored and lit a cigarette.

  “It is a reasonable question, Paul,” Max Berg adjudicated quietly, provoking Hammond to one of his abrupt chopped-off yawns: displacement behaviour for biting his colleague’s head off. Paul had pressured Max to put in an appearance, believing him safely tamed, and was now regretting it. “Personally I should like to hear Mr Morelli elaborate—”

  “Thank you,” Morelli acknowledged, in a singularly poisonous tone. “You will correct me if I make mistakes, gentlemen? I am after all only an amateur. So then, the great physicist Schrodinger asked what must happen if you lock a cat in a room with a flask of prussic acid and a hammer that will smash the flask automatically when a Geiger counter registers any radioactivity, correct? And beside this Geiger counter you place a certain quantity of radioactive substance, measured exactly so that there is a fifty-fifty chance that within one hour one of the nuclei will decay, thus leading to the death of the cat. At the end of that hour, what is the situation, mathematically speaking?” he demanded of Max, who was teasing his moustache hairs into his mouth, and tugging, with all the furtive defiance of somebody picking their teeth in public.

  Max chewed on the question.

  “We’d have to say that after one hour the total wave function for the room-cat system has a form in which live cat and dead cat are mixed in equal parts…”

  “The cat must be simultaneously both alive and dead, isn’t that so?”

  “Mathematically, it’s so,” nodded Max. “Of course in practice the cat either lives or dies…”

  “In practice, yes indeed! But what decides ‘practice’? That is what we must discover! So then, we can say this cat inhabits two simultaneous, non-interacting worlds—which are nevertheless both real worlds for the scientist. Thus the simplest event on the atomic level—the radioactive decay of one nucleus—brings a whole alternative dimension into being. And this paradox is at the heart not only of Quantum Physics, but the physics of whole worlds: of all reality!”

  “Schrodinger’s puzzle,” sighed Max. “You take it to its logical conclusion, you end up with every quantum event in the whole universe giving rise to copies of the entire universe every moment—”

  “Including copies of the Earth, including copies of ourselves! Including even—nonsense universes?”

  “An infinity of universes branching into being every second, oy veh… Alice in Wonderland is simpler.” Max shrugged. “But it’s plausible, mathematically—”

  “There was one creation of one universe,” thundered Paul Hammond, “by a God who has departed. Our observations indicate this indisputably, Morelli.”

  “But Dr Hammond,” Morelli insisted, “of course there is always one universe—for the observer! Yet universes are branching into being all the time, your colleague has said so. What is it that decides which way we shall branch? Which universe we shall continue in? Is it sheer chance? Why, then our universe could turn into nonsense any moment—for some of the set of universes that are generated must surely be irrational universes, where time may flow backwards, where light is slower than sound, where the law is that there is no law! Observerless universes. What keeps us on a rational track? I submit that it is the human act of choice, human practice, that upholds reality, as surely as human choice slays or saves Schrodinger’s Cat. The determining factor in the cat paradox is the consciousness of the observer—that is the only active variable, yes?”

  Max tore at his
moustache, and nodded grimly.

  “So then, the observer triggers the choice. He determines what situation shall exist. Well, as below, so above. As on the microscopic level, so on the telescopic! I say the world remains as it is because of the consensus belief of all the human race that a table is a table, that the night is dark, that reality has a certain form.”

  Paul Hammond snorted.

  “You might as well say that for as long as people thought the Earth was flat and the Sun went round it, that was the case!”

  “I’m not speaking about mythologies, sir, I mean the general grassroots texture of reality…”

  “So what made the choice for us, pray, before the human race evolved?” queried Hammond archly. “Eh, answer that?”

  “Other life forms maybe,” Morelli muttered mysteriously.

  “What life forms?” hooted Hammond. “Aliens? Or dinosaurs? Before the first unicellular organism even appeared on the scene, what made it tick, eh? For billions of years, too!”

  “Maybe the inertia of nature? Maybe inertia prevails until there are observers? Surely the appearance of intelligence, of life itself, overturns one prime rule of the universe—of entropy, of progressive disorder, doesn’t it? So life and intelligence ought not to come about. It is irrational. That may be the critical, and random, event that locks our universe into place as a participatory one. When the first molecule became a message, arbitrarily—generating the branch towards vital organization, no? After that, a principle of conservation of rationality prevails, unless the participant totally betrays it! No one can explain why life was. Yet in becoming proto-life, that first molecule switched the rules, and froze that change in place, in the structure of Being, statistically. And now that life is, what matters is the act of choice we make now. This is one of the few times in history, I truly believe, when consensus reality is both unified enough, and frail enough, to fall!”

  Yawning violently, Hammond clapped his jaw shut—a lizard gulping a fly. Morelli wasn’t to be gulped, however.

  “You’re tampering with the reality of the human race, with this negative nihilistic universe of yours,” the Italian jibed. “You can even bring this falsehood into being, because our minds are so sick with worry and uncertainty. Then your universe will indeed be the Universe. And science—your science—will be the religion of that empty-hearted cosmos. You will be its—”

  “Quiet, damn you!” shouted Dr Paul in a fury.

  “—its Devil.”

  Hammond gawped. He had, indeed, been expecting the word “God”.

  A long silence supervened, broken only by a sudden flapping of wings as a vulture dropped from its high roost, thinking they had all gone away, leaving the rubbish pit free. Creaking with annoyance, it landed on another spar instead.

  Paul Hammond gathered his wits.

  “One prime objection to that rigmarole, my friend, even ignoring your amateur distortions of a thing as sophisticated as Quantum Physics—”

  “And how about you?” Morelli shouted back. “Do you expect the majority of people not to distort? Oh, you are longing for them to distort reality!”

  “Even disregarding your distortions,” Dr Paul pressed on testily, “this so-called branching could only involve changes from now on. From the now-situation. It couldn’t alter the past. It couldn’t alter the form of the Big Bang. Or before that. We can’t change the past, my dear fellow, only the future—”

  He turned his back on Morelli, gazing up at the Dish in a photogenic pose that several cameramen swiftly took advantage of.

  “I don’t know if it’s so Q.E.D. as all that, Paul,” Richard found himself saying, out of sympathy for the fierce eunuch Italian. “What happened in the past is only happening now from our point of view, here on this planet. Because the information is only reaching us now. So in a sense Morelli’s right, we are the current observers—”

  “Bravo,” laughed Morelli. “Thanks for small mercies, Kimble.”

  Dr Paul directed a gaze of blank dislike at Richard, casting him into non-existence; then hurried on to terminate the press briefing.

  “This is all quibbling over details, gentlemen. The basic facts are as I outlined. You’ve all received the xeroxed handout. I throw these ideas out into the world arena a month before Seattle, so that the world may reach its own consensus about my ideas. This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. Indeed the major breakthrough since…” He groped, visibly: his grin twisted and sickly. Theatrical makeup melting from his features in the heat? He wasn’t wearing any make-up…

  Einstein? Too close, thought Richard. Copernicus, too remote. I bet he plumps for Newton.

  “… since Aristotle.”

  Morelli was watching Richard with wry expectancy, having intuited something about the other man’s own sense of frustration from the incident in Ruth’s bedroom. He expected him to act. To stem Hammond’s arrogance. To attack his cosmology. Yet something stopped Richard from saying anything. Richard had internalized Paul Hammond’s nihilism—absorbed it into his bloodstream. Matter was nothing: therefore, nothing was the matter. Richard smiled at his cheap pun; then felt nauseated as hangover surged over him in a dazing wave. The world’s firm outlines blurred and smeared. The Dish spun round his head.

  To Paul Hammond’s intense satisfaction, Richard Kimble had fainted.

  For the majority of the newsmen, this only underlined the drama and awesomeness of the Hammond Theorem—that one of his own staff should faint at the implication, when these fully dawned on him.

  Fifteen

  “If only,” confided Orville Parr, as the black Toyota bore Gerry Mercer and himself, Muzhik and child, towards Kujirajima, “the kid wasn’t so damn cryptic. He can only quarter communicate even in his native Russian. So his vocabulary’s beyond what you’d expect of a six-year-old! Big deal. It’s still chaotic.”

  He lowered his voice, so that Mikhail would have difficulty hearing.

  “Somebody’s hidden a message in him for us to find.”

  The scenic highway, carved out of rumpled cascades of frozen lava, was scantily clad in pines and maples. Flashes of blue water gleamed through the trees, then a broad expanse of sea dotted with knobbly black islands and fishing boats flying bright red and blue pennants. A concrete parking apron held a tourist bus, with picnickers scooping fast mouthfuls of rice and pickles out of their lunchboxes. Thousands of disposable chopsticks littered the apron: a scurf printed with tyre tracks…

  “That’s why I don’t like this time limit,” Parr whispered. “I’d feel far happier if we had the kid in the States, and a few months to spend on him. The Soviets are trying to stampede us. Actually adjourning a fisheries conference when half the world’s going hungry, just to get a schizo kid and a half-wit muscleman back! They’re hoping we’ll dig out whatever they’ve brainwashed the kid into believing—and fast. Otherwise, whatever they’ve put into him won’t hold up long. And they know it!”

  “We’ve been through this a hundred times, Orville. You’re too…” Gerry hesitated, then stared mutely out to sea. Parr mentally supplied a series of missing words… sceptical; unimaginative; chicken… Which would it be?

  “I guess we have to accept practicalities,” he said quickly, to forestall Gerry. “Enozawa’s collective wisdom has given us a week to get something substantial out of the boy—and that’s all we’ve got to play with.”

  “It’s a damn shame we can’t take him anywhere, except in Japanese transport with a Japanese courier—”

  “What difference would it make if we could? You’ve got to face it, Gerry, we don’t pull the political muscle we used to.”

  “That doesn’t mean our hands are tied, exactly!”

  “No, you can still fly Russian kids you’ve fished out of the sea halfway across Japan and lock them up in air bases!”

  “You still sore about that?”

  But Gerry was arguing in whispers too, by now.

  Mikhail might (in Parr’s mind!) be a Russian agen
t speaking fluent English. Or might not. The Japanese chauffeur certainly did, and reported whatever he overheard to some ambiguous superiors. On that point Parr and Mercer both agreed.

  The Toyota behind them bore Enozawa, with Tom Winterburn escorting Chloe Patton and Herb Flynn from the San Diego Naval Undersea Center. They’d flown in the day before. Chloe Patton had an old acquaintanceship to renew at the Whale Research Institute on Kujirajima, apparently, with Dr Kato the Director. “She mightn’t be the brightest cookie in the world,” a voice had confided to Parr over the phone from San Diego, “but that old guy has a soft spot for her. She was on a transfer scholarship to Japan, you see…”

  Bob Pasko should already have arrived, earlier in the day, to brief Kato on the Nilin problem.

  • • •

  Kujirajima—Whale Island—is reached by a long bridge causeway jutting out from the fishing port of Matsusaki—Pine Tree Cape—to a rugged lava cone a half-mile offshore. The black Toyotas threaded their way along quays where tuna boats were about to set off on their long hunt in the Pacific.

  How gay they looked, thought Chloe—long bright banners running up the masts, white streamers fluttering to the quayside, where loudspeakers were jangling the Japanese hit parade over coils of tarred ropes and stalls of the comic book vendors, where families were grouped saying good-bye.

  Then they rounded a block of warehouses, and came upon tuna being unloaded from a ship newly returned. A refrigerated lorry gaped open at the back, to swallow the blunt blue cylinders the fish had been chopped down to. Ice-hard metal torpedoes skidded along the quay, veils of steam boiling off in the sunlight. The porters handled these frozen carcasses as fast as possible, booting them along or skidding them on their way with gaffs to the weighing platform by the lorry, which they were hefted on, and off again on to a forklift in a single bounce.

  Hundreds of browning mackerel dried in the sun beside more stalls, split open like fans on rows of lattices…