Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  Then he got out a tape measure and measured from one tiny hole along the arrow and out onto the desk. “Nineteen centimeters this way,” he said, and entered “19” by holding the Z button down, same way you set an alarm clock. Then he measured across the front of the desk, from the other top hole, and said, “Sixty this way,” and entered “60” into X.

  He handed me a set of protective phones, just the regular things that you use on the pistol range, but with an extra pad of Swedish wool inside each. Then he handed me super-dark shades—welding—goggle, solar-eclipse dark.

  “You will want all of these. Are you armed?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because, once, when I demoed this thing to one of my security people, he was startled and drew his weapon. He didn’t fire. I was grateful for that, as, when he drew it, he pointed it at me. Since then I make a habit of telling armed people what they will see, first. It spoils the surprise but on the whole I think it’s better. But since you’re not armed, you get to have the full experience. Now, put the glasses and the earphones on. Watch this space.” He pointed to the empty spot he’d run his steel tape out to.

  In the dark blur of my peripheral vision, I saw him push the ACT button.

  It’s kind of hard to tell you what it was like, John. Put it this way: I once knew a guy, from a bar in Billings, who we all called Ed-the-Gun-Nut, like it was one word. Being known as “the Gun Nut” in Billings is kind of like being known as “the Village Idiot” in New York City; you really have to overachieve.

  Of course Ed hand-loaded, and had a dozen cute little insanely dangerous tricks that he’d made up, all of them things that would make any engineer or tech rep wet himself to see Ed doing. He was very proud of one he called the “blinder,” which was one of his already-way-overloaded rounds doped with powdered aluminum and a powdered oxidizer, to goose the temperature and pressure way up. It made a really hot, bright flash coming out of a .357 Desert Eagle, and Ed thought it would add to the terror of the guy you were shooting at. Plus, he said, the flash would blind him so that if you missed with your first shot, he wouldn’t get a shot at you.

  The few times I saw him fire one, it surely was blinding and deafening.

  As for terror, well, one day Ed the Gun Nut really terrified two buddies of mine when he was out plinking with them. Ed’s 357 Desert Eagle, having coped with all that extra heat and pressure one too many times, blew up and tore his hand apart on its way backward into his face. It got him a change of nickname, though, from Ed-the-Gun-Nut to “Clawhand Ed With No Teeth.”

  This flash and bang in the office at Xegon was about as loud and bright as one of Ed’s juiced .357 rounds—about like a welding arc for brightness, and maybe as loud as four or five simultaneous pistol shots. I jumped and yelled “Jesus!” and even Hale, who knew what was coming, lurched away.

  The flash had come from that space of empty desk, but it wasn’t empty anymore. The Gaudeamus box had appeared there.

  I could barely see Hale take off his goggles and phones—the tint on my goggles was that dark. I took mine off. “Touch the box, carefully,” he said.

  I did. It was hot, not kitchen-stove hot, but definitely hot enough to be uncomfortable.

  “So you set the position in centimeters and it goes there,” I said. “How fast does it actually go?”

  “Instantaneous,” he said. “True zero time. And it doesn’t go to anywhere in between; we’ve shown visiting generals and bureaucrats that it will go right out of a concrete box into a closed wall safe. It’s true teleportation.

  “When the Gaudeamus machine arrives in a space, no matter what is occupying that space, it all counter-teleports to the nearest point outside the teleported volume. So all the air that was in the volume of the box was instantaneously jammed into a one-molecule thick layer of extremely compressed air on its surface. The flash is what happens as that layer expands, and the bang is partly from that and partly from the implosion where the Gaudeamus machine was before.”

  “Can people ride on those?”

  “Probably. If we had a bigger one. Box number five has an interior capsule for biological specimens. So far two mice, about twenty goldfish, hundreds of bugs, and billions of germs have made the trip. No apparent harm, except that if you’re a germ on the surface of the box the heat is enough to sterilize it. So I guess so far it hasn’t killed anything bigger than a single-celled organism.”

  “So far?”

  “Well, one use for it is as a weapon, obviously. Send it into something denser than air and you get a huge explosion—we disposed of box eleven by teleporting it into rock under the Nevada Test Range, and the next day the arms control people were all over Livermore and Los Alamos, accusing them of conducting a nuclear test in violation of the moratorium.

  “For that matter, send it into the world leader of your choice’s head or chest and you get flying stew. Theoretically if you jump it into the core of a neutron star, all those trillions of tons of neutronium that would take up the same volume would end up as an even thicker film of neutronium on the surface and you’d have a major starquake. Right now the reason we can’t try that out is that we’d have to wait decades or centuries for the light to get here so that we could see the starquake happen.

  “No doubt you can see how many uses there are for this, militarily. As long as your rangefinder is good enough, you could teleport a block of explosives into a tank, a plane, an ammo dump—or an incoming missile. A miniaturized Gaudeamus bullet could have a proximity fuse so that when it sensed something a meter away, it would teleport one-point-oh-oh-five meters forward, and reappear on the other side of armor or blow a meter-wide hole in a bunker wall. Or you could send Army Rangers into a hostage situation on an airliner with an unbelievable flash and bang to cover their arrival—you’d probably want them in thermal suits for that.”

  “This thing is bigger than the bomb,” I said.

  Hale nodded and ran a hand through the hopeless blond curly mess of his hair; he really looked like he needed to be home in bed. “And for all the spy scandals the Manhattan Project had, nobody ever actually knocked down Oppenheimer and walked out of Los Alamos with an atomic bomb on his shoulder. But that’s what just happened to us.”

  He unplugged his desk lamp from the wall and said, “Now let me show you something less dramatic but probably more important.” He plugged the lamp into the socket on the front of the Gaudeamus machine and turned it on. The lamp lit, fully as bright as it had been from the wall plug.

  “That’s some battery,” I said. “How long does it last? How far can it jump on one charge?”

  “Not a battery,” he said. “You can’t charge a battery fast enough. Huge, very fast capacitors—that’s what most of the space in this box is—to capture the energy every time it jumps. The process of making a jump produces much more energy than it consumes. This lamp would stay lighted for many hours, basically till the charge leaked out of the capacitors, just on the energy from that thing jumping two feet. If we didn’t capture all that energy into the capacitors, the machine itself would have melted—actually some of it might have boiled. Set one of these to vibrate in place, for a few seconds every hour, and you can pull enough power out of that plug to run the whole Xegon facility. We did just that, recently, as a demo. You’re looking at the thing that replaces every motor in every form of transport from Segways to submarines, eliminates nearly all pollution, and probably takes the human race to the stars.”

  My first thought was trivial. “Can I take half my pay in stock options?” Hale grinned and was about to answer when suddenly an entirely different thought hit me. I realized why that flash and bang—and the box being hot—had seemed so familiar. “Uh—” I said, not sure how to ask this “—uh, do you think that you’re the only company that has the Gaudeamus technology?”

  Hale looked shocked. “Do you have a reason to think we’re not?”

  “Can Gaudeamus be used to send objects somewhere, rather than just sending itself?”
>
  “That’s a theoretical possibility, or so the scientists say. There’s a group working on it.”

  “And—this might be a really stupid question—can it be used for time travel?”

  “Have those documents leaked out?” Hale seemed to be in a near panic, so I figured he had just answered the question, and didn’t make him formulate his answer into complete sentences.

  I told him about my burglary of Lena Logan’s place. I figured if he’d been private, for a while, himself, especially in a shades-of-gray area like child recovery, he wouldn’t be too shocked that I’d done a little breaking and entering.

  If he was, he didn’t show it, anyway. He listened to my story the whole way through without saying anything, and at the end, he said, “Well, it’s certainly consistent with the idea that someone else has Gaudeamus, and they’ve been penetrating us, not to steal it, but to see how far we go—or maybe to send us barking up the wrong tree.”

  I nodded. “Look, here’s what I think. I think they’ve got a probably more advanced, definitely different version of Gaudeamus technology, which they use for purposes of their own. That flash and bang from your Gaudeamus box was like a bigger, slower version of the one from what their machine did to my quarter.

  “What I think is that there was a mini causal loop right then. That quarter went back one second in time—because one of the variables I set was a one, probably—and one meter up, and one meter behind me. When it reappeared it was carrying a big old load of energy, because Lena Logan’s team, whoever they are, don’t have your energy-absorbing system, so it popped out way hotter than that box did. Or maybe backwards time travel releases more energy. Where’s the energy come from anyway? Does this thing repeal the laws of thermodynamics?”

  “I have tried asking every scientist in the Q-tip that question, from time to time. I have a degree in physics, so you would think they’d be able to explain it. I am always lost after five minutes. They talk about Casimir power and zero point and neuroquantumistic effects interacting with neuroquantumological effects. And wave their hands. A lot. Would you understand more of it than I do?”

  “Only if they were quoting comic books or sci fi novels,” I admitted. “I’ve heard of Casimir and zero point. Some idea that plain old vacuum contains all kinds of untapped energy that can do a bunch of very weird things. And I never heard of anyone making a distinction between ‘-istics’ and ‘-ologies’ before and then saying they interact. All I can tell you is, I think the bang from the quarter reappearing startled me, one second later, into pushing the button that sent it back in time, and to me that looks like there’s some kind of conservation law operating. The bang and flash and heat are all consistent with the idea that the process makes more energy than it uses. Though why Lena Logan needed a supercomputer to control her Gaudeamus, and you just have a box—”

  “A lot of what’s in the box is hard-coded and not reprogrammable,” Hale said, “as a safety measure. My guess would be that it’s an engineer’s choice—allowing three inputs, instead of twenty-two, is a pretty good way to keep people from hurting themselves.” He rubbed his face; it seemed to me that every few minutes he looked grayer and older. “Look, at this point, you have already been worth your weight in gold; there’s so much you’ve picked up we wouldn’t have gotten any other way. Keep it up and—are you all right?”

  I wasn’t. I was having a feeling like that strange sexual hallucination I’d had while I was driving—well, except without the sex. And without the hallucination. This wasn’t the hallucination, but it felt like a hallucination trying to arrive. I didn’t know quite what it was, but I also figured I had already told Hale enough strange stories about me bending the rules, at least for the moment. “Uh, I’m fine, and I’ll explain later, but I just realized we absolutely totally got to get me out there working, as soon as possible,” I said. “Real quick, tell me how they took it.” The strange, itchy feeling in my head grew more intense. I had visions of a man stumbling around in the dark, mad at everyone, especially mad at Lena Logan, because they had made him leave the car so far away and he had gotten lost walking to it in the dark—

  I made myself concentrate on Hale’s story.

  As I listened, I thought that the job had been done by some very professional amateurs, or possibly professionals freelancing with no resources or backup. The whole operation didn’t absolutely require more than three people, maybe four or five would be useful but any more would be in each other’s way. Expenses were probably less than two grand, and the whole thing had run slicker than snot on a brass doorknob.

  According to Hale, here’s what happened:

  Norman Lawton, a senior NQ physics engineer in the headquarters section of the Q-tip, was working late, alone in the lab, planning to sleep on the bed in his office. This was not unusual. Some Gaudeamus experiments take as long as fifteen hours to run, and since they weren’t well understood, often an engineer or physicist would elect to sleep near it, with a bunch of detectors and alarms set, just in case something interesting happened.

  I recognized Norman Lawton’s name from his two visits to Lena Logan’s place during the time I was listening in. He was fifty-five years old and had bulgey toad-eyes, a petulant expression, irregular shaving habits, and one of those hanging bellies that looks like he’s hiding a giant spare brain under his navel. He had the manner and personal style of one of those janitors that reads the encyclopedia and the almanac constantly and will follow you down the hall late at night telling you all about the braided rings of Saturn or exactly how much the federal government spent on the designs for a nuclear dirigible, the kind you can only get rid of by taking a really long dump or asking them about their emotions.

  But maybe he was hiding a giant spare brain in that belly. Instead of being an eccentric janitor, Norman Lawton was taking up his space in the universe as a brilliant engineer with triple phuds, physics, chem E, and neurology. People in his shop called him “Always Right Norman.”

  He had four marriages in his past, none of them more than two years from license to final decree. What I could gather from my bug was that he was one of those very businesslike engineers that treats it as “the job of sex” and doesn’t seem to want to waste any time on irrelevancies like enjoying himself. Both times I had listened in on him with Lena Logan, he did what he was going to do (not much, very briefly), bought forty goddies, and left. That might have had a thing or two to do with his marriage record.

  His large frequent buys of goddies made me suspect that he was a low-level pusher for goddies someplace, but now that I knew they were sex enhancers, I was inclined to think that he just needed a lot more than most people.

  In midevening, about the time that I was buying my goddies from Lena, Norman Lawton had been sitting watch over a long-running Gaudeamus experiment, while typing up a technical paper about what happened to excited barium nuclei when they made a Gaudeamus jump. He was hungry and tired, and it was going to be a long night, so he ordered a pizza, something they allowed them to do because, as Hale explained, “it’s better to have a pizza wagon you can search come into the secured area, driven by someone who has no idea of what’s going on, than it is to have employees start developing smuggling routes, which anything or anyone might travel along.” He sounded like he really wanted me to say that’s the way to do things (after all just now he had every reason to be worried about his job), so I assured him it was what I would have set up if I’d had his responsibilities. He seemed to draw comfort from that.

  So old Norman lay down to take a nap till the pizza got there, since he knew it would be at least forty minutes—the facility is a ways out, even though the pizza parlor is in the just-off-base noncom strip. Also, it takes some time to get through security. Atom Bomb Pizza did it because Xegon will pay them a huge surcharge to do it; that was another advantage Hale derived from that arrangement—there was only one pizza place that would actually deliver to the facility, and only three approved drivers.

  The bad g
uys had some kind of surveillance on the connections between Xegon and the outside world, obviously. Nobody could possibly have had timing as good as theirs without that. And they had been watching the facility a long time, with people in place, because there wasn’t much of a crack to slip in through, and they went in and out mighty goddam fast, and without touching the sides. If they hadn’t committed a murder along the way, I might even have kind of admired them, in a purely professional way.

  There’s about seven hundred feet of access road, after the guard station and before the lab building, that’s not under constant observation. That seven-hundred-foot stretch is seen at irregular intervals, for maybe five minutes at a time, two to four times an hour, by an armed patrol in an off-road vehicle. There are three patrols, crew of two each, out at all times.

  Each armed patrol takes a randomized route through the open land around the facility, checking all the guardposts along the way and surveilling various blind spots like that seven hundred feet of gravel road. They are also supposed to provide backup for any emergencies at the facility itself, so “they’ve got a little more to cover than they should have, ideally,” Hale said.

  I agreed that he was right about that too. So far he’d been a smart, supportive guy to work for, old money Yankee or no, and I didn’t want to trade him in on an unknown, especially not right after he’d made me a verbal contract for more money than I’d seen on any six jobs put together before.

  The pizza car cleared the guard checkpoint just as it always did. Cheryl Tusson, the twenty-four-year-old single mother of two who was driving the car, stopped and kidded with the guard at the checkpoint (Paul San Luis, age forty-nine, a longtime reliable Xegon employee, who knew her from church) for her usual minute or two.

  Exactly one minute and fifteen seconds before the pizza car entered that hidden area, several widely scattered strings of firecrackers went off on the far side of the sandy hills to the west of the road, all at least a few feet off the ground. Two patrols were close enough to hear the bursts and roared over the low sandy hills to investigate. Just as Cheryl’s Celica, with its little Atom Bomb Pizza flag, slowed on a curve in the hidden area, a flash bomb, like the bright concussion bursts in an aerial fireworks show, went off one more ridgeline to the west. Both patrols headed in that direction.