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Cornelius shook his head. ‘We didn’t expect success so easily. We just had to eliminate the most obvious possibility.’
She glanced around. ‘These are radio telescopes. Right? You’re expecting to pick up back-to-the-future messages by radio waves?’
Dan said, ‘We’re trying to build a Feynman radio here, Emma.’
‘Feynman? As in Richard Feynman?’
Malenfant was smiling. ‘Turns out,’ he said, ‘there’s a loophole in the laws of physics.’
Cornelius held up his hands. ‘Look, suppose you jiggle an atom to produce a radio wave. We have equations which tell us how the wave travels. But the equations always have two solutions.’
‘Two?’
Dan scratched his belly and yawned. ‘Like taking a square root. Suppose you have a square lawn, nine square yards in area. How long is the side?’
‘Three yards,’ she said promptly. ‘Because three is root nine.’
‘Okay. But nine has another square root.’
‘Minus three,’ she said. ‘I know. But that doesn’t count. You can’t have a lawn with a side of minus three yards. It makes no physical sense.’
Dan nodded. ‘In the same way the electromagnetism equations always have two solutions. One, like the positive root, describes the waves we’re familiar with, travelling into the future, that arrive at a receiver after they left the transmitter. We call those retarded waves. But there’s also another solution, like the negative root –’
‘Describing waves arriving from the future, I suppose.’
‘Well, yes. What we call advanced waves.’
Cornelius said, ‘It’s perfectly good physics, Ms Stoney. Many physical laws are time-symmetric. Run them forward, and you see an atom emitting a photon. Run them backward, and you see the photon hitting the atom …’
‘Which is where Feynman comes in,’ Dan said. ‘Feynman supposed the outgoing radiation is absorbed by matter, gas clouds, out there in the universe. The gas is disturbed, and gives off advanced waves of its own. The energy of all those little sources travels back in time to the receiver. And you get interference. One wave cancelling another. All the secondary advanced waves cancel out the original advanced wave at the transmitter. And all their energy goes into the retarded wave.’
‘It’s kind of beautiful,’ Malenfant said. ‘You have to imagine all these ghostly wave echoes travelling backward and forward in time, perfectly synchronized, all working together to mimic an ordinary radio wave.’
Emma had an unwelcome image of atoms sparsely spread through some dark, dismal future, somehow emitting photons in a mysterious choreography, and those photons converging on Earth, gathering in strength, until they fell to the ground here and now, around her …
‘The problem is,’ Cornelius said gently, ‘Feynman’s argument, if you think about it, rests on assumptions about the distribution of matter in the future of the universe. You have to suppose that every photon leaving our transmitters will be absorbed by matter somewhere – maybe in billions of years from now. But what if that isn’t true? The universe isn’t some cloud of gas. It’s lumpy, and it’s expanding. And it seems to be getting more transparent.’
Dan said, ‘We thought it was possible that not all the advanced waves cancel out perfectly. Hence all this. We use the radio dishes here to send millisecond-pulse microwave radiation into space. Then we vary the rig: we send out pulses into a dead-end absorber. And we monitor the power output. Remember the advanced waves are supposed to contribute to the energy of the retarded wave, by Feynman’s theory. If the universe isn’t a perfect absorber –’
‘Then there would be a difference in the two cases,’ Emma said.
‘Yeah. We ought to see a variation, a millisecond wiggle, when we beam into space, because the echo effect isn’t perfect. And we hope to detect any message in those returning advanced echoes – if somebody downstream has figured out a way to modify them.
‘We pick cloudless nights, and we aim out of the plane of the Galaxy, so we miss everything we can see. We figure that only one per cent of the power will be absorbed by the atmosphere, and only three per cent by the Galaxy environment. The rest ought to make it – spreading out, ever more thinly – to intergalactic space.’
Cornelius said, ‘Of course we can be sure that whatever message we do receive will be meaningful to us.’ He looked around; his skin seemed to glow in the starlight. ‘I mean, to the four of us, personally. For they know we are sitting here, planning this.’
Emma shivered again. ‘And did you find anything?’
‘Not to a part in a billion,’ said Cornelius.
There was silence, save for a distant wind rustling ink-black trees.
Emma found she had been holding her breath. She let it out gently. Of course not, Emma. What did you expect?
‘Crying shame,’ said Dan Ystebo, and he reached for another beer. ‘Of course experiments like this have been run before. You can find them in the literature. Schmidt in 1980. Partridge, Newman a few years earlier. Always negative … Which is why,’ he said slowly, ‘we’re considering other options.’
Emma said, ‘What other options?’
Cornelius said, ‘We must use something else – something that isn’t absorbed so easily as photons. A long mean free path length. Neutrinos.’
‘The spinning ghosts.’ Dan belched, and took a pull at his beer. ‘Nothing absorbs neutrinos.’
Emma frowned, only vaguely aware what a neutrino was. ‘So how do you make a neutrino transmitter? Is it expensive?’
Cornelius laughed. ‘You could say that.’ He counted the ways on his hands. ‘You set off a new Big Bang. You spark a supernova explosion. You turn a massive nuclear power plant on and off. You create a high-energy collision in a particle accelerator …’
Malenfant nodded. ‘Emma, I was going to tell you. I need you to find me an accelerator.’
Enough, she thought.
Emma stood and drew Malenfant aside. ‘Malenfant, face it. You’re being spun a line by Cornelius here, who has nothing to show you, nothing but shithead arguments based on weird statistics and games with techno toys. He’s spinning some kind of schizoid web, and he’s drawing you into it. It has to stop here before –’
He snapped, ‘If something goes wrong in the cockpit you don’t give up. You try something else. And then another thing. Again and again until you find something that works. Have a little faith, Emma.’ Emma opened her mouth, but he had already turned back to Dan Ystebo. ‘Now tell me how we detect these damn neutrons.’
‘Neutrinos, Malenfant …’
Cornelius leaned over to Emma. ‘The Wheeler-Feynman stuff may seem spooky to you. It seems spooky to me: the idea of radio waves passing back and forth through time … But it’s actually fundamental to our reality.
‘Why is there a direction to time at all? Why does the future feel different from the past? Some of us believe it’s because the universe is not symmetrical. At one end there is the Big Bang, a point of infinite compression. And at the other there is the endless expansion, infinite dilution. They couldn’t be more different.
‘We can figure out the structure to the universe by making observations, expressing it in such terms. But what difference does it make to an electron? How does it “know” that the forward-in-time radio waves are the “correct” ones to emit?
‘Maybe it’s because of those back-in-time echoes. Perhaps an electron can tell where it is in time – and which way it’s facing. And that’s how come the forward-in-time waves are the ones that make sense.
‘All this is analogy and anthropomorphism. Of course electrons don’t “know” anything. I could say, more formally, that the Wheeler-Feynman theory provides a way for the boundary conditions of the universe to impose a selection effect on retarded waves. But that would just be blinding you with science; and we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ He was smiling, his teeth white. He was toying with her, she realized.
Malenfant and Ystebo talked on, slightly drunk, eager. It seemed to Emma that their voices rose up into the sky, small and meaningless, and far above the stars wheeled, unconcerned.
Bill Tybee:
Tuesday.
Well, June, I had my meeting with Principal Bradfield. She’s still determined she won’t take Tom back.
At least I found out a little more.
Tom, well, he isn’t the only one. The only supersmart kid, I mean. There are three others they’ve identified at the school, and a couple more they’re suspicious about. That makes it a couple per thousand, and that’s about right.
It seems this is some kind of nationwide phenomenon. Maybe global.
But the numbers are uncertain. The kids are usually identified only when they get to school.
The Principal says they are disruptive. If you have one of them in a class they get bored and impatient and distract everybody else. If there is more than one, they kind of hook up together and start doing their own projects, even using their own private language, the Principal says, until you can’t control them anyhow.
And then there’s the violence. The Principal wasn’t about to say so but I got the impression some of the teachers aren’t prepared to protect the kids properly.
I asked the Principal, why us? But she didn’t have an answer.
Nobody knows why these kids are emerging anyhow. Maybe some environmental thing, or something in the food, or some radiation effect that hit them in the womb. It’s just chance it happened to be us.
Anyhow the school board are looking at some other solution for Tom. Maybe he’ll have a teacher at home. We might even get an e-teacher, but I don’t know how good they are. I did read in the paper there have been proposals for some kind of special schools just for the smart kids, but that wouldn’t be local; Tom would have to board.
Anyhow I don’t want Tom to be taken off to some special school, and I know you feel the same.
I want him to be smart. I’m proud that he’s smart. But I want him to be normal, just like other kids. I don’t want him to be different.
Tom wants me to download some of the stuff from his Heart for you. Just a second …
Emma Stoney:
Back in her Vegas office, Emma sat back and read through her latest submission to Maura Della.
… The antique treaties that govern space activities are examples of academic lawmaking. They were set down far in advance of any activity they were supposed to regulate. They certainly fail to address the legitimate needs of private corporations and individuals who might own space-related resources and/or exploit them for profit. In fact they are more political statements by the former Soviet Union and Third World nations than a workable set of legal rules.
We believe the most appropriate action is therefore to get our ratification of the Treaties revoked. There are precedents for this, notably when President Carter revoked the Panama Canal Treaty by an executive order. And to put it bluntly, since the US signed these Treaties with a single main competitor in mind – the Soviet Union, a competitor which no longer even exists – there is no reason to be morally bound by them …
Malenfant was picking a fight by building his damn spaceship, out in the desert, exposing it to the cameras, and daring the bureaucrats and turf warriors and special-interest groups to shut him down. That boldness had carried him a long way. But Emma suspected that Malenfant had had an easy ride so far; the bureaucratic infighting had barely begun.
Emma – with a team of specialist lawyers mostly based in New York, and with backing from Maura and other friends in Washington – was trying to clear away the regulatory issues which could ground Malenfant’s BDBs just as surely as a blow-up on the pad.
Space activities were regulated, internationally, by various treaties which dated back to the Stone Age of spaceflight: days when only governments operated spacecraft, treaties drafted in the shadow of the Cold War. But the mass of badly drafted legislation and treaties gave rise to anomalies and contradictions.
Consider tort liabilities, for instance. If Malenfant had been operating an airline, and one of his planes crashed on Mexico, then he would be responsible and his insurance would have to soak up the damages and lawsuits. But under the terms of a 1972 space liability convention, if Malenfant’s BDB crashed, the US government itself would be liable.
Another problem area was the issue of certification of airworthiness – or maybe spaceworthiness – of Malenfant’s BDBs. Every aircraft that crossed an international border was supposed to carry a certificate of airworthiness from its country of registry, a certificate of manufacture and a cargo manifest. So was a BDB an air vehicle? Federal aviation regulations actually contained no provisions for certificating a space vehicle. When she’d dug into the records she’d found that the FAA – the Federal Aviation Administration – had dodged the issue regarding the Space Shuttle when, in 1977, it had ruled that the Shuttle Orbiter was not an aircraft, despite being a winged vehicle that glided home.
It was a mess of conflicting and unreasonable regulations, at national and international levels. Maybe it was going to take a bull-headed operator like Malenfant to break through this thicket.
And all that just concerned the operation of a private spacecraft. When Malenfant reached his asteroid, there would be a whole different set of problems to tackle.
Malenfant didn’t want to own the asteroid; he just wanted to make money out of it. But it wasn’t clear how he could do even that.
Malenfant was arguing for a system that could enforce private property rights on the asteroid. The patent and property registry of a powerful nation – specifically the US – would be sufficient. The claims would be enforceable internationally by having the US Customs Office penalize any import that was made to the US in defiance of such a claim. This mechanism wouldn’t depend on the US, or anybody else, actually claiming sovereignty over the rock. There was actually a precedent: the opening-up of trans-Appalachian America in the 17th century, long before any settler got there, under a system of British Crown land patents.
But the issue was complex, disputatious, drowned in ambiguous and conflicting laws and treaties.
Unutterably wearying.
She got up from her desk and poured herself a shot of tequila, a particular weakness since her college days. The harsh liquid seemed to explode at the back of her throat.
… Did she actually believe all this? Did she think it was right? Did the US have the moral authority unilaterally to hand out off-world exploitation charters to people like Malenfant?
The precedents weren’t encouraging – for instance, the British Empire’s authorization of brutal capitalists like Cecil Rhodes had led to such twentieth-century horrors as apartheid. And there was of course the uncomfortable fact that the upkeep and defence of the British Empire, though admirably profitable for some decades, had ultimately bankrupted its home country, a detail Malenfant generally omitted to mention in his pep talks to investors and politicians.
Meanwhile – like a hobby for her spare time – she was, somewhat more reluctantly, pursuing Malenfant’s other current obsession. Find me an accelerator … With glass in hand she tapped at her softscreen, searching for updates from her assistants and data miners.
A candidate particle physics laboratory had quickly emerged: Fermilab, outside Chicago, where Malenfant had a drinking-buddy relationship with the director. So Emma started to assemble applications for experiment time.
Immediately she had found herself coming up against powerful resistance from the researchers already working at Fermilab, who saw the well-spring of their careers being diverted by outsiders. She tried to make progress through the Universities Research Association, a consortium of universities in the US and overseas. But she met more obstruction and resistance. She had to fly to Washington to testify before a sub-panel of something called the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Department of Energy, which had links into the President’s science adviser.
The problem was that the facilities and experiments required giant sums of money. The physicists were still smarting from the cancellation by Congress in the 1990s of the Superconducting Supercollider, a fifty-three mile tunnel of magnets and particle beams which would have been built under a cotton field in Ellis County, Texas, and would have cost as much as a small space station. And in spite of all the megabucks spent there didn’t seem to have been a fundamental breakthrough in the field for some decades.
Well, the news today, she learned now, was that the approval for the Fermilab runs had come through.
It wasn’t a surprise. She had found the physicists intelligent, prone to outrage – but also politically naive and easily outmanoeuvred.
She sat back, thinking. The question was, what she should do with this news.
She decided to sit on it for now, trying to squeeze a little more productivity out of Malenfant. Because when she told Malenfant they’d won, he would take the first plane to Chicago. And she had a lot of issues to discuss with him.
Such as the pressure Cornelius was applying for Bootstrap to get involved with another of Eschatology’s pet projects: the Milton Foundation.
The Foundation was a reaction to the supersmart children who seemed to be sprouting like weeds across the planet. The Foundation was proposing to contact these kids to make sure their special needs were met, and to try to ensure they got the opportunities they needed to exercise their abilities. No potential Einsteins doomed to waste their brief lives toiling in fields, no putative Picassos blown apart in mindless wars – no more ‘mute inglorious Miltons’. Everyone would benefit: the kids themselves, their families, and the human race as a whole, with this bright new intellectual resource to call on.
That was the prospectus, and it had sold easily to Malenfant; it fit in with his view of a future that needed to be managed, ideally by Reid Malenfant.
But it was worrying for Emma, on a number of levels.
Here was a report, for example, on some kid who’d turned up in Zambia, southern Africa. He seemed the brightest of all, according to some globally applied assessment rating. But did that make it right to take him out and dump him in some school, maybe on another continent? What could a kid like that, or even his parents, possibly know about getting involved with a powerful, amorphous Western entity like Eschatology?
And besides, what really lay behind this strange phenomenon of supersmart children? Could it really be some kind of unusually benign environmental-change effect, as the experts seemed to be saying?
Her instinct, if she felt she wasn’t in control of some aspect of the business, was always to go see for herself. She had to get out there and see for herself how all this worked, just once. This Zambia case, the first in Africa, might be just the excuse.
Of course it could be the tequila doing her thinking for her.
Africa. Jesus.
She poured another shot.
The journey was gruelling, a hop over the Atlantic to England and then an interminable overnighter south across Europe, the Mediterranean and the dense heart of Africa.
She flew into Harare, Zimbabwe. Then she had to take a short internal flight to Victoria Falls, the small tourist-choked town on the Zimbabwe side of the Falls themselves.
At her hotel, she slept for twelve hours.
The next morning a Bootstrap driver took her across the Falls, through a comic-opera immigration checkpoint, and into Zambia.
