A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books


Copyright (c) 1978 by James Patrick Hogan

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Ballantine Books of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: April 1978

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hogan, James P
The genesis machine.

"A Del Rey book."
I.	Title.
	1978	77-25166
ISBN O-345-275l9-5
Every child is a born scientist.
This book is dedicated to DEBBIE, JANE, and TINA
-the three young scientists who taught me to distinguish reality from illusion by asking always:
"Who says so?"
"Who's he?"
and, "How does he know?"
Chapter 1

	The familiar sign that marked the turnoff from the main highway leading toward Albuquerque, some thirty or so miles farther north, read:


ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS
RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT

GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE

TO


UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS


SHOW PASSES-13~ MILES AHEAD



	Accompanied by the falling note of a barely audible electric whine, the Ford Cougar decelerated smoothly across the right-hand traffic lane and entered the exit slipway. Without consciously registering the bleeped warning from the driver's panel, Dr. Bradley Clifford felt the vehicle begin responding to his touch as it slipped from computer control to manual drive. The
slipway led into a shallow bend that took him round behind a low sandy rise, dotted with clumps of dried scrub and dusty desert thorn, and out of sight of the main highway.

	The road ahead, rolling lazily into the hood of the Cougar, lay draped around the side of a barren, rock-strewn hill like a lizard sunbathing on a stone. In the shimmering haze beyond and to the right of the hill, the rugged red-brown bastions that flanked the valley of the Rio Grande stood row behind row in their ageless, immutable ranks, fading into layers of pale grays and blues that blended eventually with the sky on the distant horizon.

	The road reached a high point about halfway up the shoulder o. the hill, and from there wound down the other side to commence its long, shallow descent into the mouth of the barren valley beyond, at the far end of which was situated the sprawling complex of the Advanced Communications Research Establishment. At this time of the morning, the sun shone from the far side of the Establishment, transforming the jumble of buildings, antenna towers, and radio dishes into stark silhouettes crouching menacingly in front of the black, shadowy cliffs that marked the head of the valley. From a distance, the sight always reminded Clifford of a sinister collection of gigantic mutant insects guarding the entrance to some dark and cavernous lair. The shapes seemed to symbolize the ultimate mutation of science-the harnessing of knowledge to unleash ever more potent forces of destruction upon a tormented world.

	About a mile farther on and halfway down to the valley floor, he came to the checkpoint where the road passed through the outer perimeter fence of ACRE. A black Army sergeant, in shirtsleeves but armed and wearing a steel helmet, walked forward from the barrier as Clifford slowed to a halt beside a low column. Nodding his acknowledgment to the guard's perfunctory "'Morning," Clifford extracted the magnetically coded card from his pass folder, inserted it into a slot in the front of the box that surmounted the column, and handed the folder to the guard. Then he pressed the ball of his thumb against the glass plate located adjacent to the slot. A computer deep beneath ACRE's Administration Block scanned the data fed in at the checkpoint, checked it against the records contained in its files, and flashed the result back to another soldier who was seated in front of a display console inside the guardhouse. The sergeant returned the pass folder to Clifford's outstretched hand, cast a cursory glance around the inside of the vehicle, then stepped back and raised his arm. The Cougar moved through and the barrier dropped into place behind.

Fifteen minutes later, Clifford arrived at his office on the third floor of the Applied Studies Department of the Mathematics & Computer Services Building. On the average, he spent probably not more than two days a week at ACRE, preferring to work at home and use his Infonet terminal, which gave him access to the Establishment's data bank and computers. On this occasion he hadn't been in for eight days, but when he checked the list of messages on his desk terminal, he found nothing that was especially pressing; all the urgent calls had already been routed on to his home number and dealt with from there.

	So no unexpected panics to worry about before his eleven-o'clock meeting.
	No sooner had he thought it, when the chime sounded to announce an incoming call. He sighed and tapped a button to accept.
	"Clifford."

	The screen showed a momentary frenzy of color, which stabilized almost immediately into the features of a thin, pale-faced individual with thinning hair and a hawkish nose. He looked mean. Clifford groaned inwardly as he recognized the expression of righteous and pained indignation. It was Wilbur Thompson, Deputy to the Deputy Financial Controller of Mathcomps and self-appointed guardian of protocol, red tape, and all things subject to proper procedures.

	"You might have told me." The voice, shrill with outrage, grated on Clifford's ears like a hacksaw on tungsten carbide. "There was absolutely no reason for you to keep quiet about it. II would have thought that the least somebody with my responsibilities could expect would be some kind of cooperation from you people. This kind of attitude doesn't help anybody at all."

	"Told you what?"

	"You know what. You requisitioned a whole list of category B equipment despite the fact that your section is way over budget on capital procurement for the quarter, and without an SP6 clearance. When I queried it, you let me go ahead and cancel without telling me you'd gotten a priority approval from Edwards. Now the whole thing's a mess and I've got everybody screaming down my throat. That's what."

	"You didn't query it," Clifford corrected matter-of-factly. "You just told me I couldn't do it. Period."

	"But.. . You let me cancel."

	"You said you had no alternative. II took your word for it."

	"You knew damn well there'd be an exception approval on file." Thompson's eyes were bulging as if he were about to become hysterical. "Why didn't you mention the fact, or give me an access reference to it? How was I supposed to know that the project director
had personally given it a priority 1 status? What are you trying to do, make me look like some kind of idiot or something?"

	"You manage that okay without me."

	"You listen to me, you smart-assed young bastard! D'you think this job isn't tough enough already without you playing dummy? There was no reason why I should have checked for an exception approval against that requisition. Now I'm being bawled out because the whole project's bottlenecked. What the hell made you think I'd want to check it out?"

	"It's your job," Clifford said dryly, and cut off the screen.

	He just had time to select some of the folders lying on his desk and to turn for the door, when the chime sounded again. He cursed aloud, turned back to the terminal, and pressed the Interrogate key to obtain a preview of the caller without closing the circuit that completed the two-way channel. As he had guessed, it was Thompson again. He looked apoplectic. Clifford released the key and sauntered out into the corridor. He collected coffee from the automat area, then proceeded on to one of the graphical presentation rooms which he had already reserved for the next two hours. Since the meeting demanded his presence at ACRE that day, he thought he might as well make the most of the opportunity presented to him.

	An hour later Clifford was still sitting at the operator's console in the darkened room, frowning with concentration as he studied the array of multidimensional tensor equations that glowed at him from the opposite wall. The room was one of several specifically built to facilitate the manipulation and display of large volumes of graphical data from ACRE's computer complex. The wall that Clifford was looking at Was, in effect, one huge computer display screen. In levels deep below the building, the machines busied themselves with a thousand other tasks while Clifford pondered the subtle implications contained in the patterns of symbols. At length, he turned his head slightly to direct his words at the microphone grille set into the console, but without taking his eyes off the display, and spoke slowly and clearly.

	"Save current screen; name file Delta Two. Retain screen modules one, two, and three; erase remainder. Rotate symmetric unit phi-zero-seven. Quantize derivative I-vector using isospin matrix function. Accept I-coefficients from keyboard two; output on screen in normalized orthogonal format."

	He watched as the machine's interpretation of the commands appeared on one of the small auxiliary screens built into the console, nodded his approval, then tapped a rapid series of numerals into the keyboard.

	"Continue."

	The lower part of the display went blank and a few seconds later began filling again with new patterns of symbols. Clifford watched intently, his mind totally absorbed with trying to penetrate the hidden laws within which Nature had fashioned its strange inter-plays of space, time, energy and matter.

	In the early 1990s, a German theoretical physicist by the name of Carl Maesanger had formulated the long-awaited mathematical theory of Unified Fields, combining into one interrelated set of equations the phenomena of the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. According to this theory, all these familiar fields could be expressed as projections into Einsteinian spacetime of a complex wave function propagating through a higher-order, six-dimensional continuum. Being German, Maesanger had chosen to call this continuum eine sechsrechtwink elkoordinatenraumkomPlex. The rest of the world preferred simply sk-space, which later became shortened to just k-space.

	Maesanger's universe, therefore, was inhabited by k-waves-compound oscillations made up of components that could vibrate about any of the six axes that defined the system. Each of these dimensional components was termed a "resonance mode," and the properties of a given k-wave function were determined by the particular combination of resonances that came together to produce it.

	The four low-order modes corresponded to the dimensions of relativistic spacetime, the corresponding k-functions being perceived at the observational level simply as extension; they defined the structure of the empty universe. Space and time were seen not merely as providing a passive stage upon which the various particles and forces could act out their appointed roles, but as objective, quantifiable realities in their own right. No longer could empty space be thought of as simply what was left after everything tangible had been removed.

	Addition of the high-order modes implied components of vibration occurring at right angles to all the coordinates of normal spacetime. Any effects that followed from these higher modes were incapable, therefore, of occupying space in the universe accessible to man's senses or instruments. They could impinge upon the observable universe only as dimensionless points, capable of interacting with each other in ways that depended on the particular k-functions involved; in other words, they appeared as the elementary particles.

	The popular notion of a particle as a tiny, smooth ball of "something" -a model that, because of its reassuring familiarity, had been tenaciously clung to for decades despite the revelations of quantum wave mechanics -was finally put to rest for good. "Solidness" was at last recognized as being totally an illusion of the macroscopic world; even the measured radius of the proton was reduced to no more than a manifestation of the spatial probability distribution of a point k-function.

	When high- and low-order resonances occurred together, they resulted in a class of entities that exhibited a reluctance to alter their state of rest or steady motion as perceived in normal space, so giving rise to the quantity called "mass." A 5-D resonance produced a small amount of mass and could interact via the electromagnetic and weaker forces. A full 6-D resonance produced a large amount of mass and added the ability to interact via the strong nuclear force as well.

	The final possibility was for high-order modes to exist by themselves, without there being any component of vibration in normal spacetime at all. This yielded point-centers of interaction that offered no resistance whatsoever to motion in spacetime and therefore always moved at the maximum speed observable-the speed of light. These were the massless particles-the familiar photon and neutrino and the hypothetical graviton.

	In one sweeping, all-embracing scheme, Maesanger's wave equations gave a common explanation for the bewildering morass of facts that had been catalogued by thousands of experimenters in a score of nations throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. They explained, for example, why it is that a particle that interacts strongly always interacts in all possible weaker ways as well, although the converse might not be true; clearly the 6-D resonance responsible for the strong nuclear force had, by definition, to include all possible lower modes as subsets of itself. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a 6-D resonance. This picture also explained why heavy particles always interact strongly.

	Theory predicted that 5-D resonance would produce particles of small mass, unable to participate in strong interactions; existence of the electron and muon proved it. Further considerations suggested that any heavy particle ought to be capable of assuming three discrete states of electric charge, each of which should be accompanied by just a small change in mass; sure enough, the proton and neutron provided prime examples.

	If an interaction occurred between two resonances whose respective components on the time axis were moving in opposite directions-and there was nothing in the theory to say this couldn't happen-the two temporal waves would cancel each other to produce a new entity that had no duration in time. To the human observer they would cease to exist, producing the effect of a particle-antiparticle annihilation.

	As a young graduate at CIT in the late 1990s, Bradley Clifford had shared in the excitement that had reverberated around the scientific world after publication of Maesanger's first paper. K-theory became his consuming passion, and soon uncovered his dormant talents; by the time he entered his postdoctoral years, he had already contributed significantly to the further development of several aspects of the theory. Driven by the restless, boundless energy of youth, he thrust beyond the ever-widening frontier of human knowledge, and always the need to know what lay beyond the next hill drew him onward. Those were his idyllic days; there were not enough hours in the day, days in the year, or years in a lifetime to accomplish all the things he knew he had to do.

	But gradually the realities of the lesser world of lesser men closed in. The global political and economic Situation continued to deteriorate and fields of pure academic research were increasingly subjected to more stringent controls and restraints. Funds that had once flowed freely dried to a trickle; vital equipment was denied; the pick of available talent was lured away by ever more tempting salaries as military and defense requirements assumed priority. Eventually, under special legislation, even the freedom of the nation's leading scientists to work where and how they chose became a luxury that could no longer be allowed.

	And so he had come to ACRE, virtually as a draftee ...to find more effective methods of controlling satellite-borne antimissile lasers.

	But though they had commandeered his body and his brain, they could never commandeer his soul. The computers and facilities at ACRE surpassed anything he had ever dreamed of at CIT. He could still let his mind fly free, to soar into the realm of Carl Maesanger's mysterious k-space.

	It seemed to him that only minutes had passed when the reminder began flashing in the center of the wall screen, warning him that the meeting was due to commence in five minutes.

Chapter 2

	Professor Richard Edwards, Principal Scientific Executive and second-in-command at ACRE, contemplated the document lying on the table in front of him. The wording on the title sheet read: K-Space Rotations and Gravity Impulses. Seated around the corner of the table to the professor's left, Walter Massey thumbed idly through his copy, making little of the pages of complex formulae. Opposite Massey, Miles Corrigan leaned back in his chair and regarded Clifford with a cool, predatory stare, making no attempt to conceal the disdain that he felt toward all scientists.

	"The rules of this Establishment are perfectly clear, Dr. Clifford," Edwards began, speaking over the top of his interlaced fingers. "All scientific material produced by any person during the time he is employed at ACRE, produced in the course of his duties or otherwise, automatically qualifies as classified information. Precisely what are your grounds for requesting an exemption and permission to publish this paper?"

	Clifford returned his look expressionlessly, trying hard for once not to show the irritation he felt for the whole business. He didn't like the air of an Inquisition that had pervaded the room ever since they sat down.

	His reply was terse: "Purely scientific material of academic interest only. No security issues involved."

	Edwards waited, apparently expecting more. After a few, dragging seconds, Massey shuffled his feet uncomfortably and cleared his throat.

	Massey was Clifford's immediate boss in Mathcomps. He was every inch a practical, hard-applications engineer, fifteen years in the Army's Technical Services Corps having left him with no great inclination toward theoretical matters. When he was assigned a task, he did it without questioning either the wisdom or the motives of his superiors, both of which he took for granted. It was best not to think about such things; that always led to trouble. He represented the end-product of the system, faithfully carrying out his side of a symbiotic existence in which he traded off individual freedom for collective security. He felt a part of ACRE and the institution that it symbolized, in the same way that he had felt a part of the Army; it provided him with the sense of belonging that he needed. He served the organization and the organization served him; it paid him, trained him, made all his major decisions for him, rapped his knuckles when he stepped out of line, and promoted him when he didn't. If he had to, he would readily die fighting to defend all that it stood for.

	But Clifford didn't find him really a bad guy for all that.

	Right now, Massey wasn't too happy about the way in which Clifford was handling things. He didn't give a damn whether the paper ended up being published or not, but it bothered him that somebody from his section didn't seem to be putting up a good fight to speak his case. The name of the platoon was at stake.

	"What Brad means is, the subject matter of his paper relates purely to abstract theoretical concepts. There's nothing about it that could be thought of as having anything to do with national security interests." Massey glanced from Edwards to Corrigan and back again. "You might say it's kinda like a hobby. . . only Brad's hobby happens to involve a lot of mathematics."

	"Mmm . . ." Edwards rubbed his thumbs against the point of his chin and considered the proposition. Abstract theoretical concepts had a habit of turning into reality with frightening speed. Even the most innocent-looking scraps of trivia could acquire immense significance when fitted together into a pattern with others. He had no idea of the things that were going on in other security-blanketed research institutions of his own country, not to mention those of the other side. Only Washington held the big picture, and if they went along with Clifford's request, it would mean getting mixed up in all the rigmarole of referring the matter back there for clearance . . . and Washington was never very happy over things like that. Far better if the whole thing could be killed off right at the beginning.

	On the other hand, his image wouldn't benefit from too hasty a display of high-handedness . . . must be seen as objective and impartial.

	"I have been through the paper briefly, Dr. Clifford," he said. "Before we consider your request specifically, I think it would help if you clarified some of the points that you make." He spread his hands and rested them palms-down on the table. "For example, you make some remarkable deductions concerning the nature of elementary particles and their connection with gravitational propagation. . . ." His look invited Clifford to take it from there.

	Clifford sighed. At the best of times he detested lengthy dissertations; the feeling that he was pressing an already lost cause only made it worse. But there was no way out.

	"All the known particles of physics," he began, "can be described in terms of Maesanger k-functions. Every particle is a combination of high-order and low-order k-resonances. Theory suggests that it's possible for an entity to exist purely in the high-order domain, without any physical attributes in the dimensions of the observable universe. It couldn't be detected by any known experimental technique."

	"This isn't part of Maesanger's original theory," Edwards checked.

	"No. It's new."

	"This is your own contribution?"

	"Yes."

	"I see. Carry on." Edwards scribbled a brief note on his pad.

	"I've termed such an unobservable entity a 'hi-particle,' and the domain that it exists in, 'hi-space'- the unobservable subset of k-space. The remaining portion of k-space-the spacetime that we perceive-is then termed 'lo-space.'

	"Interactions are possible between hi-particles. Most of them result in new hi-particles. Some classes of interaction, however, can produce complete k-functions as end-products-that is, combined hi- and lo-order resonances that are observable. In other words, you'd be able to detect them in normal space." Clifford paused and waited for a response. It came from Massey.

	"You mean that as far as anybody can tell, first there's no particle there-just nothing at all-then suddenly-poof!-there is."

	Clifford nodded. "Exactly so."

	"Mmm . . . I see. Spontaneous creation of matter . . . in our universe anyway. Interesting." Edwards began stroking his chin again and nodded to Clifford to continue.

	"Since all conventional particles can be thought of as extending into hi-space, they can interact with hi-particles too. When they do, the result can be one of two things.

	"First off, the interaction products can include k-resonances-in other words, particles that are observable. What you'd see would be the observable part of the k-particle that was there to begin with, and then the observable part of the k-products that came later. What you wouldn't see is the pure hi-particle that caused the change to take place."

	Massey was beginning to look intrigued. He raised a hand to stop Clifford from racing ahead any further for the moment.

	"Just a see, Brad, let's get this straight. A k-particle is something that has bits you can see and bits you can't. Right?"

	"Right."

	"All the particles that we know are k-particles."

"Right."

	"But you figure there are things that nobody can see at all. . . these things you've called 'hi-particles.'"

"Right."

	"And two hi's can come together to make a k, and since you can see k's, you'd see a particle suddenly pop outa nowhere. Is that right?"

"Right."

	"Okay . . ." Massey inclined his head and collected his thoughts for a moment. "Now-in idiot language- just go over that last bit again, willya?" He wasn't being deliberately sarcastic; it was just his way of speaking.

	"A hi can interact with a k to produce another k, or maybe several k's. When that happens, what you see is a sudden change taking place in an observable particle, without any apparent cause."

	"A spontaneous event," Edwards commented, nodding slowly. "An explanation for the decay of radioactive nuclei and the like, perhaps."

	Clifford began warming slightly. Maybe he wasn't wasting his time after all.

	"Precisely so," he replied. "The statistics that come out of it fit perfectly with the observed frequencies of quantum mechanical tunneling effects, energy-level transitions of the electron, and a whole list of other probabilistic phenomena at the atomistic scale. It gives us a common explanation for all of them. They're not inexplicable any more; they only look that way in lo-order spacetime."

	"Mmm . . ." Edwards looked down again at the paper lying in front of him. The administrator in him still wanted to put a swift end to the whole business, but the scientist in him was becoming intrigued. If only this discussion could have taken place at some other time, a time free of the dictates of harsher realities. He looked up at Clifford and noted for the first time the pleading earnestness burning from those bright, youthful eyes. Clifford could be no more than in his mid to late twenties-the age at which Newton and Einstein had been at their peak. This generation would have much to answer for when the day finally came to count the cost of it all.

	"You said that there is a second possible way in which hi- and k-particles can interact."

	"Yes," Clifford confirmed. "They can also interact to produce hi-order entities only." He looked at Massey. "That means that a hi plus a k can make just hi's. You'd see the k to start with, then suddenly you wouldn't see anything at all."

	"Spontaneous particle extinction," Edwards supplied.

	"I'll be damned," said Massey.

	"The two effects of creation and extinction are symmetrical," Clifford offered. "In loose terms you could say that a particle exists only for a finite time in the observable universe. It appears out of nowhere, persists for a while, then either vanishes, or decays into other particles, which eventually vanish anyway. The length of time that any one particle will exist is indeterminate, but the statistical average for large numbers of them can be calculated accurately. For some, such as those involved in familiar high-energy decay processes, lifetimes can be very short; for radioactive decays, seconds to millions of years; for the so-called stable particles, like the proton and electron, billions of years."

	"You mean the stable particles aren't truly stable at all?" Edwards raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Not permanently?"

	"No"

	Silence reigned for a short while as the room digested the flow of information. Edwards looked pensive. Miles Corrigan continued to remain silent, but his sharp eyes missed nothing. He smoothed a wrinkle in his expensively tailored suit and glanced at his watch, giving the impression of being bored and impatient. Massey spoke next.

	"You see, like I said, it's all pure academic stuff. Harmless." He shrugged and showed his empty palms. "Maybe this once there's no reason for us not to have Washington check it out. I vote we clear it."

	"Maybe isn't good enough, Walt," Edwards cautioned. "We have to be sure. For one thing, I need to be certain of the scientific accuracy of it all first. Wouldn't do to go wasting Washington's time with a theory that turned out to be only half worked out; that wouldn't do ACRE's image any good at all. There are a couple of points that bother me already."

	Massey retreated abruptly.

	"Sure-whatever you say. It was just a thought."

	Clifford noted with no surprise that Massey had been simply testing to see which way the wind was blowing. He would go along with whatever the other two decided.

	"Dr. Clifford," Edwards resumed. "You state that even the stable particles possess only a finite duration in normal spacetime."

	"Yes."

	"You've proved it. . . rigorously. . .?

	"Yes."

	"I see . . ." A pause. "But tell me, how do you reconcile that statement with some of the fundamental laws of physics, some of which have stood unchallenged for decades or even for centuries? It is well known, is it not, that decay of the proton would violate the law of conservation of baryon number; decay of the electron would violate conservation of charge. And what about the conservation laws of mass-energy and momentum, for example? What happens to those if stable particles are simply allowed to appear and vanish?"

	Clifford recognized the tone. The professor's attitude was negative. He was out to uncover the flaws-anything that would justify going no further for the present and sending Clifford back to the drawing board. The mildly challenging note was calculated to invoke an emotive response, thus carrying the whole discussion from the purely rational level to the irrational and opening the way for a choice of counterproductive continuations.

	Clifford was on his guard. "Violation of many conservation laws is well known already. Although the strong nuclear interactions do obey all the laws listed, electromagnetic interactions do not conserve isotopic spin. Furthermore, the weak nuclear interactions don't conserve strangeness, nor do they conserve charge or parity discretely but only as a combined product of C and P. As a general principle, the stronger the force, the greater the number of laws it has to obey. This has been known as an experimental fact for a long time. In recent years we've known that it follows automatically from Maesanger wave functions. Each conservation principle is related to a particular order of resonance. Since stronger interactions involve more orders, they obey more conservation laws. As you reduce the number of orders involved, you lose the necessity to obey the laws that go with the higher orders.

	"What I'm saying here . . . " he gestured toward the paper "is that the same pattern holds true right on through to the weakest force of all-gravity. When you get down to the level of the gravitational interaction-determined by b-order resonances only- you lose more of the conservation laws that come with the hi-orders. In fact, as it turns out, you lose all of them."

	"I see," said Edwards. "But if that's so, why hasn't anybody ever found out about it? Why haven't centuries of experiments revealed it? On the contrary, they would appear to demonstrate the reverse of what you're saying."

	Clifford knew fully that Edwards was not that naive. The possibility that conservation principles might not be universal was something that scientists had speculated about for a long time. But forcing somebody to adopt a defensive posture was always a first step toward weakening his case. Nevertheless, Clifford had no option but to go along with it.

	"Because, as I mentioned earlier, the so-called stable particles have extremely long average lifetimes. Matter is created and extinguished at an infinitesimally small rate-on the everyday scale anyway; it would be utterly immeasurable by any laboratory experiment. For matter at ordinary density, it works out at about one extinction per ten billion particles present per year. No experiment ever devised could detect anything like that. You could only detect it on the cosmological scale-and nobody has performed experiments with whole galaxies yet."

	"Mmm.. ." Edwards paused to collect his thoughts. Massey sensed that things could go either way and opted to stay out.

	Clifford decided to move ahead. "All interactions can be represented as rotations in k-space. This accounts for the symmetries of quantum mechanics and the family-number conservation laws. In fact, all the conservation laws come out as simply different projections of one basic set of k-conservation relationships.

	"Every rotation results in a redistribution of energy about the various k-axes, which we see as forces of one kind or another. The particular set of rotations that correspond to transitions of a particle between hi-space and normal space-events of creation and extinction-produces an expanding wave front in k-space that projects as a gravitational pulse. In other words, every particle creation or extinction generates a pulse of gravity."

	There were no questions at that point, so Clifford continued. "A particle can appear spontaneously anywhere in the universe with equal probability. When it does, it will emanate a minute gravity pulse. The figures indicate something like one particle creation in a volume of millions of cubic meters per year; utterly immeasurable-that's why nobody has ever found out about it.

	"On the other hand, a particle can vanish only from where it already is-obviously. So, where large numbers of particles are concentrated together, you will get a larger number of extinctions over a given period of time. Thus you'll get a higher rate of production of gravity pulses. The more particles there are and the more closely they're packed together, the greater the total additive effect of all the pulses. That's why you get a gravity field around large masses of matter; it isn't a static phenomenon at all-just the additive effect of a large number of gravity quanta. It appears 'smooth' only at the macroscopic level.

	"Gravity isn't something that's simply associated with mass per se; it's just that mass defines a volume of space inside which a large number of extinctions can happen. It's the extinctions that produce the gravity."

	"I thought you said the creations do so, too," Massey queried.

	"They do, but their contribution is negligible. As I said, creations take place all through the universe with equal probability anywhere-inside a piece of matter or way outside the galaxy. In a region occupied by matter, the effect due to extinctions would dominate overwhelmingly."

	"Mmm . . ." Edwards frowned at his knuckles while considering another angle.

	"That suggests that mass ought to decay away to nothing. Why doesn't it?"

	"It does. Again, the numbers we're talking about are much too small to be measurable on the small scale or over short time periods. As an example, a gram of water contains about ten to the power twenty-three atoms. If those atoms vanished at the rate of three million every second, it would take about ten billion years for all traces of the original gram to disappear. Is it any wonder the decay's never been detected experimentally? Is it any wonder that the gravity field of a planet appears smooth? We have no way of even detecting the gravity due to one gram of water, let alone measure it to see if it's quantized. You could only detect it at the cosmological level. At that level, totally dominated by gravity, conservation laws that hold good in laboratories might well break down. Certainly we have no experimental data to say they don't."

	"That means all the bodies in the universe ought to decay away to nothing in time," Edwards pointed out. "They've had plenty of time, but there still seem to be plenty of them around."

	"Maybe they do decay away to nothing," Clifford said. "Don't forget that spontaneous creation is going on all the time all over the universe as well. That's an awful lot of volume and it implies an awful lot of creation."

	"You mean a continuous process in which new bodies are formed out of interstellar matter by the known sequences of galactic and planetary evolution; the newly created particles provide a source to replenish the interstellar matter in turn."

	"Could be," Clifford agreed.

	At last Edwards had drawn Clifford into an area in which he was unable to give definite answers. He pressed the advantage.

	"But surely that requires some resurrection of the Continuous Creation Theory of cosmology. As we all know, that notion has been defunct for many years. The overwhelming weight of evidence unquestionably favors the Big Bang."
	Clifford spread his arms wide in an attitude of helplessness.

	"I know that. All I can say is, the mathematics works. I'm not an astronomer or a cosmologist. I'm not even an experimental scientist. I'm a theoretician. I don't know how conclusive the evidence for Big Bang
is, or if there are alternative explanations for some parts. That's why I need to publish this paper I need to attract the attention of specialists in other areas."

	The string of admissions gave Edwards the moment he was looking for, a moment of weakness that could be exploited. It was time to move in the hatchet man. He half-turned toward Corrigan.

	"What do you have to say, Miles?"

	Miles Corrigan's official title at ACRE was that of Liaison Director, a euphemism for watchdog. Aloof from the hierarchy of line managers who reported to Edwards, Corrigan took his orders directly from the Technical Coordination Bureau in Washington, an office of the Pentagon that provided a rationalizing interface between the Defense Department and the various centers of government-directed scientific research. Through the Bureau, the activities of practically all the nation's scientists were controlled and coordinated, both among themselves and with the activities of the other allies in the Western Democracies. The payer of pipers was firmly calling the tune.

	Corrigan's job was to make sure that the right things got done and got done on time; that was the publicized part anyway. The unpublicized part involved simply maintaining a political presence-a constant reminder that whatever things went on in the day-to-day world of ACRE, they were always part of and subordinate to the grand design of loftier and more distant architects. His brief was to watch for, track down, and exorcise "counterproductive influences," which meant wrong attitudes, uninformed opinions, and anything else of that nature that threatened to affect adversely or undermine the smooth attainment of the Establishment's assigned objectives. Corrigan could track a subversive rumor back to its source with all the skill and tenacity of an epidemiologist tracing an outbreak of typhoid to its prime carrier. To avoid any witch hunts, it was safer just to say the kind of things you were supposed to say, or at best, not to say the kind of things you weren't. The scientists at ACRE called him the Commissar.

	By temperament and background he was well qualified for the job. After walking through a first-class honors degree in law at Harvard, he had set up a lucrative practice in Washington, specializing in defending the cases of errant politicians-at which he had demonstrated a prodigious skill. In the course of a few years he had incurred the lifelong indebtedness of a long list of fixers and string-pullers--the only kind of friends that meant anything on his scale of values-and their tokens of gratitude soon added up to a permanent end to all of life's potential financial problems.

	He married the daughter of a senator who had made his first million in a series of clandestine arms deals that had involved the offloading of whole shiploads of substandard ammunition on unsuspecting recipients in Burma and Malaysia-or so it was said. The allegations of the senator's involvement were never proved after becoming bogged down over a legal technicality. Miles Corrigan had seen to that.

	Through the influence of his father-in-law and the goodwill of a number of friends with the right contacts, he entered government service at the right level to further his ambitions. His assignment to ACRE represented the final stage of his grooming before he made his debut on the international political scene. He had made it while still in his prime and was all set to fly high.

	He took the cue, sensing a turkey being set up for the kill. When he spoke, his voice was icy and menacing, like the hiss of a cobra measuring its distance.

"I'm not interested in k-spaces, hi-spaces, or any of the other buzz-phrases. If all this boils down to saying that you've got something that serves the national interest, then tell us about it. If you haven't, then why are you wasting our time?"

	He confronted Clifford with the sneering, unblinking stare that had destroyed innumerable confused and hostile witnesses. His eyes were mocking, inviting the scientist to court disaster if he dared; at the same time they were insistent, demanding an immediate reply. He caught Clifford completely unprepared.

	"But . . . that's not the point. This is . . ." Clifford was surprised to hear himself stumbling for the right word. Even as he spoke he realized he was on the wrong foot and walking straight into the trap, but it was too late. "We're talking about fundamental knowl-"

	"Will it help us kill Commies?" Corrigan cut him short.

	"No, but . .

	"Will it help stop Commies from killing us?"

	"No. . . I don't know.. . Maybe, someday.. ."

	"Then why are you fooling around with it? How much time and resources has all this stuff taken up? What effect has all this had on the work you're paid to be doing? Massey describes it as a hobby, but I don't believe it's quite as simple as that. I've checked the amount of computer usage you've logged over the past six months and I've checked the current status of the projects you're supposed to be working on. They're all way behind schedule. So, where's all the computer time going?"

	"I don't suppose Einstein had the A-bomb in mind when he developed special relativity," Clifford retorted, ducking the feint and walking straight into the Uppercut

	"Einstein!" Corrigan repeated the word for the benefit of the jury. "He's telling us he's another Einstein. Is that right, Dr. Clifford-you consider yourself to be on a par with Einstein?"

	"I didn't say anything of the kind, and you damn well know I didn't." Clifford had recovered sufficiently to return Corrigan's look with a glare that could only be described as murderous. He knew that he was being drawn on to Corrigan's home ground. Somehow he didn't really care much any more.

	"You're saying that we ought to allow you to dabble around with anything that takes your fancy and at whatever expense, simply in case you happen to hit upon something useful. Is that how we're supposed to preserve the security of the West? Doesn't the concept of organized professional objectivity mean anything to you people? How long do we have to protect you and the freedom that you're always talking about before you wake up to reality?"

	Edwards stared uncomfortably at the table, having joined Massey in abdication. It was all up to Corrigan now.

	"This isn't some kind of philosopher's utopia where anybody is owed the right to any living he chooses," Corrigan continued. "It's a dog-eat-dog jungle; the strong survive and the weak go to the wall. To stay strong we have to get our priorities straight. Your priorities are all screwed up. Now you're asking us to follow suit and compound the offense by approving it."

	He took a long, deep breath for effect. "No way. There's no way I'm going to tell Professor Edwards to give a carte blanche for even more time-wasting and misuse of funds and resources."

	Actually, Corrigan couldn't tell Edwards to do anything. His use of the word was deliberate, however, serving as a gentle reminder of his own power, if
not authority, at ACRE. Edwards didn't argue the point. He knew that Corrigan's reports back to the Bureau would have a lot to do with whether he ever moved on to become chief at ACRE or something similar, or whether he ended up running a backwater missile test range on the northern coast of Baffin Island.

	When the victim has been battered to a pulp and stripped of every shred of dignity, he becomes highly suggestible and will respond eagerly to even a slight gesture of friendship. Prison guards had been well versed in the technique throughout history. And Corrigan understood psychology well; he knew what made people tick all right.

	His tone softened a fraction. "Everyone's out of step except you, Dr. Clifford. We're all a team here, trying to do a good job. Why make it difficult? Once you make the effort to fit in, you might find that life's not really that bad.

	"Don't you feel you owe it to this country and all it stands for-the way of life we all believe in? Isn't it worth a few sacrifices to protect all that? Right now half the world out there is sitting and waiting for us to ease up for just one second so they can blow us all off the face of this planet. Are you just going to sit there and let it happen? Do you want them to come walking in here without having to lift a finger?" Corrigan finished on a note that oozed all-in-it-togetherness. "Or are you gonna join the team, do your share, and help us go out there and zap those bastards?"

	Clifford had turned white. Corrigan and his propaganda epitomized everything abhorrent in a world that was going insane. And now he was expecting to enlist Clifford in the ranks of the mindless, brainwashed millions who had toiled and bled and died believing that line ever since the world began. There would always be Corrigans to ride on the backs of the masses-for as long as there were willing backs to carry them. Clifford's voice fell to a whisper as he fought to control the anger that boiled inside, churning his stomach and bubbling up into the back of his throat like waves of nausea.

	"I'm not interested in zapping anybody, mister . . not for you or for whatever you represent. Your system put me here; don't you tell me I'm screwed up now because I don't belong. Don't you tell me I owe anything to your system to help straighten out its mess. Save your garbage for the morons." Without waiting for a reply he got up and strode toward the door. Edwards and Massey remained silent, staring fixedly at the table. If Brad was flushing himself down the tubes, they weren't going to get caught in any of the backsplash.

Clifford, still shaking when he slammed the door of his office behind him five minutes later, began hammering a brief code into the keyboard of the desk terminal. At least he had tried the official channel. The outcome hadn't really been a surprise; that was why he had already prepared a long file in the data bank, ready for immediate transmission.

	A woman's face appeared on the screen.

	"Message Center. Can I help you?"

	"I need an immediate outgoing channel. The destination code is 090909-73785-213 18."

	The woman began keying the code automatically, then hesitated.

	"Triple-09 prefix is extraterrestrial, sir-for the lunar bases."

	"I know."

	"I'm sorry, but those channels need special authorization from grade 5 or over. Do you have a clearance reference?"

	All the frustrations of the last half-hour boiled over. "Listen, damn it, and store this on file. This is absolutely top priority. I take full responsibility. I don't care if you need clearance from the President, the Pope, or God Almighty himself. GET ME THAT DAMN CHANNEL!"

Chapter 3

	Proxima Centauri, 4.3 light-years away from us, has at least three planets of significant size, the largest of them having a mass of 0.0018 times that of the sun and an orbital period of 137 years. Slightly farther away, at 6.0 light-years, Barnard's Star again has at least three planetary companions, B1, B2, and B3, of masses 0.0011, 0.0008, and 0.0003, periods 26, 12, and 14.3 years respectively; we strongly suspect others as well. Beyond these systems, the stars Lalande 211A, 61Cygni, and Kruger 60A, to name just three, also possess planets that have been positively observed and whose main properties have been accurately measured. In fact, more than thirty planets of stars other than our own sun are known to exist within a radius of twenty light-years from us."

	Professor Heinrich Zimmermann pointed out the last item on the list and then turned away from the three-dimensional model of the local regions of the galaxy to look directly into the camera. The camera trolley rolled noiselessly forward to close in on his tall, immaculately dressed figure, dignified by a lean, angular build and a crown of silvery hair.

	"Thus some of our work here at the Joliot-Curie Observatories on Lunar Farside has added immensely to our knowledge of the Sun's neighboring planetary systems. If these statistics are extrapolated to cover the whole galaxy, they indicate the existence of billions of planets. If only one in every thousand were to be similar to Earth in temperature and surface chemistry, we are still left with millions of worlds on which life as we know it could emerge. Furthermore, as you saw earlier, the emergence of life is not, as was once supposed, a billion-to-one freak occurrence; as the experiments of such scientists as Okoyaku and Skovensen have shown, it is virtually a certainty once the right conditions are established." He stepped aside to allow a zoom-in for a close-up of the model while he delivered his final words. "I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the implications of these statements. Despite the exciting things that we have seen in this program, it could be that the real excitement is yet to come."

	"Okay. Cut it there." The floor director's voice sounded from the wall of darkness behind the arc lights. "That was fine. Take a short break, but be ready for another take of the first part of sequence 5 in five minutes. Harry and Mike, don't go rushing off anyplace-I need to talk to you for a second."

	The lights dimmed and a hubbub of voices broke out on all sides. The floor around Zimmermann was transformed into an arena of bustling technicians. He paused to allow his eyes to readjust to the comparative gloom of normal lighting, acknowledged the thanks from the film team, and moved away from all the activity to stand by one of the dome's viewing ports. While he dabbed his forehead lightly with a pocket handkerchief, he stared silently out at the harsh, bleak landscape of the lunar surface.

	Beyond the litter of assorted engineering and latticework that marked the environs of the observatory Complex and base, the soft, rolling dunes of ash-gray dust lay seared beneath the direct rays of lunar noon, pitted here and there by the ink-black shadow of the occasional crag or boulder. Above the featureless horizon, a million blazing jewels lay scattered on a carpet of velvet infinity. Joliot-Curie was without exception the loneliest center of human habitation in the universe. Here, shielded by the body of the Moon itself from Earth's incessant outpouring of electronic caterwauling, gigantic radio dishes listened for the whisperings that brought the secrets of the cosmos; unhampered by any atmosphere and all but free of the weight-induced distortions that had crippled their Earth-bound predecessors, enormous optical telescopes probed the very limits of the observable universe. The Joliot-Curie observatory complex was distant; it was isolated, but it was free-a surviving outpost of unfettered science where the pursuit of knowledge constituted its own ends.

	A shadow from behind him darkened the wall by the side of the viewing port. Zimmermann turned to find Gus Craymer standing there; Craymer was Assistant Producer of Exploding Horizons-the documentary they were making. Craymer peered past the professor to take in the scene from the outside and pulled a face.

	"How come you guys don't go nuts in this place?" he asked. Zimmermann followed his gaze, and then turned back smiling faintly.

	"Oh, you would be surprised, Mr. Craymer. The solitude and peace can be quite stimulating. It really depends on what you see when you look out there. Remember the rhyme about the two men and the prison bars? I wonder sometimes that you don't all go nuts on Earth."

	"You see stars, huh," Craymer grinned. "Literally." He indicated the far side of the room with a nod of his head. "There's coffee going over there if you'd like some." Zimmermann folded the handkerchief and replaced it in his breast pocket.

	"Thank you, no. I'll enjoy some in comfort when we have completely finished. How near the end are we?"

	Craymer consulted the typed schedule that he was holding.

	"Well, there's some outside shooting to be done now that the Sun's at the right angle . . . some close-ups of instruments to go with the commentary we recorded yesterday. Lemme see now, where are your parts . . . Here we are-there's only one more shot that involves you and that's coming up right now. That'll be a retake of the beginning of sequence 5 . . . the one where you talk about radiation from black holes."

	"Ah, yes. Very good."

	Craymer closed the folder and turned to look out across the floor with Zimmermann.

	"I guess you'll be glad to get back to your work without this bedlam going on all the time," he said. "You've been very patient and cooperative while we've been here. I'd like you to know that all the people on the team appreciate it."

	"Quite the contrary, Mr. Craymer," Zimmermann replied. "It has been my pleasure. The public has paid for everything here, including my salary; they have a right to be kept informed of what we are doing and why. Besides, anything that popularizes the true nature of science is worth a little time and trouble, don't you think?"

	Craymer smiled ruefully as he recalled the problems that they had encountered with petty bureaucrats in Washington six months before, when they had tried to put a documentary together on spacecraft navigation and propulsion systems. In the end they'd had to abandon the project, since what was left after the censoring wouldn't have made a lesson fit for elementary school students.

	"I wish more people thought that way these days," he said. "They're all going paranoid back home."

	"I can well imagine," Zimmermann replied, moving aside to make room for a technician who was positioning a spotlight according to directions being shouted from across the room.

	As they began threading their way toward the area where the next shooting sequence would take place, Craymer asked: "How long have you been up here now?"

	"Oh, eighteen months or more, I suppose . . . although I do visit Earth from time to time. It may sound strange but I really miss very little. My work is here and, as I said a moment ago, the environment is stimulating. We have no interruptions and are largely left free of interference of any kind."

	"Must be nice to be able to do your own thing," Craymer agreed. "You steer clear of all the sordid political stuff then, huh?"

	"Yes, I suppose we do . . . but it has not always been so. I have held a number of government scientific positions, over several years . . . in Germany you understand, before the formation of U.S. Europe. However . . ." Zimmermann sighed, "when it became apparent that official support would be progressively restricted to activities of the kind in which neither my conscience nor my interests made me wish to participate, I resigned and joined the International Scientific Foundation. It is completely autonomous, you see, being funded entirely from private and voluntary sources."

	"Yeah, I know. I'm surprised the USE government didn't try and make things difficult . . . or maybe you don't push around easy?"

	Zimmerman smiled and scratched an eyebrow.

	"I think it was more a question of persuading them that neither I nor my particular kind of knowledge would have been of very much use to them," he said.

	Craymer reflected that the more he saw of life, the more he became convinced that the quality of modesty was the preserve solely of the truly great men that he happened to meet. The amplified voice of the floor director boomed around the room, curtailing their conversation.

	"All right, everybody. In your places for the sequence 5 retake now. This will be the last one today. Let's make it good." The murmuring died away and the arc lights came on to flood a backdrop set up against one wall. To the right of the backdrop, banks of instrument panels and consoles carried a colorful array of blinking lights and display screens. Zimmermann moved forward from the jumble of cameras, microphone booms, chairs, and figures, to stand in the semicircle of light in front of the consoles. A short distance to his right, Martin Borel, compere of the documentary, took his position in front of the backdrop.

	The floor director's voice came again. "Mart-this time, start moving to your left as soon as you say '. . . the most perplexing phenomena known to man.' Take it at the same speed as last time-that way the professor will appear on camera just as you introduce him. Okay?"

	"Sure thing," Borel acknowledged.

	"Professor?"

      "Yes?"

	"When you refer to the equipment behind you for the first time, do you think you could move back for about five seconds so that we can pan in on it, please? Then close back in with Mart and resume the dialogue."

	"Certainly."

	"Thank you. Okay-roll it." Borel straightened up and assumed a posture with his hands high, near his shoulders. The clapperboard echoed. "Action."

	"The black hole," Borel began, speaking in the firm, resonant tones of the professional. "Strange regions of space where matter and energy are lost forever without trace, and time itself stands still. We have traced the history of black holes through from early speculations all the way to the confirmed realities of the present day. Scientists can now draw for us an incredible picture of the bewildering laws of an unfamiliar physics, that dominate these mysterious bodies. But despite all this new knowledge, unexpected riddles continue to emerge. The black hole is still, and will continue for a long time to be, one of the most perplexing phenomena known to man."

	Borel began walking slowly across the front of the backdrop toward Zimmermann.

	"To give you an idea of the kinds of riddle that investigators into black-hole physics are meeting today, let me introduce Professor Heinrich Zimmermann of 1SF, Director of Joliot-Curie and perhaps one of the most distinguished physical astronomers of our time.

	"Professor, the receiver that we saw outside is collecting radiation from the vicinity of a black hole in space. Down here you are analyzing the information that the computers have extracted from that radiation. Could you summarize for us, please, what you are finding and what new questions you are being forced to ask?"

	By now Zimmermann had been through this routine three times.

	"The receiver is at this moment trained on a binary system known as Cygnus X-1," he replied. "A binary system is one in which two stars are formed very close to one another and orbit about a common center of mass under their mutual gravitational coupling. Most binary systems comprise two ordinary stars, each of which conforms to one of the standard classifications. Some binaries, however, contain only one normal, visible star, the second body being invisible. The so-called dark companion emits no light but can be detected by its gravitational influence on the visible star. In many cases, they are known to be neutron stars as described earlier in the program. In a number of confirmed instances, however, collapse of the companion body has continued beyond the point at which a neutron star is formed, which results in the condition of ultimate degeneracy of matter-a black hole. Cygnus X-1 is an example of precisely this."

	"In other words, you have an ordinary star and a black hole orbiting each other as a stable system," Borel interjected.

	"That is so. However, the system is not quite permanently stable. You see, the gravitational attraction of the black hole is strong enough for it to draw off gaseous material from the surface of the star. The system thus comprises three parts essentially: the visible star, the black hole, and a filament of stellar material that flows out of the former into the latter, connecting them rather like an umbilical cord. The filament spirals around the black hole as the particles Contained in it acquire energy and accelerate down the gravitational gradient. In a somewhat simplified Way, you might picture it as bathwater spiraling down Into the drain." He paused, allowing Borel to pose the next question.

	"But straightforward as this might sound, it is producing results that you are having difficulty in explaining. Isn't that so?"

	"Very true," Zimmermann agreed. "You see, the matter that is being drawn off of the visible star is extremely hot and therefore in a highly ionized state. In other words, it is made up of strongly charged particles. Now, charged particles in motion give rise to electromagnetic radiation; calculations predict that a characteristic spectrum of broadband radiation, extending up into the x-ray frequencies, should be observable as a halo around the black hole. Indeed, we do observe radiation of the general nature that we would expect. Precise analysis of the spectrum and energy distributions, however, reveals a pattern that is not at all in accordance with theory."

	Zimmermann moved to one side and gestured toward the instrumentation panels behind them. "The equipment that you see here is being used for this kind of investigation. From here we can monitor and control the receiving equipment, direct the computers, and observe what they are doing.

	"Many years of observations and measurements have enabled us to determine the characteristics of several black-hole binaries with sufficient accuracy for us to compute precisely a mathematical model that should give us the pattern of radiation that each should produce." He moved forward to indicate one of the monitor screens on the console. "In fact, this is a picture of the theoretical distribution pattern computed for Cygnus X-l." The screen showed a wavy green line, annotated with captions and symbols; it rose and fell in a series of peaks, valleys, and plateaus, like a cross-sectional view of a mountain range.

	"This is what we should expect to see. But when we analyze the data actually received from Cygnus X-1 . . ." he touched a button to conjure up a second, red curve, "we see that there is a significant discrepancy." The screen confirmed his words. The red curve was of a different shape and lay displaced above the green curve; only in one or two places did the green rise high enough for the two to nearly touch.

	"Both curves are to the same scale and plotted from the same origin," Zimmermann commented. "If our model were correct, they would be approximately the same. It means that the amount of radiation actually measured is much greater than that which can be accounted for by theory."

	"Actual measurement shows more radiation than predicted," Borel repeated. "Where does the excess radiation come from?"

	"That, of course, is what intrigues us," Zimmermann replied. "You see, there are only three objects in the vicinity-the star, the filament, and the black hole. We are quite confident that we know enough about the physics of ordinary matter-as exemplified by the star and the filament-to exclude them as possible sources. That leaves only the black hole itself. But how can a black hole produce radiation? That is the problem confronting us. You see, all our theories of physics, based on general relativity, tell us that nothing -matter, energy, radiation, information, or any kind of influence-can escape from a black hole. So how can the black hole be responsible for the extra energy that we detect as radiation? But there is nothing else there for it to come from.

	"The answer to this question could have very far-reaching consequences." The camera pulled in for a close-up. "Let us ask the question: What happens to matter when it falls into a black hole? We know that it disappears completely from the universe of which we have any knowledge. Logically, one must conclude that it exists thereafter either in some other part of our own universe or in some entirely different universe. There would appear to be no other possibility. If you reflect for a moment on the implications of what I have just said, you will realize why it is that we get excited at the discovery of what could turn out to be a process operating in the reverse direction. Something that contemporary theory declares impossible is being observed to happen. Behind it, we see hints of a whole new realm of physical phenomena and laws, of which we must at present admit an almost total ignorance. And yet we have strong reasons to suspect that within this mysterious realm, things that we consider to be impossible could turn out to be commonplace."

	Borel waited a few seconds to allow the professor's words time to take effect.

	"I find this absolutely fascinating, and I'm sure the viewers do too," he finally said. "There are one or two questions about what you've said that I'd like to come back to in a moment. But before we do that, for the benefit of the more technically minded among those watching, I wonder if you would describe in a little more detail the exact function of each of the pieces of equipment that you have assembled behind us here."

	"Okay. Cut." The director's voice called again. "That was good. We'll splice the rest of take 2 on from there to complete that sequence. That's all for today, everybody. I'd like all the people who are involved in tomorrow's outside shooting to stay on for a schedule update. Everyone else is free to enjoy the J-C nightlife. Thanks. See you all at dinner."

	The arc lights went out and Zimmermann spent a few minutes discussing technical details with the direction team. Then he left the room, traced his way through to the door that gave access to one of the interdome connecting tubes, and followed the tube through to Maindome, which stood adjacent. From there he descended by elevator to emerge four levels below ground in the corridor that led to his office suite. His secretary was watering the plants in the outer office when he entered.

	"Hi," she greeted with a freckled grin over her shoulder. "All through?"

	"Hello, Marianne. Yes. I must confess I'm not terribly sorry either." He looked at what she was doing. "My goodness, look at the size of those plants already. I'm sure that even your fingers can't be that green. It must be the gravity." Casting a casual eye over the notes and papers on her desk, he inquired, "Anything interesting?" She turned and creased her face into a frown of concentration.

	"Mellows called and said that the replacement photomultiplier has been fitted in C dome-he said you'd know what it was all about. Pierre's come down with a bug and is in sickbay; he won't be able to make the meeting tomorrow."

	"Oh, dear. Nothing serious, I hope."

	"I don't think so. I think it was something he ate. Doe said he looked distinctly hydroponic."

	"Uh huh."

	"And there was this long message that came in, addressed to you by name... from a Dr. Clifford at some place in New Mexico."

	"Clifford . . . ? Clifford . . .	?" Zimmermann shook his head slowly. "Who is he?"

	"Oh." Marianne looked surprised. "I assumed you knew him. I took a hard copy of it. . . here." She lifted a thick wad of closely printed pages out of a tray and passed them across. "Came in about an hour or more ago."

	Zimmermann ruffled curiously through the sheets of mathematical equations and formulae, then turned back to the top sheet to study the heading.

	"Dr. Bradley Clifford," he read aloud. "No. I'm sure I have never heard of him. I'll take it though and have a look at it later. In the meantime, would you get Sam Carson at Tycho on the screen for me, please. I'd like to check the schedule for incoming flights from Earth."

	"Will do," she replied as the professor disappeared through the door into the inner office.

Chapter 4

	Nothing happened for about a month.

	Then they threw the book at Clifford. They hauled him up in front of panels who lectured him about his obligations to the nation, reminded him of his moral responsibilities toward his colleagues and fellow citizens, and described to him all the things that they assumed he felt about his own career prospects. They brought in a couple of FBI officials who questioned him for hours about his political convictions, his social activities, his friends, acquaintances, and student-day affiliations. They said he was irresponsible, he was immature, and that he had problems in conforming, which they could help him with. But, to his unconcealed surprise and mild regret, they didn't fire him.

	Just when it seemed to be approaching its traumatic peak, the whole affair was suddenly dropped and apparently forgotten. It was as if somebody somewhere had quietly passed down the message to ease off. Why this should be so, Clifford could only guess, but he didn't imagine for a moment that such old-fashioned sentiments as charity or philanthropy had very much to do with it. Something unusual had happened somewhere, he was sure, and for reasons best known to others, he wasn't being told what. But he didn't waste too much time worrying about such matters; he had found other, more absorbing, things to occupy him.

	Edwards's remarks about Steady State and Big Bang theories of the universe had stimulated Clifford's curiosity with regard to cosmological models. Accordingly, Clifford applied himself to refreshing his knowledge of the subject. In due course, he was intrigued to discover that, while the weight of observational evidence amassed over the decades strongly favored Big Bang as Edwards had pointed out, a comparatively recent theory of quasars had been published that seemed to threaten seriously one of the traditional pillars upon which the Big Bang model rested.

	It was a question of the amount of helium present in the galaxy. Both cosmological models-Big Bang and Steady State-enabled mathematical predictions to be made of how much helium there ought to be.

	According to the generally accepted Big Bang model, most of the helium that existed had been produced during the phase of intense nuclear reactions that accompanied the first few minutes of the Bang. Calculation showed that as a consequence of the processes involved, one atom in every ten that went to make up the galaxy would be a helium atom. During the twelve billion years or so that followed the Bang, this amount would be increased slightly by the manufacture of helium through stellar fusion.

	On the other hand, the Steady State model, by that time largely discredited, was obliged to assume that all the helium observed had been produced by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei in the interiors of stars. Measurements of such fusion reactions in terrestrial laboratories and nuclear reactors, when combined with the data that had been accumulated through years of astronomical observation, gave a figure for the total rate of helium production for the whole of the galaxy. When this figure was multiplied by the accepted age of the galaxy, the answer provided an estimate of how much helium there should be in total; it came out at about one atom in every hundred.

	Here, then, was a relatively clear-cut method of testing the validity of the two models: Big Bang predicted ten times the amount of helium that Steady State did. Many such tests had been performed, all with a high level of confidence. They all gave a result in the order of ten percent. Big Bang, it appeared, passed the test extremely well.

	Or so it had seemed before the Japanese theory of quasars was announced and confused the issue. The theory explained the phenomenal amount of energy radiated by quasars as the result of the mutual annihilation of enormous quantities of matter and antimatter. Quasars were viewed as the scenes of cosmic violence on an unprecedented scale, where armies of matter and antimatter numbering billions of solar masses each were locked in a ruthless battle of extermination, destined to continue until one or the other adversary was completely eliminated. Eventually a galaxy would condense out of the ashes of the conflict- a normal galaxy or an antigalaxy, depending on the flag of the survivors.

	The detailed mechanics of the process as presented by the two Japanese cosmologists involved the production of large amounts of helium as a by-product. That put a new light on the question of cosmological models.

	Because of their enormous distances, quasars provided, in effect, a window into the past-a view of events that had taken place billions of years previously. If the Japanese theory was correct, the Milky Way Galaxy too would have been formed from the debris of a cataclysmic quasar event that had occurred during some earlier cosmic epoch. The quasar had burned itself out, but its residues still remained-including the helium.

	So that could be the answer. Maybe the observed amount of helium didn't require the primordial inferno of a Big Bang to explain it at all. At least, now there was an alternative explanation that needed looking into.

	Even if the theory eventually came to be fully substantiated, vindication of the Steady State model would not follow automatically. For one thing, the time window provided by long-range astronomical observations revealed an evolving universe-evolving from a population of quasars to a population of galaxies- and not one that remained unchanging in its general appearance throughout the whole of time, as seemed to be demanded by a Steady State definition; indeed, the new theory itself required an evolutionary sequence.

	But Clifford was less interested in the issue of Big Bang versus Steady State than in that of Big Bang versus his own theories of k-space rotations and spontaneous particle events. Edwards had been skeptical on the grounds that Clifford's theories seemed irreconcilable with Big Bang. However, if Big Bang were superseded by something else, Clifford could be right. Here was a hint that the ground upon which the edifice of Big Bang had been erected might not be solid bedrock after all; it made Clifford wonder how firm the foundations of its remaining pillars might turn out to be.

	Whether Steady State became resurrected or not as a consequence was a separate, and largely irrelevant, matter.

Chapter 5

	Clifford rested his elbows on the edge of the table and cocked his head, first to one side and then to the other, as he studied the checkered board being displayed on the Infonet screen. If he advanced his pawn to King 5 as he had been preparing to do for the last four moves, Black could initiate a series of exchanges that would leave Clifford with a weak center. So Clifford had no choice but to postpone the pawn move yet again and cramp Black first by pinning the knight on . . . no, he couldn't; Black's last move had unmasked the queen, protecting the square that Clifford wanted to move his bishop to. Damn! The machine had seen right through it. He sighed and began to explore possible ways of opening up his king's bishop's file to bring some rook power to bear on the problem.

	Suddenly a flashing message in bright red letters appeared across the middle of the board:

      YOU'RE IGNORING ME!
      AND YOUR DINNER'S READY!!
      AND I'M FED UP!!!
      AND IT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!!

	He grinned, keyed the terminal into Local Override mode, and tapped in the reply:

      ARMIES MIGHT MARCH ON THEIR STOMACHS
      BUT HAVE YOU EVER TRIED IT?
      OK-I'M COMING DOWN.

	"I should think so." The voice of his wife, Sarah, chided him from the audio grille. "I wonder if computers have ever been cited in divorce cases before."

	"As core-respondents?" he offered.

	"You idiot."

	"What's to eat?"

	"Bits, bytes, and synchronous whatsits-what else? Oh-and processed veg. There-how's that?"

	"Not bad."

	He canceled the override, stored the present position of the game, and cleared the connection, having been informed that the session had cost him $1.50 of network time. As he rose from the chair amid the shambles of books and papers that he had long come to feel at home in, he noted absently that the chart of elementary-particle decay processes was coming away from the wall above the desk and resolved for the fourth time that month to do something about it sometime.

	Sarah came from an English ~1amily that had once been reasonably prosperous. Her father had risen from Marketing Assistant to Managing Director of a ladies fashion business that owned a number of factories in Yorkshire and Lancashire, with its head office and showrooms in London. His life had been one of ceaseless work and total dedication; spending twelve hours a day at his desk-frequently more-and logging hundreds of hours flying time across the air lanes of Europe, he had transformed a demoralized sales force and a collection of antiquated mills into a vigorous, professionally managed and profitable business operation. On one occasion, in the early days when the going was tough, he had mortgaged his own house as security for a bank loan to pay that week's wages.

	But as the country stagnated under the burden of its own brand of socialism and everybody clamored for a more equitable distribution of a wealth that became steadily more difficult to create in the first place, the fruits of his labors were milked away and poured into the melting pot of free handouts and subsidies from which the new utopia was to emerge.

	Although she had stayed with him through the rise and fall of his dreams, Sarah chose not to join her father's business, preferring instead to pursue a career in medicine, in which she had developed an interest at an early age. She studied at London University and Charing Cross Hospital during the day and helped her father with his administrative chores in her spare time. A year before she was due to complete her studies, her parents parted amicably; her mother went north to join a Scottish company director in the oil industry while her father, leaving the carcass of his own enterprise to the squabblings of the vultures from various government ministries, cashed his shares and was last seen heading south for sunnier climes, accompanied by a glamorous Italian heiress. Sarah went to live with an aunt in California, where she continued studying medicine and qualified as a radiologist. It was there, while taking a short refresher course in nuclear medicine at CIT, that she met Clifford. They were married six months later. When he moved to ACRE, she obtained a job at the local hospital, working three days a week; the money helped and the job kept her from becoming bored and getting rusty.

	She was garnishing two juicy steaks when he entered the kitchen door behind her and pinched her sides just below her ribs.

	"Eek! Don't do that when I'm cooking-it's dangerous. Come to think of it, don't do it at all."

	"You're funny when you squeak like that." He peered over her shoulder. "Hey-I've been conned."

	"What do you mean, conned?"

	"You said it was ready. You're only just dishing it out. You might have cost me the game busting in on my concentration like that."

	"Good. Concentrate on me instead." She carried the plates over to the table. They sat down.

	"Looks good," Clifford commented. "Where'd it come from?"

	"A cow of course. Oh, I forgot. They wouldn't have taught you things like that in physics, would they?"

	"Where'd you get it, you dumb broad?"

      "Same place as usual. I'm just a good choose-ist."

      "I already know that. Look who you married." 

      Sarah raised her eyes imploringly toward the ceiling. They ate in silence for a while. Then she said:

	"I called Joan and Pete about those theater reservations while you were upstairs. It's all right for Friday night."

	"Mm. . . good."

	"George is coming too. You remember George?" Clifford frowned at his plate while he finished chewing.

	"George? Who's George?" He thought for a second. "Not Joan's brother George?"

	"That's the one."

	"The one in the Army. Big guy, black hair . . likes music."

	"I don't know how you do it."

	Clifford frowned again. "I thought he was overseas somewhere."

	"He was, but he's home on leave at the moment. He's with a missile battery in eastern Turkey."

	"Great." Clifford attacked his steak once more. "He's good fun. Haven't seen him for . . . must be around a year now." He didn't pursue the subject further. Sarah watched him in silence, her face serious.

	Eventually she said in a strangely sober voice: "Joan told me he's been talking about the situation out there. They're on stand-by alert practically all of the time now. They have combat patrols airborne around the clock, and the mountains are full of tanks ready to move at a moment's notice."

	"Mmm. . ."

	"She's worried sick, Brad. She says he's convinced there'll be a showdown before long . . . everywhere. And now that she's expecting, it's really getting her down. . . ." Sarah's voice trailed away. She continued to stare at Clifford, looking for some sign of reassurance, but he carried on eating stolidly. "What do you think'll happen?"

	"No idea . . ." He realized reluctantly that something more was called for, but was aware that Sarah knew him too well to be taken in by the clichés that immediately sprang to mind. "It doesn't look too good, does it?" he conceded at last. "Our esteemed and inspired leaders have their righteous cause to protect. I've got mine."

	When Clifford and Sarah conversed, most of the dialogue was unspoken-and instantly understood. In these few words he had told her that as far as he was concerned, even one human life was too high a price to pay for any political or ideological crusade. In anticipation of her next question-whether he would go into the armed services if drafted-the answer was no. Doing so would help solve nothing. If half the world had been brainwashed into becoming zombies, the answer was not to go backward a hundred years and emulate them. Man had to move forward. Universal education, awareness, and knowledge offered the only permanent solution. Bombs, missiles, and hatred would only drag the agony out longer, giving people a tangible threat to unite against. If war came, he would find a way to survive and to be himself in whatever way was left open to him. That would be the only meaningful way of fighting for something that was worth preserving.

	She looked hard at him for what seemed a long time, then her face softened into a wry half-smile.

	"What would we do then-head for the hills?"

	He shook his head and replied lightly, "Everybody and his brother would have the same idea. You wouldn't be able to breathe up there. Death trap- right in the middle of the fallout zone from the West Coast. You'd need to get away from the wind system of the Northern Hemisphere completely. Head south- more privacy in the jungles."

	"Ugh!" Sarah pulled a face. "Nasty crawly things there . . . and slithery things. Don't like them."

	"Nor do most people. That's why it would be the thing to do. Anyhow . . ." The chime of the Infonet extension in the den interrupted him. "Hell-who's that?"

	"I'll get it. You finish that up." Sarah rose and disappeared through the door. Clifford could hear the muffled tones of one end of a brief dialogue. Then she came into the kitchen again.

	"It's somebody asking for you. I've never seen him before-a Dr. Phillips from California?"

	"Phillips?"

	"He seems to know you."

	Clifford contemplated his fork quizzically for a moment, then set it down on his plate and strolled through into the den. He sank into a swivel chair and swung round to face the screen.

	The apparition confronting him looked like a cross between something out of a rock opera and a reincarnation from Elizabethan England. His hair fell in flowing blond waves almost to his shoulders, forming an evangelical frame for his medieval pointed beard and shaped mustache. The part of his body that was visible was clad in a loose silky shirt of vivid orange, with ornate designs in gold thread embroidered about the shoulders and the long, tapering collar. Clifford's first guess was that he was about to be the victim of a harangue by some kind of religious freak.

	"Dr. Clifford?" the caller inquired. At least there was no hint of fanatical zeal in the voice.

      "Yes."

	"Dr. Bradley Clifford of Advanced Communications Research?"

      "No less."

	"Hi. You don't know me. My name's Philipsz-Dr. Aubrey Philipsz of the Berkeley Research Institute. I'd better spell that: P-H-I-L-I-P-S-Z. Most people that like me call me Aub. I work on the experimental side at Berkeley-high-energy particle physics."

	"Uh huh." Clifford was still trying to orient himself toward the probable direction that the conversation would take, but no particular direction seemed to suggest itself. The voice issuing from the grille sounded out of character with the face on the screen. If it hadn't been for the synchronization, Clifford could have believed that the audio and visual components of two different conversations had somehow gotten scrambled in the network. Aub sounded confident, composed, and totally rational, though without any trace of arrogance. His eyes were shrewd and penetrating, yet sparkled at the same time as if suppressed mirth were bubbling up to break free.

	"You're the guy who wrote the paper that connects gravity with k-space transitions," Aub confirmed.

	Clifford straightened up in his chair. "That's right but how come you know about that?"

	"You don't know we know about it?"

	"No, I don't. Who are you and where does Berkeley fit in?"

	Aub nodded slowly, half to himself, as if Clifford's response had somehow been expected. "Just as I thought," he said. "Something smells about this whole business. You couldn't imagine the problems I've had trying to get hold of your name."

	"Suppose you start at the beginning," Clifford suggested.

	"That's a fantastic idea, man. Why don't I?" Aub thought for a split second. "Part of the paper talks about sustained rotations of k-functions. In it you derive the criteria for stability and frequency for different rotational modes."

	"That's right. It follows from conservation of k-spin. What of it?"

	"Your mathematics implies that certain sustained rotations can take the form of continuous transitions between hi-order and b-order dimensional domains. In normal space the effect would appear as a particle repeatedly vanishing and reappearing, like a light flashing on and off."

	Clifford was impressed, but dubious. For the moment, he'd reserve judgment.

	"That's correct. But I still don't see . .

	"Take a look at this." Aub's face disappeared and was immediately replaced by an irregular pattern of thin lines, some straight and some curved, traced in white on a black background. Clifford recognized it as an example of computer output from a high-speed ion chamber; this was the standard technique for capturing details of high-energy particle interactions, and was used by experimentalists worldwide. Aub's voice continued: "You see the track marked G to H, down at the lower right of the picture?"

	"Yes." Clifford picked out the detail indicated. It was not a continuous line, but comprised a string of minute points of white.

	"That's the track of an omega-two minus, resolved at maximum power. As you can see, the particle was only detected at discrete points along its trajectory. In between those points nothing was detected at all. It was continuously vanishing and re-materializing in flight-exactly as you'd expect a sustained rotation to appear. I've analyzed the momentum and field vectors, and from the measured mark-space ratio of the track, it appears to conform to a mode 3 rotation with negative phi; all the even terms of the k-spin function come out at zero. Exactly like your theory predicts."

	Clifford quickly realized that he was talking to no fool. He sat forward to study the picture more closely while his mind wrestled with the implications. He was looking at positive experimental proof of some of the predictions that followed from his theoretical work. How had this come about? Was his work being taken seriously after all-so seriously that actual experiments were being conducted to test it? If so, why did he know nothing about it?

	After a few more seconds, Aub inquired, "Okay?"

      "Okay."

	Aub reappeared on the screen. The mirthful twinkle was gone from his eyes.

	"That picture was produced six months ago, at Berkeley."

      Clifford stared back at him, aghast and incredulous. 

      "Six months! You mean somebody else already . . ." 

      Aub guffawed suddenly and held up both hands.

	"Relax, man, it's okay. Nobody beat you to it. The picture came up during some experiments having to do with something else. At the time nobody realized what the G-H line meant. We all thought it was due to some kind of fault in the computer. We figured out what it really meant only when we read your paper about, aw, two, maybe three weeks ago."

	Clifford was still nonplused.

	"Look," he protested. "I still don't know who you are or what in hell's been going on. What happened two or three weeks ago?"

	Aub nodded vigorously and held up a hand again.

	"Okay, okay. It really goes back a bit before that. I run a small team of specialized physicists at Berkeley. We handle all the way-out jobs-the oddball projects that are about as near as you can get to research these days. Well, round about a month or so ago, I was told I had to drop what I was doing and take a look at something new that was important, and very hush-hush. They gave me a copy of the paper you wrote, but without any name on it, plus some comments and notes that a few other people had produced, and told me they were interested in finding out if any of it could be tested experimentally. Could I look into it and see if I could devise some ways of checking it out? So, I took a look at it."

      "Yes."

	"And . . . well, you've seen the result. One of the guys in my section remembered something we had done about six months ago and spotted the connection. When we dug the picture up out of our records and re-examined it according to your formulae-zowie! We hit the jackpot. Here was a prediction we didn't even have to look for; we'd already found it."

	Clifford followed the story, but his bewilderment only increased.

	"That's great," he said. "But I'm still not clear. Where did the . . ." He turned to look inquiringly at Sarah, who had appeared at the door.

	"Dessert?" she whispered.

	"What is it?"

	"Fruit 'n ice cream."

	"Dish it out. I'll be a coupla minutes."

	She nodded, winked, and vanished. Clifford looked back at the screen.

	"Sorry 'bout that, Aub. I was saying-where did the paper come from?"

	"That's what I wanted to know. Naturally I wanted to talk to whoever wrote it, but when I tried to find out who it was, nobody would tell me. They just said that that didn't matter, that I had to talk through them, and that the whole thing was top-security classified. But lots of things that I asked-simple things-they didn't seem to be able to get answers to. That's when I thought the whole thing was starting to smell . . . you know-it was as if they weren't really talking to the guy who wrote it at all."

	Clifford's expression made any comment unnecessary.

	Aub continued. "So I started getting curious. Like I didn't like the idea of being just some kind of barrel organ that you turn the handle on and tunes start coming out. I started digging around on the quiet for myself-contacts, whispers, guys who know guys who know guys-you know the kind of thing; there are ways and means. Anyhow, to cut out all the details, I traced the paper back to the place you work- ACRE. You know a guy there called Edwards, and another one called Jarrit?"
	"Edwards is number two there," Clifford confirmed. "Jarrit's his boss."

	"Yeah, they were mixed up in it. Seems they got contacted by the famous Fritz on the back of the Moon. . ."

	"Zimmermann?"

	"Zimmermann. That's him. I couldn't find out how he got to know about it but. . ."

	"That's okay; I know that much myself," Clifford told him. Unable to contain a grin, he went on to describe briefly how he had been driven by pure exasperation to bring the whole thing to Zimmermann's notice by decidedly irregular channels-an action that Aub seemed to approve of wholeheartedly and without hesitation.

	"What happened after that?" Clifford asked.

	"Well, it looks like your pal Zimmermann and his bunch had been hitting all kinds of problems to do with cosmic background radiation." Aub went on to describe how the astronomers at Joliot-Curie had been involved with measurements of the spectrum of background radiation that pervades all of space and is absolutely regular in whatever direction one cares to choose. The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe required the early stages of the Bang to be characterized by a totally radiation-dominated situation. In the expansion and cooling that followed, the radiation would become decoupled from matter and continue to exist as a steadily cooling background field, exhibiting the energy distribution spectrum of a blackbody radiator. Calculations based on this model showed that in the course of the twelve billion years thought to have elapsed since the Bang, the temperature of this background radiation would have fallen to somewhere in the region of fifteen degrees Absolute.

	Measurements taken from the late 1960s onward had indeed established the existence of an isotropic background field having a temperature of three degrees Absolute-close enough to the theoretical figure when allowance was made for all the uncertainties involved. It all seemed to be very much as Big Bang predicted.

	Because of the relatively narrow radio "window" through the Earth's atmosphere, however, the range of these early measurements was necessarily confined to the band of wavelengths between 3 millimeters and 70 centimeters; inside this range the agreement between the observed energy distribution and that of an ideal blackbody was good. But later on, as more information became available, first from satellite-borne and subsequently from lunar-based instruments, a steadily increasing departure from the theoretical values became evident. The further the range was extended, the larger the error became. Big Bang Theory was meticulously re-examined, but still the answer came out the same -the energy distribution of the cosmic background radiation ought to be as for a blackbody. But it wasn't. Could it be then that the radiation being detected hadn't come from any Big Bang after all? If not, where did it come from?

	"Then," Aub explained, "your paper appeared. It described particles appearing and disappearing spontaneously all through the universe, with each such event producing a pulsed k-wave which, in normal space, would be detected as radiant energy. Particle annihilations were concentrated in masses and resulted in the phenomenon of localized gravity; what about the particle creations, spread evenly and diffusely all through space? What kind of radiation would they produce?"

	Clifford had become mesmerized by Aub's account. "At that point," the young man continued, "Zimmermann became interested and instructed his mathematicians to run computations of the cumulative energy distribution profile that should follow from your equations. The results matched extremely well with the observed data that classical Big Bang models couldn't explain. That was when Zimmermann became excited.

	"He passed details of his findings and their implications back to the senior management at ACRE, at the same time urging that attempts be made to test other aspects of the theory. Since much of the theory concerned basic particle phenomena, ACRE reported back to the folks in Washington, who then brought in Berkeley plus a few other places. That's how I came to be involved and how, as you've already seen, another prediction of your theory was found to have been already proved.

	"And while I was finding out all that, I found out who you were too," Aub concluded. "You didn't seem to be in on the project, and the more I thought about it, the more that bugged me. I figured somebody ought to tell you, and so I called." He shrugged. "I'll probably get my ass kicked, but what the hell?"

	Despite Aub's casual manner, Clifford had grown increasingly aware that behind the outlandish exterior was a mind that could work at lightning-fast speed. The piece of detective work that Aub had dismissed in a few matter-of-fact sentences would have won a commendation for a whole squad of the FBI. There were probably only a few scientists in the country who could have appreciated fully, let alone grasped instantly, the implications buried in those pages of mathematics. Clifford thought he had a good idea just who it had been that had "remembered something we did about six months ago and spotted the connection."

	Clifford sat back and digested the information for a while. Aub watched in silence, having said all he had to say.

	"It smells right enough, Aub," Clifford agreed at length. "I haven't a clue what's going on behind all this, but I'm really glad you called. What's the latest at Berkeley? Is that it?"

	"That's about it. We're setting up some experiments specifically to look for more examples of sustained k-rotations. I'll keep you posted, huh?"

	"You do that. Keep in touch. I'll see what I can find out at the ACRE end."

	"Best not to say too much about us talking direct either, okay?"
"Check."

	"Well, nice talking to you at last. What does everybody call you anyway?"

	"Brad."

	"Brad. Okay, Brad, I'll keep in touch. See you."

	"Thanks again, Aub."

	The screen blanked out. Clifford remained staring at it for a long time until a voice from the kitchen jolted him back to reality.

	"How would you like fruit and white-stuff soup instead?"

	"Uh. Why?"

	"That's what you've got."

	"That's no good. I only eat that with gravy."

	"Not in my kitchen. Who's Dr. Phillips?"

	"It's a long story . . . something funny going on. Put some coffee on and I'll tell you about it." He added absently, "He spells it with a z."

      "What?"

      "Philipsz. P-H-I-L-I-P-S-Z."

	She looked at him curiously as he walked back in and sat down.

	"How strange. I wonder why there's a z at the end." Clifford pondered the question. "If it were at the front, nobody'd be able to pronounce it," he said at last.

Chapter 6

	In the days that followed Aub's call, Clifford's attempts at ACRE to evince an open acknowledgment of the things that had been happening met with no success at all. Restricted to cautious questioning and discreet probing since the risk of repercussions falling on Aub ruled out any form of direct confrontation, he met only with what appeared to be a conspiracy of silence. Nobody reacted; nobody knew what he was talking about; nobody volunteered any information at all on the matter. Only in one or two instances did he detect an attempt on somebody's part to conceal embarrassment, or an abnormal haste to change the topic of conversation.

	Then things took a strange and unexpected turn. Clifford received a call from Edwards's secretary informing him that the professor would like Clifford and Massey to join him for lunch in the Executive Dining Suite on the following day. Edwards was a formalist with a strict regard for protocol so it was not in his nature to socialize with the lower echelons of ACRE's political hierarchy. He dined fairly regularly with Massey, it was true, but that was to be expected since their day-to-day business relationship demanded a constant dialogue and they were both busy men. The occasions on which they invited individuals of Clifford's grade to join them were few and far between, and inevitably, when they did, there was a special reason-usually when Edwards had something particularly delicate to sell.

	Clifford, predisposed by long experience to regard credibility as inversely proportional to seniority, was suspicious. But although the message was couched in phrases appropriate to an invitation, the unspoken words behind it came through loud and clear: BE THERE.

      Edwards did not look directly at Clifford as he spoke, but kept his eyes fixed on the wine glass in his hand while he absently swirled the contents round and round inside.

	"One of the subjects that I wanted to raise with you, Dr. Clifford, was the matter of . . . ah . . . the technical paper of yours that we discussed some time ago . . . the one dealing with rotations in k-space and so on."

	"I mentioned it to Walter a day or two ago," Clifford replied, then added pointedly: "He said the matter was closed and that was that." Clifford had learned enough from Aub to guess that a sudden change of attitude was being hinted at, although at that stage he had no clues as to the form the change might take. He made the comment to angle the impending conversation from his perspective of the situation -his "official" perspective anyway.

	"Yes, I know." Edwards frowned at his glass for a second. "But at that time Walter was not fully up to date on the latest discussions I've been having with Washington."

	"I was only handing down the policy I'd been given up to then," Massey added, taking his lead dutifully. 'But it seems like the prof's been putting up a good fight for you behind the scenes after all."

	Clifford ignored the sycophancy and asked simply: "So?"

	A demonstration of candor seemed called for. Placing his hands palms-down on the table, Edwards looked up at Clifford. "I admit that our reactions to your request were somewhat, shall we say, negative . . . too much so. I've had second thoughts on the subject since and have mentioned it . . . confidentially, you understand . . . to one or two of my acquaintances at the Bureau." He paused, waiting for an appropriate response, but Clifford continued to sip his drink and said nothing. "Opinions there are that, as you said, the subject is of academic interest and should therefore be pursued further, but that it has no immediate military or security significance. In other words, they are favorably disposed toward the idea of publication . . . in order to attract the attention of other scientific bodies, as you asked." He sat back in his chair and regarded Clifford expectantly.

	Clifford set his glass down slowly on the table and did not answer at once. From the things that Aub had already told him, he was pretty certain that the matter had been raised in Washington in ways that represented far more than confidential words with one or two acquaintances. The subject was no doubt causing quite a stir in high places, but Edwards was not saying so. Why? Several major scientific institutions were becoming actively involved at a time when a world crisis was approaching fast. That situation could never have come about if the military was not interested- very interested. And yet Edwards was declining to admit this side of the issue and was attempting instead to push the academic implications as an excuse for reversing his earlier decision and taking things further. Why?

	A waitress appeared at the table to clear the main-course dishes. They sat in silence until she had finished and departed.

	"That's fine then," Clifford said. "I've already signed the request. All you have to do is get on with it."

	"Well, it's not quite that simple," Edwards answered. Clifford sighed. Nothing was ever simple. "Some of the statements that you make are rather provocative, to say the least, and there are parts that, as I'm sure you would agree, do contain some still somewhat speculative assertions. What I'd like you to do is spend some time going over those areas more thoroughly and producing more in the way of substantiating evidence. Also, there are a few mathematical points that I think ought to be expounded more clearly. If you could manage that, I think we'd see a clear way through to getting the paper published."

	"It wouldn't look good for Washington to bounce it back for the same reasons," Massey supplied. "Much better if we got it absolutely clean here first."

	"In fact, I'm now prepared to authorize you full access to whatever facilities you need at ACRE to get on with it," Edwards added. "Also, we can assign somebody else to take over the projects that you're running . . . to give you more of a free hand. Right, Walt?"

	He directed the last question to Massey. Massey nodded firmly and leaned forward to prop his elbows on the edge of the table. "Right. Bill Summers is up to speed now and needs more to keep him occupied. He'd be ideal."

	Edwards had definitely overplayed his hand, Clifford decided. Acknowledging a matter of scientific but academic interest was one thing; suddenly playing down all the things that had previously been considered more important was another.

	"How will Corrigan feel about that?" Clifford asked, keeping his tone deliberately nonchalant.

	"You needn't worry about him," Edwards said reassuringly. "I can guarantee he'll stay out of the way and not interfere."

	Edwards had taken the bait. He had just told Clifford that the whole subject had already been discussed and agreed at the highest levels within ACRE, and no doubt beyond as well-hardly fitting for a topic of mere academic interest, one would have thought. The whole setup, then, was a device to keep Clifford working on the theory, to keep the ideas flowing. But at the same time he was not being informed openly that those ideas were attracting a lot of serious attention already. The action had started, but he was being left out of it.

	"Sounds like a good deal, Brad," Massey commented. "I'd have thought you'd be jumping at it by now."

	Either Massey hadn't seen through all the persiflage, or he was playing back the party line exceptionally well. Clifford decided to give Edwards one last chance to come clean. He held the professor's eye and said in a soft, curious voice: "That's all very nice to hear. But theories aren't much use without some kind of evidence to back them up. If Washington is sufficiently interested to go ahead and you're as interested as you've indicated, why can't we simply organize some tests of some of the predictions? They don't have to be all that elaborate or time-consuming. There are places around with the equipment for setting up suitable experiments. If some of the simpler things could be proved-or disproved, as the case may be-right now, it could save a lot of wasted time in the long run."

	Clifford watched the reactions of the other two closely as he posed this suggestion. For a split second a hint of guilt flashed across Edwards's eyes before he brought it under control. At the same time Massey turned toward the professor and shrugged. "Sounds a good idea to me," he commented.

	In that split second Clifford learned two things. First, Massey was not in on the conspiracy. His remark had been genuine, and in any case his taking up of Clifford's point in that way would have been inconsistent with his situation had he known that such experiments were already in progress. He would not, knowingly, have made Edwards's position more difficult. Second, there was no question of Edwards's failure to mention the experiments being accidental, since Clifford had just provided an unmistakable cue for him to put right the omission. Clifford was being squeezed out.

	Edwards then supplied all the confirmation Clifford needed. "Mmm . . . You have a point, Dr. Clifford. I agree, once we know that the theoretical arguments are on completely solid ground, yes, perhaps something along those lines might be in order. But for the time being, certainly until Washington is involved officially and has had a chance to comment, I feel that such measures would be. .. er . . . somewhat premature."

	Massey turned his gaze from Edwards to Clifford and performed his inevitable about-face as surely as if Edwards had been working the levers.

	"It's a bit early yet, Brad, see?" he said. "Maybe later on when Washington has gotten into the act. What d'you say, huh?"

	In the end Clifford agreed. Nothing he could have said without involving Aub would have changed the politics, and at least Edwards had given him unrestricted access to the facilities that he needed to do the things he wanted to do. Also, he would be relieved of doing the things that he didn't want to do. As Massey had said, it was not really so bad a deal. Clifford was not particularly interested in the politics anyway-just curious. He could sense the sticky glue of officialdom beginning to congeal and felt better off staying clear of it . . . up to a point. Every man, after all, had his pride.

So, for a while, Clifford was free to pursue his own research without interruption. But although he had dreamed of a life in which he could devote all of his hours to his own work using facilities like ACRE's and without the mundane distractions of other tasks, now that it had come about he found the job far from satisfying. He was being used to foster other men's ambitions, and that irked him. His brain, it seemed, was useful, but he didn't fit with the team.

	One morning Clifford stood by the window of his office, contemplating the view outside while mentally going over his schedule of activities for the day, when a sudden shadow in the sky above caused him to glance up involuntarily. A medium-size aircar bearing the markings USAF was slowing down to hover above the executive parking area preparatory to landing. He watched as the vehicle completed its descent and a half-dozen or so dark-suited figures emerged, disappeared into a waiting limousine, and were whisked out of sight around the corner of the building toward the main entrance of ACRE's Admin Block. He noticed too that several other aircars were already parked near where the one he had seen had landed. An hour or so later, when he was on his way through the Admin Block to collect some books he had requested from the library, he noticed two armed military policemen stationed outside the door of the Main Conference Room.

	"What's going on?" he asked Paul Newham, one of the senior mathematical physicists, later on in one of the cafeterias over lunch.

	"Oh, just another closed-doors meeting, I guess," Newham told him.

	"Another one?"

	"Washington bigwigs. They've been coming and going all week. Must be something big in the wind; Jarrit's been involved in all of them from what I hear. You didn't know?"

	Clifford sat frowning uneasily with his fork frozen in midair.

	"No, I didn't," he said slowly. "So, what's it all about?"

	"Haven't a clue. Bill Summers did ask around but was politely advised to mind his own business. I guess whatever is going on doesn't concern the likes of us, Brad." Newham started to drink his coffee and then looked up suddenly as if he had just remembered something. "Although Edwards's secretary did mention something when she was having a drink with one of the guys the other day. What did he say she said now. . . ? Something to do with k. . . k. . . k-something or other. Didn't ring a bell at the time."

Two days after that, Sarah mentioned that she had made an Infonet call to Lisa Clancy, the wife of Clifford's former tutor at CIT and an old friend of the family. Lisa had told her that Bernard-her husband -was due to travel to New Mexico to attend a scientific conference of some kind. He hadn't been very forthcoming as to exactly where he was going or what the purpose of the conference was, but she had a feeling that the meeting might be at ACRE. Eager to renew his old acquaintanceship and, perhaps, at last to get access to some inside information, Clifford called Bernard that same evening.

	"Well . . . that's a bit difficult, Brad . . ." Bernard's face contorted with visible discomfort as he looked out of the screen. "It's a pretty tight security issue . . . know what I mean? Don't get the wrong idea, I'd love to see you again but . . ." he shrugged and made an empty-handed gesture, "you know how it is."

	"Hell, I don't want to know what your business is," Clifford protested. "All I wanted to know was if you'd be in the area and if so, whether we could get together for a beer."

	"Yeah, I know." Bernard was looking acutely embarrassed but at the same time helpless. "It's awfully nice of you to think of it, but really . . . I can't. Some other time when I'm traveling that way socially, sure, but . . . this'll be business and the schedule's pretty tight." Bernard suddenly tightened his features into an expression of seriousness. "Give my regards to Harry Cottrill if you see him around there." Then he relaxed. "Well, gotta go, Brad. Nice to hear from you again. Keep up the good work, eh? Look us up if you find yourselves back in California. Regards to Sarah."

	"See you around." Clifford accepted the situation and flipped off the terminal irritably. He sat for a while staring moodily at the blank screen.

	"Who's Harry Cottrill?" Sarah asked from the far side of the room. "We don't know anybody by that name, do we?"

	"Huh . . . ?" Clifford half-turned and sat back to face her. "That's the funny part. I was just wondering about it. . . . We don't know him, but I do. He was a guy I used to know at CIT."

	"CIT?" Sarah looked puzzled. "Why should we see him around here? Did he move here or something?"

	"Not that I know of. Last place I saw him was
CIT."

	"That's crazy." Sarah returned Clifford's nonplused look. "Why should Bernard go and say a crazy thing like that?"

	"I don't know," Clifford said slowly and thoughtfully. "But I think he was trying to tell us something. His face became rather serious as he said it-you know-as if he was trying to make a point."

	"Who was this Harry Cottrill?" Sarah asked after a few seconds of silence. "Another physicist or suchlike?"

	"No, nothing like that. . . . He was a biologist . . . had a thing about termites. He was an entomologist there . . . always talking about termites . . ."
	"Bugs. Ugh. Nasty things."

	"Bugs!" Clifford looked up abruptly. "That's what it was. Bernard was afraid of his line being bugged. That's why he wouldn't say anything." He stood up and sent the chair spinning on its swivel with a sudden blow of his fist. "Bastards! What are they turning this damned world into?"

Bernard Clancy did come to ACRE. Clifford was walking along the corridor outside the conference room when the door opened and a party of visitors, several of whom he recognized as prominent mathematicians and physicists, was ushered through. Clancy just had time to catch Clifford's eye and shrug with a brief apologetic grin before he and the rest were herded hurriedly away by Corrigan and a troupe of minions. They departed from ACRE within minutes.

"Hey, I'm sure that's Walter Massey and his wife over there, Brad." 
Sarah's voice came down at him from the same direction as the heat bathing his prostrate body. He mumbled something unintelligible and raised his head a few inches to scan the nearby parts of the sloping tiled area that surrounded the pool. Everywhere was a sea of tanned arms, legs, and bodies, sunshades, and a few tables; the pool was crowded and noisy.

	"Mmm. . . where?" he asked after a second.

	"There . . ." She pointed. "Walking this way from the pool. She's got a blue bikini on."

	"Yeah . . . I think you're right." He allowed his head to flop back on the towel, closed his eyes again, and gave every indication of having dismissed the matter from consciousness.

	"Want me to call them over?" he heard Sarah ask, and then, before he had made any reply: "Hey! Sheila . . . Walter . . . Over here . . ." She turned back to her husband. "They've seen us. They're coming over."

	Clifford flinched as drops of icy liquid peppered his skin. He opened his eyes to find the lower half of Sheila Massey's bikini-surely it had been sprayed on -staring down at him over the top of a magnificent pair of suntanned thighs. A few seconds later he noticed that Sheila was there too, removing her swimcap to allow cascades of jet-black hair to tumble out onto her shoulders. Walter was close behind.

	"Hi," Sarah greeted, gathering together some of their things to make room. "Come and make it a party." Sheila sat down, accepted a towel from Sarah's outstretched hand and began drying herself.

	"Thanks," she said. "Hi, people. Just enjoying the sun?" She looked up. "Pull up a pew, Walt."

	Walter Massey was looking toward where they had been heading. "I'll just go on up and get my cigarettes," he said. "Be back in a minute." With that he disappeared from Clifford's field of vision.

	As the girls began chattering back and forth over him, Clifford became acutely aware of Sheila's sinuous movements on one side and Sarah's curvaceous form on the other, and he began suddenly to wonder if, perhaps, the Arabs had got it right all along after all. What was so bad about camels and tents anyway? Who needed civilization? Maybe polygamy ought to be compulsory-then perhaps everybody would forget about making bombs. Interesting thought. His reverie came to an end when he realized that Sarah was speaking to him.

	"Did you know that, Brad?"

	"Uh. . . ? What?"

	"What Sheila just said-about the big stir-up at ACRE."

      "Stir-up?"

	"Walt's been saying he thinks there are big changes in the offing," Sheila told him. "Some big new project connected with scientific outfits all over the place . . . Moonbases . . . Some people somewhere out in California. Stuff like that."

	"Oh . . ." Clifford's tone made light of it. "Yeah- I heard one or two things."

	"Never told me," Sarah said.

	"Just rumors," he murmured vaguely. "I didn't take a lot of notice."

	"Walt doesn't think they're just rumors," Sheila added. "He thinks a few of the top guys at ACRE have been interviewed for jobs on it . . . top scientific guys."

	"Him too?" Clifford tried to sound less interested than he was but couldn't prevent himself from half sitting up as he spoke.

	"I don't think so . . . at least, if he has, he hasn't said. The project's supposed to be very secret- security and all that stuff. But he figures there's going to be a major reshuffle right down through ACRE. All kinds of promotion prospects for everybody . . . That's what he's interested in. He could use a change."

	"Well nobody's talked to me about it," Clifford declared, falling back again to gaze up into the sky. "When somebody does, I'll tell you about it. Until then it's just rumors."

	But there was anger burning in his eyes. Harems, he had somehow suddenly decided, were strictly for other times and other places.

Chapter 7

	"Mode 3 with positive phi. Again all the even terms of the k-spin function come out zero. How about that?" Aub stared out of the screen in Clifford's den and waited for a response.

	"What's he talking about?" Sarah whispered from the chair that she had pulled up next to Clifford.

	"They've been running more experiments at Berkeley," he whispered back. "It looks as if more of the theory's predictions are coming out okay. It's fantastic news." He looked back at the screen. "That's great, Aub. Sustained rotations are real then, eh? How about mode distribution frequencies?"

	"Well, we haven't done a lot of tests yet, so the statistical data's still pretty thin, but from the figures we've got it looks as if it might check out fine. I'll keep you posted on that; we're scheduling another run for tomorrow."

	"I'll call you again tomorrow then, okay?"

	"Great, man. See ya."

	"S'long Aub." Clifford slipped an arm round Sarah's shoulder and gave her a compulsive hug as he switched off the terminal. "Everything's working out fine, baby," he said, laughing. "We're gonna be famous yet." She brought her hand up and squeezed his fingers reassuringly. Her mouth smiled but she kept her eyes averted. In his excitement Clifford had momentarily forgotten their conversation with Sheila Massey, but Sarah hadn't.

The following evening Aub called in again.

	"Man, we have news!" he announced jubilantly. "Another couple of positive tests today and mode distributions as predicted. The statistics are still from a small sample, but it's looking good. Opinion here is starting to firm up that the theory is well on its way to being validated." His expression changed to a frown. "Surely they must have told you about it at ACRE by now?"

	Clifford shook his head.

	"But Jeez . . . they sure know about it," Aub protested. "We've been sending the data through all along . . . I know for a fact that that guy Edwards is upto-date. Why are you of all people being kept in the dark, for Christ's sake?"

	"Don't ask me, Aub," Clifford said wearily. "Maybe I've told them too often what I think of their system. But there's no way they're gonna make me live in nice straight lines."

	"So what's bugging you? You wanted out and you got out. Sounds like it's okay."

	"I just feel I might have something to contribute," Clifford answered with a trace of sarcasm. "On top of that, I just don't trust them not to screw the whole thing up somehow. You know how their minds work or don't. They'll sure as hell find a way."

The next day a more subdued Aub called. "All kinds of rumors flying around here-something to do with people being selected as candidates to work on some new top-security thing. My boss hinted this morning that I might be lined up for a move, but clammed up when I tried to pump him."

	"We had something similar going on at ACRE," Clifford said. "Any idea what's up?"

	Aub grimaced. "Couldn't get a lead on that . . . it's all political and everybody's getting neurotic about security. I'm pretty sure it's being set up from somewhere high up though-probably Washington." He frowned and cocked his head to one side. "So what's the score at ACRE? A reshuffle in the wind there?"

	"Looks like it," Clifford replied. "Some other places too, I hear."

	"Are you involved in it?"

	"What do you think?"

	Aub shook his head in despairing incredulity. "It's crazy," he declared. "What kind of an operation are those nuts going to be able to run with all wheels and no engine? Do you think they're doing what I think they're doing?"

	"Don't tell me, Aub," Clifford sighed. "Right now I don't wanna hear it."

	A few minutes later, after he had cleared down the call, Clifford turned toward Sarah, who had been watching from across the room.

	"Have I got two heads or something?" he demanded. "Not that I've noticed," she replied, then became more serious. "Oh, Brad, how can people be so stupid?"

	He thought for a second and growled. "I guess it doesn't matter which way the wheels go round, as long as they're all going round the same way together."

The Aub that Clifford grew to know better during this time turned out to be even better than his first impressions had suggested. Like Clifford, he was preoccupied, almost obsessed, with a compulsive urge to add further to the stock of human scientific knowledge; he had no political persuasions and few ideological beliefs, certainly none that could be classed as part of any recognizable formal system. He accepted as so self-evident that it was not worthy of debate the axiom that only the harnessing of knowledge to create universal wealth and security could provide a permanent solution to the world's problems. It was not, however, the desire to discharge any moral obligation to the rest of humanity that spurred him Onward; it was simply his insatiable curiosity and the need to exercise his own extraordinary inventive abilities. He had no interest in impressing his beliefs on those who were not disposed to listen; in the end they would come to think his way anyhow, and whatever he did or didn't do in the meantime would make no difference that mattered.

	Unlike Clifford, Aub was not unduly perturbed by a situation in which the interests of pure science were subordinated to those of politics, a state of affairs that he looked upon as transient and one that would change nothing in the long-term history of the universe. He reacted to the warped world that others had shaped by extracting from it and using the things that he needed while remaining indifferent to and, for the most part, uninfluenced by the rest. Life was to be made the most of despite the follies of others, not by their license. Aub, the individualist, the opportunist, and the eternal optimist, would pursue unswervingly the path he had elected to follow, happily riding the tide when its direction happened to coincide with his own and just as easily striking out on his own when their courses diverged. For the time being, life at Berkeley suited him by affording ample opportunity for him to develop and refine his talents. Tomorrow-who could tell?

      Everything came to a head one day when. Clifford was working at home in his study at the top of the house. He was staring at the screen of the upstairs terminal, digesting the meaning of a group of tensor equations out of ACRE's computers, when the chime sounded and a message superimposed itself on the
display to inform him of an incoming call. He cursed, suspended the program, and touched a key to accept. It was Aub, looking angry and disturbed in a way that Clifford had never seen before.

     "I've just been talking to my boss and his boss," Aub informed him without preliminaries. His voice was seething. "So now I know what gives."

	"Hey, calm down, buddy," Clifford answered. "What's with all the bosses? Now you know what, what gives?"

	Aub seemed to take a second or two to compose himself. His heavy breathing came through clearly on audio. Then he explained. "There was a zombie from Washington here too. They want me to take another job."

	Clifford sensed the connection immediately. His brow creased into a frown of suspicion. "What kind of job?" he asked.

	"They didn't come too clean with the specifics, but it was obvious they intend taking further-a lot further-the experiments that we set up to prove your theories. They want me to set up a team and head it . . . to manage the whole thing formally and more thoroughly." He moistened his lips and asked: "Do you know anything about this yet. . . officially?"

	"No way."

	"That's what I thought. That's just what I damn well thought." Aub continued to glower while Clifford thought over what he had just said.

	"Where abouts is this going to take place?" Clifford asked at last.
	Aub showed his hands and sighed. "Again, they wouldn't say. But what I did gather was that there are going to be lots of people in on it . . . from all kinds of places. Not just experimental particle guys like me, but the works-mathematical guys, physics guys, cosmology guys. . . you name it. They're getting a whole circus together."

	"I see. . ." Clifford murmured slowly.

	"But do you, Brad . . . really?" Aub's beard quivered with his indignation. "You can see what they're doing-they're setting up a whole high-power scientific team, on the quiet, to take your work apart and go through it with a fine-tooth comb. But they're not even telling you it's happening, let alone inviting you in on it. It's plain piracy. Next thing, they'll be setting up some stooge with his name in big lights all over as having started the whole business. You won't buy their apples so they're cutting you out."

	Clifford's initial calm began changing to a cold, creeping anger that climbed slowly up his spine until it filled his whole being. The picture that he had long suspected deep down inside was now laid bare before his eyes. Fighting to keep himself under control, he asked through gritted teeth: "So, what'd you do- take the job?"

	Aub shook his head firmly. "If I didn't know what I know I probably would have-it would have sounded pretty interesting-but as things were, I wanted to check out the score with you one more time. They told me the whole thing was politically sensitive and all that junk and not to breathe a word about it, but what the hell? I'm damn glad I did check it out too. Right now I'm in the right mood to go straight back upstairs and tell 'em to upstick it ass-wise."

	Clifford was still in an ugly mood ten minutes later when, downstairs in the living room, he recounted the conversation to Sarah.

	"It's the end," he fumed, pacing from one side of the room to the other. "This time I've had it. First thing tomorrow I'm going straight in to see Edwards- and Jarrit too, if he's around-and I'm gonna spell out to the two of 'em just what I know about their setup and their neat little plans and their . . . their bullshit! They can throw me out if they like, but just to see their faces will be worth it . . . just to see them scurrying for the woodwork."

	Sarah contemplated the ceiling stoically and drummed her fingertips lightly on the arm of her chair until the pounding of his footsteps had stopped. When she sensed that he was looking at her again she lowered her eyes to meet his and shook her head slowly from side to side, at the same time smiling with a mixture of despair and amusement.

	"Now, Brad, you know you can't do that," she said. "Assuming, that is, you don't go and have a coronary or burst a blood vessel first. It's just not practical."

	"Oh? And why not?"

	"Because. . ."

	"Because what?"

	She sighed a sigh of infinite patience. "Because of Aub," she told him. "To be credible, you'd have to tell them where you got the information, and that would drag Aub into it. The only other way would mean you'd start a big scene and then have to admit that you'd got nothing to back up your accusations, in which case you'd end up looking silly. Either way, it's not practical." Sarah also knew, but didn't say, that whatever satisfaction such an action might have bought Clifford in the short run, ultimately it would achieve nothing significant. Even if such a showdown resulted in his being offered, belatedly, his rightful place in the operation, he would never accept it- not now; the price would be more than his pride and his principles would allow him to pay.

	"Yeah . . ." Clifford mumbled after a while. "Yeah, I guess maybe you're right." He walked across the room and stood staring out of the window for a long time, unsure of what he was going to do next. Sarah said nothing but sat soberly contemplating the toe of her shoe.

	She had a fairly good idea of what he was going to do.

"You can't," Corrigan declared flatly. "Your contract says so."

	"That stuff's academic now," Clifford retorted. "I've already told you-I have."

	A long table was set at right angles to the desk in Jarrit's office to form a T-useful for impromptu conferences and small meetings. Jarrit was leaning forward at the desk, fists clenched on the surface in front of him, while Edwards and Corrigan were seated next to each other on one side of the table. Clifford sat opposite them. All four faces were grim.

	"There has been no formal request and therefore no approval," Edwards pointed out. "The matter will have to be considered in the regular manner."

	"Screw the regular manner," Clifford said. "I've quit."

	"I don't think you fully realize the gravity of the issue, Dr. Clifford," Jarrit stated. "This is not some trivial question that can be settled by local procedures. You are employed under the terms of a special federal directive, which states, quite unequivocally, that you do not have the right to terminate your contract unilaterally. Surely I don't have to remind you that we-the whole Western world-are facing a crisis. We are living in an emergency situation."

	"The screw-ups that brought it on had nothing to do with me. I've quit."

	"Maybe not," Corrigan said. "But the same could be said for everybody else. Nevertheless, you'd agree that you have a share in the obligation to protect the nation from their consequences, wouldn't you?"

	"That's what your book says. I never said so."

	"Oh, is that so?" Corrigan felt himself getting into stride; the old familiar feeling of limbering up before launching into the devastation of another awkward witness was coming back. "Are you telling us that you are above the law of this country? Do you consider yourself . . ."

	"I'm telling you I'm not an object for compulsory purchase," Clifford cut him off short. "The goods aren't for sale."

	"You're copping out then, huh? That's what you're saying?" Corrigan's voice rose uncontrollably. "Democracy can go to the wall."

	"What do you know about democracy?" Clifford made no attempt to hide the contempt that he felt. His tone was close to a sneer.

	"I believe in what it says, that's what I know," Corrigan snapped back. "People have a right to choose how they want to live, and I'll fight any bastards who try to come here and take that away . . . there's a billion of 'em out there. Nobody's gonna ram some crummy ideology I don't want down my throat, or tell me what to or what not to believe. I make my own decisions. That's what I know about democracy and that's what I say you've got a duty to defend."

	"That's okay then." Clifford's voice sank abruptly to almost a whisper; the contrast to Corrigan's shouting added emphasis. "I've chosen. You're doing the ramming." Corrigan's face whitened and his lips compressed into a tight line. Before he could form a reply, Clifford went on, his voice rising. "There's no difference between you and them. You're all preaching bundles of canned delusions, and it's all the same crap! Why can't you all go home and forget about it? The people of this planet have already chosen how they want to live, but the message doesn't suit you so you don't hear it-they want to be left alone."

	"People!" Corrigan's complexion changed to scarlet. "What do people know? Nothing! They know nothing!" Jarrit and Edwards began fidgeting uncomfortably, but Corrigan had become too heated to notice. "They're just goons," he shouted. "They've never had a thought in their tiny lives. They don't know what they want until somebody strong enough stands up and tells them what to want. And when a million of 'em want the same thing they've got power and that's what it's all about . . ." He checked himself, realizing that for once he had let his mouth run away, and subsided into his seat.

	"And that's democracy?" Clifford challenged.

	Jarrit cleared his throat loudly and broke in before the exchange could escalate further.

	"You realize, of course, Dr. Clifford, that if you insist on pursuing the course of action that you have indicated, the financial consequences to yourself would be quite serious. Your severance pay, outstanding holiday pay, retirement contributions, and all other accrued benefits would automatically be forfeited."

	"Naturally." Clifford's reply was heavy with sarcasm.

	"What about your security classification?" Corrigan asked, still smarting. "That would be reduced to the lowest a man can have and still walk the streets. It'd be the next thing to having Commie painted across your forehead."

	"That would deny you any prospect of future employment in government service," Edwards added. "Or with any approved government contractor, for that matter. Think about that."

	"And you'd lose your draft-exemption status," Jarrit said.

	"You'd be jeopardizing your whole future career," Edwards added.

	Clifford looked slowly from one to another of the three and accepted the pointlessness of long speeches or explanations.

	"Stuff all of it," he said. "I've quit."

	Suddenly Corrigan exploded again.

	"Scientists! You wanna pick daisies while the whole world's up for grabs. You're telling me about delusions . . . and all the time you're chasing after reality and truth and all that shit! Let me tell you something, mister . . . that's the biggest delusion. There is no objective reality. Reality is whatever you choose to believe is real. Strong wills and cast-iron beliefs make the reality happen . . . When a hundred million people stand up together and believe strongly enough in what they want, then it'll happen that way. That's what defines truth. Men who were strong built the world; the world didn't build them. Truth is truth when enough people say it is-that's the reality of the world we live in. Your world is the delusion. Numbers . . . statistics . . . pieces of paper . . . what have they to do with people? It's people that make events, and it's about time you made it your business to grow up out of your fairyland and tried to understand it. We made you what you are and we own you . . . You exist because your toys are useful to us. We don't exist through any of your doodlings. You think about that!"