Emprise

EMPRISE

Book 1 of the Trigon Disunity

Michael P. Kube-McDowell.

For Janie, for believing,
and Matt, for being.

The idea must have surfaced ten thousand times in wishful thinking even in the earliest days of the atom age, before MARV’s, MIRV’s, and MAD; before Cuba and cruises and an unending cold war that teetered on the verge of the ultimate heat. If only the nuclear genie hadn’t been released—if only there were some way to put him back in his bottle.

If only…

But for some, whether through hubris or naivete, the thought began not with “if” but with “maybe.”

Maybe there was a way…

Only a few of the names were ever known, in part by choice and in part by chance. But in the fall of 1954, a dozen such met in one of the private chambers of the United Nations and gave birth to a project which they intended would free the human race from technological bondage. For some, the act was one of treason against the nations in which they claimed citizenship. For all, it was an act of heroism for humanity—or so they told themselves.

Some, in an ironic vein, called the project Manhattan Minus One. The official code name was Hope.

In the years to come, the secrecy which necessarily surrounded Hope would cost more than fifty lives, as the group was forced to protect itself in the most final way from the probing of the KGB and NSA and their lesser counterparts the world around. For a long time, it seemed as though those lives and the hundreds of millions siphoned from the U.N. budget and a hundred other sources were expended in vain.

Thirty years passed, and a second generation of scientists and engineers faced the futility that had defeated the first. No answer offered more than a modest shift in the strategic balance. The Hope team watched in dismay as the advance of war technologies outstripped the advance of peace technologies: first ABM’s, later the High Frontier.

Then the key to the genie’s lamp was found, in the grand unified field theorem of one Benjamin Driscoll. First published in a minor journal after rejection by the juries of all the majors, the paper had created a sensation among theoretical physicists, but was overlooked by virtually everyone else. It was not until a year later when the controversy itself was news that a Hope research librarian took the trouble to seek out the original citation. Once he brought it to the attention of the project’s directors, it took only six months to construct a working prototype of what came to be called the fission blanket.

Known more formally as the Weak Force Intermodulation Projector, the fission blanket created a field which affected the nuclear environment such that no atomic fission could take place. The field from a single projector had a range of nearly a kilometre, which in itself was sufficient to permit its use as a counterforce weapon. But there was an unexpected, though in retrospect entirely predictable, bonus: the field’s effects were permanent. Once exposed to the blanket, fissionable material was rendered inert and useless, its nuclei as stable as those of argon or helium.

The cat could be belled, after all.

Instructions for building a blanket projector were delivered simultaneously to the defense establishments of every nuclear power. While those nations puzzled over their gift, the U.N. took it on itself to covertly treat a large fraction of the active uranium mines and reserves by making passes in projector-equipped low-flying planes. That act succeeded in convincing skeptics that the world was poised for change.

The scramble to construct projectors was the most dangerous period. Throughout the three-month race, Russian and American decision-makers agonized over whether to use their nuclear arsenals before they were rendered ineffective. In the end, neither was confident enough that their own cities and bases would be safe, and the missiles and warheads stayed in the silos and weapons racks. In time, both nations reluctantly agreed to allow their arsenals to be neutralized in situ by U.N. technical teams.

It fell to two less prudent nations, Israel and Libya, to provide the probably necessary proof of the blanket’s operational effectiveness. The Soviet-made missile bearing Libya’s only warhead fell uselessly on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the bombs delivered by Israeli warplanes in response merely dug furrows in Libyan sand. In the span of less than a year, the nuclear sword vanished from above the neck of the species. To most eyes, the prospect for a long human occupation of the planet seemed good again.

In reality, the fission blanket only offered a reprieve. It ended the threat of nuclear Armageddon, but by removing what had become the only real constraint on the use of conventional weapons, it also made the coming Fuel War possible. The industrial nations were still gobbling fossil fuels at a rate that only the ages could replace, and the growing human throng was still gobbling the food that only a half century of benevolent skies could provide. More quickly than most people had thought possible, the supply of both slowed to a trickle.

Energy went first. The symptoms of what could have been an avoidable crisis were evident as early as the 1970’s. But every shortage was followed by a deceptive surplus. Little attention was paid to the fact that the inevitable change from fossil fuels to any of the real alternatives was several orders of magnitude more difficult than the change from wood to coal a century before. It could not just happen; it had to be planned.

It was not planned, and so did not happen. Fossil fuel reserves declined steadily but unspectacularly, and prices increased in the same manner. The stage was set for the new fundamentalist government of Saudi Arabia to decide it was not exporting a commodity but emptying a precious savings account. When it ordered production slashed to the level of its own needs and those of two small trading partners, the first Fuel War was just around the corner.

Cutting the oil umbilical devastated the economies of Japan, Germany, Australia, and a dozen smaller countries. Brazil and later Mexico defaulted on more than $100 billion each in international debts. Global GNP fell precipitously.

For there was nothing to fill the gap created by the embargo, though the U.S.S.R. cut millions of acres of wood and the U.S. blackened its skies with coal smoke trying. The much lauded alternative energy sources simply were not up to the task of carrying an industrial economy.

Nuclear fission, crippled by public opposition, was killed off by the scarcity of fuel and a sort of reverse nuclear terrorism: the use of the fission blanket against unwelcome plants.

Solar-electric had been hindered for decades by the interference of giant corporations with conflicting interests on the one hand and by its cultish proponents on the other. Eventually, a single solar power satellite, Solar One, was built; the right answer at the wrong time, it turned out to be the final labor of the American space program.

Still other options, underresearched, were plagued by failure and development pains. Controlled nuclear fusion, despite decades of optimistic predictions that placed the first practical power plant just twenty years away, never came at all.

Billions were poured into crash energy programs in a dozen countries, and every researcher with reasonable credentials and a plausible line got a piece of it. Nothing of substance came of any of it.

The rural landowner, his life barely changed by the twentieth century, suffered least. Ingenious tinkerers of the
Mother Earth News
stripe had created enough workable options over a twenty-year span to allow the homesteader to be self-sufficient.

But for the city dwellers, it was a much rougher go. Transportation and manufacturing staggered, then rallied briefly as the United States doled out its strategic reserves. Those with political influence got the available fossil fuels diverted to their needs, and a crash program was undertaken to turn grain surpluses into fuel for mills and vehicles. But after nearly ten years of puzzling, often punishing, weather, came the first of the bad summers—the long droughts, then crop-destroying storms—and the surpluses vanished.

Each claiming they had no choice, both the American president and the Soviet premier dispatched troops to take and hold the oil fields of the Mideast. But like two men struggling over the last oxygen mask on a depressurizing spaceship, the combat so exhausted them that not even the victor had the strength to make use of his prize.

At home, the demand for grain as energy emptied the stores of cereals, and then of meat. National distribution of other foods became impractical, then impossible. Regional distribution held on until the final collapse of an overburdened, underfueled transportation industry. As the Saudi Arabian desert bested all parties in the Fuel War, the steel and concrete cities of the once-great powers emptied, and their strained political structures shattered.

By that time the outcome was clear, and the people’s hands were already in the soil. Many of those hands were stained with blood—the blood of one-time neighbors and countrymen. There was little largesse left in the spirit of the survivors. Great farms were broken into small, by fiat and force. Travel beyond a day’s walk or horseback ride ended as the civilized world fell back to whatever level of activity the renewable resources of the region could support. Reversing two long-term trends, the world became a larger place, and communities became smaller.

Later, economists would talk knowingly of the “energy threshold” needed to sustain an industrial society. For now, the scientists emerged from their labs, classrooms, and offices ready, like all the other newly irrelevant, to take their turn in the fields.

Willing, but not always welcome. Ready, but not always content.

“Radio astronomers don’t really want to believe in little green men.”

—Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discoverer of pulsars

The day began with a problem and would end with a puzzle.

Allen Chandliss tapped the meter’s plastic cover and frowned when the needle did not budge. His suspicions had grown daily for a week, and now suspicion had become certainty: the problem was real. And it was worsening: now there was not enough power to run the full observatory, and Chandliss could not figure out why.

True, there was only a breath of wind outside, and the pitted vanes of the airfoil windmills were spinning but lazily. Even without the mills, however, the solar array on the south hill should have been providing more current than the meter showed. It was a clear Idaho day, and the spring sun was beating down on Chandliss’s little valley with an intensity it had not known for months.

But the earth’s relentless motion was bringing Cassiopeia overhead, and so he moved about the small cabin, turning on what instruments he could. In the previous day’s observations, Chandliss thought he had detected the voice of Tycho’s Star, a supernova remnant some ten thousand light-years distant. But as always there was much scruff in the infinitesimal fraction of a watt his telescope could capture, and as always it was hard to be sure. Of course, that was part of the challenge: coaxing his makeshift rig into yielding up, if not a secret of the galaxy, at least a glimpse of its majesty.

The heart of Chandliss’s lash-up was an ancient Tecron TEF computer tied to the four-metre dish a hundred yards away on the hill. Though one of the TEF’s disk drives was damaged beyond repair, the remaining drive and the unit’s number-crunching power were what made his observatory in the woods possible.

To conserve the TEF’s batteries for that night’s analysis, Chandliss ran the computer off the main line. That left no power to run the chart recorder, obliging him to forgo the duplication it offered. No great sacrifice, that; paper was growing preciously scarce, and once gone there would be no more.

The calibration routine run, Chandliss left the unit on Monitor and began to fault-check the pastiche of wires and devices which passed for an electrical system. Unaware that he did so, he talked to himself. Without another human presence to make him aware, he heard only the thoughts, not the sounds.

“Not the voltage regulator. Perhaps the resistors in the meter—but the drop’s been gradual, not like a component failure at all.” A half hour passed, and Chandliss stopped and scratched his nearly bald skull in puzzlement. “Outside—I don’t understand, nothing there but—perhaps an animal has dug up a cable and eaten the insulation for breakfast, poor meal that.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Or perhaps the cells themselves have started to go,” he said unhappily. “Like Chandliss, like TEF, like paper, all nearing the end of our useful lives. Unpleasant prospect—perhaps it’d be best if I failed first.”

Checking that the TEF was obediently monitoring the output from the receiver, Chandliss stepped outside the cabin. As he walked stiff-legged up the rise toward the solar array, he suddenly became aware that the outside world had undergone a transformation.

“A green bomb,” he said, considering the fresh growth on the brush and trees. “Some oaf’s splattered green everywhere. Can’t be mad, I guess. Or gloomy, either.”

Chuckling to himself, Chandliss topped the rise and caught a glimpse of the bowl of the telescope itself, tucked in a tiny clearing in the trees a hundred metres north of the cabin.

“Bastard son of my hands, what I would have given to have had that nine-metre dish they took from me. Then we’d have done some real work all right,” he grumped. Turning, his gaze fell on the solar array, and he slapped his wrist in mock chastisement.

“Spring, you idiot,” he said, sighing and shaking his head. One third of the array was in shadow under the fast-growing leaves freshly sprung from the buds of a dozen plants. Last fall he had noted the encroachment, but he had postponed and then forgotten the pruning that was needed.

Kneeling, he began to remove the offending growth.

“Busy little sugar factories,” he said as he twisted off the stringy green branches or hacked with a knifeblade ground thin by many sharpenings. “I know you’re designed to fight for light, but I need this more than you do.”

The growth was resilient, and Chandliss’s hands lacked the strength they had had when he built the cabin and cleared the sites for his equipment seventeen years ago. Twenty minutes passed before he returned to the cabin.

He found the meter told of a gratifying surge in power. On checking the TEF, however, Chandliss gave a little cry, jumped back, and stared in wonder at the pattern which marched regularly across the unit’s tiny twelve-centimetre display.

After a few moments, he rushed to the doorway and scanned the sky for aircraft, cupping his ears to catch the sounds any machinery might make. He saw nothing, heard nothing, and rushed back inside. Dragging a chair up to the table where the TEF rested, he tapped out the command for an analysis routine, forgetting that the Monitor program had not yet saved the data. The Monitor program crashed, all but the time and frequency data lost, and by the time he had it up again the anomaly was gone. Cursing his own stupidity, Chandliss sat back in his chair and wondered about what he had seen.

Though his memory of it faded quickly, the trace had not been so odd. In fact, what was strange was that it had a distinguishable pattern. As far as his memory could tell him, it had been unnaturally clear and unusually strong. A rather easy signal to produce with test equipment, but it had no right coming out of the sky. And yet, that appeared to be what had happened.

“Ten thousand phantoms in the electronic world,” he thought aloud. “Motors with spark plugs, streaking aircraft, and beeping satellites. But not many of those now. A truck, over the hill, come for me at last? Or could the current surge have upset a chip or surprised my program?”

That was an encouraging thought, and he savored it for a while. But then he took notice of the wavelength at which the oddity had been caught and was shaken out of his complacency.

Between the 18-centimetre note of the OH or hydroxyl radical and the clear 21-centimetre song of hydrogen is a quiet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because OH and H combine to form the precious life substance, water, the quiet region was known colloquially as the Water Hole. For a time in Chandliss’s youth it had been popular among some radio astronomers to suggest that interstellar life would “gather” at the Water Hole just as Earth life was wont to, using that quiet region for a powerful radioed hello. For a few years, there had even been a serious effort to search the sky for extraterrestrial “phone calls” at those frequencies. Chandliss had always considered the whole idea the worst sort of anthropocentric pseudoscientific bunk, and he had had the satisfaction of seeing the SETI programs phased out in favor of more serious work.

But as near as he could tell, this emission had been at 20 cm, smack in the middle of the Water Hole. Chandliss’s cultivated raised-eyebrow skepticism was shaken. Either someone, Mother of the Galaxy included, was playing an educated joke on him, or—

Chandliss refused to complete the thought. The relentless motion of the earth had swept the source of the signal away from the focus of his telescope, but that same motion would return it tomorrow. When it arrived, he would be ready to listen again.

For thirty years Allen Chandliss had listened to the song of the heavens. Three distinguished years at Agassiz, then on to Kitt Peak for work on detecting interstellar molecules. His eight years there were crowned by the perfection of the first technique for directly measuring the distance to the cool hydrogen clouds known as the H-l regions.

Just two years later, his relative fame, his promising future, and his very position were stripped from him. He was not alone in that. Radio astronomy, like all other endeavors deemed nonessential, disappeared as a means of gainful employment. Those who had practiced it left the observatories and universities, and all over the world the great dishes came to an indefinite rest in the neutral position, as if gripped by a paralytic disease.

Green Bank, Mr. Wilson, Hat Creek, and the other North American instruments were shut down by government fiat, their funding cut off, their utilities shut off. The disease spread: Efflesburg, Serpukov, even Jodrell Bank. The end came seemingly without warning, but the warning had been there. The radio astronomers, their ears to the heavens, had simply not heard it until it was too late.

At least in America, the scientists’ stock had begun to fall the moment the fission blanket became a reality. For President Martin Novak, the fission blanket symbolized the arrogance of a meddling minority who held themselves above the “plain folks.” His excoriation of them began with “traitor” and then turned unfriendly. Novak laid the nation’s loss of manhood and the calamities still to come at the scientists’ feet. And he painted with a broad brush, holding biologists and astronomers as culpable as physicists.

Novak’s campaign was only the most extreme example of a wider phenomenon. The government of every nuclear nation was livid, with a series of “people’s assassinations” of publicly identified Project Hope scientists one result. But the citizens of those same nations were, for the most part, delighted. For a brief time, a refreshing if unwarranted wave of global optimism blunted Novak’s attacks.

But Novak returned to his theme in the wake of the Saudi embargo. “Where are our benefactors now? Why can they only take and not give? Why will they not help us when their help is truly needed?” he asked, and many wondered. A scandal involving nearly $20 billion in Fund For Energy grants seemed to prove his point.

When the time came to commit troops to the Middle East, Novak could point to the failure of the scientists and be confident the masses would say he was “only doin’ what the white-coats made him.”

But by that time, Chandliss had already arranged to resume his former profession.

Chandliss was far from the first to build his own radio telescope. American Grote Reber had assembled the prototype in his backyard in the 1930’s, and with it produced the first radio map of the sky. By the 1950’s the radio telescope was a common project in amateur electronics books, and in the 1980’s many a ham radio operator added a sky antenna to his rig as part of Delta Vee’s SETI program.

The dish tucked between two lodgepole pines in the Idaho hills was in many ways a greater marvel than any of its predecessors. The dish itself was unremarkable; thousands like it had dotted the human landscape in the years before the collapse.

But it stood in its little clearing, pointing out through a small opening in the forest canopy, due to the physical labor of a man who, before beginning it, had never had the need to labor. It had escaped detection for seventeen years despite the wanderings of thousands of landless. It had been put into operation by a man who had started out notably ignorant of the arcane art of electron-pushing. And it was, potentially, the arbiter of Chandliss’s life or death.

Though a fall while pruning one of the trees during construction had lamed him, the real risk was what the antenna represented. He faced both official and informal death penalties: from the authorities for diverting precious metals and energy resources to the specious cause of astronomy, and from the common people, for wasn’t it true that the scientists were to blame for the current state of the world? Be it so or not, that was what was said.

The observatory was an odd jumble of seemingly unrelated parts, gathered with ruthless zeal during the period between President Novak’s first Energy Edict and the arrival of the National Guard to enforce it. The dish had once stood behind a suburban house pulling in movie reruns and endless athletic contests from a direct-broadcast television satellite. The TEF had served as an audio engineering testbed; the chart recorder, as a hospital labor monitor.

Only the receiver was doing the job for which it had been originally intended. It was also the only item he had been able to save from the first truckload of supplies he had brought into the Salmon National Forest. The rest, including the truck and the parts of the larger, steerable earth station, had been taken by the survivalists.

But sometimes it all worked, and when it did, the TEF would patiently record the march of the numbers. For particularly interesting sources he would allow the precious paper to curl through the recorder, displaying a jumbled landscape of peaks and valleys. Little by little, the sky rolled over Chandliss’s valley, and he listened as it did.

Chandliss labored under no pretensions. He knew that beside virtually any of the equipment he had once commanded, his rig was a laughable toy. The superb hundred-metre dish at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn had been cleverly designed to deform from one perfect curve to another as gravity tugged at its moving mass. The finely finished Kitt Peak dish had been sensitive enough to hear an electron drop an energy level in a hydrogen atom fifty light-years away.

The masterpiece had been the blandly named Very Large Array, twenty-five computer-driven dishes spread across a vast expanse of New Mexico sand. There had been so little time to use it…

Regrettably, the tasks that were left to Chandliss and his creation were vanishingly few. Radio astronomy had passed out of the backyard stage a half century ago. Unlike its optical cousin, the only significant work left demanded the newest technology—fully steerable dishes, powerful computers, atomic clocks. As early as the 1960’s once-great instruments had begun to be retired, the jobs for which they had been built completed and the new tasks beyond their capabilities. At times Chandliss identified with those instruments—his time past, his purpose gone.

There was only one task that, due to official opprobium and skepticism, had never been satisfactorily completed—scanning the sky for evidence of intelligent life. Observatory time was too precious to squander on what most considered either fruitless or irrelevant. There were exceptions, of course—Frank Drake’s imaginative “Ozma,” Bowyer’s “Serendip,” Paul Horowitz’s hopeful “Suitcase SETI,” and any number of others during that same crazy-wishful time. Chandliss could have taken up that gauntlet, but he was a doubter; he let it lie.