The man named Cotton walked into view and knelt next to Grady. “Thirty percent ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with gasoline.” On Grady’s uncomprehending stare, he added. “It’s a bomb, Jon Grady—powerful enough to flatten this entire building. To return this infernal machine of yours from whence it came. Along with the people who built it.”
Alcot’s voice answered. “It’s men like you who keep dragging us back to the Dark Ages.” He was awake after all.
Cotton turned to face the old man. “The Dark Ages are what you’re bringing us toward, Doctor Alcot. Advanced technology holds no answers for mankind—only regrets for when we play at being God . . . and fail. Creating a hell of His earth—the earth that He bequeathed us.”
“And what are you doing if not playing God? Deciding who lives and who dies. Murder is a mortal sin.”
“Not in defense of His creation.” Cotton looked to gas-masked men preparing the explosives. They nodded back, apparently ready.
Cotton turned and smiled as he scraped a wooden match across a pipe fitting. The match lit with a puff of smoke. He held it to the tip of a fuse, which began to sputter and spark. “You will winnow them. The wind will pick them up, and a gale will blow them away. But you will rejoice in the Lord and glory . . .” He looked to them. “Your judgment is at hand. Your bodies will return to the soil. Whether your souls enter into eternal torment lies with you. Use what time remains to determine your fate.”
Cotton walked toward the large, old-fashioned video camera—which was now set up on a tripod, its red light glaring. Judging by the collection of jerry-rigged radio antennas sticking out it, it was apparently taping their victims’ demise and beaming it off-site. All of the equipment looked old. None of this made sense. It was as though the group were a branch of militant Amish who had settled on the mid-1980s as their permissible technological level.
Cotton shouted to his camera. “The day of the Lord is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it! For a fire will be kindled by His wrath, one that burns down to the realm of the dead below! This is His judgment against those who violate creation!”
With that, his followers swiftly departed. Cotton gave one last look back at the doorway and made an almost apologetic shrug before exiting.
Grady was momentarily puzzled by Cotton’s parting gesture, but one glance at the sputtering fuse got him struggling against his ropes once more. They only bit tighter into his wrists.
Marrano quietly wept beside him. “Not this. Not this.”
Alcot’s weary voice spoke: “It won’t help, Jon.”
Grady looked up at the fuse and realized just how short it was. Barely a foot or so remaining unless there was more to it than he could see. It was impossible to say how much time they had—so no reason to give up yet. “Bert. Can you get your hands free?”
Alcot shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry you won’t get to enjoy this triumph.”
“We’ll get out of here. Hang on,” Grady shouted. “Can anyone get a hand free?”
Lum’s frightened voice came from the other side. “No. I’m trapped, Jon.”
“Me, too!”
“Christ! Does anyone have a Swiss Army knife or something? How about a phone?”
Johnson’s voice could be heard from the far side. “They took everything . . .”
The prisoners sat in silence for a few moments, listening to the fuse hiss.
Alcot laughed ruefully. “We really did do it, though. Didn’t we, Jon? We took a peek behind the curtain of the universe.”
“Yes. Yes, we did.” Grady nodded as he scoured his field of view for some means of escape.
“We probably would have won the Nobel Prize. Now someone else will discover this someday . . .” Alcot looked up at Grady again. “At least we know we were first.”
Grady nodded. The burning fuse neared the top of a barrel. If that was all the fuse there was, it wouldn’t be long. Just seconds left.
“Jon?”
“Yes, Bert?”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Bert.”
The fuse disappeared into the barrel, and a white light enveloped Grady.
He felt nothing more.
CHAPTER 3
Postmortem
Jon Grady became aware that he was sitting in a stylish, modern office lobby high atop an unfamiliar city skyline. The view out the window was spectacular. Modern skyscrapers stretched along a coastal plain. It was a beautiful day.
What the hell?
Grady turned to see that he was sitting in a row of empty, modernist chairs in some sort of waiting room. He was wearing his only suit, loafers, and his lucky tie—the fabric a print of helium atoms. He caught his reflection in a mirrored wall opposite. It was the same outfit he’d been wearing three years earlier when he’d been interviewed for a research grant—in other words, the last time he’d worn a suit. Libby had helped him pick it out. Helped him look normal. His hair, too, was cut short, and he was clean-shaven.
Grady searched his pockets and found only a note on which Libby’s clean script spelled out “Good luck! ” in blue ink.
What the hell?
A handsome young man sitting behind a nearby built-in reception desk nodded to him. “Mr. Hedrick will see you now, Mr. Grady.”
Grady turned uncertainly. Social convention required that he get up now. Instead, he held up a pausing finger. “Uh . . . hang on a second.”
“Can I get you some water or coffee?”
Grady took a calming breath. “No, thanks. It’s just that . . . I was just . . .” He considered the possible scientific explanations. He had no idea how he’d gotten here. Just moments ago he’d been strapped to a bomb. Was this a hallucination? A last hurrah from the dying neurons in his brain? Time was relative, after all. This might all be happening in the instant he experienced biological death.
He looked around. It seemed pretty convincing.
“Are you all right, Mr. Grady?”
He wasn’t exactly certain. “I think I might be dying, actually.”
“Excuse me?”
Grady took another deep breath. “Who am I here to see?”
“Mr. Hedrick, sir. I’ll buzz you in.”
The assistant tapped some unseen button, and a nearby set of double doors opened, revealing a huge and opulent office suite beyond.
“Go right in.” The young man smiled pleasantly. “I’ll have some water brought to you.”
Grady nodded as he rose to his feet. “Thanks.” With another deep breath, he wandered over to the doorway and entered the most lavish office he’d ever seen. The multistory bank of windows on the far wall had a breathtaking view, through which he could clearly see the Sears Tower—or Willis Tower or whatever the hell they called it nowadays. Chicago. He was in Chicago. He remembered that he’d met with a grant committee in Chicago years before. But not in a place like this.
The office he stood in could have easily served as a small aircraft hangar, with several closed doors leading out of it to either side. Thirty-foot ceilings and modern burled wood walls—one of which had a large round seal engraved into it depicting a silhouette of a human head with a tree branching within like dendrites in the human brain. Arching around the top edge were the letters “BTC” and rounding the bottom were the Latin words “scientia potentia est.”
Knowledge is power.
Just below the seal a well-groomed and handsome Caucasian man in his fifties stood behind a large, modernist desk dotted with exotic souvenirs—complex Victorian clocks, mechanical contraptions, elaborate sculptures hinting at biological origins, and oversize double-helix DNA strands sealed in glass. The man was dressed in pressed casual business attire. Massive translucent digital displays were arrayed above and behind him, projecting a riot of silent video imagery and digital maps
of the world. The displays looked impossibly thin and the images on them vibrant, hyperrealistic.
The man motioned for his visitor to come forward. “Mr. Grady, it’s good to finally meet you. I’ve read so much about your life and work. I feel I know you. Please sit. Can we get you anything?”
Grady still stood twenty feet away. “Uh. I’m . . . I’m just trying to understand what’s going on.”
The man nodded. “It can be disorienting, I know.”
“Who . . . who are you again? Why am I here?”
“My name is Graham Hedrick. I’m the director of the Federal Bureau of Technology Control. I must congratulate you, Jon—may I call you Jon?”
Grady nodded absently. “Sure. I . . . Hold it. The Federal Bureau of what now?”
“The Federal Bureau of Technology Control. We’ve been monitoring your work with great interest. Antigravity. Now that is a tremendous achievement. One might say a singular achievement. Likely the most important innovation of modern times. You have every reason to be proud.”
A male voice spoke just to his right, startling him. “Your water, Mr. Grady.”
Grady turned to see a humanoid robot standing next to him—a graceful creature with soft, rubber-coated fingers whose body was clad in a carapace of white plastic. Its face consisted only of beautiful tourmaline eyes glowing softly. Looking at him expectantly.
Grady glanced down to see a glass of water in its hand. “Uh . . .” He gingerly accepted the water and held it with increasing numbness.
Hedrick watched him closely. “You really should sit down, Jon. You don’t look well.”
Grady nodded and moved toward a chair in front of the great desk.
The machine stepped aside with the grace of a puma. “Be careful of the step, sir.”
“Thanks.” The moment he sat down Grady started gulping water, glancing around nervously.
Hedrick motioned for calm. “Slowly. I know it can be quite a shock. We would have applied a sedative, but it’s important you have full command of your faculties for this conversation.”
Grady finished the water and took deep breaths. “Where am I? What the hell’s happening?”
“You’ve just been through a traumatic experience, I know. It’s never pleasant, but neither is being born. And yet both are necessary to go on to greater things. And more importantly, it’s now over. And you’re here with us.”
Grady looked at his watch. The one he’d lost years ago. The numbers on its dial glowed in a familiar spectrum. It showed that no significant time had elapsed since the incident in his lab. A few minutes at most. “My old watch. I . . . What did I—”
“Time isn’t important, Jon.”
“This is Chicago. Two thousand miles from my lab. But . . . it’s daylight out.”
Hedrick nodded with concern. “Does that trouble you? Here . . .” He gestured with his hands, and what appeared to be a holographic control panel materialized in midair. He tapped several places, and the view outside the window changed to an uncannily real projection of New York City at night, looking uptown toward the Empire State Building. The interior office lights came on instantly to complete the illusion. “Is that better?”
Grady stared out the window uncomprehendingly. It was as real as reality. “What the hell is this place?”
“I told you, Jon. This is the Bureau of Technology Control—the BTC. We’re the federal agency charged with monitoring promising technologies, foreign and domestic; assessing their social, political, environmental, and economic impacts with the goal of preserving social order.”
“Preserving social order.”
“We regulate innovation. Because, in fact, humanity is far more technologically advanced than you know. It’s human nature that remains in the Dark Ages. The BTC is a safeguard against humanity’s worst impulses.”
Grady turned in his seat to see that the office doors had closed far behind him. The robot stood obediently nearby and nodded to him in acknowledgment.
Hedrick continued as he approached Grady from around the desk, “Mankind was on the moon in the 1960s, Jon. That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook? In some ways, what the previous generation accomplished is more impressive than what we do now. They designed the Saturn V rocket with slide rules. That they could make it work at all. So many parts. So many points of failure. They were the great ones. We’re just standing on their shoulders.”
Grady turned forward again. “What does any of this have to do with me? Why am I here?”
“Manipulation of gravity. Hard to imagine you did it—and with so few resources. But have you really not considered the implications of your discovery?”
Grady just stared at him.
“Come walk with me.” He motioned for Grady to follow him as double doors to their left silently opened, revealing a carpeted corridor extending beyond.
“Where are we going?”
Hedrick smiled genially. “Everything is fine, Jon. More than fine. Everyone here is talking about you. We’re all excited. I’d like to show you something.”
“What?”
“The true course of history. I want to show you what human ingenuity has actually achieved.”
With one last glance back at the obsequious robot still nodding at him, Grady got to his feet and followed as Hedrick placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“You should know that I’ve been in your position. Twenty-eight years ago. I know it’s not easy, but you’re a scientist, Jon. If it’s truth you’re after, there are wonders ahead . . .”
He ushered Grady into a long gallery lined with pedestals holding a series of displays—a museum by the looks of it. The closest pedestal held a sturdy-looking ceramic-and-glass construct from which a blinding white light shone. The device was the size of a washing machine. Holographic letters beneath it proclaimed:
First self-sustaining fusion reactor—May 6, 1985: Hedrick, Graham E.
Grady held his hands up to block the blinding light. “You can’t be serious . . .”
“I’m always serious.”
“Fusion. You perfected fusion.”
Hedrick nodded.
“Fusion energy?”
“I told you I’ve been where you are now.”
Grady looked back and forth between the reactor and its creator. Dumbfounded.
“I’m a plasma physicist by training. Toroidal magnetic confinement fusion devices were my specialty.”
“I . . .” Grady searched for words.
Hedrick nodded toward the reactor. “This is a later model. The first prototype was huge and output only a hundred megawatts. Even this one’s crude compared to what we have now.”
“But . . . 1985?”
“Certain innovations serve as catalysts for each other—creating a positive feedback cycle. Eventually a technology becomes inevitable. It’s managing the transition that’s critical. Fusion and quantum computing are good examples. Improved reactor designs were made possible by computer simulations of nonlinearly coupled phenomena in the core plasma, edge plasma, and wall regions of reactor prototypes. The vast energy from fusion made more powerful computers possible. And more powerful computers, better fusion reactor designs. They are symbiotic. Gravity modification will be another key symbiotic technology.”
Hedrick nudged Grady along to the next exhibit. “I wanted to show you this gallery because these are the advances that will one day transform human civilization.”
“And you’re keeping them secret? Even your own fusion work?”
“We prefer to think of it as safeguarding them. Preparing the world for the massive changes these innovations will bring about. A sudden influx of innovation could disrupt social order, and disruption of social order is not to be taken lightly
, Jon.” Hedrick brought them to the next display. It was a holographic animation hovering in midair. It depicted living cells replicating in a petri dish. The plaque read:
Cure for Malignant Neoplasm—November 1998: Rowe, Rochelle, MD, et al
“Cancer? You cured cancer?”
“Doctor Rowe did, yes—or at least most forms of it. An elusive pocket on the surface of protein 53.” Hedrick nodded and ushered Grady onward.
“How the hell can you ethically conceal a cure for cancer? Do you realize how many millions of lives would be saved? How many tens of millions of lives?”
“The human population is still growing rapidly. Even with cancer.”
“What gives you the right to withhold this from people?”
Hedrick looked on patiently. “Jon, the BTC predates me. It was founded in the years before the moon landings—as the pace of technological change threatened to overwhelm our social and political institutions. The BTC grew out of a section of the Directorate of Science and Technology. It was formed to monitor research worldwide for disruptive technologies, to classify them, and to regulate their future release to the general public. We don’t have a perfect record—Steve Jobs was a tricky one—but we’ve managed to catch most of the big disruptors before they brought about uncontrolled change.” He gestured to the line of exhibits stretching before them. “As you can see.”
Grady let a disgusted laugh escape. “Who says technology was threatening to overwhelm our social and political institutions? The space program inspired kids to go into science.”
Hedrick nodded. “Yes, but how would humanity have coped with cures for most diseases? With limitless clean energy? With greater-than-human artificial intelligence? These would result in irreversible changes to society. Changes that we’re seeing even now, despite our best efforts at management.”
“I can’t believe you think this is ethical.”
“Relinquishing my own achievements with fusion was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But I made that sacrifice for the common good.”