Biblical (40 page)

Poulsen didn’t really care who took the credit, who collected the Nobel. All that mattered was for the breakthrough to be made. All he wanted was to be able to connect to his wife’s imprisoned mind; to give her some kind of externality, even if it was false.

Every time he thought of easing the pressure on his colleagues, loosening his control, the picture of his immobile, staring wife filled his mind.

He looked at the book again. Had he gotten it wrong?

He put it back down on the coffee table when a sound tarnished the sterile silence. He got up to answer the phone.

“More wine?” asked the cheerful waitress.

A large marquee had been put up in the grounds to make allowance for the unpredictability of the British weather, but the sky had remained contrarily cloudless and everybody had elected to stand outside, huddled in cheerful groups, sipping at their wine and enjoying the pleasant warmth, the golden early evening light and the views out across the university’s parks.

“Why not?” he said, placing his empty wine glass on the tray and lifting a full one. “It’s a symposium, after all.”

The cute girl with the cropped short blonde hair frowned in puzzlement. She looked totally out of place in the white blouse and black skirt; Casey guessed she was an undergraduate volunteer, earning some extra cash.

“A symposium …” he explained. “In ancient Greece, symposia were wine-drinking parties. Not a gathering of old physics farts …”

“Oh … I see,” she said. She had one of those British accents that Casey found difficult to place, geographically or socially. He could tell from her smile that she was interested in him, as he was in her. He was about to say something else when he felt someone slap him heartily on the shoulder.

“Casey Macbeth … How the hell are you? Looking forward to hearing the answer to life, the universe and everything?” It was Juergen Franke: a stereotypically huge, ruddy-complexioned,
blond and blue-eyed German who had an equally unstereotypically jolly disposition and sense of humor. He always gave the impression of being some kind of hardy, down-to-earth, North German farmer; but Casey knew that he had a mind of frightening brilliance. Franke leaned forward conspiratorially. “I believe the answer is forty-two …”

“I’m fine Juergen. How are things at CERN?”

“We’re still going round in circles,” he said and laughed loudly at his own lame joke: Franke was part of the Large Hadron Collider team, sending photons hurtling at near light speed in opposite directions around a seventeen-mile loop, deep underground in central Europe. He had played a significant part in the hunt for the Higgs and had done groundbreaking work in the field of virtual particles. He could also drink just about anybody he met under the table. “You?”

“I’m fine. Glad to be here. Drink?” Casey asked.

“Do you have beer?” Franke asked the waitress.

“Sorry, only wine. It’s a symposium, after all,” she said and smiled at Casey.

“What?” Franke frowned, then – catching the exchange of looks between them – grinned broadly. “Oh, I see, I see … It’s like that, is it? Don’t be fooled by his boyish American charm,” he said to the waitress. “He is one of these Mormon fellows … has a wife and fifteen children back home in the States. Or is it fifteen wives and a child?”

They both looked at him wryly.

“Hmmm … I think I am urgently needed over …” Franke searched the crowd for a direction then, picking one at random, pointed in it, “ … there … I’ll see you in the lecture theater, Casey. If you can tear yourself away, that is.”

“He’s actually very bright,” said Casey once Franke was gone. “He just hides it well.”

“I better go circulate,” she said with a small, apologetic shrug. “This lot are a thirsty bunch …” She referred to the one
hundred and seventy physicists from around the world who had assembled outside the Martin Wood Complex of the Department of Physics at Oxford University.

“You a student here?’” Casey clutched at anything to stop her walking off.

“Physics, yes. Second year. A sophomore, as you call it in America.”

“Good school … what’s the course like?”

“We’re doing Electromagnetism and Optics as well as Thermal and Quantum Physics this year. Everyone seems smarter than me.”

“Get used to it, how do you think I feel with this bunch?” he waved his glass in an arc to indicate the assembled physicists.

“Where are you from?” she asked. “I mean what part of the States?”

“Boston. MIT. I’m here for Professor Blackwell’s presentation.”

“I guessed that much.”

“Oh … sorry: Casey Macbeth …” He held out his hand. She shrugged apologetically and nodded towards the tray she held filled with wine glasses.

“I’m Emma Boyd. Nice to meet you, Casey Macbeth. I’m sorry, but I really do have to do the rounds.”

“Sure …” Casey said and smiled disappointedly. “It was nice to meet you.”

She smiled back and started to move away before checking herself.

“I’ll be around after the presentation,” she said. “Serving coffee in the marquee. Maybe I’ll see you there?”

“You can count on it. Then maybe afterwards—” Casey was interrupted by someone over by the door to the main hall making an announcement.

“Could all delegates please make their way into the main lecture theater. Professor Blackwell’s presentation begins in ten minutes and the doors will be closed in five …”

“Looks like I better go,” he said.

“See you later?” “See you later …” she said and smiled.

*

Given the events at MIT and elsewhere, Casey was not surprised at the level of security. Added to the sense of siege from fundamentalists felt by the scientific community, the whole of Europe seemed to be in shock: the Red Sea Massacre, as it was now widely known, had set fire to the Middle East once more and the supporters of the European Greater Integration Act were now fighting for its survival. Even the Italians, British and Bulgarians, who had been the principal motivators behind the Levant Accession, accepted that the violence that had erupted as a consequence of the massacre made accession impossible for the foreseeable future. The European Union had declared that the terrorist attack alert throughout its territory had been raised to red.

Probably because he had never before seen one in the flesh, Casey had always imagined British policemen to be cheery bobbies on bicycles two by two, armed only with a smile and an out-of-sight Victorian truncheon. The cops who stood guard at the entrances to the Martin Wood Complex were anything but: baseball-capped, Kevlar-vested and with Heckler and Koch machine pistols strapped across their chests, they glowered suspiciously at all who arrived at the event.

Burly private security men in cheap suits, tattoos and earpieces guarded the exits, and once all the delegates were assembled in the lecture hall the doors were closed and locked behind them, making Casey feel oddly claustrophobic.

He sat halfway up the tiered seating, next to Franke. The avuncular German’s jollity did something to take the edge off Casey’s indistinct anxiousness. He felt very aware of Professor Gillman’s absence. The plan had been for the two MIT scientists to fly to England together. Casey had wanted to talk to Gillman about the Simulists and Gabriel Rees, and the flight would have
been an ideal opportunity to ease into such a sensitive subject. But the explosions at MIT had put paid to that: Gillman’s body had not been separately identified, but as he’d been in the lab at the time of the blast and had not been seen since, he was now officially listed among the dead. Gabriel would remain a mystery unsolved.

Looking around the lecture hall, Casey realized that he knew almost every one of the one hundred and seventy delegates; and not just by reputation. Particle physics at this level was a small community, even if it was spread across the world. It was an impressive assembly: the brains in this room were the best of the best, and Casey felt a thrill of proud excitement as he took his seat. He sensed the same electricity course through the entire audience as a tall, gaunt man of seventy entered through the side door, locking it behind him, and walked across the stage. As he took his place at the podium, the three large screens suspended behind him flickered into life and were filled with the same image. In this hall of Science, Michelangelo’s God reached out and gave Adam life with a touch of fingertips.

“Ladies and gentlemen …” Blackwell’s voice croaked slightly and he sipped some water before starting again. “Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I want to thank every one of you for coming. I know some of you have travelled great distances and interrupted important work to be here, and that is hugely and humbly appreciated. I must also thank you for bearing with the unusual security strictures to which you have been subjected. I am sure that you will forgive this when you understand the enormity of what I have to tell you here today. I promise you that this place and this day will be marked as the most significant in the history of science.”

Blackwell paused and took another sip of water. Casey noticed that his hand trembled, something he’d never seen before in any of the many Blackwell lectures he had attended. Something about that tremor made the hair on the nape of
Casey’s neck bristle. He had also noticed that the Englishman’s delivery was less assured than normal. Whatever he had to tell the assembled audience, it was of a magnitude to humble the world’s greatest living scientist.

“You are all here by specific, personal invitation,” Blackwell continued. “My colleagues, my peers, my friends. Assembled here before me are the finest minds on this planet, each and every one of one you dedicated to the quest for knowledge, for understanding. There has been no nobler calling in mankind’s history and I am proud, honored and humbled to have been one of your number.”

Blackwell paused and pressed a button on the podium. The two outer screens remained unchanged and God still gave Adam life, but the center screen now bore the title THE PROMETHEUS ANSWER, in plain white lettering against a blue background. The mere appearance of the words sent another pulse of electricity through Casey’s spine.

“We all know who Prometheus was,” said Blackwell. “The Titan who sneaked into the Chamber of Zeus and, setting light to a reed from an ember, stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortal man, whom Prometheus himself had fashioned from clay and whom Zeus had forbidden from having knowledge of fire. Prometheus’s punishment for this theft was eternal torment, chained to a cliff while an eagle ate his liver each day, only for it to regenerate at night for the same anguish to follow the next day, and the next, and the next for all time.

“In that tale lies a warning, I suppose, that perhaps some knowledge is beyond knowing, or too dangerous to be known. All of us here, as quantum physicists, are familiar with the concept of a knowledge that lies beyond the limits of expression, even beyond the limits of human understanding. We seek to build machines to augment our intellectual capabilities, to help us to know the unknowable and understand the supra-comprehensible.
Each one of us here is a Titan who has spent a lifetime trying to sneak into the Chamber of Zeus.”

Blackwell paused. He gripped the edges of the podium, suddenly focused, intense.

“I have brought you all here to tell you that I succeeded. I built such a machine and because of it I know the unknowable. It allowed me to gaze into the smallest moment of universal creation. I saw written in it the history and the destiny of everything we know and everything we are yet to know. I have seen how it all begins and how it all ends. I have been in the Chamber and I have stolen from the gods that which they did not want Man to know. I have the Prometheus Answer.” Blackwell scanned the audience, the intensity gone and replaced with something like sorrow.

“I am a man of science. As a physicist, I have scrutinized two universes: the inconceivably vast universe around us and the inconceivably minute universe of the quantum realm. Each of these universes works following completely contradictory laws, yet exists concurrently with the other … dependent on the other. We have known for decades that there must be some connection we have missed, some mechanism we have overlooked, that unites them.”

A heartbeat’s pause.

“I have found that connection, I have seen that mechanism at work.”

The excited buzz from the audience exploded into applause and cheers, but Blackwell held up a hand. It wasn’t the physicist’s gesture that stilled the audience, however, it was the sight of tears seeking out the furrows on the scientist’s gaunt cheeks.

“I am sorry, my friends …” Blackwell’s voice shook with emotion. The silence in the audience was now total, absolute. “I am so terribly sorry. What I have found out is that everything to which I have devoted my life – to which you have devoted your lives – is a sham. I sat in front of a computer screen and
watched a bad, bad joke play out. I sought to steal from the gods and all I came away with is the sound of their laughter in my ears.”

“My God …” Franke whispered to Casey. “He’s completely lost it. It’s like he’s having a breakdown …”

Casey shook his head impatiently, his focus on the tall, frail figure at the podium. He thought about Gabriel Rees, and what Macbeth had told him about the research student’s state of mind.

“Prometheus,” continued Blackwell, “was the most complex scientific project ever undertaken; a complexity far beyond that of the moon landings. We have achieved things in the pursuit of the Prometheus Answer that were, in themselves, answers to major scientific challenges. I can tell you, for example, that we solved the decoherence problem and created a quantum computer of unprecedented power …”

Blackwell had to pause again and hold up a hand to restrain the clamor from the audience.

“Please … please …” He waited until quiet was restored. “What Prometheus allowed us to do was to look at the complete fabric of the universe, at its origins. At its ultimate destiny. Prometheus gave us the answer. The complete, unequivocal, terrifying answer …” Blackwell’s voice faltered. “And the result of my theft from the Chamber is the phenomenon we have all experienced, all around the world. What we have experienced as hallucinations hasn’t been hallucinations at all. It is time folding in on itself as the fabric of our universe collapses at the quantum level.”