Carrier (1999) (62 page)

Turning her attention back to the sample in the test stand, she began to run current through it at a variety of temperatures. At first the readings did not seem out of the ordinary. At -200° Centigrade, the sample had exactly the superconducting properties that one would expect it to have. But as the sample came up past 0° C, it finally hit her what was wrong, or more properly, what was
right.
The sample had stabilized its conductive properties at 98% of their optimum, and held them. She continued to ramp the temperatures up, and the material held up until it finally melted at about 300° C.

She’d done it.

If her eyes and her machinery weren’t lying to her, she’d found her material. Stunned, she cleaned up the chamber, recalibrated her equipment, loaded an identical sample into the test rig, and tried it again. Identical result.

“I’ve really done it,” she whispered to herself.

As she fumbled in her purse for her mobile phone to call her faculty adviser, her brain was spinning like a pair of dice in Vegas. Her doctoral thesis was a done deal now. She could finally finish her degree and get on with her life in the
real
world. She’d realized her goals in her current research and could move on to new frontiers. But even as she called her adviser to share the news, she had no idea how crucial her new discovery would be to the rest of the world. She’d just created a practical high-temperature superconductor, and in so doing was about to change the face of civilization. “Power” and “wealth” would never be the same again.

Arjuan Ranatunga sat in the place he called his office and contemplated how to change the course of his nation’s history. Grand thoughts for a man whose major passion had only recently been playing cricket. But the continued suppression of the Tamil sect by the Indians on the mainland and the Sinhalese on the southern half of Sri Lanka had no end in sight. This repression had drawn him to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), more commonly referred to as the “Tamil Tigers.” The Tigers had always been a part of his country’s political landscape—for as long as he could remember, anyway. He was a revolutionary soldier in a battle that had been going on for longer than he had been alive. Now, at age thirty-seven—an age when he should have been coaching a regional cricket team—he had become the leader of the LTTE. When events in his country had spun out of control, he had been unable to turn his back on the needs of the people. The final straw that had made his current occupation inevitable was the death of the previous Tiger leader, his brother Sanath. Sanath had been killed by an Indian helicopter gunship a few weeks earlier.

He was sitting in a tent surrounded by jungle near Route A9. His “desk” was a folding table and his office chair a ration crate. In front of him were a laptop data slate and his encrypted satellite cellular phone. Despite the spartan surroundings, he had the power to control considerable military clout from the humble resources at his fingertips. He could dispatch forces ranging from patrol boats to special assassination teams with just a few taps on his keyboard, or a simple phone call.

And yet, force wasn’t doing the job. Decades of active resistance against the Indians and Sinhalese had utterly failed to give the Tamil Tigers the homeland they dreamed of. Already today, he had been advised by his regional commanders to begin a terror campaign in the south to avenge his brother’s death. Yet revenge was not his objective today. He knew better than anyone did how futile it was. Nothing would bring back his brother. Instead of planning and setting into motion a campaign of terror, he’d chosen to spend the morning considering his options, and the options of the organization and his people. Though well financed by the Tamil supporters on the mainland, he could see no combination of military action that would ever result in Tamil domination of Sri Lanka. Even if they won the bloody civil war that would be necessary, they would inevitably lose the peace that would follow. The Sinhalese would start their own liberation movement, and the cycle would start again.

What he needed was something different. A new kind of weapon—some new power that would break the rules, that would give his cause an edge that would count for something in a world where large-scale violence was relatively rare, but where the warfare of commerce, corporations, and economics was everywhere. A few days earlier, it came to him that an answer might lie in the rich earth at his feet. Sri Lanka was his home, the mother of his people. Perhaps that mother might provide the milk that would make them powerful enough to win, powerful enough to keep the Indians from crushing them, powerful enough to encourage a superpower like America to support them, as they had Kuwait back in 1990.

Not an easy task.

To catch the attention of the United States and focus it on the sufferings of a handful of people on the far side of the globe would take no less than magic. Luckily, he had recently hired a wizard.

The foothills of north Sri Lanka are unique in the South Asian region. While most of the Indian subcontinent is among the newest terrain on the globe, these foothills are some of the oldest. Old things are likely to be valuable, and that was why the geologist was here. The contract to survey this area had been both lucrative and timely. Short of money for his children’s school tuition, he had jumped at the chance when the Internet inquiries about his availability had reached his home in Perth, Australia. He had immediately said yes.

Before he’d even started packing, he had commissioned a series of one-meter-resolution multi-spectral satellite photographs from the French SPOT Corporation. Running the images through his desktop workstation in Perth, he had found several promising areas to explore. The commission had been explicit. Find rare and valuable mineral deposits, report them to the commissioning agent, accept the fee, and then deny that he had ever visited Sri Lanka. As an enticement to silence, the agent had promised him a tenth-of-a-percent royalty on anything that he found that was developed during his lifetime. With an offer like that, he had gone to extraordinary efforts for his employers. For almost a month, he had run the tires off of his hired Land Rover, looking for some exceptional mineral deposit to report back to them.

Now he was working the last area on his list of possibilities. So far he had found some promising discoveries, but nothing spectacular. A few days earlier, he spotted what might be a major vein of platinum in the side of a mountain, and he had taken several core samples around it to assay when he got home. Today, his chemical “sniffer” was finding samples of rare earth metals; and there seemed to be particularly large concentrations of scandium. What struck him was the purity of the sample he’d collected here—it exceeded anything he had ever heard reported.

In three days, he would return to Perth and start on his analysis and report. He hoped, for the sake of his future royalties, that the platinum find would pan out. Nobody had ever found a significant use for scandium.

April Fool’s Day is normally a day for pranks and lies, but this day would go down in the history books as a day when new truths were told. Jill Jacobs and the head of the Sandia Labs stood before a packed house of disbelieving science reporters to announce a breakthrough in superconductor technology, which would allow for the development of electric motors thousands of times more compact, powerful, and efficient than any made previously. A patent for the metal formulation had been applied for, and it would be available for commercial license immediately.

Chuckles broke out among the reporters, and there were cracks about cold fusion—until Jill came to the podium and asked everyone to go down to the street below, where she promised to demonstrate the material. Moments later, the assembled press personnel found what appeared to be a completely normal pair of buses painted with the logos of the University of New Mexico and Sandia Labs. After the reporters were all aboard and seated, Jill stepped onto the first bus, the Sandia chief onto the one behind it. A moment later, the buses accelerated smartly away from the curb, silent as ghosts, the typical diesel roar completely absent. In fact, the street noise outside was deafening by comparison. The stunned reporters sat in silence as they rode to the base of the Washington Monument several miles away.

After everyone got out of the buses and filed onto the sidewalk, Jill and the Sandia Labs chief opened the engine compartments to show the press corps a single car battery running an electric motor the size of a beer keg. All told, they informed the reporters, the two buses had consumed less than an amp-hour of power, less than one percent of what was stored in each battery. Even better, the motors, which had been designed from existing models, had cost less than a thousand dollars to build. Most of the reporters dragged out their cell phones then and there to report in, rather than waiting for the buses to return them to the Press Club building.

Today Arjuan Ranatunga’s headquarters were located in a gamekeeper’s hut, and his table and chair were actually comfortable. Moreover, the news on the data slate before him was like a gift from God himself. For the better part of a week, he’d had the mineral report he’d commissioned, but until now, it had seemed disappointing. It had promised nothing like the riches he had hoped for. But overnight, the news from America had turned the economy of the world upside down. Everyone had gone superconductor-crazy. Oil prices had taken a precipitous drop, and the prices for platinum and scandium had jumped off of the charts. This was hardly surprising. The world’s known reserves of scandium could be measured in just a few tons. These would supply a bare handful of the proposed applications for the new superconducting metal formula.

He did not need to be a financial genius to figure out that what had been found in the foothills to the east could make Sri Lanka the superconductor capital of the world. The problem was what India would do when they found out what was sitting in the foothills of Sri Lanka. Once they knew what was there, they would crush both the Tamils and Sinhalese faster than they had nuked the Pakistanis. Even worse, the rest of the world would probably not care, if what he had seen over the Internet on the various news service web pages could be believed. As long as the resource was developed, it didn’t matter who was offering it. He had to act quickly if he were to save his people and—ironically—their enemies, the Sinhalese. Taking a deep breath, he tapped out an E-mail message to his Sinhalese counterpart in Colombo.

Roshan Gandhi was having another in a long string of bad days here in his bunker. The Indian Prime Minister had not seen a ray of sunshine for weeks, and was beginning to wonder if he would ever see sun again. Since the day four months ago when he had authorized the firing of the nuclear-tipped missiles into Pakistan, his fortunes and those of his country had been spiraling out of his control.

Like so many other Indian politicians who shared his name, Gandhi was in no way related to the great man who had led India to independence six decades earlier. It had never seemed to worry the Indian people that the name Gandhi had helped a string of politicians gain power in India over the years. Still, his family did share a political connection with him. Roshan’s grand-father had been a follower of the great Gandhi’s, and had adopted the name after the assassination in the late 1940s.

The current Gandhi had been a popular provincial governor before he ran for and won his present office. Hed become the political leader of his party, and was then elected to national office because he was an honest man. He’d offered a pleasant contrast to the scandal and graft of the previous administration. Unfortunately (tragically, as it transpired), during all the discussions and analyses of what he was not, nobody had ever thought to ask what kind of leader Roshan would be. It would have been an illuminating question. As Roshan himself was the first to admit, he was a better follower than leader. And, honest man that he was, he’d have admitted that to the press. But no one thought to ask the question. From his first day as Prime Minister of India, with a vast majority in Parliament, Roshan Gandhi had been in over his head.

In the early days of his administration, his Defense Minister had badgered him into ordering a nuclear war with Pakistan. Even after the war was unleashed so catastrophically, the man was still badgering him for more. Roshan wasn’t happy about the way matters stood, either for him or for his country. Gandhi was aware of the problems his government’s actions had caused. How could he not be, even insulated here in the mountain fortress? There were tens of millions of Indians dead. Even four months after it was over, more were dying every day from the lasting effects of the nuclear exchange with Pakistan. Prevailing winds had swept the fallout to the east, making whole swathes of the land uninhabitable. Uncontaminated water was in critically short supply throughout the country. Plague and famine were rampant. Existing food stores, the crops in the fields, dairy products—all were contaminated by radioactive waste.

Unrest was everywhere in India, in a thousand villages and towns. Over the war, over the lack of food and water, over the destruction of the infrastructure, even over the UN quarantine. Mobs were forming, demanding action. Military units were suppressing the demonstrators and rioters, using deadly force if necessary. Roshan had agreed to that. It was a bad choice, but the only one that might allow India to survive as a nation.

But Roshan’s current problem was not centered on India’s massive domestic difficulties. Just at the moment, he was worrying about what would happen if any of India’s neighbors became too independent. Both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had been showing signs of slipping away from India’s influence. India was not really a “melting pot” like the United States, but a huge patchwork quilt composed of many thousands of distinct language and ethnic groups. Held together now only by the iron force of the Indian military, India might fragment into a hundred little kingdoms and regions—unless Roshan could make the center hold. In Roshan’s opinion, a crucial stage in this process would be getting the trade and imports embargo imposed by the UN dropped. Roshan’s people were starving, dying of thirst, rotting away from radiation sickness, and succumbing to a long list of ordinary diseases that could be controlled with proper medications.