--- title: "Radiance: A Novel" author: Carter Scholz, Gregory Benford, Hugh Gusterson, Sam Cohen, Curtis LeMay created: 2013-07-06 modified: 2019-08-17 description: E-book edition of the 2002 Carter Scholz novel of post-Cold War science/technology, extensively annotated with references and related texts. thumbnail: /doc/radiance/cover.png thumbnailText: "Photograph of cover of 2002 science/technology novel Radiance, by Carter Scholz. It abstractly depicts a nuclear bomb detonating and releasing x-ray radiation in a beam, as part of a missile defense research program." status: finished previous: /doc/existential-risk/1985-hofstadter next: /colder-war confidence: log importance: 8 cssExtension: dropcaps-kanzlei ...
# 1 > I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering those nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. > > --President Ronald Reagan, 1983 > Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. > > --Immanuel Kant Quine approached the Labs Lab on a road that led nowhere else. The morning light was thick, corpuscular almost a substance. Behind Past the razorwire of the perimeter fence, cranes and water towers and incinerator stacks rose above the fortress city's sprawl of buildings. Construction vehicles moved on the its roads. Beyond, grassland stretched to hillsides yellow sallow from drought and spotted with dark stands of live oak. Soon he saw the protesters blocking the gate. Cars in both lanes were had stopped. The blue lights and red lights flickered atop of patrol cars flickered on the road's shoulders. Blackclad police formed a line between the protesters and the gate. Over chanting, rhythmic but unintelligible, rang a bullhorn's clipped commands, and the protesters fell back from moved off the roadway to the shoulders, the rhythm of their chant stumbling. A few remained kneeling in the road before the gate. Three police holstered their batons and moved respectfully among them the kneeling protesters, like acolytes among devouts, helping them one by one to their feet and leading them within the gates to a waiting bus. The sequence of blockade, arrest, and release was by now ritual. The arrested chatted with their captors. As the cars edged forward, Quine saw once again the darkhaired young woman in the crowd and once again felt the hollowing of his heart. Her resemblance to Kate, any reminder of Kate, still lanced him. Two cars ahead, Leo Highet's red convertible sounded its horn as Highet leaned out to heckle, --Get a life! The woman flinched and Quine's eyes locked on Highet's head, the bald spot, the wedge of features visible in the rearview mirror, the broad nose and dark glasses. Past Once through the gate Highet's car sped into a right turn to the administration building while Quine drove on to the second checkpoint, then through a desert of broken rock, buried mines, and motion sensors erect on metal stalks like unliving plants. Past this dry moat he stopped at a third checkpoint, then parked in the shade of a concrete building with its blank walls and horizontal slits of embrasured windows, and nervously thumbing thumbed the car radio, --trafficaffic and weather together togeth, while he watched two younger scientists cross the lot and enter the building. Then he stilled the car and went in. In his office, one high horizontal window too high to reach framed a blank an oblong of sky. On the walls, left abandoned by the prior occupant and by Quine untouched, hung graphs and pictures, seismographs of bomb tests, the branched coils of particle decay, a geological map, electron micrographs of molecular etchings, a fractal mountainscape, all overlaid by memos, monthly construction maps, field test schedules, Everyone Needs To Know About Classification, cartoons, Technology Curiosity Is What Sets Man Apart, and nearby Not A Need To Know, whiteboard thick with equations in four colors so long unwiped that Quine's one pass with a wet rag had left the symbols down one edge ghosted but not eradicated erased, and a second desk, loose papers cascaded across its surface, the computer monitor topped by a seamsplit cardboard carton BERINGER GREY RIESLING and buttressed by books, manuals, folders, xeroxes, Autoregressive Modeling, Rings Fields and Groups, Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, Numerical Solution of Differential Equations, Selling Yourself and Your Ideas! and under the desk banker's boxes DESTROY AFTER, and D NULL in black marker. Devon Null, the prior occupant, was "on indefinite leave". But when Quine had moved in, Highet had insisted that he leave Null's half of the office untouched, either against Null's return, or, as Quine was coming to believe, as a monument to disappearance. Quine checked his computer mail. Most of the messages were notices, chaffing, power plays, trivia. > A memorial service will be held Nov. 1 for Al Hazen who died Oct. 27 following a length illness. He was 51. Hazen worked with the Weapons Test Group at Site 600 Aguas Secas. Donations in his memory may be made to the American Cancer Society. One message could not be ignored: > `Date:` Thu 31 Oct 12:10 EST \ > `From:` Leo Highet <sforza@milano.banl.gov> \ > `Date:` Thu, 31 Oct 1991 17:58:36 (-0800) \ > `To:` Philip Quine <quine@styx.banl.gov> \ > `Subject:` Radiance \ > `Cc:` dietz@styx.banl.gov, szabo@styx.banl.gov, kihara@dis.banl.gov, huygens@aries.banl.gov, lb@dioce.banl.gov > > Gentlemen: > > As you know, the Beltway boys are coming and it is CRUCIAL that they go home awed. I want confidence, energy and style. There are unanswered questions and we will take hits on those. Meeting at noon today to brainstorm our approach, bldg 101, rm 210 E-501. > > _Highet_ > > ---- "To apply and direct this vast new potential of destructive energy excited the inventive genius of Leonardo as had few other enterprises." ---- More galling than the message was Highet's new computer log-in login _sforza_ and his closing signature quote. This The inspirational conceit, that they were all Renaissance _maestri_ under the gentle patronage of Prince Leo the High, had come ironically from Quine, who was reading about da Vinci's eighteen years as military engineer under Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Leonardo had written, "I hate war, as all rational men hate it, but there seems no escape from its bestial madness." Not while men of genius bend their talents to it, Quine had added. Here was Highet's response comeback. Highet. What a piece of work. Builder and destroyer of his own legend. A fecund theorist but a distracted experimenter, an indifferent administrator but a champion politician. Most Lab scientists considered themselves above the funding process, but Highet tracked it as carefully as any experiment. From the start of his career he had traveled often to the capital, made himself known and available to congressmen and their staffs. In reward for such attentions he was at a young age appointed technical representative to a disarmament conference. His conduct was impeccable until one afternoon, goaded by the other side's mendacious presentation and by his own ungovernable need to occupy command the center of every situation, he let slip classified data. Highet made allies sooner than friends, and enemies sooner than either. After this gaffe his allies were silent while his enemies leapt to break him pounced. But Highet made the first of the hairsbreadth escapes on which his legend was built. A paper published a year before, cosigned by the President's science advisor, had exposed the same secret. The hearings were dropped and Highet was exiled to an underfunded oubliette of the Labs Lab housed in temporary trailers -: J Section. Anyone else would have languished there. But Highet built by inches a power base, using his charisma to attract the brightest, most driven graduate students he could find, forming in the meantime new political alliances. When Congress at last funded Radiance, all the necessary talent was in J Section, and fiercely loyal to Highet. Soon he was associate director. Two years later, the director retired and Highet filled his place. J Section. Research And Development In Advanced Nuclear Concepts. Concepts as in weapons. Advanced as in not working yet. Radiance's charter was to develop energy weapons of all types, but Highet's hope and pet was the Superbright: an orbiting battle station of hairthin rods webbed round around a nuclear bomb. The bomb's fireball ignition would excite charge the rods, focusing its with energy, focused into beams that would flash out to strike down enemy missiles, all in the microsecond before the station consumed itself in nuclear fire. So far the beams flashed out only in theory. The theory, originated by Null, seemed to Quine sound, but the more he studied the his computer model, the less he understood why any of Null's last test tests had ever produced even the ghost of a beam. No subsequent tests had shown it. Yet the farther tests fell behind expectations, the more strident became Highet's public claims. Warren Slater, in charge of testing, at last had resigned in protest. His letter of resignation was classified and squelched. Bernd Dietz had taken was given interim charge of testing, and to Quine had fallen fell the task of finding in disappointing test data any optimism about the promised results. With the showpiece of his career vulnerable, Meanwhile Highet had grown ever more reckless than ever. He began showing up at high profile, high tech conferences and seminars, in subjects outside his field: on neural nets, genetic programming, nanotechnology, virtual reality, cold fusion, artificial life, making no discriminations between the cutting edge, the speculative, and the snake oil, as if the force of his character could remake physical law, or at least the local version of it. He spoke in banquet halls at Red Lion Inns, he passed out abstracts, offprints, videotapes, he painted futures brighter and more definite than the present, with himself and his visions at the center of them, inviting the wise and the bold to sit with him in the prosperity and rectitude of that inner circle, outside which was darkness, barbarism, and chaos. *And many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude.* Again the voice. Quine recognized the line from Leonardo's _Notebooks_. In the mind's shadows were countless voices, dead, living, unborn, lost. Since working on Radiance he Quine had dreamed them. Now they irrupted came into his waking life. This voice he recognized from Leonardo's notebooks. On his second computer, secure in steel shielding, waited Quine's simulation of the rods. Abstract figures gyred This frail superstructure of hope was raised on a sprawling foundation of faith. Hundreds of man-years of Lab effort and ingenuity had gone into the underlying physics codes programs, magnetic fields, burn products, photon scattering, thermal conduction, ion viscosity, bremsstrahlung, all these imponderables had to be calculated and updated, interacting in bright colors every kernel of space, at every nanosecond. If Quine had once puzzled for years over the paradox of a single photon, the complexities here were literally unthinkable. The reward of deep understanding was not part of the package. None of this cauldron of approximation, this vast rationalization, this ingenuous mimickry, was Quine's responsibility. To him it was a black box. His laser simulation ran on top of it all, passing it data, receiving its judgments. Again he ignited his bomb and waited for the screen nuclear pinball of particles and energies to reach his rods. Color bars and line graphs crept across the bland screen, the visible satisfactions of programming. The self-contained solipsistic machine worlds. It was near to pornography, gaudy and without nuance. Any halfbright notion could be simulated, the simulation tweaked to an approximation of success, and the success conjured as proof for more funding. Realization was Tweak and squeak, as Highet might put it,. Realization was a "materials" problem, an exercise left to minions. Bend your backs, men, to prove this golden turd of an idea. The display glitched and broke into the debugger. Lines of code filled the screen, `void qelem`, `malloc(xarray)`, `atof(nptr), an arcane pidgin halfway to madness`. He ceased to see the words or even letters, his eye eyes grasping instead at the pixels, the shards of contained light within the characters comprised. That radiance within the meanest mote of being. What is light? The great mystery. Surfaces boil with quantum fire. How comes this dumb swarming to write beauty, alarm, or desolation on our souls upon the soul? Eyes are the questing front of the brain, and the channel to the heart. The eye may not, as Archytas thought, emit illuminating rays, but our modern understanding knowledge of its working is no surer than his. Mind's eye and heart's channel presented him now Kate's russet hair, her full mouth and cheeks, her dimpled chin, her dark eyes framed by wire glasses. Like a key those features fit his heart. Her flexed shoulder blades under They appeared before him like a leotard's scooped back truth of nature. Mostly he lived in a yoga class the mundane, scarcely noting what or whom he passed, but at rare moments the world came forward in all its vividness, stunning his heart. Every time he saw Kate, there was that shock of presence. She was 23, he 37. They'd met in a yoga class. Flirting He hadn't pursued at first. He was coupled with Nan, lunch a quiet woman his own age who worked at the Lab. They lived apart but spent half their spare time together. He was content and not content with what they had. But he and Kate talked, and they went out a few dates times. She was twenty-three seemed interested in him. Her eyes met something in his. Some hope had stirred in him, some need for joy so long put by he thirty-four'd ceased to miss it. Hence Thus fed his reticence need grew, and paradoxically his faith that covert but unchecked. The years between them were separating him from Kate, years he'd squandered in ever more esoteric projects at the Lab, seemed his to reclaim at will. Her Kate's attention augured it fed in him some myth of starting over. He grew testy with Nan and impatient with himself, seeking not a break between them but when at last between themselves and what he bared now acutely felt them becoming, burdens and reproofs to each other. Nan waited him out. Her deepening disappoint in him was unspoken but heavy. His need for joy desperation grew until he could contain it no longer and hope, so long put by he lay it before Kate, blurted it came out, a bitter plea. Save me. Who wouldn't flee from that? She regarded him kindly. Oh, Philip, the moment's passed. It just didn't happen for us. There's someone else. That the moment could pass. That he had let it. Had not seen it passing. Almost two years since and still it pained. His hand sought his carotid artery. Sixteen in ten seconds: ninety-six. Everything now cause for alarm: gas pains Such a small thing, headaches that attention, shortness of breath that renewed hope, specks in his vision. The blue pills with their excised triangle. Not at work. Certainly not with a meeting briefly given and withdrawn, gone now. The morning too was gone to no end. Since failing with Kate Every failure now he seemed referred back to fail at everything that moment, and he saw in all his life only patterns of failure and emptiness. --------- Quine avoided that part of the building where Highet's young theorists worked, X Section, or, as the older men called it, the Playpen. But today his customary exit was blocked by a tour group of weary adults and bored children in facepaint, their guide saying, --tiny robots that actually repair human cells, as he swerved past a sign WARNING TOUR IN PROGRESS NON-CLASSIFIED CONVERSATION ONLY to the swell of the Brahms Requiem in full clash with The Butthole Surfers and a rapid din of simulated combat followed by the admiring exclamation, --Studly! Big win! and laughter fading as he passed an open room in which three refrigerators stood flanked floor to ceiling by case upon case of soda, and veered into a stairwell clattering down metal steps to a metal door held open by a wastebasket and silent despite EMERGENCY EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND and emerged onto a loading dock between brown dumpsters NOT FOR DISPOSAL OF HAZARDOUS WASTE stepping down onto a paved path then jumping back to dodge doge a white electric cart DAIHATSU jouncing onto a debris of torn asphalt and treadmarked dirt past chainlink CREDNE CONSTRUCTION and three blue PORT-O-LET stalls to vanish behind three glossy cylindrical tanks COMPOSIT PLASTEEL CONTAINMENT DO NOT INSTALL WITHOUT READING PLASTEEL KIT B INSTRUCTIONS, on past temporary trailers holding his mouth and nose against the metallic stench of bright green flux oozing from an open pipe into gray earth, until he regained the main road and passed the checkpoint, showing his badge, to enter Building 101, passing through the lobby in which for the edification of where visitors and the inspiration of employees were displayed edified by models of bombs, lasers, satellites, boosters, and photos of the celebrated Nobelists who'd devised them, and on to the conference room where all but Highet had already arrived. --He was one of these, shall I say, Marxist radical types. He was so radical His mother cut him out of the family money. Hello, Philip. We're waiting for Leo as usual. So he's in Prague now selling laptop computers laptops to the Czechs. Ah, the man himself. --Who's this you're talking about, sounds like he's figured out that free markets are diplomacy by other means. Everyone, this is Jef Thorpe, postdoc from the University of Utah, he's here to look us over. Jef worked with Fish and Himmelhoch on cold fusion, and I just want to say don't believe everything you read in _Nature_ the conventional wisdom, something's is happening there, someday we'll look into it ourselves. Jef, Aron this is Dennis Kihara, our new press officer, he takes the heat for my excesses. Bernd Dietz, materials and research. Frank Szabo, systems integration. Phil Quine, our x-ray focusing guru., Philip, Jef's done interesting work in your area, you should talk to sit down with him. Okay, all present? Let's do it. Highet seated the young man opposite Quine,. Jeans, dark jacket over t-shirt, short black hair, high color, a small gold stud through his left nostril, his presence a breach of protocol and probably security, though the others knew better than to say so. --You all see the news last night? About the protest? The good news is we won. We won because we got to go last. First they showed the protesters, out on the street, wind noise, harsh bad lighting, and then our rebuttal from our respectable office. We won because we got to go last, and they put us last because we provided closure. So That's our the model for the our presentation: beginning, middle, end. We'll begin with our successes, by showing footage of successful tests. The middle: will be video simulation simulations of the system, highlighting where we'll highlight potential problems. By defining the problems we control the questions. And we'll end with by addressing the problems and introducing entirely new approaches and spinoffs spin-off programs. Aron's Dennis is running the show things, but I may break in at any point. --Leo, can we skip the last part, the science fiction? --No, Bernd. Past, present, future. Closure. Without this you leave people ready to ask questions. --We're avoiding questions? --Not if they're intelligent and informed but we have a few critics and wise guys on this panel and I'd like to keep it simple. --Leo, I have more respect than you for the intelligence of senators. Congressmen are not always so bright but --Bernd, it's simple courtesy. We inform them at a level that's neither condescending nor technical, we assure tell them their money is being well spent, show them how, say thanks so much. --Salesmanship. --Grow up, Bernd, a couple times a year I ask you to do this. Is the money well spent? Yes or no. --Yes, yes. --I'd ah, feel better if we could discuss the middle part in ah detail, there are just some questions that I'm not comfortable to address without ah, just a little more input. For example the focusing data... --AronDennis, only Slater has questioned that data, and he's gone. Discredited. Focus is now Philip's baby. --So, ah, focus is our main problem? --Yes, it's one, said Quine. --Focus, brightness... --But we're within an order of magnitude? --I don't see any quantitative agreement with theory, said Quine. --The tests have shown a few bright spots. That's all I'm willing to commit to. --That's all you've committed to for what is it ten months now Philip? --I don't see any fundamentals. I'm beginning to wonder. --Are you pulling a Slater on me, Philip? Because I want to tell you something, all of you. Some people in the lower echelons are making Slater out to be some kind of hero. To me m this man was a menace to every one of us because he didn't care about winning. He didn't know what he wanted out of life and wouldn't have been able to get it if he had known. I have no respect for parasites like that. --Leo, Null had a brilliant notion and we should pursue it, but that's all it is so far, a notion. We --No one's questioned Null's theory, no one, not even critics. --Sure but it's a long way from there to even a prototype --We have supporting test data --which may or may not mean qualitative agreement may or may not, but never quantitative, we have no understan --well you're the one with the models Philip lo these many --and you're the one who said this was a long term project, your words, long term, and now suddenly --oh sure, and if we all had seven lives --now that there's a little pressure it's --what I'm hearing --it's suddenly urgent --what I'm hearing from you Philip is that we need more shots. Convey that necessity to our guests when they're here, think you can do that? And put a little urgency into it? --I won't pretend there's we have focus when --You're not going to give me an inch are you? --Not on the basis of spotty data I can't interpret. --I tell you what. There's an eighty kiloton shot coming up next Saturday. That's your baby, right, Bernd? Philip, Piggyback it, Philip. Get yourself some better data. --In what, a week? Design and fabricate apparatus in a week? --Nine days. Jef can help you if he sticks around. --Now hold on... --Get off the pot. Let's move to Frank's contribution. You've all read it? --Leo... --We're moving on. There was a brief silence in which papers rustled. --Nothing new here, said Dietz. --That's its strength. We've taken heat on pre-production preproduction technologies. This is a simple, viable off-the-shelf option, an element of the overall system. It's an easy sell. Contractors are lining up. --It's also good show-and-tell, said Szabo. --We can point to a card cage, this is the guidance system a year ago, then hold up a wafer, here it is today. Tangible progress. Dietz continued to study the paper. --These are Baldur anti-satellite missiles in a smaller package. --Close enoughThat's right. --These were shelved over ten years ago as a violation of the ASAT an ABM treaty violation. --That toilet paper? Let that worry us we might as well pack it in give up. --These are not by any stretch of the imagination directed energy weapons. You want to put, what does it say, five thousand of these in orbit... --We're pursuing many options, Bernd. These would be one layer of an overall a shield. Look, it's a long way to deployment. Oh and we get something else totally for free with Frank's idea. Always think dual use. Put a warhead on these guys they're earth penetrators, aim them downward get a thousand g impact, three k p s terminal velocity, earth-coupled shock waves to destroy hardened shelters. We have a friend in the Pentagon who's hard for that and the Beltway boys know it. --Wait just, wait you mean, this, these ah interceptors are for the presentation? But it's, we need to address the existing problems, that's what they're coming for, we can't feed them something totally new! And with this Slater thing --AronDennis, trust me, it's the best possible thing to do. As far as Slater goes, he's history, a blip, not even an incident. This visit was scheduled long before he had his snit. Sure we'll get closer scrutiny than we would in the average dog-and-pony but call it's an opportunity. Remember NORAD's well-publicized famous false alarms and screwups,? They got a billion-dollar facelift out of it those incidents. You up to speed now? --Well yes, I mean, no, not on the interceptors but... --Just Put Frank's paper in the kit, I'll step in during the presentation. Oh, and make sure everyone gets a souvenir. --A, I'm sorry? --A souvenir. What are you giving the kids for family day today? --Ah, some laser-etched aluminum disks... --Good. Run off half a dozen make it a dozen more etched with the Radiance logo, can you do that? And glossies of the new artist's renderings. Highet was out the door before anyone else had left their seat. Thorpe, abandoned, stood but did not move quickly enough to follow the older man out. As the seated men studied him incuriously he blushed and exited. The others then rose. Szabo went out singing under his breath, --It's a long way, to deployment, it's a long way, I know. In the meantime, we have employment, it's the stick that makes us go... At the doorway Dietz said to Quine, --It is outrageous that he should bring a boy into that meeting and criticize you this way. Easy for him to make promises, but when the promises are not so easy to deliver we suffer for them. --I don't think the boy knew what he was getting into. --Tell me what you want added to this test as soon as possible. He has put our asses on the line, both of us. --I'll send you e-mail. --Souvenirs! He gives senators souvenirs. --------- Quine had come to the Labs Lab at Réti's invitation, Réti, the legend, intimate of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger Schrödinger, founder of the Labs Lab. Impossible to refuse. Réti had for one semester graced Quine's university with his presence, where he'd sat on Quine's doctoral committee. Quine must have made an impression, for two years later Réti called him. I hear you are working hard on some good ideas. How would you like unlimited resources for this work? Come for the summer, work on what you will. Quine and Sorokin, a fellow postdoc, had isolated the emission of a single photon from a calcium source in order to determine whether a lone quantum displayed wave-particle complementarity. For two long years they'd had refined their approach for two years, paring it to essentials, designing an experiment they had a might hope of realizing to realize with the school's meager resources. Elegance born of need. A slow and painful progress. At the Lab, in one month at the Labs Quine designed was able to design and built build a detector acute enough., and the experiment came off on the first try. Both tunneling and anticoincidence were evident. They had touched the central mystery. Even a single photon is both particle and wave. Quine stayed;. After that there it was never a question of it. Not till much later did he guess that he'd been played. That Réti had waited his reason for waiting two years before approaching him for a reason. That by then his work was ripe for plucking, and the Lab's resources had little to do with its fruition apart from giving them the juice of it. At the Lab his paper brought him a celebrity almost near to grace. Unlimited time to think. No assigned duties. And the mysteries ceased to open to him. Idle, he took on a Lab problem up one of Highet's endless suggestions, quantum the optics of x-ray mirrors. He welcomed the work, as though it paid some tithe of the mind to the practical. And it was interesting science a challenge, but finally it was, as the pioneers had with exact irony called their first bomb, a "gadget". A Any solution that, even if it laid bare first principles, was useless beside the point if it couldn't kill missiles. So his mirrors never passed a design review, but. He was left alone to fiddle with quantum optics wrote some computer codes for telescopes modeling the mirrors, and such those turned out to have some peripheral application in inertial confinement fusion. The weapons work which he knew to be central to the Lab still seemed distant from him. Then Radiance geared up, and his modeling software proved flexible enough to accommodate the next idea: the bombpumped Superbright. Opportunistic as a virus, the Labs exploited any evident skill Lab took it up. And so Now he was out pressured. Now he was in a competitive atmosphere where the possibility of quantum optics failure, of weakness, of doubt, could not be voiced even to oneself lest it undermine the resolve needed to get through each day. All the projects here were difficult, at the edge of the possible, and into weapons modeling all the scientists worked at their limits and at the limits of their science. He You could work on a problem for months only to have your work demolished in minutes in a review by your peers, your competitors, your colleagues. That was what reviews were for: to show up fatal flaws before they became busy expensively entrenched in a design. Still So ideas were hammered without mercy. It was and it wasn't personal. If the idea was good, it was yours but somehow beyond you, and if it was bad the attack was on it, not on you. Quine saw men in tears even as they went on arguing and, after it was over, thank their assailants. Throughout this he kept silent faith with the mysteries. He would return to them when the pressures of the moment were past. Programming took only the surface of his mind; its capital essence he held in reserve. But Quine could feign reserve, even to himself, while reserving nothing, and or so he thought. Quine came at last to understand that he did well at programming his assigned tasks precisely because he brought them his all to it. Nothing was left over. --------- When he left the building the sun was low. The air was warm thick with heat, and as he started the car the radio blurted --record temp, before he silenced it. Through the gate traffic slowed. Demonstrators in costume paraded in the road. Quine edged forward through skeletons and spooks with signs and props, TECHNOLOGIES OF DEATH, a longrobed mantis-headed mantisheaded figure towering on stilts above the crowd, tambourines jangling, EL DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS, and lab security herding the crowd off the road. As he cleared the crowd a klaxon blared. The mantis swayed, tugging at robes snagged on the perimeter razorwire as the entrance gates slid shut, alarm lights strobing. On the inner perimeter road security vehicles appeared, racing toward the entry kiosk. Then he saw standing by his passenger window the woman who resembled Kate. She wore black spandex bicycle pants and a blue chambray shirt. She was staring at the gate. Quine hesitated, then rolled down the window. --You want a ride out of here? They're going to start arresting people. She looked at him, then back at the gate. On the main road Quine saw a flurry of approaching lights. City police. --I can't wait. Whoops blasts squeals cut the crowd noise. She saw the vehicles approaching and with something like annoyance got into Quine's car. Quine sped away shutting his window against the shriek of the passing vehicles. --I'm Philip Quine. --Lynn Hamlin. Did you see what happened? When he looked at her all resemblance to Kate fell away. Same body type, same round features, but hair almost black with just a russet tinge, cropped close to the neck. No glasses. Dark penetrating eyes. Tanned calves darkly faintly downed, lithe as a huntress's. No key turned in his heart, just a faint an echo of loss. --The one on stilts, his costume caught on the fence. It must have set off the alarm. --Were you there for the demo? --No. I work there. His ID was still clipped to his jacket. She had'd been looking at it, and now she smiled slightly, as if to confide her little subterfuge. --What do you work on? He turned onto a road parallel to the freeway, where earthmovers were parked in debris-filled torn up lots between behind emporia of sporting goods, fast food, auto parts, videotapes, computers, discount carpets. Sun flashed through the struts of a half-finished retaining wall. --DefensiveDefense weapons. Where can I take you? --You mean Radiance. Do you believe in it? *And those in the anterooms of Hell demur, saying, I do not approve of what goes on inside.* --It's what I do. --Do you know what Einstein said? That you can't simultaneously prepare for war and prevent it? --Where can I take drop you.? --Drop me at the Corner of Mariposa. As they passed over the freeway, the sun struck their shadow out toward the golden eastern hills. He sensed her still looking at him, then she faced ahead. --I like this time of day, she said. --The light. --I don't, said Quine. --It makes me think of endings. She said nothing to that. As the car descended into the shadow of the overpass Quine said, --We didn't hear about the evening protest. The organizers usually let us know. --Maybe they're tired of playing your game. --It's not my game. A green sign with white letters Mariposa hung over the intersection. Quine pulled to the curb by a bus stop bench placarded FAST DIVORCE BANKRUPTCY. She turned to him with sudden vehemence. --But isn't it a waste now that the cold war --Look, and hearing annoyance in his voice he immediately stanched it, --even if I, it's classified and I work, I only work on a small part of it, I don't even know... --These demonstrations won't stop, you know. Until you do. You don't know how angry people are... Her voice held some doubt, whether for the anger or his belief in it, he couldn't tell. --Then I'll probably see you again out there, he said. --You willTell me, what's the point, I mean, isn't it obviously a waste now that the cold war --Look, and hearing the annoyance in his voice he stanched it, --I don't make policy... --Well, that's part of the problem, isn't it. People not taking responsibility for what they do. Pricked, he turned to her just as a bus pulled to the curb, the squeal of its brakes preempting whatever he might have meant to say. Some hurt might have remained in his eyes. She unbuckled seemed abashed and held his gaze for a moment longer before reaching to unbuckle her seatbelt. Suddenly he wanted to know her. --Listen... would you have lunch with me some day sometime? She looked at him incredulously in surprise. --Lunch? With you? But Why? --Because I'd just like to talk to you more. --Do we have anything to say to each other? --Maybe not. But if even you and I can't talk, what hope.We could find out. His pulse thickened in his throat. --But you're the enemy. Her eyes fixed on him, she said. --Oh well if you feel that way --I do! --Then there's nothingMe...? He caught, under her serious dark brow, squeal of brakes obscuring his words as a bus pulled to the curb ahead glimpse of him mischief, though she didn't smile. --Thanks for the ride. She was out the door before he felt the protest of his heart. So even now he had not relinquished some forlorn hope of starting over. --- When he reached got home Nan's car was in the lot his parking space. Most Tuesday nights she spent here at with Quine's. He went to her place Friday nights and some weekends. But he'd worked late Tuesday, so they'd shifted it to tonight. He'd forgotten. Nan worked --Lo, she called, --In another section of the Labs kitchen. I picked up some tortellini at Il Fornaio and a salad, handling personnel files is that okay? --Fine. As he had met her after failing entered she turned with Kate a wary smile. He had never told The sight of her about that. She was so unlike Kate brought him a roil of giddiness, of memory, of guilt, of sadness. Her features were sharp and fine, her skin pale, her straight auburn hair just starting to show gray, her slight body always dressed with a style that in its impeccability read as a brave front. --Lo, she called as he entered, --In the kitchen. I picked up some tortellini at Il Fornaio and a salad, is that okay? --Fine. --Some Bread's in the oven, can you get that? He looked for an oven mitt while she chattered talked about her day, a some seniority conflict in her the personnel department. Quine's patience wore. When, setting the plates down, she bent to kiss his neck, he stiffened and pulled away flinched. --What's wrong? --Nothing. It's just Highet's going mad again. A Congressional visit's coming up, it should be routine, but he acts like the whole program's at stake. --Is it? --First he drops Null's work in my lap, then today he starts pimping some lunatic idea of Szabo's, and he assigns me a postdoc like, like some kind of a chaperone... and the protesters. --What about them? --They're getting on my nerves. They ate in silence for a few minutes. At last he said, --HaveWhat would you think if I quit? --Quit? Your job? --Yes. --But Philip, what would you do? --Well, I don't know. I could take some time off to think about it. --Time off? I thought that we were trying to save money... --Save...? --Philip, I'm not trying to pressure you, but I thought we agreed that it makes sense to look for a place together... --I told you, Nan, I can't think about that while this project is on, I can't make big plans like that until this whole thing is, is settled. --Well, couldn't we start looking just to see what's available, just go to a few open houses...? --If you want. But I don't see the point if we can't afford it yet. --The point is to plan for a future, Philip. Haven't you made any progress? --NoProgress, I feel like I haven't made any progress.m chasing my tail, there's no progress to be made! --Please don't snap at me, Philip. --I, I can't even discuss it with you, you don't have the clearance. She stood and carried dishes into the kitchen without speaking. He got up to follow. --Look, I have an insane deadlineNan. I won't be able to see you for a week or so.. He came up behind her and embraced her. Her hands rested on his forearms. --What about Sunday? --Sunday? --We're seeing Ginny and Bill on, remember? If you came early we could --Sunday. Look, I thought have a deadline. --I can't. I'm sorry but I just can't. --You're working? But if you're not getting anywhere... --Well but that's the whole problem isn't it! Meantime there are still short-term goals and meetings. She sighed and left the kitchen. In the living room the television came on. When after a moment he entered the room he heard her in the bedroom speaking on the telephone. Remote control in hand he viewed a cool panoptic tumble of war famine catastrophe enormity larded with a fantastic plenty of goods caressed by smiling tanned models, to pause on the logotype of Martin Marietta, --a proud supporter for twenty-five years of science programming on public television, his impulse to switch again frozen by the worn, imposing face of Horatiu Aron Réti, saying thickly, --In science there is now a cult of the beautiful theory. But how beautiful is reality? These so-called beautiful theories, these elegant mathematics are not verified by experiment. Experiment shows us a mess of a universe with over a hundred basic particles and three irreconcilable forces. We would like to unify them all, just as we would like to smooth over all the political differences in the world. But experience shows, in physics and in politics, that this is not always possible. Abruptly the screen blanked then cleared to glared with the involute radiance of the bomb. Sun's heart. Cosmic ground. Siva and Devi coupling. A thin roar issued from the set and the waspish thick voice rode over it, --The duty of science is to pursue knowledge even if it leads to the unbeautiful. Or to the evil. How else learn about evil? Nan returned to sit beside him. --Isn't that Réti? The camera returned to the physicist facing an interviewer. Quine remembered. Though Emeritus director, Réti was rarely at the Labs Lab; the office he kept there served him solely as a clubroom or a set backdrop. Six months ago a film crew had come to the Labs Lab. He Quine had heard Réti shouting at them behind the closed door. --Watch, this is what Highet calls the liberal bias of the media, said Quine as the camera went to the interviewer. --After the war, many of your colleagues turned away from weapons design for ethical reasons. Some of them, your schoolmates, your collaborators, have won Nobel Prizes. Do you ever feel that your work with weapons has cost you credibility or respect within the scientific community? Has it compromised you as a scientist? --Never. In fact it has challenged and improved me as a scientist. --You're closely connected to Radiance. What about recent charges that test results have been faked? --This is a lie.! First, I am not closely connected... --But you've lobbied extensively for the system Radiance in Washington. Wash --I am no lobbyist! I am a private citizen with some scientific expertise, and when I am asked to testify about technical matters I do so... --But for over forty years you've been an advocate of nuclear weapons,. Your authority and influence are well known. --Now you listen to me. It is an imperfect world, a dangerous world, even an. There is evil in the world. How do you meet it? All ends, even the best, are reached by impure means. Reason is supposed to be the hallmark of science, but I tell you that no one is swayed by reason. A theory, an idea, does not make its own way. It was Einstein who said merit alone is very little good; it must be backed by tact and knowledge of the world. I know of many cases, where maybe the data does not quite agree with your theory, no, you think, the carpers will question, your case is far clearer if you discard *this* set of data, if you report only *these* results. And who are these frauds? Ptolemy. Galileo. Newton. Bernoulli,. Mendel,. Millikan. What matters in the long run is not your some wishful dream of scruples, but whether you have driven your knowledge home! Behind the fury in Réti's eyes Quine saw a bright and open wound: more illustrious for his influence than his work, he had failed at everything but success. And Quine's own life, he suddenly saw, was bent around Réti's influence. A man has no wealth nor power but his knowledge, Réti had once said to Quine. But now he said that if power did not lead, knowledge could not follow. Quine saw behind the fury in Réti's eyes a bright and open wound: more illustrious for his influence than his work, Réti had failed at everything but success. And Quine's life, he suddenly saw, was bent to Réti's influence. Quine stood up, ignoring --Philip? what is it? and went to the bathroom. He clutched held the sides of the sink, heart racing. In the cabinet he found the pill bottle. *The spirit is radiant, yet there are two principles of radiance: that of light, and that of fire. Fire comes to the use of those who go not the way of light. And the difference is, that fire must consume its object.* Quine swallowed the pills and his nausea subside as he returned and sat, to Réti's angry voice, --So I have no Nobel Prize, that accolade of * the pure* science. But Alfred Nobel would understand me well. Yes, I have the ear of presidents. And history will be my judge, not you. --What is it, Philip? What's the matter? Quine turned to Nan, her face in the phosphor light bleak as a rock outcrop. He reached to touch her neck. Unsmiling she leaned her head against his hand. His fingers cupped her nape and he drew her mouth to his. In the bedroom they undressed on opposite sides of the bed. The television droned on. Between her legs he felt the string of a tampon, and as he touched it she bent double and enclosed him in her mouth. Above the activities activity of their bodies his spirit hovered sadly regarding the terrain of his life. Lightly his hands cradled her head. He began to pump semen. Deep inside him a talon drove home and brought forth, impaled, his soul, writhing. A minute later he was awash in sleep. Waiting at a counter to pick up xeroxes. Quick tap at his shoulder. Kate. She smiled, her eyes upon him, and he knew it was a dream, and he was happy, and he slept. # 2 The morning sky, pallid with haze, conveyed yet enough sun to cast through his the high embrasure of his office window a faint rhombus which crept along the wall toward the doorway relentless as a horologe horologue. From his desk Quine gazed at it half hearing the radio, --ildfires in three counties, when his phone rang. --Quine. --Is this Philip? --Yes, who's this. --Lynn. From the demo yesterday? --Oh. Oh yes. How did you... He stood and paced with the phone. --How did you get my number? --I called the switchboard. I want to apologize. I behaved badly. I'd like to apologize. Are you free for coffee? --Well, not this morning, I... not this morning. --Later this afternoon? --Well I... --Don't let me pressure you. --No I, I want to. It's just a surprise. --I can get off work at four. Do you know the Café Desaparecidos the missing, --I get off work at four. Do you know the Café Desaparecidos [the missing]? In the central mall. I work near there, I don't have a car. --Sure I, okay, I'll see you there about four. As he hung up Jef Thorpe knocked on his open door. Black jacket, blue shirt, jeans. A faint pock where yesterday the nose stud had been. --Come in. [pg24] --I guess we'll be working together. --Oh, you're staying. --Never a question of thatIf you'll have me. Listen, that meeting yesterday, I didn't belong there, I'm sorry if... --Not your fault. As you see, Dr. Doctor Highet has his way of doing things. --Yeah, I see that. Listen, before we start started I want to tell you, the single-photon experiment you did with Sorokin was really elegant. I was, you know, sort of surprised to find you here, I thought you'd be somewhere more theoretical. --I thought everyone had forgotten that experiment by now. --Oh no. It was very sweet work. --The detector was critical. We worked on it for two years and couldn't get the resolution we needed. We got it only after I came here, they could mill the beryllium to micrometer tolerances. --You didn't follow it up. Sorokin had said, you don't leave an infant like this to fend for itself. But Sorokin had always been inflexible. He had refused even to visit the Labs during the experiment. --Sorokin thought I was wrong to come here. He said it would be a black hole. He may have been right. Of course things look different from inside. --Black hole, yeah, I've thought of that. But you know where I come from. That limits my options in the straight academic world. --You don't have any qualms about defense work? --WhatIt's this, a background check? not what I'm here for. --No, IIt's just, you might want to consider your position while you can. I came in neutral about defense work, and but before long I was in the thick of it. It's especially easy to slip into it from nuclear science. --I'll keep that in mind. I'm kind sort of apolitical. --Let me show youWell, if that's what I have you want, turning to the computer which glowed with: > `Date:` Fri 1 Nov 09:05 \ > `From:` Leo Highet <sforza@milano.banl.gov> \ > `To:` Philip Quine <quine@styx.banl.gov> \ > `Subject:` Upcoming J Section Tests > > 11/4 23:00 PDT, Building 328, Codename "Stelarc", groundbased ground-based laser guide star, R. Grosseteste, sup. R. Grosseteste, sup. > > 11/9 18:00 PDT, Site 600, Codename "Taliesin", 80 kiloton, B. Dietz & P. Quine, sup. > > "Mechanics are the Paradise of mathematical science, because here we come to the fruits of mathematics." LdV --Looks like we're real, said Thorpe. --You're lucky. It was years before I was directly associated with a shot. --Is that luck? --It's a bit of a prestige. A merit badge. Quine cleared the screen and brought up the Radiance Superbright test data. --You see. Intense brightness here, and here. Very erratic pattern. --This data is picked up how? --When the bomb ignites, radiation from the rods bounces off some reflectors to --X-ray mirrors? --Yes, something like that. They're beryllium. The data agrees with the theory to a point, but when we increase power, we don't get the expected an increase in beam, in fact we get less in fact. We've talked about trying different metals in the rods, we've used gold till now, but mercury... --Yeah, elements seventy-two through ninety-five would be good to try but with our the, you know, time constraints, I checked with and Fabrication, they have has gold rods ready to go, so maybe we should stick with those are a good choice and put our efforts into you can, or I mean we can sort of concentrate on sensor configuration, keep it simple, don't you think?... --Sounds reasonable. Thorpe continued to stare at the screen. --Could this be an annulus annular? This pattern I mean, could the sensors those reflectors be picking up an a sort of imperfect focus, you know, the edge of a ring? If we move them in... --I've tried, no luck. --Can I look at your focusing code? --Yes, sure, all the files are in this directory. --That's great. Mind if I work here? pointing to Null's desk. --Ah, sure. Sure, go ahead. I'm going for lunch and maybe a swim. I'll see you later. *We read of the beaver that when it is pursued, knowing that it is for the medicinal virtue of its testicles and not being able to escape, it stops; and it bites off its testicles with its sharp teeth and leaves them to its enemies.* --------- Gaunt, saturnine, Bran Nolan in a corner of the cafeteria looked up unsmiling from scattered papers to raise a hand in greeting. --How's our new boyo Kihara? --Well enough. Weren't you in line for that position? --It's my Tourette's syndrome. Terrible liability in a press officer, you never know what he might blurt out in public. --Seems You should have been asked. --Do you know, I'm happier, if that's the word I want, where I am. Kihara is a little lamb, a kid. The last man, Vessell, didn't outlast Slater. And we're not through done with all that, no indeed. --Getting some work done? Quine indicated the papers. --"The Labs have Lab has a long-standing commitment to developing new methods and technologies to protect the environment", the most effective of which to date has been the press release. Do you know we have a toxics mitigation program now.? Seems some chemical seeped there's a toxic plume seeping into the ground water groundwater under a vineyard off the north boundary. Vines died, soil went gray, the whole field stinks like sepsis. I'm writing an upbeat report about it. And yourself? How's the death ray coming? --We can maim small insects at a meter. The new concept is interceptors. Small flying rocks. --Do you know, da Vinci invented shrapnel. He'd have been right at home here with all these advanced minds. --Yes, that's Highet's conceit. --Throwing rocks at things. We should be proud, thinking about these old impulses in such an advanced way. years ago Réti had some hare-brained flying rock scheme, these things never die A plump figure cam forward shaking a sheaf of papers, just get recyc from which Nolan recoiled. --Bran, Bran, Bran. What must I do to get you to use a font other than Courier? Nolan pulled back from the sheaf of papers brandished in one plump hand beneath his nose. --Hello Bob, how's the gout? I don't like this business of tarting up manuscripts. You get enchanted by the beauty of it all. You start to think you're writing the Book of Kells. --A few attractive fonts, tastefully applied, can spice up a presentation so. A little humanitas, you know. Why else, Bran, did we get you that powerful and costly workstation? --Jeez, Bob, I don't know, Bob, why did you? I'm was still figuring out the type balls on my Selectric. The sheaf of papers fell fanning from their clip onto the table. Shaking his head and chuckling grimly, Bob withdrew passed on to another table. --Humanitas, yes, that's what we need here, isn't it, Highet with his Renaissance, and Aldus Manutius there, need a few more particle men who've read the Tao Te Ching, couple more managers who've studied Sun Tzu, lend these binary views a little tone, dress up the winners and losers, the Elect and the Preterite, the screwers and the screwed,. Each man in his station., and keep your distance from the Preterite low life, can't have just anyone winning, because if you ever let the rabble win ahead, if they can rise, you can surely fall. Nolan folded back pages, --listen to this lovely bit, "the support of this tight-knit community", support is it now? I'd have said the goading, the ambition, the _Schadenfreude_, that's what gets the work done. Look around you, these are people without lives, The wife walked out six months ago with the kid, they you're eating Campbell's soup cold out of the can, they you haven't got a clean shirt, but after a few months of eighteen-hour days they you've got *data* that everyone wants to see. They You *win big*. --Bran, you keep working work here, too. --What should I do then, write novels? Or maybe journalism, that's it, *investigative* journalism. Have you met the journalist from Cambridge? Right over there with his tape recorder, name's Andrew Armand Steradian. He's researching the belief systems of those who work on weapons of mass destruction, I think that was his phrase. Quite the charmer. He's published one book on scientific fraud, and a paper highly critical of what he calls the defense establishment. You probably don't watch TV but there was an antinuclear a program on PBS last night, Steradian was in it abusing Réti. --Does Highet know all this he's here? --Highet invited him. Quine headed for the door, passing as he did Andrew Armand Steradian, holding who held a small microphone before a J Section technician, saying, --you're so goldang busy every day you just put off thinking about it, though in Quine's view pressure was a tool well used to put off thinking. --------- Black cottonwoods around the pool throve despite the drought. Their catkins littered the water. A jet moved in on the sky, stitching a contrail across the thin a lace of cloud drifting eastward through which where a hot white sun struggled to assert itself. Quine sat on a towel on the grassy verge and watched a portly bearded swimsuited man enter through the gate, barrel chest glossed with sunbleached hair, and behind him a woman in a white halter top and shorts, the heads of three men turning to follow. The pool was crowded this Friday afternoon; it was warm, it was the end of the workweek, it was family day; unlike Quine, most worked a five-day week, most would depart hence into a forgetfulness. In the shallows of the pool two young girls splashed. One opened her mouth to show her companion a bright penny on her outstretched tongue. A young mother in a black maillot gripped a ladder to raise herself half from the pool and wave at her infant in a nearby stroller, glisten and shadow in the cords of her back, and Quine suffered a pang for a life now beyond his knowing: to be wed, with child, so young. On thermals a blackwinged bird black and white winged vulture, _Cathartes aura_, rocked and banked. From the jet's thunder fell like muffled blows. The warmth and the sound of water churned by swimmers and the spray tossed up by their passing lulled Quine into a lethargy from which he woke with a start to consult his watch. On the pool's floor danced cusps of light. --------- When he parked at the town's central mall the high cloud had passed and the sky was pale blue overhead and scum brown near its horizons. Quine walked sweating between pastel columns under a pediment that alluded to no place or time between smoked glass doors into an atrium so chill and disjunct it might have been another planet. Outside methane and ammonia storms might blow. Shops, granite benches, low fountains, and climbing plants ringed a pool in which stood a steel sculpture of crippled symmetry, as if a Platonic solid had ruptured. The cafe café's high walls rose past exposed beams and ducts to the nacre of frosted skylights. Lynn sat in a wirebacked chair at a glass table in a wireframe chair, face downcast at papers before her. In the moment before she looked up, Kate's face glowed before him. In this cafe they'd first talked. What do you do, Philip? --Hoy es el día de los muertos, Lynn said in greeting, banishing Kate's image. Angularities all her own moved in her flesh; a small gap showed between her teeth as she smiled. Quine seated himself and said gravely, --I should tell you I'm involved with someone. --JesusGee, I said I wanted to apologize, not start an affair. --I, sorry I... --And maybe pick your brain about Radiance. --I'm sorry, I, what did you say before? El día... --Today is the Day of the Dead. All Saints Saint's Day. All this of California used to be Mexico, you know, they called it Aztlan. Once my law firm group shuts you people the Lab down, we're going to reclaim all of Aztlan for the native peoples. Oh, don't look that way, I'm joking, that's the kind of thing the far right says about us. --You're a lawyerYour group? --Citizens Against Nuclear Technology. I'm a paralegal with them. --What's that you're reading? --Your press releases. She held a sheaf set in unadorned Courier font. --God You people have fingers in a lot of pies. When I started my concern was the bombs, but now I find out about that's just the tip of the iceberg, isn't it. There's also the supercomputers, the lasers, the genetics, the chemicals, it's a separate world in there, isn't it... --You probably know more about it than I do. --Your cover stories are so creative. Every one of. Oh, go ahead, order, she's waiting. --Cappuccino. What do you mean, cover stories? --I'll have anQuisiera un espresso, please por favor. Every one of these quote benign technologies has a pretty easy-to-imagine military use. Laser x-ray lithography for etching microchips, uh huh, right, and here's one about kinder gentler CBW, "less virulent" tear gas for "crowd control", heavier specific gravity for controlled delivery, if this is the stuff you're public about one I can only imagine the rest. --You're wrong, there's a genuine effort to convert to peacef --Dual use, I know all about it. Genuine effort to blur the line is what it is, and it goes far beyond the Labs Lab, people in physics and comp sci departments across the country are lining up at the same trough, the grants are there and if they don't take the money someone else will. That's the reasoning. What a waste of talent and resources. --It's more complicated than that. I won't defend it, but The people I work with, they're not cynical, not. --OhYes, I know how people get caught up in their work. I have a friend there, not in Radiance, in another section. He's a Quaker, he calls it "being in the world". I can respect that, At least he's thought about it. How did you get into it? --Me? I'm, well, a lapsed theorist. But I'm not typical... Was he not? Réti, Highet, Dietz, Thorpe, all had failed in some subtle way that in such a place could be denied. But where was there not failure and denial? --Do your people pay any attention at all to our demonstrations? --In J Section? Not much. --We seem to get to bug your boss, at least. --You mean Highet? --In his little red sports car. What about you? What did you think about the big one yesterday's? --It seemed, I don't know, festive, almost a costume party, I didn't realize at first it was Halloween... --But no, that wasn't it. It was a ceremony. An exorcism. --Oh come on, what, you mean we're possessed... --By arrogance, if nothing else. --That's absurd, you can't convince anyone with supersti some absurd ritual... --It's no different from your rituals, your bomb tests, just as absurd and ritualistic, but really dangerous! --They're not my tests,... and he remembered *B. Dietz, & P. Quine, sup.* --I'm sorry. I'm no good at talking about this. The set of her features, so poised and eager, softened then and her voice lowered. --I don't mean to attack you. I'm sure you think about it. --Yes but, but I'm not sure! Because What to do, I mean. What if it is a waste, what if, if all the billions money and the decades and, all the lives and talents, talent... then it's not more than just me, it's not just my mistake, but something wrong at the root... of it, and what, what can I do about that? --If it is a mistake, you can face it, call a. You could stop. --But there that wouldn's never any stoppingt stop anything. It's almost as if these things we work on... they use us to get born. Could use anyone. --I'm sorry PhilipIt must be very hard for you. Their eyes met, and the troubled sympathy in hers wrung him. Her face was so concerned for him that he almost cried out with selfpity. --No It's not your fault. I just, I need to get back now. Her face was so concerned that he almost cried out with self-pity-I really am sorry, can we. He.. can we forget about all this and just start over? --Start over...? Abruptly he rose and walked away stolid with loathing of his own erratic heart, and of her for stirring it. --------- In the night he woke sweating with a pulse of ninety, reached for the pill-bottle pillbottle next to the small box DREAMLIGHT Unlock Your Inner Potential and its plastic headset. The pills opened a plain of timelessness and haze in which it seemed a lost part of himself dwelled. All then was fine. as he lay gazing at the grainy darkness of the ceiling in their haze, his fluency returned,. Wonderful problems enticed and yielded to his insight, wisdom depended from the sky like fruit. As He began to drowse kept a notebook in case any insight survived his waking. None did. He roused himself to attach attached the headset like a blindfold around his temples. When he dreamed, At the onset of dreaming a red strobe in the headset, sensing his eye movements, flickered would flicker there and roused rouse him enough to observe and direct his dream but not to wake. He settled and conjured an image: the battle station shines shining in the void of space. Slender arms pivot as targets and rods pivoting. The missile rise in swarms, bright points on the black hollow of a crescent Earth. They blur in a silver mist of chaff. Above the crescent distant battle stations ignite in globes of light and, their beams lance out, but swarm follows swarm up from the Earth, far too many to destroy, and the dream begins again with different stations, Mylar skin of mirrors rippling, missiles coming on as earth-based beams strike up and the mirrors twitch to focus.. He pulled off the headset. The world has changed, the old enemy has collapsed into ruined republics. Yet despite this consummation of all the Labs Lab has worked strived for, the work goes on unabated, the mood is spiritless, the shots in the desert continue, as though it is like some ritual of penance, some black and endless propitiation of forces that by in losing their fixed abode have gained in menace. Now effort must redouble to keep those forces from finding a new abode, from tenanting, aye, the Labs. Vertigo of waking. Tearing of Velcro as the headset falls free. Wan dawn light grown closer and more menacing. Stillness,. Faint whistle of tinnitus, first sounds of birdcall. And he realizes this dream is true Wan dawn light. The enemy is gone. And But the work does go goes on, and on. # 3 In the next days For a while Lynn was not among the protesters. Their numbers had diminished to a small group in daily vigil contingent by the main gate, holding a drooping sheet painted DIABOLIS EX MACHINA. Quine in his machine slowed through the gate and stopped, valves in the engine ticking, for a backhoe lurching across the main road to a dirt track that wound behind a building, and closed his window against the dust billowing toward him as he went on past an air hammer chiseling breaking a sidewalk to rubble, overtones of its chatter following him across the rock moat and into the building where, too late to retreat, he saw Thorpe seated at Null's computer tapping rapidly without letup at Quine's entrance. --Morning, said Quine. --Is it still? I've been here all night. Something there for you to read. Atop On top of Quine's stack of journals, a year's unread accumulation, colored slips in their pages flagging articles that at an earlier time would not have waited a day, was a xerox topped with a yellow sticker SEEN THIS? _Physical Review Letters 1954_. A joke? A dig at his age? --I know it's old, said Thorpe. --But I think it applies. See, I started with an EE from a hick school, taught myself quantum mechanics by reading Dirac, so my perspective is sort of, things don't change that much. Lots of good ideas have been left hanging. That's how I, found your paper... I mean,... stumbling in embarrassment at having carelessly touched as he thought Quine's sensitive point, --not to say, it's just, you know, if you're a student like me, not well connected, not seeing all the latest preprints and hearing all the gossip, you need another way up. So this is my way, sort of looking for old forgotten stuff to build on. --So tell me about this. --I came across it working for Fish and Himmelhoch, looking for a sort of nuclear model to explain the cold fusion reaction.? Okay I know, the current wisdom is, there's no reaction, it's bogus, or if anything is happening it's electrochemical, okay, fine. But you can know, if you model the process in a nuclear way, the it looks like a phenomenon's called superradiance super-radiance. The equations are quite similar. Highet saw the connection. --To this? Highet told you about Superbright? --Very sharp guy. --That's quite a breach of classification. --He kind sort of hinted around it, citing the open literature. Anyway it's moot, I'm cleared now. What do you think? --I'll read it when I get a chance, dropping it back atop on to the stack of journals. --But, I mean, we don't have much time. Should I pursue it? --What have you been doing? --Well, here, let me show you, I started sort of modifying your code but I had a couple of quest --You've changed my files? --No no I made copies, all changes made to only on my copies and I was --Okay, but look, just wondering be sure you log all your changes into the CASE system, okay? You know how that works? --Yes, sure but I wondered about a few things like here where you've got this array of reals here, what's that? --That's the rod array, angles lengths diameters densities --Okay I thought so, because see I was thinking if you make that something like ten to the minus ten here --That's the thickness, we can't make rods that thin it's imposs --But what if we play what-if with these numbers... --Wait what are you do --then the beam, oop oops that's a little extreme but you see what I --But there's no, I mean sure, you can make the model do anything, but it has to correspond to reality! --Sure, I'm just getting, you know, the feel of the system. But, oh here I wanted to know what this function does, this hyperbol --Yes that's the response curve of the sensors we're using reflec, it... look, can this wait? and without pausing Quine was out of the office as from speakers overhead a pleasant female voice advised, --Attention all personnel. Starting at midnight, tiger teams will conduct exercises in this area using blank ammunition,... and he turned into the restroom where at the far end, past a row of sinks and urinals opposite metal stalls, a gym bag hung on a hook with a towel and steam billowed forth in a pelting rush of noise and as Quine, elbows braced on a basin, looked up sharply from the laving of his hands at a bass voice echoing against around the hard tile, --_bist du ein Thor Tor und rein_, to see in the mirror but not his own eternally surprised features but fogged void, turning and turned from the hiss of his faucet to glimpse through dispersing the mist a hard white nude male body emerging to towel itself, still singing, --_welch Wissen dir auch mag beschieden sein_. --------- In the cavernous building where Dietz supervised, Quine watched long metal tubes welded one by one to the great monstrance in which the bomb, would rest a quarter mile underground, would rest. From sensors instruments at the ends of each tube hundreds of cables would run to the surface. Dietz displayed a blueprint of the cylinder. --We are already welding. I cannot wait to know. --Can you hold off a day or two? If I had any idea where to put the damn things I'd tell you if I had any idea even how to find what I'm looking for... --All right, We can go ahead with other things for just a little while. For a day. Now the rod configuration... --Unchanged. I'm not touching that. --Make sure, please, that Highet knows all this. Sometimes he wanders through here and if things are not what he expects he is most unpleasant. Outside Highet's office Quine, arm raised to knock, from within heard Highet's insistent rasp, --like Kammerer, you know, it's not who makes the mistake it's who takes the blame, and at Thorpe's voice barely audible, --sorry for the poor son of a bitch stuck in his position at his age, barely shows his face, and Highet, --never passed a design review, Quine's ears flared with heat, the door before him turning flat and insubstantial as he lowered his hand and proceeded down the hall unseeing, guided by a familiarity more the prisoner's than the adept's around a corner to a water fountain, studying stopped before a bulletin board and its overlapping notices O Section, programmer needed to model underground plumes, K Section, LASS expert needed, Z Section, multimedia guru, sought B Section, materials engineer, while two young men passed, one saying, --I have no special loyalty to OOP, and on to a further junction where a convex mirror above him presented an anamorphic view around the corner. There Nan emerged from a cross corridor with a wiry black-haired man, white teeth in a blue knit shirt tanned face, his biceps and blackhaired forearms hard and tanned folded. The two spoke briefly. The man put a hand on Nan's neck and bent forward to kiss her mouth. Quine turned back the way he had come, slowing only when he found he had nearly circled the building. He backtracked to Highet's door and entered without knocking. Highet was alone. --Get Thorpe out of my office. Highet looked up in surprise. --What's your problem now did he do to you, Philip? You look ready to spit. --If he's so important give him his own space, I don't want him hanging around me. --Thought you'd appreciate the company, thought he might be useful to you. --What's that supposed to mean? --Thorpe handles himself well, you could learn from him. Show some team spirit. Poor boy's feeling abandoned by you. --I'll work with him, but I don't have to like him or share office space with him. It's bad enough Null's stuff is still there. --Thorpe has his own space. You want him out, you can tell him so. By the way, Réti's here for a visit, you might want to pay your respects. Instead of running around down in Fabrication with Dietz. --Someone has to tend to those details. --Let me tell you something, Philip, I'm a smart guy but to be brutally honest I'm a second-rate physicist. I have the ideas but not the persistence, I've known that about myself for twenty years. But I have've learned to position myself and to use other people to get what I want. Win win, you know, we help each other look good. You take my point? Voices approached approach in the corridor as Highet went on in a lower tone, --One path in the world is up. There's also a path down. What there isn't is standing still. Now you, friend, have been standing still for quite a little while. I'd say you need to make some career decisions soon, before they're made for you. Flanked by two Lab factotums, Horatiu Aron Réti came slowly, stamping his cane, into Highet's office. His eyes, azure behind thick lenses, peered without recognition as Quine greeted him. --Ah, my young friend, how are you? --You remember Philip Quine, Horatiu Aron. That beautifully sweet photon detector he built for us. --Of course, of course. --So here we are, three generations of first-rate physics talent. --Yes yes, the torch is passed. --I really must be --No, stay. Horatiu Aron, Philip's going to get us the data we need to silence the critics. --The critics, there is no need to mind them. --From your eminence perhaps not, but I have to deal with these fools and dupes almost daily. Do you know what a senator, a United States senator, said to me the other day? He calls called this place a scientific brothel. --I know the man you mean. Brothels I am sure he knows well, but of science he is ignorant. --Well unfortunately this ignoramus chairs a committee that oversees our funding, so I have to deal with him. --Speaking of influence, this left-wing journalist, I see him here again, why do you let him in? Six months ago he abused my trust with gutter tactics of the worst sort. --You mean Steradian? He's an useful idiot. He's so cocksure I let him hear things I want to see in print, look here... Highet lifted from the desktop a folded newspaper, --"Radiance Research Forges Ahead", see, this is solid gold. He's so excited when he hears something that may be classified, his critical sense shuts off. You can see him quiver like a puppy dog from the excitement. --Keep him away from me, I want nothing to do with him. What is our testing status? --We need more. As always. Classifying them has helped deflect criticism but we're still being nickel and dimed. --What do you need? --An additional three hundred million over the next year. --I will talk to the president. This is for Superbright? --Yes. We can definitely show quantitative agreement with theory. It's only a matter of time and money. --What isn't? --Excuse me, Leo about that agreement we're --Philip will tell you how close we are. He and his new assistant have made tremendous headway, just tremendous. --So? Tell me about this, my young friend. --Well, I think it's premature to say so. There's a shot next Friday Saturday. We'll know better than. --Philip's too modest, that's always been his problem. --No, I just think we need a lot more --More funding. Basically it's a matter of funding. In the long run we see coherent beams striking out a thousand miles and diverging no more than a meter. We see a single battle station downing every missile any enemy can launch. And Aron --That is excellent, I can tell the Preside --But --Horatiu, we're also going ahead with your interceptors. As part of the overall system. --Baldur? --Smaller, faster, smarter, cheaper. Less than thirty billion to deploy. That's dirt cheap. --Even twenty years ago I thought that this idea only needed the technology to catch up. It is good we have a history, a tradition, a culture here. --Like Ulysses, we're never at a loss. --Oh, is that so,Really? Never at a --Philip... --Unless we're trying to produce a thousand mile beam where no test has ever shown --Philip! --Well how long do you think we can keep it up! this this --As long as it takes. --and you, Dr. Doctor Réti? --My young friend, I am an optimist. --Philip, I want a word with you. Excuse us Horatiu Aron. One arm clutched Quine in tight embrace and steered them into the hallway, Highet saying in low controlled tones, --One day soon, very soon, I'll stop giving you second chances. Come up empty this time and you're through. Clear? --Meaning what? You'll what? --I don't know. I don't know but it will be terrible and final and I promise you'll never forget it. Highet raised his voice to hearty amiability, --Good man! You let me know, and went back into his office. --------- With the darkening of the sky As night came on the life of the building went to X Section, the Playpen, where the younger men worked on schemes even more speculative than Superbright, and Quine returned for the thousandth time to theory his simulation with the sinking heart of a man returning to a loveless home. Entrapment. As if fine wire had threaded his drugged veins, and now, as feeling returned, any movement might tear him open. He fidgeted the radio on to, --fades to a reddish color as it enters the Earth's shad, and off as he saw again the tilt of Nan's head, the fine whorls of her ear, the man's dark hand cupping her neck. The ridge of her collarbone, the warm pulse of the vein across it. On Null's whiteboard deltas sigmas omegas integrals infinities in variegated ink still wove like fundamental forces their elegant pattern around a void. From the clutter on the desk he lifted CENTURY 21 LABS LAB QUARTERLY. Changing world betokens larger role for science. Acceptable levels of social risk. Public does not fully understand. World free of threats too much to ask. Revolutionary new technique. Major improvement. Important to a variety of national goals. Unique multidisciplinary multi-disciplinary expertise. Two young men, one poised to hurl something a balloon, caromed past his doorway. He shut the door on guffaws and --teach you some hydrodynamics! Paper atop his stack, 1954, by He picked up Black 1954. He turned to looked at the citations, then read from the start, stopping. He stopped often to reread, with a doggedness that made shift for his halt sense, once so fine, of the rhythms of scientific thought and confirmation, their the probe and test and parry and clinch that now required his slow and remedial attention to be seized grasped. As he read, his respect for Thorpe grew even as an emptiness opened within with him. When he was finished he stared started into space before reaching across the desk to snap off the lights. The phone chattered. On the second ring he lifted it, holding silence to ear for a moment before speaking. In the darkness the computer screen, phosphors charged by the room's vanished light, was a dim fading square. --Quine. --Hi, it's Lynn, I'm glad I caught you. I'm hiking up Mount Ohlone with some friends tonight, you want to come? --Well... --I know it's short notice. --I should be working. --Good heavens, all night? We're not starting till nine. --No but... He scrutinized the whiteboard as if this quandary might be expressed there in double integrals. --I mean... sure, why not. --Good! Meet us at the park gate about nine. It's ten miles north on Crow Canyon Road. In the hallway a length of surgical tubing, knotted at both ends, lay ruptured and limp in a film of water. As he left the building sprinklers came on in a silver mist and rainbows shimmered in the floodlit air. He drove out past parked vehicles and armed men in fatigues. He was arrived early. The sky was starry, the moon full. Seldom Some planet was he this far from setting in the valley's lights. Orion, Taurus west, Canis Major. Eyes reaching into interstellar void probably Saturn by its color. Where in this blackness is The seed of love? V of meaning? Or is corruption inherent in Being itself, wrong at Taurus pointed back the root? way he'd come. A car approached, lights snagging in the trees, then came around the last bend lightless, and rolled to a stop. --Mark, Jackie Julie, this is Philip. --Why're we whispering? --Park's closed. Not supposed to be here. They went round around the closed gate and past a building set back among trees. In a second-story window a dim line flickered, a fluorescent tube not on nor off, stuttering between states. Fifty yards farther further they left the road for a broad path that rose winding under black oak, then bay. An owl called, leaving the harbor of an eucalyptus. Quine and Lynn walked in silence. Ahead Jackie Julie laughed and touched Mark's arm, not a lover's touch, but a gesture of intimacy with the world, the same hand caressing air and underbrush. They talked softly about the people they knew, hes and shes darting in and out of audibility like moths in the dark. Next to him Soon they entered a darkness of trees where nothing was visible but shards of the moon fallen like leaves around them. He went more slowly and stumbled. Lynn pulled at paused and he heard a low branch rustling. Leaves popped free of a branch and she came crushed them under Quine's nose, carrying to him a strong waft of mint and resin. --Sweet bay, she said, --is sacred to Apollo, but this is not European bay, _Laurens_, it's California bay, _Umbellularia_. Her tongue lingered on the liquids. They climbed kept climbing until they broke from the woods onto into an open slope. A path through long dry grass led to another dark grove. The moon, not yet risen, Moonlight rinsed palely the eastern sky. The valley to the south was filled with glittering points. At its verge was the floodlit terrain of the Labs open range land below them. --And this is _Artemisia tridentata_, Lynn said, inhaling as she broke from a sagebrush a twig of gray leaves. It was pungent in her cupped palm. The warmth of her came with it. --Smell itNamed for the goddess Artemis. I wonder what god Who loves it. And this is willow. _Salix_. _Los alamos_. Which is the meaning of Orpheus's name. Who opened doors he couldn't reenter. --How do you know all this? --This is where I grew up. This is the smell of my home. This is how I know I belong. --Look! Jackie called, --a green star! Is that a planet? and finding the pale disk straight They came up in the Ra, a handbreath from Mars near the Sisters, Quine knew it was no star, but the beam of a laser ten miles south stabbing sixty miles to Mark and Julie at the edge of space where sodium atoms glowed in its heat, and he said to Lynn, --not a planet, but some miracle of strange device, and she laughed before dropping the pungent twig and running to the next grove, and he ran after, the path dipping as seductively as the sweet hollow at the base of the spine, until he tripped and went sprawling, heart thudding, hackles alive. What was he outrunning? A presence, almost, was in the grove. He feared it though it was benign. It was not death, but it would change his life if he allowed it. Three figures stood before him laughing. --You okay? and a flash of shame, not for his fall but for the falseness of his position before these children. The errors of his life were irrevocably; as yet theirs were not. He had wanted to borrow the grave of their youth, that was the shame. Mark held out his hand. Quine grasped it and was pulled to his feet and followed them out of the grove. The moon hung above them, swollen, no goddess remontant but an airless world already mapped, trodden, and projected for division into satrapies of mining, manufacturing, and defense, occupancy deferred only until these scenarios could enrich their planners at Jackie opened a backpack margin of return greater and brought out more reliable than what current technology assured. --Let's sit here. Julie passed around bread, cheese, fruit, a plastic bottle of water. On the grass they sat eating. The ridgeline was hard black against the sky Somewhere crickets chirred on and pieces off, their presence like a field of the rising moon glinted in the trees energy shifting. --It's so warm tonight. Almost like summer. --You from around here, Philip? --FromI went to school in the East. Isn't everyone? I've been working around here five for eight years. --Practically a native. What do you do? --Computers. I write software for Taliesin Systems. --Friend of mine worked works for CodeWin, maybe you know him. --It's a big industry. --Getting Bigger by the day, said Lynn dryly. --Ah, look, look atWhere's the moon. Big Dipper? I can't see it cleared the ridge, swollen, no goddess remontant but an airless world already mapped, trodden, and projected for division into satrapies of mining, manufacturing, and defense said Julie, occupancy lapsed only until those scenarios could enrich their planners at a margin of return greater and more reliable than what current technology assured standing. --WeIt're contractings too low to see, said Quine. --That's the handle above the ridgeline. There in the west, that's Vega setting. A summer star. Winter coming in over there... pointing to that swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid, --The Pleiades. Also called the Seven Sisters. You can count more than seven on a clear night. But not with an aerospace company the moon out. And right behind them Orion, you can see him just coming over the horizon, those three stars in a line. Chasing them. Kind of a bad luck bunch, the Sisters. They were all seduced by one god or another, except for Merope, who married Sisyphus. --Look! Is that a planet? Finding the pale green disk where Julie pointed, a handsbreath from the Sisters, Quine knew it was the beam of a laser ten miles south stabbing to the edge of space where sodium atoms glowed in its heat. --No, not a planet... Suddenly Lynn's hand was in his. She squeezed it once, and before he could respond released it to run downhill toward a dark grove. He stood for a moment and then he ran too. He ran for no reason he could name, wind in his ears, an excitement rising almost to fear in his heart, hackles alive. Some presence almost, chasing him. Then the darkness of the trees was around him and he tripped and went sprawling. The presence was still there. He feared it though he knew it was benign. It was not death, but it would change his life if he let it. --Philip? Are you all right? She stood over him, at the edge of the grove as Mark and Julie approached. He lay there in anxiety, anger almost at how she'd stirred him, at the beauty of her movement, at the way her features held the moonlight. --Philip...? --I'm fine. He brushed leaf dirt from his sleeves. The presence was gone. They walked in silence until emerging from the grove and heading downslope. Overhead the green star had vanished. --So what are you working on now, Philip? --Oh... things in the sky, Quine said. --An aerospace partner wants us to control program low-orbit balloons a couple of miles across, the apparent size of the moon, sunlit, carrying messages. --Messages? --Commercial messages, logos., advertising... --But that's so, Jackie Julie began and Mark cut in, --Didn'tSeems I read about this,. The Sierra Club's bringing suit..., aren't they? --Maybe soI don't know about that, we're just the contractors, I don't really know, just do my job... and Jackie Julie glancing at Lynn seemed to lose interest, resuming with claimed Mark's arm to move them away and resume in a low voice their conversation of hes and shes while Lynn walked away apart, obliging Quine to follow at a distance, leaving behind --she doesn't see you as a friend she sees you him as more and that's scary, a reclamation project... to overtake her on a knoll where. She faced the valley lights waited with crossed arms. Behind her, the valley was filled with glittering points. At its far verge was the floodlit terrain of the Lab. --Philip, these what are my friends. Don't lie to them. you doing? --I was trying it on. That's a Lab phrase. You don't like me as a software mogul? --Is that your, your cover story? Her face remained still and fixed on him, moonshadow in her eyes' hollows. --That balloon thing really is a Lab project, they started a small group on it... --You don't want to tell them what you really do this a lot? Jerk people around?. --No, it's I... look it's just a bad habit. Defensive. Sometimes you have to, there, to advance your goals, lying's almost a game, see if the other guy's smart enough to catch it. --AndYou think Mark wasn isn't smart enough for to see through you? He is. You take his good faith for foolishness. --NoLook I, it I just didn'st know what you told them. I didn't want you to be embarrassed by me. His face heated as he said it. --Well, that would be my problem, wouldn't it. Now I have a different problem. Because it happens I did tell them. She waited for something he wasn'm tryingt able to understand you give her, then went on. You repay friendship with falsehood? --It's...When you were talking about the Pleiades you were so, I don't know what's happening there, at ease. What happened? --Look, I'm up against right now sorry, I just... Another breath of warm breeze and he realized he was sweating. --Tell meWhat happened? --That green star we saw. It wasn't a star, then it was something from the Lab. A laser test. --A Radiance laser? --No... something else. Unclassified. A guide star for adaptive optics. She was listening with her arms still crossed. --Why did that change your mood? --It's just, I can'td almost forgotten, about everything except, except for being here. That thing in the sky reminded me. Then Mark asked what I did... --They really have their hooks in you, don't they. --I know that. Face still hollowed in moonshadow she stepped toward him. His need to be touched and take comfort welled up, but some structure unknown yet dreadful held him still. After a moment's wait she turned to face the valley lights. --CanI'tm surprised you haven't quit?. --And do what! Turn from the one place where my, my talents have meaning, from everything that defines me some use? --What do you want, Philip? --Want? I don't know. I can't get it. I want five eight years back. Before them this I was a scientist. --They haven't robbed you of that. --Yes, that's so, I gave myself over, and now I'm on the line for something I don't care about. That's the way, yes, you're going to get screwed regardless, so you should make sure it's for something that matters to you... --But you, I don't believe this, you don't engage with people, you stand off, you get angry and defensive when they think they don't approve, and then you think you're screwedWhat would that be? --Lynn... --I don't know what to say, I really don't. I understand if you're bitter, but not flaunting it, this almost pride in it... --Pride! ...I have an insoluble problem, data that's no good fraudulent predictions a Congressional visit next week a few days to vindicate what isn't, Julie and I'm talking a walk in the moonlight because I don't know what to do! Not pride that's desperation... --It's that bad? Face hidden in moonshadow, she stepped toward him Mark were calling. His need to be touched They went down the slope and take comfort welled up, but some structure unknown yet dreadful held him still rejoined them. After a moment's wait She stepped back. They returned to where Jackie was packing the picnic, still talking to Mark, --so I'm going, wait, stop, this is it, these are the boundaries and he's like, what did I do? She handed the pack turned to Lynn with the pack, --take this? and embraced Mark from behind, her whiteclad arms around his chest, straps of her shortlegged overalls a dark X on her back, bare calves duckwalking the pair down the slope. In the lot Lynn said to Jackie Julie, --Get a ride with you guys? Quine called out, --Mark, just joking about the balloon. Mark looked up, fumbling with his keys, smiling. --Oh yeah? --Thanks, thanks for, for inviting me. He got in the car, opened the glovebox, found a tablet, felt the excised triangle, brushed lint from it, swallowed it dry. --------- In the his apartment was a smell. It was like stale smoke and old sweat and rotting food, edged with something fouler, like the metallic stench of the bright green flux from the open pipe. At first he thought it came from outside, where earlier they'd been roofing. But on the deck the air was fresh. He knelt to the carpet and smelled nothing. In the kitchen he bent to the drain and smelled nothing. From a bottle he squeezed a pearl of soap onto a sponge, ran hot water in the sink, scrubbed and rinsed it. He scrubbed the stove top. The ceiling fan was silted over by grease and spiderweb. He fetched a chair and reached to touch it. A black gobbet fell from it to the stove top. He fetched pliers and freed the nuts holding the shield, banging with the handle to break the dried paint around the rim. In both hands he bore the shield like a chalice to the sink. In its concavities had pooled a glossy tar. He scrubbed it for minutes, smutch washing slowly into the sink. Then he spooled off yards of paper toweling, wet and soaped it, and climbed the chair to wash over and again the sleeve of the fan, the blades, the hub. A viscous brown residue clung to the towels and his fingers. Farther Further into the recess, beyond his reach, was more tar. Sweat soaked him. He went onto the deck. The moon was dim, its fullness lurid and reddish, as if behind the sky held smoke. He stared in wonder and fear until the knowledge that it was an eclipse broke upon him banishing fear and wonder alike. When he went back in the smell was waiting. He understood that from now on everything would smell like this. For a while he sat at the table with his eyes shut, then opened the newspaper for the memory of CARPETS CLEANED but it parted to 24 HRS OUTCALL DAWNA and LOVE TALK \$2/MIN and he stared bleakly at the sullen pout, circleted forehead, hair as wild as if fresh risen from the sea, under a shiny black cloak linen garb pleated in most subtle fashion. His hand found the telephone, and after a distant chirrup a small insinuating voice flicked like a tongue in his ear, and he stepped sharply back from the uncradled receiver, switched off the lights, leaving the voice breathing unheeded into the darkness and the reddish moonlight pooled on the floor. He showered. In the stream lust swelled in him like nausea. Joylessly he seized its nexus. Hot spray lashed him. Incoherent images and broken geometries flashed upon him. Runnels nudged moonwhite globs toward the drain. Depleted he toweled. On the sink were Nan's toothpaste, hairbrush, lipstick, mascara. On the toilet tank a an unzipped travel kit of quilted cotton gaped, displaying to show diaphragm, jelly, tampons, vitamins, ibuprofen, hairpins, barrette, lens wetter, a glass jar of face cream. A towelend snagged in the open zipper as Quine scrubbed dry his hair, dragging the kit. Items hailed on the tiled tile floor. He dropped the towel, then swept his hand across the sink top. He grabbed the kit and hurled it. The jar flew out and smashed against the wall. # 4 Dry sycamore leaves scraped over pavement in a hot wind drawn west out from distant desert by a stalled offshore low. Over the ridge east of town dust and the smell of manure from the farmlands and a haze of smoke blew fitfully into the valley. as the sun rose through layers of pollution haze Quine, driving to the back gate of the Labs Lab so as to avoid the protesters, passed the dead vineyard by the north boundary. He pulled over, stilling the engine and the radio's --ty thousand acres ablaze. The gate was closed but unlocked under. A bright new sign bearing bore the biohazard bio-hazard trefoil and DANGER TOXICS MITIGATION PILOT SITE ALPHA KEEP OUT. The drone of flies rose and fell like a turbine. Inside the gate the flies abated. A stubble of dry Stunted vines clung to irrigation uprights. Underfoot a chromegreen film glazed cracked gray silt. Bark from a withered vine one sloughed like white ash on his fingers. Then From deep in the vineyard a warm moist flatus perfused the air. A stink like the chyme of a dying beast. He ran back to the car choking and drooling. At a roadside an irrigation faucet he rinsed his mouth, his face, his hair, his hands, yet the foulness, as of corroded metal, lingered. What god loves this? At Null's desk Thorpe worked. --Bernd Dietz called. He has to know where to put the sensors. Today reflectors. --I'm tempted to leave them where they were in the last shot. --We can't do that, Highet would --That's why I'm tempted. --Yeah he's, he can be a real prick can't he. --Not if you play by his rules. He always has a carrot handy. --Well I have quite a few ideas but you need to look them over, sort of tell me where they're out of line, you know we're really down to the wire here and --Okay, let's assume Black's right... --Oh then you've read --Assume we're looking at quanta as localized particles guided by a physically real field... --Highet, you know he really grilled me on this stuff when he came out to Utah, put me through the wringer, made me prove every assumption, but after an hour I had him convinced, and I thought he really respected... --Typical Highet slap and stroke. --Now suppose we... --You're good at this. And very fast. --Commercial software you know, those eighteen hour days tone you right up. --No don't touch that, we can't change the rod array, I've already told Dietz. --Can we reorient it? --Maybe. I'll check. Under Thorpe's shaping the model gradually began to show correlation. After several hours one run produced an annulus. Then nothing for hours more. They ate dinner in the cafeteria, not speaking, then returned to work. Thorpe coded for an hour, then ran the model. Again the annulus. He rotated the model's rods; again and again and at one angle power jumped and the annulus closed to a point. They stared at the screen. Thorpe bit his thumb. --What do you think? --It looks all right. --It *looks* fantastic. It's a hundred times brighter than the last shot's data. But the model's tweaked to hell and gone. --I don't see anything wrong. --No.., neither do I. So now if we would put the sensors reflectors here... see, this is how I work. I'm not a theorist, I don't have your background, I need the machine, to, you know, immerse myself in the code, feel the system... --Well, it's a remarkable job. I couldn't have done this. I've tried for months. --Well, I couldn't have done it if your code wasn't so comprehensive. You really worked at this. But the thing is it's, you know, at some level it's all just sort of pushing numbers around. I don't know if the code is it's saying anything real. --We'll know soon enough. --Do you think something's wrong? Quine shrugged. --Nothing I can see. --You're not convinced. --I don't have to be. It's what Highet wants, isn't it? --Yeah but, that's not what you think I'm doing, is it? --No... --Because I would never do that. --I'm sure you --Since the Fish and Himmelhoch thing I have to be very careful. They were crucified, just crucified, they're pariahs, their careers are finished. Anything remotely to do with cold fusion is tainted, you may as well say you're working on perpetual motion. And I was on that team, I was in that lab. So I have to be very careful. --Perpetual motion, you could probably sell that to Highet. At least as a talking point. --It's not funny to me. I had nothing to do with that debacle, just so we're clear on that. --Sure. I understand. --I'm Sorry I'm touchy. Just, you know, tired. You've been generous, letting me work with your code and all, I really thought you'd stick me with the scut work but you've done it haven't you, all the test details, and let me do the interesting part. This could take me a long way and I won't forget itm grateful. --Why don't you go home, get some sleep? --Yeah, okay, I'm whipped. --Take tomorrow off. I'll tell Highet. --No no, I'll be in. We have to make write up a work order. --I'll do it, don't worry about it. --Are you staying longer? --God no, what is it, midnight? --It's, oh Jesus, it's two a m. --No, I'm leaving in five minutes. I'll write the work order tomorrow. --Oh I meant to, here's something else for you to read... and, hesitating a moment, Thorpe placed a stapled xerox atop on Quine's stack, held his gaze for a moment, and departed. It was a new paper by Sorokin. At a prestigious school CERN now. Tenured. Quine skimmed it as if reading news from a distant galaxy or a remote epoch. It solidified and extended the work they'd done together, the experiment that had separated them. It was clear that it was a field now, and that Sorokin owned it. He stanched the welling an upwelling of envy and self-pity. Good for Sorokin selfpity. But instead of going home Quine broke apart Thorpe's code and studied the changes closely. He gave the model a new set of energies: points clustered around the focus. Again, with different energies, the same focus emerged. Something was wrong, he could smell it; oh yes, his instinct was not yet dead. Near dawn he found it. Along with the sensor positions, Thorpe had tweaked the sensor response function. Quite incidentally it Playing the system, as he said, to get results. But now the function emphasized certain wavelengths, exactly. As might the beryllium sensors themselves did when struck by the bomb's radiation. No wonder it matched The test data so well brightness from the earlier tests might be nothing but reflection, instrument error. Now When you put that he saw it error into the focusing code, the flaw jumped out like a figure from an optical illusion code naturally confirmed the data. Glue in a house of cards. And down in a corner of Null's whiteboard, half erased, was it? yes, the same function, the same tweak. It had been There in the corner of Quine's his eye for months. Wasted months. Wrong from the start. Error or fraud? No way to know. Maybe started as one, became the other. Sleep soon. Faint light outside. But wait now. If you removed the tweak, if you stopped trying for a beam, chaff fell from the problem and the expressions said something else entirely. A presence entered the room. Air gravid and light adance. Instead of the battle station There appeared to his mind's eye the battle station lost and insignificant in a congruent tide of radiance, all the universe's light at wavelengths and colors beyond mere vision, streaming in intricate brocade, weaving and mediating between matter and energy, wave and particle, the phenomenal and the noumenal. Here was the central mystery, laid at last, open for his knowing as he hovered between fatigue and ecstasy, and at the very gate of revelation he knew he was unprepared unready to pass through the gate of revelation into this realm of light, and. He drew back. And the presence, like a roebuck in forest, startled and was gone. The tide of light receded Cold rage at aspirations dashed and traduced. In compensation, then, knowledge reborn as an instrument He was left with only the particulars of power rods and reflectors. But he had found their flaw. Though Mystery might elude, but the information is was sure. *Thus angels must feel, radiant with the certainty that flows from might their single devotion to right.* --------- --Bernd, I need some sensors reflectors. --For Taliesin. --Yes. --I know, I have a work order already, this morning, from Thorpe. --No, I need more. --We do not have time to add --Find the time. I want sensors on there have to have reflectors made of something other than beryllium. Dietz was silent. He began leafing through a logbook. --Do you know, try as we might we cannot keep traces of oxygen out of the beryllium. I have told Highet this. Long ago. --Really. --I have proposed hydrogen in the past. --You have? Why haven't we tried it? --"Don't mess with success." --I see. I'd like to try it. --Does Highet know approve? --I'll take responsibility. --Without his approval I can do little nothing. --Bernd. This is what Slater thought, isn't it. That the beryllium sensors reflectors were giving false brightness. And Null knew it too, didn't he. --I did not see Slater's report. Dietz did not look up from the book. --Make some hydrogen reflectors for me. Cable them separately from the beryllium. Dietz shut the book. --Send me a work order. I will have to send a copy to Highet. Kihara came through the doors with a following of suited men. --Won't be a minute, gentlemen, don't let us disturb you, you can see here the precision engineering we're capable of, bang-up job of inventiveness, maximum return on investment, the answer to reversing the balance of trade deficit, innovative federally generated technology transfer to industry, improves the nation's economic competitiveness as we work deliberately and consciously to build partnerships, a new class of information with commercial value, very creative cooperative efforts, freedom to negotiate intellectual property rights, fees and royalties, cover the technological waterfront, take for instance these fine-grained superplastic steels, not to mention x-ray lithography... and Quine returned to his office rummaging through CENTURY 21, Rings Fields and Groups, Computer Addict Wholesale Microcenter, TeX Technical Reference, to come upon WORK ORDER Form 4439A Authorized Use Only, and sat for a minute holding a pen above it suddenly frozen at the sound of Thorpe's approaching voice, --you have to invoke the world control option from the command line, relaxing as the voice receded, pen moving to spell SECONDARY SENSOR ARRAY. --------- From Highet's open door he heard, --You want less pressure, try the Institute for Advanced Salaries, it's a fucking retirement village for the reality-impaired! and a lower voice unintelligible in response, then --I don't care, I want results! the lower voice growing sharper:, --is cheap. My people have to make it happen, as the door opened and Dietz, pale and shaking, came out past Quine glancing at him without a word and stormed down the hall, Highet following to the door, calling out, --A beard without a mustache, does that make you an honest man? and to Quine, --You. I don't want to talk to you now. Send me e-mail. --I think you'll want to hear this. We can show quantitative agreement. Highet looked at him with loathing. --You want to change the sensors reflectors. The day before the shot. --I want to try hydrogen. --That's an incredibly bad idea, that's totally braindead, to introduce a new measurement technique at this stage. You have to calibrate, you have to --If Slater's right, if the beryllium shows false brightness, it's only a matter of time until we know it. It might as well be now. Or do you want to spend another fifty million on another shot? --I'd love to. Who told you Slater said that? --It's common knowledge. We'll have to address the issue eventually. --Common knowledge. my ass. --Then it might be wise to preempt questions about it. The shot's so close to the presentation, we can't be expected to have formal data that quickly. but we could say we're investigating. If we have to. --You're sure about the quantitative agreement? --The simulation's excellent. I won't take credit for it. Jef Thorpe did the work. --Did he now. Well, we're a team. Good results show good management. --I'd like Jef to give the presentation. Highet's eyes fixed in calculation on Quine as the phone rang and Quine waited for the dismissive wave with which Highet ended audiences, but instead he spoke a moment, then covered the mouthpiece and said, --Want to make some money Philip, Devon Null's taking on investors, and uncovering the mouthpiece, --Yes, application's outside the envelope no problem there, keep me briefed, and in another moment hung up, leaning back and clasping his hands over his thinning crown, gazing at the ceiling. --Well that's fine, that's very fine. Wonder if we could work up a little something. I could invite some key people to the ranch for the shot, some unnamed sources, goose the process a little, can we get Thorpe in on this? --He's probably in my office. --You may work out yet Philip, Highet grudged as one thick finger stabbed the phone. --Jef? Leo. Get your ass over here, rising to pace past framed and signed photos of three Presidents, another of Réti and himself with the current President, artist's renderings rendering of the Superbright and of a fusion-driven spaceship, cartoon of a mushroom cloud WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO SEND THE VERY BEST, certificates from professional societies, a length of cable, a circuit board. He stopped at the windows window, gaze caught by something, and parted the vertical slats of the blind with his fingers, speaking softly, almost to himself. --Do you know the darkness that's out there? Do you realize how tenuous this all is? Twenty thousand years of civilization, and only in the last five few hundred has rationality begun to displace superstition. I tell you that I would sup with the devil, I would court risk armageddon, not to lose that. When I think of those fucking tree huggers out there... and turning back to Quine, voice low and insistent, --Think the ills are in a system, think it's that simple, Réti with and his anticommunism, your new girlfriend and her peacenik buddies, wonder why's she drawn to you? Quine said nothing. --Now wait just a --Darkness and malady is in the human heart, Philip, you can't eradicate it, don't you know that? The enemy is the heart. And all You can do is propitiate the't hide from that darkness there...as Thorpe arrived entered in black linen jacket, red t-shirt, nose stud, eyes eager, and Highet's demeanor switched to the cheerful, --Jef, my man. I want to wow the rubes when we go to the desert. We have a ranch out there with a T3 data feed lines from the test site. What can you do that's portable and fantastic? I want flash that makes you reach for your checkbook. --Hey, I've got an interface toolkit from my CodeWin days, I can throw something together overnight. Just tell me what kind of data I have to work with. --I'll e-mail email you the details. Shot's tomorrow evening, you'll have to get a plane out by noon to set up. not too much for you, is it? --Demo or die, I know the drill, said Thorpe, grinning. --------- The evening wind whipped dust across the flat stretch of highway, slowing traffic and shuddering vibrating the shells of cars backed up across stopped in three lanes behind flashing lights at Codornic s EXIT NLY CODOR IC S as Quine punched --illion in property loss, over to --noninjury accident being cleared at the Codornices Road exit not blocking lanes for you, drowned in a siren blaring up the shoulder OHLONE VALLEY RESCUE ECNALUBMA ƎƆИA⅃UᙠMA as Quine edged against horns and unheard curses into the exit lane and cut back on onto a commercial strip to loop up behind the central mall, the reverse of whose which colonnaded and pedimented facade, its raw concrete stained by long ago rains, caught with a sort of wounded dignity the sun's last rays as they lanced past likewise gilded Estancia Estates An Adult Community where Quine parked and for a moment held in his gaze a prospect of identical bungalows arrayed on lawns billiardgreen billiard-green out to their the surveyed boundary boundaries of chainlink and dry pasture before ascending the walk and ringing the bell beyond. --Oh! Philip. Come in. I wasn't expecting you, your deadline... --Well it's Friday night, I thought --Oh I'm glad you, but just, if you'd called I would have made dinner... --I wasn't sure I was coming. --Your work is done? --There's a test. I fly out tomorrow afternoon. And there's a presentation Monday. --Can you stay tonight? We can go out for... is something wrong? --Can I need to ask you something. --Yes? What is it? --Who's the guy with the curly black hair and the good tan? --The, what? --I happened to see you both the other day. In a hallway. He was acting pretty kind of proprietary. --Proprie... Nan's, her face flushed and she turned to look across the room, one hand resting on a table. Quine waited. --How long has this been going on? --His name's Ben and he's a good friend, and it's been..., we've been friends for years. Five years at least. Since before I knew you. --You still see him? The flush darkened, and as she turned back to him her mild features contorted into an a stiff anger he'd never seen in her. --Do you mean, do I sleep with him? Yes,. I have,. Once or twice since you and I have been together. --Once or twice. You've lost count. --Oh, Philip! Why are you, this is hateful! --It hurts me, Nan. Her face was a mask of plain misery. --We never --Never what, laid down rules? No, I didn't think we had to, I thought some things went without saying. --Without saying what! That I'm yours alone when you don't give me anything, not even a word of love, for God's sake Philip I didn't turn to Ben for sex, just for, for kindness, for friendship, just to feel that I *mattered*! To Someone! A year, almost two Five years of my life Philip, I'm no longer a young woman, do you want to know when it was I saw Ben, when it was I went to him after you and I were together? The coldness, the absolute coldness of the moment. --You don't, you don't even care do you. It hurts you, but I can see in your eyes, you won't listen to me. How can I possibly explain when we you won't even give me credit for, for living you, Philip? When you and I met, at the Labor Day that picnic two years ago, and I was so charmed by you, by your intelligence, your modesty, yoru your reserve. Do you remember, there was a the thunderstorm? I hadn't seen one since moving West. And afterwards you took me home, we were drenched, and I loaned you clothes. Oh Philip, it was long over between Ben and me, he was like a brother, I just wanted to, I don't know, say good-bye goodbye, to tell someone close to me how happy I was. How happy I thought I'd be. --And the second time? --Yes, a year that's all you want to hear. Two years later, when you didn't come to dinner, didn't call, and I waited and waited, so it was only an anniversary just a date on the calendar that's all, but I called Ben and he came over to be with me, and he didn't, didn't even *want*... cut off by her sobs, jagged and piercing. --But I, you knew know I was in a meeting working, you could have --And you call him proprietary! When you come here and, and sulk for hours, barely acknowledge my existence, don't call for days on end, and then expect, how do you think that makes me feel... cut by sobs, --and you've never, never asked me what I want, how I feel, I would have told you about Ben if you'd asked if you'd ever shown any interest at all in my past. I don't think If you even know who I am! Within him a stone fell and fell, soundlessly turning. --Philip, talk to me! Don't turn off away like this! --I have nothing to say, and he was out the door, where streetlights had come on, knowing that his leaving now was a catastrophe more final worse than anything gone before, a withdrawal he could never make right. Don't tell me, don't tell me we don't feed the emptiness in each other. Betrayal is an aether through which an energy moves. # 5 One hundred miles from Mesa Encantada, whose tracts In the Great Basin of Nevada thousands of acres of waste and infecund desert had been reclaimed for science as the Aguas Secas Weapons Test Site 600, and one hundred miles further west was the Advanced Research Institute of the Eastern Sierra, a ranch at the edge of the Owens Valley, a black facility whose funding appeared in no budget. Deeded Leased to the government by a conservative rancher businessman, it served as a layover site for Lab personnel on their way to the desert. It nestled in the broad base of a canyon near a creek's loud runoff through lateral moraine. To the west the ground rose in the space of a few miles from six thousand feet to a twelve thousand foot crest of granite crags. Below, a few miles to the east, the north-south highway lay like a ribbon dropped ribbon across the wrinkled valley floor, and a hundred miles farther further across desert dotted with sage under a flotilla of thunderheads was Mesa Encantada the chalk white sink of Aguas Secas. Even before joining the Labs, Lab Quine had seen ARIES. On his first trip west, while switching planes at Phoenix, he'd been paged and diverted to a single-engine craft bound for a Kern County airstrip, where a sheriff's four by four awaited him. The first Radiance shot had just gone off and at the ranch they were celebrating. Quine met Highet there as he beat. Highet was beating a twelve-year-old at chess, telling the boy, I'll trade a bishop for a knight anytime, I love knights, they leap barriers, they face eight ways at once. A month after that he later Quine was at the Mesa Aguas. Rank smell of sage hovered in the predawn cool, immensities of desert air quivered to the horizon. They drove upcanyon with the sun rising behind him them, the young initiates joking, group leaders and guards and observers in DoD hardhats silent and grim. Roadways of cables led from instrument trailers over desert pocked with the collapsed collapse craters of previous tests to the distant borehole. Above it a red crane pointing pointed straight up. The count reached zero. And the earth rippled. A wave rushed toward them and the ground shook as if a train were passing and passing and passing. When it stopped the air was a clear plasma of exaltation. To know that the binding forces of matter were yours to break, the wealth of nations yours to drive into squander in such sublime force, this was a deep and secret sweetness known only to the few. At the ranch now Thorpe was joking with some grad students from X Section. Others were there from J Section, and some stern faces he didn't know, military or intelligence, and Steradian alert as a corrupt deputy. Highet arrived in black Western shirt with red and white embroidery across the yoke, blue jeans, and tooled leather boots, carrying cases of soda, chanting in a false twang, --Twaace the sugar, twaace the caffeine... followed by a Western senator, cadaverous and grinning in white Stetson, and his young aide plump and groomed to a sheen, with the zealous black eyes of a pullet. --Look at em, young, brilliant, confident, said the senator. --That's how I felt at their age. They own the world. --The world? retorted Highet. --They own their genitals. The rest of them's mine, raising his voice to introduce, --Gentlemen, the right honorable Howard Bangerter, R- of Utah... The aide asked if physics had yet succeeded in finding in the traces of Creation the fingerprints of God, and Highet nodded, a slow smile spreading and his tonguetip darting as his hands rose to conjure, --Not God exactly... as Quine walked onto the deck where three barbecue grills sizzled, and a keg of COORS LITE sat amidst amid greasy paper plates bearing the ruins of meals, and the sun had long since chased the waning wandering moon, itself pursuing Venus, behind the mountain wall. Although the sky retained day's blue a chill came down from the remote and snowless peaks. --This young man, Highet's voice carried out from within, won last year's Heinrich Hertz Fellowship in Physics, a prestigious award I happen to administer... and Quine stepped down from the deck, crossing dry grass to the creek's rockstrewn willowed bank where it trickled through small pools and clumps of rotting leaves. Quine followed it up upward, breath laboring. He stopped at a large boulder long ago frostwedged and tumbled from a higher place, and sat. No Little residue of the day's warmth remained in the shadowed stone. The western ridge above him was a great dark wave. In the east a glamour of rosetint clouds swept up from the horizon. The ranch was small below him. A cold wind came down the great wall of rock. Into this chaos wilderness he might ascend and be lost. But he did not. He returned to the ranch,. Thorpe's voice coming came up as he slid open the glass doors, --background, you know, trucks on the highway, that sort of thing. Other side of the spool you can see some small temblors tremblors we had this afternoon. When the shot goes off we'll definitely see more than a wiggle. But the real action's on this screen here. At the site they're recording everything for later analysis but data's also piped to this workstation where this autocorrelation software I wrote gives us an immediate window on what's happening. Red is intense energy, blue is, you know, less intense. We're looking for sort of a red ringlike structure. Quine watched the stylus quiver as about him others conversed. Without warning the stylus jerked. The screen of the workstation came to life, numbers flowing down its right edge. Colors coalesced fitfully on screen. The senator and his aide leaned in enrapt. A minute passed. Blue and green surrounded a corona of yellow and a jagged red core flecked with white. --We have brightness, Thorpe said. --A hundred times the last test. More. Maybe Could be a thousand times. --Three orders of magnitude improvement in six months, declared Highet. --At this rate we'll have every enemy missile on Earth neutralized in a few years, and raising his tone with his glass, --To Team Radiance Superbright! Leonardos of the age. You people are the best in the world. Grunts and howls of triumph went off like rockets. --Do you all know what we've done? We've broken the back of Communism. And that's only so far. More applause. The senator's aide leaned smiling to whisper in the senator's ear. --Need now's a nice little war where we can demo this stuff. Feed some tinhorn tyrant some antiquated missiles and provoke him to use them. A second wave of guests arrived, a dozen men in suits adorned with MAMMOTH CONVENTION CENTER NAME COMPANY and a few women packaged as brightly as new software, and Quine moved off through the manic younger men hopped up by caffeine and sugar and the shot. --Need now's another little war where we can demo this stuff. Feed some tinhorn tyrant some antiquated missiles and provoke him to use them. --PDP eleven downstairs running spacewar --thought Malibu was bad but Acapulco's about three inch waves --guy at the Cloudrise Seminar, he blasts wheat into stubble in a shock tube at mach ten, calls that's his study science, eighty k a year. --maybe the moon's changed its orbit or --thou shalt not piss on a colleague's funding --translate the project into terms attractive to DARPA --well Mazatlan Mazatlán then or Valparaiso --think I'll propose rye --dup rot swap drop --corn smut --know better than to say that in public with troops on the border --shell game --call it Virtual Wilderness --I hear Sara squeezed it out --boy or girl? --people make money on it they're more likely to go along --girl, I think that's what Moe said --why leave home to get away --he didn't go deep enough --photo and topo database with fractal interpolation software to smooth the animation --get ourselves into a quagmire like Viet --substantive working relationship with at least six major US companies --get USGS or Interior onboard --hell why not go worldwide --translate the project into terms attractive to DOE --not this time, this is South*west* Southwest Asia --get on your Nordic Track NordicTrack put on the goggles you're up in the Cordillera --and somebody from the insurance company's selling records of who owns what where to thieves --take out the infrastructure of the whole frigging country if we have to --smells sounds good weather get up close to extinct animals --everybody makes out, homeowner's paid off, insurance company raises rates, thieves fence the stuff, fence makes a profit --ought to get the Basil Zaharoff memorial award --as defined in paragraph R of section 11 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 nineteen fifty four --in Caracas this guy shot went by on a bicycle, sliced the damn finger right off for the wedding ring --knowingly and with intent --living things probably get wiped out in a pretty thorough fashion every few million years --better than real --so cool cause like the program's working but you don't know what it's doing so there's these emergent properties --sophisticated encryption algorithms deserving of patent protection --control the flow of information, do it by classification do it by misdirection principle's the same --incorporating certain aspects of prior art such as multiplication --translate the project into terms attractive to Disney --object oriented --get this straight, if I say nine times six is seventy two I'm infringing? --yes but when your story comes back it has your fingerprints on it then you know where it's been --I have no special loyalty to DNA --must have misjudged my audience --value intellectual autonomy over anything --fifty-four, no of course not but if you codify your knowledge that nine times six is sev, ah, fifty-four in any machine-executable formalism form --sometimes the envelope pushes back --women at that high energy conference in Tsukuba --held research positions at four universities published thirty papers before anybody realized --won't impact the users of the algorithm, or affect the multiplication market, only the vendors of such algorithms --kinbakubi kenkyu kai? --lineal descendant descendent of ibn-Musa al-Qarizmi that being the first publication --no PhD not even a BA all his papers copied from obscure journals --seme-e? --Go for it, Bruno, do the meat thing. Quine edged into a hallway and down a narrow flight of stairs as behind him music began pounding, catching as he turned a last glimpse of Thorpe, cheeks flushed, smiling at a circle of admirers the impartial smile of triumph. *Nature is more ready in her creating than Time in his destroying, and so she has ordained that many animals shall be food for others each other.* He continued downstairs toward a light. In the cellar seven or eight young men from X Section were gathered around an old rackmounted minicomputer and a pool table pooltable. --so he goes, learn to hassle people and lie with a straight face. --Excuse me, I need to get back. Does anyone know the arrangements? --Excellent advice, dude. --Excuse One glanced up. --There's pool cars outside somewhere. Full dark. A dozen cars. E108637. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY OFFICIAL USE ONLY. Key in the column. The seat harness slid up and drew in over his chest and waist as a chime sounded and dash lights blinked red then glowed teal. The car swayed and bounced for a mile down the dirt road. There the highway stretched north and south into void, under stars like chips of ice. He could go anywhere. But time was a field that moved with him, inescapable, close as the blue light in the cabin. He drove for hours without stopping, radio for company, wash of noise, hollowness in his being. Mountains that a century ago killed emigrants with their rigors fell to his vehicle. Descending to the flats, he saw brushfires crawling brightly on far ridges like luminous protolife, like the fitful colors on Thorpe's screen from cells writing some teratogenic message across the bad sensors land, and the fires fell away behind him and the farm cities loomed on the ancient seabed, added their lights and sulfurous light at the meetings of capillary highways glowing with perfervid intensity in the unnatural warmth persisting from this arid heat of a summer long past its term, its heat bonded to the earth like some toxin to a susceptible organ, and booming through the car's windows when he opened them was the smell of dust, manure, smoke, exhaust, chemicals, and he crossed the last ridge to arrive in into his valley of a million souls, of all the places he might go, for all the freedom he had, here again. In the dark apartment he stripped, trailing damp dropping rank clothes behind him on the way to the bathroom. The mirror's sudden light showed him, before selfhood interposed its protective assurance, the face of a stranger, aging and vulnerable. The soft flesh of his body was without tone or color. Lowering his eyes from the harsh brightness he stood voiding for long seconds. A ribbon of urine twisted along the axis of its arc as it splashed into the bowl. Standing thus he blinked, faded, woke. The gates of sleep stood open and he was through them, uncleansed, as soon as he lay down. On a moonless night at the edge of a forest there is the slap and sizzle of rainfall. A moist breeze springs up. Yet where he stands, in long grass, all is dry. Only in the forest is it raining. A figure in the forest shadows stands regarding him. It holds an offering of some kind, a gift. He does not move to take the gift, and shortly the figure recedes into the forest. # 6 Gathering Gathered before dawn the crowd set out for the main gate, to be met by police as unceasing later arrivals swelled it further, until Lab workers began to show up in their vehicles and county and city police were called to divert traffic to the north gate against the columns of people still coming, and the south road was closed to vehicles and state police summoned, and still the spectacle slowed traffic to walking speed, so that Quine was late to Highet's office where. Highet stared out his window at the south road. --Those people out there will never understand. It could be so much worse. On the other side, entire cities, entire regions have no civilian industry at all, it's all military. Here we cut our deals as needed but we still do real science. We bring in people like you. We roll back the darkness. --There's a problem. Highet turned. --What. --The beryllium and hydrogen sensors reflectors were cabled separately. Thorpe's analysis at the ranch used only the beryllium. I looked at the hydrogen data yesterday. Nothing. No brightness. No beam. Nothing there. Nodding, Highet turned again to the window. --I see. The hydrogen sensors reflectors which I asked you not to use. You know, I almost stopped that work order, came that close. But I wanted to see what you had in mind. --As supervisor it was my decision. --On your head beYes it was. So where's your quantitative agreement now? --You saw at the ranch. The beryllium shows it. Spectrum peaks here, as predicted. But that's not a focused an x-ray, that's oxygen in the beryllium glowing at just the right wavelength. It looks exactly like the new model's predictions for focus. --And where did this new model come from? --Thorpe's has been modifying my code. I found a routine of his where just this set of frequencies is amplified. You'll find that my copies of the files haven't been modified for ten days. Highet came from the window, pacing past the photos of Presidents and artists' renderings, touching the length of cable. --So it's all Thorpe's fault! That's your story? --The CASE system shows all his modifications. --I see. Well, this is it's bad for him, you know then. Especially after Fish and Himmelhoch. He has a history. --I wouldn't call it intentional. The ideas he brought were good. I worked with him, I didn't see this, it could have happened to anyone. --It doesn't matter. He has a history, voice sharpening, --quackery or carelessness, you think it matters? You think you can ever walk away from your history? Quine said nothing. --Now those hydrogen sensors reflectors, let's talk about these, you piggybacked your own little test onto the piggyback, that was very cute. Did Thorpe know about that? --You saw the work orders. --He knew he was getting feed from the beryllium only? --It was his demo. --Yes, you saw to that. All right. We'll keep him on for a while. Then you'll write him a letter of recommendation. Down the road we'll issue a report on the false brightness. You'll be group leader on that. --You want me to... Highet's voice was tight with controlled fury. --I want you to take some responsibility. Show you're serious about this. It's about time you moved up or got out. --Okay. --You begin to interest me, Philip. I thought I knew what to expect from you. --At least we caught this now. --Oh no we haven'tOkay. I listened to your story. Now you listen to me. We haven't caught a thing yet. What we need now is another test. --I don't want to sound naive, but you're not going to mention this at the presentation? --Today? I think not. I think I will not at this time moment give the enemies of reason grounds sufficient to bury an entire body of our project, our knowledge and aspiration, our aspirations. Highet lifted from his desk a small device etched with a craft undreamed of even a decade before, raising it before him like a talisman, then replaced weighing it and gazed at Quine implacably in his hand. --I believe not. Nolan came through the telephone door bearing a red folder, acknowledged Quine with a minute change of expression, as the phone rang and Highet lifted it in midring, --No I can't see anyone right now, as Nolan came through the door bearing a red folder, acknowledging Quine with a minute change of expression. --Very clean data from your shot, said Philip, Nolan said. --no damn it Senator I can't Chase is coming in an hour --Oh, you've seen it? --what, what do you mean he's here now --We prepared the overheads. A match with theory unparalleled since Mendel's peas. Kid's a barn burner is he? --what do you mean here now? We're not set upwell damn it keep him down there --He'd like to be. --damn it keep him down therefucking hero of the people can just wait --You're taking him under your wing. --fucking lantern-jawed hero of the people can just wait --My political skills are legendary, Quine joked. --don't care! Do whatever it takes! I'll call you when we're ready. --I've noticed, Nolan said, turning to Highet as he put down the phone. --Have to do everyone's job, what's this Bran? --Overheads of the Taliesin data. --Fine, just leave them. Bernd there you are find the rest of the team will you get them up here where we have a little problem god damn senator from the liberal east arrived just a little ahead of schedule he's downsta, Aron Dennis where the hell have you been we've got a PR b... Nolan!_--! --Oh! I just, sorry, didn't see your foot --Jeez Sorry Aron Dennis let me help you up... --Nolan will you get the hell --my slides! here don't step on --Nolan! --just put these back in order, with the ah integrated twenty-four 24-bit color TGIF animations and music in standard MIDI files --AronDennis --little problem with the synthesizer all the instruments stuck on the cowbell patch so when we played the _Apocalypse Now_ music, I mean the Wager Wagner Valk, rather intriguing actually but hardly --Aron,Dennis will you --then our Silicon Graphics machine couldn't read the TGIFs so we converted had to convert them to Video PostScript but somehow they came out black and white one inch square so --Aron,Dennis will you please --go low tech instead, keep it simple, four synchronized slide projectors overheads eight-track digital tape --AronDennis, get up! Leave the, will you leave the slides on the floor. Go to the lobby. Keep Senator Chase busy down there. --But I --Go! and pacing to the window, parting the blind, --Fuck's this going to play like, must be a thousand hundreds of them in the road. --The news said two a thousand, said Dietz. --They'll claim fiveBullshit. Supposed to keep these assholes away from the main gate put them up in the north corner, I want to know how word of this got out! glaring at Quine, --I want to know who's been talking to these people, who let them know Chase was coming today. Who do we have out there? Federal protective, local police, I want county I want the Chippies, bring out the goddamn transit cops if we have to! --Leo, it's symbolic. Today's Armistice Day, you know? --Shit on that, it's to embarrass us. All for Chase. Man keeps calling me up about twenty kilos of plutonium gone missing, I keep telling him we don't stockpile plutonium here. --But we do, Leo. --Well, Bernd, Chase doesn't have the clearance to know that, and picking up the phone midring, --Yes? Damn it, Aron, Dennis just, look, take him to the downstairs conference room think you can do that? ...no will you forget the fucking slides, thumbing the phone's button, --Where's Szabo? You all go down, I'm right behind you. --- --Senator, glad you could make it. This all? Expecting Expected to see more of your colleagues... --Doctor Highet. These two gentlemen are from the General Accounting Office. You'll be seeing more of them. --Why don't you all take a seat and we'll begin. --There'sI have just one thing I want to know question, Doctor Highet. Is the Superbright going to work? --I believe our presentation will address any --I don't want a presentation, I want a yes or no. At the present moment, judging from everything you have to date, is it a workable weapon viable system, within the budget and timeframe we have? --Beyond question. In fact we have new results that show --A new Radiance Superbright test? When? --I can't discuss that in open session. --Then maybe you can discuss claims of exaggeration and fraud from Warren Slater. --Those are lies. Slater sabotaged my teams repeatedly. He had reasons of his own to derail this program. --Such as? --I can't discuss that in open session. --Slater's not the only critic. Some of your own people --Those are not my people. Those are people who've made up their minds that certain technical problems are too hard to solve. They're wrong. They could be making a contribution, but instead they find fault. --So why are you behind schedule? --We're not. --According to your own timetable --Senator, we have brilliant, creative people together here doing important work. Leave them alone and they accomplish miracles. But if you put limits on them... --You're not answering me. I didn't ask about miracles. --I am answering you if you'll let me. You cannot nickel and dime a program like this in the research phase, not if you exp --Research? I thought you were engineering phase. --Very nearly. --You sent the president a letter claiming engineering phase. --I do not acknowledge that. If such a letter were to exist it would be top secret, and you lack the clearance to see it or the competence to evaluate it. --Doctor Highet I'm getting tired of this, you have oversold this put in motion a program to the tune of that all told has squandered thirty bill billio --Senator --you have stonewalled, you have defied --Senator --gress, you have hidden behind classifica --Senator, you're an asshole. You might even be a traitor. --I will not take that from you, sir! --You don't have a clue what's at stake here, one look at the masses those hippies out front you're ready to cave, sell out this nation's security its technological edge its, breaking off for the figure in the doorway who bowed his head in apology. --Gentlemen, we have had a bomb threat. We need to clear the building. --Good God. --What the hell? --Your peacenik constituency constituents, Chase. Good work. --I'm not through with you, Highet. --Fine, I'm willing to sit right here play Russian roulette. --Gentlemen please, the security forces will be is coming through, you can'll have to move to Building 101. Harsh urgent Clipped static blurted in the hallway. Gallop of many feet approached. --Clear this area! Outside in the building sunlight a security squad came running in a wedge, helmeted and visored, booted in horseskin, only the flesh of their hands visible black gloves holding batons at port arms. Leather creaking, heels clattering, radios jabbering, they divided broke through the exiting crowd and Quine was swept the wrong way, out past an unmanned checkpoint before he broke clear cleared the surge of people onto a lawn where men in blue jumpsuits trailed strips of yellow CAUTION tape on two then three sides of him and he dashed through the diminishing gap open space as behind him shouts were raised. Between windowless walls he took a stair dropped him stairway down to where two burly men workmen rounding a corner dealt him a blow with lumber the plank they carried, --Jesus watch it! hurling him to his knees against a chainlink fence vibrating trembling at the lip of a great pit. In this excavation five, seven, ten vehicles labored grinding and roaring in desperate intensity, beeping hollowly as they reversed or clanking furiously forward over a terrain of pale mud. Vast as it the pit was it would not bury a millionth of the dead should the bombs created here detonate could kill. Quine pulled free of the fence with a tearing of fabric and went down over a walkway of plywood sheets, pausing before a trailer CREDNE CONSTRUCTION in whose which doorway two t-shirted men eating lunch regarded him with dispassion as with a handkerchief he rubbed dirt and blood from his palms, temple, and the knee visible through ripped pants, then went down a long another stair of raw wood stained with mud, glancing back at concentric terraces gouged from the hillside,. *The city is built on two levels, lords and palaces above, common workers below.*, and rounding He rounded a corner to where a stream of people hurried past guards at a checkpoint. --Look I need to --Move on, there's been a bomb threat. --Yes but I'm in an important meeting I need to get back to --You can't come this way, this is a secured secure area. --I'm cleared dammit! clapping his breast where no photo ID, but a torn flap of pocket, depended, --oh Christ, look my name's Philip Quine can't you call --Keep movingMove away! The guard pushed shoved him back into the a stream of people advancing slowly toward the main gate. He made his way through it and broke free, starting to jog into a job on a rough track path that led to the perimeter road, where he doubled back to approach the entry kiosk from its far side passing and passing close on his left the unending mass of protesters, just beyond a row of trees and the perimeter fence, only to stop. He stopped short of the entry road entrance gate where cars were stalled blocked by the leading edge of the crowd inside coursing out and around them like a stream around rocks, while bullhorns blared --personnel, do not exit by this gate repeat do not, and outside the gate protesters swirled in place like debris at a confluence of cataracts, held back by a skirmish line of county police vainly trying to keep them separate from Lab personnel. Quine stood sweating and panting until sirens turned him to face four cars slewing slewed to a stop on the perimeter road and discharging blackvested discharged Lab security forces, one of whom leveled his club at Quine, not clearly part of either crowd, and cried, --You! Quine ran for the kiosk. More Lab police had arrived inside there, forming a line wedge to divert Lab personnel from the gate, then quickly moving forward to the gate. Quine was suddenly between before two police of them who linked arms to bar his passage. Their visors, opaque and bronze, mirrored twin Quines, elongated and dismayed. He pointed past them. --I belong inside. For a moment their visors, opaque, bronze, iridescent, mirrored twin Quines, elongated, battered, dismayed. Then he was seized and pushed through the gate into the street. A helicopter swept overhead. He held crouched under its roar, hands against his ears. *Let us now speak the truth as we know it. Say that the sun is round, and bright, and hot. The sun Say that it fires its acolytes, darkens their skins, elevates their wormridden souls, the sun. It rises in our birth and it sets in our death, its writing is in the spots upon. Its face and in the spots it prints upon our skins flesh the spots that adorn its face. It is in us whether we labor under it, or hide away from it,. It strikes through our souls, it ignites the light of our being, or it limns the shadow of our denial.* In the crowd he saw Lynn, her dark head appearing and vanishing among others, lithe nape and shoulders bare and tanned below the cropped marge of hair, sun blazing on the straps and back of a white tank top. *Light is a wave and we are carried upon it,. Light is a particle to pierce us with revelation. Light is the sun or the moon, a heat that tempers or a gentleness that silvers with love.* He pushed toward her. At the end of its circuit the helicopter turned. *Here in the crowd are fools, innocents, knaves, here we are jostled, in hazard, we can do nothing but strive against currents, knowing how slight is our power to reach any shore we set out for.* He called her name and the call was lost in noise. The surge of the crowd pushed them together and she turned to him, eyes wide and surprised. It was not Lynn. Against their will they embraced. He clung to her until another push felled him. The cut on his knee opened and he bent to stanch it. When he rose she was gone and he was among figures wearing skulls of papier-mâché and skeletons painted on black tights. Tambourines jangled, clattered came again. *Say what you know, that love is lost. That light is lost extinguished. But see, loveless our souls still blaze. Our sun has not gone out, for fire comes to those who go not the way of light. What's lost is well lost. See, we blaze and are not consumed.* He called her name and the call was lost in noise. The crowd shoved them together and she turned to him, eyes surprised. It was not Lynn. Pressed by the crowd they unwillingly embraced. He clung to her until another surge felled him. The cut on his knees opened and he bent to stanch it. When he rose he was among figures wearing skulls of papier-mâché and skeletons painted on black tights. Tambourines jangled, clattered. Around him people tied kerchiefs across over their faces. Overhead The helicopter roared. Its black belly glistened like a spider's thorax, then it rocked and moved off, vanishing behind leaving a silver mist that fell gently onto the crowd as gently as the first rain of like a spring rain. Tears sprang leapt to Quine's face and he dropped to his knees gasping and blinded, clinging to the nearest figure, saying over and over, --I belong inside, his voice unheard even by himself.## "Old Legends" {.collapse}
[Long before I became interested in science itself]{.smallcaps}, I was a science fiction reader. The [Space Age](!W) changed that in 1957. At the time it seemed that the central metaphor of science fiction had become real, foggy legend condensing into fact.
I read about [Sputnik](!W) on the deck of the _[S.S. America](!W "SS America (1940)")_, sailing back from Germany, where I had lived for three years while my father served in the occupying forces. The one-page mimeographed ship's newsletter of October 4 gave that astonishing leap an infuriatingly terse two sentences. By the time I re-entered high school in the U.S., just emerging from years when the Cold War seemed to fill every crevice of the world, the previously skimpy curriculum was already veering toward science, a golden, high-minded province. Suddenly I found that I could take a full year of calculus and physics in my senior year. This was quite a change. I put aside my devoted reading of the sf magazines and launched myself into science, the real thing. [pg271] I began to think seriously that a career of simply studying the physical world, which I had often read about in fiction, could be open to such as me. I had done reasonably in high school up until Sputnik, getting Bs and As, but not thinking of myself as one of the really bright members of the class. I imagined that I would probably end up as an engineer, but I really wanted to be a writer. When I scored high in the national scholastic exams of 1958, nobody was more surprised than I. But those scores opened the advanced classes to me, in my senior year, and a whole new landscape. This fresh path led directly to an early afternoon in 1967, when two physicists and a clerk from the personnel office at the [Lawrence Radiation Laboratory](!W) ushered me into a large office without preamble, and there sat a distracted [Edward Teller](!W) behind a messy desk piled high with physics journals. To my surprise, the other physicists quickly excused themselves and left. Teller was scientific director of the Laboratory then, fabled for his work developing the [A-bomb](!W) and [H-bomb](!W), and his epic split with [Robert Oppenheimer](!W). They sprang Teller on me without warning. I had gone up to Livermore to discuss working there as a research physicist, following my doctoral thesis ["Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation in High Magnetic Fields by Plasma Modes and Impurity States"] at the [University of California at San Diego](!W). Nobody told me that Teller insisted on taking the measure of every candidate in the program. "We didn't want you to be nervous", one said later. It worked; I was merely terrified. He was the most daunting job interviewer imaginable. Not merely a great physicist, he loomed large in one of the central mythologies of modern science fiction, the A-bomb. In the next hour no one disturbed us as Teller quizzed me about my thesis in detail. Attentively he turned every facet over and over, finding undiscovered nuances, some overlooked difficulty, a calculation perhaps a bit askew. He was brilliant, leaping ahead of my nervous explanations to see implications I had only vaguely sensed. His mind darted as swiftly as any I had ever encountered, including some Nobel Laureates. To my vast surprise, I apparently passed inspection. At the end, he paused a long moment and then announced that he had "the most important kvestion of all". Leaning closer, he said, "Vill you be villing to vork on veapons?" Unbidden, images from [Stanley Kubrick's](!W "Stanley Kubrick") film _[Dr. Strangelove](!W)_ leaped to mind. But Teller had impressed me as a deep, reflective man. I said I would---occasionally, at least. I had grown up deep in the shadow of the Cold War. My father was a career army officer, and I had spent six years living with my family in occupied post-war Japan and Germany. It seemed to me that the best, indeed the only, way to avoid strategic conventional war, whose aftermath I [pg272] had seen in shattered Tokyo and Berlin. Paralleling this direct experience was my reading in science fiction, which had always looked ahead at such issues, working out the future implied by current science. That afternoon began my long, winding involvement with modern science and fiction, the inevitable clash of the noble and imaginary elements in both science and fiction with the gritty and practical. I have never settled emotionally the tensions between these modes of thinking. Growing up amid the shattered ruins of Germany and Japan, with a father who had fought through World War II and then spent long years occupying the fallen enemy lands, impressed me with the instability of even advanced nations. The greatest could blunder the most. I quit Livermore in 1971 to become a professor at the [University of California at Irvine](!W). In novels such as _[In the Ocean of Night](!W)_, written after my "Rad Lab" days, I see in retrospect that I was thrashing out my mixed feelings. I often turned to other scientists to fathom how my own experience fit with the history of both science and fiction in our time. I did not see then how intertwined they were and are, and how much we face the future using the legends of the past. ### Sixa vs Seilla "Veapons" called immediately to mind the central fable of sf in those days---the event which seemed to put the stamp on [John Campbell's](!W "John W. Campbell") _[Astounding](!W "Analog Science Fiction and Fact")_ magazine. In the spring of 1944 [Cleve Cartmill](!W) published a clear description of how an atomic bomb worked in _Astounding_, titled ["Deadline"](!W "Deadline (science fiction story)"). Actually, Cartmill's bomb would not have worked, but he did stress that the key problem was separating non-fissionable isotopes from the crucial [Uranium 235](!W). This story became legend, proudly touted by fans after the war as proof of sf's predictive powers. It was a tale of an evil alliance called the Axis---oops, no, the Sixa---who are prevented from dropping the A-bomb, while their opponents, the Allies---no, oops, that's the Seilla---refrain from using the weapon, fearing its implications. In March 1944 a captain in the Intelligence and Security Division and the Manhattan Project called for an investigation of Cartmill. He suspected a breach in security, and wanted to trace it backward. U.S. security descended on Campbell's office, but Campbell truthfully told them that Cartmill had researched his story using only materials in public libraries. A Special Agent nosed around Cartmill himself, going so far as to enlist his postman to casually quiz him about how the story came to be written. The postman remembered that John Campbell had sent Cartmill a letter [pg273] several days before the Special Agent clamped a [mail cover](!W) on Cartmill's correspondence. This fit the day when agents had already visited Campbell's office. Campbell was alerting his writer, post-haste. Soon enough, Security came calling. Sf writers are often asked where they get their ideas. This was one time when the answer mattered. Cartmill had worked for a [radium](!W) products company in the 1920s^[See the mention in _Radiance_ of the "Radium Girls" in watch factories as an example of the many uses radium was put to before the dangers were understood.], he told the agent, which had in turn interested him in uranium research. He also fished forth two letters from Campbell, one written ten days short of two years before the Hiroshima bombing, in which Campbell urged him to explore these ideas: "U 235 has---I'm stating fact, not theory---been separated in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic power research, and the like. They got it out of regular uranium ores by new [atomic isotope separation methods](!W); they have quantities measured in pounds..." Since a minimum [critical mass](!W) is less than a hundred pounds, this was sniffing close to Top Secret data. "Now it might be that you found the story worked better in allegory", Campbell advised, neatly leading Cartmill to distance the yet unwritten tale from current events. Plainly Campbell was trying to skirt close to secrets he must have guessed. Literary historian Albert Berger obtained the formerly secret files on the Cartmill case, and as he points out in [["The _Astounding_ Investigation: The Manhattan Project's Confrontation with Science Fiction"](/doc/radiance/1984-berger.pdf "'The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project's Confrontation With Science Fiction, published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact', Berger 1984")] _Analog_ (September, 1984), Campbell never told Cartmill that wartime censorship directives forbade *any* mention of atomic energy. Campbell was urging his writer out into risky territory. Cartmill was edgy, responding he didn't want to be so close to home as to be "ridiculous. And there is the possible danger of actually suggesting a means of action which might be employed." Still, he had used the leaden device of simply inverting the Axis and Allies names, thin cover indeed. Campbell did not ask him to change this, suggesting that both men were tantalized by the lure of reality behind their dreams. The [Office of Censorship](!W) came into play. Some suggested withholding _Astounding_'s mailing privileges^[The USPS can censor publications in various ways, either as part of [wartime censorship](!W "Postal censorship"), through [obscenity laws](!W "Comstock laws"), or simply refusing to accept bulk rates for a particular publication. Notoriously, they were used in WWI on anti-war publications (see the [Espionage Act of 1917](!W) & [Sedition Act of 1918](!W)).], which would have ended the magazine. In the end, not attracting attention to the Cartmill story and the magazine seemed a smarter strategy. Security feared that "...such articles coming to the attention of personnel connected with the Project are apt to lead to an undue amount of speculation." Only those sitting atop the Manhattan Project knew what was going on. "Deadline" might make workers in the far-flung separation plants and machining shops figure out what all this uranium was for, and talk about it. The Project was afraid of imagination, particularly disciplined dreaming with numbers and facts well marshaled. They feared science fiction itself. All this lore I already accepted, but I was curious about those at the top [pg274] of the Project, such as Teller. Self-cautious, a mere, fresh postdoctoral physicist, I did not at first ask him about any of these legendary events. I was busy, too, learning how science works in such lofty realms. I discussed both physics and politics with Teller while at the Lab, finding him delightfully eccentric and original. One hammering-hot summer day in Livermore, we continued well into the lunch hour. Teller wanted to go swimming, but refused to break off discussions. "Ve must not be all in our minds, all the time." I went with him. He cut an odd figure as he threaded among the muscular sunbathers, mind fixed on arcane points of theoretical physics, his skin pale as the underbelly of a fish. He sat at the pool edge and shed his suit, tie, shirt, the works right down to---instead of underwear---a swim suit. This man plans ahead, I thought. As a boy in Budapest he had come in second in a contest with a streetcar, losing a foot. Beside the pool he unfastened his artificial foot, unembarrassed. (In _Dr. Strangelove_, I couldn't help recalling, it was an artificial hand.) He kept talking physics even as he wriggled over to the edge. He earnestly concluded his point, nodded earnestly, satisfied, and then seemed to realize where he was. I could almost hear him think, *Ah, yes, next problem. Swimming. Vere iss...?* "Edward", I began---and Teller instantly flung himself like an awkward frog into the water, obliviously comic. Moments like these led me to finally see through the cultural aura that obscures figures like Teller. They are more vast and various than we think, funnier and odder and warmer. Dr. Strangelove doesn't exist. Teller had made a name for himself at Los Alamos by thinking ahead. He proposed the hydrogen fusion bomb, the Super, while the A-bomb was under development---and lobbied to skip the A-bomb altogether, leapfrogging to the grander weapon. With his penchant for problem-solving, Teller was a symbol of the "techno-fix" school of warfare, and by the 1960s the times were running against him. At one Livermore lunch, an arms control negotiator furiously said to me, "He's the Satan of weapons! We've got to stop him." Many scientists felt just as strongly. [H. Bruce Franklin's](!W "H. Bruce Franklin") [_War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination_](/doc/radiance/1988-franklin-warstars.pdf) made the case that sf, particularly in the pulp magazines, strongly influenced U.S. foreign policy. In the 1930s [Harry Truman](!W) had read lurid pulp magazine sf yarns of super weapons settling the hash of evil powers. Often they were held in readiness after, insuring the country against an uncertain future. Truman wasn't alone. Popular culture's roots run deep. Time and again at Livermore I heard physicists quote sf works as arguments for or against the utility of hypothetical weapons. As I came to know the physics community more widely, this complex weave deepened. [pg275] ### Beeps At Livermore I got involved with the theory of [tachyons](!W), the theoretically possible particles which can travel faster than light. Not the sort of thing one imagines a "weapons lab" allowing, but Teller allowed the theorists a wide range. When the tachyon idea popped up in the physics journals, I discussed it with Teller. He thought they were highly unlikely, and I agreed, but worked on them anyway out of sheer speculative interest. With Bill Newcomb and David Book, I published in _[Physical Review](!W)_ a paper titled ["The Tachyonic Antitelephone"](/doc/radiance/1970-benford.pdf)^[[Wikipedia entry](!W "Tachyonic antitelephone").]. We destroyed the existing arguments, which had avoided time-travel paradoxes by re-interpreted tachyonic trajectories moving backward in time as their anti-particles moving forward in time. It was simple to show that imposing a signal on the tachyons (sending a message) defeated the re-interpretation, so the causality problem remained. If sending a tip-off about a horse race to your grandfather made him so rich he jilted your grandmother and ran off to Paris, that was just as bad a violation of cause and effect. Teller invoked a different argument against tachyons, which recalled the causal lunchtime discussions at Los Alamos, which were legendarily fruitful. At one, [Enrico Fermi](!W) asked his [famous question, "Where are they?"](!W "Fermi paradox")---and raised the still fiercely contentious issue of why aliens, if they are [plentiful in the galaxy](!W "Drake equation"), haven't visited us by now. (That question undoubtedly inspired the proposal that [radio listening might turn up alien broadcasts](!W "Search for extraterrestrial intelligence"), made by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in 1959---the same Morrison who had worked in the Manhattan Project.) Using similar logic, Teller noted that tachyons could be used to send messages backward in time. "Vy haven't they been sent? Vere are our messages from the future?" Our answer was that nobody had built a tachyon receiver yet. Neat, perhaps, but a bit too neat. Surely somehow nature would not disguise such a profound trick. There had to be a way of seeing from theory why such disturbing things could not occur. I was so intrigued by these hypothetical particles that I wrote papers investigating their consequences. That drew me into a distant friendship with [Gerald Feinberg](!W) of [Columbia University](!W), who had introduced some of the ideas of tachyonic field theory. He was an amiable, concentrated man, always thinking through the broad implications of the present. He was also a first-class physicist who had edited a science fiction fanzine in high school with two other upstart Bronx Science High School students, [Sheldon Glashow](!W "Sheldon Lee Glashow") and [Steven Weinberg](!W)---who later won the Nobel prize for [their theory](!W "Electroweak interaction") which united the [weak](!W "Weak interaction") and [electromagnetic forces](!W "Electromagnetism"). Titled [ETAOIN SHRDLU](!W) for the frequency of letter use in English, the only fanzine ever [pg276] edited by Nobel Prize winners, it stressed science with earnest teenage energy. (A generation later Stephen Hawking spent most of his free time reading sf paperbacks. Enthusiastically discussing them decades later with me, he was like most readers, able to recall plots and ideas easily, but not titles or authors.) Tachyons were the sort of audacious idea that comes to young minds used to roving over the horizon of conventional thought. Because of Feinberg I later set part of my [tachyon novel](!W "Timescape") at Columbia. By the late 1970s I thought tachyons quite unlikely, since several experiments had failed to find them (after an exciting but erroneous detection in 1972^[This appears to be a reference to ["Search for Tachyon Monopoles"](https://www.phenix.bnl.gov/WWW/publish/wasiko/Monopole/Experiments/Bartlett_72.pdf), Bartlett & Lahana 1972]). Still, the issue of how physics could *prove* that time communication is impossible remained---the primary issue for all of us, including Teller. Tachyons seemed a better way to address this than the more exotic beasts of the theorists' imaginations, such as space-time wormholes. So I framed the issue using tachyons, exploring how people in the future might get around the problem of having no receiver: by using energetic tachyons to disturb a finely tuned experiment in a physics lab in the past. Gerry chuckled when he heard this notion, pleased that his theoretical physics had spawned a novel about how scientists actually worked. He was rather bemused by the continuing cottage industry of tachyon papers, now numbering in the several hundreds. When [an Australian experiment seemed to find](/doc/radiance/1974-clay.pdf "'Possible observation of tachyons associated with extensive air showers', Clay & Crouch 1974") cosmic rays moving over twice the speed of light, the field had a quick flurry of interest. Gerry was intrigued, then crestfallen when the results weren't confirmed. He told me years later that he had begun thinking about tachyons because he was inspired by [James Blish's](!W "James Blish") [1954] short story, ["Beep"](https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-02)^[Expanded into the 1973 novel _[The Quincunx of Time](!W)_.]. In it, a faster-than-light communicator plays a crucial role in a future society, but has an annoying final *beep* at the end of every message. The communicator necessarily allows sending of signals backward in time, even when that's not your intention. Eventually the characters discover that all future messages are compressed into that *beep*, so the future is known, more or less by accident. Feinberg had set out to see if such a gadget was theoretically possible. This pattern, speculation leading to detailed theory, I encountered more and more in my career. The litany of science is quite prissy, speaking of how anomalies in data lead theorists to explore new models, which are then checked by dutiful experimenters, and so on. Reality is wilder than that. No one impressed me more with the power of speculation in science than [Freeman Dyson](!W). Without knowing who he was, I found him a like-minded soul at the daily physics department coffee breaks, when I was still a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego. I was very impressed that he had the audacity to give actual department colloquia on [pg277] his odd ideas. These included notions about space exploration by using [nuclear weapons as explosive pushers](!W "Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)"), and speculations on odd variants of life in the universe. He had just published a short note on what came to be called [Dyson spheres](!W)---vast civilizations which swarm around their star, soaking up all available sunlight and emitting infrared, which we might study to detect them. (This was a direct answer to both Fermi's question and the Cocconi-Morrison proposal---more links in a long chain.) Dyson had read [Jules Verne](!W) while a child, and at age eight and nine wrote a sf novel, [_Sir Phillip Roberts's Erolunar Collision_](https://www.amazon.com/From-Eros-Gaia-Penguin-science/dp/0140174230 "'From Eros to Gaia', Dyson 1992"), about scientists directing the orbits of asteroids. He was unafraid to publish conjectural, even rather outrageous ideas in the solemn pages of physics journals. When I remarked on this, he answered with a smile, "You'll find I'm not the first." Indeed, he descended from a line of futurist British thinkers, from [J. D. Bernal](!W "John Desmond Bernal") of [_The World, the Flesh and the Devil_](!W "The world, the flesh, and the devil#J. D. Bernal"), to [Olaf Stapledon](!W) to [Arthur C. Clarke](!W). In _[Infinite in All Directions](!W)_, Dyson remarked that "Science fiction is, after all, nothing more than the exploration of the future using the tools of science." This was a fairly common view in those burgeoning times. In my first year of graduate school in La Jolla I noticed [Leo Szilard](!W) at department colloquia, avidly holding forth on his myriad ideas. Szilard had persuaded Einstein to write [the famous letter to Roosevelt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter) explaining that an A-bomb was possible, and advocating the [Manhattan Project](!W). He had a genius for seizing the moment. Szilard had seen the potential in nuclear physics early, even urging his fellow physicists in the mid-1930s to keep their research secret. I had read Szilard's satirical sf novel [_The Voice of the Dolphins_](https://www.amazon.com/The-Voice-Dolphins-Other-Stories/dp/B000O6DD90)^[See also ["When Speaking as a Scientist is Not Enough: Leo Szilard on Playing with Dolphins; HSS member R. Scott Sheffield's personal reflections on Leo Szilard's allegory of science."](https://web.archive.org/web/20100619071209/http://www.hssonline.org/publications/Newsletter2009/July_Szilard.html).] in 1961, and his sf short stories, and decided to wait until I had time from a weathering round of classes to speak to him. I was just taking some difficult examinations in late May 1964 when Dyson told me that Szilard had died of a heart attack that morning. It was a shock, though I had scarcely exchanged a dozen words with him. (Of his rather cerebral fiction he had said, "I am emotionally moved by extraordinary reasoning.") I had not seized the moment. Szilard was obsessed with nuclear dangers, and Dyson carried some of Szilard's thinking forward. A [student of Dyson's](!W "John Aristotle Phillips") made headlines in 1976 by designing a workable nuclear weapon using only published sources. I recalled the Cartmill episode. When I remarked on this, Dyson said, "The link goes back that far, yes." At the time I didn't know what he meant. Throughout all this, politics was not an issue. I was a registered Democrat, others were Republican, but our positions did evolve from our politics. [pg278] ### Rockets and War Stars Scientists often read sf at an early age and then drift away, but many maintain a soft spot in their hearts for it. Some, like me, bridge the two communities. So it was no surprise to me when Teller enlisted sf allies in his policy battles. Especially effective in the 1980s was [Jerry Pournelle](!W), a rangy, technophilic, talented figure. With a .38 automatic he could hit a beer can at fifty yards in a cross wind. As needed, he could also run a political campaign, debug a computer program or write a best-selling science fiction novel---simultaneously. When he asked me to serve on the [Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy](!W) in 1982, at first I didn't realize that Jerry wasn't proposing just another pressure group. This was a body which had direct lines to the White House, through the [National Security Advisor](!W). Teller, too, was "in the loop". Pournelle dominated the Council meetings with his Tennessee charm, techno-conservative ideas and sheer momentum. An oddly varied crew assembled: writers, industrial researchers, military and civilian experts on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence to rocketry. The Council, a raucous bunch with feisty opinions, met at the spacious home of science fiction author [Larry Niven](!W). The men mostly talked hard-edge tech, the women policy. Pournelle stirred the pot and turned up the heat. Amid the buffet meals, saunas and hot tubs, well-stocked open bar, and myriad word processors, fancies simmered and ideas cooked, some emerging better than half-baked. Blocking nuclear weapons had always appealed to me. My misgivings about military involvement in the space program and other areas, which had surfaced in my novels repeatedly, vanished in matters which clearly were the military's province. Never, in all the policy and technical consulting I did while a professor at UCI, did I doubt that solving the immense problem of nuclear war lay somehow outside the province of the physicists who had started it all. But physicists could contribute---indeed, they had to try. I favored as a first goal defending missiles and military command centers, using ground-based systems of swift, non-nuclear-tipped rockets. Technically this was small potatoes, really, not much beyond the capacity already available under existing treaties, which after all had allowed the Soviet to [ring Moscow with a hundred fast defensive rockets](!W "A-135 anti-ballistic missile system"), nuclear-tipped and still in place today. The more ambitious specialists talked of war stars---great bunkers in the sky, able to knock down fleets of missiles. I doubted they could deal with the tens of thousands of warheads that could be launched in a full [pg279] exchange. Still, to me that fact was a better argument against the existence of those thousands of warheads, rather than an argument against defense. Finally, we settled on recommending a position claiming at least the moral high ground, if not high orbits. Defense was inevitably more stabilizing than relying on hair-trigger offense, we argued. It was also more principled. And eventually, the Soviet Union might not even be the enemy, we said---though we had no idea it would fade so fast. When that happened, defenses would still be useful against any attacker, especially rogue nations bent on a few terrorist attacks. There were plenty of science fiction stories, some many decades old, dealing with that possibility. The Advisory Council met in August of 1984 in a mood of high celebration. Their pioneering work had yielded fruits unimaginable in 1982---Reagan himself had proposed the [Strategic Defense Initiative](!W), suggesting that nuclear weapons be made "impotent and obsolete". The Soviets were clearly staggered by the prospect. (Years later I heard straight from a senior Soviet advisor that the U.S. SDI had been the straw that broke the back of the military's hold on foreign policy. That seems to be the consensus now among the diplomatic community^[Benford is of course entitled to his own opinion and I have no personal contacts with the diplomatic community, but as of 2014, mainstream historians seem to focus on many factors such as the Afghanistan quagmire, the collapse of the USSR's vital oil revenue in the 1980s, Chernobyl, stagnating economic growth, excessive foreign debt; SDI is rarely mentioned, and apparently some central aspects of the SDI/Reagan interpretation, like increased USSR military spending (as a percentage of GDP), have been called into question.], though politically SDI is a common whipping boy, its funding cut.) None of this was really unusual in the history of politics, policy and science fiction. [H. G. Wells](!W) had visited with both presidents Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and other major figures. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was so dismayed by the Wellsian portrait of a dark future that he asked him to the White House for a long talk about how to avoid drifting that way. Well's attention to war as the principal problem of the modern era found a ready audience among world leaders. Jules Verne had not commanded such respect in the corridors of power, and no writer since Wells has, but in the late twentieth century it seemed that science fiction's grasp of possibilities was once more called forth, this time by the same government which had fretted over Cleve Cartmill. In the summer of 1984 all things seemed possible. I was not surprised that [Robert Heinlein](!W) attended the Advisory Council meetings, dapper and sharp-witted. And out of the summer heat came a surprise visitor--- [Arthur C. Clarke](!W), in town to promote the opening of [the film](!W "2010 (film)") made from his novel, [_2010_](!W "2010: Odyssey Two"). Clarke had testified before Congress against the Strategic Defense Initiative, and regarded the pollution of space by weapons, even defensive ones, as a violation of his life's vision. Heinlein attacked as soon as Clarke settled in Larry Niven's living room. The conversation swirled around technical issues. Could SDI satellites be destroyed by putting into orbit a waiting flock of "smart rocks" (conventional explosives with small rockets attached)? Would SDI lead to further offensive weapons in space? [pg280] Behind all this lay a clear clash of personalities. Clarke was taken aback. His old friend Heinlein regarded Clarke's statements as both wrong-headed and rude. Foreigners on our soil should step softly in discussions of our self-defense policies, he said. It was, at best, bad manners. Perhaps Clarke was guilty of "British arrogance". Clarke had not expected this level of feeling from an old comrade. They had all believed in the High Church of Space, as one writer present put it. Surely getting away from the planet would diminish our rivalries? Now each side regarded the other as betraying that vision, of imposing unwarranted assumptions on the future of mankind. It was a sad moment for many when Clarke said a quiet good-bye, slipped out and disappeared into his limousine, stunned. In that moment I saw the dangers of mingling the visionary elements of sf with the hard-nosed. The field welcomed both, of course, but the world chewed up those of such ample spirit. Behind much of this was Teller, close advisor to Reagan. He got involved with exotica such as [X-ray lasers](!W), which I thought beside the point. The answer lay not in vastly different, new technology, but using tried-and-true methods with a different strategic vision. I was naive about what would follow. While the Soviets got the message quite clearly---because they watched what we did, and didn't merely listen to the public debate---and began thinking about throwing in the towel altogether. Meanwhile, over the Strategic Defense Initiative issue Nobel laureates ground their axes, techno-patter rained down, politicians played to the gallery---ships passing in the night, their fog horns bellowing. Our present had become, for that sf fan reading a newspaper report of Sputnik, completely science fictional. Even in the 1980s, though, I did not know how deep the science and science fiction connection went. ### Old Legends I had always wondered about Teller's effectiveness at influencing policy. In the 1940s, as [James Gleick](!W) remarks in [_Genius_](https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp/0679747044 "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman"), a biography of [Richard Feynman](!W), Teller was as imaginative and respected as Feynman. So it was natural for me to ask him finally about science fiction's connection with both scientific discovery (tachyons) and science policy (the Manhattan Project). [pg281] "For long range thinking I trust in the real visionaries---the ones I prefer to read, at least. The science fiction writers. I haf always liked Mr. Heinlein, Mr. Asimov, of course Mr. Clarke---they are much more important in the long run than any Secretary of Defense." So we talked on about how he had read magazines in the 1940s in Los Alamos, bought similar hardbacks as they began to appear in the 1950s, and eventually from the press of events kept up with only a few favorites---the hard sf types, mostly but not exclusively. He pointed out an interesting paragraph in an old paperback. > We were searching...for a way to use U 235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center...If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour, or more, then we would be in a position to make almost anybody say "uncle" to Uncle Sam. > > We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944. The war in Europe and the troubles in Asia dragged on. After Italy folded up... That was Robert A. Heinlein as "Anson MacDonald" in "[Solution Unsatisfactory](!W)", in the May 1941 _Astounding_. It even gets the principal events in the war in the right order. "I found that remarkable", Teller said, describing how Manhattan Project physicists would sometimes talk at lunch about sf stories they had read. Someone had thought that Heinlein's ideas were uncannily accurate. Not in its details, of course, because he described not a bomb, but rather using radioactive dust as an ultimate weapon. Spread over a country, it could be decisive. I recalled thinking in the 1950s that in a way Heinlein had been proved right. The fallout from nuclear bursts can kill many more than the blast. Luckily, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air busts, which scooped up little topsoil and so yielded very low fallout. For hydrogen bombs, fallout is usually much more deadly. In Heinlein's description of the strategic situation, Teller said, the physicists found a sobering warning. Ultimate weapons lead to a strategic standoff with no way back---a solution unsatisfactory. How to avoid this, and the whole general problem of nuclear weapons in the hands of brutal states, preoccupied the physicists laboring to make them. Nowhere in literature had anyone else confronted such a Faustian dilemma as directly, concretely. Coming three years later in the same magazine, Cleve Cartmill's [pg282] "Deadline" provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos. It really did describe isotope separation and the bomb itself in detail, and raised as its principal plot pivot the issue the physicists were then debating among themselves: should the Allies use it? To the physicists from many countries clustered in the high mountain strangeness of New Mexico, cut off from their familiar sources of humanist learning, it must have seemed particularly striking that Cartmill described an allied effort, a joint responsibility laid upon many nations. Discussion of Cartmill's "Deadline" was significant. The story's detail was remarkable, its sentiments even more so. Did this rather obscure story hint at what the American public really thought about such a superweapon, or would think if they only knew? Talk attracts attention, Teller recalled a security officer who took a decided interest, making notes, saying little. In retrospect, it was easy to see what a wartime intelligence monitor would make of the physicists' conversations. Who was this guy Cartmill, anyway? Where did he get these details? Who tipped him to the isotope separation problem? "and that is vhy Mr. Campbell received his visitors." So the great, resonant legend of early hard sf was, in fact, triggered by the quiet, distant "fan" community among scientists themselves. For me, closing the connection in this fundamental fable of the field completed my own quizzical thinking about the link between the science I practice, and the fiction I deploy in order to think about the larger implications of my work, and of others'. Events tinged with fable have an odd quality, looping back on themselves to bring us messages more tangled and subtle than we sometimes guess. I am sure that the writers of that era, and perhaps of this one as well, would be pleased to hear this footnote to history. Somebody really was listening out there. I suspect today is no different. Perhaps the sf writers are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of tomorrow. # Appendices ## Gusterson {.collapse} Many comments and bits of history relevant to _Radiance_ can found in Gusterson's anthropological works on the nuclear bomb designers, eg. ["A Pedagogy of Diminishing Returns: Scientific Involution across Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons Science"](/doc/radiance/2005-gusterson.pdf), Gusterson 2005: > The 1970s and the 1980s, when nuclear testing moved [underground](!W "Underground nuclear testing"), were a period of routinization: the institutional apparatus for nuclear weapons design and testing grew, its scientific achievements shrank, and the arteries of the weapons design bureaucracy hardened. Attempts to perfect a third-generation nuclear weapon---the x-ray laser---failed and were abandoned in an atmosphere of scandal and disgrace.^11^ The art of weapons design progressed, but by increments rather than great leaps: weapons designers learned to squeeze greater yields out of smaller quantities of plutonium so that nuclear weapons could be made lighter and smaller, weapons were made safer through the addition of [Permissive Action Links](!W) (PALS) and the substitution of [Insensitive High Explosive](!W) (IHE) for conventional explosives,^12^ and the supercomputer codes used to model the behavior of nuclear weapons were gradually refined. The names of the men (and now women) behind these achievements are largely unknown outside the nuclear weapons bureaucracy, and in some cases their achievements are only partially known within the weapons laboratories, thanks to the compartmentalizing effects of official secrecy in the weapons complex.^13^ Nuclear tests were forbidden after the end of the Cold War, and the practice and pedagogy of nuclear weapons science shifted again. Forced to largely abandon their nuclear test site in Nevada---a place where the desert sands encroach on the old bowling alley and cinema, now disused, as tourist buses disgorge camera-laden voyeurs to gawk at the nuclear craters---many of the old-timers elected to retire. > > - 11: On the x-ray laser debacle at Livermore, the definitive source is the reporting of William Broad, a science journalist for the _New York Times_. His first book on the subject has been criticized as too credulous: see William Broad, [_Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look Into the Lives of the Young Scientists Behind Our Space Age Weaponry_](/doc/radiance/1985-broad-starwarriors.pdf) (Simon and Schuster, 1985). His second book, more than adequately compensating the blind spots of the first, is the definitive history of the rise and fall of this program at Livermore and in Washington: William Broad, [_Teller's War: The Top Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception_](https://www.amazon.com/Tellers-War-Top-Secret-Behind-Deception/dp/0671867385) (Simon and Schuster, 1992). See also William Broad, ["Crown jewel of 'star wars' has lost its luster"](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/13/science/crown-jewel-of-star-wars-has-lost-its-luster.html&src=pm), _New York Times_, February 13, 1990 [and ["Scientist's View of Lasers Helped 'Star Wars'"](https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/01/us/scientist-s-view-of-lasers-helped-star-wars.html)]; Deborah Blum, ["Weird science: Livermore's x-ray laser flap"](https://books.google.com/books?id=sAYAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7), _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_ 44 (1988), no. 6: 7-13; Robert Scheer, ["The man who blew the whistle on Star Wars"](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-07-17-tm-9636-story.html), _Los Angeles Times Magazine_, July 17, 1988. > - 12: A partial account of these safety improvements is given in Sidney Drell, ["How safe is safe?"](https://books.google.com/books?id=cwwAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35), _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_ 47 (1991), no. 3: 35--40; Jeffrey Smith, "America's arsenal of nuclear time bombs", _Washington Post National Weekly Edition_, May 28-June 3, 1990. > - 13: One scientist at Livermore once told me that he was never allowed to know why one of his colleagues had won the [Lawrence Award](!W "Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award"), the most prestigious award within the [DOE](!W "United States Department of Energy") weapons complex. > > ...They also made bold attempts, finally cut off by the [ban on atmospheric nuclear testing in 1963](!W "Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty"), to develop a nuclear-bomb-powered spaceship (the [Orion Project](!W "Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)")) and to develop nuclear weapons optimized for the [construction of harbors and canals, and even for mining and oil drilling](!W "Operation Plowshare").^30^ Although Livermore managers argued as the testing moratorium went into effect in 1958 that, if only testing were to resume, further exciting advances were possible (atomic hand grenades, "clean bombs", and ultra-small nuclear bombs for [recoilless rifles](!W), for example^31^)---nuclear weapons design from the 1960s onwards increasingly became, in the memorable phrase of one university physicist I interviewed, like "polishing turds."^32^ > > - 30: For more detailed accounts of these advances in nuclear weapons design, see Rhodes, [_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1451677618); Rhodes, [_Dark Sun_](https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/0684824140); Thomas Cochran, William Arkin and Milton Hoenig, [_The Nuclear Weapons Databook: U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities_](https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Weapons-Databook-Forces-Capabilities/dp/0884101738/) (Ballinger, 1984); [Sam Cohen](!W "Samuel T. Cohen"), [_Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb_](https://archive.org/details/ConfessionsOfTheFatherOfTheNeutronBomb) (Xlibris 2000); Necah Stewart Furman, [_Sandia National Laboratories: The Postwar Decade_](https://www.amazon.com/Sandia-National-Laboratories-Postwar-Decade/dp/0826311733/) (University of New Mexico Press, 1990); Barton Hacker, [_Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing_](https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Controversy-Commission-Radiation-1947-1974/dp/0520083237/), 1947--1974 (University of California Press, 1994); Chuck Hansen, [_U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History_](https://www.amazon.com/Us-Nuclear-Weapons-Secret-History/dp/0517567407/) (Orion, 1988); Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, ["Tacit knowledge, weapons design, and the uninvention of nuclear weapons"](#mackenzie-spinardi-1995), _American Journal of Sociology_ 101 (1995): 44--99; McPhee, [_The Curve of Binding Energy_](https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodore/dp/0374515980/); [Howard Morland](!W), ["The H-bomb secret: To know how is to ask why"](http://www.progressive.org/images/pdf/1179.pdf), _The Progressive_ 43 (1979), November: 14--45; Robert Serber, [_The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb_](/doc/radiance/1992-serber-thelosalamosprimer.epub), ed. Richard Rhodes (University of California Press, 1992); Edward Teller, [_The Legacy of Hiroshima_](/doc/radiance/1962-teller-thelegacyofhiroshima.pdf) (Doubleday, 1962). See [Dyson](!W "George Dyson (science historian)"), [_Project Orion_](https://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805059857/), for a detailed history of the attempt to create a spaceship, powered by hundreds of nuclear explosions, for inter-planetary exploration and for nuclear warfighting. On the program to use nuclear explosions for civilian excavation, mining and drilling---including a plan to excavate the Panama Canal with nuclear weapons---see Dan O'Neill, [_The Firecracker Boys_](https://www.amazon.com/Firecracker-Boys-Dan-ONeill/dp/0312134169/) (St. Martin's Griffin, 1994) and the documentary film by Gary Marcuse, [_Nuclear Dynamite_](http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/nd.html) (Bullfrog Films, 2001). > - 31: Francis, [_Warhead Politics_](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/10589 "Warhead Politics: Livermore and the Competitive System of Nuclear Weapon Design"), 143--144. > - 32: Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi ("Tacit knowledge," 59) make a similar point, though with a slightly different periodization, saying that "by the 1980s designing nuclear weapons had lost much of its flavor of virtuoso innovation and had become a more routine task: one, indeed, that some in the laboratories feel to have become bureaucratized, unchallenging, even 'dull.'" > > ...Also, since two-thirds of the weapons entering the stockpile through the late 1950s were Los Alamos weapons, [Livermore could afford to do speculative and exploratory design work](!W "Nuclear weapon design#Livermore"), while Los Alamos was forced to devote its resources to validation of actual designs. In its preference for more ambitious and exploratory design work the Livermore Laboratory was not only responding to the structural exigencies of its relationship with Los Alamos; it was also expressing the persona of its other distinguished founding scientist, Edward Teller. Thus, while Los Alamos developed a conservative approach to weapons design, "the new laboratory worked on 'bolder' designs, less certain of success than those of Los Alamos."^36^ Francis argued that Los Alamos, "more experienced, and with established ties to the military . . . gained responsibility for the highest priority and most urgent military requirements. Livermore found opportunities in nuclear systems that were more speculative, that did not yet have formal JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] authorization, or were low priority."^37^ Thus, after a rocky start in which the "new ideas" laboratory's first three nuclear tests were "fizzles" (the weapons designers' term for low-yield duds), Livermore consistently pushed the envelope of nuclear weapons design in a way that Los Alamos did not. It was Livermore that shrunk the diameter of fission weapons enough to make the low-diameter [Davy Crockett artillery shell](!W "Davy Crockett (nuclear device)") for the army in the 1950s.^38^ It was Livermore that pushed yield-to-weight ratios and shrunk a hydrogen bomb enough to produce the [first hydrogen bomb warhead](!W "W47") for a strategic missile---the Polaris system---after Los Alamos scientists had scoffed at the Livermore proposal.^39^ It was Livermore that designed the first [MIRV](!W) warhead. It was Livermore that introduced the first two-dimensional computer code in the mid 1950s^[See pg132--133 of Francis 1995; this apparently means literally that (contrary to my initial assumption that 1-d simulations would be useless and so the phrase must refer to something like writing in [assembly language](!W) rather than, say, [Fortran](!W) which was also developed in the mid-1950s)---the early nuclear simulations were done of _n_ atoms or molecules arranged on a 1-dimensional line, and only as Moore’s law continued in the 1950s, were they able to do somewhat more realistic simulations of _n_ × _n_ particles in planes. McNamara comments in 2001 that "Towards the end of the Cold War, design physicists were beginning to develop three-dimensional models as well, although the laboratory only recently ran a full 3D simulation of a design problem. Completing the model required over six weeks of time on the laboratory's massive computers, which are currently among the fastest and most powerful machines in the world (Fleck 2000)."]. And it was Livermore that conducted the [first [fully-contained] underground nuclear test](!W "Operation Plumbbob") in 1957, in the face of opposition from Los Alamos.^40^ > > - 36: Francis, _Warhead Politics_, 67. > - 37: Ibid., 115. > - 38: Ibid., chapter 4. > - 39: Ibid., chapter 7. Francis quotes marginalia scribbled by a Los Alamos scientist on the Livermore proposal: "material in newspapers like this generally carries in fine print at the bottom of the page (Advt)." (ibid., 123.) > - 40: Ibid., 140. The test was code-named Rainier. Los Alamos was concerned that underground testing would be too expensive and difficult to instrument, and that proof of the possibility of underground testing would make it more likely that the U.S. government would agree to a treaty banning atmospheric testing. > > But there was a dark side to Livermore's organizational culture of risk and creativity. Livermore's institutionalized propensity to cut corners and push forward with poorly understood design approaches led to periodic failures, even scandals, of a kind unknown at Los Alamos. Livermore's first two tests, which failed to even vaporize the towers from which the bombs were suspended, made the new laboratory the butt of jokes in Los Alamos, whose scientists eagerly photographed the still-standing towers.^41^ Meanwhile, during the test moratorium, Livermore rushed Polaris warheads into the stockpile despite a poorly tested mechanical safing system that, it was subsequently discovered, turned many of the warheads into duds.^42^ This risk-taking culture, essential to the younger laboratory's organizational persona, was to endure: in the 1980s Livermore scientists' optimistic and mistaken assurances that the x-ray laser---a critical component of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative---was ready for the engineering phase would create a public relations disaster for the Laboratory when the weapon was finally cancelled amidst revelations that it never really worked and that the Associate Director for Weapons Design [Roy Woodruff] had secretly resigned in protest against his colleagues' representations of the weapon to the White House.^43^ And in the 1990s Livermore's Associate Director for Lasers would resign after public revelations of cost overruns and wildly over-optimistic performance projections by Livermore's management regarding its huge new laser project: the [National Ignition Facility](!W) (NIF).^44^ > > - 41: Herbert York, "The origins of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory", _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_ 31 (1975), July: 8--14. > - 42: Francis, _Warhead Politics_, 134; George Miller, Paul Brown and Carol Alonso, ["Report to Congress on Stockpile Reliability, Weapon Remanufacture, and the Role of Nuclear Testing"](/doc/radiance/1987-miller.pdf) (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, document no. UCRL-53822); Ray Kidder, ["Maintaining the U.S. Stockpile of Nuclear Weapons During a Low-Threshold or Comprehensive Test Ban"](/doc/radiance/1987-kidder.pdf) (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, document no. UCRL-53820). The last round of tests before the 1958 moratorium had established that one of the Livermore Polaris designs was not inherently [one-point safe](!W "Nuclear weapon design#Warhead design safety"): in other words, an accidental nuclear detonation of the weapon was possible if, for example, it was struck by a bullet. Rather than replace the Livermore primary in the weapon with a Los Alamos primary, Teller, Livermore's director at the time, elected to use a mechanical safing mechanism. > - 43: See Broad, [_Star Warriors_](/doc/radiance/1985-broad-starwarriors.pdf) and _Teller's War_; Scheer, "The man who blew the whistle on Star Wars." > - 44: James Glanz, ["Panel faults laser architect for overruns"](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/11/us/panel-faults-laser-architect-for-overruns.html), _New York Times_, January 11, 2000; idem, ["Laser project is delayed and over budget"](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/19/us/laser-project-is-delayed-and-over-budget.html), _New York Times_, August 19, 2000; ["Top U.S. laser expert admits lack of a PhD and resigns"](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/31/us/top-us-laser-expert-admits-lack-of-a-phd-and-resigns.html), _New York Times_, August 31, 1999; David Perlman, ["Test lab called \$1 billion over budget"](https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/test-lab-called-1-billion-over-budget-2921620.php), _San Francisco Chronicle_, May 9, 2001. The ostensible reason for the resignation of Mike Campbell, Associate Director for lasers, was the public revelation that he had claimed to have a doctorate from Princeton despite never having finished his PhD thesis, but most observers agreed that the timing of this revelation was tied to the increasingly evident financial and organizational problems of the National Ignition Facility, a project directed by Campbell. > > At the end of the Cold War, a Livermore weapons designer said to me, only half joking, "The Soviets are the competition, but Los Alamos is the enemy." The fierce rivalry between the two weapons laboratories encouraged each, in the complex competition for contracts from the Atomic Energy Commission and the three armed services, to develop partly opposed institutional personae: Los Alamos as a conservative organization of good pedigree making carefully understood incremental design changes as it developed higher and higher yield hydrogen bombs for air force bombers and improved tactical weapons for the army, Livermore as a bolder organization using riskier design ideas Los Alamos had shelved in order to miniaturize nuclear weapons for the navy and the army. The divergence of design cultures at the two laboratories was also a legacy of the approach to physics as craft of the charismatic scientists who established the research orientations of the two laboratories at the outset: Oppenheimer and Bethe, both theorists, at Los Alamos; Lawrence, an experimentalist, and Teller, a dreamer, at Livermore. > > ...One designer who joined the Livermore Laboratory in the early 1960s, only to quit in the 1970s out of, he says, boredom, remarked of a highly respected designer at Livermore: "He's spent his whole life designing the same bomb over and over again, shaving a few centimeters off here and there but never doing anything fundamentally new. It only seems like exciting physics because it's so secret."^52^ > > - 52: Interview with retired Livermore weapons designer, February 11, 1989. > > ...New designers were encouraged to maintain broad interests and even to publish in the open literature as they were learning their corner of the art of weapons design. This was partly to ensure that young physicists---accustomed to the university environments where they did their graduate work and unsure if weapons design would hold their interest over the long run---did not become too disaffected from their new specialization and instead focused on the extraordinary opportunities offered by employment at a laboratory with the fastest supercomputers and the largest community of physicists in the country. The same designer quoted above recalled: > >> Once you step inside the gates [of the laboratory] it's a very open and university-like atmosphere. It's the closest that I've come to that kind of atmosphere outside an university. The Laboratory has tremendous resources to do work that would not be possible academically. Even now, I still believe that it's possible for someone to come up with an idea and do some interesting work, even if it's not related to the weapons program. They may not get a lot of recognition for it, but there is the possibility.^55^ > > - 55: Interview with Livermore weapons designer, January 26, 1989. > > Similarly, a senior manager in Livermore's other design division, A Division, said: > >> We like people to keep publishing. When we bring people in, we tell them that: we'll give you a certain percentage of your time, and we want you to keep to that because we want you to interact with people outside the lab. I have continued to publish---not a lot, but I have a colleague who works with me, and over the years we've published quite a few papers. It's low key, but I have an international reputation from that work. It's not my number one priority in life, but. . . .^56^ > > - 56: Interview with Livermore manager, June 8, 1989. > > ...Some weapons designers have argued that, if only nuclear testing were to resume, then a renaissance of nuclear weapons science would ensue. The reality seems to me, however, to be more complicated. After the weapons scientists' failure in the 1980s to perfect third-generation nuclear weapons, weapons scientists largely stopped talking about major new breakthroughs in their art. In the 1990s those who argued for further nuclear testing did not argue that major advances in nuclear weapons science would be possible. (Indeed it was the turn to simulations forced by the end of nuclear testing that produced the boldest innovations in the practice, and the rhetoric, of nuclear weapons science.) Instead those who opposed the end of testing argued that continued testing was necessary to ensure the reliability of old weapons as they decayed or, if they did refer to new weapons, made modest claims: they suggested that it would be possible to develop a bunker-busting mini-nuke or a sort of [Maytag](!W) nuclear weapon---what designers call a "wooden bomb"---optimized to age well in the absence of testing in the future. In other words, even without the nuclear test ban, nuclear weapons science had by the end of the Cold War hit a sort of wall. It is not that weapons scientists had no ideas for improving their weapons---the reverse was true---but the refinements had become so incremental and the ratio of effort and expense to scientific advancement in the performance of nuclear testing had shifted so far that nuclear weapons science was becoming like, say, Gothic architecture at the end of the nineteenth century: an increasingly repetitious and involuted practice that was losing its energizing edge and its appeal to the best and the brightest. The Oppenheimers and Tellers had given way to smart career physicists who saw themselves largely as custodians of a settled body of knowledge ## Cohen {.collapse} Sam Cohen, [_Confessions_](https://archive.org/details/ConfessionsOfTheFatherOfTheNeutronBomb): > ...Around this time, Livermore had commenced work on a nuclear-powered laser that would emit an intense beam of X-rays. Traveling at the speed of light, in theory, accurately aimed this beam could destroy an ICBM in space at a great distance. It was real Buck Rogers, or Star Wars, stuff that seemed to have considerable potential, but was requiring of extremely advanced technology. I remember being briefed around this time by the project director, Roy Woodruff, a Livermore acquaintance of mine, who waxed quite enthusiastically about its prospects, which I personally thought were dim indeed because of its complexity and certain operational limitations, but kept my mouth shut over these reservations. (I don't believe in throwing cold water on any new concept because one never knows what kinds of applications may emerge.) Equally enthusiastic was Edward [Teller], who fought vigorously for his lab's nuclear concept and opposed non-nuclear concepts held by people such as Danny Graham. When Reagan became President, both approaches were hyped to him and his administration. However, when he came out with his Star Wars speech, the major emphasis, by far, was on the non-nuclear side, for obvious political reasons---it was non-nuclear. As Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said shortly after the President made his dramatic announcement, it was necessary "to get a basically thoroughly reliable defense against incoming missiles, the opportunity to destroy the missiles preferably by non-nuclear means..." The nuclear X-ray laser program was allowed to proceed and, needless to say, publicized to the skies by Edward and his colleagues as a surefire solution to the problem. There was more than one problem to this sure-fire solution. Not only was it nuclear, and most people were very uncomfortable with the idea of nuclear warheads orbiting around in space; but experiments on this concept weren't proving out to be nearly as encouraging as portrayed by Edward. It finally came to the point where Roy Woodruff refused to go along with this chicanery and blew the whistle on the program. Which was the end of the program and the end of Roy whose integrity cost him a humiliating demotion at the lab, where he had been in charge of all new warhead development. Roy became a hero in my book and I called to congratulate him for his courage, welcoming him to the pariah club. He finally left Livermore in discouragement, but was able to transfer over to Los Alamos. Which is more than I can say about myself; when I was forced out of my job there was no place for me to go except into retirement. As for Teller, even though his nuclear defense dreams had come to an end, by no means was he about to get out of the act and bow out of the SDI program. > > Seeing the handwriting on the wall for nuclear solutions to SDI, some of Livermore's most innovative scientists began working on a non-nuclear space-based concept. The idea, called Brilliant Pebbles, envisaged a number of satellites carrying scads of small hypervelocity guided missiles capable of intercepting giant multi-warhead [MIRV] ICBMs during the so-called "boost phase"---while the rocket motors were still operating, providing a tremendous source of heat to be picked up by the guidance system of the defensive missiles as a homing source. Calculations indicated this to be the most cost-effective system of all, for perhaps several billion dollars (the cost of a handful of Stealth bombers) this system could deter a Soviet first-strike attack on the U.S. In fact, by placing more satellites in orbit, with the attendant but hardly excessive increase in cost, Brilliant Pebbles could protect the whole world from long-range ballistic nuclear missile attack. (You already know my feelings over the veracity of such claims and my considerable skepticism over such proposals, especially in the absence of any meaningful testing, which is prohibited by the ABM treaty. However, for all sorts of good and bad reasons Congress has slashed the Brilliant Pebbles budget and like the X-ray laser, it seems headed for oblivion. Perhaps just as well, but I hate to see something canceled that in theory has so much to offer.) > > Also seeing the handwriting on the wall was Teller, who after a lifetime of promoting anything and everything nuclear now jumped ship and latched on to Brilliant Pebbles. He proceeded to promote it everywhere, including the Oval Office where Reagan listened attentively while Edward and his Livermore cohorts showed him the way out of the wilderness. It really shouldn't have, but this shift to a non-nuclear SDI by Edward really bothered me. In fact, I was outraged to see him join the ranks of those he had formerly fought with, for no good reason, as far as I can see, other than to be able to stay on the playing field. ## Patton {.collapse} Phil Patton, [_Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51_](https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-Travels-Inside-Secret-Roswell/dp/0375753850), endnotes (ch, footnote 3, pg 305--306): > Published in 1965, [_Mission with LeMay_](/doc/radiance/1965-lemay-missionwithlemay.pdf) is a central document in the history of Cold War culture. One of its most fascinating passages is [LeMay's](!W "Curtis LeMay") effusive comparison of [SAC's](!W "Strategic Air Command") organization to a [B-58 bomber](!W "Convair B-58 Hustler") "weapons pod". He did not latch on to the obvious Freudian conclusions with which the thing fairly screamed; instead he compares it to a [jack-in-the-box](!W) in describing an inspection: > >> The chief of the ground crew and one of his men are up on the dock, engaged in removing a metal plate from the fuselage of the aircraft. We stand and watch. Off comes the plate, and there is exposed a labyrinth of silver and wire and plastic . . . tiny colored blobs and shreds. That's a meager crumb, a mere sample of the electronic equipment which is stuffed and geared throughout the stiff flesh of the B-58 . . . Something like the business of that old-fashioned jack-in-the-box you had as a child . . . You look up at that plate, and the fuselage aperture, and vaguely you wonder: how are they going to get that snake back in there? >> >> They'll get it back. And every tuft and every peg and every threadlike wire, and every infinitesimal jewel of the complex array will have been tested and found to be functioning, before that slice goes back on the aircraft---with reptiles arranged in designated position, before the plate is locked. The B-58 is crammed with those thousands and thousands of working warming cooling bits of metal and wire and tubing. Every available cubic inch within the body is occupied by such little monsters and treasures. >> >> . . . And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage---half-size, but still of the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother's belly---the B-58 carries all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A single B-58 can do that. It lugs the flame and misery of attacks on London . . . rubble of Coventry and the rubble of Plymouth . . . Blow up or burn up fifty-three per cent of Hamburg's buildings, and sixty per cent of the port installations, and kill fifty thousand people into the bargain. Mutilate and lay waste the Polish cities and the Dutch cities, the Warsaws and the Rotterdams. Shatter and fry Essen and Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen, and every other town in the Ruhr. Shatter the city of Berlin. Do what the Japanese did to us at Pearl, and what we did to the Japanese at Osaka and Yokohama and Nagoya. And explode Japanese industry with a flash of magnesium, and make the canals boil around bloated bodies of the people. Do Tokyo over again. >> >> The force of these, in a single pod. >> >> One B-58 can load that comprehensive concentrated firepower, and convey it to any place on the globe, and let it sink down, and let it go off, and bruise the stars and planets and satellites listening in. >> >> Every [petard](!W), every [culverin](!W), every old [Long Tom](!W "Long Tom (cannon)") or [mortar](!W "Mortar (weapon)") of a naval ship in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, every turret full of smoking cannon at [Jutland](!W "Battle of Jutland") . . . [Big Bertha](!W "Paris Gun") bombarding Paris . . . musketry of the American Revolutionary battles or the Napoleonic ones. [Spotsylvania](!W "Battle of Spotsylvania Court House") and [Shiloh](!W "Battle of Shiloh") and [the battles for Atlanta](!W "Atlanta Campaign"). All the paper cartridges torn with the teeth, and all the crude metallic cartridges forced into new hot chambers. . . . Firepower. All the firepower ever heard or experienced upon this earth. All in one bomb, all in one B-58. > > He went on: > >> The B-58 was and is symbolic of SAC . . . If you removed that plate from the body of SAC, you could look in and see people and instruments. They would be as the intricate electronic physiology of an airplane today: each functioning, each trained, each knowing his special part and job---knowing what he must do to keep the body alive, the blood circulating. Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of [condensers](!W "Capacitor"). All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert. ## Review excerpts {.collapse} - ["The Great Work Goes On: Carter Scholz's _Radiance_"](https://quarterlyconversation.com/carter-scholz-radiance), Sacha Arnold (_The Quarterly Conversation_) > The dozen years between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror might be remembered as a time of peace and prosperity by most Americans, but for defense-related segments of business and government they were a time of crisis. Communism was collapsing, and stateless terrorist groups were not yet seen to be a menace. With no clear enemies to point weapons at, how could the billions and billions of tax dollars spent on weapons possibly be justified? > > ...Philip Quine, the closest thing _Radiance_ has to a hero, is a blank of a character, mild-manneredly fumbling through life. His one immoderate aspect is his devotion to his research at the Lab, where he works on weapons systems for defending America against nuclear attack. Quine has become a master of war by accident. A pure theorist when he first comes to the Lab, he is seduced by the resources it offers for experimental confirmation of his theories, and before long he becomes a full-time employee. By and by, he learns the law that really governs the Lab: "Any solution, even if it laid bare principles, was beside the point if it couldn't kill missiles." But he keeps working. What knocks him out of his moral slumber is a random encounter with anti-nuclear activist Lynn Hamlin. Smitten by her, he finally begins to consider the larger effects of his work. Stress on begins-Quine's awakening is a slow one and is quite possibly incomplete by the end of the book. But his romance with Hamlin is clearly a key element in this awakening. It's in her presence that his guilelessness shifts toward actual virtue. Quine's voice is the strongest one in the novel, and it carries the most spiritual weight...Quine's ambiguous place in the moral landscape of _Radiance_, and his half-conscious toiling and scheming to better that place, unite him with West's frustrated columnist. And although Christ's omnipresence in Miss Lonelyhearts (at least in name) contrasts with Quine's avowed secularism, I don't think it's wrong to say the latter's struggle is also a spiritual one. His sense of duty comes from science's mission to understand the world, not from the orders to cloud understanding he receives from his human superiors. Disgusted by the Lab's unwillingness to acknowledge the failure of one of its projects, he attempts to blow the whistle, only to be met with great resistance by Leo Highet, the director. Once a physicist himself, Highet has long since grown interested only in his own administrative power, and he tries to squelch any indication that the theoretical promise of the Lab's weapons can't be fulfilled. > > One thing _Radiance_ handles remarkably well is the shame of a failed scientific career. Though the Lab's researchers enjoy fat salaries and major political power, they constantly sound the theme of their work's inferiority to purer forms of discovery. Here's Quine on new research by an old colleague: > > > It was a new paper by Sorokin. At CERN now. Quine skimmed it as if reading news from a distant galaxy or a remote epoch. It solidified and extended the work they'd done together, the experiment that had separated them. It was clear that it was a field now and that Sorokin owned it. He stanched an upwelling of envy and self-pity. > > Speaking of those last two things, here's Highet on Quine: > > > All I really wanted was to do physics. The structure of the universe. The nature of matter. Members of the Academy, ladies and gentlemen. And what have I accomplished? Chemist of people, catalyst, holding the place together so others can do the real work. Like young Quine, that paper he coauthored with Sorokin years ago, that was the real thing. Still know it when I see it. Well, he'll never get back to it now. Bitter satisfaction there. Reduced to living on others' failures. > > Most movingly, here's Réti on the disappointments embedded in his own success: > > > We were all excellent, all first rate, but even so, some were a bit above the rest, yes? And the very best, these were the men who did not want to go on making bombs. So when this Lab started, I became director, because I had no competition. I was the best of those who remained. The best of not the very best, do you see? I had won by a forfeit. My friends were no longer my friends. Now I talked with generals and senators, to whom physics was a magic trick. To whom I was a magus. That was my compensation. Nobel prizes for Bohr, Wigner, Einstein, Lawrence, Fermi, Urey, Rabi, Bethe, Bloch. For me, the ear of generals and Presidents. Now you know something I never told even my good friend Leo Highet. Something I am maybe a little ashamed of. So that you will understand what this place is to me. > > Beyond its tone of regret, Réti's quote also nails how the professional and moral compromises of the bomb makers interpenetrate. Talking with generals, senators, and Presidents is far from innocent when what you're talking about is technology that can vaporize the planet...In this context, _Radiance_ is Scholz's fullest exploration of the effects caused by misalignment between a career and a vocation. The clash between the demands of the two is uniquely well-illuminated in its pages. - ["'Its awful and enticing radiance': The Beauty and Terror of Carter Scholz's _Radiance_"](https://gwern.net/doc/radiance/2002-07-duchamp-itsawfulandenticingradiance.html), L. Timmel Duchamp (_New York Review of Science Fiction_) > ...and so, the politicians implicitly promise, we will be "safe" if we can just manage to keep nuclear power and weapons out of the hands of "evil-doers" and "bad guys." But what if this schema depicting a handful of individuals wielding the power of the ultimate destruction barely brushes against the reality? What if the moral maturity and leadership of individuals in the current institutional and political context is largely irrelevant to the safe management of nuclear fission and its products? > > Carter Scholz's novel _Radiance_ may be more properly categorized as fiction about science than science fiction, but it reads like science fiction sited at the edge of the current moment. The narrative of this novel of ideas demands of its readers some of the same skills that science fiction requires, and, like the best science fiction, its dense texture of detail, figuring the day-to-day life of a weapons scientist, wraps the reader in the novel's world from its first pages: > > > None of this cauldron of approximation, this vast rationalization, this ingenious mimickry, was Quine's responsibility. To him it was a black box. His laser simulation ran on top of it all, passing it data, receiving its judgments. Again he ignited his bomb and waited for the nuclear pinball of particles and energies to reach his rods. Color bars and line graphs crept across the screen, the visible satisfactions of programming. The solipsistic machine worlds. It was near to pornography, without nuance. Any halfbright notion could be simulated, the simulation tweaked to an approximation of success, and the success conjured as proof for more funding. Tweak and squeak, as Highet put it. Realization was a "materials" problem. Bend your backs, men, to prove this golden turd of an idea.(7) > > The novel's protagonist is not a character, but a place and institution called simply "the Lab," likely a thinly-veiled Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. As a place, the Lab is sinister, mysterious, and threatening--- and under continual siege from nuclear-safety activists. Already designated a Superfund cleanup site, the Lab is also the source of an unacknowledged menacing toxic plume spreading miles underground, poisoning everything it touches. The hard drives of its computers hold evidence of decades of fraudulent test results (upon which each new budget depends) as well as pornographic images that encode the classified data of every US nuclear test ever conducted. While early in the novel we glimpse younger men who work in Section X ("the Playpen") joyfully racing through the halls hurling balloons at one another, the Lab, we can be sure, will eventually snare every one of them in its coils, devouring their dreams of doing great science, destroying their integrity--- or else spitting them out, rejects of the machine, indelibly marked as failures who can't cut it....According to Réti, the "age of the individual heroic scientist is over." And because "government is not interested in physis, in scientia"(213), any real science that gets done at the Lab is superfluous to the Lab's functioning...Highet expresses bitterness when a senator calls the Lab "a scientific brothel"(36), but he tacitly accepts that corruption as well as fraud are necessary prerequisites for keeping the Lab going and spends the lion's share of his time facilitating businessmen's schemes. He manages these seeming contradictions by imagining that he creates reality. He insists that failed tests, for instance, are of no importance and must not be allowed to get in the way of theory. As his mentor, Aron Réti, tells Philip Quine, > > > All ends, even the best, are reached by impure means. Reason is supposed to be the hallmark of science, but I tell you that no one is swayed by reason. A theory, an idea, does not make its own way. It was Einstein who said merit alone is very little good; it must be backed by tact and knowledge of the world. I know of many cases where maybe the data does not quite agree with your theory, no, you think, the carpers will question, your case is far clearer if you discard this set of data, if you report only these results. And who are these frauds? Ptolemy. Galileo. Newton. Bernoulli. Mendel. Millikan. What matters in the long run is not some wishful dream of scruples, but whether you have driven your knowledge home!(21) > > ... Although Highet and Quine offer a sharp contrast in their personalities, management styles, and agenda, the habitus of their day-to-day experiences nearly levels their differences. The narrative explicitly reiterates the litany of road signs and advertisements each man encounters driving to and from the Lab, countless times throughout the book. Both directors are plagued by environmental problems with the rooms in which their meetings are scheduled and must constantly cope with problems afflicting the Lab's communications system. They both likewise feel battered by the reactionary harangues of a thinly-veiled Rush Limbaugh, which are always blaring from the radio in the office of Dolores, the director's secretary. And each of them suffers from diarrhea and a swollen face (Highet's due to allergies, Quine's to poison oak), wages wet and wild hygienic struggles in men's rooms (resulting in their having to apologize for their damp handshakes afterwards), and find ants crawling over the remains of their PapaGeno's pizzas at home. > > Many of the small differences in their personal lives underscore their basic similarities. While Highet is impatient at his mother's taking months to die from cancer, he salves his conscience for not helping his siblings to care for her by providing cash for the "extras" her insurance does not cover. Quine, on the other hand experiences not the smallest degree of grief (or even guilt) when he learns that his estranged father is dead. But neither man feels any emotional connection to their biological families. Highet's heart beats "wildly" when he talks to Lynn Hamlin, a nuclear-safety activist, but unable even to contemplate an emotional connection with a sexual partner, he satisfies himself instead with a prostitute. Quine does have sexual relationships (including one with Hamlin), but so thoroughly compartmentalizes every aspect of his life that he is unable to do more than simply wish for an emotional connection. In short, Highet may be driven by the memory of adolescent inferiority, and Quine by a constant sense of having made the wrong choices and missed his best opportunities (for love, for being a real scientist), but both are hollow men incapable of intimate relationships and unwilling to assume moral responsibility for their decisions. > > ... The narrative never once offers us a voice of clear, moral dissent to the menace the Lab poses since such a voice never registers with the POV characters. Instead, the narrative shows how the Lab works, hints at the threat it poses to the community in which it is sited, and then leaves it to the reader to make the connections-- inviting the reader to speak, as it were, in the antagonist's place. The reader can't help but see what the POV characters consistently miss. The "facts" of the narrative may be filtered through extremely tight POVs, but Scholz's continual deployment of irony effectively expands the reader's angle of vision beyond that of the Lab's directors. > > ...In the course of the novel, both Highet and Quine successively discover, as directors, that they have lost control of the Lab: Highet abruptly, and Quine more gradually. The most intense and poignant moment of the novel marks the point when Quine first begins to realize that not only has he lost the life of the scientist that he had thought would be his, but that the Lab and all that it represents in the book are beyond any institution's or person's control. Quine and Hamlin have just had sex. Quine is crying. "Bone by bone he returned to that loathed self, which could not recollect when it began, which had no future but itself, abyss covered with trance"(302). When Hamlin asks him what is wrong, he tries to explain his pain. > > > ...every day it's like, like waking up from a, a long sleep, to a world where things have, have gone on without me and I don't know how I got here, what day it is, how much time has passed, everything I'll never, never recover, all that loss, every day I wake up that way and every day the hope for, for something else gets smaller, and I have nothing, just nothing... (302) > > Not long after this, very near the end of the book, a stream of names exceeding four pages enumerates years and years of nuclear tests. > > Radiance's marvelously detailed and continuously reiterated imagery offers us a vision of vast and ever-expanding machinery far exceeding any individual's hope of control. Can we be assured that management and oversight of the nuclear forces unleashed in the twentieth century are in consciously responsible, mature hands? _Radiance_ shows that the answer is no and that to the extent that current institutions of science and technology exist merely to generate profit and serve the private and particular interests of the US's thoroughly corrupt political system the answer can only be no. - ["_Radiance_ by Carter Scholz: In this Pynchonesque tale of technocracy in the Clinton years, two rival physicists working in a weapons lab play footsie with the apocalypse"](https://www.salon.com/2002/02/21/scholz/), Andrew O'Hehir (_Salon_) > _Radiance_ is an ingenious and at times a brilliant novel, brilliant in almost the same forbidding manner as the laser death-ray space weapon its principal characters hope to build (or at least to get funded). Friendliness, however, is not high on its list of virtues. It offers two protagonists, and you'd pay not to be seated next to either one at dinner. They are Leo Highet and Philip Quine, successive directors of a nuclear-weapons lab in suburban California that bears a striking resemblance to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. > > ... Highet, who takes up less space in Scholz's text but more in the reader's imagination, is a grandiose dreamer who compares himself to Leonardo da Vinci and argues that freeing the atom's power is part of the great work of consciousness: "We open a crack through which light blazes, waking the life in every mote." But both are desperate, heartsick, middle-aged men beset by allergies, poison oak, chaos, greed, corruption, traffic jams, blood, mucus and encroaching mortality. And that's not even counting the deep geostrategic game in which both are enmeshed, a game that might, if we're lucky, involve nothing worse than a trillion dollar fleecing of the American taxpayer. > > ... Scholz may remind readers of Thomas Pynchon at some moments and J.G. Ballard at others. _Radiance_ is not science fiction but an argument that science has become fiction; not an account of an imaginary apocalypse but a claim that apocalypse was already to be seen in the sprawl and the pollution and the death wish of California technocracy in the early Clinton years. If the plot of _Radiance_ is a tangled knot of deception, self-deception and conspiracy leading only to exhaustion and despair, it's Scholz's extraordinary language---his ear for befuddled dialogue and scientific obfuscation, his resonant, haunted landscapes---that crack the book open and allow its light to blaze forth. - ["Plot Shrinks Under The Microscope"](https://www.sun-sentinel.com/fl-xpm-2002-03-17-0203150638-story.html), James T. Cain (_The Hartford Courant_) > ...Scholz's hero, Phillip Quine, is, in the words of his boss, a screw-up, a conflicted physicist working for a government weapons lab in the San Francisco area. He's emotionally detached from the women he is involved with---so much so, you wonder how he keeps acquiring them. The book is set in the early 1990s, but it takes a while to figure that out. It's fun in a way finally to puzzle out the setting (you don't really know it's in the Bay Area unless you are knowledgeable about the area's highway exit sign gobbledygook). It's part of Scholz's writing style, which is at first intriguing but eventually tiring. Conversations are clipped, and although perhaps realistic, the frequent use of dangling thoughts gets old. The punctuation is sparse---quotations are hard to discern as to where they stop, where the talker has shuffled some papers and who is speaking in a room full of people. This style would work fine in shorter fiction, but it's too much for a novel...Quine's boss, Leo Starks, doesn't care whether it works or not. A man dedicated to science (and determined to keep the religious at bay), he also knows who butters his bread, and he runs the lab with an eye to public relations and, more important, congressional relations. Still, he has more conscience than some of the people outside government with whom he deals. > >> "Dammit, Leo, it's our moral duty to skin these piggies. Capital's like blood, it's gotta flow. Like Leonardo, we gotta divert rivers, rivers of gold." - [_New York Times_](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/books/books-in-brief-fiction-529931.html) (Taylor Antrim) > ...Wickedly satiric and eggheaded in its level of scientific detail, _Radiance_ is a serious, engrossing novel. Grief percolates everywhere, especially in Quine's failing romance with a nuclear protester and his personal battle with ethics, what one researcher calls a "wishful dream of scruples". Scholz, whose most recent book was a collaboration with Jonathan Lethem titled _Kafka Americana_, uses language that can be peculiar and Latinate, and his dialogue occasionally swerves toward the didactic. Nevertheless, his patient descriptions of the natural world are often beautiful, and he convincingly invests scientific discovery with the mystery of religion. As the novel progresses, we're plunged into a conspiracy to perpetuate the science of destructiveness. There are a number of sinister puppet masters ready to take up the strings as Quine unravels. Both vibrant and sad, _Radiance_ is also terrifying in its implications. - [_Review of Contemporary Fiction_](https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Carter+Scholz.+Radiance.-a093974757) (James Crossley) > ...Politics aside, artistic accomplishment is the real draw here. Scholz already shows off a master's command of detail, and he uses it effectively to enliven this cautionary tale of funds-devouring weapons projects with unstoppable, inhuman momentum. Corporate chicanery, political expediency, and the buzzing, blooming profusion of time-saving technology combine more convincingly than in any other recent fiction, resulting in a compelling picture of "chaos on the edge of complexity." Worth particular notice is Scholz's dialogue, unmatched since Gaddis. Interrupted continually by TVs, radios, computers, and each other, _Radiance_'s characters jargonize and obfuscate with absolute authenticity. The sheer realism proves Juvenal's maxim about the impossibility of not writing satire: "I know that some of you think the, the language we use is unimportant, but I want to, to fine tune this mission statement based on DOE's expectations. First, and I've seen most of your drafts, you all know, you should know that we no longer use the word nuclear in our public information. We say national security, special programs, threat reduction, or NBC." "What's that, guided peacocks?"; "not just the power you know, it's the terawatts plus the teraflops"; "Could we, could we possibly use a different word?" "A different word, what do you mean?" "Teraflops sounds like failure. We're selling this to Congress." "But, but, that's the word for it. Trillions of floating point operations per second." "I'm worried about how it sounds. How about teraops?" "Sounds like a dinosaur." "No, it sounds optimistic."... - [_Kirkus_ review](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/carter-scholz/radiance-3/) > A thoughtful, knowledgeable exposé of half a century of America's nuclear weapons industry that also makes a surprisingly absorbing first novel about a group of scientists competing for ascendancy at a California Bay Area lab....Scholz, a composer of experimental computer music who lives in Berkeley, clearly knows his stuff, and from the inside. His narrative, far from being dry or academic, is densely layered, moving in and out of dizzying double-speak and acronyms, with a roiling display of personalities (the men are the scientists, the women the love interests), such as the emeritus founder of the Lab, Aron Réti, espousing the "cult of the beautiful theory," and numerous wily senators. A journey into "complexity on the edge of chaos," shaded by deep-felt despair. - [_Publishers Weekly_](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-26893-0) > Set in an intrepid nuclear weapons research and testing station in the middle of the desert, complete with protest banners and swinging police truncheons, this wannabe political satire treads all too familiar ground, despite the talented Scholz's inventive, high-energy prose...What is fascinating here is Scholz's stylistic knack for creating a clipped system-speak, derived from the blips and burps of conversation. Relations between characters are cold and unfulfilling, and character development is registered only by the protagonists' sudden shifts in situation: without much ado, they are hired and fired or start affairs and end them. Scholz's writing crackles with energy, intelligence and dark humor, but readers will recognize tones and topics heavily based on Pynchon, DeLillo et al and wish Scholz had struck out a little farther on his own. - ["Atmospheric irrelevancies or richly woven world-building? (4/5)"](https://sfpotpourri.blogspot.com/2012/11/2002-radiance-scholz-carter.html) (blog) > ...you'll notice many lists spaced with commas. This is one synoptic theme which is carried over into Scholz's writing, who tends to omit very little when the commas start to roll (like the four full pages deluge of atomic test names [352--356])... or he even just ignores the comma and throws lists together end-on-end. It takes some getting used to, but this is indicative of more Kafka-esque prose which Scholz injects into his novel. > > Scholz also follows in Kafka's existentialist footsteps (and Barry M. Malzberg, who he dedicated his short collection to). When the synopsis mentions "policy meetings, classified documents, petty betrayals, interrupted conversations, missed meanings, unanswered voicemail, stolen data, and pornographic files," all of these are written about in length throughout the novel. This first-person narrative is heavy on detail like this and even more so with the stuttered, tens of pages long dialogue. The detail involved borders on stream of consciousness: billboard signs read on the side of the highway, radio segments heard in the car stereo, stacked book titles read on the desk, etc. I think this immersion of detail gives an authentic picture to the life of Philip Quine, who lives in a dichotic world of politics and love, honesty and longevity., but he remains it the quagmire of self-loathing: "...he saw in his life only patterns of failure and emptiness" (9). Reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Radiance has a stream of consciousness narration along with the inclusion of missile technology a recurring theme. Radiance is listed as being "nonfantastic" but I think the heavy amount of science jargon almost qualifies it as science fiction, but then again the heavy science is yet another one of the stream of consciousness elements imposed on by the narrator. > > ...While the long 388-page ride is enjoyable, the trip isn't without its tedium. The breaks between chapters are sparse, with one section stretching 107 pages (pages 73--179) without a single break except for internal narrative observations between dialogue and observation. The tedium isn't monotonous, but breaks in the narration are good things...Then there are wondrous breaks in the canopy where Scholz shows the reader he can blend his verbose writing style with his keen observational eye: > > > The morning sky, pallid with haze, conveyed yet enough sun to cast through the high embrasure of his office window a faint rhombus which crept toward the doorway relentless as a horologe (23). > > ... To say that this book is challenging would undermine its intentions. The novel's design is obviously intended to be as loquacious and meticulous as possible with dialogue formatting intending to give (1) snippets of conversations at a party studded with incomplete sentences, (2) stuttering speech and cut off sentences, (3) and discourses which follow a hidden logic. It's also a challenge to absorb the inane details of road signs and book titles (including Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [1989]), but it's also refreshing to see someone attempt such a daring immersion into a character's world. The icing on the cake of what Radiance is all about is the lack of finality---just as the details are frivolous, so is the direction of the plot. Instead, immerse yourself in the satire of a bureaucratic middleman torn between questing for authentic applied science and securing the monies to fund such science. - [Rick Kleffel](http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2003/scholz-radiance.htm) > In the troubled days at the close of the last century the stuff of what had once been science fiction became the concern of people working in a high-pressure workplace. In 'Radiance', Carter Scholz gives us a harried, pressurized point of view into the mind of a man who is promoted to manage an unmanageable project. A tiny cog in a government bureaucracy, Philip Quine is the physicist who cries 'Wolf!', the man who stands up for the truth is a sea of shifting reality. He's sucked by forces beyond his control into a whirlwind of compromise, revenge, petty satisfactions and haunting failures. From the dawn of the dot-com age comes this tale told long after the crash. Looking into our past, Carter Scholz allows the reader to intuit the future. 'Radiance' is a daring, challenging work that slips by the reader in a chaotic scream of symbols, satire and self-loathing. In case you haven't gazed too long into the abyss, Scholz has a road map into the darkness. He's got the chaos at the edge of complexity and he can spray you with a high-power hose of words, images and concepts. > > ...Scholz is a stylist, not a straightforward plot-driven writer. The story is told in impressionistic washes of imagery and prose. The style is immersive and enfolding, as much poetry and rhythm as it is novelistic. Like Chuck Palahniuk, Scholz writes in rhythmic repetitions that layer the reader in Quine's and Highet's reality. The first portion of the novel is told from Quine's point of view. Philip is something of a self-served victim, whose reliability erodes as the narrative proceeds. When Scholz switches to Highet's point of view, it's a bracing change of pace. Highet is schemer, a pushy manipulative man who still feels the power of principles and scruples as muscular tissue moving beneath the layers of his own oily self-interest. It's a fascinating and daring tactic that really works to break up the novel and skewer the reader's take on Philip Quine. > > For all the intricate emphasis on character building and prose poetry, _Radiance_ manages to pack in a wide range of scientific and social speculation in a cleverly re-worked retroactive fashion. The reader is put front and center in the company of real scientists speculating on what was believed possible only ten years ago. It was science fiction then, and it still is now, but the years of development in between the two allow the reader an unique perspective on the science and the speculation. For the serious reader of science fiction, _Radiance_ is a hall of mirrors that gets to the heart of how science actually progresses as it imagines its own future, which is in fact our past. > > _Radiance_ doesn't provide the neat and tidy ending that one might expect a novel about weapons development would have. There's no huge explosion to punctuate the narrative, there's no final speechifying. This isn't to say there aren't (test) explosions or (satirical) speeches. _Radiance_ is shot through with hilarious worst-case-at-work scenarios, a sort of _Dilbert_ for the defense industry. The lessons of the high-tech boom und krash, the sturm und drang of the ever expanding, then contracting economic universe provide for a buffet steam-table full of observations that strike home like an ice pick to the heart to anyone who has ever written an employee review. The wild world of the middle manager rushes by like signs on the freeway and comes crashing into life in _Radiance_. - [Chard Orzel](https://www.steelypips.org/library/0802.html#082302) (blog) > ...The first section of the book is very good, covering a sort of mid-life crisis of conscience for Phillip Quine, who sort of blundered into the strange and tangled world of the Lab, and is beginning to have doubts about his career path. Not only because he questions the morality of weapons work, but because the crazed funding-based culture of the Lab, encouraged by its ambitious director, Leo Highet, is pushing their work from sound science, into shaky science, and eventually outright fraud. It's a good sketch of the culture of Big Science, particularly on the government side. I've never worked in Big Science per se, but even on the small scale on which my old group at NIST worked, budget pressures were fairly significant. On the billion-dollar scale where nuclear weapons work is conducted, it's easy to see how the need for funding could warp the whole scientific process, and Scholz's picture of it rings true. Unfortunately, Scholz has some stylistic tics which mar even this section (the use of dashes to indicate dialogue, rather than quote marks, is the most annoying). And the other two sections become thoroughly unpleasant. > > The middle third (roughly) of the book is from Highet's point of view, and aims to show how he's as much a product of his environment as a monster of his own making. It's not entirely successful in this-- he comes off better than some of his loathsome backers (some of whom are engaged in funneling nuclear technology to China and North Korea), but is still a complete cad. It's vaguely interesting to see things from his point of view, but this section doesn't really improve my opinion of him. > > At least Highet's section has some funny bits. The final section is pretty much unremittingly depressing. It goes back to Quine's POV, and shows him becoming completely compromised by the Lab and its culture. He doesn't become quite as bad as Highet, but this bit ends up destroying most of the respect the character earned in the first third. Which leaves the reader with nobody remotely admirable to root for-- Scholz is fairly clearly on the side of the anti-nuclear activist Quine starts dating, but she's awful, too. What started off as a nice satire of Big Science and weapons research devolves into an unpleasant story of corruption involving a large cast of unpleasant characters. That sort of thing is vaguely interesting, intellectually, and often impresses literary critics, but it generally leaves me cold.