Praise for John Cramer and

EINSTEIN'S BRIDGE

"A fast-paced, insider's view of how high energy physics actually works—and why its brightest people may be its worst enemies. I couldn't put it down."

Gregory Benford, author of Cosm

"A great read . . . Fans of hard science fiction will love John Cramer's new book, which combines the grandiose vision of Arthur C. Clarke with the good old-fashioned nasty aliens of a Jack Williamson or Larry Niven . . .

EINSTEIN'S BRIDGE is clever throughout. . .the type of wonderful wish fulfillment fantasy that SF has excelled at since its creation . . .The presumably impeccable cutting edge science is fascinating."

Starlog

"Cramer kindles real scientific excitement."

Los Angeles Times

"A major new science fiction talent. John Cramer knows science and people. He possesses to a phenomenal degree the wit, ingenuity, and soaring imagination all of us hope for."

Gene Wolfe, author of Exodus from the Long Sun

"An intriguing look into the world of high-tech physics—and high energy imagination. John Cramer may be the next Robert Forward, mixing storytelling with far-seeing insight on the ways of the cosmos."

David Brin, author of The Uplift War

Other Avon Books by John Cramer

TWISTOR

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Einstein's bridge

JOHN  CRAMER

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

AVON BOOKS

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Copyright © 1997 by John Cramer

Published by arrangement with the author

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-30722

ISBN: 0-380-78831-4

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Avon Books.

First Avon Eos Mass Market Printing: May 1998

First Avon Books Hardcover and Trade Paperback Printing: June 1997

AVON EOS TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

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If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

To Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen,

who discovered the Bridge

within the mathematics of general relativity,

and to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,

who organized the first Snark hunt

Acknowledgments

THIS NOVEL WAS A LONG TIME IN THE MAKING. IT WAS originally intended to be a hard science fiction novel, set in Waxahachie, Texas, and about people doing high-energy physics, that would take advantage of the publicity and interest surrounding the construction of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider. It was about 80 percent complete when the U.S. Congress cancelled the project in 1993. I was unable to even look at the unfinished manuscript for about a year after that event. Ultimately, it was rewritten from scratch. Needless to say, the present form of this novel was shaped as much by the cancellation as by the original project.

I am deeply indebted to many people for their help and advice during the approximately five-year period that this work was in progress. I particularly want to thank my wife Pauline for all her help and encouragement.

I'd like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically) for valuable scientific and technical discussions contributing to this novel: Gordon Baker, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Clements, Robert Forward, Anthony Garrett, Geoff Landis, Henry Lubatti, Vonda Mclntyre, Mike Morris, Grazyna Odyniec, Ken Young, and Matt Visser.

I'd like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically) for taking the time to talk with Pauline and me during our visit to Waxahachie: Wendell Bigham, Wendell Chen, Helen Edwards, Les Faciane, Gil Gilchrise, Ronnie and Sylvia Hastings, Richard Holleyfield, Buck Jordan, Jim Owens, Stephen and Claire Ann Pierce, Ken Reed, Wil Reuter, and Barnie Taylor.

I would like to thank the following people (listed alphabeti­cally) for reading various versions of the manuscript and making valuable suggestions: Amanda Baker, Jennifer Brehl, Ethan Bradford, David Clements, Karen Cramer, Kathryn Cramer, Pauline Cramer, John Douglas, Geoff Harries, Mark Howe, Mark Hurst, Henry Lubatti, Bede Pittenger, Susan Protter, Karen Savage, Janet Seyboth, and Richard Seymour.

PART   I

May 23, 2004

January 29, 1987

Throw deep!

—President Ronald Reagan, when asked his thoughts on initiating the superconducting super collider project

You're going to make a lot of physicists ecstatic, Mr. President.

—Director William Miller, Office of Management and Budget

That's probably fair,   because  I made  two physics teachers in high school very miserable.

—President Ronald Reagan

May 11, 1987

It would be wrong to say I'm against the SSC. It's great scientifically. In fact, it's mind-blowing. The problem is that over the past five years there has been a slow starvation of what I call "small science." I say first get small science in good shape and then by all means proceed with the SSC.

—President-elect James Krumhansl, American Physical Society

1

THE SKY-FILLING   DISK   OF THE  DIM  YELLOW-ORANGE Sun was just rising on the east coast of the northern continent when the new universe was discovered. The Hive Mind's latest breed of extradimensional Lookers signaled the find, triggering rapid transmissions that rose to a screaming pitch on all frequency bands as communications from separated components stitched across the planet. The Hive Mind gave orders. Resources must be refined, machines must be constructed, energy banks must be recharged, a new strategy of conquest must be put into place. Workers all over the planet scurried to fulfill their tasks, refining materials, producing parts, assembling machines, simulating alternate courses of action, making ready for the next great attempt at Hive colonization.

The Hive Mind was immortal, and it was very old. A million years ago it had slowly come to awareness of its own existence as an ordered structure overlaying the disorder of its Hive. It had made the leap of self-insight, viewing the instinctual behavior and the stilted, almost random, actions of its components: Workers, Soldiers, Flyers, Queens, and Drones. The Hive Mind smoothed their neural programming, turning their narrow rote behaviors toward a more holistic purpose.

The other Hives were the principal threat to the Hive Mind. Most were much older, larger, and better established. The Old Hive dominated the ecology of the entire southern continent. The Sea Hive had developed Swimmers that extended its hegemony into the ocean, somehow communicating through water with sound instead of normal electromagnetic waves. The North Hive had developed Ice Workers that could work even below the freezing point of water and could make Nests and tunnels under the polar ice cap. But none of these proved to be a match for the Hive Mind's new intelligence-directed assaults.

In a few brief millennia the Hive dominated the planet. It had killed off all of the other Hives, along with most of the planet's other life-forms. By exercising choice and vision in its multiplicity of decisions, the Hive Mind found by chance the process of selective breeding. Soon the few surviving non-Hive species of the planet had been modified into domesticated resource gatherers and food processors. Applying selective breeding to its own Queens and Drones, it soon developed fast long-range communication between its components.

The resulting increase in the speed and number of the Hive Mind's constituent parts greatly increased its awareness and volume of sensory inputs. This endowed it with a new attribute: curiosity. Systematically it began to explore its world. It encountered fire and found uses for it. It began to savor the subtle differences in the native materials of the planet and investigated how they behaved when heated with fire. It discovered refining and smelting, and it learned to use metals and ceramics as structural materials and tools.

Then it discovered the stars. By selective breeding it developed special units, Lookers, with eyes that had greatly increased optical resolution and broadened frequency sensitivity. The Hive Mind discovered that by combining simultaneous inputs of many Lookers, it could gain more information about the mysterious bright objects in the sky.

It began to notice certain regularities in the motions of some of the sky objects. From these regularities the Hive Mind's first theories and mathematics emerged, as it deduced the existence of a solar system with planets and a force of gravity that held them in regular orbits.

Its emerging science of astronomy served as a model for other discoveries that followed. Slowly, as the millennia passed, the secrets of chemistry and biology and physics were revealed, as the Hive channeled Workers to perform measurements and experiments that would verify or falsify the theories that the Hive Mind had devised. It developed Workers so small that they were only complex molecules and used these to experiment and explore. It began to understand the universe in which it lived.

The chain of discoveries ultimately led the Hive Mind to begin a new program, high-energy physics. Its tireless Workers constructed a large electromechanical structure that stretched in a long straight line spanning a considerable stretch of flat plains on the southern continent. The machine accelerated electrons from the north and from the south and brought them into head-on collisions at the center of the machine, while millions of specially designed Lookers observed and communicated the results of the collisions before succumbing to radiation exposure and dying, to be replaced by fresh units.

As these investigations were progressing, a remarkable thing happened. A particularly violent collision event opened a communication channel to another universe. The Hive Mind began to exchange signals with another species through the channel. It was a strange and stressful experience, communicating with an Otherness, a non-Self, a non-Hive. It had endured this stress for a time, gaining valuable information and concepts. Then, when the Otherness had seemed to lose some interest in communication, it had used its technology to kill the Otherness.

It found a way to manipulate atoms through the communication channel, producing and controlling molecule-size Worker mac...