"Hogan, James P - The Genesis Machine p174-259" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Chapter 14

The screen and its associated electronics had been salvaged from a basement room of the Institute that had become the final resting place for a bewildering assortment of dust-covered hardware left over from one-time projects whose purpose was long forgotten. The minicomputer that provided local control for the screen and in addition linked it into the Institute’s main computing complex had originally formed part of a body scanner at Marlboro General Hospital; it had been scheduled for the scrap heap when the hospital made a decision to replace the scanner with a more up-to-date system, but had found its way to Sudbury on the back seat of Aub’s car. The control console had been built mainly from panels of roughly cut aluminum sheeting, and included in its list of unlikely component parts: pieces of domestic Infonet terminals, microprocessors from household environmental-control units, Army-reject bubble memory modules, a frequency synthesizer from a sale of surplus stocks by a marine radar manufacturer in Boston, and a selection of items from various do-ityourself hobby kits. The whole assemblage was housed in a small room adjoining the GRASER and connected by a multitude of cables to the clutter of cabinets and racks that formed the main body of the detector situ-
ated out on the large floor, in a space cleared immediately beside the reactor sphere itself.
Professor Heinrich Zimmermann stood back a few paces from the screen, a faint smile of amusement playing on his lips as he contemplated the image being displayed, and accepted good-naturedly the challenge that it implied. Most of the screen’s area was taken up by a plain circular disk of dull orange, showing no internal detail or pattern but lightening slightly to become just a shade more yellow toward the center. The background to the disk was at first sight completely dark, but closer inspection revealed the merest hint of a tenuous blood-red mist to relieve the blackness. At length Zimmermann shook his head and looked back at Aub, who was sitting on a metal-frame stool in front of the console and watching him with mischievous, twinkling eyes that failed to conceal his suppressed mirth.
“I thought that you had shown me everything. Now it appears that you have saved some sort of mystery until the very end. I am afraid I shall have to acknowledge defeat. What is it?”
Aub’s face split into a wide grin. From behind the professor, Clifford and Morelli stepped forward to complete the semicircle around the display.
“Well, since you’re an astronomer, we thought we’d better lay on something that would have the right kind of appeal,” Clifford replied. “As we said earlier, Aub’s been spending quite a lot of time modifying the detector to give an improved response to cosmic hi-radiation. Okay?” Zimmermann nodded. Clifford continued, “The most intense sources of naturally occurring hi-waves are the concentrated annihilations produced in large masses. Now, what’s the biggest mass you can think of very near where we’re all standing?”
Zimmermann frowned to himself for a moment.
“Near here . . . ? I suppose it would have to be foundation and base supporting the reactor sph out there . . .“ He caught the look on Clifford’s f~ “No . . . ?“
“Much bigger ‘n that. Try again.”
“Bigger by lots of orders of magnitude,” Mor hinted, joining in the game.
“You don’t mean . . .“ Zimmermann pointed do at the floor while the others nodded encouragin~ “Not Earth?” He looked from one to another, ast~ ished.
“That’s what you’re looking at, all right,” Cliff confirmed. “That image is produced from data p cessed out of hi-radiation being generated ri through this whole planet.”
Zimmermann stared again at the screen while mind raced to comprehend fully the thing he was s ing. He knew that the hi-waves received by the tector did not arrive through normal space and co not be associated with any property of direction. also knew that the everyday notion of distance had direct counterpart in hi-space and that the informat arriving at the detector was a summation of hi-wa originating from every part of the cosmos. How, th could a representation of Earth be extracted from that, and just what viewpoint did the image on screen signify?
As if he could read the questions forming in professor’s mind, Clifford picked up his explanati “Distance does play a part in the k-equations, but in the sense of determining any propagation time. comes in as an amplitude-modulating coefficient.”
“How do you mean, Dr. Clifford?” Zimmerm~ asked.
“The total signal that’s picked up by the detec is made up of components that originate all over
universe,” Clifford replied. “The distance of a given source from the detector does not affect the time at which the hi-waves generated by it are received. In other words, all the components that are being picked up now are being generated now; whether the source is the GRASER or a star at the other end of the galaxy makes no difference.”
“Extraordinary,” Zimmermann mused. “So if somebody made a GRASER a thousand light-years from here and switched it on, information from that event would be buried in the signal that you detect here— at the same instant.”
“Yes, indeed,” Clifford confirmed. “But you’d have to be very clever to see it. You see, although components in the signal do exist from sources all over the universe, their strength falls off rapidly with distance. It’s the nearer and larger sources—big masses—that dominate in the equations. So it’s not impossible to single out the components that originate in Earth’s mass and use them as starting data to construct an image. The strength of the signals from other places falls off rapidly as they get farther away, and you can soon ignore them for all practical purposes. In theory, in the signal that produced the image on the screen there were components that originated, say, in the Andromeda Galaxy, but in practice they existed only as mathematical terms with values approximating to zero. There’s the cosmic background that we talked about, which is the sum of all the things like that, but we get rid of it by tuning in above the backgroundnoise threshold.”
“Fascinating,” Zimmermann said, staring at the image again. “So presumably, from the information that you select out of the composite signal, you’ve developed some method of projecting directional representations.” He pointed at the screen. “I mean, that
image presumably represents some aspect or other of this planet, seen from some particular direction or other.” His brow creased into an apologetic smile. “I must confess that what it is and where I’m looking at it from are questions that I find myself still unable to answer.”
“That was a big hassle,” Clifford admitted. “The information carried by a hi-wave contains timelike and spacelike data all scrambled together with other things you can’t really interpret. It took a while to figure out how to extract the spacelike data from all that stuff, but . . .“ he gestured toward the display, “I guess we managed it in the end okay.”
“So what are we looking at?” Zimmermann inquired. Aub joined in at that point.
“Here we’re tuned to resolve a perpendicular plane anisotropic to the detector and extending for ten thousand miles. It’s a cross section right through the center of Earth. Doesn’t show a lotta detail but . . .“ he shrugged, “it’s only our first attempt, after all.”
“Actually, if you look at the numerical data, you’ll see that it’s possible to distinguish the crust, upper and lower mantle, and the core,” Clifford informed him. “It just doesn’t show up too well on the picture.”
Zimmermann was speechless.
Aub noted his puzzled expression and began operating keys on his panel, causing the disk on the screen to shrink to a fraction of its previous size, though remaining unchanged in general appearance.
“Rotating the sectional plane to lie perpendicular to the axis,” he sang in the tones of a fairground showman. “The plane now coincides with the circle of latitude eighty-five degrees north—just below the pole. Hold on to your seats for an instant trip right through the world.” He commenced playing the keys casually. The disk swelled slowly, then stopped at a size that
almost filled the screen. “Now you’re at the ~quator,” Aub announced. The disk shrank once more and finally condensed rapidly to a tiny point of orange. “South Pole.”
“We can do better than that, too,” Morelli added, encouraged by Aub’s performance. “The dominant hi-wave components received here are naturally the ones that come from the mass of Earth. However, once we’ve computed the matrix that defines that mass, we can negate it and feed it back into the equations to cancel itself out. That leaves only the lesser hi-wave components that come from other places. Once they’re isolated, they can be amplified and used to compute spacelike images in the same way as you’ve seen. Aub...”
Aub took the cue and conjured up another disk, similar to the previous one but exhibiting a less pronounced variation in color from edge to center.
“That’s the Moon,” Clifford stated. This was the most impressive item of the demonstration, but out of sheer devilment he forced his voice to remain matterof-fact. “We could do the same thing with other bodies as well, but there’d not be much point with the setup we’ve got at the moment. As you can see, it gives little more than a smudge. Doesn’t tell an awful lot.”
“With Mark II you’d really see something,” Aub added. “For instance, I reckon we could chart all the black holes in the neighboring parts of the galaxy— directly; you wouldn’t have to rely on their effects on companion bodies to detect them the way you have to now.’,
“And don’t forget,” Clifford rounded off. “You’d see all those things like they are now . . . no time delay.”
Zimmermann continued to stare back at them silently. Never before in his life had so many stagger-
ing revelations been compressed into such a short interval of time. His mind reeled before the vision that was unfolding of the unimaginable potential of the things he had just witnessed. Surely the first acquisition of the sense of sight by the early multi-celled organisms in the seas had been no more revolutionary in terms of its impact on the evolution of an awareness of the universe. He was present at the birth of a new era of science.
The others watched him in silence. They knew full well what he was thinking, but overdramatization and plays of emotion were not their style.
“This is incredible!” Zimmermann managed at last. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “Incredible . . .“ He looked back again at the image on the screen as if to make sure that he had not dreamed the whole thing. After contemplating it for a while longer, he had another question. “Do you really believe that you could resolve detailed images . . . ones that carry information? We could really gaze down to the core of Earth and for the first time actually see what is happening in the world beneath our feet? We could look inside the planets . . . inside the stars . . . ?“
“It’s possible,” Clifford nodded. “The only way we’d know for sure, though, would be with Mark II. This system was never meant for that kind of thing.”
“Incredible,” Zimmermann said again. “I gathered that you were making progress here, but this . . .“ He gestured toward the screen and shook his head, as if still having difficulty believing what he had just seen. “It will change everything.”
“Those images you just saw weren’t being processed in real time, of course,” Morelli explained. “You’re not seeing something that’s actually being picked up at the detector right this instant. They were simply playbacks of images that had already been computed. That’s the
main problem with the system so far—the amount of computer power needed to generate those outputs is absolutely phenomenal. These two guys have just about monopolized the machines in this place for the past few weeks. We’ve had to offload nearly all of our normal work on to the net.”
“Extracting the spacelike information that you need out of the k-functions is a tedious business,” Clifford explained. “The equations involved have an infinite number of solutions. Obviously we don’t try to solve for all of them, otherwise we’d never finish, but it’s still a hell of a job just to calculate the sets of limits needed to generate whatever spatial projection you want. Planar cross sections is only one possible category of solutions, yet imagine the number of different sections of, say, Earth that could be specified . . . taking into account all the possible angles and viewpoints. It blows your mind.”
“I think mine has already been blown sufficiently for one day,” Zimmermann replied, smiling. “May I relax now, or do you three gentlemen have still more surprises up your sleeves?”
Morelli went on to describe the difficulties that they were experiencing in obtaining the components needed for Mark II. He mentioned the questions that were being asked, the snooping, the general harassment they were being subjected to, and gave his guesses as to the reasons behind it all. Zimmermann already knew much of the earlier part of the story, of course, and the rest quickly fell into place. As he listened, his face grew dark and angry.
“The damn fools!” he exclaimed when Morelli had finished. “There is more future in what you are doing here than will ever come out of all their budgets put together. God knows, I’m no militarist, but if that’s what they want, this is where they should be putting
their backing. Have they any idea what this could lead to? Have you tried to tell them?”
Morelli shook his head slowly.