John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

He slept fitfully for most of the afternoon. His dreams were populated by large flying insects that chased him as he dragged his legs through viscous water and that ate diamonds as fast as he could produce them. But when he awoke at about 6 p.m., he felt wonderfully relaxed.

George suggested a seafood dinner on the Galveston waterfront. They crossed the broad boulevard to the sidewalk along the seawall and strolled past several ancient tourist shop piers until they reached the Flagship, a hotel and restaurant built on a long pier extending from the seawall into the waters of the Gulf.

A waiter who identified himself as Bob conducted them to a table with a fine Gulf view and proceeded to recite a list of the day’s specials. Roger ordered the crab-stuffed flounder. George selected the blackened redfish and a bottle of dry oaky Washington State Pinot Chardonnay with which he was well acquainted.

Roger turned the two-carat diamond on the table before them, admiring its basic octahedral shape. “The diamond business isn’t bad,” he said, chewing slowly, “but it won’t last. I recall that at around the turn of the millennium, a new industrial vapor deposition process will become available for growing large diamonds in a variety of shapes, making all sorts of useful things with them, and selling them very cheaply.”

George nodded. “But for now it’s a good basic source of income to get us started. We have to be careful, though. Natural diamonds always have a few flaws and impurities. If ours are too perfect, it will give away the fact that they didn’t actually come from a diamond mine.”

“I’ve already thought of that,” said Roger. “The nanoassemblers I Wrote last night were programmed to include plausible impurities at the part per million level and also to put a few random flaws into the crystal structure. I’d need to do a bit of library research to get an optimum match to natural diamonds, but these should pass a cursory inspection. As I see it, our real problem will be to find a believable story for our source of diamonds. My dear late lamented old dad, the diamond merchant of King’s Lynn, can only have left me so many of the things. And I might be had up for evasion of death duties by the U.K. revenue authorities or for smuggling by U.S. Customs if I’m not careful.”

“Yes, we do need a plausible source,” said George. “We should buy a defunct diamond mine. Probably somewhere in Africa or South America. We can Write nanomachines that will seed it with a new supply of diamonds. Then we mine out the first batch and then sell the producing mine to someone in the business. That basic scheme can be used over and over. If anyone notices our string of successes, it can be attributed to our superior knowledge of diamond geology and to our ability to spot old mines with untapped veins.”

“That’s tidy,” said Roger. “There should be other applications of that basic strategy also. But our other immediate problem is personal documents. We can’t simply get new identification. There are individuals here already who look just like us, only younger, and whose names are George Griffin and Roger Coulton. We somehow have to establish new identities. And there’s also a problem with transportation. Even with our new access to cash, we can’t even rent a car. We don’t have the proper credit cards and driver’s licenses.”

“I’ve been giving that problem some thought,” said George. “I conclude that we will each need to establish several new identities, not just one. And in this country, fortunately, that isn’t too difficult. The first step is to get a birth certificate.”

“That will be a problem,” said Roger. “Could one be forged?”

“It isn’t necessary,” said George, “I can obtain a real one by picking an approximate birthdate, going to a big-city newspaper office, looking up the obituary notices in the microfilm archives, and finding a male baby that died when it was a few months old. Then I go to the city records office and ask for a birth certificate in the name of the deceased child.”

“But,” Roger objected, “won’t the records show that the child is dead?”

“No,” said George. “In this country there’s no effort to correlate birth and death records. People move around too much to make that practical, and there’s also a deeply ingrained popular view that too much detailed government record-keeping is an attack on personal freedom. It should be easy.”

Roger stroked his chin. Suddenly he pictured Susan standing before Elvis’s cage and wondered if he would see her again. Then he sighed. She’s only about twelve years old now, he realized.

“Then I go to the Social Security office,” said George, “and ask for a new Social Security number in the name of my new alter ego, saying that I’ve been living abroad for many years and had never needed one before. The Social Security people always maintain that a Social Security number is not for purposes of identification, even though it’s widely used that way, so they give them out fairly freely. With my new Social Security number, I can open a bank account in my new name and put, say, forty thousand dollars into it. I can get credit cards from my bank with no problems because of my big bank balance. Then I buy a car, paying cash, and take a driver’s license test, which provides me with a picture ID driver’s license. Then I go to the Federal Building and get a U.S. passport, using my birth certificate and driver’s license as identification.

“And presto! I’m a real person. If I do that several times, I can be several real people at the same time.”

“Interesting,” said Roger. “I have a slightly more difficult problem. I will need to do something similar in the U.K., but I’ll need some kind of valid passport even to get there. Perhaps I’ll have to work on my speech patterns and learn to speak like an American, before I can get a U.S. passport and venture abroad.”

“Maybe that won’t be necessary,” said George. “With Writing we have some control of our facial characteristics. You could make yourself look like me and use one of my passports to enter the U.K. Or better yet, we could use nanomachines to produce a duplicate of my passport with your picture on it.”

“But what happens if we’re caught?” said Roger. “Surely there are several illegal steps in the process you described.”

George smiled at him. “Are you the same person who wanted to use a cutting laser to rob an automatic teller machine this morning? The passport operation is clearly illegal, as is getting the birth certificate and Social Security number. The story I recommend, if one of us is caught, is to claim to be a victim of amnesia. You woke up one morning with money but no identification at all, and you don’t know who you are. You’re only doing your best to establish a new identity by the one means open to you, so you can become a productive and functioning member of society.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Roger, “that’s almost true.”

The following day George and Roger rode a Greyhound bus to Houston. Roger was able to make diamond sales at several jewelry dealers in the downtown Houston area. The resulting stake was $13,487.

They rented two separate rooms in the downtown Marriott, each paying cash for a week in advance when they registered. The next morning they took a taxi to the archive center of the Houston Chronicle to do file research that would be necessary to begin their new lives.

IN LATE 1987 THE FINANCIAL PAGES OF THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE had noted the rise to prominence of one George Preston and his new company, Petroleum Genetics Laboratories, or PGL for short. Preston was a mysterious figure. He had appeared on the Houston oil scene out of nowhere. Even after considerable effort, the Chronicle financial reporter had been unable to learn anything about his background, credit history, previous experience, education, or source of financial backing. The local banks had records of substantial PGL deposits but no loans.