John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

“Exactly,” said George. “That’s the dilemma. We need to create institutions that can reach some stable synthesis between the information provided by the Makers and information that comes from discoveries of our own.”

There was a roar from the crowd in the ballroom. The election results from the Midwest were coming in, and Clinton was definitely in the lead, as were Democrats in a number of congressional races.

“I’ve looked into the problem of new research a bit,” said Roger. “There are some areas where we will simply have to do our own research. Molecular biology is an obvious example. While Reading is a very valuable tool, it’s only a tool. We need a whole new generation of molecular biologists to use the new techniques to gain more understanding of our own species and the other species on this planet. We need a whole new generation of molecular engineers to explore the implications of our new ability to Write. They’ll need to reexplore the whole of civil, chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering, using Written nano-scale biomachines. I’ve studied how the Makers did that, and I’m convinced that we can do better.”

“That’s good news,” said Alice. “I’d been assuming that the Makers knew everything.”

“The Makers and their contact civilizations are far ahead of us in most areas,” said Roger, “but the trick is to quickly wade through the amassed knowledge until you reach the frontier.”

“What frontier?” Alice asked.

“You need to reach a state of knowledge where you can’t look up all the answers, where new basic research needs to be done. Every beginning science graduate student has to do this.

It’s not a new thing. The frontier has certainly been moved some distance ahead. It hasn’t disappeared.

“The near future in science will be somewhat like the period following the discovery of quantum mechanics or relativity, but on a larger scale. It’ll be a very difficult time for the established scientists. Their whole way of doing things is going to be overthrown. But it will be a time of great fun for the bright new students who will have an unprecedented opportunity to make the great leap forward and surpass their elders.”

“How does this apply to physics?” asked George.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Roger. “Astrophysics looks good in many areas. We’ll have lots of new observational data from the other bubble universes, and someone will have to put it together. And there’ll be new technology for new and better observational instruments, detectors for dark matter concentrations, axions, gravity waves, and neutrinos, for instance, that will need to be built, using the new engineering techniques.

“Nuclear physics looks less promising. The new research frontier exists, but it’s a long way away. The same can be said of condensed matter physics. The prospects in particle physics are similar. It appears from the Makers’ download that there really is a substructure to the quark, just as the preliminary experiments at Fermilab will reveal in a few years. The LHC will undoubtedly reveal more about this area. But it will require a new accelerator with special characteristics to get to the bottom of the problem, and there are some questions in this area that the Makers have not yet answered. While we could use the new engineering to construct our own private Super-SSC, to do so would certainly attract the Hive.”

“I think when we’re ready, we will want to deliberately attract the Hive,” said George.

Alice shuddered.

“Perhaps,” said Roger, “but in the immediate future there’s a better direction for particle physics than messing about with quark substructure. In particular, there’s the possibility of going directly to the most fundamental structures and doing Planck-scale physics at the quantum gravity level. That’s how the Makers contacted us. I don’t yet understand enough to know where the frontier is for that area, or whether it would be possible for us to do meaningful research there any time soon. But the work Tern’s group is doing on the problem now looks very promising.”

George nodded. “Individuals can only do so much. Our funding of a few university groups is a good start, but now we need teams of people, the best minds we can recruit, working closely together on these problems.” He looked around the room at the celebration. The Colorado results were being tallied, and the Clinton-Gore ticket was being projected as the sure winner. “Next week we’ll announce the formation of a major new research institution. We’ve already been funding research using the name the Iris Foundation. I propose we call our new think tanks and basic research facilities the Iris Institutes.”

STEVE BROWN TYPED PETROGEN INTO THE RECORDS computer system and waited while the database program searched the file structure.

Florida State University was now closed for the Christmas holidays. Last week he’d received a tip from Tom Weatherford that PetroGen had recently been buying large blocks of property in Alabama. Steve had called yesterday about access to the Alabama Department of Records files and today had driven to Montgomery, about two hundred miles to the north. Records was located in a large low brick building not far from the Alabama state capitol building.

The pretty blonde in charge of the records computer system had shown Steve to a carrel containing a black and white X-terminal and handed him a plastic-covered page of instructions. The system was straightforward enough, and afer a few minutes of practice he’d begun the real work of searching.

The computer beeped, and the screen read search has found 7 items. This was followed by a list of reference numbers. Steve clicked on the first reference number, and the database displayed the listing. It described an eighty-acre parcel of waterfront property located on the Tombigbee River. Steve recorded the details in his notebook.

The second item was also a parcel of waterfront property on the same river. The other five items were the same. Steve tried several other search keywords, but there were no more entries. Apparently all the purchases had been recorded with PetroGen as the legal owner. He totaled the cost of all the entries. It came to over $150 million. For some reason PetroGen was investing heavily in the region along one particular stretch of river.

Steve exited the database program, gathered his papers, and strolled back to the outer office. The blonde girl was sitting at a desk behind the counter. The nameplate on the desk read KATHLEEN SCOTT.

“Through already?” she asked.

“More or less, Miss Scott,” said Steve, sitting down on the chair across from her desk. “I wonder if you could tell me something. Where’s the Tombigbee River and what’s going on over there?”

She laughed. “Oh, that. Some people think the Tombigbee waterway project is the greatest thing that ever happened to Alabama, and other people think it’s just a great big black hole for state and federal money. You see, there are some big rivers in the western part of the state — over by Mississippi? — that aren’t quite navigable and that don’t quite connect up. And one of our congressmen, Tom Bevill, has been up in Washington for a long time, and he runs some appropriations subcommittee… the one that has to do with water projects? And so he just told those Army Engineers that they should do something about connecting up those rivers and fixing them… so boats could go down them to Mobile and the Gulf?”

“He wants to make the Tombigbee a navigable waterway?” Steve asked.

“That’s right,” Kathleen answered. “So the Army started this project. And every few years the Congress gives them more money to work on it.”