James P. Hogan - Paths to Otherwhere

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Paths to Otherwhere by James

P. Hogan

Prologue

The woman in the tan business suit sat in a padded recliner that looked like a

dentist's chair. Her head lay in a concave rest that kept it positioned exactly in

the focal zone of the projection array a few inches above. She was staring at one

of the screens on a panel in front of her. Leonard Sarvin, Deputy Director of the

Defense Research Administration, stood to one side, out of the field being

directed by the machine. His principal assistant, John Fiske, was with him. The

department had poured millions into this, and the Director was being harried by

the President's office for a progress update. Jesse Willard, the National

Laboratory's executive director, watched from the other side of the chair, while

the chief scientist of the project, who was handling the demonstration, checked

other screens. Cabinets and equipment racks lined the partitioned space around

them. The hum of pumps and cooling fans came from other machinery beyond.

"It's quite straightforward." Kintner looked up and addressed the three visitors.

"We're Black. The machine plays Red. It's our move. But the bet has to be real.

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Hogan, James P. - Paths to Otherwhere (v1.0) (html).html

Let's make it ten dollars, say. You've got three choices for how the game will go:

Win for Black, win for Red, or a draw. Winners divide the pot."

"What happens if we all lose?" Fiske asked.

Kintner smiled thinly. "Then I suppose thirty dollars goes to charity."

The two men from Washington looked at each other, as if checking for

something they might have missed. They both shrugged together.

Ten on Black," Sarvin said.

"Black," Fiske agreed. He looked at Kintner and Willard "I mean… what else is

there to say?"

The screen showed a position in a checkers game. Red was down to four men,

one of them blocked, the others positioned hopelessly. Black still had five men,

plus another two already crowned. No six-year-old could have lost from that

position.

The woman in the chair continued staring with a puzzled expression, however.

Her name was Jane. She had only recently been promoted to Fiske's personal

secretary, and the role of being the guinea pig had fallen on her as the junior

member of the party. Her eyes and common sense were telling her the same as

the other two had said. And yet…

As she considered the three options in turn, draw seemed to shout insistently

from somewhere deep in her mind. It made no sense; yet every instinct impelled

her toward it. She bit her lip, uneasy at the thought of appearing foolish. But

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Kintner's instructions had been quite clear: "Forget everything you think you

know. Just play your hunches."

"Ten on a draw," she said finally.

Beside her, Fiske laughed. "Okay. It's your money."

"Then let's see what happens," Willard said "Would somebody care to decide the

move?"

Sarvin and Fiske looked at each other again. Fiske pointed at the screen. "How

about that guy to there? Move him up. Why take chances?"

"Looks good to me," Sarvin agreed.

"Very well," Willard said.

Kintner tapped at keys. The move appeared below the board, with a request to

confirm. He hit the y key.

And the board disappeared, to be replaced by the legend:

WHAT WE DIDN'T TELL YOU WAS THAT THE GAME SELF-

DESTRUCTS AT THIS POINT. NOBODY WINS. SORRY GUYS.

Willard's manner lost the flippancy that he had been maintaining. "It doesn't

predict the actual future. That's impossible on principle. But what the machine

can do is extract the probabilities of possible alternatives from the weightings of

the Multiverse branching structure ahead. And since it's driven by real future

outcomes, not theoretical models or probabilities, it delivers a correct indication

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Hogan, James P. - Paths to Otherwhere (v1.0) (html).html

even if the truth is not as you've been led to believe. Think what an impact this

will have on strategic policymaking. It could enable us to restore the entire world

balance."

Just at that moment, it was having an impact on other things too. Jane, still

coupled into the machine, was getting vivid premonitions of where more in life

was heading than just a checkers game. For months now she had been buying

Jack's line about doors he could open for her in the department, a marriage that

was just a pretense… How could she have been so naive? Fancy dinners on his

expense account, a few nights in hotels when they went on trips like this—and

she'd thought she was heading for the big-time social circuit and a career?

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! the machine was telling her. Everything about

that future felt bad. There was nothing specific that she could pinpoint; just

overwhelming forebodings of anger, hurt, shame, ridicule. But it felt as certain

as the result of the checkers game had a few minutes earlier.

She sat up sharply, her eyes blazing at him. Fiske saw the change in her and

shook his head, mystified. "Hey, what is it?

There was no way that she could control the indignation boiling up inside. At the

same time, in an official visit and with others present, the moment was not

appropriate for confrontation.

She got up. "We have to talk—later," she said tightly.

Then, to the others, "I'm sorry. Will you excuse me, please?' And with that, she

walked quickly from the scene.

Sarvin frowned Fiske looked appealingly at the scientists. "I'm sorry… I really

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Hogan, James P. - Paths to Otherwhere (v1.0) (html).html

don't know what that was all about." He made a helpless gesture, as if trusting

them to understand.

"It's nobody's fault," Kintner said. "The process does have deeper side-effects.

We're still learning about them ourselves."

They were getting reports of strange happenings from a number of places where

research was being conducted. The world didn't need this loose in it as well, on

top of everything else, he told himself.

"It's too potent to be left out there for any foreign power to harness and exploit,"

Kintner told Willard later, when they were alone in Willard's office. "The whole

thing has to be brought under official direction. All other projects should be

terminated. Get the best people in the field here and put everything under one

centralized authority, where it can be controlled."

"I already talked to Sarvin about it," Willard said. "He's making the same

recommendation. We're trying to schedule a meeting in Washington with the

Security Council about it for next week."

Chapter One

Sometimes Hugh Brenner thought he'd been born on the wrong planet. It seemed

as obvious as anything could be that people achieved more when they learned to

get along than they did when they fought over things. If they put as much time

and energy into fixing problems instead of blaming each other for being the

problem, there wouldn't be any problems left. So far they'd had two full-dress

rehearsals for wiping out what passed as civilization. This time it looked as if

things might be leading up to the real performance.

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He looked from the car along a rubble-strewn side street while they waited for

the lights to change on the two-mile-long slum of University Avenue leading to

the campus. An orator in a forage-style cap and gray-shirted uniform was

pounding the air and shouting into a microphone from a raised stand. Below, a

line of linebacker-size Grayshirts stood facing a crowd of a couple of hundred,

mainly students and local derelicts. A banner above the stand read: nationalist

action coalition. Youths in parkas and leather jackets were gathered farther along

the block. Around the corner, police in riot gear stood behind armored vans with

mesh-covered windows.

"Looks like more trouble today," Chris said from the passenger seat. Hugh's

route into Berkeley brought him past the pile of one-room rental conversions that

Chris shared with nine other students. Not many sophomores drove these days.

As part of the measures to prevent Detroit from closing down altogether,

regulations and taxes were designed to clear older cars off the roads. The light

turned green below the cluster surveillance cameras covering the intersection.

Hugh sighed and shook his head as he eased the car forward. It was a GM Ocelot

that he'd bought used and well worn, built south of the border.

Behind them, Alice turned to peer through the rear window. She had started

appearing with Chris two or three mornings a week, almost a month ago now.

Hugh didn't know much more about her than that she could have looked better if

she had a good meal more often; she came from San Antonio; and she was

majoring in political sociology, whatever that was. Hugh didn't have much time

for politics. A physicist of twenty-eight, unattached, with no dependents, no

dependencies, no payments, he was one of those oddities who still thought life

could be simple and honest.

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"At least they've got plans for doing something," Alice said, turning back.

"It's all a mess and too far gone," Hugh answered. "What's anyone going to do

now?"

"Well, somebody has to. How else are we going to get things back on track?"

Hugh knew the line: Security is Strength. Pride through Duty. Honor and

Sacrifice. Liberals and speculators were the cause of all the problems. Chris had

been sounding more radical lately. Hugh had wondered where he'd been getting

it from. He wasn't in a mood to be indoctrinated just now. "Chris says you want

to come over to the lab and see our machine, Alice," he said to change the

subject.

"The QUIC," Chris said, turning his head to look back.

"You mean so you can show me how smart scientists are?" Alice replied.

Chris shrugged indifferently. "You don't have to. I just thought you might want

to see something different. If you'd rather stick to another day of same-as-usual,

that's okay by me."

"As if we didn't see enough machines everywhere all the time. They're always

going wrong, and they make life too complicated."

"I told you, this one's different."

Hugh could sense Alice searching for a put-down to come back with. He didn't

understand the fad that made younger people try to act so hard all the time.

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Hogan, James P. - Paths to Otherwhere (v1.0) (html).html

Perhaps it was part of an affected worldliness that fashion demanded. Maybe it

just reflected the insecurities of the times. Eventually she settled for a grudging,

"It's something to do with communicating with other universes, right?"

Twenty years before, she wouldn't have believed it. But there had been enough

in the news and the popular science media to make it fairly common knowledge

that the "parallel universes" conjectured by theoreticians for a long time were

now generally accepted as fact.

"Not communicating, exactly," Hugh said. "It extracts information from them—

information that you can use."

"Such as for what?" Alice asked.

"When you decide to come over, you'll see," Chris told her.

"Why not make it right now, when we get in?" Hugh suggested.

There was a pause. Neither of them, it seemed, could find anything wrong with

it. "Okay," Alice conceded finally. "Why not?"

"There you go: easy," Hugh said. "Why is just keeping things simple so much of

a problem these days? I don't understand it."

They turned left at the end of University to make the circuit around to the east

side of the campus. Coils of razor wire lined the top of the wall to the right. The

street-facing windows of the university buildings were protected with screens. A

lot of disgruntled people thought that all students were privileged rich kids. The

gates had barriers with armed guards, like military checkpoints.

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Hogan, James P. - Paths to Otherwhere (v1.0) (html).html

One thing, at least, to be said for the slump was that it made parking easier.

Hugh found a place near the East Gate, opposite Stanley Hall. As they got out, a

man in a soiled reefer jacket came over and scowled. He was big, with a blue

chin, flattened nose, and stained teeth. He slammed the wing of the Ocelot with

the flat of a hand that looked as if it could as easily have punched through.

"Mexican garbage! Waddya wanna buy this crap for? You ashamed of bein'

American or sump'n, huh?"

Hugh looked him in the face, candid and wide-eyed. "My mother left it to me…

It was only a month ago."

"Oh… yeah." The gorilla faltered. "Then I guess that's different. Okay, I didn't

know, okay?"

"It's okay."

Hugh shrugged and showed his palms in response to Chris's pained look as they

turned from the car. He didn't see it as taking work away from American auto

workers. Hell, most of them were in Mexico, anyway.

Inside the Biophysics Department, they entered the lab from a corridor of plain

yellow walls lined by doors on both sides. A technician in shirtsleeves and jeans

was working at an opened electronics cabinet, one of several clustered in the

center of the room. On the far side, a girl operating a desk terminal waved a hand

without looking away from the screen. Chris went into an inner office to check

the morning's E-mail. Alice stood looking around while Hugh hung his

windbreaker on a peg behind the door.

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Hogan, James P. - Paths to Otherwhere (v1.0) (html).html

It was the typical jumble of untidy desks, wire-entangled cubicles, and half-filled

equipment racks that electronics researchers everywhere seemed to revel in.

Charts and notice boards filled the walls between shelves sagging with books

and binders. A bench running along one side carried a collection of oscilloscopes

and other test gear, soldering irons and tools, and unidentifiable gadgets in

various stages of assembly or dismemberment.

"Do you know what quantum paradoxes are?" Hugh asked as he came over and

began entering initialization commands into the touch panel of an improvised

console.

Most people at college would know enough to be familiar with the gist.

"Something to do with things being waves and particles at the same time, isn't

it?" she said.

Hugh nodded. "Things like photons and electrons, that people usually think of as

particles, can also interfere with each other like waves." He made throwing

motions in the air with both hands. "You know when you toss a couple of stones

into a pond—each one makes circles of waves that spread out. Where the circles

start to overlap, you get a criss-cross effect of flat spots and rough spots. That's

called an interference pattern."

"Okay… And quantum whatevers do the same thing?"

"Right. Except there's a difference: They can do it with themselves—apparently.

It's as if you only threw one stone, but you still get the pattern."

Alice thought about it, made a face, and shook her head. "That doesn't make

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