Gregory Benford - Matter's End

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MATTER'S END -- Gregory Benford

When Dr. Samuel Johnson felt himself getting tied up in an argument over

Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and

that everything in the universe is merely ideal, he kicked a large stone and

answered, "I refute it thus." Just what that action assured him of is not very

obvious, but apparently he found it comforting.

--Sir Arthur Eddington

India came to him first as a breeze like soured buttermilk, rich yet tainted.

A door banged somewhere, sending gusts sweeping through the Bangalore airport,

slicing through the 4 A.M. silences.

Since the Free State of Bombay had left India, Bangalore had become an

international airport. Yet the damp caress seemed to erase the sterile

signatures that made all big airports alike, even giving a stippled texture to

the cool enamel glow of the fluorescents.

The moist air clasped Robert Clay like a stranger's sweaty palm. The ripe,

fleshy aroma of a continent enfolded him, swarming up his nostrils and soaking

his lungs with sullen spice. He put down his carry-on bag and showed the

immigration clerk his passport. The man gave him a piercing, ferocious stare--

then mutely slammed a rubber stamp onto the pages and handed it back.

A hand snagged him as he headed toward baggage claim.

"Professor Clay?" The face was dark olive with intelligent eyes riding above

sharp cheekbones. A sudden white grin flashed as Clay nodded. "Ah, good. I am

Dr. Sudarshan Patil. Please come this way."

Dr. Patil's tone was polite, but his hands impatiently pulled Clay away from

the sluggish lines, through a battered wooden side door. The heavy-lidded

immigration guards were carefully looking in other directions, hands held

behind their backs. Apparently they had been paid off and would ignore this

odd exit. Clay was still groggy from trying to sleep on the flight from

London. He shook his head as Patil led him into the gloom of a baggage

storeroom.

"Your clothes," Patil said abruptly. "What?"

"They mark you as a Westerner. Quickly!"

Patil's hands, light as birds in the quilted soft light, were already plucking

at his coat, his shirt. Clay was taken aback at this abruptness. He hesitated,

then struggled out of the dirty garments, pulling his loose slacks down over

his shoes. He handed his bundled clothes to Patil, who snatched them away

without a word.

"You're welcome," Clay said. Patil took no notice, just thrust a wad of tan

cotton at him. The man's eyes jumped at each distant sound in the storage

room, darting, suspecting every pile of dusty bags.

Clay struggled into the pants and rough shirt. They looked dingy in the wan

yellow glow of a single distant fluorescent tube.

"Not the reception I'd expected," Clay said, straightening the baggy pants and

pulling at the rough drawstring.

"These are not good times for scientists in my country, Dr. Clay," Patil said

bitingly. His voice carried that odd lilt that echoed both the Raj and

Cambridge.

"Who're you afraid of?"

"Those who hate Westerners and their science."

"They said in Washington--"

"We are about great matters, Professor Clay. Please cooperate, please."

Patil's lean face showed its bones starkly, as though energies pressed

outward. Promontories of bunched muscle stretched a mottled canvas skin. He

started toward a far door without another word, carrying Clay's overnight bag

and jacket.

"Say, where're we--"

Patil swung open a sheet-metal door and beckoned. Clay slipped through it and

into the moist wealth of night. His feet scraped on a dirty sidewalk beside a

black tar road. The door hinge squealed behind them, attracting the attention

of a knot of men beneath a vibrant yellow streetlight nearby.

The bleached fluorescence of the airport terminal was now a continent away.

Beneath a line of quarter-ton trucks huddled figures slept. In the astringent

street-lamp glow he saw a decrepit green Korean Tochat van parked at the curb.

"In!" Patil whispered.

The men under the streetlight started walking toward them, calling out hoarse

questions.

Clay yanked open the van's sliding door and crawled into the second row of

seats. A fog of unknown pungent smells engulfed him. The driver, a short man,

hunched over the wheel. Patil sprang into the front seat and the van ground

away, its low gear whining.

Shouts. A stone thumped against the van roof. Pebbles rattled at the back.

They accelerated, the engine clattering. A figure loomed up from the shifting

shadows and flung muck against the window near Clay's face. He jerked back at

the slap of it. "Damn!"

They plowed through a wide puddle of dirty rainwater. The engine sputtered and

for a moment Clay was sure it would die. He looked out the rear window and saw

vague forms running after them. Then the engine surged again and they shot

away.

They went two blocks through hectic traffic. Clay tried to get a clear look at

India outside, but all he could see in the starkly shadowed street were the

crisscrossings of three-wheeled taxis and human-drawn rickshaws. He got an

impression of incessant activity, even in this desolate hour. Vehicles leaped

out of the murk as headlights swept across them and then vanished utterly into

the moist shadows again.

They suddenly swerved around a corner beneath spreading, gloomy trees. The van

jolted into deep potholes and jerked to a stop. "Out!" Patil called.

Clay could barely make out a second van at the curb ahead. It was blue and

caked with mud, but even in the dim light would not be confused with their

green one. A rotting fetid reek filled his nose as he got out the side door,

as if masses of overripe vegetation loomed in the shadows. Patil tugged him

into the second van. In a few seconds they went surging out through a narrow,

brick-lined alley. "Look, what--"

"Please, quiet," Patil said primly. "I am watching carefully now to be certain

that we are not being followed."

They wound through a shantytown warren for several minutes. Their headlights

picked up startled eyes that blinked from what Clay at first had taken to be

bundles of rags lying against the shacks. They seemed impossibly small even to

be children. Huddled against decaying tin lean-tos, the dim forms often did

not stir even as the van splashed dirt) water on them from potholes.

Clay began, "Look, I understand the need for--"

"I apologize for our rude methods, Dr. Clay," Patil said. He gestured at the

driver. "May I introduce Dr. Singh?"

Singh was similarly gaunt and intent, but with bushy hair and a thin, pointed

nose. He jerked his head aside to peer at Clay, nodded twice like a puppet on

strings, and then quickly stared back at the narrow lane ahead. Singh kept the

van at a steady growl, abruptly yanking it around corners. A wooden cart

lurched out of their way, its driver swearing in a strident singsong.

"Welcome to India," Singh said with reedy solemnity. "I am afraid

circumstances are not the best."

"Uh, right. You two are heads of the project, they told me at the NSF."

"Yes," Patil said archly, "the project which officially no longer exists and

unofficially is a brilliant success. It is amusing!"

"Yeah," Clay said cautiously, "we'll see."

"Oh, you will see," Singh said excitedly. "We have the events! More all the

time."

Patil said precisely, "We would not have suggested that your National Science

Foundation send an observer to confirm our findings unless we believed them to

be of the highest importance."

"You've seen proton decay?"

Patil beamed. "Without doubt."

"Damn."

"Exactly."

"What mode?"

"The straightforward pion and positron decay products."

Clay smiled, reserving judgment. Something about Patil's almost prissy

precision made him wonder if this small, beleaguered team of Indian physicists

might actually have brought it off. An immense long shot, of course, but

possible. There were much bigger groups of particle physicists in Europe and

the U.S. who had tried to detect proton decay using underground swimming pools

of pure water. Those experiments had enjoyed all the benefits of the latest

electronics. Clay had worked on the big American project in a Utah salt mine,

before lean budgets and lack of results closed it down. It would be galling if

this lone, underfunded Indian scheme had finally done it. Nobody at the NSF

believed the story coming out of India.

Patil smiled at Clay's silence, a brilliant slash of white in the murk. Their

headlights picked out small panes of glass stuck seemingly at random in nearby

hovels, reflecting quick glints of yellow back into the van. The night seemed

misty; their headlights forked ahead. Clay thought a soft rain had started

outside, but then he saw that thousands of tiny insects darted into their

headlights. Occasionally big ones smacked against the windshield.

Patil carefully changed the subject. "I... believe you will pass unnoticed,

for the most part."

"I look Indian?"

"I hope you will not take offense if I remark that you do not. We requested an

Indian, but your NSF said they did not have anyone qualified."

"Right. Nobody who could hop on a plane, anyway." Or would, he added to

himself.

"I understand. You are a compromise. If you will put this on..." Patil handed

Clay a floppy khaki hat. "It will cover your curly hair. Luckily, your nose is

rather more narrow than I had expected when the NSF cable announced they were

sending a Negro."

"Got a lot of white genes in it, this nose," Clay said evenly.

"Please, do not think I am being racist. I simply wished to diminish the

chances of you being recognized as a Westerner in the countryside."

"Think I can pass?"

"At a distance, yes."

"Be tougher at the site?"

"Yes. There are 'celebrants,' as they term themselves, at the mine."

"How'll we get in?"

"A ruse we have devised."

"Like that getaway back there? That was pretty slick."

Singh sent them jouncing along a rutted lane. Withered trees leaned against

the pale stucco two-story buildings that lined the lane like children's blocks

lined up not quite correctly. "Men in customs, they would give word to people

outside. If you had gone through with the others, a different reception party

would have been waiting for you."

"I see. But what about my bags?"

Patil had been peering forward at the gloomy jumble of buildings. His head

jerked around to glare at Clay. "You were not to bring more than your carry-on

bag!"

"Look, I can't get by on that. Chrissake, that'd give me just one change of

clothes--"

"You left bags there?"

"Well, yeah, I had just one--"

Clay stopped when he saw the look on the two men's faces.

Patil said with strained clarity, "Your bags, they had identification tags?"

"Sure, airlines make you--"

"They will bring attention to you. There will be inquiries. The devotees will

hear of it, inevitably, and know you have entered the country." Clay licked

his lips. "Hell, I didn't think it was so important."

The two lean Indians glanced at each other, their faces taking on a narrowing,

leaden cast. "Dr. Clay," Patil said stiffly, "the 'celebrants' believe, as do

many, that Westerners deliberately destroyed our crops with their

biotechnology."

"Japanese companies' biologists did that, I thought," Clay said

diplomatically.

"Perhaps. Those who disturb us at the Kolar gold mine make no fine

distinctions between biologists and physicists. They believe that we are

disturbing the very bowels of the earth, helping to further the destruction,

bringing on the very end of the world itself. Surely you can see that in

India, the mother country of religious philosophy, such matters are

important."

"But your work, hell, it's not a matter of life or death or anything."

"On the contrary, the decay of the proton is precisely an issue of death."

Clay settled back in his seat, puzzled, watching the silky night stream by,

cloaking vague forms in its shadowed mysteries.

Clay insisted on the telephone call. A wan winter sun had already crawled

partway up the sky before he awoke, and the two Indian physicists wanted to

leave immediately. They had stopped while still in Bangalore, holing up in the

cramped apartment of one of Patil's graduate students. As Clay took his first

sip of tea, two other students had turned up with his bag, retrieved at a cost

he never knew.

Clay said, "I promised I'd call home. Look, my family's worried. They read the

papers, they know the trouble here."

Shaking his head slowly, Patil finished a scrap of curled brown bread that

appeared to be his only breakfast. His movements had a smooth liquid inertia,

as if the sultry morning air oozed like jelly around him. They were sitting;

at a low table that had one leg too short; the already rickety table kept

lurching, slopping tea into their saucers. Clay had looked for something to

prop up the leg, but the apartment was bare, as though no one lived here. They

had slept on pallets beneath a single bare bulb. Through the open windows,

bare of frames or glass, Clay had gotten fleeting glimpses of the

neighborhood-rooms of random clutter, plaster peeling off slumped walls,

revealing the thin steel cross-ribs of the buildings, stained windows adorned

with gaudy pictures of many-armed gods, already sun-bleached and frayed.

Children yelped and cried below, their voices reflected among the odd angles

and apertures of the tangled streets, while carts rattled by and bare feet

slapped the stones. Students had apparently stood guard last night, though

Clay had never seen more than a quick motion in the shadows below as they

arrived.

"You ask much of us," Patil said. By morning light his walnut-brown face

seemed gullied and worn. Lines radiated from his mouth toward intense eyes.

Clay sipped his tea before answering. A soft, strangely sweet smell wafted

through the open window. They sat well back in the room so nobody could see in

from the nearby buildings. He heard Singh tinkering downstairs with the van's

engine.

"Okay, it's maybe slightly risky. But I want my people to know I got here all

right."

"There are few telephones here."

"I only need one."

"The system, often it does not work at all."

"Gotta try."

"Perhaps you do not understand--"

"I understand damn well that ill can't even reach my people, I'm not going to

hang out here for long. And if I don't see that your experiment works right,

nobody'll believe you."

"And your opinion depends upon ... ?"

Clay ticked off points on his fingers. "On seeing the apparatus Checking your

raw data. Running a trial case to see your system response. Then a null

experiment--to verify your threshold level on each detector." He held up five

fingers. "The works."

Patil said gravely, "Very good. We relish the opportunity to prove ourselves."

"You'll get it." Clay hoped to himself that they were wrong, but he suppressed

that. He represented the faltering forefront of particle physics, and it would

be embarrassing if a backwater research team had beaten the world. Still,

either way, he would end up being the expert on the Kolar program, and that

was a smart career move in itself.

"Very well. I must make arrangements for the call, then. But I truly--"

"Just do it. Then we get down to business." The telephone was behind two

counters and three doors at a Ministry for Controls office. Patil did the

bribing and cajoling inside and then brought Clay in from the back of the van.

He had been lying down on the back seat so he could not be seen easily from

the street.

The telephone itself was a heavy black plastic thing with a rotary dial that

clicked like a sluggish insect as it whirled. Patil had been on it twice

already, clearing international lines through Bombay. Clay got two false rings

and a dead line. On the fourth try he heard a faint, somehow familiar buzzing.

Then a hollow, distant click.

"Daddy, is that you?" Faint rock music in the background "Sure, I just wanted

to let you know I got to India okay."

"Oh, Mommy will be so glad! We heard on the TV last night that there's trouble

over there."

Startled, Clay asked, "What? Where's your mother?"

"Getting groceries. She'll be so mad she missed your call!"

"You tell her I'm fine, okay? But what trouble?"

"Something about a state leaving India. Lots of fighting, John Trimble said on

the news."

Clay never remembered the names of news announcers; he regarded them as

faceless nobodies reading prepared scripts, but for his daughter they were the

voice of authority. "Where?"

"Uh, the lower part."

"There's nothing like that happening here, honey. I'm safe. Tell Mommy."

"People have ice cream there?"

"Yeah, but I haven't seen any. You tell your mother what I said, remember?'

About being safe?"

"Yes, she's been worried."

"Don't worry, Angy. Look, I got to go." The line popped and hissed ominously.

"I miss you, Daddy."

"I miss you double that. No, squared."

She laughed merrily. "I skinned my knee today at recess. It bled so much I had

to go to the nurse."

"Keep it clean, honey. And give your mother my love."

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MATTER'SEND--GregoryBenfordWhenDr.SamuelJohnsonfelthimselfgettingtiedupinanargumentoverBishopBerkeley'singenioussophistrytoprovethenonexistenceofmatter,andthateverythingintheuniverseismerelyideal,hekickedalargestoneandanswered,"Irefuteitthus."Justwhatthatactionassuredhimofisnotveryobvious,butapparen...

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Gregory Benford - Matter's End

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