Dark Matter (12 page)

Like Seymour Cray—the father of the supercomputer—Godin had been one of the original engineers at Control Data Systems in the early 1950s. In 1957, he left the company with Seymour to help found Cray Research. Godin had been part of the teams that built the famed 6600 and the Cray 1, but when Cray began to lose control of the bloated Cray 2 project, Godin decided the time had come to step out of his mentor's shadow. He quietly made the rounds of investment bankers, raised $6 million, and sixty days later opened the doors of Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View, California. While Seymour struggled to bring the revolutionary Cray 2 into being, Godin and a tiny team built an elegant and reliable four-processor machine that outperformed the Cray 1 by a speed factor of six. It wasn't a revolutionary advance, but it was one government weapons labs were willing to pay for. At $8 million per machine, Godin quickly paid off his debts and began designing his dream supercomputer.

Competing against national governments and Seymour Cray himself, Peter Godin had gained a foothold in the supercomputing market, and he never looked back.

When the end of the Cold War virtually wiped out the supercomputing business, Godin switched to parallel-processing technology, and by the mid-nineties his computers had augmented or supplanted the Cray machines at NORAD, the NSA, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and in missile silos across the country. In his day, Peter Godin had been both pioneer and follower, but he was first and foremost a survivor.

Everyone looked up as the old man entered the conference room, but I nearly got to my feet. When I joined the team two years ago, Godin had looked scarcely older than Andrew Fielding, who was sixty-one at the time. But two years leading the Trinity team had aged Godin at a shocking rate. His face sometimes had the swollen look of a cancer patient on steroids. At other times, it was thinned to skeletal hollowness, and his hair almost disappeared.

Today he looked as though he might collapse before reaching the table. He'd told me that during times of creative stress, his body always underwent physical changes. Godin often worked without sleep for fifty or sixty consecutive hours, and though he knew this was taking years off his life, he felt that was a fair price to pay for what he had achieved during his years on earth.

His light blue eyes scanned the room, resting longer on me than on the others.

Then he gave a general nod and settled into the empty chair beside Skow.

"Now that we're all here," Skow said with an air of ceremony, "I would be remiss if I didn't begin this meeting with a few words about the terrible loss that we—and this project—suffered yesterday. After a complete autopsy, the pathologist has confirmed that Dr. Fielding died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He—"

"Pathologist?" I cut in. "The state medical examiner?"

Skow gave me a look of forbearance. "David, you know we're not in a conventional security situation. We can't involve local authorities. Dr.

Fielding's cause of death was certified by an NSA pathologist at Fort Meade."

"The NSA has a pathologist?" I understood why the agency might need psychiatrists. Code-breaking was a high-stress profession. But a pathologist?

"The agency has access to a full complement of medical specialists," Skow said in the voice of a government tour guide. "Some directly on the payroll, others fully vetted consultants." He glanced at Godin, whose eyes were closed. "Do you have some doubt about what killed Andrew, David?"

There it was. The gauntlet on the table.

"After all," Skow said in a condescending tone, "you are an experienced internist. Perhaps you saw something inconsistent with a stroke?"

I felt the tension in the air. Everyone was waiting for me to speak, especially Ravi Nara, who had diagnosed the stroke as Fielding died.

"No," I said at length. "Ravi said he observed paralysis, speech impairment, and a blown pupil just prior to death. That's consistent with stroke. It's just ... it usually takes a while to die from a bleed. The suddenness took me by surprise."

It was as though the air had been let out of a balloon. Shoulders sagged with relief, buttocks shifted position, fingers began drumming on the table.

"Well, of course," Skow said generously. "It took us all by surprise. And Andrew was, quite simply, irreplaceable."

I wanted to strangle Skow. He had wanted to replace Fielding for the past six months, but there was no one remotely as qualified as the Englishman available for the job.

"And to show how serious I am about that," Skow said, "we will not try to replace him."

Only Jutta Klein looked as shocked as I. Fielding had known more about Project Trinity than anyone but Godin. He'd got us through a dozen major bottlenecks.

Problems that had stumped software and materials engineers for weeks were but puzzles to the eccentric Englishman, something to be solved in a quarter of an hour. In this sense, Fielding truly was irreplaceable. But the quantum aspects of Project Trinity could not be ignored. Quantum physics was akin to alchemy in my mind—alchemy that worked—and to push ahead without someone qualified to handle problems like quantum entanglement and unwanted tunneling would be madness.

"But what do you plan to do about the MRI side effects we've been studying?" I asked. "As you know, Fielding believed they were the result of quantum disturbances in the brain."

"Ridiculous," barked Nara. "There's no proof there are any quantum processes in the human brain. There never has been, and there never will be!"

"Dr. Nara," Skow said.

I gave the neurologist a look of disdain. "You didn't sound half so sure when you were in the room with Fielding."

Nara shot silent daggers at me.

Skow gave me his patient smile. "David, both Peter and I feel that you and Ravi are quite capable of continuing to explore the medical anomalies.

Bringing in a new physicist at this time would be a needless security risk."

I wasn't going to argue this. I would save my efforts for the president. "Will Fielding's body and personal effects be turned over to his widow?"

Skow cleared his throat. "We can't seem to contact Mrs. Fielding. Therefore, Andrew's remains will be cremated as per his written wishes."

Along with any evidence of murder. I struggled to keep my face impassive. So Lu Li had made her escape. On the other hand . . . would they say anything different if they'd caught or killed her?

Godin touched Skow's wrist.

"Would you like to add something, Peter?" Skow asked.

Godin rubbed his nearly bald pate under the indirect lights. He sat with a Buddha-like centeredness, only the blue eyes in detectable motion. He spoke rarely, but when he did, the world listened.

"This is no time to talk about trivialities," he said. "We lost a giant yesterday. Andrew Fielding and I disagreed about a lot of things, but I respected him more than any man I've ever worked with."

I couldn't hide my surprise. Everyone at the table leaned forward, so as not to miss a word. The hypnotic blue eyes made a quick circuit of the room. Then Godin continued, his voice soft but still deep and powerful.

"From the dawn of history, the driving force of science has been war. If he were here today, Fielding would argue with me. He would say it is mankind's innate curiosity that has driven the upward surge of science. But that's wishful thinking. It is human conflict that has marked the great forward leaps in technology. A regrettable reality, but one that every rational person must recognize. We live in a world of fact, not philosophy. Philosophers question the reality of the universe, then look surprised when you hit them with a shoe and ask if they felt that reality."

Ravi Nara snickered, but Godin gave him a withering glare.

"Andy Fielding was not that sort." Godin nodded to the black-and-white photo on the wall. "Like Robert Oppenheimer, Andy was something of a mystic. But at his core, he was a gifted theoretician with a great practical bent."

Godin brushed a wisp of white hair off his ear and looked around the table.

"The weaponization of science is the inevitable first step that brings countless peacetime gifts in its wake. Oppenheimer's superhuman efforts to give us the bomb ended the Second World War and gave the world safe nuclear energy. We here—we five who remain—face a task of no lesser importance. We're not trying, as Fielding sometimes suggested, to assume the mantle of God. God is merely a part of the human brain, an evolutionary coping mechanism that developed to make bearable our awareness of our own deaths. When we finally succeed in loading the first neuromodel into our prototype and communicating with it, we will have to deal with that part of the brain, just as with all the rest. For those who favor anthropomorphic expressions, we will have to deal with Him. But God, I predict, will prove no more troublesome than any other vestigial element of the brain. Because the completion of Trinity will render that particular coping mechanism unnecessary. Our work will end death's dominion over humanity. And surely there can be no more noble goal than that."

Godin laid his crooked hands on the table. "But today . . . today we mourn a man who had the courage of his convictions. While we, out of grim necessity, focused on the military and intelligence possibilities of an operational Trinity prototype, Fielding looked toward the day that he could sit down and ask the computer man's oldest questions: 'How did life begin? Why are we here?

How will the universe end?' At sixty-three, Andy Fielding had the enthusiasm of a child, and he wasn't ashamed of it. Nor should he have been." Godin nodded soberly. "And I, for one, will miss him."

My face felt hot. I'd expected the crocodile tears of John Skow, then a rush back to full-scale research and development. But Peter Godin was classier than that. His words showed that he'd known his adversary well.

"After the cause of our neurological symptoms has been found," Godin concluded, "the project will resume. If we need another quantum physicist, we'll hire one. What we will not do is charge forward without knowing the dangers. Fielding taught me the importance of prudence."

Godin carefully massaged his right hand with the fingers of his left. "We've all sustained a severe shock. I want everyone to take three full days of rest, beginning at lunch today. We'll meet in this room on Tuesday morning. All the usual off-site security precautions will be observed during this period."

The resulting silence was total. The man who drove himself twice as hard as anyone else was suggesting time off? Such a "vacation" went so against Godin's nature that no one knew what to say.

Skow finally cleared his throat. "Well, I, for one, could use some time at home. My wife is about ready to divorce me over the hours I put in here."

Godin frowned and closed his eyes again.

"Meeting adjourned?" Skow said, glancing at Godin.

The old man got unsteadily to his feet and walked out without another word.

"Well, then," Skow said needlessly.

I stood and walked back to my office, my eyes on Peter Godin's retreating back. The meeting had gone nothing like I'd expected. Ahead of me, Godin started to turn the corner, but instead he stopped and turned to face me. I walked toward him.

"You and Fielding were very close," he said. "Weren't you?"

"I liked him. Admired him, too."

Godin nodded. "I read your book two nights ago. You're more of a realist than I would have guessed. Your opinions on abortion, fetal tissue research, cloning, the expenditures on last-year-of-life care, euthanasia. I agreed with all of it, right down the line."

I couldn't believe Peter Godin had worked with me for two years without reading the book that had brought me to Trinity. He looked over my shoulder for a moment, then back at my face.

"Something occurred to me during the meeting," he said. "You know the old hypothetical about history? If you could go back in time, and you had the opportunity to kill Hitler, would you do it?"

I smiled. "It's not a very realistic formulation."

"I'm not so sure. The Hitler question is easy, of course. But imagine it another way. If you could go back to 1948, and you knew that Nathuram Godse was going to assassinate Gandhi—would you kill him to prevent that assassination?"

I thought about it. "You're really asking how far down the chain of events I would go. Would you murder Hitler's mother?"

It was Godin's turn to smile. "You're right, of course. And my answer is yes."

"Actually, I think your question is more about causality. Would murdering Hitler's mother have prevented the Second World War? Or would some other nobody have risen from the discontented masses to tap German resentment over the Versailles Treaty?"

Godin considered this. "Quite possibly. All right, then. It's 1952, and you know that a clumsy lab technician is going to ruin the cell cultures of Jonas Salk. The cure for poliomyelitis will be greatly delayed, perhaps by years.

Would you kill that innocent technician?"

A strange buzzing started in my head. I had a sense that Godin was toying with me, yet Peter Godin never wasted time with games.

"Thankfully, real life doesn't present us with those dilemmas," I said. "Only hindsight allows us to formulate them."

He smiled distantly. "I'm not so sure, Doctor. Hitler could have been stopped at Munich." Godin reached out and patted me on the arm. "Food for thought, anyway."

He turned and carefully negotiated his way around the corner.

I stood in the corridor, trying to read between the lines of what I'd heard.

Godin never wasted words. He hadn't been idly reflecting on history or morality. He had been talking quite frankly about murder. Justifiable murder, in his mind. I shook my head in disbelief. Godin had been talking about Fielding.

Fielding's murder was necessary, he was saying. Yielding was innocent, but be was interfering with a great good, and be had to be eliminated.

As I walked back toward my office, I realized I was shivering. No one had asked about my call to Washington. No one had mentioned my visit to Fielding's house. Not one word about Rachel Weiss. And three days off would give me plenty of time to speak to the president. I might even be able to fly to Washington. What the hell was going on?