Prisoners of Tomorrow (91 page)

“Was that where you learned about engineering?” Kath asked.

“That came later—after I’d been on the ship for some time. At first I was with the infantry . . . saw some combat in Africa. I spent most of the voyage in the Engineer Corps though . . . up until about a year or two back.”

“What made you sign up for the trip?”

Colman shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess there didn’t seem much risk of making any worse a mess of things than I had already.”

Kath laughed and rolled back to stare up at the ceiling. “You’re just like us, aren’t you,” she said. “You don’t know where you came from either.”

“That happened with a lot of people,” Colman told her. “Things were so messed up after the war. . . . Does it matter?”

“I suppose not,” Kath said. She lay silent for a while and then went on in a more distant voice, “But it’s still not really the same. I mean, it must be wonderful to have actually been born there . . . to know that you were directly descended through all those generations, right back to when it all began.”

“What?”

“Life! Earth life. You’re a part of it. Isn’t that an exciting feeling? It has to be.”

“So are you,” Colman insisted. “Chironian genes were dealt from the same deck as all the rest. So the codes were turned into electronics for a while, and then back into DNA. So what? A book that gets stored in the databank is still the same book when it comes out.”

“Technically you’re right,” Kath agreed. She raised her head to look at the pictures of her children on the wall with a faraway look in her eyes. “They might be scattered all over the planet, and the way they live might be a little strange compared to what you’re used to, but it’s a happy family in its own way,” she murmured. “But it’s still not really the same. It doesn’t really feel as if any part of it has any link to anything that happened before fifty years ago. Don’t you think it’s . . . oh, I don’t know, kind of a shame somehow?”

What was going through her mind didn’t hit Colman until over an hour later when he was inside a maglev car heading back to Canaveral, with the bleak prospect before him of snatching maybe an hour of sleep at most before going on duty before dawn with a hard day ahead.

Family?

Earth?

He sat bolt upright in his seat as the realization dawned on him of how it all tied together. Maybe Swyley did have it all figured out after all.

So
that
was why somebody from Chiron would want to get mixed up with a Terran!

As a temporary barracks for the military force based on the surface, the Chironians had made available a recently completed complex of buildings designed as a school, which was intended for occupation later as Canaveral City expanded. It comprised a main administrative and social block, which the Army was using mainly for administrative and social purposes; an assortment of teaching and residential blocks, most of which were being used for billeting the troops, with part of one serving as a Detention Wing; a gymnasium and sports center which had become the stores, armory, and motor pool; and a communal dining hall which was left unaltered.

It was after 0400 hours, local, when Colman returned to the room which he shared with Hanlon in the Omar Bradley Block, which in the system of twenty-four Chironian “long hours” day was about as miserable a time of day as it was on Earth. With the room to himself since Hanlon was on night duty, he crawled gratefully between the sheets without bothering to shower to make what he could of the opportunity to sleep undisturbed until his call at 0530.

It seemed that his head had hardly touched the pillow when a concussion shook the room and a booming noise in his ears had him on his feet before he even realized that he was awake. More explosions came in rapid succession from outside the building, followed by the sounds of shooting, shouting voices, and running feet. Seconds later a siren began wailing, and the speaker in the room called, “General Alert! General Alert! A breakout is being attempted from the Detention Wing. All officers and men report to General Alert stations.”

What followed was a General Foul-up.

Colman found Sirocco in the Orderly Room, acting on his own initiative after receiving conflicting orders from Colonel Wesserman’s staff. Sirocco ordered most of the D Company personnel to secure the block against intrusion and cordoned off the routes past it toward the outside. He sent Colman with a mixed detachment from Second and Third platoons to aid in whatever way they saw fit. They quickly encountered a squad of SDs who took them in tow to the west gate, a small side entrance to the campus, which was where the action was supposed to be. Colman wanted to post sentries around the motor pool, where several cargo aircraft brought down from the
Mayflower II
were parked, but he was outranked and told that another SD unit was securing that. Then all the lights went out.

Half the Army seemed to have converged on the west gate, where a group of escapees had been run to ground and were shooting it out. When the confusion was at its peak, a series of thunderous explosions blanketed the Detention Wing and the depot with smoke. When the smoke cleared, one of the transporters was gone. No one had been guarding the motor pool.

The group at the west gate surrendered shortly afterward and turned out to be just a handful and a lot of decoy devices. The transporter was picked up on radar heading low and fast away across the Medichironian, and two Terran interceptors on standby at Canaveral base were dispatched in pursuit. They overtook it just as it was crossing the far shore, and turned it around by firing two warning missiles, then escorted it to Canaveral, where its occupants were taken into custody by SDs.

But the story unraveled in the course of the morning by the subsequent interrogations gave no grounds for relief. Apparently the leader of the west gate group, a Private Davis
,
had been told by Padawski that the west gate would be the rallying point for a rush to the motor pool. Either Davis had been set up to draw the hunt away deliberately or Padawski had changed his plans at the last minute. Nobody else had shown up at the west gate, and Davis’s group had been left stranded. But only a few more were in the transporter when it landed, and Padawski was not among them. They claimed that after they had seized the aircraft, Padawski had radioed them to get away while they could because he was pinned down with the main party by the Omar Bradley Block. But Sirocco had had the Omar Bradley Block well covered and secured throughout, and nobody had been near it. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Padawski and twenty-three others, all heavily armed, had melted away.

Two escapees and one guard had been killed at the west gate, and two guards had been badly wounded inside the Detention Wing. Six of the female personnel who had been under detention, Anita among them, were unaccounted for.

“It was one glorious fuck-up from start to finish,” Sirocco declared, tugging at his moustache as he and Colman discussed the events late that evening. “Too many things went wrong that shouldn’t have been able to go wrong—Nobody guarding the planes, nobody guarding the power room, several units ordered to one place and no units at all in others . . . And how did they get hold of the guns? I don’t like it, Steve. I don’t like it at all. There’s a very funny smell to the whole business.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Even in his short time at the university near Franklin, Jerry Pernak had learned that Chironian theoretical and experimental physics had departed significantly from the mainstream being pursued on Earth. The Chironian scientists had not so much advanced past their terrestrial counterparts; rather, as perhaps was not surprising in view of the absence on Chiron of traditional habits of thought or authorities whose venerable opinions could not be challenged until after they were dead, they had gone off in a totally unexpected direction. And some of the things they had stumbled across on their way had left Pernak astounded.

Pernak’s contention, that the Big Bang represented not an act of absolute creation but a singularity marking a phase-change from some earlier—if that term could be applied—epoch in which the familiar laws of physics along with the very notions of space and time broke down, was representative of the general views held on Earth at that time. Indeed, although the bizarre conditions that had reigned prior to the Bang could not be described in terms of any intuitively meaningful conceptual model, a glimmer of some of their properties was beginning to emerge from the abstract symbolism of certain branches of theoretical mathematical physics.

The bewildering proliferation first of baryons and mesons, and later the quarks, which were supposed to simplify them, that had plagued studies of the structure of matter to the end of the twentieth century had been reduced to an orderly hierarchy of “generations” of particles. Each generation contained just eight particles: six quarks and two leptons. The first generation comprised the “up” and “down” quarks, each appearing in the three color-charge variants peculiar to the strong nuclear force to give six in all; the electron; and the electron-type neutrino. The second generation was made up of the “strange” and “charmed” quarks, each of them again appearing in three possible colors; the muon; and the muon-type neutrino. The third generation contained the “top” and “bottom” quarks; the tau; and the tau-type neutrino; and so it went on.

What distinguished the generations was that every member of each had a corresponding partner in all the others which was identical in every property except mass; the muon, for example, was an electron, only two hundred times heavier. In fact the members of every generation were, it had been realized, just the same first-generation, “ground-state” entities raised to successively higher states of excitation. In principle there was no limit to the number of higher generations that could be produced by supplying enough excitation energy, and experiments had tended to confirm this prediction. Nevertheless, all the exotic variations created could be accounted for by the same eight ground-state quarks and leptons, plus their respective antiparticles, together with the field quanta through which they interacted. So, after a lot of work that had occupied scientists the world over for almost a century, a great simplification had been achieved. But were quarks and leptons the end of the story?

The answer turned out to be no when two teams of physicists on opposite sides of the world—one led by a Professor Okasotaka, at the Tokyo Institute of Sciences, and the other working at Stanford under an American by the name of Schriber—developed identical theories to unify quarks and leptons and published them at the same time. It turned out that the sixteen entities and “anti-entities” of the ground-state generation could be explained by just two components which in themselves possessed surprisingly few innate properties: Each had a spin angular momentum of one-half unit, and one had an electrical charge of one-third while the other had none. The other properties which had been thought of as fundamental, such as quark color charge, quark “flavor,” and even mass, to the astonishment of some, became seen instead as consequences of the ways in which combinations of these two basic components were
arranged,
much as a melody follows from an arrangement of notes but cannot be expressed as a property of a single note.

Thus there were two components, each of which had an “anticomponent.” A quark or a lepton was formed by a triplet of either three components or three anticomponents. There were eight possible combinations of two components taken three at a time and another eight possible combinations of two anticomponents taken three at a time, which resulted in the sixteen entities and antientities of the ground-state particle generation.

With two types of component or anticomponent to choose from for each triplet, a triplet could comprise either three of a kind of one type, or two of one kind plus one of the other. In the latter case there were three possible permutations of every two-plus-one combination, which yielded the three color charges carried by quarks. The three-of-a-kind combinations could be arranged in only one way and corresponded to leptons, which was why leptons could not carry a color charge and did not react to the strong nuclear force.

Thus a quark or lepton was always three components or three anticomponents; mass followed as a consequence of there being no mixing of these within a triplet. Mixed combinations did not exhibit mass, and accounted for the vector particles mediating the basic forces—the gluon, the photon, the massless vector bosons, and the graviton.

Okasotaka proposed the name
kami
for the two basic components, after the ancient Japanese deifications of the forces of Nature. The Japanese gods had possessed two souls—one gentle,
nigi-mi-tama
and one violent,
ara-mi-tama—
and, accordingly, Okasotaka christened his two species of
kami “nigions”
and
“araons,”
which a committee on international standards solemnly ratified and enshrined into the officially recognized nomenclature of physics. Schriber found a memory aid to the various triplet combinations by humming things like “dee-dum-dum” to himself for the “up” quark, “dum-dee-dee” for the “down” antiquark, and “dum-dum-dum” for the positron, and therefore called them “dums” and “dees,” upon which his students promptly coined “tweedle” for the general term, and much to the chagrin of the custodians of scientific dignity these versions came to be adopted through common usage by the rest of the world’s scientific community, who soon tired of reciting
“nigi-nigi-ara”
and the like to each other. The scientists were less receptive to Schriber’s claim that Quan-dum Mechanics had at last been unified with Relativi-dee.

Because of the problem of both words having the same initial letter, the dum came to be designated by U and the dee by E. The dum carried a one-third charge, and the dee carried none. Two dums and a dee made the up quark, its three possible color charges being represented by the three possible permutations, UUE, UEU, and EUU. Similarly two dees and a dum yielded the down antiquark in its three possible colors as UEE, EUE, and EEU; in the same way two “antidums” and an “antidee” gave the up antiquark; and two antidees and an antidum, the down quark. Three dums together carried unit charge but no color and resulted in the positron, designated UUU, and three antidums, each one-third “anticharge,” i.e., negative, made up the normal electron, UUU. Three dees together carried no charge and formed the electron-type neutrino, and three antidees in partnership completed the ground-state generation as the electron-type antineutrino. It followed that “antitweedles” didn’t necessarily give an antiparticle, and tweedles didn’t always make a particle. Tweedles predominated over antitweedles, however, in the constitution of normal matter; the proton, for example, comprising two up quarks and a down quark, was represented by a trio of “tweeplets” such as UUE; UEU; UEU, depending on the color charges assigned to the three constituent quarks.