COMMITTEE
PROCESS
The cherry trees are
in bloom in Washington DC, and Gregor perspires in the summer heat.
He has grown used to the relative cool of London, and this
unaccustomed change of climate has disoriented him. Jet lag is a
thing of the past—a small mercy—but there are still adjustments to
make. Because the disk is flat, the daylight source—polar flares
from an accretion disk inside the axial hole, the scientists call
it, which signifies nothing to most people—grows and shrinks the
same wherever you stand.
There’s a concrete
sixties-vintage office block with a conference suite furnished in
burnt umber and orange, chromed chairs and Kandinsky prints on the
walls: all very seventies. Gregor waits outside the suite until the
buzzer sounds and the receptionist looks up from behind her IBM
typewriter and says, “You can go in now, they’re expecting
you.”
Gregor goes in. It’s
an occupational hazard, but by no means the worst, in his line of
work.
“Have a seat.” It’s
Seth Brundle, Gregor’s divisional head—a grey-looking functionary,
more adept at office backstabbing than field-expedient
assassinations. His cover, like Gregor’s, is an innocuous-sounding
post in the Office of Technology Assessment. In fact, both he and
Gregor work for a different government agency, although the
notional task is the same: identify technological threats and stamp
on them before they emerge.
Brundle is not alone
in the room. He proceeds with the introductions: “Greg Samsa is our
London station chief and specialist in scientific intelligence.
Greg, this is Marcus.” The bald, thin-faced German in the smart
suit bobs his head and smiles behind his horn-rimmed glasses.
“Civilian consultant.” Gregor mistrusts him on sight. Marcus is a
defector—a former Stasi spook, from back before the Brezhnev purges
of the mid-sixties. Which puts an interesting complexion on this
meeting.
“Murray Fox, from
Langley.”
“Hi,” says Gregor,
wondering just what kind of insane political critical mass Stone is
trying to assemble: Langley and Brundle’s parent outfit aren’t even
on speaking terms, to say the least.
“And another civilian
specialist, Dr. Sagan.” Greg nods at the doctor, a thin guy with
sparkling brown eyes and hippyish long hair. “Greg’s got something
to tell us in person,” says Brundle. “Something very interesting he
picked up in London. No sources please, Greg.”
“No sources,” Gregor
echoes. He pulls out a chair and sits down. Now that he’s here, he
supposes he’ll just have to play the role Brundle assigned to him
in the confidential briefing he read on the long flight home. “We
have word from an unimpeachable HUMINT resource that the Russians
have—” He coughs into his fist. “Excuse me.” He glances at Brundle.
“Okay to talk about COLLECTION RUBY?”
“They’re all
cleared,” Brundle says dryly. “That’s why it says ‘joint committee’
on the letterhead.”
“I see. My invitation
was somewhat terse.” Gregor stifles a sigh that seems to say,
All I get is a most urgent recall; how am I
meant to know what’s going on and who knows what? “So why
are we here?”
“Think of it as
another collective analysis board,” says Fox, the man from the CIA.
He doesn’t look enthused.
“We’re here to find
out what’s going on, with the benefit of some intelligence
resources from the other side of the curtain.”
Dr. Sagan, who has
been listening silently with his head cocked to one side like a
very intelligent blackbird, raises an eyebrow.
“Yes?” asks
Brundle.
“I, uh, would you
mind explaining that to me? I haven’t been on one of these
committees before.”
No indeed, thinks Gregor. It’s a miracle Sagan ever
passed his political vetting: he’s too friendly by far with some of
those Russian astronomer guys who are clearly under the thumb of
the KGB’s First Department. And he’s expressed doubts—muted, of
course—about the thrust of current foreign policy, which is a
serious no-no under the McNamara administration.
“A CAB is a joint
committee feeding into the Central Office of Information’s external
bureaus on behalf of a blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled from
the intelligence community,” Gregor recites in a bored tone of
voice. “Stripped of the bullshit, we’re a board of wise men who’re
meant to rise above narrow bureaucratic lines of engagement and
prepare a report for the Office of Technology Assessment to pass on
to the director of Central Intelligence. It’s not meant to reflect
the agenda of any one department, but to be a Delphi board
synergizing our lateralities. Set up after the Cuban fiasco to make
sure that we never again get backed into that kind of corner by
accidental groupthink. One of the rules of the CAB process is that
it has to include at least one dissident: unlike the commies, we
know we’re not perfect.” Gregor glances pointedly at Fox, who has
the good sense to stay silent.
“Oh, I see,” Sagan
says hesitantly. With more force: “So that’s why I’m here? Is that
the only reason you’ve dragged me away from Cornell?”
“Of course not,
Doctor,” oozes Brundle, casting Gregor a dirty look. The East
German defector, Wolff, maintains a smug silence: I am above all this. “We’re here to come up with
policy recommendations for dealing with the bigger picture. The
much-bigger picture.”
“The Builders,” says
Fox. “We’re here to determine what our options look like if and
when they show up, and to make recommendations about the
appropriate course of action. Your background in, uh, SETI
recommended you.”
Sagan looks at him in
disbelief. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he
says.
“Eh?”
“We won’t have any
choice,” the young professor explains with a wry smile. “Does a
termite mound negotiate with a nuclear superpower?”
Brundle leans
forward. “That’s a rather radical position, isn’t it? Surely
there’ll be some room for maneuver? We know this is an artificial
construct, but presumably the builders are still living people.
Even if they’ve got green skin and six eyes.”
“Oh. My. God.” Sagan
leans forward, his face in his hands. After a moment, Gregor
realizes that he’s laughing.
“Excuse me.” Gregor
glances round. It’s the German defector, Wolff, or whatever he’s
called. “Herr Professor, would you care to explain what you find so
funny?”
After a moment Sagan
leans back, looks at the ceiling, and sighs. “Imagine a single, a
forty-five rpm record with a center hole punched out. The inner
hole is half an astronomical unit—46 million miles—in radius. The
outer edge is of unknown radius, but probably about two and a half
AUs—245 million miles. The disk’s thickness is unknown—seismic
waves are reflected off a mirrorlike rigid layer eight hundred
miles down—but we can estimate it at eight thousand miles, if its
density averages out at the same as Earth’s. Surface gravity is the
same as our original planet, and since we’ve been transplanted here
and survived we have learned that it’s a remarkably hospitable
environment for our kind of life; only on the large scale does it
seem different.”
The astronomer sits
up. “Do any of you gentlemen have any idea just how preposterously
powerful whoever built this structure is?”
“How do you mean,
‘preposterously powerful’?” asks Brundle, looking more interested
than annoyed.
“A colleague of mine,
Dan Alderson, did the first analysis. I think you might have done
better to pull him in, frankly. Anyway, let me itemize: item number
one is escape velocity.” Sagan holds up a bony finger. “Gravity on
a disk does not diminish in accordance with the inverse square law,
the way it does on a spherical object like the planet we came from.
We have roughly Earth-like gravity, but to escape, or to reach
orbit, takes tremendously more speed. Roughly two hundred times
more, in fact. Rockets that from Earth could reach the moon just
fall out of the sky after running out of fuel. Next item:” another
finger. “The area and mass of the disk. If it’s double-sided, it
has a surface area equal to billions and billions of Earths. We’re
stuck in the middle of an ocean full of alien continents, but we
have no guarantee that this hospitable environment is anything
other than a tiny oasis in a world of strangeness.”
The astronomer pauses
to pour himself a glass of water, then glances round the table. “To
put it in perspective, gentlemen, this world is so big that, if one
in every hundred stars had an Earth-like planet, this single
structure could support the population of our entire home galaxy. As for the mass—this structure
is as massive as fifty thousand suns. It is, quite bluntly,
impossible: as-yet-unknown physical forces must be at work to keep
it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole.
The repulsive force, whatever it is, is strong enough to hold the
weight of fifty thousand suns: think about that for a moment,
gentlemen.”
At that point Sagan
looks around and notices the blank stares. He chuckles
ruefully.
“What I mean to say
is, this structure is not permitted by the laws of physics as we
understand them. Because it clearly does exist, we can draw some conclusions, starting
with the fact that our understanding of physics is incomplete.
Well, that isn’t news: we know we don’t have a unified theory of
everything. Einstein spent thirty years looking for one, and didn’t
come up with it.
“But, secondly.” He
looks tired for a moment, aged beyond his years. “We used to think
that any extraterrestrial beings we might communicate with would be
fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us, albeit with better
technology. I think that’s the frame of mind you’re still working
in. Back in ’sixty-one we had a brainstorming session at a
conference, trying to work out just how big an engineering project
a spacefaring civilization might come up with. Freeman Dyson, from
Princeton, came up with about the biggest thing any of us could
imagine: something that required us to imagine dismantling Jupiter
and turning it into habitable real estate.
“This disk is about a
hundred million times bigger than Dyson’s sphere. And that’s before
we take into account the time factor.”
“Time?” Echoes Fox
from Langley, sounding confused.
“Time.” Sagan smiles
in a vaguely disconnected way. “We’re nowhere near our original
galactic neighborhood and whoever moved us here, they didn’t bend
the laws of physics far enough to violate the speed limit. It takes
light about 160,000 years to cross the distance between where we
used to live, and our new stellar neighborhood, the Lesser
Magellanic Cloud. Which we have fixed, incidentally, by measuring
the distance to known Cepheid variables, once we were able to take
into account the measurable blue shift of infalling light and the
fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly and seem to
have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred
thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That’s about
four times as long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We’re
fossils, an archaeology experiment or something. Our relevance to
our abductors is not as equals, but as subjects in some kind of
vast experiment. And what the purpose of the experiment is, I can’t
tell you. I’ve got some guesses, but . . .”
Sagan shrugs, then
lapses into silence. Gregor catches Brundle’s eye, and Brundle
shakes his head very slightly. Don’t spill the
beans. Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he’s in a room with a
CIA spook and an East German defector, but he doesn’t need to know
about the Alienation Service yet.
“Well, that’s as may
be,” says Fox, dropping words like stones into the hollow silence
at the table. “But it begs the question: what are we going to tell
the DCI?”
“I suggest,” says
Gregor, “that we start by reviewing COLLECTION RUBY.” He nods at
Sagan. “Then, maybe when we’re all up to speed on that, we’ll have a better idea of whether there’s
anything useful we can tell the DCI.”