"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

'There is none.' Harrington turned off the display and sat down gingerly. 'You're only half right. Quarks are generated as well, and confined within hadron-sized bags. On the interface of the field helium is created, which disperses as fast as it is formed. Under sustained nuclear or laser bombardment, of course, a fusion plasma envelope is produced, which decays when inputs are extinguished.'
'Jesus Christ,' said Berys Marshall. Her gentle, grandmotherly face was pale. 'You boys have been busy.'
DelFord regarded the ceiling. His thoughts leapt like chains of sparks.
'Cities and agricultural belts get a perimeter of bag generators,' he said. 'The standard infrared detection satellites monitor a possible ICBM barrage launch. Up go the shields. If the intelligence was incorrect, no harm done. Unless the bag field injures the people inside it. So it does, of course.' He sat up and stared at Sutton. 'Something happens to people under the brane barrier, something intolerable. And you want us to find out what it is.' He laughed incredulously. 'An altered state of consciousness. Little wonder you came to us, Dwayne. We're expendable, and we're experts in deliberate derangement. A convenient combination.'
'That's not true,' the astronaut said sharply. 'You're free to volunteer, as I did. The United States government doesn't -- '
'Oh, we'll volunteer all right, Hugh,' Delwyn Schauble told him softly. 'They know we can't pass up a chance like this. Total exclusion of ambient electromagnetic noise. That's what it is, isn't it, Dr Harrington?'
'Absolute interdiction,' he said. 'Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Including gravity waves.'
'A space drive?'
'No.' He drew back his lips unconsciously. 'Einstein's Equivalence postulate has been disproved. Our protected cities won't be flying off into space; the inertial frame -- '
'What does it do to people?' Bill asked the general. The room was utterly still.
'There is no observable effect whatsoever, detrimental or beneficial, upon animal test preparations,' Sutton said. 'Experiments with marine organisms like grunions, aquatic worms and oysters, which respond to the lunar periodicity, show a temporary confusion of life-cycle. Extensive reports will be made available to -- '
'What does it do to people?' delFord asked again.
'Anxiety. Hysteria. Delusions of leaving their bodies. Mystical trance. In some cases,' he said with retributive brutality, 'it drives them insane.'
'I see.' Bill closed his eyes, bent his chin to his folded hands. 'Out-of-body-experience.'
'Yes.' The general stood up, stretching his legs. 'Think of yourselves as guinea pigs if it pleases you, if it caters to your damned paranoia, but the truth is that you crazy loonies come closer to being experts on this son of a bitch than anyone else we've been able to locate who wasn't under lock and key. I read your last report, Bill, read it twice, carefully, and I tell you it distressed me. All of you people in this room. God Almighty, I know your track records. You could have been doing useful work, making significant contributions. Be that as it may. My superiors want you to take a shot at it. Someone has to make sense of it.' He seemed genuinely in the grip of powerful, confused emotions.
'Sure, Dwayne,' delFord said, aware of sudden compassion for the man. He sat up straighter and looked around the group. 'Here's an idea I'd like to try out on you, gang. Romantic versus Classical science.'
'Nice,' Tony said at once.
Anne Hawthorne, their British psychologist, looked at Bill sharply. She rolled over, plucked her sari across brown knees. 'I thought we'd got past binary, polar paradigms, Bill. Even Freud used a three-way system, and he had to keep replacing the parameters. And Lennox here wants six quarks for his _elements_.'
Tony Freestone shook his great, jowled head. 'The mind has an inescapable tendency to reduce to pairs. Maybe it's the cerebral bilateral asymmetry. Pursue that -- there's no reason why the dimensions need be seen as ends of a continuum, maybe they're orthogonal.'
Crisply, Alice Langer stated: 'For what it's worth, the distinction isn't new.' Her knowledge was encyclopedic; she tended, as a result, to the pedantic, even in the Grope Pit. 'There was a respected tradition of "romantic" chemistry as late as the nineteenth century. Charles C. Gillespie discussed it in relation to the Jacobin -- '
'It's a starter, Alice, I'm not looking for prizes for originality. Here's the sort of thing I had in mind. Classicism typically connotes a regime of well-ordered rules, unities, causality viewed as segmented chains, decorous generalities. While Romanticism, of course, is the affirmation -- '
Sutton, staring around him with growing choler, said sharply, 'What the hell are you maniacs babbling about?' He looked at his watch. 'The technicians will have the device set up by now. I suggest that we break up this merry antiquarian kaffeeklatsch and get to work.'
For the first time, delFord felt truly angry at the man. 'Dwayne, shut your mouth or get out. When you're in the Grope Pit and we're engaged in heuristic reciprocity, you contribute or you leave.'
In honest bafflement, Sutton said, 'We don't have time for philosophy.'
'General, at Bethesda we used similar techniques,' Lapp said. 'Conceptual block-busting, lateral search -- '
'Those methods are tactical,' Anne told him. She eyed the astronaut with some interest. 'Ours is strategic.'
The tension and hostility in the Pit eased. As if there had been no interruption, Alister Jerison said, 'The Romantic/Classic dichotomy emerged in a specific dialectical context. Romanticism was a last-ditch attempt by a malcontent intellectual elite to regain the imagined freedoms of feudalism.'
'Nonsense,' the Caltech physicist said, to everyone's surprise. 'Go back to the late Tom Kuhn's view; you might regard the normal conduct of scientific investigation as subject to the Classical constraints. Romanticism then emerges justifiably during the collapse of exhausted paradigms.'
'Courtly love!' Anne cried. 'The doomed, heroic quest for an object which by definition is out of reach. But isn't that the background to _all_ science now, not just during paradigm upheavals?' She glanced around the group. 'I mean, we don't just have experimental limitations any more. There's quantal uncertainty, chaotic doubling, Goedel's Proof. Emergent complexity. Our courtly quest is intrinsically unsatisfiable.'
'Okay,' Alister admitted heavily. 'But in any case ordered data only becomes knowledge, in the authentic sense, when it stands in meaningful relation to the active struggle for human liberation.' Sutton groaned. 'Romantic ideology imposed isolation on intellectuals. Classic culture was repressive, sure, but it remained social. The Romantic rebellion was decadent rather than liberatory precisely because it _rejected_ the social context.'
Bill delFord lifted his head. 'Dwayne, were your experimental subjects put under the shield singly or in groups?'
The general blinked. 'Why, each man went in alone, of course. It's standard procedure; minimises risks to personnel, reduces the variables under consideration -- '
'I thought so. Good old positivist lab technique.' Rising, Bill opened the soundproofed door. 'Okay, gang, that's it for the morning. Thanks for your help.' The team immediately got to their feet and straggled out. None of them continued the fierce debate. DelFord stopped Anne Hawthorne, holding her suntanned arm. 'I'd like to try Hugh, you, and me under the field simultaneously. Are you game, Anne?'
'Fine.' The woman looked slightly nervous, but she smiled as she glanced across at the waiting astronaut.
'I presume the dimensions of the field are adequate for three people,' Bill said to Harrington.
'Certainly,' the physicist said, taken aback by the abrupt change of pace. 'It's an oblate spheroid four metres high, with the generator at one of the foci. We didn't intend the subject to be claustrophobic.'
Testily, the general said: '_I'm_ claustrophobic, goddamn it and you're screwing the lid tighter every minute. Would I offend you too grossly if I ask for an explanation?'
'Three heads are better than one,' delFord told him.
'Bill, that's not a working hypothesis, it's a blind shot in the dark. You don't lock three amnesiacs together to speed their recovery.'
'How do you know?'
'I've seen men blundering around in battle shock.'
'And do your psychiatrists treat them with solitary confinement?'
'Hmmm. Yes, if they become violent -- as they often do.'
'That's not therapy, it's staff insurance. Nor did you mention violence as a side-effect. My best guess right now is that Alister hit the nail on the head. Your methods of investigation destroyed the social context your experimental subjects needed to sustain their sanity. The gluon field imposes more savage quarantine on its victims than human beings have ever experienced. We're all linked together, Dwayne. Profoundly. Organically. This field severs that link, and your subjects bleed to death.'
Sutton grunted in disgust. 'Jung. Lilly. I've read my share, Bill, and there's not a single operational definition in the whole mystical box of tricks. Nothing testable, not one item you can put on a bench and measure.'
'We'll provide your test, Dwayne. And if I'm wrong,' he said with a grin that failed to convince any of them, 'you can tie us up in satin ribbons and pack us off to the closest funny farm as a matched set.'
On the way to the main entrance, delFord stuck his head round his office door and spoke briefly with Janine. Then they went out into the cooler midday air. Waves crashed behind them, at the foot of the vast bluff. They crossed the parking apron and left the paving, following a gentle grassy incline to the mandatory geodesic domes half-hidden in trees and shrubbery. A bird sang out; it, or its fellow, left a leafy branch and veered off into the grey sky. A large armoured vehicle stood outside one of the black domes, ugly in outline against the sombre solar-energy hexagons. On its roof, a maser mirror whirled. Sutton gestured to a patient, alert serviceman; they conferred in low tones. The general brusquely waved the others on to the entrance.
Against God's and Murphy's express ordinance, the Army technicians had evidently experienced no difficulties in getting the device installed and phase-tested within the echoing barn. In among the litter of hastily cleared equipment, the gluon field was a prodigious bauble. Like a great curved mirror, an impossible egg of mercury, it rested without compressive distortion from gravity under the bolder arc of the Fuller dome. Bill gazed at it, dazzled, expecting it to roll from its unstable position and break into a myriad smaller balls of spinning light.
Abruptly it was gone, replaced by a drab skeletal construction of bolted structural steel, an ovoid of wire mesh, a neat matt-finish box on a stanchion at one focus.
'It's activated and deactivated by a quartz crystal clock,' Lennox Harrington told him. 'Naturally, there's no way we can control it externally while the gluon field is energised. Our standard run is five minutes. You can alter that to suit yourselves -- and override the programming from inside if the strain becomes intolerable.'