Transgression Page 4

  “Damien’s an exercise freak,” Ari said. “He’s got a black belt in judo.”

  “Not judo,” Dr. West said. “Tae kwan do. And karate. But those aren’t for exercise, they’re for discipline.”

  Rivka smiled to herself. Dr. West was definitely a bit...different.

  “So, Damien,” Ari said, “when are we going to get the device working?”

  Dr. West shrugged his thick shoulders. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next year. That last shot really hammered the components.”

  “My fault,” Ari said. “There was a singular solution that I missed.”

  “Whatever. I don’t have many spare capacitors.”

  Dov rubbed his hands together. “My friends, shall we leave the physicists to their laboratory? The Burnt House awaits!”

  Rivka and Jessica both nodded agreement.

  Jessica gave a little wave to Ari and Dr. West. “If you men don’t blast yourselves into the last millennium, we’ll see you next week. Same Bat-time; same Bat-station.”

  It wasn’t very original, but for some reason, everybody laughed.

  * * *

  Rivka

  That evening, as Dov’s car puttered along a narrow two-lane highway back to the dig, Rivka sat hunched in the back seat. In the front passenger seat, Jessica suddenly tittered.

  “Did I miss a joke?” Dov asked.

  Jessica began chanting in a singsong voice. “Ari and Rivka, planting a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

  “Mah zot omeret?” Dov asked, then switched to English. “Something is wrong with your voice, Jessica?”

  Jessica peered over her left shoulder at the back seat. “Come clean, Rivka! What were you really doing with Ari this morning? What took so long?”

  “We were planting trees,” Rivka said. “And I’ve got the body odor to prove it.”

  “Surrrrrrre,” Jessica said. “I know another way to work up a sweat.”

  Dov wagged a finger at Jessica. “Rivka is a very nice girl,” he said. “And besides, she has a boyfriend back in the States, yes, Rivka?”

  Rivka grunted something, hoping the engine noise would transmute the sound into whatever Dov wanted to hear.

  “Well, if you’ve got a boyfriend back home, maybe you’d better tell Ari about it,” Jessica said. “I think he likes you, Rivka. You’re just his type.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rivka said. “You could have gone tree-planting too, if you hadn’t been sleeping in.”

  “If you say so,” Jessica said in an airy voice. She turned on the radio. Scratchy music filled the small car.

  Rivka leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Pay no attention. Jessica was probably just jealous that she had missed out on a good time.

  Ari was a nice guy, but Rivka considered him off-limits for one simple reason. It was a good bet he didn’t believe in God. And it was a given that he didn’t believe in Yeshua. Whatever she did, she wasn’t going to get involved with someone who didn’t share her faith.

  Jessica had to be imagining things. But if she turned out to be right, there was an easy way to solve the problem. Hey, Ari, guess what? I’m a Messianic Jew. That would nip it in the bud, wouldn’t it?

  Rivka felt her neck growing hot. Did she really want to tell Ari that? If she told him, he’d probably freak out. And then he’d tell Dov and Jessica, and they’d think she had been deceiving them. Which, by her silence, she had been.

  Great. She closed her eyelids, pressed both temples with her hands, and sighed. Just great. If it became necessary to tell Ari, she would do it.

  Just not right yet.

  Chapter 4

  Ari

  ARI STUDIED THE TEXT OF the e-mail message he had just written. Should he or should he not include the part about Rivka? Would Yoni read between the lines and see how crazy he was about Rivka? After five minutes of intense thought, he decided to leave it in. What harm could it do?

  He clicked on the Send button with the mouse, then read the message again.

  From:akazan@einstein.huji.ac.il (Ari Kazan)

  To:jon34@math.ucsd.edu (Jonathan Stern)

  Shalom, Yoni:

  We are making progress on Damien’s wormhole device. He tells me that he has nearly finished rebuilding the power supplies and we should not expect a repeat of last week’s mishap. I think you and I were partly to blame for attempting that nearly singular configuration. I am sending an attached file with my guess at the B-field we should aim for next. What do you think? Your guess is probably better than mine. Let me know ASAP, since we expect to be firing the machine early next week. If it works, then maybe we’ll see you last year. :)

  By the way, my archaeologist cousin brought a couple of his colleagues up to Yerushalayim last weekend. You may know one of them, Rivka Meyers, since she is from San Diego and studied at UCSD. She says that her temple is Beth Simcha. Do you know her, by any chance?

  Regards,

  Ari

  * * *

  Ari

  When Ari turned on his computer the next day, a flashing icon notified him that he had e-mail in his in-box. He clicked on it and found that he had twelve messages. Eighth on the list was the reply from Yoni. Ari clicked on it first.

  From: jon34@math.ucsd.edu (Jonathan Stern)

  To: akazan@einstein.huji.ac.il (Ari Kazan)

  hi ari:

  >I am sending an attached file with my guess at the B-field

  >we should aim for next. What do you think? Your guess is

  >probably better than mine.

  your equation 17 is wrong there is a sign error and the solution is even more singular than that last one. i suggest you try it anyway. what can go wrong, you're not going to blow up the univers you know. keep me posted i have a student looking at this problem and he has some ideas for sovling numercally. we have some;cray timne saved up at the suprecompjting centre. dont expect results beofre you fire tho.

  >If it works, then maybe we’ll see you last year. :)

  heehee, right. in stokcholm

  >She says that her temple is Beth Simcha. Do you know her,

  >by any chance?

  please tell me this is a joke. beth simcha is a messianic jewish sysnagogue here in sd. they are very conversionary types and get in the news once on a while wth their antics. tellyour cousin to crcuify her, ok?

  bye4now

  yoni

  Ari stared at the final paragraph. Yoni’s typing was always atrocious, but he never got his facts wrong. If he said Beth Simcha was messianic, then it was. That crack about crucifying her was typical exaggeration. Yoni always talked like that, but he was actually a pacifist and a gentle soul.

  A hard knot formed in Ari’s gut. He clenched his fist and slammed it down on the table beside him.

  Ari Kazan, you stupid meshuggener! The first girl you fall for since high school, and she’s a Christian!

  * * *

  Damien

  Saturday night. Damien smiled. His wife had left him, among other reasons, because he thought Saturday night was for doing physics. Tonight would be the Saturday night to end all Saturday nights. Literally.

  Damien drummed his fingers impatiently while he waited for the power supplies to charge. The Sabbath had ended an hour ago, and power had come back on in the lab shortly thereafter. That was how the Israeli government kept the ultraorthodox happy, by restricting the rights of everyone else.

  All that would end soon. If this worked, there soon wouldn’t be any electricity to shut off on the Sabbath. No generators. No wires. No engineers. And especially, no more bleeping physicists. Damien grinned. I’m putting myself out of a job.

  He flipped up the screen on his personal laptop and double-clicked on an icon on his desktop. It was password-protected. A dialog box popped up, requesting the password. He typed it in. A document opened on the screen—the Unabomber Manifesto.

  Damien had read this document a hundred times. Each time, he found pleasure in the tightly reasoned logic, the two hundred and thirty-two paragraphs, numbered as if
they were theorems. Damien had highlighted the most important ones. He scrolled through the file, picking out his favorites with a practiced eye.

  1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

  50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth.

  121. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts.

  140. We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in a such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether.

  166. The factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc.

  185. As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society—well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing you have to sacrifice another.

  202. It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the system without using some modern technology. If nothing else they must use the communications media to spread their message. But they should use modern technology for only one purpose: to attack the technological system.

  Damien leaned back in his chair. The Unabomber’s logic was flawless. It was his execution that was wrong. If he had studied his relativity theory and left the bomb-making to the chemists, he might have gotten somewhere. Ironically, he had even nibbled at the solution, and yet missed it. Damien scrolled down a bit more. There! You had it, you fool, and you missed it!

  211. In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that were about equally “advanced”: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of those civilizations remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at that time; historians have their theories, but these are only speculation.

  Damien scratched at the back of his neck. The answer should be obvious. Europe was Christian; the other three civilizations were not. Christianity in the late Middle Ages was in the process of inventing science. 3

  The Greeks had made a stab at it, but they were too theoretical. Real science was based on experiment, not theory. Not to mention, they had this weird notion about time being cyclic. Of course, that ruled out the idea of progress, of evolution in thought.

  The Jews had the right idea about time, that the universe had a beginning, that things were changing, developing, improving. Not to mention they were big on order and reason. But they didn’t know a thing about math.

  Somehow the Christians had picked up the worst of both Greeks and Jews. The Christians had screwed up the world, first with their nut-ball morality plays, and second by inventing scientific method.

  It wasn’t that science was bad. Damien liked science. The problem was that science caused technology to move forward. In turn, technology pushed forward science. Positive feedback. Bad stuff. And technology was screwing up the world.

  Nobody wanted to admit it, but the Unabomber was right. Half right, anyway. Right about technology. Missed the boat on religion.

  Too late for that now. What good would it do to cut off a few branches? The thing to do was to get at the root. Historically speaking, you couldn’t have science without Christianity. And you couldn’t have Christianity without the apostle Paul.

  Damien had read a book on it. Most people thought Jesus set up the show. Well, they were wrong. Jesus was just a nice little Jewish rabbi kind of guy who got himself killed. Then Paul went and made up all that stuff about the resurrection and communion and all that morality garbage about doing unto others.

  Get rid of Paul, and you would shut it down. All the way down.

  A beeping sound interrupted Damien’s thoughts. He closed the file and went to check the power supplies. If Ari was right, they wouldn’t need a huge current, but they would need a high voltage for the initial transient phase—a few hundred kilovolts. Damien didn’t fully understand the theory. As an experimentalist, all he had to do was make the thing work. In his field, pulsed-power physics, nobody was better at doing exactly that.

  The instruments passed his visual check. He went to the PC monitoring the experiment. Before making a shot, he always ran three diagnostics. The first two checked out. The third registered a hair high. Damien nudged one of the dials down, then rechecked everything. Good. Now throw the switch, and see what breaks this time.

  Damien pressed the mouse button.

  A loud bang rattled the lab. That was normal. You fired a gigawatt or so of power, even for a few microseconds, you were bound to get some noise. From now on, it would be very quiet. Given the high Q of this system, the steady-state power requirements were only a few hundred watts. Ari was a genius—give him credit for that.

  The monitor showed the realtime waveform of the differential voltage between the two Rogowski coils. According to Ari’s theory, this was proportional to the length of the closed timelike loop in spacetime. If the waveform showed zero, within the experimental noise, then the experiment had failed. The problem would be determining whether it was exactly zero.

  If it were nonzero, then it would be tiny—on the order of the Planck time, a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

  Give or take.

  But it wouldn’t stay tiny. A positive feedback mechanism kept it growing exponentially in time. In a few hours, if the thing worked, the wormhole would have tunneled back in time by a full nanosecond, at which point Damien’s instruments could measure it. Thereafter, the time tunnel would expand steadily, doubling every few minutes until Damien turned off the feedback mechanism. At that point it would freeze, locking in to whatever point in the past Damien wanted.

  He had chosen Friday, May 27, A.D. 57.

  The reason was very simple. On that date, Paul of Tarsus came riding into Jerusalem. 4 Damien had looked it up in a book. That marked the beginning of the single week in Paul’s life when you could pinpoint his location to within a few meters at several different points on the time line. Damien had worked it all out on a chart. A no-brainer.

  Pretty soon, Paul would be a no-brainer too, if this experiment worked out.

  At the moment, of course, nothing showed on the monitor. Damien checked the time. Barely after nine. Ari wouldn’t come in until tomorrow morning. If the beast worked, Damien would be gone by then. And if it didn’t, he would have learned something.

  He kept a cot at the other end of the lab, which he used occasionally when he had to baby-sit experiments. He set his alarm for 4 A.M. Until then, the signal would be undetectable, so why worry about it?

  Damien stretched out on the cot and closed his eyes.

  Who knew? Tomorrow might be the last day of the rest of his life. Or rather, everybody else’s life.

  Chapter 5

  Rivka

  RIVKA LEANED BACK IN HER chair, wondering what had gotten into Ari. He had been distant through the whole meal, leaving Dov and Jessica and her to do most of the talking. Last weekend, Ari had been quiet, but he had at least been there. Now he might as well be on Mars. His face seemed closed, and he picked at his food, ignoring the excited talk about Rivka’s mosaic.

  Jessica considered the mosaic the find of the summer for the entire dig. Dov thought it might be the find of the season for all of Israel. So far, they had uncovered nearly a third of it, revealing the hands and arms and lower bodies of two persons. The dating was uncertain, but some on the dig speculated early second century.

  Rivka felt exhausted after a week of intense work. She simply lacked the energy now to talk much.

  Dov fished in his wallet and laid out some bills on the table. “I am still wanting to see that art gallery we missed last weekend, my friends.”

  “Me, too.” Jessica put her money on top of Dov’s.

  Rivka dug into her pocket and pulled out some shekel notes. “Oh,” she groaned. “I don’t feel up to walking much.”

/>   Ari picked up the bill for the meal and handed it, along with a credit card, to the waiter. “Dov, I also am not in the mood to visit the art gallery. Perhaps I could sit here quietly and talk with Rivka?” He scooped up the cash and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

  Dov shrugged. “Ladies?”

  Jessica nodded and flung a wink at Rivka.

  Rivka ignored her. “I’d rather talk than walk tonight.”

  “Very good, then,” Dov said. He stood and pulled back Jessica’s chair. “We will meet you back here, Rivka? Or perhaps Ari would wish to walk you back to the hostel. It is not far.”

  “Hey! Good idea,” Jessica said.

  Rivka wondered if there was some conspiracy going on behind her back. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  By the time the waiter returned with the credit-card slip, Dov and Jessica had disappeared into the thick crowds on Ben Yehuda Street. Ari signed the slip rapidly.

  “Are you feeling well, Ari?” Rivka asked.

  He clasped his hands on the table in front of him and studied them intently. “Not particularly well.”

  Rivka had learned long ago that one way to draw out a guy was to ask him about his work. “How is your progress on the wormhole?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s Dr. West? He seems like he might be rather hard to get along with.”

  “I have no problems with Damien.”

  Was it her imagination? Had he stressed the word Damien just a hair? Was there someone else he was not getting along with? “Are you angry at someone, Ari?”