Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 33 Washington, Saturday 7 July [Now]

Five things you need to know about Zero Point Energy. A selection of tabloids lay open on Gene Newman's rosewood desk. A New York Post, a copy of the Sun from England, half a dozen others. The President hadn't bothered to check which contained the list, it could have been any or all.

The five points had been posted the previous morning on alt.sf.science by a top-end theorist from NASA, a man with a disgustingly cynical sense of humour. The tabloids had printed them straight.

1. Zero Point Energy is named after its inventor (the soon to be late Prisoner Zero).

2. ZPE uses Quantum Foam, which is so small you can't even see the bubbles.

3. A cup of Quantum Foam would be enough to boil all the seas on Earth.

4. An SUV running on ZPE would run from now until the end of time without ever needing to fill up.

5. With ZPE a spaceship will cost no more to fill than a lawnmower, but go much faster...

Gene Newman had no idea if a practical application for the Casimir force equations really had been scratched into the shit blasted off the mesh of Prisoner Zero's cage. It was impossible to tell, since some idiot had apparently decided to wash the shit, the equations and the scratched sketches away.

Whatever, serious scientists were talking about the possibility that Prisoner Zero had successfully tied a big pink bow around gravity, inertia, heat and electricity, with some throw-in about the shape of time which Gene Newman had given up trying to understand.

All he knew was that Prisoner Zero had gone from Arab terrorist, through psycho killer and ex-punk junkie to tortured American genius in a matter of hours. Which didn't stop the New York Post featuring a tasteful countdown chart to the man's execution.

Draining the last of his coffee, Gene Newman turned back to the tabloids. EINSTEIN ASSASSIN DISCOVERS ULTIMATE POWER -- FORMULA FEARED LOST FOREVER. Actually, that was one of the broadsheets.

"You got the answers yet?"

Across the Oval Office Isabel Gorst shook her head. "I'll get on to it," she said. "Meanwhile here's the list of people who've called." She walked round the eagle on the carpet, as she always walked round the eagle, and put the list into his hand. Neither of them mentioned that his in-tray was bigger than ever.

"Petra Mayer?"

"Oh yes," Isabel Gorst said. "She's going to call in an hour."

"Okay," said the President. "Have Paula remind the Secretary of Defense that I'm still waiting for some answers."

Colonel Borgenicht was going to have to explain exactly what had happened at five a.m. yesterday morning at Camp Freedom and who thought using a fire hose to blast the twenty-first century's very own version of Newton's Principia off the mesh would be a good idea.

Rage had put most of the medals on Sergeant Saez's chest and the ribbons went right over the place where the rage hid. It formed a fist-sized chunk where his heart should be and had carried him out of the Philadelphia projects and into a life where he had two kids, a nu-school BMW complete with tinted windows, and a bunch of men who trusted him not to throw away their lives.

His kids lived with his ex-wife in a house he'd more or less built by himself, after buying a pull-down on the edge of Belleville. It was a good house and he tried not to be angry about living somewhere else these days.

Michael Saez knew why he was angry and his ex-wife knew why he was angry. So Sergeant Saez couldn't fault her logic in leaving. He didn't want the boys to turn into him either.

All the same, he resented being stuck on a desolate little island in the middle of nowhere. And resentment made him drink more of a bottle of Jack Daniel's than was decent and wake before the birds, still drunk and with a filthy headache, not to mention a marked reluctance to spend his morning guarding a cage covered in shit.

There were other things that made Sergeant Saez furious and these came out in the days following, when the damage was already done and most of the questions were more about filling in gaps for Colonel Borgenicht's paperwork than building a true picture of anyone's state of mind.

Not all of these made it into Dr. Petrov's rider to the Borgenicht Report, but the ones which did included the fact the Italians had been printing lies about how the marines were treating the Arab, the fact that the weights room had apparently begun to smell worse than a brick shithouse and Sergeant Saez's fury when the so-called Arab turned out to be American. Strangely enough, Saez never mentioned the fact his cousin had been piloting the helicopter brought down in Marrakech. Although Dr. Petrov included it anyway.

After the shit had been blasted from the mesh with fire hoses and the original blanket and mattress had been removed to dry in the sun, new bedding was brought in and Sergeant Saez woke the two embedded cameramen so they could photograph the newly clean cage. (One of them was from Fox News, the other had an uncle in the Pentagon Press Office.)

Sergeant Saez then climbed into the cage himself and made sure the two men photographed him as he knelt on the floor, pulling and twisting at the plastic-coated mesh until his hands hurt. Then he showed the cameras his own fingers, which were now raw from the effort and beginning very slightly to blister.

"You see?" he said. "The prisoner damaged his own hands trying to dig his way out." Even the man from Fox News looked doubtful.

While Master Sergeant Saez was busy bringing Colonel Borgenicht to the attention of the President, Prisoner Zero was having an early morning appointment with Katie Petrov, who was too busy taking a call on a hotel phone to notice that her patient was drawing a spaceship in the dust on the floor with his foot.

"Lower the blind."

"Why?"

Turning on her office's portable television, Katie zapped to the channel mentioned by Bill Logan, still on loan to the marines from CavourCohen Media and currently CCM's most famous VP.

"Shit." It was true. The helicopter off the edge of the cliff really had been hired by Amnesty and a long lens was focused on her window. She could watch herself staring out of a window at the very helicopter taking the photograph of her staring out of the window at the very helicopter...

It was recursive to the point of insanity.

And to make matters worse the channel was busy broadcasting the verbal warnings it received as it received them. So now the whole world knew that the marine Colonel in charge of Camp Freedom had just threatened to blow an Italian helicopter out of the sky.

As Dr. Katie Petrov walked back to her desk, she inadvertently scuffed out a sketch of a needle-like racing yacht which would have told her more about Prisoner Zero's grasp on reality than carefully logging his reactions to a hundred unanswered questions.

The prisoner was quite obviously aware of what went on around him and every CT scan suggested he understood exactly what was being said. And if even half the medical data Katie had on file proved accurate, then the man was actually busy answering her questions inside his head. She'd spent the last few days coming out of their sessions only to discover that Prisoner Zero's silence had been the shell to an entire world's worth of hidden speech.

"You do know," said Katie, "that you have only six days left to live?"

Dark eyes watched her and, to make matters worse, Katie could swear that her attempt to focus Prisoner Zero's mind on his fate only left the man amused.

"It doesn't worry you?"

Again those eyes. That blankness.

Not only was he waiting for death. He was unafraid of it. As Katie wrote this on her notepad she realized it was probably the first thing she'd written in over a week that struck her as unquestionably true. Yet little in his daily ritual suggested he was certifiably religious. Maybe it was a variation on suicide by cop.

One of Katie's earliest clients had opened fire on a police car from his wheelchair and been killed in the answering fire. It had been his fifth attempt in three years.

Possible, but unlikely.

She had, Katie was forced to admit, almost no real handle on Prisoner Zero, which made her no better or worse than the psychiatrist originally brought in by the Pentagon. And if Colonel Borgenicht was getting increasingly upset by Katie's inability to reach a verdict then she could only repeat what she'd already told him.

She'd rather be late than wrong.

Of course, she wasn't the one with helicopters buzzing round her head like flies. Well, actually she was but they weren't after her. They were after the men who ripped fingernails from a world-class mathematician; because, apparently, that's who Prisoner Zero was...

Katie put her head in her hands.

It got worse.

Her mentor, the renowned Harvard academic Petra Mayer, had taken a single glance at the Vice Questore's photograph, ignored the prisoner altogether and speed-dialled the NASA theoretician with the cynical sense of humour. After that she called a Chinese refugee teaching quantum physics at Padua University and Dr. Natalia Aziz in Cairo, who specialized in the mathematics of low probability/high impact events.

Each one agreed to report their first findings to her within the hour.

Authenticating the half code, proofs, theorems, fractured formulae and incomplete sketches visible in the background of Pier Angelo's photograph took a joint effort rare in academia and rarer than kindness in the paranoid world of high mathematics and quantum research.

And only when Petra Mayer had taken one shocked call after another did she pick up her own phone and speed-dial the President direct. A lot was made of this point. And though it wasn't so surprising to discover that half a dozen of Harvard's finest had Gene Newman's direct line only Petra Mayer had the number for his cell phone.

Petra Mayer had spent her mid-twenties in prison for hammering nails into a Montana redwood. Few states send people to prison for harming a tree, Montana included. Only the girl hadn't been trying to damage the tree, she'd been there to halt a lumber firm busy taking down five-hundred-year-old redwoods to sell as specialist timber.

The nail caught the chain of a power saw and stripped off its links, exploding the cutting belt like chain shot and taking off the fingers of a foreman overseeing the lumberjack.

The court case made headline news across America and Petra Mayer used her time inside to write a best-selling polemic on ecology, biodiversity and sustainable growth. Simplicity of style was one of the things which helped Tao and the Way of Global Maintenance to become a New York Times bestseller. The other was the fact she stuck all the biology, physics and economics at the back in an appendix called "Other Stuff," where it could be safely ignored by the bulk of her readers.

The President was one of the few who actually bothered to check her sums. So when his old Professor finally dialled the direct number, Gene Newman opened his cell phone, saw who it was and promptly stood up, setting off a chain reaction that had chairs scraping the floor all around the Situation Room.

"Thank you. That will be all."

Around the table half a dozen advisors, department heads and military chiefs nodded. "Thank you, Mr. President."

"Petra," he said, watching the door close.

"Mr. President?"

"You just saved me from my Defense Secretary."

The slightly disbelieving snort from the other end made it clear that Petra Mayer found this unlikely.

"You wanted to talk to me?"

"That's why I called," said the Professor. Only her age and the weight of her news excused the impatience in her voice. "You've got a problem."

"I've got dozens," said the President. "Where do you want me to start?"

"No," said the voice on the other end of his phone. "I mean you've got a problem."

"Tell me..."

"So you see, what you and I think of as physical laws our friend considers the cosmological equivalent of local weather conditions..."

At the end of the conversation Gene Newman was not entirely sure he'd understood everything his old tutor had told him. The President imagined Petra Mayer knew this and it was only respect for Gene's office that made her refrain from firing questions at him as if they were both still in a seminar.

"It's important?"

"Gene... If this is for real then it changes everything. Think about it. We're surrounded by a high-energy field... No," the Professor corrected herself, "we exist inside a high-energy field, one we barely notice because it runs through us and through everything else and suddenly there's a chance we can tap into this field."

"That is good, right?"

"It's terrifying," said Petra Mayer. "How do you think China will react if her oilfields become worthless overnight? What's a bankrupt Saudi Arabia going to do to the balance of power in the Gulf? Shit, imagine al Qaeda with this technology. Gene, I wouldn't dream of telling you your job but--"

"Okay," said the President, "I can see the problem."

Silence came from the other end.

"What?" Gene Newman said.

"That's not it... Natalia Aziz thinks that one of the equations might relate to time. You're not going to like this." Gene Newman was Catholic, although not so Catholic that he had more than two children.

"Tell me."

"You need to know that Natalia Aziz believes in God."

"Of course she does. The woman's a Moslem."

"No, I mean as a scientist Aziz thinks God exists. It looks like Prisoner Zero thinks the same. Only one of his theorems seems to suggest that God will die."

"When?"

"At the end of time. When the universe comes to an end."

"What happens then?"

"God's born again."

"Along with a new universe?"

"You've got it, but he's probably not talking about God in the sense you're talking about God."

"You know," Gene Newman said, "we're not even going to go there."

"Okay," said Professor Mayer. "You've got your own people examining the photographs, right?"

Here the President was on firmer ground. "Of course I've got people looking," he said. "The best brains in the CIA and the Pentagon are examining them as we talk."

"That should be impressive." Petra Mayer's view on both was well known. As was the thickness of a file she'd eventually prized out of the CIA under section 552 of the Freedom of Information Act, having argued successfully that her file could no longer be regarded as operational.

There was an age when most Western scientists distinguished between space and time. This period lasted roughly from the Dark Ages to the beginning of quantum physics. A period during which the West caught up with and finally overtook the laws of science the Arab world had taken for granted for centuries.

Although few people thought of it in these terms, the shape given to time always had been a religious choice. For those within the Judeo-Christian tradition time was subservient to God and ran like a river. Other faiths saw time differently, as an illusion or a great circle that always came back to where it began and in which history endlessly repeated itself.

It was only with quantum physics that the idea of time as space and the universe as a series of endless illusions really entered Western thought. Before this, time had a beginning and an end over which God would preside. Space was by turn the home of heaven, a starry mantel and a clockwork suburb operated by angels.

As it became possible for astronomers to go further, some suggested that our solar system was not necessarily the centre of the known universe. This destruction of the heliocentric view happened at about the point God was taken out of the time equation.

And then in 1904 a minor clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne wrote a brief pamphlet, a side effect of which was that time and space became, like mass and energy, so inextricably linked they turned into variants of the same thing.

Petra Mayer was not a believer in unalloyed Einstein, any more than she believed in the angelic host, time running in only one direction or the universe as an ever-expanding balloon of mostly dark matter.

"You've got more than just the one photograph, right?" Petra Mayer said. She was having trouble keeping the impatience out of her voice. Old age and cancer were not treating her kindly.

"Yes," said the President, reopening a file. "They're one of the things we've just been discussing. We got copies this morning." Gene Newman leant over the table of the Situation Room to take another look.

There were five photographs in all. Three close-ups of the prisoner's ripped hands and two shots of his shit-smeared cage, with Prisoner Zero cropped at the waist in the foreground. Over the man's naked shoulder could be seen sketches and what looked like one half of a mirror-image equation.

"Do any of them give us more?"

Comparing the best of Pier Angelo's originals with the shot used on the front of that day's Washington Post told President Newman what he already suspected. "Afraid not," he said. There was no difference. The picture desk had used the best shot and used the whole thing.

"You can't execute him," said Petra Mayer. "We need the rest of that equation."

President Newman sighed. "You think I don't know that?"

Inside every adult was a child, or so it is said. Professor Petra Mayer was different. Inside Petra Mayer was an impossibly beautiful, barefoot adolescent who wouldn't have been seen dead giving her inner child the time of day.

In fact, that child had been left so far behind it no longer even haunted the edges of the adult's unconscious, its banishment an act of will so extreme that even Petra Mayer's husband had no idea of the sorry foundling his wife had once been. All he remembered was the ghost of the adolescent who had still, but only just, been visible behind her eyes when they first met.

She'd been beautiful, with high cheekbones and dark hair that swept back in a wave and glowed against the setting sun like a devil's halo. That was the view of Alan Ginsberg anyway, who once spent five pages and a whole summer in Asbury lamenting the fact she wasn't a boy.

Petra Mayer's beauty was long gone and in its place was a faded elegance at odds with the compact body she now inhabited. Only in her dark eyes, high cheekbones and greying hair could be seen the echo of beauty which once trapped year after year of Harvard freshmen, a collection of fathers who should have known better and the occasional female student.

"Katie Petrov," said Katie, answering her cell phone.

She listened for a moment.

"Thank you. Please show her in."

Dr. Petrov had dressed quickly and gone over her notes, taking extra care. Although she always took care, Katie reminded herself. She just hadn't been expecting a flying visit from an ex-mentor with the ear of the President. And it was a flying visit because Katie had heard Petra Mayer's helicopter land outside.

"Katie?"

Having made herself finish a note on her pad, Katie looked up and found herself staring into a familiar face, albeit more lined and slightly older than she remembered.

"You're looking good," Petra Mayer said. "Which is more than you can say for me, so don't bother." The Professor was wearing a sand-coloured skirt and matching linen jacket, both badly crumpled. "I liked your paper."

"Paper?" Katie's voice sounded puzzled.

"Anorexia and pre-adolescence... Interesting take." It had been the last piece of research Katie submitted, a slight article that did little more than attempt to overturn some of the received wisdoms on who was responsible for pre-pubertal eating disorders. Her grandmother had refused to speak to her since.

"Thanks," said Katie.

Petra Mayer smiled. "If we could have a word...?"

Only then did the Professor's gaze take in the man who sat naked on Katie's floor, his fingers swathed in white gauze.

"Maybe outside?"

When both the marines outside Katie's office snapped to attention, Petra Mayer had the grace to look embarrassed. "For the purposes of this visit I'm a general," she explained. "I didn't realize the kid could do that."

It took Katie a second or two to realize that "the kid" was Gene Newman.