White Mars

11

In a rotation of jobs, I was allocated to the synthetic foods department. I preferred it to the biogas department. The smells were better. Here I helped in time to develop something which resembled a Danish pastry. We always glossed over the fact that our foods were created from everyone’s manure. Nevertheless, my friends teased me about it.

One of my closest friends, Kathi Skadmorr, had adopted a teasing approach to me since I had danced naked before her and her lover. She rang me unexpectedly in serious vein and invited me on a short expedition to view what she called the “Smudge experiment”. I was always ready to learn. Although baby Alpha was so small, I left her in the care of Paula Gallin for a few hours while I joined Kathi.

Behind the science unit, Amazonis sprawled brokenhearted under a layer of dusty colour which seemed to be sometimes pink, or rose, or sometimes orange. A swan’s feather of cloud vapour overhead reflected these hues.

Kathi and I had suited up before leaving the science unit. As we walked along a netted way, where latticed posts supported overhead cables, a slight agoraphobia attacked me. I clutched Kathi’s hand: she was more used to open spaces than I. Yet at the same time I found something closed about the Martian outdoors. Perhaps it was the scarcity of atmosphere; or perhaps it was the indoor feeling of dust lying everywhere, dust much older than ever dimmed the surface of a table back on Earth.

To our left, the ground rose towards the heights that would culminate in Olympus Mons. There, I caught movement out of the side of my eye. A small boulder, dislodged by the morning heat, rolled downhill a few metres, struck another rock, and became still. Again, it was a motionless world we walked through.

The horrors got at me. Was it wise to have brought Alpha into this world? Granted that it was passion rather than wisdom which fathered babies, yet I had experienced no passion. And supposing our fragile systems broke down… then the dread world of the unmoving would prevail over everything … even over my dear baby. The past would snap back into place like the lid of a coffin.

As if she had read my thought, Kathi began talking about another kind of past, the past of a scientific obsession. She said I would see the latest produce of a line of research stretching back into the previous century.

“Dreiser is teaching me the history of particle physics. It begins before this century,” she told me. “It’s a tale of reasoning and unreasonable hopes. Last century, American physicists proposed to build a giant accelerator beneath the state of Texas. The accelerator was planned to measure many kilometres in diameter. They christened it a superconducting supercollider, SSC for short. The SSC was designed to detect what they referred to as the ‘Higgs particle’. It would cost billions of tax-payers’ money, and take an enormous chunk out of the science budget.

“This was the twentieth century’s idea of Big Science.” She gave a sardonic chuckle. “US Congress kept asking why anyone would think it legitimate to believe that so much money should go in a search for a single particle. After three billion dollars had been spent, the whole project was scrapped.”

I asked why it had been thought necessary to find this Higgs particle.

“The physicists who were searching for these basic ingredients which comprise the universe argued that finding the elusive Higgs would supply them with vital answers. It would complete their picture of the fundamental units.

They were like detectives seeking the solution of a mystery.

“The mystery remains. Hence the whole purpose of the Mars Omega Project. You might say the mystery is why we are here. The more deeply we probe nature, the clearer it becomes that these basic units have to be things without mass. There’s the mystery—where does mass originate? Without mass, nothing would hold together. Our bodies would disintegrate, for instance.”

I could not help asking what the Higgs particle had to do with mass. Kathi replied that it was still unclear to her, but the physicists of the time had an idea in their heads that the highly symmetrical scheme of the universe would have that symmetry spoilt according to what they termed “spontaneous symmetry breaking”. The Higgs was tied up with that idea.

“You see, for the pure unbroken scheme with exact symmetry, it was necessary to have all particles without mass. When Higgs enters the picture, everything changes. Most particles acquire mass. The photon is a notable exception.”

“I see. The Higgs was to be a kind of magic wand. As soon as it enters the stage, ‘Hey presto!’ mass comes along.”

“A rhymester said it in a nutshell:

“Because of this rather magical property, Higgs was christened by journalists ‘the God particle’.”

“And the physicists of that time believed that the SSC would enable them to catch a glimpse of this God.” I found I had lost most of my fears and let go of Kathi’s hand.

“According to the theory current at the time,” she said, “there had to be a certain limited range of possibilities for the mass of the Higgs. Otherwise, there would be an inconsistency with other things which had already been established by experiment. The God particle must deign to live among its subjects, just as if it were an ordinary mortal massive particle.”

I had to ask her what she meant by that.

“In accord with Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², the Higgs particle, it was believed, would correspond to a certain energy. That energy was supposed to lie within the range of what the SSC would have been capable of. But—the SSC was never built, as I have told you.

“As luck would have it, a rival project was already at the planning stage. This was at the international research centre, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The CERN project was greatly cheaper than the cancelled SSC would have been. It employed a tunnel already in use for an earlier experiment. The new project was the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC.”

I imagined a great tube, with a vanishing perspective into circular darkness.

“In the late twentieth century, the earlier experiment on the CERN site had yielded a great deal of information about leptons. But the energy used to produce leptons was not nearly enough to produce a Higgs. A lepton, by the way, is a member of the lightest family of subatomic particles, such as an electron or a muon. However, the clever group who constructed the LEP, as the tunnel was called, foresaw that it would be possible comparatively cheaply to modify their experiment, so that protons replaced the positrons and electrons of the original experiment.

“Protons, neutrons, and their anti-particles, belong to the family of more massive particles known as hadrons. Hence the terminology, the Large Hadron Collider.”

Kathi stopped. Then she spoke rather abstractedly. “Imagine the drama of it! The world seemed to be on the brink of a great discovery. Would they be able to trace the Higgs through the LHC? The equipment was finally up and running in about 2005. A year later, it began to reach the kind of energy levels at which it seemed possible that they might actually detect the Higgs particle. This was at the lower end of the scale of theoretical possibilities for the Higgs mass. So the fact that they found no clear candidate they could identify with the Higgs did not unduly worry the physicists.”

We stood in that unnatural place, staring at our boots.

“Do you think the day will come when we can understand everything?” I asked.

Kathi grunted. Without giving an answer, she continued with her account.

“There had never been any guarantee that the LHC could build to the energies required to find the elusive particle—unlike the potential of the scrapped SSC.”

“So more money was wasted…”

“Can you not understand that science—like civilisation, of which science is the backbone—is pieced slowly together from ambitions, mistakes, perceptions—from our faltering intelligences? Patient enquiry, that’s it. One day, one day far ahead in time, we may understand everything. Even the workings of our own minds!”

I remembered something I had been taught as a child. “But Karl Popper said that the mind could not understand itself.”

“With mirrors we may easily do what was once impossible, and see the back of our own heads. One step forward may be formed from a number of tiny increments. For example, the hunt for this elusive smudge has been facilitated by the seemingly trivial innovation of self-illuminating paper—ampaper—and 3D-paper. Their impact on scientific development has been incalculable.”

“So they did find the Higgs particle at some point?” I asked.

“By 2009, the entire energy range of conceivable relevance to the Higgs particle had been surveyed. No unambiguously identifiable Higgs was found. But what the physicists did find was at least as interesting.”

We had continued our walk. As we reached the crest of a small incline, Kathi said, “More of this later. We are nearly there!”

Over the crest, the desolation was broken by tokens of human activity. A group of suited men stood by three parked buggies. Their attention was directed towards a vast silvery tube, above which was suspended something which immediately reminded me of an immense saucepan lid. This lid evidently afforded protection against any slight aerial bombardment—any falling meteorite—for the tube below.

The men hailed us, and as we drew nearer to them I could see that this protective lid was of meshed reinforced plastic. Below it lay a large inflated bag from which cables trailed. In the background were sheds from which the sound of a generator came.

The importance of this installation was emphasised by a metal version of the UN flag, which was now raised on an extemporised flagpole.

Dreiser Hawkwood beckoned us on. His face behind its helmet appeared darker than ever. He briefly embraced Kathi, both of them clumsy in their suits, before shaking my hand in a perfunctory way. I was Kathi’s guest, not his. Among the men in the background, I saw Jon Thorgeson, whose lecture I had postponed while I was pregnant.

Climbing on to a metal box, Dreiser raised himself above us to make a short speech.

“This is such a momentous day, I thought we might hold a small ceremony. It’s to mark the occasion when, at last, the bag is completely filled. It has been a slow process. As you will know, we have had to avoid the possibility of setting up currents in the superfluid. But from this moment onwards, we are able to begin in earnest our search for the Omega Smudge.”

Pausing, he reached up to stroke his moustache but had to make do with stroking his visor instead.

“Jon and I were having an argument, although out here is not the best place for it. We were arguing about something hard to define—‘consciousness’. Jon’s hard-line view is that consciousness emanates from the interaction of brute computation, quantum coherence, quantum entanglement, if you like, and quantum state reduction—those factors which produce a CPS, a sure indicator of mind. Many people—and our quantputers—would agree with him. He claims that science is ‘nearly there’—and will arrive there before long, in these areographic wastes. Is that a fair description of your position, Jon?”

Thorgeson said, “Approximately.”

“Kathi and I take a more radical view. We see that, indeed, there are still some minor issues to be sorted out from the details of the particle physics, primarily the Smudge parameters. They will determine all the present unknowns. However, we radicals—I prefer the term visionaries—argue that something profound is still missing.”

“Yes,” said Kathi. “And we believe that magneto-gravitic fields will turn out to be part of the missing story of that profundity.”

Dreiser continued briefly in this vein, before embarking on a different topic.

“You’ll all have made use of the Ng-Robinson Plot? Let’s just have a thought for that vital minor innovation! It was named after its inventors, Ng being a Singaporean and Robinson British. This was East meeting West—very fruitfully. The Plot has given us a wonderful method of displaying vast quantities of quantputer-generated information. At the time when it was first employed, supercomputers were already giving place to our QPs, or quantputers, to use their full name—much faster and more versatile machines. The computer read off the mass of a particle along one axis, its lifetime along another, and the g-factor along a third, all colour-coded according to the various quantum numbers possessed by the particle in question—charge, spin, parity, etc.

“And one of the crucial features Ng-Robinson introduced is a key intensity factor which indicates the probability of the detection being a reliable one. A very sharp bright image indicates firm identification of a particle, while a fuzzy one implies there may be some considerable uncertainty as to the suggested identification of an actual particle.

“The essentials of so many lines of research, which in earlier times would have presented great difficulties, become immediately transparent. The Ng-Robinson Plot has proved extremely valuable in experimental particle physics, because a lot of that activity consists of sniffing out tiny subtle effects from enormous amounts of almost entirely irrelevant information!

“What they expected for the Higgs would have been one sharp, bright, and very white spot. That’s according to the conventions used in this system of colour-coding. It should have stood out clearly from a background of variously coloured spots in other places in the generally dark background of the N-R Plot. These other spots would indicate the complex array of particles of different kinds generated by the experiment. Show the vidslide, Euclid.”

At this point, an android stepped forward to project a replica of the plot. It sparkled before the small audience with its dark pointillism. It could have been mistaken for a glimpse of another universe.

Dreiser asked, “What did they see in place of a spot? They saw a smudge. Just a smudge. It arose around about the right place, pretty precisely where the particle physicists had come to expect that something would be found—which would be consistent with all the other junk observed earlier. But there was no clear-cut Higgs particle—merely a great big Higgs smudge!

“And the ultimate descendant of that smudge is what we hope to capture—one day, starting from now!”

We all clapped. Even Euclid clapped.

Somehow I felt depressed.

Even when I had my babe back in my arms, a feeling of my insignificance in the scheme of things persisted. To arrange for Jon Thorgeson to come at last and give his lecture on the Omega Smudge was a welcome diversion.

Paula Gallin helped me in the early stages. She found a small lecture hall we could use. Lectures made in person had proved more vital than lectures delivered over the Ambient—though I had no suspicion regarding the way this one was going to turn out. While I had forgotten about Jon in my preoccupation with dear Alpha, he had not forgotten his promise.

“Ah, my little honeypot!” was his greeting. I made no retort because it was pleasant to see his young-old face light up at sight of me. He was followed into the anteroom by a porter trundling a large man-size crate. Once it was set down, and was stood upright, Jon thumped it.

“There’s someone in here who can see what we are doing. Give me a kiss before I let him out.”

I put up my hands defensively. “No, I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“I wish you did,” he said, with a sigh. I was angry. The truth was, he was attractive after a fashion; it was just that his manner was so pushy. In a burst of confidence, he told me that he had left a Chinese lover back on Earth. I was a physical reminder to him of this lady. He longed to get back to her. He was miserable on Mars; it was for him a prison. “Sorry to offend you,” he said, with a hangdog look.

He turned and unlatched the box the porter had brought. “This is my visual aid,” he said, over his shoulder. The door of the box opened. A small android stepped out from its padded interior.

“Where am I?” it asked in a lifelike way.

“On Mars, you idiot.” Turning to me, Jon said, with mock-formality, “Cang Hai, I’d like you to meet my friend, Euclid.”

“I have met him before,” I said, although no recognition was forthcoming from the android.

I offered Euclid my hand. It did not move. Nor did its well-moulded face manage more than a twitch of smile.

“It’s one of Poulsen’s cast-offs,” said Jon. “I borrowed it for the occasion. It’s house-trained.”

I remembered it then as one of the machines Poulsen had complained about. The android was dressed in blue overalls, much as Thorgeson was dressed. Its hair was cut to a fashionable length, unlike Jon’s which was trimmed short. Its face wore a blankly pleasant expression which changed little. Jon clapped it on the shoulder.

There was something in its extreme immobility I found disconcerting. It had no presence. It gave out no CPS. It lacked body language.

Jon turned to me with a grin. “Kathi tells me you are a mother now! Was it a virgin birth?”

“Change the conversation. It’s none of your business. You didn’t come here to be insulting, I hope.”

He shrugged, dismissing the topic. “All right, you invited me over just to talk science. And when I get in that hall, I am going to talk about the continuing search for the ultimate smudge. All miseries forgotten.”

“Let’s go. The audience is waiting. How long will you talk for?”

“My lecture is designed for ten-year-olds,” said Thorgeson. “Euclid helps to hold their interest through the technical bits.” He caught my wrist. “Do you think the audience knows anything of the past history of particle physics?” As he spoke, he slid an arm about my waist.

“I think you can count on it,” I said, disengaging myself.

“Oh, good. Then I had better not go into all that too much. How long have I got to talk?”

“Until you lose their interest. Now come on and don’t be nervous.”

He was anything but nervous with me. “Be nice to me,” he begged. “I only came over to see you again.”

I told him not to be silly. But I was not completely annoyed.

We went into the hall, followed by the android. The audience gave us a round of applause. I introduced Thorgeson by saying that he would explain why there were so many scientists on Mars, and that he would speak of the problems they were hoping to solve. He would touch on matters affecting us all. His artificial friend, I said, would assist him.

Tom sat in the front row and nodded approval of my short speech—the first I had made before such a large gathering.

Thorgeson began nervously, clearing his throat and gesticulating too much.

“As our understanding of the basic units of the universe deepens, it becomes yet clearer that these units are entities that possess no mass. There is a profound mystery here. Ordinary matter obviously possesses mass, and so do the basic particles of which matter is composed—protons, neutrons, and electrons, and also their constituent quarks and kliks. For many decades, physicists have struggled with the question: where does mass come from?

“This is a serious issue. Without mass everything would disintegrate. We’d be instantly dispersed into a flash of ethereal substance—not even mist—spreading outwards with the speed of light. Not a brilliant way to get to the nearest star.”

The feeble joke earned chuckles enough from the audience for Thorgeson to relax a little.

Euclid spoke. “So tell us, what is the purpose of the Mars Omega Smudge Project?”

Glancing at a prepared script, Thorgeson continued, “The Omega Smudge is what has brought us here. To explain why we call this vital smudge a smudge I should remind you of some history of particle physics last century and earlier this century.

“Euclid, do you remember the names given to the six varieties of basic subnuclear entity which was postulated last century?”

Euclid: “Down, Up, Strange, Charm, Bottom, Top.”

“He has a faultless memory,” Thorgeson said, as another chuckle ran through the listeners.

He continued for a while, describing highlights of twentieth-century particle physics, which I was able to follow mainly because of Kathi’s earlier explanations.

He was saying,’… the superconducting supercollider or SSC that was planned to be built under Texas was a miracle that did not quite happen. It would have cost billions and was designed to discover what was referred to as ‘the Higgs particle’. I see that some of you DOPs remember the name, though, of course, not the excitement of the time.

“Here’s an artist’s impression of the proposed SSC entrance.” He showed a vidslide in 3D of an airy and imposing glass structure, topped by a geodesic dome.

Euclid: “Why would anyone think that so much money should be spent in search of a single particle?”

“It’s a good question, Euclid. In the end the US Congress dropped the project. But the physicists—why, they argued that finding the elusive ‘Higgs’ would have supplied them with the answer to the question of what comprises the basic units of the universe.”

Euclid: “Did they believe that in those days?”

“Well, maybe not quite. But they did regard the finding of the Higgs as vitally important in their scheme of things. Also, completing the SSC would have achieved other targets. They put all their eggs in one basket to get the collider funded. The argument became over-heated. Certain physicists assigned an almost religious quality to the Higgs, referring to it as ‘the God particle’—a good journalistic phrase…”

Euclid: “Did they believe that in those days?”

Thorgeson looked nonplussed. “No Euclid, that’s where you say, ‘Why was the Higgs regarded as so important?’”

Amid sympathetic laughter, Euclid spoke. “Why was the Higgs regarded as so important?”

At his ease now, Thorgeson said, “I’m glad you asked me that, Euclid. It all has to do with the question of mass. You are aware that most particles of nature have mass, but the photon and graviton—the basic quanta of electromagnetism and gravitation respectively—are exceptions. Those quanta of which matter is mainly composed, the protons and neutrons or their constituent quarks, are massive particles. So also are the kliks and pseudo-kliks that compose the much less massive leptons, such as electrons and muons.”

As Thorgeson continued, referring to “LEP’, the “LHC’, and various particle physics notions such as “lepton” and “hadron”, I found that I was beginning to lose the thread of much of what he was saying. Fortunately Kathi’s earlier explanations were still useful to me, so I knew what some of the terms meant.

Then I heard Euclid saying, “Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs? Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs? Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs?”

Thorgeson thumped Euclid’s back. “You mean to say, ‘Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs?’ Well, they finally got the equipment working in about 2005…”

I realised that Euclid was talking with Thorgeson’s voice although, without inflection, it sounded almost like a foreign language. But Thorgeson had programmed it. It amused me to think that, although Thorgeson was a stalwart “hard science” man where questions of the human mind were concerned—believing there was nothing more to human mentality than the functions of a very effective quantputer—he could not resist making fun of his creature now and again.

Kathi had once tried to explain this “hard science” position to me. Apparently it is commonly held by today’s scientists.

She told me that they are simply missing the point. She explained their view to be that human mentality results solely from those physical functions that underlie an ordinary quantputer. I’m not really familiar with these underlying principles, but Kathi did have a go at trying to explain them. Apparently quantputers, and their smaller brothers the quantcomps, act by a combination of brute force computation in the old twentieth-century sense, and a collection of quantum effects referred to as “coherence”, “entanglement” and “state reduction”. Although I was never clear about these terms, Kathi explained that mentatropy and CPS detectors (’savvyometers’!) are based on such effects.

Thorgeson was saying, “The riddle of mass needed a solution. A Korean scientist by the name of Tar Il-Chosun came up with a brilliant conception that, in effect, increased the energy range of the LHC by a factor of about one hundred. As a result, by 2009 the LHC had surveyed the complete range of energies that could possibly be relevant to the Higgs mass. Frustratingly, there was nothing that could be clearly identified with the Higgs. Instead they found something else, as strange as it was interesting.”

Euclid: “What was that?”

“Using the newly perfected Ng-Robinson Plot, they found a smudge, roughly where the Higgs particle should have appeared.”

Euclid: “So they found the Higgs?”

“They just found a smudge. No particle.”

Euclid: “So that’s where the name Smudge came from…”

“Absolutely.”

Euclid: “But if they found this smudge in 2009, why all this business of setting up an umpteen-billion-dollar project to look for it here on Mars?” (Spoken with that same bland pleasant expression on its face.)

“What excitement this smudge caused! Excitement and dissension in the ranks! This, by the way, was when the consortium we know as EUPACUS was being assembled. Since CERN was already involved, the Europeans agreed to invest massively in it. You can bet they’re regretting that now!

“The first problem the smudge threw up was that, by its very nature, its appearance on the Plot merely indicated a probability of something being there. The Higgs smudge had a very faint intensity, meaning the probability of the existence of a particle corresponding to any particular position on the Plot was very slight. Yet, on the other hand, the smudge covered so large a region of the Plot that the overall probability that something was there approached certainty.

“More experiments needed. The smudge remained.

“With finances forthcoming, the Americans with Asian and European backing finally built the SHC, the Superconducting Hypercollider, of beloved memory. My father worked on it as a young man, in an engineering capacity. They constructed this monumental bit of Big Science not in Texas, but straddling the states of Utah and Nevada.”

He projected a vidslide of an artist’s cutaway of the great tube, burrowing under desert.

“And when they got the SHC working—darned if it didn’t come out with the same results as previously! Seems a lot of dough had gone down the drain for nothing, one more time! The sought-after smudge remained just a smudge … At that, it was a smudge on an entirely theoretical construct, the Ng-Robinson Plot. No actual Higgs particle could be pin-pointed. Yet, you see, the overall probability that something was there amounted to certainty.”

Euclid: “No actual particle could continue to produce just an unresolvable smudge on the Plot?”

“Quite right, Euclid. They had a first-class mystery on their hands. And there, just when it gets exciting, we’re going to take a break for ten minutes.”

Applause broke out as I led Jon into an anteroom. We left Euclid on the platform, standing facing the audience with his customary pleasant blank expression.

Thorgeson shut the door behind us and came towards me saying, “I’m doing all this for you, my little Asian honeypot!”

He wrapped an arm round my waist, pulled me close, and kissed my lips.

I gave a small shriek of surprise. Asian honeypot indeed! He did not release me, but showered compliments on me, saying he had adored me ever since he had set eyes on me in the science unit. I did not mind the compliments. When he started to kiss me again, and I felt the warmth of his body against me, I found myself returning them.

I rejoiced when his tongue slipped into my mouth. I was becoming quite enthusiastic when the door opened and Tom and some others came in to congratulate Thorgeson on his exposition. This was one time when I felt really mad at Tom.

Back we marched into the hall. Thorgeson seemed quite calm. I was trembling. He had been about to grab my breasts under my clothes, and I could not decide how I would feel about that. I was furious with the situation. It was all I could do to sit there and listen to him. How should I deal with him when the lecture was over—with that Euclid looking on, too?

However, I now saw a new kind of passion in Jon—not a physical passion but an intellectual one, as he took over from Euclid and spoke of the next epoch of scientific discovery.

“Euclid and I were talking about the smudge mystery,” he said when the audience had settled down. “I will skip some years of confusion and frustration and speak about the year 2024. That was the year when there were two breakthroughs, one experimental, one theoretical.

“The experimental breakthrough came when SHC got up to full power, far beyond anything originally planned for the unbuilt SSC, using a further innovation contributed by the Indonesian physicist, Jim Kopamtim. Lo and behold at far greater energies than were achieved previously, another smudge was found!

“So the Higgs smudge had to be rechristened the alpha-smudge, while the new one went by the name of beta-smudge.

The theoretical breakthrough—well, I should say it came a while before the SHC observations. A brilliant young Chinese mathematician, Chin Lim Chung, achieved a completely reformulated theoretical basis for particle physics as it stood at the time. Miss Chin introduced some highly sophisticated new mathematical ideas. She showed how a permanent smudge could indeed come about on the Ng-Robinson Plot, but the culprit could not possibly be a particle in any ordinary sense.

“It was a new kind of entity entirely. So from henceforth it was simply referred to as a smudge.

“Soon after the SHC announcement, Chin Lim Chung, working in conjunction with our own Dreiser Hawkwood, figured out that the alpha and beta smudges had to belong to a whole sequence of smudges, at higher and higher energies. It was clear that until this sequence was known as a whole, there was going to be no solution to the mystery of mass.

“Mother Teresa! It was as though we had discovered a row of galaxies on our doorstep!” As if he could not stop himself, he added, “The remarkable Miss Chin is still alive and working. I happen to know her daughter.”

Something in Jon’s manner, in his very body language, suggested to me that this lady must have been his Chinese lover, back on Earth.

Euclid: “You cannot forever go on building bigger and bigger machines. So why did not the physicists just give up on the mystery?”

“Well, we don’t give up easily.” He shot me a glance as he said this. “It was hoped that once the gamma-smudge was found, then the mystery of mass could be resolved after all.”

Euclid. “So they built an even bigger super-duper collider, did they? Where this time? Siberia?”

“On the Moon.”

He showed a vidslide of a gleaming section of tube crawling across the Mare Imbrium.

“A collider that formed a ring completely round the lunar surface. Alas for ambition! The Luna project turned out to be a total failure, at least with regard to finding the gamma-smudge. It did produce some data, relatively minor but useful. But no new smudge.”

Euclid: “A costly mistake, wasn’t it? Why did it fail?”

“The bill all merged into Lunar expenses, when the Moon was the flavour of the year, in the late 2030s. After a host of teething troubles, the Luna Collider appeared to do more or less what it was intended to do.

“I guess the final disaster rested with nature herself. She just didn’t come up with a smudge—not even with the fantastic energy range available to a collider of that size.”

Euclid: “Why didn’t that kill off the whole idea? But you are about to tell us that after that disaster, funding was found to start all over again here—on Mars?”

“Politics came into it. The fact that Mars was a UN protectorate made it tempting. Also, there is the precept that even pure science, however expensive it may seem, pays off in the unforeseen end. Consider the case of genetically mutated crops, and how they have contributed to human longevity. Some people are willing to pay for ever-widening horizons, for freeing the human mind from old shibboleths.

“And there were two further chunks of scientific progress to encourage them—and another different kind of development which had been brewing away for some while earlier.”

Euclid: “They were?”

“Even last century, a number of theoreticians had realised that the enigma of mass could not be resolved at the energy levels relevant to the Higgs. Why? Well, the very concept of mass is all tied up with gravitation. Gravitation … Let me give you an analogy, Euclid.

“Another long-standing ‘mystery’ in particle physics is the mystery of electrical charge. It’s a mystery of a sort let’s say, although a good number of physicists would claim they understand why electric charge comes about.

“The trouble is that although there are good reasons why electric charge always comes in whole-number multiples of one basic charge—which is one twelfth of the charge of an electron—there’s no real understanding why the basic charge has the particular value it happens to have.

“I should say there was a time, late last century, when this basic value was believed to be one third of the electron’s charge. Before that it was held to be the electron’s charge itself. But the one-third value is the quark charge, and it was still thought that quarks were fundamental. Only after Henry M’Bokoko’s theory of leptons and pseudo-leptons was it realised there were yet more elementary entities. Things called kliks and pseudo-kliks underlay these particles in the same way quarks underlie the hadrons.

“These kliks, pseudo-kliks and quarks, taken together, gave rise to the basic one-twelfth charge that we know today. A diagram will make that clear.”

He flashed a vidslide in the air. It hung before the audience, a skeletal Rubik’s cube in three dimensions.

“Now, there are certain fundamental ‘natural units’ for the universe—the units Nature herself uses to measure things in the universe. Sometimes these are called Planck units, after the German physicist who formulated them in the early years of last century.

“You see how one finding builds on the previous one. That’s part of the fascination which keeps scientists working. In terms of these units, the basic value of the electric charge turns out to be the number 0.007, or thereabouts. This number has never been properly explained. So we don’t, even yet, properly understand electric charge. There is, indeed, still a charge mystery. End of analogy!”

Euclid, unblinkingly: “So what follows?”

“The point about the mass mystery—a point made by a few physicists even as long ago as last century—was that no one would seriously attempt to find a fundamental solution to the charge mystery without bringing the electric field into consideration. Electric charge is the source of the electric field. In the same way, so the argument went, it made little sense trying to solve the mystery of mass without bringing in the gravitational field. Mass is, of course, the source of the gravitational field.

“And yet, you see, the original hopes of resolving the mystery of mass in terms of finding the Higgs particle made absolutely no reference to gravitation.”

Euclid: “What do you make of all this?”

“It was really a whole bag of wishful thinking. You see, Euclid, finding the Higgs particle was considered just about within the capabilities of the physicists of the time. So, if a solution to the mystery of mass could be found that way—why, then it would have been pretty well within their grasp.

“But if the issue of the role of gravity had to be seriously faced—there would not have been a hope in Hell of their finding an answer to the origin of mass experimentally. They were looking for God with a candle!

“The energy required would have been what we call the Planck energy—which is larger than the Higgs energy by a factor of at least—well, if we said a few thousand million million, we wouldn’t be far out.

“Put it this way. Even a collider the length of the Earth’s orbit would not have been enough.” His young-old face broke into a broad grin at the thought of it.

Euclid: “Yet you tell us that they still did not give up. Why is that?”

“As I told you, it was all wishful thinking. They believed that finding the Higgs would be enough. Anyhow, science often proceeds by being over-optimistic. It’s a way in which things do eventually get done. Eventually.

“So although the mass mystery remains unsolved, we now think our project here could well be close to doing so.”

Euclid: “More over-optimism?”

“No, this time the case is pretty convincing. The thing is that we are now really facing up to the Planck energy problem.”

Euclid: “I may be only an android, but as far as I know our experiment does not involve a collider of anything like that length. Or any collider at all.”

Jon released a 3D projection of something like a dark matrix motorway into the lecture room. He let it hang there as he spoke. On that infinite road, smudges shot off endlessly into distance. A cloud of other coloured spots sped after them.

“We’re looking at a VR projection of a succession of different smudges, alpha-, beta-, gamma-, delta-smudges. Artist’s impression only, of course. You’re right, we have no collider on Mars. I’ve said there were a couple of encouraging breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs make our Mars project possible.

“First breakthrough. The realisation that there was no point in working through this whole gamut of smudges, at greater and greater energy levels, the list continuing for ever.”

He switched off the projection. The scatter of smudges died in their tracks.

The Icelandic physicist, Iki Bengtsoen, showed that when Einstein’s theory of gravitation—already confirmed to an unprecedented degree of accuracy—was appropriately incorporated into the Chin-Hawkwood smudge theory, it became obvious that the energies of all the different smudges, alpha, beta, gamma and so on, did not just increase indefinitely, sans limit, but converged on the Planck energy limit.

“You see what this implies? All would be resolved if just a single experiment could be devised to explore the ‘ultimate’ smudge, that limiting smudge, where all the lower energy smudges are supposed to converge. It’s this putative ultimate smudge we call the Omega Smudge.”

Euclid. “So we have got to it at last.” He maintained an expression of goodwill. “But maybe you can explain how an experiment out here, on Mars, can be of particular use in finding this Flying Dutchman of a smudge—supposing it to exist at all.”

“That’s where our other breakthrough comes in. Harrison Rosewall argued convincingly that a completely different kind of detector could be used to find this Omega Smudge, supposing it to exist at all.

“This involves the phenomenon known as ‘hidden symmetry’.”

Euclid: “And what might that be?”

Jon stood gazing at the low ceiling, as if seeking inspiration. Then he said, “Every part of the explanation takes us deeper. These facts should have been part of everyone’s education, rather than learning about past wars and histories of ancient nations. Well, I don’t want to go into details, Euclid, but a hidden symmetry is a sort of theoretical symmetry which is dual in a certain sense, to a more manifest symmetry than might exist in theory. The idea goes back to some hypotheses popular late last century, although at that time the correct context for the hidden-symmetry idea was not found.

“What was important for Rosewall’s scheme was that there can be things called monopoles associated with hidden-symmetry fields.

“A magnetic monopole would be a particle that has only a magnetic north pole or south pole assigned to it. As you know, an ordinary ferroperm magnet has a north pole at one end and a south pole at the other. Neither north nor south poles exist singly.

“But the great twentieth-century physicist, Paul Dirac, showed that the charge values had to be integer multiples of something. If you could find even a single example of a separate north or south pole, then—as we have since discovered to be the case—all electric charges would have to come in whole-number multiples of a basic charge.

“So, a number of years later, experimenters set to work to find such magnetic monopoles. If just one was found, then a major part of the mystery of electric charge would be solved. One group of experimenters even argued that the most likely place to find these things would be inside oysters. Of which, as we know, there’s a considerable shortage on Mars.”

Euclid: “Any luck?”

“No. No one has ever found a magnetic monopole, even to this day. But, in Rosewall’s case, the hidden symmetry refers to a dual on the gravitational field. Rosewall made an impressive case that a hidden-symmetry gravitational monopole—known as a HIGMO—ought actually to exist. In fact there is a solution to the Einstein gravitational equations—found in the early 1960s, I believe—which describes the classical version of this monopole.

“This was Rosewall’s brainwave. He realised that if you built a large ring-shaped tube, filled with an appropriate superfluid—argon 36 is what we use, under reduced pressure—then whenever a HIGMO passed through the ring, it would be detectable—just barely detectable—as a kind of ‘glitch’ appearing in the superfluid.”

A voice from the audience asked, “Why argon 36 and not 40?”

“Proton and neutron numbers are equal in argon 36, which underlies the reason for its remarkable superfluidity under reduced pressure. A technical advantage is the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. Fortunately, argon 36 is not radioactive. Okay?”

At this point, he projected a vidslide of a scene I recognised. There lay the massive inflated tube, protected by its lid. There stood Dreiser, delivering his little speech. I had been a part of that historic scene!

“Obviously, this is a large-scale but delicate experiment. No other disturbances of any kind must affect the super-fluid in the tube. You have to do the best you can to shield the superfluid from external vibrations, because any significant outside activity is liable to ruin the experiment.

“No place on Earth is going to be remotely quiet enough for such an experiment. Never mind human activity, the magma under Earth’s crust is itself active, like a giant tummy rumbling. Earth is an excitable planet.”

Euclid: “What about Luna?”

“The Moon proved no longer possible. Too much tourist activity and mining was already taking place. Maybe forty years ago the Moon could still have been used, but not now, certainly not since they began building the transcore subway.

“But Mars … Mars is ideal for the Omega Smudge experiment. No moving tectonic plates, vulcanism dead … That is, it’s ideal provided that human activity is kept down to present levels.”

Euclid: “No terraforming?”

Thorgeson laughed. “The UN did a trade-off. No terraforming for a few years. The hidden agenda was that this would give a breathing space for the Omega Smudge experiment. The gun at our heads is that we have to get results.”

At this there were rumblings from the audience, and an angry voice called, “So how long is ‘a few years’? Tell us!”

After a moment’s pause, Thorgeson said, “There was to be a stand-off of thirty years—four years from now—before they began to bombard the Martian surface with CFC gases, to start the warming-up process. This was the deal pushed through by Thomas Gunther.”

This statement provoked angry interjections from the audience. Thorgeson calmed things down with a wave of his hand.

“Obviously the collapse of EUPACUS has altered all such arrangements.

“The experiment we’re now getting under way involves only a relatively small ring, sixty kilometres in diameter. Will we discover any HIGMOs? That depends on the HIGMO density in the universe, of which there are only estimates so far. We need results. Otherwise—who knows—the terraformers take over, the CFC gases rain down…”

“Get on with it, then!” came a shout from the audience, followed by roars of support.

Thorgeson said, “The terrestrial economy is still in meltdown. Don’t worry.

“Our present experiment is basically a pilot project, partly to test out how we work in adverse conditions. Maybe we can manage with this. If not, we hope to build a superfluid ring around the entire planet.”

“Another way of ruining Mars!” yelled a voice.

“We need to solve the problem at last. With the planet ringed, the answer to the vexed question of mass will finally be answered. Maybe Mars was formed precisely to enable us to find that solution.”

“Victorianism!” came a cry from a now restive audience.

Thorgeson answered this cry directly. “Okay, tell me what else is Mars good for? You invited me here. Listen to what I have to say. I’ll take sensible questions afterwards. Till then, keep quiet, please.”

As if to back him up, Euclid spoke. “Say why it is so important to solve the mystery of mass. If a few physicists satisfy their curiosity in this respect, what good does that do ordinary people?”

“It is always difficult to justify curiosity-driven research in terms of its ultimate benefit to society. We can’t tell ahead of time. Nevertheless the effect of such research, which seems entirely abstract to the lay person, can be tremendous. An obvious example is Alan Turing’s analysis of theoretical computing machines done in the 1930s. It changed the world in which we live. We are on Mars because of it.”

Euclid: “You must have some idea as to the value of this immensely costly research in areas other than particle physics.”

“Smudge research will have an important impact on other areas of physics and astrophysics. After all, it is concerned with the deepest issues of the very building bricks of the universe, the particles of which we are all composed, and their constituent elements.

“A full understanding of mass may lead to matrix-drives that will carry us to the heart of our galaxy.

“It’s concerned, too, with gravitation and with the nature of matrix and time. It relates in a vital way to the understanding of the big bang origin of the universe, and thus to deep philosophical questions. The whole mystery of where the universe comes from and of what the universe is composed—this is what smudge research ultimately involves.”

The same angry voice from the audience now interposed to say, “Self-justification is no justification.”

I saw anger in Thorgeson’s eyes, but he answered in a controlled manner one could not but admire.

“You might ask how any of this really affects society, although the matter remains of great interest to any intelligent person. Well, society might also be deeply affected for a different type of reason. This relates to a third breakthrough, which occurred at about the same time, having to do with the very nature of the human mind—or the soul, as some unscientific people put it.

“In the early years of this century, the development of electronic into quantum computers encouraged the already widely held view that mind was just something that developed when sufficient powerful and effective computations took place. Chess, finally even the oriental game of Go, succumbed to the brutal but speedy computations of these devices.

“Yet no matter how effective these machines were, it was always obvious that they possessed no minds. They couldn’t even be called intelligent in any ordinary sense of that word. Something essential was missing.

“With the development of the quantputer about 2023, distinct new physical features were incorporated, using basic quantum-mechanical principles. We have evidence that the human brain itself operates using these same principles. Thus, it is likely that we have in a quantputer all the essentials of human mentality. As yet, we are still short of knowing all the needed physical parameters.

“In 2039, definitive experiments carried out in France established that there is a CPS, a clear physical signal, emanating from conscious entities alone, and not from non-conscious entities like our present-day quantputers.”

Thorgeson paused to let this sink in before adding, with some emphasis, “We have to improve the quantputer. When we have all the physical parameters—which the smudge should supply—then we shall be able to construct a quantputer that will actually emit a CPS. In other words, it will have consciousness.”

The audience remained unsettled, with voices still calling that Mars was not a laboratory.

John Homer Bateson rose from his seat and spoke, arms folded protectively across his chest. “Professor Thorgeson, I am embarrassed to admit that I lost the thread of your involved argument when you began talking about mind. Whatever mind is. Have you not strayed from your proper subject? And is this not the way of physicists—to usurp ground properly the territory of philosophers?”

“I have not moved from my original topic,” Thorgeson said quietly. But another quiet voice in the audience, that of Crispin Barcunda, said, “At least on Mars we have escaped the powers of the GenEng Institute, busy sculpting Megarich personalities and dupes and living rump steaks. While you guys here stay away from the biological sciences and stick to physics—”

“What’s your question, Crispin?” I asked, insulted by his connecting dupes with living rump steaks.

“Is not the most pressing matter that now confronts us the possible connection between mind and your proposed smudge ring?”

“That’s what we hope to find out,” Thorgeson said.

Other voices started calling. I told them to be silent and allow the lecture to continue.

At this point, Ben Borrow stood up, raising his hand to be seen. “As a philosopher, I must ask what is to be gained by this search for the Omega Smudge? Is it not that which, by your own admission, has brought us to this wretched planet and caused the complete disruption of our lives?”

I answered before Thorgeson could.

“Why should you talk about the disruption of our lives? Why not the extension of our lives? Aren’t we privileged to be here? Can’t we by will power adapt our attitudes to enjoy our unique position?”

He looked startled by my attack, but rallied smartly, saying, “We are of the Earth and belong there. It’s the breast and source of our life and our happiness, Cang Hai.”

“Happiness? Is happiness all you want? What a pathetic thing! Hasn’t the cult of the quest for happiness been a major cause of misery in the Western world for almost two centuries?”

“I didn’t say—”

But I would not let him continue. “The quest for scientific truth—is that not a far nobler thing than mere self-gratification? Please sit down and allow the lecture to continue.”

Thorgeson shot me a grateful look—although he was soon to teach me a horrid lesson in self-gratification. He came boldly to the front of the dais, to stand with hands on hips, confronting his hecklers.

“Look, everything in the universe depends on the fundamental laws that govern particles. All of chemistry, all of biology, all of engineering, every human—and inhuman—action—all of them ultimately depend on the laws of particle physics. Can’t you understand that?”

The audience continued to be noisy. Thorgeson pressed on.

“Most of those laws are already known. The one major thing we do not yet know is where mass comes from. Once we know the Omega Smudge parameters—which will be fixed as soon as we have sufficient HIGMO data, then we will basically know everything—at least in principle. Isn’t that important enough to put a bit of money into, just in itself? It’s philistinism to ask for further justification.”

“Not if you’re stuck here for years,” called someone from the audience, provoking laughter. Thorgeson spoke determinedly over it.

“It happens that some people in the early days of setting up the Mars experiment thought there was another justification for it. These people believed that there has to be more to the human mind than what they refer to as ‘just quantputing’. They reckoned that finding HIGMOs would lead us to a ‘mysterious something’ which would provide a better understanding of human consciousness. Maybe I should use the term ‘soul’ again here.” He gave a brief contemptuous laugh. “There are still some people—even some important people on the project, who shall be nameless—who continue to pursue this sort of notion. A load of nonsense in my opinion.”

He spoke more calmly now, and retired behind his podium to talk rather airily.

“There’s no such thing as ‘soul’. It’s a medieval concept. Our brains are just very elaborate quantputers. Maybe we do still have to tune a few parameters a bit better, but that’s basically all there is to it. Even Euclid would have a mind if he had been constructed with greater sophistication and better tuned parameters. But you can see he has a long way to go—haven’t you, Euclid?”

Euclid: “But I think I have a mind. A different kind of mind, perhaps. Maybe after a few more years, research will detect…”

“The only kind of minds so far we have direct reason to believe in are possessed by humans and animals, since they alone give the clear physical signal which shows up positively in the French experiment.”

Euclid: “You are being anthropocentric and trying to prove you are better than I.”

“I am better than you, Euclid. I can switch you off.”

“Well, what has all this to do with smudges?”

“The mind is a product of the brain, our physical brains, so that mind depends on the physics of our brains. We need to know that physics just a little better. As we shall do when the Omega Smudge reveals all. Shall we soon be able to reproduce mind artificially? Smudge is clearly central to these questions.

“Here I need to retire to relax my throat for five minutes. I shall return to answer your questions.”

He motioned me to follow him, and he, I and Euclid trooped off the platform to general applause.

His performance had converted me from mistrust to admiration. “A brilliant exposition,” I said, as we went into the rest room. “You must have enlarged the understanding of—”

“Those fools out there!” he exclaimed. As he spoke, he turned the lock in the door behind his back. “What did they understand? It was all gobbledy-gook to them. They show no inclination to learn. I’m not going back. I came over here to see you, you minx, and now I’m going to have you!” As he spoke, he was tearing off his overall. His face entirely altered from one of philosophical contemplation to a mask of lust and determination, its lines working angrily.

Never had I seen a man change so rapidly. I dreaded to think what thoughts he had been storing up in his mind during his long disquisition.

“Look, Jon, let’s just talk—”

“You’re going to be my payment—”

He tore from his pants the instrument with which he intended to rape me. I regarded it with interest. It differed from a dog’s pizzle, mainly in having a padded bulb at the top for comfort during the penetration. This must have been, I thought, an evolutionary development tending towards producing better relationships between the sexes. Nevertheless, although I admired the design, I could not conceive of having it in my body.

Or not without a lot of consideration.

Making some absurd compliments about it, I took hold of the thing and began to stroke it. Thorgeson’s “No, no, no,” turned quickly to “Oh oh oh,” as I hastened my strokes. I moved aside as he ejaculated on the floor.

All the while this embarrassing episode was taking place, Euclid stood there, smiling his blank smile. I ran past him, unlocked the door, and rushed into the passage.