The Infinitive of Go

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

CODE NAME POSTER The first practical matter transmitter was a success, or so everyone thought. In spite of paranoid security restrictions, Justin Williams and Cinnamon Wright, co-inventors of the device, counted on it to revolutionise civilisation and gain them an honoured place in history. But the first long-distance field test with a human being - a diplomatic courier carrying a vital message - somehow misfired when the courier killed himself on arrival at his destination. To prove his faith in his invention - and to escape charges of sabotage - Justin had himself "posted" thousands of miles. He came through unchanged. It was the world that was somehow different...

Release date: July 16, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 160

Sample

to travel fasterthan a speeding bulletis not much helpif you and itare heading straighttowards each other

“I’d be much happier,” grumbled the ambassador, “if I understood how these damned posters work.”

In a formal high-necked jacket and dark pants he, and his companion the first secretary who was almost identically clad, looked like intruders in the deep-dug concrete-lined redoubt concealed beneath the embassy. Everybody else present wore color-coded oversuits, even the man who, posing as a trade counselor, was responsible for gathering and forwarding local intelligence data.

Because nations are never friendly in the paranoid universe inhabited by spies, the latter would normally have been in command of any operation of this sort. But the current one was devoid of precedent. A specially-trained technician had been flown in under cover of forged documents and an improvised trade agreement. So far as this room at present was concerned he outranked everybody, although his oversuit was indistinguishable except by its tint from those worn by the lowly Marine guards standing bored beside the armored door.

It was not his first visit; he had set up an earlier, smaller installation when its parts—like the new one’s—were delivered by devious means. Not looking up from the dials, gauges and meters which were engaging his attention, he said now, “With respect, Mr. Ambassador, the fewer people who do understand it, the better for us all.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” sighed the ambassador, and went on staring at the poster.

It was a nondescript-looking cabinet about the size of two telephone booths side by side, which occupied the center of the floor and reached nearly to the low, two-meter-twenty ceiling. Its front was a transparent door; its walls might at a glance have been taken for blocks of the kind of solid plastic used for mass-produced disposable articles a generation earlier, when there was still cheap oil.

In fact those drab brown walls were dense with microcircuitry. Every cubic millimeter of them, and the floor and roof as well, contained a maze of sensors and logic units, some mere molecules wide. It had taken nearly as long to grow them, under controlled conditions, as the nervous system of a moderately advanced mammal: a dog or a horse.

Yet it was already one of dozens such, and there were hundreds more in preparation, and into the bargain there was only a quantitative, not a qualitative difference between these circuits and the ones which, built into the embassy’s walls, had for the past decade ensured its immunity from bugging, eavesdropping and even sniping.

All of which advance in security did not prevent the ambassador from saying fretfully, “Even so, I keep wondering whether a bomb might arrive when you switch the thing on …”

The first secretary raised an eyebrow at the trade counsellor, and he favored her with a broad grin behind the ambassador’s back. The technician finished his checks and set aside his testing instruments.

Patiently he said, “There is literally no way that could happen. Not even if someone stole the programs from the dozen or fifteen different factories where the various parts are made. We have enough trouble matching two units that we’ve built ourselves. For someone trying to imitate one from scratch, it would be a nightmare.” He consulted a clock on the wall which was governed by a master-signal relayed via satellite from half the world away. It showed that more than a minute remained before the intended time of transfer.

“I have to take your word,” sighed the ambassador. “But you must forgive me for being on edge. After all, a live human is very different from a mere—well—package!”

“We never had any trouble with non-living consignments,” the first secretary countered.

“There was one group so badly garbled—” began the trade counselor; she cut him short.

“One group out of how many hundreds? Given that most of us can’t even make a phone-call home from this damnable country, diplomatic priority or no, I think you ought to count yourself fortunate in having so much cipher-traffic!”

The first secretary’s complaints about how her tour here was apt to ruin her marriage were public knowledge. The counselor said placatingly, “Oh, I’m alive to the fact that this is a wonderful invention. The small version has brought in more information faster and by a more secure route than ever before, and we have a head start with the technique over everyone else on the planet. Aren’t I right?”

The technician gave a wry smile.

“The Japanese have comparable computing capacity, remember, so in principle they might be on to it. If they were, how the hell could we find out? But myself, I do believe the States have a clear lead. What we have here is almost unique—an invention that has genuinely been kept secret even after it went into regular operation. And pretty soon it won’t just be information that we’re posting, but weaponry, H-bombs, armies!” He pointed at the clock. “Coming up to zero now,” he added. “Quiet, please!”

They all fell silent. They had seen objects arrive by poster before; they were prepared for the curious wash of pale violet light which would announce a delivery to the interior of the cabinet. But the ambassador was right. The transmission of a live human being was a new benchmark in this new technology, even though back home there had been plenty of tests on volunteers and no ill-effects had been detected.

The clock ticked away the last few seconds, and there was the violet flash, and there he was, known to them, recognizable: a man of thirty-five or so, about one meter eighty tall, slim, fair-haired, grey-eyed, wearing unremarkable dark clothes. Chained to his left wrist was a portfolio, while his right hand grasped a pistol at the ready.

The pistol was unexpected … but this was a first run, so in the excitement of the moment nobody thought to question its usefulness, accepting it as a forgivable precaution. What counted was that, if asked to swear to his identity, they would all have declared him to be the person they were awaiting: George E. Gunther, who had preceded the present trade counselor as head of intelligence at this embassy before being recalled to participate in the poster application program.

The name “poster” had been selected after much debate as adequately misleading, by analogy with “tanks” in the First World War and “tuballoy” in the Second.

Tension evaporated as the cabinet’s door slid open, accompanied by a metallic and electrical smell; the transfer had required a great deal of power at both ends. Right hand outstretched, the ambassador strode forward.

“George, it’s great to see you again! I guess there’s no point in asking if you had a good trip, because—”

He broke off. Gunther’s eyes had narrowed with suspicion and his gun was levelled at the ambassador’s navel.

“George!” cried the first secretary. “Is something wrong?”

“Countersign!” Gunther hissed through tight-drawn lips.

“What countersign?” the ambassador demanded. “Nobody warned us you were instructed to require one!”

“Then I have been intercepted!” Gunther cried, and without a heartbeat’s worth of hesitation turned his pistol on himself, while at the same time a thermite charge exploded in his portfolio, destroying the secret data it contained.

And incidentally wrecking the poster as efficiently as any saboteur’s bomb.

suppose you wantedto talk to the starsand you succeededbut it turned outthe stars themselvesare not on speaking terms

Being relatively small and relatively recent—it had been founded in the thirties by a millionaire whose fortune survived the Depression—Chester University was also relatively unknown. Eight years earlier, when telling his friends that he was taking up a post there, Justin Williams had met with blank looks, partly because few people had heard of the place, partly because he was forbidden to describe what he was going there to work on, and even if it had been allowed he would probably have been met with mockery.

But at least he had been able to say, “You know! Same place they run Project Ear.”

At which their faces would light up. Everybody had heard about that latest of several attempts to detect messages from the stars, surviving to everyone’s amazement when project after fundamental research project was being cancelled in the name of economy.

He had other cause to be grateful for its existence. Since he was still banned from discussing his own work save in the most general and misleading terms, he had often found it convenient to let strangers assume he was involved with Ear, having no difficulty in conveying that impression because the few friends he had made at Chester actually did work on it, and kept him up to date. Attempts to classify or restrict news of it had long ago foundered on the intransigence of its director.

But he was dead now, and the vultures had closed in.

Daily since his arrival here Justin’s drive to and from work had carried him along a two-mile overpass, separating through traffic from the city-center slums where almost the only splash of color was provided by billboards bearing patriotic slogans and pictures of Congressman Chester. From it there was a fine view of the range of low hills to the west crowned with the antennae of Project Ear’s four-kilometer radio-telescope array.

Today in the morning sunlight polished girders shaped to a fraction of a degree of curvature were being not so much dismantled as hacked apart by a great ungainly bird-shaped machine whose hammer head was tipped with the slashing beak of an electric arc.

A carrion-eater. A fit surrogate for the man who had ordered this desecration: T. Emory Chester.

Over the hum of the sparse morning traffic—several self-guiding buses, a few cars, no “gas-guzzlers”, by order—Justin heard the clang and clatter as one especially heavy girder plunged to earth. His car was too old to boast automatic routing; he was glad the need to steer prevented him from looking that way.

Once, Project Ear had been a symbol of his own ambitions. When he left college he had promised himself that one day he would make that sort of mark on the world.

And he was doing so. But not in the manner he would have chosen: instead, privately, deviously, under government security restrictions and at the dictates of a man he loathed.

Until very lately he had not been aware how much he hated T. Emory Chester, grandson of the university’s founder. He owed him everything, above all the chance to prove that a hypothesis inconceivable a generation ago—for it was due to exhaustive computer evaluation of the original postulate—could be converted into functional machinery. Last year he would hotly have defended Chester—had done so, arguing with staffers from Project Ear who claimed he was trying to shut it down. Along with everyone else Justin had made compromising noises about satellites being preferable, the need to site detectors clear of all possible human signals, and so forth. Since it had been proved, though, that for less than the cost of launching a satellite these antennae could be automated, and since their life-expectancy was about half a century, he had imagined the worst that might happen would be the firing of a few of his acquaintances—unpleasant at a time of high unemployment, but not fatal.

He had never expected Chester to demolish everything when he won over the dean and faculty to his view that here was an unproductive application of his grandfather’s fortune. Notionally the money was administered by an impartial trust; in practice Chester—who, like many who have inherited great wealth, craved the exercise of power he owed to no one but himself—was able to cajole, and wheedle, and browbeat, and if all else failed probably blackmail the trustees into agreeing with him. He ruled the Chester roost.

And he would not even consider the possibility of automating the project. In private he dismissed it as on all fours with astrology; in public—he was a frequent speaker at Department of Defense fund-raising events—as a waste because it did not contribute to national security. He wanted it torn down an. . .