Gregory Benford - Essays and Short Stories Part 9

Fusion fires await the ruined carca.s.ses. There the separation can be exquisitely tuned, yielding pure ingots of any alloy desired. In the last a.n.a.lysis, the ultimate resources here are ma.s.s and light. The photovores lived for light, and now they end as ma.s.s.

The sleek metallovore never deigns to notice the layers of mult.i.tudes peeling back, their gigshertz cries of panic. They are plankton. It ingests them without registering their songs, their pain, their mortal fears.

Yet the metallovore, too, is part of an intricate balance. If it and its kind were lost, the community orbiting the Eater would decay to a less diverse state, one of monotonous simplicity, unable to adjust to the Eater's vagaries. Less energy would be harnessed, less ma.s.s recovered.

The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue.

Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.

Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore's polished skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the pa.s.sing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements -- wreckage and dust which can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.

All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere which stretches for hundreds of cubic light years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.

All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.

Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of s.p.a.ce and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.

It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.

Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.

Intelligent machines would build atop this ferment a society we could scarcely fathom -- but we would try. Much of the next novel I wrote, Furious Gulf was about that -- the gulf around a Mack hole, and the gulf between intelligences born of different realms.

For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among intelligences which never had to pa.s.s through our Darwin-nowing filter.

If we can copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us -- we Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?

A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on the "substrate," the basic building blocks. Machines could embody intelligence, but their styles would be different.

Angular antennas reflect the bristling ultraviolet of the disk below. Shapes revolve. They live among clouds of infalling ma.s.s -- swarthy, shredding under a hail of radiation: infrared spikes, cutting gamma rays.

Among the dissolving clouds move silvery figures whose form alters to suit function. Liquid metal flows, firms. A new tool extrudes: matted t.i.tanium. It works at a deposit of rich indium. Chewing digesting, The harvesters swoop in long ellipses, high above the hard brilliance of the disk. As they swarm they strike elaborate arrays, geometric matrices. Their volume-scavenging strategy is self-evolved, purely practical, a simple algorithm. Yet it generates intricate patterns which unfurl and perform and then cuff up again in artful, languorous beauty.

They have another, more profound function. Linked, they form a macro-antenna. In a single-voiced chorus they relay complex trains of digital thought. Never do they partic.i.p.ate in the cross-lacing streams of careful deliberation, any more than molecules of air care for the sounds they transmit.

Across light-minutes the conversation billows and clashes and rings. A civilization blooms on the brink of the deepest abyss in Creation.

By the time I reached the last volume, in 1992, I had spent over twenty years slowly building up my ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like Marvin. I had also published several papers on the galactic center, am working on a further model for the Snake, and still eagerly read each issue of Astrophysical Journal for further clues.

Much remains to be found there. My nephew, now a doctoral student at Caltech, will make a thorough map of the center in 1995, using a detector he built to view light wavelengths shorter than a millimeter -he's caught the bug.

I finished the last novel, Sailing Bright Eternity, in summer 1994. It had been twenty-four years since I started on the series and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.

I had taken many imaginative leaps in putting together a working "ecology" for the center, including truly outre ideas, such as constructions made by forcing s.p.a.ce-time itself into compressed forms, which in turn act like ma.s.s itself: reversing Einstein's intuition, that matter curved s.p.a.ce-time. All this was great fun, requiring a lot of time to think. I let my subconscious do most of the work, if possible. It's an easier way to write; but it stretches out projects, too. Occasionally I wanted to say to long-suffering readers, who wrote in asking when the next volume would appear, "Sorry; I'm writing as fast as I Doubtless there are many more surprises ahead. We're extending our gaze into ever more distant frequencies, gaining better resolution, seeing liner detail. In peeling back the onion skins, we get closer to.

how galaxies work, how the vast outbursts of their centers affect life, and how the truly bright galactic cores, quasars, work.

My own model is quite possibly completely wrong. It seems to explain some features (the filaments, the Snake) but has trouble with the jets. Eventually, comparing radio maps over time, we might see flareups and changes in the threads. Mine is strictly done in what I call the "cartoon approximation"--good enough for a first cut, maybe, but doomed to fail somewhere.

In any case, models are like matters of taste. n.o.body expects a French impressionist painting to look much like a real cow; it suggests ways of looking at cows.

Is there life at the center? n.o.body knows, but n.o.body can rule it out. Only by thinking about possibilities can we test them. My first intuition, seeing the radio map of the Arch, was, This looks artificial. Maybe it is -- you had probably thought of that explanation halfway through this piece.

Astronomy reflexively a.s.sumes that everything in the night sky is natural. Someday, that may prove wrong.

One of the ways science fiction looks at the world is by pus.h.i.+ng it to extremes, asking the questions that go beyond the bounds of what we can observe and check now. Imagination is no mere foot soldier; it wants to fly. That's why science fiction and science are forever linked.

Old Legends This memoir appeared in NEW LEGENDS, edited by Greg Bear, published by Tor Books, August 1995.

OLD LEGENDS.

A Memoir of Science and Fiction Gregory Benford copyright 1995 by Abbenford a.s.sociates

Long before I became interested in science itself, I was a science fiction reader. The s.p.a.ce Age changed that in 1957. At the time it seemed that the central metaphor of science fiction had become real, foggy legend condensing into fact.

I read about Sputnik on the deck of the S.S. America, sailing back from Germany, where I had lived for three years while my father served in the occupying forces. The one-page mimeographed s.h.i.+p's newsletter of October 4 gave that astonis.h.i.+ng leap an infuriatingly terse two sentences.

By the time I re-entered high school in the U.S., just emerging from years when the Cold War seemed to fill every crevice of the world, the previously skimpy curriculum was already veering toward science, a golden, high-minded province. Suddenly I found that I could take a full year of calculus and physics in my senior year. This was quite a change. I put aside my devoted reading of the sf magazines and launched myself into science, the real thing.

I began to think seriously that a career of simply studying the physical world, which I had often read about in fiction, could be open to such as me. I had done reasonably in high school up until Sputnik, getting Bs and As, but not thinking of myself as one of the really bright members of the cla.s.s. I imagined that I would probably end up as an engineer, but I really wanted to be a writer. When I scored high in the national scholastic exams of 1958 n.o.body was more surprised than I. But those scores opened the advanced cla.s.ses to me in my senior year, and a whole new landscape.

This fresh path led directly to an early afternoon in 1967, when two physicists and a clerk from the Personnel office at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory ushered me into a large office without preamble, and there sat a distracted Edward Teller behind a messy desk piled high with physics journals.

To my surprise, the other physicists quickly excused themselves and left. Teller was scientific director of the Laboratory then, fabled for his work developing the A-bomb and H-bomb, and his epic split with Robert Oppenheimer.

They sprang Teller on me without warning. I had gone up to Livermore to discuss working there as a research physicist, following my doctoral thesis at the University of California at San Diego. n.o.body told me that Teller insisted on taking the measure of every candidate in the program. "We didn't want you to be nervous," one said later. It worked; I was merely terrified.

He the most daunting job interviewer imaginable. Not merely a great physicist, he loomed large in one of the central mythologies of modern science fiction, the A-bomb. In the next hour no one disturbed us as Teller quizzed me about my thesis in detail. Attentively he turned every facet over and over, finding undiscovered nuances, some overlooked difficulty, a calculation perhaps a bit askew.

He was brilliant, leaping ahead of my nervous explanations to see implications I had only vaguely sensed.

His mind darted as swiftly as any I had ever encountered, including some n.o.bel Laureates. To my vast surprise, I apparently pa.s.sed inspection. At the end, he paused a long moment and then announced that he had "the most important kvestion of all." Leaning closer, he said, "Vill you be villing to vork on veapons?"

Unbidden, images from Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove leaped to mind. But Teller had impressed me as a deep, reflective man. I said I would -- occasionally, at least. I had grown up deep in the shadow of the Cold War. My father was a career Army officer, and I had spent six years living with my family in occupied post-war j.a.pan and Germany. It seemed to me that the sheer impossibility of using nuclear weapons was the best, indeed the only, way to avoid strategic conventional war, whose aftermath I had seen in shattered Tokyo and Berlin. Paralleling this direct experience was my reading in science fiction, which had always looked ahead at such issues, working out the future implied by current science.

That afternoon began my long, winding involvement with modern science and fiction, the inevitable clash of the n.o.ble and imaginary elements in both science and fiction with the gritty and practical. I have never settled emotionally the tensions between these modes of thinking. Growing up amid the shattered ruins of Germany and j.a.pan, with a father who had fought through World War II and then spent long years occupying the fallen enemy lands, impressed me with the instability of even advanced nations. The greatest could blunder the most.

I quit Livermore in 1971 to become a professor at the University of California at Irvine. In novels such as In the Ocean of Night, written after my "Rad Lab" days, I see in retrospect that I was thras.h.i.+ng out my mixed feelings. I often turned to other scientists to fathom how my own experience fit with the history of both science and fiction in our time. I did not see then how intertwined they were and are, and how much we face the future using the legends of the past.

Sixa vs. Seilla "Veapons" called immediately to mind the central fable of sf in those days -- the event which seemed to put the stamp on John Campbell'sAstounding magazine. In the spring of 1944 Cleve Cartmill published a clear description of how an atomic bomb worked inAstounding SF , t.i.tled "Deadline." Actually, Cartmill's bomb would not have worked, but he did stress that the key problem was separating non-fissionable isotopes from the crucial Uranium 235.

This story became legend, proudly by fans touted after the war as proof of sf's predictive powers. It was a tale of an evil alliance called the Axis -- oops, no, the Sixa -- who are prevented from dropping the A-bomb, while their opponents, the Allies -- no, oops, that's the Seilla -- refrain from using the weapon, fearing its implications.

In March 1944 a captain in the Intelligence and Security Division and the Manhattan Project called for an investigation of Cartmill. He suspected a breach in security, and wanted to trace it backward. US security descended on Campbell's office, but Campbell truthfully told them that Cartmill had researched his story using only materials in public libraries.

A Special Agent nosed around Cartmill himself, going so far as to enlist his postman to casually quiz him about how the story came to be written. The postman remembered that John Campbell had sent Cartmill a letter several days before the Special Agent clamped a mail cover on Cartmill's correspondence. This fit the day when agents had already visited Campbell's office. Campbell was alerting his writer, post-haste. Soon enough, Security came calling.

Sf writers are often asked where they get their ideas. This was one time when the answer mattered.

Cartmill had worked for a radium products company in the 1920s, he told the agent, which had in turn interested given him in uranium research. He also fished forth two letters from Campbell, one written ten days short of two years before the Hiros.h.i.+ma bombing, in which Campbell urged him to explore these ideas: "U 235 has--I'm stating fact, not theory--been separated in quant.i.ty easily sufficient for preliminary atomic power research, and the like. They got it out of regular uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they have quant.i.ties measured in pounds..." Since a minimum critical ma.s.s is less than a hundred pounds, this was sniffing close to Top Secret data.

"Now it might be that you found the story worked better in allegory," Campbell advised, neatly leading Cartmill to distance the yet unwritten tale from current events. Plainly Campbell was trying to skirt close to secrets he must have guessed. Literary historian Albert Berger obtained the formerly secret files on the Cartmill case, and as he points out ina.n.a.log (September, 1984), Campbell never told Cartmill that wartime censors.h.i.+p directives forbadeany mention of atomic energy. Campbell was urging his writer out into risky territory.

Cartmill was edgy, responding that he didn't want to be so close to home as to be "ridiculous. And there is the possible danger of actually suggesting a means of action which might be employed." Still, he had used the leaden device of simply inverting the Axis and Allies names, thin cover indeed. Campbell did not ask him to change this, suggesting that both men were tantalized by the lure of reality behind their dreams.

The Office of Censors.h.i.+p came into play. Some suggested withholdingAstounding's mailing privileges, which would have ended the magazine. In the end, not attracting attention to the Cartmill story and the magazine seemed a smarter strategy. Security feared that "...such articles coming to the attention of personnel connected with the Project are apt to lead to an undue amount of speculation."

Only those sitting atop the Manhattan Project knew what was going on. "Deadline" might make workers in the far-flung separation plants and machining shops figure out what all this uranium was for, and talk about it. The Project was afraid of imagination, particularly disciplined dreaming with numbers and facts well marshalled. They feared science fiction itself.

All this lore I already accepted, but I was curious about those at the top of the Project, such as Teller.

Self-cautious, a mere fresh postdoctoral physicist, I did not at first ask him about any of these legendary events. I was busy, too, learning how science works in such lofty realms.

I discussed both physics and politics with Teller while at the Lab, finding him delightfully eccentric and original. One hammering-hot summer day in Livermore, we continued well into the lunch hour. Teller wanted to go swimming, but refused to break off discussions. "Ve must not be all in our minds, all the time."

I went with him. He cut an odd figure as he threaded among the muscular sunbathers, mind fixed on arcane points of theoretical physics, his skin pale as the underbelly of a fish. He sat at the pool edge and shed his suit, tie, s.h.i.+rt, the works right down to--instead of underwear--a swim suit.This man plans ahead , I thought.

As a boy in Budapest he had come in second in a contest with a streetcar, losing a foot. Beside the pool he unfastened his artificial foot, unembarra.s.sed. (InDr. Strangelove , I couldn't help recalling, it was an artificial hand.) He kept talking physics even as he wriggled over to the edge. He earnestly concluded his point, nodded earnestly, satisfied, and then seemed to realize where he was. I could almost hear him think,Ah yes, next problem. Svimming. Vere iss...? "Edward," I began -- and Teller instantly flung himself like an awkward frog into the water, obliviously comic.

Moments like these led me to finally see through the cultural aura that obscures figures like Teller. They are more vast and various than we think, funnier and odder and warmer. Dr. Strangelove doesn't exist.

Teller had made a name for himself at Los Alamos by thinking ahead. He proposed the hydrogen fusion bomb, the Super, while the A-bomb was under development--and lobbied to skip the A-bomb altogether, leapfrogging to the grander weapon.

With his penchant for problem-solving, Teller was a symbol of the "techno-fix" school of warfare, and by the 1960s the times were running against him. At one Livermore lunch, an arms control negotiator furiously said to me, "He's the Satan of weapons! We've got to stop him." Many scientists felt just as strongly.

H. Bruce Franklin'sWar Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination made the case that sf, particularly in the pulp magazines, strongly influenced U.S. foreign policy. In the 1930s Harry Truman had read lurid pulp magazine sf yarns of superweapons settling the hash of evil powers. Often they were held in readiness after, insuring the country against an uncertain future.

Truman wasn't alone. Popular culture's roots run deep. Time and again at Livermore I heard physicists quote sf works as arguments for or against the utility of hypothetical weapons. As I came to know the physics community more widely, this complex weave deepened.

Beeps At Livermore I got involved with the theory of tachyons, the theoretically possible particles which can travel faster than light. Not the sort of thing one imagines a "weapons lab" allowing, but Teller allowed the theorists a wide range. When the tachyon idea popped up in the physics journals, I discussed it with Teller. He thought they were highly unlikely, and I agreed, but worked on them anyway out of sheer speculative interest. With Bill Newcomb and David Book I published inPhysical Review a paper t.i.tled "The Tachyonic Ant.i.telephone". We destroyed the existing arguments, which had avoided time-travel paradoxes by re-interpreted tachyonic trajectories moving backward in time as their anti-particles moving forward in time. It was simple to show that imposing a signal on the tachyons (sending a message) defeated the re-interpretation, so the causality problem remained. If sending a tipoff about a horse race to your grandfather made him so rich he jilted your grandmother and ran off to Paris, that was just as bad a violation of cause and effect.

Teller invoked a different argument against tachyons, which recalled the casual lunchtime discussions at Los Alamos, which were legendarily fruitful. At one, Enrico Fermi asked his famous question, "Where are they?" -- and raised the still fiercely contentious issue of why aliens, if they are plentiful in the galaxy, haven't visited us by now. (That question undoubtedly inspired the proposal that radio listening might turn up alien broadcasts, made by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in 1959 --the same Morrison who had worked in the Manhattan Project.) Using similar logic, Teller noted that tachyons could be used to send messages backward in time. "Vhy haven't they been sent? Vere are our messages from the future?"

Our answer was that n.o.body had built a tachyon receiver yet. Neat, perhaps, but a bit too neat. Surely somehow nature would not disguise such a profound trick. There had to be a way of seeing from theory why such disturbing things could not occur.

I was so intrigued by these hypothetical particles that I wrote papers investigating their consequences.

That drew me into a distant friends.h.i.+p with Gerald Feinberg of Columbia University, who had introduced some of the ideas of tachyonic field theory. He was an amiable, concentrated man, always thinking through the broad implications of the present. He was also a first cla.s.s physicist who had edited a science fiction fanzine in high school with two other upstart Bronx High School students, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg -- who later won the n.o.bel prize for their theory which united the weak and electromagnetic forces. t.i.tled ETAOIN SHRDLU for the frequency of letter use in English, the only fanzine ever edited by n.o.bel Prize winners stressed science with earnest teenage energy. (A generation later Stephen Hawking spent most of his free time reading sf paperbacks. Enthusiastically discussing them decades later with me, he was like most readers, able to recall plots and ideas easily, but not t.i.tles or authors.) Tachyons were the sort of audacious idea that comes to young minds used to roving over the horizon of conventional thought. Because of Feinberg I later set part of my tachyon novelTimescape at Columbia.

By the late 1970s I thought tachyons quite unlikely, since several experiments had failed to find them (after an exciting but erronious detection in 1972). Still, the issue of how physics couldprove that time communication is impossible remained--the primary issue for all of us, including Teller. Tachyons seemed a better way to address this than the more exotic beasts of the theorists' imaginations, such as s.p.a.ce-time wormholes.

So I framed the issue using tachyons, exploring how people in the future might get around the problem of having no receiver: by using energetic tachyons to disturb a finely tuned experiment in a physics lab in the past. Gerry chuckled when he heard this notion, pleased that his theoretical physics had sp.a.w.ned a novel about how scientists actually worked. He was rather bemused by the continuing cottage industry of tachyon papers, now numbering in the several hundreds. When an Australian experiment seemed to find cosmic rays moving over twice the speed of light, the field had a quick flurry of interest. Gerry was intrigued, then crestfallen when the results weren't confirmed.

He told me years later that he had begun thinking about tachyons because he was inspired by James Blish's short story, "Beep." In it, a faster-than-light communicator plays a crucial role in a future society, but has an annoying finalbeep at the end of every message. The communicator necessarily allows sending of signals backward in time, even when that's not your intention. Eventually the characters discover that all future messages are compressed into thatbeep , so the future is known, more or less by accident.

Feinberg had set out to see if such a gadget was theoretically possible.

This pattern, speculation leading to detailed theory, I encountered more and more in my career. The litany of science is quite prissy, speaking of how anomalies in data lead theorists to explore new models, which are then checked by dutiful experimenters, and so on. Reality is wilder than that.

No one impressed me more with the power of speculation in science than Freeman Dyson. Without knowing who he was, I found him a like-minded soul at the daily physics department coffee breaks, when I was still a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego. I was very impressed that he had the audacity to give actual department colloquia on his odd ideas. These included notions about s.p.a.ce exploration by using nuclear weapons as explosive pushers, and speculations on odd variants of life in the universe. He had just published a short note what came to be called Dyson spheres--vast civilizations which swarm around their star, soaking up all available sunlight and emitting infrared, which we might study to detect them. (This was a direct answer to both Fermi's question and the Cocconi-Morrison proposal--more links in a long chain.) Dyson had read Jules Verne while a child, and at age eight and nine wrote an sf novel,Sir Phillip Roberts's Erolunar Collision , about scientists directing the orbits of asteroids. He was unafraid to publish conjectural, even rather outrageous ideas in the solemn pages of physics journals. When I remarked on this, he answered with a smile, "You'll find I'm not the first." Indeed, he descended from a line of futurist British thinkers, from J.D. Bernal ofThe World, the Flesh and the Devil to Olaf Stapledon to Arthur C. Clarke.In Infinite in All Directions Dyson remarked that "Science fiction is, after all, nothing more than the exploration of the future using the tools of science."

This was a fairly common view in those burgeoning times. In my first year of graduate school in La Jolla I noticed Leo Szilard at department colloquia, avidly holding forth on his myriad ideas. Szilard had persuaded Einstein to write the famous letter to Roosevelt explaining that an A-bomb was possible, and advocating the Manhattan Project. He had a genius for seizing the moment. Szilard had seen the potential in nuclear physics early, even urging his fellow physicists in the mid 1930s to keep their research secret. I had read Szilard's satirical sf novelThe Voice of the Dolphins in 1961, and his sf short stories, and decided to wait until I had time from a weathering round of cla.s.ses to speak to him. I was just taking some difficult examinations in late May 1964 when Dyson told me that Szilard had died of a heart attack that morning. It was a shock, though I had scarcely exchanged a dozen words with him. (Of his rather cerebral fiction he had said, "I am emotionally moved by extraordinary reasoning.") I had not seized the moment.

Szilard was obsessed with nuclear dangers, and Dyson carried some of Szilard's thinking forward. A student of Dyson's made headlines in 1976 by designing a workable nuclear weapon using only published sources. I recalled the Cartmill episode. When I remarked on this, Dyson said, "The link goes back that far, yes." At the time I didn't know what he meant.

Rockets and War Stars Scientists often read sf at an early age and then drift away, but many maintain a soft spot in their hearts for it. Some, like me, bridge the two communities.

So it was no surprise to me when Teller enlisted sf allies in his policy battles. Especially effective in the 1980s was Jerry Pournelle, a rangy, technophilic, talented figure. With a .38 automatic he could hit a beer can at fifty yards in a cross wind. As needed, he could also run a political campaign, debug a computer program or write a bestselling science fiction novel -- simultaneously. When he asked me to serve on the Citizens' Advisory Council on National s.p.a.ce Policy in 1982, at first I didn't realize that Jerry wasn't proposing just another pressure group. This was a body which had direct lines to the White House, through the National Security Advisor. Teller, too, was "in the loop."

Pournelle dominated the Council meetings with his Tennessee charm, techno-conservative ideas and sheer momentum. An oddly varied crew a.s.sembled: writers, industrial researchers, military and civilian experts on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence to rocketry. The Council met at the s.p.a.cious home of science fiction author Larry Niven, a raucous bunch with feisty opinions. There was a bit of politics, but no overall bias. I am a regfistered Democrat, but that never came up. The men mostly talked hardedge tech, the women policy. Pournelle stirred the pot and turned up the heat. Amid the buffet meals, saunas and hot tubs, well-stocked open bar and myriad word processors, fancies simmered and ideas cooked, some emerging better than half-baked.

Blocking nuclear weapons had always appealed to me. My misgivings about military involvement in the s.p.a.ce program and other areas, which had surfaced in my novels repeatedly, vanished in matters which clearly were the military's province. Never, in all the policy and technical consulting I did while a professor at UCI, did I doubt that solving the immense problem of nuclear war lay somehow outside the province of the physicists who had started it all. But physicists could contribute--indeed, they had to try.

I favored as a first goal defending missiles and military command centers, using ground-based systems of swift, non-nuclear-tipped rockets. Technically this was small potatoes, really, not much beyond the capacity already available under existing treaties, which after all had allowed the Soviets to ring Moscow with a hundred fast defensive rockets, nuclear-tipped and still in place today.

The more ambitious specialists talked of war stars--great bunkers in the sky, able to knock down fleets of missiles. I doubted they could deal with the tens of thousands of warheads that could be launched in a full exchange. Still, to me that fact was a better argument against the existence of those thousands of warheads, rather than an argument against defense.

Finally, we settled on recommending a position claiming at least the moral high ground, if not high orbits.

Defense was inevitably more stabilizing than relying on hair-trigger offense, we argued. It was also more principled. And eventually, the Soviet Union might not even be the enemy, we said--though we had no idea it would fade so fast. When that happened, defenses would still be useful against any attacker, especially rogue nations bent on a few terrorist attacks. There were plenty of science fiction stories, some many dacades old, dealing with that possibility.

The Advisory Council met in August of 1984 in a mood of high celebration. Their pioneering work had yielded fruits unimaginable in 1982--Reagan himself had proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, suggesting that nuclear weapons be made "impotent and obsolete." The Soviets were clearly staggered by the prospect. (Years later I heard straight from a senior Soviet advisor that the US SDI had been the straw that broke the back of the military's hold on foreign policy. That seems to be the consensus now among the diplomatic community, though politically SDI is a common whipping boy, its funding cut.) None of this was really unusual in the history of politics, policy and science fiction. H.G. Wells had visited with both presidents Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and other major figures. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was so dismayed by the Wellsian portrait of a dark future that he asked him to the White House for a long talk about how to avoid drifting that way. Wells's attention to war as the princ.i.p.al problem of the modern era found a ready audience among world leaders. Jules Verne had not commanded such respect in the corridors of power, and no writer since Wells has, but in the late twentieth century it seemed that science fiction's grasp of possibilities was once more called forth, this time by the same government which had fretted over Cleve Cartmill.

In the summer of 1984 all things seemed possible. I was not surprised that Robert Heinlein attended the Advisory Council meetings, dapper and sharp-witted. And out of the summer heat came a surprise visitor -- Arthur C. Clarke, in town to promote the opening of the film made from his novel,2010 . Clarke had testified before congress against the Strategic Defense Initiative, and regarded the pollution of s.p.a.ce by weapons, even defensive ones, as a violation of his life's vision.

Heinlein attacked as soon as Clarke settled into Larry Niven's living room. The conversation swirled around technical issues. Could SDI satellites be destroyed by putting into orbit a waiting flock of "smart rocks" (conventional explosives with small rockets attached)? Would SDI lead to further offensive weapons in s.p.a.ce?

Behind all this lay a clear clash of personalities. Clarke was taken aback. His old friend Heinlein regarded Clarke's statements as both wrong-headed and rude. Foreigners on our soil should step softly in discussions of our self-defense policies, he said. It was, at best, bad manners. Perhaps Clarke was guilty of "British arrogance."

Clarke had not expected this level of feeling among old comrades. They had all believed in the High Church of s.p.a.ce, as one writer present put it. Surely getting away from the planet would diminish our rivalries?

Now each side regarded the other as betraying that vision, of imposing unwarranted a.s.sumptions on the future of mankind. It was a sad moment for many when Clarke said a quiet goodbye, slipped out and disappeared into his limousine, stunned.

In that moment I saw the dangers of mingling the visionary elements of sf with the hard-nosed. The field welcomed both, of course, but the world chewed up those of such ample spirit.

Behind much of this was Teller, close advisor to Reagan. He got involved with exotica such as x-ray lasers, which I thought beside the point. The answer lay not in vastly different, new technology, but using tried-and-true methods with a different strategic vision.

I was quite naive about what would follow. While the Soviets got the message quite clearly -- because they watched what we did, and didn't merely listen to the public debate -- and began thinking about throwing in the towel altogether. Meanwhile, over the Strategic Defense Initiative issue n.o.bel laureates ground their axes, techno-patter rained down, politicians played to the gallery -- s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing in the night, their fog horns bellowing.

Our present had become, for that sf fan reading a newspaper report of Sputnik, completely science fictional. Even in the 1980s, though, I did not know how deep the science and science fiction connection went.

Old Legends I had always wondered about Teller's effectiveness at influencing policy. In the 1940s, as James Gleick remarks in Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman, Teller was as imaginative and respected as Feynman. He was the great idea man of the Manhattan Project. So it was natural for me to ask him finally about science fiction's connection with both scientific discovery (tachyons) and science policy (the Manhattan Project).