The Return of Nathan Brazil

singularity somewhere, Markovian-built, that kept the rules! The Well World! A laboratory for the gods!”

Tortoi Kai nodded gravely. “He was entirely correct. The records indicate that the three aliens seized a ship, flew off, and vanished completely—the ship was eventually recovered. Somehow they had returned to their home world. The others—with Alaina’s financial help—founded Olympus. Eleven superwomen. Incredible!” She halted for a minute. “I wonder? Eleven superwomen? How did they breed— cloning?”

Billie shrugged. “Or else Yulin impregnated them and some bore males. No wonder they call their founders the First Mothers!”

“This also explains their odd religion, at least partly,” Kai pointed out. “They have a kernel of the truth—but they have it the way centuries of isolation and telling and retelling would distort it. All except this Nathan Brazil business, anyway, which is almost certainly a later addition.”

The supervisor agreed. “Yes, if Zinder was proved right, and the Olympians seem to be living proof, you could accept a god easily—they just went shopping for one and found him. I’ll bet if we key Nathan Brazil into the computers we’ll find the connection.” He suddenly stopped his enthusiastic babble and looked toward his assistant. She was frowning. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “This is proof Zinder was right! It means, I suspect, the end of the Dreel threat.”

She nodded dully. “Yes, it does. But then what? This kind of power—in full public view, in Com hands. What sort of thing are we unleashing on ourselves after the Dreel defeat? Remember—the Com Police destroyed New Pompeii and its computer, and all the files were thoroughly hidden. Back then they were scared of such power. Aren’t you? According to the records on New Pompeii, Zinder designed a dish-shaped object to remake an entire planet in seconds—to specification! Doesn’t that scare you?”

He nodded. “It does, but so do the Dreel. After… well, you and I will write the history of it and watch the next act unfold, as always. It’s too late to forget our rediscovery. For better or worse, Gilgram Zinder’s legacy is back. It is real, it is here, and it will not be buried again.”

Com Police Laboratories, Suba

“Stand by!”

The technicians ran for shields. To reinforce the controller’s verbal warning a series of buzzers sounded, then anxious supervisors visually confirmed that all were out of the danger zone.

They watched the experimental chamber on large monitors, for they were dealing with something they did not understand in the slightest and were taking no chances. The shielding on the room was sufficient to contain a thermonuclear explosion; the command center even had its own heavily shielded self-contained life-support systems. Even if the rest of the planetoid was destroyed they might survive.

Inside the chamber was a large, slightly concave metal disk; a small rod protruded slightly from its center. The disk aimed down at another disk, one that had no protuberance but was flattened slightly in the center. In the exact center of the lower disk a single plastic cup contained exactly four-tenths of a liter of distilled water. Nothing more.

The men in the command center grew tense as the operators hovered over their consoles.

“Energize!” came the command of the project director. “On my mark… Mark!”

A switch was thrown. Inside the experimental chamber the upper disk shimmered slightly and projected an odd violet light onto the lower disk and the glass it held. Now they would learn if this attempt would succeed, unlike the thousands tried earlier. So far they hadn’t even managed to boil the water.

The senior scientists of the project wondered why Zinder had been successful with essentially the same setup. They were using the plans and the math Zinder had described in bis position papers; the computers of Suba and the Council had assured them that if Zinder’s theories were correct the device would work. Historical record said he was right. Why wouldn’t it work?

They were missing Zinder’s computer, they finally concluded, and the plans for it had died with him on some Markovian world that possibly was not even in our Universe and the machine itself had been destroyed in a Com Police operation where chunks of anti-matter had been driven into collision with it.

Once understood, the problem was simply stated. To do as Zinder said could be done, what had been done, a computer would not only have to analyze a substance, but also discover its basic mathematical relationships, apply Zinder’s own formula to correlate it to his greater Universe, and isolate just that set of equations that fully describe that substance—in this case water, and not all water, but specific water. You were dealing not only in basic chemistry and physics, but in time as well. Apply feedback to the signal and the substance should simply cease to exist except in the memory of the computer. Reapply the signal to the Zinder energy flux and the substance should be restored. Or, take the substance’s equation and rewrite it to produce, say, H₂O₂—with a little ingenuity and a sufficiently sophisticated computer the alchemist’s dreams were realizable.

And so, all the available computers of the Com area were soon linked to one network, supporting a single goal. And when Zinder’s violet beam descended, the contents of the glass were noted, analyzed, and stored.

“Feedback on my mark!” the controller called. “Mark!”

A switch was thrown. The water in the glass became discolored, then seemed to wisk out of existence. Instruments indicated normal conditions in the chamber. The scientists wasted no time getting there.

The glass was, in fact, empty. Not a drop of water remained, yet the glass was cool to the touch.

“Okay, so now we’ve done what any good microwave generator could do,” one glum technician commented. “Now let’s see you put it back.”

Again the procedures, again the signals, again the eerie photographic effect, and now, when they entered, the glass was full again. They measured it. Exactly four-tenths of a liter.

They had the solution then. They played with it. Over the next few days they became quite adept at transmutation, even removing or adding atomic material. Lead into gold, gold into iron, whatever. Nothing more complicated, though.

“We’re limited by our computer capacity,” the project chief explained. “Until we develop a better, faster, smaller computer designed specifically for this sort of work, as Zinder did, we’ll be limited. Give us a year, maybe two, and we’ll be able to conjure up anything at will, I believe—but not now.”

The political and military leaders sighed and gnashed their teeth. “We don’t have a year,” one said for all of them. “We have months at best.”

“We can’t do it, then,” the scientist told them. “It takes time to design such a piece of machinery—although theoretically it’s within our capabilities—and even more time to build one.”

“Playing god is for later,” a politician snapped. “First we must have a later. Is there nothing you can do now to use this device as a weapon?”

“We could just build a huge disk, or set of disks, and use them for example, to project feedback along the entire atomic spectrum. Within the device’s limits, which are governed by power source and disk size, we should be able to nullify the individual atoms, although we’d be unable to store them or put them back together again. Whatever is struck by such a field would cease to exist.”

“I thought matter and energy could never be created or destroyed, just changed,” somebody with a little on the ball objected.

“That’s true, within our physical laws,” the project chief admitted. “But Zinder’s mathematical reality is outside of those. In a sense we don’t create or destroy, we merely allow the Universe to transmute the atoms and energy back into a state of rest—his ethers or primal energy. In effect, the so-called laws of the Universe are turned off. for anything within that field.”

“Build it!” they ordered.

Zinder Nullifiers, they called them. They were built in under four months, months of costly gains by the Dreel, who were constantly growing in numbers, resourcefulness, and boldness. Little testing could be done; the Nullifiers would work or they would not. If they did not, the Com faced annihilation; if they did, the fleet of the Dreel faced oblivion.