to North Carolina to run the Interface Team, the group responsible for communicating with the Trinity com¬puter. Levin was a tall, cadaverous man of thirty-five, and prematurely gray. Like his master in his healthier days, Levin seemed to live without sleep.
'I'll send him in,' Ravi said.
Godin held up one hand. 'What have you heard about Tennant and Weiss?'
'There's been no sign of them since Union Station.'
The old man closed his eyes and sighed with a rattle, a hint of what lay in the near future. 'The woman shot Geli?'
'They say it was Dr. Weiss, yes.'
When Godin frowned, a nest of lines formed in the lower half of his face. Though married to one woman for most of his life, Godin had no children, and he'd always displayed a paternal affection for Geli Bauer. The notion made Ravi's skin crawl; it was like having paternal affection for a cobra.
'How is Geli doing?' Godin asked.
'Remarkably well, I hear. They transferred her to Walter Reed. Her father arranged that.'
A trace of a smile touched Godin's lips. 'If she'd known that, she wouldn't have gone.' The smile van¬ished. 'What do you think Tennant was trying to accom¬plish in Washington? The president's still in China.'
Ravi wished he knew. For most of the project, the internist had been his biggest headache. Hiding cancer from laymen was easy, but Tennant was always noticing Godin's fluctuating weight, his gait disturbances, and the body changes caused by steroids. The old man's rheuma¬toid arthritis explained some of that, but for the last six weeks Ravi had been forced to keep his patient practi¬cally isolated from Tennant.
'I have no idea, Peter. It worries me.'
As a nurse gave Godin a sip of water, Ravi tried to gauge the time left to the tenacious old man. It wasn't easy. He hadn't worked directly with patients for years, and Godin was well past the mortality tables for his type of tumor. Predicting survival in these circumstances was the kind of augury at which doctors like Tennant excelled. Years of clinical experience gave them a sixth sense about life and death. But any Madras midwife might do as well.
A buzz and a purple flash made Ravi turn. Through the Bubble's transparent hatch he saw Zach Levin stand¬ing in the UV decontaminator.
Levin spent most of his time in the concrete womb of Containment, but he always seemed to sense when Godin had regained consciousness. Levin and his techni¬cians were like a priesthood, tending their master as he died and his creation as it was born. Priests of science, Ravi thought. What a contradiction in terms. He waved to Levin and thought, You get on my last bloody nerve-
'There's Levin now,' he said, and forced a smile.
'How long will I be conscious?' Godin asked.
'Until the pain gets unbearable.'
'Send Levin in on your way out.'
Ravi suppressed his anger. He'd been a wunderkind all his life, but for the past six months he'd felt more like a royal physician tending the bed of a king. The whims of a tyrant ruled his days. He stepped on the button that opened the hatch and walked out of the Bubble.
Zach Levin nodded from the decontaminator. Tech¬nically, Levin and his team were Ravi's subordinates. But the hardware and software of the Trinity computer were so complex that Ravi could not hope to lead Levin's peo¬ple in any meaningful way, except where the brain itself was concerned. Even when they approached him with neurological questions, he felt more used than listened to. They swam like piranhas through his mind, devour¬ing what they needed for their excursions into the labyrinthine neuromodels-
'How's he doing?' Levin asked loudly. The UV decontaminator buzzed and shut down.
'He's awake,' Ravi said. 'Lucid.'
'Good. I have some exciting news for him.'
But not for me, Ravi thought bitterly. 'Have you put any more questions to Tennant's model?'
Levin seemed to consider his reply. 'I dumped Dr. Tennant from the computer an hour ago.' 'Who told you to do that?' 'Who do you think?' Godin.
'At this point,' said Levin, 'bringing Trinity to full operational status is more important than any damage Dr. Tennant could do the project.'
Ravi felt the same way, but he didn't want the engi¬neer to know that. 'How does dumping Tennant's model help you to do that?'
'Peter thinks some of the problems we're now experi¬encing could have a quantum etiology. He thought per¬haps Andrew Fielding might be able to help us.'
'Fielding? You mean you've loaded Fielding's neuromodel into the prototype?'
'That's right.'
'Do you really think his model can help you solve your remaining problems?'
'To tell you the truth, I don't see why his model should perform any differently than Dr. Tennant's. But it's inter¬esting. Dr. Fielding is going through the same acclimatiza¬tion problems Tennant experienced-terror, confusion, feedback loops from his biological survival circuits having incorrectly balanced relief outlets-but he seems to be adapting to them at a significantly faster rate.'
Ravi shivered. Levin spoke as if Fielding were still alive. 'What do you think that means?'
The engineer shrugged. 'Maybe nothing. But Peter's intuition has been accurate too many times to ignore it. And it was the work stored in Dr. Fielding's crystal that brought us this far. If the processing areas of his model perform at a higher efficiency level than Dr. Tennant's… it could be a whole new ball game.'
Ravi's heartbeat quickened. 'What are the odds of that happening?'
Levin didn't answer.
Ravi felt like slapping the taller man's face, but the implications of what he'd learned drove such thoughts from his head. 'Well, carry on.'
Levin's arrogant smile told Ravi just how little weight his words carried now.
Ravi walked out of the hangar, climbed aboard his ATV, and gunned the engine. If what Levin said was true, then his phone call to Skow had been premature. Trinity might quickly become a reality despite Godin's death. And if that happened, it would change everything. Instead of looking for scapegoats, the president would be looking for chests to pin medals on. And if Ravi played his cards right, he could be first in line.
As he rode back toward his office, he glanced at the Con¬tainment building. Half-buried in sand, the concrete block exuded a sense of power he had felt nowhere else in the world. He'd experienced unease standing in nuclear power stations, but the danger in a nuclear reactor was quantifi¬able. Even the worst-case scenario was predictable, because nuclear fuel, however dangerous, obeyed natural laws.
Trinity would be different.
Fifty miles north of this facility, the first nuclear explosion on earth had turned the desert floor to glass. Robert Oppenheimer had stared awestruck into the eye of the resulting fireball, but his awe had been at himself as much as at the new machine he had built. But if the computer inside Containment reached its full potential- if every problem were solved and a neuromodel hit 90 percent efficiency-then Peter Godin's creation would dwarf Oppenheimer's deadly toy. For when men looked into the eye of Trinity, Trinity would look back. And it would know what it was looking at.
An inferior form of life.
CHAPTER 29
I came awake in a sweat-drenched T-shirt with no idea where I was. A sticky film covered my face, and a dark-haired woman lay in bed beside me. I could tell it was a woman by the shape of her shoulder. Afternoon sunlight spilled through a curtain to my left, falling across two suitcases standing on the floor. Then I remembered… Jerusalem.
A dream had awakened me, and no normal dream. All I could see was the face of a man leaning close to kiss me. The image made me shudder, but I fought the urge to push it from my mind. Soldiers, I remembered.
