“Not all human?”
“That’s what Dannerman says, yes. He said a lot of other stuff, too-until we told him to shut up, even in code, and report in full once he’s landed.” He hesitated. “One thing, though. You’re an astronomer, Dr. Adcock. Have you ever heard of somebody named Frank Tipler?”
“Tipler?” She frowned. “I think I might’ve heard the name-“
“He was some kind of astronomer, too. Late twentieth century. We retrieved all we could find about him from the bank, but the only interesting thing was that he wrote a book once about how Heaven was astronomically real.”
“Oh, right,” Pat said, tracking down a faint recollection. “I remember hearing something about him-maybe in grad school? It sounded pretty silly to me. What does Tipler have to do with all this?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. Dannerman-the other Dannerman, I mean-said we should look him up. If I get you access to the network, can you do the Bureau a favor and see what you can find?”
or Dr. Patrice Adcock the worst thing
about jail was having nothing to do-this woman who had never before in her life found herself with nothing to do. Now things were looking up. She wasn’t in jail anymore and, better still, she had a job to do that she was good at.
It took Pat an impatient half hour’s waiting to get access to Bureau’s databank-no, not the classified databank, of course, but to the one that accessed most of the country’s libraries. Then it took a while longer to get used to the Bureau’s procedures. She found the American Men of Science entry for Dr. Frank Tipler quickly and began sorting through some of the sources cited. She hardly noticed when Dannerman was back, collarless and occasionally touching his now bare neck to remind himself of the change. That Colonel Hilda Morrisey came in with him.
“New orders, Dr. Adcock,” Morrisey said cheerfully. “We’re all going for a little ride tonight. The people from Starlab are coming down, and we’re going to meet them.”
CHAPTER SIX
Dan Dannerman had never been in the deputy director’s plane before. In spite of himself, he was impressed. It wasn’t one of those custom-converted thousand-seat leviathans, like the President’s Air Force One, but those few who had experienced both reported that it was just as luxurious. Dannerman and Pat Adcock were even given a private compartment of their own. Their little cubicle wasn’t as fancy as the room Colonel Hilda had appropriated for her own use, and certainly it was nothing like the four-room private suite belonging to the D.D. himself, but it definitely was not shabby. It had full electronics. It had cut flowers floating in a sort of fishbowl, a pair of screens, a call button for one of the police-cadet flight attendants, even two pullout beds neatly made up in case they wanted to sleep on the way-on the way to wherever they were going, because neither Pat nor Dannerman had been given the word on where that might be.
Dannerman had lost his sense of time. Somehow a whole day had got away from him, all spent on waiting. After the long wait time while the deputy director got his ducks in order there was the waiting for the Bureau’s sniffer squads to finish their routine inspections-you never knew where someone might sneak in a bomb. It was full dark again by the time they took off.
Dannerman saw Pat cast one yearning look at the beds, but then she resolutely turned her back on them. She had no time to sleep because she was busy at one of the screens, checking databases for information on the Tipler person for the deputy director. Dannerman wasn’t sleeping, either, but the reason was different. The prospect of seeing this man who claimed to use his own name and spoke with his own voice had pumped him full of adrenaline. He used his screen on and off, sometimes to kill time by watching news summaries, sometimes to try to find answers to some of the questions that inflamed his thoughts. Perhaps some of the answers were there, but Dannerman didn’t have enough clearance to penetrate these particular systems.
He was seriously considering trying out one of the beds after all when Pat made a small grunt of conditional satisfaction. She sat back, watching the printer squirt out hard copy.
“Did you find what you wanted?” Dannerman asked.
“I hope,” she said, standing up, evidently getting ready to take the printout to Marcus Pell. “It’s weird. You can read it for yourself on the screen.”
“Weird how?”
But she was gone. He shifted to her seat and scrolled the screen, beginning to read.
Dr. Frank Tipler was a highly respected cosmologist until he published the book called The Physics of Immortality. In it Tipler predicted that the universe, currently expanding, sooner or later would fall back to what is called “the Big Crunch,” reproducing the conditions of the Big Bang, but in reverse. At that time, Tipler said, everyone who had ever lived anywhere in the universe would be reborn to live again as an immortal. Most of Tipler’s colleagues laughed at his idea, but there were two significant groups who shared his opinion, though Tipler had never heard of either.
“Weird” was the right word. This Frank Tipler had published a book, back in the closing years of the twentieth century. It was called The Physics of Immortality, and what it was about was Tipler’s theory- only he didn’t call it a theory; he claimed it was fact, and offered a hundred pages of equations to prove it-that the universe, after expanding as far as it could, would contract again into what he called “the Omega Point” . . . and then some very strange things would happen.
The first part of it wasn’t surprising. That was what the messages from space had described, years before: the Big Bang and the universe’s expansion, the recollapse into the Big Crunch. The surprising part was the consequence that was predicted in Tipler’s book. According to Tipler, at that Omega Point or Big Crunch, whichever you chose to call it, everybody who had ever lived would inevitably be brought to life again-in perfect health, at the peak of their powers- and would go on living forever.
It was, Tipler said, the scientific reality that underlay all the ancient human yearnings for a Heaven after death.
Dannerman scrolled the report again; just to make sure he hadn’t missed something-like the reason why this alleged other Dan Dannerman wanted the Bureau to know about this Tipler person. He hadn’t. That was all there was.
That was typical of the way the Bureau was run. Nobody told any inferior anything until they absolutely had to. Dannerman had a cynical theory about that. It was turf protection. The more information the higher-ups hung on to for themselves, the harder it was for some lower-down to leapfrog above them in the chain of command. Of course, that kind of secrecy never worked for long. Sooner or later some one person in the know would see a tactical advantage for himself in telling Dannerman what was up. …
Might, for instance, at least tell him where they were going. When they boarded the plane Pell had said they were going to meet the people from Starlab, and that was all. Dannerman craned his neck to peer out the window, but that didn’t help. It was starry dark out there, no Sun or Moon to give him at least a clue about their direction of travel. The only thing he could be sure of was that they had io be heading generally west or north. Had to be; because otherwise they’d be out over ocean by now, and they weren’t. He could catch glimpses of lights on the ground far below.
Resigned, he decided to get a little sleep.
As it turned out, it was very little. He had hardly closed his eyes when Pat Adcock returned from Pell’s private quarters forward in the plane. She was holding a partly full cup of coffee, trying not to spill .my, and she looked annoyed. “Oh, listen,” she said, setting the cup down, “I got this from one of the stews, but I didn’t stop to think about whether you might want some.”
Eschatology, which is the study of last things, is a fundamental part of nearly all of Earth’s religions. Buddhism speaks of the eternal bliss called Nirvana, while the Biblical Book of Revelations describes the eschaton in more specific and concrete terms: “And death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more.” It is what some religions call “Heaven.” As it turned out, there were other parties who didn’t think of that state as religious. For them it was a strategic objective, and they were prepared to fight for it.
NBI briefing document
“I’d rather sleep. What’s all this Omega Point stuff?”