John Barnes by Kaleidoscope Century

Author:Kaleidoscope Century [Century, Kaleidoscope]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-11T23:53:08+00:00

least we could build non-polluting power plants on Earth to drive the launchers, which would give us a temporary (but risky) way to keep the lights on while we moved everything into space.

The other thing, which reporters were making a huge deal about, was that we were close to “phase reversal MAM.” I had to hop around flashchannel recordings a lot to find out what MAM was, but it turned out that some bright guy at Tsukuba University had finally explained why surplus power was coming out of the old “cold fusion” experiments; in just the right electromagnetic field, the quantum numbers of a proton could become indeterminate enough so that some protons would flip over to being anti-protons. It didn’t take many of those to get something hot.

The scientist who had figured that out had been “killed by a prostitute still at large.” I had a sudden memory of my friend under the bridge, and a moment of admiration; she’d bagged a big one. Then I spent half an hour that day looking through my notes in my werp, to make sense of the memory. All I really figured out was that if she’d ripped me off, at least the person I was looking for was one hot piece.

The hope was they would have MAM working as a practical technology within five years. At least the surviving best brains in physics were on the job, and money was being thrown at the problem like there was no tomorrow. Of course if they didn’t solve the problem, there wasn’t.

Meanwhile, whether or not they’d have MAM to power it, they were going to be putting up space stations, and huge spaceships, and starting to colonize Mars and the Moon.

So with all that going on, a guy who had a pretty good background in radar and electronics ought to do fine, even if the Organization no longer existed or didn’t want me. I just had to get back to the States, where it would be easy to get hired.

After a few days of reading and studying, I thanked the nice old guy behind the counter at the library, checked out of the shelter, and went for a long walk. Around noon I had hutch and stashed the valise in a coin locker (using the last of my coins to do it), and started wandering around in the back streets near the Calle San Jeronimo, where if there were any tourists, they would be likely to be drifting around. Sure enough, there were a couple of kids, a man and a woman in their early twenties, wandering along in the narrow streets. I let myself shadow them for a while, listening in.

I don’t know exactly what tipped me off that the guy had been a tourist psycho. One of the most bizarre features of the Eurowar: rich American kids who dodged the draft through any of the wide variety of legal means, then got themselves over to Europe, armed to the teeth with

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