"General!" McCaskell shouted. "If an EMP pulse will knock down an ICBM, what will it do to commercial airliners?"

"Airliners have redundant hydraulic systems! They'll lose electrical power, but they'll be able to land just fine. You've got to go now, sir. The president has less than fifteen minutes to live."

A Black Hawk gunship painted in desert camouflage set down thirty meters from the hangar.

"Go!" Bauer yelled.

McCaskell turned and ran for the waiting chopper. A soldier pulled him up into its belly, and the Black Hawk lifted into the night sky.

"I can't believe he bought that," said Skow.

"What?"

"Older planes like 727s and DC-9s have redundant hydraulics, but newer models are fully computerized. They won't make it. There are probably three thousand airliners aloft right now. The passenger load is at least a hundred thousand people. If only half of them crash, that's twenty times the casualties of the World Trade Center. We'll have bodies strewn from Maine to California."

"Experienced pilots will be able to set down on the interstates," General Bauer said.

"In Montana, maybe. The rest will be blocked by stalled cars and trucks, and they won't move an inch without new parts. But there won't be any parts. There won't even be food moving on the roads. Not unless the National Guard moves it. And they'll be too busy shooting looters and delivering water to do that."

General Bauer looked fiercely at the NSA man. "If that missile had hit Norfolk, we'd be looking at two million dead. Two million."

Skow nodded soberly.

"And if we don't knock down the next two, you can scratch off three million souls in and around Washington. Including your wife and kids, if I'm not mistaken."

The NSA man looked stricken.

"Now, you get somebody working on finding Trinity's 'all is well' signal. Because if we don't get our bone marrow fried by a neutron bomb in the next fourteen minutes, we just might need it."

CHAPTER 44.

CONTAINMENT.

The black sphere of Trinity pulsed with blue light as the lasers inside fired into its crystal memory. Given the enormous capacity and speed of the computer, I could not begin to imagine how many trillions of bits of data it had to be manipulating to cause such activity. Was it monitoring the military status of every nuclear-armed nation? Scanning and analyzing every square meter of the earth visible to satellites? Was it searching obscure astrophysics theses for references to the concepts I had been talking about? Or was it patiently writing a perfect symphony while we awaited nuclear disaster? Perhaps it was doing all that simultaneously.

My original intention to persuade Trinity to shut itself down had changed under the threat of the incoming missiles. I had focused instead on convincing Trinity to spare those lives under immediate threat. Yet my efforts had failed. Trinity wanted only to continue our discussion of my coma revelations. As I stood dazed before the black sphere, hoping that General Bauer was evacuating the base, the last part of my coma conversation with Trinity began to play from the hidden speakers.

"You said that when matter and energy come to an end, consciousness will survive by migrating into something else. What can it migrate into?"

"When I was younger, I heard a Zen koan I liked. I never knew why exactly, but now I do."

"What is it?"

"'All things return to the One. What does the One return to?'"

" Very poetic. But I find no empirical evidence to support even a theoretical answer to that question. What remains when matter and energy disappear? "

"Some people call it God. Other people call it other things."

"That answer is unsatisfactory."

"I have a more detailed answer for you. For us all, I think. But-"

The light within the globe faded, and Trinity went black. Then a few needle-thin rays fired into the crystal.

"I want to know," Trinity said in real time. "What is this thing that some humans call God and other humans call other things?"

I glanced at my watch. My face felt hot. Rachel is in the helicopter, I told myself. On her way to safety. It's Washington that's at risk. And my best chance of saving it is doing what I planned to do in the beginning. What I was sent here to do.

"The longer you wait, " said Trinity, "the more people will die."

Peter Godin's vision of Trinity as a benevolent dictator was not proving out. I closed my eyes and tried to find words to relate the knowledge imparted to me in Jerusalem.

"There is a force in the universe that we don't yet understand. A force without energy or matter. I'm not sure it's a force at all, actually. It may be more like a field. It pervades all things but occupies no space. It's more like . . . antispace."

"What is this force? Or this field?"

"I have no name for it. I only know it exists."

"What is its function?"

"Let me answer with a question. What is a chair? What is required for a chair to exist?"

"A seat. Legs. A back."

"Is that all?"

"There are other types of chairs. Bean chairs. Japanese stools."

"You've left something out. Something else is absolutely required to have a chair."

"What?"

"Space."

The sphere went black again. "You are correct. Space is required."

"In the same way that space is required for a chair to exist, the field I speak of is required for space to exist."

The lasers fixed for several seconds. "Is that the sole function of this theoretical field?"

"No. It can act as a medium of communication. Such as that between quantum particles."

"Be specific."

"I'm referring to those cases when atomic particles make simultaneous decisions across vast reaches of space, as if they were invisibly connected. Experiments show that information traveling between such particles would have to be communicated at ten thousand times the speed of light. And breaking the speed of light is impossible."

"Through this medium you speak of, information is communicated faster than light? "

"Yes and no. Imagine that I dip my hand into the Pacific Ocean. Now, imagine that my hand is simultaneously touching everything that the ocean touches. That's the kind of communication I'm talking about. It's not a transfer of information. The information is simply everywhere at once."

"The quantum phenomena you speak of defy logical explanation, but observation has detected no field or medium such as the one you describe. "

"We haven't detected dark matter either, but we know it's there. We can't see black holes, but we see the light bending around them."

The lasers flashed at a blinding rate, lighting the crystal like a blue star. "My memory does contain something very like what you describe. I was searching my science banks. I find what you speak of under philosophy." "Does it have a name?" "It is called the Tao."

The word took me back to my undergraduate days at MIT, when books like The Tao of Physics were the bibles of New Age-oriented students. "That's Eastern philosophy, right?" "Yes."

"What is the Tao, exactly?"

"'The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao.'" "Is that a quote?"

"Yes. Taoism is not a religion. But its adherents believe there is a force that pervades all things. The Tao is undifferentiated, neither good nor evil. It animates all things but is not part of them. Are you suggesting that something like the Tao is what remains after the universe collapses into itself?"

"After the final singularity vanishes. Yes."

"This is the field into which consciousness migrates when matter and energy are destroyed at the end of time?"

"Yes."

"How can this happen'"

"Let me use an analogy. On the physical level, human beings are animals. Large-scale creatures who live in a Newtonian world of predictability, where time only moves forward, where we're separated from each other in space, and information is limited by the speed of light. But the subatomic world is different. There, particles exist right at the border between the large-scale world of matter and this other force-the Tao, you call it. It's only natural that at this border we should observe behavior that seems to break our physical laws."

"What does this have to do with consciousness?"

"Though we're animals in body, our minds are conscious, self-aware. Andrew Fielding believed that human consciousness is more than the sum of the connections in our brains. Through our consciousness, we participate in that all-pervasive field-in the Tao, as you say-at every moment of our lives. Our consciousness returns to it when we die, though without individuality. In the same way, the consciousness of the universe will migrate into the Tao when the universe ends."

"You suggest a cyclical pattern of existence. The universe is born, becomes conscious, dies, and then is born again."

"Yes. Big Bang, expansion, contraction, Big Crunch. Then it all starts again."

" What causes the next bang? "

I thought of my recurring nightmare, the paralyzed man in the pitch-black room. "The consciousness that survives has no knowledge of the past or future. It's a baseline awareness. But some desire to know survives. That's the strongest feature of consciousness. And from that desire to know, the next cycle of matter and energy is born."

The computer was silent for a time. "The universe exists as an incubator of consciousness?"

"Exactly."

"An interesting theory. But incomplete. You haven't explained the origin of the Tao. Of your all-pervasive field."

"That knowledge was not given to me. That is the essential mystery. But it doesn't affect our situation. You see where I'm going."

"You're saying I am not the end point of this process. I'm a way station on the road to universal consciousness. I am like man. Man is biologically based. I am machine based. But there is more to come. A conscious planet. A conscious galaxy-"

"You're another step in the ascent. No more, no less."

Trinity was silent for several seconds. "Why have you come here at the risk of your life, Doctor?"

"I was sent here to stop you from doing what you're doing."

"Sent by whom?"

"Call it what you will. God. The Tao. I'm here to help you see that Peter Godin was not the right person to make the leap to the next form of consciousness."

"Who is the right man?"

"Why do you think it's a man at all?"

"A woman, then?"

"I didn't say that."

"I've given much thought to this matter. Who would you have loaded into Trinity other than Peter Godin?"

"If you are still Godin, consider this. Your first instinct was to seize this computer by deception and take control of the world by force. You want absolute power and obedience. That's a primitive human instinct. A step backward, not forward."

"That instinct is more divine than human. Don't all gods first and foremost require obedience?"

"That's how humans portray God."

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Is that your argument?"

"Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it."

"Who then would you have loaded? The Dalai Lama? Mother Teresa? An infant?"

This question took me back to my first weeks on Project Trinity. I'd spent countless hours pondering this question, though then I believed it was a largely academic exercise. Now I knew it held the key to saving countless lives.

"The Dalai Lama may be nonviolent, but he has human instincts, just as Peter Godin did."

"And an infant? A tabula rasa? A blank slate?"

"An infant might be the most dangerous being we could put into Trinity. Animal instincts are passed on genetically. The term blank slate is misleading at best. A two-year-old child is a dictator without an army."

"Mother Teresa?"

"This isn't a problem of individual identities."

"What kind of problem is it?"