Mind Over Matter

Copyright © 1993 Jack Nimersheim

Originally published in Alternate Warriors (Tor Books), edited by Mike Resnick.

A STRANGER MIGHT PITY HIM. He certainly cut a poignant figure, his all but useless body folded unnaturally into a high-tech wheelchair. The best of the brightest humanity had to offer, held hostage in a rolling prison.
I first met Stephen Hawking in 1989. We were an odd pairing, indeed.
I owned nothing but an old, portable typewriter and the clothes on my back. He had everything a brilliant physicist could ask for. I was a struggling writer trying to complete the first free-lance assignment I'd landed in over six months. His landmark book, A Brief History of Time -- From the Big Bang to Black Holes, had already spent a year on the New York Times best-seller list. I never knew where my next paycheck was coming from. He held Sir Isaac Newton's chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
But professional accomplishments, or a lack thereof, only told half the tale. Contradictions also marked our personal lives. I ran eight miles each morning, rain or shine. Over the years, I'd cut the time required for this daily regimen to slightly under an hour. It took Stephen almost as long just to get out of bed and dress for the day. Like most serious writers, I enjoyed my solitude. He was rarely alone. Not by choice, but by circumstance. Someone -- a nurse or associate, sometimes both -- attended him constantly. Stephen accepted their supervision with characteristic wit and warmth. It demanded no great genius, however, to recognize that he did not relish his dependence upon others. Who would?
Despite these differences, Stephen and I became fast friends. We filled several evenings following our initial meeting with quiet conversations and cordial debates. Our discussions embraced topics far beyond the scope of the short celebrity profile a well known New York magazine had assigned me to write about him. I soaked up each idea and opinion he offered. I treasured every word translated into emotionless, electronic speech by the portable computer and voice synthesizer mounted inconspicuously beneath his wheelchair.
For more than a week I drank from this fount of knowledge and wisdom, savoring every drop. And then I departed. As did most people who met Stephen Hawking, however, I carried away a small part of this extraordinary man with me.
That should have been the end of my story. No doubt, it would have been, had an event that occurred almost a decade later not written a tragic epilogue to this brief moment in time.

Stephen and I kept in touch with one another, off and on, throughout the intervening years. Occasionally, our paths would cross at some scientific conference I'd been assigned to cover. But this happened only infrequently. To my surprise, however, Stephen tracked the forward momentum of my career. Intermittently, he would tender on-line congratulations for some accomplishment or another of mine. I never knew quite how to respond. I'd sold a few articles and books; he had uncovered previously hidden secrets of the universe. Where was the parity in that? And yet, Stephen always made me feel his equal, as he did everyone.
Stephen's last note was waiting for me on the network one evening when I signed on for the regular, Thursday night writer's conference. The header revealed it to be a broadcast message -- that is, a single communique transmitted concurrently to multiple destinations. My copy had been routed through an Internet gateway only moments earlier.
I did not know who else he chose to share his final thoughts with. In truth, I had no clear idea at the time what Stephen was thinking about, as he composed the message that scrolled across my display that fateful night:

They're going to do it. The bastards are really going to do it. Now I know how Einstein must have felt. Or Oppenheimer. Or Pauling. Or every scientist who's ever watched his theories transformed into a loathsome reality -- every one except maybe Teller, that is.
They took my ideas and twisted them. I should have realized they would. Albert. Robert. Linus. It happened to each of these, all better men than I.
The eagle and the crown have banded together to destroy me. I offered them order. They wanted ordnance. Using my own theories as ammunition, they have accomplished what ALS could not, these past thirty years.
I know that few of you comprehend what I'm saying. Soon, however, you'll realize the gravity of the situation. (The gravity of the situation...any irony contained in this statement was unintentional, I assure you.) I can offer no excuses, no apologies. It's far too late for that. There may have been a time when I could have stopped it somehow. Although, I doubt it.
These things take on a life of their own, you know. Just like children do. They're conceived as theories, the idea as zygote. They're nurtured within the sterile womb of incomprehensible equations scribbled on a blackboard, or tapped into a computer keyboard. And when the theory is tested and proved, when the equations are solved, the results are borne into the world. Once there, they become our mental progeny, but not our property. The intellectual child is father to the corporeal man.
Our children. What's to become of them? Where are you Robert, Lucy, Timothy? Someplace safe, I pray.
And yet, even this solace is denied me. I once stated that religion is based on revelation, while science relies on observation. I went on to claim that, since I've never experienced the revelations that lie at the heart of the former, I had to rely on the latter. You can't pray to science. For sadly, the ends to which men use it all too often are obscene.
And so, I go gently and quietly into the night. My future resembles the crowning glory of my past, as I descend into the deep, black hole of death.
Stephen

I didn't sleep at all that night. Stephen's cryptic note unnerved me and, try as I might, I could not contact him to ask what was going on. It wasn't until early the next morning that I fully grasped the meaning of his missive. That's when Tripoli imploded. A half-hour later, Baghdad blinked out of existence -- followed in short order by Tehran and Beijing.
The President and Prime Minister held a joint press conference at noon. Together, they announced the successful deployment of the Hawking Device, named in honor of the man whose revolutionary theories on singularities paved the way for the secret development of this equally revolutionary weapon. No, not a weapon, the President corrected himself, almost as an afterthought, but the ultimate instrument of global security and world peace.

- End -

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