Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  The friendly guard was continuing his suggestions. ‘It’s a wee bit past the pub,’ he was saying. ‘Might get a room there.’

  From the abandoned walkie-talkie, Ringer heard a voice. ‘Five seconds.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said to the guard, then nodded towards the hospital. ‘Big place.’

  ‘Aye it’s …’

  Ringer didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Suddenly the ground was trembling, his body was shuddering as a sickeningly deep vibration took hold of his limbs, his stomach, his head. Then almost as soon as it began, the earthquake was over.

  ‘Shouldn’t take you long to get there,’ the guard was saying, as if nothing had happened. ‘Now I’ll let you be getting on your way.’

  Ringer turned to get back into his car and was instantly gripped by nausea. His legs buckled; he grabbed the car to support himself.

  ‘Are you all right there?’ The concerned guard helped steady him.

  ‘I don’t know what came over me.’ Ringer was able to regain his balance now. He had almost passed out.

  ‘I expect it’s the altitude. Quite a few people get sick up here, though you wouldn’t think it’s high enough. Just as well we’ve got a hospital, eh?’ He gave a chummy laugh as Ringer sat down in the driver’s seat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  ‘Did you feel the ground shake a moment ago?’ Ringer asked.

  ‘Last time the earth moved for me was my honeymoon,’ the guard said with a chuckle. ‘Maybe they’re still doing some blasting and it gave you a turn. I don’t notice these things. I’m used to them.’

  By now Ringer had recovered fully. ‘Where do they do the blasting? Is there a quarry?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about it. I’m just the fellow that moves the barrier up and down for all the lorries that come this way. But I’ll need to get on to them again about that old hotel sign in Ardnahanish. Why can’t they just put up one that says Burgh House Hospital instead, then everybody’d know what’s up here?’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Ringer. Clearly he wasn’t going to get any more information; the guard knew even less than Ringer. At least Laura wouldn’t have too much trouble bluffing her way past him. Ringer thanked him and waved goodbye as he turned the car and headed back downhill. At the bottom of the road he swung away from Ardnahanish and towards the coast, in the direction of Craigcarron.

  Half an hour later he was once more in the foyer of the research centre, where the same middle-aged receptionist he had seen the previous day was beautifully turned out for the benefit of no one except perhaps the top people Don had promised would be visiting.

  She said Don was still in a meeting. ‘You could go to the library,’ she suggested, pointing along the corridor. ‘It’ll give you something to read while you wait.’

  It sounded a good idea, and Ringer went as instructed, turning right at the end of the corridor. This brought him to another long row of anonymous-looking doors, sickly and forbidding in the artificial illumination, all of them identical and unmarked. The place evidently didn’t cater for strangers; and Ringer couldn’t quite remember which door was supposed to be the library. He opened one he thought to be correct.

  What he saw inside surprised him. Differing totally in character from the rest of the research centre, it was a small room of a sort that might be found in an old-fashioned hotel. It had plain white walls, a narrow bed, wooden furnishings. A man in an antiquated suit stood with his back to Ringer. Beyond him, a woman whose face was obscured sat cross-legged on the floor.

  Silently and with infinite haste, Ringer closed the door. They hadn’t even noticed him. The startling image remained imprinted on his mind as he tried to decide which door to try next. Then the receptionist came crisply round the corner.

  ‘Can’t find it?’ she said. Ringer shook his head. ‘Here you are.’ She went and reached for the same door handle he’d only just released. Her perfumed hand stretched out to it, making her white blouse taut as she opened the door to the room where the couple were having their strange meeting.

  But it was a library after all. A bigger place, conventionally modern in appearance, with rows of technical books, and racks with the latest journals neatly placed for inspection. Ringer was stunned.

  ‘Are you feeling unwell?’ he heard the receptionist say, with the same concern the hospital security guard had shown. Yet Ringer was not nauseous now; only bewildered.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, and walked in. It really was a library; and yet he’d seen something completely different, with his own duplicitous eyes, only a moment earlier. The hallucination had been every bit as vivid and detailed as the reality that replaced it.

  ‘I’ll leave you here,’ she said, closing the door as she departed. How could Ringer’s own mind have played such a powerful trick? Was he developing the brain condition Laura had mentioned?

  Hesitantly he went to the rack, lifted one of the research journals and opened it. His vision was normal; the text made about as much sense as scientific papers ever do. There was no indication of anything unusual, except that his palms were moist with perspiration. This, he knew, was only because of the shock of what he had just witnessed, and the awareness that the same illusion might occur again.

  He put the journal back in its place, lifted another. Ringer was too distracted to read, and it was only when he picked the fourth or fifth from the rack that his attention became suddenly more focussed, thanks to the sudden falling of several pages. A previous user had inadvertently left some papers tucked inside the journal; they fluttered loose and dropped around Ringer’s feet. He stooped to pick them up, and as he tried to restore them to order, he saw at the top of the first page: Top Secret. Approved responses: media and public enquiries. Ringer only had time to glance through the contents, but the three-page memo was enough to convince him Laura was right. There was a connection between Craigcarron and the region’s health problems.

  The fourth fallen page was even more significant. It was a map of a building; a skeletal plan with the abstract, utopian quality all such blueprints possess. Figures were sketched in; pinmen brought to frozen life only as a means of displaying the vast inhuman scale of the project they served. At the very bottom of the proposed structure, occupying its most infernal level – far below ground as a precaution, Ringer guessed, against accidental blast – a tiny shaded person unwittingly stood, arm upraised in hope, beside a huge tapering cylinder lying horizontally on the floor and moored like a captured beast. It bore the legend Vacuum Array.

  Ringer heard the door opening. Hurriedly he stuffed the pages into his pocket, then saw Don entering, beaming as he extended his hand for Ringer to shake. ‘Feeling better after a good night’s rest, I take it?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Ringer replied, trying not to tremble. Don led him out, saying they should go to his office.

  ‘Today I can tell you a little more about the project,’ Don said as they reached his door. He ushered Ringer inside, offering the same chair in which yesterday he’d made Ringer feel like an errant schoolboy. Don positioned himself once more behind his desk.

  It was time for the initiation; yet Ringer was still too dazed to savour the moment as fully as he would have liked.

  ‘I have to be very careful what I say,’ Don began. ‘As you’re not yet officially part of the project, there are certain aspects I’m not at liberty to discuss. However, I’ve been cleared to explain some of the technicalities.’

  Don took a pen and began sketching on a scrap of paper. ‘Here are the reflecting surfaces of the vacuum array,’ he said, aiming his penpoint at a row of gently curving lines he’d drawn, like nested parentheses. These, Ringer reasoned, would fill the great torpedo marked on the plan in his pocket. ‘Between some of the surfaces, we insert low-pressure acetone vapour.’ Don drew in hatching to illustrate this; and a jagged line depicting the next ingredient. ‘An electric current is discharged between the plates. And we find that the spark energy is greater than the input.’ Then he
said, ‘You look pale, John. Anything wrong?’

  Ringer told him again that he was fine; but he was unnerved and distracted. Mistrustful of his own senses, Ringer also found himself questioning the resistance he’d felt yesterday to Don’s extraordinary claims. To his array of mirrors, Don had added only some vaporized nail-varnish remover; the kind the receptionist might use tonight, preparing for a solitary bed. But as Don spoke of the proposed device, Ringer became increasingly persuaded that it could really work.

  ‘The process arises from the Casimir effect,’ said Don. ‘We’re effectively harnessing the energy of the quantum vacuum between the reflecting plates.’

  ‘That energy is negative,’ Ringer objected.

  ‘Sure,’ said Don. ‘Gravitational energy is negative too; and people have been using that for millennia.’

  Ringer felt suddenly stumped, though they were conducting a discussion at a level barely above what a first-year physics student ought to know. This was stuff Ringer had learned long ago, yet it was all hazy now, fuzzy and hard to recall. Don was blinding him with science of a kind which, he assured Ringer, everyone else understood perfectly.

  ‘This is how the mass of the mirrors is converted,’ said Don, scribbling a formula. ‘You can easily get the rate by solving the Schrödinger equation. The wave function is where quantum information is encoded, and by tuning the nickel-tantalum leaves appropriately, the device becomes capable of computation.’

  Don’s sketch was starting to become cluttered, though he appeared happy with it. ‘Of course, I haven’t drawn this to anything like the true scale. You ought to see it …’

  Ringer blurted, ‘You mean this has already been built?’

  Don fell silent. He stopped sketching. ‘Forgive me; I’m not able to discuss that.’

  But it was suddenly clear that he was describing an existing machine. The blueprint was a reality. Ringer asked him, ‘Have you got this thing running here now?’

  Don’s eyes were steady and unblinking. ‘I can assure you no vacuum array is currently operational at Craigcarron.’ Ringer was left guessing where the patiently drawn plan in his pocket had been turned into concrete and steel.

  ‘Have you already reached the sort of energies we talked about yesterday?’ Ringer asked.

  Don remained evasive. ‘I can’t go into operational details, John. But yes, the quantum computer we envisage could peak at 1000EeV.’

  Then all Ringer’s fears were unfounded after all. The machine was running safely, touching summits possibly unseen since the Big Bang. The world was unharmed. The mistake Ringer had found in his calculation was genuine.

  ‘I know this all sounds a little like science fiction,’ Don admitted. ‘But just think how it must have been when Volta put some bits of metal in salt water and invented the battery. The vacuum array is so simple and elegant, the strangest thing is that nobody thought of it sooner.’

  Ringer’s nausea began returning. The ground wasn’t shaking this time, but his stomach was heaving, making him feel as if he might be about to vomit. There was a family photograph on Don’s desk, and Ringer hoped that by fixing his attention on it he could suppress his sickness.

  ‘John, do you want a glass of water?’

  Perhaps scatter-brained Mrs Moffat should have fried that egg a little longer. In Ringer’s imagination, its yolk now oozed with multiplying salmonella. Or else, thanks to her disordered mind, she’d possibly managed to put some dreadful extra ingredient in his breakfast. There she was, in her kitchen, gleefully tipping dishwasher powder into Ringer’s coffee, and taking from a dog’s red plastic feeding bowl the triangular object she’d called a ‘potato scone’.

  ‘John, please!’

  The room was swirling; Ringer tried to stand, but instead found himself collapsing to the floor. He clutched at the edge of Don’s desk as everything became engulfed in whiteness.

  Then the receptionist was saying something to him. He’d been out for a minute or two, apparently. Ringer lay stretched on the office carpet, and the receptionist was putting a pile of books under his feet.

  ‘Just need to get the blood back to your head,’ she told him. ‘Feel better now?’

  Don looked down at his stricken colleague with a dismay that was not wholly insincere. ‘Too bad we’ll have to cancel your talk,’ he said. ‘Let me go and check something.’

  Don went out, leaving Ringer in the care of the receptionist who now assumed a pleasantly maternal air. Her scented bosom hovered in Ringer’s field of view as she scrutinized his face.

  ‘Shall I call a doctor?’ she asked.

  She moved aside as Ringer sat up. The nausea and dizziness were gone. His fainting fit was as transitory and inexplicable as the hallucination that had presaged it.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ he said, as she helped him to his feet. ‘Thanks.’

  Don returned, holding a glass of water, and told the receptionist she could leave. Then he said to Ringer, ‘Although you can’t give your presentation, the visitors would still like a chat with you, if you’re feeling up to it.’

  Ringer said he was, and after taking some sips, he followed Don out along the corridor to a conference room whose door stood open. Two men in expensive-looking suits sat at a smoked-glass table, leafing through documents.

  ‘This is John Ringer,’ Don announced. They stood to greet him.

  ‘I’m Mike,’ said one, shaking Ringer’s hand.

  ‘Dave,’ said the other. Both were immaculately groomed, spoke with American accents, and had the suntanned look of men who didn’t do a lot of physics.

  Don stood waiting for some kind of cue. ‘Thanks,’ Mike said to him eventually. ‘We’ll dialogue later.’ Evidently surprised by his abrupt dismissal, Don turned and went out, closing the door behind him.

  They invited Ringer to sit down opposite them. Though their features were dissimilar, they looked as though they could have come from the same school, yacht club or religious sect.

  ‘We don’t intend to beat the bunker …’ Mike began.

  ‘Or leave you at the dog track,’ Dave added.

  ‘No,’ said Mike, ‘what we want to do, John, is bowl straight down the middle. We’re talking wave functions, right?’

  Ringer nodded, not quite sure of anything.

  ‘Quantum wave functions,’ Mike continued.

  ‘Schrödinger’s cat,’ said Dave.

  ‘The waves of the future, you might say. Thing is, John, we aren’t physicists. We’re not calculating men. No, we’re good-old, down-to-earth businessmen, that’s what we are.’

  ‘Entrepreneurs, if you will.’

  ‘Impresarios, even. We’re the men who turn your ideas into everybody’s money. And that’s good.’ Mike sat back. ‘First thing I want to know is: can we trust Don?’

  Mike and Dave stared at Ringer with faces whose calmness indicated that nothing much rode on his answer except a man’s career.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Mike. ‘Second thing is: can we trust you?’

  The same calm faces this time; but with an added gleam in Mike’s eye, reminiscent of the oozing yolk in Ringer’s breakfast.

  ‘Yes,’ Ringer said again.

  ‘Excellent,’ Mike beamed, smoothing the table with his palm. Two of his fingers bore heavy gold rings.

  Now it was Dave’s turn. ‘We don’t know much about computers,’ he said.

  ‘Not much at all,’ Mike echoed.

  ‘But we do know that a few kids in the sixties made themselves into billionaires because while their friends were playing guitars and screwing chicks, they were doing electronics in their garage.’

  Mike was nodding sagely.

  ‘And we know something else about computers,’ said Dave. ‘Which is that they get faster every year, and have more memory. It’s … what do you call it?’

  ‘Moore’s Law?’ Ringer suggested.

  ‘Right,’ said Mike. ‘Moore’s Law. Computers get better and better all the time.’ He gave a
rhetorical shrug, raising his outstretched palms. ‘Can’t go on, can it? Has to be a limit. And what is that limit?’

  A general pause while Ringer tried to figure out if they wanted him to answer, until Dave said, ‘Speed of light. The c in mc2. God’s own natural speed limit. Can’t send information faster than that.’

  Mike stepped in again. ‘Unless …’

  Another pause. Ringer had no intention of helping them out this time, and eventually Mike continued. ‘Unless the speed limit can be broken.’

  ‘Wave functions,’ Dave chorused.

  ‘Instantaneous transmission of quantum information,’ Mike intoned. ‘Entangled states, many-worlds theory, superstrings and higher dimensionality.’ Mike stopped to draw breath. ‘We want you to explain it all to us.’

  Dave grew earnest. ‘We’re not physicists,’ he reminded Ringer, somewhat redundantly. ‘But we know a good idea when we see one.’

  ‘And we think you’re a good idea,’ Mike drawled. Then the two of them sat back, staring at Ringer like he was a piece of meat in a shop window.

  ‘So tell us about it,’ said Dave. ‘From what I hear, you think the vacuum array is going to do more than anyone bargained for.’

  ‘Non-collapsible wave functions at 500EeV,’ Mike recited, quoting the contentious gist of Ringer’s paper.

  Ringer was surprised they knew about it. ‘Did Don … ?’

  ‘We have our sources,’ Mike said with a knowing wink. ‘We may not be physicists, but we do our research.’

  They wanted Ringer to describe exactly what would happen when the vacuum array reached its energy limit. They said he should pull no punches; they wanted a full and frank discussion. ‘Nothing is ruled out,’ said Mike. ‘Everything is ruled in.’

  Ringer wasn’t sure if there was any language all three of them could understand. There was surely no point trying to go through technical details. Since they were businessmen, all they wanted was answers, preferably in the affirmative. But as he pondered the problem, Ringer felt the room begin to sway.