Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  The same muted pop echoed through the room, and the wire pieces again fell to the floor. Vickie quickly retrieved them and examined the marks. 'Aha!' she said. She held the longer piece of wire against the stub still dangling from the roll. 'The missing piece came from the bottom of the wire within the coils. The top edge matches the piece on the roll.' She paused and compared the wire with her plastic ruler. 'And now more than half of the ten cm is missing. There's only about four centimeters left.' She noticed that Saxon seemed lost in thought.

  David walked to the blackboard and drew an elongated L. 'If we delay by fifty milliseconds we lose one-point-seven centimeters.' He marked equal divisions on the vertical and horizontal axes and then drew a small cross above the horizontal axis. 'If we delay by one hundred milliseconds, we lose six centimeters.'

  'It's five-point-seven centimeters, actually,' said Vickie, consulting the ruler.

  David nodded and drew another small cross on the blackboard, higher above the horizontal axis. 'Now let's assume that if the time delay were zero, we wouldn't lose anything.' He drew a third small cross at the elbow of the L, then drew a rising curve through the three points. 'A parabola, maybe,' he said.

  'Maybe the wire is falling,' said Saxon. 'Let's see, if it falls five-point-seven centimeters in one hundred milliseconds, that's an acceleration of . . . ' He punched numbers rapidly into the slim gold watch-calculator on his wrist. ' . . . eleven-point-six meters per second squared. Not quite "g," but close.'

  'Wait a minute!' said David. 'Those time delays we're using are the ones I'm giving to the computer program. But there's also the delay caused by the field changes themselves. That should be . . . ' He consulted a notebook. ' . . . about nine milliseconds.'

  Saxon poked at his wrist calculator again. 'I'll be damned! That gives an acceleration of nine-point-eight meters per second squared! That's Earth-normal acceleration due to gravity. The wire is falling out of the field. How much we lose depends on how much had dropped below the bottom edge of the field sphere.'

  David nodded. 'Wherever our wire's going, it's still in the Earth's gravity field.'

  Earth-normal gravity, thought Vickie. It's gone, yet it isn't.

  Saxon suddenly yawned and looked at his watch. 'God! It's almost midnight!' he said. 'You young folks can stay up 'til all hours if you want. But I've had a very long day, and I've simply got to get to bed. I was worn out before I even arrived here.' He smiled, then grimaced. 'And dammit, I haven't even had dinner yet! Shall we continue our investigations here at, say, one P.M. tomorrow?'

  David nodded in agreement.

  Vickie looked at Saxon. It must be tough to be so weary that you need to quit just when things are getting interesting, she thought.

  'In any case,' Saxon continued, 'I believe that we've got our hands on a very important discovery. Truly important. But I must caution you to be careful. Don't say a word about this to anyone yet. And I mean anyone!' He turned and strode to the door, letting himself out into the hallway.

  David followed Saxon outside. 'Just a minute, Allan,' he said, leaning against the lab door. 'It may be a bit early to discuss, but I think that we'd better write up a report on what we've got for Physical Review Letters. This effect is going to create a whole new field of physics, and it should be published as soon as possible. I also think we should find some theoretical help very soon.'

  'I disagree,' said Saxon firmly.

  David recognized Allan's expression as the familiar one of stubbornness.

  'We must do all of the definitive initial exploratory work before we publish or reveal anything to anyone,' Saxon continued. 'We've plenty of time. No one is likely to stumble upon this effect by accident.' He gestured back at the lab. 'This field configuration is too unorthodox.'

  David frowned and looked as if he were about to argue.

  'Look, David,' said Saxon. 'I've a very good friend who once made an important experimental discovery. A week after he made it, he went to an American Physical Society meeting and happened to mention it to some "friends" over dinner. Before he knew it, several groups were working on his effect and publishing more papers on it than he was. And after a few years a theorist received the Nobel prize for developing the theory describing the effect. But no prize was ever given for the prior experimental discovery because the experimental contributions had been distributed over too many groups. Let's just keep very very quiet about this, at least for the moment. OK?' He looked penetratingly at David.

  David was feeling a bit stubborn himself. 'OK,' he said carefully, 'for the moment we won't tell anyone who doesn't already know. But while we're working to learn more, I'm going to start preparing a draft of a Physical Review Letters paper describing the basic twistor effect. We can discuss its submission in a week or so. Allan, we simply can't sit on this thing forever; it's too damned important.'

  Saxon frowned, then nodded. 'Very well,' he said, 'but be extremely careful with any copies of the draft paper.'

  'I will,' said David. Saxon turned and strode down the hallway toward his office at the other end of the building.

  David reentered the lab and smiled at Vickie. 'He doesn't want to publish,' he said to her, shaking his head. Absently he picked up a small polished sphere of reddish wood that lay on the control console. He gently hefted it, his thoughts far away.

  In a van parked on Fifteenth Avenue Northeast across from the campus a balding man wearing headphones nodded as he switched the input signal from the first to the second digital disk audio recorder strapped to the side shelf. He removed the disk from the first machine and placed it in an envelope. On the outer envelope he wrote, Voice, University Physics Lab, Friday, 10/08, 19:00-24:00. Things are going very well, he thought.

  Vickie lifted her bicycle up the worn gray steps onto the porch of the old house on Densmore Avenue North and put it in a place out of sight from the street, chaining it to the peeling white bannister. She quietly opened the weather-stained front door and entered, then closed it and tiptoed across the hardwood floor, avoiding the squeaky spot. She felt in the darkness for the mail on the hall table, but there was none. Then without turning on the light she walked through the kitchen to the basement stairway.

  She moved quietly. It was now after one A.M., and she didn't want to disturb any of her housemates. The old house was subdivided into bedrooms rented to miscellaneous students who shared the bathrooms, kitchen, and living-room areas. Vickie didn't know her housemates very well. Their majors were in uninteresting areas like business or communications or phys ed or civil engineering, and their personal habits tended toward the untidy, but they were quiet and didn't hassle her.

  As she glided silently down the stairs she could see that a light was on in her basement bedroom. She looked inside. 'William, what are you doing with my Macintosh?' she said to her red-haired younger brother, who was sitting before the screen of her vintage computer, his hand poised over the keyboard. 'You're using my modem. You're hacking again, aren't you?'

  William (The Flash) Gordon, sixteen-year-old convicted hacker, looked up from the screen a bit bleary eyed, the light reflecting from his thick gold-framed glasses. She noticed that his acne was getting worse.

  'Hacking?' he said disdainfully. 'Hardly! I'm just using your account on the Physics HyperVAX. A friend of mine who consults for Microsoft and Boeing wanted the new high-speed frequency-domain transform routine that somebody in Physics is supposed to be using. I just found a copy in Sam Weston's area. It's written in FORTRAN instead of a civilized computer language, and it's hardly structured at all, but it is the program my friend wanted. There's no accounting for taste-o.'

  Victoria felt slightly relieved. At least this wasn't likely to lead to another brush with the law. 'How did you know my password? Anyway, I never said you could use my account.'

  'Aw, Sis,' said Flash, 'it's easy to see that you always type your first name when you log in. That's not very secure, you know. You really should choose a less obvious password.'

  'I cert
ainly shall!' said Victoria. 'Did you ask before you copied Sam's program? You can't just go around lifting people's software, you know.'

  'Well, he didn't protect his area, so I figured that he wouldn't mind. If you like, though, I can send him a MAIL message from you saying that you made a copy-o.'

  'I copied it! You mean you copied it,' said Vickie, her eyes flashing.

  'Well, sure, if you really want everybody to know that I've been using the Physics VAX,' said Flash with a suspiciously bland expression. 'I thought you wanted me to kinda keep a low profile.'

  She walked up behind him and peered more closely at the screen as she said, 'Well, I guess Sam won't mind. I'll tell him on Monday. What's this letter you're reading? Saxon? Is that Professor Saxon?'

  William looked a bit uncomfortable. 'See, your thesis supervisor, Professor Saxon, had this subdirectory in his area that was triple protected. It was the most tightly locked-up subdirectory on the whole system. That made me curious to see what he had in there that was so secret, so I gave it the old peek-o.'

  'William!' shouted Vickie, then put a hand over her mouth as she realized that several of their housemates were sleeping in the bedrooms just above. 'You promised me when I allowed you to come here from Santa Monica that you'd cut out all of this hacker stuff. And now I find you poking around in the private files of my thesis supervisor. This is simply awful!' Then she looked again over his shoulder at the screen and said more quietly, 'What'd you find?'

  'Well,' began Flash, 'most of his stuff uses some weirdo encryption system, so I can't read it just yet, but from the items in clear text he's running a business on the side.'

  'Sure, everybody knows that,' said Vickie.

  There's a lot of junk about patents and licenses,' said Flash, consulting a printout. 'Sis, what's a "holospin-wave memory device"?'

  'I don't know,' said Vickie, frowning. 'My thesis project involves holospin waves, but I never heard of holospin-wave memory. That is odd, isn't it.'

  'Yeah,' said Flash. 'Anyhow, your professor must've screwed the pooch-o. There's a long letter in there to a guy named Pierce at the Megalith Corporation about how your prof's company couldn't make this whatchamacallit memory gizmo work after all. And there's another letter about some kinda goof-o that a guy named Steve made.'

  'That's probably Steve Kosinski,' said Vickie. 'He was Professor Saxon's grad student until a couple of years ago. He got his Ph.D. and took a job as vice president of Allan's company, I heard.'

  'Anyhow, it doesn't look like your prof's doing too well in the harsh world of business. He was asking them for more time on some loan. Lemme show you.' Flash reached for the keyboard, but Vickie caught his hand.

  'Time to quit now, Inspector,' she said. 'It's very late. Tomorrow I'm going to change my password, and you may not use my VAX account any more! Is that clear?'

  'Sure, Sis. Nooo problem,' said Flash, smiling to show that there were no hard feelings.

  'It's now after one in the morning, and I need to get some sleep. Log off and get out of here,' said Victoria, sitting down on the bed and removing her sneakers.

  Flash nodded and quickly typed a few lines, switched off the modem, and then shut down the old Macintosh. He slipped a diskette into his shirt pocket and stood up. 'G'night, Sis!' he said, closing the door.

  Victoria could hear him moving around in his room next door as she undressed. She must write to Dad soon, she decided.

  9

  Saturday Morning, October 9

  Paul Ernst was reclining on the long sofa in his living room, reading the Seattle Times and glancing occasionally out the east-facing window wall at the Saturday morning activity down on the lake near Magnuson Park. The Hobie-Cat enthusiasts were having a regatta. When the door chimes sounded, he looked at his watch, wondering who could be at the door at this time of the morning. It was just after ten. He put the paper on the coffee table and walked to the front door. Looking through the peephole, he could see that David stood on the doorstep. A bit early for a visit, he thought. He opened the front door wide and smiled.

  'Hi, Paul,' said David. 'Hope I'm not intruding. I need to talk to you.'

  'Nonsense! You couldn't possibly intrude,' said Paul. Then he turned in the direction of the kitchen, from which the sounds and smells of frying bacon were emanating. 'Honey! It's David! Set another place for breakfast!'

  The children immediately ran into the entryway. 'Hi, David!' said Jeff, still in pajamas. Melissa, looking rather sleepy, took his coat and, stretching to reach the pole, hung it in the hall closet.

  'Come on in and have a seat,' said Paul, gesturing in the direction of the sofa and the view of Lake Washington backed by Mount Rainier. David sank into the sofa and the children immediately took up their stations on either side of him. He gave them each a hug.

  'So how did it go with Allan Saxon?' asked Paul, noticing that David looked a bit subdued.

  'That's what I need to talk to you about,' said David. 'We did our magic disappearing-wire act for Allan last evening, and we were able to convince him that we have a real effect. He's very excited now, and he's dropped the matter of the missing equipment, at least for the moment.'

  'David, can you do a magic act?' asked Melissa enthusiastically.

  'I guess I can now, Melissa,' said David with a rueful smile. 'I make things disappear. I'll be sure to invite you to my next performance.'

  'I wanna come to th' p'formance too!' said Jeff.

  David nodded. 'Anyhow, Paul, Allan insists that we should keep the whole thing a deep secret. Not a word to anyone. He had some story about a friend of his who talked too freely and missed a Nobel prize. I didn't mention that we'd already told you about the twistor effect.'

  'Why not?' asked Paul. 'I would have thought that the best way of dealing with Allan's secretive nature would be to tell him that people already know about your results.' Damn Saxon and his paranoid secrecy, he thought.

  'Yeah, maybe so,' replied David unhappily. 'Trouble is, Allan has a very short fuse, and Vickie and I had just gotten him calmed down. Besides, when I called him in San Francisco on Wednesday, he did tell me explicitly to keep quiet about our problems with the experiment. Also I didn't want to get you involved in some confrontation with Allan. He's a powerful man in the department, and he'd make a bad enemy. I thought we'd let things cool off for a few days while I convince him that we need theoretical help. I think I can get him to ask you for help, if I keep at it. He just wants to make sure we don't get scooped by another group.'

  Paul looked at David closely. He isn't very good at being devious, he thought. 'Well,' he said, 'I think it would have been far better to avoid all this secrecy. But handle it your way. I'll respect your wishes. At least for the moment.' And please don't screw it up any further, he thought.

  'Look, Paul, I don't like secrecy any better than you do,' said David. 'Remember, I worked at Los Alamos for two years. I was in one of the "window dressing" basic research groups where essentially nothing was classified, but I saw the effects of secrecy at first hand. When you're not sure if you can talk about something, you don't talk. And so you aren't able to share ideas, to be stimulated by the other guy's ideas or by the problems he has in understanding yours. And you sort of get into the habit of keeping quiet about what you're doing, even when it isn't classified. The result is that research goes very slowly, if at all, and often stagnates. Los Alamos made me a firm believer in open research, free discussion, and publication in the open literature. That's why I left LANL to come here. I have no interest in doing research that way.'

  *I completely agree with you on that,' said Paul. Then he remembered the list of questions he'd written on the blackboard yesterday. 'Were you and Vickie able to make any progress on our questions about the twistor effect? What about the energy dependence?'

  'Boy, have we got some good stuff for you,' said David, brightening. 'We worked on it 'til late last night. Vickie put in some shunts with ADCs to monitor the current flow better, and I set the control com
puter to integrate the net power usage as a part of the transition procedure. It shows that for a particular transition frequency, the net energy required for a twistor transition goes as the cube of the diameter of the field sphere. So the energy per unit volume is holding constant.'

  Paul nodded. Just as it should be, he thought.

  'But there are several frequencies that produce the popping noise,' said David, 'and each of them needs a different amount of energy for the same size of field sphere. There's something interesting going on here. I put a summary of all the frequencies, energies, and field sizes in a data file and mailed it to you on the Physics HyperVAX. See what you can make of it.

  'And, Paul, do you remember yesterday when we found that one frequency that produced a kind of clunk noise?'

  'Sure,' Paul nodded, 'but then we couldn't make it happen again.'

  'Right!' continued David. That frequency shows a definite power drain. And we also found another frequency that draws power but doesn't make the pop sound.'

  'Curious,' said Paul. 'If the pop is caused by an implosion when the air disappears, what does the absence of the pop mean? That the air doesn't disappear?' His mind chased after a random thought that it couldn't quite grasp . . .

  'Paul! Children! Come to breakfast! You too, David!' called Elizabeth from the dining room.

  'David,' Melissa said sweetly. Elizabeth looked over at her daughter, wondering what she was up to. 'Could you tell us more of the Ton story, since you're here, and we're here, and everything?'

  David put down his coffee cup and looked at his watch. 'I guess so,' he said, 'if it's OK with your parents . . . ' He looked at Elizabeth and she nodded.

  'Good!' said Jeff, and pulled his chair closer to the table.