Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  'Wow! It's true!' said Harrison, pointing to a pair of jagged curves on the monitor screen.

  'What's true?' said Saxon. 'What are you people up to?'

  'We're investigating electric field effects,' said Victoria enthusiastically. 'The question is, if we put an electrically charged object through the twistor transition, what happens to the electric field outside the transition region? If the E-field just stopped at the boundary, that would violate Gauss's law, wouldn't it?'

  Saxon nodded uncertainly, grappling to visualize the problem. 'Sure,' he said finally, 'electric field lines have to stop and start on charges, so you can't simply chop them off.'

  'Right!' said Harrison. 'So the question is, what does happen? I bought a doorknob and some fishing line on my way in and snarfed the Wimshurst machine from the lecture demonstration setup room. We charged the doorknob negative, and then twisted it. We compare that with discharging the doorknob with a spark.'

  He gestured at the screen. 'Our nifty new sub-nanosecond digital oscilloscope saved both traces and then dumped them to the computer, and here they are. The spark kills the field fast, on the lower curve. But when the doorknob disappears, the trace falls much more slowly. That's just what you'd expect if all the extra electrons were left behind, probably attached to air molecules on the surface of the field boundary. They'd have to travel through air at a slow diffusion rate to get to grounded conductors and kill the field. So the electric field stays around much longer. Only electrically neutral objects can make the transition. With a charged object, you leave the charges behind.'

  'That's a very nice result, Harrison,' said Saxon. 'You two are doing very well. How can I help? I came in to provide some ideas, but you don't have any shortage of them at the moment.' Saxon was feeling a bit unnecessary. He didn't know what to suggest next. Then, too, there was the stack of papers and proposals on his desk awaiting review. 'Maybe I should leave you to finish what you're doing and check back later.'

  'Sure, Allan,' said Harrison, taking the hint, 'if you have other things you need to do . . . '

  'Well, as a matter of fact, I have some reviewing to do, if you're sure you can spare me,' said Saxon. He noticed Victoria frowning slightly. She walked over to the oscilloscope cart and watched the screen closely, then twisted a knob.

  'No problem,' said Harrison. 'But Allan, if you've got a minute, there is something else we need to talk about. I've been thinking over our discussion last night about secrecy. I just can't do it that way. We need help in understanding what's going on here. This is too important to keep sitting on it. We've got to go public, and we must do it very soon. If we don't, we're cutting ourselves off from the ideas and stimulation of the department and the whole physics community.'

  Saxon frowned, dismayed at the direction of the conversation. To his left Victoria was still peering at the oscilloscope.

  'Science can't progress that way,' Harrison continued. Tor your one example of a guy who was done out of his recognition there are lots of examples of people who published quickly with no bad consequences. And there are examples of people who sat on a discovery until someone else discovered it and walked away with the credit. I left Los Alamos to come here because I don't like secrecy in physics research. I don't tolerate it any better here than there.'

  Saxon felt himself growing upset and struggled to regain his composure. His doctor had warned him again about his blood pressure. He had felt this issue had already been settled, and he resented having to deal with it again. 'Look, Harrison,' he began with superficial calm, 'there's more to this than just adding to your publication list or even becoming the next Nobel laureate. My instincts tell me that the twistor effect is going to have commercial applications that are unimaginable. Extremely valuable applications, David. To give you just one example, do you have any idea how many hundreds of millions of dollars are now being spent by the Department of Energy just to develop methods of disposing of nuclear waste? And here we're sitting on a device that can make anything – anything including nuclear waste – disappear!'

  Harrison looked as if he wanted to object, but Saxon continued. 'Harrison, when something like this goes into the open literature the patent rights virtually evaporate. It becomes part of the public domain.' That's not quite accurate, Saxon thought, but I won't confuse him with details. 'We must proceed very carefully. We must protect our own interests. The stakes are too high to get hung up on petty questions like whether secrecy is nice or isn't nice. This isn't philosophy, David, it's real life. This is the chance of a lifetime, and we must be careful to gain the maximum advantage from this opportunity.'

  Saxon suddenly noticed that Harrison's face and neck were developing a reddish tinge. I don't need to get into a shouting match with this jackass, he thought. Better keep him working while he's making good progress. 'Wait!' he said. 'Don't argue with me now, Harrison. Think it over. Think about what you could do with the wealth and opportunity that this discovery of ours can provide. You're young, and you have your whole career in front of you. I'll be in my office, if you need me. And we'll talk more about this later, after you've had a chance to think.'

  David looked bleakly at the closing door. How can you argue with a greedy asshole like Saxon, he wondered, and shook his head.

  'David, say something,' said Vickie from across the room.

  'You mean about Saxon?' asked David, mystified.

  'Say anything, talk, make noise,' said Vickie. 'Sing a song, maybe.'

  'Hmm, a song. How about this one? My name is Moses; they call me Moe; Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo!' he sang in a loud carnival-barker singsong, walking over to the oscilloscope. 7 told the Pha-roah; we had ta go; Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo!' He noticed that the high-frequency trace on the oscilloscope changed its structure in time to his syllables. 'I should've brought my guitar,' he said more softly. 'What the hell is that?'

  'It's the E-field pickup plate,' said Vickie in a quiet voice. 'It's acting as an antenna, picking up something. It has a high-frequency component that modulates in frequency in synchronism with your voice. Or mine!' she added. She walked over to the field coils and unclamped the pickup plate and its wire lead, then returned to the oscilloscope cart, holding the pickup at arm's length. 'Testing!' she said. 'It's still there, David. Sing more!'

  While Victoria prowled the room, rolling the 'scope cart and waving the pickup, David continued: 'My name is Daniel; this is my den; Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo!' Vickie halted near the control console, then dropped to her knees. 'You pussy lovers; can step right in; Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo!'

  'David, come here!' said Vickie. He crouched beside her and she pointed to a thickish oval plastic plate, about the size of two thumbnails, attached to the undersurface of the desk. Looking closely, he noticed that it was printed with the logo of a well-known office furniture manufacturer. He watched the oscilloscope screen as he tapped the little nameplate. The rough sine wave on the screen snarled, then stabilized. Reaching into his pocket, he fished out his small red three-blade Swiss army knife. He opened the knife blade and pried the object loose, and it dropped into his hand. Vickie walked to the workbench and returned with a sheet of heavy aluminum foil. She carefully wrapped the object in the foil and looked at the oscilloscope screen. The green trace on the screen had gone flat. She carefully opened the foil wrapping for a moment. The trace jumped, then flattened again.

  'David, I think this thing is a bug. Somebody is bugging our lab and has been listening to everything we've been saying! This damned thing was broadcasting our voices on some FM band!'

  'I always wanted to be a media performer,' said David. 'Hope the folks out there in radio land like bawdy songs.'

  As he spoke, the trace on the oscilloscope screen began to climb, shifting with his voice. Victoria frowned and waved the pickup again. 'Sing some more, David,' she said quietly.

  David took up the refrain again: 'My name is Jesus; the Son of God. Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo!' Vickie turned and moved toward the blackboard. 'I've
come from hea-ven; to save your bod. Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo!' Kneeling, she examined the underside of the chalk tray, then beckoned David. He joined her and spotted a second oval plastic 'label,' this time bearing the logo of a manufacturer of educational equipment. He pried it loose and handed it to her to be encased in aluminum foil like its twin. The oscilloscope trace went flat again.

  It remained flat for the next ten minutes while David and Vickie took turns singing, counting, reciting limericks, doing anything to make sounds that might be registered.

  Allan Saxon sat at his desk staring, not seeing the sheaf of typewritten pages before him. He just wasn't in the mood to review papers, he thought, not with the twistor effect on his mind. Reaching a decision, he picked up the telephone and called the unlisted home number of Dr Steven Kosinski, the vice president and general manager of his company.

  Steve answered and immediately complained about being taken away from the television set just when the Huskies were about to score. Saxon ignored his objections and began to lay out their new plan of action. Their company was going to start a major new development project, an important application of a new electromagnetic phenomenon called the twistor effect. Steve was to start making preparations first thing on Monday. Saxon would arrange to have the basic apparatus delivered late Wednesday afternoon. By that time Saxon wanted Steve to have a technical team assembled and ready to go to work on it on a three-shift, twenty-four-hour basis.

  Suddenly, Saxon had a premonition of things going wrong. Steve had a morale problem from the circuit card incident, Saxon thought, and lately he'd just been going through the motions of company management. If he screwed up this project . . .

  'Steve, this is going to be big, very big, for both of us,' Saxon told him. 'We'll have the inside track on an important new technology.'

  Steve grunted agreement.

  'You and I are going to have to work our tails off in the next few weeks,' Saxon continued. 'But you're soon going to be wealthy, Steve. Very wealthy. Think you can handle that?'

  Steve said he thought he could. Saxon detected more enthusiasm in the response.

  As he was about to terminate the call, he had another thought. 'By the way, Steve,' he said, 'if that son of a bitch Martin Pierce or anyone else from Megalith calls you, you don't know anything at all about any of this. Understood?'

  'Understood,' said Steve.

  Saxon put down the telephone and sat for a long while, thinking.

  Sam Weston looked up from the disemboweled computer on his workbench when David and Vickie entered the electronics shop. Vickie extended a pair of aluminum-wrapped packets. 'Whatcha got there, Vickie?' he said. 'I'm too old to sniff cocaine. I'm already too confused as it is.'

  'Nothing like that, Sam,' said Vickie. 'David and I think that we've been bugged.'

  'So what? I've been bugged every day since I took this job,' said Sam with a crooked grin. 'Oh, you mean "bugged," like spy stuff! Hmmm. Lemme see those.' He took one of the packets and unwrapped the foil. He examined the logo, then turned it over and peeled the double-face foam adhesive away from the back with a small knife. Underneath was a ring crack near the edge that encircled the back of the object. Sam inserted the tip of a jeweler's screwdriver at a point where the ring widened. He lowered the handle of the screwdriver and there was a sharp click. Carefully he lifted off the back plate, revealing a circular blue object centered on the oval, a microcircuit along one end and a silvery disk on the other. Taking a sharp-pointed pair of tweezers from the workbench, Sam removed the disk. 'It's a watch battery,' he said, putting it on the bench. He took the other packet and repeated the procedure. Then he turned to Vickie and David. 'Yep, you were bugged. Where'd you find these?'

  Vickie described the sequence of events in the laboratory.

  'Clever!' said Sam. 'Even if you happened to spot 'em, you'd figure they were put there by the manufacturer. And the sequence thing. They must have been set up so that the one on the desk did the broadcasting while the one on the blackboard remained dormant at low power until it stopped receiving a signal from the other one. Then it went into action itself. That way if one fails, the backup takes over. And if they both fail in rapid succession, it tips off whoever planted them that their scam is blown and that they'd better head for the bushes.

  'Gee, Vickie honey, you sure bring me interesting toys. Now I'm gonna have to dissect these babies to find out how they work.' He patted one of the disemboweled listening devices. 'With folks this clever, I'll bet there are some tricks I can learn from 'em.'

  Victoria and David carried their coffee cups to an isolated table in a corner of the basement eating area of the Husky Union Building. It was a large orange-carpeted room with white tables and fabric-covered hemispherical light fixtures suspended from the ceiling. This afternoon it was almost deserted. What customers there were had gone across the corridor, where a TV set was carrying the football game still in progress across campus.

  As they seated themselves, Victoria looked around furtively. Maybe the HUB is bugged too, she thought. David leaned down to examine the underside of their table but reported finding only abandoned chewing gum on that surface.

  Sitting upright, he looked across the table at her. 'Allan must have done it, the bastard,' he said.

  'Why would he?' said Vickie, frowning. It didn't make any sense. 'He doesn't need to bug his own lab. If he wanted a recording of what was being said, he'd simply set up a tape machine and tell us it was for documentation or something. No, I think it was my brother.' William was quite capable of this kind of thing, she thought.

  The Flash? Why him?' asked David. 'He wouldn't have the money to buy goodies like the ones we found. And look, I tried to get him interested in physics, but no luck. I even invited him to come over and help us after school. If he wanted to know what we were doing, he'd just come to the lab and hang around.'

  'Maybe you're right,' said Vickie, feeling a bit relieved. 'But who does that leave?'

  'I don't know,' said David. 'The FBI, the CIA, the KGB, the Boy Scouts, the Radio Amateurs' League, the League of Women Voters . . . ' He paused and licked his lips. 'We don't know much about what Allan is into with his business ventures, do we? Maybe it has something to do with that.'

  'I happen to know something about Allan's enterprises,' said Victoria, thinking what she could say without implicating William, 'but I can't tell you how I found out. Allan's in deep debt to an outfit called the Megalith Corporation, and his business is tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.'

  'Oh,' David said, and looked thoughtful. 'Maybe I see why he's so interested in turning a profit on the twistor effect. Well, it's clear we need to tell Allan about the bugs. If he planted them he'll wonder why we didn't tell him, and if he didn't plant them then they're something he needs to know about. I'll let him decide if the cops should be brought in.' David took a sip of coffee, then looked across at Vickie thoughtfully. She found his gaze vaguely disturbing.

  Tell you what,' he said finally. 'You and I have been working some long hours lately. I think it's time for a break. After we go back to the lab I'll have to tell Allan about the bugging, and you can return the borrowed hardware. Then we close down the lab for the rest of the day. You go home and get ready, and I'll take you out to dinner. I know a great seafood place at Shilshole over on the Sound. We can watch the sunset over the Olympics and talk more about this. OK?' He looked at her inquiringly.

  Victoria regarded David quizzically for a moment before she replied. He'd never invited her out alone before. She found, on considering it, that she rather liked this development. 'All right, David,' she said at last.

  'Great!' he said. 'It'll be easier to get a table if we get there early. This time of year the sun sets at about six-thirty. I'll pick you up around a quarter to six, OK?'

  She nodded.

  Later, as they walked from the HUB into the autumn sunshine, Victoria felt more relaxed. But as they strolled back toward Physics Hall she found herself scanning the shrubbery fu
rtively for lurking spies and hidden surveillance techniques.

  Allan Saxon looked up from the proposal that was spread out on the desk before him. 'Come in,' he called through the door. It was Harrison. He had a funny little meter in his hand. 'Hello, Harrison,' he said. 'What's the latest discovery?'

  This,' said Harrison, slapping a small object on the table top.

  Saxon adjusted his reading glasses and peered at it. Then he picked it up and turned it over in his hand. It was a thin plastic oval with a manufacturer's label on one side and a recess on the other showing microelectronics within. 'What the Hell is it?' he asked, replacing the device on the desk top and looking up.

  Harrison didn't answer. He was kneeling on the floor and moving the meter, which Saxon now recognized as the field-strength meter from the electronics shop, as if it were a Geiger counter. Finally he put the meter down and took a small red-handled knife from his pocket. He pried something from the underside of Saxon's desk and attacked the back of the object with his knife point, popping off a thin plate and extracting a small battery. He put the object and the battery on Saxon's desk. It was identical to the other one.

  'What in Hell . . . ' Saxon began, but Harrison signaled him to silence with a wave and a finger on the lips. He moved slowly around the room, stalking an invisible prey, and soon repeated his actions, this time removing a similar object from the undersurface of a low shelf of the built-in bookcase. He deposited the new object before Saxon on the desk with the others and walked once more around the room, watching the meter. Finally satisfied, he sank into the straight-backed chair. 'Bugs,' he said.

  'What do you mean, "bugs"?' Saxon asked, although the significance of the little objects was already becoming apparent to him.

  'The lab and your office,' said Harrison, 'have been the recent objects of electronic surveillance. These things on your desk are bugs, clever state-of-the-art electronic listening devices that broadcast everything said in both rooms on high-frequency FM. By a lucky accident our new ultrahigh-frequency oscilloscope picked up the signals, and Vickie found them. We thought perhaps there might be some in here too, and indeed there are. Allan, somebody is so interested in what we're doing that they've bugged the lab and your office. Do you have any idea what the Hell's going on?'