'Deal!' said Vickie with a faint smile. She turned to study the dying sunset.
David looked across at his passenger as they headed east from Shilshole on Northwest Market Street through the Ballard business district, wondering just what had gone wrong. He felt depressed. She'd been nice about it, but he'd definitely been rejected, he decided. Judged and found wanting. He supposed he'd been 'self-centered,' as Sarah would have put it, in trying the romantic route with Vickie when she was concerned about her brother, her thesis, and her whole future. His mind churned in agitation as he drove under the Aurora bridge and into the Wallingford district. This would not do.
When they reached the old house on Densmore, he asked if he might come in for a while to talk. She looked at him for a long moment and then said, 'Sure.'
Vickie showed him into the long narrow living room. Two of her male housemates were seated on the orange sofa near the front window gazing at the fading flatscreen TV that hung on the wall. Vickie led David the length of the room to an over-the-hill overstuffed chair, one of a pair facing away from the window, well away from the TV.
'I'll be right back,' she said. 'I need to see what William is up to.'
The housemates, an overweight fellow with a blond crewcut and a smaller man with wiry black hair and a ringing voice, were watching a cablecast of a pro football game. There were cheers as their favored team took possession of the ball. A beer commercial followed.
In about five minutes Vickie returned. She sat down in the empty chair, poking some of the herniated cotton back in place. 'He actually was writing a paper for his English class. I'm relieved.' She glanced at David. He was feeling uncomfortable.
'I feel the need to clear the air a bit,' he said, looking across at her. 'I have a sense of things heading in the wrong direction. What I wanted to say is that I like you. A lot. I want to see more of you. A lot more.' He looked at her, almost as if waiting for a blow. From across the room there were moans from the TV watchers as a pass went incomplete. 'Shit!' said the wiry-haired man.
She considered him. 'OK,' she said, 'refreshing honesty. I like that. You're a wonderful person, David. I like you too. I feel a sort of "gradient," you know, a sense of rising intensity.
'But we have a good working relationship right now. A very good one. Unique and rare. We're getting things done, and it's very exciting. Sometimes I can't quite believe it, it's so exciting. It's why I went into physics in the first place. I can't do anything that would endanger that.'
'Go, man!' the big blond shouted from across the room, as a back broke through the line for good yardage. Victoria looked momentarily annoyed.
'What would happen to all of that,' she continued, 'if we were to get involved and then it didn't work out? We would have destroyed something very valuable.'
David looked at her directly. 'Yes, I know that argument,' he said. 'I've thought about that a lot over the past week. What you just said is what I've told myself perhaps a hundred times. I guess I've decided that you're worth the risk.' He grinned at her. 'I think that we can build on the rapport we've already established. I want to try. And if things should not happen to work out, though I can't visualize that, well, I'm not a vindictive person. I've never had problems being friends with former lovers . . . ' Before he completed the sentence he realized that he had said the wrong thing.
Vickie winced. 'I have,' she said in a small voice, and was far away for a moment. Then she looked at him and smiled, but her eyes looked damp at the corners. 'OK,' she said. 'I've never planned anything this rationally before, but why not? We do have a huge amount of data to collect, starting early tomorrow morning. So let's wait to go out again, until maybe the middle of next week when things ease off a bit. Perhaps our problems with Allan will be resolved by then, too . . . '
'And we can try to get to know each other,' David finished.
'Yes, I'd like that,' she said. Her smile must have had several kilowatts of power behind it.
'OK!' said David, feeling that somehow he had risen through a dense cloud into the sunlight. From across the room there was a roar of appreciation as the favored team scored. 'Yeah! Touchdown!' yelled the blond, and the smaller man stood and clapped.
Vickie walked David to the door.
Alone at his apartment later, he felt her lingering kiss on his lips for a very long time.
12
Sunday Morning, October 10
Vickie awoke feeling wonderful. She lay for a while in the bed, savoring the vague feeling of heightened well-being. David, she thought. Am I falling in love with David? Her skin tingled, as if the blood were rushing through her body at a greater speed than usual, vibrating as it went.
She rose, put on her robe, and padded down the hall to the bathroom. The long shower didn't wash the feeling away. If anything, it made it more intense. As she dried off with the rough towel, her skin seemed to sing. Thoughtful, she collected her toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush and a few other items in a small plastic zip-bag.
Back in her room, she slipped the zip-bag and a few articles of clothing into her backpack. Might as well be prepared, she thought.
David hadn't slept at all well. He had gone to bed early and awakened after about an hour, thinking of Vickie. The rest of the night he had alternated between restless dozing and thinking of the previous evening and how he might have managed it better. Finally toward morning he had drifted off, only to be awakened by the cruel rasp of the alarm.
Now he stared at his face in the mirror as he shaved. He looked awful, he thought. He was hung up. Hooked. And she didn't want to see him outside the lab until the middle of next week. That was infinitely far away. This was only Sunday.
But everybody has to eat, even Vickie. He checked the freezer. There was a stack of prepounded and -floured scallops of veal, each wrapped separately. They had cost him some considerable trouble to locate at the Pike Place market and to prepare properly. Scaloppine Marsala. And perhaps a light burgundy, the Beaujolais nouveau maybe. No, rather one of those excellent Spanish Rioja reds. The Marqués de Riscal's product was still well represented in his closet 'cellar.' There was frozen broccoli in the freezer and a jar of Romanian artichoke hearts in the pantry. Not bad.
'Be prepared,' he'd learned in the Boy Scouts. Well, he was.
When Victoria arrived at the laboratory at 7:58 A.M., the first thing she did was to start checking the room. With the high-frequency scope at maximum sensitivity she'd been able to pick up a few FM stations and some SCR spikes from the electrical power lines, but no bugs. David, arriving with a thermos of coffee and a huge Danish pastry, had helped with the bug search. He'd suggested that it was his singing that had driven them away.
Over the coffee and Danish they had both been rather quiet. Vickie had been thinking of the previous evening and was feeling awkward with David. She had sensed that he was also off balance, and she had been careful to keep things on a professional level. David had followed her lead, and soon they had slipped into the familiar work routine.
David had decided that the radioactivity checks were next. He'd driven to the nuclear physics laboratory on the other side of the campus. There he had borrowed a disreputable-looking scintillation counter rig for gamma ray detection and used their radon source-maker to 'cook' an aluminum foil test source, transferring a few microcuries of radioactive thorium 226 to a hot spot in its center. Vickie had gone to the undergraduate modern physics laboratory on the fourth floor of Physics Hall and borrowed a thin-window ion chamber.
Now they were set up to detect both gamma rays and charged particles. They could test for the persistence of radiation after a twistor transition. The shiny source was hanging from a thread in the center of the twistor apparatus and the counters were clamped in place just outside the field sphere.
David moved the mouse to the region of the control computer screen and clicked. He had activated the synthesized voice from the control program, and now it began to count down. 'Five! . . . Four! . . . Three! . . . Two! . . . One!. . .
Activating!' it said. There was a pop sound. At a leisurely pace, the needle of the scintillation counter's rate-meter coasted downward to zero. On the computer screen a histogram display of counts recorded per unit of time showed a more abrupt transition to a flat-line trace.
Victoria studied the trace on the digital oscilloscope connected to the ion chamber. 'The beta counts from the source stop at transition time,' she observed. 'Paul was right.'
'I get the same from the gamma rays,' said David. 'I guess it's like Allan said. If nothing else, we've got a way to dispose of nuclear waste. Our hardware may become the flush toilet of the twenty-first century.' He frowned. 'But first we'll need to find out what's on the other end of the sewer pipe.'
'Yes,' said Vickie. 'I wonder how it looks on the other side of the transition. I wish I could stick my head through without losing it. Hey, that's another use for this thing: a no-mess guillotine! No unsightly heads to dispose of after the event!'
'Great,' said David without enthusiasm. 'Hmmm, maybe we could drop my thirty-five-millimeter camera through the transition and rig it to click while it's on the other side.'
'I've a better idea,' Victoria said. 'Chuck Swenson, a grad student in astronomy, was showing me one of the new cameras they've been using at Kitt Peak and Mauna Loa. It uses a CCD, a charge-coupled device, to digitally record image sweeps that are programmed into the optics. The data is burned into a little high-density read-only memory cartridge. You can set the optical sweeps for extremely high resolutions and even record color-wavelength information if you don't mind using more ROM space. It's made for telescopes, but it also comes with its own lens if you want to use it that way. You can even do sound and movies, if you want to devote the ROM space to that.' She typed a word into the computer terminal and pointed to the screen. 'Yeah, he's logged into the HyperVAX right now. Let's go up and see if we can borrow it.'
At nine on Sunday morning, Martin Pierce, still wearing Chinese silk pajamas, used the IBM PC/System 4 computer in his elegant bedroom to do a secured indirect link to the Puget Sound Reference Service computer. He found several files waiting for him in the [BROADSWORD]area. He downloaded the encrypted files, broke the link, and decrypted them with the PC. The first file was routine, a list of the library books and journals accessed by Saxon and his group at the university's library within the past two months. The second file was a message informing him that all four of the voice pickup bugs placed in the university physics building had been discovered, that the phone taps remained in place, and that PSRS intended to continue the surveillance operation with the remaining equipment and without replacing the bugs unless directed otherwise. The message concluded by requesting instructions on how to proceed further. Pierce frowned, then read the transcripts of the recordings. As he read, color rose in his cheeks.
A picture of the events in Saxon's university lab was emerging. The twistor effect, a whole new phenomenon . . . and it was made with essentially tabletop apparatus. The thing must be worth millions, even billions. This bastard Saxon was keeping it all to himself. That in itself was an indication of its value. Well, he wouldn't get away with it. Since Saxon wasn't allowing anything to be written down, the apparatus itself held the key. And now he was going to have it moved . . .
Pierce made a new link with PSRS and typed rapid instructions, then disconnected. He smiled. There was the potential for a very nice gain from this project. And the added spice of properly fixing Saxon for his disloyalty made it even more appealing.
David studied the little CCD camera. It did not look much like a camera to him. 'How does it work, Vickie?' he asked. 'It doesn't have enough external controls to do all those things Chuck mentioned.'
'See that little eight-pin DIN socket in the side?' she asked. 'You plug that into a terminal port and download a program that tells the internal processor what to do. There's a C control program that goes with it for doing the setup.'
David raised his hands in resignation. 'OK, you do the programming; you know C better than I do. I'll rig an orientation device and get some cryostat insulation for a catcher, and we can start the drops. By the way, what's the replacement cost of this little thing, if we should happen to lose it?'
'You don't want to know, David,' Vickie said. 'A replacement would cost about ten kilobucks, and Chuck said he would also need a posterior transplant.'
'He must be a very good friend, to lend you something so valuable,' said David, feeling a pang of jealousy.
She looked at him speculatively and smiled. 'Not that good,' she said.
David worked on the structure of the orientation mechanism, the automatic shutter trip when the twistor field broke electrical continuity, and the soft nest which caught the camera after it fell through on the return transition. Vickie worked on the programming for the CCD camera's internal processor. 'How do you think I should set the exposure and field of view?' she asked.
David thought for a minute. 'Let's make a conservative guess that there isn't going to be much light. If it were my Canon thirty-five millimeter, I'd set it up with a fast film, a wide-angle lens set to focus at infinity with a wide-open aperture, and an exposure time of one two-hundredth or less. Can this electronic marvel do anything like that?'
The CCD cranked up to maximum sensitivity is the equivalent of about ASA twenty-thousand-speed film, if you want to use it that way,' Vickie said, causing David to raise his eyebrows. 'That kind of speed can cover a lot of sins. Let me think . . . yes, I can configure it just the way you said. The wide-angle lens configuration will get about fifteen percent of a full four-pi solid angle. Is that wide enough?'
'Hmmm, that's a view angle of about forty-five degrees. Sure,' said David, 'that ought to be fine.' He tried to imagine what the little camera was going to tell them. He felt a rising sense of anticipation and squirmed in his chair. He could hardly wait for the result.
'OK, all set then,' said Vickie as she typed some final instructions to the HyperVAX, then walked over and disconnected the DIN plug from the camera.
They tried the drop-through procedure first with a plastic bag of bolts and nuts as a dummy load; it worked fine. Then they carefully oriented the camera on a clamped rod and Vickie activated the forward-reverse twistor transition. The small unit plopped satisfactorily into the catcher nest.
Vickie picked up the camera and inserted the DIN plug in the camera socket. The high-resolution image stored in the unit's high-density ROM streamed into the control computer. The computer proceeded the image, repainting it with an electron beam on the graphics display screen. It was black, with a scattering of white spots. They had photographed only darkness, punctuated by occasional dust specks on the optical system, David thought, disappointed. There was no spectacular first view of a shadow universe.
Long experience dealing with the problems and frustrations of experimental physics made him keep the feeling under tight control. He said cheerfully, 'OK, let's displace the view angle by about half the field of view. That would be, say twenty degrees, OK?' Vickie nodded and set the unit up for another shot. David repositioned the camera in the suspension and rotated the orientation by twenty degrees clockwise. Vickie activated the transition. The camera dropped into the nest again.
The graphical display showing the second image resembled that of the first, a solid black field with a few dust specks. David nodded. 'OK,' he said, 'can you do a vertical split-screen display with both pictures together on the screen? I'd like to see the right half of the first picture and the left half of the second picture side by side.' Vickie worked her magic at the computer console and the twin speckled dark fields appeared. David inhaled abruptly. 'Notice anything?' he asked as calmly as he could through the wash of rising excitement. He stood and walked around behind her.
'I see the same pattern on both images, but one pattern is displaced sideways from the other,' said Vickie. 'David, those can't be dust specks! They have to be outside the camera. They move across the field of view when you change the camera angle.'
&n
bsp; 'I know,' said David quietly. 'I think they're . . . stars.' It's too much, he thought, conceptual overload. He sat down in the old wooden chair, put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands. He sat that way for a long while, hardly moving.
David had oriented the camera so that it was pointing at a particularly dense cluster of 'dust specks.' Vickie had narrowed the camera's field of view, increased the sensitivity of the CCD, and reset the camera to use its internal diffraction grating as an optical spectrograph. Each 'speck' had now become a little stripe punctuated with black dots, the wavelength spectrum of its light. Vickie, an astronomy monograph in her lap, was examining the shot taken in the last drop. Those black dots have to be absorption lines, David. Look, this one is almost an exact match with the figure in this book. They are stars, David! We're sitting inside an enclosed building, and we're photographing stars in the middle of the afternoon!'
David had continued sorting it out in his head as he worked. 'We have to find out if any of the stars in these pictures match normal stars in position and also in spectral lines. Paul thinks that when we make something disappear in the twistor field, it isn't actually gone. Instead, it's been converted to what he calls "shadow matter," matter that completely ignores normal matter and interacts only with other shadow matter. And it's the same with light: shadow photons only interact with shadow matter. Gravity's the only exception. It's a distortion of space that links all forms of mass-energy: normal, shadow, whatever. This stuff comes from some brand of superstring theory that Paul uses. I've been thinking about how these ideas might apply to what our CCD camera sees.
'Suppose there are large numbers of shadow atoms that among themselves behave exactly like normal atoms. And suppose that a normal-matter star forms. It would make a gravity well that would attract shadow matter also, if any was around. So some stars may be all normal matter, some all shadow matter, and some a mix of both kinds. You might get a half-and-half star made of both kinds of matter and shining with both normal and shadow photons. So there is some chance of a correspondence between the stars in the picture and those in the sky. What we don't know is how much correspondence, except that it isn't one hundred percent.'
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