Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  'How do you know even that, David, when we haven't tried to do any match-ups yet?'

  'Because,' said David, 'for the first shot I pointed the camera so that if our sun were present, it'd be centered in the field of view. It isn't there, so that's at least one star that doesn't have a shadow equivalent in the picture.' He was feeling pleased with himself.

  She looked at him. 'David,' she said, her eyes widening, 'this is . . . big, isn't it?'

  'Yes,' he said, the feeling of overload returning. 'I've been struggling to comprehend just how big. It's like Galileo looking through his new-made telescope and seeing the moons of Jupiter, a miniature solar system right before his eyes. It's like Newton realizing that the same force that makes the apple fall also holds the moon in its orbit. It's like Einstein at the Swiss patent office coming to the realization that space and time are almost the same thing. Vickie, it's so big I can't get my mind around it. Saying it's going to revolutionize physics and technology doesn't seem sufficient, somehow. We should yell, or dance, or pop champagne corks or something.' He felt exhilarated and a bit off balance.

  She swallowed and looked at him for a while without saying anything. Then, 'We have more checking before celebrations are in order,' she said. 'What if we're wrong? What if those points aren't stars but something else altogether? Or what if we're somehow just seeing the normal stars of our galaxy in a different way? We need to do a correlation, and I have an idea how to do it. The astronomers have the Yale bright-star catalog on their big disk, a data base that has the coordinates and spectral characteristics of the brightest stars, thousands of them. I can digitize our pictures and then use a fit routine to vary the scale, direction, and orientation of our CCD pictures within reasonable limits and try to do a match-up.' She paused. 'David . . . are we really going to be famous?'

  'Of course,' he said, 'our names will be household words. Harrison and Gordon,' he said giddily. 'We'll be like Lee and Yang, or Fitch and Cronin, or Penzias and Wilson, or Crick and Watson—'

  'Or Gilbert and Sullivan,' Vickie contributed.

  'Rodgers and Hammerstein,' he offered.

  'Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern,' she countered.

  'Simon and Garfunkel,' he parried.

  'Ozzie and Harriet,' she rebounded.

  'Laurel and Hardy,' he responded, beginning to break up.

  'Or Bonnie and Clyde,' she concluded, as they both collapsed in gales of laughter.

  They had noticed that some of the specks in the CCD picture were fuzzy, and Vickie had set the camera for high resolution in a narrow field of view to photograph a fuzzy speck. Now she was at the color-graphics terminal examining a ROM-dump of the resulting CCD picture. The display showed a rounded central region with two spiral arms. It was clearly a galaxy.

  That, David thought, is enough for one day. Too much too fast. He walked over to stand behind Vickie, who was manipulating the false-color palette of the graphics unit to get better contrast for the image. He put his hands on her shoulders and kneaded the taut muscles of her shoulders and neck.

  'Mmmmm. That feels good,' she said. 'Too long at the terminal makes my neck hurt.' He continued to massage her shoulders as she worked. What do you say to someone, he wondered, who's just discovered the first galaxy in another universe?

  'Look, Vickie, this has probably been the most wonderful day of my life, and what we've accomplished today I can't even think about without feeling a little drunk or crazy,' he said, 'but now I think it's quitting time. My mind's getting numb, and I'm afraid I'm going to start making mistakes.' And he did not want to make any mistakes in the present enterprise.

  'I am getting hungry,' she said.

  He continued to massage the twin columns of muscle that paralleled her spine. 'Well, then,' he said gently, 'how about some dinner? It's after nine.'

  She swiveled in the chair and looked up at him appraisingly. 'What did you have in mind, David?' she asked. 'The sun's already set over at Shilshole.'

  'Well,' he said, 'I could fix us some dinner at my place. I've got the makings in the freezer. And maybe you could look over those publication drafts I've been working on.' He looked at her inquiringly, holding his breath.

  She smiled.

  David, sitting at the teakwood desk in his apartment, extracted the diskette from the drive of his little Macintosh III and placed it in the top drawer of the desk, then folded the Mac's flat screen down to cover the keyboard. He looked toward Victoria, her face framed by the mosaic of lights from the University district across the water. 'The paper reads a lot better now,' he said. 'We still need a better way of explaining the field rotation trick, but otherwise it's essentially complete, figures and all.'

  The dinner had gone well. David had learned to cook a few 'specialties' very well, and the scaloppine were among his best. He rose and fetched the gold-wired bottle of the light Rioja from the table and emptied the last into the glasses on the desk. Then he walked with her to the wide glass deck doors and turned, lifting his glass toward the night sky. 'To other universes . . . and to us,' he said, and drained his glass. She drained hers also and put it on the lamp table.

  He gathered her into his arms, and they kissed. Her responsiveness surprised him. It was rather a change from the cool promise of last night's kiss. He held her at arm's length and studied her. 'You seem to have come to a decision,' he said.

  'Yes,' she answered. 'I've decided that you're worth it too.' She grinned mischievously.

  He took her hand, and they walked toward the bedroom.

  Later, Vickie was stretched out on her stomach, her chin propped in her hands as she studied him. 'David . . . ' she said.

  He looked up at her through half-closed lids. 'Yeah?'

  'Do you remember that lecture demonstration you were doing last Wednesday?' she asked. 'The one where you took apart the Leyden jar, touched all the metal parts together, put it back together, and then made a big spark?' She sniffed the love-sweat where his arm joined his broad chest.

  'Yeah?' he answered.

  'How does it work?' she asked, tickling the hair on his bare chest with her tongue.

  He blinked, shifting mental gears. 'It isn't obvious if you haven't worked it out,' he said finally. 'When you pull the inner conductor out of the glass insulating jar, the electrons have to decide whether to stay on the conductor or on the glass. They give up less energy by staying in the glass cavity, so that's what they do. All of that electrical energy stays in the cavity.'

  'That's nice,' she said, moving toward him.

  13

  Monday Morning, October 11

  At ten forty-five his Monday Physics 122 class out of the way, Allan Saxon walked briskly down the hall to the laboratory. Already this morning he had been able to reach his NSF contract monitor in D.C. and to have a brief talk with Ralph Weinberger, the physics department chairman.

  Victoria Gordon and David Harrison were already at work. They were looking at some black pictures hanging by magnets from the blackboard. 'What's up?' Saxon asked.

  'We've been taking pictures of the other side of the twistor transition with a CCD camera!' said Victoria. She looks radiant this morning, he thought. Hard work and long hours must agree with her. But as she began to explain, Saxon felt a rising sense of irritation. Here they go again, he thought. More nonsense, more diversions. Weird astronomy instead of mainstream physics. Stars in the daytime photographed from inside a laboratory.

  'I'm not sure I understand your conclusions,' he said, examining several of the frames. They're just white dots on a black background, as far as I can see. Why would you think they're stars? And some of them look elongated and fuzzy. Stars would be points, wouldn't they?'

  'Right!' said Harrison. 'Look, Allan, here's a times-ten blowup of this fuzzy one here. I just made it. It isn't a star; it's a galaxy! See the spiral arms?'

  Saxon scratched his bushy hair. Are they trying to con me, he wondered? Maybe to make me look ridiculous? 'Dust specks can have "spiral arms" too, Harrison,' he said, a no
te of sarcasm unmistakable in his voice. Must what is it that makes you conclude they're stars instead of dust or something? Can you identify any known constellations or recognize the position of well-known stars?' Saxon struggled to recall what little he knew of astronomy, which he'd always considered a waste of time and money.

  'No constellations or recognizable stars,' said Victoria. 'I dumped all the ROM outputs, position, and wavelength information to the HyperVAX and mapped all the image positions onto a sphere. Here's a Mercator projection of the brightest ones, about visual magnitude three or less. We've taken some wavelength data too and generated B-V coefficients. We've tried to match the position and wavelength data from the stars of each transition we've studied with the big star-catalog data base on Astronomy's big WORM optical disk. The best correlation gives about a fifteen-percent overlap between the observed stars and the data base. That's not very big, but it's far too large to be due to random chance.'

  'Neither random nor the same? Sounds to me like a bug in your programming, Victoria,' Saxon muttered. It's just garbage, he thought. Has to be.

  'I'd like to ask one of the observational astronomers to help with this,' said Harrison. 'Those guys have lots of sophisticated techniques for locating and identifying stars.'

  'Absolutely not,' Saxon frowned. 'I've already told you, Harrison, that we can't go around telling everyone about this just yet.' They're trying to use this nonsense as an excuse for going against my wishes, he thought. The disloyal bastards. I won't put up with this.

  'Allan, I'm sorry, but you can't keep this quiet any longer. Whoever was on the other end of that listening device was recording everything we said in here for several days. And you might as well know that I've told Paul Ernst, and even demonstrated the effect for him. That happened on Friday morning, before you'd returned. Guess I should have told you earlier. Since then he's been working on the theory of the twistor field for us. He's been making good progress. But now we need the help of an astronomer, too.'

  'Damn you, Harrison! You specifically went against my wishes on this.' The fool, he thought. No sense of loyalty. He can't be trusted. I have to get this equipment out of his hands as soon as possible, before more information leaks out.

  'This discovery is too big to keep secret,' said Harrison. 'Dammit, Allan, I think the CCD camera is photographing other universes!'

  'What the bloody hell does that mean?' said Saxon. 'It reminds me of one of those stupid joke-exam questions, "Define Universe and give three examples." '

  'Look, Allan,' said Harrison slowly, 'consider special relativity. We're photographing unfamiliar stars and galaxies. Those objects can't be in another part of our universe. If they were, we'd be sending the camera from here to there faster than the speed of light. If you have a way of doing that, you can use it to do paradoxical things like sending messages backwards in time or determining the "true" reference frame of space. Those things are violations of both relativity and causality.'

  Crap, thought Saxon. He was growing angry, and noticed that the back of his scalp felt prickly. Blood pressure, he thought, watch the blood pressure. He took a deep breath.

  The more reasonable alternative,' Harrison went on, 'is that these stars are in another universe . . . a universe parallel to ours, like two sheets of paper in a stack. That doesn't make any paradoxes. Theorists like Paul Ernst have been talking for years about "shadow universes" as a possible consequence of their theories. My hunch is that the twistor effect has opened a door to these shadow universes.'

  Saxon snorted in disgust. In departmental faculty meetings he had frequently expressed his low opinion of these untestable fashion-driven fancies of certain particle theorists. It was unthinkable that now his own postdoc was spouting them.

  'But first we have to be very sure of that,' Harrison continued undaunted, 'which is where the astronomers come in. My guess is that our effect will blow the doors off astronomy too. It will allow them to study the stars in several universes instead of just one. And since there apparently isn't any air on the other side of the twistor transition, it'll be like having the Space Telescope in your own laboratory, with no pollution or weather or atmosphere or interference from the sun or moon or the bulk of the Earth. Incidentally, did you notice that Vickie's star maps don't have our sun in them, or even very many bright stars? Our location in the other universes is out in the celestial boondocks.'

  Saxon struggled to control his rage and to speak very slowly and precisely. 'I'm sorry that it has come to this, Harrison,' he said. *I must remind you that I'm the holder of the grants that purchased this equipment, and in my judgment it's not presently in a secure location. On Saturday I made preliminary arrangements to have it moved to my company laboratory in Bellevue where it will be safe. Just this morning I received permission from our NSF contract monitor and from Chairman Weinberger for the move. It is a fait accompli. This is Monday. On Wednesday at four P.M. the movers will arrive. You can do what you like with the equipment until then, follow any blind alleys you see fit, as long as you have the equipment all packed and ready for them when they arrive. But on Wednesday, it goes. Understand?'

  'But the equipment belongs to the university,' Harrison protested. 'It was given to you to use for basic research. You can't just appropriate it for your private business.'

  'The NSF and the physics department think otherwise,' said Saxon. 'Our government these days encourages the cross-fertilization of university research and commercial applications. My NSF contract, the same contract that pays your salary, has an explicit provision in it for this kind of cooperation. And both the NSF and the chairman have explicitly agreed to moving the equipment. Perhaps you are privy to some legal knowledge that is not known to them?'

  Harrison spluttered, then shook his head.

  'Now, unless you agree to have the equipment ready to move on Wednesday afternoon,' Saxon continued, 'I will have to deny you further access to the equipment. Do you agree to have it ready?'

  Harrison started to protest, but then nodded.

  'And please just stop talking to people about it!' Saxon stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. As he walked down the hall toward his office, he was thinking that he had made a serious mistake in not arranging for the move today. And he should not have told Harrison about the move just yet. He must get better control of his temper. Losing it was bad for his blood pressure.

  Saxon had just returned to his office after a leisurely lunch with his colleagues at the Faculty Club when the telephone buzzed. Susan informed him that Dr Pierce's office was on the line, calling long distance from San Francisco. 'Hello, this is Allan Saxon,' he said into the receiver.

  'Please hold for Dr Pierce, Professor Saxon,' said a voice that he recognized as Darlene's. There was a click. 'Allan, how are you?' said Martin Pierce.

  'I'm fine, Martin, fine. What can I do for you?' replied Saxon, as warmly as he could manage.

  'Well, I believe that we have some further business to transact. I would like you to come here on Wednesday, the thirteenth, to meet with our lawyers and to sign the paper confirming our oral agreement. And I have a new enterprise that I would like to discuss with you.'

  ' I 'm sorry, Martin, but I can't make it on Wednesday. I have a class to teach and some hardware problems to deal with then. How about Friday instead?' Things have changed since last Thursday, Saxon thought. I'm not signing any papers.

  'Allan, I'm afraid that I must insist on Wednesday,' said Pierce slowly in a steely voice. There are some matters that can not wait.'

  Saxon's lunch felt suddenly heavy in his stomach. He knows about the twistor effect, he thought. Those were his bugs. Well, let's try confrontation. 'Martin,' he said, 'we've had some strange occurrences here in Physics Hall recently. Over the weekend one of my graduate students discovered that her experimental laboratory had been bugged with two small listening devices. We later found two similar devices in my own office. They're sophisticated microelectronic devices and must be too expensive to plant
without a good reason. You wouldn't happen to know anything about this, would you, Martin?'

  Pierce's voice sounded sad. 'I'm hurt, Allan, that you would even ask me a question like that. I thought that we understood each other. I assure you that Megalith is a reputable firm. We do not stoop to actions of the kind you describe, which are not only unethical but also highly illegal. I suggest that you go immediately to the police. They may be able to find those responsible. But I must return to the subject of my call and insist again that you be here next Wednesday morning.'

  Saxon thought of the problems that refusing Pierce would bring upon him. It would be easier to go there with his lawyer. The two of them should, if necessary, be able to generate enough confusion to stall any new contractual arrangements. He sighed. 'OK, Martin, I'll persuade one of my colleagues to teach my class on Wednesday. We'll catch an early plane. My lawyer and I will be in your office by ten-thirty. But you must understand that I can only be pushed so far. Our business relations are not improved by your tendency to order me around like your office boy.'

  'I do apologize for having to insist on Wednesday, Allan,' said Pierce. 'We are inconveniencing you terribly, and I'm very sorry to have to do that. But I think that when you hear about our new initiative, you'll find it was well worth the inconvenience.'

  After some final discussion of details, Saxon replaced the handset in its cradle. He stared at the wall, thinking of the bugs and what they had picked up while they were in operation. I wonder how much that bastard knows, he thought.

  David hung up the telephone and looked across at Vickie. 'I guess it isn't as easy as I thought,' he said. The confrontation with Allan had made him very angry. He'd called the chairman at Cal-Berkeley immediately to discuss the possibility of his early arrival and to ask about a transfer for Vickie. 'He said I could show up at Berkeley early, if I wanted. No problem, particularly if I was willing to do some fill-in teaching to earn my keep.'