Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  He didn’t slacken his pace; when at last he spoke he sounded as relaxed as he had sounded yesterday morning, sitting at a café on Mykonos. “As for the war, you may have heard stirring tales of kidnapped German generals and the like. Those were English adventures, worse than useless to the Greeks. As for me, I had no reason to stay on Crete, but neither did I have a means of leaving.

  “Any prospect I had of becoming a boffin in war research had died with John—and with Sir Arthur, who died shortly after he learned of John’s fate; he was a few months past ninety. After a few more months, Richard returned from a trip to Cairo with news of yet another death.”

  “My father is dead,” Richard told Minakis, as they crouched beside a smoky fire in a dripping cave high on Mount Lazaros. A half dozen andartes lay curled in the shadows; a British sergeant in filthy garb lay on his stomach at the cave entrance, fiddling with a wireless.

  “I’m sorry,” Minakis said after a long silence, though he felt nothing.

  “I should be sorry too, I suppose.” Richard fancied that he was disguised as a shepherd, but he wore his wool cloak regally. “A hunting accident, they say. Not likely. They called him a traitor behind his back. He could never abide disapproval.” He reached beneath his cloak, brought out a packet of cigarettes, and offered one to Minakis. “Cigars a bit of a luxury, these days.” Minakis thrust out his chin, and Richard handed the pack around. He smiled apologetically. “Thing is, the family business is obscenely successful—all these uniforms, you know. And I’m the heir. Rather an embarrassment.”

  Minakis watched his friend with unblinking eyes, saying nothing, for there was nothing to say to comfort a man whose grief over the loss of his father was already many years old.

  The andartes lit their cigarettes from smoldering branches; the cigarette pack came back almost empty. Richard lit his own with his brass lighter. “Some good in this. Lots of Father’s old pals on high are friendly to his survivors.” He reached beneath his cloak again and brought out a pair of letters in brown envelopes. “These for you.”

  Minakis took them and read them quickly. One was from SOE relinquishing him to the command of the Greek army. The other bore the heading of the Greek general staff temporarily housed in British Cairo, ordering him to complete his degree at Cambridge University, whereupon he was to report to the Radar Research Establishment as scientific liaison from the Greek government in exile.

  Richard said casually, “I understand there’s a scholarship at King’s—it says that, does it?—and army pay, of course.”

  “Does it?” Minakis asked dryly.

  “These days, when Churchill says ‘jump,’ the Greek government asks ‘how high?’” Richard replied airily. “If Suggs here can raise them on the wireless, the Hedgehog will take you off tomorrow night. Already a week into Michaelmas, you know.” He was talking fast to divert his friend’s brooding sense of honor, knowing it was one thing for a boy to accept help from his sadalos, quite another for a grown man to accept a lavish favor from a colleague. A foreign colleague at that. “Not sure Malvern’ll make the best use of your talents, but the places that could really use you are not places anybody can…”

  Minakis held up his hand; Richard faltered in midsentence. “I’ll go to England, Richard. You can have Crete.”

  When the commanding hand came down, Richard nodded vigorously. “Right then. After the war I’ll let you stand me to a drink.”

  “You must stay alive to collect it.” Minakis’s tone was neutral; he meant no more than he said.

  Cambridge was colder and darker and offered even fewer distractions than before the war. By June 1943, Minakis had done the maths tripos with honors, and for the next two years he worked on radar—not theory, a fait accompli, but practical problems of mass-producing lightweight sets for aircraft. He learned the techniques of generating high-power microwaves. He learned the properties of silicon detectors. He read Cavafy and Seferis and T. S. Eliot:

  There will be time, there will be time.

  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

  There will be time to murder and create,

  And time for all the works and days of hands

  That lift and drop a question on your plate…

  Minakis was happy for his colleagues when the war ended but felt little on his own account or that of the country he had left; the Greek government was a British prop that could not feed its people, the Communists and the monarchists were at one another’s throats like savage dogs, and civil war was inevitable.

  Better to return to grim Cambridge, where, having indicated that he would apply for British citizenship as soon as he had met residency requirements, he was offered a fellowship in applied mathematics (Cambridge-speak for theoretical physics) and a research post at the Cavendish to go with it.

  His solder-splattered wooden bench-top was cluttered with electronic valves and copper switches and bulky resistors and capacitors; its centerpiece was a tiny crystalline slab mounted in a vise, connected by fine wires to a greenly fluttering oscilloscope. Minakis tweaked the oscilloscope—a piece of equipment that had survived the Blitz, if barely—and studied the racing curves on the screen. As he bent to his slide rule there was a knock on the laboratory door—

  —and simultaneously a terrific bang on the bench, a flare of pink light, a tinkling glissando of valve fragments.

  Minakis swatted at the flames with his bare hands. He turned to find Richard Wingate standing in the doorway.

  “Oh my,” said Richard. “I hope I didn’t do that.”

  “Hello, Richard.” Minakis’s mustache twitched, but he didn’t smile. “I see you took my advice.”

  “Oh yes—I’m alive. You owe me a drink, I believe.”

  They studied each other solemnly, separated by dense smoke and the stench of burned insulation. Slowly Minakis bent toward his friend, stepped forward, and took him firmly by the hand.

  They caught up over lunch at the Eagle Pub. After four years behind enemy lines in the Aegean and France, Richard had returned to take up his doctorate, leaving the family business in the hands of the functionaries who had run it during the war.

  “Not that I haven’t shocked the old dears by insisting on a number of reforms. The board think me radical, but I daresay they have no idea how fast society is shifting. Just look around—most of the undergraduates here are as old as we are, and not at all the sort of person one encountered before the war.” Richard sipped daintily at his sherry. “And you? What are you up to in that cubbyhole Bragg has put you in?”

  “I’m looking at surface effects in semiconductors.”

  “Is that work for a theorist? You know what Pauli said about solid-state physics—this after he personally invented the field—‘One shouldn’t wallow in dirt.’”

  “Wallowing in dirt is my nature,” Minakis said.

  Richard reddened. “I didn’t mean to suggest…”

  “I’m quite serious. Potsherds were my first love. Silicon is a substitute. Interesting in its own way.”

  Richard raised his glass. “To silicon.”

  For several weeks neither Minakis nor Richard made an effort to contact the other—Minakis from bad habit, because he avoided social contact and buried himself in research, sleeping on a cot in the laboratory and spending his weekends climbing mountains or bicycling to exhaustion.

  One day Richard decided to drop by the Cavendish again. Minakis was using a helium cryostat when Richard knocked on his door. At that moment a fluid line ruptured. Liquid helium spurted out, and the air filled with dense white vapor.

  Richard poked his head in. “I say, I hope I didn’t…” Amid sounds of shattering glass, Minakis leaped to block his entry.

  “Don’t touch anything, you could freeze your fingers.”

  Richard waited in the hall for half an hour while Minakis and a porter cleared the mess away. When Minakis came out Richard insisted on paying for the damages, and Minakis accepted his offer with a curt nod.

 
“Last time we talked you mentioned Pauli,” Minakis said. “Have you heard of the Pauli effect?”

  “Well, he did just win the Nobel Prize…”

  “I don’t mean the exclusion principle. I mean that whenever Pauli enters a laboratory, something breaks. But he always escapes unscathed.” With a firm hand on his shoulder Minakis guided Richard toward the main entrance. “We’ll simply have to meet somewhere besides my laboratory from now on.”

  “Dinner in my rooms?” Richard suggested meekly. “Actually, I came by to ask you about electrons in nonmetals.”

  “It will be good to talk physics with you,” Minakis said, thinking it would be a relief to talk any subject with Richard without first having to clean up after him.

  They talked physics often, but they never talked of the past.

  Richard’s respect for his friend’s work grew, even as that work was anticipated by others better funded. Minakis was well on the way to creating a solid-state amplifier when Bell Laboratories announced its patents on a similar device, which it called a transistor. Minakis turned to semiconductors made of intermetallic compounds, but the giant Siemens combine in Germany was the first to achieve practical production methods.

  Richard suffered setbacks of his own. He decided that his doctoral work was a mere footnote to the theory of quantum electrodynamics worked out in the United States and Japan. He left to spend a summer on the Continent, and when he returned to London he asked Minakis to join him for dinner at his club.

  “I haven’t any talent for the scientific life,” Richard told Minakis, when they had finished their roast beef and potatoes and the waiter had removed their plates. “I was born to be a businessman; I admit it. Unlike my effect on laboratories, looms don’t break down when I walk onto the mill floor.”

  The two men, glowing with health in the mirror-reflected light of chandeliers and sconces and polished paneling, were older than their years in every way but their looks—Richard, sleek and sunburned, barely thirty-two years old, was impeccable in fine-woven tweeds; Minakis was a smooth-browed twenty-nine, with long black lashes and black eyes and a glossy black mustache, wearing the same suit that had served him since the end of the war.

  “What became of your Communism?” Minakis asked with a smile.

  “You’re an ex-Greek, I’m an ex-Communist. My employees don’t complain as much as most.”

  “I’ll miss our talks,” Minakis said mildly. He sat back as the waiter removed the plates and returned with a bottle of Five-Star Metaxa and two snifters.

  Richard nodded for the waiter to pour the brandy. He lit a thin cigar, puffed a stream of smoke and studied the burning ash, then eyed Minakis, who was watching him steadily. “Cloth is a bore, Minakis. I’ve decided to branch out.”

  “Into?”

  “I’m thinking of buying an instrument factory in Switzerland. Add a research arm to the place. Change the name, change the direction. Miniaturized solid-state electronics. Digital computation machinery. The coming thing.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do well.”

  “Manolis, give me your attention.” Richard’s eyes narrowed, and he spoke with barely suppressed heat. “How do you like struggling to teach undergraduates the fundamentals of quantum theory for what, the fifth year now? How do you like making bits and pieces of gear out of glass valves because Bragg can’t spare you the money to buy the sort of solid-state instruments you invented? It’s been ten years since John died. Since your wife died. Aren’t you tired of wearing that bloody hair shirt?”

  Minakis found himself fascinated by Richard’s display of temper: perhaps the man wasn’t condemned to eternal politeness and guilt after all. “Am I tired of my life?” Minakis set his brandy snifter on the table and rotated it thoughtfully. “I am indeed. What do you suggest I do about it?”

  “Be my business partner. The brainy half of Androulakis and Wingate, inventors and entrepreneurs. Make us impossibly rich.”

  Minakis tilted his head to one side, his eyes hard as glass. When he smiled his teeth gleamed in the warm light. “Why not?”

  23

  “Microelectronics made our fortune, as Richard predicted. You’ll have to ask him how he did it. I only ran the lab.”

  “Is that what renewed your interest in life?” Anne-Marie asked, her breath coming hard, something she was getting used to in Minakis’s rarefied air. “Money?”

  “After Andwin was established, I could pursue my own projects.”

  “Which were?”

  “What I’m taking you to see is a kind of prototype.”

  “Oh.” Her disappointment was plain—she could stop searching the rocky slopes for a cave entrance. “Tell me when we get close enough to spot this laboratory of yours.”

  “It was never out of sight,” Minakis said. “It’s right up there.” He pointed.

  A tiny chapel built of fieldstone perched high on top of the conical tor. A cross of welded strap iron at the end of the chapel’s barrel vault was silhouetted against the lurid sunset.

  “What are you doing up there, calling God?”

  Minakis laughed, loud enough to make the donkey shy. “Don’t tell the metropolitan. After a very substantial donation to the church, I secured permission to use this place on the promise that my work had not the least religious significance.”

  They reached the lofty chapel, surrounded by purple sky, the air colder than the stone underfoot; the night’s first stars glittered like quartz. To the southeast, Dikti formed a gray wall across the horizon; far to the west the snowfields of Psiloritis were pale in the afterglow of sunset.

  The chapel door was locked, but an old iron key rested on top of the lintel, in the first place anyone would look for it; the door was locked only against the wind. Inside, under a vault of bare stone, oil lamps flickered on a wooden stand in front of a bleached paper icon of the Metamorphosis. Someone had been here not long ago, saying prayers.

  The chapel was too poor and remote a place to merit an iconostasis; where one might have stood there was a sturdy construction of steel struts mounted on leveling jacks, supporting a platform covered with a heavy plastic sheet. The platform was at the level of a slit window in the center of the apse, which neatly framed the snowy mass of Psiloritis. A computer terminal, also shrouded in plastic, sat on a table against the wall.

  “Well, it’s a picturesque place for a physics experiment.” Anne-Marie reached into her bag and pulled out a flash unit that she snapped to the Canon. She turned to find Dimitris hovering in the doorway, displaying his dazzling grin.

  “Polaroid?” he asked.

  She thrust out her chin. “Be patient, child.”

  Minakis had pulled the milky plastic covering off the platform, revealing a perforated steel bench. Answering Anne-Marie’s questioning look, he said, “Essentially it’s an interferometer.” He named the components: “Primary laser and guide-beam laser, mirrors, rotating prisms, solenoid shutters, sighting scope…”

  “Just look at me a second…that’s good.” Peering at him through the viewfinder, she bounced the flash from the vaulted ceiling, bathing the whitewashed interior in light, three times in quick succession.

  “Forty-five kilometers west of us, this side of Psiloritis, is the peak of Ambelakia,” Minakis said, “almost as high as the one we’re standing on. Two years ago, with the cooperation of the local shepherds there, I installed a compound mirror, a mirror that can reflect a laser beam straight back where it came from—here, that is.”

  “To do what?” she asked, framing him in her viewfinder against the high slit window. Her flash washed him in white light.

  “I and my former colleagues have used the interferometer to test Cramer’s transactional interpretation.”

  “Which is? If you told me already, remind me.”

  “I discussed it with Peter. Cramer’s interpretation removes uncertainty from quantum events—gets rid of the collapse of the wave function, resolves apparent dualities like the wave-versus-particle nature of a quant
um event, and emphatically gets rid of the observer required by the Copenhagen interpretation.” He smiled. “So one doesn’t have to imagine Schrödinger’s cat half dead and half alive before one looks in the box.”

  “You mean the cat’s dead or it’s alive. Really.”

  “And the moon exists, whether we look at it or not.”

  “Kind of takes all the fun out of quantum mechanics.”

  “Not at all.” He was bending over the machinery, sighting along the light paths. He groped in a tool chest and found a can of compressed air and used it to flick dust from the surfaces of the mirrors. “It’s true that the transactional interpretation is only an interpretation, a different way of looking at the same events; it uses the same mathematics as standard QM and makes the same predictions. But Cramer assumes that information travels backward in time.”

  “Time travel?”

  “Not material bodies, only information. By his interpretation, cause and effect work backward as well as forward, everywhere and always—cause and effect are an agreement, a ‘handshake,’ between something that happens now and something that happens then.”

  Minakis had made whatever adjustments he wanted to make and turned, focusing his attention on her. She snapped three more frames, up close, full face. He said, “The core of Cramer’s idea is that the signal moving backward in time, from effect to cause, quite naturally selects from among all the possibilities that are moving forward in time the only one with real results.”

  “And you’ve tested it.”

  “Yes.”

  “With this machine?”

  “Yes. What we’ve built here is a fancy version of the two-slit experiment—QM’s oldest paradox.”

  Like Schrödinger’s cat, the two-slit experiment had been familiar to Anne-Marie even before she met Peter, for it was beloved of literary theorists who had only the vaguest sense of its physical meaning. “If both slits are open, light’s a wave, but if only one slit’s open, light is particles,” she said, putting it baldly.