The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  “I want to know more.” Li said.

  “Here are the problems gentlemen . . .” Bear handed each of the three eggheads a nicely bound folder that O’Hara had prepared from materials showing all the research or slantwise applicable research that had been done on quantum changes in particles at a distance . . . including 3 TS classified briefs done by the NSA around quantum communications in past years. All of them ended with the conclusion that it was impossible with the word ‘impossible’ underlined and in bold type. “You can read all this at your leisure, but the problem we need to solve on this project is superficially this—I need a regular and reliable method of using spin change or any other method you choose that is a spin-off technology, pun intended. We need to create a real time or better than real time means of communicating with another location. It would be great if it will work through any medium, but I will settle for air and water, with earth to space functionality a bonus and communications straight through the earth a really really big bonus. You have three months maximum to skin the basic cat. If you need something, tell me what it is and I will move as many mountains as possible to get it. Ms. O’Hara informs me that I empowered to move some relatively big mountains too . . . so don’t be shy. What are your initial thoughts?”

  There was a pregnant pause until Feathersgait cleared his throat and spoke up; tucking his chins into each other like nested Tupperware.

  “Communication of information at faster than light speeds that you are suggesting is not possible . . . . these reports are correct. Particles change instantaneously without regard to distance well enough, but they cannot do so in a way that actually communicates useful data.”

  Bear tried not to smile . . . since it was what he had hoped for—Feathersgait was giving him the party line which is what Bear had been hired him for. He would speak with the originality of a GOP bumper-sticker . . . innovation and vision would come from elsewhere.

  “Not perfectly true . . . information can be transmitted, but only indirectly through reference to third party particles . . . . quantum teleportation . . .” Aziz started talking.

  Bear bit his lip to keep from grinning. This was the secondary effect he had been hoping for with Aziz arguing the cutting edge research results that pushed the boundaries of Feathergait’s more arrested vision. Aziz wound up after five minutes.

  Feathersgait snorted derisively and Aziz and Feathersgait stared at one another—a stalemate of viewpoints, neither was able or willing to move at the moment and not aggressive enough to argue about either point of view. It was a Mexican standoff of ideas.

  “Well . . .” Aziz cleared his throat like a peacemaker. “I suggest we read the briefs that Mr. MacMoran has given us, see what occurs to us and return to discuss it tomorrow.” It was a political suggestion that would lead nowhere. Bear held his breath.

  Finally Petrovski spoke up.

  “I have an idea about this . . .” He began. “No one has looked at virtual particles in this context . . . that I am aware of . . . .” Bear finally smiled behind a hand. The idea guy’s opening salvo had begun. Petrovski had begun outside all the previous research. Wild-eyed fancy and theory alone had spoken. It was what the eggheads needed; A dash of genius and imagination in the stew of current knowledge. Bear sat back, said nothing, and sipped thoughtfully on his Snapple while he listened to their often pointed discussion for an hour or more and then excused himself. The reason for his choice of the basic number 3 as the cornerstone of the team was now proven. To achieve anything like balance two of the three must reach some kind of agreement and whatever they decided would become the Q-kink compass needle.

  Bear could follow the general ideas they were throwing around, but they had lost him for the last fifteen minutes when they began writing complex mathematical equations on the whiteboard using lots of arrows and underlines to emphasize various points and erasing symbols frantically to scribble in new ones. All three were rubbing their chins thoughtfully and staring at the latest version, poised to strike like Neolithic hunters with their whiteboard Vis-a-Vis marker spears into the hide of their mental mastodon with the ululating tribal cry of ‘No! No! No!” Each was hoping for a killing stroke though a weak spot in the hide of the logic prey that would finally shut the other two up. The hunt was on.

  Bear stepped out into the hallway outside the secure conference room they had finagled at Fort Leavenworth until their own headquarters meeting rooms were complete and carefully closed the door with a sigh. By chance O’Hara was walking swiftly past bound on some task of her own.

  She looked at him with her head cocked back and to one side. He was six inches taller.

  “Well . . . boss?” She added the title absently, the brightness of her eyes amplified once again by her working granny glasses. Her sideways head was oddly insolent as if to say that Bosshood carried no weight with her and he better be sharp as a scalpel to keep up. Bear thought he saw something else around the eyes, but it could just be the swirl of light on the hazel and green being magnified by the lens’ glass.

  “Oxygen break . . .” Bear said airily, “It was getting a little rarified in there even for me—anoxia was setting in. Walk with me for a few minutes?” He asked as an afterthought, startling himself at the sudden invitation.

  She glanced at her watch and then at him and smiled in a glow of tooth enamel.

  “Cool.” She said simply.

  She passed him and led the way towards the distant ‘exit’ sign to the outside smoke area.

  He tried hard, but for the life of him he could not keep his eyes from drifting down to look at her butt as she walked ahead of him. Its counter rotating spheres inducing a kind of hypnosis that sat somewhere near the XY chromosome in his male makeup.

  “Cool indeed.” He said under his breath. .

  It was a pleasant chat between them, the topics light, casual and centered on the job; but they both pushed the others funny bones easily which was relaxing and there was still something around the eyes he thought he could not keep his subliminal mind from perceiving. It was a certain je ne sais quoi that tingled at the roots of his hair along the nape of his neck like a light breeze in no wind. The talk went on a little too long between them as if they were both reluctant to have it stop. Nothing overt was said or done, but deep in the well of instincts that resides somewhere under the mind’s thermo cline, down near the reef of the limbic system Bear sensed a reaction between them that was essentially electrical. It was a matter of charges being exchanged.

  Neutrality was going to be difficult to maintain—as it usually was in human relations. Only the spiritual and the dead are impartial—and by and large the spiritual are faking it.

  CHAPTER 4—CRACKED EGGHEADS

  Q-Kink got its azimuth.

  It took the better part of two weeks, but the eggheads emerged from a series of skull-fests which had continued like ranks of hot air tornadoes that blew in vicious circles and remained unabated. The wrangling between the brains began over eggs at breakfast and did not stop until the eggheads stumbled off to bed and exhausted sleep. Then one day quite abruptly, they were done. The packets of rancorous noise level behind the door of the recently completed bat-cave conference room door had increased steadily all morning like an engine coming up to revolutions. No one paid any attention until about 2 PM when the noise reached a crescendo and then stopped completely and instantly. Q-Kink Kommand was discussing strategy in Bear’s office across the hall and lifted their heads together at the sudden silence. The abrupt noiselessness caused Wong to comment.

  ‘They’ve probably killed each other . . . I’ll call the coroner.’

  Bear laughed.

  “Well . . . you do have to crack a few eggheads if you want to make an omelet . . .”

  Q Kink Kommand did not have to investigate because all three of their brain trust came out of the conference room at the cave looking tired and sounding h
oarse. Aziz disappeared immediately with a murmured apology, presumably to his bed. Antonin looked exhausted and perhaps triumphant but was doing the pee-pee dance and dashed for the latrines after a moment’s hesitation at seeing Bear. Only Feathersgait, veteran of a thousand committee meetings could hold his water. He puckered his mouth and looked disapprovingly in the direction of the other two. Feathersgait waited for Aziz and Antonin to get out of sight and earshot and then wanted to talk to Bear right away. Bear led him, already talking into his office. He jerked his eyes at the other two leaders who gathered their goods and departed without comment closing the door while Bear settled in to listen.

  The final vote it appeared had been two to one. Feathersgait proceeded to relate how Petrovski had convinced Aziz that his idea might theoretically work while Feathersgait was clutching conventional physics tightly where the dangerous ideas banging about in the ‘ugly little runt’s skull’ were still untested and therefore utterly theoretical and not worth the wasted time, money and effort of a group of grownups. Bear used his ears selectively to garner the gist of Feathergait’s argument about why Petrovski’s wrong-headed concept was so much pie in the sky and how Bear risked looking like a complete ass if he even considered it. Bear stayed mum, nodded sagely and then an hour later shrugged free from Feathersgait and hunted up Petrovski. He found the youngster nursing a beer in his quarters and watching a woman cavorting across the huge TV screen in black latex while something that probably passed for music screeched loudly enough to remove the enamel on teeth. He motioned and took Petrovski by the arm making it clear he wanted to listen to him too, but only sober and someplace his voice could be heard.

  “Summarize your idea for me.” He said simply over coffee in a corner of the brightly lit and neutrally decorated dining area, far from the prying ears of the civilian contract workers who were distantly staring at a football game in their office; occasionally exclaiming in anguish or joy as their team won or lost some points.

  “Didn’t Feathersgait already poison my well?” He said bitterly. Bear wondered how long he must have stared angrily at the door where Feathersgait had been sequestered with Bear.

  Bear smiled, the young often assumed the worst about older men.

  “Listen . . . Antonin . . . The first thing I want you to know is that I will always at least try to be fair. Feathersgait is a fairly bright man who probably challenged you and made you see your own ideas more clearly. Didn’t he?”

  Petrovski hesitated, surprised at this point of view, but his mind was still moving his lips in the old groove on the record. “I don’t . . .”

  Bear drove on.

  “I just want you to see what he gave you rather than what he did not; so that you will know there was some good from the process—something productive can come from critical self examination, not just inertia. You understand?”

  Petrovski’s blood still held heat—too hot to touch for now, but cooling rapidly in response to appeals to intellect rather than emotion.

  “What I know he is that he is a hidebound pain in the ass. I have been dealing with his kind all my life.” The young physicist said . . . anger raw in his voice—the light flickered on today’s lip ring as he spoke—youthful impatience pushing against aged caution, the eternal struggle, just the Yin and Yang Bear had longed to build.

  Bear nodded, acknowledging the emotion rather than the bile.

  “That is what you feel. I understand that. What I want you to do is examine what you think! Is your idea more mature now that he has challenged it? Did he compare it to existing doctrine? Didn’t he hold it up against the dogma of science and make you clarify and crystallize and justify your thinking and defend it so that eventually your own conviction and excitement about your ideas was what convinced Aziz as much as the merits of the idea itself?”

  Petrovski actually heard this long statement and looked at him in a startled manner. Then his face slowly relaxed as he considered the idea that what had come about was a process that Bear had initiated rather than an accident. He fiddled with his ear jewelry. Finally he focused on Bear more closely. There was a hint of grudging respect there that came and went for a split second.

  “You are a clever bastard.” He said quietly.

  “Hmmm . . . What is your idea?”

  Petrovski hesitated for a moment then shrugged his shoulders making the black t-shirt with the rocker logo roll across his skin.

  “The basic idea is to generate particles from a new source . . . instead of using conventional matter for fueling the communications I intend to generate virtual matter . . .”

  “Like the Casimir effect?” Bear asked—he was thoughtful himself now.

  Petrovski looked at him in a surprised way—amazed perhaps that a layman had even heard of the successful experiment let alone understand the idea of virtual matter.

  “Exactly . . . in fact it is my intention to use Casimir plates to create a stream of particles—or more technically a stream of energy that will translate through a technique I have in mind into particles. This actually limits the complexity of the mechanism which is . . . desirable—by continuously generating matter from nothing . . . or rather from the surrounding sea of virtual particles which wink into existence and then normally wink back out. We will . . . uhhh . . . sort of gather the particles and then immediately accelerate them . . . ejecting them through a . . . well . . . a sort of cyclotron which will spit them from the end to give you a continuous particle stream. The particle stream will hold the particle in our reality long enough to do their work before they relax back to their virtual state at the communications unit receiver. It is the action of those particles reverting that can then be used to imbed the communications we want.”

  “The accelerator . . . how powerful will it have to be? How bulky?”

  Petrovski scratched his head in a thoughtlessly engaging manner and looked about 12 years old for a moment.

  “I have discussed it with Aziz and we think we want to design a fairly conventional accelerator based on a slightly unconventional design and it need not be really big . . . certainly not too big for a submarine out in the fleet.” He grinned like a schoolboy, which he almost was. “We call it a paperclip accelerator and we are pretty sure it will fit in the communications area of an SSBN . . . should fit . . . if we build it right . . . we think.”

  Bear smiled encouragingly and pushed a paper napkin to him.

  “Spoken like a theoretical physicist . . . but if we are going to engineer it I want you to draw it for me.”

  Petrovski grabbed the pencil and drew what to all the world looked like a paperclip except that instead of a single loop this one had several.

  “You see!” He said triumphantly. “The shape is a paperclip . . . the particles enter at one end and are accelerated with lasers . . .”

  “You use magnets or magnetic fields in the curved parts to bend the particles around the curves I assume?” Bear asked.

  Petrovski nodded eagerly, still a little surprised that an untrained monkey like Bear caught on so fast, but he was young and his disbelief was still casual and had not taken on the taste of true bigotry that comes with age.

  “How powerful?”

  Petrovski pursed his lips.

  “Not powerful as these things go . . . at least for experimental purposes. I should think a million giga-electron volts to start . . .”

  Bear nodded.

  “OK.” He said trying to work out things in his head a moment.

  Petrovski did not get the reference at first—he mistook Bear’s ‘OK’ to be mere agreement with his the general idea . . . then he realized after a few seconds that Bear was also agreeing to build it with the same ‘OK’ He grinned like Cheshire cat.

  “Just like that? You are going to build it?” His voice was suddenly filled with excitement, a schoolboy whose idea was embraced by grownups at the
science fair. His knee began to jiggle thoughtlessly.

  Bear stood up and took the pad of paper.

  “Let’s go see Johnson and get started.”

  Petrovski followed him looking a bit dazed and Bear felt sure that if he had had a tail he would have wagged it.

  Johnson looked at the crude diagram and shook her head, a white cloud of snow that rose briefly from her shoulders. Bear thought it attractive. She saw the admiration in his eyes and he was amused to see her embarrassed by it. She was of a certain age and out of practice in thinking herself attractive. She refocused on Petrovski and asked some pointed questions pointedly about tolerances, measurements and power. She got some vague answers and a few shrugs. She was the practical engineer dragging reality out of the theorist kicking and screaming. She pressed on and they began to talk with lots of waving hands. Bear went off for coffee. He read a novel for a while and then returned a couple hours later. Petrovski was gone. Johnson looked at Bear just as pointedly as earlier, but her reason was different.

  “After I nail this down with Aziz I am thinking that we will need to order up some things. Probably cost a pile of dough.”

  Bear bit his lower lip slightly, a pro forma gesture on O’Hara’s behalf then a genuine concern. The fact that she was talking about ordering equipment meant she was planning to build something with it. It was progress.

  “Like what?” He asked. “We can’t build it all here?”

  She shook her head.

  “This is a talented crew you have here and the span of our access to machinery is pretty amazing if O’Hara is as good as her word, but this Casimir device requires huge precision down to tolerances at the lower end of existing technology—tolerances that are well below 10-10 centimeters. Killien and Pinta are good jury mechanics—almost engineers themselves, but nowhere near good enough for this job—That will mean special machinery and handling that is beyond what we can hope to do here without lots of time. Then there is this scheme to translate energy into particles. That will take some special stuff too like lasers, circuit boards, software patches, and computers and Van Zeigler isn’t going to be up to that kind of specialized scientific programming either. He’s basically a general programmer, not a firmware specialist. The good news is I think we might be able to modify some off the shelf software to get that job done. I have some thoughts on that. “ She smiled. “The other good news is that the paperclip accelerator is well within our capabilities—piece of cake that.”