The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Petrovski growled and had bent to glare at the errant canvas and then froze momentarily looking straight into the target box at something hidden from the others. He reached in tentatively and pulled out the X-Ray film on it. He looked first puzzled and then very thoughtful.

  “I think it worked . . .” He said. “. . . though perhaps not as expected.”

  He held up the film.

  It looked like the targets in the rip-off carnival midways with BB machineguns with the bad sights. The kind of booth where you can never quite eliminate the entire little red star on the paper target by shooting at it therefore makes it impossible for you to win a stuffed toy for your date. The outside of the film was intact, but the center had been shredded and now hung in tatters. Multiple tiny holes were visible in the remaining tatters of film that bespoke of multiple impacts by myriad objects. The pixelization along the edges of the remaining pieces downgraded it to extremely tiny objects—and lots of them.

  Everyone crowded around, but Petrovski handed the film to Bear.

  Bear scratched his head over it peering closely and then passed it around multiple eager hands.

  “Not according to plan certainly. What would explain it?”

  Petrovski was looking distant. Aziz was looking confused and Feathersgait simply looked sleepy or glaikit, Bear wasn’t sure which. The whole crowd exuded an aura of being uncertain and suddenly punchy.

  Bear laughed and clapped his hands and raised his voice to address them.

  “All right, folks! We’ve done it! It’s pretty clear we’ve built a working particle accelerator in record time with parts found around the home and that ain’t hay! Still . . . it needs a bit of fine tuning. Let’s give the Eggheads a bit of time to sort all this out, sleep on it, and reassemble here at . . .” He glanced at his watch and was startled to discover it was 2:22 AM. A corner of his mind pushed down the corner of his lips—that was the problem of working in a cave, you lost all sense of circadian rhythm without visual cues to night and day. “. . . Noon! I don’t want to see any of you back here until 12 noon. Sleep in, exercise, eat right and reassemble here for tomorrow’s fun while we figure this out.” He waved his hands in an exaggerated dismissive gesture and they broke apart like flight of starlings as a raptor drops uninvited into their midst for lunch. In less than a minute the group was gone in a chattering mass leaving Bear standing alone with Petrovski who had his hands on his hips, the film clutched in the right and was looking at the floor in deep thought with his lips pushed out. The position made the scrawny physicist who was essentially just past puberty look about a hundred years old.

  Bear touched him on the arm gently.

  “Cocoa, Antonin?” He inquired.

  “Oh . . . uh . . . yeah . . . sure . . .!” Said the young man made brutish and rude as much by deep contemplation as the essential social barrenness of his age and they walked companionably up to the dining facility.

  It was deserted. The all-night sandwich bar was laid out—so Bear gestured at a table and went over to slap a pair of dogwoods together, stir up a pair of packets of Swiss Miss in heavy ceramic mugs and dumped cups and plates in front of Petrovski and his own chair. He was biting his nail as Bear sat.

  The younger man put his fingers on the mug’s handle but did not drink, his mind clearly listening to wheels rotate in a Wankel motion around a brain that was turning at ten thousand revolutions per minute—he was quite unaware of his surroundings. He spit an eight inch moon of keratin from a nail over the seatback without thinking.

  “Nice!” Bear said. “I just wanted to thank you for the spectacular results.”

  Petrovski started and looked at Bear.

  “But it didn’t work! I cannot understand . . . . .” Petrovski blurted.

  Bear laughed in a loud guffaw that made Petrovski smile his shy little boy smile which looked so oddly natural around the odd dangle imposed on his lower lip by today’s choice of a diamond stud.

  “Of course it worked. It tore hell out of you target. I didn’t expect it to . . . you did not expect it to . . . but it worked . . . and things never work the first time, but this one did. That is huge!”

  Petrovski looked flummoxed at that viewpoint.

  “But it didn’t work as designed!”

  Bear smiled.

  “Did you check the cables?” Bear asked laterally.

  “What?” Petrovski asked confused. “What cables?”

  Bear smiled.

  “The metaphorical ones . . . Listen to me Antonin.” He laid a hand on the scientist’s wrist to make sure he did indeed listen. “When I was working on one of my first computer projects we had a machine that just would not work! I called in the software guy and he reloaded the software three times. No good! Then I called in the hardware guy who looked over all the hardware, ran dozens of diagnostics checks with multimeters. Know what he found? Nothing! So we talked to the systems guys and they told us it couldn’t possibly be the network. So I went back ready to take a sledgehammer to the damn thing because none of the experts; software, hardware, or systems could explain why it wouldn’t work. When I got there I went behind it and grabbed a cable to drag it onto the floor and stomp on it and the head of the cable fell out into my hand. It turned out that the primary feed cable had not been plugged in properly. It had been sitting loosely in the slot and looked plugged in to everyone who looked. It worked great after we actually plugged it in.”

  Antonin stared at him limply—it was late at night and he had suffered a disappointment.

  “The point is . . .” Bear said gently. “Whatever is wrong, start with the simplest thing first and then build up to the hard stuff. It might save you time and we will find out it was really pretty simple to solve.”

  Antonin smiled—the 21st century parable finally penetrating his tired brain.

  He leaned back and cupped the back of his neck in both hands.

  “Let me try to help you focus . . .” Bear said. “The thing generated particles using your gadget didn’t it?” Bear asked. “They punched holes in the film didn’t they?” Bear asked quietly, having to work on drawing him out since in his current mood he was disinclined to chit chat.

  Antonin nodded grumpily, as if blame was being thrown.

  “Yes; but they are not the right kind of particles.”

  “Why not?”

  “They came out of the accelerator and tore through the film! They could only do that if they had mass. I designed the apparatus to rotate the spin of the particles that excited out of the Casimir device. They should have . . .” He paused. “. . . Well . . . at least I expected them to be conventional integer spin particles . . . bosons. Fermions like electrons and quarks only have spin of one half or less while bosons have a whole number and are predictive using a different set of mathematical calculations . . . sort of . . . . Anyway I set the thing up to subtract a value of 1 from the particles charge and spin so they would end up with a spin of zero. The idea was that as we create our pair of particles we end up with mass-less particles. One minus one is zero.” He shrugged. “A particle with a charge of zero has no mass. This would allow it to penetrate . . .”

  Bear nodded hoping that Petrovski would discover what he could from the echo out of Bear’s hollow skull. He held up his hand . . . there was no way he could fix Petrovski’s theory . . . what he needed to do instead was interrupt Petrovski from looking at things as he had been already—to shift his vantage point.

  “So if I get this, the particles come out as spin one and you wanted to change the spin. What if they were electrons and you subtracted one from them? Electrons have a charge of ½. Wouldn’t that give you a minus ½ and have enough mass to tear holes in the film? Couldn’t they be anti-electrons?”

  “Yes, but we avoided partial charge particles. We created only whole numbers particles from the quantum foam . . .” He hesitate
d . . . trying to dumb it down. “It’s simple . . . we have to build the communications device so that it will communicate through water and even earth if we can get it to. Feathersgait, Aziz and I all agree that the technique to allow communications is to send out a carefully controlled stream of particles that have predictable spins . . . highly predictable. That’s why we need a device that can set the integer spin precisely which is one thing the rig is supposed to do. It should allow us to pulse the particles out in a . . . well a line or fan that will allow us to aim it so that a ship or submarine would pass through it, pick up the stream and to arrange a blip in the coherent pattern by causing certain particles to devolve in a set way that the receiving station on the submarine can read because they will know what the pattern is supposed to be. It’s . . . a sort of Key to Rebecca thing. For example if we can switch on and off the spin we can essentially send a stream of ones and zeros which is binary code and could be arranged to send the alphabet in a continuous stream. If the receiver knows what that expected pattern is then they can spot deviations in the stream of particles that could be used to send a message based on any anomalies we make in the data stream by affecting its partner. For example, if the ‘a’ is missing or altered out of sequence by changing the spin of a paired particle then the message starts with the letter ‘a’ or if the fifth element is altered then the letter ‘e’ is implied. One line of particles is beamed through the earth at about light speed to the submarine and the other is trapped in the closed loops of the second paperclip cyclotron until we want to modify one in there to insert our meaning . . . .”

  Bear knew the signs, when Petrovski started using words like ‘anomalies’ it was evidence he was winding up to a long winded explanation and it was those generalities Bear was already well aware of. Bear had been to too many staff meetings with the Eggheads by now to let that happen.

  “So you expected the particles to be stepped up or down one half?” He cut in faster than a taxi in a Boston rush hour. It helped put Petrovski back on the original track.

  “No—not a half. We chose a whole number. The device was supposed to re-spin the particles with spin one down to particles with spin zero.”

  “Which is a Higgs particle if I recall?”

  Antonin nodded.

  “Higgs particles are better for our purposes. Particles with spin of one are affected by matter—They collide with it, interacting with the strong atomic force at the quantum level. We needed something that was very nearly mass-less like a neutrino, or fully mass-less like the Higgs particle. They would not interact with matter in the same way, but would simply pass through it like the neutrinos from the sun pass right through the earth all the time. That would meet your admiral’s requirement for communications through water and exceed it by passing through . . . well, everything.”

  Bear knew the answer but sensed there might be value in keeping him talking and focused.

  “So why is what came out of the accelerators not Higgs particles? How do you know?”

  “Because they physically interacted with the film!” The Russian-American said passionately half clenching his hands palm up in exhausted supplication to the answer gods. He looked very young and tired all of a sudden. “They tore a hole in it. Higgs bosons have spin zero and interact to create a mass energy field that would . . . well I’m not sure what it would do exactly, I thought it might register one or two particles by exposing the charge sensitive film with little energy dots on the super dense coating we put on it, I was even prepared for absolutely nothing to register . . . but it would hardly tear a physical hole in the film in quite that way. That’s not a symptom of masslessness certainly.”

  Bear sipped his cocoa.

  “I am . . . tired.” Antonin said leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes again.

  Something he remembered from his reading penetrated Bear’s own brain and woke him up abruptly.

  “Antonin . . . you set your device to capture the particles as they came into existence from the Casimir plates true?”

  Petrovski simply nodded and closed his eyes tiredly.

  “So the your gadget manipulates the energy field as it is converted to matter and is set to change the particles spin to a specific step of one on the dot. Yes?”

  Petrovski nodded again, his eyes still closed.

  Bear pushed on with growing conviction.

  “Think about my cables, Petrovski!” He said forcefully. “Did you check the simplest thing? Was the effect set through the computer controls to change the field by the whole number one? Or was it set to a negative one which you would need to set to make them into Higgs particles? Because you would want to be sure about that wouldn’t you?”

  Petrovski’s eyes opened wide and he looked at Bear in astonishment.

  “I . . . well . . . there is no way we . . . I checked that it was . . . . oh my god!” He said sitting bolt upright and put one palm absently flat on the top of his head. “I’m sure I set . . . at least I asked Woo to . . . but she was distracted by Gaston hovering around and reaching over her shoulder . . . if it got set it for positive one instead of negative one I would be creating particles which would not have a spin of Zero but would have a spin of Two! Positive two!”

  Bear grinned.

  “Which are.., are what? Gravitons! Yes?”

  “Gravitons!” Petrovski said breathlessly a nanosecond after Bear spoke it like an echo of thought or a voice in a cave. “A messenger particle of gravity . . .” he said a second time astonishment and wonder clear in his voice. “Could they have been gravitons?”

  Bear patted his arm.

  “And what would be the effect of a bunch of Gravitons smacking into our film?” Bear asked leading him on.

  “Well . . . they . . .” He looked blank. “Gravitons are theoretical. They . . .”

  “Theoretically . . . wouldn’t they interact with the space-time matrix below the level of point particles? Wouldn’t they communicate a message directly to the matrix proper of mass being present?” Bear clipped each of his last three words carefully.

  “Of course” Petrovski said decisively, finally led to the tiny side path that Bear was rambling down. With his more limited knowledge Bear could only guess at what sweeping grandeur the young man saw. “They would tell the space time matrix that mass was present in quantity at the point of impact! The more gravitons in the message the more mass would be indicated! The space time matrix . . . . matter itself . . . . would be forced to react to . . . the Gravitons would have conveyed their presence to the X-Ray film and . . . uh . . . bent the space-time matrix out of the way . . . They would have torn it to hell!” He yelped the last.

  Bear rubbed his chin thoughtfully already seeing practical effects.

  “So the first piece of space time they encountered was the air at the end of the device and didn’t get much action there, because it was air with widely spaced molecules and they just pushed it aside. We had no instrumentation to measure air flow and we would not have felt the breeze as the molecules in the atmosphere moved away from the beam of particles. Then they hit the X-Ray film made of matter and tore a hole in it. What would it have done to the curtain if it had hung in place instead of falling to the floor?” He finished speculatively.

  Petrovski’s eyes squinted as he caught on.

  “It depends on how many particles are being generated and at what distance! There might not have enough to tear through canvas. The X-ray film is thin . . . the canvas is heavy and thick! And . . . . But the canvas fell down!” He snapped his fingers.

  Antonin looked at him in amazement and instantly jumped to his feet kicking his chair away with the backs of his knees so that it fell over with a clatter.

  “It wasn’t secured to the frame . . . it was just hanging on the back of the target box . . . half draped over the . . . C’mon!” No one had looked at the canvas on the floor c
losely. He sprinted for the lab, a scientific hound on the scent of discovery.

  Bear smiled and followed at a jog. A hunter who had loosed his dogs and content that perhaps some prey would come into view soon, brought to bay by the hounds.

  By the time he caught up to Antonin he was already standing by the target box and had the canvas up; trying to align it to its original position on the target box.

  He looked at Bear in triumph.

  “Look!”

  Bear stood beside where he was holding the canvas roughly in place. Clearly it had been in a good approximation of its whereabouts at the time of the experiment and had been tugged down by the force applied to it by unseen particles pouring out of the accelerator. No one had noticed; all too busy looking at the film. There was hole in the canvas that obviously aligned with the torn center of the X-ray film. The tear was a half round like a gibbous moon and the material above the hole was rumpled as if it had been tugged down from above. There was a sort of track like a ladder in a stocking across the side that had faced the accelerator where the particles continued to strike is even as it slid downward and fell to the floor under the force of the beam of Gravitons. The track was important data in itself since the movement had been too rapid for the particles to continue to fully hole the material the canvas except where they had concentrated their effects originally.

  Bear snapped his fingers again and looked around behind where they stood gawking at the canvas.

  The ten foot length of 2x4 he had seen fall after the experiment lay there behind him on the floor. Bear walked over to it and saw instantly that it was barely in one piece. Something had penetrated the wood all the way through except for about a quarter inch thread of wood holding the two halves together. That remaining piece had clearly been just out of the path of the particles as they struck while the wood in the path of the unseen force had simply vanished leaving ragged edges.

  “Look at this Antonin!” Phelan said sharply. Petrovski gamboled over and stared open mouthed at the board, made momentarily a mouth breather. Bear shook his head looking at it. “The particle stream must’ve kept going out of the target box and almost cut this board in half! Thank heavens no one was standing in front of it.”