The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Wong looked fictionally contrite and waited for orders.

  “So what about our back up generation capability here . . . ? Can’t we use that?” Bear asked, knowing Wong would have already looked at it.

  Wong half shook his head.

  “Yes and no. The 1950 Edsels we have here for back up are OK for 20 ampere light circuits, but no good for a major power bump like this. We’ll need to beef up with a lot more backup power and we will need to increase the power cables feeding the rig itself. We do all that and we could handle a surge like we made this last time and more.”

  “So you are thinking we use some of those big honking generators like we used in forward operating bases back in the wars?”

  “I already called around. They rent them tractor trailer sized and bigger—100KW range. We would need more than one depending on where this whole business is going. I just wanted your OK . . . they run into some money if we lease them for long.”

  Bear got thoughtful.

  “They are pretty big units though. I remember them as having a giant footprint. You’ll never get them in the door!”

  “Whoppers!” Wong agreed. “We’ll put them on cinderblocks out in the woods and run the cables through the doors or something . . . .” Wong agreed.

  Bear bit his lip and then got thoughtful. He was silent for several minutes and then looked right at Wong.

  “What we really may need in the long run is big power source to run it—something like atomic . . . .”

  Wong laughed at that . . .”Sure . . . about submarine sized? You know . . . in the 100 megawatt range.” Wong joked.

  Bear looked distant and Wong got nervous and suddenly shook his head.

  “I know that look. Don’t even think about atomic power!” Wong said. “ You are crazy you know that? There is a gossamer line between giddiness and insanity.” He looked searchingly at Bear for telltale tics and twitches.

  “I know . . . I crossed the line about the time I sliced myself on Ocam’s razor out there and started bleeding all over the keen edge of the known universe . . . we may need to change blades?” He looked at Wong levelly to show him his deck still had 52 cards. “Start looking around for long term power sources of all types. Get smart for me. Think about taking this show on the road. If Mohamed cannot come to the mountain . . . woof-woof, humma-humma tweet tweet tweet . . . !”

  Wong looked thoughtful as if something rested unsaid on the tip of his tongue but couldn’t quite come at it. The full feeling of the moment lasted, but it might just have been constipation.

  CHAPTER 9—LEAP INTO THE VOID

  The next day Bear decided he needed some fresh air after being underground without sidereal confirmation. Once again, he ran into O’Hara outside his office and seeing that she had sensible shoes on took her with him on another flight of whimsy. It turned out there was a rather pleasant path up through the mixed deciduous forest of the Anglewood grounds that climbed through a serpentine draw in the cliff behind the cave’s entrance to an overlook up above the bat cave entrance on the top of the cliff face—around a kilometer as the crow flies as long as it fluttered its little wings straight up, but a nice stroll of just under three miles by mare’s shank. His heart was pumping and his mind was crystal clear at the end of the cardio-vascular workout and it felt good.

  He let her talk for the first mile and a half and then began himself. Just before they came to the top he started to drop his bomb shell.

  “I want to ask you to get something for me that am a bit unusual and it will need some discretion.”

  “Oh? What is it?” She asked casually, used now to odd requests and with a growing cocky expertise in meeting them.

  At that moment they reached the outlook at the top of the bluff and the cool air of approaching twilight cut the lungs like the breath of a distant heaven.

  They both enjoyed it a moment, gulping in pine scent and wind greedily and looking out at the muddy pathway of old man river glimpsed through the floodplain’s tree tops—the air and the sunset combined for the kind of heady experience that is savored and not rushed. A ragged V of Canadian geese honked past overhead. Bear relaxed and enjoyed his senses in the quiet of the Tao for a nonce; or perhaps two nonces.

  She came down sooner and distracted by his earlier statements she lost the moment for him and prodded him out of the Zen moment.

  “You were saying you needed something special?”

  Bear nodded absently watching the blaring avians disappear in the distance with a fair amount of longing.

  “Yes. I have been thinking about where this mess is going and I think I am going to need a spacecraft.”

  He looked down at her to gauge response.

  She was grinning—enjoying the joke.

  “Yeah . . . right—a spacecraft.” She said playing along. “Will liberate a shuttle from some museum or shall I upgrade you to a Saturn five? Maybe an old Soyuz from Bakinyur?” She guffawed.

  He did not smile, but regarded her evenly.

  She had known him almost four months now and in a rush knew he was not kidding.

  “Holy shit!” She said. “You’re serious!”

  He smiled faintly.

  “Just price them for now. Maybe we can lease instead of buy, but we are probably going to have to make serious modifications so it’s better if it is our own and not just a rental.”

  She stood nonplused.

  “Who said anything about space? You’re freaking crazy!”

  “That seems to be Wong’s opinion of my sanity too.” Bear agreed. “Glad Q-Kink Kommand is in complete accord, because I think I may be just a teensy bit crazy too . . . but I am reassured by the fact that my mother still loves me.”

  She looked up at him carefully, taking a half step closer to look at his eyes in the fading light. The look she gave him was the one Explosive and Ordinance guys give an improvised explosive device with lots of loose red wires. She was searching for genuine tells of brain damage like his left eye drooping shut in an uncontrolled manner. Her own face was scrunched into lines of serious study and Bear suddenly found that in the slanting rays of the red sun’s light illuminating that look of intense intelligence that parts of him were abruptly attracted to her intensely. It was a feminine kind of legerdemain that converted an essential insult into eroticism.

  For the life of him, his blank mind could not think of anything else to do, so he wrapped his arms around her, pulled her to him, and kissed her. It started slowly and tentatively, but did not end that way—instead becoming a heated, almost painful tangle of mouths, teeth and tongues and hot breath panted through noses and around wriggling lips that clearly both had been thinking about for some time. The long kiss was a delayed reaction for them both—a result of denied attraction. It was as pleasant as the universe gets for two humans for three minutes.

  She grunted and stepped back out of breath.

  “You are crazy!”

  “Probably . . .” He said sadly and looked for a moment like a lost boy.

  She searched his face again and found the only hard insanity currently playing cards was a hormonal straight flush. Then it was her turn to open the tap on her hormones and she gave as good as she got, leaning into him with a moan. Bear moaned a bit too.

  They broke apart by mutual consent and looked at each other again warily as all mating animals do, this time each weighing the risks and meaning of further action; but the bow had been dragged across love’s violin strings and with that tune running through both their heads there was really nothing for it but to hum along—She desperately gripped his skull behind his ears and pulled his face down to hers.

  Later she pulled the rest of him down too with a panting groan and they ended up rolling around on each other right there on forest floor shedding clothes all the while, first with him on top and later with her. The clo
thes were still useful; they kept most of the pine needles from being too distracting as they poked into the pair’s pairs. It was the same old thing, that is always different every time it happens and as Bear’s loneliness saw its reflection in her beautifully revealed little form glowing in the crepuscular light, he assumed a look of astonishment and intense physical effort. Like a mirror she followed suit and they clung to each other like a rusty nut on a screw that just would not give though nature by that point had applied a whole can of WD40. Then suddenly something did release and Maureen suddenly rolled around with frantic energy and shrieked with pleasure which set him off shrieking too. As he left his mind behind he nearly laughed maniacally at how appropriate it was to consummate their passion on the edge of a cliff.

  CHAPTER 10—FREEFALL

  Life obeys the arrow in time like all things.

  Six hours later Bear walked in and sat by Petrovski. Bear was in a state of numbed bemusement. He found his physicist squatting in one of the caves silent spare rooms sitting on a crate doing his thoughtful doodling thing and glancing at various pieces of paper arranged in a crescent around him on the floor. At one point the younger man glanced at him, reached out absently and pulled a stray pine needle off Bear’s sweater and flung it aside thoughtlessly. Quantum physicists always spot the little things. They talked for several minutes in polite circles when suddenly the younger man looked pensive.

  He was leading up to asking something personal and Bear could see it was finally coming out—and like a high energy photon working its way up from the sun’s core it took a while.

  “This accelerator . . .”

  “Yes?” Bear said encouraging him while thinking about Maureen.

  “I know the boys are kidding around, but this particle beam really is a death ray. You went off and came back suddenly with a lot more money . . . O’Hara mentioned it. Is it . . . did you get the money so we can actually build a death ray?” He met Bear’s eyes. “Is it your intention to actually weaponize this? Turn it into some kind of killing machine?”

  Bear smiled.

  “That’s what I told the admiral.” He said fairly.

  Petrovski looked pained; a spanked puppy after a newspaper across his snout.

  “What is it?” Bear asked.

  Petrovski looked at him hard, his long rather dirty hair half shaded his face and made his expression tragic.

  “Look . . . I did not sign up to build weapons.” He said firmly. “I signed up to build a communications system. I do not want to build weapons or have anything to do with killing people if that is what you want to do.”

  Bear suddenly grinned and punched Petrovski’s shoulder lightly.

  “Thanks for telling me that now. It increases my respect for you that you saw fit to say it right out loud.” He glanced over each shoulder in a melodramatic fashion. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course . . .” Petrovski answered sitting on his box, alone, deep underground in the middle of a top secret project.

  Bear stood up and opened his mouth.

  Antonin misunderstood his intent and immediately cut in.

  “I mean it Mr Mc . . . Bear! I cannot stand the thought of my work killing people.”

  Bear held up a restraining hand.

  “Antonin, I get it! You do not want weapons, but you have to admit that a thing that makes a couple tons of rock just go away when you tap a key is a weapon of some kind even if you don’t want it to be . . . .”

  “You are not going to talk me out of it!” The young man blurted, still misunderstanding Bear’s direction.

  Bear grinned harder still.

  “I wouldn’t even try—But Antonin; I’ll share something with you. Something that is just between us for now. It is our secret. What I tell the admiral and what I tell you may not be exactly the same thing. As soon as I saw that hole in the wall I wanted that money because I sensed something else. I knew instinctively we needed it as soon as I understood what the Petrovski effect could do. We may actually have to look at it as a potential weapon if we are going to be intellectually honest. You’ve invented something that can vaporize 15 meters of solid rock in a nanosecond. That clearly has weapons implications whatever your personal sensibilities are. You must agree to the reasonableness of that before I tell you my secret.”

  Antonin blinked, it took some getting used to hearing what was probably a major scientific breakthrough named after you—a breakthrough that was deadly.

  He nodded reluctantly, a nebulous gesture of possible agreement—good enough.

  Bear pressed the advantage.

  “The weapons aspect was . . . dramatic . . . . It grabs people’s attention and gets them thinking about it. While most people are looking at that though . . . in the here and now . . . I have been thinking really hard about the future. It struck me that the real key to your discovery is the ability to confuse the space time continuum. The more I thought about it I realized that is what I really want to explore. So I told the admiral about the weapon. As a potential weapon it is big . . . it is very showy and it served my purposes to the military industrial complex that the Admiral represents . . . to get resources for what I really need to take a look at . . . it’s politics Antonin. I give the Admiral something while I have my own purposes.”

  Petrovski looked confused.

  “What purposes?”

  Bear reached in a pocket and pulled out folded piece of paper that looked worn around the edges. It had seen repeated use over last two days as he looked at it again and again in personal sanity checks. He opened it and held it in his hands reverently.

  “The day of the experiment . . . I looked at the slope in the tunnel that brought this image almost instantly into my mind.” He explained carefully. “I spent all night and the next day trying to remember where I had seen it . . . what it reminded me of. I looked up some things on the net and in a few references and finally found this . . .” He threw the curious diagram on the crate between them.

  Petrovski looked at it with appropriate curiosity for a moment rubbing his lip.

  “I have seen this somewhere before . . . but cannot quite remember where.” The younger man looked distant, trying to access an obscure memory trace that lingered on the edge of consciousness.

  Bear helped him.

  “Where have you seen something that looks like the front slope of that diagram? Something that could be an actual model of that diagram.”

  Petrovski thought a second and then looked at him in wonderment.

  “It looks just like the shape of the floor of the tunnel that the accelerator made!”

  Bear grunted in agreement by way of reply.

  “What is this?” Petrovski demanded urgently snatching the diagram out of Bear’s hands and searching it for some clue to its origin.

  Bear put his hand on the shoulder of the younger man in a familial way.

  “That my friend, is a diagram of the Alcubierre metric.

  “Alcubierre?”

  Bear spelled the name with a pen across the paper in a scrawl.

  “He was a Mexican mathematician who came up with this pretty speculative mathematical model. When you graph out the math you get that diagram. At least I thought it was speculative until Q-Kink recreated it in the middle of limestone bedrock. Now I am not so sure.”

  Petrovski was getting excited by the relationship between the image and the evidence of their eyes during their recent experiment.

  “Of course it may be a coincidence. I need to get with Aziz to compare the mathematics! I think you might be onto something really important here.” His eyes were alight.

  “I agree one hundred percent, but there is one little thing. As you begin reading up, I want you to keep something else in mind for me—the Alcubierre metric has another name. As you go forward I want you to start thinking about pra
ctical application for the metric other than weapons.”

  Petrovski wrinkled his forehead.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Bear looked at him levelly and his lips quirked at the corners like a shy prom date anxious to have her breasts hefted, but too embarrassed to ask.

  “There has been a lot of speculation that the application of the Alcubierre metric would be to take an object and bend space-time down in front of the object while raising space-time up behind it just like in the diagram. Essentially this would cause the object between the two waves to ‘surf’ along the space time matrix since the matrix would be constantly falling away in front of the thing between the waves—pulling it along, while the rising wave behind the object would be continuously pushing it simultaneously from the rear.”

  Petrovski scratched his shaggy head.

  “So what you are describing would be a kind of . . . some kind of engine that moves . . . something?” He asked weakly.

  “Yes! That is it precisely.” Bear agreed. “The other theoretical name of the Alcubierre metric is . . . the Alcubierre space Drive.”

  Petrovski’s mouth gaped as he gawked at Bear.

  “Space drive!” He said. “How the hell did we go from death beam to space drive?”

  Bear smiled.

  “The same way we went from building a fancy radio rig to accidentally building a working death ray. Quantum leaps . . .”

  “Do you have any idea what you are saying?” Petrovski asked.

  Bear laughed out loud.

  “That’s a curious question coming from the inventor of the accidental super death ray. As a matter of fact, Yes! I thought I would try it out. I am looking into a way to put it on a ship of some kind. It would then become a . . .”

  “A spaceship?” Petrovski finished for him sounding breathless, completely taken aback by the turn of events.

  Bear smiled shyly again and shrugged helplessly.

  “You catch on slowly for a genius. So now I have a lot of money and maybe a spaceship drive, why not?”