by Lyndon Hardy
“Yes, what?”
“Have you considered getting help — professional help?”
“Help? Of course not.” Chalice snorted. “They are real, I tell you. The imps are real. Didn’t you see the cloud of twinkling lights?”
Fig took a cautious step backward. He did not like the way this was going, the wild stare starting to bore into him.
“I have decided I must take you into my confidence,” Chalice continued. “Use a carrot rather than a stick.”
Fig took another step backwards. Temporize, he thought. Temporize until he could reach the door. “Professor, this is amazing. Amazing as a — as an electric banana. Why haven’t you already gone public?”
“The imps obey most of my commands, but not all. Evidently, they are quite shy. Show themselves only to me and, until now, to no other. Imprinting like ducklings maybe.”
Another step backward. The door handle was now almost within reach. “Wouldn’t the discovery of the imps be even more important than that of another particle? You could photograph the cloud or something.”
“I tried, and used other detectors also: remote TV, active sonar, you name it — but I never could succeed. Somehow, when they do not want to be observed, they cloak themselves in some way. I could not figure out how to prove they exist.
“So, my road to the Nobel is along the more traditional route. No one would ever believe anything about little imps from elsewhere only because I said so.”
Fig reached behind and felt the handle. “There must be some way …”
Chalice shook his head. “The prediction and discovery of my supersymmetry gluon will be enough. That has the prize written all over it. Well, it will take several years after publication, of course. Time enough to doctor a few other decay channels to exhibit more of my predictions, and then the conclusion will be overwhelming.
“Think of it. Edison was known as the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park.’ I will be known as the ‘Wizard of CERN.’“
The physicist rushed on. “And to ensure you do not come down with a sudden case of scruples and start blabbering so as to cast doubt, here’s the deal. Keep quiet about this, and your name along with mine will be on the papers I will write. The ones showing the CERN data — that my supersymmetry theory is correct.
“I will give you equal credit. We will share. Both of us, Nobel laureates. After that, you will be able to pick any university you want. Immediate tenure. A member of a very exclusive club — Lawrence Bragg is the only other one under thirty to have garnered a Nobel.”
The Nobel Prize! Fig’s thoughts thundered with the very thought of it. The award ceremony in the Stockholm Concert Hall. White ties and tails. Evening gowns. He probably even could get a date. The king handing him his diploma and medal. The banquet afterward in the city hall. The television, radio and print coverage…
“Fig? Did you hear what I said?”
Fig shook his head back to reality. The image was so vibrant, so real. He looked at Chalice intently, but did not like the beginning of a crazed look forming there. Almost staggering, he stepped backwards to the door and swung it open.
“I will think about it, Professor. I really will.” He rushed out and called over his shoulder. “And I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Cosmic Pranksters
HE SHOULDN’T be here anymore, Fig thought. Instead, be on the first plane he could get out of Geneva. Back to the States and figure out how he could transfer to another university. It would have to be an online one like Wagonbrook, but like a rat in a one-branch maze, he had few other options. In the meantime, do the internship at one of the aerospace companies and get a bankroll to start with.
Like a runaway chariot, Chalice’s mind must had vanished down a bumpy road. That was clear. But there were two things Fig could not explain away. The data was being corrupted. Physical truth was being changed. How, he did not know, but it was happening. He had seen it. Secondly, there was the matter of the cloud of twinkling lights. He had seen that, too. Well, he thought he had. Before he left, he had to make sure.
Fig waited in the empty office across the hall until he heard his advisor leave for the night after a sixteen-hour shift. Evidently, if what Chalice had told him was true, his advisor was pushing himself to get as many events altered as he could before the LHC shut down for year-end maintenance.
Fig crossed the hallway, entered his professor’s office cautiously, and shut the door. No lights were on. The room was completely dark. He could see nothing. The old tale about how graduate students were used at the turn of the previous century popped into his mind.
Long before there were fancy digital cameras, primitive scintillation counters in a darkened room signaled that a cosmic ray had entered from above and exposed a trail on a photographic emulsion. A grad student was stationed nearby to watch for these flashes of light. When he saw one, he was to mark the film plate as containing data and replace it in the ray path with a fresher one.
Being alone in the complete dark for hours, however, presented a problem. A person’s eyes grew tired of no input and began producing phantom flashes on their own. Many plates in the ‘exposed’ pile were still blank. They showed no trail of a cosmic ray. The yield for a recording session was greatly reduced. Was something like that what had happened to him?
To correct for this, experimental physicists resorted to using ‘coincidence’ grad students. Not one but two stood watch in the room at the same time. They had to see a flash simultaneously in order for the film plate to be tagged as having recorded the passage of a particle from outer space.
Fig waited patiently for his eyes to adjust, and after a short while, he began to see tiny lights swarming back and forth. As if he had salt in his eyes, he blinked several times to be sure, but the image did not go away. There was not a single isolated dot, but what looked like hundreds, perhaps thousands of specks in a rainbow of colors flitting back and forth in an amorphous cloud — the same as he had seen above Chalice’s head when he had come to his office before.
Fig let out a long sigh of relief. No hallucination, no delusion. No need for another watcher. What he was experiencing was real. But now what? What was causing the twinkling? Chalice had claimed the imps were thinking creatures. Okay, test the hypothesis. What does one do to establish contact? As he hesitated, the cloud transformed and took on a new shape. The random motion resolved into a stationary pattern that twinkled. He recognized what it said.
Hi!
Fig blinked again, but there was no mistaking what he saw. There was even an exclamation point hovering next to the letter ‘i.’
Reflexively, he batted at his face as if he was trying to shoo away a moth. Had some sort of virtual reality goggles been put in front of him? Maybe a holographic screen lowered silently from the ceiling?
“Can you hear me?” he asked, feeling foolish talking to what was otherwise empty air.
Like a marching band at a football game, the pattern dissolved and then quickly reformed.
Yes.
Fig pushed aside the sudden wonder of why the imps were even bothering with displaying a period at the end of the word. He could not believe this. There must be some rational explanation. He had to stall so he could think.
“Who — what are you?” he blurted.
Too hard.
“Okay then. How did you get here?”
Desk. Left side. Top drawer.
Fig looked about the office, but except for the glow could still see nothing. He backed up to the door, ran his hand over the wall near the jamb, and flicked on the lights. Squinting at the sudden change in illumination, the tiny mites, if they really were the explanation, were difficult to see. But he could make out barely they were still present, now hovering over Chalice’s desk in the back of the room.
Fig moved to the worktable and pulled open the drawer. Inside, on top of other papers, was an electronic schematic. He removed the drawing and studied it. There was no title or label, but part of t
he circuit appeared to be a simple enough one. It was a frequency converter that shifted audio signals higher and lower. And the output of that fed to something else more complicated.
Fig studied the diagram a while longer. “Is this how you were communicating with Chalice?” he finally asked aloud. “He built a device that shifts the tones of what you say and then slows them down so a human can understand?”
The imps swirled in front of Fig’s face and formed another pattern, now dim in the ambient light.
Build one, is all that it said.
FIG SET up shop in the office across from Chalice’s. He had checked, and it was not currently assigned. Obtaining the necessary equipment and parts from a central supply had been easy. Grad students signing out materials for their advisors was the usual custom here. A resource he could use to figure out the explanation.
As he was putting together the translator, Fig couldn’t help speculating about the implications of what all of this meant. If the imps really did exist, where were they from? Had they always been around, but never discovered? Or were they not of the earth, newly arrived, life from another planet?
Perhaps from somewhere even farther, somewhere else. He smiled as childhood memories reawoke — Barsoom, Pellucidar …
And he was the one, not John Carter, not Tarzan. No. He was the one. He had dreamed of being the traveler, the one who experienced the glorious wonders himself…
But first things first. Get proof the imps did exist or not. And if they did, then and only then, take on the problem of a journey to where they were from. Focusing on the equipment, he began putting it together.
AFTER COMPLETING the final assembly, he plugged it into power and doused the lights. The cloud of mites almost immediately appeared before him.
“Much better,” the high chipmunky voice said — the one Fig had heard before in Chalice’s office across the hall.
“What are you?” he repeated his very first question from days before.
“Still too hard,” came the answer.
“Okay, then. Why are you here?”
“To do mischief, of course.”
“Mischief?”
“Our pranks are the best, the most sophisticated.”
Fig could almost hear a shrug in the translated tone of voice, but he could not be sure. “I don’t understand.”
“Others from our realm had been doing them for years, centuries before the higher energies made it possible for us to come through to this realm ourselves.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“OK, here’s an example. Your civilization has reached a point in its culture where you now have what are called ‘dryers’ to remove the water from the clothes you wash, right?
“Yeah, so?”
“So, haven’t you ever wondered why it sometimes happens when you remove the socks from the dryer there is an odd one that does not pair up?”
“Your kind has something to do with that?”
“Not us. We are too small. But no one has ever bothered to check — not even your so-called ‘physicists” here at CERN. For every sock mysteriously vanishing from a dryer, another one appears in a second appliance not too far away from the first.”
“You mean — ”
“Yes, hoseherders, they call themselves. They move socks around all the time.”
“So misplacing socks and mutilating physics data. Those are the two things you are — make you so proud?”
“Oh, there is a lot more. Tangles, for instance. Ever wonder why when a woman with long hair wakes up after a night’s sleep, her hair is snarled? Takes an hour sometimes to get the rats out.”
“Well, no…”
“Hairjumblers. They’ve been doing it for maybe three thousand of your years. And the glitches in electronics — ”
“And yourselves? What type are you?”
“Well, others in our realm call us micromites — because of our size. But we ae so dynamic that we prefer another.”
“What?”
“Why, dynamites, of course.”
“Okay, enough of that,” Fig said. “I can relate to doing mischief. I’ve been known to do some myself.” He pushed up his glasses. “But I’m having a struggle accepting all of this. Let’s get to my next question. Chalice said only he could see you and was surprised I could as well. Why me?”
“Boredom. We’ve been doing stuff for him for almost three years now. Been there; done that. And once we figured out he was a cheat, we no longer liked him very much. Now we are looking for a new candidate.”
“So… why me?”
“You were intrigued about the prospect of a Nobel Prize, right? You did not out and out say no to Chalice’s proposition to you.”
“Tempted, yes.” Fig nodded. “I thought about that… thought about that a lot.” He shook his head. “But the way to the prize is not by manipulating bits in a data file.” He fiddled with his glasses. “Exposing you guys to the world. Now that would be worthy of the honor.”
“Yes, we agree. Bringing us to the attention of your world would be sufficient. We can help you do that.”
“What!”
“Well, you would have to prove yourself worthy first. Prove you are not another faker.”
“How do you propose I do that?” Fig felt a twinge of excitement begin to ignite.
“Prove we exist. We are not going to do circus tricks with you as a ring master. You are a physicist. Do as one does. Collect data — unaltered data convincing other scientists.”
“That would be easy. You swirl around in a cloud, you talk and reason — ”
“Yes, yes. Of course, we could do that, but we are not going to. Your challenge is to find a means of proving our existence when we refuse to cooperate in any way. That accomplishment is the path to a Nobel Prize.”
“So, you are abandoning Chalice?”
“No, not at all. For two-thirds of your daily cycle, we will continue altering data as he directs. It will make his crash all the more spectacular when the truth is revealed. For the remaining third, we will work with you.”
“But it will be so easy.” Fig pulled his phone out of his pocket, snapped a picture of the hovering cloud, and held the screen up for the imps to see. “Bingo. I’m finished.”
A detachment of the mites broke off from the main cloud and surrounded Fig’s hand. As he watched, the image of colored dots against a black background began to disappear one by one. What remained was the picture of an empty room.
“Digital data store,” the voice emanated from the down converter. “How do you say it? Infant’s play. Anything digital. Move a few electrons from here to there, and it is done.”
“Then something analog, like film,” Fig shot back. “Something that cannot be doctored so easily.”
“Won’t work either. It takes a little more effort, true, but the task is still one of moving around electrons — reversing the photochemical reaction that deposits the silver grains recording the image. Same thing with magnetic tape. Flip back the domains and only random noise remains.”
“Hmm. Well, there must be a way. I will think of something.”
“Yes! Yes! Please try. Try to prove we exist. This is going to be so much fun.”
Bump Hunting
FIG WHEELED the cart with the different types of recorders into the office he was occupying. It had taken him two days to figure out what he needed.
The imps had been right. It was not the simple matter of taking a snapshot with an analog camera or recording a tape of their buzzing wings. He had to come up with some other scheme — reproducible measurements with instruments the little sprites could not outwit. And now, he was ready to try. He made sure the door was shut and fired up the first. It was a thermometer — an old one with a chart wrapped around a rotating cylinder that traced the wiggles of a pen attached to the sensor.
The precision was not great — a tenth of a degree at the best. But the wing flapping of the hovering
cloud of imps would increase the temperature of the air, and it would be recorded.
Next was an anemometer. It too was ancient with an analog recording of pen scraggles. Standing on a chair, Fig stuffed a square of insulation into the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. If he then were to lie perfectly still on the floor and control his breathing, any anomalous variations in air pressure should be due to the beating wings.
The other instruments were powered up and initialized as well. None of them recorded their measurements as a string of ones and zeros, domains on magnetic tape, or grains of silver. He lay down on the floor, started breathing with a constant rhythm, and waited. In an hour, the imps would finish their shift working for Chalice and come to find him.
After the hour had passed, he rose and examined the recordings. These data would be the baseline. He replaced the charts with new ones, settled one more time on the floor and began his slow and even breathing. In a few minutes, the twinkling cloud appeared and settled as well, hovering inches above his eyes.
At first, he thought he would have to guard against falling asleep, but he found himself too excited performing the experiment. Slowly, the minutes ticked away.
AFTER ANOTHER hour, Fig rose, removed the new charts, and on each placed a small mark so he could tell the difference from the ones before. Every chart showed a ragged line, not straight but nearly so with only small deviations to either side along its trace. He sighed. At first blush, the measurement lines looked the same between before and after. He could not tell the ‘live data’ charts from their baselines. He would have to examine each one carefully under a magnifying glass.
Another hour passed as he slowly marched the glass over the first trace that he had uncoiled along a table. “There!” he shouted suddenly to no one. “There, half-way down, a small deviation to the top.”
Fig continued scanning down the trace. The imp cloud grew agitated when he found two more shifts in the same direction indicating that for brief moments the temperature was slightly higher.
But before he could look further, a dozen or so bright sparking red and orange dots appeared on a portion of the paper he had already examined. They formed a twinkling circle drawing back his attention.