"We'd already guessed, of course, that the process of particle annihilation inside the reaction chamber somehow induces a curvature in Einsteinian spacetime around the volume in which the process takes place. In other words, it mimics the effect normally produced by a large mass, which is not news to you any more. From what I know now about Brad's theoretical work, I can see now how it does it—qualitatively at least, that is."
"What you're really doing is amplifying by a factor of a few billion what happens naturally anyway," Aub supplied.
"That's a good way of putting it," Morelli agreed. "If I've understood what you've been telling me, the gravity field around an ordinary mass results from the tiny fraction of particles inside it that are annihilating spontaneously at any instant. Okay?"
"That's right," Clifford confirmed. "Only a very small proportion of the mass contributes anything to the field . . . is gravitationally active if you like. Most of it is purely passive; it takes up space and has bulk but contributes nothing to the field. As we said earlier, that's the part that really departs from classical ideas—gravity turns out to be a dynamic effect, not static."
Morelli nodded and then turned his head toward Aub, who was obviously about to add something. He took up the point. "In fact, your experiments are a good demonstration of just that. What you've effectively done is scrap the passive mass entirely. The particles that annihilate inside your reaction chamber can be thought of as a mass that's 100 percent gravitationally active. Every one of them is involved in the process, unlike in ordinary mass."
"You're just doing what Nature does anyway, only on a much more concentrated scale," Clifford commented. "You're concentrating inside a few cubic centimeters the same number of annihilations every second that would normally take place in . . . oh, I don't know . . ." he shrugged and turned up his hands, "a whole mountain or something."
"And we get a smooth, detectable resultant field," Morelli concluded. "Yeah, that's what I meant when I said I can see better why it works now. It also explains more specifically why we can increase the strength of the field by increasing the beam density or by focusing into a smaller volume—they both give you more annihilations per cubic centimeter per second, which brings me back to what I was about to tell you." Clifford and Aub waited expectantly.
Morelli went on. "Recently we've been pushing the limits to find out how far we could take it . . . how far we could bend Einsteinian geodesics. The result has been pretty sensational—something we sure didn't bargain for. You see, fellas, what we've managed to do is generate a field so strong that nothing can get out of the annihilation volume at all—not even light! We have to push the volume right down to microscopic dimensions to do it, but it sure works okay. The space-time curvature at that level is so great that everything gets bent right back in to the middle. What do you say to that?"
For a few seconds that seemed a lot longer, the two young scientists stared at him in mute astonishment as their minds struggled to take in his meaning. Here was something that had been widely talked about for decades, it was true, but all the same, to be told quite matter-of-factly that it had actually become a reality and was just part of a day's work at Sudbury . . .
"A black hole!" Clifford's jaw sagged. "You mean you've produced an artificial black hole here . . . ?"
"Jeez," Aub exhaled slowly. "Man, have I been wasting my time. . . ."
Morelli smiled, unable to conceal his amusement.
"Thought you'd be impressed," he said. "We may not be theoretical hotshots here, but we haven't exactly been standing still all the same." He looked from one to the other and nodded his head. "Yes, we can produce black holes artificially if we go to high enough power; they're tiny, but they're genuine. But these are black holes with a difference. We don't need enormous amounts of mass to make them, and we can switch them on and off when we feel like it. Now, did you ever hear of a black hole like that before?"
Two silent stares greeted his words. He waited a moment for possible questions and then, seeing that none would be immediately forthcoming, turned toward the display terminal situated on one side of his desk.
"I'll leave you to think about that for a minute," he said. "It's time we were making tracks. I'll just call Peter and make sure he's free."
* * *
Two hours later, after what had seemed to them to be satisfactory and promising talks with Peter Hughes, Clifford and Aub were having lunch with Morelli in the Institute's Social and Domestic Block. By this time Morelli was painting vivid pictures of his visions of the future of gravitic engineering, and his two guests found themselves being infused and excited by the torrent of ideas that poured, seemingly inexhaustibly, from their host's fertile mind.
"Artificially induced weightlessness?" Clifford repeated incredulously. "You really think it could work?"
"Aw, at this stage I can't really say," Morelli conceded candidly. "But just suppose for a moment that it did. It'd revolutionize the whole business of transportation. Just imagine—if you could move big loads effortlessly anywhere . . . all over the world. Why bother building bridges and things when you can simply float things across rivers on a g-beam? Who needs roads and rails? They're only ways of cutting down friction, and this way there'd be no friction—only inertia."
"You'd be able to move a ten-ton block of stone around with a push of your hand," Aub joined in. "Man, that's incredible."
"As long as you weren't in too much of a hurry to get it anywhere," Morelli said. "Not much acceleration, but yeah—sure—you could do it."
"What about static fields?" Clifford asked as another possibility dawned on him. "You know—for supporting structures and such. Think that might work too?"
Morelli shrugged as he began refilling the three coffee cups from the pot that had been left on the table.
"Who knows? Why not? Anything's possible until somebody proves it isn't . . . not so? Structures . . . ? Sure—maybe one day we'll even figure out how to hold up structures."
"Hey, that could change the whole of architecture," Aub whispered. In a louder voice he went on. "There'd be no limits of loading to worry about . . . weight-induced stresses and that kind of stuff. You could put up buildings any size or shape you wanted—all kinds of things—right up into the sky. You could make skyscrapers look like mud huts. It's crazy."
"Buildings . . . ? Skyscrapers . . . ?" Morelli threw out an arm to indicate there were no limits to what he could see. "Why mess around with buildings? Why not whole cities? String 'em together up into the sky like something you never dreamed of. Why not?"
Why not . . . ? Clifford found the unbridled enthusiasm of the extraordinary man that he had just met infectious. His mind soared with Morelli's unbelievable cities as new, undreamed-of possibilities tumbled before his mind's eye.
"And what about earth-moving?" he said. "You could move mountains maybe—literally. Resculpt the whole planet . . ."
"Move mountains? Resculpt planets?" Morelli's voice rose to a resonant crescendo as he threw the vision out to infinity. "Think big, Brad! Move planets! Resculpt the Solar System! Do you know there's an asteroid out there that's reckoned to contain enough iron to meet the world's needs at today's rate for the next twenty thousand years? Cost a bomb to ship it back in worthless pieces though; so why not ship the whole thing back and break it up in our own back yard? Overpopulation problems? Break up another planet and park the bits in orbit round the Sun here, where it's nice and warm; that'll keep us going for a while. How do you break a planet up? Answer: gravitic engineering! You set up an unbalanced field around it that makes it spin faster until it pulls itself apart. Easy! Want me to go on?"
Clifford and Aub just sat and stared at him wide-eyed. Yes, it could all happen. As long as there were people with the vision and the will to make it happen, a new age of human achievement could come true. And perhaps the first hesitant steps toward such a future were already being taken right there at Sudbury at that very moment. Things that had been just dreams for centuries might come t
rue because of what they were doing.
Why not?
* * *
After lunch, Morelli conducted them to a large building, situated on the far side of the Institute, to let them have a look at the GRASER—Gravity Amplification by Stimulated Extinctions Reactor. They entered an area of conventional office suites and from there proceeded through a labyrinth of corridors and instrumentation labs to the heart of the project itself.
They found themselves standing on a metal-railed catwalk, looking down across a large, windowless, concrete-walled area, most of which was crammed with a chaotic tangle of machinery, electronic equipment racking, cables, and pipework. At the center, a spherical metal construction reared up out of the mess, caged in steel lattices and festooned with electrical harnesses. A bright silvery tube, about three feet in diameter, connected the sphere to an enormous and complicated rig of some kind, which in turn appeared to be only part of something larger that was built through the far wall. About half a dozen technicians and scientists were engaged in various tasks about the floor. Morelli was pointing toward the tube and talking in a louder than usual voice to make himself heard above the background of whining and humming.
"The beam is formed and accelerated in a generating setup located next door," he said. "We use hydrogen as our starting material; the feed-stock is held by the side of the building in big tanks that you may have noticed as we came in. That tube conveys the beam into the annihilation chamber. Actually, the core of the tube—where the beam itself is—is only six inches in diameter. The rest of the thickness that you see is mainly made up of focusing and control coils. The chamber is shielded inside that sphere; we get a fair amount of heat and radiation as a side effect of the process."
"Have you got a black hole in there now?" Aub asked. Morelli shook his head.
"Not at the moment," he said. "They're only doing some calibration tests this afternoon. Pity you won't be around next Tuesday; we should have one then."
Clifford was leaning on the guardrail and looking thoughtful. After a while he turned toward Morelli. "The radiation you mentioned just then, Al—does it come simply from losses inside the chamber, or is it produced by the annihilation process itself?"
"There are some losses, sure," Morelli answered. "It's pretty straightforward to calculate what they are. But on top of that, yes, there is a residual amount left over that must come from the annihilation process."
"So you not only create a gravity effect; you generate other kinds of radiation as well," Clifford checked.
Morelli nodded and replied: "That's correct. From what you said this morning, it's what you'd expect from your own k-theory. Why—what's on your mind?"
Clifford appeared not to hear the question but went on. "What about when you go all the way to a black hole . . . what happens then?"
Morelli raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly. "It's funny you should mention that," he said. "That's exactly one of the things that's been bothering us. When we set up a black hole in there, we detect a definite radiation flux emanating from the hole itself. According to classical relativity, that shouldn't happen; nothing should be able to escape from a black hole—energy, radiation, light—nothing. But . . ." Morelli shrugged and spread his arms, "there it is. No question."
"Hawking Effect?" Aub suggested, referring to the idea of quantum-mechanical tunneling, first proposed by the English theoretical physicist Steven Hawking of Cambridge, back in the 1970s. The theory postulated a method by which black holes might be seen effectively to emit radiation. It required the spontaneous production of a particle-antiparticle pair somewhere in the vicinity of the black hole. Occasionally one particle of the pair might fall into the hole while the other escaped in the opposite direction to be detected by a distant observer. The net effect that he would observe would be a flux of particle radiation apparently produced by the hole itself.
"We thought of that too," Morelli replied. "You could be right, but I don't think we've got enough data yet to be certain one way or the other. That's one of the things we mean to look into." He looked at Clifford. "What does your theory say about it?"
"I haven't really gotten round to considering the k-physics of black holes," Clifford said, turning his back on the rail to face the other two. "But now that you mention it, it's an interesting point. According to k-theory, a particle appears to be created when two hi-domain functions interact to produce a k."
Morelli held up a hand to interrupt. "Just a second. Hi-domain . . . that's the higher order of existence outside normal spacetime. Check?"
"Check," Clifford agreed. "A k-function exists in both hi- and lo-domains together. Now, the large number of annihilations taking place inside the reactor back there will produce a flux of hi-domain particles—a kind of radiation, if you like, not detectable in normal space. Since this radiation is not subject to the limitations of ordinary spacetime, it will be capable of escaping from the black hole." Clifford nodded to himself. "Yes. Outside the hole there will be a flux of hi-particles. These can interact with each other to produce k-particles, which are detectable. What you would see are particles apparently appearing spontaneously . . . looking like conventional radiation coming out of the hole. As I said, I haven't gotten round to working out the details, but qualitatively the theory sounds okay."
"So there are two possible explanations for it," Morelli summarized. "Hawking Effect and k-theory."
"That's about it."' Clifford seemed pleased.
"The first involves conventional quantum probabilities; the second doesn't but talks about hi-radiation instead . . . as an intermediary agency."
"Uh huh."
Morelli seemed very interested. "It would be something if we could figure out some kind of experimental test to see which one fits," he said. "Any ideas?"
"Difficult," Clifford admitted. "In either case you'd expect to see the same thing. I guess the only approach would be to calculate precisely the intensity of the observed field that each theory predicts. Several people have already done that for Hawking Effect; when I've had a chance to think about it, I could probably give you some numbers for the other. Then we'd just have to do some accurate measuring to see which one fits best."
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Aub asked him.
"What?"
"The hi-radiation. That's the big difference between the two theories. Yours says that there ought to be an intense source of hi-radiation inside that thing; the other one doesn't. So why not simply test for that?"
Clifford looked at him quizzically. "How can we test for it? It doesn't exist in ordinary spacetime. It doesn't interact with our universe in any way, except when it produces k-functions, but they appear as conventional forms of energy. So we can only infer the existence of the hi-radiation indirectly . . . which is what we've been saying all along. We don't have any kind of instrument that can respond to it directly."
"That's my whole point," Aub insisted. "I think I could make one that does."
"Make one?"
"Yeah, I've been thinking about it for a coupla days now. Remember that picture I showed you when I called that first time? It was a track of a particle rotating continually through hi-space and normal space . . . vanishing and reappearing all the time."
"Okay. So?"
"Well, the mode of rotation should be influenced by hi-radiation. That means that it does interact in an observable fashion with our universe. I figure I could design an instrument based on that principle. Essentially it would be a special kind of ion chamber in which you could measure the effect of incident hi-radiation on the tracks of particles with full k-spin. To test out the idea, I knew that we'd need a concentrated source of hi-particles." He gestured downward in the direction of the reactor sphere. "Now it looks as if we've got one."
Clifford stared at him in astonishment. "A hi-radiation detector . . . ? You're joking."
"I am like hell."
"Any idea how long it'd take?" Morelli joined in, becoming intrigued.
"Depends
how soon you tell me I can start," Aub replied, grinning unashamedly. He didn't believe in beating around the bush.
It was early evening by the time they left. Morelli walked with them to the pad where the airmobile was waiting to take them back to Logan. As they were about to turn to climb aboard the vehicle, he shook hands with both of them.
"Well, I've never had too much time for being secretive and all that. We'll be sending you formal letters and that kind of stuff, but I don't see any doubt about it. I'm looking forward to working with you guys. It's gonna be a great team."
They arrived back at Clifford's house at nine o'clock. Sarah couldn't really feign surprise at the news. She was already dressed to go out.
Chapter 12
The day after they returned from Massachusetts, Aub had already begun making preliminary notes for the design of the detector. He worked through the following night, hogging the upstairs terminal and amassing a mountain of notes and diagrams, and seemed only to have whetted his appetite for more by the morning.
That same morning the formal job offers came through from Sudbury and were promptly accepted. By late afternoon Aub had, via the Infonet, found himself an apartment in Concord, within easy reach of the Institute, and by evening he was packed and ready to go.
"That's one of the problems about having houses to sell and being married," he grinned as he bade Clifford and Sarah au revoir from the doorway. "Like I always said, it suits me to travel light. See you both back East when you've sorted out all the chores, huh?"
Sarah turned from the door after he had gone and shook her head wonderingly.
"What a character," she mused to Clifford. "I've never seen anybody so eager to start a new job. He won't sleep for weeks."
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