"You haven't met Al yet," Clifford told her. "Once the two of them really get going together, anything could happen. If those two had been the Wright Brothers, World War I would have been fought with supersonic jets."
Just over a month later, Clifford and Sarah moved into an attractive house on the outskirts of Marlboro, within easy distance of both Sudbury and Concord. Sarah had already gotten a job at the Marlboro General Hospital, and for once everything seemed to be going smoothly.
By the time Clifford arrived at the Institute to commence his first day's work there, Aub had already persuaded Morelli to assign a team of technicians and junior scientists to assist full-time on the project. Clifford met the group later that morning at one of the informal meetings that Aub had instigated as a means to review regularly the progress of design work on the detector—which was proceeding in leaps and bounds.
"Brad, this is the crew," Aub said as Clifford nodded in response to the "hi's" from around the table. "Alice, Sandra, Penny, Mike, Joe, Phil, and Art." They acknowledged their names in turn as Aub pointed them out. "Crew, this is Brad—the guy you've been hearing about for the last month or so. And now that the team is at last complete, to business." Aub opened a folder that was lying in front of him, extracted a sheet titled Action Points, passed a copy to Clifford without comment, and glanced briefly at his own. Clifford had only been in the room for a minute, and yet already they were at work. He was impressed; if this was typical of how Aub's enthusiasm was rubbing off, it was small wonder that the project was racing at breakneck speed. Somehow Aub had never before struck Clifford as an effective manager of people; Clifford wondered how many more unsuspected talents lay beneath that outlandish exterior.
"It says here Mode-Hold Synthesizers," Aub stated. He looked up. "Mike, how's it going?"
"I've got a prototype circuit breadboarded in the lab downstairs," a red-haired young man dressed in a Pendleton shirt and green jeans replied from the far end. "It's going to need tighter tuning at the h.f. end, and there's still some stray leakage capacitance somewhere that needs tracking down, but I think it'll be okay. Gimme . . . say . . . another week on it."
"Review again next Monday," Aub mumbled, marking the margin of the paper. "Okay?"
"Sure."
"Mode Interpretation Routine, Alice?" Aub read the next item and shot an inquiring look at one of the girls.
"Bit of a problem there," she replied. "I need to know more about the mathematical derivation of the phase functions."
"Well, we now have just the guy with us," Aub said, looking over to Clifford. "Brad, how about sitting down with us after we break up and going over it?"
"Sure thing," Clifford answered.
"Special analogue IC chips from Intercontinental Semiconductors," Aub went on. "Did you get any joy on those, Joe?"
"No dice," Joe answered. "They're on a six-month waiting list. Nothing they can do about it."
"Shit!" Aub began drumming his fingers on the table irritably.
"But . . . despair not," Joe added. "I tracked a dozen down in a surplus shop in Boston, and Penny's going over to pick them up tomorrow. Cheap too."
"Fantastic." Aub brightened up again. "Next . . . Penny . . . two hundred feet of low-loss cable . . ."
The meeting was rapid-fire all the way through and lasted less than forty minutes. By the end of it Clifford felt completely at home. As Al had said just before Clifford and Aub departed on the first day they had come to Sudbury, it was a great team.
* * *
"I knew you were here so I brought you a coffee." The voice from behind him made Clifford look round from the screen with a start. Standing just inside the door of the office, Joe was holding a steaming cup in each hand. The time was twenty minutes before midnight; three months had gone by since Clifford's arrival at Sudbury.
"You must be a mind reader, Joe," Clifford said. "Thanks, put it down there." He indicated a spot on the table next to his chair, amid the disorderly piles of folders and papers. "What's the matter; can't you sleep these days either?"
"I got a bit carried away with testing out that stabilizer subsystem," Joe said, putting down one of the cups. "Today was the first time we've had a chance to try it out on-line. I couldn't wait to see the results."
"How'd they come out?" Clifford asked.
"They're looking good. I think we've got the compensation derivatives right now. Aub and Penny are downstairs now tuning it in."
"Doesn't anybody ever go home in this place?" Clifford asked with a sigh. "You know, Joe, if we were paid overtime, we could all have retired by now."
"Yeah, well . . . I guess we'd all find we've forgotten how to spend time any other way if we did," Joe said. "Besides, this is more fun."
"You like it still, eh? That's good."
"Beats baseball," Joe declared. "How about you . . . things working out?" He slid into an empty chair beside Clifford's and gestured toward the strings of equations frozen on the screen at which Clifford had been working. "What are you into here now, for instance?"
Clifford returned his gaze to the screen and relaxed back in his chair. "If this detector that Aub's making works, we will have for the first time ever an instrument that responds directly to hi-radiation. We'll actually be able to observe effects taking place in the universe we know, that are the results of causes taking place in a domain that can't be perceived directly. That'll be a pretty significant thing."
"Okay, I'm with you," Joe said, nodding. "So what's all that on the screen?"
"Its part of a theoretical analysis to predict exactly the pattern of hi-radiation we ought to get for different annihilation rates, volumes, beam power settings . . . that kind of thing."
"Oh, I get it," Joe said after a moment's reflection. "Once you've got some firm numbers to work with, you'll be able to test the predictions by means of the detector. If Aub's readings confirm that you get what the calculations say you ought to get, then the theory's on pretty solid ground."
"Exactly," Clifford confirmed. "It's the only motto to go by, Joe—always check it out. It's the only way I know that you can be sure you know what you're talking about. That's what science is all about."
"I thought you were mixed up in something to do with secondary radiation too," Joe said, sipping his coffee slowly. "This Hawking Effect business . . . isn't that so?"
"That's so," Clifford agreed. "But that's another part of it. We already know that the annihilation process produces a fair amount of conventional classical radiation as a secondary effect. What we don't know for sure yet is how it happens. Classical quantum mechanics—in the shape of the Hawking Effect hypothesis—gives one explanation; secondary reactions among hi-particles offer another. What I'm trying to do is work out exactly the pattern we ought to see if the hi-particle explanation is correct. Al has already run some experiments on black-hole situations to see how well Hawking Effect predictions stand up. They don't come out too well at all."
"Oh?" Joe sounded interested.
"No," Clifford said. "There was a lot more radiation detected from the hole than quantum mechanics said there should have been."
"You reckon the other explanation will do better then?"
"I don't know yet . . . not until I've finished working out the model. Then there's nothing to stop us testing it out. We won't need Aub's detector for that since we're talking about conventional radiation that we can detect and measure without it."
"What about the other thing—the pattern of pure primary hi-radiation?"
"That's a different matter," Clifford told him. "That detector of Aub's is the only way of measuring it. So let's hope he can make it work."
* * *
Three months later, Peter Hughes and Al Morelli were standing beneath the reactor sphere of the GRASER amid the collection of electronics racks, cubicles, and tangles of wire that had gradually come together in the area of floor which had been cleared for it. It looked more like a collection of technological junk that had been thrown haphazardly together a
nd had somehow, miraculously stuck than anything designed for a purpose, embodying all manner of components and assemblies as a consequence of Aub turning to whatever sources of materials were available or improvising alternatives—another of his talents, Clifford discovered. In front of them, quite unperturbed, Aub was keying some final settings into a console while Clifford and the rest of the team stood watching intently.
"The beams's on and running," Morelli said to Hughes. "So annihilations are in progress in the reactor now."
"What power are you running?" Hughes inquired.
"Black hole," Morelli said.
"You're testing for pure hi-radiation then?" Hughes looked intrigued but at the same time cast a dubious eye over the chaotic and improbable mixture of equipment around him.
"First live test," Morelli confirmed. "That's why we brought you down."
Morelli noticed that Aub had half-turned from the console and was looking very glum. "What's up?" Morelli called. "Problems?"
Aub gestured at the screen above the keyboard he had been operating. "It's screwed up somewhere," he informed them. "We've either got a hardware fault or there's a bug in the initialization routine. It's hanging up and I can't get into the Command Interpreter." He exhaled a long sigh and turned to look at the disappointed faces on the other side of him. "Sorry, people, but the show's off for today. Can you come back next week?"
* * *
A week later it was.
"Something's screwed up somewhere . . . I hope. The system checks out okay, but it's reading zero. That either means we've got some obscure fault that the diagnostics aren't picking up or it means hi-waves don't exist. For the sake of Brad's theory, I hope it's the first."
Hughes and Morelli walked toward the exit. "How the hell can they trouble-shoot in all that mess, Al?" Hughes remarked in a low voice. "It looks like a cross between a bombed computer factory and a combined harvester."
"Yeah, but they've done it all in six months and on a shoestring," Morelli replied. "There have to be teething problems. I'll let my money ride on that bunch for a lot longer yet."
* * *
At half past three the morning of the following day, Aub withdrew his head from the signal-processing subsystem cubicle and held out his hand triumphantly to present a tiny silver object to Clifford, Phil, Art, and Sandra, whose eyes were red-rimmed from hours of studying the circuit diagrams and wiring lists that littered the area around the detector.
"It was a break in the a.c. signal path to the third differential," he announced. "The diagnostic only checked out the d.c. Just imagine—all that trouble over one lousy open-circuit capacitor. It's enough to make you want to throw up."
And so, later on that same day. Peter Hughes and Al Morelli returned once more to the GRASER building to witness a repeat performance. This time, after Aub had keyed in the final command sequence and while the rest of the team waited and watched with bated breath and crossed fingers, a column of numbers appeared on the display screen of the master console. Aub gave out a whoop of jubilation and turned in his seat to face toward where Hughes and Morelli were standing.
"That's it!" he shouted, gesticulating wildly at the screen. "It's responding! We're getting a response! Those readings are pure, 100 percent hi-radiation."
Peter Hughes stepped forward to peer at the display, his face wreathed in a smile of pure delight.
"They've done it, Al!" he exclaimed, turning toward Morelli. "Well I'll be doggone . . . they've actually gone and hit jackpot!"
Morelli moved forward and gazed at the screen in disbelief.
"You're absolutely certain that that's what you're measuring," he said to Aub. "That really is hi-radiation doing that? It's not just some indirect measure of secondary reactions or something like that?"
"It sure as hell is not," Aub stated in a tone that left no room for doubt. "What we're measuring here is coming straight from the middle of that black hole in there." Just to make sure the message was loud and clear he added a few more words. "And to get from in there to out here, it isn't traveling through any of the dimensions of ordinary spacetime. It's coming through the hi-order domain of k-space."
Peter Hughes was studying the screen closely, his brow knitted into a frown of concentration. Eventually he caught Aub's sleeve lightly and pointed to the display in front of them.
"If that data relates to hi-waves that are propagating through a domain of k-space unknown to conventional physics, then surely none of the units of conventional physics can be used to measure it," he said.
"Absolutely right," Aub agreed.
"That's what I thought," Hughes informed him. "So in that case, what units do those numbers represent?" Aub beamed a wide grin up at him.
"A new unit that we've defined specifically for the purpose," he said. "The first unit ever defined for measuring pure hi-phenomena."
"What do you call it?" Hughes asked. "Have you thought of a name yet?"
"Of course we have, man." Aub's smile broadened. "Milliaubs—what else?"
* * *
The first major hurdle had been cleared. Hi-radiation had not only been demonstrated positively to exist, but an instrumental technique for detecting and measuring it had been found. The project team was naturally in high spirits after these developments, but as further experiments were conducted to exploit the new knowledge, Clifford became even more troubled by the difficulties he was running into on the theoretical side. The detector had provided a complete vindication of his predictions concerning the existence and nature of hi-radiation, it was true, but measurements of the secondary radiation—conventional electromagnetic radiation—showed repeatedly that there was a flaw in his mathematical model somewhere. The amount of radiation measured always turned out to be far greater than his theory predicted. He found himself describing the problem to Sarah one evening, while they were out having a few drinks in the bar of one of the local hotels.
"You really wanna know?" he said, leaning forward across the table of the booth in which they were sitting. Sarah whisked his glass out of harm's way a split-second before his elbow reached the spot. "It's all kinda technical . . . I'm not sure I know how to put it."
"I really want to know," she told him. "I know there's something not quite right, and I'd just like some idea of what it is. Try me anyway—I'm interested."
Clifford folded his arms on the table in front of him, buried his chin in his chest for a moment, then looked up at her and began. "We've talked before about k-space, hi-space . . . that kind of thing. Just tell me first what you understand about it."
"Any prizes?" she asked hopefully.
"Not today. Just testing."
"Okay," she said, then thought for a second. "As I understand it, there's more to the world around us than we can see. Didn't you say once that you can think of the normal world as some kind of 'shadow' existence—a 'projection,' I think you said, of something bigger—like shadows on a wall being projections on a flat world of solid things in a real world? Wasn't it something like that?"
"You've got the general idea," he said, nodding. "We can perceive—in other words, we know about—the things that happen in space and time, which turn out to be different aspects of the same thing anyway—"
"Four of them, aren't there?" she interrupted. "Dimensions, right?"
"Right. At least, physics has always dealt in terms of four. But in fact there are more . . . to be precise, six of them."
"That's the bit I thought was strange," Sarah came in again. "Four I can visualize okay, but six . . . ? No way. Where are the other two?"
"That's the whole point. There is no way anybody can perceive the higher ones . . . either by their senses or by instruments. We've got no way of knowing about them . . . no more than a shadow man on the wall can know about up or down out of his flat world. He not only can't move out of it, he can't even see out of it, so the words just don't mean anything."
Sarah held up her hand to prevent him from going any further and sipped her drink while she refl
ected on what he was saying. At last she put the glass down. "I don't know if I'm missing something, but if all that's as you've said, how do you know about them . . . the higher dimensions? I thought you just said nobody could."
"Mmmm . . ." He studied the tabletop pensively, "that's where the problem gets technical. If I just say that the mathematics of a lot of physical processes—down at the subatomic level—makes sense when the extra dimensions are assumed and don't make sense when they aren't, would that be good enough? You'd buy that?"
"Suppose I'll have to," she accepted. "But you said 'assumed.' That's not good enough, surely. Aren't you supposed to be able to prove things like that?"
"Absolutely right! And that's what we've been trying to do, and that's where we're hitting problems."
She rested her chin on her knuckles and said again:
"Well—I'm interested. Tell me."
"Okay," he agreed. He was beginning to enjoy the conversation. "Let's play a game . . ."
"What, in public?"
"I'm serious. There's a flat universe." He indicated the top of the table. "Forget we're solid 3-D people and imagine we're shadow people that live in that universe—as we said a minute ago. Now . . ." he pointed at one of the coasters lying between them. "That's an object that exists in our flat universe . . . it's got no thickness at all, okay?"
"Okay," she agreed.
He picked up the coaster and turned it at a right angle so that its edge rested on the table.
"Now I've rotated it so that, although it still exists, it now lies completely in the dimension that we—the shadow people—don't know about. How much of it do we see?"
"It's got no thickness at all, you said?" she checked.
"That's right."
Sarah shrugged and opened her fingers.
"We don't see any of it," she said. "It's vanished."
"Precisely. The tabletop is lo-order space . . . normal space. The up-down dimension is hi-space, and all of them together is k-space. Get it?"
A light of comprehension glowed in Sarah's eyes.
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