Twistor (13 page)

'
OK, let's try it,' said Saxon. He had taken charge. David nodded and moused the computer into the activation cycle. There was the usual
pop,
but slightly muted this time, and two pieces of wire fell to the floor. One was the usual end piece. But the other was the wire section which had passed through the central region of the coils. It was cut smoothly at both ends.

'Holy shit!' said David.
'
We got it back!'

'Yes,' said Saxon, 'it would appear that the reversing trick works.'

Vickie
picked up the longer of the two pieces of wire. 'I thought you said the field diameter was ten centimeters,' she said. She held the wire against a piece of green graph paper lying on the console. 'This piece is only eight-point-three centimeters long. I don't think we got all of the wire back.'

'Better check the parameters, Harrison,' said Saxon. 'Maybe there was a mistake in the settings.'

'Sure,' said David. He moused up the editor program and opened the data file that had specified the operation. 'Nope, the parameters are fine,' he said, 'but let's see what happens when we jiggle one of them.' He changed a number in the file and closed it. 'I had the time delay between the two twists set for about fifty milliseconds, plus a few for the twistor operation itself. I just reset the delay for one hundred milliseconds. How about some more wire, Vickie?'

'OK, but wait a minute.' Using a plastic ruler and a black marking pen, she made a succession of equally spaced lines on the flat white plastic-surface of the wire, then numbered the lines with tiny numerals. 'There,' she said, 'now we can tell where the missing wire came from.' She pulled out enough wire from the roll so that a length of wire containing the new markings hung vertically through the center of the field coils. 'Ready,' she said, retreating a few feet.

The same muted
pop
echoed through the room, and the wire pieces again fell to the floor. Vickie quickly retrieved them and examined the marks. 'Aha!' she said. She held the longer piece of wire against the stub still dangling from the roll. 'The missing piece came from the bottom of the wire within the coils. The top edge matches the piece on the roll.' She paused and compared the wire with her plastic ruler. 'And now more than half of the ten cm is missing. There's only about four centimeters left.' She noticed that Saxon seemed lost in thought.

David
walked to the blackboard and drew an elongated L. 'If we delay by fifty milliseconds we lose one-point-seven centimeters.' He marked equal divisions on the vertical and horizontal axes and then drew a small cross above the horizontal axis. 'If we delay by one hundred milliseconds, we lose six centimeters.'

'It's five-point-seven centimeters, actually,' said Vickie, consulting the ruler.

David nodded and drew another small cross on the blackboard, higher above the horizontal axis. 'Now let's assume that if the time delay were zero, we wouldn't lose anything.' He drew a third small cross at the elbow of the L, then drew a rising curve through the three points. 'A parabola, maybe,' he said.

'Maybe the wire is falling,' said Saxon. 'Let's see, if it falls five-point-seven centimeters in one hundred milliseconds, that's an acceleration of . . . ' He punched numbers rapidly into the slim gold watch-calculator on his wrist.
'
. . . eleven-point-six meters per second squared. Not quite "g," but close.'

'Wait a minute!' said David. 'Those time delays we're using are the ones I'm giving to the computer program. But there's also the delay caused by the field changes themselves. That should be . . . ' He consulted a notebook. ' . . . about nine milliseconds.'

Saxon poked at his wrist calculator again. 'I'll be damned! That gives an acceleration of nine-point-eight meters per second squared! That's Earth-normal acceleration due to gravity. The wire
is falling
out of the field. How much we lose depends on how much had dropped below the bottom edge of the field sphere.'

David nodded. 'Wherever our wire's going, it's still in the Earth's gravity field.'

Earth-normal gravity, thought Vickie. It's gone, yet it isn't.

Saxon suddenly yawned and looked at his watch. 'God! It's almost midnight!' he said. 'You young folks can stay
up
'til all hours if you want. But I've had a very long day, and I've simply got to get to bed. I was worn out before I even arrived here.' He smiled, then grimaced. 'And dammit, I haven't even had dinner yet! Shall we continue our investigations here at, say, one P.M. tomorrow?'

David nodded in agreement.

Vickie looked at Saxon. It must be tough to be so weary that you need to quit just when things are getting interesting, she thought.

'In any case,' Saxon continued, 'I believe that we've got our hands on a very important discovery. Truly important. But I must caution you to be careful. Don't say a word about this to anyone yet. And I mean anyone!' He turned and strode to the door, letting himself out into the hallway.

David followed Saxon outside. 'Just a minute, Allan,' he said, leaning against the lab door. 'It may be a bit early to discuss, but I think that we'd better write up a report on what we've got for
Physical Review Letters.
This effect is going to create a whole new field of physics, and it should be published as soon as possible. I also think we should find some theoretical help very soon.'

'I disagree,' said Saxon firmly.

David recognized Allan's expression as the familiar one of stubbornness.

'We must do all of the definitive initial exploratory work before we publish or reveal anything to anyone,' Saxon continued. 'We've plenty of time. No one is likely to stumble upon this effect by accident.' He gestured back at the lab. 'This field configuration is too unorthodox.'

David frowned and looked as if he were about to argue.

'Look, David,' said Saxon. 'I've a very good friend who once made an important experimental discovery. A week after he made it, he went to an American Physical Society meeting and happened to mention it to some "friends" over dinner. Before he knew it, several groups were working on his effect and publishing more papers on
it
than he was. And after a few years a theorist received the Nobel prize for developing the theory describing the effect. But no prize was ever given for the prior experimental discovery because the experimental contributions had been distributed over too many groups. Let's just keep very very quiet about this, at least for the moment. OK?' He looked penetratingly at David.

David was feeling a bit stubborn himself.
'
OK,' he said carefully, 'for the moment we won't tell anyone who doesn't already know. But while we're working to learn more, I'm going to start preparing a draft of a
Physical Review Letters
paper describing the basic twistor effect. We can discuss its submission in a week or so. Allan, we simply can't sit on this thing forever; it's too damned important.'

Saxon frowned, then nodded. 'Very well,' he said, 'but be extremely careful with any copies of the draft paper.'

'I will,' said David. Saxon turned and strode down the hallway toward his office at the other end of the building.

David reentered the lab and smiled at Vickie. 'He doesn't want to publish,' he said to her, shaking his head. Absently he picked up a small polished sphere of reddish wood that lay on the control console. He gently hefted it, his thoughts far away.

In a van parked on Fifteenth Avenue Northeast across from the campus a balding man wearing headphones nodded as he switched the input signal from the first to the second digital disk audio recorder strapped to the side shelf. He removed the disk from the first machine and placed it in an envelope. On the outer envelope he wrote,
Voice, University Physics Lab, Friday, 10/08, 19:00-24:00.
Things are going very well, he thought.

Vickie lifted her bicycle up the worn gray steps onto the porch of the old house on Densmore Avenue North and
put
it in a place out of sight from the street, chaining it to the peeling white bannister. She quietly opened the weather-stained front door and entered, then closed it and tiptoed across the hardwood floor, avoiding the squeaky spot. She felt in the darkness for the mail on the hall table, but there was none. Then without turning on the light she walked through the kitchen to the basement stairway.

She moved quietly. It was now after one A.M., and she didn't want to disturb any of her housemates. The old house was subdivided into bedrooms rented to miscellaneous students who shared the bathrooms, kitchen, and living-room areas. Vickie didn't know her housemates very well. Their majors were in uninteresting areas like business or communications or phys ed or civil engineering, and their personal habits tended toward the untidy, but they were quiet and didn't hassle her.

As she glided silently down the stairs she could see that a light was on in her basement bedroom. She looked inside. 'William, what are you doing with my Macintosh?' she said to her red-haired younger brother, who was sitting before the screen of her vintage computer, his hand poised over the keyboard. 'You're using my modem. You're hacking again, aren't you?'

William (The Flash) Gordon, sixteen-year-old convicted hacker, looked up from the screen a bit bleary eyed, the light reflecting from his thick gold-framed glasses. She noticed that his acne was getting worse.

'Hacking?' he said disdainfully. 'Hardly! I'm just using your account on the Physics HyperVAX. A friend of mine who consults for Microsoft and Boeing wanted the new high-speed frequency-domain transform routine that somebody in Physics is supposed to be using. I just found a copy in Sam Weston's area. It's written in FORTRAN instead of a civilized computer language, and it's hardly structured at all, but it is the program my friend wanted. There's no accounting for taste-o.'

Victoria
felt slightly relieved. At least this wasn't likely to lead to another brush with the law. 'How did you know my password? Anyway, I never said you could use my account.'

'Aw, Sis,' said Flash, 'it's easy to see that you always type your first name when you log in. That's not very secure, you know. You really should choose a less obvious password.'

'I certainly shall!' said Victoria. 'Did you ask before you copied Sam's program? You can't just go around lifting people's software, you know.'

'Well, he didn't protect his area, so I figured that he wouldn't mind. If you like, though, I can send him a MAIL message from you saying that you made a copy-o.'

'I copied it! You mean
you
copied it,' said Vickie, her eyes flashing.

'Well, sure, if you really want everybody to know that I've been using the Physics VAX,' said Flash with a suspiciously bland expression. 'I thought you wanted me to kinda keep a low profile.'

She walked up behind him and peered more closely at the screen as she said, 'Well, I guess Sam won't mind. I'll tell him on Monday. What's this letter you're reading? Saxon? Is that Professor Saxon?'

William looked a bit uncomfortable. 'See, your thesis supervisor, Professor Saxon, had this subdirectory in his area that was triple protected. It was the most tightly locked-up subdirectory on the whole system. That made me curious to see what he had in there that was so secret, so I gave it the old peek-o.'

'William!' shouted Vickie, then put a hand over her mouth as she realized that several of their housemates were sleeping in the bedrooms just above. 'You promised me when I allowed you to come here from Santa Monica that you'd cut out all of this hacker stuff. And now I find you poking around in the private files of my thesis
supervisor.
This is simply awful!' Then she looked again over his shoulder at the screen and said more quietly, 'What'd you find?'

'Well,' began Flash, 'most of his stuff uses some weirdo encryption system, so I can't read it just yet, but from the items in clear text he's running a business on the side.'

'Sure, everybody knows that,' said Vickie.

There's a lot of junk about patents and licenses,' said Flash, consulting a printout. 'Sis, what's a "holospin-wave memory device"?'

'I don't know,' said Vickie, frowning. 'My thesis project involves holospin waves, but I never heard of holospin-wave memory. That is odd, isn't it.'

'Yeah,' said Flash. 'Anyhow, your professor must've screwed the pooch-o. There's a long letter in there to a guy named Pierce at the Megalith Corporation about how your prof's company couldn't make this whatchamacallit memory gizmo work after all. And there's another letter about some kinda goof-o that a guy named Steve made.'

'That's probably Steve Kosinski,' said Vickie. 'He was Professor Saxon's grad student until a couple of years ago. He got his Ph.D. and took a job as vice president of Allan's company, I heard.'

'Anyhow, it doesn't look like your prof's doing too well in the harsh world of business. He was asking them for more time on some loan. Lemme show you.' Flash reached for the keyboard, but Vickie caught his hand.

'Time to quit now, Inspector,' she said. 'It's very late. Tomorrow I'm going to change my password, and you may
not
use my VAX account any more! Is that clear?'

'Sure, Sis. Nooo problem,' said Flash, smiling to show that there were no hard feelings.

'It's now after one in the morning, and I need to get some sleep. Log off and get out of here,' said Victoria, sitting down on the bed and removing her sneakers.

Flash
nodded and quickly typed a few lines, switched off the modem, and then shut down the old Macintosh. He slipped a diskette into his shirt pocket and stood up. 'G'night, Sis!' he said, closing the door.

Victoria could hear him moving around in his room next door as she undressed. She must write to Dad soon, she decided.

9

Saturday Morning, October 9

Paul Ernst was reclining on the long sofa in his living room, reading the
Seattle Times
and glancing occasionally out the east-facing window wall at the Saturday morning activity down on the lake near Magnuson Park. The Hobie-Cat enthusiasts were having a regatta. When the door chimes sounded, he looked at his watch, wondering who could be at the door at this time of the morning. It was just after ten. He put the paper on the coffee table and walked to the front door. Looking through the peephole, he could see that David stood on the doorstep. A bit early for a visit, he thought. He opened the front door wide and smiled.