Twistor (2 page)

Jeff crowded between David and Melissa.
'
David, does this stuff ever make sparks and blow up, like the things the scientists on TV use?' he asked.

That's a very good question, Jeff,' said David. 'Our stuff doesn't do anything so spectacular when it breaks. Maybe it would be easier to fix if it did. The hardest part of doing this kind of physics experiment is making sure that each part of the experiment is working the way it should and that all the parts are working at the same time. About half the equipment you see here isn't for actually
doing
the measurements; it's for checking to make sure that the other half of the equipment is working.*

Looking for something to amuse the children, David led them to the far end of the room near the windows. Here an old wooden desk had been converted through some feat of amateur carpentry into a control console. In its center were a small computer and a color monitor flanked by two short electronic racks.

This is where we sit to run the experiment,' he told them. 'This computer sends and receives messages from the equipment and puts them in a form that we dumb humans can understand. It has a part that does very fast calculations and another part that draws pictures for us on this monitor to let us know what's happening in the calculations or the experiment. We make things happen by moving this “mouse” around and clicking its button.' David moused up the main desktop, selected the speech synthesizer utility, and fed it a text file. A stylized human
face
appeared on the screen, and with realistic lip movements and facial expressions it recited a bit of text which was a short commercial for the computer.

'And that,' said David, turning to point to the stainless-steel sphere in the center of the apparatus, 'is the most important part of the equipment. Inside is the sample holder where we put the material we're studying: a perfect single crystal, a special arrangement of atoms that we want to learn about. We pump all the air out of the sphere so there's a vacuum inside, like in space. Then we make it very cold.

The lowest temperature possible is called absolute zero. We cool our crystal sample down to almost that temperature. When they're cold enough, we can learn about how atoms behave in crystals. Then we make special waves in them.'

'I have a crystal at home,' said Melissa. 'It's very pretty. Can we see your crystals, David?'

David nodded, opened a metal cabinet, and took two plastic boxes from a clear plastic drawer. 'Here are some natural iron sulfide crystals that we've been using.' He handed shiny black cubes to Jeff and Melissa. 'You can keep 'em if you want.'

'Are you sure you aren't going to need those?' asked Paul.

David shook his head. 'They're nice crystals, and we went to some trouble to get good ones,' he said, 'but they turned out to be worthless for the calibrations we had in mind.'

Paul nodded. Melissa seemed very pleased as she held the dark crystal cube near the desk lamp, examining it closely.

'What's that thing?' asked Jeff, wrinkling his nose and pointing to a wheeled cart supporting a brown tank with a green rubber hose and copper nozzle.

'That's a tank of helium gas, Jeff. We use it to check our equipment,' said David. 'Helium is the second smallest
atom
of all, lighter than everything except hydrogen. We use it to find leaks in our equipment, because it can find even the tiniest hole in a steel or aluminum container and squeak through it into our leak detector. We squirt helium around on the outside, and if it finds its way to the inside we know we have a leak. And helium also has another use, too.'

From a bottom shelf of a cabinet David produced two red rubber balloons and some strings. He held each balloon to the nozzle, filled it with helium, tied off its neck, and attached a string. The red balloons bobbed on the string as he gave them to Jeff and Melissa. 'Sir and madam, I present you with the second lightest element in the known universe!' he said dramatically. Then he winked at Paul.

'Is Allan around?' Paul asked.

David shook his head. 'He's off to D.C. for some big National Science Board meeting at the NSF. He's amazing. He really has the connections. He persuaded a guy at Argonne to send us some huge single crystals of fluoridated layered perovskites. You should see the X-ray diffraction patterns. They're the most beautiful perovskite crystals I've ever seen. Just what we'll need after we get this kludge working.' Allan Saxon was the senior professor for whom David worked as a postdoc.

'Allan knows everybody,' Paul agreed. 'He has a reputation in the department for keeping tight control, making sure everyone under him is working flat out. Does he give you enough elbow room, David?'

'He was a bit hard to deal with when we were having equipment problems,' said David. 'Nothing I couldn't handle. But he brightens right up when he smells progress. Just now he's very friendly and helpful. He's busy writing proposals and editing that AIP journal, so he leaves Vickie and me to do most of the lab work.'

Paul nodded. 'Kids, I'm afraid we have to go now,' he said. 'David has work to do, and we've interrupted him
long
enough.' Jeff protested, but David assured him that they could come back again for another visit soon. Grasping their balloon strings with one hand and holding their crystals carefully in the other, they filed out the door.

'
See you later!' David called after them.

'See you tonight, David,' said Paul. 'And thanks.'

' 'Bye, David!' said Jeff and Melissa together as they walked down the hallway, balloons bobbing.

David turned back to the problem at hand. Too bad, he thought as he arranged himself on the floor again, that doing physics experiments isn't all flash and dash and helium balloons. The dogwork always has to be done first, and sometimes after it's done there isn't any good stuff anyway. Carefully he resumed the checking of each of the several hundred connections, gradually eliminating possibilities and progressively closing in on the obscure wiring mistake. He looked at his watch. Vickie ought to be here after lunch, he thought.

Victoria Gordon, her red hair overflowing her yellow helmet and streaming in her wake, eased her ten-speed down the long gentle slope of Densmore Avenue North, squeezing a brake handle occasionally to kill excess speed. She'd worked quite late last night, completing most of the wiring for their new experiment. This morning she'd slept in until nearly noon to make up some of the missed sleep of the previous week. Her head still felt muddy, but it was clearing in the crisp air.

The view of Lake Union with its backdrop of downtown high-rises spread below her at the end of the street, opening ever wider as she coasted downhill. The morning drizzle had burned off. The transcendentally wonderful smell of baking bread grew as she approached the Oro-Wheat Bakery on Pacific Avenue North. She sometimes bought their day-old bread in the little bakery shop, but the smell of the bread baking was the best part, a treat she savored every morning.

A
gap in the traffic on Pacific allowed her to head east to join the Burke-Gilman Trail. It paralleled Pacific above the lakefront north of Lake Union and the Ship Canal. When gaps in the massive blackberry vines along the trail permitted, there were marvelous views of the city, the waterway and its boat traffic. She enjoyed riding on the pleasant and relatively automobile-free link between her co-op house in the Wallingford district and her laboratory at the university. The breeze off the lake now smelled fresh and clean, with the barest hint of fish and diesel oil from the boatyards down the slope. She contoured around a slower cyclist, deftly threading through the walkers and joggers, taking their lunch-break exercise.

She glanced downhill to the right. It was cool, but that didn't seem to have deterred the wind surfers who dotted Lake Union near Gasworks Park. Victoria considered their dedication to an essentially empty activity and smiled to herself. It was nice to have something better to do with your life.

She passed under the I-5 bridge, so high above her that the hum of her own wheels was louder than the freeway noise. The massive bridge pillars near the trail were rather like giant redwoods, but done in concrete gray. Now the sequence of marinas, run-down boatyards, and the occasional posh lakefront restaurant was giving way to the outer fringes of the university's sprawl: converted older buildings, landscaped parking lots, new buildings under construction, plots of grass, and rhododendron beds.

Victoria's mind began to slip into work mode as she neared the campus, reviewing what was on the menu for today. First on the list was the redesign of the radio-frequency control interface. Those nifty phase-control chips were going to allow a whole range of new tricks with the RF control system, if she could just find a way to shoehorn them into the crowded control card.

She pictured the card layout. Those analog-to-digital
converter
chips took lots of space on the present card, and that new LSI chip from National might just be substituted for the whole mess of them, if only it was fast enough. She'd have to check that with Sam.

The upper stands of Husky Stadium in edgewise perspective loomed ahead like the twin jaws of a monumental bear trap. Fuzzy thinking is a trap, too. She tried to bring the design problem into sharper focus as she turned off the trail at Rainier Vista and pedaled harder. She liked to use this last upslope beside the lush green lawns of the campus leading to Physics Hall to add some final stress to her leg muscles.

A new card layout clicked into place in her mind's eye. It wasn't even going to be very difficult, she thought, grinning. David would be delighted.

Allan Saxon reached down and massaged his rump. It was getting numb, he decided. Arthur Lockworth, Presidential Science Advisor, had been droning on and on for most of an hour. He was informing the NSF's National Science Board, of which Saxon was a member, of all the wonderful things that the administration had done for science in the past year and was planning for the coming year. He painted the bright canvas with broad strokes, skipping over the damage done by political pork-barreling, the opportunities missed through shortsighted budgeting, the initiatives lost because Lockworth's masters had no real understanding of science.

Lockworth's resonant voice shifted timbre, a clue that he was at last reaching his conclusion. Saxon breathed a sigh of relief and glanced around the room. The board members, their chairs oriented to face Lockworth at the podium, sat around a long oak table. Behind them was a ring of seats occupied by National Science Foundation people, a few news reporters, and some observers from the scientific societies and organizations.

This had been a miserable meeting. The big-science
contingent
of the board had grabbed the initiative
and
never relinquished it. All the plums distributed here had dropped into other pockets. Funding for the NSF's Science/Industrial Initiatives, Saxon's pet project, had been neglected. The board's enthusiasm had focused on new funds for the National Gravity-Wave Telescope Project and the Neutrino Earth-Scan Initiative. Well, there would be other meetings, Saxon thought. His time would come.

Lockworth finally droned to a stop. There was determined applause when he finished. Lockworth looked up inquiringly, and Saxon put up his hand. 'Yes, Allan?' Lockworth said.

'Arthur,' said Saxon, 'we're all impressed by the breadth and vision of the administration's long-range plans for science . . . ' He paused while Lockworth absorbed the compliment and smiled. ' . . . but there is one area that this administration persists in neglecting.' The smile faded. 'I refer,' Saxon continued, 'to the NSF's longstanding program for promoting the infusion of the fruits of basic science research into the industrial sector. The Science/Industrial Initiatives program has been at a flat funding level for the past three years, without even adjustments for inflation—'

'Allan,' Lockworth cut him off, 'the administration has a vigorous program aimed at the preservation of the competitive edge of our nation's industries. We have worked with Congress to implement a generous investment tax credit program for promoting more private-sector funding of scientific research . . . '

'That's fine for Bell Labs and IBM, Arthur,' Saxon broke in, 'but it does nothing for the small entrepreneur who's trying to start a business based on high-technology innovation. He'll be taking a loss for the first few years of operation. Those tax credits are worthless to him. The small innovator is the wellspring of our technology-based economy, yet your administration is stifling this important
activity
by neglecting the Science/Industrial Initiatives.' Saxon looked up at Lockworth, now standing beside the podium and leaning on it with one hand. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, he thought, and this is a better place to squeak than most.

'I would agree with you, Allan, if I believed that the S/I Initiatives were the best vehicle for matching our excellent university research base into the technological development stream. But I and my staff at the OSTP have made a detailed study of the effectiveness of that S/I program, which the previous administration pushed rather hard. We've determined that in the balance it just wasn't cost effective. That's why we're de-emphasizing it. There has to be a better way. I would, of course, be interested in alternative approaches . . . '

Saxon nodded. That was a foot in the door, at least. Lockworth fielded several questions from others, but Saxon ignored them and gathered his papers in preparation for the cab ride to National for his flight to San Francisco.

'Professor Saxon?'

Saxon glanced up. A man stood looking down at him. He wore a rumpled tweed sport coat, a stained yellow necktie, baggy brown slacks, and scuffed loafers. He needed a haircut. He might have been a faculty member, except that this wasn't a university.

'I'm Gil Wegmann from
Newsweek,'
the man said. 'I wonder if you'd tell me what was behind your dialogue with Lockworth just now. Would you say that the administration was screwing over the tech-innovation entrepreneur?'