A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  Kelly came up to Loren in the kitchen, where he was making coffee. It was about 2 A.M.

  “I printed out all the visuals you used in the presentation, Loren, and bound them into the daybook. And I’ve been typing up the transcript from Homer’s dictated notes. I didn’t bind that in because you might want to correct some of what I typed. Maybe I got some of the words wrong.”

  “How come you’ve been typing instead of working with Homer?”

  “He’s been on the phone for the last hour with Albert.”

  “Tomkis?”

  “Yes. Who would think the old dear would even be awake at this hour.”

  “Something going on at State, I guess.” Loren shrugged.

  “He sounded worried. But then he always does. I think he is a professional worrier. He’s such a nice man, Loren. He’s the only one of the project overseers that seems like he ever had a mother or wrote a love letter or tickled a baby.”

  “So that’s what makes him different. We need to have a compulsory course in baby tickling for Curly and Rupert Paule. Maybe that would make things more sane around here.”

  Kelly smiled, but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about time, as they all were. “What does it mean, Loren, that there is this t-prime kind of time? Could it make it possible to build a time machine, for instance? Or could we make ourselves get younger?”

  “No and no. Nothing at all practical, I’m afraid. It’s like the discovery of fractals or the Goldbach Conjecture about prime numbers. It’s only of interest to people like us who are totally disconnected from the real world.”

  “I don’t think so. The notion is too fundamental to have no effect. It’s like the discovery of fire. It’s going to change the world, I can feel it.”

  “It’s going to change the world of physics, that’s for sure,” he agreed.

  “The world of people, too. Suppose you could separate the effect from the beam. Suppose you could make a t-prime flashlight and anywhere you shone it, the value of time would be reduced because of the different t-prime. If you shone it on an angry man, would he be less quick to do some dumb thing?”

  “He might be 0.04 percent less quick. Nothing that would help.”

  “Suppose we shone it on the whole world. Would it change anything?”

  “I don’t know, Kelly.”

  Homer’s door was open again. Loren could see him sitting in the easy chair in front of the desk, staring vaguely off into space.

  “Hullo, everybody. Time for show and tell.” It was Ed. He gestured toward the computer room. He went to fetch Homer and Sonia while the other two took their places. There was a small dancing flame displayed in color on the plasma board. When they were all assembled, Edward began:

  “The effect of t-prime taking on its second stable value instead of the normal first value is very slight. Time runs 0.04 percent slower inside the beam. So if you put a flame in the beam you would expect it to give off heat 0.04 percent slower. You’d hardly notice. But when you try the experiment the flame burns at about half the height inside that it burns outside.” The others all nodded.

  “There are two things going on in the flame that are a little different from what you might first think. The first thing is that the potential energy in the match is less. The match was formed with a different t-prime. That value is etched into its structure. It gives off less energy in t-prime-two because it is a t-prime-one match.”

  “So big deal,” said Homer. “So it burns 0.08 percent slower instead of 0.04 percent slower. You still wouldn’t notice.”

  “No,” Edward agreed. “You wouldn’t. It’s the other effect that really matters.” He typed in a command at his console to display a simple differential equation on the plasma board. “The second effect is that the whole nature of differential calculus is changed. Whenever you take a derivative with respect to time, you now have to work with both t and t-prime.” He stopped to let the thought sink in. Homer and Sonia and Loren stared at the equation with their mouths open.”

  “Edward! Have a heart.” It was Kelly. “What on earth is a derivative? I never got to calculus.”

  “Oh. It has to do with the way things change, Kelly. Something might move 0.04 percent slower inside the beam, but when it tried to accelerate its motion, the effect would be much greater than 0.04 percent. You see there is a change going on in the burning match. The temperature of the gas has to shoot up suddenly.”

  “So if I were driving around in there in a little car, then the car would go 0.04 percent slower and I’d never notice. But if I put down the accelerator to speed up, it would seem a lot more sluggish?”

  “Well almost. First of all, you wouldn’t notice the difference in speed even if you had enough sensitivity to detect 0.04 percent differences, because your body clock would be slowed down by exactly that same 0.04 percent. Even if you had precise instruments to measure speed, those instruments would be slowed down by 0.04 percent, and so the speed they measured would be the same as always.”

  “OK. And the acceleration?”

  “Even the acceleration wouldn’t be noticeable to you, it’s only noticeable to an observer with a different t-prime. When your t-prime is slower, things accelerate more slowly, but your expectation for how they ought to accelerate is slowed down too.”

  “But couldn’t I notice that the flame was burning lower?”

  “Yes, you could. But that’s because of the combination of the two effects. The match is made of normal t-prime wood. If you were in the beam and the tree that the match was made of had grown inside the beam, then the result would look normal to you. It would look very slightly different to us on the outside. But combine the lowered energy of the wood with the increased resistance to change, and the difference is magnified so much that it’s visible no matter where you observe it from.

  Kelly unfocused her eyes. “Since all present wood and other combustible materials are formed with normal t-prime, then the beam works like a kind of electronic fire extinguisher?”

  “Yes. Only it’s not strong enough to extinguish. Only to reduce.”

  Sonia put her hand up. “It might be an explosion extinguisher, though.”

  They were all silent for a moment.

  Sonia picked up again. “An explosion might not be able to happen inside the beam because there just wouldn’t be enough energy in a t-prime-one explosive to explode at t-prime-two. Did anyone try to strike the match inside the beam.”

  “Isn’t that what we did on Sunday, Homer?”

  “No. At least I never have. I always struck the match outside the beam and then moved it in.”

  All five were up and headed toward Homer’s office. Loren turned on the beam and took up the matches. He held his hands inside the light beam and tried to strike the match against its box. There was no spark, no flame.

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” said Homer. He climbed up on top of a chest of instruments and began to search for something behind it. All that was visible for the moment was his backside. The rest of his body was bent down behind the chest. When he came up he had a Very Pistol in his hands. It was the one he used as a starter’s gun when he ran the sailboat races for the town’s pre-teens.

  Loren could feel his pulse picking up as Homer approached the beam. Homer put the pistol directly into the beam and clicked the trigger three times. Nothing happened. Then he held the pistol in the air and squeezed again. There was a sharp bang and a bright yellow light.

  It took a moment for their ears to clear. Kelly was smiling. “There’s a use for our t-prime flashlight, Loren. When we shine it on the angry man, he can’t shoot us.”

  9

  THE MASTER OF PO

  For Marine Captain Willard Courtenay of the White House security staff, this week marked a new beginning. He had decided to take on destiny, mano a mano, as he thought of it, and make some things happen in his career. To certain outward appearances, he was already an important man: Neighbors in his Alexandria apartment house, for example, would whisper excited
ly each time he passed: “(whisper), works in the White House, (whisper, whisper), knows all the important people (whisper), top echelon.” He knew that when people were whispering like that about you, it meant you were getting right up there toward being a honcho. He was becoming a honcho in his neighborhood, but not at work. In the White House, he was treated like furniture. The more expertly he did his job, the less anyone noticed him. His job was to be invisible, the invisibler the better.

  The perks were nice of course: the marine color guard that snapped to attention whenever he arrived, the extra allowance for freshly ironed uniforms each day. His desk at White House Reception had actually belonged to President James Buchanan at one time, as had the chair. Willard Courtenay sat in a chair that had once served the President of the whole U.S. of A! He ran his hand over the leather top of Buchanan’s desk and over its gold engraved edges. The White House protocol officer had told Courtenay that this was fine piece of Louie Kanze workmanship. Louie Kanze!

  The job was OK, only, it ought to be a stepping stone to something, rather than an end in itself. But a stepping stone to what? In a building where you could smell the naked ambition oozing out under nearly every office door, he himself had almost none. He didn’t hanker after the positions of any of the people who walked past his desk each day. The nearest he had ever come to political ambition was the idle thought that it might be nice to be a boxing commissioner. Maybe Federal Boxing Commissioner. He would have to look up in the FedRex and see if there was such a position.

  He needed to develop some ambition, and he needed to do it quickly. Wherever it was that he was headed, it was time now to start getting there. He wasn’t growing any younger. That meant he had to stop being just furniture. Getting noticed was the ticket to, well, to whatever.

  Captain Courtenay had been reading the George Stephanopoulos memoir of happenings in the Clinton White House. The amazing thing to Courtenay was how much Stephanopoulos remembered. Did the man have a photographic memory? Or was he writing stuff down all the time? It must have been the latter. Courtenay wasn’t reading Stephanopoulos for the pure joy of reading. The truth was that he had aspirations of one day writing a memoir himself. What was the use of being here in the very center of world-shaking events and not profiting from it?

  He even had a title, or part of one, for his memoir. It would be called I Was There When _________. (He wasn’t sure yet what would go in the blank.) But important things were going to happen during his own tour of duty in the White House, of that he was sure. And his book would cover them in detail. It would be timely, informative and perceptive. There would be the picture of himself and the President on the cover along with the completed title. On the back would be blurbs from enthusiastic reviews, including the words ‘timely,’ ‘informative,’ and ‘perceptive.’ That part of the book was pretty much done. It was the part in the middle that still needed some work.

  The sad thing was that Courtenay did not have a great memory. And he hadn’t written anything down. He had been in the White House for the last three years, but aside from a general sense of being in the middle of fascinating machinations, he couldn’t remember much. So when he sat down to dash off a chapter or two of memoir, all he got on the page before him were sentences like, “On many occasions the President and I would discuss various topics,” or “The President would often share with me his innermost thoughts about what he was thinking about.”

  There was nothing for it but to buy a diary and write into the goddam thing all the details that George Stephanopoulos would have put there. The diary he got had a pale blue padded cover and a blue ribbon to mark the place. It was dumb and he felt dumb writing in it. But what the hell. Each day he made an entry of what had happened and who had come by his desk at White House Reception. Sometimes he would forget until that evening and have to be content with an entry like the one for yesterday: April 19: Tall Arab in headgear. Several ambassadors with flunkies. Many others (incl. delegation of black congressmen all pissed off about something). Another busy day.

  Not the stuff that great books are made of. This morning he had made a slight change in procedure. From now on he would write the entry directly into his blue book as each person signed in. He would give the blue book priority over the official log. He could always go back later and fill in the names next to the signatures in the log. At least his own record would be complete. For today had already had quite a respectable entry:

  09:00 Gen. U.S. Simpson (JCS) and aide

  09:25 Gen. Gordon Buxtehude (JCS)

  10:17 Senator Portentious Collier (Va.)

  10:26 Ms. C. Roberts, (PBS) TURNED AWAY

  11:16 Gen. Simpson again

  12:02 Pizza Hut delivery

  13:22 Rev. Nolan Gallant

  The possibilities here were obvious. From such a record you could produce timely and perceptive commentary. He took out a lined pad and tried his hand by writing, “When Senator Collier arrived at my desk at 10:17 on that fateful morning, he smiled and said, ‘_________________’. I thought there might have been just a hint of ________ in his careworn features.” What was it that Collier had said?

  “Ahem.”

  “Mmm?” The clunk of a briefcase being set down on the Buchanan desk.

  “Dr. Lamar Macmillan Armitage to see the President.”

  “Oh. Yes sir.” Courtenay shoved the log toward the tall, nattily dressed man. He noted the man’s appearance for his memoir: pink scalp visible through pure white hair, sunburned skin on the tops of the ears. Courtenay really only got to look searchingly at the visitors when they were bent over signing the log, so many of his best impressions were of the tops of famous people’s heads. He checked the display on his computer terminal and saw that Armitage was expected. There was a picture of the man on his screen and his affiliation at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Courtenay touched the name on the touch-sensitive screen so that Paule would know Armitage was on the way. Then he copied the name Lamar Macmillan Armitage into his blue book. He tried to dredge up what he’d heard about Armitage. Wasn’t he head of a DoD development project involved with missile defense or some such thing? He vaguely remembered that the funding had been cancelled by Congress. Courtenay turned back to the visitor.

  “Yes sir. Mr. Paule’s secretary will come down to escort you.”

  Armitage suppressed an urge to wrinkle his nose at the mention of Paule, not one of his favorite human beings. Rupert Paule was one of the many disagreeable aspects of grubbing for government money. He tried to think for a moment of pleasanter things.

  “Professor Armitage?” A skinny intern in a brown suit.

  “What? Oh, yes.”

  “Come with me, please.”

  Armitage followed the young man up one flight of carpeted stairs and back into the executive office wing. A moment later he was ushered into Rupert Paule’s office. Paule came around his desk to greet him.

  “Lamar. Always a pleasure.”

  “Rupert.”

  They shook hands. Paule motioned his guest to the easy chair in front of his desk and sat down himself in his own place. Armitage sank into the chair with some surprise, as it was a full eight inches lower than he would have expected. In spite of his height, he now found himself looking up at the shorter Paule.

  “Always a pleasure, Lamar. As I say.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll get right to the point. The President specifically wanted to see you this afternoon.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Usually when he wants to see you, it’s sufficient that I see you instead and ask about or tell you whatever it is that’s on his mind. But today, for some reason, he wants to see you himself.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I thought it might be good to have this short briefing session before you went in.”

  “I see.”

  “I, of course, have no desire to tell you what to say to the President.”

  “No.”

  “Still, there are things that you might say w
hich could only be misinterpreted. You do see what I’m saying, don’t you, Lamar?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “The President, as you know, will be in office for another two years. So, it goes without saying that I shall be here in my position for those two years. And then, failing an act of utter lunacy by the American people, the Vice President will have his eight years. The Vice President and I, you know, are very, very close. In fact he has already suggested that I might like to fill the same role in his presidency that I am filling now. So you see, I am almost certain to be here for another ten years.” He smiled grimly at Armitage.

  The professor repressed a sigh.

  “I think I should say something about the President’s present frame of mind,” Paule continued. “He is feeling just a trifle low at the moment. The pressures of his position, of course, are awesome. Just imagine the weight of the world that is on his shoulders, having to spend his days face to face with the fact that history will be a severe judge of his every action. Well, a lesser man would crack.” He looked significantly across the desk.

  “I see.”

  “It would be an act of real patriotism to buoy up his spirits in any possible way, Lamar. At such a moment. And I think, conversely, it would not be a service to the country to depress him further. We need to put the best possible face on things to help the man along. We need to instill in ourselves less of a New York Times attitude and more of a U.S.A. Today attitude. Positive. You see what I mean? Instead of whining about every fucking thing that’s not perfect.”

  “Mh.”

  “I think the President is likely to ask you something about the Shield. He may want to know about the status of the control program, Revelation13. Tell me, what is the status of Revelation13, Lamar.”

  “Well, as I explained to you on the phone, it’s as good as could be expected, given that the software staff has been reduced from 120 professionals to six, plus a few grad students working part time.”