A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  Edward was reading over the day’s record. “Kelly, is this average couplings per week for the whole colony?”

  “Nope. It’s couplings per week for each individual.”

  “Jesus.”

  Sonia and Kelly were working experiments inside the beam when Loren opened the back panel and began to tinker with the maser generator’s wiring. “Don’t worry, this won’t affect anything, at least I don’t think it will.” He disconnected one wire, causing the red shaft of light to pop off.

  Kelly snapped at him. “Dummy! Now I’ve got to start over.”

  “No you don’t. The light is off, but the effect is still on.” He pointed to the little differential clock they had rigged, a device that measured the variation of t-prime from the middle of the beam’s track to a location a few inches away. It still showed a variation of 0.04 percent.

  Kelly returned to her experiment without worrying of how the effect could exist in the absence of the light. But Sonia was stunned. “How did you do that?” she asked. “What maintains the Layton Effect if not the beam?”

  “It’s the magnet. There’s a high frequency magnetic variation that is used to initiate the beam. When they built the maser, they didn’t bother to turn off the magnet after the beam was on. It’s the rapidly varying magnetic field that supports the effect. That and the ruby chip.” He looked away uncomfortably. “The ruby chip is important too, but I’m not sure why.”

  Kelly and Sonia went back to their own experiments, but Loren kept thinking about the chip. Was it possible that the small piece of ruby acted to focus the magnetic field in the same way that it focused the beam of light? If so, what would that imply? What is a ruby, anyway? He looked it up in a materials handbook to find that ruby is a hard, colored, corundum or aluminum oxide. The color came from trace impurities in the crystal. It didn’t mention what the impurities were, but iron was the logical candidate because of the red color. Assuming there were ferro-magnetic materials suspended in the matrix of aluminum oxide, what effect would that have on an incident magnetic field? The field equations were too hairy to work out himself, but he could use SHIELA to set up a simulation of the field as it passed through the ruby.

  He had just turned on his SHIELA workstation when Kelly interrupted him: “You have a disgruntled team-mate, Loren Martine. You turned off our nice red beam and the work has suffered.”

  “It has? Maybe the light is important after all.”

  “The magnet may be sufficient to maintain the Layton Effect, but the beam helps keep people’s spirits up. It’s a symbol of, I don’t know, a symbol of discovery and innovation. Turn it back on, please, pronto.”

  “Okay, Kelly.”

  Loren went back into Homer’s office and reconnected the lead. The beam popped back on. It was true, it was nice to have it on again.

  Instead of accessing SHIELA from his normal station, Loren set up the Macbook Air laptop with its wireless connection to the main Clark Hall computer. This was the laptop he intended to take along to Florida so he could continue working from there. It could communicate via the Internet to the Clark Hall computers and from there to SHIELA over the microwave link through the dish on the roof. When he connected to SHIELA from Ft. Lauderdale, his communication would involve a 2,000 mile detour in each direction, up to Ithaca by Internet and back, but it would still work properly and with an almost unnoticeable delay. The advantage of the battery powered laptop now was that he could bring the work into Homer’s office where the experiments were going on and not miss out on any of the fun.

  It took the better part of an hour to key in the simulation, and then less than a minute for SHIELA to run it through and get the results back him. Loren began to digest the answer. He considered the problem distractedly, half listening in on the banter of the two young women as they worked. Sonia and Kelly were preparing to rotate the base of the maser generator so they could pass the beam through an unwieldy piece of measurement gear. It was going to be easier to move the beam than to move the device into the beam. But not a lot easier, the maser weighed a “ton.” They were laughing together as they lifted the unit, beam still glowing, and began to swing it around.

  Loren stared again at the simulation result on the screen and then leaned back in his seat to ponder. The Layton Effect was propagated along a magnetic field. The propagating field of this particular beam, he thought, the one in front of him, was now being turned as Kelly and Sonia labored it into position. And as it turned it might happen to line itself up with…. With a choked cry, Loren lunged toward them. He grasped the top of the emitter and ripped it forcibly out of its housing. The beam went out. There was a blue spark as one of the torn leads grounded against the base. Sonia and Kelly stared at him, open-mouthed. They were still supporting the weight of beam generator. The circuit breaker in the hall had clicked off. The only light left in the room was from the dismal gray sunlight filtering in through one dirty window. Homer came running in, followed by Edward.

  “What happened?” Homer looked at each of them for signs of injury, the concerned mother hen.

  “Loren tore out the emitter with his bare hand,” said Kelly, still astonished. She set down her end of the maser.

  Sonia came over to him to put her hand on his arm. “Are you OK, Loren?”

  “I cut my finger on the lip of the housing. That’s all. It isn’t anything.” He held out his finger for the others to see, then absently licked away a small drop of blood with his tongue. He sat down on Homer’s easy chair, the tension draining out of his body. And then he jumped up again, a startled fear visible in his features. “Jesus, is the other magnet still on?” They had jury-rigged a second Layton Effect device in Edward’s office to provide a second station to conduct experiments.

  “It went off when the circuit breaker cut out,” said Edward. “I know, I was working with it at the time.”

  Loren looked relieved. He sat down on top of one of the wooden crates, trying to relax himself. “Good,” he said. “They’ve both got to stay off for the moment. This is important. We don’t dare turn on either beam again until we’ve thought out the way the beam propagates itself along magnetic fields.” He gestured toward the laptop computer, where the results of the simulation were glowing at them from its battery-powered display. His Spanish accent, which had faded over the past year, seemed in this last sentence as thick as it ever had been. It fairly dripped from his words. They knew the accent tended to return when he was tired or stressed. Now he was both. “We’ve been playing with fire,” he said.

  The first attempt to explain was a botch. The thoughts were still a jumble in Loren’s own mind. He spoke as he sorted them out, but the net effect was no communication yet, or very little. All that was clear to the others was that something important was coming. They waited patiently. Homer sat down on the arm of the overstuffed chair, and the others looked for places to settle.

  Sonia stared gravely at Loren as he struggled to express himself. She sensed he wouldn’t be ready for a few moments more, and then it would all become clear. Waiting, she was struck again by how wonderfully pretty he was: the prominent high cheekbones, the fine lines of his face, his dark, kind eyes. His present moment of confusion gave an intimation of the young boy he had been, a lovely child. She smiled slightly, allowing herself this undisciplined thought. In a moment, she knew, she would be called upon to apply her intellect again to their newly developing science. But for just these few seconds, she was conscious only of desire. Then his eyes were focused directly into hers and a new torrent of words began, these all too comprehensible.

  The color drained out of Homer’s face as he listened. Sonia stared down at the desk. Edward shut his eyes. Loren turned to Kelly, aware that she might still not have understood. In the very dim light of the room, he could barely see her expression.

  “It’s the earth’s magnetic field you have to think about, Kelly.”

  “Yes. I think I followed. If the beam ever lined up exactly with the earth’s field, the effec
t would go outside the beam. Is that it?”

  “Yes. The effect would be ‘catching.’ It would propagate itself onto the earth’s magnetic field.”

  “And everyplace where there is a field — that’s the whole world, I guess — everyplace would have its own Layton Effect.” She stopped to think what that would mean.

  “All the cars would stall,” said Edward. “No more automobiles. That would be kind of an improvement.”

  “Airplanes would fall out of the sky,” said Kelly. She winced. “When we rotated the beam…”

  “You didn’t know, of course. But yes, when you rotated the beam, you might have lined it up. You might have stalled the whole world.”

  Sonia glanced out the window. “The lights are on everywhere else,” she said. “It’s just this floor.”

  “No harm done,” said Loren.

  Kelly was still shaken. “But we could have done a lot of harm. All those people in airplanes, suddenly falling to the earth.”

  “Patients in respirators,” Homer picked up. “Power failure everywhere. Hospitals would try to cut in their backup generators, but they wouldn’t start. Diesel generators would be useless.”

  “No trucks to bring in food,” Kelly continued. “People would starve. There would be riots.”

  Edward was going back over Loren’s explanation of how the Effect would come to extend outside the generator. “But what would maintain the Effect, Loren, once the maser’s power was turned off?”

  “The power doesn’t matter. As long as the ruby chip stayed lined up with the earth’s field, it would continue to re-inject the disturbance onto the field, and t-prime would be slowed. The local magnet is only necessary to get the Effect started.”

  “So un-aligning the chip would stop the Effect.”

  “I think so. We’d have to try it to be sure. And of course, we’re not going to do that.”

  Kelly spoke up again: “There’s something wrong here, Loren. There have been masers for decades. How is it possible that no one ever happened to line one up with the field? You would think we would have had a Layton Effect world starting years ago.”

  “There have been masers for decades,” said Homer, “but not very many of them. They were never very popular.”

  “Also, Kelly, think how heavy the damn things are,” said Sonia. “You and I may have been the only silly people ever to move one while it was running.”

  Loren nodded. “There is something else, too. The earth’s magnetic field is not exactly level in most places. In Ithaca, for example, it has a slight downward angle. It would offend the esthetics to set up the instrument with its beam on an angle, so probably nobody ever did. The result is that anyone who worked with a maser was running a risk of propagating the Effect, but never actually did. The mix of factors was too unlikely. But when you two lifted it up and started to rotate it, then you were taking a chance.”

  “Sonia and I might have propagated the effect temporarily, but then as we continued to rotate it past North…which way is North, anyway?”

  Edward pointed away from the window. They all looked at the maser which was lined up fairly close to the direction he was pointing.

  “Ugh. But anyway, when we set it down, it would have been level again, and so, as Loren says, not lined up. The result would have been a short period in which the Layton Effect was propagated. So things would have hiccuped a bit, and then restarted. Can a jet engine restart in flight? Does anybody know?”

  “I think so,” said Loren. “But this is all speculation. Let’s say we had a device to set up the Layton Effect, an ‘Effector,’ if I can use that term. It would be a high frequency magnet with its field focused through a ruby chip. And now we rotate the effector around until it lines up with the earth’s magnetic field in such a way as to infect the field. The result would be a Layton Effect world…”

  “Essentially repeal of the modern era,” Edward interjected.

  “Yes, temporarily. But now we rotate the Effector a little bit further so that it no longer lines up. I think the propagated Effect would cease. But there is still the question of how much deviation from the direction of the field is required. Once the Effect had begun to propagate, it might be able to maintain itself even if the Effector were a few degrees out of line. Who knows?”

  Homer had a faraway look. “Who knows? But one thing we do know is that if the Effector had some way to maintain itself in alignment, the result would be persistent. We would have a ‘Persistent Effector.’ How would you make a Persistent Effector if you wanted to, Loren?”

  Loren thought for a moment, feeling himself responding to the challenge. “Well, I can think of one easy way. We could mount the whole thing on a kind of compass arm, so that it would automatically seek out the earth’s magnetic field.”

  There was a ship’s binnacle off in one corner of the office, part of the star boat’s gear. Homer went over to it and dragged the thing back into the center of the room. Loren looked at the compass-like device and continued his train of thought, “Sure, we could use the floating housing. Make a miniature Effector, powered with a tiny battery like the ones they use in quartz watches. We could mount it here where the compass card is…” He put his hand onto the round globe of the binnacle.

  “Stop! What are you talking about?” Kelly’s face was flushed. “This is crazy. Why are we even thinking of making a Persistent Effector? That’s just what we want never to do. That would be a disaster.”

  There was a long silence. She looked at each of them dumbly. Finally Sonia said, very softly, “Think of the Doomsday Clock, Kelly. Think of what it means when the hand is approaching twelve. Think of what it would mean if ever it did arrive: the world about to explode and nobody could do anything about it…except us.”

  11

  DO NO HARM

  “My young friends…” Homer said. Then he trailed off into silence.

  They had not moved from their positions in his office. No one had yet reset the circuit breaker, so the room was dark and getting darker. The drizzly afternoon had turned into a drizzly dusk; they could hear the sounds of cars hissing over the wet pavement of East Avenue in front of the building. Homer was slumped in the chair as he had been for the past half hour.

  He began again, “My young friends. We have been making some discoveries these days. Oh yes. This is what we had hoped for, a time of immense and important discoveries. This is the happy reward we sought.” Only, he didn’t seem very happy.

  “You could think now about what it means to be a scientist, the combined roles of discovery and social conscience. How does the scientist decide whether or not to reveal his discovery to the world? You could think about this in abstract terms. You could. But instead, I want you to think very specifically. I want you to remember that not so long ago, you were only part-time physicists. The rest of the time you were programmers and contract experts on the simulation of strategic warfare. You remember that? The Simula-7 project. Oh, the government lost interest in that work. You can keep the money, they said, but don’t send in any more scenarios. The scenarios were just upsetting them. So we did exactly what they wanted us to do. We freed ourselves to work full time on physics and zero time on Simula-7. It was a big relief for each of you, because that’s what you wanted to do anyway. And you did it.” He looked around at them. “But I didn’t.”

  Homer ran a thumbnail absently through one unruly white brow. “While you were having all the fun, playing with Effectors and inventing a brand-new science, I was still at work on Simula-7. Now, why do you suppose I was doing that instead of joining in your exciting work? Well, because of all those phone calls that you’ve noticed have been coming in. The last few days I go into Loren’s office for the calls because I couldn’t get into my own, you were so busy in here. Phone calls at almost any time of the day or night from Albert Tomkis.” A very tiny lopsided smile. “Poor Albert, a professional worrier even when there is nothing to worry about, but when there is something to worry about, well, then a very w
orried man indeed. What he had to be worried about was a new idea the Pentagon was considering. It was a new idea to them, but a very old idea for anyone who has ever read a history book. A pre-emptive strike.”

  Homer shifted in his seat, and stared morosely out the window. He appeared to have lost the train of his thought.

  Kelly prodded him at last, “Homer?”

  “A very old idea…” he repeated. Another pause, and then he looked up, seeming surprised to see they were still there. He shook his head and went on: “Albert, of course, doesn’t work for the Pentagon, but for the State Department. He is almost an enemy as far as the Pentagon is concerned. So he had to learn about this plan they are planning through informants within the DoD. Whenever he would learn something more, he would call me up and tell me. He would ask me to run it past Simula-7 to find out what would happen if they actually did what they were thinking of doing. So I keyed in the actions they were considering and let SHIELA have a look.” Homer stood up. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

  They trouped into the computer room behind Homer. The lights were still on in there, a different circuit. Homer sat down at Kelly’s workstation to key in a few commands. The giant screen blinked, then displayed what they recognized as a Simula-7 input scenario. Homer had entered it as Tomkis described the secret plan. In its present form, it would have been incomprehensible to anyone but the five persons now present. Inputs were presented to Simula-7 by setting selected groups of its more than 10,000 parameters. Each parameter had a name, sometimes suggestive of its meaning, sometimes abstract. The values were codes. The members of Homer’s team had learned most of the commonly used parameter names and codes. There was a dictionary to look up any that they didn’t recognize, but no one moved toward it now. The first statement of the set read: THEATER.OPS = KB. KB stood for Cuba. Subsequent statements told the rest of the story. They read them over in silence. A minute to digest their meaning. Sonia was the first one to speak. “Jesus, Homer, what kind of idiot dreamed this one up?”