Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  Vickie was checking more of the pieces. 'They all focus the sun at the same distance,' she said. They all have the same radius of curvature.'

  'Hey,' said David, suddenly looking up, 'what ever happened to that first set of field coils we made, the ones that had to be done over because they had those big ugly sextupole and octopole field components?'

  'I gave them to Sam,' said Vickie. 'He said that maybe he could use them for the electron spin resonance setup in the senior lab.'

  David smiled. 'Well, maybe we're not dead yet. Look, Vickie, we've lost our chamber, our cryostat, our sample holder, our superconducting solenoid, all of the stuff we spent so much time building. But it occurs to me that we still have all the power supplies, the driving electronics, and the control computer. And whatever gobbled up our hardware, the boundary was outside the volume where the vacuum and the cryogenics were, so those things probably didn't matter. Maybe we don't need all that stuff to do it again. So let's just reproduce the external field conditions and see what happens.

  'You know, the unique thing about this experiment is that tricky spherical rotation of the twistor field that we developed. Nobody's ever made a field do anything like that before. Vickie, maybe we've found a real effect. If you think about our problems of last evening, perhaps those funny vacuum gauge "resonances" were just a smaller version of whatever took out the chamber. Perhaps we were just making gas molecules disappear instead of stainless-steel chambers. Let's go get those coils back from Sam and see if we can reproduce the effect.'

  'Wait a minute, David,' said Vickie sternly. 'Just wait, now! Think! Do you realize how crazy that sounds?'

  David paused for a moment, then grinned. 'As some famous physics pioneer must have said at one time or another,' he said, holding two fingers against his upper lip like a mustache and pointing upward with the index finger of his other hand, 'Der nutty problems machst für das crazy explanations!'

  Vickie giggled, shaking her head and rolling her eyes upward in mock despair.

  'And this explanation, Vickie,' he continued, 'is just about crazy enough to be right. Cross your fingers. Maybe we can get you a Ph.D. out of this mess yet!' He walked quickly to the door, motioning her to follow.

  As they walked down the corridor toward the stairs, Vickie said, 'David, aren't you forgetting Allan and the disappearance of his expensive equipment? You've got to call him.'

  David slowed and gave her a pained look. 'Problem is, I don't know where Allan is, so I can't just pick up the phone and dial. I'll have to ask Susan, his secretary, to track him down. Then I get to tell him that the sky is falling.' He sighed. 'I do not look forward to that conversation,' he said.

  6

  Thursday Midmorning, October 7

  The Megalith Tower loomed over Market Street, a featureless prism of black glass that contrasted bleakly with the whites and beiges of the other buildings of downtown San Francisco. From its thirty-third floor, the gray blanket of fog over the Pacific Ocean, somehow held back at the Golden Gate Bridge, looked like a shag carpet about to be unrolled over the bay.

  Allan Saxon tapped his fingers on the chrome armrest of the black leather designer chair and felt himself becoming increasingly upset. Yesterday in D.C. the National Science Board meeting had not gone at all well. His fellow board members were even more self-serving, stubborn, and pigheaded than usual, and his pet projects consistently received the short end of the funding stick. Then he had drunk too much first-class booze on the much-delayed flight from Dulles to San Francisco and hadn't slept at all well after he reached the St Francis.

  And it had now been well over half an hour since he had arrived at the Megalith Tower and seated himself in the elegant reception area of Martin Pierce's outer office. Under slightly different circumstances he might have found advantage in the wait, an opportunity to arrange some after-hours recreation with Martin's stunning blond receptionist. But after yesterday's reverses he was in a petulant mood and didn't feel he had the patience for such games. Dammit, who did Martin think he was to keep him waiting so long? Perhaps he should invent another appointment and leave! But no, he couldn't afford to put additional distance between himself and Martin. There were problems enough already.

  The ivory telephone made a bland musical sound. The receptionist answered it and listened for a moment, then turned smoothly toward him. 'You have a long-distance call, Professor Saxon,' she said with a smile that she probably also used in swimsuit competitions. 'You can use the second office on the right if you'd like more privacy.'

  'That's very kind of you, Darlene,' he said, hoping he remembered her name correctly. 'I don't have any secrets, but perhaps I'd be less of a nuisance if I took it in that office.'

  'Oh, you're nev-ver a nuisance, Professor Saxon,' she said, awarding him The Smile again as he turned and retreated down the hall.

  He seated himself at the polished walnut desk and pushed the flashing button on the telephone. 'Hello! This is Allan Saxon,' he said.

  'Allan, I'm glad Susan was able to track you down,' said a voice which he was able to identify as that of David Harrison, his postdoc at the university.

  'Hello, David,' he said. 'What's up? What can I do for you?' What's so important that he'd call me here, he wondered.

  'Well, I doubt if there's much you can do from there,' said David, 'but I wanted to give you the bad news without delay. There's been a major breakdown in our experiment. Some of the equipment was damaged and will have to be replaced.'

  The words were like a blow to the pit of Saxon's stomach. 'Which equipment, David? What the hell happened?' His voice rose a bit in pitch. He stood ready to take action.

  'Well, the vacuum chamber, the superconducting solenoid, the sample holder, the cryopump heads, and the field coils are all unusable. There was some kind of implosion that took them out. We're going to have to replace them completely.'

  'My God! An implosion? Was anybody hurt? What about you and Vickie?' Saxon's mind spun, trying to grasp, to visualize what had happened. Were there injuries? Were there to be insurance claims, accident reports, paperwork, lawyers?

  'We're just fine,' came David's voice, 'except that we're still a bit stunned. Losing all that work and hardware, I mean.' That sounds a bit lame, Saxon thought.

  'What exactly happened? Can anything be salvaged? What caused it?' Saxon recalled the optimism he'd expressed just yesterday to his NSF contract monitor and considered the obstacles, without new results to show, that he would face in obtaining more funding for the project.

  'I'm afraid that the hardware near the chamber is a total loss. We aren't sure what happened. We were doing preliminary tests. I was just about to start the coil calibrations late last night when there was an implosion. We're still trying to reconstruct the sequence of events, so I can't tell you much yet. The only thing we're sure of is that we're going to have to start over, almost from scratch. Maybe half the hardware is still OK . . . the power supplies, regulators, and control circuits. The control computer is fine, too. But all that machine-shop work that you pulled strings to get done in a hurry will have to be done over, no question.'

  There was the odor here of a cock-and-bull story, Saxon thought. 'David, I don't understand. What imploded? How could it destroy that big hunk of stainless steel? It sounds crazy!'

  'It is crazy, Allan! That's what I'm trying to tell you. It's completely insane. We don't know what imploded. All we know is that all the hardware in the center of the rig is gone.'

  He was covering something up; Saxon was sure of it. Had he done something stupid that he was hiding? The bloody incompetent! 'Gone! What do you mean, "gone"! Vacuum chambers and cryopumps don't vanish into thin air! There must at least be some pieces you can analyze to figure out what happened.'

  There are no pieces, Allan. Everything within about a meter of chamber center is gone. Vanished.'

  There was silence for a moment. Theft! He must have stolen the equipment. The bastard! An eruption followed. 'Goddammit, Harrison, when I get b
ack I'm going to kick your ass into orbit! This story of yours is the most ridiculous fabrication that it has ever been my misfortune to hear. You expect me to believe that fifty thousand dollars' worth of hardware just vanished into thin air! I'll find out where you're hiding it, or who you've sold it to! You'll go to jail! I'll have you blacklisted! You'll never be able to get a job even sweeping out a physics building. You're not going to rob my laboratory and get away with it!' Saxon could feel the back of his scalp tingling, the usual sign that his blood pressure had risen too high.

  'Allan, please calm down,' said David in a soothing voice. 'Nobody is trying to rob you of anything. Nobody is trying to put anything over on you. We have a problem, and we need your help. We're doing some checks now, to try to get some more information. You can look things over when you get back and decide for yourself. I wanted to bring you up to date now, so you can be thinking about it. We don't understand what happened. I thought perhaps you might have some ideas.'

  'I have a very good idea what happened,' said Allan, then paused and cleared his throat. There was nothing to be done from here, he realized. Better not to burn any bridges. 'But I will certainly examine all the evidence when I return, and I expect all the evidence to be there. Don't throw anything away or change anything. I'll come to my own conclusions and determine what course of action to take.' He paused a moment. What would others in the department think? Better to keep the lid on. 'And be careful to whom you talk. Don't mention this to anyone! I, at least, have a reputation to consider.' He took a deep breath. 'I'll be flying back tomorrow afternoon. I'll see you and Vickie in my office at seven tomorrow evening and hear your report. And it had better be damned good, Harrison. Goddamned good! Now goodbye!'

  He slammed the receiver into the cradle and took several deep breaths. He shouldn't lose control like that, he thought. It gave jackasses like Harrison the opportunity to assume the voice of calmness and rationality, leaving him on the defensive. He must try to stay calm. He'd need perfect control for his meeting with Martin Pierce. That young asshole! he raged silently to himself.

  He got up from the desk, breathed deeply again, and walked back down the hall to the reception area. Darlene was talking quietly into the microphone of a small comm set when he returned. He inhaled the scent of her perfume, full of musk and implications. She looked up to give him The Smile again as he sat down. 'I was just talking to Mr Pierce. He's real-ly sorry to keep you waiting so long, and he says that he'll only be a few minutes more. Can I get you some coffee, Professor Saxon?'

  'Yes, coffee would be nice, Darlene,' he said, thinking that what he actually needed was a stiff drink. But he quite admired the view as she walked down the hall to the coffee maker, and he began to wonder how much progress he could make in the next few minutes.

  It was fully twenty minutes later when Martin Pierce, thirty-ish, tall with a charcoal gray three-piece business suit, silk tie, and neat British officer's mustache, finally emerged from the inner office and welcomed Allan warmly. Too warmly, considering the situation, Saxon thought as Pierce guided him into the large, well-appointed corner suite with its sweeping view of the San Francisco waterfront and Marin County beyond. 'Please, be seated here, Allan.' He waved to a designer chair of rosewood and black leather. 'Excuse me for just a second. I'll have to rearrange some appointments so we will have enough time to work on our problem.'

  Saxon grimaced as he sat down in the low comfortable chair, then smiled. As Pierce walked away, Saxon considered that perhaps it wasn't so bad that the bastard had kept him waiting. Now he had some moral advantage, with Pierce a bit on the defensive. Ignoring the view, he silently marshaled his arguments.

  Pierce strode to Darlene's desk in the outer office, glancing back to make sure that Saxon was out of earshot. That call of his probably was important,' he said in a low voice. 'At least it's worth following up. Thanks for setting him up, listening in, and then bringing the recording to my attention. You deserve another efficiency bonus. Now here's what I want you to do while I have him in the office. First, type a transcript of the call into a computer file. Combine that transcript with our dossier file on Saxon, then make a copy with all references to Megalith removed so that it might have come from anyone. Put the final version in my file area on the computer system. Second, have Communications set me up with a secure net-path using at least five untraceable nodes. I'll need to contact the spooks we deal with in Seattle with no possibility of a traceback. Our investigators there can dig up some more information on Dr Saxon and his little friends and what they're on to.

  'Finally, when the old lecher comes out of my office, see if you can get him to invite you out this evening without being too obvious about it. If you can manage it, get him well lubricated and see what you can get him to tell about what he's been doing. I want to know all about his so-called business enterprises and also his work at the university, particularly this new experiment that was discussed in the phone call. You know the routine. And enter your report into his dossier file tomorrow morning.'

  'Sure,' said Darlene, winking at Pierce and giving him The Smile. The old fart thinks he's God's gift to women. It oughta be easy.'

  Pierce leaned down, patted her bottom, and strode back to his office. Seating himself behind his uncluttered oiled-rosewood desk, he looked across at Saxon. Saxon was dressed as usual, a bit more dapper than the garden-variety academic with his neat blazer and coordinated slacks, Italian loafers, and one of the oversize silk bow ties that he affected. He needs a haircut, Pierce thought, noting the bushy hair, and he looks a bit down in the mouth this morning.

  'Well, Allan, we have a problem,' Pierce began. 'Let me start with a review of the facts.' He glanced down at a note pad, the only item on his broad rosewood desk. 'My company has provided you with an interest-free loan of $273,000 and moreover has leased to you at nominal cost about $400,000 worth of electronics equipment of the highest quality. In return for our generosity we hold twenty percent of the stock in your corporation and the option for an exclusive license on the holospin wave memory technique that you have patented and that you and your colleagues had contracted to make into a commercially marketable ultrahigh-density picosecond cycle storage device for us. That development effort has now collapsed. It appears that neither your stock nor your patents are worth a nickel.'

  Saxon started to object, but Pierce raised a hand. He did not want Saxon interrupting his carefully prepared presentation. 'When the development of this memory device began to go sour,' he continued, 'you agreed to do a bit of extra work for us, disassembling certain pieces of electronic equipment for analysis, determining their operating characteristics, and reassembling them so that they were exactly the same as before. I stress the word "exactly."

  'Last month we delivered to your laboratory a new military command computer which one of our associates had been able to "obtain" for us for a brief period of time. You and your former graduate students, your present business associates, were to disassemble the computer and determine the function of certain proprietary components used in the device. You were then to reassemble it so that it was in exactly its original condition. You supposedly carried out your task and returned it to us. But after our associate had returned it to the place from which it had been borrowed, someone discovered that it was not functional because one circuit board was missing from inside the device.'

  Saxon looked uncomfortable.

  'Our associate is now under suspicion,' Pierce continued, 'and has been suspended from his former position. An investigation is being conducted. Things may get worse, but the present situation is bad enough: a valuable contact of ours has been eliminated from further participation in our enterprises. He may go to prison and will almost certainly be of no further value to us.

  'Your little business enterprise has failed us twice, first by failing to deliver the commercial device you had promised and now by bungling a simple operation which any marginally competent technician should have been able to accomplish. Standard busine
ss practice would dictate that we should call in our interest-free loan and our leased equipment at once. I would be interested in your thoughts as to why Megalith should wish to provide your company with any further favors or to continue our association.'

  'Look, dammit,' said Saxon, 'when I reluctantly agreed to help a bit with some of your "industrial product evaluation" work, I never agreed to do anything illegal. If you bribed someone to steal that unit, that's your problem, not mine. We did learn what you wanted to know about that tricky little computer unit and delivered our report. Moreover, that missing circuit board was found under a circuit diagram only about an hour after your courier had left, and I immediately tried every means I knew to contact you. But you didn't return my calls until the next day, when it was too late.'

  Pierce frowned. He must get this back on track, he thought. The fact remains, Allan, that you and your colleagues screwed up,' Pierce's voice rose in pitch and amplitude and his face lost its bland expression for a moment, then resumed its tranquility as he continued, 'what was basically a simple and routine job. Your carelessness has damaged one of our more important projects, perhaps beyond repair. I have no interest in your recriminations and accusations. My company holds most of the cards in this game. And you should consider that your professional reputation will not be enhanced if it becomes known that you have been engaged in illegal industrial espionage on a secret military device. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how this problem can be resolved.' He looked across at Saxon, who was agitated, struggling for control.