Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  'Well,' David began, 'you'll remember that Ton had just been lowered into a dark underground passage at the base of a mountain.' The children shook their heads in agreement.

  'At first Ton could see nothing. His eyes had not yet made the adjustment from the bright daylight above. But slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he was able to see that he stood in a long passage walled with stone. Ahead, in the direction that Zorax had indicated, it did lead back into the heart of the mountain. But in the opposite direction it ended nearby in a jumble of cut stone blocks and dirt.

  'Ton followed the tunnel until he came to a side passage on the right. Deep within the opening he was able to make out many large bags spilling silvery coins and bars on the rough stone floor. A vertical slab of stone, like the blade of a guillotine, was propped up with a single rotting wooden beam. Remembering what he had been told, he continued on along the main tunnel until he came to a passage on the left. It contained baskets and bags of golden objects, cups and bowls, arm rings and crowns, bars and coins. Ton noticed one coin near his foot. He touched it with his toe and noticed that it felt cool and substantial, not at all like an illusion. But again he remembered his instructions, and turned and continued along the passage.'

  Ton sounds rather like David actually, thought Elizabeth. He doesn't trust theories, he tries things for himself. And he's goal oriented, not too interested in money. A good story for children, a good role model character.

  "After a while, Ton came to the third passage,' David continued, 'which was on the right. This one contained bags of jewels and bejeweled objects. Near the doorway was a beautiful little jeweled dagger. Ton, armorer-apprentice that he was, could see that the workmanship was exquisite. He thought of how delighted his father would be with such a gift and reached out for it. But remembering the magician's warning, he hurried on along the main tunnel.

  'He walked for quite a while. Just as he was beginning to worry whether his candle would last, the passage ended at a massive barred door with strange runes carved upon it. The door must once have been a formidable obstacle, for it was made of thick oak and bound with heavy wrought iron, but many decades of dry rot and decay had done their work. Ton gave the door one stout push with his foot, and it collapsed backward.

  'He walked beyond the door and looked around. Before him was a catafalque upon which rested a skeleton clothed in once-rich garments that had long ago moldered to rotten rags.'

  'What's a catafalque, David?' Melissa asked. Jeff looked annoyed at her interruption.

  'It's a special stand for holding up the coffins and dead bodies of important people,' David said, then took a sip of coffee.

  'Oh,' said Melissa.

  'Behind the skeleton,' David continued, 'a broad curved shelf had been cut in the native stone where the passage ended. Ton walked around the catafalque to the shelf and examined its contents. There was a roll of woven material tied with a cord, a bag the size of a small melon, and a corroded swordlike weapon with a thin shaft ending in a sharp point. These must be the things that the magician had described. Ton carefully took the three items and turned to leave. As he was passing the catafalque again, he noticed that clasped in the bony fingers of the skeletal hand was a small book handsomely bound in a light-colored leather. Hesitating, with trembling fingers Ton took the book from the grasp of the corpse. Lifting it for closer examination, he caught the leathery odor of its binding and heard the sound of its crisp pages. Suddenly he had the vivid memory of his mother teaching him to read. Without considering what he was doing, he clutched the book and hurried with his burdens past the skeleton and back up the tunnel.'

  I see, thought Elizabeth; he isn't tempted by money, but he can't resist the possibility of new knowledge.

  'He slowed as he passed each side passage, and the glint of precious metal and jewels pulled at him. But he kept straight on the path. Finally, just as his candle was guttering out, he came to the point below the hole where he had entered this underground world. The area below the hole, which had previously seemed dim and gloomy, now was illuminated with sunlight so bright that it hurt his eyes.

  ' "Zorax! I'm back, sir!" called Ton.

  ' "Excellent!" crowed the magician. "Did you find all of the mementos that I described?"

  ' "I did, sir!" called Ton.'

  Elizabeth could see the children squirm with relief at the successful completion of the dangerous task. Just wait, she thought, David's going to end with his usual cliffhanger.

  The magician lowered the rope. Tied to it was the basket which Ton had carried. "Put all of the objects in the basket, and I will pull them up," said the magician. "And I will, of course, pull you up afterwards," he added, his voice taking on a faintly sinister tone.

  'Ton considered his situation. "If you don't mind, sir," said Ton, "I would like to be pulled up at the same time. I'll tie the rope around my body and hold the basket with the objects in it."

  The magician spluttered and became very angry. He said terrible things to Ton, threatening him with awful consequences. In strident tones he commanded that Ton place the three objects, which he now called "treasures" and "amulets" into the basket at once.

  ' "You mustn't think that I don't trust you, sir," Ton told him with careful respect. "It's only that my father taught me always to bargain carefully, even with one so great as yourself, and I could not go against my father's teachings. I hope that you understand, sir."

  'Zorax became more and more agitated and shouted fouler and fouler curses in a voice that became louder and louder, but Ton remained steadfast, for he was now very suspicious. As the magician's rage increased, he began to kick big rocks and large sticks into the hole. Then there was silence, then a loud explosion. The explosion was followed by a great shaking of the ground itself, and there came from behind Ton in the tunnel the sounds of cave-in and collapse. And following the explosion and its aftermath there came a wind and a great crash like a blow, and the little hole above him suddenly winked out, leaving Ton in utter and absolute darkness . . . '

  David looked from one child to the other. 'I think that will do for now,' he said. 'But we'll continue next Wednesday. OK?'

  Jeff and Melissa seemed far away as they nodded.

  Over a second cup of coffee, Paul asked, 'What about the reversibility of the effect? Did you have a chance to try that?'

  'Oops!' said David. 'I almost forgot to tell you the most interesting part. Yes, we did try reversing the twistor operation. And it is reversible. We can twist and then un-twist, and when we do, we get the wire back. Or at least part of it.'

  'Only part of it?' said Paul, frowning.

  'Yeah,' David continued, 'we only get part of the wire back. Part of it falls out of the transition region. So if there's a time delay between the twist and the un-twist, part of the wire drops below the field sphere and doesn't come back. Vickie proved that it's pulled downward, and Allan calculated that the acceleration is essentially nine-point-eight meters per second squared. Wherever the wire goes, it's still in the Earth's gravity field. Isn't that weird!'

  'Weird?' said Paul. 'No, it's exactly what should be happening if my suspicions are correct. Look, David, since the mid-eighties theorists have been developing "superstring" theories that explain all of the particles and forces in the universe in terms of "superstrings." Instead of mass-points, particles are described as tiny extended loops in a space that has the normal three space dimensions and one time dimension, plus six or more extra dimensions that are all curled up or "compactified" into little loops. The development of this theory went very fast at first, and there was a lot of excitement. We thought maybe "The Theory of Everything" was at hand. But in the last few years theoretical progress has bogged down because there's simply no contact with experiments, no tests to be done to show us where we part company with reality. It was beginning to look as if all the experimental work in this area was over and done with in the first femtosecond of the Big Bang.'

  'Yes, I believe you've mentioned that before
,' David said.

  Paul realized that he'd probably slipped into lecture mode. 'OK,' he said, 'but here's the new part. I've found a superstring variant that looks very interesting, except that it has a sort of ungainly appendage. It predicts the existence of extra "shadow matter" particles in addition to the normal ones, particles that share the same space-time and the same gravity with normal matter but are completely noninteracting in all other ways. The two kinds, shadow and normal, completely ignore each other except through gravity. There would be two distinct types of light also, with each kind of light interacting only with its own kind of matter.'

  'Is that why you call it "shadow matter," ' asked David, 'because only its gravitational shadow could be detected? Invisible matter and even invisible light . . . sounds like H. G. Wells or something. And you think it has something to do with our recent results?'

  'Maybe,' said Paul. 'Since yesterday I've been playing with the idea that your twistor apparatus, in rotating the electromagnetic field as it does, somehow precesses all the particles in a certain volume of space, using one of the extra dimensions as a rotation axis, so that normal particles become shadow particles. If that were to happen, the Earth's gravity would still be there, so an object converted to shadow matter should still fall. It's as if the particles are still physically present, but they have been made invisible and noninteracting. Or maybe it's better to consider that the matter inside the sphere has been moved to a universe next door – call it a "shadow universe" – where it still feels the pull of Earth's gravity but nothing else.'

  'That's wonderful!' said David. 'It really fits with what we've been seeing.'

  'Anything else in the way of new results?' asked Paul.

  'As a matter of fact, yes,' said David. 'I once read a Paul Davies book that made a big deal of the delicate balance of the physical constants in our universe that's required for the existence of living things. So Vickie and I decided to see if a living thing could survive a brief exposure to the other side of the twistor transition. Vickie has a friend who's a psychology graduate student, and she lent us a white rat. His name is Neil Tailstrong, the extradimensional astro-rat.'

  Paul laughed. Melissa looked interested.

  'We put Neil into a sealed jar and dropped him through the twistor transition,' David continued. 'The astro-rat office of mission control is happy to report that both Neil and the launch vehicle came through the transition with no apparent problems.'

  'Do you still have him? Could we see him?' asked Melissa.

  'He's not at my lab anymore,' David said. 'Neil's returned to his normal place of residence in the psych department's rat lab, where he's being checked periodically to make sure he stays healthy. If he survived his trip to your shadow universe, it can't be immediately hostile to life.'

  Paul smiled. 'That's indirect evidence that the forces between shadow particles are the same as for normal particles,' he said. 'That's very nice to know, David.'

  Elizabeth looked up from her reading to glance from one of them to the other but didn't say anything.

  'The other news item,' David continued, 'is that I didn't have the equipment to try your test with the radioactive source, but I did make a small permanent magnet disappear. Since gravity still affects materials after the twist, I was wondering if we could use some kind of magnetic suspension to keep things from falling out of the field during a transition. But it didn't work. I had a Hall probe mounted just outside the field sphere, but near enough to register the magnet's field. As soon as the transition hit, the reading from the Hall probe dropped to zero and stayed there. Magnetic fields don't get through.'

  'Great! It's wonderful to make predictions that work,' said Paul with a feeling of rising excitement. 'Now I'll make another prediction. I'll bet you can't make an electrically charged object completely disappear. When you try, most of it will go. But you'll leave behind enough electrons or positively charged ions to make what disappears electrically neutral.'

  'Yes,' said David, standing up excitedly and walking over to the window, 'I think maybe I can test that. I could borrow some of the hardware from the Physics 122 lecture demonstration I did last week. The old Wimshurst machine might work nicely.'

  'And watch the energy required,' said Paul. 'There may be a small extra energy loss in separating off the charges because of induced fields.'

  David looked at his watch. 'Guess I have to be moving along. Vickie and I are meeting Allan at the lab at twelve thirty, and I have to do my laundry first.' He turned to Elizabeth, who sat reading a novel at the other end of the table. 'Ever notice, Elizabeth, how the guys in works of literature never have to worry about doing their laundry?'

  She looked up at him. 'Probably the writers have better taste than to mention it,' she said, and smiled.

  He grinned back. 'Thanks very much for the breakfast, Elizabeth,' he said. 'I feel like a new man.' He tickled Jeff, got up, and headed for the door.

  Elizabeth smiled after him, then turned back to her book.

  Paul sat for a long time, thinking about what David had said. Then several ideas began to take form. He stood and walked toward the stairs. As he moved toward his basement computer link, the symbols of an algebraic manipulation task for the UCSD Cray-4 began to assemble themselves in his head.

  Martin Pierce had been in his office in the Megalith Tower for most of Saturday morning, working on a report for the president. He looked up as a beeping sound came from the built-in computer terminal in his broad rosewood desk. Ah, he thought, that's to remind me to check on the progress of the agents in Seattle. He levered the flat display screen into position and logged on, then established a secure link to the PSRS system. The connection was established and the message User Name:appeared on the screen. Pierce provided the two passwords, and the usual PSRS header message followed:

  Welcome to the PSRS HyperVAX 98000 running under VMS 8.7.

  This is the Puget Sound Reference Service.

  Library reference services and literature searches are our specialties.

  Pierce made a directory listing of his [BROADSWORD]area and found that there was a new file there called S931008.TXT.He downloaded the file to his own computer and logged off the PSRS system. Then he decrypted the new file With the prearranged 'DOG' decryption key. The file was a transcript provided by Mandrake of the recordings collected yesterday over the time period from seven P.M. until midnight from the voice and telephone surveillance of Saxon's laboratory and office.

  Pierce read the transcript twice carefully, made a few notes, then deleted the decrypted version of the file. It was corporate policy that sensitive material could be left on the system disk in encrypted form only, never as clear text. He was pleased that his plan was proceeding well. His instincts had been correct: some important discovery had recently been made in Saxon's University of Washington laboratory. That much, at least, was clear. And Saxon's little speech to the others about the importance of secrecy was particularly interesting. Secrecy from whom?

  He reached for the telephone. He would call Saxon in Seattle to make a friendly inquiry as to how things were working out with the laboratory 'setbacks' Saxon had mentioned on Thursday. Saxon's reply would be very telling. Pierce smiled.

  10

  Saturday Afternoon, October 9

  Allan Saxon cursed fluently as he threaded his BMW through the football traffic on Montlake Boulevard. When he had suggested that they meet at the lab at twelve-thirty, he'd forgotten that the Huskies would be meeting their latest victim at the stadium at the same time. He was already running late, even without this traffic crush.

  He'd been delayed by a curious telephone call from Martin Pierce, who had called from San Francisco to ask about the 'reverses' he'd mentioned on Thursday in connection with the new experimental equipment. The nosy bastard. Saxon smiled as he thought how he had deceived Pierce by describing a mysterious implosion that had destroyed some of the equipment. He had given not even a hint of the twistor effect. If this hand is played right, he though
t, I can cut all ties with Pierce and his sleazy crowd, secure all the application patent rights for the effect, and perhaps collect a Nobel prize as a bonus.

  Finally Saxon reached the east gatehouse of the campus. He drove around the paying customers, pointing to the annual permit sticker on his windshield when the guard looked up. He followed the curving road around the campus past the Faculty Center and the Engineering Library to the turnoff for the rear of Physics Hall. When he reached the small parking area behind the building he was relieved to see that one lone spot had not yet been expropriated by the football crowd. It was marked with a wheelchair symbol and a DISABILITY PERMIT ONLY sign. But it wouldn't be checked on Saturday, he decided. He pulled in.

  Entering the laboratory, he found David Harrison and Victoria Gordon already there. Harrison was sitting at the computer console, and Victoria was energetically cranking the antique Wimshurst machine that Allan recognized from twenty years of E&M lecture demonstrations. A round brass doorknob was suspended from a transparent cord, perhaps monofilament fishing line, at the center of the apparatus, and a fine wire connected it to the whirling glass and metal contraption. A curved piece of aluminum sheet was clamped in position near the doorknob, and a piece of coaxial cable led from the aluminum and its stand to an oscilloscope nearby, which in turn was connected to the control console by a flat gray ribbon lead.

  'Now!' said Harrison, and Victoria touched a C-shaped conductor across the electrodes of the machine, producing a fat blue spark and a loud crack, 'OK,' said Harrison, 'I've got the calibration. Let's do the real thing.' Already at it, thought Saxon, seating himself in the wooden chair as he tried to understand what they were doing.

  Victoria cranked again, and the glass disks spun. Finally she said, That ought to do it, David.' He nodded and did something behind the console. The characteristic pop of the twistor transition echoed through the room and the doorknob disappeared. Victoria rose and ran to the console. Saxon followed her.