Anne's brow knitted as she handed him one of the mugs. "I'm so glad you told me that. It was just what I was wondering. Now tell me what it means."
"It means that normally, without anybody sending any tau waves through time, the timeline is highly stable; alterations at the macroscopic level due to avalanching quantum effects are rare. But an incoming tau wave raises the energy-level of some quantum processes, and makes them far more likely to alter large-scale events on the timeline. So every time we use the machine, we destabilize the system to a degree at the moment in time that receives the signal."
"You mean that it interferes with the outcome of chance events in the universe that the signal arrives in… and therefore all the universes after that as well?"
"Yes," Murdoch replied simply.
Anne looked slightly uncertain. "Chance events where… at Storbannon? In the lab?… "
"No, everywhere," Murdoch said. "You're forgetting that the wave rematerializes in a volume that expands at light-speed as it gets farther away in time from the instant of transmission. The range of the machine is one day. In that time the Earth moves about twenty-one million miles. So everywhere inside a sphere of that radius, the signal is at least as strong as it needs to be for the machine to detect it. In other words if it can affect chance events in the lab when it rematerializes, it sure-as-hell can do the same thing here in Nairn, or come to that anyplace else on Earth too."
Anne remained very quiet for a moment. "I hadn't realized that," she said, for the first time sounding genuinely awed. "You mean that whenever you use the machine to send a signal, you could be changing the outcome of chance events all over the world in the universe that you inject the signal into?"
"Exactly that," Murdoch said slowly. His tone had become very serious. "Imagine a guy somewhere in New York who made a million last night on the spin of a roulette wheel. The overwhelming probability is that the part of the timeline that includes him in it has remained stable since then, and tonight he's out somewhere whooping it up. But now suppose we decide to run a test on the machine at Storbannon right now. Suppose that in the course of that test we happen to send a signal back to the exact moment in time at which the ball on the wheel was balanced between falling into red or black last night. The tau-pulse field materializing at that instant, here, in New York, and everywhere else inside twenty-one million miles of where the Earth is right now could be enough to make the ball go the other way, and reconfigure that part of the timeline from that moment on. So tonight, instead, the guy's on a bridge, about to jump into the East River.
"It makes you think, doesn't it."
Chapter 19
When Murdoch returned to Storbannon in the early hours of the following morning, he was surprised to see Elizabeth Muir's car parked outside the main entrance. He hurried inside and found the team and Elizabeth gathered in Charles's study. Charles was at his desk with his tie loosened and his waistcoat unbuttoned, and Cartland was propped wearily against the blackboard to one side, his arms folded across his chest. Elizabeth was sitting in another chair, and Lee was standing by the window. The room was littered with papers and empty cups, and evidently the scene of much hard work for many hours. There was an atmosphere of tension about the place.
"What's happened?" Murdoch asked.
Charles looked up and passed a hand across his brow. "If it's what we think it is, it's bad, Murdoch," he said. "Elizabeth called earlier today about some thoughts she'd been having on the wee wormholes that are appearing all over the place. She came down later to go through some of our formulas. We think we know what they are."
"The bugophants?" Murdoch stared at Elizabeth. A smile flickered briefly on her mouth to acknowledge his arrival, but she was evidently too tired to volunteer a lengthy explanation. Murdoch shifted his gaze to Lee. He couldn't imagine what the mysterious objects could have to do either with anybody at Storbannon or with Elizabeth.
"When is a fusion pellet like a supernova?" Lee asked simply. There was no humor in his voice.
Murdoch blinked back his bewilderment at the question. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he asked them.
"Think about it, old boy," Cartland said quietly. Murdoch stared helplessly around the circle of somber faces. Nobody was offering any clues. So he thought about it.
A supernova: a catastrophic explosion of an abnormally large star. Throughout its stable life, the star maintained an equilibrium between the gravitation of its mass, which tried to make it collapse, and the radiation-pressure resulting from the fusion reactions going on inside it, which tried to blow it apart. The radiation was conveyed to the surface by photons, which moved extremely slowly because of their repeated absorption and reemission by matter along the way. The inside of the star generated energy faster than the surface could radiate it away, so the core got hotter… and hotter. Eventually it reached a temperature of sixty billion degrees—at that number, who cared on what scale?
At that critical temperature, the rate of production of neutrinos suddenly increased abruptly to an enormous figure. Neutrinos hardly reacted with matter at all; they went straight out through the body of the star, carrying away with them lots of the energy that up until then had gone into producing photons. So, all of a sudden, there were far fewer photons being produced, and consequently far less radiation-pressure to hold the force of self-gravitation in check.
At that point the star started to collapse, suddenly and violently.
In the process it released gravitational energy at a phenomenal rate—far faster than the material of the star's outer layers could absorb it. So they exploded away into space, producing a supernova. The opposite reaction of that explosion drove the already collapsing core harder and faster inward toward the star's center.
A fusion pellet was imploded in the same way… almost. The difference was that, because the pellet possessed negligible self-gravitation, the energy to implode it had to be supplied externally, such as by lasers or particle beams. But apart from that, the mechanics were similar. An inertial-confinement fusion reactor was, in effect, a supernova in a test tube. And a supernova produced…
Murdoch gasped in disbelief as the answer to the riddle at last became clear. "Oh, Jesus Christ!" he murmured, sinking weakly down onto the nearest chair, the color draining from his cheeks.
A supernova compressed its core all the way down to a black hole!
Chapter 20
Ralph Courtney, Chairman and Managing Director of the local Board at the Burghead Heavy-Ion Fusion Facility, and Associate Director of the European Fusion Consortium, studied the faces of the dozen or so people sitting around the polished oak table that formed the centerpiece of the main conference room. Some of the faces were wearing worried frowns, some were still looking bemused, and others were just deep in thought.
Elizabeth Muir was still standing where she had finished speaking a minute or so before, in front of a large map of the world pinned to a board halfway along one side of the room, opposite the middle of the table. The meeting had been specially convened at her request. In the half hour that it had been in session, she had already said all there was to say. In fact she had said that in the first ten minutes; it had taken the rest of the time for the turmoil that followed to die down, and more than a few of those present were still only beginning to recover their capacity for coherent thinking.
She had begun by announcing her conviction that a serious flaw existed in the body of theory upon which the design of the Burghead reactor system had been based. Despite the decades of research that had gone before, and despite the carefully verified formulas and figures, she claimed, something completely unexpected, and at that stage inexplicable, had occurred during the full-power tests that had been conducted in January: The target pellets had been crushed down into miniature, probably nuclear-sized, black holes. The black holes had fallen through the floors of the reactor vessels toward the Earth's center, and that was what had caused the erosion that nobody had yet been able to explain.
> The dynamics of what would happen after that were unclear. However, she told them, she had evaluated some approximate models, and the possibilities were alarming. The swarm of tiny black holes could form a mutually orbiting system within the Earth's core, exchanging energy among themselves and undergoing further excitation and agitation as new arrivals from the surface supplied gravitational energy and components of surface rotational momentum. Some of them could be thrown into violently eccentric orbits in this process—sufficiently eccentric to penetrate back up and reemerge on surface-grazing trajectories. Hence the "bugophants" that had been making appearances in recent months, Elizabeth suggested.
What was the evidence?
First there was the erosion through the lower casings of the two reactors used in the January tests. Analysis had shown that the erosion comprised a dense concentration of tiny tunnels that were identical to the ones being reported from various parts of the world. Second, the tests had been performed in mid-January; the first bugophant had been reported less than two weeks later. Third, all the incidents reported to date were scattered along a band that extended from the northern British Isles southward across the Atlantic to Panama and the top of South America, down over the southeast Pacific to miss Antarctica, and then northward from there to rejoin itself via Western Australia, northern India, central Russia, and Scandinavia. When this band was drawn on a globe, it formed a great circle around the Earth; if Elizabeth's account was correct, this marked the line of intersection between the Earth's surface and the orbital plane of the black-hole system. It was as simple as that.
There was one other thing. The two reactors had been run first independently for a day at fifteen pellets per second, and for about half of the second day in parallel at a combined rate of thirty per second. That meant there would be something like two million black holes down there.
"Surely… God, I don't know… This whole thing is preposterous, Elizabeth," Courtney said at last. "Black holes… milling around in the core like a swarm of bees? It's too far-fetched. I can't accept anything like that purely on the basis of what you've said. That isn't evidence; it's just a collection of coincidences… wild hypotheses, if you don't mind my saying so." Some of the heads around the table began nodding in mute agreement.
"I know that, Ralph," Elizabeth said wearily. "I know there isn't anything quantitative to support it. But it is a consistent explanation of what these things are and where they've come from. And it explains the erosion. It's the only one that fits both sets of facts. How many experts have been racking their brains and haven't even been able to offer a clue?"
There was one other item of evidence, an item that was conclusive, but she was obliged not to mention it. At Storbannon on the previous day, she and Charles had analyzed the data collected by the machine at the time in January when the system had been malfunctioning, which covered from Friday to Saturday before the Monday on which the Burghead test had commenced. As Lee had maintained at the time, the cause of the problem had been interference from tau waves coming from some source other than the machine itself. Cartland had analyzed the groupings and timings of the interference pulses, and found that it matched exactly with records brought by Elizabeth of the pellet-firing sequence followed in the tests at Burghead. The two had matched exactly, which could never have been explained away by coincidence. Therefore the interference picked up by the machine could only have come from the reactors being tested at Burghead. But the interference had been picked up at Storbannon two full days before the tests at Burghead took place.
Therefore the Burghead reactors must have generated tau waves that had propagated back two days in time. But tau waves were generated by the annihilation of matter. The Burghead reactors were not designed to annihilate matter; they were designed to convert matter to energy via fusion. Nevertheless, they had generated tau waves; therefore they must have annihilated matter. According to the established theory upon which the designs had been based, such an eventuality was impossible. The facts said it had happened. Therefore there was something greatly amiss with established theory.
Elizabeth and Charles had spent most of the previous day reviewing the physics of fusion plasmas in the light of Charles's newer theory, and had discovered some significant discrepancies. The compression of a target pellet to black-hole density was clearly predicted from Charles's equations, though for reasons that could never have been taken into account using conventional concepts. They had agreed that Elizabeth would have to inform the Burghead directors of the conclusions, and accordingly she had called the meeting for the afternoon of the following day. Charles had been reluctant to publicize details of his research if it could be avoided, and Elizabeth had therefore elected to try in the first instance to convince the directors of the facts without mentioning the Storbannon machine or its function. She knew that this would be a tough assignment, but she had to give it a try. The first indications at the meeting were that she was unlikely to enjoy much success.
Max Wehrbaum, from the EFC's Munich laboratories, was shaking his head and looking openly contemptuous. "What is all this talk about a fundamental flaw in the theory?" he demanded. "The theoretical foundations for fusion and plasma physics have been well understood for half a century. Where is there room for any kind of flaw?"
"I agree," Simon Vickers, Technical Director at Burghead and Elizabeth's immediate boss, said from Courtney's right. "Accepted theory appears to be more than amply validated. Experimental results have always been consistent with prediction, and there are machines working all over the world without problems." He shrugged. "We've got holes through the reactor casings that we can't explain yet, and some other people in other places have found a few holes here and there that they can't explain either. I don't see any compelling reason to assume that the two are connected at all. It's certainly no reason to go tearing up physics all the way back to Galileo."
"There just isn't enough energy delivered to a pellet to get it anywhere near to black-hole density," somebody else threw in from the far side. "We all know that. It's elementary. Surely you're not suggesting that every scientist who's worked in the field over the last fifty years couldn't get a few sums right."
"Nobody has ever worked at the same combination of high energy and energy density," Elizabeth replied. "Plasma phase changes are notoriously nonlinear at high-density regimes. I'm saying that I suspect we have invalidly extrapolated lower energy-density results into a realm where they don't apply. The tests entered a completely new phenomenological region dominated by processes that we failed to anticipate."
"What kinds of processes?" Courtney asked dubiously. "Substantiated by what data? What reason is there for postulating processes that nobody's had any inkling of before?… As far as I'm aware, anyway." He glanced from side to side and was rewarded by a few solemn shakings of heads. "Nor anybody else by the look of it," he added.
"Oh, I can't describe them in precise detail at this stage," Elizabeth said. "But I contend we must assume they exist, and we should investigate them. Look at the map here. The plot passes right through Scotland… and the first incidents were reported within days of the tests here. Surely that tells us something."
She couldn't tell them that Charles had already determined where the flaw in conventional theory lay and explained how it was possible for the beams to crush the pellets to far higher densities than had been predicted. In the energy-dense core of the pellet, pair-production of electrons and positrons would be induced, followed by mutual annihilations sufficiently concentrated to generate minute tau waves; these tau waves would amplify rapidly as a consequence of a complicated, positive-feedback mechanism. The amplified tau waves would propagate out of the universe entirely, carrying away energy that should have been available to oppose the implosion. This process would invalidate the predictions of conventional theory completely by effectively increasing the beam-power in the core region by a factor of millions. Conventional theory took no account of tau waves.
"That track on t
he map is a pure fabrication." The speaker this time was Maria Galdarini from Turin, another member of the European delegation that was at Burghead that week to investigate the erosion problem. "There is only a handful of points on it. The trend is illusory. There's nothing but a scattering without any statistical significance at all."
"Anyway, besides all that, there's another thing," Simon Vickers added. "Even if we suppose for the moment that you are correct and these things are black holes, Elizabeth, they'd be microscopic. You said that yourself a few minutes ago. They'd be very short-lived because of Hawking radiation. They could never have continued to exist since January. But the latest bugophant was reported only a few days ago. So how could it have been a black hole that was produced here when we ran the tests? It's impossible."
Elizabeth had discussed this issue at great length with Charles as well. According to accepted quantum mechanics, a particle trapped inside a black hole had a certain probability of being able to "tunnel" its way out. The probability grew larger with particles that were more energetic, and with holes that were smaller. A small hole would therefore lose particles at a higher rate, and continue to do so in an accelerating fashion until the hole "evaporated." But accepted quantum mechanics failed to allow for the energy lost to the tau waves produced whenever a new particle fell in. Therefore the trapped particles would be left with less energy than accepted theory said. Therefore they would not be able to tunnel out as easily as accepted theory said. And that meant that the hole would last longer than accepted theory said.
"I do know about Hawking radiation," Elizabeth said. "All I can say is that if we did drive the plasma into a new region of nonlinearity, then we might be mistaken in assuming that we can apply the same concepts that work for other regions." None of the listeners appeared very convinced. What Elizabeth had said sounded too much like bending the facts to suit the answer, and she knew it.
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