The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Bear nodded and matched her happy mood by patting her shoulder.

  “You’re great.” He said frankly meeting her eyes.

  She stopped and actually blushed slightly again. It must have been awhile since a man complimented her while that physically close.

  Bear helped her overcome.

  “Get with Van Ziegler and the Wongers; pull an all-nighter if you have to. See if you can give a draft vision of what equipment you need to O’Hara by tomorrow at 10. I will sit in, but I am anxious to get going . . . the clock is ticking now and making special equipment means time. Time is always our enemy, but we will try to compensate by throwing money at the problem. Maybe we can trade dollars for some of those minutes.”

  He liked the turn of phrase and looked proudly at Johnson like a toddler who has just successfully used the toilet. He got no parental endorsement—Johnson only nodded and had already turned away to reach for a phone. She was all business that one . . . a bulldog who was already worrying the bone of invention. He had loosed the hounds of Eureka on the world . . . and he didn’t even blink

  Li was on the phone to Po.

  “I need you to go to China.”

  The phrasing was unfortunate. Generations of automatic respect to elders was overlooked in the way it was said—which made it a command—which made it wrong between Chinese. In the case of a lunatic like Po it came out very wrong.

  Li sensed the change in Po’s breathing tempo shift to blind anger over the phone as soon as he said it. Li shifted tactics deftly before the old man could vent steam.

  “Certain sections of our reports have raised questions back in Beijing. It would be good if you were to explain them, otherwise they will doubt about the report’s value. They are . . . concerned about its validity . . . they count on your wisdom.” He improvised carefully.

  It was clever, since it indirectly threatened the only thing that Po actually did which was to forward the reports that Li gave him. If the reports were questioned then Po’s cash cow was threatened and his comfortable retirement in America at risk. He would also lose face because if anyone but Po went it meant they might learn how little he actually contributed.

  Po went quiet on the line and his breathing evened out again as enlightened self interest was evoked.

  “Naturally they want to see the head man.” Li said, lying easily. “They will not accept a foolish subordinate.” Li finished reeling out the fishing hook and line.

  “Who will I see?” Po asked.

  Li smiled and seated the hook with a verbal tug.

  “Important people . . .” Li almost choked stroking the old man’s cerebral foreskin. “Several very important people who must see you. When you return we will meet together ourselves so that we can discuss your insights. There is a possibility of a bigger budget if we do this correctly.”

  Po breathing changed again. He had not seen Li close up since he had conveyed him to the safe house where he lived in Michigan. Anything that allowed Po access to more cash was important to him. Li might forward his report easily, but he controlled the budget with a miser’s grip.

  Po grunted in an annoyed manner, but quit protesting. It was only half submission for now, but he would do it in time . . . after an appropriate period of haggling.

  They negotiated for an hour in the instinctual Chinese way. Li hung up eventually, the national honor assuaged. Money always worked on the Chinese too.

  Three more weeks had passed and Bear stood in one of the empty spaces next to a lab watching the Boys at work under the squinting force of multiple sunlight work lights on the floor, the ceiling and the walls making a pool of noon time light in the heart of darkness that was their cave. On a huge wheeled table that rested at the focal point of the light sat the contraption that was the product of the translation of Petrovski’s vision through Aziz’s numbers and Johnson’s disciplined mind and into the reality wrought by the rest of the Q-Kink team’s soiled hands. Taped to the walls with duct tape were paper copies of Johnson’s detailed CAD blueprints of the particle accelerator with greasy fingerprints on them where people had pointed to specific points of interest or traced a particular wiring feature during construction. Next to it was an equally fondled GANT chart showing the schedule for production that looked distinctly grubby too.

  Johnson stood beside him—she looked tired, but exuded the joy of an artist whose act of creation was finally coming into final view. She was lead engineer and Gaston was second. He had no engineering degree, but he had so much practical application he might as well have.

  “By the way . . .” Bear put his hand on her shoulder gently. “I was looking at the most recent wiring diagrams you and Gaston did . . .”

  She looked at him inquisitively.

  “You do nice work.” He smiled down at her. He had not complimented her in days. As part of leadership 101 he made a point to find something good that someone had done every day and tell them so. It was her turn again.

  She returned the smile shyly, taking the compliment again perhaps more personally than intended. He had a distinct impression from her return look that she was thinking about more than just the accelerator. He was surprised to find himself flattered for a change.

  “Still . . . the gadget we got here doesn’t look as neat as your pristine drawings.”

  “They aren’t finished . . .” She said defending the work and the team instinctively. “They are still waiting on the delivery of the damned Casimir generator components. At least the loose cabling you see is waiting for that . . . .” Then she said pointing absently. “The Boys are doing awfully good work though . . . Killien and Pinta are a terrific team—Superb really.”

  Bear looked at the two machinists who were manhandling a large black box into position beside the apparatus on the table. Sweat glistened on their foreheads and their T-shirt armpits were soaked. Diaz and Baxter, stripped themselves to T-shirts were also sweating lying underneath the thing, ready to take its weight and hold it in place. Anderson and Rivera stood by with wrenches poised—ready to bolt the assembly down when called for. They exuded an air of matter-of-fact workmanship and looked for the entire world like they were the best high energy laser powered Casimir cyclotron particle accelerator assembly team in the world—which they were.

  Johnson walked abruptly over to help with something she saw needed doing.

  The corner of Bear’s lips twitched up.

  “Team-work!” He said absently out loud to the air. “You can’t beat the military for focused teamwork at times.”

  O’Hara had materialized beside him.

  “Talking to yourself? Do we need to get you some rest? Some alcohol? Maybe a shrink?” She asked.

  Bear smiled openly at her—liking her.

  “Leadership can be demanding—Especially with a bunch of wild cards like this crew. Hold off on the psychiatrist though until I demand that you refer to me in the third person.”

  O’Hara giggled, wrinkling her nose in an irresistible way.

  “Frankly, the two personalities you have is plenty . . . a third person would be too much.”

  “My schizophrenia is undone?” He asked absently—giggling women did that to him, he found it sexy.

  “Zip your schizophrenia up . . .” She agreed glancing at his fly unconsciously in the absent way women do. “By the way, we just got a delivery at the front gate.” She said. “It’s the circuit boards and software for the ‘thingee.’” She waved at the center of work effort. “Woo, Gaston and Maxmillian are helping Petrovski inventory it now. Van Ziegler should be in here in five minutes with the computers and monitors.”

  He looked down at her and on impulse and tried his favorite stroke again.

  “Nice work, O’Hara.” He complimented her. “You do nice work.”

  She grinned back not at all shyly as Johnson had. There was definit
ely something in those eyes. Apparently there was some pleasure corollary in women about work coming to a head.

  “When will the Casimir stuff come in?” He asked.

  “Tomorrow—absolutely tomorrow after about a million zillion gazillion phone calls and e-mails from me—I finally used Feathersgait to contact a few folks on the company’s board of directors and in its management. Apparently the words “Atomic Energy Commission” also carry some kind of weight in scientific circles; that and the clever phrase I added which was—’3% bonus if you get it here by tomorrow’ The combination worked because they are shipping it tonight.”

  Bear laughed and gave her his very best smile.

  “I love it when a plan comes together.”

  CHAPTER 5—CURTAIN FALLS

  They all did what they could to help through the night while Van Zeigler hooked up his new circuits and tested them as best he could without the main source of particles. Petrovski tried again to explain what the heap of boxes and wires did, but left most of the audience informed but not enlightened, though several found a renewed faith in magic. Bear had to admit that the ‘money for nothing’ nature of changing virtual particles into real ones in a quantum slight of hand appealed to his aesthetic sensibilities. The Boys had started casually calling the process “The Petrovski effect.”

  Besides bribery there was another reason Q-Kink had advanced so quickly and that was because their skunk works mentality allowed them to improvise continuously. Instead of government solutions requiring years of R&D, Bear’s team avoided paying millions for software development and simply raided a commercially available medical system for its software, then modified it for use in aligning what had previously been medical lasers to pass through the Casimir plates to accelerate the particles into one end of the paperclip which in turn muscled them along faster still using its hefty million plus giga-electron volts. Of course every time you did it you had to enter patient information and an insurance billing company account number when the standard menus popped up on the computer during use; but it got the job done in a hurry and it worked. In fact, most of their apparatus’ electrical and electronic guts had been purchased second hand from earlier generations of accelerators and various high dollar electronics rotting on dusty shelves at three different universities around the country—long since superseded in the race for international leadership in education. What looked like an unhappy heap of mismatched parts had the attraction of being ready in weeks and days instead of month and years. Bear was thinking of adopting “Second hand Rose” as their theme song.

  Everyone had gone to bed for five hours at Bear’s orders, but they were all up and on hand in minutes when the Casimir shipment arrived via UPS. Van Zeigler mumbled something about how using a commercial carrier was yet another notorious break of security protocols, but Bear was a big believer in the purloined letter approach and ignored his lemon-bite personality. No one at big brown was the wiser since the devise arrived labeled ‘machine parts’ which had the advantage of not actually being a lie—though the machine in question had never ever been built before and there was a good chance it might not be built again . . . especially if it did not work.

  The whole team; Boys, Wongers and Eggheads were present and shifting from foot to foot anxiously. Bear smiled. They were all emotionally invested in success. Bear could feel the excitement as Baxter and Rivera seized the just arrived devise and wheeled it wobbling down to the lab on a flat cart with a bad wheel someone had ‘appropriated’ from a Costco store in the middle of the night. There were so many people vying to unpack the boxes there that it snowed cardboard packaging and special non-static bubble wrap. Bear feared they would damage the contents and had to restrain them. He ordained that everyone should work in pairs. Each pair got to handle the devise through its removal, movement to the apparatus table and then during mounting.

  The Casimir apparatus was a sealed unit and needed little assembly while the rest of the rig was rugged enough to withstand conditions in the cave so that there was no great need for a super-sterile environment. This helped as everyone stomped around raising bits of dust and sneezing. Under all this silliness Bear felt a secret pride. Their attentive actions and basic eagerness showed Q-Kink had gelled around a common objective. He could feel everyone in the room striving with their minds, emotions and clenched sphincters toward success and found himself fighting to lead them rather than join them.

  It took three hours to mount the unit whose precise position was tested with special laser levels and adjusted to tolerances that were far less that a fraction of a fraction of a centimeter. To keep the frustration of the rest of the team from boiling over when they could not actually help on this delicate balancing of the machinery, Bear had them help in constructing a crude target from canvas and lumber nearby. There was a more formal receiver and dish waiting for calibration—but initially they wanted to simply test the efficacy of the accelerator setup in general and not worry about the fine tuning that the receiver would require so Bear settled on something that would initially simply detect the general presence of particles coming out. For that test he rigged a special X-ray type negative that was sensitive to particles on a frame a couple feet in front of the mouth of the accelerator and enclosed it in a canvas box that shut out other sources of light so that there would not be any outside contamination in the results. The crew happily sawed, nailed and hammered under the general direction of Pinta and had their primitive target ready before the main devise was completely assembled so that the bulk of the team were back to milling about and grumbling again. Pure science can be boring until you blow up a corner of New Mexico with it.

  Even precision must give way in time to impatience. Maxmillian, Gaston, Wong and Petrovski had a final vociferous argument over the settings for the final calibrations, running back and forth between Van Zeigler and Woo with a great deal pointing at screens and the often heard shouts of ‘That’s bullshit!’ Woo had somehow become the one making manual adjustments to the apparatus mainly by being the first person to sit down in the chair at the computer keyboard and then steadfastly refusing to give it up.

  Satisfaction was perhaps too much to hope for, but ultimately Wong, Maxmillian and Petrovski overruled Gaston and whispered in Woo’s ear. She set certain specifications to their data fields in the software and the group turned to Bear instinctively.

  He carefully clasped his hands behind his back, looked about as solemnly as he could and asked each of them individually.

  “You ready?”

  Each one nodded in turn though Gaston visibly hesitated.

  “Well . . .” Bear said. “On my command—turn it on for a nanosecond or so and we will see how this goes . . .”

  Bear walked to the ‘stern’ of the contraption behind the new Casimir devise and stood with a leg on either side of the aft paperclip accelerator and sighted along the length of the thing towards the target box whose canvas draped the end of the forward paperclip. The whole thing looked like a Star Trek special effect that had been tinkered with by Spankie and Our Gang. The clip at the front was a twin of the one between Bear’s knees where the ejected particle’s pair would be trapped in an endless loop, waiting for them to alter its spin inside the paperclip below Bear’s penis which would change the spin of its partner and trigger it to fire in what they predicted was the direction of the target. Everything today hinged on the machinery actually generating and spewing out a particle. The modest result of a light dot on the film would be enough. They would go further in future tests.

  Puckishly he waved two fingers into a breathless silence and said simply—“Do it.”

  Gaston reached over Woo’s shoulder and slapped a key on a keyboard which earned him a withering glare from her—the lights flickered briefly and Bear absently saw a two by four leaning against the wall choose that moment to topple over opposite him, but attached no importance to it. Startled, he felt a tingling in his test
icles and stepped away from the device carefully mentally apologizing to his future mutated children. Nothing else appeared to happen and the team broke into excited talk. Bear walked down towards the business end of the thing.

  “OK, Boss . . .” Gaston declared trying to avoid his seeing the smoke emanating from Woo’s ears as she contemplated an eruption over the usurpation of her button press.

  “Take a look.” He said to Petrovski who stepped up to heavy canvas curtain at the end of the target box they had built and then looked visibly disappointed.

  “Damn it!” He exclaimed.

  Everyone instinctively shifted position, craning their necks to see what he was looking at.

  The heavy curtain that had covered the back of the target box lay in a heap on the floor instead of hanging firmly over the back of the chamber where the special X-Ray film was sitting at the end of the paperclip accelerator. Without the canvas some light would have gotten into the chamber and perhaps exposed the target to more ambient light than they had planned—ruining whatever scientific purity the crude experiment had possessed. Everyone’s faces took on various degrees of the crestfallen.

  Bear laughed at the anticlimax of it all which lightened their mood.

  “It’s hard to test the particle winds when your sails are down.” He said tritely.