The Trigger

by Arthur C. Clarke

  It was the time of year and the kind of clear Ohio morning when the sun rose directly over the east-west roads like an oncoming fireball, greeting drivers with a blinding glare. Squinting his sleep-cheated eyes and groping beside him for a pair of sunglasses that failed to manifest themselves, Horton was grateful when he finally turned in at the tree-lined entry to the Terabyte Laboratories campus.

  With a generous buffer of woods and meadow separating the research complex from the surrounding suburbs, the entrance to the complex looked more like the entrance to a park than to a world-class research center. To preserve the illusion, security at the perimeter was unobtrusive. There were no gates, no guards, no barriers - just a low-profile shadow-box sign.

  But appearances were deceiving. A hundred meters in, there was a pull-off lane for remote visitor screening. Just beyond that, a pavement sensor scanned the undercarriage of Horton's Honda Passport, and a roadside transmitter interrogated his own radio-responder ID card.

  Horton knew from experience what would happen if he failed either check: just beyond the first turn, he would encounter a series of barriers rising from the driveway, and be intercepted by a canary-yellow security Jeep roaring down it. Anyone who tried to go further, or to enter the campus cross-country, would be tracked by optical and thermal sensors and met by the drawn weapons of the professionally humorless security detail.

  At first, Horton had regarded the security diffidently. It jarred with Brohier's insistance on calling the Terabyte site a 'campus', because fences and checkpoints had not been part of Horton's college experience at Stanford, or Purdue, or Tennessee State. But of late he had come to appreciate the quiet vigilance of the security staff - especially after the lab received one of 'Ned Ludd's' package bombs in a shipment of office supplies.

  Now Horton knew all the officers by face and first name, and they in turn lent a comforting presence when, as was often the case, he found himself keeping early, late, or weekend hours. The only trouble Horton had ever had with them was during his first winter at Terabyte, when, with his own car in for brake service, Horton tried to enter the campus on a Sunday in his girlfriend's untagged electric Saturn.

  His girlfriend - that was a construction Horton hadn't had need of in longer than he cared to remember. His last serious relationship had been with Kelly Braddock at Stanford. In a year and a half of dating, they had never quite gotten to the decision to live together, but between Kelly's brittle emotional defensiveness and her bold sexual openness, that relationship came to take up as much space and energy as his friends' live-in relationships seemed to. By the time Karl Brohier showed up at Horton's door, Horton was growing weary. He had begun to occasionally avoid Kelly, and to contemplate disengaging completely.

  Brohier's offer had resolved that problem, though not in quite the way Horton expected it would. A few weeks later, Kelly announced she had secured a fellowship at the University of Texas. That allowed her to leave Palo Alto a month before Horton did, thereby proving to herself that she had not compromised her independence by sleeping with him. They had said good-bye without tears or concrete promises.

  For a time, they had kept up with each other over the net. But netsex had proved a pale substitute for the real thing, and the real thing proved to have been the binding energy of their relationship. Lust absent, there was too little left to keep them from drifting apart, and within a few months, they were 'old friends' on their way to becoming nodding strangers.

  Still, the disappearance of Kelly from Horton's life did deprive him of both an agreeable heat and a comforting unpredictability, and he made a few awkward and half-hearted efforts to replace both.

  Of his several relationships that first year, the one with Moira, the owner of the Saturn, had lasted the longest. An outgoing thirty-year-old Toledo native who lived in Horton's apartment building, she had some of Kelly's fire in a softer and more accommodating package. But she lacked Kelly's enthusiasm for independence, and her principal ambition was an old-fashioned one - to marry and have children. She waited only until the first afterglow to start musing aloud about buying a house together. When she learned that Horton did not share her ambition, she wasted no more time on him.

  Since then, more by inertia than design, Horton had allowed his work to swallow him whole. His recreation was limited to occasional visits to a target-shooting range or IMAX theater, plus one week-long hiking trip into a National Park each year. His social contacts outside of work were limited to netchat and two or three family holidays at his parents' new house in Columbia, South Carolina.

  He told himself he did not mind his chaste bachelorhood, that the work was enough - but there was no one close enough to him to question it. He told himself he did not mind sleeping alone, eating alone, traveling alone - but the truth was that he also did not greatly enjoy it.

  He told himself that there would be more time, more laughter, a fuller life later, when he had had a chance to prove himself, when work and not-work came back into balance - but he had been telling himself that for nearly six years. His thirtieth birthday was now only a month away, and it had suddenly become possible to see himself still living this way at thirty-five, and forty, and beyond.

  The catalyst for all this melancholy, Horton knew, was the experiment scheduled for that morning. And the best antidote Horton could think of would be a little long-overdue success.

  At the end of the snaking driveway was the main parking area and the gate into Terabyte's compound. As an associate director, Horton was entitled to one of the parking spaces inside the wrought-iron fences. He pointed the Passport toward the gate, lowering the driver's window as he did.

  'Hello again, Dr Horton,' said Eric. The barrel-chested, gentle-voiced officer had been on duty when Horton left at 3.00 a.m. 'Did that catnap do you any good?'

  'Not much,' Horton said, making an effort to smile. 'Have you heard anything about the status of the arrangements?'

  'I just talked to the boss. We'll be ready for you at seven-fifteen,' said Eric. 'Other than me and Tim, your team has the campus to itself. The site engineer will start taking down nonessential systems at seven. It'll be as quiet as we can make it for you.'

  Thanks,' Horton said with a nod, and drove on.

  'Good luck!' Eric called after him.

  Horton grimaced. Luck. The team had had a bundle of it, all of it bad.

  The theoretical and design work on Baby had consumed nearly a year, and construction of the experimental apparatus had taken most of six months. Now, more than two years later, the rig had yet to complete successfully a single test series. There had been a fire, computer failures, power supply problems, and a series of puzzling bugs, leading to a major redesign of the detector, two partial rebuilds of the emitter, and replacement of most of the test and measurement gear.

  To be sure, the project was bleeding-edge, unmapped-territory work, and setbacks were to be expected. But even in the relaxed culture of Terabyte Labs, Horton was feeling pressure - most of it self-imposed. If he had spent the last forty months and fourteen million of Aron Goldstein's dollars chasing a chimera, it was up to him to make that assessment and close down the project. And if Suite I didn't produce some positive results soon, Horton might be forced to do exactly that, and admit that he had been wrong.

  The Hong- Jaekel-Mussermann unified field equations had brought on the paradigm shift for which theoretical physics had been hungering through the last third of the previous century. Cosmologists rushed to embrace the so-called 'CERN system', providing as it did attractive solutions to both the missing mass problem and the age/expansion paradox.

  But physics itself was turned upside down and plunged into the turmoil of scientific revolution. Reputations crumbled like fallen kings, and new heroes rose from anonymity to lead the way. The last five Nobel Prizes in Physics had been awarded for CERN system work, and no one was betting that that was the end of the string. It was an exciting time to be a physicist.

  And Horton might easily have missed it. If th
e United States had built its Superconducting Super Collider on schedule, the essential elements of the CERN system could have been revealed nearly two decades earlier. And if it could be done, someone would have already done what Horton was trying to do. The window of opportunity would have closed before Horton had left primary school. The new history of physics was being written at a breathtaking pace.

  But the American Congress, a body historically long on lawyers and short on vision, had canceled the SSC when it was little more than a hole in the Texas flatland. Ironically, their short-sightedness had created Horton's opportunity - if he and his team could just teach the Baby to walk.

  Four years ago, at the American Physical Society's Honolulu conference on the CERN system, Horton had realized that one of the field equations in the new paradigm allowed for - but did not require - a heretofore unobserved phenomenon. That was the day that Jeffrey Horton began pursuing the stimulated emission of gravitons, the tiny bosons which were the vector of universal gravity.

  His own collateral equations said that what was unthinkable in the old physics was just barely possible in the new - namely, to build the analogue of a laser for gravity. Though such a device had yet to be demonstrated, it already had a name waiting for it, inherited from the science fiction tales where it had become part of the technological furniture: the tractor beam.

  And it would not stop there. Artificial gravity for long-duration spaceflight, frictionless drives, overhead cranes with no cables and no moving parts, zero-g chambers at sea level - Horton and Brohier already had a list of more than two hundred patentable applications.

  When Baby came of age, everyone would want to play with him.

  But Horton could not count on being the only free-thinking physicist to have looked at the CERN team's equations and seen the same opportunity. He lived in dread of logging into the Los Alamos preprint server, skimming the new high energy physics papers, and finding his hunch made real in the words and equations of someone else.

  He dreaded that prospect almost as much as he did the prospect that he was wrong, and they'd all been wasting their time.

  The lights were already on in the Planck Center's Davisson Lab, and both of Horton's associate project managers were busily making final preparations for the test.

  Dr Gordon Greene was lying on his back on the floor, half-hidden under the refrigerator-sized transformer stage of the field generator. One corner of a faded and stained tool pouch was visible beside him, as was the Number 4 Faraday panel.

  Dr Leigh Thayer was tailor-sitting in the chair at the data collection console, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand while she studied the twin displays. Her back was to Horton as he entered.

  In so many ways, Gordie and Lee were a study in contrasts. He was chocolate skin on a middleweight wrestler's frame, she was tall, pale, and coltishly slim. His family's short American roots ran back to the time of Nkrumah's Ghana and had been watered mostly with hope, while her deep ones traced to the days of genteel mercantile England which had once traded in his ancestors. He was the streets of Oakland, California, and she was the upscale suburbs of Connecticut. He had needed a state scholarship to attend UC-Davis, while she had had her pick of the Ivy League before choosing Cornell.

  But both had in common that they had defied the expectations of their backgrounds. Gordie had sufficiently distinguished himself at Davis to earn his way into the graduate programs in electrical and mechanical engineering at Gal Tech. And after a year, Lee had declared Cornell and her classmates a bore and, shrugging off her parents' financial blackmail, transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic with a determination to 'get some dirt under my nails'. Even her chosen nickname was a subtle rejection of what she called 'old money affectations'.

  Horton knew he was fortunate to have snared both of them. Gordie had come to Terabyte after Hughes ITT closed down its prototype shop in favor of virtual prototyping. And Lee, eight years older than Horton, had become disillusioned at Fermilab after three consecutive projects fell under a budgetary axe.

  'Gordie, Lee - did either of you actually go home?' Horton asked, dropping his portfolio on one end of his workbench.

  Thayer raised her hand. 'I did,' she said without looking back at him. Took a shower, changed my underwear, collected my fetishes and lucky charms, and came right back to finish calibrating the detectors.'

  'Gordie?'

  'I napped on the couch in your office for a couple of hours,' Greene called from underneath the apparatus. 'Had a nightmare about another fire in the transformer stage, decided I'd eyeball things one more time.'

  'Do I detect a whiff of creeping superstition in the air?' Horton asked with a quizzical grin. 'Never mind, don't answer, I have to go light a prayer candle in the Grotto of Niels Bohr.'

  Greene chortled. 'Now there's an exotic fetish! -'

  'You're a pathetically lewd individual,' Thayer said, shaking her head. 'If you weren't also the best metal-basher I've ever seen…'

  'You want me,' Gordie said to her, digging his heels into the floor and wriggling out from under the transformer stage. 'Why else would you put on fresh underwear?'

  'See what I have to put up with when you're not here, Boss?' Thayer asked, spinning her chair half a turn. 'Why, if this creature and I were the same species, I'd be able to file a sexual harassment complaint as thick as his ego.'

  'You both sound like you could use about ten hours' sleep,' Horton said. 'In separate beds,' he added quickly. 'I'm wondering if we shouldn't postpone this a day, come back to it fresh -'

  Thayer shook her head. 'Boss, I'm planning on leaving here in three hours to go home and sleep for a week. Or go home and get drunk for a week, depending. Either way -'

  Horton nodded. 'Well, I wouldn't want to have to ask you to change your plans. Gordie, how does it look? Are we going to be able to go?'

  'I'm satisfied,' said Greene.

  'You're supposed to say, "Dr Horton, I guarantee it - this is the day".'

  'I'm willing to guarantee that if it breaks today, it'll be something that's never broken before. Is that good enough?'

  Horton snorted. 'I guess it'll have to be. Lee, how much more time do you need?'

  'I'm ready. All the recorders are sync'd up, and all the sensors are zeroed-in. I'm just watching to make sure Gordie doesn't undo all my hard work at the last minute.'

  'Gordie?'

  Ten minutes to finish getting Baby dressed,' said Greene. 'Then we can start warming up the generator at any time.'

  Horton glanced up at the clock above his workbench. 'All right.

  I need to chase down some caffeine and sugar, update the experimental log before I forget what we did last night. Let's start running the checklist at seven-fifteen, and aim for starting the test series at seven-thirty.'

  'Is Dr Brohier coming?' asked Thayer.

  'He said he'd take a pass this time - that considering he'd been present for all the previous disasters, maybe he was jinxing us. I'm sure he was speaking metaphorically, not metaphysically -'

  'I'm sure he just didn't want to get up this early,' said Thayer, sniffing. 'I'm half his age, and I don't want to be up this early.'

  'Something tells me he's going to wish he'd been here,' Greene said, lying back and disappearing under the machine with the Faraday panel in hand. 'Don't ask me how I know,' he continued, his voice falling away into a horror-movie affectation. There's an unknown power tugging at my awareness, an inexplicable compulsion to my thoughts - I am suddenly in the grip of a mysterious, irresistible force -'

  'Testosterone,' Thayer muttered.

  Horton laughed, then went in search of a doughnut.

  In principle, at least, the primary detector was simplicity itself.

  The goal was to detect a minute, temporary local variation in the gravitational attraction between the target and the emitter. The method was to measure the deflection of the target itself -a curtain of extremely fine ribbons, each made from a different elemental metal.

  In theory, whe
n the target was subjected to the full sweep of electromagnetic radiation - from kilohertz to gigahertz, long-wave radio to short-wave X-ray - produced by the emitter antenna, the magic combination of material and frequency would cause each of the ribbons in turn to twitch toward the antenna. Horton could not predict what the magic frequencies would be. His equations required a theoretical constant that could not be derived, only determined experimentally.

  In practice, the more sensitive the detector, the more fragile it was, and the more sensitive to outside influence. Even the air current created by someone walking past the detector was several orders of magnitude stronger than Brohier's most optimistic estimate of the tractor effect at experimental power levels. The first set of ribbons was torn in half by vibration when a visitor bumped into the workbench where it was being assembled.

  Since then, everything possible had been done to isolate the detector. It was enclosed under a thick glass bell, with the air inside evacuated to an infinitesimal fraction of normal air pressure. Then the entire assembly was rigidly attached to a three-ton cube of black Ohio granite floating on an oil cushion.

  Brohier had walked into the lab one day to find Horton, Greene and Thayer gathered in a circle around the granite cube, vigorously jumping up and down to test the shock mounting. With characteristic presence of mind, the senior director began humming the Zarathustra theme from 2001 as he wordlessly retreated toward the hallway.

  It had been a long time since Horton had laughed that hard.

  'Gordie?'

  'Power supply is steady and quiet. Fingers are crossed, hat is on backwards.'

  'Lee?'

  'Zeros across the board on all sensors. Prayer weasels spinning counterclockwise.'

  Horton glanced in the direction of the detector, now hidden from view by a semi-circle of portable radiation screens. 'Let's do it. Starting sequencer.'

  'Recorders running,' Lee reported from her station.