Twistor (11 page)

David nodded and activated the field sequence. Again there was the popping sound, and the lower portion of the wire fell to the floor, leaving the hooked wire, now much shorter, dangling from the upper coil. 'Jesus!' said David.

Vickie
retrieved the wire stubs and examined their ends. 'Smooth and shiny, just like those pieces from the chamber,' she said. She held them out to David, then returned to the workbench for two more pieces of heavy wire. These she balanced on the side coils so that they formed a white horizontal
X
across the central region of the field coils. 'OK . . . again,' she said.

David activated the sequence. The now-familiar
pop
echoed through the room, and an instant later four stubby wire ends fell to the floor. He laughed, with just an edge of hysteria in his voice. 'Holy shit! Vickie, do you realize what we've discovered?'

'What?' said Vickie, looking over at him.

'What we've got here,' he announced with a crooked grin, 'what we've discovered,' almost breaking up completely, 'is a unique and com-plete-ly new and un-precedented way . . . ' he could hardly talk now for laughing,
'
. . . of cutting wire!'

On the large bed of his suite at the St Francis, Allan Saxon lay on his stomach. 'Al-lan,' Darlene said, as she massaged his bare back, 'how do you manage to be such a fa-mous pro-fes-sor and still run an important business at the same time?'

Saxon rolled over and looked up at her, savoring the view. I wonder what she's up to, he thought. His finger traced the crinkled aureole around her erect nipple. He was getting his third wind, he decided. 'It isn't too difficult,' he said. 'The basic research work that we do at the university leads to applications that feed into my business. And the techniques that we develop at my business lab are often useful for our basic research at the university.' At least, that was how it was supposed to work, he thought. 'Does Martin ever say anything about our work?' he asked. Might as well see what he could find out.

'
Mr Pierce never discusses things with me like this, Allan. I love to watch you talk,' she added. 'Your eyebrows are so expressive. What are you doing now at the university? You seemed so excited when you came back from your telephone call this morning.'

Saxon explained to her in some detail about their holospin wave experiments, and her gaze never left his face. She was a remarkable girl, he decided. Talented in many ways, and interested in physics, too.

7

Friday Morning, October 8

Martin Pierce turned from Darlene's neatly typed report, which had been waiting on his desk when he arrived at his office this morning. She was good, he thought. In more ways than one. He lifted an oiled rosewood panel, unfolding the built-in computer terminal that opened from his desktop. He adjusted the angle of the high-resolution color display plate, switched on the terminal unit and logged in, then called up the special program that the Megalith Communications Group had prepared for him. It was time for another bit of spook work.

Industrial espionage was a primary tool of Martin Pierce's operation at Megalith. The company survived by spotting new technologies and sewing up patent rights and exclusive license agreements before their value became apparent to the bigger, slower-moving corporations competing for the same turf. But there were severe dangers to the corporation if one were caught with a hand in the cookie jar. Therefore, the intelligence operatives who were used to provide the essential inflow of information about developing technologies were never corporation employees; they were kept at a discreet distance from the corporation proper. Deniability is as essential in business as in politics.

Modern computer communications made possible almost complete isolation, protection, and damage limitation for both parties in the operation. The operatives in Seattle had no inkling of the identity of their employer, only that from time to time requests from one Broadsword for certain information or actions appeared in their computer systems.
After
the operation was completed, reports were posted in Broadsword's private encrypted area on the same computer system's disk storage area. The deposit of funds of an appropriate sum in a numbered Swiss account always followed shortly thereafter. It was a sanitary and satisfying arrangement for all concerned.

Pierce entered his private encryption key and the program shifted to graphics mode, displaying a full-color map of the North American continent, adding each of the links leading from San Francisco to Seattle to the display as they were established. The route was remarkably indirect, crossing the continent four times. But that, after all, was the idea. Finally the last link in the chain was forged and the map disappeared, to be replaced by the message
User Name:.
Pierce typed BROADSWORD, and the computer responded with
Password:.
Pierce typed EXCALIBUR. The computer then responded with
Second Password:,
and Pierce typed ARTHUR.

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.

came the response. This was followed by a
$
prompt. Pierce responded by typing RUN UPLOAD, then completed a set of responses which caused the newly prepared
SAXON.TXT
file on Pierce's system to be transferred to the
[BROADSWORD]
disk area of the Puget Sound Reference Service computer system. A pie chart appeared on Pierce's terminal screen, the 'slice' corresponding to that fraction of the file which had been encrypted with an encryption key known to PSRS, transferred, and checked for accuracy. The slice grew larger and larger until it was the whole 'pie.' Then the display disappeared, to be replaced by:

New
file [BROADSWORD] SAXON.TXT successfully created.

Pierce then entered the message describing his needs:

$MAIL

MAIL
> SEND/ENCRYPT

PASSWORD:
EXCALIBUR

To:
MANDRAKE

Subject:
SAXON SURVEILLANCE

Text:

Establish soonest Class III surveillance on the residence and workplace of Professor Allan D. Saxon. Reference encrypted file [BROADSWORD] SAXON.TXT for details including authorization of related activities. Use encryption key DOG. Special attention to experiment in progress at Saxon's laboratory at University. Full operative reports and transcripts of all recordings to be posted in the [BROADSWORD] account within 12 hours of collection. Original recordings to be sent Federal Express to F&G Enterprises, 1436 Avenue of Americas, Suite 356, New York, NY 10047 within 24 hours of collection. Operation authorized for 14 days, renewable.

Pierce logged off the system and disconnected, folded the terminal back into his immaculate desk, and smiled. There was something deeply rewarding about a job well done.

The balding man of middle age sat down at his scratched metal desk beside the line of ill-matched file cabinets. A sign with the legend PRESIDENT, PUGET SOUND REFERENCE SERVICE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON stood at a corner of the desk. The old VT-220 terminal on the littered desk of the president of PSRS made a 'beep' sound as he logged
into
his computer system. The message
You have 1 new Mail message.
appeared on the terminal screen. He called up the
MAIL
utility and read the new message. It was from 'Broadsword,' one of his anonymous clients. He decrypted and read the file
[BROADSWORD] SAXON.TXT,
then retrieved a battered pad from his pocket and made a few notes from the screen. He was glad to have the business. Broadsword was a good customer who paid promptly, and the cash flow had been a bit sluggish lately.

This particular operation was going to require some backup operators, at least one a muscle type. He knew that his usual experienced help was presently tied up on another assignment, so it was going to be necessary to line up some new recruits. He picked up the phone and began to dial. Maybe he could get a lead from some of his former CIA contacts: the Company usually took care of its own, even after their people had dropped out for a more sedentary lifestyle.

Several phone calls later he made a connection. He settled for three operators he'd never used before who had only so-so recommendations. It was certainly getting difficult to find good help these days.

When Paul Ernst arrived at his office in Physics Hall at 10:03 A.M., David and Vickie were already standing at his door. They both looked rather bedraggled. He wondered what was behind David's call earlier this morning to request a meeting.

'I hope I didn't cause any problems, asking you to show up so early,' said David with a note of broad sarcasm.
'
I know you theorists don't come to work before noon.'

Paul shrugged. 'Actually, I've been at work since seven by dial-up to San Diego,' he said, letting them into his office and waving them to the chairs opposite his desk. The Cray-4 at the UCSD Supercomputer Center is now crunching on a twelve-hour symbolic integro-differential
equation
reduction for me. By the time I finish dinner tonight it should have the answer for me. But you said you needed some theoretical advice. What's up, David?'

David took a deep breath. 'Do you remember the other night when I was telling you about the problems we'd been having with our experiment? You said that you had a theory that could explain space acting as a vacuum pump and doing other weird tricks, if the conditions were right. Well, weird tricks we now have in great abundance,' said David. 'Our twistor field is making things disappear!'

Paul blinked. I'm not getting this, he thought. 'Do you mean that it makes objects harder to see?' he asked. 'Maybe it's some distortion in the glass—'

'Paul, there isn't any glass, or any stainless-steel vacuum chamber or cryopumps either. They've disappeared.'

Paul recalled the massive equipment setup that David had shown him and the children a few days earlier. Disappeared, he thought, that's crazy.

'We've been having weird effects at certain frequencies with our spherical rotating field,' David hurried on. 'When I came back here after the dinner at your house night before last, I decided to do a test by increasing the field volume. I made it almost two meters in diameter, big enough so the boundary was outside the coils and chamber and pumps. And when I activated it, everything within the boundary just disappeared. The braces at the edge of the field volume were cut off clean, smoother than a good machinist could make them. And the cut surfaces are concave, with a curvature that matches the field radius.'

'Whoa! Wait a minute,' said Paul, trying to make some sense out of what David was saying. 'First, what's this "spherical rotating field" business? There can't be a spherical field! That would violate several of Maxwell's favorite equations.'

'OK,' said David, 'imagine a globe of the Earth, but now the lines of longitude are lines of magnetic flux and the lines of latitude are lines of electric flux, with the
magnetic
lines looping back on themselves inside the globe at the poles. To a rough approximation, that's our spherical field. But the whole thing is spinning, like on an axis through the north and south poles of the globe. That couples the magnetic field to the electric field. But instead of oscillating and reversing the field directions, we've got it rigged so that the whole axis of rotation shifts by ninety degrees. Vickie and I designed some coils that set that up. We call it a 'twistor' field. There are some games that we can play with holospin waves in solids after we put a cryogenically cooled sample in this twistor field. But we haven't progressed that far because our equipment keeps disappearing.'

Paul shifted uneasily in his chair, looking for a moment out the window and then turning back to David and Victoria. There was a long pause before he finally spoke. 'OK, I think I understand more or less what you're doing with the fields. Now tell me precisely what you observed.' This is a pretty good story, Paul thought, considering the possibility that David and Vickie were playing a joke on him. 'And tell it slowly,' he added.

David carefully described what had happened in the previous thirty-six hours. Paul rubbed his chin. He was beginning to get the drift of the story. They wanted him to believe that a considerable volume of matter had disappeared from their laboratory because it was in a particular electromagnetic field. David was his good friend, but this was ridiculous. Electromagnetic fields do not make things disappear.

'Of course,' David continued, 'we didn't believe that any such thing was possible. So yesterday we dug out some of our old reject coils and made a mockup of what had been there before. No vacuum hardware or cryogenics, but about the same twistor field. And, goddammit, Paul, the same thing happened! Vickie and I have been up all night making things disappear. We even made the wires inside a light bulb vanish without breaking the glass
envelope.'
He held out a large clear industrial-size light bulb to Paul for inspection.

Paul looked into it and shook his head. Inside there was no filament, only two short wire stubs projecting from the glass holder. He looked appraisingly at David. A trick? Any competent glassblower could produce such 'evidence.'

David turned to Victoria. Tell him, Vickie! He thinks I'm crazy.'

'Not crazy,' said Paul carefully, 'but you have been working rather too hard lately.' David has a strange sense of humor sometimes, he mused. Maybe he's punchy from overwork and is trying to play weird jokes on his friends.