Twistor (19 page)

Victoria studied the trace on the digital oscilloscope connected to the ion chamber.
'
The beta counts from the source stop at transition time,' she observed. 'Paul was right.'

'I get the same from the gamma rays,' said David.
'
I guess it's like Allan said. If nothing else, we've got a way to dispose of nuclear waste. Our hardware may become the flush toilet of the twenty-first century.' He frowned. 'But first we'll need to find out what's on the other end of the sewer pipe.'

'Yes,' said Vickie. 'I wonder how it looks on the other side of the transition. I wish I could stick my head through without losing it. Hey, that's another use for this thing: a no-mess guillotine! No unsightly heads to dispose of after the event!'

'Great,' said David without enthusiasm. 'Hmmm, maybe we could drop my thirty-five-millimeter camera through the transition and rig it to click while it's on the other side.'

'I've a better idea,' Victoria said. 'Chuck Swenson, a grad student in astronomy, was showing me one of
the
new cameras they've been using at Kitt Peak and Mauna Loa. It uses a CCD, a charge-coupled device, to digitally record image sweeps that are programmed into the optics. The data is burned into a little high-density read-only memory cartridge. You can set the optical sweeps for extremely high resolutions and even record color-wavelength information if you don't mind using more ROM space. It's made for telescopes, but it also comes with its own lens if you want to use it that way. You can even do sound and movies, if you want to devote the ROM space to that.' She typed a word into the computer terminal and pointed to the screen. 'Yeah, he's logged into the HyperVAX right now. Let's go up and see if we can borrow it.'

At nine on Sunday morning, Martin Pierce, still wearing Chinese silk pajamas, used the IBM PC/System 4 computer in his elegant bedroom to do a secured indirect link to the Puget Sound Reference Service computer. He found several files waiting for him in the
[BROADSWORD]
area. He downloaded the encrypted files, broke the link, and decrypted them with the PC. The first file was routine, a list of the library books and journals accessed by Saxon and his group at the university's library within the past two months. The second file was a message informing him that all four of the voice pickup bugs placed in the university physics building had been discovered, that the phone taps remained in place, and that PSRS intended to continue the surveillance operation with the remaining equipment and without replacing the bugs unless directed otherwise. The message concluded by requesting instructions on how to proceed further. Pierce frowned, then read the transcripts of the recordings. As he read, color rose in his cheeks.

A picture of the events in Saxon's university lab was emerging. The twistor effect, a whole new phenomenon . . . and it was made with essentially tabletop apparatus.
The
thing must be worth millions, even billions. This bastard Saxon was keeping it all to himself. That in itself was an indication of its value. Well, he wouldn't get away with it. Since Saxon wasn't allowing anything to be written down, the apparatus itself held the key. And now he was going to have it moved . . .

Pierce made a new link with PSRS and typed rapid instructions, then disconnected. He smiled. There was the potential for a very nice gain from this project. And the added spice of properly fixing Saxon for his disloyalty made it even more appealing.

David studied the little CCD camera. It did not look much like a camera to him. 'How does it work, Vickie?' he asked. 'It doesn't have enough external controls to do all those things Chuck mentioned.'

'See that little eight-pin DIN socket in the side?' she asked. 'You plug that into a terminal port and download a program that tells the internal processor what to do. There's a C control program that goes with it for doing the setup.'

David raised his hands in resignation.
'
OK, you do the programming; you know C better than I do. I'll rig an orientation device and get some cryostat insulation for a catcher, and we can start the drops. By the way, what's the replacement cost of this little thing, if we should happen to lose it?'

'You don't want to know, David,' Vickie said. 'A replacement would cost about ten kilobucks, and Chuck said he would also need a posterior transplant.'

'He must be a very good friend, to lend you something so valuable,' said David, feeling a pang of jealousy.

She looked at him speculatively and smiled. 'Not that good,' she said.

David worked on the structure of the orientation mechanism, the automatic shutter trip when the twistor field broke electrical continuity, and the soft nest which caught
the
camera after it fell through on the return transition. Vickie worked on the programming for the CCD camera's internal processor. 'How do you think I should set the exposure and field of view?' she asked.

David thought for a minute. 'Let's make a conservative guess that there isn't going to be much light. If it were my Canon thirty-five millimeter, I'd set it up with a fast film, a wide-angle lens set to focus at infinity with a wide-open aperture, and an exposure time of one two-hundredth or less. Can this electronic marvel do anything like that?'

The CCD cranked up to maximum sensitivity is the equivalent of about ASA twenty-thousand-speed film, if you want to use it that way,' Vickie said, causing David to raise his eyebrows. 'That kind of speed can cover a lot of sins. Let me think . . . yes, I can configure it just the way you said. The wide-angle lens configuration will get about fifteen percent of a full four-pi solid angle. Is that wide enough?'

'Hmmm, that's a view angle of about forty-five degrees. Sure,' said David, 'that ought to be fine.' He tried to imagine what the little camera was going to tell them. He felt a rising sense of anticipation and squirmed in his chair. He could hardly wait for the result.

'OK, all set then,' said Vickie as she typed some final instructions to the HyperVAX, then walked over and disconnected the DIN plug from the camera.

They tried the drop-through procedure first with a plastic bag of bolts and nuts as a dummy load; it worked fine. Then they carefully oriented the camera on a clamped rod and Vickie activated the forward-reverse twistor transition. The small unit plopped satisfactorily into the catcher nest.

Vickie picked up the camera and inserted the DIN plug in the camera socket. The high-resolution image stored in the unit's high-density ROM streamed into the control computer. The computer proceeded the image, repainting it with an electron beam on the graphics display screen.
It
was black, with a scattering of white spots. They had photographed only darkness, punctuated by occasional dust specks on the optical system, David thought, disappointed. There was no spectacular first view of a shadow universe.

Long experience dealing with the problems and frustrations of experimental physics made him keep the feeling under tight control. He said cheerfully,
'
OK, let's displace the view angle by about half the field of view. That would be, say twenty degrees, OK?' Vickie nodded and set the unit up for another shot. David repositioned the camera in the suspension and rotated the orientation by twenty degrees clockwise. Vickie activated the transition. The camera dropped into the nest again.

The graphical display showing the second image resembled that of the first, a solid black field with a few dust specks. David nodded. 'OK,' he said, 'can you do a vertical split-screen display with both pictures together on the screen? I'd like to see the right half of the first picture and the left half of the second picture side by side.' Vickie worked her magic at the computer console and the twin speckled dark fields appeared. David inhaled abruptly. 'Notice anything?' he asked as calmly as he could through the wash of rising excitement. He stood and walked around behind her.

'I see the same pattern on both images, but one pattern is displaced sideways from the other,' said Vickie.
'
David, those can't be dust specks! They have to be outside the camera. They move across the field of view when you change the camera angle.'

'I know,' said David quietly.
'
I think they're . . . stars.' It's too much, he thought, conceptual overload. He sat down in the old wooden chair, put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands. He sat that way for a long while, hardly moving.

David had oriented the camera so that it was pointing
at
a particularly dense cluster of 'dust specks.' Vickie had narrowed the camera's field of view, increased the sensitivity of the CCD, and reset the camera to use its internal diffraction grating as an optical spectrograph. Each 'speck' had now become a little stripe punctuated with black dots, the wavelength spectrum of its light. Vickie, an astronomy monograph in her lap, was examining the shot taken in the last drop. Those black dots have to be absorption lines, David. Look, this one is almost an exact match with the figure in this book. They
are
stars, David! We're sitting inside an enclosed building, and we're photographing stars in the middle of the afternoon!'

David had continued sorting it out in his head as he worked. 'We have to find out if any of the stars in these pictures match normal stars in position and also in spectral lines. Paul thinks that when we make something disappear in the twistor field, it isn't actually gone. Instead, it's been converted to what he calls "shadow matter," matter that completely ignores normal matter and interacts only with other shadow matter. And it's the same with light: shadow photons only interact with shadow matter. Gravity's the only exception. It's a distortion of space that links all forms of mass-energy: normal, shadow, whatever. This stuff comes from some brand of superstring theory that Paul uses. I've been thinking about how these ideas might apply to what our CCD camera sees.

'Suppose there are large numbers of shadow atoms that among themselves behave exactly like normal atoms. And suppose that a normal-matter star forms. It would make a gravity well that would attract shadow matter also, if any was around. So some stars may be all normal matter, some all shadow matter, and some a mix of both kinds. You might get a half-and-half star made of both kinds of matter and shining with both normal and shadow photons. So there is some chance of a correspondence between the
stars
in the picture and those in the sky. What we don't know is how much correspondence, except that it isn't one hundred percent.'

'How do you know even that, David, when we haven't tried to do any match-ups yet?'

'Because,' said David, 'for the first shot I pointed the camera so that if our sun were present, it'd be centered in the field of view. It isn't there, so that's at least one star that doesn't have a shadow equivalent in the picture.' He was feeling pleased with himself.

She looked at him. 'David,' she said, her eyes widening, 'this is . . . big, isn't it?'

'Yes,' he said, the feeling of overload returning. 'I've been struggling to comprehend just how big. It's like Galileo looking through his new-made telescope and seeing the moons of Jupiter, a miniature solar system right before his eyes. It's like Newton realizing that the same force that makes the apple fall also holds the moon in its orbit. It's like Einstein at the Swiss patent office coming to the realization that space and time are almost the same thing. Vickie, it's so big I can't get my mind around it. Saying it's going to revolutionize physics and technology doesn't seem sufficient, somehow. We should yell, or dance, or pop champagne corks or something.' He felt exhilarated and a bit off balance.

She swallowed and looked at him for a while without saying anything. Then, 'We have more checking before celebrations are in order,' she said. 'What if we're wrong? What if those points aren't stars but something else altogether? Or what if we're somehow just seeing the normal stars of our galaxy in a different way? We need to do a correlation, and I have an idea how to do it. The astronomers have the Yale bright-star catalog on their big disk, a data base that has the coordinates and spectral characteristics of the brightest stars, thousands of them. I can digitize our pictures and then use a fit routine to vary the scale, direction, and orientation of
our
CCD pictures within reasonable limits and try to do a match-up.' She paused. 'David . . . are we really going to be famous?'

'Of course,' he said, 'our names will be household words. Harrison and Gordon,' he said giddily. 'We'll be like Lee and Yang, or Fitch and Cronin, or Penzias and Wilson, or Crick and Watson—'

'Or Gilbert and Sullivan,' Vickie contributed.

'Rodgers and Hammerstein,' he offered.

'Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern,' she countered.

'Simon and Garfunkel,' he parried.

'Ozzie and Harriet,' she rebounded.

'Laurel and Hardy,' he responded, beginning to break up.

'Or Bonnie and Clyde,' she concluded, as they both collapsed in gales of laughter.

They had noticed that some of the specks in the CCD picture were fuzzy, and Vickie had set the camera for high resolution in a narrow field of view to photograph a fuzzy speck. Now she was at the color-graphics terminal examining a ROM-dump of the resulting CCD picture. The display showed a rounded central region with two spiral arms. It was clearly a galaxy.

That, David thought, is enough for one day. Too much too fast. He walked over to stand behind Vickie, who was manipulating the false-color palette of the graphics unit to get better contrast for the image. He put his hands on her shoulders and kneaded the taut muscles of her shoulders and neck.

'Mmmmm. That feels good,' she said. 'Too long at the terminal makes my neck hurt.' He continued to massage her shoulders as she worked. What do you say to someone, he wondered, who's just discovered the first galaxy in another universe?

'Look, Vickie, this has probably been the most wonderful day of my life, and what we've accomplished today
I
can't even think about without feeling a little drunk or crazy,' he said, 'but now I think it's quitting time. My mind's getting numb, and I'm afraid I'm going to start making mistakes.' And he did not want to make any mistakes in the present enterprise.