Twistor (6 page)

'It was a seamless, polished delivery,' said Elizabeth, still considering the psychological implications of the story. She thought it was good for David to tell stories to the children, and she enjoyed listening for clues to his inner conflicts. 'You know, David, you're very good with children. Which reminds me, how are you and Sarah doing? I don't believe I've heard you mention her lately.'

'Sarah and I are
finito,
as of a couple of weeks ago,' said David.
'
I think it's the Curse of the Harrisons at work again.'

The Curse of the Harrisons?' Elizabeth frowned. That sounds like a bad gothic romance. What is it?'

'It's an infirmity which has afflicted most of the male members of my family for generations,' said David.
'
We have a weakness for intelligent women. But we're not very tolerant, I'm afraid. Quirks, hang-ups, and neuroses drive us right up the wall. I'm still looking for a lady who's smart
and
well adjusted. But our society does terrible things to the psyches of adolescent females who betray the stigmata of intelligence. Nothing against Sarah. She's a fine person. I was just hoping she was different.

'
So the bottom line, Elizabeth, is that Sarah and I have decided to go our separate ways. She had become increasingly jealous of the long hours that I put in at the lab. It
got
so we argued all the time when we were together. I suppose it's just as well. During this present rather precarious phase of my career it's better that I don't devote too much time to the pursuit of females, intelligent or otherwise. It can be a full-time job.'

Elizabeth deliberately gave him a pained look. Poor David, she thought, I hope you grow out of it. 'Cheer up,' she said, 'you only have to find one, you know. Your afflicted ancestors seem to have managed it.'

Just then, Paul, who had gone to the basement 'to stoke the computer,' returned. He and David walked to the kitchen for the after-dinner cleanup.

I wonder what his mother was like, Elizabeth thought as she settled back into her chair.

David was standing at the sink, rinsing the dinner dishes and handing them to Paul to place in the dishwasher. While Paul was doing some rearranging, David looked out the kitchen window, considering the shimmering reflections of the lights from Kirkland across the lake. The residences of Bellevue made densely packed points of light that shaded to a continuous galaxylike glow on the more distant hillsides of Somerset and Newport Hills. Farther south the traffic on the Evergreen Point Bridge seemed to be moving now. He handed Paul another dish.

'So you're having problems with your hardware,' Paul said. 'Anything serious?'

'Well, you never know how serious an experimental problem is 'til after you understand it,' said David, 'and by then it's usually not a problem any more. This one's particularly insidious because it makes our diagnostic instruments tell us lies. Vickie and I are just putting the finishing touches to the new perovskite holospin-echo rig.'

'I'll bet Allan's excited,' Paul said mildly.

'Well, Allan's out of town right now,' David answered. He considered just what he wanted to say to Paul about
Allan
Saxon. 'That's OK, though. Even when he's around his forte isn't debugging hardware. His talents lie in other directions. He has some pretty good ideas for where to push, he gets the NSF contracts that pay the bills and our salaries, he gets the shop time, and he gets us the very best samples to play with. Right now he's pretty involved with his national committees and his business ventures.'
And it's damn hard to get his attention,
David added silently to himself. 'But anyhow, we're setting up to look for holospin wave excitations in some of the more exotic warm superconductors. We're going to have the best setup in the world, if it ever works.'

Paul nodded.

'But so far we haven't even been able to get to square one,' David continued. That'll be when we put a sample in the chamber. We're still on square zero, working on the "null" part of the experiment to make sure that we don't get false signals from the equipment when nothing's inside. But at the moment we do get unexpected results without a sample.' He described what had happened that evening at the laboratory. 'It's weird!' he concluded. 'Vickie thinks it's an RF power leak.'

As he was speaking, Elizabeth came in from the living room and opened the refrigerator.
'
RF power?' she said. 'That sounds like a political movement. "Power to the Rs, not to mention the Fs!" You guys certainly have your own language.'

'
It only seems that way,' said David, handing Paul another plate. ' "RF" just means "radio frequency" or high-frequency electricity. We're using something like a TV transmitter to pipe electromagnetic energy into our experiment. We're driving the system with high-frequency radio waves.'

'What happens during the commercials?' asked Elizabeth with an impetuous grin.

'We have a special circuit that cuts out the commercials, the game shows, and the wrestling matches,' David
said,
laughing. 'We prefer to use soap operas and new-wave music. It's much smoother.'

'Paul told me that you've been working with warm superconductors,' said Elizabeth. 'I remember hearing about them five or six years ago when they were making the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek.
What ever happened to them?'

'Oh, they're still around,' said David, 'but the floating trains and the superfast computers described in the magazines are taking a bit longer than was advertised. Warm superconductors were special in the first place because they have a special crystal structure called a layered perovskite. It's a flat crystal plane like a checkerboard with copper atoms in the centers of the squares. The copper atoms in the red squares have spin up and those in the black squares have spin down.'

'Wait, David, let me get this straight,' said Elizabeth, holding up a hand. 'As I recall, atoms have a permanent "spin" rotation about their axes that also gives them a magnetic field like a little compass needle attached to each atom. If the needle points up or down, then the atom has spin up or spin down. Right?'

'Right,' said David. The atoms of copper resemble little spinning tops, and can point either way.'

Elizabeth nodded, measuring coffee beans into the grinder.

'OK. About two years ago it was discovered,' David continued, speaking more loudly over the noise of the grinder, 'partly by our own dear Professor Allan Saxon and his students, that in these checkerboard crystals of some of the warm superconductors there's a new and previously unsuspected kind of ordering. Waves called holospin waves move through these crystals by changes in the spin directions, rather like the waves you see when the wind blows over a field of wheat. You know, like "amber waves of grain." But these waves are special because instead of being like a regular wave pattern, they're more
like
a hologram.' He handed Paul some silverware.

'That isn't much help, David,' said Paul. 'The workings of holograms are not widely understood. I'm not sure that I understand how they work in every detail. There are some tricky phase aspects of the wave interferences—'

'Never mind the details,' David interrupted. 'The only thing you need to know about them is that if you break off a small piece from a big hologram, it still shows the same picture as the whole thing but with less resolution. That's because the holographic ordering, the encoding of the picture, is spread out over the whole thing rather than localized in any one place on the hologram.

'And it's the same with the waves that we make in our superconductor samples. It's called "holospin order," and the wave disturbances that move in funny ways through the crystals are called "holospin waves." ' He paused to run the plastic scrubber over the inside of a pot.

'Allan Saxon told me that those are the hottest thing in condensed matter physics just now,' said Paul. 'He said that a holospin transmission cable made from one pair of warm superconductor strips could carry simultaneously an almost unlimited number of messages of very high bandwidth. It will revolutionize communications, he said, and there are lots of other applications, too. Should I believe him?' He shook some detergent into the dishwasher, closed its door, and turned it on.

They dried their hands and adjourned to the living room. Paul stirred up the fire he had started in the stone fireplace. David stared into the fire, musing. 'Sure you should . . . at least in this case. The application potential is real enough,' he said. *I turned down a tenure-track faculty job at a pretty good university to come here for a second postdoc so I could work with Saxon and get in on the ground floor of this. And we're beginning the second generation of experiments. These will be the ones where we learn to fully understand the phenomenon: how it works, and what it's good for.'

'
But you're having problems?' said Elizabeth.

'Yeah,' said David. 'Our equipment is lying to us. Vickie thinks some funny resonance in the vacuum-readout electronics is the culprit. That would explain all the facts, but it doesn't feel right to me. I've used almost the same hardware in a dozen other experiments, and I never saw anything like this. It's true that we're making some pretty strange electromagnetic fields. The field vectors are rotating, precessing, and jumping according to an intricate program that we set up. But there's no reason that that should produce what we're seeing.

'Anyhow, Vickie is now checking things out while I'm over here wining and dining. I promised I'd be back about midnight to take over. I'll work a few more hours tonight and try to flush some bugs out of the system. As a psychologist, you should understand this, Elizabeth. If you interact closely enough with a complicated system, it'll eventually tell you what its problems are. And somehow it works best in the wee hours.'

'You guys have your own pagan religion,' said Paul, shaking his head. 'Instead of sacrificing sheep, you sacrifice sleep. Do you suppose there's any chance at all that you're seeing a real effect, not just an instrument glitch?'

'Look,' said David, 'we're talking about a volume of empty space about the size of a baseball acting as a vacuum pump and absorbing lots of energy at the same time. There's no physics I know about that could account for that.'

'I know some physics that could, if the energy density were, say, 10
³²
electron-volts per cubic centimeter,' said Paul. He smiled ruefully. 'Some of the oddball superstring theories I've been playing with lately would seem to say that you can make space itself do tricks if you fill it with the right amount of energy. Trouble is, that "right amount" hasn't been around since the Big Bang.'

'We ain't making any Big Bangs in my lab, buddy!' said David. Then he paused and smiled. 'You might say we're
close,
though . . . the power's only off by thirty orders of magnitude.' He winked at Paul. That's closer than some of your predictions, I believe.' They both laughed.

Elizabeth disappeared in the direction of the kitchen and soon returned with a tray of steaming coffee cups. 'David,' she said, 'if you're going back to work tonight, you'll certainly need some of this.'

'I'm afraid it's going to take more than coffee to get the job done tonight, Elizabeth,' said David, taking a cup and saucer from the tray. 'You have anything that makes you smarter instead of just more wide awake?'

'Wish we did!' said Paul. 'I could use some of that myself.'

4

Thursday Midnight, October 7

David pulled into the Fifteenth Avenue Northeast entrance to the central parking garage. At this time of night there was no guard in the glass-walled booth as he drove past it to the short ramp up to the A level. He selected an empty spot near the southeast corner, parked and locked his car, and climbed the garage stairs to the exit at the corner of the Administration Building. Across Rainier Vista he could see lights in the windows of their lab in Physics Hall; Vickie's still at it, he concluded, smiling to himself. As he walked down the broad granite stairs and headed across an open space, the bell in the campanile to the north slowly tolled twelve. Midnight, he thought. He was still feeling pretty sharp. Maybe he could get something done tonight.

He unlocked the outer door with his building key and let himself in, then walked along the dimly lit hallway to his laboratory. It was an unusually quiet night, he observed. None of the usual night owls seemed to be working in the other labs tonight.

Victoria looked up from the console as he let himself in. David noticed that she looked unusually tired. 'Maybe I should have called you at the Ernsts and told you to save yourself a trip,' she said. She told him what she had been doing. 'And I found two new frequencies where the same thing happens. The vacuum improves, and the RF power shows a load increase,' she said. 'It's spooky!'

'I didn't want to say anything that might have dampened your enthusiasm,' said David, 'but your vacuum gauge
resonance
theory smelled wrong to me then. Driving over, I was wondering whether we could be making a cyclotron resonance with free electrons in the sample volume. Maybe stray electrons get up some speed, collide with gas molecules in the vacuum, ionize them, and the fields sweep them out. That would explain both the power loss and the improved vacuum.'

Vickie frowned and shook her head.
'
If that works,' she said, teasing, 'you'd better patent it quick. It makes a far better vacuum pump than this one we bought for several thousand dollars.'

'Yeah.' David sighed, nodding agreement. That point had occurred to me also. I guess it's a lousy theory. I'm grasping at straws, Vickie. Maybe if I play with this miserable beast for a while I'll get some better ideas. Anyhow, you look as if you could use some rest. We can't have you expiring from exhaustion before we even get you a Ph.D. You have to wait 'til you're a postdoc for that.'

Victoria looked at David, frowning. 'Don't worry about me; worry about yourself,' she said. 'I know your disgusting work habits very well, David Harrison. You're quite capable of forgetting the time and working all night. Remember that you have a class to teach tomorrow. You can't afford to hang around here for more than an hour or so, no matter how interested you get in our hardware problems. I'm going to set this timer, see. When it buzzes, you have to go home. OK? Promise?'