          |
|
>> Picoverse
About the novel: Reviews
With PICOVERSE, Bob Metzger takes his rightful place in the hard-SF pantheon. He's the equal of Clarke, Benford, Forward, and Brin: huge ideas, cosmic concepts, ramifications well explored -- and Metzger throws in interesting characters to boot. This one will keep you turning the pages, and should be a definite awards contender. Physics hasn't been this much fun since TIMESCAPE. This is probably the most daring SF novel since RINGWORLD. You make E.E. Smith look like a Luddite. A mind boggling work of hard SF.
--F. Paul Wilson A 21st century leap from the physics lab into the multiverse that only Gregory Benford, Philip Jose Farmer, and A. E. Van Vogt could have written--if they had ever collaborated.
--Tom Easton - book reviewer for Analog PICOVERSE is a mind-blowing journey to the wild shores of the scientific imagination. Not only did it leave my head spinning but it left me very grateful that there is only universe. Or is there?!
--Marcus Chown - cosmology consultant "New Scientist" and Author of "The Magic Furnace" This is a quick, savvy ride through an ever-expanding conceptual landscape, whirling the reader through sharp swerves and fresh thrills -- a hard SF read at high velocity.
--Gregory Benford "Bob Metzger knows his science. He proves it in PICOVERSE, a complex and intriguing story that ranges widely through time and space, and has enough of both action and hard science to satisfy the most demanding reader."
--Charles Sheffield Picoverse I. The Sonomak
Had I been present at the Creation,
I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the Universe.
------------------------
Section I Chapter 1
The Nunn Physics Building, a six-story sprawl
of red brick and smoke glass, dominated the northern boundary of Georgia
Tech’s campus, throwing a long shadow down 14th Street, painting the dozens
of ramshackle student bungalows that hugged its western edge in depressing
shades of gray and brown. Built six years earlier, and intended to
accommodate a wide spectrum of students, the bungalows were now the exclusive
domain of physics grad students, tethered close to their professors, and
even closer to their experiments.
Dr. Katie McGuire sat cross-legged atop Nunn’s observation platform
– a three-by-three square meter slab of rain-rotted plywood, once painted
black, but now weathered gray and streaked with mildew. Wedged between
a behemoth segment of galvanized ducting that carried away acid fumes and
metalorganic residues, and a half-dozen 200-gallon liquid nitrogen tanks,
long empty, pressure gauges and relief valves scavenged, the platform was
Katie’s roost, a place to think, to fret, to clear a cluttered mind.
She faced east, in the direction of Atlanta’s midtown, the oil-on-water
lenses of her Virtuals reflecting the morning light. Sunrise was
spectacular, the sun hanging behind the Bank of America tower, the light
cutting into the building, refracting through stained glass windows, then
erupting from the building’s western face in rainbow streamers that played
out across the city. Clouds, tinted blood red, hung low on the distant
horizon, while the air, full of springtime pine and grass pollens, glowed
golden. It was a perfect morning. But Katie saw none of it.
“Two seconds,” she said. The lowermost left quadrant in
her field of view flickered, locked, and then the Virtuals began to feed,
cycling through channels every two seconds.
CNN.
Cryo-Dyne.
Bold and Beautiful.
ESPN IV.
Real Time.
High resolution video streamed into her retinas, the 50 gigahertz
modulated lasers in the frame of her Virtuals, bouncing light from the
imbedded prisms in the lenses and then rastering the input across the back
of her eyeballs. A screaming face replaced the green-blue waters
of a tropical paradise.
“Quotas are for the slight of—“
As quickly as it had appeared, the face vanished in a growing
fireball that filled her viewing field as the next channel locked in.
Katie refocused and let the channels blur, as the Wireless Local Area Network
within Nunn’s multimedia stream flashed channel after channel, rolling
through its nearly infinite menu. The WLAN’s content didn’t matter
– volume did. Katie craved the noise, was addicted to the input,
and in fact, could not concentrate unless assaulted by a cacophony of bits.
She momentarily checked the simulation running in the lower right quadrant
of her field of vision – a bare-bones, three-dimensional plot, with plasma
density contoured in a Day-Glo green mesh, and temperatures textured from
cool yellows to smoking blues. The simulation was a hydrodynamic/kinetic
mix, melding a fluid approach to an atom-by-atom calculation, her latest
attempt at predicting the plasma turbulence that was damping the Sonomak’s
ability to really burn.
Katie smiled.
Hydrodynamic/kinetic mix. It was a tricky approach, but
the only one that had the slightest chance of modeling what was occurring
in the heart of the Sonomak. The physics describing high-speed liquid
turbulent flow and ultra-hot plasmas were still poorly understood, nearly
impossible to model, and when mixed together, turned into a mathematical
nightmare beyond belief.
Impossible.
Couldn’t be modeled.
So chaotic, so intrinsically nonlinear, that the system just couldn’t
be understood.
At least that was what the experts insisted – all those wizened
old white men, with worn leather belts cinched over their little pot bellies.
Can’t do it, girl. No one can do it, girl.
This girl would prove them wrong.
That thought normally cheered her, but the smile faded from her
face as her thoughts drifted away from the simulation and to the chunk
of stainless steel, flickering lasers, and pulsing plasmas that the simulation
was attempting to model – the Sonomak. This work was too applied
for her taste, too tied to experiments and the boxful of zip discs crammed
with data that refused to be modeled.
There was no real theoretical work anymore, no more physics that
was studied for the pure joy of simply understanding how the universe worked.
For twelve wonderful months at Cambridge, she had worked directly under
Stephen Hawking, modeling the vacuum fluctuations that took place in the
vicinity of black holes.
Bliss.
But she had lost her funding. Cosmology, particle physics,
those areas of research that couldn’t be transformed into a product suitable
for insertion into microwave ovens, or high definition CCD recorders, or
used to slow down the ever-widening trade gap with mainland China, had
been deemed nonessential by the Feds who doled out the science dollars.
The only other avenues of funding were in the production of military systems
used to carbonize Third World types before they could stumble out of their
huts, or to sign your soul away to one of the big Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence consortia and spend your days trying to crack the uncrackable
signals that poured down from the heavens, having been picked up for a
century now. Neither frying Third-Worlders nor crunching uncrackable
SETI signals was her cup of tea.
Good-bye funding.
At the moment, plasma physics was about as theoretical and esoteric
a topic as the U.S. government could tolerate. And Katie was afraid
that even that indulgence was about to come to an end.
She refocused on the simulation. At the edge of the plasmon,
that region where electrons had been swept out of the plasma, leaving behind
positively ionized helium atoms, just nanometers away from the shock wave
being generated by the collapse of the plasmon, the plasma temperatures
were peaking, the ascent rate punching discontinuities in the plot, the
diagram indicating that the plasma residing within a few atomic spacings
of the shock wave had reached a temperature in excess of 60 million degrees.
Then the Pocket Accelerators were ramped down.
The thermal gradient went ballistic as the plasmon imploded.
The simulation broke down, the plasma density mesh lines rippling,
actually folding back on themselves as the high-energy electrons transferred
their energy to the helium ions. Frame after frame of contour plots
rolled by, each one a snapshot of the plasma as it evolved every two picoseconds.
Katie shook her head in disgust, but the simulation continued to hang stationary
in her field of view, the input being fed directly into her retinas through
her Virtuals.
“Damn,” she said.
The simulation shattered, a black spiderweb sucking down plasma
density contour lines, the plasma temperature color scale oscillating,
unsuccessfully trying to auto-scale, as temperatures soared into the billion-degree
range, a temperature so unrealistic that even a theoretical physicist like
Katie, for whom lines and contour plots were reality, knew that the simulation
and physical reality had parted company. Not even Katie could believe
plasma temperatures in the multibillion-degree range, higher than temperatures
in the center of the sun.
“Terminate.”
The simulation vanished. In its place appeared Anthony’s
playroom, the default input for the simulation quadrant when she was not
running simulations. Anthony sat at his worktable, nearly hidden
behind a multicolored mound of construction paper, glistening tape, and
rubber bands. He carefully taped what looked like a rainbow-colored
fish to the top of the mound. Within the mound Katie recognized a
wide spectrum of geometrical shapes, ranging from the most basic squares,
circles and rectangles, to more complex Mobius strips, convoluted manifolds,
Penrose tiles, and Gordian-like knots.
Katie did not like the look of it.
Her son was obsessed with anything geometrical, and the things
he built usually caused trouble. The six-year-old focused; his crystalline
blue eyes flicking back and forth.
But for the moment, all was calm.
Anthony was not screaming. And just as importantly, the
latest in a long string of special ed teachers was not screaming.
Katie did not hold out much hope for Miss Alice. Caring, loving,
degreed in special-needs primary education, with a strong background in
math and science, she should have been perfect. Miss Alice had been
working with Anthony for almost three weeks now. Katie doubted that
Miss Alice would break the four-week barrier, not after what happened two
days ago, when Anthony had set up a convoluted array of aluminum foil and
lightbulbs, the contraption generating enough focused heat to ignite the
kitchen curtains.
911 was on speed dial.
He was a brilliant little boy, but could not quite connect with
the world, had no concept of the difference between appropriate and inappropriate
behavior. Katie sighted. People skills were an alien concept
to Anthony.
But at the moment, all was calm. She refocused past the
input being fed into her head and out into the Atlanta morning.
Reality.
Katie sipped tea from her cracked and terminally stained Starbuck’s
vacuum cup, the contents burning her tongue and scorching the roof of her
mouth. Tears momentarily welled up in her eyes, blurring both reality
and input.
“Watch, Mama!”
Katie squinted, driving tears from her eyes. Anthony looked
up at her, peering into the camera. He held up a paper cube that
fit snugly in the palm of his right hand. It was tied up like a Christmas
present with a green and blue string, bound together at the top of the
cube with what looked to Katie like a carrick knot. She knew that
only moments before the cube must have been the huge mound that had covered
is play table. She found herself smiling, thinking that someday Anthony
would make a wonderful Boy Scout, with absolutely no problem passing the
knot test.
“What have you got there, Anthony?” she asked, her voice picked
up by the receiver in the data pack slung across her back and transmitted
to the speaker in Anthony’s playroom.
“A surprise, Mama,” he said, smiling.
“No!” Katie stood up, turning her head, the camera in Anthony’s
playroom rastering in synch to her movement. Miss Alice walked into
the room, like a lamb to the slaughter, with nothing to defend herself
with except a warm simile.
“Put it down, Anthony!”
Anthony obeyed, placing the cube on the floor. Katie knew
at that instant she’d made a mistake, played right into Anthony’s hands.
Before she could say anything, he tugged on the carrick knot, the blue
and green strings parted, and the cube unfolded in an explosion of color
and twirling rubber bands, rising up off the floor, flapping sheets of
construction paper giving it lift, rubber band power driving it.
The contraption hit Miss Alice in the face. A swatch of tape unrolled
itself, tugged by multicolored beating wings, and then wrapped several
times around her head.
“Not today,” Anthony, please not today,” Katie said, knowing that
it was already to late. Miss Alice danced around the room, frantically
tugging at the tape that stuck to her face and the paper and rubber bands
that were wrapped around her head.
Anthony smiled for the camera. “An automatic tape dispenser,
Mama. Do you like it?”
Katie lowered her head and closed her eyes. It would be
a miracle if Miss Alice made it until the weekend. She started doing
quick calculations. Tech to Sandy Springs: twenty minutes.
Calming down Miss Alice: fifteen minutes. Confiscation of Anthony’s
tape, construction paper, scissors, glue, rubber bands, and markers: ten
minutes. A stern yet compassionate lecture to Anthony: two minutes.
More pleading and apologies to Miss Alice: ten minutes. Sandy Springs
to Tech: twenty minutes.
Grand total: one hour and seventeen minutes.
Katie groaned. Of all the mornings for this to happen.
For a moment, she wondered if she could ignore the situation, letting Miss
Alice handle this one on her own. She opened her eyes and refocused.
Miss Alice sat on the floor, cross-legged, whimpering, trying to pull a
big knot of masking tape out of her hair.
“Mama?” said Anthony, now standing next to Miss Alice, reaching
out toward her with a shaking right hand, but pulling it back each time
Miss Alice lurched and twisted as she tried to dislodge the sticky mess
from her head. “Is Miss Alice sad?” he asked.
Again Katie closed her eyes, and her right hand went toward the
phone on her belt. She should call Horst, her ex-husband, and make
him go home, acquainting him with the mundane aspects of the real world
and fatherhood, insisting that he deal with a six-year-old who had chewed
through three special-ed teachers in the last eight months.
Sure.
The silk-suited son of a bitch hadn’t seen Anthony in more than
two weeks. And there was no way that he’d leave campus this morning.
When Anthony had been born, Horst had cancelled trips, meetings, and conferences
to be with them, spending an entire month at home. But the fame that
Horst’s research had brought him, and the pressure to perform at an ever
higher level, had destroyed that gentle Horst, and eventually their marriage.
Katie checked the virtual clock hanging in front of her nose. The
Sonomak would be put through its paces in less than three hours.
She knew that nothing would get that egomaniac off campus today.
“Did I do a bad thing?” asked Anthony.
Katie refocused again. Anthony had backed away from the
now-sobbing Miss Alice. His chin quivered, his eyes had grown large,
and with his right hand he clenched a fistful of his sandy-blond hair,
twirling a lock of it with his index finger. Tears began to run from
the outside corners of his eyes. “I was bad, Mama!”
Katie was up, hopped from the platform, and started to run for
the stairwell. “It was just an accident, baby. Don’t worry,
I’m coming right home,” she said as she descended the stairwell, taking
two steps at a time. “Everything will be all right.”
#
The senator looked at the professor. The professor was big,
probably topping 220 pounds, and looked powerful even on screen.
His ink-black hair was slicked straight back across a head so big and square
that it looked chiseled from a block of wood. His pencil thin mustache
looked painted on.
The senator tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it.
Dr. Horst Wittkowski smiled back, instantly understanding what
the look on Ty Miller’s face meant. Bad news. Of that he had
absolutely no doubt. The only question was how bad it would be.
He slowed his breathing, lifted his hands from his lap and placed them
atop the cool lacquered perfection of his mahogany desk. He leaned
forward, pursed his lips ever so slightly to denote concern, and then angled
his head to the left as he furrowed his brow, the expression and body language
precisely engineered to solicit details.
Senator Ty Miller felt the thin sheet of sweat across his forehead
begin to bead up, and a muscle in the left side of his face, just at the
base of his jaw, ticking as sure and steady as his pocket watch.
He did not like to deliver bad news – it made him nervous. His career
had been built on the twin political pillars of filling up the pork barrel
and slapping the backs of countless good ‘ol boys. Nothing good came
from delivering bad new.
“The news, Senator?” asked Horst, his voice deep and resonant,
the German accent polished to a high luster.
Senator Miller swallowed hard. “The president has decided
to fund the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor,” he said,
and then slipped back in his chair, bracing himself for the explosion that
he was sure would come, as the significance of what he’d told Wittkowski
hammered home.
What is wrong with the presidents of this country? Horst wanted
to shout. Clinton forced to resign in ’97, Gore killed in ’99 after
a visit to the troops in Cairo, where a wayward SAM took out Air Force
One, with both those events opening the way for Vice President Marie Meyer
from Iowa to fill the power vacuum. If it didn’t involve corn or
cows she was out of her depth. She didn’t know plasma physics from
pork bellies. But Americans loved the woman, had actually elected
her twice after she had finished out Gore’s term.
“Professor?”
Horst did not flinch. He had known this day would come,
had known that the pressure that big Malaysian money was exerting on the
White House, and the sheer force of the personality of Mahathir bin Mohamad
could not be denied. The Malaysian government had had the Japanese,
the Russians, the Europeans, and now the Chinese on board for the better
part of a year now. Only the Americans had been holding out – saying
that they couldn’t afford ITER, not after the billions they’d spent on
the latest SETI upgrade, extending the diameter of the Aericibo radio dish
by yet another 100 meters, boosting sensitivity in order to try and cut
out some of the background noise from the most recent indecipherable signals.
The fact that Meyer had finally bent to world pressure did not
surprise Horst. What did surprise him was the timing of the announcement.
HE had thought that such a decision would not have been made until at least
a year after the election – he had been depending on that eighteen-month
window. He did not think that the Democrats could tolerate anymore
“International Cooperation” this close to the election, not after having
sunk nearly three times the amount of funds than had been originally budgeted
for the International Space Station, upgrading its Ears so it could listen
to aliens pass gas in distant galaxies, only to have the whole station
burn up less than a year later when a jammed Russian thruster accidentally
deorbited the behemoth.
“I assume that a deal has been made the with the Malaysians, and
that ITER will be built in Putrajaya, tapping the amazing know-how of a
people whose high-technology capabilities are best evidenced by their domination
of the world market in basketball show manufacturing?” asked Horst in silky
tones.
The senator nodded.
“Wonderful news for the Malaysian,” said Horst, a smile now filling
his face, exposing $20,000-worth of exquisite bridgework. “But why
would this have an impact on me?” he asked, knowing full well what that
impact would be.
The senator leaned forward. He’d gotten this far without
an explosion, so saw no reason to sugarcoat the rest of it. “ITER
will be allocated nearly 75 percent of both the Department of Energy and
Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration plasma funding from ongoing
programs. This change will be reflected in the ’08 budget, with those
programs which support ITER being given the highest priority for the remaining
funds.”
Horst’s eyebrow arched in a questioning gesture.
The senator answered without having to hear the question.
“There will be no increase in the total plasma funding from either DOE
or DARPA. What was a $200 million allocation for general plasma funding
for this year will be reduced to something around $50 million for ‘08”
Horst took a quick, shallow breath and frowned. Fiscal ’08
started on October 1 of ’07, which meant that the fate of existing programs,
and the meager funding that they would receive, would be decided at the
latest by the end of August. It was already June. That gave
him only two months, not the eighteen that he really needed to get the
Sonomak up and running, and generate the results that would get him follow-on
funding. “Then I have two months to dazzle my good friends at DOE
and DARPA?” asked Horst.
“At the most,” answered the senator.
Horst knew that it wasn’t even as hopeful as that. By the
time the in-crowd at Princeton, MIT, and Stanford were funded, there would
be absolutely nothing left for other efforts. He was certain that
Georgia Tech had been redlined the moment the president had finished shaking
hands with the Malaysian egomaniac. “Thank you, Senator,” he said,
dismissing the topic with the tone of this voice, knowing that nothing
more could be accomplished with Ty Miller, DOE or DARPA. He took
a deep breath. There was only one other source of money that he could
possibly tap into. Images of an orbital Sonomak powering up a gamma
ray laser flashed through his head. He did not like it – not one
little bit. He was not opposed to getting into the covert weapons
business. The problem was the way those people operated. Breakthroughs
were instantly classified, and hardware sucked down into a secret agency
vortex never to be seen again. They wouldn’t let you publish, wouldn’t
even let you talk about your work. They kept you in money, but to
the outside world, to the physics community, it would appear that you had
fallen off the planet.
Bye-bye Nobel.
But he knew he would have to make that call.
However, first things first. He refocused on Ty. “We’ll
have you on line for this morning’s demonstration?” he asked, sounding
positive and upbeat.
Senator Miller nodded, not certain how to read the situation.
He had just informed this man that his entire research program, the thing
that he had built his life around, would cease to exist in the next two
months. “I look forward to it, Professor,” he said, sounding relieved.
Horst smiled and disconnected.
“ITER,” Horst said in a whisper, slowly shaking his head, feeling
the rage begin to build. “Goddamned Malaysians!” It was their
fault. With more money than brains, willing to pay for more than
half of the cost of the project, operating under the belief that if they
had the world’s tallest building, the fastest rail system, the largest
database of indecipherable alien noise, the biggest supercomputer, and
now the world’s most expensive pressure cooker, that all those things would
somehow make them a First World nation.
They were savages.
They prayed to snakes and poked knitting needles through their
faces to prove their oneness with God. Imbeciles.
“Goddamned imbeciles!” The sound of his own voice unnerved him.
He was standing, his hands balled into fists, the knuckles white, the sound
of blood pounding in his head. He forced himself to think of something
else. Time was short – incredibly short. He needed a new source
of funding now, before his existing money ran out and he could no longer
keep the team intact. If they disbanded, it would be nearly impossible
to regroup and get the Sonomak back up. He forced his breathing to
slow, sat back down in his chair, and opened the center desk drawer.
Reaching in deep, all the way to the back, he grabbed the slick surface
of a DVD wallet and pulled it out. The bundle was thick, nearly thirty
discs crammed into the wallet, one for every possible contingency, both
technical and political. The wallet unfolded like an accordion and
he fingered through it, looking for a very special disc.
The DVD.
He laid it on his desk. Although he had planned for this
contingency, until this moment, he had not believed that it would have
ever actually come to this. He looked down at the DVD and at its
small, handwritten, white label: Implosion.
Horst tugged at his tie, making sure that it was straight, ran
a hand across his slick-backed hair, and looked at the wall of plaques
and citations, as if checking to make sure that they hadn’t vanished in
the last few minutes. In the center of the wall, directly above his
head, hung a hone-meter-length of tube – the Pocket Accelerator, a mile’s
worth of conventional electron accelerator packed into a tube that you
could twirl like a baton.
Horst smiled affectionately at the hardware and then turned around
to face the Vid camera mounted in the far corner of his office. “Vid
on,” he said. He looked into the camera, took a deep breath, focused
his thoughts, and expelled the lungful of air as the Vid’s red recording
light came on. He smiled, no longer seeing the camera. He now
saw the millions that he knew would someday be watching him, viewing this
Vid, reliving a critical piece of history.
“I’ve come to realize that adversity can be the scientist’s greatest
ally,” said Horst, pushing his voice down half an octave. “An abundance
of funding causes one to become complacent, to follow a conservative approach
that only incrementally increases one’s knowledge, adding a brick here
or there to a scientific edifice which already reaches to the heavens.
But the breakthrough, the new insight, the opening of vistas yet unseen,
come about only by bold action and desperate times.”
Horst held the DVD up to the camera.
#
“I do not like bolts,” Beong Kim said to the torque wrench as
he checked yet one more bolt, tugging on the wrench handle, its LCD screen
reading fifty-eight foot-pounds. He snugged the bolt, bringing it
up to the specified sixty foot-pounds.
Tightening bolts was not a proper job for a posdoctoral research
engineer. It was disgraceful. But the Titanium-Sapphire Laser
and the Pocket Accelerators it powered were his responsibility. And
today nothing could be left to chance – he would not let the grad students
or co-ops anywhere near his equipment. There could be no mistakes.
Beong closed two of his three eyes and lowered his face to the
barrel of the Titanium-Sapphire Laser, letting his chin rest on the cold
stainless steel. Transmitted through the metal, the chug-chug vibration
of mechanical backing pumps rang in his head, actually rattling his back
molars. It felt right, the pitch correct, the intensity balanced.
Five years in the Sonomak lab had taught him to use every one
of his senses.
As he felt the equipment, his third eye, ever vigilant, continued
to suck down photons, converting light to electrons, digitizing, sampling,
compressing, and then uplinking the data to Low Earth orbit and the nearest
Teledesic satellite. Bounced among the 240 satellites of the system,
the data spanned the globe within a few milliseconds, downlinked to Taejon,
Korea, and to the one-meter dish perched atop Sangbom Kim’s roof.
The Vid display glowed in the Kim living room, showing an out-of-focus
close-up of the Titanium-Sapphire Laser’s output port. No one watched.
All were asleep in Korea. But that did not matter. Everything
was being recorded for later viewing. Sangbom Kim, Beong’s father,
was ever vigilant, spedding his days viewing his son’s previous day’s activities,
making certain that nothing happened to disgrace his family or country.
Beong opened his eyes and straightened up, his back creaking.
He moved along the laser tube, running his right hand across it, not looking
at it, but focusing on the electronics that filled the line of rack panels
running across the rear wall of the lab. Vacuum pressures, cryo-pump
cold head temperatures, residual gas traces from the tube. He scanned
them all.
There could be no mistakes.
“How many times are you going to retorque that tube, Beong?” asked
Aaron Tanaka from the other room – the main lab that housed the Sonomak.
Despite the fact that Beong was now in possession of a Ph.D.,
and was a postdoc for Professor Wittkowski, while Aaron Tanaka was merely
a technician, without so much as a Bachelor’s degree, Beong still twitched
from the waist at the sound of Aaron’s voice, ingrained reflexes forcing
the abbreviated bow.
Aaron was in charge of the lab – Professor Wittkowski had made
that perfectly clear when Beong had agreed to stay on after receiving his
Ph.D.. Aaron would always be in charge, whatever Beong did, despite
the fact that it had been his work and his thesis project that had let
to the first experimental demonstration of the Pocket Accelerators.
Beong pushed those thoughts out of his head.
Dr. Horst Wittkowski was the professor, not him.
“Earth to Beong!” said Aaron, his Texas drawl echoing off the
lab walls. He did not bother to look up from what he was doing, not
wanting to make eye contact with any of the grad-grunts sweating over the
Sonomak, making everything pretty for the dog and pony show that would
begin at one o’clock.
Once again Beong’s muscles twitched, forcing him into an abbreviated
bow. “I am done with the torquing,” Beong said, as if announcing
he had just completed a religious rite. “I am feeling the equipment.”
Aaron smiled, set down the multimeter he’d been using to check
some high voltage feedthroughs, walked over to the doorway connecting the
two labs, the doorway the Titanium-Sapphire Laser’s main tube went through
before it fed into the beam splitters, which in turn coupled with the Sonomak’s
Pocket Accelerators. Poking his head in, he watched Beong running
his hands down the tube, fingers pushing at electrical feedthroughs and
gas injectors.
Aaron had seen a lot of students come and go, but Beong was the
best. He understood equipment, knew that in the final analysis, regardless
of what some fancy-ass simulation told you and what a bank of green lights
insisted, that you never powered up until you’d felt the equipment.
And Beong was always afraid. That was critical. As soon as
you lost fear of your equipment, that little act of arrogance would cause
it to self-destruct in some new and gruesome fashion.
“Beong!”
Beong looked over at Aaron, focusing all three eyes, bowing once
more.
Aaron smiled. “Today is no big deal, Beong, just take it
down a few notches. We’ve run the system at the fifteen-kilowatt
level more than a dozen times now without any problems. Horst will
be at the controls. If any bug crops up, he’ll just flip the displays
into remote mode and output one of the test runs.
Beong shook his head. That would be dishonest. The
professor would never do that.
Reading the expression on Beong’s face, Aaron knew why Beong was
a postdoc and not a professor with is own lab – he had the real-world savvy
of a pup. “This show is for Washington-types, program monitors, and
a few military paper pushers. We could run the whole damn thing as
a simulation, and they wouldn’t have the slightest idea that you hadn’t
tossed a single electron down the Pocket Accelerators.”
Beong shook his head.
Aaron smiled once again, knowing it was futile. “You might
want to check the third and fifth harmonics on the main beam oscillator,”
he said, knowing full well that those wouldn’t affect the experiment in
the slightest, but knowing that Beong needed something to worry about.
“Don’t want to be wasting any power at those useless frequencies.”
Horrified at what Aaron had said, Beong dropped to the floor and
rolled under the tube. He’d checked the higher harmonics less than
an hour ago, but that didn’t matter. Aaron thought there might be
a harmonic problem.
There could be no mistakes today.
© robert a. metzger. All rights reserved. |
