© Copyright 2004, 2006 by silli_artie@hotmail.com
This work may not be reposted or redistributed without the prior
express written permission of the author.
A work of fiction, meant for adults. Read something else if you are
not an adult, or are offended by stories with sexual content. Then
again, if all you’re looking for is in-out, in-out, in-out, you
should probably read something else. I welcome constructive comments.
Enjoy.
I was double-checking a customer project when the phone rang.
I glanced at the Caller ID display. My lips went into a snarl and my stomach tightened as I recognized the number. The question was, should I answer the damn thing?
Why not -- let’s see how long I can go before telling him to fuck off.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Ah, yes, Doctor Russell. This is David Hooper calling. Are you busy?”
Oh, so it’s Doctor Russell -- he must be in trouble. How nice. “What do you want?” I said flatly.
“Ah, Doctor Russell, we’re having some difficulty with your oscillators. We were wondering if you would be in a position to ...”
“Have Nikki look at them -- he understands them better than I do, right?” I told him, and hung up the phone.
I took a breath and looked at the phone. Was that nice? Nope. Was that nicer than I’d expected I’d be to him? Yes. Remarkably civil, considering how Hooper had treated me.
He must be in a real pickle -- he’d called me “Doctor,” twice, and said, “your oscillators,” a pretty clear recognition that they were my invention, not his ass-kissing Nikki’s.
And I imagine that Nick had been breaking his back on whatever the problem was, and Hooper had been forced into the realization that his dear Nikki couldn’t do it.
The phone rang again, Hooper again. I hit the button to turn off my voicemail system. Rather than let him leave a message, I was sending him one.
Besides, I had a customer to help out, someone who was actually interested in what I could do for them, and paid for my time.
But I put down my mechanical pencil again. Paying customer, yes. A challenge? Not quite up to the level of what I’d left.
The phone eventually stopped ringing.
I slid my chair over to the computer that handled the phone and fax. I brought up a config screen and told the phone not to answer calls from Hooper’s number.
Back to work.
By the next afternoon, I’d prototyped what the customer needed, and put the design through its paces. Let it run overnight, and I’ll turn it over to them.
Another phone call -- hadn’t I? No, not from Hooper; same prefix, different extension. With a slight smile, I picked up the phone. “David -- how are you doing?”
He replied, “Please don’t hang up on me, Terry...” He sounded harried.
Hooper must be on his ass. “I won’t. I take it there’s a problem?”
He sighed. “Oh yeah.”
“And Nikki couldn’t solve it? That must have been quite a blow to Hooper.”
Dave sighed again. “Terry, you don’t know what it cost him to call you yesterday...”
Bile moved into my throat. “And he only cost me my job, my career?” I took a breath and shook my head. “I’m sorry. What’s up?”
“Terry, we’re between deep shit and totally screwed. Can I come over and talk?”
“Does he know you’re talking to me?”
“Of course! He’s been begging me, practically on his knees, that’s how bad it is. Terry, he’s an asshole. I know that just as well as you, and Nick is an asshole, an ass kisser, and has proven himself to be the ignorant twit we’ve all known him to be. But I need your help -- the group needs your help -- your product needs your help. Please.”
“Dave, come on by,” I told him.
“Thanks. I’ll be over in about an hour.”
“Just come around to the back, then. That’s the friends’ entrance.”
“Thanks, Terry.”
I hung up the phone, pushed back from the desk, and looked out into my back yard. Confirmation, I guess... Of a bunch of things -- that it was my product, that Nikki was a twit. Didn’t make up for Hooper ending my research career and squeezing me out of the company.
So what the hell was I going to do? The damn things had been working fine when I left.
I started thinking of possibilities, but I didn’t have any data. What I could do was make sure I had two mugs chilling in the freezer. I knew I had a few cold bottles of Belgian ale.
When Dave arrived, he had a brown paper bag with him, and a manila folder. We shook hands and hugged briefly -- I hadn’t seen him in six or seven months.
He took a bottle of Chimay out of the bag.
I shook my head, walking to the refrigerator. “You don’t trust me?” I said in mock anguish. I got out the mugs and a chilled bottle of Chimay.
He laughed. “Just wanted to be sure.”
I opened and poured for us. We sat around the little table outside my office and lab area.
“How are you doing, Terry? Busy?” Dave asked me.
I took another sip of my ale. “Dave, I’ve worked on more projects since I left than in years at the salt mines. Some of them have even been interesting. All of them have paid well.”
“Hey, I talked to Charlie, and he showed me the design you did for him -- a really clever piece of work!”
I nodded. “That one was fun. Wish I had more like that, and more customers like Charlie. So, how are you doing? Scrub your nose before you came over here?”
He scowled and shook his head. “I’m counting the days until I retire, and they know it. I’m just hoping that when it comes, you’ve got too much work to handle, and you need a flunky.”
My turn to shake my head. “Dave, I’m turning away work now. Let me know when you want to start.”
He smiled. “Thanks -- I appreciate it.”
“So, Mom is sick? What’s happening?” I asked. “Things were smooth last I knew.”
I’d invented a new kind of oscillator, a clock. Call it a quantum resonator, for lack of a better term. It was a lot more stable than existing atomic clocks, far simpler, smaller, and cheaper. “Mom” was the first one I’d built.
Dave nodded. “And they were until about two months ago. Then Mom and some of her children started having problems.”
“How many do we have?”
Dave glanced up at the ceiling. “Six in the lab, two at a local, ah, customer -- I think you know who, and another nine scattered around the country, three of those in Fort Mumble, Maryland.”
“Synch problems?” I hazarded a guess.
He frowned again. “Not really -- they’re still in remarkable synchronization. The problem is, well...” He scratched his head. “It’s weird. The local ones, just the local ones -- ours in labs, and the ones at Onizuka, periodically get this ... wobble. It’s a little wobble, and the control loops take care of it, so we’re still rock solid. But it’s an anomaly.”
“In the P2 loop?” I asked.
He smiled, a nasty smile, as he shook his head. “Nope, the P1 loop.”
I sat back. Weird. “Interesting. I don’t know how you get it to do that.”
He chuckled. “Neither do we. Want to know what Nikki did?”
I shrugged. “He screwed up, that much I know. How bad?”
Dave took a long draw on his ale. I reached for the bottle and refilled both of us. “Well, he decided to dick with proto 4. He refused to show me, or anyone, what he was going to do before he did it.”
“And?” I asked.
“He gathered a crowd, to show his mastery. Powered it up. The 8-ball made this weird ringing noise for a few seconds and exploded into a zillion pieces. Lucky the covers were in place -- someone could have been hurt.”
I shook my head. The 8-ball was what we called the oscillator core. It was a fused ceramic sphere the size of a billiard ball that contained the heart of the quantum resonator. “Learn something new every day -- didn’t know you could get it to do that.”
Dave nodded. “Neither did we. That was last week. Hooper was pissed. The customer found out, and delivered an ultimatum -- get you involved, or they’re marching in and handing the whole thing to EG&G.”
“Marching in” was Government contract-speak for taking over the project.
“That must have been an interesting meeting,” I suggested.
Dave grinned. “It was; I was there. Hooper tried to tell them you’d left the project, but they knew better -- they told Hooper they knew he threw you out, and they’d almost marched in when that happened. Get you back on it, or they’ll have EG&G call you and help them.”
EG&G? I thought about it. “Brenner? Brunner? Have to look at my phone log, but I talked to a guy from EG&G about a week ago. He wanted to know if I was available, nothing specific. Told him I was busy at the moment, but to call back. We had a nice chat. I mentioned I’d lost my clearances, but he didn’t think that was a problem for what they needed.”
“Charles H. Brunner,” Dave said.
“That’s the guy. Sounds like they’re itching to go on this deal?”
“Oh yeah. More heat on Hooper, and the rest of us.”
Sounds like deep shit. “Still, if it’s just a wobble that the P1 loop takes out, why worry?”
Dave nodded again and pulled out the folder, taking out a printed page with a weird looking waveform on it. “Okay, boss, how you get it to do that?” he said, tapping the page and quoting a phrase I used when I suspected someone didn’t understand things.
I looked at the waveform. “This is decaying? It eventually dies out?” It looked like a ringing waveform -- exponentially decaying sine series.
“Yeah, it dies out, or it wobbles again. Some times once, for a few seconds, some times it repeats for hours. They never start before eight at night.”
“They? More than one does this?”
Dave nodded again. “Oh yeah -- like I said, all the local ones. Except for 4, which Nikki trashed. Oh, and they all do it at the same fucking time.”
I sat back and worked on my ale. I got another bottle and refilled us.
After a while I spoke up. “And I expect you want me to fix it?”
Dave gave me a nod. “Terry, I understand the damn things a whole lot better than Nick does or ever will -- and in the last few days even he and Hooper have admitted that. I don’t know what the hell is going on. It’s your baby. I hope you can figure it out, for our sake.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said. We spread paper over the table.
After looking at a few waveform captures, I said, “This is where Nikki says something on the order of, ‘it is impossible -- your measurements are in error,’ right?”
Dave laughed. “You don’t have the accent quite right, but you hit it on the head. And the customer doesn’t appreciate his attitude one damn bit.”
“Because it’s pretty obvious that it is doing it, no matter what our opinion is,” I suggested.
Dave reached for the ale bottle. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from you, Doctor Russell, it’s that when my hypothesis disagrees with what the thing on the bench in front of me is doing, it’s my hypothesis that’s suspect.”
I sat for a few minutes, puzzling at the data. It wasn’t a big wobble, but it shouldn’t be there, and I didn’t know how or why it was there.
“Okay, first thing I want,” I started in...
“You’ll do it?” Dave interrupted, excited.
I smiled. “I’m offering. It isn’t going to be cheap. I’m going to tweak the bastard’s nose every millimeter of the way, and I don’t know what’s going on either!”
Dave matched my smile. “I wouldn’t expect anything less. What do you need?”
“For starters, I want a diagnostic loaded into all units, wherever they are. When we see this rising edge in the P1 loop,” I pointed to a portion of the waveform, “I want a snapshot of the following parameters, and twenty zero crossings of digitized P1 loop detector output.” I listed the parameters, starting with the exact time. “Whenever one of them triggers, e-mail the data to me at this address.” I wrote out one of my data collection addresses.
I saw the expression on Dave’s face.
“Yeah, I know, the spooks at Onizuka and NRO aren’t going to like it. Have them move units outside the hot zones so they can send me data. I need this data from every unit if I’m going to figure out what’s going on.”
“It shouldn’t be a hard sell,” Dave replied. “Actually, I’ll start with the locals -- Captain Lee wants me to call after I leave here anyway. I imagine he’ll buy off on it, which will make it pretty damn hard for Hooper to turn down.”
“This could be fun,” I suggested to Dave.
“Yep, if you don’t mind the sound of crushing bones.” Dave said, still smiling.
“I’m going to want two units brought over here, both with diagnostic extenders for the 8-balls. I’ll need a really fast four-channel sampling scope, with deep memory -- a gig at least. I also need a spectrum analyzer. I’ll work up the full list tonight and e-mail it to you.”
“Why the spectrum analyzer?” Dave asked. “I can understand the rest of the gear, and I agree with bringing it here. I’ll put together a set of matched cables and the other stuff.”
“I’ve always wanted a good spectrum analyzer,” I told him with a grin.
Dave laughed and took another sip. “Oh yeah. It’s going to be painful, but fun to watch.”
I had another thought. “I’ll e-mail you a work order later tonight. The cover letter will be nasty -- this is a take-it-or-leave-it deal, and I’ll make the same exact offer to EG&G if it comes to that.” Thinking about it a little more, I added, “That should make your life easier with that asshole -- you can say I’ve gone over the line, I’m being vindictive, all that kind of crap.”
Dave nodded. “Yeah, I can’t smile too much. Dammit Terry, I miss working with you. I hope I can out-breathe the bastards. Only got a few months to go.”
“Hey, like I said -- I’ve got the work, whenever you’re ready. You won’t have to sweep floors.”
We talked for a bit more and finished our ale. He took off.
I actually got a call from Captain Lee about a half hour later. He was quite happy I was willing to work on the deal. I told him quite honestly that while I was very interested in understanding the anomaly, and resolving it, I was going to have to hold my nose to get past certain aspects. He understood, and offered his services if I ran into any obstacles. I told him the first obstacle was likely to be the agreement I’d be sending; as far as I was concerned, it was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, and I’d offer the same terms to EG&G. He understood, and suggested I copy him on the thing. I can do that.
After awhile in thought, I put dinner into the oven, and started on the paperwork. I worked from my usual form agreement, adding details to attached schedules at the end. That was my style -- Schedule A listed the gear I kept. Schedule B listed the gear I’d need on loan.
I put things aside while I did dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. That gave me a clearer head to read things once more. Yeah, it was one-sided. But it wasn’t nasty. Oh, the cover letter was nasty, and deliberately so. I made some small tweaks, sending the contract part as a PDF to make it more difficult to modify. I sent it around six thirty, to Hooper, Dave, and Lee.
And heard from Captain Lee once more. We talked about my statement of work -- investigating the P1 anomaly and making recommendations. Damn, the guy was good -- he got it, understood why that was the best I could do right now. He could also have one of the East-coast units in my office within 24 hours, if that would help. Yes, it would. I still needed two with the full diagnostic extenders, but a third buttoned-up box that hadn’t shown the anomaly would help.
I stayed up late, for me at least, wrapping things up so I could devote full time to this thing, figure in two to three days or so. Figured it would take at least that long to gather up the goods and deliver them. That and for Hooper to swallow the rest of his sizeable ego.
Another morning, another day full of challenges... Deliberately didn’t check e-mail; I’d do that after lunch.
About twelve fifteen got a call. Caller ID told me it was Dave on his cell phone.
“Dwarf,” I answered the phone.
“Pliers,” Dave replied.
“Have a fun morning?” I queried.
“Barrel of laughs,” he replied. “Lee was waiting in the lobby, full dress uniform, with an aide, when Hooper got in. They were locked in Hooper’s office for two hours. Oh, I’m calling you from Santa Clara -- I’m picking up your scope and some other goodies. I got called in about eleven. Thanks for the cover letter; I gave my speech about how you were being nasty and over the top. Hooper ate it up and Lee smiled. I guess Hooper tried to stall on the spectrum analyzer, telling Lee that it would take six to eight weeks to get. Lee got a phone call while I was there, and told us they’d found one on the East Coast and would deliver it to you by five today along with one of the East Coast boxes. Oh, and bill us for it, and shipping. Hooper was pissed.”
“That’s too bad. Any more events last night?”
“Oh yeah. I finished the diagnostic patch this morning, and gave it to Lee after I tested it. Lee said it will be up and running on all their boxen by five this afternoon. He also told us it will be up and running on all of our boxen by then as well.”
“And Hooper sat there and took it?”
“I guess the brutal stuff took place earlier. For all the ass-kicking he did, Lee’s shoes were still shiny.”
“But Hooper signed the thing?”
“Shit no! He passed that up the line, probably to Pat or whoever is running the division this week. Lee’s aide is collecting that signature. You should clear some lab space and put extra mugs in the freezer -- the party is at your place this afternoon.”
“Great! What time?”
“I should be there with the DSO and random bits around three. Lee’s East Coast delivery four thirty or so. Jenny and Phil are in charge of robbing two units from the lab, and setting them up at your place with the diagnostic stalks. Jenny said they’d be ready to go at three. That too early?”
“Make it four, and I’ll be ready. Is the DSO on a cart?”
“Can be. Want it that way?”
“Yeah. I’ll build stands to put the connectors on the diagnostic stalks at the same height as the DSO inputs.”
“I can get Jenny to call you with dimensions,” he offered.
“That’s great. I’ve got the lumber. If you get here early, you might get to help me make sawdust.”
“Hey, love to! But remember, you said I wouldn’t have to sweep floors!”
That made me laugh. “Okay, I’m going to get to work. See you later.”
“See you.”
I cackled as I walked into the lab and started cleaning space for things. I kept a ten-by-ten foot area by the side door for customer setups. Luckily, it only had small stuff in it right now. That got moved to the den. I had time to run to the lumber yard and pick up a few sheets of MDF to make stands. Hmmm -- and some rotating caster feet to make things easier to move.
Jenny called just after I got back. She was looking forward to seeing me again. She and Phil were first-class lab technicians. I missed them. She gave me height measurements.
I looked at my catalogs to get height measurements for the DSO on its cart. Damn, three options for carts, each of them differing heights! I sketched out what I wanted for stands, two-by-four strength members, three-quarter fiberboard, one open side for cables, casters. I knew the box dimensions, and cut the parts I could.
Dave showed up a little after two. The DSO was still warm, undoubtedly freshly looted from someone’s lab. I felt a little guilty about that; I’d set someone’s work back.
I set the DSO the way I liked it, made some height measurements, and we whipped out two stands complete with wheels by three thirty, even got the sawdust cleaned up and a spray coat of lacquer on the stands. Nice.
Lee and his aide, a cutie named Mendoza, arrived just before four. Root beer all around. I signed copies of the work order. They kept one, I kept one, and one would go back to Hooper.
We talked about the deal. Lee let me know he’d strong-armed Hooper, and wasn’t happy with him at all. I pleaded the case for the company, even though I didn’t work there any more, and it was Hooper who ran me out -- the company was still supportive, and if Lee was hot to get these things, they (I think I lapsed into “we”) were the best way to do that. It would take someone else a year or more to pick up the manufacturing skills needed to replicate where we were now, and that’s with someone such as Dave or I to help the process along. There were so many nuances, little things, that we’d learned. And it wasn’t that we were trying to keep things secret -- it’s natural, in the development of such a technology, that there are a lot of little things, and we just don’t realize what they are. Dave chimed in on those points, emphasizing that we wanted to understand what was going on, and fix it.
Lee agreed with us. He thought we had a really important technology. If we could get it space-qualified, the next generation of GPS birds would be cheaper, lighter, and more accurate. Hell, if we could get volumes up, it could be far cheaper than rubidium standards, let alone cesium.
I mused about that. In comparison to the cesium standards they flew now on the GPS birds, these things should be a piece of cake.
Jenny and Phil arrived in Phil’s van, and we’d only unloaded the support stuff when an Air Force van drove up.
We arranged the DSO and the two stands in the open area of my lab. We very carefully moved the two oscillators from Phil’s van on to the stands. Everyone thought the stands were very cool. Phil and Jenny started the work of pulling covers and remounting the 8-balls on the diagnostic stalks.
The East Coast box we installed in the den, plugging it into an outlet and the house Ethernet network. The spectrum analyzer was still in its shipping crate, as were four boxes of accessories, options, and manuals. A tech was scheduled to do setup for me tomorrow.
Damn, but the stands looked good. The diagnostic ports on the stalks were at just the right level for the DSO inputs, so running cables was easy. I printed another set of drawings for the stands for Jenny -- she wanted a few made for their lab.
By six that night those two oscillators and the DSO were cabled together, powered up, and run through diagnostics. With this kind of deal, the cable lengths had to be carefully matched -- a foot is a nanosecond. The two oscillators were matched to within picoseconds -- a thousand times smaller than a nanosecond, ten to the minus twelfth seconds. Cable lengths were matched to within millimeters. Even so, I got out my color-coding tape and put color bands on cables and connectors, so I could be sure of what was used to make which measurements.
My offer to get pizza was accepted; I ordered from a good local place, and Dave picked it up. The Air Force guys with the van were happy with that. Lee cut them loose after dinner. Jenny and Phil left as well, leaving me with Dave, Captain Lee, and his aide Miss Mendoza.
We verified Dave’s diagnostic program was in place on the three units in the house. Who knows about the ones back at the lab. Dave had built a front-panel “phone home” command into the diagnostic, which we used to verify things.
The hardest part of debugging is sitting around waiting for something to happen. And there’s a fine line to be drawn between exploring possibilities and becoming so fixed on a particular hypothesis that you exclude others.
We didn’t have to wait long. I had the DSO set to capture our weird event. Anything arriving at the data drop mailbox would sound a chime.
Four minutes after eight -- the wobble showed up on the DSO, and almost immediately we heard “bing bing bing!” from the computer -- three sets of diagnostic messages. The status LCDs on the oscillators showed “P1 Loop” and “Diag 23.”
Lee frowned.
Dave sighed and patted me on the back. “I’ll go back to labs and make sure things are set up.”
I thanked him for his help, and so did Lee.
We watched the P1 phase wobbles from both boxen on the DSO screen. How it do that? “Now comes the tough part,” I told Lee and aide. “I get to figure it out.”
Lee smiled and shook my hand. “We’ll leave you alone. Call me if you don’t get diagnostic messages from the labs systems, otherwise I’ll leave you alone for a week.”
I nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate that!”
They took off.
I was still watching the traces dance half an hour later when I started getting more “bings” from the mail computer. Dave was getting the diagnostic installed at Labs.
The thing dampened out. All clear and quiet. I’d recorded the first few seconds of the event in the scope’s memory. I went back and reviewed that, and dumped it to my Dual G5 desktop computer, as I had better tools for waveform inspection there.
Once I had the waveforms up, I reset the DSO’s waveform capture.
I started playing with the diagnostic traces, cobbling together a Mathematica tool to look at the stuff.
Hmmm... The three hits I’d gotten had been at different times. Different on the order of microseconds; I had sub-nanosecond timing accuracy to work with.
Like a lot of researchers, I do some of my best pondering sitting on the toilet.
My first hypothesis/insight -- they’re doing this in response to some external influence; something is making them act this way.
Okay, that’s pretty obvious. So what’s that external influence? The damn things are shielded out the kazoo, and the field coils maintain the operating magnetic field. That eliminates most of the electromagnetic spectrum, the direct current to light portion. Had I invented a particle detector? That’s a possibility.
Pondering interrupted by “bing bing bing bing bing bing bing!” A quick wipe and flush, stepping out of my pants as it would slow me down to pull them up and fasten them.
Thanks, Dave -- more data.
I looked at the DSO traces. I had the feeling this one wouldn’t decay as quick.
Hmmm... Difference in time... Assume something is generating a wavefront, a point source. I’m seeing the result of the wavefront propagating to my sensors.
I carefully moved the right hand oscillator, swinging it and the DSO around, careful not to tension the cables. If my hypothesis was correct, then changing the orientation of the sensors would change the time difference of arrival of the wavefront to the two oscillators. I had enough accuracy to measure centimeter differences at the speed of light.
Aha! The separation between the waveforms changed! It acted like a wavefront! I could do direction finding with my two oscillators!
But then my phantom wavefront petered out. Everything back to normal.
I looked at the clock. Eleven thirty. Past my bed time.
I knew what I was going to build in the morning, but for now, it’s bed time.
And damn, I built and rebuilt that damn gadget in my sleep! I finally got up around three, sketched it on paper, and went back to bed. I slept until almost eight, late for me.
I checked the incoming mailbox; an event at one thirty.
I’ll be ready for you tonight, guys!
Back to the hardware store for two more 4 by 8 sheets, plywood this time, more good, straight two by fours -- hard to find these days. I also got a longish bolt, a concrete anchor, and a concrete drill.
Back at the ranch, I made a wheeled 4 by 8 foot platform. I flipped the platform over, and right in the middle, I drilled a hole through it and into my concrete floor in the lab. That would be my pivot point.
By ten I was set -- both oscillators and the DSO were secured to the platform, which I could rotate. Another trip for long Ethernet cables, extension cord, and to REI for topological maps of the area. Set things up with the compass, mark up the floor, mark my location.
Had a funny phone call. The field tech who was to set up the spectrum analyzer wasn’t sure he had the address right. He didn’t do too many setups at residential addresses. I assured him the address was correct, and I’d be waiting for him.
He still wasn’t sure, until I showed him into the lab. He saw the DSO sitting between the two oscillators and stopped in his tracks. The spectrum analyzer is about $65,000 when you include the options. The DSO is a very specialized piece, running around $130,000, and the oscillators, well, I don’t imagine he’d seen one of them quite yet, let alone two.
I fixed us tamales for lunch. About halfway through, I think he recognized my name. Yeah, that Doctor Russell.
He was done about two in the afternoon. I played with the spectrum analyzer, teaching it about the network. What a great piece of equipment!
Still, I was waiting, and pondering. I looked at the map I’d tacked to the wall. Assume I’ve invented a particle detector. What are likely sources? Well, the Sun, certainly. The variable on-and-off part didn’t make sense for that. Could be another kind of stellar/interstellar source, but once more, I’d expect more repeatability, regularity. Terrestrial sources?
I looked at the map. Ooh -- how about the Stanford Linear Accelerator? They’re in the business of smashing things together to make even smaller, weirder things. Something possibly at Berkeley? How about Lawrence Livermore Labs?
Or a scary thought -- a third possibility -- a high-tech startup doing something similar? One of the arguments I’d never quite dismissed for the apparent “synchronization” of these devices involved quantum entanglement and the nightmares of J.T. Bell, a physicist of the mid 1960’s.
Eight O’clock. One minute after... Two minutes... Six... Eleven...
I was about to trade used water for fresh when, “bing bing bing bing bing bing bing!”
Once I’d transferred the captured waveforms to the computer, I reconfigured the DSO to have some fun. Find a null, and find a maxima -- they should be orthogonal, 90 degrees apart.
Null was hard to see, so I found and marked spots where I had a three tick offset in both directions on the DSO screen. Split the difference between the angle marks on the floor, and that was my null. Looked pretty null to me, both traces at the same time, implying both oscillators at the same radial distance from the source.
Finding the max was easy, swing to around 90 degrees and adjust for maximum difference between the traces. mark that. Looked 90 degrees to me. Record and dump that to the computer.
So now I had a line. One end pointed to the source, but which one? I was pretty sure, but I could be off by a cycle. When I got the next startup event, I’d have a direction as well, as I’d know which oscillator was “closer” to the source. Closer by around eight feet, eight nanoseconds as the photon flies, longer if it’s a slowpoke particle with actual mass.
The waveform dampened out to zero. Everything quiet. I wedged a book under one corner of the platform to keep it from turning.
Back to waiting.
“Bing bing bing bing bing bing bing!”
I’d half-dozed; a little after eleven.
Dumped the recorded waveform to the confuser and brought up the display. Okay, now I know for sure which one is “near” and which is “far.” My position was marked on the map.
And the line I drew went into San Jose, nowhere near SLAC. Nowhere near the company’s Santa Clara site, either. That third possibility was nosing to the front of the pack.
I was tired. I reset things to capture the next event, and went to bed.
A data analysis day. For grins, I ran Fourier transforms on the captured waveforms. Interesting -- the fundamental frequency wasn’t constant; it increased slightly with time.
Okay, what else can we learn about our mysterious trigger? I looked at the time difference of arrival at max again, which would tell me how fast my wavefront was moving.
Oh shit.
I moved from the computer to the scope and reviewed the last captured trace on the screen. The time difference was the same.
I pulled out the manual for the DSO, powered it off, and forced it through its extended diagnostic and self-calibration sequence. It said it was fine.
Oh shit.
I pulled a bunch of high-quality cables and tees from my cable assortment. I disconnected the cables from the oscillators, and tied them together with the tee. Ran another cable to the scope’s calibrator. That looked fine. Spliced a one meter long cable into channel two. One meter, figure in the velocity factor of the cable, it checked out down to the delay introduced by the adapters I’d used.
Oh shit.
Everything I tried showed the measurements were correct.
Which presented me with an interesting problem. If the measurements were correct, and they sure as hell seemed to be, my trigger wavefront propagated between the two oscillators at around 3.7 times the speed of light. Not the eight nanoseconds I expected, but a little over 2.1 nanoseconds.
Wait -- the third box had been in the den; I had valid samples from it. I got the tape measure from the garage, measured the distance, drew a triangle, and calculated the time difference I should see. I pulled up a sample, and another, and a third. It checked out -- 3.7, plus or minus a bit.
Oh my... I’m detecting something that propagates at faster than the speed of light?
The other samples -- I had 7 reporting boxen total. I worked on the map, guessing at coordinates and distances for the machines at Labs, and the two at Onizuka. The error bars on those were pretty big.
But even with the error bars, a simple time difference of arrival analysis told me that a signal propagating at “merely” the speed of light couldn’t give me the data I had.
I called Dave.
“Hey, what’s the good news? Answers already?” he asked.
“Just questions. You still have the GPS box in your car?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I need as good a GPS fix for Mom and her kids in labs as you can give me, and I need it yesterday.”
“Ooh -- I can do offsets from a solid fix; It doesn’t work inside the building, let alone in 26 lower where Mom lives. Will that work?”
“It will have to. When you’ve got that, drive over to the house so I can get good numbers for here.”
“Okay, about an hour?”
“That will work.”
“Did you get good data from Mom and the kids overnight?” he asked.
“I think so. They still in synch?”
“They were half an hour ago -- within the resolution of our measurements.”
That was picoseconds. “Good enough. See you.”
By the time Dave arrived I’d refined my analysis software somewhat. Mathematica is a joy to work with, if you have plenty of horsepower. I also knew the first experiment I wanted to run tonight when the anomaly reappeared. I’d move the “far” oscillator in by two feet. That would change the timing. How much?
Dave gave me numbers that were fairly close to what I’d picked off the topo map using calipers. We set the GPS on top of the “close” oscillator and let it overdetermine the position for a few minutes.
I was really closed-mouth with Dave. This was so over-the-top, I needed to be really, really sure. He recognized that mood in me, and didn’t press for answers.
When he was gone, I reran my models using the new position information. Damn, everything was consistent! I tried variations -- 3D distances rather than flat distances, geodesic distances rather than straight lines between points. None made any significant difference.
I was still looking at something propagating at faster than the speed of light.
From where? I had my line. I had enough points to determine, and overdetermine a solution. So, what is it?
Link from Mathematica to Google Maps -- an industrial area in San Jose. By hand on the map, same thing.
I took a break. Went to REI and bought a GPS box, one with maps. Got extra cables and an external antenna as well. Set it on the dashboard for the ride home; it figured out where it was pretty quickly. Set it up where I’d put Dave’s once I got home. It gave me the same answer; that was comforting.
Part of me skimmed the GPS manual while another part pondered what I’d found.
And what the hell had I found? I’d developed the theory and application of quantum resonators. Where did this fit into the theory? Not part of the Standard Model, that’s for sure!
Okay, what next? Determine the propagation velocity as accurately as I can, refine my fix. That implies a known, long baseline. I looked at the way the two oscillators were pointed. Damn -- they were pointed right out the side door!
If I opened the side gate, I could put box #3 on the sidewalk, maybe 80 feet away?
Another trip for a 100 foot Ethernet cable, measuring tape, and an equal length extension cord. I had a dolly to put the box on. 78 feet was the best I could do. I reeled it back in.
I stretched out on the floor in the den, my feet up on the couch. What the hell was going on? My initial model -- water dripping into a pond, sending waves out from the point of impact, the waves registering on my oscillators. It fit so well.
Except for the small matter of taking one of the few remaining sacred cows of physics and roasting it on a spit -- the sacred cow moooving at 3.7 times the speed of light.
I managed to eat some dinner. At a quarter to eight, I wheeled box#3 out to the sidewalk. I would have moved it further into the street, but a parked car eliminated that possibility.
Three minutes after eight, and I had new data. 3.72, +/- 0.03 times the speed of light. And the numbers scaled as they should as I moved box#3 closer. In a word, fuck.
I’m assuming constant, uniform propagation. Is that the case? I pulled the center pin and wheeled the platform with the two oscillators and the DSO out the garage door, down the driveway, and as far into the street as my cables would allow. Another reading for max, get the new GPS location. Within the 3.72 reading.
Things back in the lab, the data looked solid. How could I get more data? Dave lived in Palo Alto, close to the Labs. That geometry wouldn’t get me anything. I needed data from Milpitas, some place like that.
I had an AC inverter I’d used before in the car; it was rated at 300 watts. The oscillator drew 80. What would it do if it didn’t have a valid Ethernet connection? Would it hold its bladder until it got a connection? I thought so -- the e-mail client would back off.
I loaded box#3 in the car, switching power at the last minute, got the GPS, and drove off.
I picked a likely location. Okay, now how do I tell that it’s found an event?
Bless you, Dave -- a little before ten the box beeped and “ P1 Loop Diag 23” appeared on the front panel LCD. I logged the GPS position and headed home.
Good data! 3.71 +/- 0.01 was as close as I was going to get, and my target narrowed down.
Damn, I’m getting too old for this. Bed time.
Got up, and after breakfast, spent the morning doing yard work, deliberately letting the problem simmer in my sub/un-conscious.
I looked at the rest of the data from last night after I’d had a long shower. Damn, everything fits.
I played with things, with the spectrum analyzer, with the DSO, looking for, hoping to find an error somewhere. Nope. Time to wait. Put box#3 out next to the fence, 31 feet out, covered with an overturned plastic trashcan to protect it from the elements. Had to smile -- Hooper would love to see that.
It started; six minutes after eight. The e-mail data rolled in, and my Mathematica hack integrated it with the earlier data. Position confirmed, propagation velocity confirmed. The map came up, and a Google Earth image -- the same midsized rundown warehouse in San Jose, surrounded by weed-filled lots and asphalt. I entered the target into the GPS.
Okay, what now?
With a sigh, I picked up my car keys, secured the house, and got into my car. Let’s go for a ride.
And what the hell am I going to do when I get there, I thought to myself as I drove down the 280 freeway, following the directions the GPS was feeding me.
It’s that damn cat again -- I should know better, having studied and taught physics. You don’t know if Schödinger’s cat is alive or not until you open the damn box and look. I won’t know what I’m going to do until I do it.
So much for economic recovery -- the area still looked pretty depressed. There’s my target, the warehouse. Some lights visible inside, a car parked around the front. No razor-wire fences, no fences at all. Hiding in plain sight? Who knows. Doesn’t look very high tech!
I parked about twenty feet from the office door; a light was on in the office. Walking to the door, I didn’t see anyone in the office.
I wiped my hands on my pants and pushed on the door. It opened, and I heard a bell ring as I walked in. I stood in front of a counter, a swinging door about eight feet behind the counter. Nothing around me gave a clue as to what went on here. Not very damn much, that was apparent from the dust.
Soon a young man came through the door. Asian? Indian subcontinent? Hard to tell.
“Yes?” he said. He was wearing nondescript pants and a windbreaker over a polo shirt -- standard dress in most Silicon Valley haunts. “You need what?”
I took a breath and put my hands on the counter. This was more nerve-wracking than defending my Ph.D. thesis. Assume English as a second language; speak clearly and don’t use complex sentence structures or contractions.
“Yes, I am here to help you. I am a physicist, and the device you are working on is affecting my work. Your testing is registering on my instruments. I would like to help you with your work.”
The guy behind the counter boggled. His mouth hung open and his eyes bugged. He reached into the right windbreaker pocket and retrieved something gun-shaped, which he pointed at me. “You will ... here stay. Please.” He put the gun-thing down on the counter, and almost ran back through the door!
I didn’t touch it, but I looked at it. Didn’t look like a projectile weapon. Should I be looking for Rod Serling hanging around a corner somewhere?
I took one of my business cards from my wallet. I’d just put the wallet back when the door opened again. My greeter and two women walked through. The guy gave great deference to the women. They were good looking, dressed in hi-tech casual, with that somewhat Asian-Indian cast to them.
“Can we help you?” the one on the left said with a smile. She had the bearing, that presence, I’d associate with leadership.
I slid my card to them, observing the black-haired one on the right quickly palming the gun thing. “I hope so. I’m a physicist. I’d like to help you with your project. The device you are testing is affecting my work, and registering on my instruments.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
I nodded. How much to tell? “You started running it at six minutes after eight tonight. I can give you times for the last few days. The wavefront that’s affecting my instruments is coming from this location. Oh, that wavefront propagates at about 3.7 times the speed of light.”
“Doctor Russell?” the one on the right asked. I turned to face her.
And fell into a pool of pulsing blue light. I was floating, drifting in the light, totally enveloped in it, in soft, blue light, soothing, relaxing.
A conversation was taking place. Was I talking to someone? The voices seemed familiar, and the topics -- quantum resonators, TDOA positioning, very fast wave propagation. I think I was talking to them -- about why I wanted to help. They needed help, but were unsure. Oh yes, I understood the need for secrecy.
The light shifted in hue, toward a deeper blue, so relaxing, drifting again...
I blinked my eyes open. My head hurt; I closed my eyes and covered them with a hand as I moaned. My head really hurt.
“Here,” a female voice said, “this will help.”
Something cool and metallic touched the side of my head. Zing! Something ran through me, a combination of too much wasabi and being dipped in electricity, but so brief.
The pain in my head was gone. Hell, the usual pain in my right knee was gone.
I opened my eyes and sat up. Smallish room, industrial, a desk, some chairs. I was sitting on a ratty looking couch. Two women -- the leader-type and the other one with jet black hair.
“What’s happening?” I asked. A good place to start.
“My name is Tarah,” said the leader. “This is Nikki,” she said, pointing to the black-haired gal.
I nodded. Unfortunate name, but still, she looked cute.
“Okay, so where am I, what did you do to me, and where do we go from here?”
Tarah pulled up a chair, as did Nikki. “All good questions, Doctor,” Tarah said. “You’re still in the same building -- one of the inside offices. For now, let’s just say we needed to find out some things about you and why you were here. Doctor Russell,”
“Terry, please,” I suggested.
“Thank you. I hope you will forgive our skittishness as you learn more. Your supposition was correct. We are indeed trying to get a device to work, trying and not succeeding. Perhaps the best place to start would be to show you?”
“Okay...”
As I started to stand up, both ladies came to my side and helped me. “You may be a bit wobbly for a while yet,” Nikki told me.
Gee, that’s encouraging... They led me down a hall and up a wobbly enclosed ramp.
“Holy shit,” I muttered. In the middle of the room was an eight-ball, like the ones I built, only this one was a meter or more in diameter!
I glanced around it, identifying support equipment -- field coil controllers, exciters, and some other equipment. I was identifying by connection and by engineering sense -- a lot of the assemblies used components I’d never seen. One of the units, it looked like the P2 stabilizer, was new, stuff I could buy myself, sized up to work with the larger 8-ball. Same with the field coil electronics.
“You recognize the apparatus?” Tarah asked.
“Aspects of it, yes -- quite similar to what I’ve been doing, but on a much larger scale. I’ll guess that you’ve been rebuilding -- the P2 stabilizer, the field coil drivers. This stuff I don’t recognize. Is it driving another set of field coils? It looks built for speed and not for power, like the fine tuning or FM coils on a YIG.”
I looked at the two ladies. They smiled at each other, and seemed to relax substantially.
“Doctor, Terry, you are correct once again. We’ve been trying to repair it. And if you can help us...”
I looked around. We seemed to be in the back of a big truck, like a U-Haul, industrial fluorescents tacked to the ceiling. Looking down and more carefully, I could see where the gadget and its supporting equipment had been uprooted from somewhere else, bolted to a steel plate temporarily. The power supplies for this beast had to be massive. “The power supplies are outside?”
“Outside this enclosure, yes,” Nikki replied.
“So what’s it do?” I asked innocently.
Tarah smiled. “When operational, it allows our starship to greatly exceed the speed of light. It’s the core of our stardrive.”
I got very dizzy and very wobbly.
They helped me back down the ramp, back to the office.
“Excuse me while I boggle,” I managed to say.
They both laughed, which I interpreted as indicating a good command of colloquial American. “You’ve told me this much, how about more of the story? What cruel quirk of fate landed you in such a technological backwater?” I asked.
Nikki shook her head. “Terry, you have summed it up extremely well.”
Tarah nodded. “I am the Captain of a small Ship. We were going about our business when something dreadful happened. We’re still not sure what exactly, except that it damaged portions of our main drive, and caused the death of three crew members.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“As are we... Our ... Ship is... sentient, you might say. When Ship detected the problem, it got us as close to your star system as it could before the main drive failed completely. We dropped to sub-light, and limped in to your planet on secondary propulsion.”
“That was a year and a half ago,” Nikki said, picking things up. “It’s taken us that long to learn enough to get where we are now. So close, and yet so far.”
Something didn’t make sense. “You lost crew?”
“Yes,” Tarah told me. “I’m ship’s Captain, and Nikki is my medical officer. We lost our Engineer, our cargo master, our linguist, their links.”
“As medical officer,” Nikki explained, “I’m responsible for Ship as well as for her crew. I’m very good with my ... hands -- I’ve done the repair and reconstruction work. But neither of us have the skills, the understanding. Oh, we can tell you the theories behind things, but as to how those theories are put into practice? I’ve learned so much, but there’s so much I don’t know, and don’t understand. And parts of Ship were damaged, so she can’t help with the repairs.”
“So you’ve made repairs, rebuilt some assemblies?” I asked, recalling what I’d seen.
Nikki nodded. “Yes! For most, we still have spares, but we’re running out of them. I’ve designed replacements and had them built, and they test out as barely acceptable, so we’ve been using those, trying to find the other problems.”
“What happens? What happens when you test it?”
She shook her head. “I sequence things up slowly. We get to ... a certain point, everything checks out, I activate the next step, and the resonator starts to misbehave. The fault detection system normally shuts everything down, but I’ve bypassed parts of it so I can try and find anomalies. If I’m not quick enough, we lose another driver.”
She must have seen the look on my face -- the “put in a bigger fuse” school of troubleshooting.
“Oh,” she added, “the fault detection system will shut things down before it gets dangerous.”
“And the sphere explodes,” I suggested.
“How do you know that?” Tarah asked accusingly.
“Scientific speculation,” I suggested. They frowned. “Wild guess,” I told them. They smiled a little and nodded.
“The sphere we are using now,” Nikki told me, “is our spare. The other one lost integrity in the event. High velocity shard impacts killed our crew and damaged parts of Ship.”
Well, I could certainly walk through part of it. If... “Do you have schematics, block diagrams?” That I could interpret was another question. “I’ll need to get test instruments.”
“We have those,” Nikki said, smiling to Tarah. “Our symbol systems are not that different. I can help you interpret.”
I shook my head. “I can take a look.”
They looked at each other, smiling. Yeah, I’m offering hope.
“Hope,” I told them, “not promises.”
Tarah nodded. “We understand. Shall we?” she offered to help me stand.
Yeah, we were in the back of something like a big truck, with industrial lighting attached to the ceiling. Nikki pulled up stools while I walked around the device again.
“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a design on one aspect of their 8-ball.
“That’s the contact point for the driver, another component of the propulsion system,” Nikki told me. “It’s integral to Ship, and can’t be moved. It also passes all its tests.”
I stifled a frown. Diagnostics are, by definition, those tests all systems pass, even when they don’t work.
My design used three split field coils, mounted orthogonally. Think X-Y-Z, and rotate it 45 degrees around X and Z. Theirs looked as if it used six coils, mounted true X-Y-Z. Where I used 3 field coil drivers and split coils, it looked like they used six. A design tradeoff, one of many, undoubtedly. Made sense for the increased power levels involved.
“Okay, question time,” I started. “Inside the sphere you have six coils in three pairs, mounted orthogonally, X, Y, and Z.” I gestured with my hands.
Nikki nodded and agreed, “Yes.”
Good. “With a driver for each coil.” I pointed to the drivers. Looked like two “old” ones, and four “new” ones. She agreed again.
“Some of the drivers and their wiring were damaged in the incident?”
“Yes,” they both said.
“Okay... In operation, the field coils come on first, levitating the inner sphere, lifting it off its supports. Once stabilized in position, we apply exciter power.”
“Correct,” Nikki said.
“Okay, let’s look at diagrams and get ready to make measurements.”
Nikki pointed to a stool. I sat next to her, Tarah behind us.
Sitting on a little bench in front of us was a box, maybe six inches wide by two deep and an inch high. Nikki pressed a colored indentation near the forward right corner.
And the image of a screen, about three feet on a side, appeared in front of us!
She held a stylus in her hand. “To see a block diagram, touch the stylus to the component in question.” She reached over and touched a driver, one of the non-homebrew ones.
A diagram appeared on the screen, one box highlighted. I smiled... Nikki and I reviewed the block diagram. Other than going right-to-left where I’d go left-to-right, at this level at least, it looked pretty good.
Could we sequence things slowly, bringing up the field coils, observing voltages? Oh yeah -- touch the probe either to a point on the block diagram, or to the gadget itself, then touch this symbol to measure voltage, this symbol to measure current through the point. I had to laugh! What I’d give for one of these! I wanted voltage and current on each of the six field coils. I wasn’t worried about the control loop, not yet. Touch, touch, touch, touch -- done! Six smaller windows appeared in the air. Nikki repositioned them to mimic the arrangement of the coils.
Pointing, she said, “Voltage will be here, and current here. Ship should arrange these automatically, but those functions were damaged.”
Damaged or not, still better than anything I had!
Something nagged at me... We’d tilted our system for a reason... “Which drivers failed?” I asked.
“We had to replace them all,” Nikki said as she brought up another screen with angular writing on it, touching boxes on that screen. On the block diagram screen, driver boxes flashed yellow. “Those are the ones that have failed since we repaired the system, and the sequence we’ve replaced them in. The driver modules are used in other devices as well, so we had quite a few spares to start. We’ve saved six good drivers, and have been using the drivers we’ve put together here, as bad as they are. Oh, I’m sorry...”
“That’s all right,” I told her, chuckling. “You’ve done wonders with such primitive technology.” I added the driver inputs to what I wanted displayed. They grouped automagically with their respective coil voltages and currents. Nice.
I was looking at the block diagram, and the gadget, pondering, tapping my wrist with the stylus. Must have tapped a little differently, as a new window opened, showing an outline of my body! I don’t know if the weird sensation I had was from the shock of the display, or something scanning me. Most of my outline quickly shaded to a light blue, with some spots different shades of yellow -- my right knee, okay I understand that, my heart, prostate, and the right side of my neck. Other graphs appeared along the right side of the outline. While the legends were unintelligible, the graphs were easy enough to interpret -- nominal limits and current values. Anything out of bounds was in a shade of yellow.
“Ah, explanation?” I asked Nikki.
She glanced behind her to Tarah, who must have given her the go-ahead. “As you might surmise, this is a display of your current condition.” She took the stylus from me, tapping quickly, going through additional screens. “This,” pointing at my heart, “represents a narrowing of a blood vessel, as does this,” pointing to my neck. “Abnormal cells here,” my prostate, “and tissue damage here,” my knee. She waved at the graphs on the right. “Some other issues. Nothing we can’t take care of easily.”
“That’s encouraging,” I told her. “How do I close this?”
She gestured at the window and it went away.
On the block diagram, the drivers were still cycling yellow. Aha... Hypothesis...
“Since the initial replacement, you’ve never had a failure on the Z-axis drivers,” I suggested.
Nikki nodded, then said, “No, we have not.”
“And a seemingly random X or Y driver blows, if you let things get that far, right? No real pattern, other than it’s always an X or a Y driver, never Z, right?”
“Yes...”
I smiled. “Hypothesis -- something is wrong with the Z coils, or their drivers. I suspect one or both coils are connected out of phase, probably both. During startup, the field coils levitate the inner sphere, and hold it in position during operation. In this design, the X and Y coils combined have enough power to lift the inner sphere off the supports. Assume the Z coils are both out of phase -- we should see an initial spike on the Z drivers, and then see the Z drive go to zero, or to a very low value, as the bulk of the work is done by the X and Y coils and drivers. But when the exciter powers up, we don’t have Z stability! Things wonk about, and we blow a driver, anyone but the Z drivers.”
I recognized the look on Nikki’s face, the way she nodded her head. “Let’s give it a try!”
I shook my head. “Let’s trace some wiring first.”
“Shouldn’t Ship verify that?” Tarah asked.
Nikki, still smiling, shook her head. “Normally, yes -- but we don’t know how much damage she’s suffered. We can try this, manually...”
She took the stylus and tapped on new screens too quickly for me to follow, then went back to our block diagram, tapping on coils, then wires, first X, then Y, and as she hit Z -- lines from the Z coils to their drivers, both the top and bottom ones, lit up bright yellow.
“That’s it!” she cried.
I felt arms grab me, hugging me from behind, and heard Tarah say something. When she and Nikki stopped hugging me, and we were standing, I suggested to Tarah, “Did you say something like, ‘Now we can get our asses off this lousy rock?’”
She nodded, smiling. “Very close to that; very close.” She looked to Nikki. “How long on the wiring?”
Nikki returned to the screens, touching now with both hands. I saw colored spots run along wiring on the actual gadget. “It will take the links about an hour to change and verify. Damn, why didn’t I see that earlier!”
“You’ve worked plenty of miracles already,” I told her.
“Indeed she has,” said Tarah. “Terry?”
I turned to her. “We should verify the rest of ...”
And fell into that pool of blue light.
I was a little kid again, sitting with my father on the couch, watching our black and white TV set. I was cold and tired; it was before dawn. There on the TV screen was a Redstone rocket, and atop it was Mercury astronaut Alan B Shepard. My dad went back to bed, but I stayed up. It didn’t launch that morning. I got up the next morning, long before dawn, and watched again. I don’t remember how many mornings it was, but I saw it; I saw the launch. I saw that first manned launch, and I cried.
I saw every launch. I set two alarm clocks. Once, when I was sick, my mom turned them off so I could sleep. I missed a launch, and I cried and screamed. I remember my throat being so sore, but what hurt more was that I’d missed a launch.
I was a young teen, in my little workroom off the garage, watching the black & white TV someone had given me, that I’d fixed. I remember watching, that day in July of 1969, hearing those words, I’ll always remember hearing those words, Neil Armstrong saying, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” I’ll always remember those words, and I’ll probably always cry.
The first time I prayed, not for my grandfather in the hospital, but for Apollo 13, and her safe return.
So many memories, so many tears. And tears for the knowledge that our supposed leaders had sold mankind’s future in space for their own short-term glory, and after a few brief visits, mankind was unlikely to visit the moon again in my lifetime.
I opened my eyes, wiping away tears. A lot of memories hurt; some hurt more than others.
Tarah and Nikki sat in front of me. I was back on that ratty couch again. They were trying to look stoic, unmoved, but I thought I could see the traces of moisture in their eyes.
“Terry,” Tarah said slowly. “This is sudden, I know. You ...”
Nikki interrupted, speaking in a language I didn’t understand. What I could understand was the emotion, the fervor, the strength in her voice. Both of them glanced at me while she was delivering her tirade, then argued back and forth.
Nikki ran out of steam. Tarah nodded and sighed. “Terry, Doctor Russell, Nikki reminded me that we haven’t tested things out. We may yet have problems.” She looked to Nikki, then to me. “And yes, it isn’t fair. But life isn’t fair. I know I’m asking you to make a decision on the spur of the moment, and while you’re still in an emotional state. But dammit, I need an Engineer! Terry, you have a choice, and it has to be made right now. We need an Engineer. Do you want the job? If you do, we leave tonight, and we’ll never return.”
More tears, but different tears. I fought for control, smiling through them, feeling them burn.
“Let’s get our asses off this damned rock,” I whispered.
Both of them smiled. I did see tears on Nikki’s face, and Tarah’s.
“No turning back?” Tarah asked.
“No turning back. Go. Now.”
“Ah, we still need to see if we found all the problems,” Nikki said, interjecting a bit of reality.
Tarah nodded. “I know that. But we don’t have to do that from here.” She looked around in disgust.
They helped me up again, and we returned to the gadget.
Weird -- the guy I’d met earlier, and his seeming twin, were working on the gadget. And they looked surprised to see me. Identical twins?
Nikki spoke to them in the same language I’d heard before. Gestures, pointing, conversation. They left quickly.
Nikki turned to me. “The links corrected the wiring errors, and in verifying the rest, found one additional problem, which they corrected. They are now doing cleanup.”
“Links? Their names?” I inquired.
Nikki looked to Tarah, who answered. “The links are ... artifacts, constructs, ...”
“Drones?” suggested Nikki.
Tarah nodded. “Drones, which are animated by Ship. They have some local autonomy, but primarily they ... think of them as part of Ship. You’ll understand better later on.”
Local autonomy enough to point a weapon at me? Interesting.
Another interesting thought as Tarah and Nikki ran through what seemed to be checklists.
“What if I’d said no?”
Tarah smiled. “You still can, if you want. There’s still time. If you do, you’ll wake up alone in your car, with a splitting headache, and no memory of the last half-day or so.”
“Other than the headache, you’ll also be in better health than you’ve been for a long time. We’ve already corrected the minor issues diagnosed earlier,” Nikki added with a smile.
So I could get away with my sanity, what I had at least, and better health? “I want to go places, and see things,” I told them.
Tarah beamed.
Nikki said, “Over here by me, please.”
I stood by her, Tarah on the other side of me.
A pedestal topped with controls appeared in front of Nikki. She touched some controls and the monitor windows reappeared; she dragged them off to the side.
With a touch to another control, things seemed to flicker between us and the gadget.
“The field will protect us from ... possible anomalies,” she said. “Starting the sequence...”
Another touch, and the monitor windows lit up, showing waveforms and superimposed text, numbers, I suppose. A group of indicators on the pedestal glowed blue. The displayed waveforms looked pretty damn nominal.
“Looks good from what I can tell,” I said.
“Bringing up the exciter,” Nikki whispered, touching a control.
The waveforms danced a bit, and another set of indicators glowed blue.
Nikki’s hands were poised above the controls.
“Breathe!” I told her.
She startled, and smiled. She looked to Tarah, and to me.
“Taking system to standby,” she called out, and pressed another control.
I felt a momentary twinge of something. Everything around us took a golden cast. The remaining set of indicators on the pedestal glowed blue.
Nikki turned to Tarah, started to speak, then turned to me. “You tell her. It’s your job now.”
“What?” I asked.
She leaned over and whispered to me. I hugged her.
I turned to Tarah. “Captain, Engineering reports drive system at standby. All nominal.” Then I added, “But we have more testing to do.”
Tarah nodded and said formally, “Thank you, Engineer.”
Then she grabbed the two of us and sobbed. We all did.
Nikki showed me how to sequence things off.
A flurry of activity, helping the links pull things together in one area in the back of the warehouse. Some things they were leaving, some they collected. The ramp to the truck holding the gadget was disconnected, as was a small fortune in Kepco switching power supplies.
Tarah put a hand on my shoulder. “Terry, in the office, please?”
I followed her. Nikki was there, with one of the links.
“Terry, please undress and recline on the floor for me,” Nikki said in a most professional tone.
It was about three in the morning, but I was full of energy. As I undressed, so did the link. Pretty nominal looking body, aside from no external signs of genitalia, male or female.
I found an empty spot of floor. Tarah and Nikki went to their knees beside me.
“Terry, this is your last chance. Are you going with us, or staying?” Tarah asked.
“Let’s get off this rock,” I told her.
She touched my shoulder, smiling.
Blue light again. Deep blue. Floating, floating -- falling! Floating again.
I was sitting up, in the cab of the truck, sitting between Tarah, who was driving, and Nikki. We were driving through thick fog.
I felt ... good. I felt younger, stronger somehow. I looked at my hands. They looked different, younger. My MIT class ring felt loose on my right hand.
“What happened?” I asked.
Tarah smiled. “I’ve gotten to do a lot of reading while we’ve been here, collecting your arts and literature. One of your authors said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“Yes, Clarke. So the non-answer to my question is?”
Nikki put a hand on my shoulder. “Imagine two of you, two shells, you at your current age, and you thirty years younger. All of who you are, who you will be, is in the younger shell, here and now. Your older shell, animated by Ship, drove your car back to your house. Once there, Ship withdrew the animation.”
I smiled, nodding. “Much better than leaving loose ends. Thank you.”
“So where the hell are we going?” I asked Tarah.
She grinned. “Almost there.”
“There? Where’s there? We’re in the middle of nowhere!” I complained.
She laughed.
I sat while we drove through fog. East bay somewhere, maybe the valley? Fog and no traffic. We turned off the side road, driving over ground, what felt like soft ground.
A disc about five centimeters in diameter and a centimeter or so high, sitting on the dashboard, started pulsing blue.
Tarah pulled off the road, stopped, and turned off the engine.
A spot on top of the disc glowed orange.
“Engineer, you may commence retrieval,” Tarah said.
Nikki elbowed me in the ribs. “Push the button.”
I reached over and touched the orange spot. Something went “Ping!” and the disc started alternating between pale blue and bright flashes of orange.
“Here we go!” Tarah said enthusiastically.
Three quick orange flashes accompanied by pings, and the fog started moving. No, we were moving, lifting without any sensation!
As we lifted through and above the fog layer, I saw a spherical shell surround us. I pointed to it.
“Holds in atmosphere, and adsorbs electromagnetic energy.”
“No radar returns?” I suggested. Tarah nodded.
Our upward velocity increased. I craned and moved to look out the window. So many different directions I wanted to look, all at once!
Haze and curvature, jet black and stars. An arm around my shoulder, Tarah. “You never get tired of the view,” she said.
A different sound after a few minutes. It was hard to tell our velocity with so few reference points close by.
I became aware of something near us. Light sprang up around us; we were near a ship, twenty or so meters long, six or so meters wide. It had a stubby, high angle-of-attack feel. Glide down, and get back up how? A large open hatch beckoned.
“Time to leave,” Tarah said, unbuckling her seat belt. Nikki did hers. As I sat there, Tarah released mine. “Come on,” she said, grabbing the disc and pulling me out as she left the truck cab.
As we exited the truck, my reference frame shifted. “Down,” which had been the floor of the truck, was now inside the hatch of the ship. We drifted towards it, accelerating slightly. I kept looking “up,” letting Tarah and Nikki orient me.
The inside of the ship illuminated as our feet touched “down.” Curved surfaces, some instrumentalities, labeled controls, and a hatchway forward.
“Holy shit,” I muttered. I’d just experienced a varying artificial gravity field!
“Something wrong?” Nikki asked, standing beside me as Tarah moved forward, doing something to open the hatch.
“No,” I shook my head. “Just more magic to contemplate.”
“Let’s go.” She urged me forward.
We stepped through the hatch, a little wider and shorter than I’d expected. Nikki did something to close it. A ladder of sorts to my left went to a lower level. In front of me was a more familiar sight; four funny-looking seats, controls, switches, displays. Tarah was already seated, her hands moving over glowing control surfaces.
“Sit there,” Nikki pointed to the seat next to Tarah.
The seat adjusted to me as I sat down.
“This is hard with just two...” Tarah started to say, but stopped suddenly.
“Can I help?” Did she need more crew? She looked like she was doing okay, hands moving with grace and assurance over controls.
I couldn’t tell if the area in front of us was transparent, or I was looking at a displayed image of some kind. I think it was a displayed image, as it shifted suddenly, and we were looking at the truck from above. As Tarah’s hands moved on controls, the back of the truck peeled away. An oblate shell settled around the drive system, lifting it from the bed of the truck. The shell shimmered as it passed through the sphere surrounding the truck. Our “vision” tracked the drive system until it settled in the cargo bay of our ship, and the doors closed.
Our view snapped back to the truck. The sphere enclosing it shrank, and kept shrinking, crushing the truck, until it was a meter or less in diameter. Axes adorned with symbols appeared around the truck’s remains. Some tapping, and an arrow, a vector, appeared. Tarah muttered something, slapped a control with a ritual air of finality, and the remains of the truck departed along the indicated vector.
Our vision returned to space and stars.
“Re-entry orbit?” I asked when Tarah turned to me.
She nodded. “Middle of the South Pacific.”
As she sat smiling, I asked, “Give me a tour of the Ship?”
She chuckled and hit a control. We started to move, or at least points of light in the display did; I couldn’t sense any movement.
“This is only a shuttle. We’ll be at Ship in a few minutes.” Her hands danced on controls. I saw orbits pop up, an ellipse marking where I supposed us to be and a point where I guessed Ship was. Hohmann would be at home with the transfer orbit...
Visible motion with no sensation once more; rapid motion at that.
“We are on our way,” Tarah said, and sat back.
I felt Nikki’s touch again. I turned, reclining a bit. The seats we were in looked to be retro-fitted. The control surfaces didn’t look to be made for, well, critters like me.
“Terry,” Nikki started.
“Yes?”
She smiled, but shook her head a little. “You’re in for a few more ... surprises. These shapes we’re wearing now, they’re not the ones we were born with.”
I nodded. “You moved me from one to another.”
She smiled. “Yes. And we’ll be moving back to our other forms after we reboard Ship; while we’ve adapted the shuttle, Ship is designed for other forms.”
I was getting the feeling... “And those other forms are?”
More of a smirk now. “Terry, we queried you earlier; you don’t remember. If that had been an issue, and with many of your kind it could be, you wouldn’t be here. Think of it as an adventure.”
“That bad, huh?”
Tarah laughed and moved closer, holding me. “You’re going to do just fine.”
Nikki agreed. “We switch forms ... not frequently, but when we need to. On some planets, doing business is easier if we fit in. Other places don’t care. And our forms are very well adapted to space travel, much more so than these.” She gestured to her form, which looked pretty damn good to me -- I wouldn’t mind spending time with it at all...
I thought about it. Could be fun... The flip side -- how bad could it be? Banana slug -- couldn’t see much exciting about that. Interesting questions about adaptation -- how do you adapt monkey (primate) brains to other forms, like multi-legged forms?
“We’ll be storing these shells,” Tarah said, gesturing to herself, “Including the one you’re wearing now. So you’ll be able to use it when we visit similar worlds and societies. But before we do that...”
We turned to Nikki again.
She gave me a more interesting look. “We need to do more ... patterning with you. The technologies are old and very well known. The process is also quite pleasurable. We have a suitable environment prepared. We’ll do the patterning, and when you wake up, you’ll be a member of the crew.”
“On the way to Shanghai,” I muttered.
Nikki looked puzzled, then blushed a bit.
Tarah laughed. I turned to her.
“We just located that reference, and it’s not entirely unsatisfactory.” She was smirking. “We’re going to have one hell of a party, and then, yes, we’ll wake up out at sea, but only a little ways. I imagine you’d like to do some sightseeing in your home system, yes?”
“Yes! I certainly would!”
“We’ll have the chance. We need to reintegrate the drive, and perform systems tests -- you need to reintegrate the drive, and perform systems tests, Engineer.”
“Yes, Captain,” I said formally.
She nodded. “Good. I like that attitude.”
Nikki made a raspberry.
Tarah shook her head. “It’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s going to be ... uneven is the best way to put it. We’ll be able to give you basic language and technology, but the rest will have to wait until we make a port advanced enough for real diagnosis and repair. It’s the best we can do.”
“I’ll give it my best,” I told my Captain.
“I know you will,” she replied.
I happened to glance at my hands. I still had the weird cuticle and nail on my left middle finger where I’d tried to cut off my fingertip with a bandsaw as a little kid. “It’s still here!” I said, wiggling my fingers.
Nikki reached out and held my hand. “Oh, yes; we replicate everything initially, including scars. If you decide you’d rather part with them later on, you may. I assumed you were not attached to the artificial repairs to your teeth, though.”
Hadn’t thought of that! “Fillings and crowns? Won’t miss ‘em.” I pondered. “Not sure what I’m going to be missing in a little while...”
“Think of it as an adventure,” Tarah chuckled.
“Off to Shanghai,” I muttered again. “Where is the ship? How long will it take us to get there?” The “view” outside was steady, a few stars, no apparent motion. None that I could sense, anyway.
“Oh, orbiting Mars -- a few minutes.”
More pondering... “So we’re traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light?”
Tarah nodded. “For part of the trip, yes; it’s our secondary drive.” She smiled and shook her head. “You’ll understand it soon. I suspect you’ll understand it far better than I do!”
Our forward “view” wobbled a bit. We were homing in on an object, approaching rapidly, and I mean really rapidly! It had a manta-ray appearance to it, what little I saw of it before the viewscreen was completely occluded.
A hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” Nikki told me, “You’ll have plenty of opportunities to explore.”
“You’re going to be exploring her from one end to the other!” reminded Tarah.
Docked in the ship, as we made our way out, I noticed the portals were shorter yet wider than I’d expected -- a portent of our upcoming forms? “The drive?” I asked as I was being led in low illumination along a passageway.
“Later,” Tarah told me.
Passing through another portal, one which opened as we approached, and closed behind us -- we were in a chamber.
I smiled; I know I did. Soft lighting, gravity a bit lighter, the area was filled with what looked to be soft cushions, cool slightly scented air. Hope I’d guessed correctly...
A touch on my shoulder, I turned into Nikki’s embrace. Soft, warm, passionate!
We made love, giving and sharing pleasure. I responded, performed, like I was in my twenties again; I guess I was!
Inflamed, ridden, and drained once more, snuggling closer, holding and being held.
I whispered, “I love being held, and holding, snuggling.”
They squeezed me gently between them. “And that makes you all the more desirable,” Nikki whispered to me.
I sighed and went to sleep in their embrace.
END of Part 1
Rev 2007/12/05
On to Part 2
Time of Arrival
By silli_artie@hotmail.com
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/artie/www