Stan made a sour look. “Pfeh! Can you see why I almost switched to quantum biology? That was where new theories might make a difference, lead to new products, and change people’s lives.”
Hutton regarded his old friend with clear disappointment. “And I always thought you math types were in it for the beauty. Turns out you’re as much a gadget junky as I am.” He waved to a passing barmaid, ordering another round.
Goldman shrugged. “Beauty and practicality aren’t always inconsistent. Look at Einstein’s formulas for absorption and emission of radiation. What elegance! Such simplicity! He had no idea he was predicting lasers. But the potential’s right there in the equations…”
Alex felt the words wash over him. They were like swarming creatures. He had a strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young. Normally, he had little use for the popular multimind models of consciousness. But right now the normal, comforting illusion of personal unity seemed to have been dissolved by the solvent, alcohol. He felt he wasn’t singular, but many.
One self watched in bemusement while a dark pint reappeared before him, again, as if by magic. Another sub-persona struggled to follow the thread of Stan’s rambling reminiscence.
But then, behind his tightening brow, yet more selves wrestled over something still submerged. Benumbed by fatigue and alcohol, logic had been squelched and other, more chaotic forces seemed to romp unfettered. Ninety-nine to one the results would be just the sort that sounded great during a party and like gibberish the morning after.
“… when, out of nowhere, the cavitron appeared! Imagine my delight,” Stan went on, spreading his gnarled hands. “All of a sudden we found there was, after all, a way to gain access to the heart of the new physics!”
The elderly theoretician made a fist, as if grasping tightly some long-sought quarry. “One year the field seemed sterile, sexless, doomed to mathematical masturbation or worse — perpetual, pristine theoretical splendor. The next moment — boom! We had in our hands the power to make singularities! To move and shape space itself!”
Stan appeared to have temporarily forgotten the tragic consequences of that discovery. Even so, Alex took sustenance from his friend’s enthusiasm. He recalled his own feelings on hearing the news — that the team at Livermore had actually converted raw vacuum into concentrated space-time. The possibilities seemed endless. What he himself had envisioned was cheap, endless energy for a shaky, impoverished world.
“Oh, there remained limitations,” Stan went on. “But the chink was there. The new lever and fulcrum. Perhaps a new wheel! I felt as Charles Townes must have, the day he bounced light back and forth through the lattice in that pumped-up ruby crystal, causing it to…”
Alex’s chair teetered backward as he stood suddenly. He steadied himself with his fingertips against the tabletop. Then, staring straight ahead, he stumbled awkwardly through the crowd, weaving toward the door.
“Alex?” George called after him. “Alex!”
A stand of Norfolk pine, twenty meters from the rural pub, drew him like flotsam from a roaring stream. In that eddy the air was fresh and the chatty hubbub no longer sought to overwhelm him. Here Alex had only the rustle of boughs to contend with, a gentle answer to the wind.
“What is it?” George Hutton asked when he caught up a minute later. “Lustig, what’s the matter?”
Alex’s mind spun. He swiveled precariously, torn between trying to follow all the threads at once and grabbing tightly onto just a few before they all blew away.
He blurted, “A laser, George. It’s a laser!”
Hutton bent to meet Alex’s eye. It wasn’t easy, both men wavered so.
“What are you talking about? What’s a laser?”
Alex made a broad motion with his hands. “Stan mentioned Einstein’s abs — absorption and emission parameters. But remember? There were two ‘B’ parameters — one for spontaneous emission and one for stimulated emission from an excited state.”
“Speaking of an excited state,” George commented. But Alex hurried on.
“George, George!” He spread his arms to keep balance.
“In a laser, you first create an — an inverted energy state in an excited medium… get all the outer electrons in a crystal hopping, right? The other thing you do is you place the crystal inside a resonator. A resonator tuned so only one particular wave can pass back and forth across the crystal…”
“Yeah. You use two mirrors, facing each other at opposite ends. But—”
“Right. Position the mirrors just so, and only one wave will reach a standing state, bouncing to and fro a thousand, million, jillion times. Only one frequency makes it, one polarization, one orientation. That one wave goes back and forth, back and forth at the speed of light — causing stimulated emission from all the excited atoms it passes, sucking their excited energy into one single—”
“Alex—”
“ — into a single coherent beam… all the component waves reinforcing… all propagating in parallel like marching soldiers. The sum is far greater than the individual parts.”
“But—”
Alex grabbed George’s lapels. “Don’t you see? We fed a single waveform into such a medium a few weeks back, and again two days ago. Each time, something emerged. Waves of energy far greater than what we put in!
“Think about it! The Earth’s interior is a hot soup of excited states, like the plasma in a neon tube or a flashed ruby crystal. Given the right conditions, it took what we fed it and magnified the output. It acted as an amplifier!”
“The Earth itself?” George frowned, now seriously puzzled. “An amplifier?. In what way?”
Then he read something in Alex’s face. “Earthquakes. You mean the earthquakes! But… but we never saw any such thing in our old resource scans. Echoes, yes. We got echoes and used them for mapping. But never any amplification effect.”
Alex nodded. “Because you never had a resonator before! Think of the mirrors in a laser, George. They’re what create the conditions for amplification of one waveform, one orientation, into a coherent beam.
“Only, we’re dealing in gravity waves. And not just any gravity waves, but waves specifically tuned to reflect from—”
“From a singularity,” George whispered. “Beta!”
He stepped back, wide-eyed. “Are you saying the taniwha …”
“Yes! It acted as part of a gravity wave resonator. With the amplifying medium consisting of the Earth’s core itself!”
“Alex.” George waved a hand in front of his face. “This is getting crazy.”
“Of course the effect ought to be muddy with only one mirror, and we had only Beta to bounce off of. The second series of tests conformed to that sort of a model.”
Alex stopped and pondered. “But what about that first scan, weeks ago? That time our probe set off narrow, powerfully defined quake swarms. That output beam was so intense! Focused enough to rip apart a space station…”
“A space station?” George sounded aghast. “You don’t mean we caused the American station to…”
Alex nodded. “Didn’t I tell you that? Tragic thing. Awful luck it just happened through a beam so narrow.”
“Alex…” George shook his head. But the flow of words was too intense.
“I understand why the amplification was muddy the second time — just what you’d expect from a one-mirror resonator. But that first time…” Alex slammed his fist into his palm. “There must have been two reflectors.”
“Maybe your Alpha, the Iquitos black hole…”