Noise Level

A little after three there came a knock. He looked up in irritation as Dykstra walked in.

'Dr Nagle! I'm glad you're in. I tried and couldn't find you yesterday.'

'I took a day off for fishing. Can I help you?'

Dykstra slid into the chair on the other side of the desk with an almost furtive motion. Mart frowned.

'I have something of extreme importance to discuss regarding the project,' said Dykstra. He leaned forward confidentially, his eyes squinting a little behind the owlish glasses.

'Do you realize,' he said, 'that this entire project is a fraud?'

'Fraud! What are you talking about?'

'I have been over the Dunning house, so called, with a fine-toothed comb. I proved to you in our last seminar that the postulate of equivalence denied the possibility of any such device as this Dunning is supposed to have invented. Now, I can assure you that Dunning never existed! We are the victims of a base fraud.'

He clapped the palms of his hands upon the top of the desk in triumphal finality and leaned back.

'I don't understand,' murmured Mart.

'You shall. Go over that laboratory. There is no consistency. Examine the shelves of reagents. Ask what possible chemical endeavour could be carried out with such a random selection of materials. The electronics section is as hodgepodge as the corner television shop. The computers have never been used in the room they are in. And that library — it is obvious what an intellectual packrat's nest that is!

'No, Dr Nagle, for some inconceivable reason we are the victims of a base fraud. Anti-gravity! Do you suppose that anyone here actually thought they could make us believe it?

'Now, what I want to know is why we have been sent on this fool's errand when the nation needs the talents of each one of us so badly?'

Mart felt a faint sickness in the pit of his stomach. 'I'll admit there are strange things about this presentation. If what you say should be true, how can the eyewitness accounts be explained?'

'Perjury!' snapped Dykstra.

'I can hardly imagine a member of the JCS involved in such. I am sorry, but I do not share your opinion. As a matter of fact, I have done a good deal of work towards our goal.

'As of this moment, I am prepared to say definitely that the postulate of equivalence is not going to hold.'

Red-faced, Dykstra stood up. 'I'm extremely sorry you hold such views, Dr Nagle. I had always believed you a young man of great promise. Perhaps you shall yet be when proper light is thrown upon this abominable fraud perpetrated upon us. Good day!'

Mart didn't bother to rise as Dykstra stomped out of the door. The visit bothered him. Absurd as the accusations were, they threatened the foundation upon which he worked. If he could not be sure that Dunning's device had performed as described he was subject to the buffeting of all his prior assurance that anti-gravity was nonsense.

But the JCS involved in a reasonless and silly fraud as Dykstra proposed-!

He turned back to his sheets of computations with almost frantic energy. When it was almost time that most of them would be leaving he reached for the phone and called Jennings. The man was an able mathematician and could work this through if anyone could. It was not as far along as Mart would have liked it, but he had to know if he were at the entrance to a blind alley.

'Can you come over for a moment?' he said. 'I've got something I'd like to show you.'

In a few moments Jennings appeared. As he came in the door he gave Mart the momentary impression of an old-time country preacher ruffled with righteous indignation at the sins of his congregation.

He blurted out before Mart had a chance to speak. 'Did you see Dykstra this afternoon running around with some cock and bull story about the project being a fraud?'

Mart nodded.

'Why Keyes ever let an old fool like him in here — Dyk has been a fine man. But he's shot his wad. I called Keyes at once.'

'I guess all of us have had natural suspicions like Dykstra's,' said Mart, 'but not enough to go completely overboard as he has.'

'I've talked to several of the others. They are upset, some of them. I tried to lift them out of it. But what is it you've got? Anything that looks like an answer?'

Mart slid the sheets across the desk. 'The postulate of equivalence is out. I'm pretty sure of that. I've been computing the possible field of motion circulating through curved space. It turns out to be an eight-dimensional thing, but it makes sense. I'd like you to look it over.'

Jennings' eyebrows raised. 'Very good. Of course, it's not easy for me to accept the renunciation of the postulate of equivalence, you understand. That has been around for forty-five years now.'

'We may find something to fit in its place.'

'You have no other copy of this?'

Mart shrugged. 'I can do it again.'

'I'll take good care of them.' Jennings put the papers in an inside pocket. 'But suppose you do demonstrate the possibility of such a flow? Where do we go from there? Have you any idea?'

'Some,' said Mart. 'I watched a whirlpool yesterday. Ever watch what happens to sticks when they are thrown into one? They go towards each other. That's gravity.'

Jennings frowned. 'Now wait a minute, Mart-'

Mart laughed. 'Don't get me wrong. Consider this flow. I don't know what properties it might have. It would have to take place through four of the dimensions involved. But when we get through, we'll develop the expression for the curl of such a flow through material substance.

'Suppose such a curl exists. Whirlpools appear. It's crude analogy. Your mind can't get hold of it. We need the math. But perhaps we can show that the curl is in such a direction as to cause a reduction of spatial displacement between masses causing the curl. Could that make sense?'

Jennings had been sitting very still. Now he smiled and spread his hands on the desk top. 'It could. The curl of an eight-dimensional flow would be fairly complex. But if it develops all right, what then?'

'Then we build a device to streamline matter through this flow, so that curl will not develop.'

Jennings sat back in his chair as if suddenly limp. 'Holy smoke, you've got it all figured out! But wait a minute, that would simply nullify gravity. How about anti-gravity?'

Mart shrugged. 'We find a way to introduce a reverse curl vector.'

'That does it, boy, that does it.'

Mart laughed and walked to the door with him. 'Yeah, I know how the thing sounds, but, look — I'm really not kidding. If this gravitational flow expression works out, the rest of it could follow. It could, Jennings.'

Jennings faced him with all amusement gone out of his face. 'I'm not laughing, Mart,' he said, 'not at you, anyway. If we get the answer to this whole thing it's going to be something like that. It's just that everything we've postulated up to now has so completely blocked any thinking of this kind that a man has to be prepared to consider himself slightly rocky to even talk about it.'

It was a day later when Berk called him. 'Hey, Mart, why didn't you let us know right away about Dykstra? If Jennings hadn't called, we might have got to him too late.'

'What do you mean?'

'This story he's been giving about the project's being a fraud. I hope you weren't bothered by it.'

'Not much. Are you going to kick him off the project?'

'That follows, naturally. He's in a rest home now. His mind was so congealed that be couldn't accept the reality of Dunning's work. He flipped his lid in a mild sort of way. He'll be all right in a few weeks and can go back to teaching.'

'I'm sorry about it. We almost have the answer he was afraid to face, I believe.'

Impatiently, Mart threw his thesis open to the whole seminar that day. It was a bit hard to take for some who had been inclined somewhat in Dykstra's direction, but the maths was clean enough to appeal to all of them. They pitched in almost as a solid unit to try to obtain a formulation convertible to metal and electrons and fields.