Near the end of 1953, however, Petrosian's prose style suddenly changed. The entries became longer, the text became both enthusiastic and ferociously technical, and the handwriting was that of a man who could hardly write fast enough to get the words down.
By now they could hardly understand a word. But the crabbed writing, the cryptic style and the air of enthusiasm told the same story to Romella and Findhorn. The Armenian physicist was onto something.
The first such entry was on 29 November. Stefi had appeared with hot chocolate and biscuits, and Romella's voice was now slurred with tiredness.
Petrosian's diary, Sunday, 29 November 1953
Spent the day ski-ing on Sawyer Hill. Snow-plows, dead stops, jumps, lots of bruises. Cloudless day. Then did something really stupid. On an impulse I gathered up camping stuff and went to the end of Frijoles Canyon, where it joins the Rio Grande. Wonderful solitude, even the rattlers were gone. Bivouacked out. Bitterly cold.
Woke up early hours. Lay and looked at the brilliant starry sky, and with no effort on my part a thought jumped into my head. It just came. I suddenly realized that the two most awesome experiments in physics — the Casimir effect and Foucault's pendulum — are connected. Maybe it was all that talk with Bethe on ZPE. More likely it was a gift from God.
And the connection lets me solve an ancient problem: how do we know that ten minutes in ancient Greece was the same length of time as ten minutes today? We can compare metre sticks by carrying them around, but we can't transport clocks back and forth in time. Quantum fluctuations in ZPE are the answer. They give us an absolute clock, constant throughout all space and for all time.
Can we possibly have been thinking about physics the wrong way for the past forty years??!!
Okay so ZPE might not be observable because it permeates everything but changes in it surely are. If this is right, then the vacuum is a bottomless pit. The wonderful thing is that ZPE might be changed by fiddling boundary conditions, like the Casimir plates.
Leading to a fantasy thought. Could I squeeze hydrogen into small enough cavities so that low frequency ZPE is excluded and the atoms have to shrink? And so release energy? If the Coulomb barrier is overcome with a Casimir pinch, what then? Do we head for Planck energy?
Head swirling with fantastic thoughts. Can't sleep — anyway I resent the time it takes up.
Findhorn was suddenly on his feet. He paced up and down excitedly, muttering and shaking his head. Momentarily, he looked at the women wildly with bloodshot eyes. Then he carried on pacing.
'Fred!' Romella pleaded.
He paused to look at her. 'I can't tell you.'
'We're shareholders, damn you,' Stefi pointed out.
'It's too bizarre, too way out. I must be wrong.'
Stefi blocked his path. 'Try us.'
Findhorn shook his head energetically. 'You wouldn't understand. You're only a linguist.' He looked at the clock: it showed two thirty a.m. 'Stefi, I want you to get me on the next available flight to America. Not from Edinburgh airport. I'll give you my credit card number.'
'I'm only a linguist, I can't do things like that. Where in America?'
'Los Alamos. I want to nose around.'
Romella was shaking her head. 'Fred, the people you met in Fat Sam's…'
'… are almost certainly acting for the American Government.'
'And you want to put your head in the lion's mouth?'
'America is the last place they'd expect me to go. I'm gambling that my name won't be on their Immigration Department computers.'
'I'll come,' Romella said. 'The FBI must have old files on Petrosian.'
Findhorn blinked with surprise. 'You intend to just walk into the FBI offices in Washington and ask about Petrosian? You're mad.'
'As you say, Fred, it's the last thing they'd expect. They're looking for us in Edinburgh. I'm betting their right hand doesn't know what their left is doing. It's the same gamble.'
Stefi said, 'You're both mad.'
Romella said, 'You'll have to pay my fare, Fred. I'm skint.'
'Don't do it,' Stefi said.
'Give me an account number and I'll feed money into it.'
'Please can I come too?' Stefi asked. 'I've never been to America.'
Findhorn shook his head. 'You're needed here. See what you can find out about green Mercs registered in Switzerland.'
Stefi attempted a pout.
Romella picked up the photocopies and tapped them into a neat pile. 'At least tell us this, Fred. What's ZPE?'
'It stands for zero point energy. It's the lowest possible energy state any system can have.'
'I know the feeling.'
16
Cult
The first time round, it might have been his imagination.
But not the second. There it was again, a faint bump from the room directly below him. He struggled with the geometry of the house before settling on Doug's study.
Findhorn reckoned he had been asleep for about two hours.
He lay in the dark, his heart thumping, straining to hear. Long ago, the fire authorities had insisted that metal stairs should come from the top floor of the big house down to the back garden. These stairs were reached through the window in Stefi's room. Sensible to get the women and himself out, call the police from a public box.
He wriggled his feet into Doug's slippers and wrapped a dressing gown round himself before opening the door, an inch at a time. Faint light came up the stairwell.
He stepped quietly down the stairs, knowing it was against all sense. The study door was slightly ajar. Keeping about two feet back from the door, he peered in, the strong light hurting his eyes.
Romella, in a peach-colored negligee, was at the keyboard of Doug's machine, staring intently at the monitor. Findhorn couldn't make out the text on the screen, the angle was too awkward. Unexpectedly, she glanced in his direction. He pulled away and slipped back up the stairs, uncertain whether he had been seen.
In bed, he lay on his back and thought that maybe his long sojourns in Arctic environments had made him stupid, that mixing with nobody but people like himself had made him fail to appreciate the range and depth of human duplicity. That maybe the Fat Sam's people had reached Romella before he did, or that her brief captivity had turned her. Archie's words, 'Trust nobody', kept forcing themselves into his head.
They had the diaries. But they would know that Findhorn had made copies. Maybe they wanted the copies destroyed. Maybe the bandstand incident was a setup, maybe he had been allowed to escape with Romella. Maybe Romella appreciated the finer things in life, things you could do with a million pounds. All she had to do was find the files and press the delete button. Not a lot to do for a million. What did she owe Findhorn anyway?
Then he thought that maybe circumstances were making him paranoid, that there was a natural explanation, that only a heel would think this way.
He fretted for half an hour, wriggling and turning on wrinkled sheets, feeling betrayed, paranoid and guilty, sometimes all at once, before drifting into a restless sleep.
'You want to be very careful when you talk about a religious cult, Fred. The point is that "cult" is a hate word. It carries emotional baggage and people use it as a weapon to impart bad vibrations to the group they're talking about. Likewise your use of the word "nutter" shows that there's an evil intolerance at work in the murky depths of your subconscious. Most way-out systems of religious belief are harmless and deserve the tolerance —'