Revelation

Stayed over at Kitty's. Both of us bruised in awkward places!'

'Okay. "Charles" is Klaus Fuchs. Who's "Ant"?'

Romella shuffled papers. 'I've an FBI dossier on her someplace. Here we are.' She skimmed the pages. 'Kristel Fuchs, younger sister of Klaus, alias Kristel Heineman. Unhappily married with three children. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Later diagnosed as schizophrenic, recovered, married again and had another three kids.'

'Was she a spy?'

'It says that Fuchs used to meet his contact, Harry Gold, alias "Goose", in Kristel's home. But there's no evidence that she knew what was going on.'

'Okay,' said Findhorn, 'We have Klaus and Kristel Fuchs, Dick Feynman and Kitty Cronin in the Venona message. And we have "Quantum".'

'And we have Klaus and Kristel Fuchs, Dick Feynman and Kitty Cronin in Petrosian's account of a picnic held on the same day. And Petrosian.'

Findhorn drew up two columns on a sheet of A4 paper:

KLAUS FUCHS = CHARLES

DICK FEYNMAN =?

BRAINLESS BLONDE =?

KRISTEL FUCHS = ANT

KITTY CRONIN =?

LEV PETROSIAN =?

He said, 'So the question is, where do we place "Quantum"?'

'We can forget Kitty and the blonde,' Romella said. 'Kitty wasn't part of the Manhattan Project and the blonde was just a casual pick-up.'

Findhorn blew out his cheeks. 'And Feynman was an all-American kid from the Bronx. He's never been a suspect. In that case the chances are that Petrosian was "Quantum".'

'Hey, we've found something. If that's right, he probably wasn't a spy. At least, Beck considered he couldn't be cultivated as one.'

'So why the hell was Petrosian fleeing to Russia with useless diaries?'

Romella said, 'It's hot in here.' She started to slip off her dark, lace-topped stockings. She stretched, and ET stretched along with her. 'Okay, Fred, let's call it a day.' Then, eyes full of innocent enquiry, 'I was wondering about the sleeping arrangements.'

Findhorn looked across at the purple and chrome, made-in-Japan monster a few hundred yards away. Light flakes of snow were drifting past the window and the sky was now dark grey.

'Is that vile thing yours?'

'The purple people eater? Yes, I've rented it.'

'It's going to be a cold night. You could freeze to death in it.'

'So what do you suggest?' Romella asked.

'I'll lend you a blanket.'

'You know, Fred, there's a sort of purity about my hatred for you. It's undiluted by any other emotion. It has the intensity of a laser. Can't you feel it? Or are you made of stone?'

Findhorn's face showed bewilderment. 'Two blankets, then.'

19 Foucault's Pendulum

Findhorn trudged shivering along a track lightly dusted with snow and the prints of a small, clawed animal. A thin, red-nosed zombie was lurching into the men's toilets, carrying a towel and toilet bag. In Babbitt's, a couple of sleepy campers, all skip caps and quilted body warmers, were drifting along the meat aisle. Through bleary eyes Findhorn found milk and picked up a cereal called Morning Zing.

A tall, round-faced girl at the counter was stacking newspapers. 'You the yellow RV?'

'Uhuh.' Findhorn struggled with unfamiliar coins.

'This was faxed through for you.'

Back outside the store, Findhorn read the message:

I got this from a naval architecture book but I haven't a clue what it means. If you want more I could go to Kew and look at the Admiralty Reports they keep progress books ships logs etcetera.

In 1894 high-speed sea trials of the British destroyer HMS Daring revealed severe propeller vibrations which were attributed to the formation and collapse of bubbles, a phenomenon known as cavitation. This phenomenon has now been widely studied and is important in many underwater applications. A related problem was discovered during the First World War, when the need to detect enemy submarines led to the development of high intensity subaqueous acoustic sources. It was realized in 1927 that such intense underwater sound produces cavitation. An extraordinary discovery was made in 1934, namely that when the bubbles collapse they produce visible blue light. The source of this light remains a mystery to this day. One possibility, suggested by the Nobel prizewinner Julian Schwinger, is that a dynamic Casimir effect is at work, that is, that zero point energy is being extracted from the vacuum. A bubble in water is a hole in a dielectric medium and the speed of collapse is extremely…

Findhorn shouted 'Yes! Yes!' and did a brief war dance on the sidewalk. A fifteen-year-old girl scuttled off in alarm, clutching milk. He skipped to the end:

Your brother's nice and we're getting on fine. Told him the story and he wants you to phone him urgently.

Love

Stefi

Findhorn did a subtraction and found that it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon in Glasgow. Even Archie would be up and about by now. He went smartly back into Babbitt's, fed a heap of nickels into the call box and dialled through. He had almost given up when there was a sort of moan from the other end of the line.

'Archie?'

A moment, and then, loud and clear, 'Fred, lad.'

'I've woken you up.'

'Not tae worry.'

'Look, the time has come to pick that giant brain of yours.'

'About?'

'What's the connection between Foucault's pendulum and the Casimir effect?'

Another long silence. When he spoke, Archie's voice was serious. 'You're into some heavy stuff here, Fred.'

'A pendulum is heavy stuff?'

'It's awesome. You want ten years' worth of frontier science in a five-minute call?'

Findhorn stayed silent. There was the sound of running water in the background, what sounded like a female voice, another long silence, two nickels' worth, and finally Archie was saying, 'This is desperate, you appreciate. Let's go back to Foucault's pendulum. You probably know about it. This was an experiment carried out in 1851 inside the Pantheon in Paris. This guy Foucault suspends a heavy iron ball from the dome by a wire two hundred feet long and sets it swinging. A pin at the bottom of the ball scrapes the surface of a tray of sand, so that the direction of swing gets traced out in the sand.'

'A straight line.'

'Except that over the hours the direction of this straight line shifts. It moves clockwise, at a rate that would have it back to its original direction in thirty-two hours… Leave the shower running, sweetie.'

'I know the experiment.'

'Then you also know the shift is just a human perspective because we're a lot of self-centered bloody apes and we have to bend our minds to see the real picture which is that the pendulum isn't shifting, we are. The tray of sand was doing the turning. The Pantheon, the sand tray, the watching Parisians, they were all spinning, carried round on a rotating Earth. The swing of the pendulum was fixed in space. It's constant in relation to distant galaxies.'

'Why is this awesome?'

'Och, use the stuff between your ears, Freddie.'

'I'm trying.'

'Don't you see, Fred? The pendulum's telling us that somehow its inertia is fixed by intergalactic space. What's a child's swing, or the sway of a ship, but glorified pendulums? It means all of local dynamics, say like the damage done when you walk into a lamp post, is under the control of distant galaxies. You either see that as slightly strange or you're brain dead… Of course I know your name, it's Heather.'

'Okay, so our frame of reference for dynamics is the whole Universe.'