Revelation

'The nonsense is entirely Professor Bradfield's.' Aristotle's face was flushed. 'Gravity is just a mutual shielding of atoms from the ZPE. The zero point energy cannot shield itself from itself. It cannot exert a gravitational force and does not, therefore, collapse the Universe.'

Uninvited, plates of soup were approaching, balanced on the waiter's arms. Findhorn found himself looking at little fish, and octopus tentacles immersed in a thick, tomato-red juice. Bradfield looked at his plate with something like alarm. The Alsatian reappeared and settled down with a sigh, out of kicking range but within throwing distance of scraps.

Aristotle said, 'Pepper? The undeniable fact is, Mister Cartwright, that numerous small atomic effects can be explained — can only be explained — if the vacuum contains radiation whose intensity increases without limit as we go to higher and higher frequencies. Its energy must approach infinity.'

Bradfield was being smooth again. 'Not everything that appears in an equation has physical reality. This ZPE is nothing more than a computational trick.'

Aristotle dipped bread into his fish soup. 'We progress. My colleague now admits that ZPE is a unifying explanation for a wide range of atomic phenomena. The Americans — or is it the British? — have an expression for this. If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then we call it a duck, not a computational trick.'

Archie was prodding a tentacle with his fork, as if he expected a reaction.

Findhorn said, 'This is getting over my head.'

'Perhaps you need more retsina, my friend,' Aristotle suggested, pouring it.

Findhorn thought the wine bore some resemblance to paint stripper, but he sipped it anyway. 'How much energy are we talking about?'

Aristotle speared a fish with his fork. 'The zero point energy shapes molecules, even determines the internal structure of atoms. The material world is a froth floating on the surface of a deep ocean of vacuum energy.'

'Give me a number.'

Papa tossed it out casually. 'There is enough energy in a volume of space the size of a coffee cup to evaporate the world's oceans.'

Archie's eyes gleamed. Bradfield said, 'Ugh!' Whether in reference to the soup or the Greek's claim was unclear.

'But that's vast,' Findhorn said lamely.

'You must have considered the implications of a source of infinite energy, easily tapped,' said Aristotle.

'Cheap electricity. The end of starvation. Water in the desert. A world of plenty.'

Aristotle burst out laughing. 'Cheap super-bombs, more powerful than nuclear weapons and much easier to build. Economic collapse. Massive unemployment. Social chaos. And, somewhere, the emergence of another Fuhrer to rescue the situation.'

Findhorn tried again. 'How could you mine this energy, Papa? How could it be done?'

Aristotle pushed his chair back and stood up, carrying his plate. The Alsatian jumped up expectantly. The waiter exchanged exuberant Greek with Aristotle. No money was changing hands and Findhorn let it go. 'Simple. Think of some simple way to make the vacuum decay. To change the ground state of the neutral vacuum.'

Bradfield looked as if he was in pain.

'I don't understand these terms,' Findhorn said in frustration.

'Forget mechanical devices like parallel plates. Go atomic. Look for a system which shimmers in the vacuum energy, like a crystal with complex resonances on the quantum scale, allowing it to achieve the impossible, like a momentary reversal of time's arrow. Work on that.' Aristotle stood at the kitchen door. 'There is one problem, I believe, with any attempt to engineer the vacuum. Petrosian may or may not have thought of it.'

Findhorn waited. Aristotle finished his dramatic pause, and continued: 'We would be toying with something we know very little about.'

'You mean…'

'Now, Mr Times journalist…' was there, Findhorn wondered, a tiny hint of scepticism in Aristotle's tone? '… I have given you time, vacuum, cosmos. It is everything you need for your newspaper article.' There was a brilliant blue flash, and seconds later Zeus roared angrily around the hills. 'We, should return.'

'One last thing, Papa,' Findhorn said.

Aristotle waited.

'Who were Chase and Henshal?'

In the near-dark, Aristotle looked blank. Bradfield looked blank. Archie looked blank. And so, finally, did Findhorn.

* * *

'I guess you were surprised to see me,' Archie said. The air was oppressive, and his brow had a light coating of sweat. He kept glancing through the kitchen window towards the courtyard.

Findhorn poured them both more wine. 'The surprise was entirely yours, Archie. Still, you've had time to think up a plausible story.'

Archie blew out his cheeks, took a gulp. 'You're too effing bright for plausible stories. I may as well tell you.'

'You must have come out here like lightning, after you sent me that phoney message.'

Archie hesitated. Then: 'Aye. How did you know it was false?'

'You almost had me fooled. Your mistake lay in those intermediate addresses between Angel Lodge and my Aberdeen one. You mis-spelled digital.com as digitil.com. It meant the e-mail header had been typed in manually by someone covering his tracks. And by this time it had twigged that every time I contacted you something bad happened shortly afterwards.'

Archie stayed silent.

Findhorn was suddenly angry. 'People are trying to kill me.'

'That wasn't part of the deal.' Archie's gaze still kept flicking towards the window.

'You hurt me, Archie. You were the one person on this planet I thought I could trust.'

'Aye, well, we all have to grow up.'

'Why?' Findhorn asked, although he knew the answer.

Archie looked at Findhorn. His eyes were red-rimmed. 'You're a fool, Fred. If this Petrosian was really onto something then a fortune isn't the word for it. Imagine having a patent for some device that gives the world free energy.'

'You heard Papa the Greek. It could blow up in your face. So grab the money and stuff the risks?'

'Fred, you're holding something that could make you richer than Croesus. I've had it with poverty, I do not recommend it. I want more out of life than slogging my guts out, trying to educate a generation of third-rate students who don't give a damn. I just wanted to be up there with the people who made it. A piece of the action, was that so bad?'

'Some action.' Findhorn paused, then suddenly asked: 'What's your connection with these religious nuts?'

Archie shifted uncomfortably. 'You don't know what you're up against.'

'Are you and Romella in it together?'

He was sulking like a child.

'If Bradfield is right there's no zero point energy and this Casimir thing is just interatomic forces.'

'Aye.'

'Aye, spoken like a no.'

Archie sipped at the wine with every sign of disliking it. 'Bradfield conveniently forgot to mention one thing. These atomic forces he was spoutin' about. They're caused by ZPE in the first place.'

'You mean…'

'They're just part of the effing vacuum energy. He also slightly misled you about a small noisy clique of outsiders. The people who believed in ZPE also laid down the foundations of modern physics. People like Einstein, Planck, Feynman and Bethe.'

Feynman and Bethe. Names in Petrosian's diary: he had worked with them at Los Alamos. 'So what's your gut feeling, Archie?'

'My money's on the Greek.' Then, 'Fred, there's something I have to tell you.' Archie refilled his tumbler and took another long draught. He screwed his face up with disgust. 'Effing turpentine.'

'You need that stuff to screw up your courage?'

'I'm supposed to invite you over to my hotel for a late drink. It's a kilometre away and between here and there, there are lots of dark alleys. And there are lots of nice wee coves for late night swimmers to drown in and I don't suppose the forensic science in this neck of the woods is world-beating.'