The woman is now unconscious. The bearded man says, 'Her pulse is rapid. I can hardly feel it.'
Findhorn hands the document to Romella. 'Let's make it quick.'
She nods, tight-lipped. 'Okay.' She flips through the pages. 'Right, it's entitled Energy from the Vacuum. It's in four sections. Section One, Introduction; Section Two, Thermodynamics of energy extraction; Section Three, A new view of gravity and inertia; Section Four, Practical energy extraction.'
'Section One: it's about the Casimir effect?'
'Well, yes. But there's a lot more. Here's this HMS Daring you talked about, and Foucault's Pendulum. He's tying it in to something called the Ylem —'
'Never mind, there's no time. What sort of energy is he talking about extracting? What's he saying here?' Findhorn points to a sentence with a number.
'"… the energy density of the vacuum is therefore estimated to be of the same order as the Planck energy, with an extractable fraction of perhaps 1021 ergs per cubic millimetre" — is that a lot?'
A Hiroshima bomb in every cubic millimetre of space. 'It's enough. What's his punch line? Give me the last para of the Intro.'
She translates verbatim, speaking in a low, rapid voice inaudible to anyone but Findhorn: ' "In Section Two I show that there is no inconsistency between the principle of conservation of energy and the extraction of unlimited energy from the vacuum. Section Three meets the objection that the energy density of the vacuum would curve space to a degree contradicted by observations. The point here is that the virtual radiation has such a fleeting existence that no gravitational mass is associated with it. Indeed, I show that inertia and gravity can be viewed as the reactions of mass to an asymmetric radiation field in an accelerated frame…"'
'Her pulse is almost gone. If we don't get her to a hospital she may die.'
Drindle says, 'She assuredly will if Albrecht is not playing straight with me. You two, why have you stopped?'
Section Three amounts to a new theory of gravitation. Findhorn suspects that he is staring a Nobel Prize in the face. He says, 'There's no time for this. The woman may be dying. Skip to Section Four.'
Section Four. The sorcerer's trick.
Romella reads the words rapidly and quietly, not understanding any of it, Findhorn asking her to skip as many paragraphs as he can. And as she translates, Findhorn almost forgets where he is. The concept is utterly strange, an approach to vacuum engineering unlike anything he had visualized. It is a symbiosis of biology and physics. It is also stunningly simple.
In 1952 Chase and Henshal discovered the structure of viruses. It was a dual structure, like a golf ball. A soft inner core of RNA carried the information the virus needed to replicate itself. Protection of this vital core came in the form of a hard outer layer, a protein molecule, a long string of atoms folded round the RNA, its thousands of constituent atoms densely packed. This protective shell — the capsid — is an enormously complex crystal. A golf ball with legs.
The virus is a fraction of a micron in size. Its atoms shimmer and shake in the quantum vacuum; they feel the zero point energy, the vibrations of distant galaxies.
Coat a little plate, a centimetre on a side and machined as flat as technology will allow, with a thin layer of virus. Put this plate in a vacuum, and surge a huge electric current through it. The plate disintegrates into a cloud of microscopic platelets. The energy of the galaxies — the zero point energy — forces the little plates together. For a tiny handful, flatter than the average, the Casimir force is large enough to create X-rays, the pressure from which compresses neighbouring platelets together, creating more zero point pressure and hence more X-rays…
And now Petrosian cleverly exploits the dynamics of the viral crystal. It is small enough to feel the vacuum fluctuations and big enough to absorb them, extracting energy from the tiny vacuum between the plates and allowing reactions to take place which would be impossible in the macroworld; time moves at a different rate; light moves faster; causality is violated; high-energy electrons and positrons are created out of the void. The virus crystal now behaves like a single giant atom; its quantum levels are squashed closely together; the relativistic electrons crash through these, penetrating the nucleus, sinking into the shadowy depths of the energy ocean. The vacuum is now unstable; and it cannot be emptied.
A childhood memory flashes through Findhorn's mind, a story about a miller who wished for more flour but the process couldn't be stopped and the stuff poured out of his mill and flooded the countryside.
Petrosian is vague about where it will end but makes speculative remarks about matter annihilation.
Once triggered, there is no more need for an electric field: the immense pressure created in the process is enough. There is an appendix. For some reason Petrosian has typed it in Russian. Romella says she reads Russian, translates in a quiet voice which is seething with rage. There are engineering drawings. Small virus-coated plates are being fired into a giant titanium chamber (a hundred metres across in Petrosian's sketch, with walls three metres thick); they maintain an incandescent fireball, fuelled by gamma rays pouring out of empty space, drawing on incomprehensible cosmic energies.
All this Findhorn and Romella skim through in a couple of minutes. The text is backed up by a second appendix of densely argued mathematics that Findhorn doesn't even attempt. However, he notes the virus that Petrosian has identified as suitable. The tobacco mosaic virus, which Findhorn assumes is a source of disease in tobacco plants.
Another thirty seconds: the problem, admitted by Petrosian in a footnote, is the cut-off point for the energy generation. It depends on unknown properties of the vacuum at unexplored energies. It is all untested theory. It may go as Petrosian thought, giving a sort of controlled fireball from which endless energy can be safely tapped. Or a few powers of ten may be missing and a laboratory and the surrounding countryside may disappear when the switch is thrown. Or a few more powers of ten, and oceans will boil and the planet will be sterilized.
Or the whole process could be a dud. Petrosian's machine might be a nonsense, a fantasy thing which would yield nothing. Findhorn remembers Bradfield's words: we get a lot of crank science in our field.
Findhorn thinks of that sweaty day in MacDonald's Ranch where the bits of plutonium had to be pushed together almost to the point of criticality. He thinks of Petrosian's recurring nightmare, that the nuclear fireball might be hot enough to ignite the atmosphere. And he thinks of his own fears about instability, of the polar meltdown waiting to happen, and at last his mind becomes one with Petrosian's, and he understands his fear about the dark corners of the vacuum process, and his wish to hide it away until some future Utopia when the pirates were gone and the risks could be assessed in a responsible and open marketplace. Petrosian, Findhorn realises, was the classic naive academic.
Drindle's voice brings him back to harsh reality: 'Have you finished?'
Findhorn blows out his cheeks. 'The document is authentic'
The Korean grins. He points the gun at Findhorn and says, 'Boom boom!'
35
The Kill
Findhorn is nauseous. He is shaking, and almost choking with stress. He knows the answer but tries it anyway: 'These people know nothing about the process. You can let them go.'
Drindle smiles. 'You are so naive.'
What happens next spans no more than three seconds.
The woman at Drindle's feet moans. He points his carbine down at her and fires. The bang is deafening. A fountain of red spray shoots into the air. The bearded man, still trying to stem the blood from her legs, looks up in astonishment, his face dotted with little red spots, but there is another deafening bang and he falls back in slow motion, his chest a mangled red hole. Albrecht opens his mouth to speak but there is a third bang and his eyes roll back and he flings his arms out like a preacher and collapses lifeless on the sofa. The woman at the Christmas tree still has her eyes closed and she is praying in a wild, frightened voice, and Drindle is pointing his gun at her but now Findhorn is on his feet and screaming at the top of his voice, 'It's going out on the Internet! It's going out on the Internet!'