Twistor Read online

  TWISTOR

  JOHN CRAMER

  Introduction to the Dover Edition by

  GENE WOLFE

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Mineola, New York

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1989 by John Cramer

  Introduction to the Dover edition Copyright © 2016 by Gene Wolfe

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William Morrow & Company, Inc., New York, in 1989. A new Introduction to the Dover edition by Gene Wolfe has been specially prepared for the present edition.

  International Standard Book Number

  ISBN-13: 978-0-486-80450-7

  ISBN-10: 0-486-80450-X

  Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

  80450X01 2016

  www.doverpublications.com

  For Pauline

  who wanted me to,

  and David,

  who knew I could

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 2

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Introduction to the Dover Edition

  When I began reading science fiction, a good many people were complaining that there wasn't enough hard science in it. Things have changed today. The pulp magazines I remember so fondly have gone the way of the dodo. There are no longer jungles on Venus. Robert A. Heinlein, the SF giant of that day, is dead. So are the ABC writers, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. The excitement has faded.

  One thing, however, has not changed, faded, or died. In those days, readers complained that there was too much fiction in science fiction, and not enough science. Few seem to understand the reason for that, so let me explain.

  Scarcely anyone who writes science fiction is in fact a scientist. My own degree is in engineering. I have been a soldier, an engineer, and a journalist, but never a scientist. Even so, I have come closer than most.

  John Cramer is one of the rare exceptions. He is a scientist, and is highly regarded in his field of experimental physics. When he writes about science or scientists, about laboratories, and about the public's reaction to all three, he knows what he's talking about.

  That is much, but it is far from all. He not only knows science, but he knows science fiction, which he has read for decades. At various times, I have tried to explain to various groups of people, some of them very skeptical, that for a science fiction book to be good, it must be a good book. It is a simple truth, and it may be that it seems to you (as it does to me) an obvious one. A children's book cannot be a good children's book unless it is a good book, which is why a reader of fifty may read Tom Sawyer with pleasure. In just the same way, a crime novel like The Maltese Falcon must be a good novel. Otherwise, it cannot be a good crime novel. Can a good evening meal NOT be a good meal?

  GENE WOLFE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once I complained to David Hartwel! that not enough hard science fiction of quality was being published these days. His response was that the fault lay with people like me, who had the scientific background and writing skills to produce good hard SF but were not doing so. That challenge stimulated me to write this novel. David Hartwell, therefore, is the progenitor of Twistor. His many suggestions for improvements in style and structure over many months and several drafts have made this a far better book than it might have been in the hands of a less interactive editor.

  My wife, Pauline, has also played a key editorial role in this, my first venture into the writing of fiction. Her sense of style and her deftness with point-of-view relationships help me to convert flat scenes into dynamic ones, lifeless characters into interesting ones.

  I am also indebted to the patient readers of various preliminary versions of the manuscript who have made useful and sometimes important suggestions: my daughters Kathryn Elizabeth Cramer and Karen Cramer Doyle, and my friends Dr. Ilan Ben Zvi, David and Jan Rowell, Dick Seymour, Judy Gustafson, and particularly Vonda McIntyre, who helped me to avoid many of the pitfalls into which the inexperienced fiction writer can stumble.

  This novel is set in the Department of Physics of the University of Washington in Seattle, where I am a faculty member, and it accurately represents the structural layout of the present physics building and campus. David's laboratory is, in fact, my former lab/office in 101 Physics Hall. However, the physicist characters in the book are not based on any of my colleagues on the physics and astronomy faculties and should bear no resemblance to any particular individuals.

  J. G. C.

  TWISTOR

  PART 1

  Problems worthy of attack, prove their worth by hitting back.

  Piet Hein

  (1905–1996)

  1

  Wednesday Morning, October 6

  The towers and battlements of Physics Hall shone wetly in the morning light filtering through the Seattle drizzle. The structure would have been well suited for shooting arrows and pouring boiling oil down upon some horde of barbarians, were any so foolish as to venture onto the campus of the University of Washington to besiege Physics Hall.

  On its north and east sides the 1920s yellow-brown brick structure was embraced by the Suzzalo Library, a gothic pseudo-cathedral of arching marble and stained glass, straining along its angled length to contain its overburden of books as it metamorphosed into Bauhaus glass and concrete at its southeastern terminus. Physics Hall stretched north to south along Rainier Vista, a broad walkway so aligned that when the Seattle weather cooperated it looked out across a large circular pool and fountain past the cityscape of Capitol Hill to a stunning view of Mount Rainier some eighty-five miles to the southeast.

  But this particular October morning the sky was overcast, and a light rain dampened the walkway. The arching water plumes of the fountain were absent, leaving only a dark circular pool that reflected the ragged downslope of Capitol Hill, its indistinct edge shading into grayness in the space where giant Rainier belonged. The giant's absence was ignored by the interweaving of bicycles and quick-stepping students on Rainier Vista.

  Inside Physics Hall the activities of the morning were beginning to build as the outflow of milling and chattering undergraduates, their eight-thirty classes just ended, diffused from the large upstairs lecture halls to collide with the inflow of nine-thirty replacements. But behind the closed doors on the ground floor, within the long rectangular laboratory rooms, a calmer, more focused atmosphere prevailed. Here, carefully tended by faculty and the most recent generation of graduate students and postdocs, were ongoing long-term experiments that might reveal more about the inner workings of the universe, or at least provide the basis for a Ph.D. thesis or a respectable journal publication.

  Behind one glass-paneled door an arcane array of hardware imprisoned a single atom of antimatter, a nucleus made of antiprotons and antineutrons and surrounded by a swarm of positrons. The anti-atom, created at a large accelerator in Geneva, had been carefully imported to Seattle riding in its ow
n electromagnetic trap. It had been held here for over a year, while ever-changing probes extracted secrets of the symmetries between matter and antimatter. In another room a coherent beam of X-rays was meticulously mapping the arrangements of a single layer of atoms clinging to a cold graphite surface, the holographic interference patterns revealing unsuspected regularities and geometrical connections in their configurations. Behind another door a gleaming, rainbowed laser disk spun within its drive. Its data stream, beamed down from an orbiting telescope and captured in plastic, aluminium and gold, was now with systematic reconstruction yielding an emerging vista, a giant galaxy suspended in the act of a violent explosion that had occurred over a billion years ago. And in another laboratory room just down the corridor, a doorway on another universe was about to open . . .

  David Harrison, in loose sweater, old jeans, and scuffed brown loafers, sat sprawled on the floor beside a rack of electronic equipment. He brushed a shock of dark brown hair from his eyes as he peered into the tangle of wires, ribbon cables, and fiber-optics bundles. Somewhere in this mess two signal leads had been interchanged. All he had to do was find them.

  Beside him on the bare concrete floor was a large electrical drawing showing many neat square-cornered lines in a rainbow of colors. It was the latest version of the experiment's control wiring layout, and just minutes earlier it had been traced and labeled by the inhumanly adroit pens of the 'coat rack' graphics plotter in the corner. With a small digital multimeter David was beginning the tedium of verifying the correspondence between the beautifully ordered ideal world of electrical wiring represented on the paper and the untidy real world of jumbled multicolored wires, spade lugs, solder joints, and screw connectors in the equipment rack before him. He was confident that he would find the error. But he was also pretty sure that he would not find it soon.

  There was a knock at the door. He rose and brushed off the seat of his jeans with his hand, then rubbed hand against jeans. His butt felt cold from sitting on the bare concrete floor. He walked across the cluttered laboratory room to the brown varnished door, noting the tall shadow on the frosted pane. He could hear the shrill sounds of high-pitched child-voices. It was Paul and the children. He felt a rush of pleasure and smiled broadly as he pulled the door open.

  'David!' they said in unison as the door came open. David noticed how their voices echoed from the bare concrete floor, the white plaster walls, and the high ceiling of the room. Jeffrey Ernst, age six, and Melissa Ernst, who had just had her ninth birthday, charged across the threshold and embraced David's knees. He absorbed their small impacts and knelt to hug them.

  'Hi, David!' said Paul Ernst. 'We've come for the grand tour you promised.'

  'C'mon in,' said David, rising from greeting the children. He took each child by a hand and led them down the long room.

  Paul glanced around the cluttered laboratory. 'Where's Victoria?' he asked.

  'I suppose she's still sleeping,' said David. 'She wrote an entry in the lab book at three A.M., SO she must have gone home after that. We're working shifts. We've really been up to our ears in problems here, but now things are finally coming together.' He looked at Paul. 'A lot of our progress is due to her. Vickie's very smart, and good with equipment, and she gets things done. I think she's the best experimentalist graduate student in the department.'

  His friend nodded. 'The CalTech undergrads we get as graduate students are usually pretty good, and Victoria is better than most. She took my advanced quantum mechanics class last year,' he continued, 'and all three quarters she got one of the highest grades in the class. She beat out some of our hotshot theory grad students. As I recall, she had one of the better scores on the qualifying exam, too.'

  'Well,' said David, 'this mess will soon be collecting her thesis data. She and I have invented a neat trick for manipulating the drive field. Vickie calls it a 'twistor' field because of the way it twists and contorts the electric and magnetic fields. She's taking George Williams's quantum gravitation class now, and she says the time structure we impose on the field is an electromagnetic analog of one of the twistor operators in Roger Penrose's hyper-dimensional calculus.'

  Paul nodded noncommittally.

  David noticed that Jeff, perhaps bored with the adult conversation, was beginning to fidget. He smiled at the boy, gesturing toward the shining array of equipment that occupied most of the central part of the room. This,' he said, 'is our new experiment. We had to work some to cram it all into this little seven-by-fourteen-meter lab room. Some parts were scrounged from an older setup of Professor Saxon's, some were bought from commercial suppliers, and some were made in our machine and electronics shops. We spent a long time deciding exactly what we wanted, and we designed a lot of it ourselves. Now all the parts are here, it's all put together, and all we have to do is make it work.' He thought of the wiring error yet to be found and looked across at the wiring diagram spread on the floor.

  Jeff crowded between David and Melissa. 'David, does this stuff ever make sparks and blow up, like the things the scientists on TV use?' he asked.

  That's a very good question, Jeff,' said David. 'Our stuff doesn't do anything so spectacular when it breaks. Maybe it would be easier to fix if it did. The hardest part of doing this kind of physics experiment is making sure that each part of the experiment is working the way it should and that all the parts are working at the same time. About half the equipment you see here isn't for actually doing the measurements; it's for checking to make sure that the other half of the equipment is working.*

  Looking for something to amuse the children, David led them to the far end of the room near the windows. Here an old wooden desk had been converted through some feat of amateur carpentry into a control console. In its center were a small computer and a color monitor flanked by two short electronic racks.

  This is where we sit to run the experiment,' he told them. 'This computer sends and receives messages from the equipment and puts them in a form that we dumb humans can understand. It has a part that does very fast calculations and another part that draws pictures for us on this monitor to let us know what's happening in the calculations or the experiment. We make things happen by moving this “mouse” around and clicking its button.' David moused up the main desktop, selected the speech synthesizer utility, and fed it a text file. A stylized human face appeared on the screen, and with realistic lip movements and facial expressions it recited a bit of text which was a short commercial for the computer.

  'And that,' said David, turning to point to the stainless-steel sphere in the center of the apparatus, 'is the most important part of the equipment. Inside is the sample holder where we put the material we're studying: a perfect single crystal, a special arrangement of atoms that we want to learn about. We pump all the air out of the sphere so there's a vacuum inside, like in space. Then we make it very cold.

  The lowest temperature possible is called absolute zero. We cool our crystal sample down to almost that temperature. When they're cold enough, we can learn about how atoms behave in crystals. Then we make special waves in them.'

  'I have a crystal at home,' said Melissa. 'It's very pretty. Can we see your crystals, David?'

  David nodded, opened a metal cabinet, and took two plastic boxes from a clear plastic drawer. 'Here are some natural iron sulfide crystals that we've been using.' He handed shiny black cubes to Jeff and Melissa. 'You can keep 'em if you want.'

  'Are you sure you aren't going to need those?' asked Paul.

  David shook his head. 'They're nice crystals, and we went to some trouble to get good ones,' he said, 'but they turned out to be worthless for the calibrations we had in mind.'

  Paul nodded. Melissa seemed very pleased as she held the dark crystal cube near the desk lamp, examining it closely.

  'What's that thing?' asked Jeff, wrinkling his nose and pointing to a wheeled cart supporting a brown tank with a green rubber hose and copper nozzle.

  'That's a tank of helium gas, Jeff. We use it to check our equip
ment,' said David. 'Helium is the second smallest atom of all, lighter than everything except hydrogen. We use it to find leaks in our equipment, because it can find even the tiniest hole in a steel or aluminum container and squeak through it into our leak detector. We squirt helium around on the outside, and if it finds its way to the inside we know we have a leak. And helium also has another use, too.'

  From a bottom shelf of a cabinet David produced two red rubber balloons and some strings. He held each balloon to the nozzle, filled it with helium, tied off its neck, and attached a string. The red balloons bobbed on the string as he gave them to Jeff and Melissa. 'Sir and madam, I present you with the second lightest element in the known universe!' he said dramatically. Then he winked at Paul.

  'Is Allan around?' Paul asked.

  David shook his head. 'He's off to D.C. for some big National Science Board meeting at the NSF. He's amazing. He really has the connections. He persuaded a guy at Argonne to send us some huge single crystals of fluoridated layered perovskites. You should see the X-ray diffraction patterns. They're the most beautiful perovskite crystals I've ever seen. Just what we'll need after we get this kludge working.' Allan Saxon was the senior professor for whom David worked as a postdoc.

  'Allan knows everybody,' Paul agreed. 'He has a reputation in the department for keeping tight control, making sure everyone under him is working flat out. Does he give you enough elbow room, David?'

  'He was a bit hard to deal with when we were having equipment problems,' said David. 'Nothing I couldn't handle. But he brightens right up when he smells progress. Just now he's very friendly and helpful. He's busy writing proposals and editing that AIP journal, so he leaves Vickie and me to do most of the lab work.'

  Paul nodded. 'Kids, I'm afraid we have to go now,' he said. 'David has work to do, and we've interrupted him long enough.' Jeff protested, but David assured him that they could come back again for another visit soon. Grasping their balloon strings with one hand and holding their crystals carefully in the other, they filed out the door.