An Implementation of Magic Read online

download pre-publication scientific papers on subatomic physics and cosmology, and made maximum use of computer analysis and hypertext to assemble the new theories and data in meaningful patterns. Fuelled by McCall's obsession, they found a non-obvious correlation between new theory and old facts in a few weeks. By more traditional means the discovery would have taken years of sifting papers and millions of dollars of experiment time.

  With some satisfaction Derek went home to report this news. "We think we know how it could happen. At least, we have a theory. More than one theory, actually. Some say that we could increase the uncertainty of a particle’s position and then lock it into a different position. Other guys talk about wormholes."

  Sally stretched back in her chair. "You're all working so hard to find an explanation. Why don't you accept that it's telekinesis? Magic."

  Derek shook his head doggedly. "We do call it telekinesis. And if we can explain it, that's science. And if we can make it work every time, that'll be technology. Not magic at all. Hell, there are savages who think TV's magic - until they've seen a few reruns of Dallas."

  Derek was put to work supervising technicians who were assembling a new and completely different piece of equipment at the far end of the lab. It was to be connected to the end of a boson source. Bosons, massive and short-lived subatomic particles, figured largely in McCall's theory. Basically, McCall's idea was that a boson spin wormhole could be created in spacetime, and while it existed, normal matter at the ends of the hole could be flashed through it.

  Some months later they built another one. The new apparatus had little in common with the first rig, and it was designed to be trolleyed up to the end of an accelerator. It looked singularly unimpressive; a sturdy aluminium frame about two feet square supported a ring of segmented vacuum chambers with EHT electrodes around the focus behind a shaped magnet coil. Stubby cylindrical detectors pointed at the focus and trailed cables to amplifier modules. Underneath was a rack of Zenith power supplies. The set-up had a small array of coils, which Derek had to tune to reproduce the readings obtained on the first rig. Before doing that he had to fix a mesh guard cage over the target area where the test objects would be, fitted out with safety switches and a little sticker symbol warning personnel to keep their hands off. It gave him a strange feeling; for the first time it came home to him that their work might be dangerous.

  He tuned the rig out by adjusting dozens of screws and resistors and generator settings. It took days of work against a deadline; the slot of time McCall and Prof. Boothby had booked on the accelerator. When they were ready to test it, they took it on an air-sled to the nuclear physics building and offered it up to the end of the massive gleaming accelerator. Final checks; gigawatt pulses hummed; Derek made a few adjustments via telemotor. The new rig began to deliver near the end of their time-slot, after hours of tweaking, and the net result of several million dollars worth of kit and a large electricity bill was allegedly to move a dust of almost molecular fineness a couple of centimetres into a receiving crucible.

  McCall was ecstatic. Derek could see he was almost booking his ticket for the Nobel Prize ceremony already. His colleagues were overjoyed and sent out for champagne. They had some reason to celebrate; in seeking to prove telekinesis, they had invented a matter transmitter.

  A minor accident terminated the session. As McCall sat waiting for a band-aid, Ted said, "Why not aim it at enemy soldiers, and take lumps out of them?"

  Then Fritz said, "Why not turn it round, put cyanide tablets in their bodies?"

  "It could take tiny samples from the far focus and examine them in a mass spectrometer or some such detector," said McCall.

  "You mean we make the equipment sense what it's picking at, and then work on what it finds?" Boothby replied.

  "Is that useful?"

  Other ideas came tumbling out, things they hadn't visualised until they could believe the process was real.

  That evening Derek came home in subdued mood. As she put his dinner in front of him, Sally asked what had happened.

  He looked up slowly. "We've shown that you don't need a human being at all to make it work."

  "Oh," she said. "You don't seem too happy about it."

  "We'll be paying off that dopehead, Chenier." He put down his fork, the dinner untasted. "It's just some things the guys were saying at coffee. About what we could do with the gear when we get it sorted."

  "What sort of things?"

  "They were just brainstorming. But they came up with amazing ideas. Things I'd never have thought of. Things you wouldn't believe."

  "Such as?"

  "McCall got a hole in his arm this afternoon. Stupid accident; everybody was tired. Suddenly they were all talking about using the gear to kill enemy soldiers."

  "You can't do that if it's white magic. It must be black magic, evil."

  "That's bullshit. The machine doesn't know what it’s pointed at. All matter's the same to it." He paused and rubbed his eyes.

  "What else?"

  "We could make it search for things and fetch them back. Maybe it could cut out brain tumours.""Could it look for gold?" Sally asked, eyes shining.

  "It probably could," said Derek. He picked at his dinner as though it was tasteless.

  "You don't seem too thrilled," said Sally.

  "McCall wants to try all these things. Tomorrow, if possible."

  Derek was not surprised that his next task was to make electrical interfaces to connect the telekinesis unit to the small computers they already used in the lab. A programmer wrote software to control it. Once this was done, the work of fine-tuning the system went on at a faster pace. They developed a means of moving the foci, the send and receive points, at will.

  Derek designed and built a computer-controlled analyser to analyse pinhead-sized objects received at the telekinesis unit's near focus. But he was not altogether happy in his work.

  He said as much during one coffee break. "Now we've connected a computer into it, it seems it isn't what we thought we had discovered this spring. This is something else. This is a machine that searches for things out of sight and does stuff to them."

  A few days after the Fourth of July, Sally was probing Derek's uneasiness about the Magic Machine, as she called it.

  "It does seem as though they have something new," she admitted. "Surely you're not unhappy about possible military applications? I never thought you were a pacifist!"

  Derek rubbed his stubbly chin and sipped his coffee before replying. "It's the potential of it that gives me a chilly feeling. That and the way it picks holes in steel with just a little popping noise."

  "You've never explained exactly what it does. Does it send things for miles, or what?"

  "You never asked me before. The furthest we've made it send is about three times the length of this trailer."

  "Oh." She felt deflated. "And how big a thing does it send?"

  "About the size of a sugar cube. Away from the unit the capacity falls off rapidly, then more gradually, to like the size of a pinhead."

  "This toy is what you're worried about? A pinhead? So much for Beam Me Up Scotty!"

  Derek scowled. "It's hardly a toy. It does that at up to a thousand times a second." "That's a lot?" She felt patronised.

  Derek shrugged. "Eighty million a day. It just happens that our little computer won't drive it any faster. We don't know how fast it could work."

  He put down his coffee cup. "I'm almost certain that Chenier and his girl were faking the results. If McCall hadn't believed in his powers he would never have gone ahead and invented the Machine."

  Derek learned that in the next stage of the work they would be working at probing the limits of the telekinesis equipment's range.

  Slabs of tank armour were brought into the lab, hot from the heat of July, and placed around the receiving focus. The scientists had realised that because of the Earth's daily rotation, one side of the Earth was moving at up to 1000mph relative to an external reference, and the other side of the Eart
h was moving at 1000mph in the opposite direction. The difference, 2000mph, could manifest itself in the form of an object moving faster than an artillery shell if they received it from the equator at the far side of the Earth.

  Derek was worried. Again he was reminded that what they were doing was dangerous. The team exchanged some uneasy jokes."Don't dial Australia," was one.

  At home, Sally asked if the tank armour meant the military were getting involved. Derek denied it, but privately he wasn't so sure.

  "I can't find my cherry lipstick. I wonder if all the objects that get lost for good get teleported somewhere else?" Sally said.

  Three days later, Derek ate his dinner in closemouthed silence. "I'm not allowed to talk about my work any more. The new funders won't allow it. And it would be better if you don't say anything about what I've told you already."

  "Are you serious? Everybody knows about it now! And when did I sign any contract?"

  Soon there was new building work going on at the College. "Do you know what it's for?" Sally said one morning. "Jennifer next door says it's a new computer room for a secret project. There are cars visiting the project; I know from the names that they are computer software companies who have worked on big aerospace and weapons contracts."

  "Well, I can’t tell you anything," Derek muttered into his coffee.

  Derek had to sign for a pile of photocopies the Project had requested from the College Library. He flipped through them and saw that they