Free Twistor by Gene; John; Wolfe Cramer Page B

surface. He walked to the window where the late morning sunlight was slanting through the glass. Holding the shiny surface so that it reflected the sunlight, he brought the sun's image to a brilliant spot on the palm of his other hand. ' It focuses!' he said, quickly removing his hand from the hot spot. He walked across the room to the workbench, picked up a meter stick, and returned to the window. With the mirrorlike surface he cast a bright image of the sun on the wall under the windowsill and used the stick to measure the distance from the reflecting surface to the wall.
    'What are you up to, David?' asked Victoria, walking to the window to stand beside him.
    'If you look carefully,' he answered, 'you can see that all of these shiny surfaces are slightly concave, like fragments of a shaving mirror. I was using the sun's image to measure the focal length of this big one. It's just about forty-six centimeters. That means, if I remember my freshman physics right, that the radius of curvature of the reflecting surface is twice that, or ninety-two centimeters.' He walked quickly to the control console and moved the mouse through a rapid series of operations. ' Yes, I thought I remembered that number from last night. Vickie, the curvature of these surfaces matches the size of the field I set up just before the chamber disappeared. My field solution was for a sphere with a radius of ninety-two centimeters!' He sat at the console, his chin in his hands, and was quiet for a long time, not moving, his thoughts far away.
    Vickie was checking more of the pieces. 'They all focus the sun at the same distance,' she said. They all have the same radius of curvature.'
    'Hey,' said David, suddenly looking up, 'what ever happened to that first set of field coils we made, the ones that had to be done over because they had those big ugly sextupole and octopole field components?'
    'I gave them to Sam,' said Vickie. 'He said that maybe he could use them for the electron spin resonance setup in the senior lab.'
    David smiled. 'Well, maybe we're not dead yet. Look, Vickie, we've lost our chamber, our cryostat, our sample holder, our superconducting solenoid, all of the stuff we spent so much time building. But it occurs to me that we still have all the power supplies, the driving electronics, and the control computer. And whatever gobbled up our hardware, the boundary was outside the volume where the vacuum and the cryogenics were, so those things probably didn't matter. Maybe we don't need all that stuff to do it again. So let's just reproduce the external field conditions and see what happens.
    'You know, the unique thing about this experiment is that tricky spherical rotation of the twistor field that we developed. Nobody's ever made a field do anything like that before. Vickie, maybe we've found a real effect. If you think about our problems of last evening, perhaps those funny vacuum gauge "resonances" were just a smaller version of whatever took out the chamber. Perhaps we were just making gas molecules disappear instead of stainless-steel chambers. Let's go get those coils back from Sam and see if we can reproduce the effect.'
    'Wait a minute, David,' said Vickie sternly. 'Just wait, now! Think! Do you realize how crazy that sounds?'
    David paused for a moment, then grinned. 'As some famous physics pioneer must have said at one time or another,' he said, holding two fingers against his upper lip like a mustache and pointing upward with the index finger of his other hand, 'Der nutty problems machst für das crazy explanations!'
    Vickie giggled, shaking her head and rolling her eyes upward in mock despair.
    'And this explanation, Vickie,' he continued, 'is just about crazy enough to be right. Cross your fingers. Maybe we can get you a Ph.D. out of this mess yet!' He walked quickly to the door, motioning her to follow.
    As they walked down the corridor toward the stairs, Vickie said, 'David, aren't you forgetting Allan and the disappearance of