Twistor by Gene; John; Wolfe Cramer Read Free Book Online Page A

who had gone to the basement 'to stoke the computer,' returned. He and David walked to the kitchen for the after-dinner cleanup.
    I wonder what his mother was like, Elizabeth thought as she settled back into her chair.
    David was standing at the sink, rinsing the dinner dishes and handing them to Paul to place in the dishwasher. While Paul was doing some rearranging, David looked out the kitchen window, considering the shimmering reflections of the lights from Kirkland across the lake. The residences of Bellevue made densely packed points of light that shaded to a continuous galaxylike glow on the more distant hillsides of Somerset and Newport Hills. Farther south the traffic on the Evergreen Point Bridge seemed to be moving now. He handed Paul another dish.
    'So you're having problems with your hardware,' Paul said. 'Anything serious?'
    'Well, you never know how serious an experimental problem is 'til after you understand it,' said David, 'and by then it's usually not a problem any more. This one's particularly insidious because it makes our diagnostic instruments tell us lies. Vickie and I are just putting the finishing touches to the new perovskite holospin-echo rig.'
    'I'll bet Allan's excited,' Paul said mildly.
    'Well, Allan's out of town right now,' David answered. He considered just what he wanted to say to Paul about Allan Saxon. 'That's OK, though. Even when he's around his forte isn't debugging hardware. His talents lie in other directions. He has some pretty good ideas for where to push, he gets the NSF contracts that pay the bills and our salaries, he gets the shop time, and he gets us the very best samples to play with. Right now he's pretty involved with his national committees and his business ventures.'
And it's damn hard to get his attention,
David added silently to himself. 'But anyhow, we're setting up to look for holospin wave excitations in some of the more exotic warm superconductors. We're going to have the best setup in the world, if it ever works.'
    Paul nodded.
    'But so far we haven't even been able to get to square one,' David continued. That'll be when we put a sample in the chamber. We're still on square zero, working on the "null" part of the experiment to make sure that we don't get false signals from the equipment when nothing's inside. But at the moment we do get unexpected results without a sample.' He described what had happened that evening at the laboratory. 'It's weird!' he concluded. 'Vickie thinks it's an RF power leak.'
    As he was speaking, Elizabeth came in from the living room and opened the refrigerator. ' RF power?' she said. 'That sounds like a political movement. "Power to the Rs, not to mention the Fs!" You guys certainly have your own language.'
    ' It only seems that way,' said David, handing Paul another plate. ' "RF" just means "radio frequency" or high-frequency electricity. We're using something like a TV transmitter to pipe electromagnetic energy into our experiment. We're driving the system with high-frequency radio waves.'
    'What happens during the commercials?' asked Elizabeth with an impetuous grin.
    'We have a special circuit that cuts out the commercials, the game shows, and the wrestling matches,' David said, laughing. 'We prefer to use soap operas and new-wave music. It's much smoother.'
    'Paul told me that you've been working with warm superconductors,' said Elizabeth. 'I remember hearing about them five or six years ago when they were making the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek.
What ever happened to them?'
    'Oh, they're still around,' said David, 'but the floating trains and the superfast computers described in the magazines are taking a bit longer than was advertised. Warm superconductors were special in the first place because they have a special crystal structure called a layered perovskite. It's a flat crystal plane like a checkerboard with copper atoms in the centers of the squares. The copper atoms in the red squares have spin up and those in the black squares