“Half your time would be empty,” Evelyn pointed out. “No. On second thought, most of it.”
“Great.”
“What would you do with it?”
He kissed her on the cheek and pretended to think about it. “Oh, I’d find something.”
* * *
They spent the next couple of days sight-seeing around the city. They went to the aquarium, planetarium, botanical gardens, and museums in Golden Gate Park, rode cable cars, and ate the best at Fisherman’s Wharf, Japantown, and Broadway. They rented a car and drove north across the Golden Gate to the wine country, around the Bay to visit some of the researchers at Berkeley, and back across the Bay Bridge in the evening to see the SF Symphony, playing the winter season.
When they got back to the hotel, Corrigan called Hans Groener, his onetime colleague from MIT days, to confirm their visit to Stanford for the next day.
“Yes, that will be fine, Joe,” Hans said over the phone. “Also, I have a surprise for you.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I talked to an old friend of yours who’s out here now, and who would like to say hello again. So I invited her to join us for dinner tomorrow night and make it a foursome—Ivy Dupale.”
“Hey, terrific!” Corrigan called across the room to Evelyn. “How about this. Hans knows Ivy. She’s joining us for dinner tomorrow night.”
“How wonderful!”
“Fine, Hans. That’ll be just great.”
* * *
The following morning they left San Francisco again and headed southward this time, to Stanford University. Hans was involved in sleep and dream research, which Corrigan looked on as something different and quite probably interesting, but not really relevant to his own line of work. It would be good to see Hans again anyway, even if the visit did turn out to be mainly social. But after he and Evelyn arrived at the sprawling campus with its Spanish-inspired facades of rounded arches and shady colonnades, and had talked with Hans in his laboratory for only half an hour, he realized that he had been mistaken. Hans’s work could turn out to be very relevant indeed.
The DINS technology used by Pinocchio and EVIE used a configuration of electrodes inside the collar to create a dynamic pattern of ultra-high-frequency electric fields that penetrated the lower brain regions and brain stem. The fields superposed and were precisely shaped to add or cancel in different spots that could be very finely localized, which was how desired neural centers were activated selectively. However, attenuation and dispersion increased with penetration depth, reducing selectivity and hence the effectiveness of the technique. This was the main factor drat had restricted direct coupling to the medulla.
For several years, papers had been appearing in the scientific literature, reporting on an alternative approach using intersecting photon beams tuned to several narrow-frequency windows at which body tissue was found to be surprisingly transparent. It was only in talking with Hans that Corrigan first came to realize how rapidly these investigations had consolidated and were advancing. The new, emerging field was known as “Deep Selective Activation.”
“The window allows photons to penetrate coherently and maintain a tight focus, below disruptive ionization energies,” Hans explained. “On top of that, frequency tuning to specific neural states provides an additional dimension for fine probing. There’s no need for flooding the cells with huge numbers of photons.” He was lean and narrow-framed, with straight blond hair and a pale, thin-lipped countenance. The movies would have cast him as an SS officer whose sadism was a compensation for a physique that fell short of the Wagnerian Nordic ideal. In reality, Hans played American folk guitar and bred parakeets. Most of his equipment was being rebuilt currently, and his staff hidden away in offices or at computer terminals: there wasn’t a lot, really, to show that day.
“I knew you were dabbling in this, but I never realized it had come so far,” Corrigan confessed.
“DSA has had a boost from a lot of government work that was declassified,” Hans told him. “We’ve got quite a club springing up here on the West Coast. SRI are putting a team together. Todd’s group up at Berkeley.”
“We hoped to see him yesterday, but he’s away this week.”