Wernstecki, who had also stood at Keene and Shayle’s arrival, was physically Pang’s opposite in just about every respect. A tall, gaunt Caucasian, he had a halo of fair, frizzy hair, thin, pointy nose and chin, and thick lips that looked as if they belonged to another face. His eyes were pale, almost colorless, and took in Keene with a steady gaze, unlike Pang’s, which shifted restlessly as if constantly reading in updates from the surroundings. His head was perched atop a long neck protruding from a shirt collar riding atop a sweater, with a light jacket hanging loosely over a gangly frame. Keene judged him to be in his mid thirties.
“Lan, meet Jansinick Wernstecki,” Pang said, making an ushering motion. “Jan, this is Doctor Landen Keene, one of the survivors that Gallian’s mission brought back, who looks after the power-engineering side of the project. . . . And this is Lan’s colleague, Shayle Hartz. Fission and fusion. They make a good combination—or should I say hybrid? I hear Jan is one of the top theoreticians in celestial electrodynamics, Lan. A real live-wire in the field.” The corners of the rubber mouth twitched upward. Keene refused to encourage him.
The three shook hands. Wernstecki’s fingers were like turkey talons, but the grip was surprisingly firm. On meeting the unwavering eyes, Keene got the feeling of everything readable about himself being absorbed and logged, and immediately sensed an odd but strangely powerful personality. He knew that Wernstecki had been born on Enceladus and had studied under Pang’s father for a while. He had gone on to specialize in celestial electrical phenomena, and in recent years had been involved in the frantic work of trying to quantify and recompute the changed dynamics of the Solar System following Athena’s disruptive electrical effects. Pang, recognizing the potential value of this kind of experience in electro-gravitic interactions to his own project, had invited Wernstecki to visit Tesla and learn more of what they were doing there. He hadn’t said anything specifically about recruiting him . . . but Wernstecki would know how things worked.
Pang went on, “I’ve told Jan that our work began as a generalization of Weber’s force law. . . . But why don’t I let Lan come into the act more and take it from here?”
Keene understood that the invitation was as much for Keene to establish his own credentials in Wernstecki’s eyes as to help Pang assess Wernstecki’s. “You’re familiar with that, Jan?” he inquired.
Wernstecki nodded. “Yes, of course. Weber’s original work was to derive the Ampère current law by generalizing Coulomb’s force law to include second-order reciprocal terms in c.” He paused, as if for a response. For some reason Keene had expected a reedy voice, but it was deep and firm, like the handshake.
“Unifying electrostatics with electrodynamics,” Keene said. “It gave a correct expression for wave propagation before Maxwell.”
“Jointly with Neumann,” Wernstecki supplied. “They also succeeded in deriving Faraday’s induction law from the force law, and formulated the first example in physics of a potential energy that depended on the velocity of the interacting particles.”
It sounded like a perfect background for the Tesla project. No wonder Pang’s eyes were twinkling. Pang seemed to decide suddenly to put Wernstecki out of the strain of suppressed curiosity that was written all over his face. “We extended the force law further to include still higher terms,” he said, turning to face Wernstecki fully. “Then we used it to calculate the average force between groups of neutral dipoles consisting of paired oscillating charges. The results were interesting. It indicated a residual force as a fourth-order effect. Inverse-square. Attractive.”
Wernstecki didn’t need time to think. Keene saw that what it meant was clear to him immediately.
The velocity of light, conventionally denoted as c, is a very large number. The reciprocal, 1 divided by c, is therefore a very small number. The fourth-order term meant the term in Pang’s extended force-law polynomial that contained the reciprocal multiplied by itself four times, which would give an inconceivably small number. That was how small the force that Pang was talking about—an attractive force between the dipoles—would be compared to the electrical force between the charges forming them.