“That’s the track of an omega-two minus, resolved at maximum power. As you can see, the particle was only detected at discrete points along its trajectory. In between those points nothing was detected at all. It was continuously vanishing and rematerializing in flight—exactly as you’d expect a sustained rotation to appear. I’ve analyzed the momentum and field vectors, and from the measured mark-space ratio of the track, it appears to conform to a mode 3 rotation with negative phi; all the even terms of the k-spin function come out at zero. Exactly like your theory predicts.”
Clifford quickly realized that he was talking to no fool. He sat forward to study the picture more closely while his mind wrestled with the implications. He was looking at positive experimental proof of some of the predictions that followed from his theoretical work. How had this come about? Was his work being taken seriously after all—so seriously that actual experiments were being conducted to test it? If so, why did he know nothing about it?
After few more seconds, Aub inquired, “Okay?”
“Okay.”
Aub reappeared on the screen. The mirthful twinkle was gone from his eyes.
“That picture was produced six months ago, at Berkeley.”
Clifford stared back at him, aghast and incredulous.
“Six months! You mean somebody else already . . .”
Aub guffawed suddenly and held up both hands.
“Relax, man, it’s okay. Nobody beat you to it. The picture came up during some experiments having to do with something else. At the time nobody realized what the G-H line meant. We all thought it was due to some kind of fault in the computer. We figured out what it really meant only when we read your paper about, aw, two, maybe three weeks ago.”
Clifford was still nonplused.
“Look,” he protested. “I still don’t know who you are or what in hell’s been going on. What happened two or three weeks ago?”
Aub nodded vigorously and held up a hand again.
“Okay, okay. It really goes back a bit before that. I run a small team of specialized physicists at Berkeley. We handle all the way-out jobs—the oddball projects that are about as near as you can get to research these days. Well, round about a month or so ago, I was told I had to drop what I was doing and take a look at something new that was important, and very hush-hush. They gave me a copy of the paper you wrote, but without any name on it, plus some comments and notes that a few other people had produced, and told me they were interested in finding out if any of it could be tested experimentally. Could I look into it and see if I could devise some ways of checking it out? So, I took a look at it.”
“Yes.”
“And . . . well, you’ve seen the result. One of the guys in my section remembered something we had done about six months ago and spotted the connection. When we dug the picture up out of our records and re-examined it according to your formulae—zowie! We hit the jackpot. Here was a prediction we didn’t even have to look for; we’d already found it.”
Clifford followed the story, but his bewilderment only increased.
“That’s great,” he said. “But I’m still not clear. Where did the . . .” He turned to look inquiringly at Sarah, who had appeared at the door.
“Dessert?” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“Fruit ‘n ice cream.”
“Dish it out. I’ll be a coupla minutes.”
She nodded, winked, and vanished. Clifford looked back at the screen,
“Sorry ’bout that, Aub. I was saying—where did the paper come from?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. Naturally I wanted to talk to whoever wrote it, but when I tried to find out who it was, nobody would tell me. They just said that that didn’t matter, that I had to talk through them, and that the whole thing was top-security classified. But lots of things that I asked—simple things—they didn’t seem to be able to get answers to. That’s when I thought the whole thing was starting to smell . . . you know—it was as if they weren’t really talking to the guy who wrote it at all.”