“Well, we now have just the guy with us,” Aub said, looking over to Clifford. “Brad, how about sitting down with us after we break up and going over it?”
“Sure thing,” Clifford answered.
“Special analogue IC chips from Intercontinental Semiconductors,” Aub went on. “Did you get any joy on those, Joe?”
“No dice,” Joe answered. “They’re on a six-month waiting list. Nothing they can do about it.”
“Shit!” Aub began drumming his fingers on the table irritably.
“But . . . despair not,” Joe added. “I tracked a dozen down in a surplus shop in Boston, and Penny’s going over to pick them up tomorrow. Cheap too.”
“Fantastic.” Aub brightened up again. “Next . . . Penny . . . two hundred feet of low-loss cable . . .”
The meeting was rapid-fire all the way through and lasted less than forty minutes. By the end of it Clifford felt completely at home. As Al had said just before Clifford and Aub departed on the first day they had come to Sudbury, it was a great team.
* * *
“I knew you were here so I brought you a coffee.” The voice from behind him made Clifford look round from the screen with a start. Standing just inside the door of the office, Joe was holding a steaming cup in each hand. The time was twenty minutes before midnight; three months had gone by since Clifford’s arrival at Sudbury.
“You must be a mind reader, Joe,” Clifford said. “Thanks, put it down there.” He indicated a spot on the table next to his chair, amid the disorderly piles of folders and papers. “What’s the matter; can’t you sleep these days either?”
“I got a bit carried away with testing out that stabilizer subsystem,” Joe said, putting down one of the cups. “Today was the first time we’ve had a chance to try it out on-line. I couldn’t wait to see the results.”
“How’d they come out?” Clifford asked.
“They’re looking good. I think we’ve got the compensation derivatives right now. Aub and Penny are downstairs now tuning it in.”
“Doesn’t anybody ever go home in this place?” Clifford asked with a sigh. “You know, Joe, if we were paid overtime, we could all have retired by now.”
“Yeah, well . . . I guess we’d all find we’ve forgotten how to spend time any other way if we did,” Joe said. “Besides, this is more fun.”
“You like it still, eh? That’s good.”
“Beats baseball,” Joe declared. “How about you . . . things working out?” He slid into an empty chair beside Clifford’s and gestured toward the strings of equations frozen on the screen at which Clifford had been working. “What are you into here now, for instance?”
Clifford returned his gaze to the screen and relaxed back in his chair. “If this detector that Aub’s making works, we will have for the first time ever an instrument that responds directly to hi-radiation. We’ll actually be able to observe effects taking place in the universe we know, that are the results of causes taking place in a domain that can’t be perceived directly. That’ll be a pretty significant thing.”
“Okay, I’m with you,” Joe said, nodding. “So what’s all that on the screen?”
“Its part of a theoretical analysis to predict exactly the pattern of hi-radiation we ought to get for different annihilation rates, volumes, beam power settings . . . that kind of thing.”
“Oh, I get it,” Joe said after a moment’s reflection. “Once you’ve got some firm numbers to work with, you’ll be able to test the predictions by means of the detector. If Aub’s readings confirm that you get what the calculations say you ought to get, then the theory’s on pretty solid ground.”
“Exactly,” Clifford confirmed. “It’s the only motto to go by, Joe—always check it out. It’s the only way I know that you can be sure you know what you’re talking about. That’s what science is all about.”
“I thought you were mixed up in something to do with secondary radiation too,” Joe said, sipping his coffee slowly. “This Hawking Effect business . . . isn’t that so?”
“That’s so,” Clifford agreed. “But that’s another part of it. We already know that the annihilation process produces a fair amount of conventional classical radiation as a secondary effect. What we don’t know for sure yet is how it happens. Classical quantum mechanics—in the shape of the Hawking Effect hypothesis—gives one explanation; secondary reactions among hi-particles offer another. What I’m trying to do is work out exactly the pattern we ought to see if the hi-particle explanation is correct. Al has already run some experiments on black-hole situations to see how well Hawking Effect predictions stand up. They don’t come out too well at all.”