“Al would never okay it,” Aub protested. “The theory’s still got too many unknowns in it. Suppose there’s some imbalance that you and Zim’s guys haven’t figured out yet, and the space integral isn’t unity. You might find that a lot more comes out than you put in.” Aub was looking worried. “Anyhow, where were you thinking of focusing the return energy?”
“Right there in the lab. I’m happy the integral is unity.”
“In the lab! Christ! Al will never buy that in a million years. Peter’d have the mother and father of all heart attacks.”
“So we don’t tell them about it. We set it up nice and quiet and run it late one night like a routine piece of overtime. What’s the matter—don’t you trust me any more?” Clifford was grinning in a crooked kind of way. “I thought you were supposed to be the adventurous one. Have a ball.”
Aub stared as if Clifford had taken leave of his senses. He looked imploringly at Sarah, who was following the conversation, and threw out his hands.
“It must be all these English females,” he said. “He’s finally flipped. Brad, get this straight. There is absolutely no way I’m gonna come into the lab with you, late one night like some kinda crook or something, and run that kind of experiment.”
* * *
Four weeks later at about an hour before midnight Clifford’s car eased to a halt outside the GRASER building of the Sudbury Institute. Two figures got out, presented their credentials to the police guards at the main door, and disappeared inside. By three in the morning the huge generators that supplied the GRASER were humming and the banks of equipment racks stacked around the reactor sphere were alive with patterns of winking lights. An array of heat sensors, radiation detectors, ionization counters and photomultiplier tubes had been positioned around a ten-foot-diameter circle that had been cleared near one of the walls, about thirty feet away from the sphere. Clifford and Aub were sitting at a control panel, facing the circle from behind the battery of instruments.
Aub adjusted the parameters of the GRASER to produce just the faintest trickle of particles through the beam tube and into the reactor. Then he switched on the annihilation modulators. The readings on the display screens on either side of the panel confirmed that a microscopic reaction was taking place inside the sphere. The particles were disappearing out of space to be transformed into hi-waves that propagated instantly to every point in the universe, where they subsequently reappeared as energy through secondary reactions. So far, it was an everyday GRASER run.
Clifford nodded. Working together, they started up the sequence of specially written programs that they had loaded into the system earlier that day. One by one the additional modified modulators were switched in and brought up to operating power, compressing the return energy into an ever-decreasing radius centered on the middle of the empty circle. The energy that would normally have been distributed infinitesimally sparsely throughout the whole of space was now being focused within a volume no bigger than a beach ball.
The screens showed that the instruments were detecting radiation. Counters registered the ionization of molecules of air. The infrared scanners indicated a rise in temperature. As Aub increased the beam power a fraction, dust particles began scurrying across the floor of the lab toward the center of the circle, drawn inward by the convection of the rising, heated air. A cool breeze made itself felt on their skin.
At higher power an incandescent glow appeared, elongated upward into a shimmering column of fiery radiance by the rising currents. It burned dull red at the outside, changing through brighter shades of orange to a core of brilliant yellow. Clifford and Aub watched spellbound. They were witnessing something that no men in history had seen before; energy was materializing in space out of nothing, from a source that lay thirty feet away—and it was traversing the distance in between through a realm of existence that lay beyond the dimensions of space and time.
After a few minutes Clifford, having satisfied himself that the recording instruments had captured everything, nodded and raised a hand. “That’ll do. Don’t take it any higher.”