‘She started this run,’ whispered Nurse Dolores, ‘early yesterday morning. Of course, she hasn’t been sitting here all the time. She’s sleeping well now, even without sedation.’
The image flickered briefly, as one scan line was completed and a new one started creeping from left to right across the screen. More than ninety percent of the picture was now displayed; the lower portion still being generated would show little more of interest.
Despite the dozens — no, hundreds — of times that Donald Craig had watched these images being created, they had never lost their fascination. Part of it came from the knowledge that he was looking at something that no human eye had ever seen before — or ever would see again, if its coordinates were not saved in the computer. Any random search for a lost image would be far more futile than seeking one particular grain of sand in all the deserts of the world.
And where was Edith now, in her endless exploring? He glanced at the small display screen below the main monitor, and checked the magnitude of the enormous numbers that marched across it, digit after implacable digit. They were grouped in fives to make it easier for human eyes to grasp, though there was no way that the human mind could do so.
. . . Six, seven, eight clusters — forty digits all told. That meant —
He did a quick mental calculation — a neglected skill in this day and age, of which he was inordinately proud. The result impressed, but did not surprise him. On this scale, the original basic image would be much bigger than the Galaxy. And the computer could continue expanding it until it was larger than the Cosmos, though at that magnification, computing even a single image might take years.
Donald could well understand why Georg Cantor, the discoverer (or was it inventor?) of the numbers beyond infinity, had spent his last years in a mental home. Edith had taken the first steps on that same endless road, aided by machinery beyond the dreams of any nineteenth-century mathematician. The computer generating these images was performing trillions of operations a second; in a few hours, it would manipulate more numbers than the entire human race had ever handled, since the first Cro-Magnon started counting pebbles on the floor of his cave.
Though the unfolding patterns never exactly repeated themselves, they fell into a small number of easily recognized categories. There were multipointed stars of six-, eight-fold, and even higher degrees of symmetry; spirals that sometimes resembled the trunks of elephants, and at other times the tentacles of octopods; black amoebae linked by networks of contorted tendrils; faceted, compound insect eyes. . . . Because there was absolutely no sense of scale, some of the figures being created on the screen could have been equally well interpreted as bizarre galaxies — or the microfauna in a drop of ditchwater.
And ever and again, as the computer increased the degree of magnification and dived deeper into the geometric depths it was exploring, the original strange shape — looking like a fuzzy figure eight lying on its side — that contained all this controlled chaos would reappear. Then the endless cycle would begin again, though with variations so subtle that they eluded the eye.
Surely, thought Donald, Edith must realize, in some part of her mind, that she is trapped in an endless loop. What had happened to the wonderful brain that had conceived and designed the ’99 Phage which, in the early hours of 1 January 2000, had briefly made her one of the most famous women in the world?
‘Edith,’ he said softly, ‘this is Donald. Is there anything I can do?’
Nurse Dolores was looking at him with an unfathomable expression. She had never been actually unfriendly, but her greetings always lacked warmth. Sometimes he wondered if she blamed him for Edith’s condition.
That was a question he had asked himself every day, in the months since the tragedy.
3 A BETTER MOUSETRAP
Roy Emerson considered himself, accurately enough, to be reasonably good-natured, but there was one thing that could make him really angry. It had happened on what he swore would be his last TV appearance, when the interviewer on a Late, Late Show had asked, with malice aforethought: ‘Surely, the principle of the Wave Wiper is very straightforward. Why didn’t someone invent it earlier?’ The host’s tone of voice made his real meaning perfectly clear: ‘Of course I could have thought of it myself, if I hadn’t more important things to do.’
Emerson resisted the temptation of replying: ‘If you had the chance, I’m sure you’d ask Einstein, or Edison, or Newton, the same sort of question.’ Instead, he answered mildly enough: ‘Well, someone had to be the first. I guess I was the lucky one.’
‘What gave you the idea? Did you suddenly jump out of the bathtub shouting ‘Eureka’?’
Had it not been for the host’s cynical attitude, the question would have been fairly innocuous. Of course, Emerson had heard it a hundred times before. He switched to automatic mode and mentally pressed the PLAY button.
‘What gave me the idea — though I didn’t realize it at the time — was a ride in a high-speed Coast Guard patrol boat off Key West, back in ’03 . . .’
Though it had led him to fame and fortune, even now Emerson preferred not to recall certain aspects of that trip. It had seemed a good idea at the time — a short pleasure cruise through Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, at the invitation of a cousin in the Coast Guard. How amazed Ernest would have been at the target of their antismuggling activities — blocks of crystal, about the size of a matchbox, that had made their way from Hong Kong via Cuba. But these TIMs — Terabyte Interactive Microlibraries — had put so many U.S. publishers out of business that Congress had dusted off legislation that dated back to the heydays of Prohibition.
Yes, it had sounded very attractive — while he was still on terra firma. What Emerson had forgotten (or his cousin had neglected to tell him) was that smugglers preferred to operate in the worst weather they could find, short of a Gulf hurricane.
‘It was a rough trip, and about the only thing I remembered afterwards was the gadget on the bridge that allowed the helmsman to see ahead, despite the torrents of rain and spray that were being dumped on us.
‘It was simply a disc of glass, spinning at high speed. No water could stay on it for more than a fraction of a second, so it was always perfectly transparent. I thought at the time it was far better than a car’s windshield wiper; and then I forgot all about it.’
‘For how long?’
‘I’m ashamed to say. Oh, maybe a couple of years. Then one day I was driving through a heavy rainstorm in the New Jersey countryside, and my wipers jammed; I had to pull off the road until the storm had passed. I was stuck for maybe half an hour; and at the end of that time, the whole thing was clear in my mind.’
‘That’s all it took?’
‘Plus every cent I could lay my hands on, and two years of fifteen-hour days and seven-day weeks in my garage.’ (Emerson might have added ‘And my marriage,’ but he suspected that his host already knew that. He was famed for his careful research.)
‘Spinning the windshield — or even part of it — obviously wasn’t practical. Vibrations had to be the answer; but what kind?
‘First I tried to drive the whole windshield like a loudspeaker cone. That certainly kept the rain off, but then there was the noise problem. So I went ultrasonic; it took kilowatts of power — and all the dogs in the neighborhood went crazy. Worse still, few windshields lasted more than a couple of hours before they turned into powdered glass.
‘So I tried subsonics. They worked better — but gave you a bad headache after a few minutes of driving. Even if you couldn’t hear them, you could feel them.
‘I was stuck for months, and almost gave up the whole idea, when I realized my mistake. I was trying to vibrate the whole massive sheet of multiplex safety glass — sometimes as much as ten kilograms of it. All I needed to keep dancing was a thin layer on the outside; even if it was only a few microns thick, it would keep the rainwater off.
‘So I read all I could about surface waves, transducers, impedance matching — ‘
‘Whoa! Can we have that in words of one syllable?’
‘Frankly, no. All I can say is that I found a way of confining low-energy vibrations to a very thin surface layer, leaving the main bulk of the windshield unaffected. If you want details, I refer you to the basic patents.’