Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (7 page)

“Yes, yes. You’re right. This has nothing to do with containment… Actually, you could apply it to containment, if that were…” He was looking out the window again. Something outside had caught his nervous glance. “There seem to be some people out front constructing something.” A puzzled look came over his face.

“That’s precisely what we want to discuss—” Anne began.

“Those are students, demonstrators,” I interrupted. “They seem, unaccountably, to have some moral or political objection to whatever it is you’re doing here. Which raises the question of just what you
are—”

“Oh, students,” he said, as if that would be a satisfactory explanation for anything whatever. “You’re sure they’re just students? They don’t like it when you take government grants. Protest all the time. But the money is indispensable. All the more reason to raise capital privately. I have to remember to get the name of that book from you. We have to have a strategy for approaching the banks—”

“I believe they plan to shut off power to the building,” I went on.

“Shut off power? Why would banks shut off power? You mean the electric company. I thought we had an understanding for the time being. The trouble is, it’s literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That’s our biggest single problem: the incredible quantities of electricity this work requires. The potential is unbelievable. It’s all a question of capital.”

I wasn’t quite sure whether the potential he was talking about was electrical, scientific, or financial.

“I myself don’t know anything at all about raising money,” he went on, “and the work we’re doing is extremely important — revolutionary — so I’m particularly glad to have this chance to talk to you.”

“Well, we’re extremely interested in the work you’re doing down here,” I said. I hoped the “we” would convey vast financial interests. “By the way, you don’t happen to have a set of financial statements here that I could have a look at, do you?” I thought as a matter of principle I should ask, as long as we were having this inane conversation. I wasn’t getting anywhere in the interview, so I might as well try for something written.

He bustled over to his desk and began burrowing through a stack of papers.

“It’s extraordinary,” he said. He pulled out a battered manila envelope, peered inside, and handed it over to me. “It’s amazing no one has seen it before. The mathematics of it is deceptively straightforward.”

Was he talking about the financials?

“It follows inevitably once you set up the proper mathematical representation of magnetism. Beautifully simple, but when you follow it through, it stands everything on its head. Incredible that no one has seen it before.”

The folder contained unaudited statements from a local accountant. As a show of politeness, I stared at them earnestly for several moments. The most impressive thing which emerged, aside from the quantity of money obtained from the government — was the fact that this man had somehow talked a bank into financing the building we were in.

“The potential is limitless,” he was saying, apparently to Anne’s breasts.

The intercom on his desk buzzed. He picked up the phone.

“Yes, yes. Absolutely. We’re just heading down there now. I know. No time.” He looked up at us as he replaced the receiver. “We have to be getting down to the conference room. It’s time to begin. We should talk afterwards. Money is the whole key,” he said, looking at Anne.

He led us across his office and out through a door into an interior corridor. Next to that door was another, slightly ajar, and I saw that it opened into a lavatory. I wanted rather badly to use it, but decided not to give up on my interview now. I would hate to have to begin again with this man several hours later.

As we marched down the corridor he continued excitedly, “Now, we really don’t have any time to look at this, but I just want to show you the laboratory. Unfortunately, in the format of a press conference I can’t really explain in a meaningful way what we’re doing here, but I just want you to see this. In this kind of thing you have to gear your remarks to a lay audience and it’s difficult to go into some things. Fortunately, I’ve done a certain amount of lecturing to students with no real scientific grounding at all — ‘History and Philosophy of Science’ and that kind of thing — and I flatter myself that I manage to convey at least a sense of the underlying conceptual substance, but—”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I meant to ask you if you might have your current work written up so that—”

“Well, that’s the problem,” he said quickly, and a troubled expression crossed his face. We had stopped halfway down the corridor, in front of a heavy metal door, and he was pulling out a large key ring. “I had expected by now to have this in publishable — not to say published — form. I shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be making a public announcement at this point — before publication, I mean. But,” and his eyes darted about, “we need funding. That’s the key.” He had paused thoughtfully with his hand on the door, and now he observed with apparent surprise the key that he had inserted in the lock.

“A rough draft would be fine,” I persisted. “We’re all extremely interested in what you’re accomplishing here. I don’t think most people appreciate the significance of what you’re trying to do.” I wondered whether I would ever find out, even in general terms, what in fact he was trying to do.

“No one understands what I’m trying to do,” he echoed enthusiastically. “Not even the people I work with. It’s amazing.”

He pushed open the heavy door, and we stepped into the laboratory. The laboratory was certainly amazing. It was a large warehouselike area with a double-height ceiling which must have represented more than half the building’s volume, and although it had evidently been extensively cleaned up for the day’s events, it retained an appearance of thorough chaos. There were tables everywhere. Tables with desk-top computers; tables with machine tools, with circuit boards, with plumbing. The center of the room was filled with a massive metal ring ten feet across. Through it and around it were coiled further tubes and wires, and around them yet other wires and tubes, which finally spilled out into the rest of the room, connecting to a dozen inexplicable projects on various tables.

When I was a child, computers were referred to as “electronic brains.” This would be the intestines.

“Jesus,” I said.

“I wanted to show you this,” Wachs said, oblivious in his enthusiasm. He led us over to a table where an extraordinarily thin, ascetic-looking man wearing a jacket and tie and running shoes was staring at a computer display filled with a grid of continually changing numbers. He did not acknowledge our presence.

“I don’t know if it’s obvious to you what’s going on here,” said Wachs jubilantly, “but right now, at this moment, a magnetic field is being generated — an enhanced magnetic field,
EMF
, we call it. You could say that an
EMF
is to a normal magnetic field as a laser is to normal light waves. Of course, that’s only a metaphor,” he added in a tone indicating that he did not hold metaphors in much esteem.

“Wait,” he said, turning to the man at the computer. “Put up the primary matrix so they can see exactly what’s happening.” The man gave Wachs a brief skeptical look and punched a key. All the numbers changed at once. “You see? To put it in the crudest possible layman’s terms, the momenta of the particle spins and orbits are constituting a field which is continuously altering the internal structure of those very particles and yielding a net gain in energy sufficient to maintain the field itself. Of course that’s quite misleading,” he added glumly. “It’s probably simpler, really, not to think of it as matter or energy at all, but just as equations.” Wachs waved his hand expansively to indicate that he was talking about the mass of equipment in the middle of the room.

The man at the computer punched a key, and the screen filled with percent signs.

“Fuck,” said the man.

“Wait a minute,” said Anne. There was a glint in her eye. “Do you mean to say that you’re generating atomic energy right here in this room — fission or fusion, or whatever you call it?”

The man at the computer pushed more keys, and the screen went blank.

“Well, you wouldn’t really want to characterize it as fission or fusion— although you could describe it as subatomic decay — or even generation, I suppose. Continuous change would—”

“But whatever it is is actually going on right there,” she insisted, “in that… device?” She pointed sternly at the intestinal mass of tubes and wires.

“Yes. That’s it. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Right there. Well, actually, a lot of what you’re looking at isn’t really involved. Some of that equipment is related to work we were doing on magnetic containment. Quite a lot of it could be removed, actually.”

As a practical matter, it was hard to imagine how anything could be removed.

“That’s fascinating,” Anne said, smiling. Wachs in his innocence probably imagined it was a friendly smile, but Anne thought she was on to something. “Could you tell me what safeguards you have against radiation leakage or a nuclear mishap?”

She had a point, in a way: there didn’t seem to be any kind of shielding around the equipment. People like Wachs are apt to get caught up in the intellectual delights of whatever problem they are working on and lose track of things like not enough heat in the room, or lethal radiation.

“There’s no more radiation here than you would encounter around an average radio transmitter,” he reassured her.

I wondered briefly what an “average” radio transmitter might be like, and whether it would meet my standards for personal hygiene, but I doubted that there was really anything to worry about. Wachs and his employees all seemed healthy enough. I was more interested in finding out what they were doing and whether it might be of some value.

“What I want to understand,” I said, “is about the quantity of heat or light or whatever it is being emitted by this process, relative to—”

“Electricity,” he said. “It’s generating electricity directly.” He was almost dancing up and down with excitement. “No one will believe this.” For some reason, that thought seemed to please him enormously. “Even with this equipment here, we can bring the process to a stable level where it generates as much energy as it consumes. It’s actually driving itself now. The only exogenous energy is what powers the control system. Except for that, it could run itself virtually forever.”

Right there. I should have paid more attention. I knew that someone was about to shut off power to the building, or at least to give it what used to be called the old college try. And this man was telling me that he had some loopy subatomic process roaring away, which sustained itself but whose control system used outside power. It is important to listen to exactly what people are saying. Just out of good will or good citizenship I might have made Wachs focus on what was about to happen. Think it through. Thoughtless of me. Easy to see these things with hindsight, easy in retrospect to point to the flaw when you have already watched it shear open into a gaping crevasse. I couldn’t know what the consequences were. Still, if I had been a little more interested in doing Wachs a favor. Well, it doesn’t matter. Too late now. But I am sorry. For him as much as for myself. Although, really, the man was a lunatic. When they tried, with the help of his utterly uninformed colleagues and suppliers, to reconstruct what he had actually done in that laboratory, it seemed incredible that he had not long ago electrocuted himself and the entire staff of Micro-Magnetics. You can’t just pile together equipment like that, one idea on top of another.

“It’s an absolutely structured process,” he was explaining to Anne, who had begun to grill him about licenses and federal safety standards. “Not like an explosion at all. If I took you through the mathematics, you’d be amazed. It’s absolutely beautiful. And really so simple, the whole thing. It’s amazing that no one has seen it before, although in a way it’s all right there in Maxwell—”

“What I’m trying to understand,” I interrupted, “is whether this process, whatever it is, can generate more energy than just what it needs to maintain itself? Can you get more electricity out than you put in? Or is that some sort of theoretical limit?”

“No, no, no. That’s not a theoretical limit at all. That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t be even a practical limit, if we just had the money for a full-scale generator.”

People go about saying this sort of thing all the time. Usually the theory turns out to be all wrong, or the machine too expensive to build, or both; but you never know. Anyway, there is nothing to be gained by contradicting people.

“Well, if what you say is true — or even arguable,” I assured him, “money shouldn’t be much of a problem for you from here on in. At the very least, you’ll have endless grants — if not fabulous wealth. Tell me, what sort of fuel does this thing use?”

“Fuel?”

“What sort of matter is it that is having its structure continuously altered or whatever—”

“Dr. Wachs!” The receptionist had tracked us down. Her voice was like doom. “We’re going to be nearly fifteen minutes late getting started.” She glared.

“Yes, yes,” he replied excitedly. “We should get in there right away.”

He scurried out of the laboratory with me, Anne, and the receptionist chasing behind. We entered a long, narrow room at the end of the building. A large oval table had been pushed down to one end, and the remaining space had been filled with rows of folding chairs. In the back a slide projector had been set up. Anne insisted on sitting in the front row, which disappointed me since I was half hoping to sneak in a short nap, but she, I suppose, wanted to keep a close watch on the nuclear criminal.

There were roughly two dozen people in the room. A few of them might conceivably have been journalists. More likely, however, all of them were academics. Probably they were all friends or colleagues of Wachs’s. Nevertheless, Wachs began by introducing himself and assuring us that he was not going to subject a nonacademic audience to a technical account of his work. A scholarly paper was in preparation and would in the course of time appear in an appropriate journal. And although normally publication of such an article would predate the sort of public announcement he was making today, the significance of his results and the need for support of ongoing research had induced him to present preliminary results informally.