A Reasonable World

12

One morning in the spring of that year, Robert S. Windom’s desk computer said, “Call from Andrew Vick of Standing Wave Transportation, boss. He wants to speak to you personally.”

“What the hell is Standing Wave?”

“Just a moment. Standing Wave Transportation, incorporated in Delaware, a subsidiary of Transport Systems, Ltd., a British corporation. President, Laurence Hawkins; Chief Executive Officer, Douglas De Angelo.”

“Okay. Is that a new company? I never heard of it.”

“Date of incorporation is January 21, 2005.”

“Standard and Poor’s rating?”

“Triple A.”

“See if you can find anything about them in the net.”

“Searching. An article in Business Day, March 23, 2005.”

“Put it on.”

The article came up in the flatscreen. Windom scanned it quickly; it wasn’t much. “. . . intends to develop the so-called ‘standing wave’ system of instantaneous transportation based on the work of the Danish mathematician Olvard Torreson (d. 1989).”

What the hell. “Okay, Benji, put him on.”

A face appeared in the tube, young, pale, brown-haired, rather attractive. “Mr. Windom, my name is Andrew Vick; I’m an assistant to Douglas De Angelo, the CEO of Standing Wave Transportation. We’re interested in a feasibility study, and we’d like to know if your firm can devote a substantial amount of time to it beginning fairly soon.”

“Let me find out. Benji, work schedule.” The chart came up on the flatscreen. “I have a four-week window beginning on January third. Is that what you mean by a substantial amount of time?”

“I think it might be more like six months, but you would be the best judge of that.”

Windom hesitated. “There are a few things we could put off, but I’d have to know more about it first.”

“That’s satisfactory. Would it be possible for you to come and talk to Mr. De Angelo sometime this week?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Let me turn you over to my secretary.” He gave the call to the computer, then sat back a moment and thought. The computer said, “Nine-thirty June eighth, boss.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Windom, the head of the consulting firm that bore his name, was a red-haired, freckled man of forty-eight who liked cats, beer and jazz, in that order. He had been a project design supervisor with Martin Marietta until he began to feel peculiar about some of the work he was doing. The consulting firm he had founded after that was doing fairly well, although not as well as he sometimes pretended. Like other people in his profession, he worked himself too hard and sometimes felt depressed on Mondays.

He searched Torreson and got a little more. Eight years after the mathematician’s death, his unpublished papers had been discovered in a library in Copenhagen. Among them was a solution of Schrodinger’s wave equation which made it possible to transport an object instantaneously from one location to another. This so-called “uncivilized” solution had been known and ignored for years, but Torreson had added a hint of a way to make practical use of it. An international team of physicists and engineers had taken it to the point of laboratory demonstration. It sounded crazy, but it smelled like money, and besides, he was curious.

The reception room of Standing Wave Transportation in Newark was neat but very small. Precisely at nine-thirty, Windom was ushered into the office of Douglas De Angelo, a heavy-set man in his early fifties, with a smooth face and an easy smile. The office was also neat but small. De Angelo came around his desk to welcome the visitor, led him to a comfortable chair and sat down on the sofa opposite the coffee table. “Glad you could come, Mr. Windom. Some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

De Angelo poured from the silver thermos. “Cream and sugar?”

“No, black.”

After a few social remarks, De Angelo said, “I suppose you know what SWT is.”

“Just what’s been on the net. It sounds like lunacy to me.

“Me too. I’ve just been handed this, and I don’t understand how it works, but I’ve got people who say they do.”

“Mr. De Angelo—”

“Make it Doug.”

“Okay, Doug, my field is aerospace—that’s the only kind of mass transportation there is anymore. I don’t know a thing about rolling stock, if that’s what you have in mind.”

De Angelo looked pleased. “What made you say rolling stock?”

“Well, it’s obvious that if you’re going to zap something across lines of latitude, you have to compensate for the differences in rotational speed—unless you’re breaking all the laws of physics, not just one or two.”

“Good. You’re right, and I think you may be the man for us. Let me just tell you generally what we’re up against, so far as I understand it. The first thing we have to know is how many stations for a complete worldwide network, and where? The next thing—”

Windom leaned forward. “Wait a minute. What do you mean by a complete network? Major cities, or Bent Fork, Texas?”

“Major cities, but if the line passes through other places we’ll do traffic projections. Okay? Next thing, design of the vehicles, one kind for passenger, one or two for freight. We need to know what constraints the vehicle design puts on the standing wave transport devices and vice versa. Then there’s propulsion systems, then passenger and freight terminals, then warehousing and so on. We can’t move on any of that until we have a basic concept that we know we’re going to stick to. I’ll give you copies of the patents before you leave, but first, I suppose you’d like to see a demonstration?”

“Yes, I would.”

De Angelo took him to a small windowless room where a young woman was waiting. “Bob, this is LeAnne Bondy, she’s our demonstrator.”

Windom said hello, but he barely glanced at the woman; his attention was on the apparatus. It was on two glass-topped tables six feet apart: each was a metal cylinder about a foot long, horizontal on a black plastic stand, with a control board attached. A hinged cap on one end of each cylinder was open. Windom had expected to see cables, but there was only an ordinary electrical cord leading from each device to a baseboard outlet. He stooped to look inside the nearest cylinder: he saw metal rings, closely spaced, and a glimpse of wiring. “How much power does this thing use?”

“Ten watts. We could run it off penlight batteries.”

Windom stooped further to look under the table. When he straightened up, De Angelo and Bondy were smiling. “Everybody does that,” Bondy said. “We’ve had people feeling around for mirrors, and pipes hidden in the table legs. It doesn’t make us mad, because it really does look like some kind of trick. But it isn’t, it’s real.” She picked up a small glass paperweight from the table and handed it to Windom. “Will you put that in the cylinder, please?”

“Does it have to be this?”

“No, it doesn’t. Anything, so long as it fits.”

Windom put the paperweight down, pulled a notebook out of his pocket, and wrote, “I am a monkey’s uncle.” He signed his name, tore off the sheet, folded it twice, and put it in the cylinder.

“Okay, will you verify that there’s nothing in the other cylinder?”

Windom did so, keeping a wary eye on De Angelo and Bondy. Neither of them moved, and both of them were well out of reach of either apparatus. He felt like a fool to be so suspicious, but he knew he would feel worse if he didn’t look out for deception.

“Okay? Now close the cap, come back to the other table, close the cap on that one and press the button.”

“What’s the cap for?”

“A safety interlock. We don’t want you to lose any fingers.”

Windom closed the cap, pressed the button.

“Okay, open the cap.”

The cylinder was empty. He crossed to the other one, took the paper out and read the words. He handed it to De Angelo, who barked with delight.

“Can I try this once more, this time without the cap?”

“Afraid not,” De Angelo said. “That interlock is supposed to be tamper-proof.”

Windom shrugged. “Ms. Bondy,” he said, “how the hell does this thing work?”

“Do you want the standard lecture? Okay. Every now and then in physics we have to realize that something we know isn’t true anymore. For instance, for many years we knew that matter can neither be created or destroyed. Then we had to admit that that wasn’t true. Matter can be created and destroyed, and in fact modem theory says that it happens spontaneously all the time—‘virtual particles’ pop in and out of existence all through the universe. Where do they go in between? Well, never mind.

“Up till recently, one thing we have always known about physics is that you can’t get something for nothing. Perpetual motion machines don’t work—you can never get more out of a system than you put into it. But Torreson discovered a loophole in this theory—an elegant way to cheat, from which we are all benefiting now. His solution of Schrodinger’s wave equation shows, in effect, that a particle can be anywhere in the universe, and it doesn’t care where. When we transfer that particle to another location, the books still balance because the total mass of the universe hasn’t changed, but we can make money on the transfer and put it in our pockets. Lucky us.”

“Are you a physicist, Ms. Bondy?”

“No, I’m a PR person, but that spiel you just heard comes straight from Adrian Edelman, one of the inventors of this apparatus.”

Windom looked at the two devices again. “I still don’t believe it,” he said.

“Join the club.”