A Reasonable World

13

Windom read the patents. The device generated a “virtual field” which caused anything placed inside it to acquire a preferential location at another device tuned to the first. The claim was broad, including some aerospace applications; it also included the heating and cooling of buildings and entire cities, and the generation of energy.

Next week he got to talk to Adrian Edelman, an exuberant bushy-haired Englishman who doodled incessantly on a scratchboard to illustrate his points. He appeared to think the Torreson process was funny—a great joke on Nature.

“I notice the patents call for an evacuated system,” Windom said. “Is that because it would blow up if you zapped something into an occupied space?”

“No, that’s not it. The process exchanges volumes and whatever happens to be inside them, not equivalent masses. There isn’t any question of two objects occupying the same space, or anything of that sort.”

“What, then?”

Edelman lost his grin for a moment. “Well, there are certain other dangers. Nothing to worry about.”

Windom took a guess. “Did you ever try zapping something half in and half out of the cylinder?”

“Yes, actually. It produced a small explosion.”

“What do you mean by small?”

“I’d rather not say. In fact, I expect I’ve said too much already.”

That made sense to Windom. If you broke the bonds between atoms of a solid, energy would have to be released, probably a lot of energy.

“Do you think there are military applications?”

“Oh, well, you could make a bomb out of this, certainly, but it would be a pretty elaborate sort of bomb.”

“Dr. Edelman, is this thing a matter transmitter?”

“No, no. Something completely different.”

“What’s the distinction?”

“Well, look, let’s start with space. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place, all right? And time is what keeps everything from happening at once. So that’s very straightforward. But space and time had to be created in the Big Bang, you know, just like matter and energy, and you can’t create nothing, there wouldn’t be any point—nothing was there already. All right so far?”

“Sure.”

“Good. So we have to make one little change in the postulates. Space is what keeps everything else from being in one place, and the same thing with time. Now, we know that space is something, because it can be warped by matter, and it can be charged by an electric or magnetic field. So like everything else, space has a structure. Time too, but that’s another matter. So Einstein got it wrong in one respect, there really is one inertial frame in which all motion takes place, and that’s why a Foucault pendulum works. Now it follows, you see, that you could specify a location anywhere in the universe numerically, and you could transfer a particle there, but then to transfer an object you’d have to have numbers for each individual particle, and to get those you’d have to destroy the object. So that’s why matter transmission is no good.”

“All right.”

“I used to watch those sci-fi films, you know, where the hero is broken down into atoms and beamed down to the planet to be reassembled, and I always thought, you poor sod, that isn’t you, it’s some other guy with your clothes on. Well, anyhow, this is an entirely different approach. The Torreson device sends out a virtual pulse to find a receiver tuned to a certain frequency. It sends this pulse out instantaneously in all directions, but as it’s a virtual pulse, unless it finds the receiver the pulse doesn’t go anywhere, so it doesn’t cost anything. All right? Now when the pulse reaches the receiver, it instantaneously sends back a virtual signal which arrives, of course, at the same instant as the original pulse, and we can load this signal with any information we want. Is the receiver empty or does it have solid objects in it? Do any of them overlap the boundaries of the field? If the answer to that one is yes, the transfer doesn’t happen. If the answer is no, the transfer takes place instantaneously. Then the receiver becomes a transmitter, sends out a pulse looking for the next receiver, and so on.”

“Okay. So you need sensors in each receiver to locate solid objects that are partly in the field and partly out. Radar, I suppose. And maybe other information?”

“Certainly. Temperature, for instance—we’d like to know the receiver isn’t in the middle of a fire. Barometric pressure would be good, just to make sure an explosion isn’t going on. And a systems check, perhaps, although if there’s anything wrong with the circuits, that’s fail-safe. I wouldn’t mind loading this with anything you can think of, because the information can be continuously available and the system is still instantaneous.”

“Does this seem like magic to you?”

“No, no. It’s demented, of course, but that’s the kind of universe we’re living in.”

Windom turned over vehicle design problems to a team headed by one of his associates and concentrated on the network itself. After another week he invited De Angelo to come and look at his results. De Angelo looked with curiosity at the five computers, the drafting machines, the CAD sketches on the walls.

“This is tentative, of course,” Windom said, “but I’ve got a map of the network. There it is on the screen; take a look. It isn’t as neat a system as I was expecting. Some places just aren’t very near the same meridian or parallel as other places.”

“You’re using just meridians and parallels? Why?”

“Simplicity. If you go in any other direction, you’re mixing two kinds of problems. North to south, what you have to deal with is a change in horizontal velocity and yaw. It isn’t severe for the first forty degrees from the equator—you can handle that in one jump. By the way, you get one more free ride—from any north latitude to the corresponding south latitude or vice versa, there’s no change in velocity, and you can use that to go from Greenland to the South Pole for nothing. That’s lucky, because you’re going to need the polar route.”

“South Pole? How come?”

“I’ll show you that in a minute. Now, for east-west travel, the problem is angular velocity, not yaw. If you cross ten degrees of longitude eastward, for instance, you come out with the same speed as the surface, but in a different direction—tilted upward ten degrees. The net relative motion is upward and a little backward.”

De Angelo thought a moment. “You’re crazy.”

“Well, look here.” He turned to the computer. “Benji, let’s have a ten-degree isosceles triangle. Make one of the long sides the base.”

The triangle appeared on the flatscreen.

“Now erect a perpendicular from the base to the upper vertex.” He turned to De Angelo. “Okay, this bottom line represents the speed of the surface. The top line is the speed of the vehicle, and it’s the same—the two sides are equal. But because it’s tilted, the end of it isn’t perpendicular to the end of the other one. So while the surface is moving horizontally, the vehicle is moving upward at an angle, and by the time it gets here, it’s fallen this much behind. These are just the relative motions of the vehicle and the earth’s surface—we haven’t added in gravity yet. When we do that, we find that the shape of the tower is a parabolic curve with the fat part at the bottom.

“Anyway, the problem is that we have to cope with these angular differences, and they get bigger the farther apart the stations are. For ten degrees at the equator, you’d have to build a tower a thousand feet tall. At the latitude of Portland, Oregon, it would still have to be over seven hundred. And if you wanted to do a twenty-four-degree hop at sixty-five north latitude, you’d get a tower sixty-seven hundred feet high.”

“We can forget that one. How many stations would you need to get from Portland to Ottawa?”

“Six, if you want to limit it to ten degrees. So that’s why you need the polar route, because it’s twenty-four degrees from Iceland to Norway.”

“What about just going around the other way—west instead of east?”

“I was coming to that, and it’s a whole new can of worms. When you go from east to west, the net motion is downward and you can’t let gravity decelerate the vehicle, you’ve got to decelerate intrinsic motion and gravity. There’s a limit on how much g force you can put on passengers in a commercial vehicle, and on some kinds of freight, too. Furthermore, there’s a safety factor involved. If something goes wrong, you don’t want a vehicle smashing into the bottom of a tower. I know it sounds loony, but the easiest way to get from east to west is to go south and north.”

“Bob, does your brain ever crack?”

“Only about twice a day. When you first look at this, you think it’s a free lunch, but in fact it’s fiendishly complicated. You really have three kinds of problems here. North and south are symmetrical, but east and west aren’t. Even for west to east, I don’t like those towers for a lot of reasons. So I began to wonder, why not think smaller? Take a look at this.”

He asked the computer for a Mercator map of North America, then told it to draw a line from Oakland to Richmond. “I’m not using Portland to Ottawa, because that’s a different problem—we have to go around the Great Lakes. But this illustrates the general solution. See, the stations are just under one degree apart—that’s about fifty-four miles at this latitude. That way, the vehicle comes out with a relative speed of sixteen feet per second, and the tower, if you want to call it that, only has to be four feet high.”

“How do you figure that? I’d think it would be eight.”

“No, because it’s a ballistics problem; we’re taking the sum of two motions, one linear and one accelerated. Benji, give me a line chart, x axis sixteenths of a second, zero to sixteen, у axis feet, zero to sixteen. Draw a curve for sixteen feet per second. Draw another curve for thirty-two feet per second per second, using inversions of data. Okay, now draw the resultant on the same scale. Isn’t that a pretty thing, Doug? The two lines cross way over here, but the resultant is perfectly symmetrical.”

“Yes, I see now.”

“Anyway, when the vehicle gets to the top of the tube, right here, you zap it again to the next station, but it’s still cheaper than those thousand-foot towers. The pitch changes are minimal, and the passengers will never notice them anyway—the vehicle will be in free fall all the way.”

“Free fall? Zero gravity?”

“Has to be. Didn’t I mention that? The vehicle is a ballistic object—the only accelerating force is gravity. You could apply braking in the tube, but then the passengers would feel upside down. So you’ll strap them in, no big deal.”

“We’re intending to promote this as an instantaneous system, though. How long will it take to get across the continent?”

Windom grinned. “About twenty-three seconds.”