Two

That was 1992, I remember, because that was the year I got serious about physics again, and started my post-doctoral research on mass creation in the electron and proton. It was a good thing it was post-doctoral, because I was on the wrong track for five years, and although I learned a tremendous amount about configurations of electromagnetic fields, there wasn't enough when all was said and done to publish as more than a couple of articles, let alone a Doctoral dissertation.

All of my colleagues thought I was just fickle, because I'd take up a line of research, and just as it seemed to be getting interesting (to them), I'd drop it. A couple of the graduate students, in fact, got their Doctorates pursuing lines of investigation that I'd let go of. I never told anyone exactly what I was looking for, because I couldn't figure out a way of saying, "I'm trying to find a way I can make a rocket ship go into mystical ecstasy and lose its mass" without giving them grounds for locking me up.

Michele knew, of course--more or less--but she had interests of her own; and as time went on, I needed less and less prodding to keep going. I kept getting hints that there were ways that bodies--and especially living bodies--did things that borrowed energy from their mass, and so the idea was in principle possible, at least with very tightly unified systems; and yet though I took aim at this from every angle I could think of, there seemed to be something that deflected me from the target every time. But this sort of thing just makes me stubborner; and so I kept spending more and more time locked up in my room with my big computer on my lap (the nice thing about theoretical physics is that you don't get your hands dirty), filling up disk after disk with junk.

Every now and then, for form's sake, I'd stick the little computer in my pocket and go down to the lab, and wander around a little pretending that I was interested in what the others were doing, and then go back to my chair, flip up the screen, and bury myself in whatever it was that had a grip on me at the moment.

I was doing this one day in January, 1997, when Mike Wang, an old friend from grammar school who'd just joined the faculty a year back, and who couldn't believe I was simply fooling around, came over from his bench to the armchair I'd brought into my cubicle, looked at me strangely, and sat down at my desk.

"Say, Paul, you know that last set of equations you showed me?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"Did you realize that you could create a circuit based on them?"

"That's kind of what I had in mind. But I can't see that it'd do anything."

"Yes, but look at this. See this square root here? You took the positive square root, and left out the negative."

"Well sure. This represents the internal electromagnetic field of the system that'd be affected by this circuit. The negative square root would lead to the field's being an imaginary number--it doesn't have any physical significance."

"You didn't work it out with the negative, did you?"

"Of course not," I said. "Why should I?"

"Well, I did. See, what I noticed was that the amount of this particular square root looked a lot like the energy-equivalent of the mass of the system; and if you take the negative square root, then just exactly the mass-equivalent of the internal field becomes imaginary."

"I don't believe it!" I said. There it was. There was the mass-conversion.

"Do you realize that this probably means that this is how the system gets its mass?"

"Mike, do you know that I've been working around this particular equation for two years now, because I was sure somehow it was the key, and I never thought to look at that square root?"

"You mean that's what you were looking for?"

"Look, look look!" I said, going back three pages in the equations he had been showing me, my hands trembling so much I could hardly turn the pages. "You know more electronics than I do. This expression here would correspond to a resistor, wouldn't it?"

He studied the page for a few minutes. "I think so. I'd have to work it out, but it looks like it."

"Now, suppose you put a variable resistor here."

"Let me see," he mused. "It's kind of hard jumping back to the middle of things. Suppose you doubled this, what'd happen?"

"Here, let me show you. If you double this, then that goes into the triple integral up here, which makes the denominator of this fraction here on the next page--let's see, I think it'd be four times as much, but anyway bigger--and that plugs in over here where you were looking before--"

"And increases the square you took the square root of! If this actually could be translated into a physical circuit, this'd take away--how much? but who cares?--it'd be a chunk off the mass of the system!"

"And theoretically, if you had a variable resistor there, you could control how much mass the system would have!"

He looked at me. "You can't be serious," he said.

"It sounds fantastic, doesn't it? But after all, the mass is just a way the electromagnetic energy is configured inside the system, really; it isn't something added to it."

You are serious!" he said.

"I think you can see why I never really told anybody what I was looking for. You can't believe it when you're the one who finally found it."

"You think it'd work? Really? I mean, physically?"

"I don't know. Those equations look like the equations of a circuit, but I never tried to build one, because it didn't look as if it'd do anything."

"Can I try it? I was looking at the figures this morning, and it seems pretty straightforward. And after all," he added, in a tone that seemed to say he'd like a share in the fame he foresaw, "I did see that negative root."

It is interesting how at such moments a possessiveness takes over one. This was my project, really, and now any papers that would be published would have Blair and Wang as their joint authors. Why else had I let no one in on what was on my mind for the past six or seven years? It's one thing to get a hint from a colleague and acknowledge it in a footnote; it's another to make him a partner.

He saw me studying the situation, and didn't say a word. We both knew enough of each other that if I said, "No, I'll work it out myself" he wouldn't take advantage of his greater skill in electronics and beat me to making the circuit and the credit--but it meant the difference between a friendship and a purely professional relation.

"Be my guest," I said finally, and a trifle grudgingly. "I'm no good with a soldering iron."

A couple of days later, Mike called me over to his table, where he had a crazily-wired contraption attached to a couple of wires with alligator clips. "I didn't want to put it into a box," he said, "because I want to be able to get at the parts in case there're changes we have to make. Here's the variable resistor." He showed me a knob.

"Have you tried it out?" I said a little breathlessly.

"Not yet, of course. That's what I asked you to come here for."

"Okay, you attach these clips to something. What are you using for power, by the way?"

"This," he said, showing me a penlight battery on the underside of the board. "I wanted to keep it out of the way."

"That little?"

"Oh, it's more than enough. There's very little energy in the circuit itself, if you look at it. You know that; you wrote the equations."

I took his word for it; considerations like how much energy the circuit would need hadn't been uppermost in my mind at the time.

"Let's try it on the pan of this scale," he said. "It's pretty sensitive, and that way, we can measure what happens."

"If anything." I was afraid to actually test it, but I attached the clips to the pan. "Go ahead," I said.

Nothing--or was it? "Let me adjust the resistance," he said, and it did seem that the needle moved a trifle.

He looked at it. "That's funny; either it ought not to do anything, or the effect should be a lot more than just that."

"I'd guess there's some extra resistance in the circuit someplace. Let me see your wiring diagram."

We studied it for a while, tracing the intricate pattern of wires, transistors, capacitors, and resistors. "What's this capacitor for?" I asked finally.

"That regulates this over here," he said. It seemed all right. "Oh, wait a minute! This bottles up the current in this little loop. See, we need a--okay, give me fifteen minutes or so."

"I'm calling Michi. I want her to see this."

He turned his head from the circuit board and looked up at me, then turned back.

When she finally answered, I said, "Mich, could you get over here for a few minutes? Something's happened." She began to make concerned noises, and I said, "No, nothing bad--I hope, anyway. But we need you, if you can manage."

"Mike," I said after she had agreed, with some concern, to come; I had never called her like this before. "Have we got something fairly heavy around that we could use for a dramatic demonstration?"

"Keep your shirt on," he said. "I don't know if this'll work at all now."

"It will," I said with a confidence born of a desire to impress. "Let me see." I pulled out the computer, and studied the diagram with the new shunt in it, putting in figures. "Well, it's too complicated for this little pocket model, but I've got an order of magnitude I think--I can see more or less the results on the scale when we didn't have the shunt, and now we should be able to reduce the mass of something fairly heavy almost down to zero."

"Alf has a block of lead someplace that he was using for a shield. It should weigh about twenty kilograms. Is that too much?"

"That'd do fine. Where is it?"

We couldn't ask him, because it was semester break and he'd gone back to Australia to catch up on an extra summer. I rooted around over by his station and found it. It was a hollowed block about the size of one of the cinder blocks on the wall, and weighed as much as a loaded suitcase. If we could make this as light as a feather, it would certainly be impressive.

The temptation to try it out before Michele got there was enormous, and Mike and I discussed it at some length; but it was my project, and I opted for the suspense on all our parts.

Finally she arrived, saying as she came in the door, "What happened? I had to leave Ellen with the new porpoise, because she's sick--the porpoise, I mean. Oh, hi, Mike."

Mike nodded. Both of us were toying with the circuit, apparently very busy. I said, "Mich, could you move that block over a little closer? I can't let go of these for the moment."

She dragged it across the table with some difficulty, and I attached the clips I had in my hands to each end of it.

"Okay, Mike," I said. "Turn it on, and see if anything happens this time."

--And of course nothing did. "Damn it, now what?" said Mike. I knew we should have tested it first!"

"Don't get excited," I said, excited. "It should work. Did you check your soldering?"

He looked over what he had done. "Oh, boy, where does this go?" he muttered, and studied the diagram. "Okay. I know what happened." He took up the soldering gun and the solder remover, and spent a couple of minutes, and then said, "Now!" and flipped the tiny switch.

The block of lead shuddered slightly, rose slowly off the table, and did a little gyration in the air, tugging gently at the wires attaching it to the circuit board.

Michele looked at it, then at me, and then at Mike, then back at the block. "I don't believe it," she said.

"It's having a mystical experience," I said.

"A what?"

"Remember years ago, I mentioned that Dad had said that mystics might rise off the ground because they borrowed from their mass to concentrate? Well, there's what ecstasy is, physically."

"Really?" she said.

"What're you talking about?" said Mike.

"That's what gave me the idea," I replied. "Always listen to your father, even if he's a philosopher."

"You mean you've got the way to make rockets that'll actually take us into space?" Michele said.

"Rockets?" said Mike.

"That was what was in the back of my mind," I told him. "With something like this on a rocket, we could lift any payload we wanted to anywhere we wanted. We could send a mission to Mars with a skyrocket."

The two were silent, thinking of the implications. "We could ship anything anywhere, with practically no energy. And with next to no mass, crashes wouldn't do much damage!"

"How low can you get the mass of a system?" asked Michele.

"Theoretically," he answered, "down as close to zero as you want, though you can't get rid of it completely. But it's hard to say in practice. This thing still has a lot of power left in it, for instance." He had been looking at the circuit board, and looked up and suddenly stopped. Michele reacted to the look almost as if it had been a slap, and turned to me.

"Will it work on organic things?" she asked.

"I don't know; I suppose so."

A thought suddenly occurred to her. "Paul," she said, "This means that we wouldn't need elaborate delivery systems for atomic weapons. We could make them weigh practically nothing."

"Oh, fine!" said Mike. "I see TOP SECRET on this already."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Just think of the military applications for a second."

"But we won't allow it to be used for military applications!"

"How'd we stop anybody? And even if we didn't, what's to prevent the Chinese from using it?" (You will recall that back then, there was concern about China's belligerent attitude toward us.)

There was another silence. I said, "Which means that we can't publish this. As soon as it gets known how to control mass, troop movements, weapons shipping, everything that used to be so complicated gets a lot easier."

"Right," said Mike. "Like I said, TOP SECRET."

"Well, if you mean that we let the Pentagon in on this," said Michele, "and they keep it secret, I'm not so sure I approve. Personally, I don't think our government has some kind of monopoly on virtue."

"I wasn't--" said Mike.

"I don't think this should be used for any military purpose," I said, "and I don't care who the good guys and the bad guys are. I'd rather bury it now. Look what happened to atomic energy."

"Yeah, well we were doing the same thing with conventional stuff. What about Dresden?"

"All the more reason."

"Would you mind filling me in on the logic behind that remark?" said Mike.

"What's going on here?" said Michele. "What are you two arguing about? Here we are with something tremendously important and terribly dangerous, and instead of trying to figure out what we should do with it, you fight about something that happened in 1940!"

Mike and I both expostulated at the same time, but of course she was right, and after some discussion we realized that we were all agreed on the fact that only the three of us should know about this.

"At least for now," said Mike, "until we can figure out a way of keeping control and only letting out enough information so it can't be used for military purposes."

"If there's any way to do it," I added. "That's what I meant about atomic energy."

"At least we have the advantage of not having anybody else working along these lines, the way the Germans were working on the atomic bomb," said Michele. "No one is, are they?"

"Not as far as I know," I said; "and I think I'd know."

"Hell," said Mike, "even I thought I'd seen something that'd take Paul in a completely new direction. I had no idea I'd stumbled on what he'd been looking for all this time. Anybody who's been interested in his investigations into internal fields wouldn't have been paying any attention to the production of mass in the system. No, we're safe on that score."

After a pause, I said, "Then there's nothing really to stop us from continuing experiments along these lines, as long as we're careful about it." Nobody just wanted to drop everything, and Michele was as eager as the two of us.

"You said it should work on living bodies," she began, and I interrupted, "Well, I said organic things. The internal field changes are pretty strong, and God knows what'd happen if you did that to something that was alive."

"Well, here's my purse; it's leather. Let's try it on that and see what happens."

"It may disintegrate it."

"Well so what? That'll tell us something. Let me take my license and money out of it first, though. Turn the circuit off for a minute, will you, Mike?"

"With that block of lead up in the air?" He put his hand out to push it down to the table, and I said, "Wait! Don't touch it!"

"What's the problem?" he said, lowering the block and turning off the current.

"Listen!" I said, my heart in my mouth. "We're going to have to be very careful with this thing! For all you know, the current could have gone through you and blown you up in front of our eyes!"

He looked down at the block and back at me. He was obviously shaken by his narrow escape. "Well," he said finally, "nothing happened. I did feel a vibration, like when you touch something that has an electrical leak in it, but that's all. Give me the purse, Michele." He never called her Michi.

She gave him the purse, and he attached the clips, one on each side, and flipped the switch. It stayed down. "Looks like you're wrong, Paul," he said. I've got it turned up all the way, and nothing happened." He took it to remove the clips, and said, "Wait a minute; it feels lighter. I know." He undid the clasp and dumped out the contents. The purse suddenly slipped from his fingers and shot up into the air.

"Catch it!" I cried. It had broken free of the clips and was about to fall right on the circuit. Mike rather clumsily caught it and put it back down on the table.

"Well now we know something else," said Michele. "It reduced the mass of the purse, but not what was inside."

"Evidently it only works on a single system," I said. "That was why nothing happened to you when you touched the block, Mike. And that stands to reason, now that I think of what's going on."

Mike was examining the purse. "Seems perfectly okay."

"Well that's one thing in our favor," I mused. "If you want to reduce the mass of something complicated, you'd have to attach one of these to every component. That'd probably make it more trouble than it'd be worth--or we could design it, maybe, so that it'd work but it would be more trouble than it's worth to get it to work on military things."

"I wouldn't be too optimistic about that," said Mike. "But I have an idea. Wait here a minute; I thought Henry Steigerwald got in a shipment yesterday . . ."

His voice trailed off as he left the room and can back with a cage of five white mice.

"You're not going to try it on them!" said Michele.

He gave her a half-scornful look. "Why not? It didn't hurt the purse, and that's what you were hinting at, wasn't it? We have to know sometime, and why not now?"

"I suppose you're right," she said reluctantly.

He attached the clips to the tail of one of the mice, fiddled with the knob of the potentiometer, and switched on the current. The mouse had been squeaking and biting at the clip, when suddenly, with a little shriek of surprise, it floated up to the wooden top of the cage. When it felt the roof at its back, it flipped itself over, just as if it had fallen down, and began running frantically around the underside of the roof, too frightened to pay any attention to the wire it was attached to.

"Well, it didn't blow up," said Mike. "Scared as hell, of course; but it looks healthy."

Michele was examining it as well as she could as it scampered around upside down. "If we could only get it to stay in one place for a second," she said.

Mike adjusted the resistance a bit, and the mouse began to lose contact with the roof. As it sank down, looking around with a bewildered expression, it flipped back over, and began flailing the air with its little legs so fast you could hardly see them. It hovered there, swimming in the air, though not making much progress through it, about five centimeters over the heads of its brothers.

"The poor thing!" laughed Michele. She reached into the cage, and I thought she was going to free it, but she got the food dish and held it in front of its snout. This was something it found familiar, and it put its forepaws on the dish and began gobbling up the food, its hindquarters resting quietly on nothing at all. But as it got the food inside it, it began to tilt and then to sink gradually down, until it just touched the floor with the tips of its toes. It could run now, which it proceeded to do, with tremendous leaps (for a mouse) over the backs of the other mice, which were now scampering in contagious fright in all directions. I was reminded of the old films of the lunar astronauts playing in their weightless cabins.

"There you are," said Mike. "It only works on complete systems."

We watched, laughing at the antics of the little circus and its Supermouse.

"Look at that!" said Michele. "He's going up again!" The mouse was gradually losing contact with the ground, and was becoming terrified all over again. "He must be digesting the food," she added, "making it part of his system."

For a while the mouse could get back into contact with the ground by bouncing; and as it grew lighter, it used the backs of the other mice as stepping stones, while they bit at it and ran away, knocking it here and there the way children bat an inflated balloon.

Michele was for turning the circuit off and having mercy on the mouse, but Mike and I agreed that we ought to leave it on for a few days or even till it died, to see if there were any serious problems for a living being in having its mass reduced. After all, if ever my dream of reintroducing space travel was to come true, people would have to wear these things too.

It was fortunate that it was the semester break in January, so that there wouldn't be many people in the lab. I found another cage and put Supermouse in it alone, leaving a note on Henry's desk that we'd borrowed one of his mice. I took the cage and the circuit into my office, and put it out of sight when the door was locked.

It was only after we had cleaned up the place that the three of us began to realize how dazed we were. It was almost as if we'd been in an automobile accident; if the initial shock doesn't immobilize you, you find yourself capable of doing all sorts of things as if everything was normal; and then when the time of action passes, everything hits you at once, and you lose all power to think.

I don't remember even if we said goodbye to Mike or how we got home that afternoon; and it wasn't until days later that it occurred to me--as a kind of abstract proposition--that my internal field-geometry was as fundamental an understanding of bodies as was Einstein's revolutionary view of space-time.