Naked in School
The Vodou Physicist
Chapter 65 - Slowing Time
Cynthia Denison was confused. What had just happened? She had just met this dynamo of a young woman—how old? Denise had told her that she was around eighteen and was scary, both scary smart but also could be completely intimidating at times. When their hands touched, Cindy had felt a spark of something, kind of like the feeling of recognizing someone you knew a long time ago. And something deep inside her made her sense that she indeed did know Tamara, on some deeper level. But Tamara was speaking now.
“Cindy... It’s great meeting you after hearing about you lots from Denise, but did you feel that sensation of recognition?”
“Ahh, good to meet you too, Tamara; Kevin and Denise told me just how impressive you are... but you said ‘recognition’? Was that the feeling I got?”
“Oh sure. You probably don’t feel it, but your psyche has the imprint of a spirit being and the impression I got is that it’s very similar to spirits I’ve sensed in someone from Denmark... Okay, you’ll think this is a weird question, but tell me, do you have any Norse relatives in your ancestry? I’m sensing a warrior presence in you.”
Cindy looked for a chair and sat down.
“Wow. This is heavy. A warrior?” Tamara nodded and told her to go on. “I guess I am; Dad’s a Marine and I’ve always tried to emulate him... I suppose that’s how I approach life, aggressively. But what do you mean by ‘spirits’?”
Tamara briefly explained about the Vodou lwas and Greta’s own protectors, and how they weren’t really “present” in the sense of a physical presence, but the potentiality of their attributes seemed to be part of her and Greta’s psyche. And in a somewhat weaker sense, those potentialities were present in her mom’s, dad’s, Peter’s, and now in Cindy’s case.
“Our Haitian warrior lwa, Ogorin, has given me some of his attributes and that allowed me to see a corresponding characteristic in you. Do you know if you have Nordic ancestors? Where’s your family from?”
“Huh. Let me think. Dad said that the family emigrated here from Scotland in the eighteenth century and lived in North Carolina at first. He said that there were lots of Scots that went there from the Highlands. They were farmers.”
“Do you know your family history from Scotland? I’m asking ‘cause Peter’s Danish grandmom told me that people who have this ... um... aura of a ‘presence’ like you do must have had ancestors who were somehow linked to a form of spirituality in some way. Hey, we’ll need to talk about this later. I’ve pulled you away from the others; let’s go see what’s up with them.”
They walked over to the group and found out what was up with them: they were discussing why Tamara had pulled Cindy away so abruptly.
“I found out that Cindy’s a bit like Greta, Peter, and she’s similar to you, as far as the spirit ‘presences’ are concerned,” Tamara told them. “I had already told Denise and Kevin about how that works.”
Denise looked at Tamara and then Cindy. Then she looked at Peter and back to Cindy.
“I do see something in Peter. It’s different somehow than when we first met. More ... focused? Assured? Stronger somehow,” Denise said slowly. “And I do see a really powerful internal strength in Cindy, but I always thought that was her personality...” she went on.
“Oh, but that’s exactly what it is,” Tamara told her. “That’s her psychic response to her association to that spiritual stimulus. It’s like Peter’s but more developed; more integrated into her personality. Peter’s has only recently been formed.”
Peter had been staring intently at Cindy, so she looked at him, asking, “Something wrong?”
“Ah, no, no. You just look so familiar,” Peter said, embarrassed. “Can’t place it. Maybe someone I knew. No big deal.”
“Yeah, that happens to me too. It’s fine,” Cindy assured him.
“So who’s ‘Greta’?” Denise asked.
“My grandmom. On Dad’s side,” Peter responded. “She’s an anthropologist but also a seeress in the ancient Norse religion.”
“I was asking Cindy about her ancestors from before they came to the U.S.,” Tamara explained. “That’s why I grabbed her; I wanted to find out her background. Finding this out is exciting.”
“Say, Cindy, that sounds really interesting,” Tom put in. “I’ll bet you’d like to know too, right?” Cindy nodded. “Got an idea. Could you see if your dad is free now? I think you should call him and see if he knows about his family history.”
Cindy made the call but had to leave a message. The group remained in the lounge, talking about things—one big thing was Tamara’s experience with her attempted blackmail. She gave an edited account, leaving out the NSA’s role and attributing the incident to industrial espionage. Then about noon, they went to lunch.
After lunch, Denise suggested a swim, and Cindy chuckled, “Yeah, damn, okay. Can’t stand the wet suits, but okay.”
“A real convert there, isn’t she?” Tom smirked to a grinning Denise and Kevin, while the others looked puzzled.
Then Barbara exclaimed, “Oh! Wet suits! Don’t tell me—you guys nudists?”
That was a revelation for both sets of friends—having nudism in common. That led to Cindy sharing her own introduction to nudism and how she and Tom got Denise and Kevin involved. And then Tamara and her friends found out that Cindy and Tom sometimes visited Emma’s Maryland nudist resort outside Annapolis. They were in Kevin and Denise’s room, getting ready to change for the pool, when Cindy’s dad returned her phone call. She turned on the speaker.
“Hi, Dad. Something came up about my ancestry. It’s complicated, but it has to do with my aggressive personality trait. A new friend here has some insights and she thinks that it’s genetic and has to do with our family’s ancestors. Let me introduce you to our new friends. Kevin and Denise are here too.”
They both called, “Hello, Stuart!” and he answered their greetings.
Cindy continued, “Our new friends are Tamara Alexandre and her boyfriend Peter Winsberg; also Peter’s sister Barbara and her boyfriend Terence Dryer. They’re students at Johns Hopkins and Barbara’s at Maryland.”
They all said hello.
“Dad, do you know anything of the family before they came over here from Scotland?”
“A fair bit, Cindy. First, did you know that most of the male line of my family were military in some way? You mentioned a genetic link to aggression; well, that’s part of it.”
“Yeah, I do remember that,” she answered.
“So here’s some family background. I actually have a number of really old letters that my grandpa had, plus several very old family Bibles that list births, marriages, and deaths. I recall looking through them when I was a teen and I did a report on my family when I was in high school. And I remember some things from the report.
“My family came over in the 1780s, somewhere in that decade, and settled in western North Carolina, near the part that later became Tennessee. The family came from the Scottish Highlands and our name back then was Dennison, with two ‘n’s. But the records that Grandpa had kept go back much earlier, to the 1500s, when the family, or part of it, was actually living in the Orkney Islands, way up in northern Scotland. The earliest record that I found was from 1522, a faded letter that was sent to ... ah, Kirkwall, I think the town was, and addressed to an Abigail Dennison there. So I concluded that part of our family originated in the Orkneys of Scotland well before the 1500s and I also found records that showed that the Dennisons, part of them, anyway, were a sept of the MacGregor clan. They’re a Highland clan and that group goes back as far back as the 800s. If you want, go on line and see if you can go back further than the 1500s. We didn’t have those kind of research tools back when I was in school, of course.”
They spoke for a little longer and then disconnected, then they trooped down to the pool. While the group was in the pool, Peter suggested that he could call Greta.
“She’d know better about whether the Norse had anything to do with the Scots way back then. Grams’ family has a detailed oral history,” he told Cindy and she told him to go ahead and do it.
After their pool soak, the group got dressed again and Peter called Greta.
“Hi, Peter; thought you were with your friends today,” she answered.
“I am, Grams, and we’re all here,” he answered, and then, on speaker, introduced the four whom she hadn’t met.
“We called you ‘cause it seems that Tamara’s gone and found a new person who has an attachment to the spirit world, that’s Cindy. Tamara senses a warrior spirit in her and her dad told us that their family history may go back over a thousand years to northern Scotland. So we’re wondering if she could have any genetic link to the Norse people.”
“Sure, there’s plenty of Norse history in Scotland, Peter,” Greta told them. “Vikings and other Norse settlers from Scandinavia, including Denmark, colonized parts of northern Scotland, especially the islands in the far north. Denmark is right across the North Sea from Scotland and the Faroe Islands are still part of the Kingdom of Denmark. So yes, Denmark’s and Scotland’s history are closely tied. And the time frame from the 8th to the 15th centuries is known as the ‘Scandinavian Scotland’ period. I’m familiar with reports of Nordic influence in the far north of Scotland as early as the late 8th century, when battles between the Scandinavian earls of Orkney and the rulers in the Hebrides were occurring with regularity. Also, there were frequent incursions by the Vikings from Norway and, later, a period of colonization of northern Scotland by the Saxons of Denmark, began.
“So to answer your question, yes, there’s almost a certainty that there is a genetic link between the Norse and the Scots of the north. I assume that you may want to know whether there’s a possibility that ... um, it’s Cindy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That Cindy could have seeresses in her ancestry,” Greta went on. “That’s really a big unknown, since as far as religious practices in Scotland of that period go, that’s much less clear. There’s all kinds of conflicting information, but still, it’s fairly likely that pagan practices existed in early Scandinavian Scotland but those practices ended with the introduction of Christianity, which came to that area earlier than to Scandinavia. Does that explanation help you people?”
“Oh, for sure, Grams,” Peter answered as he saw a lot of heads nodding. “Say hi to Gramps. Thanks and ‘bye.”
Cindy looked over at Tamara. “So what does this ‘spirit’ thing mean for me?” she asked. “Now that I know that I might have it legitimately,” she chuckled.
“Not a whole lot,” Tamara responded. “My dad had his for his whole time in the Marines without knowing about his own spirit connection. He only began learning about it maybe four years ago and that’s when he realized how much that spirit connection did for him.”
“Oh, that’s right, your dad’s a Marine too,” Cindy smiled. “Denise told me he got the Medal of Honor, too.”
“Yep, he did, but they had to rebuild his leg so they retired him. But the president had him reactivated last year and now he’s a kind of ambassador and will be doing special gigs for the State Department.”
“Wow, that’s cool,” Cindy said. “I wonder if he and my dad ever crossed paths. Dad joined the Corps in 2000 and I was born in 2007, so I never lived at his earlier postings, obviously.”
“Well, my dad joined in 2002, I think. He got wounded in 2008. His unit was based in North Carolina.”
“That would be Lejeune,” Cindy told her. “Before I was born, the units Dad was in were based at Pendleton in southern California. Hey, we got way, way off the topic over that spirit thing and then Marine stuff. We were going to talk about the Avery Program.”
Cindy called to Barbara, who was talking to Tom and Peter just then, “Hey, Barbara, Denise told me that you did a research topic on the Avery Program as a senior.”
“That’s right,” Barbara said as she walked over to Cindy. “I started looking at social relationships between students before and after they were in the program.”
They began discussing Barbara’s project and Cindy’s work on its initial design and how so little work was being continued at Avery on continued curriculum development.
“That’s why Denise’s work in the U.K. was so important,” Cindy finished. “That kind of kick-started work on the Avery curriculum again back here. Maybe you should send them a copy of your own work; it sounds like it might be useful.”
“You know that I want to keep working on studying the Avery Program too, right? It won’t be my major emphasis in my dissertation research, but it’ll be a part of it.”
“That’ll be great. Please keep me in the loop too; I’d like to keep up with what you find.”
“Hey Cindy,” Tamara asked at one point, “you’re quite tall and have a real athletic build. By any chance, did you play volleyball in college? I recently started playing, myself.”
“Not v-ball. I was a power forward in college basketball, even though my height was more like a guards’, my aggression and power let me play up front. I was a four-year starter and was named to the AP All-American team as a junior and senior.”
“Woo, that’s cool,” Peter said. “Your team do well?”
“Final four of the NCAA tourney in my junior and senior years, so yeah, we were okay.”
“Cindy doesn’t mention it much,” Tom cut in, “but at seventeen years old, she was on the U.S. Judo Team and competed in the International Judo Federation’s world championship tournament in Tokyo, and she took the gold medal in the women’s lightweight division.”
“Shit! — sorry, everyone,” Peter blurted. “That’s where I know you from, Cindy! Sensei showed us the films from a few selected matches and your gold medal match was one of them. He ran yours several times in slo-mo ‘cause he said your technique was just about perfect. He also said you must have had great conditioning ‘cause in the rematch they had you do to break the tie, you were much stronger and faster than your opponent.”
“Obviously you saw it, Peter—that’s exactly how it went down,” Cindy exclaimed. “So you do judo?”
“Barbara and I’ve been studying it for ... um, seven years, but I’m no way in your class... world champ... damn. Why didn’t you stick with it?”
“Several reasons. Number one, I achieved my goal, to reach the art’s highest level. But there’s nowhere higher to go than the top. Sure, I could have kept defending the title, but that’s kinda static—keeping others from reaching their top. Here’s a sort-of similar idea. A mountain climber gets to Everest’s summit. Does he stay there and keep others from reaching it? No he achieved his goal and others who make the attempt can do it too. I proved to myself that I could be the best; that was enough.
“Number two, I was a very strong high school b-ball player—even though I was short. Well, not short but not tall either. Shorter than the typical forward, anyway. I loved the game; got a full-ride college scholarship out of it. Keeping up the judo and competing in international tourneys wouldn’t allow me to play college ball. And, you know, doing both b-ball and judo is hell on the ol’ joints.”
Everyone laughed.
“Cindy, I saw Peter in action, you know,” Denise commented. “We told you about the Russian thugs who attacked us in England. Well, Peter just about destroyed the one he faced. The prettiest hip throw I’ve ever seen; he made the jerk fly.”
Cindy looked at the others in the group. “That’s cool. Yeah, look at this bunch of us... all killers, right? Me, judo. Peter and Barbara, judo. Kevin and Denise, taekwondo and Kevin knows karate too. It’s a deadly crew,” she laughed.
Terence chuckled, “Yeah, don’t include me in that. Ah don’t do violent stuff at all; Ah just played football.”
More laughter.
The group spent the rest of the afternoon sharing stories and getting to know each other, although Tamara didn’t bring Cindy into her secrecy circle about her abilities. She’d have to think about that a lot more.
End of December and the New Year
When the holidays came, Tamara spent them with her family, Peter and his family, and Emma and hers, in varying combinations, on different days. Terence was gone for part of the two-week period; he was visiting his family and had three younger siblings whom he greatly missed. After the new year, it was back to work for Tamara.
Emma had arranged a gathering of physicists to visit her lab and the APL, to look at the research that Tamara was involved in, and to review and critique Tamara’s latest theories. No one took issue with her mathematics; the issue was with her interpretation of its real-world meaning. The group outlined a few possible experiments which could be performed to answer some of the questions that her theory raised. As far as the major issue was concerned, which was how to experimentally create a particle having the appropriate mass to produce the effect that Tamara had discovered, one of the physicists, the cosmologist John van der Bellen, had joked that that particular issue could easily be resolved by building a larger collider—larger, that is, than Geneva’s 27-kilometer circumference LHC.
“Actually there’s an experiment we can do if we got the funding to build a larger collider,” he told the group, chuckling. “I did a quick computation on the size of the device and calculated that the collider ring should be about the circumference of the inner part of the Oort Cloud ring—you know, the collection of asteroids, comets, and planetesimals that surrounds the Solar System way outside Pluto’s orbit. That circumference is roughly 2.1 trillion kilometers.”
Everyone laughed at that suggestion and one of them asked, “How’d you come up with that, John?”
“Basically, Tamara’s calculations suggest we need to reach an average energy of about 1012 TeV. Extrapolating the properties of the LHC, that ring size would be what’s necessary to achieve sufficient energy to produce particles of that mass.”
Tamara laughed herself and commented, “You all know that we’d just be repeating an experiment that’s already been done—the Big Bang produced energies at that level, but unfortunately I’m not aware of anyone who might have witnessed it.”
Everyone groaned at her lame humor.
“Tamara, you’re not getting any points for that one,” another physicist laughed. “But you get full marks for these calculations. We just need to figure out what those results imply.”
Although Tamara got no points for her humor, her experimental devices did cause a minor sensation. When the guest physicists visited the APL and were shown the G-coil assembly and its test data, the doubters began to question their doubts. It certainly looked like energy was coming from nowhere; that was completely impossible. Tamara had reminded everyone of Conan Doyle’s quotation that went, “Once you eliminate the impossible...” et cetera.
When Emma summarized the group’s findings and recommendations at the end of the two-day session, she reminded her peers, “We know that we showed you unbelievable things here and you saw that the maths support the conclusions that Tamara’s shown you. How you view our interpretation of the maths is the stumbling block. But let me send you away with another quotation, this one from Arthur Schopenhauer. He said, ‘All truth passes through three stages. First, it’s ridiculed. Second, it’s violently opposed. Third, it’s accepted as being self-evident.’ Can we all agree that this is where we’re sitting at now, just before the third stage?”
All those attending agreed with Emma and told her that they would continue to think about Tamara’s calculations and their interpretation. Then they left for their homes after thanking Emma for her hospitality, not to mention the entertainment that this new physics puzzle presented.
End of January
The new suite of tests on the G-coil assembly had been finalized by the third week of January. Tamara was allowing her team to do the testing and they were proceeding with extreme caution, using minimal power applications, to try to define the field size and strength that the G-force exerted on its surroundings. By mid-February, they were able to determine the minimum coil activating power and were also able to obtain a steady-state condition which allowed the G-coil to float over its base where an equilibrium of applied input power and the coil’s repulsive power was achieved. But the issue of the inertialess acceleration phenomenon was still unsolved.
Tamara was performing some calculations of applied energy versus time and reviewing the G-coil’s vertical movement performance, using the cameras that the research team had mounted on the coil assembly itself, when she noticed something. The images of the coil’s background as seen in the cameras’ peripheral views seemed to be strange—distorted somehow, as if they had been speeded up.
Jeez. What am I seeing here? Is this some kind of time dilation? Tamara wondered. That would explain the appearance of an inertialess acceleration.
She got out her paper on the G-coil experiment, which she was holding off on submitting until all the patent application work was complete. Looking over the math, she saw places where her calculations might have a tie-in to general relativity theory; when she first began working on those calculations, any connection to general relativity seemed to be irrelevant. Now it seemed that the connection might be very important.
Her G-coil calculations had implied that the field created by the G-force involved some kind of curvature of the space-time of the “dimensional space”—or whatever it might be called—which was populated by dark matter and energy. This curvature should be directly analogous to the momentum and energy of whatever dark matter and energy were present and therefore, she realized, Einstein’s field equations should apply. And general relativity theory showed that time dilation was a function of differences in gravitational potential; she knew that a clock located near a massive body will appear to run slower than a clock situated further away. And apparently something very massive was associated with the projection of the G-force into the real world. How then was the gravitational potential field of her coil assembly related to the field that existed in the conjectured dark matter dimension? She dove into the math to see if it held an answer.
After a day of work, her mathematical calculations were creating more questions than answers, so she went off to discuss the matter with Betty Miskin. Emma was away; she was off again to Cambridge where the first set of ElectroPowerCube devices were almost ready for delivery to the company’s pilot energy farm outside Cambridge.
“I’ve been working on the inertia problem,” she told Miskin. “I noticed that there might be a time effect associated with the application of power to the G-coil. The calcs I’ve done seem to agree with that idea, but looking at the results another way, they don’t agree. It’s kinda like the solution to a quadratic equation—you get two answers, one positive and one negative. Quantum mechanics is like that too, it can give conflicting answers. What I need to do is to set up an array of very accurate clocks, but put them in particular locations around the coil. Here’s the plan for where to put them. You can see that they all need to be triggered by the coil power input. Do you see anything here that might need to be changed?”
Miskin looked over the materials.
“I don’t think so, but then, as far as your math goes, I can’t follow some of it. The clock idea is sound and I get why you chose those locations.”
Tamara found Fox and asked him where she could find six very accurate clocks.
“Yeah, check out the APL’s Time and Frequency Lab, Tamara,” he told her. “They can set you up.”
They did.
~~~~
When Emma returned from Cambridge, Tamara told her about a quick experiment she had Miskin run after an idea had occurred to her..
“We took the super-coil design and made a small version of it. You know how it focuses the repelling effect? It’s how we make the disk float—something like ground effect.”
“Of course. So what new magic are you about to unveil then?” Emma grinned.
“So Betty made a few of the small coils to test this idea I had. I was planning to use the frictionless bearings we’re developing to build better wind turbines, but this is way better than wind. John Wolbers and Betty cobbled up several coil assemblies together and aimed the array at these specially shaped blades connected to a shaft. When they fired the coils, it pushed the blades and turned the shaft. We stuck a dynamometer on the shaft of this little setup and measured the torque developed—see, it’s 220 Newton-meters. This shows that we can get the G-force to operate a turbine and skip the need for wind. Also skip huge towers, monster blades, and special sites with lots of wind.”
“Blimey, Tamara, again, you never fail to astound. With all of these spin-off developments you seem to generate, have you had the time to work out the strange inertia anomaly yet?” Emma asked.
“Yeah, I need to stop the distractions. That’s still a work in progress.”
End of February
Three weeks later, after performing many experimental sequences using the large G-coil assembly, Tamara had finally learned the reason why the coil gave the appearance of an inertialess acceleration. It was, as she had initially suspected—the result of a time dilatation in the presence of a large mass—actually a virtual mass, as best as she could tell—which seemed to manifest itself when the G-force first appeared. She conjectured that this effect must be a result of the instantaneous folding of the “space” to which the G-force opened a portal; an extremely large quantity of the “mass” in that other dimension was suddenly folded into close proximity to the G-coil, until the folds settled into stability. Theoretically, the effective mass approached that of a small black hole. The time for this to occur, relative to someone outside of the field, was about 200 to 300 milliseconds. Only the immediate area around the super-coil was affected by this field, a few millimeters around the device, so exterior gravitational tidal forces never appeared, and according to general relativity, in the proximity to massive objects, clocks, or atomic processes, run slowly compared to outside the field. Thus the G-coil and its supporting disk did obey Newton’s First Law, but it was within a reference frame where time ran slower.
Of course reports of this result quickly went viral and was an instant sensation, so the APL had to set up a news conference so that they could stop the media’s insistent requests for interviews. Tamara was unhappy about the furor and all the attention but relented when Emma agreed to be with her for support.
“Tamara, I have a bit of advice about general press interviews where the topic can be open like this one,” Emma told her. “I had one press conference where one twit wanted to know about my nudist practices.”
“Shit, really?”
“Oh yes. I resolved then, that in similar kinds of conferences where open-ended questions could be asked, I’d insist that questions be submitted in writing.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Tamara said.
The press “conference” opened with Tamara describing, in non-technical terms, that she had found a way to generate a strong repulsive force using a special electronic circuit and the circuit could push away close-by solid objects. One such object could be the ground, so that an object containing her device could hover above a surface in much the same way that a magnetic levitation train hovers above its track. In the process of developing the curcuit, her team discovered that, for less than a second, time within the field ran slower than outside of it. This observation agreed perfectly with the predictions of general relativity.
Many written questions had been submitted and Tamara noticed several more being written as she was giving her introduction.
One was, of course, “Why do we have to write down our questions?”
Answer: “We’ve had some experience with some members of the press asking questions which, unfortunately, were totally inappropriate. Having you write them out allows you to ask well considered questions.”
Question: “Does this mean that you invented time travel?”
Answer: “No. Time is slowed by less than a second, but only locally inside the field produced by the device. It still moved forward.”
Question: “Can you make time stop in that field?”
Answer: “No. There’s too much matter in the universe to allow time to stop anywhere. As long as any matter exists, time will exist.”
Question: “How does your device work to cause it to float?”
Answer: “Sorry; the patent applications are being prepared, so the device’s theory is still confidential.”
Question: “Is this device like an electromagnet?”
Answer: “In some ways it is; in others, no. Again, its theory is confidential for now.”
Question: “It looks like there could be many commercial applications for your device. Can you discuss them?”
Answer: “In general. For transportation, possibly an improvement to magnetic levitation. For motors and generators, better bearings, lowering shaft friction. Applications like those.”
Question: “If the field slows time, is it safe for people?”
Answer: “It seems to be safe. The way the field operates, the time dilation appears to be restricted to the structure that generates the field force.”
Emma had been weeding out the personal questions, such as ones that asked about Tamara’s age, how someone who was “just a student” could be in charge of a project like this, and ones which suggested that Emma was the actual source of Tamara’s ideas. Also, many of the media people present had connected Tamara to the Cambridge energy device rollout and several wanted her to answer questions about “magic.” Emma bypassed those too. Several people tried to shout out their question, but an APL security person quickly stopped that. But the overall tone of the press “conference” seemed positive and soon all the acceptable questions had been dealt with. Then Tamara gave a recap.
“We’ve covered all of your questions relevant to the device which exhibited the temporal anomaly we found. Some of your questions were quite off topic and we didn’t answer them, but a few were about the new ElectroPowerCube being introduced in the U.K. Yes, I developed that invention, based on Dr Clarke’s mathematical theories. And yes, it is magic, as I said in my remarks when the company manufacturing it, EEC Energy Solutions, unveiled it. I said then that its magic was in how science and engineering intersected to allow a discovery like that to occur. It’s the power of the magic in seeing how kids take to learning STEM subjects so that they can learn to do their own magic. Remember, science can and does make magic real. As Michael Faraday, the great nineteenth-century physicist, said, ‘Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.’ Many thanks for your interest in all of the amazing research work being done at Johns Hopkins University, including here at their Applied Physics Lab. We do magic here too.”
The whole group actually began to applaud and began to get to their feet to clap. Tamara and Emma quickly left the front of the little assembly hall, escaping through the door there; then Emma hugged her.
“Blimey, my dear, you did it again!” she enthused as Zucker came hurrying around the corner.
He had been at the back of the room during Tamara’s “conference.”
“If I didn’t see that, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Zucker told them. “That was an amazing windup to your answer session—can’t call it a ‘conference,’ can we. I’ve never seen the press do that here, give one of our presenters a standing ovation.”
“She did it in Cambridge too, Wil,” Emma said, grinning. “Her delivery style is compelling and the energy is overwhelming.” She turned to Tamara. “Extemporaneous again, I’m sure.”
“Yep. I wanted them to leave with positive feelings, ‘cause we made it difficult for them to ask questions. But I like the way having the written questions stops the inappropriate ones.”
“Quite. That rule has stood me in good stead,” Emma agreed.
The news coverage from that meeting was positive and Tamara’s comment about Hopkins was included in the written and video reports, which led to a call to Tamara from the university’s president. He wanted to thank her for the positive news coverage.
“You can be a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins anytime you want, Miss Alexandre,” he concluded. “Thanks again for your stirring words.”
~~~~
It was around this time that Tamara heard from Agent Wilkins about the NSA and the rogue agents.
“I can’t say a whole lot about what’s happened, Tamara, but they did root out the people involved. There weren’t many. The main culprit was an assistant director who was running his own show there and had a few cases he had successfully brought in, so he got a swelled head, it seems. We did do a federal indictment and shook him up big time and the NSA put him on probation—he’s an agent in analysis now; lost his management position. No field work for him. There were three regular agents who were indicted to scare them and they got written censures in their files. They also did find someone who was working for them under a limited amount of duress. With that bit of a shakeup, only involving those few people who all got a scare with their arraignments, as you suggested, we at the FBI have closed our part in the case, so my connection to it is over.”
“Thanks. I suspect you told me more than you should have, Mrs Wilkins, so I appreciate getting that news,” Tamara told her. “I wonder where the counterfeit money came from, if that was NSA too.”
“I didn’t hear anything about that and don’t expect I ever will.”
They said their good-byes and Tamara thought, Well, that chapter’s finally over. I can stop thinking about it now and concentrate on my work.
End of March
Tamara was at Hopkins this term taking one of the rare classes she needed for her degree, so she was ensconced in her little corner of Emma’s lab on a Tuesday morning, working on her problem of feeding microwave power to her linked-coil paired device, trying to work out the math which suggested how the RF beam might be tightened up, when Terence popped in. He had finished the radio telescope detector he had been designing and now had it working successfully. A year ago, he had teamed up with an astronomy professor on an NSF grant to use the device in a small telescope which was located on the roof of the Physics-Astronomy Building. He wanted to talk to Tamara about an idea he had about the dish drive aiming mechanism.
“So Ah was thinkin’ that this could be a demo for other ‘scopes, and some have those big, heavy dishes—the ones that aren’t fixed in direction. Could y’all make frictionless shaft bearings with your G-coils? Seems it’s possible.”
“Yep, it is, and bearings like that are one of the claims in my patent app. I did some calcs on the effective areas of repulsion, though, and so far it seems like there’s a lower threshold to the shaft size. We can’t get a reliable beam focus at less than about three centimeters, so about a three-centimeter diameter shaft seems to be the current minimum. The problem is with arranging three G-coils in a 120 degree array; the coils currently interfere if they’re too close. But it seems to me... why would you need special bearings? Aren’t the aiming movements very small?”
“Yeah, they are, unless y’all need to change the sector of sky bein’ looked at. Ah, well, it was a thought,” Terence said. “But y’all think it would work on bigger things? And how do they work?”
“It should. I built a model of a kind of shaft bearing with John Wolbers’ help, you know, he’s Emma’s mechanical engineer, and the bearing pair worked great. They work kinda like magnetic bearings do but take much less power than the active electromagnetic bearings do. They also don’t need a control circuit to accommodate compensation for precession and vibration. I’m working on some ideas for several different commercial applications, in fact.”
“Cool; that’s impressive, Tamara. Are y’all gonna design a hover train like those mag-lev trains in Europe and Japan?”
“I’m gonna leave that one up to others. They can license the tech from my foundation.”
Terence laughed. “Yeah, and Ah just heard the ‘ka-ching’ of more bucks comin’ in. Oh, another thing Ah wanted t’ask. Can y’all give me a hand reinstalling the detector in the ‘scope this evening? It needs to be done after 9 p.m. ‘cause another group’s usin’ a different detector up to that time for their own stuff,” Terence asked.
“Sure. I’ve got plenty to do here; it’s no problem so I’ll see you up there at 9.”
Tamara met Peter for dinner that evening at Levering Café; he had decided to work late too. They had dinner together and then headed back to their respective buildings.
When she left the cafeteria, Tamara told him, “I’ll meet you at East Gate near the Homewood Museum at 11, honey. I’ll text you when I’m on the way.”
Going that way was the most direct route to their apartment building.
“Okay, see you then, sweetie.”
Tamara finished up working with Terence at 10:50 p.m. and went down to her little office area to get her backpack. On the way out of the building, she sent a text to Peter.
“On my way.”
“See you soon,” he replied.
Tamara was walking along the path near the Blue Jay Statue, a campus feature which got redecorated with new graffiti almost weekly, when she began to get a sense of foreboding. She had noticed that the nearby area was empty of foot traffic, and the heavily treed path toward the Homewood Museum looked fairly dark. Some of the walkway lights seemed to be out, but she decided to take that path anyway. Walking warily, she was approaching the mid-point of the museum when a figure slipped out of the darkness and began moving toward her; then she noticed another figure waiting in a copse of trees nearby. Both were radiating a sense of evil.
Oh shit, it’s my magnet for evil again, the thought ran through her mind. Damn, no time to “push” a taste... and he’s getting too close... too dark to see his eyes...
What could she do now?
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