Revelation

22 Papa the Greek

Findhorn tried to stay calm. Without a word he turned away and pushed towards Papagianopoulos. The Greek was still listening to the Englishman, but now with a sceptical, irritated look.

Findhorn interrupted the conversation. 'I want to learn about the vacuum.'

Papagianopoulos didn't falter for a second. 'But to understand the vacuum, you must first understand time.' His strongly accented speech made him unmistakably Greek.

'My name is Cartwright and I'm a science reporter for The Times in London. May I call you Papa?'

'No, I am Aristotle, if you must be familiar at all. May I introduce my colleague, Professor Bradfield?' Bradfield was tall, nearly bald, dressed in a heavy dark suit and tie, and with a face beaded with sweat. He announced himself as John Bradfield from the Rutherford-Appleton laboratory. He had a limp, two-fingered handshake.

Papagianopoulos said, 'I can best describe Professor Bradfield as an excellent guide for beaten paths.'

'Beaten paths are for beaten men,' Bradfield said. 'And am I beaten? By some fringe eccentric from the Balkan hinterlands?'

Findhorn deduced from this exchange that the two men were friends. He said, 'I shouldn't be here. I've gatecrashed. I'm writing up an article on the nature of the vacuum and I want to speak to the best people going.' Experience had taught Findhorn that the way to an academic's heart was flattery, laid on with a trowel.

Papagianopoulos nodded his approval of Findhorn's judgement. 'You have come to the right person.'

'It's noisy in here. I'd be pleased to take you to dinner someplace where we can talk.'

'I'll join you,' said Bradfield. 'I can correct my colleague's errors.'

'An interview with The Times is worth a little yapping at the heels. But the dinner, Mr Journalist, is mine. I have friends on this island.'

Archie approached and mumbled something. 'By all means join us,' Findhorn said.

Aristotle glanced at Archie's name badge and nodded indifferently. 'At this time of the evening there is a cool breeze in the hills. I suggest we enjoy it.'

They followed Aristotle out to a small, tinny Fiat parked in the square, patches of bare metal showing through the blue. Findhorn glanced back. Mr Revelation was at the hotel entrance, gloating happily. Archie and Bradfield squeezed into the back. The air was humid and there was a smell of cats. Aristotle rattled the car out of the square and took it along a quiet road lined with trees and limestone outcrops. It eventually turned inland and wound its way steeply up into the hills. Near the top of a rocky summit they drove into a village — or at least a cluster of four or five houses — and stopped.

A black Alsatian, plainly dead, lay stretched out on a dusty track. Even in the dying light they could see flies swarming around it. An old woman, on a rocking chair under the shade of a tree, watched the visitors while knitting with effortless skill. The track went round to the back of a low, whitewashed house and Aristotle led the way. As they approached, the dead Alsatian jumped up and trotted off.

They sat on kitchen chairs round a small garden table at the back of a house. There was a cooking smell and dishes were clattering. Bradfield compromised his standards by removing his jacket, although the Brasenose College tie stayed tightly round his neck. The garden was bounded by a low limestone wall and fell steeply away. They sat under overhanging vines. A thin, stooped man emerged from a kitchen door with a white paper tablecover which he spread over the table. Aristotle seemed to be known and there was an exchange of noisy Greek banter. The man vanished and reappeared with big hunks of bread, goat's cheese and herb-sprinkled tomatoes, and two carafes of cold white wine.

Findhorn looked over the parched, stony land falling steeply away, and the dark sea glittering beyond; the sun was a large, scarlet ellipse just above the horizon, shining through thunder-laden clouds. He thought that the scene had probably changed little in thousands of years, and that in California or Nice a house with a view like this would set you back a million bucks.

He spoke to Bradfield. 'Thanks for sparing me your time.'

Bradfield said, 'Glad to help.' Even gladder to see his name in The Times, Findhorn suspected.

Aristotle waved his hands expansively over the darkening landscape. 'This is a magic place. Greece is where the nature of matter and the vacuum were first discussed, six hundred years before Christ. It was here that my namesake, the other Aristotle, argued that a pure void does not exist in Nature. His insight was lost for two thousand years. It was the twentieth century before the particle physicists discovered that the vacuum is indeed a sea of seething particles and radiation. We are therefore in the most natural setting on Earth for this discussion.'

Findhorn fired the opening shot. He sailed as close to the truth as he dared. 'I'm trying to check these persistent stories about Petrosian, the atom spy. You may have heard of them. The story that he had found some way to extract energy from empty space.'

Bradfield gave Findhorn a quizzical look. 'I don't recall any such tale.'

'Could there possibly have been anything to it?'

The Englishman tried not to smirk. 'Of course not. Some very strange ideas come out of America from time to time. Especially from that era, there were what I would describe as peculiar mental phenomena. Flying saucers, psychokinesis, the Red menace and so on. I believe they were all psychological responses to 1950s anxieties about a thermonuclear holocaust.'

'You dismiss it, then?'

Bradfield continued, 'I have a problem, Mister Cartwright. Because my views belong to the mainstream of physics I'm too easily portrayed as a sort of Establishment spokesman. I feel like the Sheriff of Nottingham against Robin Hood here —' Bradfield glanced briefly at Aristotle '— but in fact the consensus of opinion in physics is against the idea that empty space holds any significant energy. Opinions to the contrary have been expressed by a small, noisy clique of outsiders. I expect that's what has triggered your enquiry. However, you ought to know that these people carry little influence with the scientific community.'

The waiter came out carrying an oil lamp, which he placed in the centre of the table and lit with a cigarette lighter. Aristotle pointedly ignored Bradfield, speaking to Findhorn. 'Fashions come and go in science as elsewhere. The only opinion which matters is that of Mother Nature.'

'We get a lot of crank science in our field,' Bradfield countered smoothly. Aristotle visibly tensed.

Findhorn tried to deflect the rapidly growing animosity. 'I read something about the Casimir effect and zero point energy. What are these things? And just how much energy are we talking about?'

Aristotle produced a biro, moved a plate of bread aside and started to scribble on the tablecover. 'The vacuum is filled with a light of unimaginable intensity if we could only see it. Let me first write down its intensity.' Then he wrote an equation in a large, extrovert scrawl: I_v — Kv³. Findhorn tilted his head to read the equation. 'Remember I'm a mere journalist. You'll have to explain.'

The Greek tried a joke. 'Even journalists can read. I is the intensity of this light at a particular frequency v. K is an extremely small number.'

'Which would therefore make the intensity of the light extremely small,' Findhorn pointed out. 'What is K anyway?'

Aristotle scribbled down 6.14 x 10^-57. 'For the innumerate, this is 6.14 divided by the number one followed by fifty-seven zeros.'

'K is as near to zero as makes no difference,' Findhorn said.

Aristotle was patient. 'But look at the other term, young man, the v³. The equation also tells you something else, namely that the intensity of this light increases with the cube of its frequency. No matter how tiny K is, its smallness is always overwhelmed at a sufficiently high frequency.'

'Okay, so we're immersed in a radiation field of tremendous intensity.' Findhorn broke some bread, dipped it in his wine. He'd seen people do this in movies. 'Why doesn't it just fry us? I don't even see it. Space is black.'

Aristotle waved his arms to encompass the sky; a slightly fanatical tone was creeping into his voice. Or maybe, Findhorn thought, it was just Latin dramatics. 'Does a fish at the bottom of the ocean feel the weight of a ton of overlying water on every square centimetre of its surface? Do you feel the atmosphere bearing down on you, a kilogram compressing every square centimetre of your body? You do not. Because it pervades you. Only differences in pressure can be felt. You cannot feel the crushing atmospheric pressure, but you can feel a light breeze on your cheeks.'

'You're telling me that we don't see this vacuum light because we're pervaded by it.'

Aristotle nodded again. 'It is everywhere, in the retinae of your eyes, in your gut, in the spaces between your atoms.'

'So how do we know it even exists?'

'If you were in a submarine, with no pressure gauge, how could you tell if you were under the ocean?'

'Tell me.'

More dramatics. Aristotle was now squeezing an imaginary submarine between the palms of his hands. 'By the tiny shrinking of its steel hull. A shrinkage of a few millimetres would let you infer the existence of a huge ocean pressure outside. In the same way there are subtle manifestations of the vacuum radiation. Tiny shifts in the expected energy levels of atoms. Miniscule forces acting between flat plates in a vacuum. The merest hints of this shadow world. The rest is inference. But we have no plumb lines to explore the ultimate depths of this ocean of energy. It is terra incognita.'

'And how does this relate to zero point energy?'

'ZPE, my journalist friend, is the energy of the vacuum, that is to say, the energy of this radiation field. It is a remnant of the Creation, and it is vast beyond comprehension.'

'And the Casimir effect?'

'So intense is this radiation, at the highest frequencies, that wherever there is the slightest shadow, the difference in intensity creates a pressure. This is what happens with the Casimir effect. The plates shield each other, however slightly, from the surrounding vacuum radiation. The differential pressure of the light forces them together.'

Bradfield interrupted the dialogue. His voice was carrying an undertone of annoyance. 'Don't let my colleague's enthusiasm sweep you along, Mr Cartwright. The best experiments have produced less Casimir force than the weight of a paperclip.'

Aristotle said, 'Beh!' dismissively. He scribbled some more: F = Cd^-4. 'This is the force pushing the plates together. You see the closer the plates are, the better they shield each other, the bigger the push. The force increases with the inverse fourth power of their separation d. It is true that experimental limitations have put a wide separation between the plates in the laboratory and the measured force is small. But put them ten times closer and they would feel ten thousand times the force. One hundred times closer and the force is multiplied by one hundred million times.'

'A thousand times closer and you'd crush that submarine,' Archie suggested. His sweaty, red face had a strange, almost feverish look. Findhorn thought it was something like greed.

'But how could we get at all this power?' Findhorn asked. 'What did Petrosian see?'

Bradfield again, the irritation becoming open. 'What power? It doesn't exist. There is no vacuum energy.'

Archie was looking puzzled. 'But Professor Bradfield, you've just told us that people have measured the force between the plates.'

'They have measured a force. But it's all interatomic. The atoms feel it when they are close to each other.'

'It has nothing to do with the vacuum?'

Bradfield was emphatic. 'Nothing. The vacuum is empty. Ideas about extracting energy from it belong with anti-gravity devices and astral projection.'

Findhorn asked, 'Can you prove that?'

Bradfield held out his hand at arm's length. 'I see my hand. No distortion, no bending of light, my hand is just there.'

Findhorn looked baffled. 'That's proof?'

Bradfield said, 'Correct, Mister Cartwright. Energy has mass. Mass exerts gravity. If the vacuum carried as much energy as Papa here claims, the Universe would be far more massive than the astronomers tell us. It would collapse in on itself under its own weight. The cosmos would be the size of a golfball.' He waved his hands around, in a parody of Aristotle. 'Some golfball!'

Archie was scribbling with Aristotle's pen. 'I get your point. Even with the tiny energy already measured in the lab: you couldn't see distant galaxies.' He leaned back, frowning at Aristotle. 'There's already a contradiction between the lab and the telescope.'

Bradfield managed to sip his wine while nodding agreement. 'A blatant one. And Aristotle knows it. Vacuum energy extraction belongs with perpetual motion machines and cold fusion. It's nonsense.'

'The nonsense is entirely Professor Bradfield's.' Aristotle's face was flushed. 'Gravity is just a mutual shielding of atoms from the ZPE. The zero point energy cannot shield itself from itself. It cannot exert a gravitational force and does not, therefore, collapse the Universe.'

Uninvited, plates of soup were approaching, balanced on the waiter's arms. Findhorn found himself looking at little fish, and octopus tentacles immersed in a thick, tomato-red juice. Bradfield looked at his plate with something like alarm. The Alsatian reappeared and settled down with a sigh, out of kicking range but within throwing distance of scraps.

Aristotle said, 'Pepper? The undeniable fact is, Mister Cartwright, that numerous small atomic effects can be explained — can only be explained — if the vacuum contains radiation whose intensity increases without limit as we go to higher and higher frequencies. Its energy must approach infinity.'

Bradfield was being smooth again. 'Not everything that appears in an equation has physical reality. This ZPE is nothing more than a computational trick.'

Aristotle dipped bread into his fish soup. 'We progress. My colleague now admits that ZPE is a unifying explanation for a wide range of atomic phenomena. The Americans — or is it the British? — have an expression for this. If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then we call it a duck, not a computational trick.'

Archie was prodding a tentacle with his fork, as if he expected a reaction.

Findhorn said, 'This is getting over my head.'

'Perhaps you need more retsina, my friend,' Aristotle suggested, pouring it.

Findhorn thought the wine bore some resemblance to paint stripper, but he sipped it anyway. 'How much energy are we talking about?'

Aristotle speared a fish with his fork. 'The zero point energy shapes molecules, even determines the internal structure of atoms. The material world is a froth floating on the surface of a deep ocean of vacuum energy.'

'Give me a number.'

Papa tossed it out casually. 'There is enough energy in a volume of space the size of a coffee cup to evaporate the world's oceans.'

Archie's eyes gleamed. Bradfield said, 'Ugh!' Whether in reference to the soup or the Greek's claim was unclear.

'But that's vast,' Findhorn said lamely.

'You must have considered the implications of a source of infinite energy, easily tapped,' said Aristotle.

'Cheap electricity. The end of starvation. Water in the desert. A world of plenty.'

Aristotle burst out laughing. 'Cheap super-bombs, more powerful than nuclear weapons and much easier to build. Economic collapse. Massive unemployment. Social chaos. And, somewhere, the emergence of another Fuhrer to rescue the situation.'

Findhorn tried again. 'How could you mine this energy, Papa? How could it be done?'

Aristotle pushed his chair back and stood up, carrying his plate. The Alsatian jumped up expectantly. The waiter exchanged exuberant Greek with Aristotle. No money was changing hands and Findhorn let it go. 'Simple. Think of some simple way to make the vacuum decay. To change the ground state of the neutral vacuum.'

Bradfield looked as if he was in pain.

'I don't understand these terms,' Findhorn said in frustration.

'Forget mechanical devices like parallel plates. Go atomic. Look for a system which shimmers in the vacuum energy, like a crystal with complex resonances on the quantum scale, allowing it to achieve the impossible, like a momentary reversal of time's arrow. Work on that.' Aristotle stood at the kitchen door. 'There is one problem, I believe, with any attempt to engineer the vacuum. Petrosian may or may not have thought of it.'

Findhorn waited. Aristotle finished his dramatic pause, and continued: 'We would be toying with something we know very little about.'

'You mean…'

'Now, Mr Times journalist…' was there, Findhorn wondered, a tiny hint of scepticism in Aristotle's tone? '… I have given you time, vacuum, cosmos. It is everything you need for your newspaper article.' There was a brilliant blue flash, and seconds later Zeus roared angrily around the hills. 'We, should return.'

'One last thing, Papa,' Findhorn said.

Aristotle waited.

'Who were Chase and Henshal?'

In the near-dark, Aristotle looked blank. Bradfield looked blank. Archie looked blank. And so, finally, did Findhorn.

'I guess you were surprised to see me,' Archie said. The air was oppressive, and his brow had a light coating of sweat. He kept glancing through the kitchen window towards the courtyard.

Findhorn poured them both more wine. 'The surprise was entirely yours, Archie. Still, you've had time to think up a plausible story.'

Archie blew out his cheeks, took a gulp. 'You're too effing bright for plausible stories. I may as well tell you.'

'You must have come out here like lightning, after you sent me that phoney message.'

Archie hesitated. Then: 'Aye. How did you know it was false?'

'You almost had me fooled. Your mistake lay in those intermediate addresses between Angel Lodge and my Aberdeen one. You mis-spelled digital.com as digitil.com. It meant the e-mail header had been typed in manually by someone covering his tracks. And by this time it had twigged that every time I contacted you something bad happened shortly afterwards.'

Archie stayed silent.

Findhorn was suddenly angry. 'People are trying to kill me.'

'That wasn't part of the deal.' Archie's gaze still kept flicking towards the window.

'You hurt me, Archie. You were the one person on this planet I thought I could trust.'

'Aye, well, we all have to grow up.'

'Why?' Findhorn asked, although he knew the answer.

Archie looked at Findhorn. His eyes were red-rimmed. 'You're a fool, Fred. If this Petrosian was really onto something then a fortune isn't the word for it. Imagine having a patent for some device that gives the world free energy.'

'You heard Papa the Greek. It could blow up in your face. So grab the money and stuff the risks?'

'Fred, you're holding something that could make you richer than Croesus. I've had it with poverty, I do not recommend it. I want more out of life than slogging my guts out, trying to educate a generation of third-rate students who don't give a damn. I just wanted to be up there with the people who made it. A piece of the action, was that so bad?'

'Some action.' Findhorn paused, then suddenly asked: 'What's your connection with these religious nuts?'

Archie shifted uncomfortably. 'You don't know what you're up against.'

'Are you and Romella in it together?'

He was sulking like a child.

'If Bradfield is right there's no zero point energy and this Casimir thing is just interatomic forces.'

'Aye.'

'Aye, spoken like a no.'

Archie sipped at the wine with every sign of disliking it. 'Bradfield conveniently forgot to mention one thing. These atomic forces he was spoutin' about. They're caused by ZPE in the first place.'

'You mean…'

'They're just part of the effing vacuum energy. He also slightly misled you about a small noisy clique of outsiders. The people who believed in ZPE also laid down the foundations of modern physics. People like Einstein, Planck, Feynman and Bethe.'

Feynman and Bethe. Names in Petrosian's diary: he had worked with them at Los Alamos. 'So what's your gut feeling, Archie?'

'My money's on the Greek.' Then, 'Fred, there's something I have to tell you.' Archie refilled his tumbler and took another long draught. He screwed his face up with disgust. 'Effing turpentine.'

'You need that stuff to screw up your courage?'

'I'm supposed to invite you over to my hotel for a late drink. It's a kilometre away and between here and there, there are lots of dark alleys. And there are lots of nice wee coves for late night swimmers to drown in and I don't suppose the forensic science in this neck of the woods is world-beating.'

Findhorn felt as if spiders were crawling up his back. 'I wondered how they were planning to do it.'

'Revelation Island. Jerusalem of the effing Aegean.' Archie shook his head. 'Get off it, Fred. Get out of it as fast as you can.'

'I've been thinking of nothing else. But there's only one way off Patmos, and that's the ferry in Skala harbour.'

'Do you hear me? Get out of this house. Vanish. Sleep out in the open. Then come straight down from the hills and onto the ferry when it's crowded. And never, never be alone between here and the nearest airport, not for a second. It's your only chance, Fred.'

'What about you?'

'I'll tell them you went looking for a place in Oriko, to be close to a beach. It's the best I can do for you.' For the first time in the evening Archie looked directly at his friend. The man's eyes were dark with despair. 'I failed you, Fred. I'm sorry. But for a few days there I had a wonderful vision of freedom.'

Findhorn had a better idea. In the early morning he emerged, freshly shaven but cold and smelling a little of sheep dung, along a track leading into Kampos, the northernmost village of the island. In one little shop he bought black shoe polish, in another some safety pins, scissors and a few yards of black cloth. Then he disappeared back up the track. It took him two hours of experiment before he was satisfied, and he had trouble with the dark eyebrows, but the men on the quayside paid no attention to the woman in sunglasses, dressed head to toe in the traditional black, who climbed the gangplank onto the morning ferry.

The taxi driver fully justified the fearful reputation of all Greek taxi drivers and Findhorn, having just escaped with his life, thought it would be dumb to end up wrapped round a lamp post. He arrived at Athens airport drained and in a state of nervous exhaustion. He just caught a flight to Heathrow, changing at Paris, and found himself a quiet, clean bed and breakfast in Cricklewood, as far from Central London as the Underground would take him. He bought a burger and ate it in his room, watching some nondescript quiz game on television while his mind whirled around the day's events. I came close. I now know the stakes. But I'm no nearer Petrosian's mechanism.

He telephoned nobody, checked no e-mails. In no way could he be traced here. Nothing could touch him. He was secure. Absolutely safe. Yet again, he thought, pure reason triumphs over irrational fear.

And he jammed a chair up against the door handle.