Revelation

34 Petrosian's Secret

The Saab has snowchains, which is just as well given the steadily falling snow and the steepness of the road. Peering through a crack in an upstairs shutter, Drindle spreads out five fingers of one hand.

There is the rattle of a key in a lock and a brief gust of wind as the front door opens. The voices are in German; two of them are female. Findhorn recognizes one of the male voices.

He tries to visualise what is about to unfold but can't take it in. His legs are shaking. Drindle and the Korean, on the other hand, are showing no emotion. They are standing still, quiet and alert, two predators poised to kill.

Somebody has moved into the kitchen. Pots are being slid onto hotplates. Others are drifting into the living room. There is the sound of logs being thrown on the fire. A collective laugh. Glasses clinking.

And now somebody is plodding heavily up the stairs.

The Korean steps back from the door, an ugly little pistol in his hand. The door opens. Drindle points his squat shotgun at arm's length, straight at the man's head. The man is fortyish and bearded. He drops the suitcases he is carrying. Drindle raises a finger to his lips, then points, and they follow the terrified man down the stairs. Drindle steers him into the living room, and the Korean turns into the kitchen.

A man and woman are lounging back on the leather sofa, glasses in hand. They do not immediately realize what is happening. Then the woman gives a startled 'Ach!' The man next to her gapes, pop-eyed, and spills red wine onto his white sweater and slacks. Two other men, in armchairs, sit bolt upright. One is formally dressed in a white dinner suit and black tie. The other is Pitman, and Findhorn wonders whether there are any limits to human duplicity.

The Korean joins them, pushing an ashen-faced, middle-aged woman in front of him. He pushes her into a chair next to the Christmas tree. Drindle strolls casually towards Albrecht and stops, just outside arm's length. He points the gun at the quivering woman on the couch next to him. 'You have been naughty, Herr Albrecht, alias Tati. Your Temple was to deliver the diaries to my employer, not steal it for your own profit. I fear that punishment is called for.'

There is dead silence.

Drindle continues: 'You will recognize the weapon as a Russian VEPR 308 carbine. Indeed you have done business with the Vyatskie Polyani machine plant where it is produced. I do not need to tell you that it is autoloading, and you will understand its effects on the human body at this range.'

The woman screams. Drindle throws her an irritated glance and continues, 'The position is simple. You will either deliver up the Petrosian document or I will give a practical demonstration of its effects on this woman. Then, if this has not persuaded you, I will repeat the process with another of your guests. If, when I have run out of guests, you still have nothing to say, then it will be your turn.'

Through his fear, Findhorn almost feels admiration for Albrecht's nerve. He is silent for about ten seconds, during which time the woman begins to hyperventilate and Findhorn increasingly expects the gun to fire. Then Albrecht is saying, almost calmly, 'And what happens to us if I give you the document?'

'We will disable your cars and telephone, tie you up and leave you. By the time you have freed yourselves and called the police we will be out of Switzerland.'

'I can't deliver the document. It's in Davos.'

Drindle looks at the woman and smiles. He speaks softly: 'That is unfortunate.'

She looks as if she might faint. 'Please. I have two children.'

'Two misfortunes, then.'

The Korean has moved behind and to the left of Findhorn, near the door, a position from which he can view the whole room. There is a gap of about five feet between him and Findhorn. Findhorn has a desperate momentary vision of diving for the man's gun, using it to shoot Drindle. Almost immediately, he rules it out. It is a schoolboy fantasy, a quick route to suicide.

Again that amazing nerve. 'If I do not give you the document, you will not kill us. The small gain of doing so would be outweighed by the risk of spending your remaining days in a cage. But if I give you the document you will kill us. This is because its value is so large that murder becomes a risk worth taking. After all, we can identify you.'

The Korean actually speaks. His voice is guttural, coming almost from his chest, and English is clearly a poor second language. 'Shoot the bitch. Show him we serious.'

Albrecht says, 'But if you shoot Elsa there is no point in giving you the document. This is because we would all be witnesses to murder. You would have to kill us all.'

'Your logic is flawed, Albrecht. For one thing, we are professionals. The risk of capture is very small and does not enter into the equation. For another, I can cause pain.' The bang of the carbine irrupts savagely into the quiet room. Blood and fragments of white bone spray from around the woman's shins, along with hunks of polystyrene foam from the sofa. She collapses onto the floor, writhing and shrieking.

Albrecht jumps up. He raises his hands as if to ward off further shooting. He looks down at the screaming woman. His expression is one of pure horror. 'Wait!'

Over the woman's screams, Drindle is saying, 'I fear your Christmas Eve is turning out brutal, Albrecht. And it is going to get worse. But give us the document and you will not be killed. That is a promise. Sie verstehen?' He points the gun at the man in the dinner suit, and smiles again. The man pales and speaks rapidly to Albrecht in some Schwitzerdeutsch dialect, his voice brimming with terror. Pitman is sitting quietly, but alert like a cat.

'It's upstairs, in a safe.' Albrecht can scarcely talk.

'I know it is. Get it. Beeilen Sie sich.'

Albrecht stumbles out of the room, Drindle following.

The bearded man and Romella are on their knees, trying to stem the flow of blood with table napkins, but the woman is writhing too much, screaming with every touch of her shin. The man in the armchair is gripping its arms and shaking uncontrollably. His eyes are wide with terror. The woman next to the Christmas tree has her eyes closed and is mumbling under her breath. The Korean watches dispassionately from a corner, arms folded and pistol in hand. Findhorn judges the five foot gap, but he knows it is hopeless. The Korean glances at him and grins, as if inviting him to try. A pool of bright red blood is spreading across the wooden floor.

Albrecht appears a minute later, Drindle following with his carbine in one hand and a thick document in the other. The pages are stapled together and look slightly yellow with age. He tosses the document to Findhorn and with his free hand pulls at the cover on the dining-room table. Glasses, candles, cutlery and crockery crash onto the wooden floor in a heap. He pulls a dining-room chair back and motions to Findhorn with his head. 'Verify its authenticity, if you please.'

Findhorn sits down. There are about twenty pages. It is single-sided, handwritten in Armenian, with half a dozen diagrams. Names like Bethe, Bohr and Einstein are written in English. The equations use the familiar alphabet and the diagrams are also annotated in English. Findhorn suspects that, with an effort, he might be able to grasp what is going on through the mass of equations alone.

'I need my translator.'

Drindle snaps his fingers at Romella.

'Fuck off.' She is up to her elbows in blood. The table napkins are now saturated with blood and the woman is moaning, slipping in and out of consciousness.

Drindle stands over the groaning woman, points the gun at her head. Romella looks as if she wants to grab the gun and ram it down Drindle's throat. The frozen tableau seems to go on and on.

Findhorn, sensing catastrophe, says, 'Romella, better not,' and she stands up and heads angrily for the door.

'Where you go?' the Korean demands, pointing his gun, but she pushes past him roughly, blood from her hand staining his shirt.

She is back in a minute, drying her hands with a white towel. She sits down beside Findhorn at the table. She is breathing heavily and white with rage.

The woman is now unconscious. The bearded man says, 'Her pulse is rapid. I can hardly feel it.'

Findhorn hands the document to Romella. 'Let's make it quick.'

She nods, tight-lipped. 'Okay.' She flips through the pages. 'Right, it's entitled Energy from the Vacuum. It's in four sections. Section One, Introduction; Section Two, Thermodynamics of energy extraction; Section Three, A new view of gravity and inertia; Section Four, Practical energy extraction.'

'Section One: it's about the Casimir effect?'

'Well, yes. But there's a lot more. Here's this HMS Daring you talked about, and Foucault's Pendulum. He's tying it in to something called the Ylem —'

'Never mind, there's no time. What sort of energy is he talking about extracting? What's he saying here?' Findhorn points to a sentence with a number.

'"… the energy density of the vacuum is therefore estimated to be of the same order as the Planck energy, with an extractable fraction of perhaps 10²¹ ergs per cubic millimetre" — is that a lot?'

A Hiroshima bomb in every cubic millimetre of space. 'It's enough. What's his punch line? Give me the last para of the Intro.'

She translates verbatim, speaking in a low, rapid voice inaudible to anyone but Findhorn: ' "In Section Two I show that there is no inconsistency between the principle of conservation of energy and the extraction of unlimited energy from the vacuum. Section Three meets the objection that the energy density of the vacuum would curve space to a degree contradicted by observations. The point here is that the virtual radiation has such a fleeting existence that no gravitational mass is associated with it. Indeed, I show that inertia and gravity can be viewed as the reactions of mass to an asymmetric radiation field in an accelerated frame…"'

'Her pulse is almost gone. If we don't get her to a hospital she may die.'

Drindle says, 'She assuredly will if Albrecht is not playing straight with me. You two, why have you stopped?'

Section Three amounts to a new theory of gravitation. Findhorn suspects that he is staring a Nobel Prize in the face. He says, 'There's no time for this. The woman may be dying. Skip to Section Four.'

Section Four. The sorcerer's trick.

Romella reads the words rapidly and quietly, not understanding any of it, Findhorn asking her to skip as many paragraphs as he can. And as she translates, Findhorn almost forgets where he is. The concept is utterly strange, an approach to vacuum engineering unlike anything he had visualized. It is a symbiosis of biology and physics. It is also stunningly simple.

In 1952 Chase and Henshal discovered the structure of viruses. It was a dual structure, like a golf ball. A soft inner core of RNA carried the information the virus needed to replicate itself. Protection of this vital core came in the form of a hard outer layer, a protein molecule, a long string of atoms folded round the RNA, its thousands of constituent atoms densely packed. This protective shell — the capsid — is an enormously complex crystal. A golf ball with legs.

The virus is a fraction of a micron in size. Its atoms shimmer and shake in the quantum vacuum; they feel the zero point energy, the vibrations of distant galaxies.

Coat a little plate, a centimetre on a side and machined as flat as technology will allow, with a thin layer of virus. Put this plate in a vacuum, and surge a huge electric current through it. The plate disintegrates into a cloud of microscopic platelets. The energy of the galaxies — the zero point energy — forces the little plates together. For a tiny handful, flatter than the average, the Casimir force is large enough to create X-rays, the pressure from which compresses neighbouring platelets together, creating more zero point pressure and hence more X-rays…

And now Petrosian cleverly exploits the dynamics of the viral crystal. It is small enough to feel the vacuum fluctuations and big enough to absorb them, extracting energy from the tiny vacuum between the plates and allowing reactions to take place which would be impossible in the macroworld; time moves at a different rate; light moves faster; causality is violated; high-energy electrons and positrons are created out of the void. The virus crystal now behaves like a single giant atom; its quantum levels are squashed closely together; the relativistic electrons crash through these, penetrating the nucleus, sinking into the shadowy depths of the energy ocean. The vacuum is now unstable; and it cannot be emptied.

A childhood memory flashes through Findhorn's mind, a story about a miller who wished for more flour but the process couldn't be stopped and the stuff poured out of his mill and flooded the countryside.

Petrosian is vague about where it will end but makes speculative remarks about matter annihilation.

Once triggered, there is no more need for an electric field: the immense pressure created in the process is enough. There is an appendix. For some reason Petrosian has typed it in Russian. Romella says she reads Russian, translates in a quiet voice which is seething with rage. There are engineering drawings. Small virus-coated plates are being fired into a giant titanium chamber (a hundred metres across in Petrosian's sketch, with walls three metres thick); they maintain an incandescent fireball, fuelled by gamma rays pouring out of empty space, drawing on incomprehensible cosmic energies.

All this Findhorn and Romella skim through in a couple of minutes. The text is backed up by a second appendix of densely argued mathematics that Findhorn doesn't even attempt. However, he notes the virus that Petrosian has identified as suitable. The tobacco mosaic virus, which Findhorn assumes is a source of disease in tobacco plants.

Another thirty seconds: the problem, admitted by Petrosian in a footnote, is the cut-off point for the energy generation. It depends on unknown properties of the vacuum at unexplored energies. It is all untested theory. It may go as Petrosian thought, giving a sort of controlled fireball from which endless energy can be safely tapped. Or a few powers of ten may be missing and a laboratory and the surrounding countryside may disappear when the switch is thrown. Or a few more powers of ten, and oceans will boil and the planet will be sterilized.

Or the whole process could be a dud. Petrosian's machine might be a nonsense, a fantasy thing which would yield nothing. Findhorn remembers Bradfield's words: we get a lot of crank science in our field.

Findhorn thinks of that sweaty day in MacDonald's Ranch where the bits of plutonium had to be pushed together almost to the point of criticality. He thinks of Petrosian's recurring nightmare, that the nuclear fireball might be hot enough to ignite the atmosphere. And he thinks of his own fears about instability, of the polar meltdown waiting to happen, and at last his mind becomes one with Petrosian's, and he understands his fear about the dark corners of the vacuum process, and his wish to hide it away until some future Utopia when the pirates were gone and the risks could be assessed in a responsible and open marketplace. Petrosian, Findhorn realises, was the classic naive academic.

Drindle's voice brings him back to harsh reality: 'Have you finished?'

Findhorn blows out his cheeks. 'The document is authentic'

The Korean grins. He points the gun at Findhorn and says, 'Boom boom!'