Twistor by Gene; John; Wolfe Cramer Page B

'Broadsword,' one of his anonymous clients. He decrypted and read the file [BROADSWORD] SAXON.TXT, then retrieved a battered pad from his pocket and made a few notes from the screen. He was glad to have the business. Broadsword was a good customer who paid promptly, and the cash flow had been a bit sluggish lately.
    This particular operation was going to require some backup operators, at least one a muscle type. He knew that his usual experienced help was presently tied up on another assignment, so it was going to be necessary to line up some new recruits. He picked up the phone and began to dial. Maybe he could get a lead from some of his former CIA contacts: the Company usually took care of its own, even after their people had dropped out for a more sedentary lifestyle.
    Several phone calls later he made a connection. He settled for three operators he'd never used before who had only so-so recommendations. It was certainly getting difficult to find good help these days.
    When Paul Ernst arrived at his office in Physics Hall at 10:03 A.M., David and Vickie were already standing at his door. They both looked rather bedraggled. He wondered what was behind David's call earlier this morning to request a meeting.
    'I hope I didn't cause any problems, asking you to show up so early,' said David with a note of broad sarcasm. ' I know you theorists don't come to work before noon.'
    Paul shrugged. 'Actually, I've been at work since seven by dial-up to San Diego,' he said, letting them into his office and waving them to the chairs opposite his desk. The Cray-4 at the UCSD Supercomputer Center is now crunching on a twelve-hour symbolic integro-differential equation reduction for me. By the time I finish dinner tonight it should have the answer for me. But you said you needed some theoretical advice. What's up, David?'
    David took a deep breath. 'Do you remember the other night when I was telling you about the problems we'd been having with our experiment? You said that you had a theory that could explain space acting as a vacuum pump and doing other weird tricks, if the conditions were right. Well, weird tricks we now have in great abundance,' said David. 'Our twistor field is making things disappear!'
    Paul blinked. I'm not getting this, he thought. 'Do you mean that it makes objects harder to see?' he asked. 'Maybe it's some distortion in the glass—'
    'Paul, there isn't any glass, or any stainless-steel vacuum chamber or cryopumps either. They've disappeared.'
    Paul recalled the massive equipment setup that David had shown him and the children a few days earlier. Disappeared, he thought, that's crazy.
    'We've been having weird effects at certain frequencies with our spherical rotating field,' David hurried on. 'When I came back here after the dinner at your house night before last, I decided to do a test by increasing the field volume. I made it almost two meters in diameter, big enough so the boundary was outside the coils and chamber and pumps. And when I activated it, everything within the boundary just disappeared. The braces at the edge of the field volume were cut off clean, smoother than a good machinist could make them. And the cut surfaces are concave, with a curvature that matches the field radius.'
    'Whoa! Wait a minute,' said Paul, trying to make some sense out of what David was saying. 'First, what's this "spherical rotating field" business? There can't be a spherical field! That would violate several of Maxwell's favorite equations.'
    'OK,' said David, 'imagine a globe of the Earth, but now the lines of longitude are lines of magnetic flux and the lines of latitude are lines of electric flux, with the magnetic lines looping back on themselves inside the globe at the poles. To a rough approximation, that's our spherical field. But the whole thing is spinning, like on an axis through the north and south poles of the globe. That couples the magnetic field to the electric field. But instead of oscillating and reversing