Earth

Stan appeared to have temporarily forgotten the tragic consequences of that discovery. Even so, Alex took sustenance from his friend’s enthusiasm. He recalled his own feelings on hearing the news — that the team at Livermore had actually converted raw vacuum into concentrated space-time. The possibilities seemed endless. What he himself had envisioned was cheap, endless energy for a shaky, impoverished world.

“Oh, there remained limitations,” Stan went on. “But the chink was there. The new lever and fulcrum. Perhaps a new wheel! I felt as Charles Townes must have, the day he bounced light back and forth through the lattice in that pumped-up ruby crystal, causing it to…”

Alex’s chair teetered backward as he stood suddenly. He steadied himself with his fingertips against the tabletop. Then, staring straight ahead, he stumbled awkwardly through the crowd, weaving toward the door.

“Alex?” George called after him. “Alex!”

A stand of Norfolk pine, twenty meters from the rural pub, drew him like flotsam from a roaring stream. In that eddy the air was fresh and the chatty hubbub no longer sought to overwhelm him. Here Alex had only the rustle of boughs to contend with, a gentle answer to the wind.

“What is it?” George Hutton asked when he caught up a minute later. “Lustig, what’s the matter?”

Alex’s mind spun. He swiveled precariously, torn between trying to follow all the threads at once and grabbing tightly onto just a few before they all blew away.

He blurted, “A laser, George. It’s a laser!”

Hutton bent to meet Alex’s eye. It wasn’t easy, both men wavered so.

“What are you talking about? What’s a laser?”

Alex made a broad motion with his hands. “Stan mentioned Einstein’s abs — absorption and emission parameters. But remember? There were two ‘B’ parameters — one for spontaneous emission and one for stimulated emission from an excited state.”

“Speaking of an excited state,” George commented. But Alex hurried on.

“George, George!” He spread his arms to keep balance.

“In a laser, you first create an — an inverted energy state in an excited medium… get all the outer electrons in a crystal hopping, right? The other thing you do is you place the crystal inside a resonator. A resonator tuned so only one particular wave can pass back and forth across the crystal…”

“Yeah. You use two mirrors, facing each other at opposite ends. But—”

“Right. Position the mirrors just so, and only one wave will reach a standing state, bouncing to and fro a thousand, million, jillion times. Only one frequency makes it, one polarization, one orientation. That one wave goes back and forth, back and forth at the speed of light — causing stimulated emission from all the excited atoms it passes, sucking their excited energy into one single—”

“Alex—”

“ — into a single coherent beam… all the component waves reinforcing… all propagating in parallel like marching soldiers. The sum is far greater than the individual parts.”

“But—”

Alex grabbed George’s lapels. “Don’t you see? We fed a single waveform into such a medium a few weeks back, and again two days ago. Each time, something emerged. Waves of energy far greater than what we put in!

“Think about it! The Earth’s interior is a hot soup of excited states, like the plasma in a neon tube or a flashed ruby crystal. Given the right conditions, it took what we fed it and magnified the output. It acted as an amplifier!”

“The Earth itself?” George frowned, now seriously puzzled. “An amplifier?. In what way?”

Then he read something in Alex’s face. “Earthquakes. You mean the earthquakes! But… but we never saw any such thing in our old resource scans. Echoes, yes. We got echoes and used them for mapping. But never any amplification effect.”

Alex nodded. “Because you never had a resonator before! Think of the mirrors in a laser, George. They’re what create the conditions for amplification of one waveform, one orientation, into a coherent beam.

“Only, we’re dealing in gravity waves. And not just any gravity waves, but waves specifically tuned to reflect from—”

“From a singularity,” George whispered. “Beta!”

He stepped back, wide-eyed. “Are you saying the taniwha …”

“Yes! It acted as part of a gravity wave resonator. With the amplifying medium consisting of the Earth’s core itself!”

“Alex.” George waved a hand in front of his face. “This is getting crazy.”

“Of course the effect ought to be muddy with only one mirror, and we had only Beta to bounce off of. The second series of tests conformed to that sort of a model.”

Alex stopped and pondered. “But what about that first scan, weeks ago? That time our probe set off narrow, powerfully defined quake swarms. That output beam was so intense! Focused enough to rip apart a space station…”

“A space station?” George sounded aghast. “You don’t mean we caused the American station to…”

Alex nodded. “Didn’t I tell you that? Tragic thing. Awful luck it just happened through a beam so narrow.”

“Alex…” George shook his head. But the flow of words was too intense.

“I understand why the amplification was muddy the second time — just what you’d expect from a one-mirror resonator. But that first time…” Alex slammed his fist into his palm. “There must have been two reflectors.”

“Maybe your Alpha, the Iquitos black hole…”

“No. Wrong placement and frequency. I…” Alex blinked. “Of course. I have it.”

He turned to face George.

“The other singularity must have been aboard the space station itself. It’s the only possible explanation. Their being directly in line with the beam wasn’t coincidental. The station hole resonated with Beta and caused the alignment. It fits.”

“Alex…”

“Let’s see, that would mean the outer assembly of the station would be carried off at a pseudo-acceleration of…”

He paused and looked up through a gap in the branches at the stars overhead. His voice hushed in awe. “Those poor bastards. What a way to go.”

George Hutton blinked, trying to keep up. “Are you saying the Americans had an unlicensed…”

Again, however, Alex’s momentum carried him. “We’ll need a name, of course. How about ‘gravity amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’? Might as well stay with traditional nomenclature.” He turned to look at George. “Well? Do you like it? Shall we call it a ‘graser’? Or would ‘gazer’ sound better. Yes, ‘gazer,’ I think.”

Alex’s eyes glittered. Pain dwelled there, mixed equally with a startled joy of discovery. “How does it feel, George, to have helped unleash the most powerful ‘modality’ ever known?”

The two men looked at each other for a stretched moment of time, as if each were suddenly acutely aware of the pregnant relevance of sound. The silence was broken only when Stan Goldman called from the door of the pub.

“Alex? George? Where are you fellows? You’re taking a long time relieving yourselves. Are you too drunk to find your zippers? Or have you found something else out there that’s interesting?”

“We’re over here!” George Hutton called, and then looked back at Alex, who was staring at the stars again, talking to himself. In a somewhat lower voice, George added, “And yes, Stan, it appears we’ve found something interesting after all.”

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