Levy busied himself lighting an ancient and sulphurous pipe as the wheelchair whined down the corridor and out of sight. He was bald, skinny, relaxed, his face dominated by a nose of heroic proportions. He was one of the top mathematicians in the country — perhaps the world.
"You call me Hymie, I'll call you Adam, more friendly like. Okay?" Adam sniffed mild disapproval and was ignored. "First off we got some control problems and you may be just the guy we need to help. I read your paper on cmos gate arrays, good stuff. And fast, that's what we need. How many gates do you get into your six inch wafer?"
"About twenty thousand now. We use three levels of interconnects, two metal and one poly-silicon, with 600ps minimum gate delays."
"Marvelous." He nodded happily and puffed out a cloud of noxious smoke. "We can use all that operational speed — and more. Let me tell you why. The Epsilon project is one that went wrong— or rather right — by accident. What it started out to be is no longer relevant. They were hitting samples with high-energy proton streams, different samples, more and more power. They got from alpha to beta and on up to delta with no results. Epsilon gave them more than they bargained for. With this experiment they punched a hole into something or somewhere and no one, not even the great Professor Bhattacharya, has the foggiest of what has been done."
"Are you being facetious, Dr. Levy?"
"Hymie to my friends, Adam. Be a friend. We are like one big happy family here. And to answer your question — no I'm not. I'm a very serious guy. Come along and I'll show you what I'm talking about."
There must have been six inches of glass between the control room and the experimental laboratory, yet Adam could feel his hair stir as the electrical charge built up, then discharged with a most impressive display of sparking activity.
"You could light up Detroit for a week with all that juice," Hymie said. "I'm glad the government's paying the electrical bill. And what, you might ask, do we get for all that effort? We get that." He pointed to the monitor screen where a spot of light blinked for a second then vanished, the sort of spark you see when your television set is turned off. "Not too impressive. But let me amplify the picture and slow it down."
This time the screen showed a jagged metal hole with what resembled a pool of mercury at the bottom.
"Plenty of magnification. The biggest one of these we've done so far has been less than two millimeters wide and lasted all of five hundred milliseconds. That's when we made the temperature experiment. It worked too — though not in the way that we had expected." He searched through the video cassettes scattered on the table, found the right one and inserted it into the machine. "Very clear picture, very slowed down."
There were the rough metal walls again, the shining pool at the bottom. Suddenly a thick rod came into view, sliding down toward the surface. It came close, moving toward its mirrored image until they touched, kept moving downwards for an appreciable length of time. Then it stopped and withdrew — to show a truncated end. Most of the rod was missing.
"Melted — or burnt off," Adam said.
"Neither. No temperature rise. If anything a brief lowering of the temperature. No metallic particles emitted. It just went in — and never came out. And before you ask, it didn't come out the other side because, and I find this utterly fascinating, the silvery surface has no other side. Can you imagine a substance with only a single surface? It's like trying to think of the sound of one hand clapping."
The next morning Adam Ward arrived at the lab promptly at nine and quickly found himself immersed in the work. In another life — under another name that he never permitted himself to think about — he had done related research. Not on this scale, not with this sort of funding, but work that had been closely related to the control circuitry he was helping to design now. He had done this until his Country had Called — or rather the heavy-set men, the dark coats, who had shown him why he had no choice but to help. All this was forgotten as he worked with the others to discover the secret of that silvery entity.
When his alarm watch pinged he at first could not remember why it had been set. The letters on the face of the watch simply read message. Message? From whom? No, not from anyone but to someone; his spirits sank with the memory. He was now Adam Ward. But he was someone else as well — and the message was a grim reminder of that. It was time to report to those across the Atlantic who had sent him here. He was not at his best for the remainder of the day and left early, blaming a headache. In the security of his room he took out his programmable calculator and shook out the handful of magnetized strips that were various programs and formulae that he used; he found the one with the encoding program. He slowly typed his report into the calculator's memory, ran it through the encoding program then recorded it on another magnetic strip. Without the code it was just electronic hash. He went to bed troubled, but slept well, as he always did.
After work the next day he followed the routine that he had established on the previous three Fridays. He drove first to the car wash, paid, then watched until he saw the government Plymouth dragged into the watery tunnel. Then he crossed the road to Mom's Bar and Grill for a glass of beer. The bar was not what might be called exclusive; at least the beer was cold. He finished the glass quickly, as he always did, then went to the grimy toilet and locked the door behind him. It took only a few seconds to fix the tiny magnetic strip to one end of the bandaid, to reach up and stick it behind the cistern with the other adhesive end. He flushed, unlocked the door and went out. He showed no curiosity about the others in the bar, made no attempt to imagine which of them would retrieve the strip. He crossed back over the road just as they were finished wiping his car dry. It had certainly been easy enough to do. His watch was already set for the date of the next drop. This made it easy for him to put all memory of this from his mind, to think instead about the Epsilon field.
During the next week they worked hard and managed to increase the duration of the field's existence by a factor of ten. Prof. Bhattacharya dropped his bombshell at the weekly report meeting.
"You gentlemen, and lady of course, will I am sure be most interested in a theory about the Epsilon field that Dr. Levy has developed. We have had discussions of an exhaustive and continuous nature and the time has arrived to present you with some of our tentative conclusions. Dr. Levy."
For a change — and a relief — Levy's pipe was not working but lay instead reeking at his elbow. He shook a cautionary finger at Bhattacharya. "In all fairness, I must speak the truth about this discovery. Yes, I did the hack work on the computer to see if the math supported the supposition. But, no, I did not originate the idea. Our illustrious chairman did and all credit where credit is due. Now as to the theory. ."He took a deep breath and reached for his pipe — pulling his hand back when de Oliveira coughed politely. By mutual consent he had been requested, ordered rather, not to ignite the foul object at these meetings. His fingers twitched and he sighed.
"Now nobody laugh. To put it as simply as I can — the silvery surface that we have been observing is. . the interface between our plane of existence and another. Or between our dimensions and a space of different dimensions. Or between here and there — only we don't know yet where there is. But we do have an idea how we can find out." There was an expectant silence and he went on.
"We have to construct a second field. In the relationship between the two fields we will find our explanation of this phenomenon."
This was not the end, or even the beginning of the end of the research. But it was the first step along the road to a fuller understanding of the Epsilon phenomenon. While they pursued this line of research Adam saw to it that he had his car washed every Friday, had his single beer at the same time — and had the opportunity to put three more bandaids into place, one month apart. Each time that this had been done he put the matter from his mind until the next time the alarm buzzed. He was as engrossed in the work as anyone else, just as excited as they all were when Bhattacharya elected to sum up what they had discovered and proposed a tentative explanation.