Sam sighed, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and patted two sides of an imaginary question. “All right. I’ll go over it once more for those of you who still don’t understand. Think back to your old relativity model. As a particle’s speed in a straight line approaches the speed of light, its volume decreases in the direction of the motion, its time processes relative to the observer slow down, its mass increases and so does its gravity. Now suppose the acceleration is in a curve. This all still holds true, only not at the rate governed by Fitzgerald’s contraction; suppose it’s in a very tight curve—say a curve as tight as an electron shell. Does it still hold true? It does. And suppose the curve is tighter still, say, so tight its diameter is smaller than that of the particle itself—essentially this is what we mean when we say the particle is ‘spinning.’ The relativity model still holds: it’s just that the surface of the particle has a higher density, mass, and gravity than the center—a sort of relativistically-produced surface tension that keeps the particle from flying apart in a cloud of neutrinos. Now by some very fancy technological maneuvering, involving ultrahigh frequency depolarized magnetism, superimposed magnetic waves, and alternate polarity/parity acceleration, we can cause al\ the charged nucleons—which is theoretically only protons but in actuality turns out to include a few neutrons as well—in certain, high-density, crystalline solids, starting with just their spin, to increase the diameter of their interpenetrating orbits to about the same size across as the nucleus of an atom of rhodium one-oh-three—which, for a variety of reasons, is taken to be, in this work, the standard unit of measurement—while still moving at speeds approaching that of light—”
“You said before, Sam, that they didn’t really circle,” someone else said, “but that they wobbled, like off-center tops.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “The wobble is what accounts for the unidirectionality of the resultant gravitic field. But I’m trying to explain it now for those who couldn’t understand the last explanation. Actually, it isn’t even a wobble; its a complex vertical gradient wave-shift—the thing to remember is that all of these terms, particle, spin, orbit, wobble and wave, are just highly physical-ized metaphors for processes still best understood and most easily applied as a set of purely mathematical abstractions. Anyway, all the particles in a bunch of tri-layer iridium/osmium crystalline sheets, spaced about under the city, are madly orbiting in tiny circles of one point seven two seven the diameter of a rhodium one-oh-three nucleus. The magnetic resonance keeps the crystals from collapsing in on themselves. The resultant mass, and the gravity set up, is increased several hundred million-fold—”
“—in one direction, because of the wobble,” Flossie said, slowly.
“That’s right, Floss.” (Freddie, visibly relaxed, dropped his hand from his father’s knee—and slid two glittering fingers into his mouth.) “The result is that anything above them is held neatly down. This, coupled with the natural gravity of Triton, gives street-level Tethys point nine six two Earth-normal, at-sea-level-on-the-magnetic-South-Pole, gravity.”
“You mean Earth has one point oh three nine five the normal bolstered gravity of Tethys,” someone said from the back of the room.
Sam’s black brow wrinkled above a smile. “One point oh three nine five oh one ... more or less.” He glanced around the group. “The cold-plasma atmo—
sphere-trap works by similar magnetic maneuvering, though it has nothing to do with the gravity. The thing to bear in mind, with all of those twelve hundred thousand trilayer crystal sheets, is that each group of ten has its own emergency power supply.”
“Then they couldn’t all go off at once,” Lawrence said. “Even for a few seconds. Is that what you mean?”
“That’s what I said.” Sam put his chin on his dark knuckles, looking up at the men from under lowered brows. “What I suspect is far more likely: some synchronous overtone in the magnetic resonance was induced—”
“Induced by whom?” someone asked.
Sam raised his chin about an inch from his knuckles. “—was induced in the magnetic resonance, that caused the gravity field—remember, the magnetic field that controls the particle’s spin is alternating at literally billions of times a second—to list: all the wobbles wobbled to one side at once. Not even for a second; perhaps as much as a hundred-thousandth of a second, if that long. Yes, we got a sudden bulge in our atmosphere. But I doubt if we lost more than a pound or three’s pressure; and it settled back in seconds. Sure, it was a big shock, but I don’t think anything really serious—”
“What was it—!”
They turned to the balcony.
“What happened}. I didn’t ...” Alfred (who was seventeen, had the room directly across from Bron, and was the third person in the co-op Bron, from time to time, thought of as a friend) stood naked at the rail. A blood bubble burst in one nostril. Blood ran down his neck, across his bony chest. He reached up with a hand, already smeared, and wiped more blood across a bloody cheek. “I was in my room, and then ... I was scared to come out! I didn’t hear anything. Except some screaming first. What ... ?” A trickle crawled his belly, reached his genital hair, built there for three, silent breaths, then rolled on down his thigh. “Is everybody ... ?” With terrified, green eyes, he blinked about the common room’s assemblage.
Somehow, twenty minutes after that, the pieces had been rearranged on the vlet board; some dozen people were back at the various readers around the room, and several others (among them Sam) had taken Alfred to the console room where the co-op’s outlet for the city information computer would give him a medical diagnosis and any necessary referrals. Then someone came back to report, with astonishment, that there would be a seven-to-ten-minute wait for processing of all medical programs due to a city overflow! “I guess a lot of people sprained a lot of ankles ...” was someone’s dubious comment. Bron decided to go down and see for himself. Downstairs, he crowded into a room with several others. Between two shoulders, he could see the screen flashing: “There will be a three-minute delay before we can ...” Now that was unsettling. But other than a bloody nose and scared, Alfred seemed all right. While Bron was there, the delay sign was replaced with the usuaclass="underline" “Your diagnosis will begin in one minute. Please prepare to answer a few simple questions.” So while Alfred, one knuckle pressed against his upper lip, was sitting down to the console, Bron and several others had come back to the commons.
He lost the astral battle seven to one.
“What,” Lawrence said, sitting back in his chair, “were you ever thinking of?”
Bron reached out and removed his own, overturned, scarlet Assassin and slid Lawrence’s green Duchess into the square by the waterfall’s bank, to threaten the caravan preparing to cross the river less than three squares to the East. With the piece still in his fist (he could feel its nubs and corners), he picked up his cards and surveyed his depleted points. “That woman.” Only one meld was possible and he was three away from his most recent bid.
Lawrence laughed, sat back, and turned his own cards down on his bony knee. “You mean to tell me, in the middle of all this excitement, you’re thinking about some woman? If you’re that kind, what are you doing in this co-op? There’re plenty of places set up for you oversexed, libidinous creatures. Most of them, in fact. Why do you want to come here and let your nasty id mess up our ascetic lives?”
“The first time I ever saw you,” Bron said, “you lumbered into me in the upstairs corridor, drunk out of your mind, and demanded I screw you on the spot.”
“I remember it well.” Lawrence nodded deeply. “The next time I get drunk, I may do the same: There’s life in the old pirate yet—the point, however, is that when you refused, saying that you just weren’t (as you put it so diplomatically) all that turned on by men, I did not immediately drop you from my acquaintanceship; I did not snub you in the dining area next time we passed. I even, if I recall, said hello to you the next morning and volunteered to let the repairmen in to fix your channel circuit while you were out at work.”