Argansonite Number 23

Bonus Short Story

Since I’m on holiday, I thought I’d schedule a short story for you.

—

Thomas Paulson opened up the recording. He’d downloaded it from the web, having gone through three separate anonymisation procedures first, and saved it on a memory stick—he’d destroy the stick after watching the video.

It opened up to show the instrument panel of a spaceship in the bottom half of the screen, and a view of stars through a viewscreen in the top half of the screen. The scene changed as the ship disconnected from the space station, and then the pilot, whom Thomas knew only as Number 17, started to accelerate the ship away from Earth, into the outer solar system.

It would take about half-an-hour for the ship to accelerate to the requisite speed for the next stage of the experiment.

***

Thomas had first come across Arganson’s theories as an undergraduate. His lecturer held up Arganson as an imbecile who had torpedoed a very promising career by insisting that the impossible was possible. Intrigued, Thomas had done some digging, and had come across the (unpublished and unpublishable) paper in which Arganson had laid out his seminal idea, that if a field with very specific characteristics were to be created around an object, this object might be accelerated to speeds beyond that of light.

The idea fascinated Thomas, but he soon learned that every single professional physicist, and all the university Physics departments on the globe were vehemently opposed to Arganson and his theories. Anyone who was believed to be an Argansonite was persona non grata in the academic world.

Thomas hid his fascination with Arganson, and instead got a doctorate studying a much more acceptable field of theoretical physics. After this he did his stint as a post-doc researcher, before getting a post in a physics department at one of the most prestigious universities. His research in the acceptable side of theoretical physics had ultimately led to an appointment to a prestigious professorship.

On the side, he was doing his own study of Arganson’s ideas, and trying to learn more about how they had been developed. This led to his discovery of the Arganson Resarch Group.

The ARG was a paranoid organisation. To gain access to any of their material, one had to use multiple anonymisation protocols. Use of one’s own name was forbidden, to the extent that there was a local bylaw that if anyone used a personal or family name other than in a crystal-clear reference to some scientific paper that had been published elsewhere, the individual concerned was permanently banned from the body. The researchers were known to each other only as numbers. Thomas Paulson was Number 23.

The paranoia was essential. Every so often, at least four times in the last decade, a note was passed around the department stating that formally-respected so-and-so had been outed as a closet Argansonite, and that consequently he was to be shunned, no paper wholly or partially written by him was ever to be published by any reputable journal, and he was never to be employed in any professional scientific capacity ever again. Thomas had never known whether any of these were people he’d worked with in the ARG or had done work on the problem in other secretive groups, or whether the accusation was false and had been made for nefarious purposes.

Thomas had never spoken Arganson’s name nor mentioned any of his heretical theories in all the years that he’d been employed at his current university. He had no idea where any of the other ARG researchers, whose numbers seemed to be constantly varying, worked, and he preferred it that way. If Number 15, for example, was ever outed as an Argansonite, he or she couldn’t give the scientific authorities Thomas’ name in order to get a more lenient sanction.

The ARG wasn’t a prescriptive organisation when it came to research interests, although it did, for easily explicable reasons, strongly advise that all work be carried out on their servers, under their security protocols, and not on other servers or local personal computers. The various numbers were allowed to do research on whatever aspects of Arganson’s theories they liked best. However, all papers had to be peer reviewed, and since only the numbers had access, it was convention (strongly enforced convention) that each number had to review at least one paper for each one that he or she authored.

Thomas, Number 23, had started researching the properties required by an Arganson field in order for it to behave as proposed. Number 11 had already carried out a significant amount of work on this problem, clarifying various issues. Within a year, Numbers 11 and 23 had progressed the theory to the point that the more practically-minded numbers were convinced that they had a design for the very first Arganson field generator.

It took two years to figure out a way to get the generator constructed, not least because of the need for absolute secrecy over the identities of the various numbers involved. The test went as well as could be expected. The field generator generated a field that, as far as the sensors in the small spacecraft were concerned, had the right characteristics. However, with the field on, the ship’s engines didn’t generate anywhere near the acceleration that they did outside the field. This was expected.

Thomas had first spotted the issue in some calculations in one of Number 11’s papers, and had proceeded to examine the underlying theory. One of Number 23’s most important papers, peer reviewed with glowing praise by Number 11, showed that one of an Arganson field’s essential properties meant that gas exhaust propulsion and other standard forms of spacecraft engines had an extremely damped acceleration effect within such a field. While the field theoretically allowed acceleration to beyond the speed of light, the existing means of accelerating objects could not do so within sensible time frames.

Thomas, Number 23, had already been working on a solution, alongside Number 11. They were joined by Number 29, who was, in Thomas’ opinion, a genius. It wasn’t easy, but they figured out a way to manipulate the field to accelerate and decelerate any objects within it. The technique was called the Arganson propeller, only partly because it propelled objects. The main reason was that talking about propellers didn’t sound like Arganson-related matters, so accidental references in public were relatively safe.

It had taken them years to work their way from a broad-brushstrokes idea to something that could be tested. And then the testing delay had begun again. Finally, finally, the next test was ready. It had been performed, and now Thomas had downloaded the video evidence to watch.

***

The spaceship on the screen was now up to speed. The hand of Number 17, gloved so as to give minimal information on his or her identity, turned off the engines.

Number 17 proceeded to flick the switch to turn on the Argonson field. There was then a short delay. Thomas filled the delay by checking the sensors shown on the screen. The sensors showed what he expected to see should the field work.

Now Number 17’s gloved hand reached out to a rotating knob, and twisted it. If the spaceship’s sensors were to be believed, the spaceship was accelerating. How fast it went at maximum velocity was unclear, for the speed exceeded the maximum on the speedometer, and the location sensors weren’t able to cycle fast enough to keep up with where the ship was, making dead-reckoning calculation impossible.

Number 17 turned the propeller back to its initial position, before turning off the Arganson field. The engines were then turned back on, and Number 17 started to decelerate the craft, in order to turn back for home.

It took about a minute for the location sensors to finish catching up with where the spaceship was now. Thomas paused the video.

On a separate screen, Thomas went through all the anonymisation protocols before logging on to the ARG servers. On his personal section, he carefully copied the spaceship’s co-ordinates from the location sensors, and the ship’s internal time (reset every minute using the solar time signal, adjusted from this to account for the time lag, the signal taking minutes to reach across space from the signal’s origin to the ship, but the lag could be calculated given the ship’s location, an easy task for a spaceship’s internal computers).

Then he went back to the video and back-tracked the video to just before the Arganson field was turned on. Thomas copied the spaceship’s location and ship’s internal time for that point too.

Now Thomas could get some idea of how fast the spaceship had gone. He carefully calculated the distance between the two points, and the (non-relativistic) time taken. Dividing one by the other gave the average speed. 1.01c. Thomas double-checked. Then he triple-checked. 1.01c! If that was the average speed, then the maximum speed attained was even higher. Number 17 had just become the first human ever to travel faster than the speed of light.

Thomas went back to the video, and watched the rest of the experiment. Number 17 slowed the spacecraft down, turned it around, and then accelerated once more.

Then the Arganson field was activated once again, and the Arganson propeller used to significantly increase the speed of the craft to speed the return leg.

Thomas calculated the average speed of that portion of the trip as well. It came to about 0.98c. Understandable. Travelling into the inhabited sections of the solar system required more care than travelling into uninhabited space.

Thomas kept watching the video until it came to an end just after the spacecraft had docked once more at the space station it was based at.

It was a successful experiment. The Arganson propeller had worked! Arganson had been proved right. Man could travel faster than light.

But security came before pleasure at the experiment’s success.

Thomas removed the memory stick from his computer, and then wiped the short-term memory as completely as he could.

The memory stick he put between the jaws of a vice, and crushed it as best as he could. He checked the wreckage, and any component that looked to be still intact he put back in the vice and had another go.

Finally the wreckage, all that was left in his possession of their success, was put in the dustbin outside.

On Monday he would go back into the department. Any there who had heard about the experiment would either ignore it, or denigrate it. He would have to do likewise to maintain his employability.

Thomas already had ideas about how to make the propeller work better. That would be his secret contribution to the ARG for the next year or so, as long as it took for the scientific community to realise that Arganson wasn’t a heretic whose followers must be condemned.

***

Decades Later

Thomas Paulson, now an old retired man, highly regarded as a physicist, watched the ceremony from the Stockholm Concert Hall.

The spokesman for the Nobel Committee for Physics announced that that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was being awarded to the Arganson Research Group for their work in developing and demonstrating the underlying theory of faster than light travel over many decades, despite the vehement opposition of the scientific community.

“It is our great regret that the Arganson Research Group have not sent a representative to accept this award. They have instead sent this statement:

“ ‘We thank the Nobel Committee for Physics for their gracious awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to the Arganson Research Group.

“ ‘We were founded in the era when to be a supporter of Arganson’s ideas was terminal to the career of a physicist—a time that the older scientists present will be able to remember—and consequently were set up on strict anonymity. The need to maintain this, to protect all our members at that time, mean that we do not even know the names of any of our colleagues in the group, and as a consequence we can give the Nobel Committee for Physics no names of any of our members for the purpose of collecting this award.

“ ‘It was said by a famous physicist of the past that “If I see so far it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Our success in this field is because we stood on the shoulders of our own giants. On the shoulders of Arganson, who had the initial ideas. On the shoulders of our members known only to us as Numbers 11, 23, 29 and 37, who hammered out between them the theory that underpinned the practical applications. On the shoulders of our members whose numerical identities are too numerous to mention, who took this theory and turned it into practice. On the shoulders of our members known only to us as Numbers 12, 17, 24 and 38, who carried out the test flights that demonstrated that the practice worked.

“ ‘It is because we stood on the shoulders of these men and women, whose names are known only to themselves, all of whom carried out this work at great personal risk to their own careers in the wider physics field, that we were able to demonstrate the veracity of Arganson’s ideas, which finally led to its acceptance as a valid scientific theory.

“ ‘We do not know the names of any whose numbers we have mentioned, we do not know if they yet live or are watching this ceremony. But we say to any who qualify by still being alive on this date, “This is your award.” ’ ”

The spokesman stepped backwards as the entire concert hall erupted in applause. Thomas knew that many of the physicists present would have ostracised him had they known that he was Argansonite Number 23, but it didn’t matter. As he watched the applause, tears streamed down his face.

Thomas himself had stepped back from the ARG a few years back, in the run-up to his retirement, so he had had no say in the text of the statement. He had greatly appreciated the references to himself as a great of their past, and would have freely acknowledged the great debts he owed to Numbers 11 and 29, but until he stepped forwards as Number 23 that would not be possible.

***

Less than a Year Later

Thomas Paulson, sat between two colleagues. All three of them had retired in the last decade. All of them had been professors at highly reputable institutions. It had taken some time to arrange this announcement.

“Our names are known to you all. Our achievements in our various fields of physics are numerous. Or should that be, our known achievements.

“Many of you will have seen the announcement that last year’s Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to the Argansonite Research Group. It has taken many long discussions, but the ARG’s rules have been slightly relaxed. Formally active members may now, if they wish, inform the wider world of their prior involvement. Today, for the first time, names and faces are being put to numbers.

“I am a formally active member of the Argansonite Research Group. Within the group I was known as Argansonite Number 23.”

Numbers 25 and 26 proceeded to announce their other identities to the world.

It was a dawn of a new era. No longer did Thomas need to keep a key part of his research hidden.