knelt down beside her, making it more comfortable for her to look at him. She looked at him, her smile fading, and Sam could only suspect he had made an error. "I think I've misinterpreted our relationship, Milly. I apologize."
"You could have called me," Milly said, keeping her voice neutral.
"I could have? I didn't want to presume..."
"Call me every day, if you want. Couldn't you tell that I like you?"
"I wasn't sure how much you liked me."
"I could say the same thing," she said. She raised an eyebrow, waiting for his reply.
"A lot," Sam replied immediately.
"Ditto," she said, watching closely for his reaction. He blushed. She smiled. He stared into her eyes, until she had to look away. "Okay, you are here, Samuel Lee. Finally! Is there another reason?"
"More science fiction?" he replied.
"Your place or mine?" Milly asked.
"Mine is on the third floor with no elevator."
"Can't carry me up three flights? My place, then. Your bathroom probably doesn't have all the monkey bars I need."
= = =
Milly took too long in the bathroom, worrying over every detail of her appearance she could do anything about. When had she ever done this, after her first and only prom? Sam was just so damned nice! She tried to remember the details of what Sam had postulated on their first date. Was he actually serious about that? She should have tried harder to make him explain himself. She had not wanted to do anything but be nice, which was always difficult for her to do. Poking holes in his "science fiction" postulate would not have been nice.
When Milly finally wheeled herself out of the bathroom she was surprised and a little dismayed by the stack of papers on her kitchen table.
/
"Sorry." Sam saw Milly's reaction to the papers he had pulled from his briefcase and stacked on her table. "I left your apartment wondering what the hell I had actually said to you. How could I take it all back? Unfortunately, I then lost control of my imagination."
"You really think you have something?" Milly asked hopefully.
"I may have a way to test it, but it's going to require more math and geometry than I think I can manage."
"Test it? Already? Test what?"
"It's going to be hard to explain. That's why all the drawings." Sam looked up from his stack of papers and tried to decipher the look on Milly's face. He looked back at the papers. His wild theory began to fade in importance when he remembered Milly's situation, especially her need to finish work on her doctorate. Why was he so fixated on something so impossible? Fixated on two things: the theory and Milly. "I'm sorry, Milly." He shook his head, picked up the stack of drawings. "Forget this crap. Is there any possible way I can help you with your doctorate? I, who am a math whiz?"
/
Milly gazed at Sam for several quiet moments, wondering why this was happening to her. She was actually prepared to give up her doctorate, if it was a choice between it and Sam. She could see the consequences. The doctorate was a piece of paper that would give her some security and prestige for the rest of her probably brief life. Sam was a more important possibility, but still only a possibility. He could vanish from her life tomorrow. She could see herself helplessly grasping at the short-term pleasure of being with Sam, taking a chance on him, taking a big chance.
"You have a theory, a postulate," Milly said, stalling for time, trying to avoid foolish choices. "What do you call it?"
"Quantum circuits."
"Why the word quantum, Sam?"
/
Sam sensed that Milly didn't like the word, perhaps because he had borrowed it from Quantum Mechanics. It was her first criticism of his theory. She was going to be serious now. That was what he wanted. He needed the help of someone who had the mathematical intelligence to at least relieve him of this compulsion.
"I don't know why," Sam answered. "I don't have another term that better identifies where the action is taking place. My quantum is a primary unit of force, a sort of vibration that rides each kind of loop discontinuity of both the cosmic universe and the quantum universe. Quanta are the only reason for all relative motion in the universe. They exert force on other circuits and the circuits intersect other circuits, with varying effect according to angle. At steep angles they can pass through each other, at shallow angles they slide past, always exerting force. The quantum may be a single waveform riding the circuit or it may be interpreted as the way the circuit wiggles in any given positional relationship to another circuit or pattern of circuits. These circuits permeate space, giving space all of its properties, including gravity."
"You lost me at loop discontinuity," Milly said, rolling her eyes.
"It all started with that notion of a magnetic line of force," Sam said. "What is it? I imagined it was like an electrical circuit, or loop. But what is it physically? I tried to reduce it to the most basic physical model I could imagine. All I could see was the somethingness of space, then an infinitely fine thread of nothingness, then space again. In other words, the loop path of force was a discontinuity."
Milly closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. "Space is a solid something and loops of force are empty threads in it? What about matter, atoms?"
"Matter is a discontinuity also," Sam replied. "It isn't important which part of the binary relationship is the something and which is the nothing. The interface between the two is what is important. That's where all of the possibilities of cause and effect are expressed."
"And you think you can test it?"
"Magnetic or electrostatic fields are the long quantum circuits associated with electrons, and I think their effective mass is added to the electron, making it equal to protons and electrons, which are themselves bundles of loop discontinuities. I have a kind of brute-force experiment that would prove a basic premise of my theory."
/
Sam stopped talking, seeming to ponder something unpleasant. Milly wondered why. "I'm listening," she urged.
"I want to overload a small volume of space with parallel electric field lines."
"Lines of force don't like to be squeezed, Sam. They repel each other. Something is going to melt or blow up. What would that prove?"
/
"Yes, there could be an explosion," Sam said. He was hoping for a very big explosion or at least a very weird explosion, anything other than his test apparatus flying apart due to design failure. He could almost visualize the shape of the component that would plunge the magnetic field lines into critical density. He needed Milly to help him determine the exact geometry.
"What would this prove, Sam?" Milly repeated. "How much gauss? It sounds dangerous."
He hesitated again to reply. He didn't know if Milly knew enough physics to see the implications. He didn't want to spell it out for her because it would sound like madness or utter conceit. "It will be dangerous if it proves I'm on the right track," he finally replied.
"How big an explosion? My big brother is an Air Force officer and I think he might know where to blow things up."
He shrugged. "I don't know."
/
She repeated the question. "How big an explosion, Sam?" She was beginning to get a notion that Sam was hiding some critical idea from her. She was beginning to think this was a very large explosion. Too large. He wouldn't respond to her repeated question. "Nuclear?"
/
Sam tried to shape an answer that still avoided saying what he didn't want to say plainly. "I'm trying to prove that my quantum circuits - in the form of magnetic or electrostatic lines of force - are a basic form of matter. When matter fuses - as in a hydrogen bomb - energy is released. I feel that the energy of any nuclear bomb is provided simply by quantum circuits being broken and then coming back together. Trying to fuse magnetic lines of force may actually break their circuits and release quite a lot of energy. Visualize it as a bundle of rubber bands you stretch until it breaks, except that these bands must return to being loops."
"So...energy equals mass t
imes the square of the speed of light?"
"It isn't clear to me that the equation fits quantum circuits."
/
"Your quantum circuits have energy because you think they have mass, but not a lot of mass. How would there be much energy released?" She saw Sam was uncomfortable with what she said. She thought through the terms of Einstein's equation. It was almost as if Sam was implying there was something wrong with it. "The speed of light, that's all that's left."
"The speed of information, to be more precise."
"So, what's wrong with it?"
"I can't define it."
"You don't know what's wrong with it?"
"I didn't want to get into this so soon, or ever, depending on whether I could test my theory. If Einstein's equation applied to quantum circuits, the value of c would not be a constant. It would be undefined at best and infinite at worst. I don't have another equation to replace it. The mass term is meaningless as well. Like Newton's equation for gravity, Einstein's equation is an approximation for much larger aggregates of mass, aggregates composed of myriad complex entities, many kinds of quantum circuits. I'm not trying to define entities yet - what we call atomic particles - except to say they must be closely related to quantum circuits, and even connected by quantum circuits. The concept I'm trying to work out first is what I call reluctance, which is somewhat akin to the electronic term. Reluctance is the property of the interface of the discontinuity needed to provide the fulcrum upon which force can be exerted by circuit quanta. It's vaguely like the skin of an air