Flight Home
GEORGE Griffin glanced up from reading the Times of London and looked out the window of the 777. The fjords of Iceland were passing by below. Brown and green fingers of land seemed to grasp at the incredibly blue water. He recalled a charter flight from Luxembourg to Washington, DC that had landed at Reykjavik to refuel. He had bought a fluffy gray Icelandic sweater for Grace at the airport shop, but he had not gone into the city. Too bad. He might never have the chance again. He wondered if Grace still wore that sweater.
He looked at his watch. They were an hour into the ten hour over-the-pole flight from Heathrow to Seattle. It was 1:30 PM, London time and 5:30 AM Seattle time. It was his practice to try to sleep as much as possible on transatlantic flights, but he certainly wasn’t sleepy. Perhaps he could get some work done on his report before British Airways started shoving food and drink at him. He didn’t enjoy writing inconclusive reports, but it was necessary, and he might as well get it over with.
He opened his briefcase and removed the magic glasses and the data cuffs. He switched on the small computer inside and made that sure that its sensor flap was extended outside when he latched the briefcase lid, then slipped it back under the seat in front of him. He pressed a switch recessed in a thick ear piece of the magic glasses, then put them on. He draped the flesh-colored data cuff around his left wrist, just in front of his wristwatch, and secured it with the Velcro joint underneath. He repeated the process on his right wrist and activated the calibration process, flexing finger, twisting wrists, and bending elbows.
The glasses produced a display screen presented vertically in front of him and a horizontal keyboard etched in bright lines in mid-air. He reached out, grasped the screen, and moved and stretched it until it filled the full area of the seat back in front of him, then positioned the virtual keyboard to a more comfortable position at the surface of the tray table. He called up the report he’d been working on earlier and began to type and revise.
The smell of food at last attracted his attention. He realized that he had missed lunch waiting at Heathrow and was very hungry. The flight attendants were rolling the food cart down the aisle, dispensing dinner to the passengers. George saved his file and exited. He was slipping the data cuffs and magic glasses into his pocket just as the male flight attendant placed the food tray before him, exactly where the keyboard had been.
“What were you doing just now?”
George turned. The question had come from the older woman seated next to him. Earlier she had asked him to put her carry-on in the overhead rack and thanked him, but otherwise she hadn’t spoken nor had he. George noticed a thick paperback historical novel stuffed into the seat pocket in front of her. She reminded him of his grandmother, although he supposed she was only about fifteen years older than he was.
He smiled, surveying the food on the tray. “I was using my computer to write a report,“ he said. He opened the zip of a small plastic bag and removed the silverware.
“That’s certainly what you seemed to be doing,” she said, “except that I didn’t see the computer. There was absolutely nothing in front of you, and you were typing on the tray table. You reminded me of my grandson. He strums away on nothing and says he’s playing ‘air guitar’ while he listens to that loud music of his.”
George laughed. He’d only had the VR portable a few months, and he enjoyed explaining his new toy. “I suppose it does look weird when you put it that way,” he said. He removed the glasses and cuffs from his pocket. “These are what we call ‘magic glasses’. The name is a joke; they aren’t really magic, of course. They’re linked by infrared, like a TV remote control, to a small workstation in my briefcase. They measure my head and eye positions, and they draw full-color 3-dimensional images directly in my eyes with small diode lasers built into the frames. The laser beams bounce off the inner surfaces of the lenses and write with light directly on the retinas of my eyes.” He didn’t mention that the thing was also a top-of-the line ultra-high capacity UNIX workstation and that its price had removed a big chunk from his Department of Energy research contract funds.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” the woman asked. “I thought one needed eye protection around lasers.”
“Correct,” said George, “but these are very low power lasers that scan very fast. Even in the worst case, they wouldn’t have enough power to damage a retina. And if a malfunction was obvious to me, all I’d have to do was close my eyes and take off the glasses.”
She looked interested. “They look like my variable density sunglasses.”
“They’re similar,” said George. “The lenses are variable density like your sunglasses and they’re non-distorting, so I see the real world through them. I can use the liquid crystal effect to eliminate outside light, but I had them set for full transparency.
“What do you see when you’re wearing them?,” she asked. “Is the picture small?”
“The computer images are superimposed on external surroundings, so I can see both the real world and the computer world at the same time. The picture is as big as you want it to be. It can fill your whole field of view, if you want. I was looking at a fairly simple picture, just standard word-processing display screen and a keyboard. My computer can make far more complex three-dimensional images with the right programs, but this is all I need for word processing.”
She considered this. “But you were typing. You were behaving as if images drawn by the computer can be treated as real objects. As if, with your magic glasses you could reach into the television, snatch the game show prizes, and deal severely with the irritating host.”
George laughed. “That sounds like fun. Perhaps I should try it sometime. Perhaps I didn’t explain the hand part of the eye-and-hand operation.” He held up the flesh-colored objects in his lap. “These are data cuffs. They go around my wrists and measure my hand and finger positions by monitoring the movement of tendons in my wrists with Doppler-shift ultrasonics. They send the information to the computer over another infrared link. The glasses were making the image of a keyboard on the tray table. When I typed, the cuffs detected my finger motions, the computer correlated them with the locations of the keys it was drawing, and the words I typed appeared on the computer screen that I saw on the seat back.”
She thought about this as she pulled the strip of a small red cheese. “It seems like a lot of trouble to do a simple thing,” she said. “Why don’t you just use an old-fashioned laptop computer?”
George smiled. “Good question. My computer is a new model intended for high resolution interactive graphics and complex data analysis. It can also be used for other purposes, for example, providing maps and navigation information when you’re driving a car. Using it for word processing is like using a jet engine as a hair dryer. However, it’s convenient to use it in a cramped space, and airline seats seem to get more cramped every year.” He picked at the complicated foil wrapping on the butter pat until it opened, then applied some of the good Irish butter to his roll.
“That’s very interesting,” she said. “What is it you were writing?”
“I’m a physicist. I’m just returning from a trip to the CERN laboratory in Geneva,” he said. “I was writing a report on what I learned there about radiation-hardened electronics. It’s useful for the physics experiment we’re presently doing at the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. I’ll finish the report with a bit more work, and then I’ll connect into the plane’s Airphone system and send it to my colleagues using the Internet.” He looked at his watch. “It’s a bit after 9 AM on the East Coast, so some of them will be able to read it even before we land in Seattle.”
She brightened at the mention of the Internet and began to tell him about the web forum she belonged to which focused on medieval cuisine and recipes.
The meal finished, George put the glasses and cuffs back on. He called up the LEM Handbook. The glasses darkened, and a bright multi-color image of the great detector hung in the dark volume of space before him.
He reached out and lifted off the top of the detector, then gestured to expand the cut-away image. It grew until it had an apparent size greater than the airplane. George reached out and touched a region near the center of the image. The small region brightened, and the rest of the image vanished.
Before him was the vertex detector, a barrel shaped object that was shingled with small slabs of silicon. Wires and fiber-optic cables snaked away on both sides. George enlarged the view until it was approximately true size, then he touched one of the control spots on the right edge of the display. It was as if the device had contracted a disease. Bright purple spots appeared at random places on the shingled surfaces.
These were the failure points, the places where the “pixel” transistors created on the silicon surface with large-scale integration had failed and died in the hail of charged particles and gamma rays from the SSC’s ultra-relativistic proton-proton collisions.
Perhaps, looking at the thing one more time would give him an idea. It was worth a try. George looked for a pattern, but could see none. Perhaps there were more dead transistors at the central region of the device than near the edges, but the effect was not striking.
It was a fucking disaster, he thought. The fact was that the transistors were dying, more every day, and there was apparently nothing the LEM group could do but tear the detector apart, at great expense and down time, and replace the silicon slabs with improved ones, at even greater expense, some millions of dollars. There were lots of better things to do with that money. And there was no expectation that the replacements would work any better or live any longer.
George blanked the display and called up the Handbook’s index, then selected the section on radiation damage. There, in beautifully typeset mathematical equations, were the calculations on which the design of the pixel-detector slabs had been based. ATLAS’s pixel detectors worked, and LEM’s died. Both designs were based on the same measurements, the same equations. What the hell was the difference? George banged his fist on the tray table, erasing the image before him and bringing questioning looks from his fellow passengers. He inhaled, taking deep measured breaths until his composure returned. Conceding defeat, he put the finishing touches to the radiation damage report, linked to the Airphone, and sent it on its way on the Internet.
With a gesture he called up the book reader and mounted a detective novel set in Seattle, a ROM-book he’d picked up at the HUB branch of the University Bookstore just before leaving Seattle for Geneva. He would let J. P. Beaumont do the detective work for a while. George did not feel capable of solving any problem just now.