The Accelerated Man

Stairway to Heaven

Maitland wandered down the echoing stairwell, shaking his head to clear it of the accumulated muddle. His exit from the journal club meeting, immediately after telling the visiting speaker that he hadn't believed a word the man had said or published in his entire life, would clearly be the talk of the laboratory for weeks to come. As he passed the electronics workshop on the first floor he heard, blasting out from a tinny radio, one of the songs that had presided over his undergraduate days. There's a lady who's sure... Of course, there were always monopoles. With an aching smile he walked out into the overlit afternoon.

Scientist builds perfect woman

The offices were, as always, like refrigerators. After a futile attempt to turn up the thermostat, Maitland resumed contemplation of his virtually empty desk. Was some rival group sabotaging the air-conditioning in an effort to reduce the experiment to a wirewrapped morgue? Listlessly -- his hands were numbing in the machine-made air -- he extracted a copy of the National Enquirer from the journal rack. Soon all the scientific journals would be conforming to its expository style, falling over themselves to sensationalize the discoveries of ever more perverse particles and effects. Science as subatomic journalism -- at that, if at nothing else, Maitland knew he would overcome the competition.

Seizure

But which one do you mean? Wondered Maitland, as he sat in the commons area watching the secretaries brewing coffee. Caius `Caligula', wandering the imperial palace in his little boots, to be blasted into history with his brains scrambled by meningitis. Or his father Tiberius, hapless inheritor of the greatest empire in the world, retiring in fear to the island of Capri to indulge his tastes: the virginity of young girls and the bathtime attentions of young boys. Mere caprice, of course. Or Augustus, the only statesman among them -- bring me my lost legions, Varro! I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me. Uncomfortable watching the productive dance of plastic cups and spoons, Maitland began inventing an excuse to leave.

Significant signals

At his desk, Maitland resumed the contemplation of his years-old mass plots. These sadly jagged histograms, long forgotten offspring of bug-ridden programs and improperly calibrated data, were largely ignored by the other researchers. Maitland juggled them impatiently on his lap, determined that their wild oscillations held some key to the enigma of the laboratory's secret resonances. Taking out a pencil, he began to alter the plots, at first subtly, then with greater panache -- smoothing the nervous backgrounds, and enlarging the bare hints of signal into imperious peaks. The first products of his rehabilitation program slipped to the floor, as if unready to display their new-found vigor, but Maitland picked them up and taped them prominently on the wall. `You have to face the world sometime!'

Love's in town

Maitland drove back to the apartment with obstinate caution, delighting in the impatient gestures of the drivers trapped behind him as he held them hostage to yet another red light. Arriving home, he spent several minutes checking every corner of the apartment. Only when he was satisfied that Lez had left -- presumably cruising bars downtown for the newly arriving freshmen -- did he relax into one of the threadbare chairs. Unable to take the rising pangs of hunger seriously, he pulled from his briefcase a sheaf of the mass plots and spread them out on the dusty carpet. A tremor of awe passed through his body, as when he had first realized the extent of the new power dawning within his skull. The plots rose before him, a series of townscapes in a city of right-angles, like a bank of blueprints showing various views of a ziggurat under construction. The first quantum architect! The power in Maitland's head throbbed impatiently, pushing his brain aside in a surge for escape. In rising temper, it hammered against the doors of his cranium, squeezing the sweat from his brow and bringing a croak of pain to his throat. The pressure grew as Maitland hands tore desperately at his distorting face. As the stutures of his skull parted, Maitland's groans quickened into a brief scream.

The subatomic city

Maitland found himself pressed between clean sheets, his wife's anxious face close to his own, her hands pressing pads of lint over the bleeding furrows in his face. At first he did not recognize her, failing to comprehend the amorphous blur that assaulted the rectilinear purity of his dream world. With an effort he interpreted her anxious pleadings, and tried to reassure her that he felt perfectly well, but the new perceptions torn loose in his skull made it impossible to concentrate on her questions. Before long he sank into a reverie, lost in wonder at the geometric perfection of the quark-like jewel on her finger. When she left he began to notice the hints of a new geometry suggesting themselves in the shapes around him: an extra flash of clarity in the eyes of the glass dragon on his mantlepiece; a deeper graniness in the wallpaper above his head. Soon he would be able to see the city of his dreams, crystallizing out of the shapeless world around him like a diamond growing out of graphite.

Partial Reconstruction

No-one commented on his injuries in the lab the next day. Realizing that his colleagues had given up trying to involve him in the absurd games they played with the endless stream of data from the accelerator, Maitland devoted himself to writing a critique of curve-fitting. That morning, at his wife's insistence, he had paid a visit to the campus medical center, and had been delayed there for several hours as a succession of doctors performed elaborate tests upon him. Convinced that he was being involuntarily initiated into some secret brotherhood, Maitland had answered all their questions in the most uninformative manner, although he had been unable to avoid agreeing to another visit. Writing his denunciation of the preference for smooth curves over the angular beauty of a raw plot, Maitland at last felt himself at peace with the power throbbing in his head.

I've just got to submit one more job

The headaches returned, and with them Maitland's vision into the subatomic world: compared with him the lepton accelerator was a blind battering ram. Realizing that he needed to train this new-found sense as carefully as a gifted child, Maitland spent long hours gazing at three-dimensional histograms, feeding himself on their unrounded clarity. The new lobe of his brain, all too clearly misinterpreted by the doctors as some kind of tumor, made striking progress under this stimulus, and soon he was able to feel the quantum world solidifying around him like a jeweled townscape emerging from mist. His failed attempts to explain to his colleagues that the jagged signals they attempted to demystify were outline plans for the subatomic city only strengthened his resolve to pursue the enterprise to its natural conclusion. Noticing one day that the apartment seemed roomier than usual, he realized that Lez and all her possessions were gone, sucked up into the chaotic fantasy that he had once called the `real world'.

Stairway to Heaven

Maitland looked up from his desk as three men, aggressively coated in white, entered his office. He remembered a long argument with the doctors the previous day, in which they had inexplicably insisted on the `operability' of some supposed defect. The ugly scene had culminated with an admittedly exaggerated description on his own part of the extent of his perceptual abilities. The insistent pulse in his head, now a constant companion, quickened in anger. Knowing that he was too weak to resist them, Maitland attempted to formulate an pacificatory explanation, but already their images were decaying before his eyes. Soon they were no more than ghostly clouds, curling around the quark-studded portal that had opened up between them. Rising from the seat, Maitland and his new brain shouted their greetings to the gateway, and plunged through it. Geometric figments of the laboratory stairwell resolved themselves into another doorway. Dimly, he perceived the ghosts of radiation warning signs upon it, but they spoke from a world that he had left far behind. Stepping forward, he found himself looking down into the heart of quantopolis. Stripped of its shabby coat of magnets and shields, the accelerator was a golden carousel, whirling an endless stream of rainbows into the jeweled eyes of the detector. Maitland stumbled forward, remembering at last that heart-stopping moment, worlds ago, when he had accidentally wandered into the beamline during a high-energy run. Then he had seen only the curl of smoke as the beam had burnt through his hair. Now he would see everything. Happy at last, Maitland ran down the opalescent stairway into the welcoming path of the leptons.

alford(at)wuphys.wustl.edu

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