Experimental Error

Students often surprise professors. One student is hiding a secret Prof. Archambault never imagined.

Photo by Axel Richter on Unsplash

Professor Archambault looked up from his laptop. Normally, undergraduates having difficulty in the lab were something he left to his teaching assistants. But when that undergrad had a quarter-million dollar grant from a well endowed foundation, priorities changed. “What’s the matter, Juan?”

“It looks like I’m violating conservation of energy. So obviously I’m doing something wrong.”

At least the kid didn’t think he’d hit on a Nobel Prize level discovery his first semester in the lab. “Gaining energy or losing it?”

“Losing it. The receiver isn’t registering as much energy as I’m putting into the transmitter.” Juan looked a little embarrassed.

“Don’t sweat over it. Most apparatus needs some tweaking to get the bugs out. If everything added up right on the first try, then I’d worry there was something wrong.”

Juan’s corner of the lab was a ‘bowling alley’ left over after remodeling the building to install an ADA-compliant elevator. It extended off the main physics lab as a five foot by thirty foot alcove. The kid’s experiment was in radio wave transmission, seeing how three different frequencies would make interference patterns.

Archambault didn’t think it would lead to anything interesting, but the Harlocker Foundation thought it was worth a grant. The department chairman thought making the Harlocker people happy could lead to bigger grants. The Foundation’s endowment was over ten billion dollars.

Juan led him through the apparatus. The open end of the alcove had the three transmitters. A wave guide connected them to the receivers. Instrumentation measured the inputs, outputs, frequencies, sidelobes, and total energy emitted and received.

Sure enough, total energy received didn’t match emitted.

“Right. Let’s start looking for loss paths. Are the transmitters as efficient as they’re supposed to be? Is the waveguide absorbing more than it should? We should be able to measure the losses as heat. Thermally isolating the apparatus will help with that.”

Locking down all the loss paths so they could be measured took three weeks. More of Juan’s grant was spent on high precision thermometers and insulation. The transmitter and receiver assemblies stood on polyurethane blocks (the grant wasn’t big enough to cover aerogel). The waveguide was wrapped in fiberglass batting.

Testing after each stage of upgrades found energy was still being lost. So Archambault finally authorized spending enough to instrument and insulate everything.

Juan did an excellent job installing everything for an undergrad. When Archambault asked, the kid shrugged and said, “I did a lot of odd jobs in high school for spare cash.”

He let it drop. Juan was an orphan, found in the desert as a child where some illegal immigrants had died of thirst. The Harlocker Foundation’s grant was directed to recent immigrant STEM students. The guy’s personal story may have mattered more to the grant reviewers than the research target.

Inspecting the work was the hardest part. With the insulation added to the waveguide, there was barely enough room for Archambault to make it past with his back pressed to the wall. He couldn’t see the new footings for the receiver assembly without sliding down to sit on the floor. All the thermistors were soldered in properly. Juan must’ve been doing off the books electrical work. Lots of it.

Looking at the wiring harness on the far side of the assembly forced the professor to lay on the concrete floor sliding under it. Then he had a new problem. “Crap.”

“Professor? What’s up?” asked Juan.

“I don’t think I can stand up without ripping some of the insulation off. Worse, I might bend the waveguide.”

“I could take some batts off to make room for you.”

“No, I’ll just crawl out.” Life as an untenured professor. Then again, nobody with tenure in the department was thin enough to make it to this end of the bowling alley in the first place.

Juan helped Archambault up as he emerged from under the transmitter assembly. “Thanks for checking on it, Professor.”

“No problem. All part of the job.” He rubbed his hands against each other. They itched. He must’ve picked up some fiberglass particles crawling on the concrete. “Let me know how the new data runs come out.”

“Will do!”

Damn, the kid was cheerful. Hopefully he wouldn’t lose that before becoming a grad student.

---

“Professor, have a moment?” asked Juan.

Archambault looked up from the grant application he was working on. He’d rather be doing research, but grants mattered more to the tenure committee than research results. “What’s up?”

Juan came in holding his research notebook before him. A thick stack of printouts were sticking out of the notebook. “My preliminary results, sir.”

“Good. So that energy loss problem is all solved?”

“Mostly. Let me show you what I’ve got. Here’s some samples of the interference patterns. I’ve covered most of the analysis space I defined in my original proposal.” He flipped printouts onto the professor’s desk.

The professor nodded as Juan showed him the results. They were exactly the kind of interference patterns he expected, the waves making lines of constructive and destructive interference. The patterns changed as the three input frequencies were altered.

“Looks good. How much time will you need to provide the rest of the cases to fill out the whole space?”

Juan looked tense. “I’m not sure. It’s not that there’s more cases to run. I’ve done all of them. There were just a few with odd results.”

He laid down another printout. This one was barely an interference pattern at all. It looked like a physical barrier had absorbed most of the energy shown in the others.

“Corner case? I could see the transmitters losing efficiency at the edge of their frequency range,” said Archambault.

“No, sir. It’s close to the middle.” Juan laid down another printout. This was a oblique view of a cube with sides labeled Ku, U, and D. A cluster of “O” symbols sat low and left of the center.

“It seems to be a specific point. I bracketed it, found the center of the disturbance. It’s pretty tightly bounded.” Three more printouts went down, labeled “Ku Frequency Range,” “U Frequency Range,” and “D Frequency Range.” Each was a flat line with a downward spike near the middle.

“The interference patterns were messy. I found the center of it by following the thermal curves. Those are actually the first derivative of the temperature curve.”

The professor leaned back. “So your results say if you have three specific frequencies going at once, the energy from the transmitters just goes away.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I think it’s more likely we have some odd vibrations synching up and shaking something enough to cause a short.”

“We added vibration damping before we insulated the waveguide, sir.”

“The problem with adding safety measures is sometimes they cause a problem instead of preventing it. Space Shuttle, Delta Clipper Experimental, and so on. We could take the whole thing apart and rebuild it. But I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Toss the data points close to that anomaly as experimental error and write up the report for your grant with the data you have.”

“Oh.” Juan frowned. “I was thinking I could do a paper on the anomaly. Something like ‘Energy Sink From Destructive Multiple Frequency Interference.’ Maybe someone else would have an idea about it.”

Archambault sighed. “Yeah, I can see the appeal of that for you. The problem is—I’m going to have to explain how life works at my level.”

The undergrad looked puzzled but curious.

“I need to make tenure—get promoted, effectively. If I don’t, I’m out of the whole academic research game. If I was already tenured, I could maybe co-author that paper with you and just put up with some flack. But at this point in my career, I’d be hearing, ‘Hey, found that short in your test set up yet?’ at every American Physical Society conference. I wouldn’t become tenured here or at any other university. And I’d wind up teaching Physics 101 at some community college.”

“Oh. You have to co-author the paper?”

“Yes, since I’m heading up the lab. And more practically, no journal is going to publish a paper without a professor on the list of authors.”

“So you think it’s best to just treat it as experimental error, professor?”

“Of course. What else could it be?”

“The energy could be going into hyperspace,” said Juan.

Archambault laughed. “Okay, points for noticing the science fiction collection,” he said, waving toward the bookcase in the corner with more colorful books than the reference texts. “But that’s for relaxation, not for generating theories. I’d need to see some real evidence before I put hyperspace into a hypothesis.”

Juan nodded. “May I have a drink, professor?”

“Sure.”

The undergrad went to the water cooler in the corner by the door. He picked up one of the clear plastic cups but returned to his seat with it still empty. He placed the cup on the edge of the desk.

Juan took a folding knife from its belt sheath, flipped it open, and slashed open the palm of his other hand. He held the wound over the cup, letting blood drip into it.

“What the hell, Juan!” said the professor in shock.

“Bear with me a moment, sir,” said Juan.

After bleeding enough to leave quarter-inch deep puddle of red in the cup, he clenched his hand to squeeze the wound shut. Then he returned the knife to its sheath.

Archambault’s hand retreated a few inches from the handset of the phone on his desk.

“Now we wait a few moments . . . .” said Juan. He was staring into the clear cup.

The blood shifted. It was darkening. Clumping. Moving.

“Take a look, please, sir,” said Juan. He slid the cup into the middle of the desk.

The professor looked. Instead of a red liquid, the cup held a worm. It was poking about as if trying to find a way to escape. “What the hell is that?”

“In your terms, a combination of genetically engineered cells and nanobots, trying to repair the damage that was done to my body. Which I’ll let it do.”

Juan held his wounded hand out palm up. With the other he picked up the cup and tipped the worm out onto the empty hand. The worm wiggled about, aligning itself with the slash. Then it melted into the flesh, patching the wound. In moments only a red stripe was left where there’d been a knife cut.

“What the hell are you?” demanded Archambault.

“An alien. Not an illegal alien, as I told you. I arrived before the immigration laws were passed. Or before there was a United States. Though not by much. I was scouting this region of the galaxy for interesting life forms. My reactor failed. I crashed on Earth. Had to bail out before my ship hit the surface. It’s about a mile deep in the Pacific. Since then I’ve mostly been focused on survival.”

That drew a suspicious look. “Survival and what?”

“I’d like to go home. My species is long-lived, but three hundred years is still a long time for us. I’d like to get home while my parents are still alive. They’ve probably given up on me by now.”

The professor contemplated this. He cast a long look at his shelves of recreational reading. “Is bleeding worms the only difference between you and humans?”

“Oh, no. I’ve been evading physicals from your university clinic since I arrived. But we’ve used our technology to make ourselves more adaptable in various ways. Let me show you another example.”

Juan bent down, holding his face in his hands. When he straightened up, the Latin features had been replaced a craggy European face. “Check the Harlocker Foundation webpage, please.”

The professor did so. The image of ‘Old Man Harlocker’ on the home page precisely matched Juan’s new—or was it old?—face. “So you were Harlocker?”

“Yes. I pretend to be his son for the trustees occasionally, so I don’t lose control of the Foundation. Excuse me.” He put his face down again for some long moments. When he took his hands away, he was the young Latin undergrad again.

“Could you pretend to be me?” The professor didn’t hide his worry.

Juan shrugged. “If I spent months practicing to get your appearance right. Changing my height would take days. And I still wouldn’t know enough about you to fool anyone who knew you well.”

“So you can’t read minds?”

“If I could I would’ve blackmailed you into supporting my research instead having to get a grant.”

That drew a chuckle from the professor. “So what’s really going on?”

“Those frequencies are combining to put stress on the barrier between normal space and hyperspace. It pushes some energy into hyperspace. So far I’m not making enough of a signal to be detectable from Mars, but if we put some work into it would could make a Morse code generator which can be detected from my home. That’s what I want your help with.”

“Hyperspace?”

Juan shrugged. “It’s a perfectly good word for the phenomenon. It’s not like you could pronounce my people’s word for it.”

“Mmmmm.” Archambault contemplated Juan, or whatever his name was. From what he’d said so far he’d been doing a lot more than just surviving. “You’ve been here what, three hundred years?”

“Three hundred thirty-seven. Give or take a couple. My timepiece died less than a century after arriving.”

“What were you doing all that time?”

A shrug. “Learning local languages. Learning human psychology and customs, which were harder. Fortunately in the old days I could skip town and change my face when I made too many mistakes. Then building up the resources to make a transmitter.”

“I’d think that would be easy for you with your advanced knowledge.”

Juan laughed. “I’m no historian. And I don’t think humans are following the same paths my people did. I doubled down on investing in canals when railroads were starting up. Lost my shirt. Had to start over with nothing.”

“But you did make some money. That’s what the Harlocker Foundation is, isn’t it? Your ticket home.”

“Yes. After losing a few small fortunes I learned enough to make a big fortune and keep it. Also spent some time keeping up on physics. I was hoping one of you smart boys would figure out how to access hyperspace. But no, we’re going to have to do it the hard way.”

Archambault cocked his head at the alien. “Don’t you know the theory?”

“Sort of. I was taught it. I probably understand it as well as you know continental drift. I’m a pilot, not a scientist.”

“Right. Well, we have a starting point. And a goal. The rest will just be work. Which it sounds like you can pay for.”

“We’ll have to ramp it up in stages. I can’t drop a billion dollars on you now without people getting suspicious. I don’t want an IRS audit discovering the Harlocker heir doesn’t actually exist.”

“Yeah. The university wouldn’t like anything that looked like money laundering. So what do you need to get home? A vehicle? A voice transmitter? Or just Morse code?”

“Morse is fine. Not that we use Morse code, but a regular pattern of dots and dashes from here would bring another scout eventually. They’ll give me a lift home.”

Another long, contemplative stare. “What happens to us after you go home? Is this a Prime Directive situation?”

Juan grinned. “We do that sometimes. Sometimes we send in development aid. Depends on what the locals are like and what various factions back home are pushing for. My recommendation would be listened to, since I’ve had up close experience with humans. So, Professor Archambault, what do you want the answer to be? Earth stays isolated until you find your own way into hyperspace? Or advanced aliens come and give you the answer to all your problems?”

Archambault looked at his science fiction collection again. “I don’t know. I can think of bad consequences either way.”

“Well, there’s no need to decide until I’m picked up. But that’s my reward to you for helping me go home: you control the fate of humanity. Plus the multi-billion dollar grants.”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.