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Winter shook his head.  It happened in the Bologna Dome, my last day there. 
 But But  She leaped up, looking like one of the avenging Furies, and Winter imagined he
could see serpents twined in her hair.  Rogue Winter, if you re zigging me on, I ll 
 No, no, no, he interrupted.  Would I joke about a thing like that, Demi?
 Yes you would. You re a wicked liar.
He patted the couch.  Sit down, love. It s a story all right, but I didn t invent it. It happened, and I
have to talk it over with someone I can trust.
She sat down, still suspicious.  So? Tell.
 I came across the tail end of a peculiar pattern in Bologna which involved the Meta Mafia. You
know the Triton jinks have a lock on Meta, and they re tough. They set prices and quotas, and if they
don t like the Inner Barbarians for any reason, they cut your quota. So naturally there s a Meta Mafia
smuggling the stuff out of Triton. Their prices are outlandish but they deliver, no matter who or what you
are. Sort of nice-guy goniffs. Clear so far?
 Except Meta, she said slowly.  I know it stands for metastasis, which produces energy, but
how?
 It s kind of complicated.
 I ll try.
 Well, start with atoms and charged particles. They can be kicked from their normal state into an
excited state by Meta. This absorbs energy from the Meta. Then they flop back into their normal state,
releasing that energy, and that s the metastasic process. Dig?
 No. Too scientifical, and I m not going to try to look like Marie Curie.
 She was no looker anyway. All right. You tried talking chemical to me; I ll try talking pattern to
you. I want you to think of a laser beam that can drill a hole through steel or carry a message across
space& 
                  -
 Got that?
 No pattern yet. Just a straight line.
 Ah, but how s that line produced? Think of a cloud of particles in their normal rest state& sort of
like a gang of zeros& 
 Now we stimulate this crowd into an excited state by pouring energy into them. That kicks them up
into particles-plus& 
 But this isn t a natural stable condition, it s a sort of nuclear hysteria, and they start to quit and go
back to their normal, comfortable zero rocking chairs& Got the pattern?
 Continuez. Continuez lentement.
 They re not freeloaders, so a particle gives up the energy it s received, which coaxes a couple
more of its chums back into their normal rest state, giving up their energy, which cues four more, and
then eight take the hint, and sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and it builds until you ve got all that energy
emerging as a beam.
 All in nanoseconds and all in phase, which is what gives it its power. Got the picture?
 Yes, but where does Meta come in?
 Well, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to stimulate atoms and particles into the excited
state, more than they give back; so when you balance profit and loss, you wind up in the red. But when
you use Meta to excite them, you re in the black. You spend one and get back a hundred.
 Why? How?
 Because that freak catalyst is a powerhouse of stored energy fighting to get out. There s stored
energy in everything, Demi, and all it needs is an electron transfer system to be released. Think of a
match. You ve got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released.
Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it s like a stick of dynamite compared to a
match. It s the chess legend for real.
 I don t know it.
 Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The
king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he d get it, no matter what. The
philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the
second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.
 That doesn t sound like much.
 So the rajah said. He d expected a request for gold and jewels and stuff. This, he thought, was too
modest until he discovered that all the rice in India and China wouldn t be enough to fill that last square.
That s geometric progression for you, and it s what Meta does for energy.
 How did it get that way?
 I don t know. I ve always wanted to do a full feature on it but never could get started because the
Jinks on Triton refused to cooperate. The only thing our local physicists can tell me is that it reverses
entropy, and good luck to them.
 What s entropy?
 Didn t they learn you nothing in that high-class collitch you took from?
 The foreign-language department didn t offer any courses in entropy.
 It s not a language, it s Decadence 101. Entropy is decay. If you leave a physical system alone, its
entropy increases, which means that it runs down and flakes out and its energy available for work peters
out too. The stored power in Meta reverses that with one hell of a shot in the arm.
 Zig wow! It is complicated.
 Yeah, it s a race apart.
 What does Meta look like?
 I ve never seen it. The engineers protect it like eunuchs defending a harem. No visitors. No [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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