The Concrete Jungle | Page 8

during the French revolution, was hardly conducted as a
scientific study of the phenomenon. This time, we will make progress!
Once Subject C was comfortable, Dr Rutherford arranged a series of
seminars. The New Zealander is of the opinion that the effect is
probably mediated by some electromagnetic phenomenon, of a type
unknown to other areas of science. He is consequently soliciting new
designs for experiments intended to demonstrate the scope and nature
of the gorgon effect. We know from the history of Mademoiselle
Marianne's grisly collaboration with Robespierre that the victim must
be visible to the gorgon, but need not be directly perceived; reflection
works, as does trivial refraction, and the effect is transmitted through
glass thin enough to see through, but the gorgon cannot work in
darkness or thick smoke. Nobody has demonstrated a physical
mechanism for gorgonism that doesn't involve an unfortunate creature
afflicted with the characteristic tumours. Blinding a gorgon appears to
control the effect, as does a sufficient visual distortion. So why does
Ernest insist on treating a clearly biological phenomenon as one of the
greatest mysteries in physics today?
"My dear fellow," he explained to me the first time I asked, "how
did Madame Curie infer the existence of radioactivity in
radium-bearing ores? How did Wilhelm Roentgen recognize X-rays for
what they were? Neither of those forms of radiation arose within our
current understanding of magnetism, electricity, or light. They had to

be something else. Now, our children of Medusa apparently need to
behold a victim in order to injure them -- but how is the effect
transmitted? We know, unlike the ancient Greeks, that our eyes work
by focussing ambient light on a membrane at their rear. They used to
think that the gorgons shone forth beams of balefire, as if to set in stone
whatever they alighted on. But we know that cannot be true. What we
face is nothing less than a wholly new phenomenon. Granted, the
gorgon effect only changes whatever the medusoid can see directly, but
we know the light reflected from those bodies isn't responsible. And
Lavoisier's calorimetric experiments -- before he met his unfortunate
end before the looking glass of l'Executrice -- proved that actual atomic
transmutation is going on! So what on earth mediates the effect? How
can the act of observation, performed by an unfortunate afflicted with
gorgonism, transform the nuclear structure?"
(By nuclear structure he is of course referring to the core of the atom,
as deduced by our experiments last year.)
Then he explained how he was going to seat a gorgon on one side of
a very large device he calls a cloud chamber, with big magnetic coils
positioned above and below it, to see if there is some other physical
phenomenon at work.
I can now reveal the effects of our team's experimentation. Subject
C is cooperating in a most professional manner, but despite Ernest's
greatest efforts the cloud chamber bore no fruit -- she can sit with her
face pressed up against the glass window on one side, and blow a
chicken's egg to flinders of red-hot pumice on the target stand, but no
ionization trail appears in the saturated vapour of the chamber. Or
rather, I should say no direct trail appears. We had more success when
we attempted to replicate other basic experiments. It seems that the
gorgon effect is a continuously variable function of the illumination of
the target, with a sharply defined lower cut-off and an upper limit! By
interposing smoked glass filters we have calibrated the efficiency with
which Subject C transmutes the carbon nuclei of a target into silicon,
quite accurately. Some of the new electrostatic counters I've been
working on have proven fruitful: secondary radiation, including gamma

rays and possibly an elusive neutral particle, are given off by the target,
and indeed our cloud chamber has produced an excellent picture of
radiation given off by the target.
Having confirmed the calorimetric and optical properties of the
effect, we next performed the double-slit experiment upon a row of
targets (in this case, using wooden combs). A wall with two thin slits is
interposed between the targets and our subject, whose gaze was split in
two using a binocular arrangement of prisms. A lamp positioned
between the two slits, on the far side of the wall from our subject,
illuminates the targets: as the level of illumination increases, a pattern
of alternating gorgonism was produced! This exactly follows the
constructive reinforcement and destruction of waves Professor Young
demonstrated with his examination of light corpuscules, as we are now
supposed to call them. We conclude that gorgonism is