I was living in Oak Ridge, TN at the time, working as a tour guide at the Museum of Atomic Energy. One weekend evening, after spending a day helping to break down and crate up some exhibits for shipment, I stopped on the way home at the Holiday Inn for a few beers. I was dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt, and had been in Oak Ridge long enough to pick up enough of the mountain accent to pass myself off as a local. The Inn was a very target-rich environment for the local belles, and who knew? I guy can sometimes get lucky.

Unfortunately, the only empty seats next to me at the bar were soon occupied by a couple of engineers (the skinny ties and crewcuts were a dead give-away, all they lacked was the plastic pen pocket-protectors) who were engaged in an arcane conversation about some convoluted technical management issue. It was pretty clear they worked at one of the big labs in town, but I gathered there was more paper shuffling than slide-rule jockeying on their work plates. I had had a few by this time, and couldn’t resist the temptation to get into a little mischief. I jumped into the middle of one of their conversations about “semiconductors" and interrupted as if I had misheard, or misunderstood, them; “Yeah, we’re working on room-temperature superconductors in my lab, too.”

Needless to say, this got their attention, and when they tried to pump me for more information, I went on to point out that this was not what we were researching, but just a tool we were using in our tachyon research (“Whatever the hell THEY are”). I droned on, in my best East Tennessee brogue, how I was no scientist or engineer, but just a humble electrician working on the control panels of a “tachyon generator”. The room temperature superconductors were just a side issue, the means we were using to transfer megawatts of power into the generator and the “searing cough” radiation detector which we were using to track the path of the tacky-ons when they came out of the machine. I had a great time describing the eerie blue glow in the heavy water tank (“Just what IS a heavy tank, anyway? It’s made out of plain old fiberglass with a little glass window in it.”). They must have been hooked, they bought me a drink.

A physicist friend of mine in college had once worked on one of the early TOKOMAKS, so I liberally cribbed his description of the main power busses (wide flat ribbons of copper or silver alloy, capable of carrying huge amperages without generating counter emf and to easily dissipate resistive heating) to help give my tall tale some versimilitude. I reckoned my ignorance of transluminal and plasma physics would be thoroughly disguised by the humble good ole boy electrician role I was adopting.

But it wasn’t till I remarked how crazy them scientists were because they would whoop with joy when they started counting tachyons BEFORE the generator that produced them was even turned on, that I started noticing signs of panic in my marks.

“Er, maybe you shouldn’t be talking about your work at the lab with strangers…”.

I guess they didn’t want to hear any more. They paid for the drinks and scooted out, leaving me to take care of the tip.