Broken Symmetries, page 6
The ring itself, embraced by its superconducting magnets, was contained in a concrete tunnel, and where it traversed an experimental hall it was isolated behind the concrete-block shield walls. Outside the wall experimenters could come and go freely, protected from the intense radiation of the ring’s circulating beams of protons and antiprotons.
Penny mounted the steel steps of the elevated platform. Frank McDonald and Jorgen Stern from the regular evening shift were already hanging their lab coats in their lockers, having seen her approach. Penny was surprised to find Hiro Watanabe buttoning up his own coat. “Hiya, Hiro,” she said. “What the hell you doin’ here? Didn’t I see you makin’ an ass of yourself at Edovich’s place an hour ago?”
“Oh yes, I’m afraid you did,” said the young Japanese, grinning diffidently. “It was necessary.”
“Necessary?” Penny wrinkled her snub nose in amusement. “That’s a good one, Hiro; I’d sure like to hear how you work that out.”
Watanabe smiled disarmingly. “Hai! You see, Professor Yamamura, who has done much good for me in the past, was already showing the effects of drink when I arrived at the party…”
“Yeah, he was bombed.”
“So. Thus it was necessary for me to behave in a similar fashion. Otherwise, upon remembering the night’s events, he might have suffered shame.”
“Terrific, Hiro. You pretend to be blotto so this old guy who really is blotto won’t be ashamed of himself.” She cocked an eyebrow at Frank McDonald, a thickly mustached Californian in his late thirties. “Hey, Frank, what’s cookin’? What’s this character Watanabe doin’ on my shift, when the man’s obviously out of his mind?”
The sober McDonald did not smile. “Cy called in sick, Penny. Hiro’s standing in for him.”
“Too bad. The expensive air conditioning around here must have given Cy the flu. I guess that means Watanabe and me have to unload the collector, right, Frank?” She displayed her engaging dimples for McDonald, coaxing him. Penny was an ambitious young woman who’d received her Ph.D. from Texas at Austin only the year before; she prided herself on being able to handle every job on the experiment, including the one she’d only been allowed to rehearse—that task, the actual unloading of the collector, was reserved to TERAC’s legendary tinkerer, Cyrus Alvin Sherwood, on Martin Edovich’s express orders.
“I checked with Martin earlier,” said McDonald, who had long been associated with Edovich and often functioned informally as his aide. “He says to let it go tonight. If Cy’s still sick tomorrow he’ll make other arrangements.”
Penny shrugged. “Okay, I can tell when I’m not wanted.” She went to the locker and slipped on her own frayed coat, transferring her film badge from the hip pocket of her jeans to the breast pocket of the coat. “Anything I should know before you guys take off?”
Jorgen Stern replied, “Earlier there was some slight increase in noise at the high-energy end of the gamma ray spectrum.”
“There should be an increase as summer approaches, perhaps,” Watanabe offered. “Because of cosmic rays.”
“Even down here?” Penny asked skeptically.
“We were discussing it when you came in,” said Stern. “We are not deep enough underground to be significantly shielded, considering there is nothing but a hollow building over our heads.”
“Yeah, but you’re only talking about an increase from the solar wind. Pretty low energy. Don’t forget we’re in the tropics.”
“Maybe so.” Stern dropped the subject. “You were at Martin’s house?” he asked wistfully. The gloomy Dane hated to miss a party.
“Oh, yeah, it was a blast,” said Penny. “Check it out. They’ll be goin’ all night.”
“Perhaps I will, then. Goodnight to you.”
“G’night, Jorgen. Frank.” As Stern and McDonald went down the stairs, Penny opened the small brown paper sack she’d brought in, winking at Watanabe as she did so. “Smuggled it from Edovich’s,” she confided. “Ham. Want some?”
Watanabe smiled politely, and shook his head vigorously—he definitely did not.
The control platform was crowded with racks of electronic monitoring equipment, but there was barely room for a couple of desks, one an old wooden desk someone had probably swiped from condemned Schofield Barracks. Half buried under the piles of computer printout on its top was an old coffee maker. Penny cleared a space, took the ham and some slices of bread from her sack, and proceeded to build herself a sandwich. Then she had second thoughts. She’d been losing the battle of the bathroom scales these past few weeks; better stick to her resolve and save the sandwich for a midmorning snack.
She stepped to the wall of monitors and stared at the counters and dials, wondering about Jorgen’s anomalous gamma rays. It was part of her job to program the computers to distinguish beam-collision events from the natural background—indeed, she’d promised herself she’d work through a whole stack of data analyses before morning—and possibly it would be a more interesting task than usual. By themselves the counters could not tell the difference between the energetic muons produced by cosmic-ray hits and the muons that were always emerging from the colliding beams.
She shifted her gaze to the row of big color TV monitors displaying views of the I-particle collector. This was her real love, the powerful and elegant machinery that did the work, without which the eggheads would have nothing to argue about. The collector was a thick, upright, lens-shaped device of bronze and steel some six meters in diameter, supported from the floor by yellow-painted steel bridgework. Through the center of the lens, threading it like a string through a bead, ran the narrow stainless-steel pipe that was the heart of TERAC.
An access port was let into the edge of the collector. A system of steel rods inside a clear plastic cylinder reached from the port, through the shield wall, to the control platform, allowing the contents of the collector to be carried onto the platform.
Penny had often watched the intricate process of removing what Martin Edovich called “holy water,” for she normally shared the owl shift with the man who’d designed and built the collector, Cy Sherwood. Sherwood was a Gary Cooperish old guy who’d worked around accelerators for forty years, and Penny liked him most of the time, though she was occasionally exasperated by his corny charm and his insistence on treating her as a token of femininity.
And she’d begun to resent his absolute monopoly on what she regarded as the most interesting work. She was a young experimentalist hungry for hands-on experience with the multimillion-dollar machinery; she thought Sherwood was playing the dog in the manger. But when she’d expressed these feelings to McDonald and others she’d been squelched. Sherwood’s wife had died several years ago, she’d been told, and his work was the only thing left that had meaning for him.
Perhaps his loneliness had something to do with his preference for the owl shift. Penny Harper drew the awkward shift because she was the youngest member of the team. Sherwood could have drawn any duty he’d asked for. Maybe he liked being alone with his big steel creation. It was likely to be his last major accomplishment.
The machine he’d built for Edovich was the most ingenious he’d ever made. TERAC produced I-particles from proton-antiproton collisions at the rate of a few hundreds of thousands per day; considering that there are something like forty billion trillion atoms of hydrogen in a cubic centimeter of liquid water, Sherwood took TERAC’s parsimony as a personal challenge. He had no intention of allowing a single one of the particles created in Hall 30 to escape his grasp.
Penny, despite her impatience, deeply admired the man for having come as close as humanly possible to achieving his goal. The instruments in front of her indicated the ring’s clocklike production of I-particles, a little over sixty per second, and the collector’s efficient capture of the strange entities.
She was about to turn away from the monitors and settle down with her stack of printouts when a rush of numbers on a digital display caught her eye. She keyed instructions into the recorder and ordered a graphic copy of the event; within a few seconds the computerized device delivered a sheet of paper covered with spiky lines. Penny studied it a moment.
“Say, Hiro, what do you make of this?” She handed the paper to the Japanese scientist, who looked up from his own batch of printouts and took it from her, smiling politely.
He studied the paper longer than Penny had, to assure her of his serious intent. Then he handed it back. “I don’t know what to think. Possibly an instance of cosmic rays, as Jorgen suggested?”
She suppressed a rude reply. “Hey, Hiro,” she said, prodding him, “it’s the middle of the night.”
“Yes,” Watanabe responded brightly. “That is true.”
“Solar cosmic rays?”. A hint of amused contempt crept into her voice. “The whole earth is between us and the sun, Hiro.”
“Ahhh, of course,” said the Japanese, brushing limp hair from in front of his eyes. “Please forgive me. I am somewhat confused about the time.”
Penny watched him go placidly back to work. With some disgust she prodded him. “Is that all you’ve got to say, Hiro?”
Endlessly polite, he looked up smiling. “You wish me to say more?”
“I think whatever that was, it came from inside the machine,” she said.
“That is certainly one possible interpretation,” Watanabe said with enthusiasm.
“Oh, go back to work,” she said. He did so immediately, and she went to her own desk. She sighed wearily, loudly, asking the spirits of the place for a distraction from the piles of paper confronting her. Nothing happened. She sneaked a glance at the purloined ham sandwich. Conscious of self-betrayal, she reached out for it, brought it to her mouth, and took a healthy bite.
8
“What was that all about?” Anne-Marie asked Chauncey, as she watched Peter Slater disappear inside the house, shouldering other guests aside as he went.
Moments before, the tall scientist had blocked their path and demanded that Chauncey introduce him to Anne-Marie, something Chauncey had been delighted to do. Then Slater had turned on Anne-Marie: “Are you wearing blue contacts?”
Startled, she’d nodded yes, but could think of nothing to say. Chauncey tried to fill the awkward silence, but only the words “Well, Peter” had escaped his lips before Slater had cut him off: “I’m not interested in your gossip.”
Another uncomfortable pause. Anne-Marie had murmured, “Un ange passe,” and Slater, as if taking it for a cue, had wheeled and stalked off.
Tolliver smiled apologetically at Anne-Marie. “Peter’s been through a very great deal lately, and he’s a very sensitive boy, I’m afraid. He’s just been divorced, for one thing. And that on top of missing out on the Nobel Prize.”
“The Nobel Prize!”
“Well, nobody knows about these things for sure, of course. But everyone assumes Martin is going to get the prize for finding the I-particle, and most people think that Peter laid a lot of the groundwork, theoretically. He could have predicted it, but for some reason he didn’t.” Chauncey was chattering nervously.
“You seem to know him well.”
“Partly it’s my job. But in fact we were classmates at Yale. We were even in the same senior society for a while.”
“Chauncey, you amaze me—you seem to be on intimate terms with everybody.” She sought to flatter him into relaxation.
“I’ve never met the President,” he said with mock humility. “Although of course I know his daughter.”
She laughed. Then, casually, she pressed him for more information. “Were you in one of those secret societies together? Like Skull and Bones?”
“If I’d been in Bones I’d have to walk out on you, you know.” Chauncey passed a nervous hand over his blond crew-cut. “Actually Crucible hasn’t been around quite as long as Bones.”
“Crucible! What a deliciously suggestive name.” She smiled wickedly, teasing him to tell her more. “Come on, Chauncey, what really goes on in those places—secret ceremonies? Pornographic movies?”
Tolliver’s eyes blinked and looked past her. “Nothing that would interest you. And Pete left us for Cambridge pretty soon after he’d been tapped and accepted. He never let us get to know him very well, really. Some of the fellows never really forgave him, I think.” He smiled tightly.
“So you won’t tell me,” she pouted. “You’re still an undergraduate at heart, Chauncey.”
His lips twitched into a grin. “We all have our own ways of refusing to grow up.”
She looked at him with mild surprise. “Chauncey, I think that’s the wisest thing you’ve said all night.”
“I have to talk to some of my people, Anne-Marie,” he said distractedly. “Can I leave you a moment?”
“I’ll survive.”
“I’m sure.” He smiled past her, that little tight smile again, then walked down the terrace steps toward the lawn. Anne-Marie noticed that his pink scalp glowed beneath his crew-cut, and his trouser cuffs rode half an inch too high, like a proud badge of conservatism.
Peter Slater sat at the Edoviches’ piano, shoving the bench back until his long legs found room. It was a good piano, a Wurlitzer baby grand, and to his surprise it was in tune. He played a few slow chords, then idly picked out sad arpeggios of his own composition, while quietly regretting his stupid behavior. The first-floor living room was dimly lit by a single floor lamp and light that came through the flamboyant windows from the torches on the terrace; the couples who whispered in the shadows paid him no attention.
Her hair was soft ebony, and there was an abundance of it framing her tan oval face. Her lips were full, wide, mobile, and she had the bluest eyes…At first he’d thought they looked so blue because of her blue dress, and because her hair was so dark. Then when he’d looked closer he’d realized that she wore blue contact lenses. The prosaic fact took nothing from the magic, but some positivist quirk had compelled him to confirm his guess, and he’d demanded her secret of her before he’d even memorized her name. After that his embarrassment would not let him stay near her.
Sudden anger was expressed in music: the Shostakovich piece began frantically, but if tolerated would later reward the listener with lyrical melodies. He absorbed himself in the intense, intricate, intelligent score, ignoring the curious faces which peered at him out of the darkness.
“Quite a bash,” Gardner Hey said with satisfaction, waving a whiskey glass. “Met a couple of folks who are gonna be quite a bit of help.”
“That’s nice, Gardner.” Anne-Marie smiled politely, her attention on the music coming from the house. The pianist was an amateur, but remarkably adept.
“Yeah, the big picture’s emerging very nicely. This guy Edovich has really got the wool pulled over everybody’s eyes. You know he’s never stopped working for the Defense Department?”
“Oh?” She looked at him warily. “Is that bad?”
“Well, it isn’t illegal, if that’s what you mean. But TERAC is an international laboratory, it’s supposed to be pure science,” Hey said indignantly. “Edovich was actually head of Los Alamos for a while, you do know that—before he went to NAS, which was supposed to clean up his image, I guess. But I think he never really stopped…”
“Really, Gardner,” said Anne-Marie restlessly. “You know what puzzles me about you?”
“No.” He looked at her suspiciously. “But perhaps I should be flattered that you think of me at all.”
“How is it that somebody as cynical as you are about science spends all his time writing about it? Why not write about something you have faith in?”
“That would be nice, Anne-Marie, but I don’t know what that would be. That occult stuff of yours, maybe? Like you were reading on the plane?”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said irritably. “And take off that stupid tie. You and Chauncey are the only people here who are wearing nooses around your necks.”
“Gladly.” He yanked at the frayed knit tie until it came loose in his hand, then shoved it into his back pocket. “Anyway, I’m not cynical about science, if you care. I am cynical about scientists—most of them, anyway. I started out to be one myself. I changed my mind.”
“Maybe that’s what’s really eating you,” she said, challenging him.
He glared back at her. “I could have done it. Unlike your husband, I didn’t want to play the ass-kissing game.”
She looked pointedly at the people on the terrace and the lawn, men and women of many races, young and old, neat and sloppy, sober, drunk, brooding, arguing, laughing, nuzzling in the torchlight. “They all look human to me, Gardner. Maybe you’d rather they spent their time arguing about money and politics instead of playing with their molecules or whatever they do; but that’s your hang-up, not theirs.”
“Wrong,” said Hey, as if grading a quiz. “They get politics and money and science and morality all mixed up. They think you and me owe them a living, even if we’re too dumb to know a gluon from a screw-on.” He was silent for a moment, peering into his whiskey glass. “You know, when Congress was cool at first about the Japanese offer to finance TERAC, Edovich and Lasky and the big guns from MIT and Cal Tech and Berkeley and Stanford all started screaming—they actually had the gall to bring up Giordano Bruno and Galileo and Darwin and the rest of the persecuted pantheon—just because they couldn’t get their money.” Hey’s face was a mask of disgust. “It’s true, Anne-Marie. The big science boys don’t give a damn about anything as long as they get the money to build their machines and fly off to their conferences and look down their noses at the rest of us.”
“You take it awfully personally,” she drawled.
“And you’ve got a low tolerance for strong feelings, babe.” He took a swig of his drink. “I think if you’re serious about news photography you’d better grow a thicker skin.”
