Broken Symmetries, page 8
A big tour bus pulled up to Slater’s left and wheezed to a stop. For a moment the oil-smeared double-decker bus and the tiny sports car sat parallel, neither vehicle betraying a sign of the life within. Then the rain abated. Slater flung open the door of the Triumph, unfolding his long legs, dashing for the museum, while behind him a score of young Japanese tourists scurried laughing from the bus.
They fled to the reservoirs and the rivers by the thousands to escape the flames. They trampled each other and drowned, or died standing up, suffocated, boiled alive…
Inside the hall, noisy excited children from the local schools ran distracted from one display to another. Peter ignored the bright exhibits and the gift shop with its stuffed pterodactyls and made his way to a mahogany-paneled room centered under the museum’s dome. It was a quiet room, almost deserted, the only room in the building not designed to attract children. Here were Ernest Lawrence’s medals and commendations, preserved under glass. And here were the very first cyclotrons.
One was made of silvered glass like a Tiffany vase; it would have fit easily into the palm of Peter’s big hand. Vaguely sexy glass nipples protruded from it, threaded with copper wires and liberally smeared with red sealing wax to keep in vacuum.
A handmade brass pillbox, hardly bigger, was the first real, practical cyclotron, capable of developing energies of several thousand electron volts—not much, even by the standards of 1930, but a hint at the shape of things to come.
The next scale-up was less than a foot in diameter. Its pipes and leads were also smeared with red wax, a Radiation Laboratory tradition for almost a decade—old-timers still remembered the stench of burning wax. When set between the poles of a big telegraph magnet, this little box could crank up a beam of protons with more than a million electron volts of energy, enough energy to turn the air blue—and more than enough to crack atomic nuclei, thus freeing a flood of the then newly discovered particles called neutrons. The atom smasher had been born.
Peter bent over the display cases, peering closely at the handcrafted artifacts. They might have been buried in shattered Knossos four thousand years ago in the Bronze Age, so sophisticated and at once so primitive did they appear. He pictured their workings: inside the disc-shaped box fitted with hollow electrodes, protons—the positively charged particles which were simply the bare nuclei of ordinary hydrogen atoms—spiraled in a strong magnetic field. Alternating voltage nudged the protons to accelerate each time they crossed the gap between the half-circular electrodes; slow protons made tight circuits, fast protons made wide ones, and the time taken to complete each circuit was always the same, precisely matching the AC frequency.
As a mathematically inclined physicist Peter was accustomed to spinning the most subtle and complex symmetries, but he was struck with admiration for the elegant simplicity of Lawrence’s cyclotron principle. Impressive beam energies could be built up with only a modest constant input of power. The first cyclotrons had run on house current.
From the prototypes had descended a race of giants with names like UNK and Tevatron and TERAC, with beam energies measured in hundreds of billions or even trillions of electron volts, and diameters measured in kilometers instead of inches. Their power, instead of coming from the wall socket, was supplied by high-tension wires from hydroelectric dams, or by their very own nuclear reactors. They were called synchrotrons and storage rings these days. Gone were the cyclotron’s simple symmetries, long since sacrificed to Special Relativity—for the mass of speeding particles multiplied as each single proton acquired the energy of a buzzing wasp, and the crushing strength of hundreds of supercooled magnets was required to keep them from chewing through the walls of their vacuum chambers.
Slater heard a muffled giggle, and circumspectly turned his head to peer at the Japanese tourists who’d filed into the small room behind him. Most of them, though they did their best to appear nonchalant, seemed bewildered; evidently they’d lost their guide.
They wandered silently in the smashed city, naked, stunned, deaf. The retinas of those who had chanced to look up at that particular quadrant of the sky at that particular moment had been burned away. Many walked with a grotesque delicacy, holding their arms stiffly away from their bodies, so as not to touch seared flesh to seared flesh…
The Japanese tourists, all in their late twenties, were dressed as casually and expensively as the window shoppers Peter had seen on Rodeo Drive the last time he’d passed through Beverly Hills. One tall, slender young woman could have been a Paris mannequin. Peter caught her eye as she looked sidelong at him; she was whispering to a friend, rather wickedly and quite audibly: “Anmari sei ga takai no de koshi wo futatsu ni ot’te kēsu no naka wo mita.” (“He’s so tall he has to fold himself in half to see into the case.”)
Peter smiled, stood up to his full six and a half feet; he considered speaking to her in Japanese, but he knew he would only make her and all the others in her group intensely uncomfortable. Instead he inclined his head just slightly in her direction, hardly more than coincidence might have allowed. Startled, the woman blushed and hid her face behind manicured fingers. Peter turned away, moving along past the display cases, leaving her to wonder.
Idly he studied the laudatory mementos and tried to put the tourists out of his mind. He was reminded of several facets of Lawrence’s career the Hall of Science brushed over lightly, if at all…
In 1935 a rat was placed in a beam of neutrons from a cyclotron. Minutes later it was found dead. For the first time it occurred to scientists that cyclotron radiation could kill. Ernest Lawrence and his associates started hiding behind blocks of concrete while conducting experiments, a wise precaution even though in fact it was established that the rat had perished of mere asphyxiation, the experimenter having neglected to drill air holes in its box.
In 1938 Lawrence cured his mother of an inoperable cancer by irradiating her with a beam of neutrons from his cyclo-tron.
By 1941 the cyclotron was the sine qua non of nuclear research, used to determine the neutron-capture cross section of uranium, to separate uranium isotopes, to create the artificial element plutonium…
Hordes of desperate wounded, fleeing the firestorm, nevertheless halted and stood respectfully aside as the Emperor’s picture was carried to safety. Four days later, amid the rubble of ruined Hiroshima itself, its survivors were dismayed to hear the Emperor inform the nation by radio of his decision to concede defeat.
In 1945 Lawrence and other good men met to recommend what use should be made of the thing that had been a building on the mesa in New Mexico. Whether their advice was heeded or had been sincerely solicited matters little, for certainly they spent long hours in private soul-searching beforehand. The Nazis were already defeated. Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Compton were asked for their opinions, as scientists, on how the bomb should be used against the Japanese. They needed only a single morning to reach agreement: no warning.
No warning. Fanatic Japanese soldiers, enthralled by warlords and hypnotized by their love of the Emperor, would simply have defied a warning—as indeed they defied the bomb itself—along with the old men, the doctors and nurses and tradespeople and schoolchildren and (to the extent they were capable of defiance) the babies, all the human inhabitants of Hiroshima. Of this the scientists were reluctantly persuaded. In advance.
The bomb exploded two thousand feet in the air, directly above a hospital, driving the pillars of its gate straight into the ground.
Peter left the shrine. He watched the Japanese tourists heading for their bus, dashing through the rain—bright laughing scraps of humanity in the cold wetness. At the last moment before she went out the museum door the pretty Japanese girl turned and glanced at Slater over her shoulder. The sight left him desolate. She was the life he had denied himself; he saw no remedy but further retreat.
He walked out of the museum slowly, into the drenching rain, leaving behind the mementos and the little four-inch silvered glass cyclotron in its display case.
Within two months he had received the appointment he sought and had moved to Hawaii. He got the divorce notice by mail; Kathleen had handled it all herself, with typical efficiency—she was, after all, an excellent applied mathematician. She’d kept the things that meant something to her and let him keep the things he cared about, which for both of them meant pretty much what material possessions they’d brought to the marriage. They’d had no children.
To his left the main gate of TERAC slid by, lit by unearthly pinkish yellow light from sodium-vapor lamps—noon on the planet of a red dwarf star. He slowed for the darkened jumble of shops and houses that was Wahiawa, then accelerated again, down the long northern slope toward the sea.
10
Anne-Marie stared at the ceiling of her hotel room, sleepless, her head buzzing with exhaustion. There was no point in trying to hide the truth from herself. She was pregnant and probably had been for two months. What was she going to do about it?
That, at least, she didn’t have to decide until the week was over. She kicked off the sweaty sheets and sat up on the edge of the lumpy bed. A sailing scene, printed on cardboard embossed with phony brushstrokes, hung skewed on the wall behind her head. The curtains of tough polyester mesh moved in the draft; outside, streetlamps gleamed in the darkness. The telephone crouched like a toad on the bedstand.
She could have gone home with him so easily. She’d wanted to. What would the man think when he found out the truth? He was a puritan, by the look of him—somebody who’d want to keep his relationships as neat and abstract as his calculations. She sensed something much less calculating at his core, however, as little as she knew him—though he would not welcome her bringing it to the light. She should tell him everything tomorrow, and say goodbye.
Yet why say goodbye? What did she care for his scruples, once she was willing to give up her own? What did it matter in the long run, a week from now, or a month? He’d be gone.
She lay down, turning her face to the wall. She let herself imagine his long fingers tangling themselves in her hair, his lips moving across her cheek…She would tell him part of the truth. She would not tell him what he didn’t need to know. With images of warm caresses she tried to lull herself to sleep…
She was seventeen when her father died. He was at the height of his fame, a pianist of real accomplishment; his Scandinavian good looks, glacially handsome and moody, lent a passionately romantic air to his performances. Giddier critics gushed of Liszt and Chopin.
Behind the scenes, Anne-Marie’s mother, about as hardheaded a penny-pinching daughter of the petite bourgeoisie as ever latched onto a hungry and promising young performer, managed the Brand family finances with merciless skill. Even when concert managers offered to pay the bills she would never allow the family to stay in first-class hotels, for Mme. Brand knew her husband would not be able to resist room service, or the shops, restaurants, and bars on the ground floor—charges she would have to meet from his earnings. Wherever Brand performed on extended tours, his family was to be found ensconced nearby in a modest pension.
For years after the event Anne-Marie tried to pretend that her mother’s unsmiling grip on her father’s money was the principal cause of his death. The truth was, there was plenty of blame to go around for that sadly comic event. The maestro loved womankind. His wife maintained a bitter silence; Brand was an American, after all, with no proper religion and no a priori objection to divorce. But she would not let him spend money on his conquests. When one night he came home late from a performance at the Odéon, drunk, demanding money to pay for a taxi, Mme. Brand, who’d selected their furnished apartment on the Rue St. Placide partly for its excellent Métro connections, refused him. In his rage he struck her. His son, Anne-Marie’s older brother by two years, leaped to her defense; then, appalled that he’d raised his hand to his father, the boy panicked and went further, began beating his father savagely, as the tears streamed down his face.
Brand was wholly taken by surprise. Rather than risk his hands by defending himself, he fled. Anne-Marie stood by, peering from her room, too shocked and frightened to interfere. As Brand bolted from the apartment his son followed, far enough to hurl a handful of francs after him. Brand stopped to pick the coins off the sidewalk before the taxi driver could get to them; then he disappeared down the block, loping wildly in the direction of the Métro.
Later that night he was shot dead. The husband of the woman with whom he’d sought solace had returned unexpectedly from a business trip to Switzerland.
Anne-Marie got control of her trust fund on her twenty-first birthday. She vanished from the apartment, and from her classes at the Sorbonne, leaving only a forwarding address with the bank.
Her twin passports served her well; those countries unfriendly to the U.S. were usually tolerant of the French. And she had a better passport than any document, her youth.
She traveled the rim of the Mediterranean. Once she risked life imprisonment, smuggling enough hashish to buy cameras; the experience was terrifying, and she never repeated it. For three months she was the lover of an English classicist at the university in Alexandria, tolerating his condescension to learn what he knew of the occult, of Hermes Trismegistus, of the cabala, of alchemy.
Eventually Crete drew her, and there she took up a restless residence, and there, eventually, she met Charlie…
The surf that boomed outside the veiled window was the surf of a different shore, but her heart’s nervous beating was the same. She’d tasted the Fruit of the Tree, and though the taste was sour, it had made her hungry.
But perhaps Peter Slater would not need to hear about all that—for the use she would make of him, in the time she would know him. His remembered features were becoming vague now, as she conjured a dark solid form, possibly his, to lie down beside her. Slowly her busy brain relinquished its grip on consciousness, and she drifted into the warmth of her shadow lover’s embrace.
11
For half an hour Hey and Anne-Marie drove through Saturday morning’s getaway traffic, until at last the suburbs dropped behind, the traffic thinned, and the scenery grew wild. Black lava cliffs, strangely eroded and dry as any desert, fell off swiftly into the surging ocean. They passed the spouting Blowhole, a geyser of channeled surf set into a miniature moonscape at water’s edge, and drove on toward land’s end at Makapuu Point. For the first time since leaving San Diego Anne-Marie began to feel she was a long way from home; the feeling wasn’t altogether a good one.
Hey and Anne-Marie had exchanged few words but many yawns. She was sleepy but otherwise content, while he was blatantly suffering from an overdose of good whiskey. To her surprise, he’d mumbled the briefest of apologies for “anything I might have said” when she’d answered his knock on her door. She thought that covered a lot of territory, but she hadn’t needled him; she’d nodded and smiled and allowed him to treat her to Egg McMuffins at the McDonald’s in the Kahala Mall.
At last they rounded the point and came upon the village of Waimanalo from the south. On their left was a thin straggle of bungalows on stilts, fronting the highway; on their right, behind the steel guard rail, heavy surf rolled in from the Kaiwi Channel. Molokai was a blue silhouette on the horizon. They drove to the single stoplight, past a curious agglomeration of suburban ranch houses, rusting Quonset huts, and wooden shacks with horses tied outside. Behind the town rose the sheer gray wall of the Makapuu Pali, a cliff as sere and imposing as the brow of a war god’s idol.
They had to turn back and retrace their route, but Hey finally found the faded, hand-lettered numbers on a roadside mailbox. He parked the Datsun on the highway’s sandy shoulder to avoid blocking the drive, two ruts across a patch of lawn leading to an empty shed of corrugated iron. Anne-Marie waited beside the car, her cameras slung over her shoulder, while Hey got out and crossed the lawn to the house.
Hey mounted the wooden steps and banged on the door. A scrawny little dog of indescribably mixed breed suddenly darted from under the raised house and bounded up the steps toward Hey; he flinched away from the beast, but it merely sniffed at the cuff of his chinos, yawned, and rolled over on its back, inviting a tummy scratch.
Anne-Marie looked around for a picture. The sun was midway up the sky, strongly cross-lighting the pitted cliffs, glaring from the narrow beach, the weathered houses. The surf groaned against the shore. Intermittent cars whined by on the highway. The fronds of stunted coconut palms rattled fitfully in the breeze.
Anne-Marie found an abandoned pickup truck, splayed on rusted wheelless axles, staring blindly at her from under a tattered banana plant beside the shed; the inner surfaces of its headlights were coated over with cataracts of bright-green algae. Very arty. She snapped a few frames of Kodachrome. Then she became aware of that damned insistent urge to pee.
The door of the house had opened and someone inside was talking to Hey. Anne-Marie walked quickly to the porch. The mongrel dog writhed invitingly, and she stooped to scratch its pink stretched abdomen; the dog’s rows of nipples were prominent. Anne-Marie looked up at the woman inside the house. “Please,” she said, “could I use your bathroom? I know it’s an imposition, but I really need to.”
The woman was young, a dark solid beauty quite the opposite of slender Anne-Marie, the kind of lush beauty celebrated in paintings on black velvet. She looked Anne-Marie over with a quick, perceptive glance, then said cheerfully, “Sure, you come in. You too, mister.” She held the door open. The dog tried to squeeze in behind Hey, but she stopped it with a foot. “Not you.”
Anne-Marie got a hasty impression of the interior: cool, dark, and empty. “Down the hall,” the woman said.
The bathroom smelled of strongly perfumed soap. There was no tub. The shower stall was hung with wet cutoffs, enormous in girth, and the floor was gritty with sand. Through the closed door Anne-Marie could hear the woman’s voice: “You stay if you want to. Dan won’t talk to newspapers, though. So you probably wasting your time.”
