Broken Symmetries, page 13
The heat was reflected from her white coat, but her dark hair began to singe. She was tossed against the nearest equipment rack. She was knocked unconscious so quickly that she neither heard the explosion nor felt its shock.
16
Peter awoke from a confused dream—a forge, hammer blows, lurid flames in the darkness—to see that the moon had moved far enough west to be visible through the rippling curtains.
He heard a phone ringing, a muffled thudding through the cinder-block walls of the funny old hotel—doubtless the source of his spectral hammer. The phone seemed to be in the next room, the room that belonged to Gardner Hey. And Hey must have answered it, for it stopped in mid-ring.
What time was it? It was quiet outside, and black, except for the moon—and the streetlights, which showed as bright blobs in the curtains’ reticulation. Past midnight, then, certainly. Who would be calling Gardner Hey at this hour?
Anne-Marie was sleeping soundly, one long brown leg thrown over his, her head pillowed on his outstretched arm, her face nuzzling his side. When the night air had grown chill they’d retreated under the sheets and thin blanket; beneath the covers all was warmth and comfort.
So what did he care who was calling Gardner Hey? But he was reminded that he’d have to be careful, discreet that is, about leaving in the morning—unless he wanted to be pestered by the man’s insinuations.
Fondly he pressed his lips to Anne-Marie’s hair, filled his nostrils with her sweet smoky aroma. She was a marvel, so quick to guess his secrets. Ancient hermetic knowledge, indeed! She was a sensitive, intelligent woman, adept at reading the myriad nonverbal cues people constantly broadcast about themselves; perhaps that’s what had drawn her to photography, that sixth sense for the decisive moment. Surely she’d seen through him when he was overloaded with sensations, virtually radiating desire—seen through him, but matched his feelings with her own…
He secretly smiled to himself in the darkness. Best to steer away from particular memories, perhaps, before he tempted himself to wake her from a sound sleep. He wriggled the numb fingers of his left hand, but did not move his arm from beneath her sleeping head.
He pondered the source of her fascination with the occult, which sooner or later seemed to entangle a lot of thoughtful people who were not already mired in establishmentarian science or religion. It was the religious impulse, at base. Even reason itself could function as a religion, he supposed—but only for those of severely limited imagination.
He’d toyed with “psi” himself, written a couple of papers now much quoted by crackpots, to his chagrin. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand—for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox. Quantum theory was inextricable from the uncertainty relations.
The classical fox knows many things, but the quantum-mechanical hedgehog knows only one big thing—at a time. “Complementarity,” Bohr had called it, a rubbery notion the great professor had stretched to include numerous pairs of opposites. Peter Slater was willing to call it absurdity, and unlike some of his older colleagues who, following in Einstein’s footsteps, demanded causal explanations for everything (at least in principle), Peter had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.
The psychic investigators, on the other hand, demanded to know how the mind and the psychical world were related. Through ectoplasm, perhaps? Some fifth force of nature? Extra dimensions of spacetime? All these naive explanations were on a par with the assumption that psi is propagated by a species of nonlocal hidden variables, the favored explanation of sophisticates; ignotum per ignotius.
“In this connection one should particularly remember that the human language permits the construction of sentences which do not involve any consequences and which therefore have no content at all…” The words were Heisenberg’s, lecturing in 1929 on the irreducible ambiguity of the uncertainty relations. They reminded Peter of Evan Harris Walker’s ingenious theory of the psi force, a theory that assigned psi both positive and negative values in such a way that the mere presence of a skeptic in the near vicinity of a sensitive psychic investigation could force null results. Neat, Dr. Walker, thought Peter Slater—neat, and totally without content.
One had to be willing to tolerate ambiguity; one had to be willing to be crazy. Heisenberg himself was only human—he’d persuasively woven ambiguity into the fabric of the universe itself, but in that same set of 1929 lectures he’d rejected Dirac’s then-new wave equations with the remark, “Here spontaneous transitions may occur to the states of negative energy; as these have never been observed, the theory is certainly wrong.” It was a reasonable conclusion, and that was its fault, for Dirac’s equations suggested the existence of antimatter: the first antiparticles, whose existence might never have been suspected without Dirac’s crazy results, were found less than three years later.
Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem—they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry.
Anne-Marie’s eyes flew open. “What are you thinking?”
He laughed. “You’re supposed to tell me.” He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her, smiling.
“Unfair,” she said. She yawned enormously, teeth gleaming in the darkness, then turned her face away from him. She stared out the window. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. One or two, I guess.”
She looked back at him. “I’ve been wasting time. Sleeping.”
“The world will still be here in the morning.”
“That’s what I don’t want,” she said. “Can’t you stop the sun from rising?” She scraped her nails lightly over his belly.
“I haven’t worked out the details yet,” he said. “Give me time.” He lowered his mouth to kiss her. His shoulder overshadowed her face.
Somewhere nearby a door opened and closed, and footsteps hurried away in the night, but they paid no attention.
17
Assistant Fire Chief Ferdinand Kawaiola was a big silver-haired Hawaiian who’d put in twenty-five years with the Honolulu Fire Department before taking a much-better-paying job with TERAC’s emergency services division. His friends had criticized him for it, but he had grandchildren who needed his help to get a good education. When the alarm came in from Hall 30, Kawaiola responded like a veteran, reflexively. He and his men were already roaring along in their yellow trucks, sirens screaming and lights blazing, following the access road to the hall, when it occurred to Kawaiola that something was wrong. Unusually wrong, that is.
An operating accelerator is dangerous. Inside the ring there’s enough radiation to make people very sick indeed, and in the unlikely event that the main beams ever got loose—although they’d dissipate in an instant—it would be as if a couple of bombs had been set off in the tunnel. The beams were regular death rays that could slice through sheet metal and people alike, rupturing helium lines, shorting out megagauss electromagnets, causing them to disintegrate in a spray of shrapnel. Nobody went inside the ring when the beams were up. Any attempt to enter without a key and without the authorization and coordinated assistance of an operator in the main control room instantly dumped the beams, squirting energetic protons and antiprotons straight into the roots of the mountain, where they could drill holes in the basalt without doing harm.
Kawaiola had memorized all this during hours of orientation lectures and drills. He’d mentally filed radiation along with all the other things he’d learned to watch out for, in order to stay alive inside burning tenements, exploding chemical warehouses, blazing tank farms, and now, berserk accelerators.
But TERAC, far from going berserk, seemed to be operating as usual. The beams had not dumped, at least not according to the lights on the situation board back in the fire station. Kawaiola had been in such a rush to get to the scene of the problem that it had taken him half a minute to realize the significance of those unblinking lights.
With his big brown left hand Kawaiola easily steered the chief’s car, a bright yellow Land Cruiser, while he wrapped his right hand around the radio microphone. “Control room? What kind of situation do you think we’ve got over here, huh? Is this a fire, or what?”
The radio speaker crackled. “Can’t tell you for sure, Chief. We got a box alarm. We can’t rouse anybody in the hall by phone. Health physics is on the way.” Health physics officers were casual folks, by and large, but in a situation like this they put on their lead suits and yellow booties and carried Geiger counters. Sometimes they also carried .38-caliber Police Special revolvers, to indicate their sincerity.
“So the beams’re still up, right?” Kawaiola asked.
“That’s right. Don’t let anybody attempt to enter the ring. Health physics will order a controlled dump if necessary, once they’ve had a look.”
“Okay. Roger, Control. Talk to you guys later.” Kawaiola hung up the microphone. He steered off the access road, sailed over the berm in his Land Cruiser, and skidded down the short drive to the entrance of Hall 30. The big tanker and the ambulance followed close behind him. Sirens died; red and white lights continued to flash and revolve. The firemen dismounted and stood by their trucks.
Kawaiola ran to the edge of the wide round shaft and peered down into blackness. Steel stairs, starting from the near section of the wall, ran down into the murk, out of sight; work lights should have been burning to light the steps, but the nine-story descent was blind. The air in the shaft was thick—cement dust rather than smoke, or so Kawaiola judged by its astringent odor. Kawaiola knew he should wait for the health physics officers to set up their line, the hotline across which all exchanges of people and material were monitored, but they were late, and years of experience urged him to hurry. In a fire, and in most other emergencies, time was never on the side of the rescuer.
Kawaiola knew that a wall of concrete blocks shielded the Hall 30 control platform from the inner ring. The access shaft was even farther from the ring, outside the control room and normally separated from it by a steel shutter, so as long as he stayed in the control area or the shaft he and his men should have nothing to fear from the ordinary operations of TERAC. Besides, they all wore chirpers, which would warn them audibly if things got hot.
“Luther, Marcos, let’s check this out. Button up good,” he called. “Marcos, you take the elevator inside the building. The rest of you guys stand by.”
Kawaiola and the two men he’d designated sealed their faceplates and opened their respirator valves. Marcos headed for the elevator in the building. Kawaiola unlocked the steel gate to the stairs with his master key, and he and Luther started down, directing powerful torch beams into the gloom below. Within three stories they noticed that the bulbs of the lights along the stairs had been shattered in their sockets. Another three stories and they reached the ceiling level of the underground hall; they could see that the foot of the staircase had been twisted and loosened where it was stapled to the concrete wall. Wiring conduits had been ripped loose. Across the hall the steel curtain door had jammed open a couple of feet above the floor, punched in as if by a big fist. In the concrete floor there was an incipient crater, a spiderweb of cracks a yard wide.
They descended the loose stairs cautiously, their flashlight beams probing through the fine dust that hung suspended in the air. On the far side of the shaft the beams picked out the heavy utility tractor, flipped upside down, its little hard rubber tires in the air. A man’s foot protruded from beneath the tractor, missing its shoe. A pool of blood was still spreading.
“Hank, we need your team down here on the double, with everything you got. We got one badly injured. And at least one more around here someplace.” Kawaiola heard the acknowledgment in his helmet radio as he hurried down the last few steps of the twisted stairs. Reaching the floor safely, he signaled his partner to come after him and to check the control room on the far side of the mangled door. As he moved across the floor, Kawaiola heard his chirper’s oscillator burp halfheartedly—low-level gammas, barely significant. “Keep an eye open for ruptured shielding,” he warned Luther.
Kawaiola hurried to the wrecked tractor. He saw that the man under it had no use for an ambulance. He played his flashlight beam over the scene. A bright metal object reflected the light. He bent to inspect it: a large stainless-steel cylinder, the size of a Thermos bottle, apparently intact. Had the dead man been carrying it?
“We’ve found a woman,” said Luther’s voice on the radio. “Alive, unconscious, flash burns, maybe worse.”
“Marcos with you?”
“Here, Chief. The elevator’s working fine,” said Marcos.
“What’s the damage?” Kawaiola demanded.
“Not much,” Marcos replied. “Some stuff knocked over. Papers burned, but no fire now. Looks like that steel door caught hell, though.”
“Sure did,” Kawaiola muttered. He heard feet clanging on the stairs above, and helmet lights stabbing through the darkness.
“That you down there, Chief?” said a voice in his helmet.
“Yeah. This man’s dead. There’s a woman hurt in the control room. Go on in there and take her out by the elevator. Be careful of the steps at the bottom.”
“Okay.”
“Health physics here?”
“Right behind us. Are we gonna be hot?”
“My chirper can’t make up its mind. Some stuff, not much.”
“My wife’ll be glad to hear it,” said a fireman.
Kawaiola took a last look at the dead man. He bent and picked up the steel cylinder, hefted it; it was surprisingly heavy.
“Give us a hand over this railing, Chief.”
Kawaiola moved quickly to help the arriving firemen maneuver their equipment past the damaged section of stairs; absently, he shoved the steel cylinder into his overalls pocket as he went.
18
Smoky orange flames flickered outside the bedroom window. Greta Edovich regarded them dreamily in her vanity mirror as she brushed out her long blond hair in swift, strong strokes, working with the deft efficiency of years of practice. She’d heard you weren’t supposed to do your hair like this anymore, but it had worked fine for her, and she wasn’t the type to try to improve success. Crystal lamps shaped like miniature kerosene lanterns were ensconced on either side of Greta’s mirror, and the Chinese porcelain lamp on the bedside table had a tall shade of lemon-yellow silk; the light in the room was diffuse, warm, flattering to Greta’s fair skin. And outside the window, orange flames…but they were only the massed scarlet flowers of a tall poinciana, a flame tree, mellowed by the room’s soft light.
Martin was already in bed, sitting up in his peppermint-striped pajamas, propped up by pillows against the headboard. He was reading, something he did in every spare moment. He wasted no time as he flipped through a pile of reports and preprints, slowing only occasionally to grunt with interest, putting most of the papers aside without a second glance.
Greta eyed him surreptitiously, allowing herself a fond smile. She loved him, and she knew he loved her. It was a relaxing, gratifying sensation, like the glass of B&B she’d warmed in the candle flame after their dinner this evening. The night had been easy, pleasurable, a leisurely dinner out with Chauncey and the Laskys at a new French place he’d found in Kahala—a welcome escape from the drudgery of cleaning up after Friday’s crowd. The conversation had gone on much later than anyone had expected.
Complacently, Greta reflected that she and Martin had had many such good times in their lives, made many interesting friends, visited many fascinating places—Europe, India, China, Japan—almost always on Martin’s business, of course—the international science business. She supposed it was remarkable that she and her husband of a quarter century still found it easy and pleasurable to be with each other—to talk about nothing much and even still, every once in awhile, to work up a satisfying fit of passion. She eyed him in the mirror; her cheeks grew warm. But she still had thirty-five strokes of the brush to go.
The only person who obviously hadn’t enjoyed the evening was poor Chauncey. That woman was on his mind, that Anne-Marie Brand or whatever her name was. If Greta had known she was married to Chauncey’s best friend (and, she admitted to herself, if she hadn’t been a little tipsy) she wouldn’t have teased him so unmercifully about Anne-Marie’s running off with Peter Slater Friday night. Like a couple of teenagers, the two of them, grinning and giggling. And the woman with a young child at home! But Chauncey had defended her, poor boy; obviously he was in love with her himself. And he’d defended Peter just as strenuously.
For a moment Greta speeded up the pace, pulling the brush through her hair with extra vigor. She shifted uneasily on the stool, then relaxed, stealing another glance at Martin. He was tugging hard at his sparse red forelock—he’d found something fascinating in his papers, no doubt, some new discovery in particle physics or, just as likely, some exploitable development in one of his pet government agencies.
Greta kept on brushing. Maybe it wasn’t the Brand girl’s fault, altogether. Peter Slater was no innocent, that was plain enough. He was newly divorced, no doubt starved for sex, though beautiful as an angel, and arrogant—because all he had to do was crook his finger; in Greta’s experience men who knew they were irresistible often managed to be so. And Greta was not exactly naive on the subject. Since she’d married Martin…well, nothing serious—that one time, when she’d been stuck on the spouse’s tour in Hamburg for a week, with Martin too busy to talk and her with nothing to do. It hardly counted, all heavy breathing and blind fumbling and clumsy dry rubbing and poking in the dark. But before Martin…well, that was a long time ago. Greta knew what the Brand girl must be feeling, though: like all women, she was getting older all the time.
