Gravitys Angel | Page 3

antiparticles playing their spear-carrying roles in this drama, banging together and sending out jets of energy that QUARKER dutifully calculated, watching the energy-conservation books the whole time, ready to signal when something happened it couldn't fit into the ledger. Complex and interesting enough in its own way, all this, but just background.
QUARKER shifted gears all of a sudden, signaling it had so many collisions it could not track them accurately. The screen turned into what we called a hedgehog, a bristly pattern of interactions too thick to count
"We don't care," Carol Hendrix whispered. "Do it." And she forced QUARKER to plunge ahead, made it speed up the pictures of events. She didn't care about the meanings of the individual events; she was looking for something global and, I thought, damned unlikely.
Events unrolled until we seemed to be in the middle of the densest particle interactions this side of the Big Bang, and I almost forgot what we were there for, because this stuff was the product of my work, showing that, as promised, we would give the experimenters higher beam luminosity than they'd dreamed of having.
Then the numbers of collisions lessened, and that was the first time I believed she was on to something. Things were going backwards. The beam continued to pour in its streams of particles, but all usual interactions had ceased: Inside the beam pipes, one utterly anomalous point was absorbing all that came its way. We both sat in complete silence, watching the impossible.
The screen cleared, then said:
END SIMULATION
Quantitative evaluation appears impossible employing standard assumptions. The conclusions stated do not permit unambiguous physical interpretation.
We lay in reclining chairs and watched the sky. The moon was down, and stars glittered gold against the black. Meteors cut across the horizon, particles flashing through the universe's spark chamber. We'd been drinking wine, and we were both a little high--the wine, sure, both of us drinking on empty stomachs, but more than that, the sense of discovery she had communicated to me.
"Finding the order behind the visible," she said. "I've wanted to be part of that for as long as I can remember. And at Los Alamos I've gotten a taste. They offered me a job two years ago, and the offer just caught me at the right time. I had done some work I was proud of, but it was frustrating-it's easy for a woman to become a permanent post-doc. And to make things worse, I'd always worked in my husband's shadow."
"He's a physicist?"
"Yes. At Stanford, at SLAC. We've been separated since I took the job. The two things, the job and the split-up; sort of came as a package." She stopped, and the only sound was the faint roar of cars down the Interstate nearby. She said, "Tell me what happens tomorrow."
"That depends on Diehl's reaction. I'll see him in the morning. First I'll ask to borrow our resident imaging expert. That is, if I can pry him loose. I'm figuring Diehl won't want to look at any of this stuff; he might want a report on it, if I can talk to him just right. After that, we'll see."
"Okay," she said. "Look, I'm really tired...."
"I'm sorry. I should have said something." I started to get up, but she said, "No, I'm fine. I'll see you in the morning." She waved good night and headed into the house; I'd shown her the guest room earlier and folded out the couch for her.
I lay watching the sky, my mind circling around the strangeness we'd seen earlier. I wanted to understand it all more clearly than I did, and I hoped that Dickie Boy would be a help. In particular, he might know where her simulations had gone wrong. They had to be wrong, or else....
I sipped at wine and wondered at the possibility that I was present at one of those moments in physics that get embalmed and placed into the history books. I suppose I was still wondering when I fell asleep.
I was jerked awake some time later by a noise like high wind through metal trees. Amber flashes of light came from the side of the house, and a piano-shaped machine rolled out on clear plastic treads, ripping chunks of sod with its aerating spikes as it came. The machine was a John Deere Yardman, apparently run amok.
I went into the house and called Grounds and Maintenance. A few minutes later a truck pulled up, and a man in dark-blue overalls got out and called the robot to him with a red-lighted control wand, then cracked an access hatch in its side. Optic fibers bloomed in the robot's interior like phosphorescent alien plants.
I awoke around eight-thirty the next morning. Carol Hendrix was still in bed; I let her sleep. I left a message on Diehl's machine asking