Gravitys Angel

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Gravity's Angel
by Tom Maddox
This story originally appeared in OMNI, November 1992.
Author's Note: This story concerns a future in which Congress continued funding for the SSC, which of course did not happen in our timeline, where instead of gravity's angel we have a large, mostly empty tunnel beneath the Texas plains. I would also remind the reader that all stories take place in alternate realities, perhaps, as David Deutsch maintains, among an infinite number of them.
The Invisible Bicycle burned beneath me in the moonlight, its transparent wheels refracting the hard, white light into rainbow colors that played across the blacktop. Beneath the road's surface the accelerator tunnel ran, where the SSC--the Superconducting Synchrotron Collider--traced a circle one hundred and sixty kilometers in circumference underneath the Texas plains.
Depending on how you feel about big science and the Texas economy, the SSC was either a superb new tool for researching the subatomic world or high-energy physics' most outrageous boondoggle. Either way, it was a mammoth raceway where subatomic particles were pushed to nearly the speed of light, then crashed together as violently as we could contrive--smashups whose violence was measured in trillions of electron volts. Those big numbers get all the press, but it's only when particles interact that experiments bear fruit. The bunches of protons want to pass through each other like ghosts, so we--the High Beta Experiment Team, my work group--had all sorts of tricks for getting more interactions. Our first full-energy shots were coming up, and when the beams collided in Experimental Area 1, we would be rewarded for years of design and experiment.
So I had thought. Now I rode a great circle above the SSC, haunted by questions about infinity, singularity--improbable manifestations even among the wonderland of quantum physics, where nothing was--quite--real. And more than that, I was needled and unsettled by questions about the way we--not my group but all of us, the high-energy physics community--did our business. I'd always taken for granted that we were after the truth, whatever its form, whatever our feelings about it. Now even that simple assumption had collapsed, and I was left with unresolvable doubts about it all--the nature of the real, the objectivity of physics--riddles posed by an unexpected visitor.
Two nights earlier I had returned from a ride to find a woman standing in front of my house. "Hello," I said, as I walked the Invisible Bicycle up the driveway toward her. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Carol Hendrix," she said, and from the sound of her voice, she was just a little bit amused. "Are you Sax?"
"Yes," I said. And I asked, "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" Really I was just stalling, trying to take in the fact that this woman was the one I'd been writing to for the past six months.
We had begun corresponding in our roles as group leaders at our respective labs, me at SSC-Texlab, her at Los Alamos, but had continued out of shared personal concerns: a mutual obsession with high-energy physics and an equally strong frustration with the way big-time science was conducted--the whole extrascientific carnival of politics and publicity that has surrounded particle accelerators from their inception.
Her letters were sometimes helter-skelter but were always interesting--reports from a powerful, disciplined intelligence working at its limits. She had the kind of mind I'd always appreciated, one comfortable with both experiment and theory. You wouldn't believe how rare that is in high-energy physics.
Women in the sciences can be hard and distant and self-protective, because they're working in a man's world and they know what that means. They tell each other the stories, true ones: about Rosalind Franklin not getting the Nobel for her x-ray work on DNA, Candace Pert not getting the Lasker for the first confirmation of opiate receptors in the brain. And so they learn the truth: In most kinds of science, there are few women, and they have to work harder and do better to get the same credit as men, and they know it. That's the way things are.
Carol Hendrix looked pale and tired, young and vulnerable-not at all what I'd expected. She was small, thin-boned, and her hair was clipped short. She wore faded blue jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and sandals over bare feet.
"I didn't have time to get in touch with you," she said. Then she laughed, and her voice had a ragged, nervous edge to it. "No, that's not true. I didn't get in touch with you because I knew how busy you were, and you might have told me to come back later. I can't do that. We need to talk, and I need your help ... now-before you do your first full-beam runs."
"What kind of help?" I asked. Already, it seemed, the intimacy of our letters was being transformed-into instant friendship in