Gravitys Angel | Page 7

to talk right now."
"Sure," I said. "Go anywhere you want. In fact, I think I'll go for a bicycle ride. I'll see you later." So moonlight flashed through the bicycle frame as I rode the berm road above the SSC, and finally I realized I had no answers to what perplexed me, and I turned around and headed back toward home. I rode through streets of darkened homes and came to my driveway, where a light burned on a pole, walked the Invisible Bicycle up to the door, and went in to absolute silence. On a low table in the living room, I found a note:
Dear Sax,
I have gone back to Los Alamos.
Don't worry about me, I'm fine. I just need to think about what happened here.
Thank you for all you've done.
Carol
Over the next weeks, as the full-energy trials came closer, I thought often about Carol Hendrix, her singularity, and the treatment she'd gotten.
I went back to Thursday Group the next week but found I had little to say to any of them-the whole bunch seemed strutting apes, obsessed with their own importance and show. If they were interested in the truth, and particularly in new, interesting truths, then why hadn't they treated Carol Hendrix with the seriousness her ideas deserved? Her ideas were strange, but important ideas always were. She was a woman, but so what? How could that matter?
All of a sudden, I felt a fool. Their conversation excluded everyone not a member of the group, and their masculinity, while entirely free of conscious malice, effectively recognized only its own kind. A young, small woman simply did not exist for them as a physicist to be taken seriously.
I left early that evening and decided I would not go back.
But what I had seen at Thursday Group was everywhere at the lab. Secretaries were women, scientists and administrators were men-white men by and large, with a sprinkling of Orientals. Carol Hendrix was right: I was incredibly naive. But I understood why. As a high-energy physicist, I had been devoted to what I thought of as an unbiased search for the truth, a search that creates intense tunnel vision-because of how difficult it is, it demands absolutely everything you can bring to it, and often that isn't quite enough. Now I had awakened, and what I saw appalled and confused me.
I got one note from Carol Hendrix, apologizing for leaving so abruptly and saying that she would write again when she had gotten her thoughts straightened out. Then, five days before the first full-energy, high-beta runs, she called me at the office. "Sax," she said. "I'd like to come watch the runs. Would you mind?"
Carol leaned over me, slid her body down mine, pulled the gown over her head. She was astride me, hands at her side as she moved in rhythmic arcs. "The stars," she said. Through the window I could see points of light strobing, red--and blue-shifting through the spectrum. "Something is poking through behind them," she said. "It wants in." A sheet of blue light poured through the window, burned through us, x-raying flesh and bone. In it we were translucent, the intricate network of our nerves burning in silver fire. We were fusing together, so close to an orgasm that would annihilate us.
I woke, got up and drank some water for my burning throat, fell back on the bed. I hung suspended between waking and sleeping as a flood of images passed across my eyes. Bright, blurred shapes vanished before I could see them clearly.
She was coming in the next day, the day before the first big runs.
She wore khaki shorts and a dark-blue T-shirt. We were sitting in my backyard again, under a moonless sky--a thousand stars above us and meteors cutting brief, silent arcs at the horizon. She sniffed at the glass of cold Chardonnay she was holding, drank, and leaned back in the reclining chair.
"I owe you an apology," she said. What do you mean?
"You did everything you could to help, and I walked out on you."
"You were troubled."
"I was, but I shouldn't have treated you like one of them."
"That's okay. Apology accepted."
"Tomorrow morning, what do you think will happen?"
"Truthfully, I don't know. If we get good beam, we'll have the right conditions for your simulation."
"That's what I thought. I've gone over it and over it, worked it through time and again, had a work group tear my analysis apart. It all adds up to the same thing: My simulations are realistic, plausible ... and unverifiable without experimental evidence. All of that's fine. What worries me is this: If I'm right, your people are going into what could be a dangerous situation, and no one has a clue about it; no one wants to hear about it, at least not from me."
"You've done