Gravitys Angel | Page 8

everything you can."
"Maybe."
"No, I mean it. Listen." And I poured it all out to her, what I'd seen in recent weeks, how incredibly closed and self-confident our world was, unbelievably blind about its own nature, which within the community was seen as inevitable. I'm not sure how long I talked or how I sounded-I just know that the frustration and anger and amazement I had lived with for the past weeks came tumbling out in one long screed.
"Oh, Sax," she said, finally. "You poor innocent." And she laughed, then laughed again, harder, and carried on laughing as I sat there embarrassed. Finally she stopped and said, "Sometimes I get so wrapped up in all of this, I forget how things really are. Thanks for reminding me. To hell with them all. I've tried, you've tried. If the SSC's turned into the world's most expensive junk pile, it won't be our responsibility."
We talked a bit more until we had finished the bottle of wine; then she said, "When do we have to be there?"
"Seven a.m. We should leave here around six-thirty, so I guess it's time to go to bed."
She found me standing at the sliding-glass door in my bedroom, looking out onto the night. I turned and saw her in the doorway, backlit by the light from the hall behind her. "Are you all right?" I asked.
"Who knows?" she said. She came across the room to me, stood in front of me, and put her hands on my bare shoulders. She said, "Want to make love, pen pal?"
She leaned against me, and I could feel her body under the thin jersey. "Yes," I said. "I do."
Through the night we moved to the rhythms of arousal and fulfillment: making love, lying together in silence, sleeping, waking again. All the frustration, anger, anxiety, excitement we had both felt the past weeks funneled into those moments, sublimed into active, driven lust.
Shortly after five I was awakened by a sweep of amber light through the window and the sound of wind. I found the groundskeeper robot outside. It had settled onto one patch of ground; its aerating spikes flashed out of the bottom of the machine, their blind repetition chewing turf into fine mulch.
I said, "You ought to go back to the barn or wherever they keep you and just kind of relax. Keep this shit up and they'll scrap you." It stopped and sat there emitting a low-pitched hum punctuated with occasional high harmonic bursts. "That's sensible," I said. "Think it over." It decided: It crawled over to a row of stunted ornamental shrubs and began to slice them into very small pieces.
I went back inside, called the thing's keepers, and tried to go back to sleep. Instead I lay awake, thinking of what might happen that morning, until Carol turned over to me and whispered, "One more time?"
"Oh yes," I said. "One more time."
Around six-thirty we walked out of the house and ten minutes later were at Maingate shuttle station, where we went down into the tunnel with five members of a tech team. They wore orange overalls and helmets and had respirators dangling over their shoulders, protection against any accident where helium would boil from the superconducting magnets and drive the air out of the tunnel.
Harry Ling, the BC 4 supervisor, was directing people at the shuttle stop. "How's it going, Harry?" I said.
"Ask me later," he said.
At Experimental Area 1, teams were making final adjustments to their instruments and hoping no last-minute gremlins had crept in. The room was fifty meters square, dominated by the boxcar-sized composite detector. Inside it, the storage rings came together; at their intersection the protons and antiprotons would meet and transform.
Two men were levering a bulky, oblong camera-SONY in red letters on its side-into position at an external port. People picked their way through snarls of cable.
Fifty meters up the tunnel was the control room. It was on two levels: ground floor, where technicians sat in rows at their consoles, and the experiments command above, where the Responsible Person sat with his assistants and controlled the experiments.
I introduced Carol Hendrix to Paulsen, my assistant, who was crouched over his screen like a big blond bear over a honeycomb. "Hello," he said, then went on muttering into his headset-I often wondered how anyone understood him.
I said to her, "Let's find you a set, and you can plug in to my console and watch what develops."
The next hour was taken up with the usual preparations for a run: collecting protons and antiprotons in their injector synchrotrons, tuning the beams. The "experiments underway" clock had started when the first particles were fed out of the injector synchrotron and into the main rings. Now the particles would be circling in the rings at a velocity near the speed of