Gravitys Angel | Page 9

light, their numbers building until there were enough for a sufficiently violent collision.
"I have initiated the command sequence," Diehl said on the headphones.
About a minute later a voice said, "We're getting pictures," and there was a round of sporadic clapping from the people on the ground floor. On one of the screens in front of us, QUARKER was providing near-realtime views of the collisions, which appeared as elaborate snarls of red and green, the tracks color-coded to distinguish incoming from outgoing particles. "Beautiful," the man in front of us said.
On the screen next to this one, data flickered in green type. I saw that everything was, as they say, "nominal." Then all lights in the control room went out, every screen blank, every com line and computer dead. Under amber emergency lights, everyone sat stunned.
And the world flexed, the wave from the singularity passing, the shape of spacetime changing. Puffs of gray dust jumped off the walls, and there were the sounds of distant explosions.
Carol jumped out of her chair and said, "Come on."
I took off my headset and followed her. We passed through the door and into the tunnel, where settling clouds of dust were refracted in yellow light. I stopped at a locker marked Emergency and took out two respirators-false faces in clear plastic with attached stainless steel tubes. If enough helium escaped into the tunnel, it could drive out the oxygen and suffocate anyone without breathing apparatus. "Here," I said and gave her one.
The door to the experiments room was askew. Behind us I heard loud voices and the sounds of feet pounding up the stairs to the surface. Turning sideways, I slipped through the door's opening.
Blue blue blue blue, the slightest pulse in it, then suddenly as the conjurer's dove flying from the hat, white, swords or crystals of it jammed together; vibrating as if uncertain, then turning as suddenly to blue.
The composite detector unit and surrounding equipment had disappeared. Carol Hendrix had become a translucent, glowing figure that left billowing trails of color as she moved. The world was a sheet of light and a chittering of inhuman voices, high-pitched and rising.
Etched images in gold against white, flickering, the reality tape shrieking through its transports as every possible variation on this one moment unfolded, the infinitesimal multiplied by the infinite.
Sometime later, hands pulled on me, dragging me backward across rough cement to a world which did not burn like the middle of a star. My heels drummed against the floor, my back was arched, every muscle rigid.
Riding the Invisible Bicycle past Building A, I saw two men bent over the partially disassembled carcass of a groundskeeper robot. Sprays of optic fiber, red lengths of plastic tubing, and bright clusters of aluminum spikes lay in the grass beside it. One man was holding a dull-gray, half-meter cube, the container for the expert system that guided the robot and was the apparent source of its problems.
The state of things at Texlab: Big science-grandiose and masculine and self-satisfied-lay in ruins all around, shattered by its contact with an infinitely small point, the singularity.
On the steps of Building A, camera crews and reporters had gathered. They just milled aimlessly at this point, waiting for the Texlab spokesman--presumably Diehl-who would have to come out and recite a litany of disaster. Then would come the questions: How did this happen? What does it mean?
As I headed out the perimeter road I was passed by lines of vehicles: vans carrying tech teams, flatbed trucks loaded with massive chunks of bent metal, cars with solemn, dark-suited bureaucrats in their back seats. No shuttle rides today-the tunnel was strictly off-limits.
Near station 12 an orange quadrupole assembly lay next to the hole it had made coming out of the ground. Part of its shrouding had torn away to reveal the bright stainless steel ring that held its thousands of intertwined wires together. At other stations I passed there were stacks of lumber for shoring the tunnel, repair crews in hardhats milling near them.
Little more than an hour after the medical team had carried me out of the tunnel, I was apparently fully recovered. The rest of my morning had been spent with me the focus of doctors, nurses, and lab techs. I had suffered an episode of grand mal, an epileptic fit, they told me--apparently a reaction to the singularity.
Today there were fifty-six injured, one dead, two more probably to die. The collider had been destroyed: beam pipes deforming and spraying those high-energy particles all over the place--explosive quench in the lattice, it was called .
And Carol Hendrix was one of the fifty-six injured. A chunk of concrete had fallen on her. Skull fracture, assorted lacerations ... Christ. While they were testing me at the Texlab hospital, she was being flown toward Houston in a