Gravitys Angel

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,