Gravitys Angel | Page 3

actual run; you don't have the experimental uncertainties
about good beam, good vacuum, reliable detector equipment; it's a
simulation, so everything works right.
As we watched, the usual sorts of events occurred, particles and
antiparticles playing their spear-carrying roles in this drama, banging
together and sending out jets of energy that QUARKER dutifully
calculated, watching the energy-conservation books the whole time,
ready to signal when something happened it couldn't fit into the ledger.
Complex and interesting enough in its own way, all this, but just
background.
QUARKER shifted gears all of a sudden, signaling it had so many
collisions it could not track them accurately. The screen turned into
what we called a hedgehog, a bristly pattern of interactions too thick to
count
"We don't care," Carol Hendrix whispered. "Do it." And she forced
QUARKER to plunge ahead, made it speed up the pictures of events.
She didn't care about the meanings of the individual events; she was
looking for something global and, I thought, damned unlikely.
Events unrolled until we seemed to be in the middle of the densest
particle interactions this side of the Big Bang, and I almost forgot what
we were there for, because this stuff was the product of my work,
showing that, as promised, we would give the experimenters higher
beam luminosity than they'd dreamed of having.
Then the numbers of collisions lessened, and that was the first time I
believed she was on to something. Things were going backwards. The
beam continued to pour in its streams of particles, but all usual
interactions had ceased: Inside the beam pipes, one utterly anomalous
point was absorbing all that came its way. We both sat in complete

silence, watching the impossible.
The screen cleared, then said:
END SIMULATION
Quantitative evaluation appears impossible employing standard
assumptions. The conclusions stated do not permit unambiguous
physical interpretation.
We lay in reclining chairs and watched the sky. The moon was down,
and stars glittered gold against the black. Meteors cut across the
horizon, particles flashing through the universe's spark chamber. We'd
been drinking wine, and we were both a little high--the wine, sure, both
of us drinking on empty stomachs, but more than that, the sense of
discovery she had communicated to me.
"Finding the order behind the visible," she said. "I've wanted to be part
of that for as long as I can remember. And at Los Alamos I've gotten a
taste. They offered me a job two years ago, and the offer just caught me
at the right time. I had done some work I was proud of, but it was
frustrating-it's easy for a woman to become a permanent post-doc. And
to make things worse, I'd always worked in my husband's shadow."
"He's a physicist?"
"Yes. At Stanford, at SLAC. We've been separated since I took the job.
The two things, the job and the split-up; sort of came as a package."
She stopped, and the only sound was the faint roar of cars down the
Interstate nearby. She said, "Tell me what happens tomorrow."
"That depends on Diehl's reaction. I'll see him in the morning. First I'll
ask to borrow our resident imaging expert. That is, if I can pry him
loose. I'm figuring Diehl won't want to look at any of this stuff; he
might want a report on it, if I can talk to him just right. After that, we'll
see."
"Okay," she said. "Look, I'm really tired...."

"I'm sorry. I should have said something." I started to get up, but she
said, "No, I'm fine. I'll see you in the morning." She waved good night
and headed into the house; I'd shown her the guest room earlier and
folded out the couch for her.
I lay watching the sky, my mind circling around the strangeness we'd
seen earlier. I wanted to understand it all more clearly than I did, and I
hoped that Dickie Boy would be a help. In particular, he might know
where her simulations had gone wrong. They had to be wrong, or
else....
I sipped at wine and wondered at the possibility that I was present at
one of those moments in physics that get embalmed and placed into the
history books. I suppose I was still wondering when I fell asleep.
I was jerked awake some time later by a noise like high wind through
metal trees. Amber flashes of light came from the side of the house, and
a piano-shaped machine rolled out on clear plastic treads, ripping
chunks of sod with its aerating spikes as it came. The machine was a
John Deere Yardman, apparently run amok.
I went into the house and called Grounds and Maintenance. A few
minutes later a truck pulled up, and a man in dark-blue overalls got out
and called the robot