Gravitys Angel | Page 4

to him with a red-lighted control wand, then
cracked an access hatch in its side. Optic fibers bloomed in the robot's
interior like phosphorescent alien plants.
I awoke around eight-thirty the next morning. Carol Hendrix was still
in bed; I let her sleep. I left a message on Diehl's machine asking for a
few minutes person-to-person; then I drank coffee and worked again
through her Monte Carlos: lovely work, plausible and elegant, but
almost certainly not enough to move Diehl. How could it? As she had
said, he wouldn't understand it.
However, I knew who would. In the event that Dickie Boy vetted her
simulations, we'd take them to the Thursday Group that evening. We
met weekly at Allenson's house. Every important work group at the lab
was represented, and every significant problem the groups worked on

was discussed there. Thursday Group was the locus of oral tradition,
the place where the lab's work was revealed and its meaning decided
upon. By the time experimental results saw print, they were old news to
anyone who had been to Thursday Group. Usually there were ten or so
people there, all men, most in their mid 30s, most of them white and
the rest Chinese.
Midmorning she came in, wearing old Levi's and a black tank top.
"Any news?" she asked, and I told her no. She got a cup of coffee and
sat next to me and watched as her simulations played.
Shortly after noon a message popped up in a window on the screen: If
you want to talk, meet me in section 27 within the next hour. Diehl.
"Do you want me to come along?" she asked, and I said, "No way. He's
a tricky bastard to handle at the best of times." I left her sitting at the
console, starting the Monte Carlos up again.
I rode the Invisible Bicycle to the shuttle station at Maingate and
locked it in the rack outside. Down concrete steps I went and into the
cold, musty air of the tunnel. A dark-blue, bullet-shaped shuttle car sat
waiting. I was the only one boarding. I told the car where I was going.
"Section 27," it confirmed in its colorless voice.
The repetitive color scheme of the lattice flashed by the windows.
Radiofrequency boosters were in red, superconducting dipoles in blue,
quadrupoles in orange; the endless beam pipes, where the straw-thin
beams of protons and antiprotons would circle, were long arcs of bright
green. If there were a universal symbolism of colors, these would say,
intricate, precise, expensive, technologically superb primary qualities
of the SSC.
About ten minutes later, the car slowed to a stop. The doors slid back,
and I stepped down into the tunnel. About fifty meters away, Diehl
stood talking to a man wearing blue overalls with the yellow flashes of
a crew chief. The man looked taut, white-faced. "So pull every
goddamned dipole with that batch number and replace the smart bolts,"
Diehl said. They walked toward me, and the crew chief stopped at a

com station and plugged in his headset, no doubt beginning the evil
task Diehl had set him.
"What can I do for you, Sax?" he asked.
"I've got a visitor," I said. "From Los Alamos. And she's got some
interesting simulations of our full-power shots. I think you ought to see
them." He looked startled; he hadn't expected me to ask for his
time-money, resources, priority, yes, but not his time. "Or ma be not," I
said. "Maybe you should let me have Dickie Boy put her Monte Carlos
on The Thing. She's got some strange stuff there, and if it works out,
we need to be prepared."
"Sax, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm tired, you know? We're
in the home stretch here, on budget, on time ... now take Hoolan--you
know, who heads the Meson Group-he knows nothing about this. He
knows his experiments are coming up soon, his simulations do not
make shit for sense, and Dickie Boy is the one to help him. But if he is
not available because you have him doing what you consider the Lord's
work, Hoolan's going to be pissed, because he cannot understand why,
in light of these approaching deadlines, he should have to come
begging for assistance."
"Then maybe you should come look at what she's got."
I was playing a tricky game, using my position as group leader to put
pressure on him but betting he wouldn't want to give up valuable time
and maybe expose his ignorance. "I think this is really important."
He was watching the crew chief explain to six men that they would be
working in the tunnel until the troublesome smart bolts had been
replaced. None of them looked happy. "Jesus," Diehl said. "Take
Dickie Boy if