Gravitys Angel | Page 8

was, but I shouldn't have treated you like one of them."
"That's okay. Apology accepted."
"Tomorrow morning, what do you think will happen?"
"Truthfully, I don't know. If we get good beam, we'll have the right
conditions for your simulation."
"That's what I thought. I've gone over it and over it, worked it through
time and again, had a work group tear my analysis apart. It all adds up
to the same thing: My simulations are realistic, plausible ... and
unverifiable without experimental evidence. All of that's fine. What

worries me is this: If I'm right, your people are going into what could
be a dangerous situation, and no one has a clue about it; no one wants
to hear about it, at least not from me."
"You've done 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: