The Concrete Jungle | Page 9

a wave effect of
some sort -- and the act of observation is intimately involved, although
on first acquaintance this is such a strange conclusion that some of us
were inclined to reject it out of hand.
We will of course be publishing our full findings in due course; I
take pleasure in attaching a draft of our paper for your interest. In any
case, you must be wondering by now just what the central finding is.
This is not in our paper yet, because Dr Rutherford is inclined to seek a
possible explanation before publishing; but I regret to say that our most
precise calorimetric analyses suggest that your theory of mass/energy
conservation is being violated -- not on the order of ounces of weight,
but by enough to detect. Carbon atoms are being transformed into
silicon ions with an astoundingly high electropositivity, which can be
accounted for if we assume that the effect is creating nuclear mass from
somewhere. Perhaps you, or your new colleagues at the Prussian
Academy, can shed some light on the issue? We are most perplexed,
because if we accept this result we are forced to accept the creation of
new mass ab initio, or treat it as an experimental invalidation of your
general theory of relativity.
Your good friend,
Hans Geiger

A portrait of the agent as a (confused) young man:
Picture me, standing in the predawn chill in a badly mown field,
yellowing parched grass up to the ankles. There's a wooden fence
behind me, a road on the other side of it with the usual traffic cams and
streetlights, and a helicopter in police markings parked like a gigantic
cyborg beetle in the middle of the roundabout, bulging with
muscular-looking sensors and nitesun floodlights and making a racket
like an explosion in a noise factory. Before me there's a field full of
concrete cows, grazing safely and placidly in the shadow of some low
trees which are barely visible in the overspill from the streetlights.
Long shadows stretch out from the fence, darkness exploding toward
the ominous lump at the far end of the paddock. It's autumn, and dawn
isn't due for another thirty minutes. I lift my modified camcorder and
zoom in on it, thumbing the record button.
The lump looks a little like a cow that's lying down. I glance over my
shoulder at the chopper, which is beginning to spool up for takeoff; I'm
pretty sure I'm safe here but I can't quite suppress a cold shudder. On
the other side of the field --
"Datum point: Bob Howard, Bancroft Park, Milton Keynes, time is
zero seven fourteen on the morning of Tuesday the eighteenth. I have
counted the cows and there are nine of them. One is prone, far end of
paddock, GPS coordinates to follow. Preliminary surveillance indicated
no human presence within a quarter kilometre and residual thermal
yield is below two hundred Celsius, so I infer that it is safe to approach
the target."
One unwilling foot goes down in front of another. I keep an eye on my
dosimeter, just in case: there's not going to be much secondary
radiation hereabouts, but you can never tell. The first of the cows looms
up at me out of the darkness. She's painted black and white, and this
close up she's clearly a sculpture. I pat her on the nose. "Stay cool,
Daisy." I should be safely tucked up in bed with Mo -- but she's away
on a two-week training seminar at Dunwich and Angleton got a bee in
his bonnet and called a code blue emergency. The cuffs of my jeans are
damp with dew, and it's cold. I reach the next cow, pause, and lean on

its rump for a zoom shot of the target.
"Ground zero, range twenty metres. Subject is bovine, down, clearly
terminal. Length is roughly three metres, breed . . . unidentifiable. The
grass around it is charred but there's no sign of secondary combustion."
I dry-swallow. "Thermal bloom from abdomen." There's a huge rip in
its belly where the boiling intestinal fluids exploded, and the contents
are probably still glowing red-hot inside.
I approach the object. It's clearly the remains of a cow; equally clearly
it has met a most unpleasant end. The dosimeter says it's safe -- most of
the radiation effects from this sort of thing are prompt, there are
minimal secondary products, luckily -- but the ground underneath is
scorched and the hide has blackened and charred to a gritty, ashlike
consistency. There's a smell like roast beef hanging in the air, with an
unpleasant undertang of something else. I fumble in my shoulder bag
and pull out a thermal probe, then,