by Mark Alpert
Then the wounded woman let out a moan, a throaty, broken “Daaaaaavid.” Her eyes were closed but she was still conscious. Perhaps, Simon thought, she knew where Swift was.
Simon removed his combat knife from its sheath. To inflict the maximum amount of pain, it was best to start with the fingers.
KAREN COULDN’T BELIEVE HER GOOD LUCK. As she ran with Jonah down the road that David had pointed out, she saw three fire trucks and a red-and-white Jeep heading their way. She waved her arms wildly to flag them down. The trucks sped by her, their sirens blaring, but the Jeep, which had the words FERMILAB FIRE CHIEF written on the driver’s-side door, came to a stop. A balding man with a jolly round face leaned out the window. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
She paused for a second to catch her breath. “There’s a fire! In the beam tunnel! You have to shut off the power!”
The fire chief smiled, unruffled. “Now, now, slow down. We got a report that the sprinkler system activated in the Neutrino Detector. That’s where the trucks are going.”
“No, no, that fire’s already out! You have to go to the beam tunnel instead! You have to shut off the power before they blow it up!”
The chief ’s smile faded a bit. He gave Karen a once-over and glanced at Jonah, who was still crying. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a Fermilab visitor’s pass?”
“No! They brought us here in a truck!”
“I’m afraid you can’t enter the laboratory grounds without a pass. You have to—”
“Jesus Christ! There’s a bunch of terrorists taking over the place and you’re worried about a goddamn visitor’s pass?”
The smile disappeared altogether. The chief shifted his Jeep into park and opened his door. “You’re breaking the law, ma’am. I think you better come with—”
Karen grabbed Jonah’s hand and bolted down the road.
DAVID RAN THROUGH A STAND of oak trees, which gave him some cover as he followed the curving ridge above the beam tunnel. He didn’t look back to where he’d left Monique. He’d already gone half a mile, far enough that he probably couldn’t have seen her anyway, but still he refused to look back. He had to push everything out of his mind except the beam line.
Carrying the fire ax, he sprinted toward the E-Zero entrance, a cinder-block structure that was identical to the one he’d just left. A bulky yellow electric cart was parked next to the building; it was probably used to ferry maintenance workers or tow equipment from one access point to another, but no one was on the job yet this morning. All he heard was the twittering of the songbirds and a low hum that came from the stairway leading down to the beam tunnel.
He quickly examined the gate at the head of the stairs. It was secured with a chain and a Master Lock, but the chain was cheap and thin. David grasped the handle of his ax as if it were a baseball bat and took a couple of practice swings. Then he pulled it all the way back and smashed the blade against the chain’s spindly links. The impact jarred his hands and he almost lost his grip, but when he looked at the chain again it was cut in two.
He opened the gate and dashed down the stairway. At the bottom of the steps, though, he had to stop—there was another locked gate blocking the entryway to the tunnel. Through the gate’s bars he could see the beam pipe, long and curving and silver gray, running about a foot above the tunnel’s floor. This was another thing he’d read about in Scientific American. The superconducting magnets sandwiched most of the pipe; they were strung along its length like beads on a giant necklace, except that each magnet was about twenty feet long and shaped like a coffin. The magnets kept the protons and antiprotons in line, kept them traveling in tight beams inside the steel pipe. And with the flip of a switch, the same magnets would draw the beams together and ignite the apocalypse.
David lifted his ax again, but the second gate was a tougher obstacle than the first. It was locked with two dead bolts that extended from the jamb. When he took a swing at them, the ax blade didn’t even make a dent. He tried aiming at the center of the gate instead, but the bars just rattled. Part of the problem was that the corridor was too narrow—he didn’t have enough room to take a full swing. In frustration he chopped at the dead bolts again and this time the head of the ax broke right off. David shouted, “Fuck!” and clubbed the gate with the broken handle. He was within spitting distance of the beam pipe but he couldn’t get any closer.
Lacking a better idea, David ran back up the stairway. Although he could probably find another fire ax somewhere on the premises, he knew it wouldn’t do much good. He might be able to breach the gate if he could hammer away at it for half an hour or so, but he only had a few minutes at best. As he stepped outside he looked around wildly for some kind of deliverance—a key, a hacksaw, a stick of dynamite. And then his eyes fixed on the electric cart.
Luckily, the cart’s motor started with the push of a button. David got into the driver’s seat and steered the vehicle toward the tunnel entrance, which looked like it would be just wide enough. Flooring the pedal, he accelerated the cart to about 20 mph. Then he leaped out of the vehicle and watched it careen down the flight of steps.
The crash was tremendously loud, raising David’s hopes. He rushed down the stairway and saw the yellow cart balanced on a heap of crumpled fencing. The vehicle’s front end was inside the tunnel while the rear end hung just outside the gate. The back wheels were spinning madly in the air—the cart’s motor was still working and the accelerator pedal had evidently gotten stuck—but David managed to squeeze past the chassis and clamber through the breach.
He slid to the tunnel’s concrete floor, which was littered with bits of glass from the cart’s headlights. The beam pipe, though, appeared to be undamaged. A few feet away David found a control panel on the wall. Muttering a quick prayer, he opened the panel and threw the manual shutdown switch. But nothing happened. The long line of superconducting magnets kept on humming. Gupta had disabled the switches, just as Monique had predicted.
David picked up a piece of debris from the crash, a heavy steel bar that had been torn from the gate. He couldn’t see any other option. It would be impossible to disable one of the superconducting magnets—the coils were encased in thick steel columns—and all the power lines for the collider ran along the arched ceiling of the tunnel, out of reach. No, the only way to shut down the Tevatron was to smash the beam pipe. He had to pummel it hard enough to disrupt the stream of particles, which would then spray into his body like a trillion tiny darts. David’s eyes began to sting. Well, he thought, at least it’ll be quick.
He rubbed his eyes and whispered, “Good-bye, Jonah.” Then he raised the steel bar over his head. But as he stepped toward a section of the beam pipe that ran between two of the magnets, he noticed another pipe running just above, with HE printed on it in black letters. It was the pipe that delivered the ultracold liquid helium to the magnets. The helium was what made the magnets superconducting—it lowered the temperature of their titanium coils to the point where they could conduct electricity without any resistance. And as David stared at the thing, he realized there was another way to stop the particle beams.
Adjusting his grip on the steel bar, he took aim at the helium pipe. All he needed to do was make a puncture. Once exposed to the air, the liquid helium would turn into a gas and escape; then the magnets would overheat and the Tevatron would shut down automatically. Swinging the bar as hard as he could, David struck the pipe directly on the black HE. A sharp clang echoed up and down the tunnel. The blow had made an inch-wide dent—good, but not good enough. He struck the pipe again in the same spot, making the dent wider and deeper. One more time should bust it, he thought as he raised the steel bar again. Then someone grabbed the bar out of his hands and yanked him away from the beam line.
David’s head hit the concrete wall of the tunnel. He didn’t see his attacker, but as he crumpled to the floor he heard a familiar voice.
“Hello again, Dr. Swift. Your colleague Dr. Reynolds was kind enough to tell me where you were. And I only h
ad to remove two of her fingers.”
“NO, MA’AM, THERE’S NOTHING GOING ON. Just another beautiful day here at the lab. Seventy-five degrees and not a cloud in the sky.”
Adam Ronca, the chief of security for Fermilab, had a cheery Chicago accent. As Lucille listened to him over the phone, she imagined what he looked like: chunky, ruddy, middle-aged. An easygoing guy who’d found a job that wasn’t especially strenuous. “What about your incident reports?” she asked. “Any signs of unusual activity in the past few hours?”
“Well, let’s see.” He paused, rustling some papers. “At four-twelve A.M., the guard at the West Gate saw some movement in the woods. Turned out to be a fox. And at six twenty-eight the fire department responded to an alarm at the Neutrino Detector.”
“An alarm?”
“It’s probably nothing. They’ve been having trouble with the sprinkler system over there. The darn thing keeps—” A burst of static interrupted him. “Uh, excuse me, Agent Parker. The fire chief is calling on the radio.”
Lucille shouted, “Wait!” but he’d already put her on hold. For nearly a minute she drummed her fingernails on her desk, staring at the tracking records for George Osmond’s cell phone. Fermilab wasn’t a likely terrorist target—there were no weapon designs at the lab and very little radioactive material. But maybe Mr. Osmond was interested in something else.
Ronca finally came back on the line. “Sorry about that, ma’am. The fire chief needed my help with something. Now what were you—”
“Why does he need your help?”
“Oh, he spotted a couple of trespassers. Some crazy woman and her kid. It happens more than you’d think.”
Lucille squeezed the telephone receiver. She thought of Swift’s ex-wife and their son, who’d disappeared two days before. “Is the woman in her midthirties, blond, about five foot eight? With a seven-year-old boy?”
“Hey, how did you know—”
“Listen carefully, Ronca. A terrorist attack may be in progress. You gotta lock down the lab.”
“Whoa, hold on. I can’t—”
“Look, I know the director of the Bureau’s Chicago office. I’ll tell him to send over some agents. Just make sure no one leaves the facility!”
PROFESSOR GUPTA KNEW EXACTLY WHERE he was. The closet he was locked inside wasn’t very far from the Collider Detector, Fermilab’s crown jewel. As he sat with his back against the wall he could hear the low hum of the device and feel the vibrations in the floor.
The detector was shaped like a giant wheel, more than ten meters high, with the beam pipe in the position where the axle would be. The protons and antiprotons would collide at the very center of the wheel, a point surrounded by concentric rings of instrumentation—drift chambers, calorimeters, particle counters. During the normal operation of the Tevatron, these instruments tracked the trajectories of the various quarks, mesons, and photons ejected from the high-energy collisions. But today there would be no particles flying outward from the center of the wheel. Instead the collisions would tear a hole in our universe, allowing the sterile neutrinos to escape into the extra dimensions beyond, and no instrument on the planet would detect their presence until they came screaming back to our spacetime. Gupta had overheard the new target coordinates that Simon had given to his students, so he could make a good guess at the reentry point. It was approximately a thousand kilometers to the east. Somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard.
The professor lowered his head and stared at the floor. It wasn’t his fault. He’d never intended to hurt anyone. Of course he’d known from the start that the effort might require some sacrifices. He’d recognized that Simon would have to apply some pressure on Kleinman, Bouchet, and MacDonald to extract the Einheitliche Feldtheorie from them. But that was unavoidable. Once the equations were in Gupta’s hands, he’d tried to avoid any violent acts that would mar his demonstration of the unified theory. He couldn’t be blamed if his orders weren’t properly carried out. The problem was simple human perversity. The Russian mercenary had been deceiving him all along.
As Gupta sat there in the darkness he heard a new noise, a distant thrumming. It was the sound of the RF system, which was now generating an oscillating radio-frequency field to accelerate the protons and antiprotons. Every time the particles went around the ring, fifty thousand times a second, the RF field gave them another boost. In less than two minutes the proton and antiproton swarms would reach their top energies and the superconducting magnets would point the beams at each other. The professor raised his head and listened carefully. He might not be able to hear the rupture in spacetime, but he would know soon enough whether the experiment had worked.
DAVID LAY FACEUP ON THE floor of the beam tunnel. Simon loomed over him, stepping on his chest, making it difficult to breathe and impossible to stand up. Dizzy and gasping, David grabbed the man’s leather boot and tried to lift it off his rib cage, but the mercenary just pressed down harder and dug in his heel. For good measure, Simon also pointed his Uzi at David’s forehead, but he didn’t seem particularly inclined to fire. Maybe he was worried that a ricocheting bullet would hit the beam pipe. Or maybe he simply wanted to gloat. As he ground his boot heel into David’s breastbone, the hum of the superconducting magnets grew louder and the floor of the tunnel began to vibrate.
“Hear that?” Simon asked, his sweaty face breaking into a grin. “That’s the final acceleration. Only two minutes left.”
David twisted and kicked and beat his fists against Simon’s leg, but the bastard just stood there, impervious. He looked like a man in the throes of passion, staring openmouthed at the victim he’d pinned to the floor. After a while David’s strength began to ebb. His head throbbed and blood seeped from the gashes on his face. He was crying now, crying in pain and despair. It was his own fault, the whole damn thing, from start to finish. He’d thought he could get a glimpse of the Theory of Everything without suffering any consequences, and now he was being punished for this sin of pride, this rash attempt to read the mind of God.
Simon nodded. “It hurts, doesn’t it? And you’ve felt it for only a few seconds. Imagine what it’s like to live with it for years.”
Despite the pressure on his chest, David managed to suck some air into his lungs. Even if it was completely hopeless, he was going to keep fighting this bastard. “Fucker!” he gasped. “You fucking coward!”
The mercenary chuckled. “You can’t spoil my mood, Dr. Swift. I’m happy now, for the first time in five years. I’ve done what my children wanted me to do.” He glanced over his shoulder at the beam pipe. “Yes, what they wanted.”
David shook his head. “You’re fucking crazy!”
“Maybe so, maybe so.” His mouth hung open and his tongue lolled obscenely on his lower lip. “But I’ve done it anyway. Like Samson and the Philistines. I’m going to topple the pillars of their house and bring it down on their heads.”
Simon clenched his free hand into a fist. He turned away from David for a moment and gazed at the wall of the tunnel. “No one’s going to laugh over my grave,” he muttered. “No laughter, no pity. Nothing but…” His voice trailed off. He blinked a few times and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then, regaining his train of thought, he glared at David and dug in his heel again. “Nothing but silence! The rest is silence!”
David felt a jolt in his chest, but it wasn’t from Simon’s boot. He stared intently at the mercenary’s face. The bastard looked drowsy. His jaw was slack and his eyelids were drooping. Then David looked at the liquid-helium pipe he’d tried to puncture. The section near the HE was still intact, but the pipe was slightly bent at a junction several feet to the left. It looked like there might be a small leak in the fitting—not enough to overheat the magnets, but maybe enough to displace some of the oxygen in the tunnel. And because helium was the second-lightest element, it would expand more rapidly in the upper part of the tunnel than in the space near the floor.
Simon blinked a few more times. “What are you doing? What are you stari
ng at?” He stretched his right arm, lowering the Uzi to within a foot of David’s brow. “I should shoot you right now! I should send you to hell!”
The mercenary was breathing fast. That was one of the symptoms of oxygen deprivation. Another was loss of muscle coordination. David held up his hands as if surrendering. Maybe he still had a chance. “No, don’t shoot!” he yelled. “Please, don’t!”
Simon curled his lip. “You pitiful worm! You…”
David waited until Simon blinked again. Then he swung his right arm and batted the Uzi out of the bastard’s hands. As the submachine gun skittered across the concrete floor, Simon shifted his weight off the foot that was crushing David’s chest. Gripping the boot with both hands, David wrenched it like a corkscrew and Simon crashed to the floor.
The gun, David thought. I have to get the gun. There was less than a minute left. He rose to his feet but stayed low so he wouldn’t breathe too much helium. It took him a couple of seconds to spot the Uzi, which had slid beneath the beam pipe, nearly twenty feet down the tunnel. He started running for it, but he’d waited too long. Before he could go three steps, Simon caught up to him and grabbed his waist. The mercenary threw him against the wall and sprinted toward the Uzi.
For a moment David just stared in horror. Then he turned around and raced the other way, back to the tunnel entrance. He was running on instinct, thinking only of escape, but there was no escape now unless he shut down the collider. While Simon knelt on the floor and reached for his Uzi, David looked frantically at the debris around the gate, searching for something heavy to fling at the beam pipe. Then he raised his eyes and saw the electric cart. It was halfway through the breach, its chassis balanced precariously on the crumpled gate and its motor still turning the rear wheels in midair.