“I’m Carol Hendrix,” she said, and from the sound of her voice, she was just a little bit amused. “Are you Sax?”
“Yes,” I said. And I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Really I was just stalling, trying to take in the fact that this woman was the one I’d been writing to for the past six months.
We had begun corresponding in our roles as group leaders at our respective labs, me at SSC-Texlab, her at Los Alamos, but had continued out of shared personal concerns: a mutual obsession with high-energy physics and an equally strong frustration with the way big-time science was conducted—the whole extra-scientific carnival of politics and publicity that has surrounded particle accelerators from their inception.
Her letters were sometimes helter-skelter but were always interesting—reports from a powerful, disciplined intelligence working at its limits. She had the kind of mind I’d always appreciated, one comfortable with both experiment and theory. You wouldn’t believe how rare that is in high-energy physics.
Women in the sciences can be hard and distant and self-protective, because they’re working in a man’s world and they know what that means. They tell each other the stories, true ones: about Rosalind Franklin not getting the Nobel for her X-ray work on DNA, Candace Pert not getting the Lasker for the first confirmation of opiate receptors in the brain. And so they learn the truth: in most kinds of science, there are few women, and they have to work harder and do better to get the same credit as men, and they know it. That’s the way things are.
Carol Hendrix looked pale and tired, young and vulnerable—not at all what I’d expected. She was small, thin-boned, and her hair was clipped short. She wore faded blue jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and sandals over bare feet.
“I didn’t have time to get in touch with you,” she said. Then she laughed, and her voice had a ragged, nervous edge to it. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t get in touch with you because I knew how busy you were, and you might tell me to come back later. I can’t do that. We need to talk, and I need your help … now—before you do your first full-beam runs.”
“What kind of help?” I asked. Already, it seemed, the intimacy of our letters was being transformed into instant friendship in real time.
“I need Q-system time,” she said. She meant time on QUARKER, the lab’s simulation and imaging system. She said, “I’ve got some results, but they’re incomplete—I’ve been working with kludged programs because at Los Alamos we’re not set up for your work. I’ve got to get at yours. If my simulations are accurate, you need to postpone your runs.”
I looked hard at her. “Right,” I said. “That’s great—just what Diehl wants to hear. That you want precious system time to confirm a hypothesis that could fuck up our schedule.”
“Diehl is a bureaucrat,” she said. “He doesn’t even understand the physics.”
Yeah, I thought, true, but so what? Roger L. Diehl: my boss and everyone else’s at the lab, also the SSC’s guardian angel. He had shepherded the accelerator’s mammoth budgets through a hostile Congress, mixing threat and promise, telling them strange tales about discoveries that lay just at the 200 TeV horizon. All in all, he continued the grand tradition of accelerator lab nobility: con men, politicians, visionaries, what have you. Going back to Lawrence at Berkeley, accelerator labs prospered under hard-pushing megalomaniacs whose talents lay as much in politics and P.R. as science, men whose labs and egos were one.
“Let’s talk,” I said. “Come inside, tell me your problem.”
“All right,” she said.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“I thought I’d find someplace later, after we’ve talked.”
“You can stay here. Where are your bags?”
“This is it.” She pointed to the sidewalk beside her. At her feet was a soft black cotton bag.
“Come on in,” I said.
* * *
I figured she would be doing interesting work, unusual work; maybe even valuable work, if she’d gotten lucky. I wasn’t the least bit ready for what she was up to.
We cranked up “The Thing,” a recent development in imaging. It had a wall-mounted screen four feet in diameter; on it you could picture detector results from any of the SSC’s runs. When it was running, the screen was a tangle of lines, the tracks of the particles, their collisions, disappearances, appearances; all the wonderland magic so characteristic of the small, violent world of particle physics, where events occur in billionths of a second, and matter appears and disappears like the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only its smile—in the form of brightly-colored particle tracks across our screens.
Still, setting up and running simulations is an art, and at any accelerator lab there’ll be one or two folk who have the gift. When a series of important shots is coming up, they don’t get much sleep. At Los Alamos, Carol Hendrix, despite her status as group leader, was the resident wizard. At Texlab, we had Dickie Boy.
She stretched, then sat at the swing-arm desk with its keyboard and joystick module and logged on to QUARKER with the account name and passwords I gave her. Her programs were number-crunching bastards, and QUARKER’S Cray back end would be time-slicing like mad to fit them in.
“Tell me what this is all about,” I said. “So I’ll know what we’re looking at when this stuff runs.”
“Sure,” she said.
While we waited for QUARKER, she drew equations and plots on my whiteboard in red, green, black, and yellow, and she explained that she was postulating the existence of a new kind of attractor that came into being in a region of maximum chaos, its physical result an impossible region of spacetime, where an infinite number of particle events occupied a single, infinitesimal point.
Mathematically and otherwise, it is called a singularity, and in cosmology something like it is assumed to be at the center of black holes. There were all sorts of theorems about singularities, few of which I knew, none rigorously. Why would I? This stuff went with astrophysics and the gravitational forces associated with huge chunks of mass.
When she finished her explanations and turned from the whiteboard, I could see that she was wired and sleepy at once. Mostly, though, she was exultant: she felt she’d hit the jackpot. And of course she had, if any of this made sense … it couldn’t, I thought.
The Thing gonged, to tell us we had our results. I pulled up a canvas-backed chair beside her as she sat at the console. “We’ll walk through the simulation,” she said. “If you have a question, ask.”
At first there were just cartoon schematics of the detectors; line drawings of the big central detector and its surrounding EM boxes, hadron calorimeters, and gas chambers. Then the beam shots started coming, and in a small window at the top of the screen, the beam parameters reeled by. Running Monte Carlos is one hell of a lot easier than doing an actual run; you don’t have the actual 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 backward. 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 outside 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 goodnight 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 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-thirties, most of them white and the rest Chinese.
Mid-morning 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—the 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 maybe 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 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 explaining 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 you can convince him.”
“Thanks,” I said. He looked at me like he tasted something sour. I owed him one, and one thing was sure: he’d collect when and where he wanted.
* * *
“You really like this thing, don’t you?” Carol Hendrix asked as she reached up to touch one of the Inv
isible Bicycle’s clear polystyrene tires. It hung from rubber-covered hooks just inside my front door.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got it in Germany. It’s just plastic, but there’s something wonderful about it—almost the Platonic idea of a bicycle. There’s one in the Museum of Modern Art.” Hanging above her head, it seemed to glow in the soft light given off by baby spots. “I usually ride it to think.”
“What do we do now?” she asked. She wasn’t interested in my toy.
“We get Dickie Boy over here,” I said. “If we can. I’ll call him.”
“New physics,” I told Dickie Boy on the phone. “Nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
“No bullshit. Wrong physics, maybe—that’s what we want you to help with, find out if we’re missing something tricky.”
“Or something obvious.” He had no respect for anyone’s ability on The Thing but his own.
“I don’t think so. I think we’ve got a whole set of tracks here like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“I’ve got the Meson Group on my schedule.”
“I know. Diehl said I could borrow you today.”
“Where you want me?”
“Come over to my house.” No way I wanted anyone looking over our shoulders.
* * *
Dickie Boy had made his name as a post-doc at Fermilab, where Diehl had recruited him when the SSC was nothing but a stack of plans, an empty tunnel, and mounds of heaped dirt. He hadn’t been brought on for his good looks: he stood just over six feet tall and weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds; his dull brown hair was tied into dreadlocks; he had a long, thin nose and close-set eyes and usually seemed slightly dirty. However, in his brief time at Texlab he had already made legendary forays on The Thing—the last, a tricky sequence of pion studies, lasted nearly seventy-two hours, during which time Dickie Boy had worked through several shifts of physicists and finished by asking the group leader if he needed anything more.
Carol had heard about Dickie Boy, but she had her own reputation, and so when they said hello and looked each other over, I could almost hear the wheels turning, the question being posed, “Are you as good as they say?”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection Page 51