Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  She had come here, fled here, really, after Steve’s death. She had decided to quit her job with the Democrat and sell the house with its bittersweet memories and big mortgage payments. On her tight budget she hadn’t been able to afford the high-rent district, so she brought the remnants of her old life to this new home. She considered the years she had lived here. It had been a time of healing. There had been good times here, parties and friends, a lover once or twice ...

  She picked up the silver-framed picture of Steve shown roped to the rock wall of El Capitan and confidently waving. He’d been such a self-centered jerk sometimes ... She sniffed, wrapped the picture in a pillowcase, and placed it carefully into the cardboard box from the liquor store that now held some of her possessions and memories. She sealed the box, carried it to her car, and slammed the lid of the trunk, perhaps a bit harder than necessary.

  She suddenly felt good, released from a burden. She was, she decided, pleased to be shedding, for the moment, her frugal Tallahassee apartment and lifestyle, the shrunken fragments from the split chrysalis of a dormant creature that was about to spread its new wings and fly away.

  Quitting her job at the Tallahassee Democrat and becoming a free-lance writer had at first been very appealing. It released her from the burden of dealing with the bad assignments, the routine, the unforgiving deadlines, the jerks and the lechers at the Democrat, and also it offered the advantages of not being tied to a particular city, a particular job, of being able to live and work anywhere she wished, anywhere in the world. She had always liked to travel and had looked forward, in a year or so, to spending a season in London or Paris, a month writing on a Greek island or on the Costa Brava of Spain or in the South of France, or doing a few weeks of research in Hong Kong or Tahiti or Rio while she worked on a new book.

  It hadn’t turned out that way. For the past three years she had been securely bound to Tallahassee by the realities of economics. Her equity in the house had not been large. It, along with Steve’s insurance money and the small income from her first books, had been barely enough to support her, even in this part of Florida where the cost of living was among the lowest in the nation. She had been tied here as securely as if she had been under house arrest.

  But now the economic equations were changing, and her writing career was finally taking off. A year ago the advance for Earthworms had been only $20,000, but the recent advance for Fire Ants, based on the first chapter and an outline, had been a promising $40,000. She was proud that she had half of it still in her savings account. Now Earthworms seemed sure to earn out its advance with another month of sales. Her agent, who up to now had been conservative but surprisingly accurate in his educated guesses, was predicting that in the coming year she would be getting more royalties from the unexpectedly large sales of Earthworms and the boosted sales of her previous books that were still in print. He was even suggesting that if Fire Ants was good enough when she turned it in, he might be able to negotiate a multi-book contract for her next three books with a “mid-six-figure advance,” as they say in Publishers Weekly.

  Alice was finally rising above the poverty level, and it felt damned good. Perhaps Waxahachie was not a Greek island, but it was a good start.

  She checked the contents of her suitcases, still open on the floor. Everything she needed was packed. She made a final check of the closets. They were empty for the first time in three years. Deciding what to take in the car had been a watershed. What she didn’t think enough of to take, she didn’t need. She had stored some years’ accumulation of clothing. When she returned, she might donate the things to local charities. Her accountant had said that the donations might make a nice tax deduction to offset the taxes on her increased income, if her agent’s predictions came to pass, if the Fire Ants book she hadn’t written yet was good enough.

  She would go to Waxahachie, she would write the book, and it would be a good one. The opportunity was there within her reach, and she would snatch it. She must.

  She smiled, imagining a slim silvery lighter-than-air craft dropping ballast in preparation for free flight. She was ready to fly. She snapped her suitcases shut and carried them to the car.

  CHAPTER 2.3

  LEM Seminar

  George glanced at the time readout hanging in midair at the top of his field of view. It read “05/31/04, 11:32 CDT, LEM Auditorium, SSC, Texas.” He mentally translated the time as 9:32 AM, Seattle time. He was bored and becoming slightly irritated. Larry’s rambling “10 minute” talk on the status of the data compression software had now been going on for almost half an hour and showed no sign of concluding. George heard his remote’s motor whirr softly as he turned to look at Jake, who sat in his special chair against the wall at the front of the auditorium. Jake’s eyes were hooded in thought, and his ivory hands were in his lap with the fingertips together, making a horizontal steeple.

  He turned toward Wolfgang, who sat in an aisle seat in the LEM auditorium, next to the spot where George’s remote was parked. “Jake is a ticking bomb,” George whispered to him. “Watch. He’ll go off any second now.”

  As if responding to the cue from George, the spokesman and absolute monarch of LEM, Harvard University Professor Jian-Kwok “Jake” Wang, stood up. “Enough,” he said and paused, his head tilted slightly backward, staring at Larry. George was familiar with that Stare. All too familiar.

  Larry looked toward Jake. “B-but, I wasn’t quite finished,” he said.

  “Time is short,” said Jake. “LEM is running, and data are coming in at this very moment. Many of us have shifts that will start soon. If you have more to tell us, Larry, you may continue at another group meeting.” Jake consulted the list in his hand. “Next,” he said, “George Griffin, who was at CERN last week and is now back in Seattle, will tell us about radiation damage and vertex detectors.”

  Larry stood bewildered at the overhead projector for a moment, then attempted to collect his numerous scattered transparencies. About half of them slipped from the pile and skittered across the floor. A few in the audience of about 300 people gathered in the LEM Auditorium laughed nervously, but most sat quietly in sympathetic silence.

  George’s remote whirred up to the podium and with a robotic hand he expertly scooped up the loose transparencies in his path. The robot arm telescoped outward, offering them to Larry, who snatched them and retreated to the back of the auditorium in disarray, arms crossed over the transparencies and notes clutched against his chest.

  George’s remote turned off the overhead projector and activated the projection monitor system. Through electronically tracked camera eyes, George looked out at the large group. “First,” he said, “I want to introduce a visitor who is newly arrived from CERN, Dr. Wolfgang Spiegelmann, a distinguished physicist, a micro-electronics specialist, and a valued member of the ATLAS collaboration.” At George’s urging, Wolfgang stood, turned, and nodded to the audience. “Wolfgang will be working with our group for the next month,” George continued. “His stay with us is relevant to the present discussion because he’s an expert on radiation damage in pixel detector microchips.”

  George looked at a sensitive spot in his field of view and blinked, and his first figure appeared on the screen. It showed a cylindrical device with flat black surfaces on its sides. “I’ll keep this short,” he said, “but I want to start with a bit of orientation for the new students. This is the vertex detector for the LEM experiment. It’s placed as close as possible to the point where the two proton beams collide, and the emerging particles reach it first. It’s made of five concentric layers of slabs of silicon containing several million tiny pixel detector elements, along with some of their associated electronics.” He blinked again and a second figure appeared. “A pixel detector is a square of silicon 20 microns on a side that gives a current pulse when a charged particle passes through it.” His pink wireframe hand appeared in the projection and pointed at the dark square
area on the diagram. “These pixel detectors and their electronics are made directly on a slab of silicon, using the same fabrications processes used to make integrated circuits for commercial electronics.”

  George blinked, and the picture changed to a display of curving colored tracks. “The vertex detector provides some valuable information for LEM. Using all of the pixels together, we get a close-up image of the charged particles from the collision. We’re able to track some of the secondary products of short-lived particles from the collision and establish the location where their breakup occurred. This helps in following the production of strange and charmed quarks in the collision. The secondary vertex particles, as we say, have strangeness and charm.”

  Another blink, and the picture changed again, displaying the vertex detector now mottled with damage points shown in purple. “Now the problem is that we’ve been running LEM for less than a year, not even at full luminosity yet, and we’re already losing pixels from the vertex detector due to radiation damage. We were expecting to be in our present state of radiation damage after perhaps two or three years of operation at full luminosity, not after six months at low luminosity. So we’ve got a problem.”

  “We all know we have a problem, George,” Jake interrupted. “Do we have a solution?” He stared across the room, seeming to focus his gaze several yards behind George’s remote.

  George noticed that Jake’s famous Stare was less intimidating through a telepresence remote. The remote’s motor whirred as he turned. “Patience, Jake, patience,” he said with a grin. “First the problem, then the solution. It’s important to do these things in the proper order.” A few in the audience laughed appreciatively. Fewer than would have liked to laugh, George suspected. As a full professor with tenure, George had little to fear from Jake, but others here were not so fortunate.

  He blinked his next figure to the screen, a diagram of an electronic circuit. “This shows one pixel detector and its associated on-chip electronics. We made some tests with our probe station of a few of the radiation damaged chips that were replaced last month. The good news is that it is not the pixel detectors themselves that are failing. Even in the failed units, the detector leakage currents are staying low.” He gestured and two areas of the circuit became circled in red. “The bad news is that there are two key components that are failing: the first FET of the input stage and the power-drive junction transistor of the output stage. What we’ve learned so far, Jake, is that with no input and no output you don’t get much data.” Again there was scattered laughter from the group.

  “We did a lot of radiation damage testing of vertex detector prototypes several years ago, and we never saw such problems. So the question is, why are these components failing now? The answer is, we don’t know, yet. It could be an undetected beam halo from the SSC. It could be some subtle impurity in the kind of silicon we’re using. It could be the on-chip layout of the integrated circuit components, which is slightly different from the layout we tested. It could be the design of the circuit itself, also slightly different. It could be some glitch in the details of the fabrication process. It could be a lot of other things.

  “Fortunately, we have a way of finding out which it is. Our European competitors at the LHC were very accommodating during my visit last week in sharing their experience. In their ATLAS detector at the LHC they have a similar vertex detector with very similar on-chip electronics. Moreover, because of the LHC runs at a lower energy, the radiation damage at full LHC luminosity is about the same as ours to ours at reduced luminosity. And, as Wolfgang will tell you in a seminar scheduled for next week, their vertex detector is performing above their expectations. It has not had the radiation damage problems that ours is suffering. The question is, why not?”

  George’s remote held up a small plastic box with its right robot arm. Something wrapped in pink polyethylene was visible inside. “This is one of the spare silicon chips from the ATLAS vertex detector that Wolfgang brought us. He brought a dozen more of them, and also some electronics and components. We’re going to test their chips along with ours and find out why theirs live and ours die. That’s about all for now. Thanks for your attention.”

  He stopped, turned to look at Jake, and nodded, indicating that he was finished. There was scattered applause.

  Jake stood and leveled the Stare at George’s remote for what must have been a full minute. “This is not satisfactory,” he said finally. “We should not humiliate ourselves before our competitors by admitting our failings and begging their help. We should go to CERN to discuss our victories, not our defeats.”

  George shook his head, producing a whirr. “First we have to have victories, Jake,” he said with a twinkle, drawing more laughter from the group and discharging the tension that had been building a moment before. “Our resources in this experiment, as you know better than anyone else here, are very limited. If we can shortcut many man-months of work by getting assistance from CERN and directly comparing a chip that works with one that doesn’t, then the effort saved can go elsewhere. I’m just goddamned glad that the ATLAS people were willing to provide us with spare chips and expertise. I think we would have done the same, if the circumstances were reversed. At least, I hope we would have.” He stared back at Jake. He was certain that Jake would never have diverted any LEM resources to help ATLAS with their problems.

  Jake made a dismissive motion with his hands, a gesture that one might use to send away a servant. George rolled the remote back up the aisle and positioned it next to Wolfgang’s seat. Jake could be such a jerk sometimes, he thought.

  Jake peered at his notes. “The next speaker,” he announced, “is Pierre Barbotin, who is in Nantes at the moment. Pierre will tell us about the performance of the straw tubes.”

  Wolfgang looked at George’s remote inquiringly.

  “Welcome to the LEM collaboration,” George whispered.

  CHAPTER 2.4

  On the Road

  ALICE pressed down the dictation bar and held the recorder near her mouth, speaking loud enough to be audible over the car noise. She held the steering wheel steady with her other hand. “PARAGRAPH,” She said to the recorder.

  “The heifer edged down the slope and into the ravine, loose clods dislodged by her hooves tumbling down the slope ahead of her. Then she trotted to the place she had seen from above, a spot where tall grass grew in the shade of the overhang. Ignoring the unfamiliar musky smell that permeated this place, she began to crop the lush grass. It was good, and she ate it contentedly.

  “PARAGRAPH

  “There was a dry rustling noise behind her. She turned a wide brown eye toward the sound. A large insectoid head was framed by a shadowed hole in the wall of dirt, sharp pincers extending toward her hindquarters. She uttered a high shriek of primal fear and moved. But it was too late, as she felt the cruel pincers grip her shank ...”

  Alice paused and released the dictation bar, placing the small recorder on the seat beside her. Should it be “primal fear” or “primordial fear.” The trouble with trying to write while you were driving was that it was just you and the recorder, with none of the electronic aids of a writing workstation available. The scene she was working on was not going well. It sounded too much like a B-grade horror movie. Perhaps she should work on the plot continuity and save the scene writing for later, when she could run the recording through her workstation’s speech-to-text program and have what she had dictated directly on the screen in front of her.

  Through the windshield she could see that she was approaching the state boundary, as denoted by state-shaped concrete monuments and large signs beside the highway. Mississippi was giving way to Louisiana, white-oak and hawthorne woods to palmetto wetlands. “YOU ARE LEAVING MISSISSIPPI, THE MAGNOLIA STATE; Y’ALL COME BACK AND SEE US REAL SOON NOW!” and “WELCOME TO LOUISIANA, THE PELICAN STATE; CALL 1-800-33-GUMBO FOR TOURIST INFORMATION.”

  Alice
considered picking up her cellular phone and doing just that, but raised the small recorder instead and squeezed. “NEW PAGE,” she said. “HEADING Plot Line for UNDERSCORE Fire UNDERSCORE Ants; SUBHEADING Problems.” She relaxed her grip on the record bar, took a deep breath, and thought about the many problems with her plot so far. The basic idea was that the fire ants burrow into the SSC tunnels, are exposed to radiation, and mutate into giant ants that attack the countryside. Her research had turned up a few problems with this plot concept.

  First, the mobile ants, the one that were likely to be exposed to radiation, were workers. The queens and drones, the ones who reproduced and were the ones that mattered genetically, tended to stay in the anthill except for a brief trip to the outside world for a mating flight. She would have to have some special scenario that exposed a queen or drone to radiation. A queen would be better, she decided. She pressed the record bar and spoke. “BREAK Problem COLON Radiation exposure BREAK Find a way to expose a queen to radiation.”

  The depth of the SSC tunnel would also be a problem. The accelerator and the radiation that went with it were buried in a tunnel as deep underground as a thirty story office building is high. Ants never burrow more than a few feet below the surface. How were they supposed to get down to where the radiation was? She pressed the record bar again. “BREAK Problem COLON Depth in ground BREAK How does queen get down to radiation. BREAK Elevator? QUESTION,” she said.

  Another problem was that ants, and insects in general, were not very susceptible to radiation-induced mutations. Irradiated animals almost always died or became sterile instead of producing mutated offspring. A particle has to break both sides of just the right DNA strand in the same place and the broken ends have to oxidize before they rejoin, a Florida State University biologist had told her, and that was very unlikely. If you really wanted mutations, he’d said, it was far easier to produce them with certain organic chemicals than with radiation.