George and the Big Bang

by Lucy Hawking

  ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is designed specifically to search for quark-gluon plasma produced by colliding lead ions. This plasma is believed to have existed very soon after the Big Bang. ALICE is 26 meters (85 feet) long, 16 meters (52 feet) wide, 16 meters (52 feet) high, and weighs about 10,000 metric tons (22,046,226 pounds).

  LHCb (Large Hadron Collider-beauty)—the “beauty” in the name of this experiment refers to the beauty, or b quark, which it is designed to study. The aim is to clarify the difference between matter and antimatter. It is 21 meters (69 feet) long, 10 meters (33 feet) high, 13 meters (43 feet) wide, and weighs 5,600 metric tons (12,345,886 pounds).

  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

  New Discoveries?

  The Standard Model of particle physics describes the fundamental forces, the particles that transmit those forces, and three generations of matter particles.

  But …

  Only 4.6% of the Universe is made from the type of matter we know. What is the rest made of (the dark matter and dark energy)?

  Why do elementary particles have masses? The Higgs boson—a particle predicted by the Standard Model but never observed—could explain this. Hopefully the LHC will see the Higgs for the first time.

  Why does the Universe contain so much more matter than antimatter?

  For a brief time, just after the Big Bang, quarks and gluons were so hot that they couldn’t yet combine to form protons and neutrons—the Universe was filled with a strange state of matter called quark-gluon plasma. The LHC will re-create this plasma, and the ALICE experiment is set to detect and study it. In this way, scientists hope to learn more about the strong nuclear force and the development of the Universe.

  New theories are trying to bring gravity (and space and time) into the same quantum theory that already describes the other forces and subatomic particles. Some of these ideas suggest there may be more than the familiar four dimensions of space-time. Collisions at the LHC could allow us to see these “extra dimensions,” if they exist!

  Even though the smooth running of the great experiment should have been a source of great happiness for Eric, instead it was a lonely and strange time. His colleagues and friends were sympathetic but distant. Until the Order resolved the dark cloud hanging over his name, Eric was a controversial figure whom people tended politely to avoid.

  Even worse than the isolation from his peers, Eric realized he was on the cusp of becoming alienated from his work. The round of experiments being prepared were the most powerful of all, and might unlock the answers to the great questions of physics. But, Eric suddenly realized, if the meeting went against him and he was thrown out of the Order of Science, he would have to leave immediately; he might not be here to witness the most important moment in science since the Big Bang. No matter what the results of the experiment, Eric realized he might be banned from reading the data. Until he was reinstated as a trusted and responsible colleague, he remained a solitary and suspect individual, on the fringes of the scientific world. Was this, he wondered, what he himself had done to Dr. Reeper all those years ago? Was this how Reeper had felt when he found himself reviled and rejected by all his peers? Eric sank in gloom as he considered his future, spent far away from the work he loved above all else.

  His pager beeped.

  Meeting confirmed tonight at 19.30 hrs. Underground trigger room, read the flashing letters. Eric gulped. At last, his fate would be decided.

  Eric had been waiting for some time now. It had taken all the members of the Order of Science longer to get here than they had at first calculated. Eric didn’t even have Cosmos for company. The supercomputer had been confiscated the minute he had stepped onto the tarmac in Switzerland from his small jet. Dr. Ling, the Chinese scientist who had spotted Eric and George on the Moon, had been waiting for him at the airfield.

  “I’m so sorry, Eric,” Dr. Ling had said, looking very embarrassed, unable to meet Eric’s eye as the rain poured down from the night sky, “but you must hand Cosmos over immediately.”

  “What will happen to him?” asked Eric.

  “He will be interviewed by The Grid,” said Dr. Ling. “The Grid will review all Cosmos’s activities since he was put in your care.”

  An image of Freddy flashed into Eric’s mind. He wondered what The Grid, the vast and sprawling computer network that analyzed data from the Large Hadron Collider, would make of Cosmos and Eric transporting a pig from a farmyard to a peaceful rural setting. And of Eric and George’s recent trip to the Moon—not to mention his various journeys around the Universe with not one but two kids in tow.

  The Grid was one of the mightiest computers in the world, but he wasn’t like Cosmos. Cosmos had a special power that The Grid completely lacked: He had empathy, and this allowed him to be creative, making him the world’s most intelligent computer. Despite his name, The Grid was unable to bypass his own rigid rules or make intuitive connections between different pieces of information. In a straight contest, Eric knew clever little Cosmos would win every time against the enormous bully. But even so, Eric was sad to see his little silver friend taken away for such a challenging experience.

  As he waited in the main control room Eric looked at the clock. Not long to go now until the meeting to decide his fate. He was still baffled by the speed at which his life had unraveled. Was it really so drastic, that photo taken on the Moon? Did it really merit this extraordinary meeting of the Order? Weren’t they making a very big mountain out of what was, after all, just a lunar molehill?

  A scientist walked past him, nose in the air, attempting to evade Eric’s gaze.

  Eric stopped him. “Is Professor Zuzubin here?” he asked anxiously.

  Perhaps he could persuade his old tutor to take a relaxed view of the incident. Maybe Zuzubin would ask the Order to go easy on Eric, provided he promised never to do anything like this again … ?

  “Zuzubin?” said the scientist. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” said Eric in surprise. “But I thought he called this meeting! Why wouldn’t he stay when the result must be so important to him?” The other scientist didn’t hang around to answer him, so Eric was left alone with his thoughts once more.

  Something was very wrong here. The meeting had been arranged too quickly and on too flimsy an excuse. Zuzubin, who’d seemed to be in charge, had suddenly vanished, and Cosmos was now handcuffed to The Grid, being examined circuit by circuit. This, Eric suddenly realized, was not the way things should be. Something was very wrong indeed. But what could he do?

  He looked at his cell phone. The screen was blank. Even here in the main control room, the Grid exerted a powerful blocking signal, meaning you could only use the internal paging system or the LHC phone network. Anyway, he realized with a shock, he didn’t have anyone to call. The only person who would unquestioningly believe him was George, and this really wasn’t the moment to bring a kid into this difficult and uncomfortable situation.

  Sighing, Eric felt he might as well switch off his phone before the battery died. He mooched around the control room for a few more minutes but suddenly felt he couldn’t stand it any longer. There was only one thing for it. Faced with the hostility and suspicion of his peers, bored of his isolation and lack of activity, and frustrated at the manner in which his opinion was being disregarded, Eric decided he would go for a long, soothing walk.

  Chapter Fourteen

  George shot out of the silver tunnel and landed on his belly, skidding across his bedroom floor. He lay there, panting, until he realized that, as on the asteroid, he was not alone. This time, two pairs of feet in sneakers were waiting for him. He rolled over onto his back. Through the window of his space helmet, two blurred faces peered down at him, distorted by the curved glass. One was fringed with blonde hair and had round, worried blue eyes. The other, topped by a plume of black spikes, looked totally astonished.

  “George”—the smaller figure shook him—“you’re back! You shouldn’t have gone by yourself!”

  Who
were these people? George struggled to place them. It was as if they’d met once, in a strange dream, and he could no longer remember why or how he knew them. Lights danced in front of his eyes as he battled with the shifting, multi-colored cloud inside his head to form thoughts that meant something. But they just seemed to evaporate into the mist in his brain before he could seize on any of them to make sense of what was happening to him.

  The taller figure grabbed George’s hands in their space gloves and pulled him to his feet. But George couldn’t stand up. It was as though his bones had melted and his muscles turned to mush.

  “Oh, man!” the larger figure said, catching George as he crumpled to the floor. George’s vision went in and out of focus, the swirling silver light of the tunnel still turning before his eyes. “Where did you come from? What was that?”

  Looking around blearily, George could just about see that the portal had closed again and Pooky was still and quiet. Only these two facts seemed to signify anything to his confused mind. This strange person had him in his arms now, half-carrying him to the bed, where he laid George down, still wearing his space suit and perched uncomfortably on top of his oxygen tank. A pair of hands undid the clasp on his space helmet and took it off, then mopped George’s soaking face with a corner of the duvet cover.

  “Water!” shouted the smaller figure. “Get him some water!”

  The other person dashed out of the room, coming back with a mug in his hands. “Here, drink this.” He dribbled a few drops into George’s mouth.

  The small person was tugging off George’s space boots. “George! It’s me—Annie. Vincent, help me!” she ordered. “We need to get him out of this space suit.”

  They each took a boot, unclipped the fasteners, and pulled, both flying backward with a thump as they suddenly released George’s feet from the heavy boots. But this didn’t stop them for a second—they just got up and rushed back over to George, who was looking worse by the minute. His face was white as a sheet, except for his cheeks, which were mottled with bright pink patches, and his eyes rolled around in their sockets as he tried and failed to focus them.

  “What’s happened to him?” cried Vincent as Annie sat George upright and unsnapped the oxygen tank from his back.

  “Unzip him,” she commanded.

  Vincent unzipped the suit and dragged George’s arms out of it. “Stand up,” he said, lifting George up so that he could pull off the space suit, revealing George’s shirt and jeans underneath.

  George just flopped into Vincent’s arms, as though he had no bones in his body. Vincent laid him carefully back down on the bed, using a T-shirt he found on the floor to wipe George’s face, which was again covered in beads of sweat.

  “The suit!” shouted Annie. “Give me the suit!” Vincent threw the heavy suit over to her and she started rifling through the pockets. “Where is it?” she muttered.

  “He doesn’t look so good,” warned Vincent. “Shall I call a doctor?”

  Annie looked up from the suit. “And say what?” she asked desperately. “Our friend got back from space and he’s not feeling well? How can we explain that he traveled through an unauthorized portal that clearly wasn’t safe?” Her voice was rising hysterically. Some green drool was now snaking out of George’s mouth and dribbling down his chin.

  “Help me!” said Annie. “Help me find the emergency space drops—they’re in one of these pockets.”

  Vincent slid off the bed and grabbed the other half of the suit, which he patted all over, trying to feel for something in its depths. “Is this it?” He’d located a small plastic bottle in an arm pocket. SPACE RESCUE REMEDY it said in cheery red letters on the bottle. Vincent read out the words on the label. “Do you need a space rescue? Have you had a bad space experience? Nausea? Loss of vision? Muscles turned to glue? Hair loss?” He looked anxiously at George, who still seemed to have a full head of hair.

  “Give!” shouted Annie.

  “Have you taken this before?” said Vincent suspiciously, holding onto the bottle.

  “Never needed to,” she admitted. “But Dad always told us to take it if we were travel-sick after a space journey.”

  “Where does it come from?” said Vincent.

  “We get it from Space Adventures R Us. They send it with each space suit my dad buys,” said Annie. “But I never imagined we’d actually use it.”

  Vincent tossed it over to her and noticed that George was now twitching violently. Annie gently squirted a few drops from the nozzle of the small bottle into George’s mouth. Some of the amber liquid oozed out between his numb lips, which were now turning blue.

  “Please, planets and stars,” muttered Annie, “make this work for George!” She carefully squirted a few more drops into his mouth.

  “Did you check the dose?” Vincent asked her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “The bottle only contains one dose, so you can’t take too much; that’s what Dad said.”

  As she spoke, George’s lips started turning pink again, and his face was changing from mottled white and pink to its usual healthy color. His breathing slowed from rapid gasps to a gentle whoosh, and his eyelids fluttered as the Space Rescue Remedy ran though his system, putting right the things the cosmic journey had messed up.

  “Oh, George!” said Annie—and burst into tears. Vincent came over to give her a hug—just as George’s eyes opened again.

  “What the … ?” mumbled George.

  Annie and Vincent sprang apart and rushed over to either side of the bed.

  “George! You’re alive!” Annie kissed him sloppily on the cheek.

  George’s head was pounding. “Annie … ?” he mumbled. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me!” she said joyfully. “And Vincent,” she added. “We saved you! You came through some weird-looking tunnel in your space suit and started having a fit.”

  “I had a fit?” repeated George, who was feeling stronger by the second. He sat up and looked around his bedroom.

  “You were dribbling,” said Vincent helpfully. “And your eyes had gone crazy.”

  George lay back down on the bed and let his eyelids close. This was all super-weird. He tried to remember what had happened, but the only image he could focus on was Annie hugging Vincent when he’d come out of his brightly colored delirium.

  “George,” she said urgently. “Where were you? What were you doing, out in space without us?”

  “Us?”

  “Me and Vincent,” said Annie, a touch impatiently now that she could see George was going to be fine. “We would have come with you, if you’d just waited. We got here as quickly as we could, once you stopped talking on the phone.”

  “How did you get in the house?” George’s brain had not yet recovered enough to take him back to space—it could only deal with the details of what was going on immediately around him.

  A wail from downstairs answered the question. “Your mom and the twins,” said Annie. “Daisy let us in.”

  “Does she know? About the space portal?” said George, sitting up again in panic.

  “No, she’s too busy with the babies—they make so much noise, I don’t think she heard anything,” said Annie.

  “Here, drink this.” Vincent handed George a mug of water.

  George took a huge gulp and then nearly spat it out. “What is that?” he said in disgust.

  “Sorry,” said Vincent. “It’s the toothbrush mug. It was the first thing that came to hand.”

  “C’mon,” urged Annie. “C’mon, George, think! Where have you been? Why did you go?”

  George’s mind snapped into focus. It all came whooshing back to him, brilliantly clear and very, very urgent.

  “Oh, holy supersymmetric strings … ,” he said slowly, using Emmett the computer geek’s favorite phrase. He looked at Annie and Vincent, deciding on what to say. “Vincent, can I trust you?”

  “I think you have to,” said Annie, putting her arm around George, “given what he’s just seen. And he helped save y
our life. Just tell us, George—what happened to you out there?”

  He thought for a second. There was more at stake here than just his feelings. He might not be super-fond of Vincent, but the karate kid was here now, and obviously he knew everything.

  George took a deep breath. “I’ve seen Reeper,” he told them.

  “So he was there,” said Annie, “waiting for you.”

  “That’s the creepy guy, right?” said Vincent, reaching over and taking a swig out of George’s toothbrush mug.

  “Um—yeah,” said George. “He took me out to an asteroid in Andromeda.”

  “Andromeda!” squeaked Annie. “Wow! I’ve never been that far.” She almost sounded jealous.

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.” George grimaced. “I don’t think Pooky’s portal would pass any safety checks.”

  “You looked rough, man,” said Vincent admiringly. “You must be made of strong stuff.”

  “Er, thanks,” said George.

  At that moment his mom knocked on the door and poked her head in. “I brought you some broccoli and spinach muffins!” She passed a plate into the room.

  “Thanks, Mrs. G,” said Annie, swiftly taking the plate and blocking the doorway until Daisy had disappeared downstairs, summoned by another angry wail from one of the twins. “They look delicious!” Annie called after her.

  Vincent, who was always hungry, fell on the plate of muffins with a little cry of joy. As he tasted them, his expression changed from delight to surprise.

  “Oh my God!” he exclaimed through a mouthful of crumbs.

  Annie kicked him sharply before he could make any rude comments about Daisy’s cooking. It was all right for her and George to laugh about it, but suddenly she realized that it wasn’t okay for Vincent to make fun of George’s mom.

  “I just meant this tastes like serious energy food,” Vincent assured her. “Like we eat before a karate championship. That’s all. No wonder George is a man of steel, if this is what he lives on.”

  “What time is it?” asked George.