But the next step was easy—and essential for his peace of mind. He picked up his phone and searched for the next available flight to Chicago.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fermilab was familiar ground, particularly Wilson Hall, the towering office building in the center of the accelerator complex. Daniel had lost track of the number of times he’d been here since their first contact with Core.
Except for the emissary robot, no alien lifeform had visited Earth in the eight months since that day. Most people saw this as a positive sign—at least the aliens weren’t attacking. But it also meant that if humans had questions—and there were many—it required a trip to a star nearly four thousand light-years away, where Core was located. The only way to get there was through compressed space, and the only way to compress space was with a high-energy particle accelerator. For the first few months, Fermilab had had a monopoly on interstellar space travel.
But by January, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva had duplicated the technology, and Europeans had hosted two of the scheduled sessions with Core. Later, the Chinese, having admitted their responsibility for the Soyuz mishap, had offered the world’s newest and most powerful accelerator in Qinhuangdao. It had been used on one occasion, mostly a symbolic gesture of international cooperation.
Daniel knew things had changed the moment the taxi entered the Fermilab parking area, filled with police, fire and US government vehicles. Both the atrium and the top floor of Wilson Hall were busy with activity. Many of the new faces were people wearing uniforms that displayed arm patches from the Department of Energy or the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Daniel walked down the corridor of interior offices on the top floor of Wilson Hall. He slowed as he passed the one office that was empty and dark. The plaque by the door read Nala Pasquier. Several bouquets of flowers were stacked along the bottom of the office window, and someone had written We love you, Nala on the glass. A lump formed in Daniel’s throat. This trip wasn’t going to be easy.
He continued down the hall and stopped at Jan Spiegel’s office. The slender man with light blond hair looked up from his work and waved through the window for Daniel to come in.
“Daniel,” Jan said. “Good to see you again.” He stood up and shook Daniel’s hand with a solemn face. “I wish the circumstances were better.”
“Good to see you too, Jan. I’m sure you’re busy, but I wanted to come by and offer condolences to the staff.”
“Thank you. We’re all still in shock.” Jan’s eyes fixed on Daniel’s. “Condolences to you too. I believe you have lost as much, maybe more.” Jan motioned to a chair, and Daniel took it. Jan closed the door and leaned against the edge of his desk. “She loved you.”
The words were unexpected. Nala had never said them, and even if she’d felt that way, how would Jan know? Daniel had never mentioned his relationship with Nala to Jan or anyone else at Fermilab. They’d been discreet, or so he’d thought.
“She told you this?” Daniel asked.
“Not in those exact words, but I could tell. You’re surprised, Daniel. At her or me?”
“Both, I guess.” They had never declared their relationship to be a secret, but it was hard to picture Nala divulging personal information to Jan.
Jan seemed to understand the issue. “Nala and I shared a connection deeper than you might know.” He held up a hand. “Only as colleagues. But an intellectual connection to a person can be profound. The pain of her loss is very personal to me.”
“Her loss, as you and everyone says,” Daniel said. “I was told that no bodies were found. How sure are you?”
“Daniel Rice, the skeptic in all things.” Jan thought for a minute and then stood up. “To be honest, no, I’m not certain. But come with me and judge for yourself. I believe this is why you came to Fermilab today, is it not?”
Jan walked out of the office, and Daniel followed him down the hall. There was only one possible destination, and Daniel realized that Jan was right—it was the reason he had come to Fermilab.
They called the elevator and dropped past the ground floor to level B3, deep underground. They exited to a concrete corridor that Daniel knew well, but the corridor was now blocked by a barrier and what looked like a hastily erected guard station. Jan signed a log and the guard waved them past the barrier.
As they turned a corner, the familiar pathway changed. The right side of the corridor was gone. Twisted rebar protruded from the smashed concrete wall, and the broken floor fell away into an enormous pit. Security tape hung from the intact wall on the left to the cracked remains on the right. Beyond the tape and destruction, a single bright light hovered in empty space.
“Jesus,” Daniel whispered. A spotlight had been set up on one side and shined into the dark cavity. It illuminated a rotating disk of dust at least ten feet across.
“The blast shook the whole building,” Jan said. “Pictures fell off the walls up on the fifteenth floor.”
Daniel peered over the edge of the broken floor into a deep pit. He couldn’t see the bottom.
“Thirty-five thousand cubic meters of reinforced concrete was pulverized to dust,” Jan said. “The fire department sent some guys down there. They found a few scraps of materials that may have come from the lab, but no bodies.”
Daniel continued staring into the scene of destruction, feeling numb. “I see your point. Thanks for showing me.”
“If it helps, it was probably over quickly. Our systems operations guy was caught in it too. Thomas, I think you may have met him?”
It took Daniel a minute to register the name and to tear his thoughts away from what the blast must have been like. “Uh, yeah. Thomas. Funny guy.”
“He was; a very funny guy. He’d worked here for more than ten years. Always happy, always ready to try something new.” Jan’s features tightened, looking angry. “But he’s dead now, and so is Nala.”
A strange mix of emotions filled Daniel. Grief, skepticism, denial, all tangling with one another. Perhaps it was simply his ability to logically analyze anything, including his own emotional struggle. He hoped so, but he recognized he’d need to set that struggle aside for now.
Daniel pointed to the strange light in the center of the pit. “What is it?”
“We don’t really know,” Jan said. “It’s one of the things I’m working on.” He pointed to a metal stand set up near the edge of the pit. Several electronics boxes were stacked on top and an array of antennae and sensors of unknown function connected to a pole that rose above. “We’re monitoring everything we can to try to make sense of it. No doubt it’s a byproduct of the collapse of quantum space, unintended. Before the accident, Nala told me she created a smaller version of this in her lab. She thought it was a new type of singularity.”
“A singularity? But not a black hole?” Daniel asked.
“No, definitely not a black hole. That would involve enormous mass, and any particle accelerator works only with quantum-sized particles. But singularities may come in different forms. This might be a singularity formed by bosons alone and related to the collapse of four-dimensional space. It may share some properties with a black hole.”
Jan pulled out his phone and picked an app that drew a large purple arrow on the screen. A label next to the arrow marked it as Gravity. “The app is using the accelerometers in the phone to point straight down.” He tilted the phone and the arrow twisted, continuing to point down. “But watch this.”
Jan stepped closer to the edge of the pit and reached out as far as his arm would allow. The arrow on the screen wobbled, pointing more toward the light hovering in the center, as if it were a compass needle drawn to a nearby magnet.
“Gravity is different here. We’re gathering more data, but we still don’t know exactly what’s going on. Or why.”
Jan pocketed his phone and backed away to a safe distance from the edge. He grabbed a piece of rebar sticking out from the shredded wall and pulled like he wanted to tear it out. “It’s absurd that we’re still strugg
ling with this. For months, the whole world has shouted its praise for the great discoveries at Fermilab. Talk even of a Nobel Prize. But you see the reality.” He waved toward the destruction. “I feel like an undergraduate student who has only barely scratched the surface of the subject. We were playing with fire, all of us. I shouldn’t have allowed Nala to continue to test.”
He picked up a loose pebble of concrete and tossed it into the open pit. The rock made an unusually elongated arc in the disturbed gravitational field before finally turning down to the bottom of the pit. “I’ve spent most of my time since the accident searching for someone to blame. This was not an accident. It was inevitable. Entirely predictable. Much of the blame falls on me. I left everything in Nala’s hands, even after the instabilities started showing up. I’ll be second-guessing myself for a long time to come.”
Jan turned to Daniel, his anger showing. “But I also lay blame with this so-called friend of ours, Core. This intelligence out in space knew exactly what we were working on. This thing even pointed us toward HP bosons as the answer and expected us to study further. But where was the warning of the danger?”
“You’re right, we need to ask,” Daniel said.
“And we will,” Jan said, determined. “Unfortunately…” He pointed to the destruction.
“There’s CERN. You could go to Geneva. We could reach Core with their help.”
“I’ve already asked. Unfortunately, the IAEA has asked government particle acceleration labs worldwide to suspend operations until the Fermilab investigation is complete. Several weeks, minimum. I’m in touch with several sympathetic colleagues at CERN—and they are considering my request—but the bureaucracy over there can be slow.”
“How about the Chinese?”
“We’re working that angle too, but so far they haven’t responded to our request.”
“I can help,” Daniel said. “I’ll make some calls.”
“That might help, yes. If we can reestablish the communications with Core, I have a lot on my mind that I’d like to discuss.”
“You’re not the only one. I’m sure we can find another accelerator that can connect us to Core. Heck, they’re even creating 4-D space out of Romania now.”
“Romania?”
Daniel started back down the corridor, and they continued talking as they walked. “Yeah, that’s the case I was working on before I came here. A guy in Texas has a contract with a private Romanian lab. Apparently, the Romanians have your coherent neutrino beam all figured out.”
Jan rubbed a hand across his forehead. “It wouldn’t be hard. The word is out. With the classification lifted, we shared our techniques in a series of published papers. Any decent physicist with a gigaelectron-volt accelerator could reproduce it.”
They took an elevator to the lobby of Wilson Hall, its interior atrium soaring far above. “Based on what you know about the accident, should we shut this kind of business activity down?”
“Is your Texas guy a decent physicist?” Jan asked.
“He doesn’t know a proton from a coconut.”
“Better shut him down, then. I’m still dealing with a lot of unknowns. If we get some answers from Core, maybe we’ll be in a better place. Otherwise, it could be weeks, even months, before we know how to prevent this from happening again.”
“Getting the answer out of Core will be tough. Like squeezing juice from a rock.”
“Now you’re starting to sound like one of us,” Jan said.
Daniel shook his head. “I can only imagine what Nala had to say about Core.”
“A barrage of profanity that would singe your ears.”
“Yeah,” Daniel sighed. “She always was a delicate thing.”
18 Isolation
Nala woke to a sizzling sound and the smell of something burning. A foul smell like oil or creosote. Her head throbbed.
She opened one eye. Darkness surrounded her, but a dim light came from somewhere off in the distance. She lay on her stomach, her chin and open mouth pressed against a hard floor. A large piece of broken wood rested just in front of her face. She pushed it away.
A groan, a man’s voice, muted and far away, brought her back to reality. “Thomas!” she cried.
Nala could hear him, but pain and disorientation made it difficult to get up off the floor, much less find her colleague. He was alive; his moans verified that much. She was surprised to be alive herself.
She pushed up from the hard surface onto her knees. A wooziness in her head made the simple task a major effort. There was something about the air that didn’t feel right, but at least there was air.
A pinprick of light hovered in one direction, dimly illuminating a sea of debris all around. Shattered wood, bent metal, piles of broken wallboard and glass shards were everywhere. She recognized a portion of the workbench and a metal frame filled with smashed electronics that at one point had been part of her lab.
She inched forward on hands and knees toward the light. Pain shot up one knee, and she lifted it from the floor. There was enough light to see a small piece of glass that had punctured her pants and buried in the skin. She pulled it out and a spot of blood appeared. She examined herself. Both pant legs had rips, and her bare arms were cut in several places, but the blood was already congealed. Nothing appeared to be broken, and except for a throbbing headache, she felt no other pain. Thomas moaned again.
He’s hurt. I’ve got to find him.
She tried to stand; shoes would spare her hands and knees from the broken glass. The ground felt uneven, and her head spun. It was like trying to stand on a half-inflated beach ball. “Hang on, Thomas, I’m coming,” she shouted. Her voice disappeared into nothingness.
She took faltering steps toward the light. The moans seemed to be coming from that direction. Several chairs were overturned, the mini-fridge sat on its side, and piles of books, broken pipes and many other obstacles made the going slow.
Now standing, she could see that the debris field ended abruptly on one side, with nothing beyond but jet-black darkness. At first, she thought it was a shadow cast by something large blocking the light, but as she came closer, a very definite edge became apparent. The surface that she walked on and the debris that covered it ended at a vertical wall of darkness. The wall was speckled with thousands of tiny sparks randomly distributed across its surface. The sparks popped and crackled like drops of water in hot grease.
She didn’t dare touch the dark surface. Danger is obvious even when its form is entirely unknown. She searched along the sparkling wall toward the bright light in the distance and finally found him.
Thomas was on his back, arms splayed, and eyes closed. He lay among splintered boards in a pool of blood. She climbed over the debris and bent down by his side. His left leg protruded into and beyond the black vertical wall. A ring of sparks around the perimeter of his leg sizzled and popped where it touched the wall. It smelled like bacon frying.
“Holy shit. Thomas, this looks…” Bad. Worse than bad.
She grabbed him under both arms and dragged his heavy body a few feet until the sparks stopped. The lower portion of his leg was missing where it had touched the wall. His pants were soaked in blood.
She pushed aside more debris and kneeled next to his face. His breathing was shallow. She spoke gently in his ear. “I’m here, Thomas. I’ve got you.” She patted his arm and steeled herself to the task she knew would be gruesome. She carefully lifted the ripped pants to reveal a bloody leg cleanly sliced at midshin. Nausea was immediate, along with a dizziness that weakened her resolve. She took a deep breath.
You can do this. Thomas needs you. Stanch the bleeding. Your first-aid training, remember?
It seemed like ancient history, but portions of the training surfaced to her conscious thoughts. A tourniquet. She looked around and found a roll of masking tape. Not much strength in paper tape, but it might help. Her thoughts clarified. Use clothing strips instead.
Thomas was too heavy to turn over; she’d never get his pan
ts off, so she removed her own. They were made of light material and already torn in places, making it easier to get a rip started. A minute later, she had produced several long strips of cloth from one leg. The tinny smell of blood was strong closer to his severed leg, but she held her breath as she wrapped the strips just above the slice and tied them off as tightly as she could manage. The pressure of the binding did seem to slow the bleeding.
She ripped off the other leg of her pants and wrapped it around the end of the stump, then tied her belt loosely around the whole package. A primitive bandage, but it would have to do. If the first-aid kit was buried somewhere under all the debris, she might find it and do a better job of nursing later.
Nala scanned his body for other wounds but found nothing obvious. Except for the leg, he looked uninjured. His face was pale from blood loss, but he had fewer scratches from flying glass than she did.
She leaned in close. “Thomas, can you hear me?”
He moaned slightly.
“You’re alive. Alive is very good.” She pushed her cheek up against his and spoke into his ear. “Thomas, I’m going to take care of you. You’re going to be alright. Okay?”
He opened his lips slightly, but no words came out.
“Don’t try to talk. It’s okay. I’m going to try to find some medication and water for you.” Blood loss meant fluid loss. He’d need water. She’d remembered that much from her training. He was also in shock. She couldn’t remember the procedures for shock, but keeping him warm seemed like the right thing to do. She stood up and looked around for anything that might help. There were no blankets or towels, but she did find some shredded carpeting. She grabbed a large piece and laid it gently over his chest. She took another piece and placed it under his head.
Water. I had some in the fridge.
She made her way back into the darkness and located the mini-fridge. The dented door was jammed closed, but she managed to pry it halfway open. Inside were three water bottles, undamaged. The simple success made her smile. She carried the bottles back to Thomas, lifted his head and poured a small amount of water on his lips. Most of it dribbled onto the floor.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 43