Alicia spent her first minutes getting people out of her equipment. A fat, mournful-looking man was taking fingerprints and complained to her that it was hard to get anything off the oscilloscope knobs. Another climbed halfway up the bay and took vertical photos. Others milled around, many just watching, more people than made any sense.
To her surprise, Brad’s experiment was still running, the ‘scopes and detectors showing tiny red ON lights. She had left it in the rush to get Brad into the ambulance. Now the milling crowd edged gingerly around the bunches of light pipe, cabling, and struts, looking uncomfortable. Something had killed a man here and nobody knew what it was. But training died hard and the lab looked so innocuous that nobody seemed threatened.
At least they had not fooled around with the U-magnet, though the cloak was drawn back. Some of Sturges’s people were taking tiny samples of the cloak and wrinkling their foreheads. They spread the absorbent cover out on the concrete. It was scorched everywhere except for an odd blob. She studied it and suddenly saw the distorted shape of Brad, his shadow. Her head swam and she breathed deeply to clear it. The burnt smell swarmed up into her nostrils and she bent over in a wracking cough.
The buzz of conversations around her was lost in the tall, chilly bay, whose stark lighting bleached out the scene. She steadied herself, got her breath. The police lamps gave a clinical sharpness to the U-magnet. The sphere reflected the glare into their eyes, so few looked directly at it.
Then came the questions.
After she had arrived, most of the crowd had just shuffled back. Now they watched as she explained to a crescent arc of frowning faces how the experiment was set up and where Brad had been. By unspoken agreement they let Sturges set the tone.
“Professor Jalon, what is your role in this?”
“I’m a theorist from Caltech. I was helping Dr. Butterworth and her students understand what they had.”
“But not actively conducting experiments?”
“No, I just think.”
“Think what?”
“For a living.”
Sturges gave Max a sharp look, seemed to decide there was no point, and started asking Alicia quick, detailed questions about where Brad usually stood, where she had found him, what the parts of the experiment did. “Any chance he was playing with something inflammable?”
“There’s nothing here of that sort.” She gazed at him steadily.
“The sprinkler system didn’t go on. No signs of a fire, except the scorching on the inside of this ‘light blanket’ you’ve got here.” Sturges stooped and fingered the material, which someone on the technical team had spread out for close inspection.
“The sprinklers respond to soot in the air of a particular particle size,” she said tensely, just to be saying something. A quick pulse of radiation would not set it off at all.
Sturges ignored her digression and gestured at the U-magnet, where bundles of optical pipe diagnostics nearly concealed the sphere. “That thing you’re studying, what is it?”
“We don’t know. It seemed to us to be an unusual product of an accident at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. We were trying to fit it into understanding why our experiment there failed.”
“Looks like a metal ball,” Sturges said, peering between the magnet poles.
“Perhaps it is,” Alicia said and instantly regretted it. “But it doesn’t have many properties we understand.” None, actually. “We do know that it emits light in the far ultraviolet. Very little, though, so we had placed this array”—a gesture at the photoreceptors—“to pick up its spectrum.”
“So you figured right away it was radioactive?” Sturges asked.
“Not at all. No particle emission comes from the sphere. None. So far we had seen only very weak, invisible, ultraviolet emission.”
“Except that something roasted your student and this seems to you to be the likely source.” Sturges watched her carefully along with all the other eyes in the bay.
“I… believe so. I can’t think of any other way he could have… been in danger.”
“What can you tell us from all this”—his hand swept in the diagnostics in their steel frames—“about what happened?”
“Give me time to look at the data. I was gone well over an hour and the electronics are still compiling what Brad did.”
“You can figure out what went on here?”
“Uh, perhaps.” She was grateful for this chance to get away from the audience of eyes. She and Max went into the screening room. It was a plywood box with sheets of webbed steel that sheltered the optical and microwave detectors from outside emissions. Max shut the door and they looked at each other, both faces drained. A small pocket of privacy.
She sighed and sat before a computer keyboard with a big, flat screen. It was chugging away, still collecting data from the photoreceptors around the sphere. No damage evident to the system, not a single light pipe gone dead.
She called up the running data file and found that Brad had been doing the reduction in real time, smoothing out the statistical jitters. The incoming photon counts got batched and handed off to a separate program, running on another computer, which sorted and displayed the spectrum. She had expected the familiar blackbody spectrum they had seen before and indeed, early in Brad’s run there were plenty of the curves. The cooling had continued, she saw, slewing peaks of the curves to the left, as compared with days ago.
She hit keys and quickly flashed through a dozen spectra. “My God, the spectra are coming closer together in time.”
“So?” Max asked.
“We’ve got the system almost on automatic. It collects light long enough to make a reliable, smooth spectrum, then compiles it. A week or so ago, we took data for days to get one spectrum. These last few, though, have been shaping up in less than an hour of data collecting.”
“So the intensity was climbing.”
She typed furiously, her eyes widening. “Yes. Climbing through today, particularly. While I was busy and Brad was registering all this and saying nothing.”
“Up by a couple orders of magnitude, looks like.”
Max was leaning over her shoulder, reading numbers off the vertical axis of the spectra. She did not like people doing that but suppressed her annoyance; he was right about the increase, too. “Why didn’t Brad tell me? Damn.”
“His discovery, he figured?”
“That would fit the Brad I know. He was competing with Zak Nguyen, some issue between them.”
“Ambitious grad students go with the territory.”
“He must have known this for days. I was working on other stuff—”
“Don’t start blaming yourself,” he said emphatically.
“Right, just do the data.” She sat up straight, smoothed her hair back from her forehead.
“Let me have that intensity data, though. I want to look it over.”
She quickly printed out the spectra; let him get whatever he liked from them. She felt herself veering away from all this, her thoughts shooting off in all directions to escape somehow from what had happened. A long watery sigh escaped and Max gave her a worried look. Get a grip, she told herself fiercely.
“Let’s… let’s follow these spectra forward,” she muttered. There was trouble with the data files as she stepped them forward in time. Those from this afternoon were much more powerful and the program had trouble accommodating the huge increases. The smooth spectra also showed a thin, jagged peak.
“This looks wrong,” she said.
“Or maybe it’s not a blackbody anymore,” Max said.
She studied the peak in what had been the expected blackbody curves, thinking. As an emitter became transparent, it lost the simple blackbody emission form. Instead, the radiation began breaking through, light no longer captured and reemitted. Sharper, distinctive lines could begin to poke their heads above the smoothness.
“The intensity’s going up fast, too,” Max pointed out.
“Ummm.” She jumped through the lat
e-afternoon collection bin; the peak got bigger, jutting out. “Don’t know if I trust any of this.”
“Is there any more?”
She checked the compilation lag. “Incomplete collection in the next run, seems to be.” She told the program to display the spectrum anyway, narrowed to the odd peak. The software ground around as the hard disks buzzed, trading information, and then the screen filled with a ragged spike, a classic atomic radiation line.
“Very energetic emission,” Max said.
“Look at the intensity!”
“Up orders of magnitude.”
“Bright and sharp.” She checked the time log. “This would be right around when Brad…”
“Yeah. The smoking gun.”
“What line is that?”
“Let me look up something…” Somewhere in the software menu, she recalled, there was a finder routine that matched an observed line with candidate frequencies of various atoms and molecules. She found it and pulled down the appropriate menus, the usual pointing and clicking that still reminded her of kids’ games. In less than a minute she said, “It’s hydrogen.”
“Can’t be.”
“It fits the basic recombination line.”
“You’re sure?” Max was leaning over her shoulder again.
“Of course I’m not. That’s just the closest comparison.”
“That’s the line emitted when an electron falls into the lowest hydrogen orbit?”
“The lowest Lyman line, yes.”
“So whatever’s on the other side of this has changed from being a hot plasma into hydrogen gas.”
“I thought there was a star at the other end of this wormhole.”
He shrugged. “The star part was a guess. Whatever the hot plasma is on the other end, it’s cooling off.”
“Cooling fast. But why the huge flash of this Lyman radiation?”
“Suppose the other end of the wormhole is growing. If it opened up suddenly, letting a lot more light come in—”
“Why should it?”
“You said yourself that the size of this end is changing.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Grew by half a centimeter.”
“It’s growing. That’s the point. On the other side the mouth could suddenly open up—”
“Why?” she persisted.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to be led by the facts here.”
She sank lower in her chair. “The fact is that the thing killed Brad.” Flash-fried him, she thought but did not say.
“True.” Max himself sagged into a roller chair and they sat looking at the bright, cheery colors of the graphics display.
“Let’s look at all the data sets together,” she said numbly.
It compiled quickly. She typed in instructions which dropped away the spectral pictures and just gave the total intensity of the emission. These she plotted versus time. “Wow, look at what happens after 1 P.M.,” she said. The curve rose steadily from 13:00 on, then really took off. A sharp spike of emission had occurred at 18:07, the time register said.
“Off the chart,” Max whispered.
“That’s the burst, all right,” she said. “Many orders of magnitude brighter than we were getting before. See, the system saturated in self-defense.”
The electronics had shut down the detectors, or else they would have been swamped. Max said, “It must have started glowing.”
She saw his point. “Brad would’ve noticed it, even if he was in here just looking at the digitized images. So he ducked under the light blankets to have a look.”
“Probably stuck his head up to it, curious,” Max said.
“Rather than call me.”
She understood completely. In research there came enchanted moments when one seemed to be peering into the heart of reality. Often they came to the solitary gaze, in gliding quiet times of concentration. She had experienced moments like that and remembered them clearly. Brad had been admiring something strange and lustrous in his last moments. He had died as a scientist, not out of accident, but out of the irreducible danger that went with the unknown. A strange chill ran through her.
They sat there for a long moment. Max finally stood and whispered, “What’ll you—ah, we—tell them outside? They’re waiting.”
She sighed. The hushed moment had slipped away. The physics puzzle had mercifully taken her attention, given her some rest of a sort. Now she had to go out there and answer more questions from Onell and Lattimer and Detective Sturges—
“Wait a minute. Why is everybody letting that detective ask all the questions?”
“Homicide investigation comes first,” he said somberly.
“They think…?”
“They suspect. So they nose around.”
“Am I a suspect?”
He shrugged. “It’s your lab.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Sure, but these guys are methodical. They have their routines.”
“I wonder what they’ll think of this hydrogen line business.”
“Pass it off as some technical accident,” he said confidently, then added, “I hope.”
She took off her clothes and threw them into the hamper. As she groggily took down her hair, she suddenly smelled it: a singed acid tang, thick in her hair.
She went straight to the shower and washed it, but after she blow-dried it out, the damned hair still smelled. It took leaving the scented shampoo on for ten minutes and two more showers before she was sure the smell was gone. It was hard to be sure because in straining she was trying not to remember the smell at all.
It was far past midnight and she made herself not review the last few hours. The only good advice she had gotten after emerging from the screening room with Max came from a UCI lawyer, summoned by Vice Chancellor Lattimer. He had whispered, “Say nothing and make it sound convincing.”
She took two pills from a prescription a guy had gotten for her, a face only vaguely remembered now, though she had gone out with him several times four years ago. She had not realized until him that you could meet a man and like him and just as fast, say in a nasty hour in a restaurant, it could all go wrong. Well, at least she had gotten these pills out of it, which was rather more than she had to show for the others—a few, very few, other men.
The pills did not work at all and she was afraid to take any more. The guy four years ago had warned her about that.
3
The next day was pure hell of a kind she had never imagined.
First her introductory physics class, which felt like swimming through mud. Then the campus safety review board came to inspect the lab. After that, delegations from several other appendages of the campus bureaucracy, each probing her with questions for which she had pitifully few answers. Each wanted copies of lab notebooks, computer files, printouts; the urge to document, amass files, show that you were doing something concrete.
Next, a meeting with Chairman Onell and Executive Vice Chancellor Lattimer, each acting as though they had become their titles.
All through this she tried to figure out what had happened. She stared at the graphs on the flat, multicolored computer screen. The intensity of light coming from the sphere had risen rapidly in the hour she was over in Lattimer’s office.
Brad would have seen it. Though the emission was at high frequencies beyond sight, there was weak radiation in the high, visible blue. Brad would have watched the sphere, wondering why it was lighting up, looking closer—
Then the flash. The spectra hinted that there was emission all the way up into the X ray. That alone might have killed him, but there was plenty of ultraviolet to do the job, too.
Then the emission fell. She plotted out the time dependence.
Exponential. The hydrogen recombination line began to slide down in frequency, and the temperature of the overall spectrum dropped.
She pulled the light blanket aside and stepped into the close, cloaked blackness. The safety people had added layers, making sure that if any burst of emission ca
me from the sphere, it would be muffled by nonflammable layers. They were already talking about erecting lead-concrete walls around it.
The sphere was invisible in the dark. The intensity was dropping steadily and had been already below visibility when she came back into the lab and found Brad, about thirty minutes after the flash. She leaned into the U-magnet and sniffed. No tang of ozone, either.
She thought about Max’s ideas. Plenty of maybes, no real answers.
Max came down the next day and helped her get through Brad’s funeral. Jill volunteered, too, but Alicia believed the day would be awkward enough and did not want to complicate matters.
Brad Douglas had been from a small town that was now just an off-ramp, swallowed by the expansion east of Riverside. Brad’s parents were quiet and worn-looking and she could find no way to get through the silences that surrounded them. They were stiff and polite and asked her nothing. Somehow that was worse than anything she had anticipated.
The service was in the Gremlich Funeral Home, five blocks from the 55 freeway. It seemed an odd choice to her, until later at the reception she had helped Mrs. Douglas with the food in the kitchen and saw the calendar on the wall. “Oh yes,” Mrs. Douglas said, “they send us one every year.” It was from the funeral home; all those free calendars had finally paid off for Mr. Gremlich.
And Gremlich knew his business. The reception line led straight by the coffin, so everyone got a full view of Gremlich’s craft. She had a terrible moment imagining Brad even after, as the doctor at the hospital had put it, a lot of reconstruction work was needed. Without wanting to, she was looking down at him from a great height, and she saw a giant version of those dolls people make out of dried apples…
Then she turned away, suddenly realizing that she had been standing there—how long?—and absurdly, how the metallic blue coffin made her recall a 1950 Mercury.
A minister spoke for a long time—or it seemed long. He started with compliments to the corpse and then moved on to the higher ramifications and meanings of it all. A lot of moral implications, rules for living, lessons to be drawn. He had an unnerving way of smiling after every few sentences. She folded her arms and reflected that death was one of the few biological functions that this kind of religion seemed to approve of.
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