by Glenn Cooper
No one was hit.
He rose in time to see the man accosting a woman in the visitor car park, pushing her back into the driver’s side of her Ford sedan and climbing in beside her.
“He’s got one of the reporters!” John shouted. “Call the police, Trev, I’m going to try to stop him.”
John launched himself through the shattered door, skidding on broken glass before running toward the car park. But the Ford was already speeding off, wildly clipping the bumper of a parked car as it raced toward the perimeter gate.
John yelled into his walkie-talkie, “Gate A, Gate A! We’ve got an armed man with a hostage approaching you. Get the plate number but do not attempt to block him. The police are on the way.”
He could only watch helplessly as the Ford hurtled through the open gate and turned toward the Dartford city center.
The next several hours were fitful and chaotic. The first thing John did was to make sure the press got off campus with as few questions as possible. The press had assembled at the media center and fortunately, none of them had witnessed the lobby incident. They left reluctantly, to put it mildly, but with a security clampdown in effect, they had no choice. With Quint in casualty having his scalp wound stapled, John took sole charge of the post-incident investigation. The CCTV footage was dissected and interviews were conducted with control room eyewitnesses. Despite the obvious conclusion that Emily had seemingly vanished into thin air, John insisted that every inch of the lab be searched. Her mobile phone was at her work station in the control room. When the search came up empty he personally retrieved her car keys from her office and searched her vehicle in the car park.
She was gone. Missing without a trace.
While the search for Emily was ongoing, John tasked Trevor with spearheading the investigation into the mystery man. Trevor liaised with the police who were blanketing Dartford looking for the carjacked journalist, a freelance science writer from London, and worked with a police crime scene unit to dust all surfaces the man might have touched. The lab’s head of communications crafted a press statement that the MAAC had been safely powered-down following an unauthorized intrusion by an armed man who later kidnapped a journalist. That was as far as anyone was willing to go for the moment.
In two hours’ time, Quint, his head heavily bandaged, returned to the lab and assembled the management group for a crisis meeting. John briefed him on the search for Emily and the intruder and the police investigations. Matthew Coppens, who had not been able to stop shaking since the incident, summarized the shutdown protocols.
When the time came for Quint to speak, John found him tentative and unfocused. He launched into a rambling monologue on how angry the energy secretary seemed when she reached him in hospital and how difficult it was dealing with dual scientific and political agendas. That’s when John lost it.
“Look, Dr. Quint,” he said, “I don’t give a damn about your political problems right now. Dr. Loughty is missing! You haven’t even mentioned her name. I want to know what the hell happened this morning. Emily was obviously livid when the accelerator went beyond twenty TeV. She’s the head of research and it’s damned clear that you and Dr. Coppens went behind her back to exceed the limits of Hercules I.”
“Look here, Mr. Camp,” Quint said angrily. “You’re the head of security. Stick to your knitting and leave the science to the scientists. And rather than pointing an accusatory finger elsewhere I suggest you point it at yourself. You allowed an unprecedented security incident to happen on your watch. An unauthorized stranger got access to the most sensitive area of the lab. Believe me, I’ve already made the secretary aware of your failings. If heads are going to roll, yours will be the first.”
Suddenly, Matthew Coppens lifted his bowed head and shouted, “Mr. Camp is blameless here! The blame lays elsewhere, Dr. Quint. It lies with me and it lies with you.”
Quint abruptly ordered everyone but John and Matthew out.
When the room was cleared he sat back down and said, “Dr. Coppens, I won’t stand for this kind of insubordination and I am putting you on warning. And Mr. Camp, I am seriously inclined to relieve you of duty. I have been aware of your intimate relationship with Dr. Loughty and I’m afraid it has clouded your judgment. I require objectivity from members of my staff, particularly in moments of crisis.”
Matthew started sobbing. “I never should have listened to Dr. Quint,” Matthew said. “I never should have betrayed Emily.”
There was a box of tissues on the sideboard. John got it and slid it over. “Okay. Here’s what I want to know,” John said, ignoring Quint’s rant. “Why did you go beyond twenty TeV? And give me your best assessment what happened here. Emily disappeared in under one-sixtieth of a second.”
Matthew started to say something but Quint interrupted him. “Dr. Coppens, let me advise you …”
“You can’t shut me up,” Matthew said. “If we’re going to find Emily then everything needs to come out.”
“Let him speak,” John demanded, “or that head wound of yours is going to feel like a love tap.”
Quint stiffened at the threat and kept quiet.
Matthew crumpled his moist tissue and tossed it onto the table. “This was all about the merger, wasn’t it? Everyone knows that MAAC’s delays were the reason that a decision was taken to merge us with the LHC. And everyone knows that Gestner from CERN was going to be taking over responsibility for MAAC. Dr. Quint told me that the only way he’d be able to hold onto his position was for Hercules to have immediate success with something higher profile than CERN’s Higgs discovery. According to him we needed to find the graviton now, not in two year’s time with Hercules II, but now. Which meant leapfrogging to thirty TeV.”
“Even though it wasn’t safe,” John said.
“We didn’t know it wasn’t safe,” Quint said, stony-faced. “We still don’t.”
“Okay, Matthew,” John said as if Quint wasn’t even there. “What do you think happened this morning?”
Matthew looked at him squarely. “Have you ever heard of strangelets?”
3
Matthew raced through a layman’s primer on particle physics. John had heard some of the terms bandied about during staff meetings but he had always tuned out when the scientific patois thickened. Now he gave it his full attention.
Matthew explained that quarks were the fundamental particles of matter. They combined to form hadrons such as protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. There were six different types of quarks, all of them identified with certainty and given quirky names during the latter half of the twentieth century: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom, each with a different spin and charge. Strange quarks were highly unstable and existed for fleeting moments before decaying into lighter up and down quarks. Strangelets were hypothetical particles consisting of equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks bound together.
“Hypothetical,” Quint spitting out the word like a hairball. “Did you hear that, Camp? Hypothetical.”
“I won’t deny it,” Matthew said, “but most elemental particles were hypothetical before they were proved real.”
“Go on,” John said. “I’m listening.”
Strangelets, Matthew continued, were thought to have occurred in certain high-energy scenarios, such as the early stages of the formation of the universe, or within neutron stars or with head-on collisions of cosmic rays.
“How about inside the MAAC?” John asked.
“That’s the important question,” Matthew said. “Yes, theoretically colliders can produce strangelets. However, to date, no collider, not even the LHC has been shown to generate them. But this morning we exceeded all previous collision energies.”
“And?”
“David Laurent and his people are analyzing the spectrometer data. He’s going to come see me when he’s got some conclusions.”
“And what if strangelets were produced?” John asked.
“Again, it’s hypothetical, but it’s always
been one of those infinitesimally small risk factors out there in collider research. These strangelets, the theory goes, particularly negatively charged strangelets, would be highly unstable but the larger they were the more stable they’d become. So the disaster scenario goes like this: one strangelet collides with a nucleus of ordinary matter and catalyzes its transformation into strange matter. This liberates considerable energy producing a larger more stable strangelet that collides with ordinary matter catalyzing more strange matter. And on and on in a chain reaction, until all the ordinary matter in the world is converted into a molten lump of strange matter. Again, hypothetically, this could happen in the blink of an eye.”
John arched his brows. “That doesn’t seem to have happened.”
“Clearly not, but I’ve always been concerned about more subtle scenarios,” Matthew said.
“Such as?”
“Okay, I know I’m out on a limb here, and you can see from Dr. Quint’s face that he thinks I’m on the fringe, but far more likely than a cataclysmic chain reaction involving massive amounts of ordinary matter is a short-chain of strange matter production. This would involve minute amounts of matter. The strange matter formed would spontaneously decay harmlessly in a miniscule fraction of a second.”
“What’s the problem with that?”
“The energy generated when strange matter is produced would be relatively enormous, much higher on a unit basis than nuclear fission or fusion.”
“But there wasn’t an explosion,” John said.
“Right, no explosion. What I’m talking about is intense energy production on a scale that’s unimaginably small. Something huge and tiny at the same time, if that makes sense.”
Dr. Quint piped up, irritated, “Listen, this is a waste of our time.”
“Please, hear me out. I’m almost finished,” Matthew said. “Strangelets may be hypothetical and so are gravitons but Dr. Quint and every scientist who works here believes gravitons will be found. For all we know, when the data’s analyzed, we may have found them today. Gravity is peculiar as all get up. It’s ridiculously feeble. After all, when I pick up this pen my puny arm muscles are defeating the gravitational pull of the entire Earth. We think it’s such a weak force because gravitons may spread out over, not just our observable dimensions, but through all the extra dimensions of the cosmos. The equations of supersymmetry and string theory argue strongly for the existence of extra dimensions. In fact, most of the really good theoretical physicists today believe that the consequence of extradimensionality is that our universe exists as one in a multiverse of other universes, perhaps an infinite number of other universes. Communication between these other universes is impossible. We’re trapped like flies on sticky paper in our own three dimensional space in our own universe. But gravity, which is the warping of space-time, is the exotic traveller. Gravitons can freely tunnel into other universes. Do you follow?”
John nodded tentatively.
“So here’s what I’ve been worried about and I shared my concerns with Emily who correctly placed them into a low-probability bin. What if MAAC’s unprecedented collision energies produced a relative abundance of strangelets and gravitons? What if, in a volume of space, trillions and trillions and trillions times smaller than the head of a pin, those strangelets produced fleeting but enormous energies akin to what was seen near zero-time at the Big Bang, perhaps fusing ordinary matter and gravitons together? And what if the result was that matter and gravitons were able to pass together through an extra-dimensional tunnel?”
Quint rose and said. “You passed from science to science fiction several minutes ago. I thought I was the one who got hit on the head. But here’s my deputy head of Hercules who seems to be suggesting that Dr. Loughty has trundled off to another dimension. That’s enough. I’ve got calls to make.”
There was a knock on the door and Trevor came in.
“Sorry to interrupt but I thought you should know. The police just found the stolen car. The reporter’s dead. Her neck was snapped.”
John stood and put his hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “I’ve got to go but we need to talk some more. A lot more.”
John had Trevor brief him on the forensics. The CSIs had found good prints on the door handle and several more on the shards of broken glass. Fortunately the cleaner had disinfected and polished the door hardware as part of her morning rounds so they weren’t expecting to sort through a zoo of prints. The stolen car was being processed as they spoke.
“There’ll be blood in the car,” Trevor said. “I definitely hit him.”
“How long will it take to get the prints analyzed?”
“It’s going to be top of the queue. They’ll be running them through the IDENT1 computer already. If he was ever arrested in the UK, we’ll have him.”
“How about the interviews with the control room people? Did any of them hear him say anything? Or notice anything peculiar?”
“He didn’t say a word, guv. Just barreled through there like a bull out of a chute. But a few people who were nearest him told me there was a funny smell about him.”
“A body odor?”
“In a way, but no one described it exactly like that. More like a smell of decaying flesh. Like meat gone bad.”
John shook his head. “Wonderful. What about his clothes, his shoes? Anything identifiable?”
“From what people said and from the still photos off the CCTV it looks like he was dressed in old farmer’s gear. Really rough kind of hand-made garments. Ill fitting. One funny thing one of the techs noted.”
“Yeah?”
“Said he had a rope belt.”
“Rope.”
“Yeah, a bit of rope to hold up his trousers.”
John was painstakingly reviewing the CCTV footage when Trevor called.
“Bad news, guv. There’s no finger or palm matches in the National Fingerprint Database.”
“Shit. How far back does it go?”
“1987.”
“The guy looked like he was late thirties, early forties so it should’ve been there. From the way he was quick to use violence I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have an arrest record. Maybe he’s not from the UK. Can you run them through Europol, Interpol and the FBI?”
“Already requested.”
“What about the blood?”
“It’ll be run through the NPIA DNA database. It’ll take several days but if the bloke’s prints aren’t there I don’t have much hope for his DNA.”
“All right. I’m going back to talk to Matthew. He’s got a wild theory.”
“Oh yes? What’s he say?”
“Just trust me. It’s wild.”
Matthew was in his office going over spectrometer plots with David Laurent.
“Find anything?” John asked.
“It’s very preliminary,” Matthew said. “Not the kind of thing we’d ordinarily even talk about at this stage.”
“This isn’t an ordinary situation,” John said.
“Right. But please take this with an enormous pinch of salt. We may have a graviton signal.”
“And I think there might also be strangelets,” David said, excitedly.
Matthew quickly added, “Please remember the collider was running for only a brief time before we powered down so the number of collisions was tiny compared to a full experimental set. We don’t have enough statistical power to make any hard conclusions.”
“But there’s a chance your theory’s right?” John asked.
“All I can say is that the conditions were possibly present to support it. You know, Emily was standing at the closest spot in the control room to the collision point of the beams. It was less than three meters under her feet.”
“What does your colleague here think about your ideas?”
David delivered a Gallic shrug. “You know, in science you have to keep an open mind. But it’s not something that has occurred to me.”
“What has occurred to you?”
“I have no explanations.
”
“That’s very helpful, thank you very much,” John said, eliciting another shrug. “I hate to ask this question but is it possible she was just, I don’t know, vaporized by some strange energy field. What I’m asking—could Emily be dead?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “I honestly don’t know. Everything’s on the table till it’s excluded by data.”
“Christ.”
“Has there been any progress in locating the stranger?” Matthew asked.
“There’s an active manhunt, but no. His fingerprints weren’t in the police database.”
“How many years does the database include?” Matthew asked.
“It goes back to 1987. Why?”
“Is it possible to check older records?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to ask Trevor. The guy looked young enough to be in the database provided he was ever arrested.”
Matthew had a queasy look. “I just think it might be prudent to check back further.”
When he returned to his office John called Trevor in.
“How would you go about searching for pre-1987 fingerprints?”
“There’re cards going back to about 1900 I think. The National Fingerprint Collection used to be kept in New Scotland Yard but it got moved to secure storage elsewhere in London. You want to go back further on this geezer?”
“I do.”
“Don’t know why. He’s too young.”
“Can you just have it done, please?”
“Yeah, ’course. It’ll take a little while. They’ll have to do a manual search using the Henry system.”
“What’s a while?”
“Dunno exactly. I may have some lady friends still about in fingerprints. I’ll see what I can do.”
Alone, John turned up the volume on the TV and listened for a while to the news on the manhunt in Dartford. A SKY helicopter was broadcasting live feed of police fanning out through a Dartford neighborhood of attached houses. He muted the sound and stared into space.
Emily was gone.
His fists balled up involuntarily in anger and frustration. He wanted a drink badly. He might not see her again. And his last memory would be her reproachful eyes.
