by John Ringo
“Those defenses the Adar have on their side,” Avery said, looking around to ensure nobody would overhear.
“Yes?”
“They’re not for us. They’re for if… when the Titcher overwhelm us.”
* * *
“The largest nuclear weapon we have in the inventory is the Mk-81,” the national security advisor said, nervously. “That’s right at two megatons. You’re saying that that will only close the gate for, what? A couple of weeks?”
“Maybe three,” Bill said. “Right now it’s been closed for more than a month. And I somehow suspect that something that size wouldn’t shut down all the gates simultaneously.”
“We’ve converted Mk-81s and mounted them at the three gates,” the secretary of defense said. “But at that rate…”
“A potential of a nuke every three weeks on a potential twenty-two gates,” Bill replied. “And that assumes that every one works; the failure rate for nuclear weapons we’re not even considering.”
“True,” the national security advisor said, biting her lip. “To be sure, we should have two or three at each gate. And you don’t have any idea what this weapon system they use is?”
“No, ma’am,” Bill said. “That is, I’ve got a couple of theories but nothing I can test.”
“Between twenty-two and sixty-six nuclear weapons every three weeks,” the secretary of defense said, shaking his head. “We’re going to have to begin scrapping our nuclear arsenal and converting them for gate closure. We’re going to have to go back into the nuke building business. In ten years we’re going to have to have a flock of breeder reactors just to keep up with the plutonium usage. And if any of the devices fail…”
“Then we’re going to have to retake the gate,” Bill answered. “Wherever it is, from Eustis to Saskatchewan. And the only way we’ve been able to do that is by nukes.”
“And we’re only set up at the active gates, anyway,” the national security advisor pointed out. “Dr. Weaver, are you sure they won’t destabilize all the gates with one nuke?”
“No, ma’am,” Bill said. “But I wouldn’t have expected them to destabilize the way they did at all. It may destabilize some, it may destabilize all of them. It may only destabilize the local gate. It’s something that we just don’t know and haven’t experimented with.”
“Could you?” the President asked.
“Certainly,” Bill replied. “Test it on one of the gates that is in an out-of-the-way area. Drop a nuke in it and see if it destabilizes the whole track.” He thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “I think Track Four would be best. There’s a gate in Northern Ohio, out in the country. The planet on the other side is a low atmospheric pressure planet with virtually no life. Certainly nothing sentient that we’ve encountered. Understand, sir, it will irradiate the immediate area on our side, just as the blast at Eustis irradiated Staunton. But we can do the test.”
“Nothing more remote?” the President asked.
“There are a couple of bosons out in the desert areas,” Bill said. “We could probably test open them and see what’s on the other side. Or, maybe, do a link between two bosons in deserted areas, but that would leave one nuke on the earth. I think that would definitely violate the test ban treaty.”
“Not to mention ruin any chance of reelection,” the President said, dryly. “Dr. Weaver, on my authority prepare to send a nuke through the Mississippi gate; get the Titcher over there off our backs for the time being at least. Cleanup can be arranged.” He reached into the interior pocket of his jacket, pulled out a card that looked somewhat like an American Express Gold Card and shook his head. “When I came into office, we were, more or less, at peace. Since then we’ve had 9/11, the Iraq War and now this. No President had authorized the use of a nuclear weapon since 1945. Now I’m getting to the point I’m wearing out the plastic on this thing. Dr. Weaver, find a better way. We must all pray to God that you find a better way.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Bill said. “And you should really talk to my counterpart among the Adar sometime, Mr. President.”
“Why?” the President asked, coldly.
“He said almost the same thing to me yesterday. That I should pray to God.”
* * *
“Mrs. Wilson, I really need to talk to Mimi alone,” Bill said.
As Mrs. Wilson had predicted, with the exception of very occasional “local interest” programming when the news was slow, and it had rarely been slow lately, the media seemed to have forgotten Mimi and Tuffy.
The Wilsons lived in a ranch house in west Orlando, an older neighborhood but pleasant and not run down, probably built during the first rush of construction after Disney World was completed. It had a pleasant “Old Florida” feel with oaks in the yard that had grown well in the succeeding thirty years.
The interior was neat as a pin and done in a country manner. Mimi had been carefully dressed for the interview in a flowery dress, Tuffy perched on her shoulder. She was seated on the same plaid couch that had been in the news broadcast, which turned out to be in a “Florida Room,” a room filled with windows to bring the light indoors. Bill sat to one side in an overstuffed, matching armchair. Mrs. Wilson was seated beside Mimi, on the far side from Tuffy he noticed, eyeing him warily.
“I don’t think that’s good,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I don’t think it’s proper.”
“Ma’am,” Bill said, as politely as he could. “I’m here at the direction of the President of the United States to ask Mimi some questions. If you want to stay, what you have to understand is that the questions, and any answers that I might get, are matters of National Security. You can’t ever talk about them.”
“You’re going to ask Mimi the questions, aren’t you?” Mrs. Wilson said, puzzled. “What about her talking about them?”
“I’ve got a feeling that she won’t,” Bill replied. “It has to do with Tuffy. I’ve met other aliens like him, I think. I need to ask him the questions, frankly. I’m just hoping that he’ll answer.”
“People have asked him things before,” Mrs. Wilson said.
“They’re not me,” Bill replied. “If you’re staying, you have to understand that this is like knowing the names of spies or knowing how to build nuclear weapons. You can’t ever let anyone know that you even know those things.”
“Do you?” Mimi asked, suddenly.
Bill looked at her and shrugged. “If I did, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Auntie,” Mimi said. “Tuffy asks you, nicely, if you could let us talk. Alone. He doesn’t think that you would like some of the things they have to talk about.”
“What about you, honey?” Mrs. Wilson asked.
“I’ll be okay, Auntie,” Mimi replied in very close to a monotone. “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Mrs. Wilson considered this carefully and then stood up. “You going to be long?”
“I doubt it,” Bill replied. “If we are, it’s going to have to be a very strange conversation.”
Mrs. Wilson, with occasional backward glances, left the room.
“What are you?” Mimi asked. “You’re a doctor you said.”
“I’m a physicist,” Bill answered. “I’m called a doctor because I went to college a lot.”
“What’s a physicist?” Mimi asked.
“A person who studies how the world works,” Bill answered. “Why gravity pulls things down.”
“Because it likes us,” Mimi answered then giggled. “Tuffy says that gravity is the world giving us a hug. I’m going to be a physicist, too, when I grow up. I need to know the words. For Tuffy. He’s smart, so smart I feel dumb all the time. But he helps me with my work. He doesn’t do it for me, but he explains how I can do it. School is getting pretty boring.”
“Have you told anyone else that?” Bill asked.
“No, Tuffy said I shouldn’t,” Mimi replied. “My teachers just think I’m really smart. They don’t know Tuffy’s smarter than them. He’s smarter than you, too. And he says he’s met
you before. Not at the place where everything blew up. Someplace else. I don’t understand what he’s saying. Something about between the small bits.”
“In the space between the atoms,” Bill said, wonderingly.
“He says something like that. Even smaller.”
“Can you tell Tuffy I need to close the gates?” Bill said. “There are bad monsters coming through. They’ll destroy everything. I don’t think you would be killed, I think Tuffy would probably protect you. But everything else will be gone. There won’t be any colleges for you to go to.”
Mimi considered this carefully and then looked at the giant spider on her shoulder.
“Tuffy says I don’t know the words,” Mimi replied, softly. “I don’t know the mathematics. He’s been showing me some of it, but we’re not far beyond something called algebra. He says that’s not even close, yet. He can’t say the words.” She looked at the spider again and nodded.
“Tuffy says, when you take a grain of sand and cut it, then cut it again and again, getting smaller and smaller, when you get to the smallest bits that you can possibly cut. When you get to the bits that are smaller than those, bits that won’t cut because they flow away like air, like water, like trying to cut sunshine, that is the secret of closing the gates. But you need a lot of them. More than he thinks you can make. Enough that they get in the space between the gates, in the space between the smallest bits and smaller, and push the gates apart. The gates are the lock and the key to the lock as well.” Mimi grabbed her head and shook it, a faint trickle of tears coming out of her eyes.
“Tuffy says that’s as much as I can take,” she said, in a very small voice, suddenly just a six-year-old girl who was old beyond her years. “He says I shouldn’t talk about it right now. That if the bad monsters come he’ll take me in his arms, as Jesus took up the small children, and take me to a place where there aren’t any monsters.”
“Mimi,” Bill said, softly. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the monsters don’t come here and you don’t have to go away. And thank you for your help. You’re a good girl, the best girl in the world, and Tuffy’s a great friend to all of us.”
“Can you really keep the monsters from coming?” Mimi asked.
“If I can find a small enough knife,” Bill replied, looking at the shifting dust motes in the light through the window.
* * *
It was three a.m. and Bill still couldn’t sleep. He’d ridden back to the encampment around the anomaly at two, sure that he was exhausted enough from riding all over North Orlando to turn his mind off. But it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t functioning right, either, twisted in the mire of images. Tuffy, the shattered man, patrol cars with evil police, the grains of dust in the light, bosons that had happy faces on them. Ray Chen smiling as he pressed a button that changed the world. He picked and pried at particle theory, but it was no use. He’d had a drink and that hadn’t helped; it just seemed to make him think faster and more chaotically. Finally he’d gotten up from the couch where he’d been sitting and made his way from shadow to shadow until he reached his exercise bike and started furiously pumping.
He’d been at it for an hour, trying to use up all the energy in his body so that maybe his mind would rest, when the door to his trailer opened and Robin walked in.
“I heard the squeaking of that damned thing from over in my trailer,” Robin said.
“Sorry,” Bill replied, letting it coast to a stop. “I just can’t get my mind to work. It’s spinning around like an out-of-control boson. Occupational hazard.”
“Tried having a drink?” she asked, stepping into the trailer and flipping on the light over the stove. She was wearing a robe and bunny slippers.
“Yeah,” Bill said, leaning on the bike and frowning.
“A glass of warm milk… perhaps?” she intoned with a faint accent.
“Maybe an Ovaltine?” Bill replied, smiling. “I wish there was a book in some musty room. But all there are is these strange dream images and hints that I think I’m supposed to be smart enough to figure out.”
“You’ve lost some hair,” Robin said, frowning. She walked over and touched where some had fallen out.
“Radiation damage,” Bill replied, shrugging. “It’ll grow back. Most of it.”
“Anything else wrong?” she asked.
“My white blood cell count dropped for a while,” Bill admitted, frowning. “Other than that, no damage.”
“None?” Robin asked, rolling the word off of her tongue.
“Nope,” Bill said, finally getting the hint.
* * *
“QUARKS!” Bill shouted.
“What?” Robin panted, clearly exasperated. “Is that a normal thing to shout at a moment like this? Usually it’s ‘Oh, My, God!’ ”
“It’s what they’re talking about!” Bill said, taking her face in his hands. “Quarks!”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Robin said, coldly. “But if you do not return to the business at hand you’re going to be unable to explain it to anyone. Except, maybe, if I’m kind, as a soprano.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
* * *
“The key to the gate is quarks,” Bill said. He had more to go on at this point than just raw speculation. With that link in hand he had seen the theory of gate formation clearly and had even worked out most of the physics. He hadn’t waited for much in the way of peer evaluation; among other things he was as anxious as the government to classify the data. Because it worked as a weapon as well as a gate. “When the Chen Anomaly formed we didn’t have a universe inversion; we had a high rate of unlinked quark emissions. That was what caused the explosion.”
“How high a rate?” the national security advisor asked.
“Oh, the total emission was probably right at two or three hundred thousand particles,” Bill said.
“That’s all?” the President asked. “I mean, these are smaller than atoms, right? It takes a lot more uranium than that to get a nuclear blast…”
“Yes, sir,” Bill replied. “But their destructive power is orders of magnitude higher than any substance except strange matter. And we don’t have any theory on how to form either one in any quantity. Even the biggest supercollider only forms one or two at a time and those almost immediately link. But the point is that we may be able to adjust one of the inactive bosons to form a stream of unique quarks, one particular type, strange, charmed, whatever. That way, they don’t link at all; it’s like pushing the same poles of a magnet together. If we can, we can capture them and move them to one of the gates. When it opens, we pop them in and get either a big explosion, low in neutron emission, on the far side or, possibly, we collapse the gate. I’m virtually certain that a large enough quantity will collapse the gate. Permanently. It will not only close the gate it will eliminate the bosons on either side.”
“Hold on,” the national security advisor said. “I know just enough about quarks to know that they always link. A muon is two quarks, right?”
“Yes,” Bill said, frowning. “But they have to have the right color to link…”
“Color?” the President said, puzzled.
“Ai-yai-yai,” Bill said, frowning again. “Okay, quarks are described as coming in flavors and colors. Why? Because they were discovered by physicists who didn’t have much else to do but come up with strange terms. The point is that you have to have a quark and an antiquark of two different colors to create a muon. In this case, we’ll create a stream of a single type of quark, probably strange since that seems to be the easiest to create for some reason.”
“You’ve already been experimenting with it?” the NSA asked.
“Oh, yes,” Bill replied. “Otherwise we’d be spinning our wheels. The problem isn’t tuning the boson to produce them, it’s capturing them…”
“And you’re going to do that, how?” the NSA asked, fascinated.
“We’re looking at two different possibilities,” Bill admitted. “We might put tw
o bosons in close proximity. Have one produce a stream of similar color muons, ones that can’t bind to strange quarks, and set up a magnetic field to create a capture bottle. The muons will pass through the field and create a sort of stream field that will surround the quarks. I’m not sure that one will work but it’s less energy intensive than the other way.”
“What’s the other way?” the President asked.
“Well,” Bill said, his face working, “the other way is to create a miniature white dwarf. But that’s going to take a whole lot of power.”
“A white dwarf?” the defense secretary said, grinning. “You’re serious?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary,” Bill replied. “All a white dwarf is is a collection of electrons. What we’ll do is create an electron field and then use a magnetic field to sort of cup it. Then we’ll shoot a whole bunch of quarks into the cup and wrap the electrons around the quarks, compressing them at the same time, sort of like catching water in your hand. Some of the quarks will escape but, hopefully, not enough to destroy the containment vessel. The only problem is, maintaining it will require a whole lot of electricity. But it will work for sure.”
“And then you slip this… device into the gate?” the secretary asked. “And that destroys the bosons.”
“Yes, sir,” Bill said.
“Destroying whole universes?” the President asked.
“Errr… possibly,” Bill replied. “But current theory is changing as to the nature of bosons; at this point theory is pointing to them being gates to other universes, or links, rather than the universes themselves.”
“How much?” the secretary of defense asked. “How many particles?”
“Probably on the order of a million, Mr. Secretary,” Bill said. “We’ll have to see what the rate of emission is of the boson.”
“How long to do the experiment?” the national security advisor asked.
“There’s a boson conveniently settled in Death Valley,” Bill replied. “We’ll have to assemble the materials and set up a base camp. A week, maybe less. Getting enough power to it will be the key.”
