Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Ah, very brilliant! After a few years of such an education program, the proportion of people who tunnel bombs under our building may decrease by a statistically significant amount!"

  Hilda felt deflated. “I'm sorry."

  “And I, too, am sorry for using humor to disguise my frustration, which is as great as yours. I shall trust you and Sarah to deal with any possible physical causes of the anomaly, in the distraction-free field location. Brad will continue to supervise the work here. It will be left to me to talk to people to try to bring things back into harmony again. I think next year, you should chair the project."

  Nobody had ever said or done anything to scare Hilda as much as that pronouncement. It left her open-mouthed and staring at Tse Wen in abject horror. She could not think of anything to say.

  Tse Wen laughed and reached out to touch her. “No, no, I was only kidding."

  Hilda began to giggle a bit in a reaction that soon dissolved into the kind of uncontrollable laughter that was for her but a micrometer from uncontrollable tears.

  “You'll need to go soon. Your certification is current?"

  Hilda nodded.. One of the results of being awake for eight years on a starship was being a qualified spacecraft commander.

  “You can work out the details of the investigation on the Psi Naught en route.

  * * * *

  It took a week to get clean up loose ends and get underway, but once the Psi Naught finished acceleration and settled into the routine of interplanetary travel, Hilda buried herself in simulations, changing parameters and discarding approximations in an effort to make theory fit the data. She came up only to eat and sleep. For her, this was what physics was all about—the driving compulsion to work through a compelling problem.

  Three days after they departed, Sarah came to Hilda's cabin.

  “Any luck with the theory?"

  Hilda shook her head. “If those results are real, they don't fit theory. But the main data-handling software seems very clean"

  Sara frowned “I think we can verify the anisotropy question by placing new Ragi probes away from the collision plane and firing another round of tests."

  Hilda nodded. “That leaves bugs in the data stream itself.” A century or two ago, spy services developed a very thin technology that could be inserted in a fiber optic cable joint. The bug could read data and pass it on with or without modifications.

  “The controller would have to be very sophisticated, possibly even a non-Asimovian AI,” Sarah said.

  The idea of an AI not limited by the laws of robotics disquieted Hilda. “Chaos, these people have blinders on if they'd do that!"

  “You've seen them in action. Using an illegal AI would be exactly what Consolidationists should be against. But power is what they're about, not principle."

  Hilda shook her head. “They'd undercut themselves if it ever got out. Too big a risk, I think."

  “So maybe they think that we wouldn't be looking for it,” Sarah said. “Anyway, the Rieds aren't the whole story. The project is a big target. There are other more fanatic Consolidationists and people who need to make their own mark on the cosmos. They could do anything."

  “Our AI's should help us against that kind of threat."

  Sarah shrugged. “They'd try to protect us, but remember that our opponents are people, too. Typically Asimovian AI's stay out of people conflicts until physical harm to someone becomes a real possibility, whatever their evaluation of the potential perpetrators."

  “I'm not sure I'd want to change that,” Hilda said after some thought.

  “Me neither—which is why we have some work to do ourselves, and quietly.” Sarah stood up. “I've got the equipment ready to go. My thinking is that we should get it in place first thing before the opposition figures out that anything is happening, let alone what."

  “Okay.” Hilda nodded and smiled. “It's been a while since I did anything experimental. I may be all thumbs."

  Sarah smiled. “We have time and a fully equipped nanoscale fabrication facility on board."

  * * * *

  Six weeks later, Hilda watched the fountain of glowing plasma corkscrew ahead of the Psi Naught as the ship decelerated toward the main habitat for the Ten-Ten experiment personnel. Her weight fell as magnetic fields transferred the spacecraft's spin angular momentum to its exhaust.

  As the rotation slowed, she could watch long enough to follow the long white tubes of the Ten-Ten experiment's pellet accelerators all the way in either direction from the Macrocollider Experiment Station. The faded to the thinness of spider silk but never quite vanished, even ten thousand kilometers distant. The beauty of it never ceased to thrill her.

  The project's cylindrical habitat and control center swung tethered to an asteroid about ten kilometers from the planned collision vertex. The complex seemed to grow as they got closer and she watched the cylinder of the habitat module swing around its asteroid anchor once a minute like the second hand of a giant clock. A tiny elevator climbed inward from the habitat to meet them at the central rock.

  The plasma fountain ceased as the Psi Naught's relative velocity decayed to a few meters per second. Hilda and Sarah felt a momentary queasiness as they returned to zero gravity. Hilda took personal control of the spacecraft docking for practice, goosing this thruster and that to bring them to the counter-rotating dock assembly at the north pole of the little asteroid. There were three other spacecraft present, including the Interplanet News ship, Gulliver.

  “I thought we were going to get away from that,” Hilda said.

  Sarah shrugged.

  As she settled in among three other spacecraft, Hilda watched insect-like limbs deploy from a half dozen places around the Psi Naught's toroidal hull and grasp the open latticework of the docking platform. A flexible tube rose like a cobra from the platform and mated itself to the main door of the cabin. Sarah supervised the shutdown.

  “Your helmet.” Sarah handed Hilda her helmet with a slightly defiant look. The chances of her needing it were about as close to infinitesimal as any AI could calculate, but Sarah liked all her stones turned over.

  Hilda laughed and took it. “I feel like I'm headed for another giant leap for woman-kind instead of a docking tube."

  The entrance into the air-filled docking tube was as normal as ever, though, as was the trip down the elevator to the habitat cylinder. There was a surprise when they got there, however: Torsten Ried

  “Uh!” was all Hilda could manage.

  “Mr. Ried,” Sarah said, drawing out the “Ried."

  “Torsten, we're going to be kind of busy,” Hilda said, apologetically.

  He nodded, but looked at her more like a puppy than a predator. “Don't worry, the media room's on the Gulliver. We'll all be there, anchoring, when the thing actually happens. Besides, you don't have to work all the time, do you? Dinner's being served in the level six atrium now. That's where everyone is."

  His questions over their last meetings had been getting less and less hostile, and their conversations had ranged over the known universe, from Hilda's memories of New Antarctica to the debate about the genetically unmodified New Reformationist colony at Proxima II. Hilda felt repelled at the loss of life and Torsten listened; he'd been a good listener.

  Hilda nodded. “Good. We'll be up after we get settled in. I didn't mean to be cold, Torsten. It was just, well, a surprise."

  He laughed. “That was the general idea. May I offer you a tour?"

  Sarah waved him off. “We spent a year out here helping set this place up."

  “Oh. Well, okay, I'll see you ladies later."

  The walk was a pleasant stretch. Hilda reviewed the layout on her net to locate their assigned quarters. The can was about thirty meters in diameter with staterooms arranged in rings around the outside of each of the first nine levels. The center sections were given over to equipment, labs, and common functions. There were three elevators spaced equilaterally. The tenth level was a domed combination of park and vegetable g
arden, with a swimming pool that Hilda had been dreaming about since the Psi Naught shipped out. The corridors were lined with hydroponic flower boxes as well; a thornless yellow rose with just enough scent adorned either side of her room, Number 502. Sarah was in 503 next door, with petunias.

  Later, they went through an uncomfortable dinner in which almost everyone was either a media jackal looking for meat or a potential saboteur.

  Hilda took Sarah's arm. “I'm not sure I can take another one of these."

  “I know how you feel. Ready?"

  “You mean, just go and do it? Now?"

  Sarah grinned. “Now."

  * * * *

  They wandered out of the cafeteria separately, then checked out a shuttle and arrived at the MES at 2300 universal. The ten-meter-radius sphere of the Macrocollider Experiment Station was so covered with various protuberances, antennae, and boxes that it looked to Hilda as if someone had dipped a geckro-covered volleyball into a bin of miscellaneous electronic parts. Formally, it was called the MES, informally, the “mess.” Their shuttle headed for a tubular protuberance that turned out to be an airlock. They docked.

  Pressures equalized, the doors opened.

  The spherical room was brightly lit. Narrow boxes, tubes, and lattice frames radiated from the very center of the complex like an outsized metallic forest growing from the tiniest asteroid imaginable—a one-meter radius ball. It looked like random junk. But a second look showed Hilda that the long axes of most of the equipment lay in a circular plane centered on the vertex, as they should be to investigate a sheet of debris normal to the collision axis. Black patches of photovoltaic cells and infrared data bus windows glinted on most of the equipment.

  Hilda examined one of several huge boxes around the outer wall of the sphere and found what she was looking for. “Sarah, here's the neutrino detector. Neutrino radiation from the experiment should be approximately isotropic and proportional to the total energy. Let's see if this one is telling us the truth."

  “Got it,” Sara said, and shoved herself over to the device.

  Meanwhile, Hilda placed a number of simple, disk-shaped neutron detectors, each about two centimeters across and a couple of millimeters thick, at various places around the collision site.

  “Good evening, ladies,” a voice announced.

  Hilda felt a chill down her back.

  She turned and saw a large ruddy man wearing a BHP staff sweatshirt glide out from behind the central globe. He was calm, inexpressive, neither smiling nor frowning, but his eyes darted restlessly.

  “Good evening,” she said. “You are?"

  “Dr. Vitaly Rossov, Dr. Kremer; I am new site engineer. Anything I can do to help?"

  Sarah stopped her with a hand on her arm and smiled at Rossov. Hilda noted that the front of Sarah's skin-tight pressure suit had opened almost down to her navel.

  “Nothing we needed to bother you with, Dr. Rossov,” Sarah said. “We're putting some equipment in place for tomorrow's test shots and adjusting camera fields. Trying to get a handle on the anomaly."

  “I'll be about my calibrations then,” he said. “We have a test shot at 0900 and everything should be ready. Not expecting visitors. Will be done in hour or so."

  “We'll manage,” Sarah said. “Thanks, Dr. Rossov."

  Rossov nodded and floated back to where he'd come from.

  Sarah made a hush gesture to cut Hilda off, then pointed to the terminal end of the neutrino detector cable on the outer wall of the facility. “Hold that,” she whispered, positioning Hilda so her body hid the work site.

  Sarah, Hilda decided, really didn't trust Rossov.

  Silently, Hilda held the cable, floating so her body hid what they were doing while Sarah slipped the tiny, transparent disk over the optical cable end and reconnected. Then she followed Sarah to the airlock and the shuttle.

  “Is Rossov a spy?” Hilda asked, in the privacy of the shuttle.

  “Someone is,” Sarah said. “He gives me the creeps, so that makes him a suspect. He's also in the right place. “If Rossov were working for them, he'd know how to fake it. I'm going to set an agent watching with an radio link back to the Psi Naught. If there's any tampering, we should see it."

  * * * *

  Everyone gathered in the habitat auditorium to watch the data come in from the shot—staff, investigators, and press. Sarah wore a thin T-shirt and loose, clingy shorts—artlessly practical in the warm controlled temperature of the habitat, but Hilda thought it made her look like a teen age pin-up instead of one of the top physicists in the solar system.

  Hilda wore a much more dignified plain black jumpsuit and had her vacuum tights underneath, in case they needed to go to the experiment site on short notice. What an odd couple we make, she thought. Hilda found a spot next to Sarah, then Torsten Ried planted himself next to them.

  “Morning, Hilda! Hi, Sarah."

  “Good morning, Torsten,” they said, almost simultaneously, and with about the same weary inflection, then laughed.

  He smiled. “Yes, uh, what are we going to find out new today?"

  If we knew that, thought Hilda, we wouldn't be doing the experiment. But be nice, she told herself. “For one thing, we'll be able to put some limits on anisotropy and get a better idea of radiation losses."

  “Anything that would detect the beginnings of a new universe?"

  Some people, Hilda thought, had one-track minds. She shook her head.

  “T minus three minutes and counting,” the experiment control software reported.

  She scanned the situation display. A green color raced down the two beamline representations, indicating that the accumulators for each set of coils along the line were fully charged, each coil ready to come on at the appropriate time to push the pellets ever faster.

  The count reached ten. Torsten, she saw, looked confused. Too bad, she thought, I'm not going to launch into a lecture now.

  “...3, 2, 1, fire."

  The green lights went off down the line at an accelerating rate until they were all off.

  “Good shot,” the controller reported.

  I don't believe this, Sarah sent. It's completely nominal. Hilda?

  Hilda was already comparing the readings from these instruments with those reported on the previous shots that had brought them out here. The anomaly had vanished entirely.

  Nothing, she reported

  “It looks completely nominal so far,” Hilda said aloud.

  “So far?” Torsten asked. “What does that mean? Why wasn't it like the first shot?"

  Hilda stared at him, searching for words. She was not, she realized, ready to accuse nameless parties of falsifying the experimental results, even though that was what had clearly happened.

  “Something in the instrumentation setup itself may have caused the first set of anomalous readings. That's the only thing that's changed."

  “An observer effect? Like Schrödinger's cat—half dead and half alive until someone looks?"

  Hilda groaned. “No, we physically moved the detectors. Besides, it's not ‘half,’ it's a superposition..."

  “Excuse me, Mr. Ried,” Sarah said. “Hilda and I need to have a chat. In private."

  “You're in over your heads, then, aren't you?"

  Sarah smiled. “Not exactly, Mr. Ried."

  * * * *

  Hilda followed Sarah, but instead of heading for their rooms, she headed for the airlock. Hilda smiled to herself—when Sarah said private, she meant private. Fifteen minutes later, they were outside gliding over the small asteroid's surface near its center of rotation, with Sarah trailing an emergency survival pod along. Sarah said nothing for a while, but appeared to be looking for something. Finally she motioned for Hilda to follow her. Then, amazingly, Sarah seemed to vanish straight into the ground.

  It was a cave entrance, Hilda discovered, as she got to where Sarah vanished. “Sarah?"

  No response. The asteroid had a high nickel-iron content, though, and might be screening Sarah from her r
adio. There was no other cave entrance around, so Hilda gulped and pulled herself in afterward. It was pitch black.

  “Sarah?"

  An intermittent signal light started blinking on the display reflected in Hilda's helmet faceplate. As her eyes adapted to the dark, she began to detect a very dim glow and smiled. She activated her own suit lights so she could follow the passage, and in a minute was floating next to Sarah in a small, roughly spherical room.

  Sarah put her helmet next to Hilda's.

  “I think I know who,” she said.

  “Isn't this getting a bit melodramatic? I almost didn't follow you in here!"

  Sara laughed. “We might be bugged. The station net might be bugged. If your radio signal couldn't reach me in here, then the signal from any bug can't get out. Now, help me with the vacuum tent."

  The two-person emergency tent was a tight fit, but they managed to wiggle inside and inflate it. As soon as the pressure was up, Sarah made a hush sign and started to take off everything, motioning for Hilda to do the same.

  Their clothing might even be bugged, Hilda realized.

  They pushed their clothes into a pallet, and sealed it. Donning the emergency gear, they deflated the tent, and pushed the pallet out. Then they reinflated the tent.

  “There's no reasonable theoretical explanation for this, is there?” Sarah asked.

  Hilda thought hard, giving that question a lot more effort coming from Sarah than from Torsten. Maybe she owed him an apology. “The results are inconsistent and the second set are the right ones. It's Rossov."

  Sarah nodded. “Besides, he may have intimate connections to the Ried family; he had an affair with one of the cousins, someone named Anna, years ago."

  “Sarah, that's personal data. How did you...?"

  “Pillow talk."