Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Persons like Wayne.

  Despite the shutting down of the Milton Foundation, the Blue kids continued to be the subject of feverish, superstitious awe and fear — a mood whipped up needlessly, in Bill’s opinion, by commentators who speculated endlessly about the children’s superhuman nature and cosmic role and so forth. There was still protection, of course. In fact security had gotten so tight it was virtually impossible for anybody outside of an armored truck to pass in or out of the center.

  But it seemed quite possible to Bill that it might be becoming more acceptable to people at large that the Waynes of the world be recruited to “supervise” the Blue children, that the centers be allowed to evolve from education homes for gifted children to prisons for freaks, guarded by brutes, just like the Milton Schools. As long as it was out of sight, of course.

  But none of it mattered, Bill thought doggedly, not as long as he was here with Tom, and could keep him from harm’s way.

  Bill promised himself that if Wayne ever did raise a hand to his son, he would take on Wayne, despite any consequences, and that was that.

  Sooner than Bill had expected, it came to a head.

  Tom’s group, in their shiny gold uniforms, were working in the physics lab. Wayne and Bill were both on duty, sitting in chairs in opposite corners of the room.

  The kids were building something: a cage of wires and electromagnets and batteries and coils. They’d been working all day, in fact, and Bill and the other assistants had had some trouble making them stop to eat, or even take toilet breaks, let alone do any of their other study programs.

  The kids seemed to be growing more purposeful in their activities. They didn’t have a written plan, and they didn’t even speak to each other much, but they all worked together flawlessly, according to their abilities. The older ones, including Anna, did the heavier work like the bulky construction of the metal frame, and also more dangerous stuff such as soldering. The little ones generally worked inside the cage itself, their fine little fingers doing fiddly, awkward manipulations.

  Bill watched Tom clambering around inside the cage like a monkey, snipping and twisting together bits of wire with flawless accuracy. As he concentrated, he stuck his tongue out of his mouth, just as he used to when he made clay soldiers or drew pictures of flowers for his mother.

  As the day’s end approached the kids seemed to have finished their cage. It was a box that was taller than Tom. Anna made them stand back, threw a few switches, and watched. Nothing happened as far as Bill could see save for a dull humming, a sharp scent of ozone. But Anna nodded, as if satisfied.

  Then the kids broke away and, as if going off duty, wandered off around the lab.

  Some of them went to the bowls of food Bill and Wayne had put out around the room. They seemed to avoid the dishes Wayne had slyly dipped his fat fingers into. Others, Tom and Anna among them, began playing. They started to throw Tom’s electronic Heart around, catching it like a football, kicking it along the ground like a soccer ball. That was okay. The Heart was built for kids and was meant to last a lifetime, and was more than strong enough to take the punishment. The kids were noisy now, calling and yapping and even tussling a little.

  As if they were normal.

  Bill studied the wire cage, wondering how safe the damn thing was. At the end of each day the inspectors and experts crawled over everything the kids did. If it wasn’t self-evidently safe they would shut it down and pull it apart, or maybe amend it to remove the hazard. The next day the kids would just start putting it back the way it was, unless physically restrained from doing so. And so it would go on, like building that bridge in Apocalypse Now, a battle of stubbornness between the kids and their adult keepers, until the kids were forced — or sometimes chose — to move on to something else…

  That was when it happened.

  Bill saw that the Heart had rolled between Wayne’s feet. The kids were standing in a loose pack in front of Wayne, watching him.

  The moment stretched, growing tauter.

  Then Wayne looked at the Heart, and the waiting kids. Something like a grin spread over his face, and he lifted his hefty foot and pushed the Heart back along the floor.

  A little boy called Petey, no older than Tom, collected the Heart. Petey, shyly, put the Heart back on the ground and rolled it back to Wayne.

  Again Wayne returned it.

  Back and forth the Heart went, a couple more times. The kids came a little closer to Wayne.

  Then Petey picked up the Heart, and threw it at Wayne.

  Wayne caught it one-handed, grinned wider, and threw it back to another kid.

  Who threw it back again.

  The game gradually built up steam. The kids seemed to be warming to this surprising new Wayne, this big bear of a man who was suddenly prepared to play ball with them. They ran around, starting to laugh and call, and threw the Heart to each other and to Wayne. Even Anna — Tom’s quiet, reserved, honorary sister — was joining in, her thin frame rising like a giraffe’s above the rest of the children.

  Bill started to relax. If Wayne was playing with the kids, however unimaginatively, at least he wasn’t doing them any harm.

  Bill kept watching, however.

  Now Wayne got hold of the Heart, wrapped it in his huge fist, and lifted it high above his head.

  The kids crowded around him, calling. “Me! Give it to me!” “No, me!” “Me, me! Give it to me! My turn!” Bill saw that Tom was at the front of the little crowd, jumping up and down right in front of Wayne, reaching for the Heart.

  Wayne looked over the kids, one by one, still grinning, as if selecting. And Bill saw the change in his face, the hardening of his fist around the solid plastic toy.

  To Bill it was a nightmare of paralysis. He knew he could never reach Wayne in time.

  In slo-mo, down came Wayne’s arm, that heavy plastic ball nestled in his fist, the Heart heading straight for Tom’s big, fragile skull.

  There was a blur of motion. That big arm was knocked sideways, with something clinging to it.

  Wayne’s meaty forearm brushed Tom, knocking him back, and the boy screamed; but Bill knew in the first instant that he wasn’t badly hurt. The other children scattered away, yelling.

  Wayne stood up, roaring, his face twisted, lifting his arm high above his head. The girl, Anna, had sunk her teeth deep into the flesh of his muscle. And now she was hanging on by her teeth, her arms and legs dangling, bodily lifted off the ground by Wayne’s brute strength.

  Bill grabbed Tom and pulled him away.

  Wayne shook once, twice; Anna’s head was rattled back and forth, but still she wouldn’t let go. So Wayne took a pace and slammed his arm against the wall. Bill heard a crack as Anna’s skull collided with the smooth plastic there. She came loose of his biceps. She seemed stunned, her limbs loose, and she slid to the floor like a crumpled doll. Her mouth was bloody, like some carnivore’s.

  Wayne clutched his torn flesh, blood seeping through his fingers, snarling obscenities. Bill saw something white there, embedded in the flesh — one of Anna’s teeth, perhaps.

  Bill tensed. One leap and he would be on Wayne’s back.

  … And then something came ghosting through the wall. It was a glowing, fizzing bullet: just a point of light, yellow-white, bright as the sun, and it cast shadows as it moved.

  Bill, shocked, skidded to a halt.

  The light slid smoothly through the air, floating like Tinker-bell, heading downward and toward the center of the room.

  Wayne, looming over Anna, didn’t see it coming.

  The light slid neatly into the top of his head. There was a sharp smell of singed hair, burned meat. Wayne convulsed, eyes flickering. The light passed out at the nape of Wayne’s neck, following an undeviating straight line, as if the man, two hundred pounds of vindictive muscle, were no more substantial than a mass of mist and shadows.

  Wayne, shuddering, toppled backward like a felled tree.

  The children were wailing. Bill found Tom clutching h
is legs; he reached down, lifted up his son, and buried his face in the crying boy’s neck. “It’s all right. It’s all right—”

  “What the hell—”

  Bill turned. Principal Reeve and a couple of the other assistants had come in at a run. “Get the medic,” Bill said.

  “What happened?”

  He pointed to Anna. “She’s hurt. And her teeth—”

  But Reeve was no longer listening to him, it seemed, despite the blood and fallen bodies.

  At the center of the room, something was glowing, yellow-bright. Bill turned. It was the yellow dot, the glowing Tinkerbell. It had come to rest at the heart of the children’s wire cage; it bobbed to and fro, following complex paths.

  The children were calmer now. A couple of them were with Anna, trying to help her sit up. But the rest had started to cluster around the cage and its imprisoned light point; its brilliance shone over their faces.

  Bill followed them, his son still in his arms. Fascinated, Bill reached out a hand toward the cage. He felt something, a ripple, as if a mild electric shock were passing through his system. He reached farther—

  A hand grabbed his arm, pulling it back. Tom’s hand.

  Maura Della:

  Bill Tybee was pretty distressed, and he had a right to be, Maura

  thought.

  Wayne Dupree had, it turned out, come from an extremist Christian group who believed the Blue children were the spawn of Satan, or some such, and so required destruction. He had gotten himself into the center on a fake resume and references from other members of his cult group: credentials that, Maura agreed, the most minimally competent vetting process should have weeded out.

  On the other hand, Dupree hadn’t succeeded — and not because of the system or the presence of other adults, even a devoted parent like Bill, but because of the freakish plunging of the Tinkerbell anomaly into his body, just at the right moment.

  “Which I can’t believe was a coincidence,” she told Dan Ys-tebo as they walked into the center’s physics lab, now crowded with researchers.

  He laughed uncomfortably, his big belly wobbling. “I don’t know why you brought me here. This isn’t exactly my field. And you have no jurisdiction here.”

  “But you spent long enough in the asylum with Reid Malen-fant. This is more spooky stuff, Dan. Somebody has to figure out what all this really means. If not us, who?”

  “Umm,” he said doubtfully.

  In the lab, they confronted the anomaly that had killed Wayne Dupree.

  Tinkerbell in a cage, Bill Tybee called it, and that was exactly what it looked like. Just a point of light that glowed brightly, like a captive star, bobbing around in a languid, unpredictable loop inside its ramshackle trap of wire. The anomaly was so bright it actually cast shadows of its wire mesh cage: long shadows that fell on the white-coated scientist types who crawled around the floor, and on their white boxes and probes and softscreens and cameras and tangles of cabling, and even on the primary-color plastic walls of the schoolroom, which were still coated with kids’ stuff, blotchy watercolor paintings and big alphabet letters and posters of the last rhinos in their dome in Zambia.

  It was this contradiction, the surreally exotic with the mundane, that made Maura’s every contact with these children so eerie.

  Dan Ystebo was beside her. “It looks as if someone found a way to split the atom in the middle of a McDonald’s, doesn’t it?”

  “Tell me what’s going on here, Dan.”

  He guided her forward through the nest of cabling toward the glowing thing in the cage. There was a protective barrier of white metal thrown up a yard from the cage itself. “Hold your hand out,” he said.

  She held her palm up to the glow, as if warming it by a fire. “By golly, I can feel the heat. What makes it glow?”

  “The destruction of neutrons from the atmosphere. Step a little closer.”

  She stepped right up to the protective barrier, nervous. This time she felt a ripple in the flesh of her hand, a gentle tugging. When she moved her hand from side to side she felt the wash of some invisible force.

  “What’s that?”

  “Gravity,” Dan said.

  “Gravity? From the anomaly?”

  “At its surface the gravity pulls about thirty thousand G. But it drops off quickly, down to less than one percent of G a yard away. The anomaly masses about a million tons. Which, if it were water, would be enough to fill a fair-sized swimming pool.”

  “All crammed into that little thing?”

  “Yup. It’s around a sixteenth of an inch across. Right now these guys, the physicists here, don’t have a good handle on its shape. It’s presumably spherical, but it may be oscillating.”

  “So it’s pretty dense.”

  “A little denser than an atomic nucleus, in fact. So dense it shouldn’t even notice normal matter. An anomaly like that should pass right through the Earth like a bullet through a cloud.”

  “Then how come it doesn’t fall through the floor right now?”

  Dan looked uncertain. “Because of the cage.”

  “This contraption the children built?”

  “Maura, it seems to generate a very powerful, localized magnetic field. It’s a magnetic bottle that holds up the nugget.”

  “How?”

  “Hell, we don’t know. We can do this — we have to build magnetic bottles for fusion experiments — but only with such things as superconducting loops, and at vast expense. How the kids do it with a handful of copper wire and an old car battery…”

  She nodded. “But this is where the potential is. The technological potential.”

  “Yeah. Partly, anyhow. If we could manipulate magnetic fields of that strength, on that scale, so easily, we could build an operational fusion reactor for the first tune. Clean energy, Maura. But that’s not all.”

  “So what is Tinkerbell? Some kind of miniature black hole?”

  “Not quite as exotic as that.”

  “Not quite?’“

  “It seems to be a nugget of quark matter. The essential difference from ordinary matter is that the individual quark wave functions are delocalized, spread through a macroscopic volume…”

  It took some time for Maura, cross-examining him, to interpret all this.

  In ordinary matter, it seemed, atomic nuclei were made of protons and neutrons, which in turn were made of more fundamental particles called quarks. But the size of a nucleus was limited because protons’ positive charges tended to blow overlarge nuclei to bits.

  But quarks came in a number of varieties.

  The ones inside protons and neutrons were called, obscurely, “up” and “down” quarks. If you added another type of quark to the mix, called “strange” quarks — a geeky term that didn’t surprise Maura in the least — then you could keep growing your positive-charge “nuclei” without limit, because the strange quarks would hold them together, And that was a quark nugget: nothing more than a giant atomic nucleus.

  “We’ve actually had evidence of quark nuggets before — probably much smaller, fast-moving ones — that strike the top of the atmosphere and cause exotic cosmic-ray events called Cen-tauro events.”

  “So where do the nuggets come from?”

  Dan rubbed his nose. “To make a nugget you need regions of very high density and pressure, because you have to break down the stable configuration of matter. You need a soup of quarks, out of which the nuggets can crystallize. We only know of two places, in nature, where this happens. One place is — was — the Big Bang. And the nuggets baked back there have wandered the universe ever since. The theory predicts we should find Bang nuggets from maybe a thousand tons to a billion. So our nugget

  is right at the middle of the range.”

  “Where else?”

  “In the interior of a neutron star. A collapsed supernova remnant: very small, very hot, very dense, the mass of the sun crammed into the volume of a city block. And when the pressure gets high enough quark matter can form. All you need is a
tiny part of the core of the star to flip over, and you get a quark matter runaway. The whole star is eaten up. It’s spectacular. The star might lose twenty percent of its radius in a few seconds. Maybe half the star’s mass — and we’re talking about masses comparable to the sun, remember — half of it is turned to energy, and blown out in a gale of neutrinos and gamma rays.”

  Quark matter runaway. She didn’t like the sound of that. “Which origin are we favoring here?”

  “I’d back the Big Bang. I told you our nugget is right in the middle of the mass range the cosmogenic-origin theory predicts. On the other hand we don’t have a real good mass spectrum for neutron-star nuggets, so that isn’t ruled out either. But then there’s the slow velocity of our nugget. The nuggets should squirt out of neutron stars at relativistic velocities. That is, a good fraction of light speed. But the Big Bang nuggets have been slowed by the expansion of the universe…”

  Slowed by the expansion of the universe. Good God, she thought. What a phrase. This nugget is a cosmological relic, and it’s right here in this plastic schoolroom. And brought here, perhaps, by children.

  He spread his hands. “Anyhow that’s our best guess. Unless somebody somewhere is manufacturing nuggets. Ha ha.”

  “Funny, Dan.” She bent to see closer. “Tell me again why Tinkerbell shines. Neutrons?”

  “It will repel ordinary nuclei, because of the positive charges. But it can drag in free neutrons, which have no charge. A neutron is just a bag of quarks. The nugget pulls them in from the air, releasing energy in the process, and the quarks are converted to the mix it needs.”

  Converted. Runaway. “Dan, you said something about a drop of this stuff consuming an entire star. Is there any possibility that this little thing—”

  “Could eat the Earth?”

  She’d tried to keep her tone light, but her fear, she found as she voiced the notion, was real. Was this the beginning of the Carter catastrophe, this little glowing hole in the fabric of matter?

  “Actually, no,” Dan said. “At least we don’t think so. It’s because of that positive charge; it keeps normal nuclei matter away. In fact the larger it grows the more it repels normal matter. But if it were negatively charged—” He waved his ringers, miming an explosion.” — Ka-boom. Maybe.”