Gravity's Angel, by Tom Maddox

This story originally appeared in OMNI, November 1992.

Author's  Note: This  story concerns  a future  in which  Congress
continued funding for  the SSC, which of course did  not happen in
our timeline,  where instead of  gravity's angel we have  a large,
mostly empty tunnel beneath the  Texas plains. I would also remind
the reader  that all  stories take  place in  alternate realities,
perhaps, as David  Deutsch maintains, among an  infinite number of
them.

The  Invisible  Bicycle  burned  beneath  me  in  the  moonlight,.
its  transparent wheels  refracting  the hard,  white light  into.
rainbow  colors  that played  across  the  blacktop. Beneath  the.
road's surface  the accelerator  tunnel ran, where  the SSC—the.
Superconducting  Synchrotron   Collider—traced  a   circle  one.
hundred  and sixty  kilometers  in  circumference underneath  the.
Texas plains Depending on how you  feel about big science and the.
Texas  economy,  the  SSC  was  either  a  superb  new  tool  for.
researching  the subatomic  world  or  high-energy physics'  most.
outrageous  boondoggle.  Either way,  it  was  a mammoth  raceway.
where  subatomic  particles  were  pushed  to  nearly  the  speed.
of  light,  then  crashed  together  as  violently  as  we  could.
contrive—smashups whose  violence was measured in  trillions of.
electron volts.  Those big  numbers get all  the press,  but it's.
only  when particles  interact that  experiments bear  fruit. The.
bunches of protons  want to pass through each  other like ghosts,.
so  we—the  High  Beta  Experiment Team,  my  work  group—had.
all  sorts of  tricks for  getting more  interactions. Our  first.
full-energy shots were coming up,  and when the beams collided in.
Experimental Area 1, we would be rewarded for years of design and.
experiment                                                       .

So  I had  thought.  Now I  rode  a great  circle  above the  SSC,
haunted  by  questions  about  infinity,  singularity—improbable
manifestations even among the wonderland of quantum physics, where
nothing was—quite—real. And more than  that, I was needled and
unsettled by questions about the way  we—not my group but all of
us,  the high-energy  physics  community—did  our business.  I'd
always taken  for granted that  we were after the  truth, whatever
its form,  whatever our  feelings about it.  Now even  that simple
assumption had collapsed, and I  was left with unresolvable doubts
about  it  all—the  nature  of  the  real,  the  objectivity  of
physics—riddles posed by an unexpected visitor.

Two nights  earlier I  had returned  from a ride  to find  a woman
standing in  front of my house.  "Hello," I said, as  I walked the
Invisible Bicycle up the driveway toward her. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Carol  Hendrix," she said, and  from the sound of  her voice,
she was just a little bit amused. "Are you Sax?"

"Yes,"  I said.  And I  asked, "Why  didn't you  tell me  you were
coming?" Really  I was just stalling,  trying to take in  the fact
that this woman was  the one I'd been writing to  for the past six
months.

We had  begun corresponding in our  roles as group leaders  at our
respective  labs, me  at SSC-Texlab,  her at  Los Alamos,  but had
continued out of shared personal concerns: a mutual obsession with
high-energy  physics and  an equally  strong frustration  with the
way  big-time science  was  conducted—the whole  extrascientific
carnival of  politics and  publicity that has  surrounded particle
accelerators from their inception.

Her  letters   were  sometimes  helter-skelter  but   were  always
interesting—reports  from a  powerful, disciplined  intelligence
working  at its  limits.  She  had the  kind  of  mind I'd  always
appreciated, one comfortable with  both experiment and theory. You
wouldn't believe how rare that is in high-energy physics.

Women in the sciences can be hard and distant and self-protective,
because they're working  in a man's world and they  know what that
means. They tell each other the stories, true ones: about Rosalind
Franklin not getting the Nobel for  her x-ray work on DNA, Candace
Pert not getting  the Lasker for the first  confirmation of opiate
receptors in the brain. And so they learn the truth: In most kinds
of science, there are few women,  and they have to work harder and
do better to get the same credit  as men, and they know it. That's
the way things are.

Carol Hendrix looked  pale and tired, young  and vulnerable-not at
all what I'd expected. She was small, thin-boned, and her hair was
clipped short.  She wore  faded blue  jeans, a  shirt tied  at the
waist, and sandals over bare feet.

"I didn't have time to get in  touch with you," she said. Then she
laughed, and  her voice  had a  ragged, nervous  edge to  it. "No,
that's not true. I didn't get in touch with you because I knew how
busy you were,  and you might have  told me to come  back later. I
can't  do  that.  We need  to  talk,  and  I  need your  help  ...
now-before you do your first full-beam runs."

"What kind of help?" I asked.  Already, it seemed, the intimacy of
our  letters  was  being transformed-into  instant  friendship  in
realtime.

"I need Q-system  time," she said. She meant time  on QUARKER, the
lab's  simulation and  imaging system.  She said,  "I've got  some
results,  but they're  incomplete-I've been  working with  kludged
programs because  at Los Alamos  we're not  set up for  your work.
I've got to get at yours. If my simulations are accurate, you need
to postpone your runs."

I looked  hard at  her. "Right," I  said. "That's  great-just what
Diehl wants to hear. That you want precious system time to confirm
a hypothesis that could fuck up our schedule."

"Diehl is a bureaucrat," she said. "He doesn't even understand the
physics."

Yeah, I thought, true, but so what?

Roger L. Diehl:  my boss and everyone else's at  the lab, also the
SSC's guardian angel. He  had shepherded the accelerator's mammoth
budgets  through a  hostile Congress,  mixing threat  and promise,
telling them strange tales about  discoveries that lay just at the
200 TeV horizon.  All in all, he continued the  grand tradition of
accelerator lab nobility: con  men, politicians, visionaries, what
have you.  Going back  to Lawrence  at Berkeley,  accelerator labs
prospered under  hard-pushing megalomaniacs  whose talents  lay as
much in politics  and PR as science, men whose  labs and egos were
one.

"Let's talk," I said. "Come inside; tell me your problem."

"All right," she said.

"Where are you staying?" I asked.

"I thought I'd find some place later, after we've talked."

"You can stay here. Where are your bags?"

"This is it." She pointed to  the sidewalk beside her. At her feet
was a soft, black cotton bag.

"Come on in," I said.

I figured she would be  doing interesting work, unusual work-maybe
even valuable work, if she'd gotten  lucky. I wasn't the least bit
ready for what she was up to.

We cranked up "The Thing," a recent development in imaging. It had
a  wall-mounted screen  four feet  in  diameter; on  it you  could
picture detector results  from any of the SSC's runs.  When it was
running,  the screen  was a  tangle of  lines, the  tracks of  the
particles, their collisions,  disappearances, appearances; all the
wonderland magic so characteristic of  the small, violent world of
particle physics,  where events occur  in billionths of  a second,
and matter appears  and disappears like the  Cheshire cat; leaving
behind only  its smile-in  the form  of brightly  colored particle
tracks across our screens.

Still, setting  up and running simulations  is an art, and  at any
accelerator lab  there'll be one  or two  folk who have  the gift.
When a series of important shots is coming up, they don't get much
sleep. At Los  Alamos, Carol Hendrix, despite her  status as group
leader, was the resident wizard. At Texlab we had Dickie Boy.

She stretched,  then sat at  the swing-arm desk with  its keyboard
and joystick module and logged on to QUARKER with the account name
and  passwords  I gave  her.  Her  programs were  number-crunching
bastards, and QUARKER's  Cray back end would  be time-slicing like
mad to fit them in.

"Tell me what this is all about," I said. "So I'll know what we're
looking at when this stuff runs."

"Sure," she said.

While we  waited for QUARKER, she  drew equations and plots  on my
whiteboard in  red, green,  black, and  yellow, and  she explained
that she was postulating the existence  of a new kind of attractor
that came  into being in a  region of maximum chaos,  its physical
result an impossible region of spacetime, where an infinite number
of particle events occupied a single, infinitesimal point.

Mathematically and otherwise,  it is called a  singularity, and in
cosmology something  like it  is assumed  to be  at the  center of
black holes. There were all sorts of theorems about singularities,
few of which I knew, none rigorously. Why would l? This stuff went
with  astrophysics and  the gravitational  forces associated  with
huge chunks of mass.

When she finished her explanations and turned from the whiteboard,
I could see that she was wired and sleepy at once. Mostly, though,
she was  exultant: She felt she'd  hit the jackpot. And  of course
she had, if any of this made sense ... it couldn't, I thought.

The Thing  gonged, to tell  us we had our  results. I pulled  up a
canvas-backed chair beside  her as she sat at  the console. "We'll
walk through the  simulation," she said. "If you  have a question,
ask."

At first there were just  cartoon schematics of the detectors-line
drawings of the big central detector and its surrounding EM boxes,
hadron calorimeters, and gas chambers. Then the beam shots started
coming, and in a  small window at the top of  the screen, the beam
parameters reeled by.  Running a Monte Carlo is one  hell of a lot
easier than doing  an actual run; you don't  have the experimental
uncertainties  about good  beam,  good  vacuum, reliable  detector
equipment; it's a simulation, so everything works right.

As we watched,  the usual sorts of events  occurred, particles and
antiparticles playing  their spear-carrying  roles in  this drama,
banging  together and  sending  out jets  of  energy that  QUARKER
dutifully calculated,  watching the energy-conservation  books the
whole time,  ready to signal  when something happened  it couldn't
fit into  the ledger.  Complex and interesting  enough in  its own
way, all this, but just background.

QUARKER shifted  gears all of a  sudden, signaling it had  so many
collisions it could  not track them accurately.  The screen turned
into what we called a  hedgehog, a bristly pattern of interactions
too thick to count

"We don't care," Carol Hendrix  whispered. "Do it." And she forced
QUARKER to plunge ahead, made it  speed up the pictures of events.
She didn't care  about the meanings of the  individual events; she
was looking for something global and, I thought, damned unlikely.

Events unrolled until we seemed to be in the middle of the densest
particle  interactions this  side of  the Big  Bang, and  I almost
forgot what we were there for,  because this stuff was the product
of  my  work,  showing  that,  as  promised,  we  would  give  the
experimenters  higher  beam  luminosity  than  they'd  dreamed  of
having.

Then the  numbers of collisions  lessened, and that was  the first
time  I  believed she  was  on  to  something. Things  were  going
backwards. The beam continued to pour in its streams of particles,
but all usual interactions had  ceased: Inside the beam pipes, one
utterly anomalous  point was absorbing  all that came its  way. We
both sat in complete silence, watching the impossible.

The screen cleared, then said:

END SIMULATION

Quantitative  evaluation  appears  impossible  employing  standard
assumptions.  The conclusions  stated  do  not permit  unambiguous
physical interpretation.

We lay in reclining chairs and watched the sky. The moon was down,
and stars glittered gold against the black. Meteors cut across the
horizon, particles flashing through  the universe's spark chamber.
We'd  been drinking  wine, and  we were  both a  little high—the
wine, sure, both  of us drinking on empty stomachs,  but more than
that, the sense of discovery she had communicated to me.

"Finding the order behind the  visible," she said. "I've wanted to
be part of that  for as long as I can remember.  And at Los Alamos
I've gotten a taste. They offered me  a job two years ago, and the
offer just caught me at the right time. I had done some work I was
proud of, but it was frustrating-it's easy for a woman to become a
permanent post-doc. And to make things worse, I'd always worked in
my husband's shadow."

"He's a physicist?"

"Yes. At Stanford, at SLAC. We've  been separated since I took the
job. The two things,  the job and the split-up; sort  of came as a
package." She  stopped, and the only  sound was the faint  roar of
cars down the  Interstate nearby. She said, "Tell  me what happens
tomorrow."

"That depends  on Diehl's reaction.  I'll see him in  the morning.
First I'll ask to borrow our  resident imaging expert. That is, if
I can pry him loose. I'm figuring  Diehl won't want to look at any
of this stuff; he might want a report  on it, if I can talk to him
just right. After that, we'll see."

"Okay," she said. "Look, I'm really tired...."

"I'm sorry.  I should have said  something." I started to  get up,
but she  said, "No, I'm  fine. I'll see  you in the  morning." She
waved good  night and  headed into  the house;  I'd shown  her the
guest room earlier and folded out the couch for her.

I lay  watching the sky,  my mind circling around  the strangeness
we'd seen earlier. I wanted to understand it all more clearly than
I did, and I hoped that Dickie Boy would be a help. In particular,
he might know where her simulations had gone wrong. They had to be
wrong, or else....

I  sipped at  wine  and wondered  at the  possibility  that I  was
present at one  of those moments in physics that  get embalmed and
placed into  the history  books. I suppose  I was  still wondering
when I fell asleep.

I  was jerked  awake some  time later  by a  noise like  high wind
through metal trees. Amber flashes of  light came from the side of
the house, and a piano-shaped  machine rolled out on clear plastic
treads, ripping chunks of sod with its aerating spikes as it came.
The machine was a John Deere Yardman, apparently run amok.

I went  into the house and  called Grounds and Maintenance.  A few
minutes later a  truck pulled up, and a man  in dark-blue overalls
got out  and called the  robot to  him with a  red-lighted control
wand,  then cracked  an access  hatch  in its  side. Optic  fibers
bloomed in the robot's interior like phosphorescent alien plants.

I awoke  around eight-thirty the  next morning. Carol  Hendrix was
still in bed; I let her sleep. I left a message on Diehl's machine
asking for a few minutes person-to-person; then I drank coffee and
worked again through her Monte  Carlos: lovely work, plausible and
elegant, but almost certainly not  enough to move Diehl. How could
it? As she had said, he wouldn't understand it.

However, I knew who would. In the event that Dickie Boy vetted her
simulations, we'd take them to the Thursday Group that evening. We
met weekly at Allenson's house.  Every important work group at the
lab  was represented,  and  every significant  problem the  groups
worked on  was discussed  there. Thursday Group  was the  locus of
oral tradition,  the place where  the lab's work was  revealed and
its meaning  decided upon.  By the  time experimental  results saw
print,  they were  old news  to anyone  who had  been to  Thursday
Group. Usually there were ten or so people there, all men, most in
their mid 30s, most of them white and the rest Chinese.

Midmorning she came  in, wearing old Levi's and a  black tank top.
"Any news?" she asked, and I told  her no. She got a cup of coffee
and sat next to me and watched as her simulations played.

Shortly after noon a message popped  up in a window on the screen:
If you want to  talk, meet me in section 27  within the next hour.
Diehl.

"Do you want  me to come along?"  she asked, and I  said, "No way.
He's a tricky bastard to handle at  the best of times." I left her
sitting at the console, starting the Monte Carlos up again.

I rode  the Invisible Bicycle  to the shuttle station  at Maingate
and locked it in the rack  outside. Down concrete steps I went and
into the cold, musty air of the tunnel. A dark-blue, bullet-shaped
shuttle car sat  waiting. I was the only one  boarding. I told the
car where I was going. "Section 27," it confirmed in its colorless
voice.

The repetitive color scheme of the lattice flashed by the windows.
Radiofrequency boosters  were in  red, superconducting  dipoles in
blue, quadrupoles  in orange;  the endless  beam pipes,  where the
straw-thin  beams of  protons and  antiprotons would  circle, were
long arcs  of bright  green. If there  were a  universal symbolism
of  colors,  these  would   say,  intricate,  precise,  expensive,
technologically superb primary qualities of the SSC.

About ten minutes later, the car  slowed to a stop. The doors slid
back, and I stepped down into the tunnel. About fifty meters away,
Diehl stood talking to a man wearing blue overalls with the yellow
flashes of  a crew  chief. The man  looked taut,  white-faced. "So
pull every goddamned dipole with that batch number and replace the
smart  bolts," Diehl  said. They  walked toward  me, and  the crew
chief stopped  at a  com station  and plugged  in his  headset, no
doubt beginning the evil task Diehl had set him.

"What can I do for you, Sax?" he asked.

"I've got a visitor," I said. "From Los Alamos. And she's got some
interesting simulations of our full-power shots. I think you ought
to see them." He looked startled; he hadn't expected me to ask for
his time-money, resources, priority, yes, but not his time. "Or ma
be not," I said. "Maybe you should  let me have Dickie Boy put her
Monte Carlos on The Thing. She's got some strange stuff there, and
if it works out, we need to be prepared."

"Sax, what  the fuck are you  talking about? I'm tired,  you know?
We're in  the home stretch here,  on budget, on time  ... now take
Hoolan—you  know, who  heads  the Meson  Group-he knows  nothing
about  this. He  knows his  experiments  are coming  up soon,  his
simulations do not make shit for  sense, and Dickie Boy is the one
to help him. But if he is not available because you have him doing
what you  consider the Lord's  work, Hoolan's going to  be pissed,
because he  cannot understand why,  in light of  these approaching
deadlines, he should have to come begging for assistance."

"Then maybe you should come look at what she's got."

I was playing a tricky game,  using my position as group leader to
put  pressure on  him  but betting  he wouldn't  want  to give  up
valuable time  and maybe  expose his ignorance.  "I think  this is
really important."

He was watching the crew chief  explain to six men that they would
be working  in the  tunnel until the  troublesome smart  bolts had
been replaced.  None of  them looked  happy. "Jesus,"  Diehl said.
"Take Dickie Boy if you can convince him."

"Thanks," I said. He looked at me like he tasted something sour. I
owed him one, and one thing  was sure: He'd collect when and where
he wanted.

"You really  like this thing,  don't you?" Carol Hendrix  asked as
she  reached up  to touch  one  of the  Invisible Bicycle's  clear
polystyrene tires.  It hung from rubber-covered  hooks just inside
my front door.

"Yeah,"  I said.  "I got  it in  Germany. It's  just plastic,  but
there's something wonderful about it-almost the Platonic idea of a
bicycle. There's one  in the Museum of Modern  Art." Hanging above
her head, it  seemed to glow in  the soft light given  off by baby
spots. "I usually ride it to think."

"What do we do now?" she asked. She wasn't interested in my toy.

"We get Dickie Boy over here," I said. "If we can. I'll call him."

"New physics,"  I told  Dickie Boy on  the phone.  "Nothing you've
ever seen."

"Bullshit," he said.

"No bullshit.  Wrong physics, maybe—that's  what we want  you to
help with, find out if we're missing something tricky."

"Or something obvious." He had  no respect for anyone's ability on
The Thing but his own.

"I don't think  so. I think we've  got a whole set  of tracks here
like nothing you've ever seen."

"I've got the Meson Group on my schedule."

"I know. Diehl said I could borrow you today."

"Where do you want me?"

"Come over to  my house." No way I wanted  anyone looking over our
shoulders.

Dickie Boy had made his name as a post-doc at Fermilab where Diehl
had recruited him  when the SSC was nothing but  a stack of plans,
an empty tunnel, and mounds of heaped dirt. He hadn't been brought
on  for his  good looks:  He  stood just  over six  feet tall  and
weighed maybe  a hundred and  thirty pounds; his dull,  brown hair
was tied into  dreadlocks; he had a long, thin  nose and close-set
eyes and usually seemed slightly dirty. However, in his brief time
at Texlab he had already  made legendary forays on The Thing—the
last, a tricky sequence of pion studies, lasted nearly seventy-two
hours, during  which time  Dickie Boy  had worked  through several
shifts of physicists and finished by asking the group leader if he
needed anything more.

Carol had heard about Dickie Boy,  but she had her own reputation,
and so  when they said hello  and looked each other  over, I could
almost hear the wheels turning, the question being posed, "Are you
as good as they say?"

We went to the terminal, and  Carol ran the Monte Carlos as Dickie
Boy-sat almost squirming  with impatience to have at  what she was
doing. When she got out of the  chair, he almost leapt into it and
said,  "You two  go somewhere  else,  okay? The  other room's  all
right; just leave me alone."

"I need to do some work at  the office," I told Carol. "What about
you?"

"Yeah," she  said. "I should check  my mail at the  lab, see who's
angry that I'm gone. You got another terminal with a modem?"

"In the bedroom," I said. "I'll see you two later."

At HBET I found  a line of people waiting for me  to talk about or
approve  their  experimental  arrangements,  and so  I  spent  the
afternoon there, amid  the chaos of getting the SSC  ready for its
first full-energy runs, scheduled for just a month away.

Carol  and Dickie  Boy  were seated  next to  one  another when  I
returned, with another variation on her Monte Carlos on the screen
in front of them. "What's up?"  I said, and Dickie Boy said, "This
is fantastic." Carol was smiling.

"Think we can take it to Thursday Group?" I asked.

"Tough audience," Dickie Boy said.

"Is it the one that counts?" Carol asked.

"Yes, it  is," I  said. "If  we can convince  them, they'll  go up
against Diehl or anyone else."

"Let's do it, then," she said.

"Can you do a presentation?" I asked. "Good talk, good pictures?"

"Yes," she said. "I've been getting ready to do it."

"Fine," I said. "I'll call Allenson and ask if I can take over the
agenda. I don't think anyone's got anything hot working."

Bad haircuts,  cheap clothes, and  an attitude—that's the  way I
once  heard  a  gathering  of  theoretical  physicists  described.
They—we—consider ourselves aristocrats of the mind, working in
the deepest and  most challenging science there  is. Getting there
first with good  ideas, that's the only  thing that counts—under
all circumstances, that was the unspoken credo.

The  whole  group  showed  up  that  night.  The  living  room  of
Allenson's house was shabby and comfortable, with couches, chairs,
and  large pillows  enough to  hold  the sixteen  of us:  thirteen
regulars and me, Carol, and  Dickie Boy. Eight Caucasians and five
Orientals, three Chinese and two Japanese. Most were in their late
thirties, though a few were in  their middle forties. No one under
thirty, no one over fifty. These were the theoretical heavyweights
at  the lab,  men  in  their short-lived  prime  as  it exists  in
high-energy physics.  A few  were drinking  coffee; most  just sat
waiting, talking.

I  gave her  the  simplest possible  introduction.  I said,  "This
is  Carol  Hendrix,  who  is   here  from  Los  Alamos  where  she
is  Simulations  Group  Leader.  She  has  some  very  interesting
simulations she would like to present to us."

Carol Hendrix knew her audience. She had gone into sexless mode as
much as possible.  Her face was pale and scrubbed,  no makeup, and
she wore baggy  tan trousers and a plaid wool  shirt-in short, the
closest approximation  she could get to  what the men in  front of
her  were wearing.  From her  first  words, she  spoke calmly  and
authoritatively, for they'd  listen to nothing else  from her, and
allowed none of the passion I'd heard to animate her presentation.

She gave it all to them, dealt it  out on a screen in the front of
the  room. The  slides came  up  showing perky  pictures from  The
Thing, equation  sets from QUARKER,  annotations in her  own hand:
Each  idea led  straightforwardly  to the  one  after, theory  and
practice brought together with casual elegance.

Leaving  the  last  slide's  END SIMULATION  on  the  screen,  she
summarized: "We  know little  about the  physical attributes  of a
singularity;  in  fact,  its  essential nature  is  lawless."  She
stopped, smiled. "Though we would anticipate its interactions with
the nonsingular  world of  spacetime to be  governed by  the usual
conservation  laws,  this may  not  be  the  case. In  short,  the
consequences of  creating a  singularity are not  well understood,
and I would  suggest that further analysis is  required before any
experiments are undertaken that could bring such a peculiar region
of spacetime into close proximity  with instruments so delicate as
those in an experimental area." She paused and looked at them all,
said, "I will be glad to hear your questions and comments."

This is where it will happen,  I thought. Guests to Thursday Group
often got taken on the  roughest intellectual ride of their lives,
as this  group of brilliant  and aggressive men  probed everything
they  had  said  for  truth,  originality,  and  relevance-or  the
converse. I went very tense, waiting for the onslaught to begin.

"Dickie  Boy," Bunford  said. If  this  group had  an alpha  male,
Bunford was it. He was a  big man—around six-three and more than
two  hundred  pounds—with  a  strong  jaw,  a  lined  face,  and
sunburned skin. He had elaborated  the so-called Standard Model in
new and interesting ways—the  "semi-unbound quark state" was his
particular interest-and  the smart  money had it  that he  and his
group could pick  up a Nobel if the SSC  found the interactions he
was predicting. "Did you validate her simulations?" Bunford asked.
Rather an oblique approach, I thought, probably in preparation for
going for the throat, theoretically speaking. Carol Hendrix turned
to see how Dickie Boy would answer.

"Sure," Dickie  Boy said. "Very  sweet, very convincing.  Take for
instance the series of transforms ..."

"Fine," Bunford said. And to  Carol Hendrix: "Thank you. If Dickie
Boy  validates your  Monte  Carlos, I'm  sure they're  well-done."
He  paused. "The  physics  is interesting,  too  ... though  quite
speculative, of course."

And he stopped there, apparently having finished.

I waited for him to go on, but he didn't-he was whispering quietly
to Hong, one  of his group members.  And no one else  was saying a
word.  Finally, Allenson  stood from  the pillow  where he'd  been
sitting cross-legged and said, "Shall  we make it an early evening
tonight? I don't know about you guys, but I could use some sleep."
He turned to Carol Hendrix and  said, "I'd like to thank our guest
for speaking  to us this  evening." Murmured voices said  much the
same  thing.  "At  a  later  time,  perhaps  we  can  discuss  the
implications of  this work,  but this  week we  are all  very busy
getting the SSC up to spec."

Carol Hendrix stood white-faced and silent  as all the men got up,
nodded  good-bye to  her, and  left, some  alone, others  in small
groups of their colleagues.

"I don't  understand," I said.  We were  walking along one  of the
suburb-like loops that led from  Allenson's house to mine. For the
present, many of  us lived in Texlab-owned housing as  a matter of
convenience. "They didn't even want to argue with you."

"I'm an  idiot," she said.  "I forgot  some of the  most important
lessons  I've ever  learned. In  particular, I  forgot that  I'm a
woman, and anything I say gets filtered through that."

"Do you really think that?"

"Sax,  don't be  so  fucking naive.  Why do  you  think they  were
polite? Because I was a visitor?' Her voice was filled with scorn;
she knew as well as I did what treatment visitors got.

"Your conclusions  are radical.  You can't  expect them  to assent
right off."

"I'll grant you that, and it would have been hard to convince them
of  anything substantive,  but I  could have  begun tonight.  They
dismissed me,  they dismissed  what I  was saying.  Bastards. Smug
male bastards-it's no wonder they  can't hear anything; they're so
filled with their own importance."

We stood in front of my house. She said, "I think I'll walk around
for a while, if that's all right. I don't want to talk right now."

"Sure," I  said. "Go anywhere you  want. In fact, I  think I'll go
for  a bicycle  ride. I'll  see you  later." So  moonlight flashed
through the bicycle  frame as I rode the berm  road above the SSC,
and finally I realized I had  no answers to what perplexed me, and
I  turned around  and  headed  back toward  home.  I rode  through
streets of darkened  homes and came to my driveway,  where a light
burned on a pole, walked the Invisible Bicycle up to the door, and
went in to absolute silence. On a  low table in the living room, I
found a note:

Dear Sax,

I have gone back to Los Alamos.

Don't worry  about me, I'm fine.  I just need to  think about what
happened here.

Thank you for all you've done.

Carol

Over  the next  weeks, as  the full-energy  trials came  closer, I
thought  often  about  Carol  Hendrix, her  singularity,  and  the
treatment she'd gotten.

I went back to Thursday Group the next week but found I had little
to  say to  any of  them-the  whole bunch  seemed strutting  apes,
obsessed  with  their  own  importance  and  show.  If  they  were
interested  in the  truth,  and particularly  in new,  interesting
truths,  then  why hadn't  they  treated  Carol Hendrix  with  the
seriousness  her  ideas  deserved?  Her ideas  were  strange,  but
important ideas  always were. She  was a  woman, but so  what? How
could that matter?

All  of a  sudden,  I  felt a  fool.  Their conversation  excluded
everyone not a  member of the group, and  their masculinity, while
entirely free of conscious malice, effectively recognized only its
own kind. A young, small woman simply  did not exist for them as a
physicist to be taken seriously.

I left early that evening and decided I would not go back.

But  what I  had  seen at  Thursday Group  was  everywhere at  the
lab. Secretaries  were women,  scientists and  administrators were
men-white men by and large,  with a sprinkling of Orientals. Carol
Hendrix was right:  I was incredibly naive. But  I understood why.
As a high-energy  physicist, I had been devoted to  what I thought
of as  an unbiased  search for  the truth,  a search  that creates
intense tunnel vision-because  of how difficult it  is, it demands
absolutely everything  you can bring  to it, and often  that isn't
quite enough.  Now I  had awakened,  and what  I saw  appalled and
confused me.

I  got one  note from  Carol Hendrix,  apologizing for  leaving so
abruptly and saying that she would write again when she had gotten
her thoughts  straightened out. Then,  five days before  the first
full-energy, high-beta runs,  she called me at  the office. "Sax,"
she said. "I'd like to come watch the runs. Would you mind?"

Carol leaned  over me, slid  her body  down mine, pulled  the gown
over her head. She was astride me,  hands at her side as she moved
in  rhythmic arcs.  "The stars,"  she said.  Through the  window I
could  see  points  of  light  strobing,  red—and  blue-shifting
through the  spectrum. "Something is poking  through behind them,"
she said. "It wants in." A  sheet of blue light poured through the
window, burned through us, x-raying flesh  and bone. In it we were
translucent, the intricate network of our nerves burning in silver
fire. We  were fusing together, so  close to an orgasm  that would
annihilate us.

I woke,  got up and drank  some water for my  burning throat, fell
back on the bed. I hung suspended between waking and sleeping as a
flood  of images  passed across  my eyes.  Bright, blurred  shapes
vanished before I could see them clearly.

She was coming in the next day, the day before the first big runs.

She wore khaki shorts and a  dark-blue T-shirt. We were sitting in
my backyard again,  under a moonless sky—a  thousand stars above
us  and meteors  cutting brief,  silent arcs  at the  horizon. She
sniffed at  the glass of  cold Chardonnay she was  holding, drank,
and leaned back in the reclining chair.

"I owe you an apology," she said. What do you mean?

"You did everything you could to help, and I walked out on you."

"You were troubled."

"I was, but I shouldn't have treated you like one of them."

"That's okay. Apology accepted."

"Tomorrow morning, what do you think will happen?"

"Truthfully, I  don't know. If  we get  good beam, we'll  have the
right conditions for your simulation."

"That's what I  thought. I've gone over it and  over it, worked it
through time and  again, had a work group tear  my analysis apart.
It all  adds up to the  same thing: My simulations  are realistic,
plausible ... and unverifiable  without experimental evidence. All
of that's fine. What worries me is this: If I'm right, your people
are going into what could be a dangerous situation, and no one has
a clue about it; no one wants  to hear about it, at least not from
me."

"You've done everything you can."

"Maybe."

"No, I mean it. Listen." And I  poured it all out to her, what I'd
seen in recent weeks, how incredibly closed and self-confident our
world was, unbelievably  blind about its own  nature, which within
the community  was seen  as inevitable.  I'm not  sure how  long I
talked or how I sounded-I just know that the frustration and anger
and amazement  I had lived with  for the past weeks  came tumbling
out in one long screed.

"Oh,  Sax,"  she  said,  finally. "You  poor  innocent."  And  she
laughed, then laughed again, harder,  and carried on laughing as I
sat there embarrassed. Finally she  stopped and said, "Sometimes I
get so wrapped up in all of  this, I forget how things really are.
Thanks for reminding me. To hell with them all. I've tried, you've
tried. If  the SSC's turned  into the world's most  expensive junk
pile, it won't be our responsibility."

We talked  a bit more  until we had  finished the bottle  of wine;
then she said, "When do we have to be there?"

"Seven a.m.  We should  leave here around  six-thirty, so  I guess
it's time to go to bed."

She found  me standing  at the sliding-glass  door in  my bedroom,
looking out onto  the night. I turned and saw  her in the doorway,
backlit  by the  light  from the  hall behind  her.  "Are you  all
right?" I asked.

"Who knows?"  she said. She came  across the room to  me, stood in
front of  me, and put  her hands on  my bare shoulders.  She said,
"Want to make love, pen pal?"

She leaned  against me, and I  could feel her body  under the thin
jersey. "Yes," I said. "I do."

Through  the  night  we  moved  to  the  rhythms  of  arousal  and
fulfillment:  making love,  lying together  in silence,  sleeping,
waking again.  All the frustration, anger,  anxiety, excitement we
had both felt the past weeks funneled into those moments, sublimed
into active, driven lust.

Shortly  after five  I  was awakened  by a  sweep  of amber  light
through  the   window  and  the   sound  of  wind.  I   found  the
groundskeeper  robot outside.  It had  settled onto  one patch  of
ground;  its aerating  spikes flashed  out  of the  bottom of  the
machine, their blind repetition chewing turf into fine mulch.

I said, "You  ought to go back  to the barn or  wherever they keep
you  and  just kind  of  relax.  Keep  this  shit up  and  they'll
scrap  you."  It stopped  and  sat  there emitting  a  low-pitched
hum  punctuated  with  occasional high  harmonic  bursts.  "That's
sensible," I said. "Think it over." It decided: It crawled over to
a row  of stunted ornamental shrubs  and began to slice  them into
very small pieces.

I went  back inside, called the  thing's keepers, and tried  to go
back to sleep. Instead I lay  awake, thinking of what might happen
that morning,  until Carol turned  over to me and  whispered, "One
more time?"

"Oh yes," I said. "One more time."

Around six-thirty we walked out of the house and ten minutes later
were  at Maingate  shuttle station,  where we  went down  into the
tunnel with five members of a tech team. They wore orange overalls
and  helmets and  had respirators  dangling over  their shoulders,
protection against any  accident where helium would  boil from the
superconducting magnets and drive the air out of the tunnel.

Harry  Ling, the  BC 4  supervisor,  was directing  people at  the
shuttle stop. "How's it going, Harry?" I said.

"Ask me later," he said.

At Experimental  Area 1,  teams were  making final  adjustments to
their instruments and hoping no last-minute gremlins had crept in.
The room  was fifty meters  square, dominated by  the boxcar-sized
composite detector. Inside it, the storage rings came together; at
their  intersection the  protons  and antiprotons  would meet  and
transform.

Two men were  levering a bulky, oblong camera-SONY  in red letters
on its side-into position at an external port. People picked their
way through snarls of cable.

Fifty meters  up the tunnel  was the control  room. It was  on two
levels:  ground floor,  where  technicians sat  in  rows at  their
consoles, and the experiments command above, where the Responsible
Person sat with his assistants and controlled the experiments.

I  introduced Carol  Hendrix  to Paulsen,  my  assistant, who  was
crouched over his  screen like a big blond bear  over a honeycomb.
"Hello," he said, then went  on muttering into his headset-I often
wondered how anyone understood him.

I said to  her, "Let's find you a  set, and you can plug  in to my
console and watch what develops."

The next hour was taken up  with the usual preparations for a run:
collecting protons and antiprotons in their injector synchrotrons,
tuning  the beams.  The "experiments  underway" clock  had started
when the first particles were  fed out of the injector synchrotron
and into  the main rings. Now  the particles would be  circling in
the rings  at a velocity  near the  speed of light,  their numbers
building  until  there  were  enough for  a  sufficiently  violent
collision.

"I  have  initiated  the  command sequence,"  Diehl  said  on  the
headphones.

About a minute  later a voice said, "We're  getting pictures," and
there was  a round  of sporadic  clapping from  the people  on the
ground floor.  On one of the  screens in front of  us, QUARKER was
providing near-realtime views of the collisions, which appeared as
elaborate  snarls of  red  and green,  the  tracks color-coded  to
distinguish incoming from outgoing particles. "Beautiful," the man
in front of us said.

On the  screen next to this  one, data flickered in  green type. I
saw that everything  was, as they say, "nominal."  Then all lights
in the control  room went out, every screen blank,  every com line
and  computer dead.  Under  amber emergency  lights, everyone  sat
stunned.

And the world  flexed, the wave from the  singularity passing, the
shape of  spacetime changing.  Puffs of gray  dust jumped  off the
walls, and there were the sounds of distant explosions.

Carol jumped out of her chair and said, "Come on."

I took off my headset and followed her. We passed through the door
and into the tunnel, where  settling clouds of dust were refracted
in yellow light.  I stopped at a locker marked  Emergency and took
out  two respirators-false  faces in  clear plastic  with attached
stainless steel tubes.  If enough helium escaped  into the tunnel,
it  could  drive  out  the oxygen  and  suffocate  anyone  without
breathing apparatus. "Here," I said and gave her one.

The door to the experiments room was askew. Behind us I heard loud
voices  and the  sounds  of feet  pounding up  the  stairs to  the
surface. Turning sideways, I slipped through the door's opening.

Blue blue blue  blue, the slightest pulse in it,  then suddenly as
the conjurer's dove flying from the hat, white, swords or crystals
of it jammed together; vibrating  as if uncertain, then turning as
suddenly to blue.

The  composite   detector  unit  and  surrounding   equipment  had
disappeared.  Carol  Hendrix  had become  a  translucent,  glowing
figure that left billowing trails of color as she moved. The world
was  a  sheet  of  light  and  a  chittering  of  inhuman  voices,
high-pitched and rising.

Etched images in gold against  white, flickering, the reality tape
shrieking through  its transports  as every possible  variation on
this  one moment  unfolded,  the infinitesimal  multiplied by  the
infinite.

Sometime later,  hands pulled on  me, dragging me  backward across
rough cement to  a world which did  not burn like the  middle of a
star.  My heels  drummed against  the floor,  my back  was arched,
every muscle rigid.

Riding the Invisible  Bicycle past Building A, I saw  two men bent
over the partially disassembled  carcass of a groundskeeper robot.
Sprays of optic  fiber, red lengths of plastic  tubing, and bright
clusters of  aluminum spikes lay in  the grass beside it.  One man
was holding  a dull-gray, half-meter  cube, the container  for the
expert system that guided the robot and was the apparent source of
its problems.

The state of things at Texlab: Big science-grandiose and masculine
and  self-satisfied-lay  in ruins  all  around,  shattered by  its
contact with an infinitely small point, the singularity.

On  the  steps of  Building  A,  camera  crews and  reporters  had
gathered. They  just milled aimlessly  at this point,  waiting for
the Texlab spokesman—presumably Diehl-who would have to come out
and recite  a litany of  disaster. Then would come  the questions:
How did this happen? What does it mean?

As  I headed  out the  perimeter  road I  was passed  by lines  of
vehicles:  vans carrying  tech teams,  flatbed trucks  loaded with
massive  chunks  of  bent  metal, cars  with  solemn,  dark-suited
bureaucrats in their back seats. No shuttle rides today-the tunnel
was strictly off-limits.

Near station 12 an orange quadrupole assembly lay next to the hole
it had  made coming out of  the ground. Part of  its shrouding had
torn away to reveal the bright  stainless steel ring that held its
thousands  of  intertwined wires  together.  At  other stations  I
passed there were stacks of  lumber for shoring the tunnel, repair
crews in hardhats milling near them.

Little more than an hour after the medical team had carried me out
of the  tunnel, I was apparently  fully recovered. The rest  of my
morning had been  spent with me the focus of  doctors, nurses, and
lab techs.  I had suffered an  episode of grand mal,  an epileptic
fit, they told me—apparently a reaction to the singularity.

Today   there  were   fifty-six  injured,   one  dead,   two  more
probably  to die.  The  collider had  been  destroyed: beam  pipes
deforming and  spraying those  high-energy particles all  over the
place—explosive quench in the lattice, it was called .

And Carol  Hendrix was one  of the  fifty-six injured. A  chunk of
concrete had  fallen on her. Skull  fracture, assorted lacerations
.. Christ. While they were testing me at the Texlab hospital, she
was being flown toward Houston  in a medivac helicopter brought in
by the Air National Guard. She remained in a coma, but for reasons
that escaped me her doctors were hopeful, so mine had told me. The
men she had talked to couldn't  listen, simply couldn't. She was a
woman,  her  approach  was  unusual, her  conclusions  weird,  and
despite all their  protestations to the contrary, the  men she had
spoken to were prisoners of their contexts, their presuppositions.
Their scientific objectivity didn't exist, never had.

I wondered  if they  felt as  Oppenheimer and  company had  on the
morning of the Trinity explosion: bright light and EM pulse, shock
wave throwing those nearby to the  ground ... then they all had to
confront-whatever their  jubilation, awe, fear,  sorrow-their part
in this thing, their complicity.

At the aboveground entrance to BC  4 Texlab Security had placed on
wooden sawhorses  a yellow plastic  ribbon with the  words EXTREME
DANGER  repeating along  its  length.  Several gray-uniformed  men
stood nearby.

"I'll  keep your  bicycle  for you,  Doctor Sax,"  one  said as  I
dragged it down  the steps. "No," I said, "that's  all right. I'll
take it with me."

Rusty iron latticework showed where chunks of the tunnel walls had
fallen, brushed by an angel's wing.  In the hard yellow light, the
Invisible Bicycle looked cheap, a stupid toy. Which it was: just a
thing of plastic and conceit.

I wheeled the  bicycle around the plywood barrier in  front of the
experiments room  door and  stopped to watch  the blue  white blue
which  continued  to some  rhythm  we  did not  understand.  Robot
cameras and recording instruments sat against the near wall.

Reduced to primitive magic, I  hurled the Invisible Bicycle at the
thing, a burnt offering: take this,  let me have her. It slowed in
midair as though moving through  heavy liquid and began to deform.
It  seemed  to turn  inside  out.  Now the  Topologically  Bizarre
Bicycle, no  longer recognizable  by shape or  anything else  as a
human artifact, it was shot for a moment with rainbow colors, then
was gone.

Unmoved, the  singularity continued its transformations.  Here was
the  angel,  inscrutable as  Yahweh  answering  Moses out  of  the
whirlwind,  "I am  that  I  am." It  promised  infinite levels  of
discovery, an order  not inexplicable but complex and  deep as the
night.  And  it promised  that  for  every fragment  of  knowledge
gained, for  every level of understanding  surmounted, there would
be pain and  sorrow. How puffed up we become,  filled with immense
pride in our knowledge, and how quickly the universe reminds us of
how little we know.

In the  desert it was bright  and hot. One of  the security guards
gave me a ride back to Maingate.

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