George’s remote held up a small plastic box with its right robot arm. Something wrapped in pink polyethylene was visible inside. “This is one of the spare silicon chips from the ATLAS vertex detector that Wolfgang brought us. He brought a dozen more of them and also some electronics and components. We’re going to test their chips along with ours and find out why theirs live and ours die. That’s about all for now. Thanks for your attention.”
He stopped, turned to look at Jake, and nodded, indicating that he was finished. There was scattered applause.
Jake stood and leveled the Stare at George’s remote for what must have been a full minute. “This is not satisfactory,” he said finally. “We should not humiliate ourselves before our competitors by admitting our failings and begging their help. We should go to CERN to discuss our victories, not our defeats.”
George shook his head, producing a whirr. “First we have to have victories, Jake,” he said with a twinkle, drawing more laughter from the group and discharging the tension that had been building a moment before. “Our resources in this experiment, as you know better than anyone else here, are very limited. If we can shortcut many man-months of work by getting assistance from CERN and directly comparing a chip that works with one that doesn’t, then the effort saved can go elsewhere. I’m just goddamned glad that the ATLAS people were willing to provide us with spare chips and expertise. 1 think we would have done the same, if the circumstances were reversed. At least, I hope we would have.” He stared back at Jake. He was certain that Jake would never have diverted any LEM resources to help ATLAS with their problems.
Jake made a dismissive motion with his hands, a gesture that one might use to send away a servant. George rolled the remote back up the aisle and positioned it next to Wolfgang’s seat. Jake could be such a jerk sometimes, he thought.
Jake peered at his notes. “The next speaker,” he announced, “is Pierre Barbotin, who is in Nantes at the moment. Pierre will tell us about the performance of the straw tubes.”
Wolfgang looked at George’s remote inquiringly.
“Welcome to the LEM collaboration,” George whispered.
11
ALICE PRESSED DOWN THE DICTATION BAR AND HELD the recorder near her mouth, speaking loud enough to be audible over the car noise. She held the steering wheel steady with her other hand. “PARAGRAPH,” she said to the recorder.
“The heifer edged down the slope and into the ravine, loose clods dislodged by her hooves tumbling down the slope ahead of her. Then she trotted to the place she had seen from above, a spot where tall grass grew in the shade of the overhang. Ignoring the unfamiliar musky smell that permeated this place, she began to crop the lush grass. It was good, and she ate it contentedly.
“There was a dry rustling noise behind her. She turned a wide brown eye toward the sound. A large insectoid head was framed by a shadowed hole in the wall of dirt, sharp pincers extending toward her hindquarters. She uttered a high shriek of primal fear and moved. But it was too late, as she felt the cruel pincers grip her shank.
Alice paused and released the dictation bar, placing the small recorder on the seat beside her. Should it be “primal fear” or “primordial fear”? The trouble with trying to write while you were driving was that it was just you and the recorder, with none of the electronic aids of a writing workstation available. The scene she was working on was not going well. It sounded too much like a B-grade horror movie. Perhaps she should work on the plot continuity and save the scene writing for later, when she could run the recording through her workstation’s speech-to-text program and have what she had dictated directly on the screen in front of her.
Through the windshield she could see that she was approaching the state boundary, as denoted by state-shaped concrete monuments and large signs beside the highway. Alabama was giving way to Louisiana, white oak and hawthorne woods to palmetto wetlands. YOU ARE LEAVING ALABAMA, THE HEART OF DIXIE. YALL COME BACK AND SEE US REAL SOON! AND WELCOME TO LOUISIANA, THE PELICAN STATE. CALL 1-800-33-GUMBO FOR TOURIST INFORMATION.
Alice considered picking up her cellular phone and doing just that, but raised the small recorder instead and squeezed. “NEW PAGE,” she said. “HEADING Plot line for UNDERSCORE Fire UNDERSCORE Ants; SUBHEADING Problems.” She relaxed her grip on the record bar, took a deep breath, and thought about the many problems with her plot so far. The basic idea was that the fire ants burrow into the SSC tunnels, are exposed to radiation, and mutate into giant ants that attack the countryside. Her research had turned up a few problems with this plot concept.
First, the mobile ants, the one that were likely to be exposed to radiation, were workers. The queens and drones, the ones who reproduced and were the ones that mattered genetically, tended to stay in the anthill except for a brief trip to the outside world for a mating flight. She would have to have some special scenario that exposed a queen or drone to radiation. A queen would be better, she decided. She pressed the record bar and spoke. “BREAK Problem COLON Radiation exposure BREAK Find a way to expose a queen to radiation.”
The depth of the SSC tunnel would also be a problem. The accelerator and the radiation that went with it were buried in a tunnel as deep underground as a thirty-story office building is high. Ants never burrow more than a few feet below the surface. How were they supposed to get down to where the radiation was? She pressed the record bar again. “BREAK Problem COLON Depth in ground BREAK How does queen get down to radiation? QUESTION, BREAK Elevator? QUESTION,” she said.
Another problem was that ants, and insects in general, were not very susceptible to radiation-induced mutations. Irradiated animals almost always died or became sterile instead of producing mutated offspring. A particle has to break both sides of just the right DNA strand in the same place and the broken ends have to oxidize before they rejoin, a Florida State University biologist had told her, and that was very unlikely. If you really wanted mutations, he’d said, it was far easier to produce them with certain organic chemicals than with radiation.
When she thought about it, however, this wasn’t a problem for her novel. Her readers believed that radiation easily produces mutations — everyone knew it was true. So even if it wasn’t, it didn’t really matter, at least for the purposes of her novel. She felt a guilt twinge and pushed it aside. She was writing a book to be read for entertainment, not a textbook.
She was approaching a tall advertising sign featuring a giant hot dog that was mounted atop a fast-food place near the upcoming freeway exit on the right. Giantism was a similar kind of problem. If you took a creature like an ant and made it bigger, its weight increased faster than its strength did, and its breathing and metabolism also got out of whack. The biologist had tried to explain it by talking about surfaces and volumes and scaling laws, but she hadn’t really followed the details. However, his conclusion was clear. Scientifically speaking, you couldn’t make a big ant by, say, boosting the quantity of growth hormone in a small ant. Even if it magically grew to the desired size, it wouldn’t be able to stand up and would probably die on the spot.