Alice smiled. “Perhaps I’ll be lucky, and disaster will strike while I’m there.”
Part IV
June 8, 2004 July 5, 1989
Building the Super Collider would be a Super Mistake.
So the question becomes: is the SSC the kind of good science we most need right now?
—CONGRESSMAN SHERWOOD BOEHLERT (R.-NEW YORK)
September 1,1989
Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as Earth]. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We nave seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water, if there is water, there is oxygen. if oxygen, that means we can breathe.
September 8,1989
What a waste it is to lose one’s mind — or not to have a mind. How true that is.
20
WOLFGANG WAS SITTING AT THE CONSOLE OF THE SCANNING Tunneling Microscope when George walked in. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “The trigger group meeting ran way overtime.” George felt guilty about being late. Wolfgang must have been here for almost an hour and had the STM in full operation. The display showed what looked like the gate region of a failed field effect transistor.
George walked forward and peered through the thick glass window of the instrument’s sample holder. The silicon slab they had brought was clipped to a complicated positioning mechanism. The interior was close-packed with unfamiliar shapes, but George imagined that he could make out the needlepoint probe of the STM as it scanned a few atomic diameters above the surface of the silicon, measuring the electrical conductivity of the tip-to-surface gap on an atom-by-atom scale. The display screen showed a colorful contour map depicting a lumpy mountainlike terrain. “How’s it going, Wolfgang?” he asked.
“Schlecht,” said the other man. “It’s clear that your FET gate pinched off destructively for some reason, but its geometry is not significantly different from its neighbors, and also no different from the ones we used in the ATLAS detector.” He gestured at the colorful display.
George looked at the structures on the screen. The p-type and n-type regions of the silicon differed in elevation by a few atomic layers, enough to show up clearly on the STM. The gate region, which should have had an hourglass shape, was instead two separated clumps with no connection between them. Around the region where the connection channel should have been George noticed several clusters of white dots. “What are these?” he asked.
“Those speckles?” said Wolfgang. “I don’t know. There seem to be clusters of them near the gate region. Perhaps they are small particles made during the gate failure, debris from the catastrophe. There must have been some energy dissipated when the semiconductors decided to rearrange themselves.”
“Perhaps so,” said George. “Can we look at some gate that didn’t fail?”
“Of course,” said Wolfgang, typing into the keyboard of the STM control computer. The scene on the display began to shift to the right as the piezoelectric needle-position mechanism was given a new bias voltage. The stratified terrain passed by until an hourglass shape appeared on the screen.
George studied it closely. “I see a few of the clusters near the gate region here, also. There are fewer of them, though, and they seem to be lined up along the gate channel, like spectators along a parade route,” he said. “Was there anything similar on the ATLAS chips?”
Wolfgang shrugged. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think we would have noticed.”
“What’s the scale here? A few microns?” George asked.
Wolfgang typed a command, and a graduated scale appeared along the lower part of the display. “Ja, the clusters are perhaps a micron across,” he said.
George thought for a moment. He had an idea. “The superconductor metallurgy group has a scanning electron microprobe. It scans an energetic electron beam over a surface, and records the X rays produced at each spot. It can label any feature of a scan picture with its chemical composition of elements. Maybe we can schedule some time on it to find out what the clusters are.”
Wolfgang pursed his lips and nodded. “Ja, good idea.” he said.
George took out his cellphone and called Jerry Walton, the superconductor metallurgy group leader. George reserved two hours of microprobe time in the next blank spot in the schedule, Friday, June 18. It was frustrating to have to wait more than a week, but there were no openings sooner. Jerry promised to call George or Wolfgang if anyone canceled.
They spent the rest of the afternoon moving the STM probe around on the microlandscape of the detector, finding other blown FETs and clusters of speckles but learning nothing more.
At the end of the day, after a quick meal in the cafeteria, George returned to his room at the SSC hostel feeling depressed. He spent the evening watching second-rate movies on the room’s TV wallscreen.
21
ROGER STROKED HIS CHIN AGAIN AS HE STUDIED THE papers and diagrams on Susan’s laboratory desk. Susan was very excited about her work, and her enthusiasm had caught him up, too. And it was interesting. He thought about the implications of her neuroprotein. If it worked, it could change the world. Again he felt the dull ache in the pit of his stomach, an ache related to how badly his own work had been going lately. Her protein, when it was available, could even change theoretical physics, he thought. It could change his theoretical physics.
Susan laughed.
Roger looked up inquiringly. Had he done something amusing without realizing it?
“You always stroke your chin when you’re thinking hard,” she said. “Elvis seems to be imitating you. Perhaps he’s considering going into particle theory.”
Roger walked over and looked in at Elvis, the rhesus monkey in the laboratory cage on the cart in front of Susan. “There are some fairly odd animals in the field already,” he said. “I suppose we could accommodate one more.” He wondered if imitating humans was an indication of intelligence. He watched the movement of Elvis’s eyes, studying Roger, then flicking away. He could believe there was intelligence behind those eyes.
Roger turned to Susan and again felt the pull of her attraction. He liked her very much. After a pleasant Tuesday evening dinner at the Four Seasons in Dallas, they had driven the short distance to her laboratory at Mitocon. Susan had told him that she was concerned that the person on the evening shift had called in sick, and she had decided to give Elvis his next shot and checkup herself. Roger was pleased to finally get a look at her laboratory and at Elvis, one of her favorite topics of conversation. He had been seeing a lot of Susan in the past week and a half, but this was his first visit to her lab.
“I wonder…” he said, watching Elvis and thinking again about what Susan’s drug might do for humans. “Do you have any quantitative measure of how much this new protein has improved his intelligence?” he added lamely. He didn’t want to bring up the topic of human experimentation again. He had already heard Susan’s strict views on the subject.
She removed a felt-tipped pen from the pocket of her white lab coat and scribbled on a pad. “It’s a matter of interpretation,” she said. “I have superconducting magnetometer measurements showing a significant increase in electromagnetic brain activity after we gave him synaptine, but there’s no way, at present, to relate that to intelligence. His reactions are faster. His basic reaction time is down to about 70 percent of what it was before the treatments.”