Roger rubbed his chin. “Tricky question…” He paused. “Perhaps there wasn’t an evolutionary path that could lead… No, wait a minute…” He stopped, then grinned at her. “Maybe there is such a mechanism in real neurons, but no one had found it yet, so Crick didn’t know about it.”
Susan grinned back and kissed him on the cheek. “Very good for an amateur!” she said. “That’s exactly what I concluded. So I decided to look more carefully to see if I could localize an agent that might be enhancing changes in the synapse transmission strengths. I was able to use some new tricks, real-time MRI microimaging, for example. And I found that in primate brain tissue whenever the synapse connections showed large changes in their transmission strengths, a certain protein was always present.
“That’s how I found synaptine. It’s the protein agent that provides Crick’s missing mechanism. It enhances adjustment of the connection strengths at synaptic junctions, just the way the back-propagation calculations do at the connection nodes of a neural network.”
Roger, whose hands had been behind his back, brought them forward and grasped both of hers. “That’s a great story. You’re wonderful,” he said and kissed her slowly and purposefully. As they kissed, he could feel the four slim glass cylinders he had slipped into the tight back pocket of his slacks pressing against his buttocks. He’d stolen the drug from Susan. Stolen it! When the act of theft had occurred, it had been very smooth, as if he were watching someone else, some skilled thief who had effortlessly pocketed the vials and made the bogus entry on the clipboard. He could still slip the vials back in the rack, he thought, but he made no move to do so. He recalled the time in King’s Lynn when he’d been caught stealing a sweet at the grocer’s. He’d been perhaps seven at the time, but the shame of being caught still brought a flush to his cheeks.
Was he crazy? Yes, he did seem to be rather crazy just now. He needed the synaptine, and Susan had so much that she would never miss what he had taken. If this was a crime, it was one that lacked a victim. Roger’s feelings of guilt were not diminished by this rationalization, but he decided, guilt or no, that he was keeping the drug. He had to. He kissed Susan with rising urgency, guilt transmuting to desire.
They left soon after and, with some haste, returned to Susan’s apartment.
Two hours later the empty laboratory was very quiet. Elvis was feeling very strange. The street sounds that came to his ears seemed to have dangerously sharp edges. The light from the window seemed to have an aura of fruity taste about it. The familiar smells of the laboratory seemed each to have an individual musical ring. He began to shake, then to rock slowly back and forth.
He fell to the floor of his cage, his back arching, his mouth stretched in a rictus grin. An electrical fire danced in his brain.
Elvis was having his first petit mat epileptic fit.
22
GEORGE LOOKED AT THE LARGE WALLSCREEN DISPLAY mounted on the SSC counting house wall. The beam luminosity was stabilizing nicely. The SSC beam had been late in the ramp-up on Tuesday evening and was not at full energy until well after midnight. LEM had limped into operation but now was finally recording data smoothly.
He glanced over at Alice, who was seated at a nearby table, busily transcribing handwritten notes into her laptop workstation. It was almost 3 a.m. She seemed to be holding up very well. He realized that he really liked having her here with him.
He looked at the colorful flatscreens of the LEM counting room. The data acquisition computers continuously sampled the data stream and selected a few of the events for display. All events were also recorded on ultra-high-density holographic optical platters for later analysis.
The displays showed several views of the LEM detector and the paths of the reconstructed particle tracks that signaled the occurrence of a head-on collision between two 20 TeV protons, particles so highly accelerated that their rest mass represented only a part in twenty thousand of their mass-energy. The beam monitors showed that tonight the twin proton beams had been ramped to a new SSC record for luminosity.
A brushlike fan of varicolored particle tracks from a new event was traced on the screen, while numerals below the picture indicated the quantities of energy deposited in the various calorimeters. George smiled. The LEM experiment, constructed with the efforts of almost a thousand physicists and perhaps two thousand technicians, for once seemed to be functioning properly.
He seated himself at one of the consoles and studied the oscilloscope traces of signals from electronics units thirty stories below that were processing the massive flow of data from each event. Everything seemed okay.
He directed the signals from the vertex detector into the analog signal bus and checked the overview monitor of the pixel detectors. The number of dead pixels from radiation damage had increased slightly since the beam had come on. Well, at least the chips should be usable through the end of this data collection period.
Without warning, the digital oscilloscope signal trace changed. The smooth up-and-down bump of a single particle passing through the detector was replaced by a rise to the saturation level of the amplifier chip, as a section of the pixel detector was overwhelmed with ionization and charge.
“What the…?” he said aloud. The numerical display showing the number of tracks in the detector, which normally registered the few hundred tracks from a normal event, was now registering over a thousand. And from the tracking display, most of them were not coming from the vertex of the collision. One particle, indicated in purple because of its heavy ionization, traced across the detector in a path that was almost undeflected by the 2 Tesla field of the toroidal magnet. Emanating from this particle were jets of secondary particles that seemed to occur every centimeter or so along the path.
George glanced at the numerals along the bottom edge of the display. The calorimeters were indicating an impossibly high energy. They had received far more energy than could be supplied by any proton-proton collision, more even than from several superimposed collisions.
“What the hell is that?” George demanded in a loud voice. The dozen physicists and technicians also in the counting room all reacted at once.
“Holy shit! Was that a spark?”
“Could that have been a computer glitch?”
“How did it get past the fucking trigger?”
“You should have seen what the straw tubes just did!”
George blinked. He was sure that this had not been a detector failure. He was all too familiar with detector glitches and knew how they looked. This was not a glitch. He had just witnessed the law of conservation of energy being violated with extreme prejudice.
He walked to the central console, sat down, and began to write in the logbook. Then he looked across the room. “Ralph,” he said, “run the diagnostics! Quick! If that was an equipment glitch, we need to know as much as possible about what happened.” The technician strode to an equipment rack and began to move switches.
Alice was suddenly beside George. “What just happened?” she asked.
“As Lewis Carroll might have put it, Alice, we just saw a Snark,” he said. “An impossible event. Something just lit up the LEM detector in a way that, according to our conventional wisdom, could not, should not have happened. The collision event, according to our readouts, had more energy, more momentum, and more particles than the laws of physics can allow. It could not have happened, yet it did.”