But in theoretical physics, if you weren’t the brightest chap in the quad, the cleverest, trickiest, sharpest, most imaginative bastard in the business, then you were the dog’s breakfast. The difference was just a bit of extra intelligence, just enough to put you out in front of the pack. You knew it when you had it. And he’d had it, dammit. Before he’d left Geneva for Waxahachie, he’d had it.
But here, now, he was definitely the canine’s morning repast. And perhaps he would remain canine cuisine. From now on…
Perhaps he’d simply set his sights too high. Only one person could be the brightest particle theorist of the generation. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t him. Perhaps he could go back to England and get a nice faculty job at some redbrick university with large teaching and administrative responsibilities and less pressure on research. He could become a gentleman lecturer who met with fawning undergraduates over coffee each afternoon to discuss the Nature of Structure. Roger grimaced, recalling a few of those.
Or perhaps he could get a well-paid programming job and move east to Wall Street or west to Silicon Valley, as some of his friends at Cambridge and CERN had done when they couldn’t make it as particle theorists. He thought of the prospect of driving his Porsche for an hour on the San Jose Freeway or the Long Island Expressway to a job where he made clever improvements to programs that drew better pie charts for business leaders.
No, by God! He’d rather die than do that. He had to wield the brick again, he needed to pound on a first-rate new problem, beating on it with an avalanche of ideas until it yielded results that came so fast he hardly had time to write them down. He had to.
Roger got up and closed the door of his office. He pulled up his trouser leg past the knee.
Then he took the black plastic box from the drawer and placed it on the desk. He knew well what needed to be done. One of his girlfriends at Cambridge had been a diabetic, and many times he’d watched her give herself an insulin injection as she explained how it was done.
Susan had given Elvis an intramuscular injection. The protein was stable enough, she said. The effect lasted longer if it was injected into muscle tissue rather than directly into the circulatory system. He stripped the wrapper from the hypodermic, fitted on the needle, selected one of the vials, and punctured its latex cap.
Then he paused. Susan had used half a milliliter on Elvis, he recalled. Should the dose be scaled by body weight or cortex area? That determines if I should use half a vial or the whole thing. Better play it safe and use cortex area, he thought, drawing half the contents of the vial into the syringe. Using his left hand, he wiped a patch on the inside of his left thigh with alcohol, then injected the protein. It was done. He withdrew the needle. A yellow droplet beaded its tip, a red droplet dotted his thigh. He wiped the spot with alcohol again and rolled down his trouser leg.
Roger breathed a sigh when his paraphernalia were safely placed in the black box and locked in the lower drawer of his desk. He sat, considered what he had done. He had injected himself with an untested experimental drug with completely unknown side effects. He could feel a slight tingling sensation spreading upward from his left thigh and minute twitchings of the muscles near the injection point.
Suppose he had an adverse reaction, perhaps convulsions requiring hospitalization. He could visualize them carrying him out of the building on a stretcher while his colleagues looked on. He could not tell them what he’d done. He’d been very stupid to inject himself with a drug that had only been tried on rats and monkeys. Perhaps he was feeling a bit ill. He extended his hand and studied it to see if it was shaking. It was, a bit.
There was a knock at his closed office door. Roger jumped, feeling he’d been caught in some unclean act. He glanced at his watch. It was 1:50. Who could it be? He stood, now feeling a bit shaky, and walked to the door. He opened it carefully, hoping that he looked more calm than he felt.
Roger was surprised to see George Griffin, the chap he’d met at CERN a few weeks ago. They’d had lunch at the CERN cafeteria and later gone to dinner at the Pizza d’Oro in Meyrin. They had ended the evening trading beers, jokes, philosophy, and personal histories.
George was an experimentalist with the LEM collaboration here. He was older, perhaps forty-five, and had held a string of research positions at CERN and Fermilab before he landed his present tenured faculty job at a big university somewhere on the north Pacific coast of the United States. Was it Oregon? Roger couldn’t remember. “Hello, George,” he said more cheerfully than he felt. “Good to see you again.”
“Good afternoon, Roger,” said George. “Welcome to Waxahachie. How do you like the New World?”
“I like it well enough, so far,” said Roger. “How are you? We must do a bit of pub crawling soon, assuming we can find crawlable pubs in this arid landscape.”
“My informants tell me,” said George, “that in Texas pub crawling is called ‘juking.’ It has to do with moving from one juke joint to the next until you must stop because you either run out of quarters or can’t make it back up on your horse.” He grinned.
Roger laughed. He had difficulty in imagining George sharing the same roof with a functioning jukebox.
“But actually, Roger, I dropped by to ask you a theoretical question. Is this a good time?”
Roger glanced quickly at his desk drawer. Yes, it was indeed closed and locked. “Of course,” he said and stood aside to offer George a chair. He glanced at his workstation screen. “Actually, I’ve just finished a project.” As Roger sat at his own desk chair, he noticed that the tingling feeling had migrated from his thigh up to the base of his spine. He could feel the twitching of muscles in his buttocks. He looked across at George. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I’ve only had about four hours’ sleep since my night shift, but I need to talk to someone. I’ve been puzzling over a very peculiar collision event that the LEM detector recorded in the wee hours this morning,” he said. “It cannot plausibly have been produced by the usual suspects, event pileup or equipment failure, yet it violates several of my favorite laws of physics. It seems to be legitimate.”
Roger rubbed his chin. “So the laws of physics were overthrown overnight?” he said. “I hadn’t heard, George. You must tell me about it.” The twitching sensation was moving progressively up his spine. But now it felt rather pleasant, like a back rub.
George described the LEM event and showed Roger the colorful hardcopy details of the event’s characteristics, graphs, histograms,tables.
Roger thumbed through the sheets of printout. It was very complex, and the format was unfamiliar. But somehow he was able to grasp the densely packed information on each page almost at a glance. As he did this, a remote corner of his consciousness was considering model after model that might explain the data and rejecting each in turn as inappropriate. It was quite enjoyable. Roger was beginning to feel very good as he warmed to the task.
There was a multitude of models to sort through. Three generations of particle theorists had made it their business to fill the physics literature with every possible twist on what at any given time was called “the standard model.” Every conceivable variation that could be wedged into an unoccupied corner of “theory space” had been published and promoted by its progenitor. It had been a gold rush of ideas. The losing theorists had their papers published, perhaps had their ideas tested against reality by some hyperactive experimental group, and usually had their work listed a few times in the Citation Index. The winners, those with enough of “the right stuff” to hit upon a combination of theoretical ideas that happened to map, at least momentarily, into the actual structure of the physical universe, became famous, received Nobel prizes, were given endowed chairs in physics, and were asked to sign numerous petitions expressing outrage at or support for various social and political issues and causes.