“It’s beautiful.”
“As it turns out,” George continued, “associating computer files and operations with physical locations in the Palace does seem to make a good computer-human interface.
The operations and locations feel very natural and stick in the memory. Pietro claims the interface is based on a classical scheme for memory improvement developed by the Greeks.”
“Are there more of these locational interfaces?” asked Alice, wishing for her notepad. “I’ve never heard of them before.”
“As far as I know,” said George, “it’s unique to the SSC. But it’s become rather a local fad to see who can come up with the most bizarre locational interface. The SDC programmers designed one based on the works of Lewis Carroll, and I’m told there’s a new one at the EA-4 experiment that’s supposed to be derived from the H. P. Lovecraft mythos.”
The view of the Palace began to change. They were moving through the vast building. The statues were passing faster now. So fast that she could not comprehend one before the next appeared. They passed gardens, open areas, belvederes, glittering fountains, and elaborate staircases leading up or down. Finally the view stopped before a goat-headed man. Alice noticed that the words SNARK TALK TO JAKE! were carved in neat architectural letters into the white marble pedestal of the statue.
“Here we are,” said George. “This is the icon for the event I need to measure.”
Alice saw George’s phantom hand, a representation of curving connected yellow polygons and lines, reach out and touch the pedestal. The words TALK TO JAKE vanished from the inscription. Then the hand moved to touch the foot of the statue…
… there was a pop sound and she floated in a black night illuminated by a spiked flower pattern constructed of many-colored curving lines.
“This is the Snark event,” George said. “Its collision products passing through the LEM detector made this pattern.”
“It’s like a neon-tube sculpture I saw once,” she said. As she watched, the phantom hands dimmed each colored line of the pattern until only one remained. It was a straight line that glowed with a violet color, and at random intervals along its length were blossoming bunches of shorter red lines.
“Here,” said George, “is our Snark. It has a large electric charge and a very large mass. It came out of the vertex, but it took no energy or momentum from the collision.” The phantom hand touched one of the bunches of red along the violet line. “See these? They’re called jets, bunches of energetic particles that are made when a quark or a gluon is ejected by a collision.”
“I’ve read about them,” said Alice.
“They always come from the point of collision. Never are they found at random spots along a trajectory like this.”
“What? Never?” Alice quoted.
“Well, hardly ever,” George responded.
She imagined that he must be grinning.
“Roger Coulton suggested that they’re from a process he called ‘color ionization.’ Somehow the Snark is losing energy by separating quarks and antiquarks along its path and making them into forward jets, just as a normal charged particle loses energy by separating electrons from atoms.”
A frame of yellow lines, which Alice took to be an outline of the LEM detector, now surrounded them, and they swam in the space it enclosed. “What I’m trying to do,” George said, “is estimate where in the detector the Snark stopped. Ah!” A region at the edge of the detector suddenly contained a sprinkling of colored line segments. The viewpoint shifted until Alice could see that one of the segments, a fat red line, was a direct extension of the violet line that still glowed near the center of the device. A dashed yellow line winked on, connecting the violet line to the red.
“That,” said George, “means the Snark went through the inner slab of the depleted uranium absorber, made a big flash of light in this lead glass scintillator, but never made it to the outer muon detector. It stopped somewhere in here.” A column of green numbers appeared momentarily above the place where the red track ended.
The field of view expanded and grew more detailed. Alice could see structures within structures within structures.
The hand gestured again, and a bar with a hexagonal cross section lit with a violet glow. “Jackpot!” said George. “The Snark hit this lead-glass scintillator unit, and the thing is still scintillating, half a day later. I think our Snark must be embedded in it.” The hands made another gesture…
… and Alice found herself before the statue of the goat-headed man.
“Okay, I have the Snark’s coordinates,” George said. “Now we know where it’s hiding. So we need to figure out how to get to it.”
They moved off through the forest of statues at a dizzying speed.
30
ROGER GLANCED AT HIS WATCH. HE HAD BEEN TALKING for about forty-five minutes now. The seminars of the SSC Particle Theory Group were supposed to last an hour, but that rule was frequently breached by long-winded speakers. At the rate he was going, however, he would finish easily with some time for questions. That was fine, because his headache was intensifying again. “So,” he said, “last night I set up the problem on my workstation to do a preliminary evaluation of the perturbation series, using the formalism outlined on the previous transparencies. Here’s what Mathematica gave me. It’s a standard 3-D plot of generalized isospin against flavor, treating both as continuous variables for the purposes of the minimization, with mass as the altitude on the vertical axis.” He placed the color transparency on the stage of the overhead projector. It was a brightly hued two-dimensional surface that showed the gentle rolling hills of the surface, punctuated here and there by deep depressions.
Roger ran the red spot of the laser pointer over the numbers near the depressions. “As you can see, the minimization gets the masses of each of the ground-state mesons to better than 1 percent. I think that can be improved, but it’s fairly good as it stands. I haven’t had time to investigate the baryons, but I see no reason why it should not do as well for them.” He paused and massaged his temples. His forehead was pounding. The bright colors of the slide seemed to bring with them peculiar individual odors. He turned toward his seated colleagues. “Well, that’s about all. This formulation is only one day old, but it shows, as they say, initial promise. In fact, I think it looks quite lovely! Thank you.” He nodded to the group to indicate he was through and switched off the projector.
The applause from his theoretical colleagues, usually somewhat perfunctory and reserved at the end of an informal theory seminar like this one, was thunderous. Roger smiled. He knew that he had done well. They had understood the complicated ideas that he’d presented, and they were delighted with his new approach.
“Questions?” he said quietly, and a dozen hands shot up. As he turned to point to a postdoc in the front row, he was surprised by a sharp peculiar odor. He stared in bewilderment at his audience. Each person seemed to have a bright coruscating aura around his head. Roger could feel the points of each aura like sharp individual pinpricks. Their faces were weirdly distorted, and they were attempting to speak to him in sibilant glottal languages that he could not comprehend.
The sharp smell intensified, and his ears filled with a high-pitched warbling susurrus that seemed to whisper hints of forbidden knowledge. A vast enveloping darkness closed in about him, and he could feel himself falling out of the world…
Part V
June 11, 2004 January 15, 1990
The only way to keep the cost of the SSC at $5.9 billion would be to seriously reduce its capabilities… We considered whether there are cuts that would allow substantial savings… restored later. We found none.