Carefully, George removed the electrical connectors from one of the units and slid it out of the array. He slowly descended the ladder holding the unit in the crook of his elbow and placed it carefully on a workbench. Then he opened a cabinet and removed an identical unit. “We have spares,” he said, “and that one needed to be replaced anyway.” He climbed the ladder, slid the new unit into its place in the array, connected the wires, slid the tray back into the detector, and replaced the cover plate. He descended, restored the switches to their original positions, and typed commands into the keyboard and studied the screen. “Everything is back to normal,” he said, picking up the unit he had removed, “and the other scintillators are much happier with this one gone.”
George walked to a tall blue cabinet that stood back against the gray concrete wall and removed a small instrument. “This,” George said, holding up the instrument, “is a radiation survey meter for checking radioactivity.” He placed the round end of the survey meter against the unit in his hand. The instrument chirped every few seconds, and a digital readout on its face read 0.1 MR/H. Then he slid the device along the length of the unit. As he neared the far end, the chirp rate increased sharply, and the readout changed to 1.3 MR/H. “I’ll be damned!” he said. “It does seem to be a bit radioactive.”
“Isn’t that what you expected?” Alice asked. “Isn’t that what this was all about?”
George turned, smiling. “Sure, but it was only a wild idea,” he said. “I didn’t really expect to find anything. Chances were, this thing had only developed a light leak. There’s almost never any measurable radioactivity from events in the detector after the beam goes off. But the Snark made jets all along its path from ejected quarks and gluons. If it could do that, it might disrupt normal nuclei and make them radioactive, so I thought it was worth checking the level of radioactivity.”
He walked to the cabinet, replaced the meter, and closed the door. He took a small knife from his pocket and cut at the black tape on the outside of the unit. It peeled back, to reveal a transparent crystal interior.
In the dimness of the area Alice could see that a blue glow illuminated the crystal inside, and that the glow was centered at the tiny blue point near the end of the bar. “Is that the Snark?” she asked, feeling a rising excitement.
“It must be,” said George. “It has to be! We did it, Alice. We’ve captured our Snark!” He placed the glowing scintillator bar on the workbench, slowly gathered Alice to him, and kissed her. She was surprised but responded with some enthusiasm, and they stood together for a long time.
Finally they walked to the elevator. George held the glowing barlike object in one hand and Alice’s hand in the other.
35
DEREK INCHED ALONG THE CATWALK, PULLING THE stiff Cryogenic hose after him. Below Patricia moaned softly as she retreated to a corner, where she was hemmed in by the tall racks of electronic equipment. The train of giant fire ants, their clattering venom-wet mandibles extended, clamored toward her.
She lifted a heavy piece of equipment from a table and hurled it at the giant insect at the head of the line. It caught the object in its jaws, then flung it aside with a twist of its giant head. It paused, as if studying her with its jet black compound eyes, then brushed its mandibles with its forelegs.
“Patricia,” Derek called from above, “turn your back on them and cover your face with your arms. I’m going to try something.” She looked up at him, then turned as he had directed. She was sobbing softly to herself, waiting for the mandibles to dig into her back, waiting for death.
Derek twisted the valve at the end of the long corrugated hose. A jet of clear, steaming liquid nitrogen leapedforward and cascaded downward, producing great plumes of vapor as it fell. Derek played the stream directly on the head of the first fire ant. The insect stopped in midstride. He could hear a cracking, popping sound as the insect froze solid. It did not fall over, but stood rigidly frozen in a six-legged midstride.
“It’s working,” he called down to Patricia. She seemed to be shivering, perhaps from the rapid drop in temperature. He pulled the hose backward now and directed the stream at the other ants in the column. Through the heavy work gloves he wore the back-splatter of the liquid nitrogen was slowly freezing his fingers…
Alice stopped typing, yawned, and decided to save the file and go back to bed. An hour ago she had come wide awake and had decided to work on her novel for a while. She shut down the lapstation, turned off the dining room light, opened the door, and padded barefoot back into the darkened bedroom. She dropped her robe on the floor and crawled slowly back into her big bed. She stretched and pulled the sheet over her nakedness. She felt wonderful.
She could hear George’s soft breathing beside her. She looked at him, sleeping peacefully with a contented smile on his face, and she thought about recent events. He was wonderful. She thought perhaps she was in love with him. It had all been very exciting. It had been romantic, too. His delight at finding the Snark had turned to passion. It was fun while it lasted. But realistically, it couldn’t last much longer.
She had to earn her living by finishing Fire Ants. A great deal of money was at stake. Their lovemaking had inspired her to write a great new scene. But when George found out why she was really studying life at the SSC so closely, the chances were he would want to have nothing more to do with her. She had come here to Waxahachie under false pretenses, and that fact was likely to sour their blossoming relationship. Nevertheless, she had to tell him. Soon. She sighed and snuggled against him. But not yet.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of light from across the room. She rolled over, facing the dresser. George had placed the scintillator bar on the dresser, its open end toward the wall. In the mirror she could see its blue glow. It was flashing. But just as she focused her attention on it, the flashes stopped and there was only the faint and continuous blue glow. She waited, drowsy now. Perhaps she had dreamed the flashes.
Then, as she was almost dozing off, they came again. Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash… This went on for a while and then stopped again.
She waited, wide awake now. In a few minutes the flashing began again. This time she counted flashes. 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-31-37. Then it stopped. Twelve numbers. Something was familiar about their sequence. When she had worked as a reporter for the Democrat, Alice had interviewed some Florida State University astronomers about their research. They had been using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI they had called it. They were searching for radio signals that might have been sent by some hypothetical alien race that lived in another star system.
After the usual jokes about picking up alien game shows on TV and whether that could be construed as intelligence, Alice had asked about strategies for making the initial contact. How could they be sure that a message they received was not random noise or some natural phenomenon? Or, to put it the other way, how would they send a simple radio signal that was clearly a product of an intelligent species? One answer had been to send a sequence of prime numbers, numbers that had no integer divisors. She was sure that the first few primes were 2-3-5-7-11-13. The Snark, Alice decided, was trying to send a message. The Snark wasn’t an exotic particle. It was… something else… something much more important than that. She shook George awake.