“I doubt it,” said George. “Remember the tests we did on unused chips? I think this cadmium contamination must have something to do with the way they were mounted in the pixel detector’s holder. Let me try a long shot.”
He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and dialed. “Hi, Murray,” he said, “George Griffin. I’m glad you’re in already.”
“Hi, George,” Murray’s voice answered in the earpiece. “Yeah, I had to come in early today to get something ready before a contractor crew arrives. What’s up?”
“Murray,” George said. “What do you know about how the chip connections were made on the pixel detector? Were we using any new techniques or materials? I’m particularly interested in soldering or spot welding.”
“Hmm,” Murray said and paused. “Yeah, I remember. We had some problems with cracked solder joints due to the flexing of the thin beryllium frame, so we went to a new more ductile solder alloy. I think it came from Japan or somewhere. Sony had been using it in some of their LCD processes.”
“Do you have a spec sheet on it?” George asked.
“Yeah, lemme see here…” George could hear the sound of typing as Murray interrogated the LEM materials specification database. “Aha! Here it is. What did you want to know?”
“Is there a breakdown of the metals used in the alloy?” George asked.
“Um, yeah. It doesn’t give percentages, that must be proprietary info, but it says that in descending order of concentration it contains tin, lead, silver, cadmium, and indium.” “Bingo! Thanks, Murray. I think you’ve just solved our pixel detector problem.” George felt a great wave of relief. The problem that had been plaguing him for months was probably solved.
He hung up and turned to Wolfgang. “There’s cadmium in the solder they were using for mounting chips,” he said.
“Ja,” said Wolfgang, “so…?”
“Cadmium has a low vaporization temperature. It gets spread around easily, and can migrate on a substrate in the presence of electric fields. And it selectively absorbs neutrons and makes betas and gamma rays. It’s used as a neutron-eater to control nuclear reactors. That’s harmless in a normal environment, but near the SSC beam there are great floods of neutrons traveling along the beam line. That’s what’s killing our detectors. We’ve been poisoning them with cadmium-based solder.”
“Ja,” said Wolfgang, “and ATLAS wasn’t using such solder, so it had not the problems. I see. Sehrgut, George. We must test this theory, of course.”
“Of course,” said George, “but at least I have some progress to report at the group meeting this morning. I’ll need some hardcopies of those images showing the cadmium spots.”
Wolfgang set about capturing the microprobe images they had produced as image files.
George’s cellphone beeped. He excused himself, walked across the room, and pressed the receive button. Must be Murray calling back, he thought.
“Hello, George.” It was Roger. “I’ve been working all night on our little problem. I understand the message!”
“You do?” George said. “That was fast. Tell me all about it.” Roger sounded very alert for someone who had been up all night.
“The 12 primes and 144 primes were the key,” Roger said rapidly. “The following bitstream is a set of pictures. The resolution matrix is 1728 by 1728. That’s 12 to the third power, 12 times 144.”
“Excellent,” said George. “And what are the pictures?” He was feeling a rising excitement. This was starting out to be a very good day.
“There are twelve pictures in all,” Roger said. “I don’t understand all of it yet, but I’ve made some progress. It seems to be a tutorial in elementary science, very graphic and with a minimum of symbols. You know the bit. The periodic table, the structure of matter, and so forth.”
“That doesn’t sound very informative,” said George, feeling a slight disappointment. Roger seemed to be building up slowly to… what?
“Just wait,” said Roger. “Then it gets into general relativity and cosmology. And then it comes to the punchline. George, the Snark isn’t a particle. It’s the mouth of a wormhole!”
“A wormhole?” George exclaimed. “Do you mean an Einstein-Rosen bridge?” He paused, struggling to recall the concept. “That can’t be right, Roger. When I studied general relativity at MIT, my prof was very fond of the idea of Einstein’s bridges, of curving space into a shortcut between two distant locations.
“But, as I recall, the things are dynamically unstable. They have the annoying tendency of winking out of existence so rapidly that one can’t even shoot a photon through. And besides, an Einstein-Rosen bridge should have a lot of space curvature and a mass comparable to a black hole, shouldn’t it?”
Roger laughed. “You were at MIT a while back, my friend. In the late ’80s Kip Thorne at Cal Tech discovered that, theoretically at least, a wormhole can be kept open and stabilized in several ways, all involving a bit of negative mass-energy. And as for the wormhole mass, it can be anything from a Planck mass upward. A Planck mass is only a microgram. I don’t think you know for sure that your Snark isn’t that massive.”
“A microgram?” said George. “That’s much too large. If it started at 2 percent of the speed of light, it would never have come to rest in the detector.”
“Perhaps the chaps on the other end helped to stop it,” Roger said. “Perhaps that’s what all of those jets were accomplishing.” George could imagine Roger’s grin.
“Does the message say where they are? Where the other end of the bridge is located?” George asked.
“Yes,” said Roger. George waited, but Roger said nothing else. He seemed to be playing for dramatic effect.
“So where are they? Is it a nearby star system? How many light-years?” Damn the man and his cute games, George thought.
“It’s not that simple,” Roger said quietly.
“What do you mean, it’s not that simple?” George was growing exasperated. “Roger, where in hell are they?”
“Not in hell,” Roger said. “A place that’s harder to reach than that. They’re in another universe, George.”
Part VI
June 21, 2004 June 15,1992
The truth is, I don’t think there is a single person in this body who has the scientific background to know for sure whether [the SSC] is the greatest investment ever or the worst…
June 20,1992
High-energy research with particle accelerators has resulted and will result in plastics for medical use, solutions for DNA research and… maybe even for AIDS… nuclear waste disposal… pollutant removal…, location of oil deposits, creation of integrated circuits… studies of water tables… cryogenic engineering, tumor and body chemistry detection… ultra-fast computers.. and lots, lots more…”
They have already, as a result of this program, developed cancer technology, developed treatment of tumors, developed advanced plastics that can be used in hospitals to reduce hazardous wastes.. The SSC is almost driving supercomputer technology, and supercomputers are what has made the United States an advanced technology [leader] in lots of areas.