What will happen once [the SSC] is finally completed? It deals with compressed energy. Scientists say they will be able to have enough energy to run an automobile.. In the medical profession, they will have a machine that [can] find any tumors or cancer in your body, never using a knife.
38
THE TIME HAD PASSED SO RAPIDLY. ALICE COULDN’T quite believe that it had only been nine days since they had isolated the Snark. She recalled how George had commandeered a new laboratory room for them to work in and set up the recording and display hardware, how Roger had quickly scanned electronic conference proceedings, identified SETI experts on alien contact, and persuaded them to come to the laboratory, how the subtleties of the Snark’s pictorial messages had slowly been decoded. It seemed like months of events compressed into a handful of days.
She looked around SSC’s large lecture theater. It was absolutely packed. Alice suspected that its occupancy probably exceeded the fire code limit by 25 percent. The front row was occupied by the laboratory hierarchy, with Roy Schwitters, the SSC director, seated in the center. Jake Wang sat immediately to his left and occasionally delivered a whispered comment in the director’s ear. Also scattered along the first and second rows were the group leaders, Nobel laureates, and distinguished physicists that Alice had come to know and recognize in the past two weeks.
George had wanted Alice, as a participant in the Snark discovery, to sit on the front row also, but as a reporter she had preferred to sit halfway back in the lecture theater, where she could experience the reactions of the audience around her. She had arrived forty minutes before the seminar was scheduled to begin, and she was glad that she had. Late-arriving graduate students and others sat on the floors, filling the aisles and the space on the floor in front of the first row of seats. Both walls were lined with remotes. Alice had heard from some of the late arrivals that all the telepresence units and couches in the laboratory had been commandeered for the special seminar, bringing all interactive data analysis at the SSC to a dead stop.
George had been speaking for over half an hour and was now getting to the final conclusions of his talk, which had been designed to provide an overview of the past week’s work on the Snark. The seminar schedule, projected at the beginning, had indicated that George would speak first for forty-five minutes, followed by a question period and a break, followed by thirty-minute talks by four other speakers. Roger Coulton, seated now at the far right of the front row next to his boss, Bert Barnes, would discuss the twelve Snark diagrams and their interpretation. Professor Angelo Axel, distinguished cosmologist from the University of Chicago, would discuss inflationary cosmology and bubble universes. Professor Rudyard Home of Cal Tech would discuss general relativity and quantum gravity as applied to stable microscopic wormholes. And Professor Wilson Mulligan, George’s friend from the University of Washington Astronomy Department and a longtime leader of SETI efforts in radio astronomy, would discuss strategies for establishing two-way contact using the Snark.
There had been some discussion of coupling the seminar to a press conference, but George had vetoed that idea, preferring to wait until the two-way contact attempt had been made. Alice was delighted with this decision. She had a major news scoop, the discovery of the Snark, ready to break to an unsuspecting world later this afternoon. Alice took digital camera shots of the arrangement on the front row and made detailed notes of everything. She was thinking of the news release, the Search article she would write on the Snark, and the popular-level science book that would follow it. The Snark was a historic event, and she was in a unique position to write its history.
George started his talk by projecting several multicolored and rotating views of the now-famous Snark event on the large computer-driven flatscreen at the front of the room. He mentioned several important features of the LEM detector that had been essential in discovering the event. He graphically traced the path of the Snark through the various layers of the detector, projecting diagrams that showed in detail the region where the Snark had stopped. He then described how he and Alice had come in the middle of the night and removed the scintillator bar containing the Snark from the LEM detector. He held up a unit like the one they had removed.
Alice smiled. George made it sound as if their actions that Saturday night had been a thoroughly planned course of action, a careful set of logical steps, rather than the slightly beery culmination to an evening of dancing at P.J.’s. And he didn’t mention that after they’d found the thing, they’d gone to Alice’s house and screwed like demented weasels. He seemed to imply that at least half of the insights that had led to finding the Snark had been hers. George was a gentleman, but he was unduly generous. She felt embarrassed, thinking about her half-finished techno-disaster thriller.
George showed a close-up image of the lead-glass scintillator that held the Snark, made at a sufficiently low light level that the blue glow was visible. This was followed by graphs showing the wavelength spectrum of the light and its time structure. Then he described the encoded message, including all twelve of the bitmap images it contained. Finally George described the plan for transmitting a message in the other direction, mentioning that one of the following speakers would describe the plan in more detail.
There was thunderous applause in the auditorium as George concluded. The SSC director stood and asked if there were questions. Alice shifted in her seat, wondering what the question period would bring. She could see that Jake was holding his hand stiffly in the air.
The director called on the first questioner, a theorist in the front row who asked a detailed question about the energy and momentum balance in the reconstruction of the Snark event. George answered the question and projected a new diagram that provided additional information.
Another questioner, an experimentalist for the LEM group whom Alice recognized, asked skeptically about the mass and charge of the Snark and how these related to its stopping power. George quickly admitted that there was a problem here and projected a graph showing an analysis of the Snark’s ionization track in the various parts of the LEM detector. He followed this with a graph of the time-of-flight analysis of the Snark event. “If we assume the Snark is an object having a Planck-scale mass with a velocity of beta equals point-oh-two,” he finished, “then the observed ionization should have been insufficient to bring it to rest. We suspect that the previously unknown color ionization process, the process that produced the twenty-nine jets we saw, also served to decelerate the Snark. Roger has suggested that there may have been neutral particles involved in the deceleration, which we wouldn’t track. We would be interested in other suggestions bearing on this issue.”
The third questioner, one of the accelerator engineers, wanted a more complete explanation of what had been learned from the bit-map diagrams. In particular, what could be learned about wormholes and about the location from which the message was being sent? “First let me deal with the wormhole question,” said George. “The wormhole, or ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’ as we used to call it when I was in graduate school, is almost as old as Einstein’s general theory of relativity itself. The mathematics of general relativity indicates that when space becomes sufficiently curved and distorted, a three-dimensional tube can form that connects one region of space-time with another, a sort of spatial shortcut.” George projected a diagram of a surface curved back on itself, with a tube connecting one region of the surface to another.