George was surveying LEM, she was doing the SDC, and Roger was surveying the east test area used primarily for beam diagnostics.
She adjusted her grip on the detector carefully. The thing, in addition to being a sensitive detector of Bridges, contained a cutting laser that could be useful or dangerous. Its control system was crafted to interface with her new Reading skills. Variable molecules on its surface fed information through the molecule-sensing areas of her fingers and into the new molecular pattern-recognition centers of her brain. She somehow perceived directly what the Bridge detector sensed. At present there was no real signal from the detector, but there was perhaps a faint sniff of something as she walked toward the SDC office building.
Inside, Alice located the reception office. “Hello,” she said to a secretary there, “I’m Alice Lang. I’m looking for Daniel Warren. I have an appointment.”
The secretary consulted a list before her. “Oh yes,” she said, “Dan said he would be waiting for you in the data analysis room. It’s just down the hall to your right.”
Alice found the room and entered. The inside was a mixture of conventional graphics workstations and VR-equipped recliner chairs, about half occupied by physicists wearing magic glasses and data cuffs. A tall thin man sitting at one workstation rose as she entered. “Alice?” he inquired.
She nodded.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Dan. After you called, I looked through our collection of oddball SDC events. I found something that might interest you. Have you ever used our VR gear, Alice?”
Alice assured him she had. Soon she was seated in one of the recliners and wearing magic glasses and data cuffs. She lay back, went through the calibration ritual, blinked three times, and…
… found that she was slowly falling down a deep well, the sides of which were lined with cupboards and bookshelves, with maps and pictures hung on pegs.
“Don’t worry,” said Dan’s voice at her right ear.
She turned and could see Dan, now wearing a yellow wireframe body, falling with her.
“This is the Lewis Carroll positional interface that our SDC systems people developed,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if they actually spend any of their time trying to write useful programs, rather than amusing themselves. Watch the things on the wall as they go by. Each item is different every time.”
Alice watched and wondered at the complexity of detail. Finally the fall stopped, accompanied by an appropriately loud crash from the sound system, and Alice looked around. She seemed to be standing in a heap of sticks and dry leaves. The figure of a white rabbit wearing a checkered vest was just disappearing down a passageway.
Dan’s wireframe hand gestured, and they moved down the same passageway and turned a corner. Alice could see now that they were in a long low hall lit by a row of lights hanging from above. The room contained several glass and wooden tables and a great many doors. “Just how far did your programmers go in following Lewis Carroll?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know,” said Dan. “Don’t touch anything labeled ‘Drink Me’ or ‘Eat me.’” There’s supposed to be a Mad Hatter, a March Hare, a Dormouse, a Caterpillar, a Cheshire Cat, a Walrus, a Carpenter, and a Mock Turtle down here somewhere. The SDC users seem to like it, but if these programmers were working directly for me I’d have packed them off to Walt Disney World long ago.”
They came to an elaborately carved round door that bore the words unusual events in elaborately serifed letters. Dan’s wireframe hand opened it, and they entered…
… and Alice found herself suspended in darkness.
“This is an event that we recorded three days ago,” Dan said. “It bears some similarity to your Snark event. Here it comes…”
The darkness filled with the wireframe outline of a massive barrel-shaped object that Alice recognized as the SDC detector. Multicolored curving tracks emanated from a point at its central region. One track, colored a deep blue, came straight from the vertex point with no evidence of curvature and passed in a nearly horizontal trajectory through the outlined wall of the detector.
“What have you learned about this event?” asked Alice, feeling some alarm. Three days ago! That’s too long. If this is the Hive’s Bridgehead, it may already be too late!
“We wouldn’t have paid much attention to it before we heard about your Snark,” said Dan. “The blue track is very highly charged, judging from its ionization, but doesn’t curve at all in our 2 Tesla magnetic field. The event’s energy and momentum balance only if we exclude it. It went right through the iron-stopping wall of our detector, leaving a track in the muon counter as it passed through, and probably went into the tunnel wall. It didn’t make any jets, though.”
“The SSC beam is still off, right?” Alice asked. She was trying to remain calm. She remembered Iris’s assurance that they would have a year before the Hive attempted a Bridge.
“Yeah,” said Dan. “At last report, they’re almost finished fixing the dipole in the north segment of the ring that quenched last night. They should be starting another ramp-up cycle soon.”
“Could we go down to the SDC detector, then? I need to have a look at the place on the wall where that track would have hit.”
“Sure,” said Dan. “I can assure you there’s nothing to see on that wall, but you might as well have a look at the detector itself while you have the chance. When they get the dipole fixed, they’ll turn on the beam again, and there’ll be no access for many days.”
Alice tried to call George, setting the urgency level to maximum, but got no answer. He was probably down in the tunnel at the LEM detector, where his cellphone wouldn’t work. She recorded a message telling him where she was going and suggesting that he link to an SDC remote and join her.
Ten minutes later Alice stood with Dan in the vast SDC experiment cave. Beside them was a tall remote. George had received her message, finally, and linked to an SDC remote. He said that Roger and Iris were with him, watching. His bearded face was visible on the remote’s headscreen.
Dan consulted a printout and reached up to touch a spot on the wall of the concrete-lined cave wall. “As nearly as I can tell,” he said, “that blue track should have hit the wall about here.” He took a felt-tip pen from his pocket and drew a red X on the wall.
Alice had been getting weak positive signals from the Bridge detector ever since she had stepped out of the elevator. Now she stood on tiptoes and held the soap-bar device up to the spot. It produced a remarkable sensation. As it moved it closer to the mark, she could “see” that there was indeed a Bridgehead behind the wall. “It’s here,” she said, turning to the remote, “about five meters in. It must have been here for several days. What should we do now?”
The image of George on the headscreen frowned. “Hell, I guess we’ll have to bore into the concrete and limestone. That won’t be easy. It will interfere with accelerator operation and make a big mess next to delicate equipment. Hold on a minute. Let me ask Iris.”
“I wonder if…” said Alice. She walked to a nearby tool board and returned with a medium-size ball-peen hammer. She began to tap the wall, starting well away from the spot of interest and working her way toward it. As she approached the red x, the tapping sound changed from a dull thunk to a more resonant hollow sound.
Dan looked surprised. “Let me try,” he said. He took the hammer from her hand. She was too startled to protest.
“Dan, wait!…” said George, looking up to realize what was happening.
Dan struck the X a solid blow, and the wall crumbled like a broken eggshell, falling away to leave a jagged hole about forty centimeters across. Behind the hole was darkness.