Dr. Philpott stared at the TV set in the lounge. “Anti-gravity? What the hell are they talking about?”
“Professor,” Cindy said, sounding frightened and looking wide-eyed as she brushed the hair out of her eyes, “they told. They weren’t supposed to tell.”
And, of course, that was true. The level of lay ignorance demonstrated by that anti-gravity reference had distracted him from the even more egregious error in that announcement: they weren’t supposed to tell.
The media knew he was hidden in here, of course. He was the closest thing to a celebrity connected with Green Meadow, so naturally the media would have sought him out at the very beginning of the crisis, for statements and comments and interviews and all that, and God knows the authorities had initially wanted him out of here. But he’d convinced them, finally, after a number of phone calls — fortunately, the phones in here didn’t have to go through any switching system that the terrorists would see — that both he and the lab were safer, that the whole plant would be safer, if he stayed right here. (He didn’t tell them he was continuing his experiment, merely that he was “safeguarding” it; a white lie, that’s all, a venial sin of omission.)
But the media wasn’t supposed to tell. As one of the officials he’d talked to on the phone had said, there would be a “news blackout” on the whereabouts of the eminent Dr. Marlon Philpott until this emergency was over. (And why were all scientists “eminent,” anyway?)
But, as ever in human affairs, there’s always someone who didn’t get the message, some temporary assistant subeditor in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. “All we can hope,” Philpott said, “is that the terrorists are too busy to watch television.” And he went back into the lab to see how Chang and the infinitely minute speck of something in the deuterium was coming along.
“This raises the ante,” Frank said. “I’ll go in that lab there and get him and bring him here and put him on the phone with those assholes, and maybe we’ll start to get somewhere.”
“I should come with you,” Grigor said. “We’re not sure what’s happening in that lab.”
“I must come, too,” Maria Elena said. “I want to see this laboratory. I want to see what this man is doing.”
“You don’t leave me in here with these people,” Pami said. She’d had trouble waking up just now, and was more irritable than ever.
“Well, somebody’s gotta keep an eye on the store,” Frank said.
“You know,” Grigor told him, “most of this is automated, it’s merely a matter of watching the gauges. We could lock the staff in the day room while we’re gone, five or ten minutes. We would bring Philpott here, and let them out again.”
“But who looks at the gauges?”
“Kwan.”
Frank looked over at Kwan, huddled in a chair in the corner, lost in his own helpless despairing rage. “We’ll see,” Frank said, and went over to him. “Kwan? You get the idea?”
Kwan looked at him without response.
Frank said, “We’ll lock these people up, go over and get the mad scientist, and bring him back. You sit at the controls there, keep an eye on things. If it looks like something’s gonna blow, you fix it, right?”
Kwan’s head lifted slightly. A faint gleam came into those dead eyes.
Frank touched his shoulder, feeling its bony hardness, tense as a bridge cable. “You don’t wreck it, okay? Not yet. I tell you what: if the time comes to say screw it, let er rip, you’ll be the guy to do it. Okay?”
A faint smile touched those gray lips.
Frank grinned at him. “You’d like to blow the whole thing, wouldn’t you? China and everybody.”
With those eyes, and that smile, on that fleshless face, Kwan looked like a death’s head.
No one was in the lounge to watch the television set three minutes later, when a scared-looking newsreader tried to shut the barn door, now that the horse was out and off and running. “From his vacation home in East Hampton, Long Island, the eminent scientist Dr. Marlon Philpott today broke his silence on...”
In the lab, Dr. Philpott broke a long tense silence to whisper, “It’s there.” He sounded as though he’d seen God. “Chang? Cindy? It’s in there.”
It was. This time it was. The radiation monitor showed definite gamma ray activity in the holding ring. Somewhere within the swirling deuterium something now existed that hadn’t been there before. It had been trying to be born for some time, for weeks, as high-speed streams of heavy ions had been directed into collision courses inside the holding ring. But to get a specific result out of these collisions was as chancy and difficult as getting a specific result out of any collision; like smashing two Hondas together and coming out with one Cadillac. Or like throwing a deck of cards into the air and having them land, all face-up, in exact sequence by suit and number.
Well, this time they had it. And they would keep it. While Philpott and Cindy watched, barely breathing, Chang operated the switching circuit that would transfer the — thing — from the holding ring to the storage bottle. “Gamma radiation has stopped in the holding ring,” Chang announced.
“Then it’s in the bottle.”
Chang looked stricken. “There’s no gamma activity from the bottle!”
“Strange matter,” Philpott reminded him, “only gives off radiation while it’s being fed, that’s one of the reasons it’s so safe. Shoot deuterium across the center of the bottle.”
“A reaction!” Chang’s round face beamed with delight.
“So it’s real,” Philpott said, as though he still hadn’t really believed it, not even one minute ago. His mouth was dry. Knowing that something was real was in no way the same thing as experiencing it; the difference between being out in a blizzard and looking at a snowscape on a Christmas card.
Held poised in the storage bottle was a piece of strange matter, known as an S-drop. The storage bottle itself was a simple glass vacuum jug on a table, containing one positive and one negative hemispherical electrode, with the S-drop suspended by electric current between them. Facing the bottle, a video camera was lined up with an ordinary bare light bulb on the other side, the S-drop centered midway between the two. The camera informed the computer at which Chang sat, and the computer directed the power supply in maintaining the equilibrium of the S-drop. To make the S-drop fall — to the terror of alarmists such as Dr. Delantero — all one had to do was wave a hand in front of the video camera. Dr. Philpott would do it himself, simply to prove Dr. Delantero wrong in the presence of these two graduate student witnesses, but it would ruin the experiment, and who knew how long it would be before he could produce another such beneficial collision?
Chang broke into the self-satisfaction of Philpott’s thoughts, saying, “Professor, it’s getting larger and a whole lot heavier.”
“What? Are you still feeding it?”
“Well, yes, sir.”
“Turn it off,” Philpott told him. “Turn off the deuterium. If that drop gets much larger, I won’t be able to use it. In fact, we won’t be able to hold it.”
Leaning close to the bottle, vision hampered by the guidance light to his left, Philpott peered into the center of that enclosed airless space. Could he see it, actually see it? A speck? Or was that wishful thinking?
Once Frank had convinced the staffers he really would shoot the locks off the lab doors, no matter how much that might startle Dr. Philpott or louse up his experiments, it seemed they had keys to that building after all. “I’ll tell him you fought like hell,” he promised, as he locked them into the dayroom.