“Oh… damn,” the secretary of defense said. “Are you sure? The Mreee took a couple of our officers up to watch the fighting. They were using those blasters to really sock it to the Titcher.”
“Disinformation,” Bill said. “The Titcher don’t care how much is destroyed as long as we left a gate open and undefended. We were even getting ready to send through support that we wouldn’t have been using against them at other gates. But, really, how much did we see of the Mreee? Just where they took us with those jaunt belts. Total area a couple of square miles, most of it in buildings or cities. The evidence against the Mreee is pretty strong. I’m sorry I supported them in my initial evaluation. That was my mistake. Fortunately, we found out in time.”
“We’ve got teams over there,” the national security advisor said. “From State and Defense.”
“They might be just fine when, if, the gate opens again,” Bill said. “In which case I strongly suggest that they be ‘called home for consultation.’ Then again, I’d suspect that they’ll disappear in the interim. And even if they didn’t, the gate room must have taken one hell of a whack. It was on the same boson track as the rest. That probably transmitted the wave front of particles.”
“They’ve attacked, in some strength but not as much as normal, on another track,” the national security advisor said. “The open boson in Mississippi. We’re holding them and they’ve apparently retreated for the time being.”
“I’d guess that that was a leftover from a previous civilization on that planet,” Bill said, thoughtfully. “There wasn’t an organism at the gate so they’re having to move them over from wherever they have forces. Which makes the point that we really have to hold them here.”
“Why?” the secretary of defense asked.
“We’re opening multiple bosons along multiple tracks,” Bill pointed out. “The Titcher seem limited to just one resonance, one track; they don’t appear to have our version of a boson generator. If they break out on Earth, we’re going to let them out across the entire circuit; thousands of worlds they’ve never been able to touch. And the generator is not going to shut off for thousands of years.”
“Oh… shit.”
The boson in Horse Cave, Kentucky was quite invisible to the naked eye. The survey team from Louisville that found it, an environmental company again, which normally responded to spills generated by CSX railroad, had had one team member, in fact, walk right through it. It gave off no radiation that was detectable with a Geiger counter. It had no apparent physical presence. But it was giving off a continuous stream of muons.
As Weaver had been assembling the materials he needed for his experiment he had kept one eye on the news and came away with an even greater cynicism than was his wont. The fact that the bosons were generating muons had become common knowledge and it had created a real hysteria, exceeding, if possible, the hysterias about the use of nuclear weapons. Which was far greater than the hysteria generated by invading aliens, although of the three they were by far and away the greatest threat. Muons were subnucleic particles. They didn’t generate “radiation,” they didn’t cause cancer, they didn’t make two-headed babies. Hell, there are about 10,000 muons per square meter at sea level continuously coming from active galactic nuclei and quasars and other cosmic stuff and that hasn’t caused us any problems in five billion years. But try to tell that to reporters.
They had found a slew of so-called “scientists” who had trotted out elaborate… lies about the danger from muons and bosons. Did they bother to tell people that light particles were bosons? Hell no! They were based on no scientific evidence but the falsehoods were much more interesting to the news media than the occasional countering truth from physicists who actually knew what they were talking about. People who had never heard the term “muon” until they saw it on the evening newscast were now running around hysterically trying to find muon detectors and calling up environmental companies to have them come in and check their homes for muons and bosons.
Bill had been at a scientific conference where a psychologist had laid out the theory of hysteria. In chimpanzee society when faced with an overwhelming or previously unknown threat, such as the first time they heard a rifle shot, the tribe would act in a hysterical manner. Some would try to fight, some would run, some would bluff, others would hide or simply collapse. With no way to logically evaluate the threat, the very randomness ensured that some would survive and, presumably, reproduce. It was an evolutionary method to ensure survival.
It was a pain in the ass in humans, though.
And the protests. Oh my God. Rioters had trashed the physics department of the University of California, destroying hundreds of man-hours of work, some of it directly linked to boson research which might have helped fix the anomaly in Florida. Antiscience hysteria was sweeping the nation, hell, the world. The anomaly site was an armed camp now that protesters had decided it was safe to picket there.
In Horse Cave, Kentucky, however, things were placid. The area that the boson had generated on was an open field just up the road from Park, a natural depression, a shallow forty acre sinkhole, with a stream running through it. The county road had a sign about a quarter mile north that had a horse and buggy on it, indicating that Amish used the area. The county had sent over a couple of sheriff’s cars and a few reporters had come down from Louisville, asked him some questions, most of which he’d either lied about or avoided answering by invoking national security, and left. Fortunately they left before the units from Fort Knox showed up.
The boson had been chosen for the experiment for several reasons. The area was rural, well away from major roads, so if the worst happened minimal damage would occur to humans and their possessions. Even if they got a Cthulhoid entity through the gate, the worst that it would mean was having to change the route of I-65 by a few miles. The depression meant that the boson was easily defended. And it was only two hours from Fort Knox which was the Armor Home of the U.S. Army and which had a vast stock of armored vehicles for the Kentucky Army National Guard. A goodly few of them were being arrayed on the slopes around the depression.
“This is a track one site,” Bill said to the National Guard battalion commander. “The Titcher attacking in Mississippi are coming through a track one, but that seems to be a world that was held by another civilization; there wasn’t a Titcher organism on the far side. So far all the gates they’ve opened have come from track three. So we’re pretty sure that there aren’t Titcher on the other side of this gate. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean there’s not something hostile. On the gripping hand, most of the gates have been neutral. We may not be able to open it. We may find that there’s nothing on the other side. We just don’t know.”
“Okay,” the lieutenant colonel said. “When do you open it?”
“As soon as you’re in position,” Bill answered.
“We’re as ready as we’re gonna get,” the colonel replied. “Blast away, Doctor.”
Particle accelerators were delicate things that were normally only found in laboratories. And the rest of the mechanisms involved were even worse, not to mention being hastily thrown together by the team from Columbia. There was, therefore, an inflatable shelter, courtesy of the United States Army, thrown up over the boson.