The deck beneath him began to tilt. The rear of the ship started to tilt down. MacAllister gripped the arms of his chair.
Amy squealed with delight.
It felt as if the Salvator was turning over. The bridge moved steadily up until it was almost directly overhead.
“Don’t worry,” said Valya. “It’s a directed-gravity field. They’re slowing us down.”
THERE WAS A mild jar as they completed the docking maneuver. Then down was once again in the direction of the deck. “Okay, everybody,” said Valya. “They have quarters set aside for us. We’ll sleep in the tower and come back to the ship tomorrow.”
The outer hatch opened. A cheerful male voice said, “Hello. Welcome to Origins.”
He was middle-aged, with a high forehead and receding black hair, convivial green eyes, a thick mustache, and a casual manner. He wore a mud-colored sweater and a silver bracelet-style commlink. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said, extending a hand to help Amy with her bag. “My name’s Lou Cassell. I’m on the director’s staff.”
Lou was amiable and sincere. The sort of individual who inevitably tried MacAllister’s patience. It was easy to picture him leading a church choir. He shook hands enthusiastically. Good to have you aboard. “Unfortunately, Dr. Stein will not be able to meet with you. He wanted me to convey his disappointment, but to ensure that you got everything you need.” He introduced them to a few other staff members, asked whether they needed anything, and escorted them to their quarters, which were, to MacAllister’s surprise, smaller and more spartan than those on the Salvator.
They took a few minutes to get organized. Then Lou suggested they might want something to eat.
It was early morning for Valya and her passengers, but the occupants of the tower, which ran on Greenwich Mean Time, were just settling in for lunch. They followed him into a large, crowded dining area. “How many people do you have here?” asked MacAllister.
Lou looked around, as if he needed to do a count. “I think we have seventy-seven on board at the moment,” he said. “And another ninety or so in the West Tower.” He passed the question to the AI, who confirmed the number at seventy-nine. “Plus yourselves, of course.”
Of course.
“You mentioned a director? Stein? Does he run the entire operation?”
“You mean the entire facility?”
“Yes.”
“More or less. He sets overall policy and whatnot. But the day-to-day operations in the West Tower are handled by his deputy.”
MacAllister was surprised there were so many people. “I understood Origins wouldn’t become operational for years.”
“Fully operational. We’ve been up and running for eighteen months. We don’t have anything like the capacity the system will have when it’s completely put together. But it’s still far and away the world’s best collider.
“It takes a lot of people to make this place go, Mac. It’s okay if I call you that? Good. About a third of them are engineering and construction types. Another third do technical support and administration. You know, supply, general maintenance, life support, and so on. The rest are scientific staff. The researchers. They rotate. They come on board in groups by project. And they compete for instrument time from the first day they get here.”
“What would they be doing on the instruments?” asked Amy, who couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.
MacAllister thought about her father trying to send her to law school and couldn’t suppress a smile.
“They’ll want one more run on the beam, or more time on the computers, or a little more bandwidth on the comm channels. We can’t possibly keep everybody happy.”
MacAllister was still thinking about DiLorenzo. “Is the place safe?” he asked.
“Absolutely. You couldn’t be in a safer place.”
“You’re not going to blow up this part of the galaxy?”
“I’ve heard those stories, too. I wouldn’t take them too seriously, Mac.” Lou allowed himself a polite smile. Didn’t want to offend anybody, but it was a dumb question.
Lou did a lot of introductions, including some to people whose names he had trouble remembering. Hardly any of them recognized MacAllister’s name.
He wasn’t used to people smiling, shaking hands, and turning away.
WHEN THEY’D FINISHED, Lou announced it was show-time, and led the way out into a corridor. “If you’ll allow me,” he said, “I’d like you to see what we’re about.”
They crossed into a dark room, and the lights came on.
It was a circular VR chamber. They took seats around the wall, and Lou brought up an image of a long narrow line, which stretched wire-thin from one side of the chamber to the other. “This is our basic structure as it is now constituted,” he said. “The East Terminal is on your right; the West to the left. Between, of course, is the tube.” He put up a silhouette of North America, and laid it over the line. Origins extended from Savannah, Georgia, to Los Angeles and out into the Pacific almost to the Hawaiian Islands.
“All one structure?” said Amy.
“All one. When it’s finished, it will be considerably larger.” The line lifted off the map. Hawaii and the Pacific and the NAU shrank and were seen to be on a curved surface. Then the Earth was dropping away. The line extended off-world, well past the moon.
And finally stopped.
“I know the wire’s thin,” said MacAllister, “but that’s still a lot of the stuff. Where’s it come from?”
“We mine it. Iron asteroids in the Ophiuchi system. We do everything over there, extract it, smelt it, whatever, put it on spools, and bring the spools here.”
“It’s enormous,” said Eric. “I don’t think I ever realized how big this place is. How big it will be.”
“In fact,” said Lou, “the collider, when it’s finished, will be too short.”
MacAllister stared at the line projecting out past the moon. “You’re not serious.”
“Oh, yes. Eventually we’ll have to build another one. When we have the resources.”
“And when you know more,” said MacAllister.
“That, too.”
The image rotated and gave them a close-up of the East Tower. “Accelerator beams are generated here,” he said. “And at the other end, of course.” The sphere opened up, and they were inside, looking at a round, polished disk. Lou launched into a standard lecture. Here was how the beam was aimed, here’s what the robots did, there’s how they kept even a few stray particles from getting into the tube.
MacAllister started getting bored. “Lou,” he said, breaking in, “what’s it for? What do you expect to learn?”
Lou inhaled. Looked simultaneously proud and cornered. “The easy answer,” he said, “is that we will be collecting accurate data that can’t be had any other way. The true reason, though, the one that gets to the heart of things, is that we don’t know what we might learn. Won’t know until we see it. It’s fair to say we’re looking for ultimate answers. Why is there a universe instead of nothing? Are there other universes? You might even say we’re looking for the right questions to ask.”
“Such as?”
He fumbled that one. “Nobody else would want to be quoted saying this, but there are a lot of people here who think the same way I do about this.” He paused. “It would be nice to know whether our existence has any meaning beyond the moment.”
That was a bit too spiritual for MacAllister. The taxpayers were spending enormous sums so Lou Cassel and his crowd could look for answers to questions that, by their nature, had no answers.