Van Cott (Sighing): That takes a while to explain. Why not break for a commercial, and then I’ll tell you. (Break)
Van Cott: Neutrons are electrically neutral, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have anti-particles. When two antiparticles meet, they annihilate each other completely. So now we have two objects, falling through the Earth. Neutronium is very dense compared with rock. The objects — let’s call them bullets — would orbit within the Earth, passing through the core as if it were very thin air. They would be very cold — neutronium, being dense, would absorb lots of heat. They would not slow much at all during each orbit.
The antineutronium bullet would interact with the Earth’s matter and create what’s called an ambiplasma, which would prevent the antineutronium from blowing up all at once. This bullet would slow down much more rapidly. So finally it comes to rest at the center of the Earth, spitting and sparking, making lots of noise. When the other bullet slows down enough to also come to rest, the two meet…and I’m not sure what would happen after that.
Kearney: Maybe this anti- or whatever-plasma would keep them separated. Van Cott (Nodding): Smart thinking. Maybe, and then again — maybe not. Maybe the pressure at the Earth’s core would hold them together long enough for them to fuse. Kearney: What would happen then? Van Cott: Complete or almost complete annihilation of a hundred or two hundred million tons of matter. (Holds his hands clenched in a double fist, spreads his fingers, and moves the hands slowly apart) Think of it as a kind of time-delay bomb with a fuse controlled by gravity.
Kearney (Considerably sobered): That…Mr. Van Cott, that is a very disturbing thought. Have you spoken about this to anybody else?
Van Cott: No, and I’ll probably be sorry I mentioned it here. It’s my private speculation. I don’t suppose it’s private anymore.
43
Walt Samshow and David Sand had been aboard the Glomar Discoverer for only an hour when they received an urgent phone call from Jeremy Kemp. Otto Lehrman, the Secretary of Defense, had released pictures from three Navy Kingfisher subtracker satellites just that morning. Why the pictures had been released was not explained; Kemp surmised it was part of a power struggle in Washington between the President and his decimated Cabinet and the military. Sand quickly hooked up a computer slate to the phone and Kemp transmitted the photos from California. There were more than a hundred.
An hour later, Samshow scrolled through the pictures on the slate screen while Sand asked Kemp about the details.
All of the pictures were of deep-ocean regions, taken from low-Earth-orbit submarine-tracking satellites. The satellites were equipped with laser spectrometers to detect oil and other detritus from submarine operations and ocean weapons testing.
The first fifteen pictures tracked the atmosphere and ocean surface above the deep trenches from south of the Philippines to the Kamchatka Peninsula, at approximately five-hundred-kilometer intervals, with little magnification. All were in false color to show concentrations of free oxygen in the near-ocean atmosphere. Within each picture were dozens of red dots against the general blue and green background.
The next group of ten showed waters off the western coast of Central America, with similar dots. In groups of two or three pictures, the ocean surfaces above all the world’s deep trenches were shown to be regions of high free-oxygen concentration. Several unenhanced color photographs of very high magnification focused on an area three hundred kilometers east of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. They showed several square kilometers of ocean turned white with what appeared to be froth or spume. Then Samshow reminded himself of the scale: each tiny bubbling speck would have to be tens of meters across.
Here was the source of the atmosphere’s increase in oxygen. No natural phenomenon could be blamed for such a display.
“So much for that,” Kemp said. “Did you catch the Andrew Kearney Show last night?”
“No,” Sand said. “We’re not watching much TV here.”
“Have you ever met Lawrence Van Cott?”
Sand hadn’t.
“I have. He’s sharp. He said something on the Kearney Show that’s got Jonathan Post very excited. I haven’t heard the tape yet, but Post says Van Cott may be on to something. Not black holes. Neutronium pellets?”
“Still out of my league,” Sand said. He wanted to get back to the satellite data. Kemp passed on a few more items of information and then hung up. Sand reexamined the photographs on the slate as Samshow scrolled through them again.
“Why oxygen?” he asked. “Volcanic activity?”
“I don’t think so,” Samshow said. “Not in my experience. Something is definitely dissociating seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. But only the oxygen is showing up…”
”Something!” Sand asked softly. “What, machines? Where?”
“There don’t appear to be bubbles above the ocean plains. Only in the trenches, and here and here, in known fracture zones.” He scrolled back. “Wherever there are deep cracks in the crust, something is storing up hydrogen and releasing oxygen.”
Sand made a clench-jawed tsk-tsk. “Kemp says oxygen is up by another percentage point in the Pacific region, and half a percent in central Eurasia.”
“Approaching dangerous concentrations,” Samshow said. “We’re going to see conflagrations…forests, cities.”
“I’ve already given up smoking, thank God,” Sand said.
Edward Shaw sat in a comfortable antique chair in the bar of the Stephen Austin Hotel — alone, with a whiskey sour in one hand and a fistful of Smokehouse almonds in the other. He had returned to Austin to straighten out his affairs, as might a man condemned to death by lingering illness. He found himself unable to cope with ordinary life any longer.
Austin and environs had been his final effort to get in touch with the past and attempt at least a symbolic reconciliation. His last girlfriend — almost a fiancée — had married a bank vice-president and wanted nothing to do with him. The university had taken his departure philosophically.
He had even broken free of Reslaw and Minelli in Arizona, though Minelli had promised to meet him in Yosemite in late March, weather allowing. He did not want his malaise to burden them. Reslaw, lightly bearded, hair cut to a thin shag, told them he was going to Maine to live with his half brother.