“I—I should call my fiancee. She might come to find out what’s wrong.”
“Hah! Nice try, but I’ll take that chance. Now, I have no intention of trying to cart the device itself away. You are going to explain how it works, give me copies of your equipment lists, layout plans, progress reports and anything else my clients might be able to use to duplicate your results.”
Jack lowered his head, shut his eyes, and bit his lip. As he walked back to his desk, the gunman walked over to the phone box to check his work. He never came within two meters of Jack. Very careful, confident. As if he had been doing this successfully for a while. Jack’s grandfather had been a policeman and often entertained the family with stories about how stupid most criminals were. But this man did not seem stupid.
“Come on. I know it makes antiprotons and I know it makes them more efficiently than anything else. What’s the theory and how do you make it work?”
Commercial espionage? Who was he working for?
“Now!” the voice commanded.
“Do… do you know about the Benton-Kubota effect?” Gina Benton had given him the idea. Her graduate student neutrino observations of Supernova SN 2012A, ten years ago, indicated that the insides of white dwarf stars behaved as if they had more particles than were accounted for by standard theory. He had done a brute-force numerical simulation as a senior that supported the idea.
“Nano-scale quasi-singularities? You pinch a field to a point where it can scatter things like it was a particle?”
Jack nodded his head slowly. The gunman had given him a crude description that bypassed volumes of controversy. He and Gina had finally published in 2017, when some of his early experimental data had come out of the noise level.
“I… I see it like this. The collision between a proton and a quasi-singularity momentarily dissects the proton and blows it up into a quark-gluon plasma bubble, we call it quagma—” Jack looked at the gunman, who nodded, indicating, Jack supposed, that he understood and that Jack should goon.
“But my quagma bubbles are constrained, predictable. Each—”
“Keep your hands down!”
Jack froze—he had started to gesture as if he were talking to a graduate student, forgetting the situation. He was notorious for his one track mind—his ability, or disability—to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Gina called it the Kubota effect. Slowly he lowered his hands and continued his lecture, concentrating this time on the gun barrel.
“Uh, the, each of the three quarks in the proton hits the maximum field gradient in turn and produces a quark-antiquark pair, which are separated inside the quagma by the imposed fields—the six positive quarks one way, the six negative the other. A field twist affecting the one-third-charge quarks more than the ones with two-thirds charge mixes the up and down quark beams of opposite sign.
“As the quagma bubble collapses, the six quarks glue together to form two protons and the three antiquarks form an antiproton. That’s the tricky part—the triplets are energetically more stable, but if the bubble collapses too fast, they don’t all have time to form and you get a lot of mesons, too. Each collision is as exactly the same as I can make it, except for a small time uncertainty, so they emerge in controlled directions. Instead of spraying a variety of particles all over the place, I get pure beams of protons and antiprotons. That’s the idea.”
The gunman nodded again. “I surmised something like that. Your incident protons hit an electromagnetic wall and split—viewed in the proton’s frame of reference, it’s just high energy gamma scattering. How can you control it?”
“I, uh, prefer to think of the pinch nexus as a very special captive virtual particle, but the electrodynamic description is equivalent. Anyway, I get a big long quagma bubble.”
“OK, the net result is that you control what happens on a subnuclear level deterministicaUy so you make an antiproton for five times its annihilation energy instead of five hundred.
How?”
“Well, almost deterministicary.” Jack winced at his own accent as he wondered, who was this? What could a man in a trench coat and a gun know about twenty-first century sub-nuclear physics? “I need control over the quantum numbers for 1.3 picoseconds. The main innovation is a Bell-effect probability filter. It, uh, cheats the uncertainty principle by defining the spin phase of the incident proton in exchange for a tolerable momentum spread. The theoretical basis for the experiment is in my proposal.”
“That’s classified. Do you have a copy here?”
Jack shook his head. What was his responsibility here? Would anyone punish him for giving up the document at gunpoint? There were people who thought antimatter bombs were a possibility. That was nonsense, but you almost had to be a weapons physicist to understand why it was nonsense—and some professional technophobe-baiters took advantage of that to bask in a phony world-saving glory at the expense of researchers’ livelihoods.
Was that what he was up to? Was he going to try to create a scandal that would convince the world that Jack’s research was too dangerous to be allowed—and free up Jack’s measly thirty grand a year for something else?
“Come, on, come on.” The gunman waved the gun at Jack’s filing cabinets. “You must have at least a draft here.”
Jack trembled but didn’t move.
The shot was the loudest thing he ever heard in his life. In the closed space, the shock wave rattling off the curved concrete sounded, incongruously, like a ping-pong game. When the echoes died down, Jack opened his eyes. The gunman waved the gun toward the filing cabinets again.
There was a slightly burnt odor about, with a sharpness to it. Gunpowder? Jack had never smelled it before.
“I… I’ll look.”
He found himself in front of the file cabinet without remembering how he’d gotten himself out of the chair and over to it. There was a bullet hole in the bottom drawer of the first cabinet. Jack did a quick mental inventory—his diploma probably had a hole in it now. There was a picture of Gina in there—maybe too far back. His late father’s Ph D thesis might have protected it. His college physics department chairman’s “Retter of Recommendation,” as the kindly but mischievous old man had called it in good natured mimicry of Jack’s accent, was in front of the thesis. So that had a hole in it too, now.
This was a lesson to him for something. Of course. His display of pride at his success had been immediately punished, a load of karma to teach him the humility he had not shown before the powers of the Universe. He frowned deeply. Did he really believe that?
The proposal was in the top drawer. Jack’s thumb print released the lock, he pulled the drawer open, found the section, and put his hand on the document.
Why stretch it out, he thought? Just give him what he wants now. Maybe he’ll choke on it. Jack pulled out three thick file folders.
“The proposal, eight years of progress reports, and three journal articles. There are other copies.”
The gunman gave him that quizzical smile again. “That’s nice.” He waved the gun barrel again, toward the experiment bench.
It was like the gun was a “mouse” and Jack was the little arrow on a computer screen. He had to go where the hand willed. He felt powerless, like a woman in the hands of a rapist.
“Now let’s see the business end.”
“It’s… in this vacuum chamber. I just finished a run. Perhaps you could look just through the observation window?”
Now the gunman laughed. “You may have thirty seconds left to live, but you don’t want to waste a good pump-down. Ha! Fine. I want to see this mother work and I don’t have time for another pump-down either. So, talk me through a diagram.”