Jack did so, with the gun so close to his head that he could still smell the shot. But the picture of his tormentor was filling in. The man had to have worked in a lab at some time—it was in his language. He knew things.
“Finally,” Jack concluded, “the three beams emerge into the mass spectrometer separated by about a microradian. That’s tunable—the momentum detector port is fixed and I change the magnetic field until the beam I want to measure is bent by the correct angle.”
“Yeah, that’s basic. OK, now, show me how you do this. Every step. You won’t be around to help when I… when my clients do this again.”
That sounded pretty final. Of course, Jack’s usefulness would end when the gunman had what he wanted. But the gunman wanted cooperation, and so allowed hope.
If one had to die, Jack thought, one should do it with dignity. That was the way it had been in the land of his ancestors.
Gina, I love you, I don’t want to go. Not now, not this way.
“Let’s get on with it.” The man waved the gun back to the control station. “Boot it up.”
Jack nodded quickly. “The software is still on. Artoo, activate program… no, just a minute.”
If one had to die, one might as well see what one’s apparatus could really do first. Radiation was beside the point, now. Gammas, neutrons, pions shooting right through the chamber walls, the pions decaying into the tightest beam of neutrinos this world had ever seen. He chuckled, inanely, to himself about seeing neutrinos—then stopped.
There were places where you could see neutrinos, and one of them was just a few kilometers around the bend of this tunnel—where Gina worked.
“Please excuse me,” Jack said in a trembling voice. “I should not run that program again because of the radiation. We would both be sterile, I think. I need to be more careful.”
“No shit! OK, you have ten minutes—after which you’ll be trying to do this on one leg. Understand?” The gunman grinned frostily at him again. But there was something eager in the grin, something beneath that hardened exterior that understood. The man must have been a physicist at one time, or at least a physics student. Where?
Here? Before they canceled the supercollider? It would explain how he’d gotten in and out, and been able to hide in the tunnels until Jack’s experiment had succeeded. The gunman would have been a very young man then, Jack’s age—full of dreams. Then they’d let everyone go.
Jack nodded and fumbled through the papers on the desk beneath the computer. There it was! The main evacuation diagram. It showed the neutrino observatory around the curve of the tunnel—sixteen kilometers of solid Texas rock. Sixteen kilometers of near vacuum, to a neutrino. He had to eyeball the angle and be very careful to disguise his purpose—the man watching him would know about the neutrinos.
He brought up the mass spectrometer control simulator and adjusted the magnetic field controls until the negative pion beam was headed in about the right direction.
“We’re just about ready. I’m going to up the output a bit, enough to get some secondary fluorescence out of the annihilation gammas. That way you can see that it’s really working.”
“OK.” The gunman was staring at the computer screen instead of Jack. Maybe if he was distracted enough… “You know we… they were going to make antiprotons here back before…”
Jack snuck a look at him; the man’s eyes seemed to glisten for a moment. Then the moment had passed and the gun was leveled at Jack’s head again. “Let’s get on with it.”
Jack nodded. Would just a steady neutrino signal be enough, he wondered? They might not look at their data for days. He should modulate it.
“Pulse mode,” he said as he made the changes. Explain everything correctly, he told himself, but disguise purpose. “Keyed to the mouse, OK? Less radiation that way. I’m ready to start. If we turn the lights down, you should see flashes at the window.”
“I’ll take my chances with this light.”
“OK. Artoo, activate program nine point three.”
There was a slight snap, and the screen display showed only a slight signal. That was because the beam wasn’t hitting the detector, deliberately.
“I didn’t get the… the beam aligned quite right, so we’re not seeing it on the screen as much as it should—”
“You’re misaligned a bit for the detector, but I saw the flash! Hit it again. Enough antimatter to make a reaction I can see! That will show them. Thirty bloody years, damnit! And they told us it wasn’t worth anything. You didn’t hear that, kid.”
Jack barely had heard him. He was thinking furiously, trying to imagine a message, oblivious to everything outside his own head. What kind of signal would Gina recognize? Jack didn’t know any code—was “SOS” three dashes and three dots or three dots and three dashes? His finger was poised over the mouse key when he spotted a cheat sheet with the physical constants he’d taped to the shelf next to the computer.
Ah—so. He started tapping the key. Six times, wait, six times more, wait, two, wait, six, wait, one, wait, seven, wait, six. That was “h,” Planck’s constant.
“I see it, I see it,” The gunman said, his voice excited, not threatening. “Not too efficient, yet—you’re getting some glow from the positron beam too, aren’t you—on the left?”
Actually, it was the positive pion beam, but Jack didn’t feel like correcting him. “Yes, but only a few. This is just an experiment; it—”
“I understand. Let’s see some more. This is interesting, if it’s this reliable already. You lucky son of a… Hit the key again.”
Trembling, his finger tapped twice, then seven, then once, then eight, two, eight again. That was enough for “e,” the base of natural logarithms. There was no “L” on his cheat sheet, but Jack had an answer to that, one that Gina would be sure to get. The universal gas constant: eight, three, one, six… finally, P? Ah, standard atmosphere pressure, in Pascals.
Then back to Planck’s constant. He tapped slowly, as if at random, looking at the flashes of annihilation energy. He did not have to fake worry about the radiation.
“That’s enough,” the gunman said by the time Jack had tapped his way back to “e” again. “Now, the most critical part of this setup has to be the collision chip, right?”
Jack nodded. “Yes, that was the hardest to make.” Except for the software. There were eight months of work—trial and error nanolithography—in that millimeter-thin, square centimeter chip. It was unique in the Universe—the first and only one that had worked.
“Not hot, is it?”
Jack thought about saying yes, but he’d explained the beam line too carefully. The gunman knew that the meson and baryon beams emerged into the steering magnets without hitting anything.
“No. But it will take a few minutes to dump the vacuum—non-destruc-tively.”
The gunman smiled wryly and waved at him again. “Get with it. You’ve got a briefcase here? With a security tag.”
The bastard had thought of everything, Jack realized. With a cleared case, he could take anything he wanted out of the lab, provided it would fit. Who the hell was he?
Jack told the computer to open the pressure valve, and found his briefcase for the gunman. Brown, pseudoleather, D.O.E. issue—at least that had no sentimental value.
It took ten minutes for the pressure to equalize in the collider chamber, and another ten to unbolt the flange. The liquid helium had already drained and evaporated, but the gold-plated box with the nano-channel chip and the field effect needles was still burning cold to the touch.
Jack ignored the pain, taking a perverse pride in his ability to do so. His ancestors would approve. Pain meant nothing now. He handed the precious device to the gunman and allowed himself a momentary pleasure in the scowl on his tormentor’s face as his fingers closed on his frozen booty. They would both leave skin on it.