The light slid neatly into the top of his head. There was a sharp smell of singed hair, burned meat. Wayne convulsed, eyes flickering. The light passed out at the nape of Wayne’s neck, following an undeviating straight line, as if the man, two hundred pounds of vindictive muscle, were no more substantial than a mass of mist and shadows.
Wayne, shuddering, toppled backward like a felled tree.
The children were wailing. Bill found Tom clutching his legs; he reached down, lifted up his son, and buried his face in the crying boy’s neck. “It’s all right. It’s all right—”
“What the hell—”
Bill turned. Principal Reeve and a couple of the other assistants had come in at a run. “Get the medic,” Bill said.
“What happened?”
He pointed to Anna. “She’s hurt. And her teeth—”
But Reeve was no longer listening to him, it seemed, despite the blood and fallen bodies.
At the center of the room, something was glowing, yellow-bright. Bill turned. It was the yellow dot, the glowing Tinkerbell. It had come to rest at the heart of the children’s wire cage; it bobbed to and fro, following complex paths.
The children were calmer now. A couple of them were with Anna, trying to help her sit up. But the rest had started to cluster around the cage and its imprisoned light point; its brilliance shone over their faces.
Bill followed them, his son still in his arms. Fascinated, Bill reached out a hand toward the cage. He felt something, a ripple, as if a mild electric shock were passing through his system. He reached farther—
A hand grabbed his arm, pulling it back. Tom’s hand.
Maura Della:
Bill Tybee was pretty distressed, and he had a right to be, Maura
thought.
Wayne Dupree had, it turned out, come from an extremist Christian group who believed the Blue children were the spawn of Satan, or some such, and so required destruction. He had gotten himself into the center on a fake resume and references from other members of his cult group: credentials that, Maura agreed, the most minimally competent vetting process should have weeded out.
On the other hand, Dupree hadn’t succeeded — and not because of the system or the presence of other adults, even a devoted parent like Bill, but because of the freakish plunging of the Tinkerbell anomaly into his body, just at the right moment.
“Which I can’t believe was a coincidence,” she told Dan Ys-tebo as they walked into the center’s physics lab, now crowded with researchers.
He laughed uncomfortably, his big belly wobbling. “I don’t know why you brought me here. This isn’t exactly my field. And you have no jurisdiction here.”
“But you spent long enough in the asylum with Reid Malen-fant. This is more spooky stuff, Dan. Somebody has to figure out what all this really means. If not us, who?”
“Umm,” he said doubtfully.
In the lab, they confronted the anomaly that had killed Wayne Dupree.
Tinkerbell in a cage, Bill Tybee called it, and that was exactly what it looked like. Just a point of light that glowed brightly, like a captive star, bobbing around in a languid, unpredictable loop inside its ramshackle trap of wire. The anomaly was so bright it actually cast shadows of its wire mesh cage: long shadows that fell on the white-coated scientist types who crawled around the floor, and on their white boxes and probes and softscreens and cameras and tangles of cabling, and even on the primary-color plastic walls of the schoolroom, which were still coated with kids’ stuff, blotchy watercolor paintings and big alphabet letters and posters of the last rhinos in their dome in Zambia.
It was this contradiction, the surreally exotic with the mundane, that made Maura’s every contact with these children so eerie.
Dan Ystebo was beside her. “It looks as if someone found a way to split the atom in the middle of a McDonald’s, doesn’t it?”
“Tell me what’s going on here, Dan.”
He guided her forward through the nest of cabling toward the glowing thing in the cage. There was a protective barrier of white metal thrown up a yard from the cage itself. “Hold your hand out,” he said.
She held her palm up to the glow, as if warming it by a fire. “By golly, I can feel the heat. What makes it glow?”
“The destruction of neutrons from the atmosphere. Step a little closer.”
She stepped right up to the protective barrier, nervous. This time she felt a ripple in the flesh of her hand, a gentle tugging. When she moved her hand from side to side she felt the wash of some invisible force.
“What’s that?”
“Gravity,” Dan said.
“Gravity? From the anomaly?”
“At its surface the gravity pulls about thirty thousand G. But it drops off quickly, down to less than one percent of G a yard away. The anomaly masses about a million tons. Which, if it were water, would be enough to fill a fair-sized swimming pool.”
“All crammed into that little thing?”
“Yup. It’s around a sixteenth of an inch across. Right now these guys, the physicists here, don’t have a good handle on its shape. It’s presumably spherical, but it may be oscillating.”
“So it’s pretty dense.”
“A little denser than an atomic nucleus, in fact. So dense it shouldn’t even notice normal matter. An anomaly like that should pass right through the Earth like a bullet through a cloud.”
“Then how come it doesn’t fall through the floor right now?”
Dan looked uncertain. “Because of the cage.”
“This contraption the children built?”
“Maura, it seems to generate a very powerful, localized magnetic field. It’s a magnetic bottle that holds up the nugget.”
“How?”
“Hell, we don’t know. We can do this — we have to build magnetic bottles for fusion experiments — but only with such things as superconducting loops, and at vast expense. How the kids do it with a handful of copper wire and an old car battery…”
She nodded. “But this is where the potential is. The technological potential.”
“Yeah. Partly, anyhow. If we could manipulate magnetic fields of that strength, on that scale, so easily, we could build an operational fusion reactor for the first tune. Clean energy, Maura. But that’s not all.”
“So what is Tinkerbell? Some kind of miniature black hole?”
“Not quite as exotic as that.”
“Not quite?’“
“It seems to be a nugget of quark matter. The essential difference from ordinary matter is that the individual quark wave functions are delocalized, spread through a macroscopic volume…”
It took some time for Maura, cross-examining him, to interpret all this.
In ordinary matter, it seemed, atomic nuclei were made of protons and neutrons, which in turn were made of more fundamental particles called quarks. But the size of a nucleus was limited because protons’ positive charges tended to blow overlarge nuclei to bits.
But quarks came in a number of varieties.
The ones inside protons and neutrons were called, obscurely, “up” and “down” quarks. If you added another type of quark to the mix, called “strange” quarks — a geeky term that didn’t surprise Maura in the least — then you could keep growing your positive-charge “nuclei” without limit, because the strange quarks would hold them together, And that was a quark nugget: nothing more than a giant atomic nucleus.
“We’ve actually had evidence of quark nuggets before — probably much smaller, fast-moving ones — that strike the top of the atmosphere and cause exotic cosmic-ray events called Cen-tauro events.”
“So where do the nuggets come from?”
Dan rubbed his nose. “To make a nugget you need regions of very high density and pressure, because you have to break down the stable configuration of matter. You need a soup of quarks, out of which the nuggets can crystallize. We only know of two places, in nature, where this happens. One place is — was — the Big Bang. And the nuggets baked back there have wandered the universe ever since. The theory predicts we should find Bang nuggets from maybe a thousand tons to a billion. So our nugget