Gravitys Angel | Page 9

ground floor, where technicians sat in rows at their consoles, and the
experiments command above, where the Responsible Person sat with
his assistants and controlled the experiments.
I introduced Carol Hendrix to Paulsen, my assistant, who was crouched
over his screen like a big blond bear over a honeycomb. "Hello," he
said, then went on muttering into his headset-I often wondered how
anyone understood him.
I said to her, "Let's find you a set, and you can plug in to my console
and watch what develops."
The next hour was taken up with the usual preparations for a run:
collecting protons and antiprotons in their injector synchrotrons, tuning
the beams. The "experiments underway" clock had started when the
first particles were fed out of the injector synchrotron and into the main
rings. Now the particles would be circling in the rings at a velocity near
the speed of light, their numbers building until there were enough for a
sufficiently violent collision.
"I have initiated the command sequence," Diehl said on the
headphones.
About a minute later a voice said, "We're getting pictures," and there
was a round of sporadic clapping from the people on the ground floor.
On one of the screens in front of us, QUARKER was providing
near-realtime views of the collisions, which appeared as elaborate

snarls of red and green, the tracks color-coded to distinguish incoming
from outgoing particles. "Beautiful," the man in front of us said.
On the screen next to this one, data flickered in green type. I saw that
everything was, as they say, "nominal." Then all lights in the control
room went out, every screen blank, every com line and computer dead.
Under amber emergency lights, everyone sat stunned.
And the world flexed, the wave from the singularity passing, the shape
of spacetime changing. Puffs of gray dust jumped off the walls, and
there were the sounds of distant explosions.
Carol jumped out of her chair and said, "Come on."
I took off my headset and followed her. We passed through the door
and into the tunnel, where settling clouds of dust were refracted in
yellow light. I stopped at a locker marked Emergency and took out two
respirators-false faces in clear plastic with attached stainless steel tubes.
If enough helium escaped into the tunnel, it could drive out the oxygen
and suffocate anyone without breathing apparatus. "Here," I said and
gave her one.
The door to the experiments room was askew. Behind us I heard loud
voices and the sounds of feet pounding up the stairs to the surface.
Turning sideways, I slipped through the door's opening.
Blue blue blue blue, the slightest pulse in it, then suddenly as the
conjurer's dove flying from the hat, white, swords or crystals of it
jammed together; vibrating as if uncertain, then turning as suddenly to
blue.
The composite detector unit and surrounding equipment had
disappeared. Carol Hendrix had become a translucent, glowing figure
that left billowing trails of color as she moved. The world was a sheet
of light and a chittering of inhuman voices, high-pitched and rising.
Etched images in gold against white, flickering, the reality tape
shrieking through its transports as every possible variation on this one

moment unfolded, the infinitesimal multiplied by the infinite.
Sometime later, hands pulled on me, dragging me backward across
rough cement to a world which did not burn like the middle of a star.
My heels drummed against the floor, my back was arched, every
muscle rigid.
Riding the Invisible Bicycle past Building A, I saw two men bent over
the partially disassembled carcass of a groundskeeper robot. Sprays of
optic fiber, red lengths of plastic tubing, and bright clusters of
aluminum spikes lay in the grass beside it. One man was holding a
dull-gray, half-meter cube, the container for the expert system that
guided the robot and was the apparent source of its problems.
The state of things at Texlab: Big science-grandiose and masculine and
self-satisfied-lay in ruins all around, shattered by its contact with an
infinitely small point, the singularity.
On the steps of Building A, camera crews and reporters had gathered.
They just milled aimlessly at this point, waiting for the Texlab
spokesman--presumably Diehl-who would have to come out and recite
a litany of disaster. Then would come the questions: How did this
happen? What does it mean?
As I headed out the perimeter road I was passed by lines of vehicles:
vans carrying tech teams, flatbed trucks loaded with massive chunks of
bent metal, cars with solemn, dark-suited bureaucrats in their back seats.
No shuttle rides today-the tunnel was strictly off-limits.
Near station 12 an orange quadrupole assembly lay next to the hole it
had made coming out of the ground. Part of its shrouding had torn
away to reveal the bright stainless steel