COSM Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  PART I 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART II 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  PART III 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART IV 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART V 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART VI 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  COSM

  Gregory Benford

  To the younger women,

  Alyson and Vanessa

  PART I

  GLITCH

  If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.

  —Frank Wilczek, particle physicist

  1

  Alicia was irked, not exactly a rare event. She glared at the thin man across the desk from her and wondered if he was being deliberately irritating, or whether this was just his best-of-the-menu personality.

  “A stop order on my experiment?” She repeated his words scornfully.

  “On any uranium run.”

  “They’re gonna stop the whole damn Collider?”

  “There’s the final A-3 safety review—”

  “Done!”

  “But not completed and filed.”

  “What? You want all the paperwork?”

  “Hey, I don’t wanna rain on your parade…”

  Had this man actually said rain on your parade? He should be in a museum. “It’s the lawyers, right?”

  A Long Island judge had leveled a stay order on the Lab, active until yet another environmental impact report got done. Suffolk County was a hotbed of worriers; they had once shut down a five-billion-dollar nuclear power plant.

  He gave her a smile like wilted lettuce. “I’ve got to certify on it, then boot it over to Legal, and they certify to the judge.”

  “I thought that was all a done deal.”

  Hugh Alcott held up a thick packet of paper. She recognized the safety report from the manila jacket. “There’s some technical detail missing.”

  “The background data? I was told the Lab would pony that up.”

  “That’s your job, I think.” He was known as the Safety Nazi for his unshakably banal, hedgehog manner and now he gave her the blank safety operations officer gaze. “I suppose I could check with—”

  “The whole damn report was supposed to go through yesterday.”

  He stirred uneasily in his standard-issue desk chair. She could tell he did not like being seated while she stood, especially since she was taller than he was anyway. He scratched absently at his ear and she noticed that today’s hairpiece was a demure Tom Cruise ‘95 model. She had seen so much of this guy, he was repeating on rugs.

  “I think we’ve really got to dot the i’s on this one.”

  Alicia turned, crossed her arms, and made herself look out Alcott’s window. Eastern Long Island, early spring, grass just peeking out of the brown mud. Truck ruts rather damaged the view of pine trees and soft, cloudy sky. She had lived in the East and a familiar sensation came over her whenever she visited from California: here was a place with its edges worn off. And she preferred edges. Still, she was close to blowing up all over Alcott, so she let five seconds of stony silence go by in hopes that would help. Ever since she had moved out to California, she found it harder to work with East Coast types. Her home campus, the University of California at Irvine, worked in subtly different ways. When she flew back to Brookhaven to work, she had to retune her social responses. She turned back, arms crossed tightly across her blue work shirt, and said clearly, slowly, “Look, I’ve—we’ve—planned for years to use uranium on this run.”

  “Yeah, I know all that, but my point is, this suit—”

  “Uranium is the point! The review committee said, ‘Put all the details in and we’ll get it cleared.’ In one shot, they said.”

  “Then you’ve got to expect delays.”

  “But we’re ready to run! My team’s all set up—”

  “That was a mistake by Operations.” He blinked owlishly. “Not my department.”

  “You said this would all be done a month early!”

  “That was before the Friends of the Earth filed their suit. Again, not my department.”

  Not my department, said Wernher von Braun, she thought skittishly. I just shoot them up. Who cares where they come down?

  “I have to start running. If I lose my time—”

  “You should have anticipated delays in agreeing to your scheduled run time,” he said, another standard phrase. “You’re getting a one-week window, the only experiment operating, while the big detectors do maintenance away from the beam. You understood—”

  “It’s your fault, damn it.” She bit her lip to stop from saying more, but the tone in her voice had already done the damage.

  Alcott’s jaw hardened until she half-expected to hear his teeth burst one by one, like enamel popcorn. “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.”

  “Even your clichés don’t make it!”

  His lips compressed to a white line. “Look, this isn’t about anything else, just regulations, follow-through—”

  “What ‘anything else’?”

  “Your being black, I mean.”

  Silence for two heart thuds. “I didn’t think it was,” she said more stiffly than she had intended.

  “Good. You’re just another facility guest, see? And until your tech detail is complete—”

  “I never expected otherwise,” she murmured carefully, noting that he said “guest” rather than “user,” which was the common term.

  “I mean, you got bumped up some because of those minority scientist points that got added to your group’s proposal.”

  “Okay, okay!”

  Then she was out of there, before she could say anything more and louse things up even further. Her lab boots clicked on the concrete, tick-tick, wasting time.

  2

  She worked off her anger by biking the whole distance from the health, physics, and safety building to the collision hall. On top of the administration building loomed a vast satellite dish, like half the discarded bra of a giantess. It carried the data link to physicists around the world, those who could collect measurements and analysis from the accelerators, archived here and available over the Internet, without ever leaving their snug offices. It saved a lot in airline tickets.

  A cool breeze whipping by reminded her that spring was still laced with chilly air skating down from Canada. The gust unfurled her bun and sent tendrils playing about her face. She felt she must look even more peculiar than usual, a big black woman with the classic African bulging bust and rear, a blob bobbing along on a spindly bike. Definitely out of place on Long Island. She had never entertained the slightest hope of resembling the willowy models of Vogue; those she regarded as aliens from another world, whom all true human females hated.

  She zoomed on her beat-up bike alongside an enormous grassy berm, nearly four kilometers around and buried in the sand and stone of Lo
ng Island. Slanting morning beams highlighted the immense curve of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a giant swollen wrinkle. She had used the acronym RHIC, pronouncing it Rick, for so long that she thought of it as somehow male. Taking in deep breaths, she coasted amid pine trees just showing the light green tips of new growth.

  Patches of the berm were bare, the residue of gasoline some vandal had sprayed. When the damaged areas were found, the more vocal environmental groups had publicly wondered if they were due to radiation from the accelerator. Page one stuff indeed. Chemical analysis killed that theory a week later, back on page twenty-eight of The New York Times. Still, the Lab had a continuing problem with hot-eyed “enviros” who wanted the Lab closed forever, even though it did a great deal of medically directed research using high-energy sources.

  Gray concrete framed the delivery bay of her experimental station, one of the six where particles collided along the circumference. Teams of resident scientists and outside users combined here to study the myriad effects of particle collisions. Threading among huge apparatus, she went past the Northrup Grumman magnets, long sleek cylinders. No humming, only the chill of cryogenic cool. RHIC needed nearly two thousand of these superconducting particle guides, and it had turned out that an aerospace company knew best how to make so many. With half a billion bucks of building budget, RHIC had entertained many industrial suitors.

  She weaved among the necessary clutter of ongoing experiments. Most people envisioned labs as tidy and clean, with white-coated scientists working alone, making careful, meticulous movements. Experiments in nuclear and particle physics were big, often noisy, and where neatness didn’t matter, fairly sloppy. Big steel racks packed with instrumentation crowded together, some out of alignment. The odor of oil and shaved steel hung everywhere. Makeshift wooden housings covered thick bunches of wrist-thick electrical cabling. Some cable bunches were so fat that little ladders had been passed over them for foot traffic. Necessary chaos.

  Through her pique she reminded herself that she was damned lucky to even be here. A lot of talented physicists were selling stock options over the phone or pursuing exciting careers in sales management. She had gotten in on the ground floor, working as a graduate student in the UC–Berkeley team that helped build one of the detectors. When the accelerator fired up for the first time in 1999, she had staked claim on her own patch of conceptual turf, and now that was paying off.

  Of course, in 1999 they had just turned the Collider on for a few hours at low intensity to meet the schedule, then shut down. That let the Lab accountants use the operations budget to finish actually building the machine. Nobody dared run overbudget, not after the Superconducting Supercollider debacle in the early 1990s.

  Even now, the place had a slapdash feel, with pipes wrapped in metal foil held by duct tape. Nothing worked or looked better than it had to. Results mattered—period. This was one of the few spots in the world where any big physics got done any longer.

  Brookhaven had its own rugged spirit. All the major racetrack accelerators in the world went clockwise, except Brookhaven’s “feeder” accelerator; the full RHIC was a Collider, with beams running in both directions. Still, people from Fermilab and CERN joshed them about their “backward ring.” So someone regeared the Lab clock so it ran the other way. Then they could boast that they had the only accelerator ring that ran clockwise—by their clock.

  Granted, Brookhaven National Laboratory was stuck in a pretty boring part of Long Island. This far out from the city, people thought of quality entertainment as a six-pack of Coors and a bug zapper. Not that surroundings mattered to her or the other Lab physicists; all people did here in the Physics Gulag was work, anyway.

  Example A: her postdoctoral student, Zak Nguyen, hunched over a screen. “Got those calibrations done,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Great, great,” she said uncomfortably. He was ready to fly on his first run, had chattered incessantly about it on their flight together from California. Among the seasoned technicians and physicists here, he was an awed neo. She had to let him down softly.

  “Source conversion is nearly finished, the ion guys say.”

  “Good, good.”

  Zak grinned. He looked eager and thrilled but trying not to show it, like a puppy in a new home where nobody had much time for puppies. “They’re giving us plenty of cooperation.”

  “Asking for plain old uranium, we’re low-budget.” A weak joke, but Zak nodded dutifully.

  When congresspersons had heard that a bunch of snooty physicists were throwing gold around, there had been some headline-grabbing hearings. It all blew over when even the lawyers realized that during the entire lifetime of the facility they would not sling enough gold to make a visible speck.

  She didn’t want to break the news to Zak, but she made herself say, “There’s… a delay.”

  “Huh? We only got a week-long slot as it is.”

  “Safety again.”

  “Damn, I thought we’d dealt with that. I mean, the radiation’s trivial!”

  “This is paperwork, not logic, Zakster.”

  His face fell. She wanted to comfort him somehow, but she didn’t know how to not be obvious about it. Zak was actually named Phat by his Vietnamese parents and had taken the improbable name Zak—not Zachariah, he reminded people, just the short, zippy Zak—as a gesture of his distance from them. One side of him wanted to be totally American, drove a Chevy, and had an eagle eye for nuances of hip fashion that eluded her. Another side emerged in his earnest, often troubled expression, eves always squinting a little when he concentrated; there lurked a devotion as strong as hers. He had the nuclear/particle physics bug, an obsession that had opened a deep cultural chasm between him and the small tailor shop his parents ran in Garden Grove. She was fond of him perhaps because, like her, he was struggling with an identity imposed by others’ expectations. That did not prevent her bossing him around, of course; such was the world of competitive science.

  “But after that stupid gasoline business,” Zak said earnestly, “how can any judge even listen to some lawyers and their trumped-up—”

  “Nuclear anything scares people. The Lab’s security blanket is more paperwork.”

  The Collider normally smacked gold ions together at speeds razor-close to the speed of light. Alicia had gotten her hard-sought few days on this colossal machine by proposing an ingenious experiment, one that could yield higher net energies than ever before attained, simply by speeding a heavier nucleus around the racetrack.

  Trouble was, the heavier nuclei wanted to fall apart into radioactive debris. Nature built a nucleus by gluing in several uncharged neutrons for every proton, to overcome the electric repulsion of the charged protons. This strategy worked up to Creation’s prettiest triumph of stability—gold, with 79 protons, needed 118 neutrons to force things together. With a total of 197 nucleons—the term for neutrons and protons alike—it was among the heaviest of elements. Nuclei not much heavier than gold eventually fell apart. Some of them were always dying, so those elements were radioactive.

  Alicia had decided on uranium as the best compromise between the lust for mass and the troubles of handling radioactives. Uranium’s most stable and abundant form had a nucleus with 238 nucleons and a curious property shared by the heaviest elements: it was not a sphere, but cigar-shaped. The struggle to remain stable—lost, ultimately, by U-238, with a decay time comparable to the age of the Earth—stretched the nuclei, protons edging away from each other.

  That was the crucial fact driving Alicia’s method. Rarely, two U-238 nuclei struck each other exactly front-ended along their axes, like trains colliding. Such an aligned crash might be more energetic. Might—theorists were not sure.

  “What do they want?” Zak asked in the blank way that meant he was irritated. The only sign in his lean face was a slight tightening around his eyes, shadowed by a wedge of thick black hair.

  “A better estimate of the shielding and radioactive products.”

  Spray
ing high-energy nuclei into a chamber yielded a shotgun blast of decay particles. Those in turn collided with the surrounding detectors, walls, floor, iron—all leaving telltale radioactivity. Most of it cooled off within minutes, but the heavier the nuclei used, the worse the effect.

  How much worse? The Friends of the Earth had argued for greater certainty in court, as soon as they found out about the shift to uranium. After all, uranium meant bombs, right?—to the crowd that pronounced nuclear “new-killer.” The Lab had passed the buck to Alicia, as principal investigator. That meant more calculations, a numerical simulation, then writing up pages of graphs and jargon-heavy charts—

  Alicia snapped her fingers. “I think I see a way.”

  3

  Hugh Alcott worked his mouth around but said nothing. Alicia sat at one end of the polished walnut table gazing steadily at Hugh and at Dave Rucker, the director of experiment operations. Her stomach rumbled, not merely from hunger. It was 11 A.M. and in the last twenty-four hours she had eaten just one meal and slept only four hours.

  Hugh’s office looked across the majestic sweep of the Collider’s huge ring, a pleasant grassland dotted with pines, but the vista did not help her relax. She had asked for this special audience to speed up matters. With only one card in her hand to play, the maneuver was either going to work immediately or not at all.

  Hugh put one finger on the cover of her completed safety report, pressing down on it as though he could penetrate to the heart of matters. “You sure did this job fast.”

  “I had it in pieces. I just pulled an all-nighter.”

  “You had these numerical simulations? The Monte Carlo codes?”

  “Yes,” she lied.

  Dave Rucker smiled wanly. “Great. You’ve always been a go-getter. This damned lawsuit hit us out of left field.”