The Trigger Page 26

  There were now a total of twenty test pads laid out in two arcs to the north of the main lab. Lee had asked for more, so more materials could be tested at once. But after watching the first Scramble shortly before he left for Princeton, Brohier had ruled against her request.

  'As things are, you have one person per material - very orderly, little chance of error,' he had told her. 'Go beyond that, and all you'll do is increase the chance of a mistake.'

  Mistakes were not the threat they had been in the beginning, because they were no longer using explosives in their testing. Instead, they used the closest thing to a workable Trigger detector that had yet been devised - Leigh Thayer's 'puff caps'.

  Analogous to a reagent strip or radiation badge, the caps consisted of a plastic panel bearing a fabric disc impregnated with a solution derived from black powder. When exposed to a Trigger field, the caps erupted with a readily visible puff of fragrant smoke.

  The information they provided was strictly binary - yes or no, Trigger detected or not - and the caps were consumed in the process. Nevertheless, unlike the pyrotechnic poppers, which had cost one of Lee's assistants the tip of two fingers, the caps could be handled with no special training, and the test cycle shortened by half. They were also nearly noiseless, which meant that testing days no longer sounded like the Fourth of July. The Pentagon saw potential in them as perimeter alarms, so Goldstein was rushing them into production, and Lee had applied for a patent.

  But Lee was still looking for the breakthrough that would allow her to build a proper detector and strength-meter for Trigger fields. The two problems - shielding against the fields and taking their measure - seemed inextricably linked. Up to the limit of a Mark I's range, the Trigger field appeared to pass through any amount of matter as if it wasn't there.

  She had tested with poppers suspended a hundred meters down a well-shaft and placed on the far side of a granite ridge. They had tested with the well flooded and the emitter swathed in lead. They had sealed a popper inside a box made of depleted uranium. The results - all positive - destroyed all notions of propagation based on the behavior of any form of electromagnetic energy. Whatever it was that came from the emitter of a Mark I Trigger found rock as transparent as air.

  Because the Trigger's interaction with matter was so weak and selective, it was inevitable that Horton and Brohier started looking at neutrinos. The CERN model had relegated those mysterious ghost particles to the status of the interplanetary ether, dismissed as a mere bookkeeping convention of an immature theoretical model. Even so, neutrinos remained attractive. For most of two weeks, Horton had talked of almost nothing else.

  In their last days on the theoretical stage, neutrinos had been the strangest of the many strange creatures in the subatomic zoo. With their variable mass, fractional spin numbers, candy-store variety, and the bizarre ability to pass through the entire mass of the Earth as though it wasn't there, neutrinos were the last Holy Grail of the Standard Model physicist - and the last hope of Jeffrey Horton.

  The hope was that somewhere in the experimental record there lurked, unremembered and unrecognized, another Trigger anomaly. It had troubled Horton that he had been unable to connect their discovery with any naturally-occurring phenomenon.

  'I'd give my right arm for a good look at this thing from another angle,' he had told Lee at dinner one evening shortly after she arrived at the Annex.

  'You'd have to find someone who actually wants your right arm first.'

  Horton was already humorless by that point. 'You know what I mean. What we do in here with technology ought to mirror something that happens out there without it. I'm uncomfortable with the lack of natural analogues. If this is a real phenomenon, where are the observations it should be helping us explain?'

  'Horton's Paradox,' she had said. 'What did the literature search turn up?'

  'Nothing,' he had said with a shake of the head and a disgusted expression.

  'Maybe you searched the wrong literature,' she had suggested. 'Maybe you want The Weekly World News instead of Physics Today.'

  'Do you think I'm above resorting to phenomenology at this point? Maybe I didn't go all the way to the tabloids, but I purposely left the search parameters as open as possible. I made sure they caught all of the fringe science and parascience.'

  'And?'

  'You don't want to go there.'

  'Come on - tell me.'

  The search agent kept trying to tell me that spontaneous human combustion was a good match on my criteria.'

  She had chortled with delight. 'Oh, it is!'

  'It is not,' he had said tersely. 'There's not a single documentable case with witnesses - no preachers immolated in the pulpit, no matter what you've heard. As near as I can tell, all of the "best" cases involve a reclusive elderly woman who was overweight, lived alone, liked to tipple, and smoked.'

  'Hmm. Doesn't sound like you'd need Sherlock Holmes to draw you a picture.'

  'And the forensic science is either anecdotal or nonexistent. You've never seen such credulous reporting -'

  'Sure I have,' she had said. 'I was raised an Episcopalian.'

  'Withdrawn,' he had said with a wry smile. 'But still, if we need Mary Reeser or Mrs Oczki to make our case -'

  'Well - what about "fires of suspicious origin"? Someone must keep records.'

  'Someone does - the National Fire Data Center. We covered this ground while you were still in Utah, training the Army operators.'

  'And?'

  The best we could do is a definite "Maybe". NFDC tracks two million fires and explosions a year, and one out of five is "cause unknown". We hired a private arson investigation company to go through NFIRS database for possibles. They came back with a very long report, and none of it was anything I could use. Not enough information, not reproducible, no patterns that held up to close examination.'

  'No proof.'

  'In a word.'

  'It has to be out there somewhere.'

  'If we're asking the right questions,' Horton had said. 'One of the truths I'm still reasonably sure about is that matter and energy interact. But I'm starting to wonder if whatever's coming off that emitter is neither matter nor energy.'

  'You have any other suspects?' she had said, surprised.

  Horton had frowned and shook his head.

  That question was now Karl Brohier's to worry over. Within three weeks of returning from Washington with Horton, the director had packed his bag again, this time for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

  In his absence, Horton had become a presence again at the Annex, showing welcome signs he was returning to his old form. No longer a hermit, he had evinced renewed enthusiasm for his work, some of which spilled over as an almost intrusive interest in Lee's work as well. He had spent most of a week going over her unit's records and talking to her staff about the detection and measurement problem.

  And at the end of that week, he had delivered what amounted to an old-fashioned pep talk to her staff.

  'If you can detect it, we can deflect it. If you can measure it, we can modulate it,' he told them. 'Stay focused - stay committed. If you can, stay optimistic. We all have trouble with that one sometimes. But your work may well hold the key to everything we're doing here. If you find something that interacts strongly with a Trigger field, we can have shielding the next day, and directionality the day after.'

  Horton's involvement was coming late in the day from Lee's perspective, but she was surprised to find that his enthusiasm even buoyed her own mildly discouraged spirits. And she was pleased when Horton showed up at testing control half an hour before the second Scramble was scheduled to begin. It reminded her of the old days, before Baby - a time which, like many new parents, she looked back on with some selective nostalgia.

  'Anything I can do?' Horton asked.

  'I'm accepting donations of synapses in good condition,' she said. 'Did you know that the last brain growth spurt takes place right after puberty? After that we're coasting - and coastin
g is downhill.'

  'I did know that.' He smiled broadly. 'I even developed a pet theory about how our life paths are decided by how we use those last few billion connections - academics or sex.'

  'You must have looked around in grad school and realized just how many really bright people haven't a clue about relationships,' she said, regretting the touch of bitterness that crept in unbidden.

  'I could see it as early as high school honors math,' Horton said. 'Only two of us went to the prom, and they went with each other. Diana and Kim. Got an extra headset?'

  She pointed. 'Bottom drawer.'

  They were too busy for conversation soon after that. Lee ran the final checklist herself with a brisk efficiency that kept everyone hopping. Horton distinguished himself by managing to stay out of her way, which she appreciated more than any help he could have offered.

  The actual test was an anticlimax. With the test range cleared, Lee brought the Mark I up to ten percent for fifteen seconds. All of the test strips were sealed inside small resin boxes lined with the test material; there were no vent plugs, so there was no puff of smoke, no sound. When the green light went out again, one of Lee's crew brought the electric truck back from outside the test radius, and the numbered boxes were gathered up and taken away for examination later.

  As that cart drove off, a second arrived, carrying another batch of samples. There was another short lull at testing control as they were being placed.

  'Did Dr Brohier say anything to you about how long he expected to be in New Jersey?' asked Lee.

  'He said it wasn't as terrible a place as people liked to say, and not to be surprised if he was gone a few weeks.'

  Think we'll hear from him while he's gone, this time around?'

  'Not unless he has something,' Horton said. 'He's just not the chatty type.'

  'Did he give you any clues about why he went there - I mean, who in particular he was planning to talk to?'

  'Well - he has plenty of friends on the faculty. Buhl and Esterovich, particularly. But all he actually said to me was that he'd been wondering if we'd been pushing on the wrong end of the stick, if what we needed wasn't a new physics, but a new mathematics. I took that to mean he was going there to talk to Reichart and Wu.'

  Both names were familiar to her. Reichart was faculty in the School of Mathematics, and a recent Wolf Prize winner. Wu was a visiting member in the School of Natural Sciences, and a notorious free-thinker whose critiques of the CERN model were as much a part of his reputation as his own work in stellar physics.

  'The by-line's going to be as long as the paper by the time we have this all figured out,' she said lightly.

  'I'm more worried about it ending up published by Kreskin's Journal of the Bizarre,' Horton said.

  'Could be worse - you might get invited to appear on Wonders of Nature,' she teased. The ratings leader of Phenomenal!, an infotainment channel devoted to fad religions and paranormal pseudo-science, the lowbrow daily Wonders featured a voluptuous former model turned neoEgyptian priestess as hostess. Her undraped assets (bared by her neotraditional garb) might not have given rise to the show's title, but certainly accounted for much of its audience.

  'It's a hope worth grabbing onto,' Horton said straightfacedly.

  She laughed, and swung the headset mic toward her mouth. 'This is Lee in the booth. Ready for round two. Call off by stations.'

  A few days later, it was much harder to find any humor in their situation. Lee and Horton were finishing their inventory of exposed samples from the third Scramble, and facing up to the reality that the results had been no different from those of the first two. None of the shielding materials had worked; all of the puff caps had been destroyed.

  Horton sat back in his chair and surveyed the line of tables filled by opened test boxes. 'Guess we're going to need to reorder, eh?'

  'Jeffrey, I want to talk to you about that.'

  He noticed that she no longer called him Boss. 'I'm listening.'

  'I've already worked my way down the periodic chart and back again. Given unlimited time and money, I could work my way through the Handbook of Chemical Compounds, too. But that doesn't seem to me to be a good use of either. Not without some encouragement from the tests we've already done, some direction that shows a little promise. But the only materials that interact with the Trigger field blow up or disassociate. And even there, I don't understand the process -I can't even prove anything's being absorbed. It's a dead end, Jeffrey. This damned thing -' She shook her head, frustration denying her the words.

  'Have we gotten a good survey?'

  'Absolutely.' She thumbed the stack of test reports. 'Metals, non-metals, transitionals, noble gases, actinides, sulfides, carbonates, cobalt complexes, phosphates, resins, alloys - Geri's a good chemist. She understood what I wanted.'

  'So what do you want to do now?'

  Lee sighed and looked away. 'I suppose we could stand to work the metal-organics a bit harder. And I've been shying away from liquids, because of the handling problems - so many of them are reactive. We could go there, I suppose.'

  'Okay,' Morton said encouragingly.

  'What I really want to do is get out of here for a while,' she said plaintively. 'Is that possible? You had your holiday. Or am I still on probation - house arrest?'

  'Hmm? What are you talking about? What do you have in mind?'

  'How far is it to Las Vegas?'

  'By chopper, close enough for a night on the town. If you drive, you'll want a three-day pass.'

  'It's no fun going to Las Vegas alone,' she said, looking at him hopefully. That's for gambling addicts and showgirl wannabes. I'm neither.'

  'You know more about it than I do - I've never been.'

  'Neither have I.'

  'Reason enough,' Horton said, rising. 'You grab your toothbrush. I'll roust the pilots from their card game.'

  * * *

  17: Festivity

  Sacramento, California - Six workers died Saturday night when fire broke out in a confined basement area of the State Capitol. Capitol Park Director Beth Markham said there was 'no structural damage' to the historic building, and the upcoming session of the State Assembly would not be affected. Markham said the contractors were installing cutting-edge air-quality equipment intended to help preserve the Capitol's museum-grade artifacts when they apparently sparked the blaze. The casualties included two US Army engineers supervising the installation.

  Complete story

  Horton and Thayer immersed themselves in the glitter and spectacle of Las Vegas with the reckless glee of runaway children with a borrowed credit card. They hired a white Cadillac limousine at McCarran International Airport, and told the driver - a breezy, tuxedoed Louisianian named Ruby - their intentions. By the time the limo reached The Strip, Ruby and her cellular RedCarpet city guide had secured them a suite at Bellagio and tickets to the two hottest casino shows.

  The early show, at the Luxor, included a sumptuous dinner served by bronzed 'temple slaves' wearing mock-gold jewelry and short colorful skirts that owed more to Hollywood than to Egyptology. The spectacle that followed depicted the rise and fall of the First Kingdom, and was built on the twin foundations of prurience and ufology, highlighted by an on-stage Nile flood, a sybaritic orgy, and the destruction of the Great Temple at Karnak by a departing spaceship.

  There was just time enough between shows, Ruby told them, to catch one of The Strip's most enduring crowd-pleasers. She dropped them at the curb in front of the Treasure Island Hotel's Buccaneer Bay just as the first twelve-pounder from the HMS Britannia roared, belching crimson flame and silver smoke. The crowd of 500 lining the bridge cooed in delight, then cheered as the privateer Hispaniola returned fire.

  'Do you ever wonder why we find guns and explosions so attractive as entertainment?' Lee asked as they watched the playlet unfold. 'Or is that something that testosterone just understands instinctively?'

  A deafening cannonade from the Britannia sent pirates and planking flying in the air, an
d Horton held his answer until the pirates had triumphed and he and Lee were back in the limousine.

  'I do wonder about it,' he said. There's something visceral, to be sure. The bright lights, the intense colors, the loud sounds, the pressure wave against your chest -'

  That explains fireworks. Not war movies.'

  "That's tied up with something primal, I think. Something deep in the animal mind. All those myths about Big Men - fathers and kings and warriors -'

  "The friend with the gun is our champion. The enemy with the gun is the killer beast,' she mused.

  'And slaying the beast without being harmed confers heroic status - the protector and provider.' He shook his head and dropped his voice, mindful of the driver. 'It's an old script -going to be strange to see what it looks like when we're done rewriting it,'

  'What are we going to do for entertainment?' she said with a little laugh. 'Half the writers in New York are going to be out of work.'

  'Aren't they already?'

  'Okay, then the other half will be out of work, too.'

  Horton shrugged. There's always historical fiction.'

  A hopeful smile appeared on her face. 'Just think, Jeffrey. Maybe in a thousand years, a "Western" will be a story set between the invention of the flintlock and the invention of the Trigger - a moment in time when the rules were different. A colorful era, a fascinating one, a rich source of legends and folklore - but fundamentally tragic and brutal, with no reason for anyone to regret its passing.'

  Horton reached across the wide leather seat and squeezed her hand. 'A nice thought. Hold tight to it. If we can ever manage to look back with that much clarity - well, we'll have learned something, then, won't we?'

  'It could happen,' she said with conviction. 'When's the last time you heard anyone defend the genocide against the American Indians, or wish they were living in Tombstone, circa 1880?'