“Yeah,” said van Hutten sheepishly. “I clearly hadn’t thought this through. But after hearing your argument, the image that comes to my mind is a huge bloody carcass in a steel cage being lowering into the world’s most shark-infested waters. It would be the feeding frenzy to end all feeding frenzies.”
“Now we’re on the same page,” said Griffin in amusement. “Take away the steel cage and I think you’ve got the picture exactly.”
11
“Arm the JDAM, Lieutenant,” ordered Jake as the chopper he was in settled down for a landing several miles from the target. A car would be picking him up momentarily to drive him to the site.
“Roger that,” came the response from the bomber pilot. “JDAM is armed and ready.”
“Captain Ruiz, how is the perimeter looking?”
“The perimeter is clear, Colonel. I repeat, the perimeter is clear. You are good to go.”
Jake took a deep breath and held it. “Engage target, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Target engaged,” came the reply.
And six miles above Colonel Morris Jacobson, a five hundred pound bomb streaked angrily away from the jet that had restrained it, like a rodeo bull when its gate was pulled open. The munition hovered for just a moment as its onboard computer got its bearings from the continuous stream of GPS data being fed to it. Then, satisfied that it could achieve its mission parameters and arrive within ten feet of dead center of the mirrored glass building, and only then deliver its devastating payload, it made a slight turn and accelerated downward.
12
Madison Russo finished making love to her boyfriend of four months, Greg Davis, and a warm sense of both physical and emotional contentment settled over her. Only two days earlier he had said “I love you,” to her for the first time, and given that this same sentiment had been threatening to burst from her for weeks, this was a very good thing.
Her life couldn’t be going any better, she decided. And falling in love was only partly the reason.
In high school she had been socially awkward, and while her figure and looks were slightly above average, her confidence was well below. And winning the state science fair hadn’t exactly cemented her reputation as one of the cool kids. Given that her intelligence was already intimidating to almost every guy her age, she could have bottled her science fair victory and sold it as male repellent. Upon graduation from high school she had yet to be kissed.
But this situation changed quickly in college. As a physics major she was around other bright people who shared her passion: other bright people who were predominantly men. And the further she went forward in her major the greater the men outnumbered the women. The incoming class for the physics graduate program at the University of Arizona consisted of eighteen men, her, and one other woman who was now her closest friend. While many red-blooded males in physics departments around the world welcomed relationships with women who could understand their work, most had to seek relationships outside of the field. It was either that or get used to being very, very lonely. But as for Madison and her friend, they tended to get their pick of the litter.
But she still hadn’t been happy during her first three years in graduate school. There was more to life than dating, and she had struggled to find a thesis project. Everything in cosmology these days was string theory. It was the cool kids’ table from high school translated into academia. If string theory wasn’t your thing—and it was definitely not hers—then you were a second class citizen. She found herself foundering, and there were times when she contemplated dropping out of the program with a master’s degree and going into industry.
But then, just this year, new developments in the emerging field of gravitational wave astronomy had come along—just when she needed a new direction the most. Gravitational wave detectors had previously cost hundreds of millions of dollars, had required oscillation of the mass being detected, and their sensitivity—if one could call it that—had been laughable. But a new breed of detector had emerged. A breed that took advantage of novel theoretical principles, could be built for just a few million dollars, and had off-the-charts sensitivity.
In fact, if anything the new technology was too sensitive, generating the equivalent of a library of congress full of data each day. If not for supercomputers capable of many trillions of operations each second nothing meaningful could have ever be extracted from the morass, unless one was looking for the Sun, which Madison was pretty sure had already been found.
She had leaped onto this new bandwagon immediately. This powerful tool was sure to launch careers like so many bottle rockets on the 4th of July, and catapult gravitational wave astronomy to an unforeseen level of prominence in the cosmological quiver. And she was perfectly positioned to be in on the ground floor. Given the ocean of data a single detector could generate, if she used the most powerful tool of all, the one between her ears, she was confident she could find a way to make a major breakthrough.
The U.S. physics community, having been denied the Supercoliding Superconductor—ensuring Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider would become the particle physics capital of the world—was hungry to take a leadership position in this emerging field. Centers around the country had embraced the new technology, even before all the bugs had been worked out, and once perfected, additional waves of adoption had occurred overnight. Now almost seventy percent of all detectors in operation were located in America. While this advantage wouldn’t last long, U.S. physicists couldn’t have asked for a better head start. And The University of Arizona had been in the very first wave. Madison had truly been in the right place at the right time.
As she basked in the knowledge that her life had come together more perfectly than she could have dared to hope, her computer monitor on a desk ten feet away began blinking. The light from the full screen was vivid in the darkened room. Greg Davis groaned beside her. “You’re not going to check that, are you?”
She smiled. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
“I think we need a new rule. We turn off our cell phones during sex. I think we should turn of computer monitors also.”
“But this isn’t during sex,” she pointed out. “It’s after sex.”
“Well, given how often that false-alarm generator of yours goes off, a case of false-alarm-us interuptus is only a matter of time.”
“And you’d like to make sure that doesn’t ever happen?”
“Right. I mean, you wouldn’t interrupt Da Vinci while he was painting a masterpiece would you?”
“So you’re suggesting you’re the Da Vinci of sex? Wow, really?” She rolled her eyes. “So what are you worried about Leonardo—that your brush might go limp?”
Davis laughed. “Not at all. You just don’t want to interrupt a master at work.”
Madison kissed him briefly and then grinned. “We could always stop having sex,” she said. “Then you’d have nothing to worry about.”
“As great as that sounds,” he responded wryly, “I’m going to have to pass.” He shook his head and gestured toward the computer. “Go ahead. I know it’s killing you not to check it out.”
He glanced at the clock on the end table nearest him. “We can probably catch the late movie if you’re still interested, but we’d better drag ourselves out of bed and get ready. How about if I take the first shower while you take a quick look at your data.”