Vittoria nodded. "My father did it."
"I… I don’t know what to say."
Vittoria turned to Langdon. "Would you like a look?" She motioned to the viewing device.
Uncertain what to expect, Langdon moved forward. From two feet away, the canister appeared empty. Whatever was inside was infinitesimal. Langdon placed his eye to the viewer. It took a moment for the image before him to come into focus.
Then he saw it.
The object was not on the bottom of the container as he expected, but rather it was floating in the center—suspended in midair—a shimmering globule of mercurylike liquid. Hovering as if by magic, the liquid tumbled in space. Metallic wavelets rippled across the droplet’s surface. The suspended fluid reminded Langdon of a video he had once seen of a water droplet in zero G. Although he knew the globule was microscopic, he could see every changing gorge and undulation as the ball of plasma rolled slowly in suspension.
"It’s… floating," he said.
"It had better be," Vittoria replied. "Antimatter is highly unstable. Energetically speaking, antimatter is the mirror image of matter, so the two instantly cancel each other out if they come in contact. Keeping antimatter isolated from matter is a challenge, of course, because everything on earth is made of matter. The samples have to be stored without ever touching anything at all—even air."
Langdon was amazed. Talk about working in a vacuum.
"These antimatter traps?" Kohler interrupted, looking amazed as he ran a pallid finger around one’s base. "They are your father’s design?"
"Actually," she said, "they are mine."
Kohler looked up.
Vittoria’s voice was unassuming. "My father produced the first particles of antimatter but was stymied by how to store them. I suggested these. Airtight nanocomposite shells with opposing electromagnets at each end."
"It seems your father’s genius has rubbed off."
"Not really. I borrowed the idea from nature. Portuguese man-o’-wars trap fish between their tentacles using nematocystic charges. Same principle here. Each canister has two electromagnets, one at each end. Their opposing magnetic fields intersect in the center of the canister and hold the antimatter there, suspended in midvacuum."
Langdon looked again at the canister. Antimatter floating in a vacuum, not touching anything at all. Kohler was right. It was genius.
"Where’s the power source for the magnets?" Kohler asked.
Vittoria pointed. "In the pillar beneath the trap. The canisters are screwed into a docking port that continuously recharges them so the magnets never fail."
"And if the field fails?"
"The obvious. The antimatter falls out of suspension, hits the bottom of the trap, and we see an annihilation."
Langdon’s ears pricked up. "Annihilation?" He didn’t like the sound of it.
Vittoria looked unconcerned. "Yes. If antimatter and matter make contact, both are destroyed instantly. Physicists call the process ‘annihilation.’ "
Langdon nodded. "Oh."
"It is nature’s simplest reaction. A particle of matter and a particle of antimatter combine to release two new particles—called photons. A photon is effectively a tiny puff of light."
Langdon had read about photons—light particles—the purest form of energy. He decided to refrain from asking about Captain Kirk’s use of photon torpedoes against the Klingons. "So if the antimatter falls, we see a tiny puff of light?"
Vittoria shrugged. "Depends what you call tiny. Here, let me demonstrate." She reached for the canister and started to unscrew it from its charging podium.
Without warning, Kohler let out a cry of terror and lunged forward, knocking her hands away. "Vittoria! Are you insane?"
22
Kohler, incredibly, was standing for a moment, teetering on two withered legs. His face was white with fear. "Vittoria! You can’t remove that trap!"
Langdon watched, bewildered by the director’s sudden panic.
"Five hundred nanograms!" Kohler said. "If you break the magnetic field—"
"Director," Vittoria assured, "it’s perfectly safe. Every trap has a failsafe—a back-up battery in case it is removed from its recharger. The specimen remains suspended even if I remove the canister."
Kohler looked uncertain. Then, hesitantly, he settled back into his chair.
"The batteries activate automatically," Vittoria said, "when the trap is moved from the recharger. They work for twenty-four hours. Like a reserve tank of gas." She turned to Langdon, as if sensing his discomfort. "Antimatter has some astonishing characteristics, Mr. Langdon, which make it quite dangerous. A ten milligram sample—the volume of a grain of sand—is hypothesized to hold as much energy as about two hundred metric tons of conventional rocket fuel."
Langdon’s head was spinning again.
"It is the energy source of tomorrow. A thousand times more powerful than nuclear energy. One hundred percent efficient. No byproducts. No radiation. No pollution. A few grams could power a major city for a week."
Grams? Langdon stepped uneasily back from the podium.
"Don’t worry," Vittoria said. "These samples are minuscule fractions of a gram—millionths. Relatively harmless." She reached for the canister again and twisted it from its docking platform.
Kohler twitched but did not interfere. As the trap came free, there was a sharp beep, and a small LED display activated near the base of the trap. The red digits blinked, counting down from twenty-four hours.
24:00:00…
23:59:59…
23:59:58…
Langdon studied the descending counter and decided it looked unsettlingly like a time bomb.
"The battery," Vittoria explained, "will run for the full twenty-four hours before dying. It can be recharged by placing the trap back on the podium. It’s designed as a safety measure, but it’s also convenient for transport."
"Transport?" Kohler looked thunderstruck. "You take this stuff out of the lab?"
"Of course not," Vittoria said. "But the mobility allows us to study it."
Vittoria led Langdon and Kohler to the far end of the room. She pulled a curtain aside to reveal a window, beyond which was a large room. The walls, floors, and ceiling were entirely plated in steel. The room reminded Langdon of the holding tank of an oil freighter he had once taken to Papua New Guinea to study Hanta body graffiti.
"It’s an annihilation tank," Vittoria declared.
Kohler looked up. "You actually observe annihilations?"
"My father was fascinated with the physics of the Big Bang—large amounts of energy from minuscule kernels of matter." Vittoria pulled open a steel drawer beneath the window. She placed the trap inside the drawer and closed it. Then she pulled a lever beside the drawer. A moment later, the trap appeared on the other side of the glass, rolling smoothly in a wide arc across the metal floor until it came to a stop near the center of the room.
Vittoria gave a tight smile. "You’re about to witness your first antimatter-matter annihilation. A few millionths of a gram. A relatively minuscule specimen."
Langdon looked out at the antimatter trap sitting alone on the floor of the enormous tank. Kohler also turned toward the window, looking uncertain.
"Normally," Vittoria explained, "we’d have to wait the full twenty-four hours until the batteries died, but this chamber contains magnets beneath the floor that can override the trap, pulling the antimatter out of suspension. And when the matter and antimatter touch…"