This was translated and Tchar made another head gesture, waving one hand and speaking.
“Only one boson that they have generated seems to be accessible to the T!Ch!R!,” Avery said, doing the closest approximation of the word Bill had ever heard. “He wants to know if you know if the T!Ch!R! can access only certain bosons and if you’ve identified them.”
“Yes,” Bill said. “Twenty-one of them were generated on that fractal before we learned how to prevent it. They are scattered across our country but not in other countries, not in France near your gate.”
Tsho’futt made a noise that sounded like pain and so did Tchar as the words were translated.
“What have you done about that?” Tchar asked through Avery.
“An explosion happened on the Dreen side that destabilized the entire fractal. But we don’t know for how long. Do you have any idea?”
“Was it your device?” Tchar asked.
“No, one of theirs,” Bill said, pulling out a sketch of the thing in the gate-room. It was the best they could do from his and Miller’s recollection; both of their camera systems, which had been recording the events, had been erased. Miller’s was straightforward EMP damage; the scorching was noticeable. Bill wasn’t so sure about his; the systems weren’t functioning when he got back to earth but after replacing a few parts they worked fine. The recording chip, however, had been erased. It was fully functional, there just wasn’t anything on it.
The Adar examined the picture, then set it on the table.
“We have seen nothing like that,” Avery translated. “As to the question of time, Dr. Weaver, we’re working on that. We’ve shown them the time pieces we have and vice versa but we’re still working out what it means.” He listened as Tchar spoke, nodding.
“Tchar said that they have had the gate restabilize three times since they have opened it. They were hit by the T!Ch!R! when they first formed the boson, a heavy attack which they repulsed on the ground. Then they brought up the… it’s not a device to throw a nuclear warhead, we’re not sure what it is exactly, but it is a weapon. They triggered it at the gate and shut it. But it opened again…” He listened and pulled out a piece of paper. “I think it’s seventeen of their days later.”
“Holy…” Bill said. The Adar day was approximately thirty hours long. That meant less than three weeks. There had been more time than that already. “Do they know what… we need to know what kilotonnage they use!”
“That is more difficult,” Avery said when he translated. “Time we’re getting better on. And I’m aware that science is supposed to be a universal language, but only in certain details and not in the notations.” He smiled thinly at his little joke.
Bill was well aware that many scientific baseline measurements were taken from nonuniversal constants. The meter was a fraction of the Earth’s diameter, as best it could be measured in the seventeenth century, and only later defined as a certain number of light waves of a particular wavelength. Joules, the internationally recognized standard for energy, were similarly arbitrary. But one was not.
“Singlet transition,” Bill said, pulling out a sheet of paper. He made a dot on the paper then drew a circle around it and placed a smaller dot on that circle. Then he drew a squiggly line hitting that circle. Then he would drew a larger circle around the thing showing the dot jumping from the inner circle to the outer circle. “I should have set this up as a cartoon, but most physicists would understand it if I showed it to them,” he added, sliding the picture across the table to Tchar. Tchar tilted his head and considered the picture for a moment, then tilted it the other way. Then he picked up the pen and began to draw.
The picture that he slid back to Bill was… incomprehensible. There was a complicated group of figures at the center with another figure in an oval off to the side. There were three more symbols spaced around the central symbol. Overall, it looked like a Chinese charm or a mystic spell and Bill wasn’t sure what they represented.
“What is this?” he asked, looking at Admiral Avery.
“He says it’s a drawing of an atom,” Avery replied. “Look, Bill, some things are intuitively obvious to humans because our societies evolved in connection with each other. I have no idea what that’s saying, exactly; we haven’t gotten that far. For all I know, it could be saying the same thing as yours. What is a… singlet transition?”
“The energy necessary for an excited electron to jump from one orbital level to another. It’s a base energy equation.”
“Try something else?” Robin asked. “Calories? That’s just the energy necessary for one gra… damn, we’d have to get measurements for a gram, right?”
“Right,” Bill said, leaning back and steepling his hands. Then he leaned forward and tapped the symbols. “Does this represent an atom? Are we sure of that?”
“Yes,” Admiral Avery said. “They consider it a transitional state, which is interesting. But it’s definitely an atom.” He spoke to Tchar for a moment and then shrugged. “Tchar said it’s the smallest possible atom.”
“Hydrogen, good,” Bill said. “What amount of energy is released when one of these atoms fuses into the next largest atom?”
Avery translated that and the Adar got a distant look. Admiral Avery explained that he was accessing their datanet.
“I wonder if it’s like ours,” Robin said. “One-third data, two-thirds pornography and singles sites?”
Tsho’futt made a hacking noise and translated the question. Tchar continued to look distant but the third Adar, who had not been named, said something.
“Announcements of tcheer,” Tsho’futt said in not bad English. “And much announcements of herbal remedies to prevent loss of youngness.”
“Tcheer is the reaching of bonding age of a sexual transfer intermediate,” Avery said, tightly. “Nonsentient. I suspect we just discovered what their pornography is.”
“The wonders of science,” Weaver replied.
Tchar spoke and Avery paid rapt attention.
“Tchar says that he can see where we are going and he thinks we can come to some conclusion on energy level translations,” Avery said. “When we have those, we might have a measurement of their weapon’s yield. And he’s willing to let us know what theirs are if we tell them what ours are.”
“Ouch,” Bill said. “We’ll get the materials but the rest we’ll have to kick upstairs.”
Three hectic hours later they had a measurement.
“Ten megatons, give or take,” Bill said, looking up from the calculator on his laptop. “I wonder if it’s straight geometric progression or nonlinear or what?”
He and Tchar had spent most of the time, with Avery as an interpreter, discussing the formation of bosons and boson gates and their characteristics. They had come to a mutual understanding of muons, neutrons, neutrinos and quarks. Because they weren’t generated by inactive bosons or nuclear weapons, quarks had been a little harder, but Bill was pretty sure they were talking about the same particles. They’d also discussed, badly, quantum mechanics. Bill got the impression it was as insanity causing for Adar as for humans.
The French physicist, Dr. Bernese, had turned up and had joined in the discussion for a while and then politely excused himself as it turned to weaponry. He was a firm member of the nuclear disarmament committee and while he appreciated the current necessity he deplored actually discussing them.
Bill, on the other hand, had, without getting into anything that would violate security, discussed them with wholehearted abandon. The Adar, it turned out, did not use fission-fusion devices but something else. Tchar was somewhat reluctant to specify what it was but he noted that the results that Bill described from the gate room might, in fact, have been the same thing. Bill was pretty sure that the thing in the gate room had been an antimatter containment system, but when he brought up the subject of antimatter, after having a tough time explaining it, Tchar had been more than happy to discuss the material. Ergo, it was not their weapon system.