“Tuffy says that’s as much as I can take,” she said, in a very small voice, suddenly just a six-year-old girl who was old beyond her years. “He says I shouldn’t talk about it right now. That if the bad monsters come he’ll take me in his arms, as Jesus took up the small children, and take me to a place where there aren’t any monsters.”
“Mimi,” Bill said, softly. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the monsters don’t come here and you don’t have to go away. And thank you for your help. You’re a good girl, the best girl in the world, and Tuffy’s a great friend to all of us.”
“Can you really keep the monsters from coming?” Mimi asked.
“If I can find a small enough knife,” Bill replied, looking at the shifting dust motes in the light through the window.
It was three a.m. and Bill still couldn’t sleep. He’d ridden back to the encampment around the anomaly at two, sure that he was exhausted enough from riding all over North Orlando to turn his mind off. But it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t functioning right, either, twisted in the mire of images. Tuffy, the shattered man, patrol cars with evil police, the grains of dust in the light, bosons that had happy faces on them. Ray Chen smiling as he pressed a button that changed the world. He picked and pried at particle theory, but it was no use. He’d had a drink and that hadn’t helped; it just seemed to make him think faster and more chaotically. Finally he’d gotten up from the couch where he’d been sitting and made his way from shadow to shadow until he reached his exercise bike and started furiously pumping.
He’d been at it for an hour, trying to use up all the energy in his body so that maybe his mind would rest, when the door to his trailer opened and Robin walked in.
“I heard the squeaking of that damned thing from over in my trailer,” Robin said.
“Sorry,” Bill replied, letting it coast to a stop. “I just can’t get my mind to work. It’s spinning around like an out-of-control boson. Occupational hazard.”
“Tried having a drink?” she asked, stepping into the trailer and flipping on the light over the stove. She was wearing a robe and bunny slippers.
“Yeah,” Bill said, leaning on the bike and frowning.
“A glass of warm milk… perhaps?” she intoned with a faint accent.
“Maybe an Ovaltine?” Bill replied, smiling. “I wish there was a book in some musty room. But all there are is these strange dream images and hints that I think I’m supposed to be smart enough to figure out.”
“You’ve lost some hair,” Robin said, frowning. She walked over and touched where some had fallen out.
“Radiation damage,” Bill replied, shrugging. “It’ll grow back. Most of it.”
“Anything else wrong?” she asked.
“My white blood cell count dropped for a while,” Bill admitted, frowning. “Other than that, no damage.”
“None?” Robin asked, rolling the word off of her tongue.
“Nope,” Bill said, finally getting the hint.
“QUARKS!” Bill shouted.
“What?” Robin panted, clearly exasperated. “Is that a normal thing to shout at a moment like this? Usually it’s ‘Oh, My, God!’ ”
“It’s what they’re talking about!” Bill said, taking her face in his hands. “Quarks!”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Robin said, coldly. “But if you do not return to the business at hand you’re going to be unable to explain it to anyone. Except, maybe, if I’m kind, as a soprano.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
“The key to the gate is quarks,” Bill said. He had more to go on at this point than just raw speculation. With that link in hand he had seen the theory of gate formation clearly and had even worked out most of the physics. He hadn’t waited for much in the way of peer evaluation; among other things he was as anxious as the government to classify the data. Because it worked as a weapon as well as a gate. “When the Chen Anomaly formed we didn’t have a universe inversion; we had a high rate of unlinked quark emissions. That was what caused the explosion.”
“How high a rate?” the national security advisor asked.
“Oh, the total emission was probably right at two or three hundred thousand particles,” Bill said.
“That’s all?” the President asked. “I mean, these are smaller than atoms, right? It takes a lot more uranium than that to get a nuclear blast…”
“Yes, sir,” Bill replied. “But their destructive power is orders of magnitude higher than any substance except strange matter. And we don’t have any theory on how to form either one in any quantity. Even the biggest supercollider only forms one or two at a time and those almost immediately link. But the point is that we may be able to adjust one of the inactive bosons to form a stream of unique quarks, one particular type, strange, charmed, whatever. That way, they don’t link at all; it’s like pushing the same poles of a magnet together. If we can, we can capture them and move them to one of the gates. When it opens, we pop them in and get either a big explosion, low in neutron emission, on the far side or, possibly, we collapse the gate. I’m virtually certain that a large enough quantity will collapse the gate. Permanently. It will not only close the gate it will eliminate the bosons on either side.”
“Hold on,” the national security advisor said. “I know just enough about quarks to know that they always link. A muon is two quarks, right?”
“Yes,” Bill said, frowning. “But they have to have the right color to link…”
“Color?” the President said, puzzled.
“Ai-yai-yai,” Bill said, frowning again. “Okay, quarks are described as coming in flavors and colors. Why? Because they were discovered by physicists who didn’t have much else to do but come up with strange terms. The point is that you have to have a quark and an antiquark of two different colors to create a muon. In this case, we’ll create a stream of a single type of quark, probably strange since that seems to be the easiest to create for some reason.”
“You’ve already been experimenting with it?” the NSA asked.
“Oh, yes,” Bill replied. “Otherwise we’d be spinning our wheels. The problem isn’t tuning the boson to produce them, it’s capturing them…”
“And you’re going to do that, how?” the NSA asked, fascinated.
“We’re looking at two different possibilities,” Bill admitted. “We might put two bosons in close proximity. Have one produce a stream of similar color muons, ones that can’t bind to strange quarks, and set up a magnetic field to create a capture bottle. The muons will pass through the field and create a sort of stream field that will surround the quarks. I’m not sure that one will work but it’s less energy intensive than the other way.”
“What’s the other way?” the President asked.
“Well,” Bill said, his face working, “the other way is to create a miniature white dwarf. But that’s going to take a whole lot of power.”
“A white dwarf?” the defense secretary said, grinning. “You’re serious?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary,” Bill replied. “All a white dwarf is is a collection of electrons. What we’ll do is create an electron field and then use a magnetic field to sort of cup it. Then we’ll shoot a whole bunch of quarks into the cup and wrap the electrons around the quarks, compressing them at the same time, sort of like catching water in your hand. Some of the quarks will escape but, hopefully, not enough to destroy the containment vessel. The only problem is, maintaining it will require a whole lot of electricity. But it will work for sure.”