“And then you slip this… device into the gate?” the secretary asked. “And that destroys the bosons.”
“Yes, sir,” Bill said.
“Destroying whole universes?” the President asked.
“Errr… possibly,” Bill replied. “But current theory is changing as to the nature of bosons; at this point theory is pointing to them being gates to other universes, or links, rather than the universes themselves.”
“How much?” the secretary of defense asked. “How many particles?”
“Probably on the order of a million, Mr. Secretary,” Bill said. “We’ll have to see what the rate of emission is of the boson.”
“How long to do the experiment?” the national security advisor asked.
“There’s a boson conveniently settled in Death Valley,” Bill replied. “We’ll have to assemble the materials and set up a base camp. A week, maybe less. Getting enough power to it will be the key.”
“I want Dr. Weaver to have whatever he needs to get this experiment running,” the President said to the secretary of defense.
“I’ll see that he gets it,” the secretary replied. “You’re saying that these things are the equivalent of nuclear weapons?”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Bill said, frowning. “More like nuclear explosive material. That’s why I’ve been pretty careful about spreading the theory around. If the theory is right, making unlinked quarks and then capturing them is going to be relative child’s play. Any decent physicist with access to a boson could make them.”
“Giving every two-bit country on Earth nuclear weapons.” The National Security Advisor winced.
“Close one Pandora’s Box and we open another,” the President said.
“That’s science for you, Mr. President.”
“Remember Ray Chen,” Bill said as his hand hovered over the initiator.
The base camp had been set up ten miles from the inactive boson. A bunker, constructed of concrete filled sandbags and steel beams, had been built a mere five miles away. Comfortably cooled by an air-conditioning unit, similarly protected, it had independent power and materials to dig out if it were covered by an explosion. It was there that the team had assembled to study the anticipated quark formation.
In the end the muon field plan had been a bust. A brief, and mildly traumatic, experiment had proven that they’d be unable to hold the field closed well enough to capture sufficient quarks. Bill was almost sure that tinkering would fix the problem, but they didn’t have time to play around with the idea so they’d set up the white dwarf bottle instead.
The problem, of course, would be moving it; they were going to be using several megawatts of power just to create the field and about a half megawatt per hour, if they could spin the electrons in a toroid, to maintain it. The Army was trying to find a portable half-megawatt per hour generator, thus far with little success.
Mark was there, having assembled another whatchamacallit device on less than a week’s notice. Bill Earp from FEMA, who pointed out that for once the agency might as well get there before the disaster. Sergeants Garcia and Crichton who had been useful military liaisons. Robin had been writing code, with Garcia’s fumble fingered help, eighteen hours a day for the last four. The only person missing was Command Master Chief Miller, who Bill, after a certain amount of argument, had sent off on a different project. But everything was finally in place and it was time to find out if it worked.
“Let’s see what happens,” Bill Earp said, inserting earplugs. “Everyone got their plugs in? Safety first.”
Bill already had earplugs in and he hoped he wouldn’t need them. If everything went as planned nothing would happen, outside of some changes in very sensitive instruments.
He looked around one more time.
“Everybody ready?” Bill asked.
“Ready, sir,” Garcia and Crichton said.
“Let’s get it over with,” Robin said, yawning.
“Gotta test it sometime,” Mark said.
“Just proud to be here,” Earp intoned.
Bill pressed the button.
Nothing blew up. The lights dimmed rather deeply, though.
He looked over at Garcia who was frowning.
“Something’s happening,” the sergeant said. “We’ve got fluctuations in the magnetic containment bottle.”
“Power’s going somewhere,” Mark added. “Quite a bit. We keep this up and we’re going to start affecting California’s power requirements in a bit.”
“More fluctuations,” Garcia added a few minutes later as everyone was congratulating themselves. He had stayed glued to his monitor, however, his brow furrowed in a frown. “The electrons are starting to slip. I think we’re…”
There was a very slight ground shudder and everyone looked at the external monitors. In the distance was dust rising from a small explosion where their expensive and difficult to build quark generator now appeared to be so much metal and plastic scrap.
“… losing it,” Garcia finished. “Negative signal.”
“Back to the drawing board,” Bill said.
“It looks like it’s working this time,” Garcia said, watching his monitors carefully. “The Quark Hotel is in operation.”
Analysis of the data that they had gotten before the explosion indicated that some of the quarks, rather than being fully trapped in the bottle, had gotten caught in a magnetic eddy. When their local charge overcame the eddy they reacted, violently, with the surrounding matter and released the rest of the quarks to do so even more energetically.
The containment bottle had been upgraded and redesigned so that, as Garcia put it: “Quarks go in, but none get out.”
It had been instantly dubbed the Quark Hotel.
“Negative radiation emissions,” Crichton said. “But the rate of entry is really low. It looks like only a quark per second.”
“Not fast enough,” Bill said. “We need to increase the rate by a couple of orders of magnitude.”
“Up the power input?” Mark asked. “We need to increase the size of the bottle anyway.”
“Maybe,” Bill replied. “We’re probably only catching a fraction of the potential stream. But we don’t have the generators for that. We’re already pushing a hundred kilowatts through at the moment. To up it we’ll need big power. I don’t think we can do it here unless we can get some really monstrous generators and then we’ll be hauling in diesel so fast the experiment is going to be pretty damned obvious.”
“So what do we do?” Robin asked.
“Shut it down,” Weaver replied. “We can do it, we just need another boson that has access to a lot of power. Set the quarks on battery backup. We need to see if we can move the containment bottle, anyway. I’ll have to kick this upstairs.”
“So that’s where we’re at,” Bill said. “We can make the material, we can even contain it and move it, with relative safety. But we need orders of magnitude more power. I don’t think the rate of capture will be linear, more like asymptotic…”
“What?” the President said. “You’re usually pretty good about avoiding extreme jargon, Dr. Weaver, but…”