“The iridium source is about the size of what you would call a mini-keg of beer. Which reminds me, you must try my Mr. Beer soon and tell me if it works as advertised.”
“When we get back to Earth.” Weaver liked beer. Not enough, however, to make it on-board.
“Control… control… the lazy Susan motor through the RS-232 port on the side via some of this phone cable — five hundred meters from Radio Shack…”
“Hey, can you put a wireless switch that’ll give me a couple kilometers range in noisy rad environment?”
“Perhaps… how about more wire? I have more rolls, at least two kilometers of wire that will work for this.”
“Wire is good, just heavy. I’ll have help carrying it.”
“Wire then. So, let me see. You control the gammas incident on the LGB by turning the lazy Susan on and off. I’ll put one springloaded push button on it that will rotate the table ninety degrees when held down.” Tchar pulled out a push-button kit from somewhere in his quarters. The kit was in a small light blue modular toolbox with a ToolWorld.com logo on the front. Never more out of place did it look than in the hands of the alien Adar wearing spandex shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
“There must be a button in here that will…”
“I’ll come back in ten minutes.” Weaver said.
“So this is a… what?” Miller asked as they approached the gate.
The radiation counters were going off the scale; they weren’t going to be able to spend much time in place.
“It generates gamma rays,” Weaver replied, setting the box down and pointing the emitter at the gate. They had to set it up on the edge of the crater; the Looking Glass was hanging forty feet in the air. “There are detectors for that as part of the defense system on the other side. When we start beaming through the concrete and steel on the other side, the detectors are going to go nuts. I hope. Hey, this thing is bad news on the front end so don’t get in front of it when we take the cover lid off. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anyway, they detect the gammas on the other side. These are a different energy level than the background gammas here. So they should be able to see them. We point the gammas ninety degrees away from the LGB and then just push that button at the end of the wire to point the gamma rays at it. You let off the button and it points back away from the gate. Voila! it goes on and off and they should see this on the other side.”
“And then they drop another nuke through the door,” Miller pointed out.
“That is why this thing is set up on a looong wire,” Bill replied, peering down the tube. “But if they’re paying any attention at all, they’ll notice that there’s a signal coming through. You think that’s pointed at the gate?” He depressed the button a time or two. It worked — gotta hand it to Tchar.
“I think there’s enough radiation going through the gate that it won’t be noticeable,” Weaver said. “I’m up to over a thousand millirads. These suits are going to be hotter than fire when we get back.”
“Too bad we don’t have any neenions,” Bill said, standing up. “Let’s open the lid on this thing and get the grapp out of here.”
“You ready?”
“Yes, sir,” the commo tech said, swallowing nervously. He felt good reason to be nervous. The Dreen were in the neighborhood and while everyone else was in armor just bristling with guns, all he had was as stupid space suit. “How long do we have to be down here?”
“Until we get a response,” Bill replied. “Start sending.”
It was one of the more boring vital jobs on the planet. Seven gates had opened that were from planets that had current or former Dreen presence. Once it became possible to move gates, all seven had been relocated to a fortress deep under the Antarctic rock. The area was tectonically stable, as far away from anything vital as you could get on Earth. Each of the gates was plugged with a special door made of heavier armor than the one securing Cheyenne Mountain. However, the door could be opened, quickly, and opposite each door was an air cannon loaded with a nuke. In the event of Dreen presence being detected on the far side, the nuke could be fired and the door closed again. When a heavy duty nuke went off on the far side of the gate, it closed fast enough that the only thing that made it through was a blast of radiation.
Even if the Dreen were able to get through those defenses they’d be, well, in Antarctica. There wasn’t anything for them to eat and it was a long way to anywhere they wanted to be.
Just in case things got very bad, the facility also had a massive nuclear weapon embedded under it. The facility was deep enough that when the nuke went off, the blast would just collapse the thousand feet of rock overhead. If the Dreen got through the defense they were going to find the other side was quite a nasty place.
But somebody had to keep an eye on things. So twenty miles away was another facility. It had a large staff of Army infantry that rotated in and out, doing winter training along the way, and a smaller staff of permanent residents that kept an eye on the gates.
Keeping an eye on the gates was simple on one level and much more difficult on another. Each gate was shown on a video monitor with another screen that gave particle readings. All of those screens showed higher than normal particle levels. Gates generated a stream of muons and quarks naturally. But all of the gates had had one or more nukes fired through it. That, too, generated a lot of particles.
Computer programs monitored levels and determined if they were within normal range. However, radiation slowly decreased over time. From time to time the amount of particles from a particular gate would drop far enough to trigger the automated detectors.
At which point a human had to be involved. And it was a very boring job. Most of the time the technicians just sat for twelve hours staring at nothing. From time to time an alarm went off and they had to analyze the situation and decide if it was an emergency or just normal fluctuation. Thus they had to be familiar with particles and radiation.
Fortunately, the U.S. government produced a large number of such people every year. They were called “nukes,” the guys who handled the atomic teakettles for nuclear submarines and the few remaining nuclear aircraft carriers. Not only were they trained in some fairly advanced particle physics, they were used to sitting for hours looking at nothing.
It was still a God damned boring job.
So when the alarm went off on Gate Eight, the tech was happy to have a change. Since radiation fell off fastest in the immediate period after a nuke went off, he initially assumed that the rad level had just fallen out of spec. But when he examined the readout, it was apparent that the alarm was anything but a false alarm. All sorts of radioactive decay products were coming through the gate as background noise that looked like the remains of a big nuke. But it was suddenly bursting gamma radiation. Gamma was produced in an initial nuke blast and there was a tiny amount of residual. But not like this.
Without thinking about it, he hit the base alarm button. Seconds could count if the Dreen were preparing to breach the gate.
As he waited for his supervisor to respond he examined the readings. After a moment, he frowned and leaned forward.
“What?” his boss asked, running in while still tucking in his blouse.
“Big stream of gammas coming out of Gate Eight,” the tech said, still leaning forward. “We nuked it and all that. But something’s funky.”
“Define funky,” the supervisor asked, leaning over the tech’s shoulder. A former nuclear officer, he could read the screens as well as his tech if not better. “Why’s the gamma spectrum have a sharp peak at six-twelve keV?”