“Oppenheimer looked at the mushroom cloud and thought of a Hindu saying: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. At that point, man crossed a line that few have really focused on. We became capable of destroying ourselves.”
“And we haven’t stopped since,” Nada said. “Not long ago, at the supercollider near Geneva, they discovered the — what is it, Doc?”
Doc had a defeated look on his face, having been through this discussion before. “The Higgs boson particle.”
“Often called the God particle,” Eagle threw in.
Nada picked back up. “But when they first turned that thing on, there were some scientists who speculated they might actually cause a black hole and consume the planet,” Nada said. “But they turned it on anyway.”
“That held an incredibly small possibility,” Doc argued.
“But a possibility nonetheless,” Nada said.
“The pursuit of knowledge—” Doc began, but Nada cut him off again.
“Us and the Russians, both our teams, we were over there, waiting that day.” Nada shrugged. “We weren’t sure what we could do, but we were ready to try if anything went wonky. And they actually did — nine days after that thing was turned on it broke.”
“Magnet quench,” Doc said, as if anyone had an idea what that meant.
“Right. Clusterfuck,” Nada clarified. “We’d redeployed back to the States and had to fly back over there. They lost five tons of super-heated helium. Took forever to cool it down. Faulty electrical connection, they said. Took the thing off-line for over a year. And that still didn’t stop them. They fired it up again. And again and again. Until now they found one of the things they were looking for. But what if they find something they weren’t looking for?”
“Would you have us move back into caves?” Doc asked.
“I’d prefer if we didn’t blast ourselves back into caves,” Nada argued.
“The Higgs boson could hold the key to figuring out the Rifts and the Fireflies,” Doc shot back. “It might make that part of our job unnecessary if we really can control the Rifts.”
“I don’t want to control the damn things,” Nada said, “I want to stop them. Forever. I’ve lost friends to the Fireflies.”
“All right, gentlemen,” Moms said, cutting off the growing argument. “Speaking of caves, Doc, show our newest member the Can. The rest of you, grab some sleep.”
Doc made a face indicating it was not a task he relished, but he got to his feet. “Come with me, Kirk.”
Doc hated this part of his job, but it was necessary. Every member of the team had to understand the process. The elevator inside Groom Mountain had been descending fast for over ten minutes and suddenly came to a jarring halt next to massive air ducts that poured cold air into the cavern.
“Don’t like being underground?” Kirk said as the whine of the elevator wound down.
“Not particularly,” Doc said. He didn’t want to get into how his mind was calculating how much rock and dirt was above them, automatically figuring out the weight, and what kind of pressure that would exert if it suddenly collapsed. He knew the odds were unlikely, but that knowledge was scant comfort.
They were over two miles below Area 51. This facility, having taken over three years to build and costing over fourteen billion dollars, served one purpose: to detect Rifts as they developed and then locate them.
Doc shoved aside the metal gate to the high-speed elevator and they walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock, over ten feet wide and ten high.
“Ahead is a natural cavern, a void that was discovered early in Area 51’s history. No one thought much of it, until it was decided we needed to put in a Super-Kamiokande.”
“Right,” Kirk said. “The Can.”
Doc glanced at him and noticed Kirk had a slight grin.
After two hundred yards, the tunnel opened into the large natural cavern eighty yards deep and eighty wide. They paused in the entrance as Kirk took it all in.
“Most people think there is only one Super-Kamiokande in the world. Over in Japan, deep inside a mine shaft. But we have this one and the Russians also built one, after we figured out that it could detect a Rift in early formation. Sharing data with the Russians and Japanese, we can eventually triangulate the location of a Rift.”
A steel grating extended out over the open space, with several workstations.
Doc pointed down. Flat black water reflected the overhead lights. To Kirk it looked like the water in the quarry back home, on a moonless night. Scary, dark, and deep.
“This is a stainless-steel tank holding that water. Sixty meters wide by sixty deep. Along the walls of the tank are over twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes. They are extremely sensitive light sensors that can detect a single photon as it travels through the water and reacts with it. They are all linked together to those displays over there.”
A young Asian man was watching the displays Doc indicated, one of two people on the duty shift. The other on-duty person was a young woman five desks away, peering at her screen with a rather bored expression.
“Since we built this, the Can has detected the formation of every Rift in the past seven years: nine altogether. So it is not exactly the most exciting place to work, unless something bad happens.”
“Sort of like the Nightstalkers,” Kirk said.
Doc raised his voice so the two worker bees could hear. “The Can is critical in getting us on-site as quickly as possible. We even managed to block three Rifts from opening by arriving before the formation was complete.” He walked over to the young man. “Anything?”
“Nope. Everything’s quiet.” He nodded toward a stack of papers. “The latest printouts are there for you, Doc.”
“Technically,” Doc continued to Kirk, “this is a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light is produced when an electrically charged particle travels through water. The reason this has to be so far underground is to allow the earth and rock above us to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet. It also helps that we are in the middle of the desert.”
“Yeah,” the young man said, “but we’re underneath Area 51. Some researchers do some strange experiments in that place. Once in a while we pick up some weird readings.”
“Yes,” Doc said, not wanting to dwell on that. “But most of the Can is focused into the Earth. It covers the entire planet. Since charged particles should not be emitted by the Earth itself, no one thought to use it that way. It was only when, at the most classified levels, information on the Rifts was shared among various governments, that someone checked the data over in Japan and found they’d picked up abnormal readings through the planet when each Rift occurred. So we had the Japanese keep an eye out, and sure enough, for the next Rift, they picked it up, even before it opened. So it became a priority to build one here and in Russia.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” Kirk asked, pretending to be interested. He now also appreciated Nada’s last Yada: Just tell me how to kill it. This place was all about telling them where the “it” to be killed was, and he appreciated that, but still…
The young man answered that. “We’re looking for muons.”
“Right,” Kirk said. “Moo-ons?”
“Seriously,” Doc said, “there is a reason Moms makes me take every new team member down here. I know all you are thinking of is just tell me how to kill it.” Doc laughed at the surprised look that flashed over Kirk’s face. “Yes, every Shooter focuses on that. But you have to understand the Rifts aren’t fantasy and the Fireflies aren’t magical. It’s science. We will figure it out someday.”