“I want zero-g inside that sample chamber now!”
“Doing so.”
“Good—no, wait. Change that! I want five standard gees in there, but—I want them coming from the chamber’s ceiling, not its floor. Got that? I want gravity in there to pull objects up toward the roof.”
“Doing so,” said PHANTOM.
Rissa and Jag watched, fascinated, as the egg-shaped piece of material started to rise out of the bottom of the chamber. Before it was all the way out, pieces of gravel welled up from beneath the solid floor and fell up toward the ceiling, hitting it not with the ricochet bounce one would expect but more like pebbles falling into tar and beginning to sink.
“Computer, oscillate the gravity until all the objects are free from the floor and ceiling, then shift to zero-g, with the objects floating in the chamber.”
“Doing so.”
“My word, that’s incredible,” said Rissa. “The stuff can pass right through other matter.”
Jag grunted. “The original samples we tried to collect must have leaked through the probes’ walls, pushed out by the force of their acceleration toward Starplex.”
By bouncing the apparent source of gravity inside the chamber between the top and the bottom, PHANTOM eventually got all the gravel pieces to float freely. But Jag’s fur danced when he saw the results of two pieces moving together. He’d expected to see them hit, then bounce off. Instead, when they got to just a few millimeters apart they deflected away from each other.
“Magnetic,” said Rissa.
Jag moved his lower shoulders. “No, there’s no magnetism at work here—there are no charges present.”
There were four articulated arms ending in tractor-beam emitters inside the chamber, and Jag operated all of them in unison, controlling one with each hand. He used one beam to lock onto a piece of translucent gravel a centimeter in diameter, and used a second beam to grab another piece of equal size. He then operated the controls to move the two pieces together. Everything went fine until the chunks were within a very short distance of each other, but then no matter how much power he fed into the tractor beams, he was unable to bring them any closer. “Amazing,” said Jag. “There’s some sort of force repelling them—a nonmagnetic repulsive force. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“That must be what keeps the haze of gravel from coalescing,” said Rissa.
Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “I suppose. The net effect is that the material in the haze between the spheres is bound together gravitationally, but it won’t ever coalesce more than it already has.”
“But then what keeps these pebbles together? Why doesn’t that repulsive force blast them apart?”
“They must be locked chemically. I suspect they were originally formed under great pressure—pressure that defeated the repulsion we’re observing. Now that their constituent atoms are bonded, they stay together, but it would take great effort to combine the pebbles into bigger groupings.”
“Oh, hell,” said Rissa. “You know what I’m thinking…”
Jag’s four eyes went wide. “The Slammers! We’ve only ever seen what their weapon did to one of our probes. Perhaps if they turned it on a world, this might be the result. Quite the doomsday device: not only does it destroy the planet, but it also imparts a force to the rubble to prevent it from ever collecting back together to form another world.”
“And now there’s an open shortcut leading from here to the Commonwealth worlds. If they were to come through—”
At that moment, Jag’s wall beeped, and the elderly face of Cynthia Delacorte appeared on it. “Jag, it’s—oh, hi, Rissa… Listen, thanks for sending up those samples. Do you know that this stuff sinks into normal matter?”
Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Incredible, isn’t it?”
Delacorte nodded. “I’ll say. It’s not normal baryonic matter. It’s not antimatter, of course. We’d have been blown out of the skies if it were. But where normal protons and neutrons consist of combinations of down quarks and up quarks, this stuff is made of matte quarks and glossy quarks.”
Jag’s fur danced excitedly. “Really?”
“I’ve never heard of those kinds of quarks,” said Rissa.
Jag made a sound like she was a fool, but Delacorte nodded. “Since the twentieth century, humans have known of six flavors of quarks—up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charmed. In fact, six was the maximum number allowed for under the old Standard Model of physics, so we’d pretty much given up looking for more, which turned out to be a big mistake.” She looked pointedly at Jag. “The Waldahudin had only found the same six flavors, too. But when we met the Ibs, they were aware of two more, which we refer to by opposing lusters, glossy and matte. There’s no way you can get them by breaking down normal matter, but the Ibs had done unique work pulling matter out of quantum fluctuations. In their experiments, luster quarks were sometimes produced, but only at very, very high temperatures. What we’ve got here are the first-known naturally occurring luster quarks.”
“Incredible,” said Jag. “You’ve noticed the fardint things carry no charge? What explains that?”
Delacorte nodded, then looked at Rissa. “Electrons have a charge of negative one unit, up quarks have a positive two-thirds charge, and down quarks have a negative one-third charge. Each neutron is made of two downs quarks and an up, which means the net charge is zip. Meanwhile, each proton consists of one down and two ups, which gives a charge of positive one. Since atoms have equal numbers of protons and electrons, they have an overall neutral charge.”
Rissa understood that the explanation had been for her benefit. She nodded at the wall monitor for Delacorte to go on.
“Well, this luster-quark matter consists of what I’m calling para-neutrons and para-protons. Para-neutrons consist of two glossy quarks and one matte, and para-protons consist of a pair of mattes plus a glossy. But neither glossies nor mattes carry any charge whatsoever—so regardless of how you combine them, there’s no charge on the nucleus. And without a positive nucleus, there’s nothing to attract negatively charged electrons, so a luster-quark atom is solely a nucleus; it has no electron orbital shells. The bottom line is that luster matter isn’t just electrically neutral. Rather, it’s nonelectrical; it’s immune to electromagnetic interactions.”
“Gods,” said Jag. “What would explain why it can sink into solid objects. It would probably pass through completely unhindered if it weren’t for drag caused by the regular-matter carbon grains and hydrogen polluting it, and—of course! That explains why we can see it, too. If it were purely luster quarks, it would be invisible, since the reflection and absorption of light depend on vibrating charges. We’re just seeing the interstellar dust that’s caught gravitationally inside the luster matter, like sand in jelly.” He looked at the wall screen. “All right—it doesn’t interact electromagnetically. What about the nuclear forces?”
“It is affected by both the strong and the weak nuclear force,” said Delacorte. “But those forces are so short-range, I doubt we’d get any interaction through them with regular matter except at incredibly high pressures and temperatures.”
Jag was quiet for a moment, considering. When he next spoke, his barking was subdued. “It’s incredible,” he said. “We knew the Slammer weapon could break chemical bonds, but changing regular matter into luster matter is—”
“Slammer weapon?” said Delacorte? her gray eyebrows arching. “Is that what you think produced this stuff? No, I doubt that. It’d take thousands of years for that much dust to be swept up by the spheres. My guess is that we’re seeing a natural phenomenon.”
“Natural,…” said Jag, repeating the bark his translation implant had provided. “Fascinating. What about gravitational effects?”