Euclid: ‘No actual particle could continue to produce just an unresolvable smudge on the Plot?’
‘Quite right, Euclid. They had a first-class mystery on their hands. And there, just when it gets exciting, we’re going to take a break for ten minutes.’
Applause broke out as I led Jon into an anteroom. We left Euclid on the platform, standing facing the audience with his customary pleasant blank expression.
Thorgeson shut the door behind us and came towards me saying, ‘I’m doing all this for you, my little Asian honeypot!’
He wrapped an arm round my waist, pulled me close, and kissed my lips.
I gave a small shriek of surprise. Asian honeypot indeed! He did not release me, but showered compliments on me, saying he had adored me ever since he had set eyes on me in the science unit. I did not mind the compliments. When he started to kiss me again, and I felt the warmth of his body against me, I found myself returning them.
I rejoiced when his tongue slipped into my mouth. I was becoming quite enthusiastic when the door opened and Tom and some others came in to congratulate Thorgeson on his exposition. This was one time when I felt really mad at Tom.
Back we marched into the hall. Thorgeson seemed quite calm. I was trembling. He had been about to grab my breasts under my clothes, and I could not decide how I would feel about that. I was furious with the situation. It was all I could do to sit there and listen to him. How should I deal with him when the lecture was over – with that Euclid looking on, too?
However, I now saw a new kind of passion in Jon -not a physical passion but an intellectual one, as he took over from Euclid and spoke of the next epoch of scientific discovery.
‘Euclid and I were talking about the smudge mystery,’ he said when the audience had settled down. ‘I will skip some years of confusion and frustration and speak about the year 2024. That was the year when there were two breakthroughs, one experimental, one theoretical.
‘The experimental breakthrough came when SHC got up to full power, far beyond anything originally planned for the unbuilt SSC, using a further innovation contributed by the Indonesian physicist, Jim Kopamtim. Lo and behold at far greater energies than were achieved previously, another smudge was found!
‘So the Higgs smudge had to be rechristened the alpha-smudge, while the new one went by the name of beta-smudge.
The theoretical breakthrough – well, I should say it came a while before the SHC observations. A brilliant young Chinese mathematician, Chin Lim Chung, achieved a completely reformulated theoretical basis for particle physics as it stood at the time. Miss Chin introduced some highly sophisticated new mathematical ideas. She showed how a permanent smudge could indeed come about on the Ng-Robinson Plot, but the culprit could not possibly be a particle in any ordinary sense.
‘It was a new kind of entity entirely. So from henceforth it was simply referred to as a smudge.
‘Soon after the SHC announcement, Chin Lim Chung, working in conjunction with our own Dreiser Hawkwood, figured out that the alpha and beta smudges had to belong to a whole sequence of smudges, at higher and higher energies. It was clear that until this sequence was known as a whole, there was going to be no solution to the mystery of mass.
‘Mother Teresa! It was as though we had discovered a row of galaxies on our doorstep!’ As if he could not stop himself, he added, ‘The remarkable Miss Chin is still alive and working. I happen to know her daughter.’
Something in Jon’s manner, in his very body language, suggested to me that this lady must have been his Chinese lover, back on Earth.
Euclid: ‘You cannot forever go on building bigger and bigger machines. So why did not the physicists just give up on the mystery?’
‘Well, we don’t give up easily.’ He shot me a glance as he said this. ‘It was hoped that once the gamma-smudge was found, then the mystery of mass could be resolved after all.’