“Oh?” Joe sounded interested.
“No,” Clifford said. “There was a lot more radiation detected from the hole than quantum mechanics said there should have been.”
“You reckon the other explanation will do better then?”
“I don’t know yet . . . not until I’ve finished working out the model. Then there’s nothing to stop us testing it out. We won’t need Aub’s detector for that since we’re talking about conventional radiation that we can detect and measure without it.”
“What about the other thing—the pattern of pure primary hi-radiation?”
“That’s a different matter,” Clifford told him. “That detector of Aub’s is the only way of measuring it. So let’s hope he can make it work.”
* * *
Three months later, Peter Hughes and Al Morelli were standing beneath the reactor sphere of the GRASER amid the collection of electronics racks, cubicles, and tangles of wire that had gradually come together in the area of floor which had been cleared for it. It looked more like a collection of technological junk that had been thrown haphazardly together and had somehow, miraculously stuck than anything designed for a purpose, embodying all manner of components and assemblies as a consequence of Aub turning to whatever sources of materials were available or improvising alternatives—another of his talents, Clifford discovered. In front of them, quite unperturbed, Aub was keying some final settings into a console while Clifford and the rest of the team stood watching intently.
“The beams’s on and running,” Morelli said to Hughes. “So annihilations are in progress in the reactor now.”
“What power are you running?” Hughes inquired.
“Black hole,” Morelli said.
“You’re testing for pure hi-radiation then?” Hughes looked intrigued but at the same time cast a dubious eye over the chaotic and improbable mixture of equipment around him.
“First live test,” Morelli confirmed. “That’s why we brought you down.”
Morelli noticed that Aub had half-turned from the console and was looking very glum. “What’s up?” Morelli called. “Problems?”
Aub gestured at the screen above the keyboard he had been operating. “It’s screwed up somewhere,” he informed them. “We’ve either got a hardware fault or there’s a bug in the initialization routine. It’s hanging up and I can’t get into the Command Interpreter.” He exhaled a long sigh and turned to look at the disappointed faces on the other side of him. “Sorry, people, but the show’s off for today. Can you come back next week?”
* * *
A week later it was.
“Something’s screwed up somewhere . . . I hope. The system checks out okay, but it’s reading zero. That either means we’ve got some obscure fault that the diagnostics aren’t picking up or it means hi-waves don’t exist. For the sake of Brad’s theory, I hope it’s the first.”
Hughes and Morelli walked toward the exit. “How the hell can they trouble-shoot in all that mess, Al?” Hughes remarked in a low voice. “It looks like a cross between a bombed computer factory and a combined harvester.”
“Yeah, but they’ve done it all in six months and on a shoestring,” Morelli replied. “There have to be teething problems. I’ll let my money ride on that bunch for a lot longer yet.”
* * *
At half past three the morning of the following day, Aub withdrew his head from the signal-processing subsystem cubicle and held out his hand triumphantly to present a tiny silver object to Clifford, Phil, Art, and Sandra, whose eyes were red-rimmed from hours of studying the circuit diagrams and wiring lists that littered the area around the detector.
“It was a break in the a.c. signal path to the third differential,” he announced. “The diagnostic only checked out the d.c. Just imagine—all that trouble over one lousy open-circuit capacitor. It’s enough to make you want to throw up.”
And so, later on that same day. Peter Hughes and Al Morelli returned once more to the GRASER building to witness a repeat performance. This time, after Aub had keyed in the final command sequence and while the rest of the team waited and watched with bated breath and crossed fingers, a column of numbers appeared on the display screen of the master console. Aub gave out a whoop of jubilation and turned in his seat to face toward where Hughes and Morelli were standing.