* * *
Aub was busy in his office when he received a call from Alice, who was downstairs on the reactor floor debugging a program that had recently been added to the system.
“There’s something unusual happening here, Aub,” she said, looking puzzled. “I don’t understand it. Can you come down and have a look?”
Fifteen minutes later, Aub joined her beside the reactor sphere, at the master console of the detector and cast an eye quickly over the familiar clutter of equipment around them.
“What’s the problem?” he asked cheerfully. She pointed at a column of numbers on the main monitor screen. Almost at once Aub’s face knotted into a puzzled frown as he realized that it was unusually quiet; there was none of the humming and whining that signaled when the GRASER was running.
But before he could speak, Alice offered an explanation. “I had to switch on the detector to run the program. It seems to be measuring hi-radiation, but the GRASER is shut down this morning. What do you make of it?”
Aub sighed and sank into the operator’s chair. Late the night before he had installed an additional rack of hardware to improve the sensitivity of the instrument still further and had gone home without testing it out, having wasted half the night tracing an intermittent fault.
“I guess I musta screwed up somewhere last night,” he said in a resigned voice. “It looks like we’re in for another day of trouble-shooting. Better hook into the main computer and start calling down the diagnostics.”
* * *
But by mid-afternoon, at which time they had been joined by a curious Sandra, Joe, and Art, Aub was still disturbed. “This is crazy. The system checks out okay, the GRASER’s not running, so we’re not generating any hi-waves, but we’re still measuring them. Let’s start up the GRASER and run a few standard calibration routines. There has to be something screwy somewhere.”
Later that evening the whole team, including Clifford, was gathered round the console while Aub repeated the tests that he had performed time and time again. Still the results came out the same. They were detecting hi-waves where there were no hi-waves to be detected. Clifford took the logical view that if the waves were there and they were definitely not coming from the GRASER, then they had to be coming from somewhere else. No sooner had he said it when the truth dawned on him. Five minutes later he was on the line to an astounded Al Morelli, who was half-shaved and wearing a bathrobe.
“The detector is definitely responding, Al,” he said, his voice quivering with excitement. “But what it’s responding to has got nothing to do with the GRASER at all. It’s coming from the whole of the universe!”
“Universe? What universe?” Morelli looked bewildered. “Brad, just what are you talking about?”
“The universe!” Clifford exclaimed. “All over the universe you’ve got particle transitions going on all the time, right? You’ve got creations happening all the time, everywhere, and you’ve got annihilations happening mainly inside masses.”
“Sure, but . . .” Morelli’s eyes widened. “You’re not saying . . . ?”
“That’s just what I’m saying,” Clifford affirmed, nodding violently. “Every single one of those events generates hi-waves just as surely as those same events taking place inside the GRASER do. What Aub’s done is wind the sensitivity up so high that we’re actually getting a reading from it. We’re reading the hi-wave background noise from the whole universe.
Morelli’s face just gaped out of the screen.
Before he could formulate a coherent reply, Clifford went on. “I’ll tell you another thing too. There’s every reason to suppose that the background hi-wave noise also produces a background of ordinary radiation through secondary reactions. That gives us a possible alternative explanation for the three-degree thermal background radiation, so maybe we don’t need the Big Bang model to account for it at all now. How about that? Here’s something we’ve got to talk to Zimmermann about right away.”
* * *
“What do you mean—’k-astronomy’?” Peter Hughes looked suspiciously over his desk at Aub and Morelli, who hadn’t stopped babbling excitedly since they sat down. “If you’re telling me you want more money for the project . . .”