‘Those stuck-up British toffs don’t pick on you for that French accent?’
‘Father, I am French. That’s my identity.’
‘But not your citizenship.’ Hiram slapped his son’s thigh. ‘You’re an American. Don’t forget that.’ He glanced at David more warily. ‘And are you still practicing?’
David smiled. ‘You mean, am I still a Catholic? Yes, Father.’
Hiram grunted. ‘That bloody mother of yours. Biggest mistake I ever made was shackling myself to her without taking account of her religion. And now she’s passed the God virus on to you.’
David felt his nostrils flare. ‘Your language is offensive.’
‘ … Yes. I’m sorry. So, England is a good place to be a Catholic nowadays?’
‘Since they disestablished the Church, England has acquired one of the healthiest Catholic communities in the world.’
Hiram grunted. ‘You don’t often hear the words ‘healthy’ and ‘Catholic’ in the same sentence … We’re here.’
They had reached a broad parking lot. The car pulled over. David climbed out after his father. They were close to the ocean here, and David was immediately immersed in chill, salt-laden air.
The lot fringed a large open building, crudely constructed of concrete and corrugated metal, like an aircraft hangar. There was a giant corrugated door at one end, partly open, and robot trucks were hauling cartons into the building from a stack outside.
Hiram led his son to a small, human-sized door cut in one wall; it was dwarfed by the scale of the structure. ‘Welcome to the center of the universe.’ Hiram looked abashed, suddenly. ‘Look, I dragged you out here without thinking. I know you’re just off your flight. If you need a break, a shower – ‘
Hiram seemed full of genuine concern for his welfare, and David couldn’t resist a smile. ‘Maybe coffee, a little later. Show me your new toy.’
The space within was cold, cavernous. As they walked across the dusty concrete floor their footsteps echoed. The roof was ribbed, and strip lights dangled everywhere, filling the vast volume with a cold, pervasive gray light. There was a sense of hush, of calm; David was reminded more of a cathedral than a technological facility.
At the center of the building a stack of equipment towered above the handful of technicians working here. David was a theoretician, not an experimentalist, but he recognized the paraphernalia of a high-energy experimental rig. There were subatomic-particle detectors – arrays of crystal blocks stacked high and deep-and boxes of control electronics piled up like white bricks, dwarfed by the detector array itself, but each itself the size of a mobile home.
The technicians weren’t typical of a high-energy physics establishment, however. On average they seemed quite old – perhaps around sixty, given how hard it was to estimate ages these days.
He raised this with Hiram.
‘Yeah. OurWorld makes the policy of hiring older workers anyhow. They’re conscientious, generally as smart as they ever were thanks to the brain chemicals they give us now, and grateful for a job. And in this case, most of the people here are victims of the SSC cancellation.’
‘The SSC-the Superconducting Super Collider?’ A multibillion-dollar particle-accelerator project that would have been built under a cornfield in Texas, had it not been canned by Congress in the 1990s.
Hiram said, ‘A whole generation of American particle physicists was hit by that decision. They survived; they found jobs in industry and Wall Street and so forth. Most of them never got over their disappointment, however.’
‘But the SSC would have been a mistake. The linear accelerator technology that came along a few years later was far more effective, and cheaper. And besides most fundamental results in particle physics since 2010 or so have come from studies of high-energy cosmological events.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Not to these people. The SSC might have been a mistake. But it would have been their mistake. When I traced these guys and offered them a chance to come work in cutting-edge high-energy physics again they jumped at the chance.’ He eyed his son. ‘You know, you’re a smart boy. David.’
‘I’m not a boy.’
‘You had the kind of education I could never even have dreamed of. But there’s a lot I could teach you even so. Like how to handle people.’ He waved a hand at the technicians. ‘Look at these guys- They’re working for a promise: for dreams of their youth, aspiration, self-fulfillment. If you can find some way to tap into that, you can get people to work like pit ponies, and for pennies.’
David followed him, frowning.
They reached a guardrail, and one gray-haired technician-with a curt, somewhat awed nod at Hiram-handed them hard hats. David fitted his gingerly to his head.
David leaned over the rail. He could smell machine oil, insulation, cleaning solvents. From here he could see that the detector array actually extended some distance below the ground surface. At the center of the pit was a tight knot of machinery, dark and unfamiliar. A puff of vapor, like wispy steam, billowed from the core of the machinery: cryogenics, perhaps. There was a whirr, somewhere above. David looked up to see a beam crane in action, a long steel beam that extended over the detector array, with a grabbing arm at the end.
Hiram murmured, ‘Most of this stuff is just detectors of one kind or another, so we can figure out what is going on – particularly when something goes wrong.’ He pointed at the knot of machinery at the core of the array. ‘That is the business end. A cluster of superconducting magnets.’
‘Hence the cryogenics.’
‘Yes. We make our big electromagnetic fields in there, the fields we use to build our buckyball Casimir engines.’ There was pride in his voice – justifiable, thought David. ‘This was the very site where we opened up that first wormhole, back in the spring. I’m getting a plaque put up, you know, one of those historic markers. Call me immodest. Now we’re using this place to push the technology further, as far and as fast as we can.’
David turned to Hiram. ‘Why have you brought me out here?’
‘ … Just the question I was going to ask.’
The third voice, utterly unexpected, clearly startled Hiram.
A figure stepped out of the shadows of the detector stack, and came to stand beside Hiram. For a moment David’s heart pumped, for it might have been Hiram’s twin – or his premature ghost. But at second glance David could detect differences; the second man was considerably younger, less bulky, perhaps a little taller, and his hair was still thick and glossy black.
But those ice blue eyes, so unusual given an Asian descent, were undoubtedly Hiram’s.
‘I know you,’ David said.
‘From tabloid TV?’
David forced a smile. ‘You’re Bobby.’
‘And you must be David, the half-brother I didn’t know I had, until I had to learn it from a journalist.’ Bobby was clearly angry, but his self-control was icy.
David realized he had landed in the middle of a complicated family row – worse, it was his family Hiram looked from one to the other of his sons. He sighed. ‘David, maybe it’s time I bought you that coffee.’
The coffee was among the worst David had ever tasted. But the technician who served the three of them hovered at the table until David took his first sip. This is Seattle, David reminded himself; here, quality coffee has been a fetish among the social classes who man installations like this for a generation. He forced a smile. ‘Marvelous,’ he said.
The tech went away beaming.
The facility’s cafeteria was tucked into the comer of the ‘countinghouse,’ the computing center where data from the various experiments run here were analyzed. The counting house itself, characteristic of Hiram’s cost conscious operations, was minimal, just a temporary office module with a plastic tile floor, fluorescent ceiling panels, wood-effect plastic workstation partitions. It was jammed with computer terminals, SoftScreens, oscilloscopes and other electronic equipment. Cables and light fiber ducts snaked everywhere, bundles of them taped to the walls and floor and ceiling. There was a complex smell of electrical-equipment ozone, of stale coffee and sweat.
The cafeteria itself had turned out to be a dismal shack with plastic tables and vending machines, all maintained by a battered drone robot. Hiram and his two sons sat around a table, arms folded, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Hiram dug into a pocket and produced a handkerchief sized SoftScreen, smoothed it flat. He said, ‘I’ll get to the point. On. Replay. Cairo.’
David watched the ‘Screen. He saw, through a succession of brief scenes, some kind of medical emergency unfolding in sun-drenched Cairo. Egypt: stretcher-bearers carrying bodies from buildings, a hospital crowded with corpses and despairing relatives and harassed medical staff, mothers clutching the inert bodies of infants, screaming.
‘Dear God.’
‘God seems to have been looking the other way,’ Hiram said grimly. ‘This happened this morning. An other water war. One of Egypt’s neighbors dumped a toxin in the Nile. First estimates are two thousand dead, ten thousand ill, many more deaths expected.