The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 Richard Phillips
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47 North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612184951
ISBN-10: 1612184952
For my lovely wife, Carol, who believes that finishing a task is at least as important as starting it.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105
CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 108
CHAPTER 109
CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 111
CHAPTER 112
CHAPTER 113
CHAPTER 114
CHAPTER 115
CHAPTER 116
CHAPTER 117
CHAPTER 118
CHAPTER 119
CHAPTER 120
CHAPTER 121
CHAPTER 122
CHAPTER 123
CHAPTER 124
CHAPTER 125
CHAPTER 126
CHAPTER 127
CHAPTER 128
CHAPTER 129
CHAPTER 130
CHAPTER 131
CHAPTER 132
CHAPTER 133
CHAPTER 134
CHAPTER 135
CHAPTER 136
CHAPTER 137
CHAPTER 138
CHAPTER 139
CHAPTER 140
CHAPTER 141
CHAPTER 142
CHAPTER 143
CHAPTER 144
CHAPTER 145
CHAPTER 146
CHAPTER 147
CHAPTER 148
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Rodger Dalbert stepped out of the black Mercedes, almost losing his footing on the icy blacktop. His driver reached out to support him, but he waved the hand away.
“It’s OK, Carl. I’ve got it.”
“Black ice is a bitch this morning. Thought we’d slide off the road in that last roundabout.”
Rodger smiled at the bigger man. “That crossed my mind.”
An icy blast of wind forced Rodger to duck his head, seeking some protection behind his overcoat’s high collar. Damn, it was cold. Of course, what could one expect of March in Switzerland?
On the bright side, Meyrin wasn’t far outside Geneva. Rodger had always loved Geneva. Too bad his schedule wasn’t going to allow him to tour more than the airport. Oh well. He’d known his personal life would suffer when he’d agreed to chair PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Hitching his overcoat more tightly around his neck, Rodger hurried out of the wind and into the building that would host today’s conference, a review of ongoing repairs on the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The most ambitious science project ever undertaken by man occupied a monstrous tunnel a hundred meters below ground, just west of Lake Geneva, its twenty-seven-kilometer circumference crossing the border between France and Switzerland in multiple spots. This building sat seventy meters above a cavern in which the huge ATLAS detector enfolded LHC Point One, a beam interaction point where two super-accelerated proton beams collided...at least they did when the whole thing was working.
“Dr. Dalbert. I am so pleased you could make it.”
Rodger turned to see Dr. Louis Dubois, the famed French physicist who headed the team of ATLAS scientists, approaching from across the room. The man had aged since last Rodger had seen him, at a conference in New York, long black hair flowing down over his shoulders as if he had just stepped out of a Paris salon, looking more like a twenty-something Yanni than a Nobel Prize–winning quantum theorist. Now, he wore it tied back in a greasy ponytail, as if he hadn’t bothered to wash it in weeks. His eyes, which seemed to have sunk back into his face, showed a fatigue no sleep could wash away.
“The pleasure is mine, Dr. Dubois. I apologize for my tardiness. The drive took us a bit longer than expected this morning.” Rodger nodded toward the reception desk. “Should I sign in?”
“No need. I have your badge right here. Now, if you’ll follow me, the conference is about to begin.”
Passing through a doorway, Dr. Dubois led Rodger down a short hall and then turned right into a room that was much smaller than what Rodger had expected. The conference table seated a dozen, but today only three people occupied its chairs. Dr. Dubois, with Rodger in tow, now made a grand total of five.
As Rodger seated himself, Dr. Dubois moved to the head of the table and began the obligatory introductions.
“Good morning to you all. Although most of you have already met, I wil
l make my way around the table.
“On my left is Dr. Robert Craig, chief scientific advisor to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense.”
The stocky redheaded man inclined his head in acknowledgment.
“Continuing in clockwise fashion, Dr. Klaus Gotlieb, scientific advisor to the European Commission.”
Rodger recognized the bald, birdlike visage of the older man from an August meeting in Stockholm. Although he’d only chatted with the scientist briefly, the encounter had felt interminable.
“Next we have Dr. Pierre Boudre, senior astrophysicist for the European Space Agency.”
Raising his left eyebrow ever so slightly, Rodger glanced across the table at the slender Frenchman. He had known and liked Pierre since they had collaborated on the International Space Station for NASA. The man was brilliant, and endowed with an affable personality that could charm a group of locals at a Houston coffee shop as effortlessly as society’s elite at a Long Island social. But what was he doing here?
For that matter, what was Rodger doing here? What had been billed as a conference on the status of LHC repairs was clearly nothing of the sort. Five people? This wasn’t enough for a round table discussion, much less a conference. And the makeup of the group. Two French, one German, a Brit, and an American. Something about the mix didn’t seem right for an LHC discussion. The project was a worldwide collaboration. So what was this about?
“And on my right is Dr. Rodger Dalbert, chairman of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
“As for me, I am Dr. Louis Dubois, and I am the senior physicist for the ATLAS experiment. Actually, that title is a bit presumptuous, since we have over two thousand five hundred physicists from thirty-seven countries collaborating on this experiment. Let’s just say ATLAS is my baby and a very big baby at that.”
Rodger heard chuckles of approval from the small assemblage.
Dr. Dubois paused, then spread his hands, palms up, like a pastor about to call his flock to prayer. “It is by now obvious to you all that this is no conference on the LHC repair schedule. I apologize for the subterfuge, but I am quite certain you will soon understand why we deemed this necessary, given the current situation...one that requires deft handling to avoid undesirable media involvement.”
Rodger’s pulse quickened. Media involvement? Had the CERN scientists made a breakthrough? Had they finally established definitive validation for the physics standard model? But then why not just present their results? Nothing about this made any sense.
“Rather than try to explain why I called you together, let me show you.”
Dr. Dubois thumbed a button on the small remote control unit he picked up from the table, bringing the flat-panel display on the far wall to life. The screen showed a myriad of colored lines twisting away from a central point, something a child might have produced given a full day with a Spirograph.
Dr. Dubois moved the mouse pointer on the screen, circling the central point.
“This is an ATLAS image from testing conducted just prior to the latest system shutdown, early on the morning of the last Friday in November. In fact it was still Thanksgiving night over in America when this image was captured.”
Rodger studied the screen. Without a detailed study of the complete data set he was at a loss to spot anything unusual in the image. Clearly the extreme energy released in the proton collisions had created a wide range of particles with different charges, spins, and masses, accounting for the assortment of paths that were displayed on the screen.
“Now this,” Dr. Dubois said, bringing a new image to the display, “is ATLAS data captured this very morning.”
Although the first image had been indicative of an extreme energy event, this latest image showed an order of magnitude increase in particle interactions, so many that it was difficult to discern one path from the other.
“Excuse me,” Dr. Craig interjected. “Were you using the same filter and trigger settings on this last event?”
“The ATLAS instrument settings are unchanged,” Dr. Dubois replied.
Something about that statement bothered Rodger, and he leaned forward. “But you said this was captured this morning. I didn’t realize that you had finished repairing the damaged electromagnets and restoring vacuum to the system. Have you managed to further increase beam energies beyond ten TeV?”
Dr. Dubois leaned back in his chair. “That brings us to the issue at hand. There’s really no way to put this except bluntly. There never was any electromagnet damage, or any loss of vacuum in the beam tube. That was merely a cover story issued to the press to allow us time to develop a detailed understanding of the anomaly.”
Voices rose in concert, each scientist demanding attention until no single question could be discerned above the noise. Dr. Dubois waited patiently until, at last, the scientists fell silent.
“I understand you have questions, but before I yield the floor, you need to hear the rest of what I have to present, information that will answer many of the questions you have already asked, but which will certainly raise more. Now may I continue?”
Glancing quickly around the table, Dr. Dubois encountered no objection. He rose from his chair, as if he could no longer bear the tension while remaining seated.
“As I indicated in my early remarks, the testing conducted through late November produced a series of exciting results. However, during a test conducted on the morning of the last Friday in November, we noted an odd spike in measurements across the range of ATLAS instruments. I’m talking about across the inner detector, the calorimeters, the muon spectrometer, even the outer toroid magnets.
“Even more disconcerting, the readings continued after the beam channel was shut down. Naturally, we first looked for some failure in the instrumentation, faults in the electronics or in the software responsible for collecting and processing the data.”
Dr. Dubois’s face had taken on a pallor that could not be blamed solely on the room lights. Rodger understood why. The implications were enormous. For ATLAS to record such a powerful event with no beam firing couldn’t be good.
“We shut down all further LHC testing until we could determine the exact nature of the problem. We have not done a beam firing since that day.”
“Wait one minute.” Dr. Gotlieb rose from his chair to point at the screen. “You said that image was collected this morning.”
Dr. Dubois nodded. “That is correct. That is a slice of the data collected by the ATLAS detector this morning.”
“But, if there has been no proton acceleration around the LHC, how...?”
Dr. Gotlieb’s question trailed off into horrified silence.
“Jesus Christ.” The words slipped from Rodger’s lips like a prayer. It was worse than he had thought.
“The November Anomaly, as we have come to call it, appeared at the interaction point within ATLAS and somehow achieved a semblance of stability. We immediately scrambled to isolate the anomaly in an intense electromagnetic containment field to keep it from escaping the vacuum chamber. Since that day, we have had a team of engineers working around the clock to improve the quality of the surrounding vacuum, adding multiple redundancies to prevent electromagnetic or vacuum failure.”
Dr. Dubois pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbing at the beads of sweat that dampened his brow. “I think you can see why we’ve held this information close-hold as the best minds on the program struggled to understand exactly what has happened.”
“But how is that possible?” asked Dr. Boudre. “Admittedly I’m an astrophysicist rather than a quantum specialist, but even the energies provided by LHC collisions have far too small a probability cross section to allow for stable formation of some sort of micro black hole. Besides, Hawking radiation should dissipate any black hole with a mass of less than two hundred thousand kilograms in under a second. A micro black hole such as yours should have evaporated in a tiny fraction of that time.”
“We don’t think that’s what it is.”
“You don’t think?” Dr. Gotlieb sputtered.
Rodger realized that he had also risen to his feet, although he found himself leaning on the table for support.
“And after three months of secret study, what have you learned?”
Dr. Dubois started to speak, paused, then began again. “The anomaly violates all accepted theory. We have pored over every paper published in the last fifty years that could remotely have bearing on this matter and have only found one that seems to describe what we are seeing. It’s a theoretical treatise titled ‘Quasi-Stable Quantum Singularities,’ published three years ago.”
“And what does the physicist who wrote the paper have to say about your anomaly?” Rodger pressed.
“I don’t know. We haven’t spoken to him.”
“What? Why the hell not?” Dr. Craig bellowed.
“Gentlemen, please sit back down. Thank you. I know you are all wondering why I have gathered you here instead of taking this directly to the world’s governing bodies. What we have here is something entirely beyond our current understanding of physics, something that for now appears quasi-stable. It has the potential to transform into something far more dangerous, possibly even a black hole that would consume our planet. If a government reacted to this out of fear, you can imagine what they might try.”
The table jumped as Dr. Craig’s fist slammed its surface. “They’ll nuke the bloody hell out of your goddamned science experiment. Should have been done before now.”
Rodger understood Dr. Craig’s anger. But all he could do was lean back in his chair, too stunned to respond.
Dr. Dubois leaned forward. “And if they do that, they will probably bring about the disaster that we all fear. According to our analysis of the equations in the paper I mentioned, an anomaly of this type occupies an inflection point between a number of more stable states, most of which are unpleasant. Even a relatively minor perturbation could tip it from its perch, sweeping away humanity in an avalanche of destruction.
“So we have determined that you four, as respected scientific representatives of the key governments of the European Union, Great Britain, and the United States, are best suited to bring this knowledge to your political leadership. After those governments have absorbed the facts, they can come to consensus on how best to proceed.”
Dr. Craig’s face had acquired a purple cast. “You still haven’t answered my question. Why haven’t you contacted the physicist who wrote the damned paper?”