Gregery Benford - Cosm

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and

incidents either are the product of the author's imagination

or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,

locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely

coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or

the publisher.

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

1350 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10019

interior design by Kellan Peck

Visit our website at http://www. Avonbooks.com/Eos

ISBN: 0380974355

thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

For information address Avon Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Benford, Gregory, 1941-

COSM / Gregory Benford.--lst ed.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3552.E542C67 1998

97-29652

813'.54-1c21

CIP

First Avon Eos Printing: February 1998

AVON EOS TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

FroST EDrrlorq

QPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

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To the younger women,

Alyson and Vanessa

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PART I

GLITCH

If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems,

And that's a big mistake,

--FINK WILCZEK PAITICLE PHYSICIST

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· I Alicia was irked, not exactly a rare event. She glared at the thin

man across the desk from her and wondered if he was being deliberately

irritating, or whether this was just his best-of-the-menu personality.

"A stop order on my experiment?" She repeated his words scornfully.

"On any uranium run."

"They're gonna stop the whole damn Collider?"

"There's the final A-3 safety review--"

"Done!"

"But not completed and filed."

"What? You want all the paperwork?"

"Hey, I don't wanna rain on your parade ..."

Had this man actually said rain on your parade? He should be in a

museum. "It's the lawyers, right?"

A Long Island judge had leveled a stay order on the Lab, active

until yet another environmental impact report got done. Suffolk

County was a hotbed of worriers; they had once shut down a five-billion-dollar

nuclear power plant.

He gave her a smile like wilted lettuce. "I've got to certify on it,

then boot it over to Legal, and they certify to the judge."

"I thought that was all a done deal."

Hugh Alcott held up a thick packet of paper. She recognized the

safety report from the manila jacket. "There's some technical detail

missing."

"The background data? I was told the Lab would pony that up."

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GREGORY BENFORD'

"That's your job, I think." He was known as the Safety Nazi for

his unshakably banal, hedgehog manner and now he gave her the

blank safety operations officer gaze. "I suppose I could check with--"

"The whole damn report was supposed to go through yesterday."

He stirred uneasily in his standard-issue desk chair. She could tell

he did not like being seated while she stood, especially since she was

taller than he was anyway. He scratched absently at his ear and she

noticed that today's hairpiece was a demure Tom Cruise '95 model.

She had seen so much of this guy, he was repeating on rugs.

"I think we've really got to dot the i's on this one."

Alicia turned, crossed her arms, and made herself look out Alcott's

window. Eastern Long Island, early spring, grass just peeking

out of the brown mud. Truck ruts rather damaged the view of pine

trees and soft, cloudy sky. She had lived in the East and a familiar

sensation came over her whenever she visited from California: here

was a place with its edges worn off. And she preferred edges. Still,

she was close to blowing up all over Alcott, so she let five seconds of

stony silence go by in hopes that would help. Ever since she had

moved out to California, she found it harder to work with East Coast

types. Her home campus, the University of California at Irvine,

worked in subtly different ways. When she flew back to Brookhaven

{[Work, she had to retune her social responses. She turned back, arms

crossed tightly across her blue work shirt, and said clearly, slowly,

"Look, I've--we've--planned for years to use uranium on this run."

"Yeah, I know all that, but my point is, this suit--"

"Uranium is the point! The review committee said, 'Put all the

details in and we'll get it cleared.' In one shot, they said."

"Then you've got to expect delays."

"But we're ready to run! My team's all set up--"

"That was a mistake by Operations." He blinked owlishly. "Not

my department."

"You said this would all be done a month early!"

"That was before the Friends of the Earth filed their suit. Again,

not my department."

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Not my department, said Wernher von Braun, she thought skittishly.

I just shoot them up. Who cares where they come down?

"I have to start running. If I lose my time--"

"You should have anticipated delays in agreeing to your scheduled

run time," he said, another standard phrase. "You're getting a

one-week window, the only experiment operating, while the big

detectors do maintenance away from the beam. You understood--"

"It's your fault, damn it." She bit her lip to stop from saying more,

but the tone in her voice had already done the damage.

Alcott's jaw hardened until she half-expected to hear his teeth

burst one by one, like enamel popcorn. "It's a poor workman who

blames his tools."

"Even your cliches don't make it!"

His lips compressed to a white line. "Look, this isn't about anything

else, just regulations, followthrough--"

"What 'anything else'?"

"Your being black, I mean."

Silence for two heart thuds. "I didn't think it was," she said more

stiffly than she had intended.

"Good. You're just another facility guest, see? And until your tech

detail is complete--"

"I never expected otherwise," she murmured carefully, noting

that he said "guest" rather than "user," which was the common term.

"I mean, you got bumped up some because of those minority

scientist points that got added to your group's proposal."

"Okay, okay?

Then she was out of there, before she could say anything more

and louse things up even further. Her lab boots clicked on the concrete, tick-tick, wasting time.

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· She worked off her anger by biking the whole distance from the

health, physics, and safety building to the collision hall. On top of the

administration building loomed a vast satellite dish, like half the discarded

bra of a giantess. It carried the data link to physicists around

the world, those who could collect measurements and analysis from

the accelerators, archived here and available over the Internet, without

ever leaving their snug offices. It saved a lot in airline tickets.

A cool breeze whipping by reminded her that spring was still

laced with chilly air skating down from Canada. The gust unfurled

her bun and sent tendrils playing about her face. She felt she must

look even more peculiar than usual, a big black woman with the classic

African bulging bust and rear, a blob bobbing along on a spindly

bike. Definitely out of place on Long Island. She had never entertained

the slightest hope of resembling the willowy models of Vogue; the she regarded as aliens from

another world, whom all true human

females hated.

She zoomed on her beat-up bike alongside an enormous grassy

berm, nearly four kilometers around and buried in the sand and stone

of Long Island. Slanting morning beams highlighted the immense

curve of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a giant swollen wrinkle.

She had used the acronym RHIC, pronouncing it Rick, for so long that

she thought of it as somehow male. Taking in deep breaths, she

coasted amid pine trees just showing the light green tips of new

growth.

Patches of the berm were bare, the residue of gasoline some vandal

had sprayed. When the damaged areas were found, the more

vocal environmental groups had publicly wondered if they were due

to radiation from the accelerator. Page one stuff indeed. Chemical

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analysis killed that theory a week later, back on page twenty-eight of

The New York Times. Still, the Lab had a continuing problem with hot-eyed

"enviros" who wanted the Lab closed forever, even though it

did a great deal of medically directed research using high-energy

sources.

Gray concrete framed the delivery bay of her experimental station,

one of the six where particles collided along the circumference. Teams

of resident scientists and outside users combined here to study the

myriad effects of particle collisions. Threading among huge apparatus,

she went past the Northrup Grumman magnets, long sleek cylinders.

No humming, only the chill of cryogenic cool. RHIC needed

nearly two thousand of these superconducting particle guides, and it

had turned out that an aerospace company knew best how to make

so many. With half a billion bucks of building budget, RHIC had

entertained many industrial suitors.

She weaved among the necessary clutter of ongoing experiments.

Most people envisioned labs as tidy and clean, with white-coated scientists

working alone, making careful, meticulous movements. Experiments

in nuclear and particle physics were big, often noisy, and

where neatness didn't matter, fairly sloppy. Big steel racks packed

with instrumentation crowded together, some out of alignment. The

odor of oil and shaved steel hung everywhere. Makeshift wooden

housings covered thick bunches of wrist-thick electrical cabling. Some

cable bunches were so fat that little ladders had been passed over

them for foot traffic. Necessary chaos.

Through her pique she reminded herself that she was damned

lucky to even be here. A lot of talented physicists were selling stock

options over the phone or pursuing exciting careers in sales management.

She had gotten in on the ground floor, working as a graduate

student in the UC-Berkeley team that helped build one of the detectors.

When the accelerator fired up for the first time in 1999, she had

staked claim on her own patch of conceptual turf, and now that was

paying off.

Of course, in 1999 they had just turned the Collider on for a few

hours at low intensity to meet the schedule, then shut down. That let

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file:///F|/rah/Gregory%20Benford/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20Cosm.txtThisisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,placesandincidentseitheraretheproductoftheauthor'simaginationorareusedfictitiously.Anyresemblancetoactualevents,locales,organizations,orpersonslivingordead,isentirelycoincidentalandbeyondtheintent...

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Gregery Benford - Cosm

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