our Miss Ash was busy with the angels. We now have a technology that rudely—perhaps even cruelly—yanked her out of Heaven, presuming that exists, and you’re presuming she came from there. That means we’re messing around with the grand plan. No, Matty, I don’t think they’re going to be happy about this one at all. This is going to get worse.”
After a moment, Matilda crossed her arms and said with a faint note of mischief, knowing her employer’s views, “You don’t think she came from Heaven.”
“No, I don’t.”
“She was dead,” said Matilda gently.
“Yes, she was. And then she wasn’t. Which is another thing that troubles me.”
Her eyes widened, already guessing his fresh point.
“If she can be dead and then suddenly not dead, who says Nickelbaum will stay where he is?”
Weintraub sent him an email with an attachment—his preliminary report for the government on how the equipment was thought to work. In the body of the email itself, Gary had informed him in his usual rushed, sloppy typing style: “WE DON’T DARE TAKE THING APART BE A DISASTER.”
Okay, thought Tim. They’re afraid if they dismantle it, they won’t be able to get it to work again. They choose, instead, to learn all they can from experimental use. And they wonder why I’m concerned.
There was a schematic diagram that showed the two chambers, but a picture wasn’t worth a thousand words here. Instead, the report had several thousand words, almost all of it conjecture. But there was just enough, Tim realized as he flipped the pages, to suggest Gary Weintraub and his staff had made some brilliant guesses. The white light tinged with blue when Emmett Nickelbaum was executed was perhaps a unique form of Cerenkov radiation—the electromagnetic radiation that’s generated when charged particles pass through an insulator at the speed of light. It was why nuclear reactors had their blue glow. This much Tim could follow, and though he had barely passed physics in high school, it intuitively made sense to him. There was, however, no easy explanation for the bizarre light effects and patterns that flashed in the chamber when Nickelbaum was torn apart—nor for the ones preceding Mary Ash’s arrival.
But Weintraub and his fellow scientists would have had plenty to talk about even if Nickelbaum had not vanished, screaming, or if Mary Ash had not come back into their plane of existence. As they videotaped and measured the transposition equipment, they discovered it had the equivalent of about seven times the power—all of it contained within the two chambers—that was needed for the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
Within seconds, the booths had proved the Higgs boson was real.
Weintraub and his team had measured other particles that were once only hypothesized in university papers and research: sleptons, photinos, squarks, the so-called “sparticles” that winked quickly out of existence in a ten trillionth of a nanosecond after the Big Bang. The booths proved they could exist. They did exist.
The booths proved something else. They proved the existence of a particle that had been the wet dream of physicists for decades, the one first proposed by Gerald Feinberg in 1967, a crutch for science fiction movie plots ever since: tachyons.
These particles had flashed and disappeared in the booths. They were tantalizingly there for slices of infinite time, then gone. And the fact that they blinked in and out as part of the riddle of human existence itself made these proofs somehow irrelevant and small and yet desperately essential at the same time.
No, Weintraub and the other lab coats definitely did not want to take the equipment apart.
They don’t know, thought Tim.
They don’t know how it works. They don’t know all that it can do.
They simply don’t know.
It was unfathomable to him, too, that the research and development of such a machine could be done and then production carried out with complete secrecy—all benchmarks, findings, assigned personnel, initial test trials hermetically sealed. With not one word of publicity or a single media leak. Tim could hardly believe it. How had they pulled that off?
If the machinery had been a government project, leaks were inevitable. Impossible to prevent. If a private corporation had developed the equipment, yes, of course, staff could be required to sign gag orders as part of their contracts. But you would think at each stage of development the company’s PR department would want to herald its sensational discoveries from CNN to Scientific American to Nature magazine. If you didn’t want to make a noise for the sheer benefit of branding prestige, fine, then how about the more immediate concern of attracting capital for future development?
But nothing, Tim realized. No story about the booths had appeared until after the Nickelbaum execution.
The booths had seemingly come out of nowhere.
Gary’s report indicated that his team couldn’t even identify yet what parts were actually included in each of the chambers.
Inside both of them, mounted on the inside roof of the booths, could be seen astonishing equipment that looked “as if someone had miraculously miniaturized a Tevatron.” Tim read this line in Gary’s report and had to look up what the hell a Tevatron was—turned out it was a huge circular particle accelerator.
Only the guts of the machinery were incredibly more sophisticated. Weintraub’s team spotted something akin to a Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier—what an accelerator would need first (Tim figured he would have to take that one on faith). But there was no ladder-network of capacitors and diodes. It was more like an insect eye pattern of capacitors, and the whole mechanism had no leads or cords or hook-up to an external power source.
To measure voltage, after all, you need current. But the baffling mechanism suggested the thing didn’t run with regular electrical current at all but on something else.
Weintraub and his colleagues had to switch on the control panel to start the procedure, and the panel, at least, had to be plugged into an ordinary, humble wall socket.
But they couldn’t detect any radio beam or satellite signal linking the panel to the booths.
Yes, there were indicator lights and narrow screens to measure the pulse, blood pressure and EEG of booth occupants, but no one understood either how this data was relayed back.
And that was the sum of their knowledge without disassembling the equipment. They could turn the machinery on and off and start a sequence. That was it.
After turning a switch, they knew nothing about the exchange of a murderer for his or her slain victim.
Not encouraging, thought Tim. Well, he couldn’t help his friend Gary Weintraub find technical answers from the booths. But he could speak to the world’s first booth arrival.
The Ash family home stood in a distinctly rich, white-dominated part of greater Lancaster, southern Pennsylvania. The house at the end of the tree-lined block was distinctive enough that you didn’t need to check the rising address numbers. Mary Ash’s father was a retired architect, and the long structure with the sloping roof and overhangs resembled one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie Houses.”
The mother came to the door and showed no surprise over finding Timothy Cale on her porch step. Obviously someone in Washington or New York had thought the decent thing to do was to call ahead, whether Tim wanted the Ashes to be warned or not. He could hardly fault the polite gesture.
Mrs. Ash, an older version of Mary in a sleeveless dark sweater and green slacks, seemed to carry a resignation towards the infinite. The resurrection of her daughter was something she would have to cope with long after this stranger imposed on her. Tim