talking to himself. He unscrewed a metal plate on the side of the magnet’s case, clipped a device with two wires— one red, one black—to terminals in the magnet.
He consulted the computer, his face darkening. “Well, damn you, bitch.” The cryogenic pump that was part of the insulating system was failing. “I’m glad I caught you early.”
Silently he repacked the tools, shoved the laptop back into its neoprene carrying case, and got behind the wheel of the cart. He unhooked a radio from the dashboard, pressed a button.
“Dolby calling the Bridge.”
“Wardlaw here,” came a tinny voice from the speaker.
“Lemme talk to Gregory.”
After a moment Hazelius came on.
“You can start Isabella.”
“The high-temperature alarm is still red on the board.”
A silence. “You know I’d never risk my machine, Gregory.”
“Fine. I’ll start her up.”
“We’re going to have to install another cryogenic pump, but we’ve got plenty of time. It’ll last at least another two runs.”
Dolby signed off, put his hands behind his head, and kicked back, propping his feet up on the dashboard. In what at first felt like utter silence, Dolby began to make out faint sounds—the whisper of the forced-air system, the humming of the cryogenic pumps, the hiss of liquid nitrogen moving through the outer jackets, the faint creakings of the golf cart engine as it continued to cool, the cricks and ticks of the mountain itself.
Dolby closed his eyes and waited, and then he heard a new sound. It was like a low, low singing, a humming, rich and dark.
Isabella had been turned on.
He felt that ineffable shiver of wonder, of awe that he had designed a machine that could peer into the moment of creation—a machine that actually
A God machine.
Isabella.
26
FORD DRAINED THE BITTER DREGS FROM his coffee mug and checked his watch: close to midnight. The run had been one long bore, endless adjustments and tinkerings stretched out over hours and hours of time. As he watched everyone work, he wondered: Was one of them the saboteur?
Hazelius strolled over. “We’re bringing the two beams in contact. Keep your eye on the Visualizer—that screen in front.”
The physicist murmured a command and, after a moment, a bright point of light appeared in the center of the screen, followed by a flickering of colors that radiated outward.
Ford nodded at the screen. “What do all those colors represent?”
“The computer translates the particle collisions at CZero into pictures. Each color represents a type of particle, the bands represent energy levels, and the radiating shapes are the particles’ trajectories as they exit CZero. It’s a way for us to see at a glance what’s going on, without having to crunch a bunch of numbers.”
“Clever.”
“It was Volkonsky’s idea.” Hazelius shook his head sadly.
Ken Dolby’s voice tolled out, “Ninety percent power.”
Hazelius held up his empty coffee mug. “Get you another?”
Ford winced. “Why don’t you get a decent espresso machine in here?”
Hazelius went off with a low chuckle. Everyone else in the room was quiet, focused on various tasks, except for Innes, who paced the room with nothing to do, and Edelstein, who sat in a corner reading
It had been a long twelve hours—long stretches of crushing boredom, punctuated by brief bursts of manic activity, and then more boredom.
“Beam steady, collimated, luminosity fourteen point nine TeV,” said Rae Chen, hunched over a keyboard, her glossy black hair spilling in an unruly curtain over the keys.
Ford strolled along the raised part of the Bridge. As he passed Wardlaw, who was at his own monitoring station, he caught a faintly hostile glance, and smiled coldly back at it. The man was waiting and watching.
He heard Hazelius’s quiet voice. “Bring it to ninety-five, Rae.”
The faint clicking of a keyboard sounded in the hushed room.
“Beam holding steady,” said Chen.
“Harlan? How’s the power?”
St. Vincent’s leprechaun-like face popped up. “Coming in like a tidal bore: smooth and strong.”
“Michael?”
“So far so good. No anomalies.”
The murmured catechism went on, Hazelius asking for a report from everyone in turn, then repeating the process. It had been going on like this for hours, but now Ford could feel the anticipation finally beginning to build.
“Ninety-five percent power,” said Dolby.
“Beam steady. Collimated.”
“Luminosity seventeen TeV.”
“Okay, folks, we’re verging into unknown territory,” said Chen, her hands on a set of controllers.
“Here there be monsters,” intoned Hazelius.
The screen was awash in color, like a flower forever blooming. Ford found it mesmerizing. He glanced over at Kate. She had been working quietly on a networked Power Mac to one side, running a program he recognized as Wolfram’s Mathematica. The screen displayed a complicated infolded object. He went over and looked over her shoulder.
“Am I interrupting?”
She sighed, turned. “Not really. I was going to shut this down and watch the final run-up anyway.”
“What is it?” He nodded at the screen.
“A Kaluza-Klein eleven-dimensional space. I’ve been running some calculations on mini black holes.”
“I hear that Isabella will investigate possibility of power generation using mini black holes.”
“Yes. That’s one of our projects—if we can ever get Isabella online.”
“How would that work?”
He saw a nervous glance back at Hazelius. Their eyes met for just a moment.
“Well, it turns out Isabella might be powerful enough to create miniature black holes. Stephen Hawking showed that mini black holes evaporate after a few trillionths of a second, releasing energy.”
“You mean, they blow up.”
“Right. The idea is that maybe we can harness the energy.”
“So there’s a possibility of Isabella creating a black hole that will blow up?”
Kate waved her hand. “Not really. The black holes Isabella might create—if any get created at all—would be so small that they would evaporate in a trillionth of a second, releasing a lot less energy than, say, the bursting of a soap bubble.”
“But the explosion might be bigger?”
“Highly unlikely. I suppose it’s possible that if the mini black hole lasted, say, a few seconds, it might knock around long enough to acquire more mass and . . . then blow up.”
“How big an explosion?”
“Hard to say. The size of a small nuke, perhaps.”
Corcoran glided over, sidling up to Ford. “But that’s not even the scariest scenario,” she said.
“Melissa.”
She arched her eyebrows at Kate, putting on an innocent look. “I thought we weren’t going to hide anything from Wyman.” She turned to Ford. “The really scary possibility is that Isabella will create a mini black hole that
