“This is a waste of time. What the hell are we doing on this two-bit tour?”
“Goddamnit, we had to start somewhere!” Isaacs replied just as hotly, in a fierce whisper. He was not sure what they were looking for, but he was sure they hadn’t seen it. He had been ticking off the various buildings mentally. As they climbed into the van once more and Floyd began to make noises about the end of the tour, Isaacs stopped him.
“We haven’t seen that farthest building, out near that large cleared area.”
“Oh,” Floyd seemed nervous, tentative. “These experiments I’ve shown you are all basically mission oriented, and each has its own project scientist. That building contains Dr. Krone’s own special experiments.”
He leaned closer to Isaacs and lowered his voice.
“Frankly, we regard that set up as part of the overhead. It has been frightfully expensive, but it has kept Dr. Krone occupied and happy when he was not working directly on one of the other projects.”
“I’ll need to see it.”
“Oh, but it was shut down when Dr. Krone became—ill.” Floyd could see visions of presidential commendation vanishing with the opening of the door to that boondoggle building.
“Just the same,” Isaacs insisted.
“Very well.” Floyd gestured to the driver, and they were deposited in the drive of the far building. Perhaps, he thought, this will finally distract them from the condition of Krone himself.
Floyd dawdled over his keys, but finally accepted the inevitable and opened the door. The small group stopped immediately inside the door and craned their necks upward. The building was essentially one immense room, ten or eleven stories tall and somewhat larger in length than width. What arrested their attention was the behemoth construction that dominated the room, towering almost to the ceiling. It had the complex unfinished look of a research project as opposed to some of the production prototype devices they had just seen. An array of massive tubes projected radially from a hidden core, giving the whole structure the look of a giant monstrous hedgehog.
If Isaacs had any doubts that this was it, the look on Runyan’s face banished them.
Runyan stood transfixed as his brain catalogued the components he vaguely recognized and wrestled to identify myriad paraphernalia that were foreign to him. Then he slowly moved toward the device, circled it and within a minute was scrambling up ladders and around catwalks in a furious desire to lay hands on the machine.
Ralph Floyd jittered from foot to foot, aware of the change in mood that had come over his visitors, but unable to comprehend it.
Isaacs turned to him.
“Do you know what the purpose of this thing is?”
“Only very vaguely,” replied Floyd. “I believe Dr. Krone was studying states of matter at very high density. I believe he had some goal of generating large amounts of cheap energy in a new way.”
He snickered behind one hand.
“To tell you the truth, the technicians who worked in here had a private name for it—Gravel Gertie.”
Isaacs raised an eyebrow.
“Well, when the thing was working, if that’s what you could call it, it consumed vast amounts of material. Lead bricks! My god, you don’t know how he had me scouring the whole country for lead bricks. He’d feed them in over there at a whopping rate—”
Floyd pointed to an extension of the machine at the far side.
“They would vaporize and disappear. And at the same time he’d feed it granite from that hopper up there— vaporize that too. At one point about a year ago he hired fifty dump trucks. Fifty of them! And he kept them working around the clock for a month dumping gravel into that hopper. That’s where the name came from. Just the overtime alone I had to pay! My head still spins.
“That’s where that clear area out back came from, by the way. Disappeared into that hopper.”
Isaacs looked at the little man and refrained from asking him where he thought all that rock went to. Instead he said, “My companions and I would like to look around here a little. Would you mind waiting outside?”
“Oh, no, of course not. I’ll, I’ll just be outside.” Floyd dreaded the thought of leaving his visitors alone, unable to make convenient excuses and explanations, but he turned to leave, pulling the door shut behind him.
Isaacs looked at his watch. 3:40, local time, twenty till six in Washington. The world was still in one piece. Apparently rationality reigned, if only for a little while, and global catastrophe was held in abeyance. He hadn’t really expected a first strike, yet some small fatalistic corner of his mind would not have been surprised to see a mushroom cloud rising in the distance as they walked between buildings. Now he could be confident their mission would not be a total disaster. If they could learn nothing from the machine that loomed before him, others would follow who could. With this the Russians could be stalled, if not convinced. There was time to look a bit here, he thought, try to see Krone, and still get back in time to lay the whole story out for the President. He stood and watched as Runyan scrambled around the device like a kid on a city park playscape.
A call from Pat Danielson came from the far side of the room.
After a minute of staring at the gargantuan, incomprehensible device, Danielson had looked around the room. Along its perimeter individual cubicles had been partitioned off. Although dwarfed by the looming device in the center, they were normal sized rooms, some even fairly large. She walked the perimeter peering into each through their large glass windows and discovered they were shops. The first was crammed with oscilloscopes, amplifiers, power supplies, and other electronic accouterments. Next was a machine shop with a multitude of drills, lathes, and saws, and a carpet of coiled, oily shards on the floor.
After wandering past several more rooms, one housing a late model large capacity scientific computer, Danielson found a small windowless room just opposite the door from which they had entered. She tried the door and stepped in, groping for and finding a light switch. There was a small but comfortable desk, shelves filled with books and computer output. What caught her eye, however, was a bound laboratory notebook resting alone on the desk. She reached for it and thumbed rapidly through. The book was three-quarters empty. She found the last entry, read briefly and then walked to the door.
“Mr. Isaacs,” she shouted, “Bob? I’ve found something!”
Isaacs rounded the device looking for her and hurried across the intervening space, stepping over cables strewn on the floor.
Danielson watched him approach with an air of excitement.
“Look here! I’ve found a lab book describing the experimerit.” She twisted to let him read over her shoulder where her finger marked a place. “The experiment has been a tremendous success,” Danielson read aloud, “much has been learned about the properties of matter at ultrahigh densities and the transition to the final state of that matter. The experiment is not over, but it is no longer in my hands.”
There was a gap and then other entries in a more hurried, scrawling manner.
“How could it have gone wrong!” Danielson read. “The sudden loss of containment is shocking, some instability, something unexpected in the containment process. The principle is now established. Must 1) study containment 2) study implications 3) retrieve them.”
The two exchanged a long glance.
“That’s the last entry?” Isaacs wanted to know. Danielson nodded.
“Are there any more of these?” Isaacs inquired, turning to examine the shelves.
“Not in here,” Danielson replied. “There is a computer. It may have files of interest, but this book seems to be where he records his personal insights and reactions.”
“Let’s keep looking,” Isaacs said.
They toured the rest of the perimeter, but found only shops. There were no more lab books. Isaacs went outside and spoke briefly with Floyd who was fidgeting in the driveway. He returned and explained to Danielson.
“Floyd says anything connected with this experiment should be here, unless Krone has other books at home. He worked at home a lot.”
He raised his voice.
“Alex? Time to move on. We’ve got to go see Krone.”
Runyan was near the top of the device. His voice carried faintly.
“A little longer. I’ve hardly explored a tenth of this thing.”
