'But our knowledge is academic,' Chris said.
'Not anymore,' Doniger said.
The group filed out of the room, heading off with Gordon to see the machines. Doniger watched them go, then turned as Kramer entered the room. She had been watching everything on the closed-circuit television.
'What do you think, Diane?' Doniger said. 'Will they go?'
'Yeah. They'll go.'
'Can they pull it off?'
Kramer paused. 'I'd say it's fifty-fifty.'
They walked down a broad concrete ramp, large enough for a truck to drive down. At the bottom was a pair of heavy steel doors. Marek saw a half-dozen security cameras mounted in different locations around the ramp. The cameras turned, following them as they walked down to the doors. At the bottom of the ramp, Gordon looked up at the security cameras, and waited.
The doors opened.
Gordon led them through into a small room beyond. The steel doors clanged shut behind them. Gordon went forward to an inner set of doors, again waited.
Marek said, 'You can't open them yourself?'
'No.'
'Why? They don't trust you?'
'They don't trust anybody,' Gordon said. 'Believe me, nobody gets in here unless we intend for them to get in.'
The doors opened.
They walked into an industrial-looking metal cage. The air was cold, faintly musty. The doors closed behind them. With a whir, the cage began to descend.
Marek saw that they were standing in an elevator.
'We're going down a thousand feet,' Gordon said. 'Be patient.'
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. They walked down a long concrete tunnel, their footsteps echoing. Gordon said, 'This is the control and maintenance level. The actual machines are another five hundred feet below us.'
They came to a pair of heavy doors that were dark blue and transparent. At first, Marek thought they were made of extremely thick glass. But as the doors slid open on a motorized track, he saw slight movement beneath the surface. 'Water,' Gordon said. 'We use a lot of water shielding here. Quantum technology is very sensitive to random outside influences - cosmic rays, spurious electronic fields, all of that. That's why we're down here in the first place.'
Up ahead, they saw what appeared to be the doors to an ordinary laboratory hallway. Passing through another set of glass doors, they entered a hallway painted antiseptic white, with doors opening off on either side. The first door on the left said PREPACK. The second, FIELDPREP. And further down the hallway, they saw a sign marked simply
TRANSIT.
Gordon rubbed his hands together. He said, 'Let's get right to the packing.'
The room was small and reminded Marek of a hospital laboratory; it made him uneasy. In the center of the room stood a vertical tube, about seven feet high and five feet in diameter. It was hinged open. Inside were dull strips. Marek said, 'A suntanning machine?'
'Actually, it's an advanced resonance imager. Basically it's a high-powered MRI. But you'll find it's good practice for the machine itself. Perhaps you should go first, Dr. Marek.'
'Go in there?' Marek pointed to the tube. Seen up close, it looked more like a white coffin.
'Just remove your clothes and step inside. It's exactly like an MRI - you won't feel anything at all. The entire process takes about a minute. We'll be next door.'
They went through a side door with a small window, into another room. Marek couldn't see what was in there. The door clanged shut.
He saw a chair in the corner. He went over and took his clothes off, then walked into the scanner. There was the click of an intercom and he heard Gordon say, 'Dr. Marek, if you will look at your feet.'
Marek looked down at his feet.
'You see the circle on the floor? Please make sure your feet are entirely within that circle.' Marek shifted his position. 'Thank you, that's fine. The door will close now.'
With a mechanical hum, the hinged door swung shut. Marek heard a hiss as it sealed. He said, 'Airtight?'
'Yes, it has to be. You may feel some cold air coming in now. We'll give you added oxygen while we calibrate. You're not claustrophobic, are you?'
'I wasn't, until now.' Marek was looking around at the interior. The dull strips, he now saw, were plastic- covered openings. Behind the plastic he saw lights, small whirring machines. The air became noticeably cooler.
'We're calibrating now,' Gordon said. 'Try not to move.'
Suddenly, the individual strips around him began to rotate, the machines clicking. The strips spun faster and faster, then suddenly jerked to a stop.
'That's good. Feel all right?'
'It's like being inside a pepper mill,' Marek said.
Gordon laughed. 'Calibration is completed. The rest is dependent on exact timing, so the sequence is automatic. Just follow the instructions as you hear them. Okay?'
'Okay.'
A click. Marek was alone.
A recorded voice said, 'The scan sequence has begun. We are turning on lasers. Look straight ahead. And do not look up.'
Instantly, the interior of the tube was a bright, glowing blue. The air itself seemed to be glowing.
'Lasers are polarizing the xenon gas, which is now being pumped into the compartment. Five seconds.'
Marek thought, Xenon gas?
The bright blue color all around him increased in intensity. He looked down at his hand and could hardly see it for the shimmering air.
'We have reached xenon concentration. Now we will ask you to take a deep breath.'
Marek thought, Take a deep breath? Of xenon?
'Hold your position without moving for thirty seconds. Ready? Stand still - eyes open - deep breath - hold it… Now!'
The strips suddenly began to spin wildly, then one by one, each strip started to jerk back and forth, almost as if it were looking, and sometimes had to go back for a second look. Each strip seemed to be moving individually. Marek had the uncanny sense of being examined by hundreds of eyes.
The recorded voice said, 'Very still, please. Twenty seconds remaining.'
All around him, the strips hummed and whirred. And then suddenly, they all stopped. Several seconds of silence. The machinery clicked. Now the strips began to move forward and back, as well as laterally.
'Very still, please. Ten seconds.'
The strips began to spin in circles now, slowly synchronizing, until finally they were all rotating together as a unit. Then they stopped.
'The scan is completed. Thank you for your cooperation.'
The blue light clicked off, and the hinged door hissed open. Marek stepped out.
In the adjacent room, Gordon sat in front of a computer console. The others had pulled up chairs around him.
'Most people,' Gordon said, 'don't realize that the ordinary hospital MRI works by changing the quantum state of atoms in your body - generally, the angular momentum of nuclear particles. Experience with MRIs tells us that
