Earth Cult (3 page)

‘Right.' The young man nodded emphatically. ‘The Tell-uride Mine.'

‘Is that what it was called before the Project took it over?'

‘The oldest mine in this part of the Rockies, so they say. Goes right back to the first rush in the 1850s when Colorado was opened up for the first time. Men been diggin' that mine for more than a hundred years, then the scientists move in and everythin' goes haywire—'

As if realizing that he was talking too much the young man turned away and went behind the bar; it almost seemed as if he needed to place a physical barrier between them.

Frank now saw, or thought he did, the connection which linked the religious following to the old mine working: the Telluric sect apparently regarded it as possessing special religious significance because of its name – which in fact, as he now recalled, was the description of an oxide of tellurium, a silvery-white non-metallic element found in association with
gold, silver and bismuth. In some weird and wonderful fashion the Tellurians had confused the Latin derivative
telluric
– meaning ‘of the earth' – with the mineralogists' name for a non-metallic oxide:
telluride
. It seemed plausible enough, though it never ceased to amaze him how the human race had this capacity for conjuring up out of thin air random figments of fantasy and building an entire structure of belief on the shiftiest of premises.

He smiled, wondering if the scientists over at Deep Hole knew of the rash of rumour, distrust and consternation they had caused by innocently choosing to install their neutrino detection equipment at the bottom of the deepest shaft in North America. That was the whole point of the operation, of course, shielding the perchloroethylene tanks from cosmic rays and other background ‘noise' with a mile-thick layer of solid rock so that only the elusive massless, uncharged neutrino travelling at the speed of light would get through. Every other particle known to science would be stopped dead in its tracks, with only the ‘ghost particle of the atom', as it had been called, completing the trip into the depths of the mine.

It would be unreasonable to expect the layman to understand the need for such a location; he would naturally assume that the scientists were actively seeking something deep below ground and not simply using the mountain as an efficient shielding device to prevent stray and unwanted nuclear interactions.

Frank said good night and took his drink up to his room. It was on the first floor overlooking the small main square. The dim street lights made pools of pale illumination, leaving murky areas of darkness which were filled with the murmur of low voices. Frank stared out but could see nothing, and after a few moments stripped down to his underclothes and lay on the bed, his drink near at hand, a pleasant drowsiness pressing down on his eyelids.

Now that he was alone he thought longingly of the girl he had met out on the Coast. She had been very good. It had
been one of those instantaneous attractions – for both of them – and five hours after meeting her at a publisher's cocktail party they had wound up in her bed making very satisfactory love. Susan Cleeve, twenty-nine, small and dark with a sexy generous mouth she had known how to use. Divorced, living alone, an attractive independent woman with a lively mind and a desirable body …

He had fallen into a light doze, drifting along on the gentle waves of pleasant retrospection, and then he slowly became aware of the sound of low monotonous chanting from the square below. The words were indistinct, lost in the constant drone of voices, but as his senses sharpened he picked out the odd phrase here and there which seemed to have the ring of Biblical quotation. There was something about ‘… and the flood was forty days upon the earth', and another chant, repeated over and over again, which went, ‘… and the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth'.

The Tellurians, it appeared, were prophesying doom and destruction in the manner of the Flood as depicted in the Bible. Yet another sect who believed that the end was nigh.

Turning the light off and going quickly to the window, Frank looked down into the dark square. He could vaguely make out a group of people, the dim lamplight catching the outline of a face, the shape of a hand, and now that his eyes were accustomed to the gloom he could plainly see the white stetson, a ghostly hat on the head of its invisible wearer.

The preacher, Mr Cabel – if he was there, which Frank assumed he was – was lost in the darkness. The chanting went on, rising and falling to the mournful rhythm of a funereal dirge. It seemed odd, and rather eerie, to be witnessing such an event in what was after all the most technologically advanced country on the face of the earth – and in an age of scientific reason and enlightenment when the antiquated voodoo of religious ceremony had, supposedly, been swept away along with primitive superstition and the belief in spirits.

The chanting lulled Frank to sleep that night, but his dreams were filled with cataclysmic visions of torrents of rushing floodwater and mountains split asunder by thunderbolts from the heavens.

The drive out to the Deep Hole Project took forty minutes. He hadn't asked directions, surmising that somewhere along the road east of Gypsum there would be a bridge crossing the Eagle River, and from that point he would watch out for signposts.

Five miles out of town he came to the bridge, a single-span timber construction with room enough for only one vehicle at a time. There was no sign pointing the way to the Project, which struck him as odd. The main highway carried on along the northern bank of the river to the next town of Avon, and further on, Mintburn, Red Cliff, Breckenridge and Climax. Somewhere in that vicinity – about ten miles away, he reckoned – was the Great Eagle Dam, built in the sixties to supply the High Plains territory to the east of the Continental Divide. This was the farmland of the State, good rich soil robbed of the rainfall it required by the granite backbone of the Rockies which lifted the rain-bearing cloud from the west and claimed most of the water for its own mountain streams. So the Dam had been built to feed Denver and the vast flat acreage where crops were grown and the bulk of the cattle reared.

Beyond the bridge the road turned from smooth grey asphalt into red shale. It started to climb, gradually at first, past small rocky outcrops, then steepened and began to curl in a series of sharp hairpin loops. Below and to his left
Frank could see the winding thread of the river, and further away a speckle of buildings which was Gypsum.

The Mount of the Holy Cross was immediately above him, so close that he couldn't get a good look at it. The weather at the moment was fine and clear, the temperature quite mild for the time of year, but he could easily imagine what it would be like when the snows came and blanketed the range, virtually sealing off the Project from the outside world. He wondered what they did in winter for supplies; if there was a suitable piece of flat ground it was possible that helicopters could maintain the supply-line, or maybe they stocked up for months ahead and sat it out – but it would be a bleak kind of existence, marooned up here on the side of the mountain.

Still no marker. This annoyed him a little and for a moment he thought he'd taken the wrong road; yet how could he lose his way when there was only a single track leading upwards in ever-decreasing spirals? Most scientific establishments (except the top secret ones) were adequately signposted and there was no reason he could think of why Deep Hole shouldn't be the same.

The road levelled out and up ahead he could see three logs lashed together to form an entrance. Nailed to the one spanning the road there was a sign which read: Telluride Mine. This had to be the place. And then he did see a small metal plaque, no bigger than a letter-box, which as he drove slowly up to it transpired to have the words
US Institute of Astrophysics
stamped across its metal face, and below in smaller letters,
Solar Neutrino Research Station
.

Nothing like being ostentatious, Frank thought.

The prefabricated huts, half a dozen or so grouped together, were set some distance away across a compound of packed red earth from the mine-head, which itself was enclosed by a new brick building, the winding gear above contained in a latticework of steel girders painted bright orange. The authorities had obviously spent more on the equipment than on the living quarters, which Frank personally thought was a poor balance and bad psychology. The best equipment
in the world wouldn't achieve results if the personnel who had to operate it were living in what they felt were below-standard conditions.

There were several people about but none of them paid any attention to him as he stepped out of the car and slung his Pentax camera and Plustron cassette recorder across his shoulder. He'd chosen to wear a short denim jacket and jeans, anticipating that part of the day would be spent scrambling in and out of a wire cage and travelling for periods underground. He hoped they wouldn't object to his taking photographs, which even if the editor decided not to use them were always useful as reference. Some scientists could be touchy about giving too much away, despite the fact that their particular line of work might be known and well-documented in umpteen scientific papers.

But Professor Friedmann raised no objection. He'd been given advance warning of the visit and seemed amenable to Frank's request to take shots of the underground installation. He was a tall spare man – in his mid-fifties, Frank guessed – with short grey hair that was razored in a line above his ears. He wore blue-tinted spectacles with metal frames which seemed to lend him a rather bemused attitude as if life's little surprises always took him aback slightly. He wasn't vague or absent-minded, yet there was almost a kind of innocence about him that reminded Frank of a brainy though naive schoolboy.

His greeting was cordial, if a little guarded, but then Frank Kersh was accustomed to the caution of scientists and academics when dealing with the press. They had it firmly fixed in their minds that he was ‘a reporter', and as such had to be treated with scepticism, if not open distrust.

‘If you're looking for a “scoop” I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place,' said Professor Friedmann with forced joviality. ‘Isn't that what you fellows are always after, a new and exciting scientific “breakthrough”?'

He spoke the jargon self-consciously, in the arch manner of an adult unused to conversing with children but making a gallant effort to do so.

‘I'm with
Science Now
, not
Hustler
,' Frank said with a smile. ‘Our editorial policy is to treat scientific and technical subjects with the degree of seriousness they deserve. But if you've made a breakthrough in neutrino astronomy I'd be happy to hear about it.'

Professor Friedmann shook his head and indicated a foot-high pile of computer printout folded concertina-fashion on his desk. ‘There's our latest batch of data, three weeks' D and D processed and analysed by computer. No surprises there I'm sorry to say.'

‘D and D?' Frank said, flipping open his notebook.

‘Ah, yes. You're obviously not well-up in neutrino terminology.' He cleared his throat and nodded, smiling gently. ‘Detection and Differentiation. It's a two-stage process whereby we have to observe the various particle interactions in the tanks and then interpret and classify each one. There are random events happening all the while, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, so it's essential to differentiate those from the neutrino interactions.'

‘The crucial factor being the rate and frequency at which chlorine-37 is transformed into argon-37.'

Professor Friedmann's smile faded at the edges. ‘Then you do know something about neutrino detection?' He blinked behind his blue-tinted glasses and pinched his nostrils together with thumb and forefinger.

‘Something,' Frank agreed. ‘Not a great deal.'

He had always found it best to underplay his hand in matters of scientific knowledge: in this way scientists tended to be more forthcoming and sometimes revealed information they otherwise might not have done.

‘Well, as you may know, Mr Kersh, our principal concern at Deep Hole is to detect and measure the number of neutrinos being emitted by the Sun's core. These are formed during the fusion of hydrogen to helium. It's been accurately estimated that during this process the Sun loses 4,600,000 tons of mass each second, which represents about 0-71 of the total mass of hydrogen being fused to helium, and from that we know that the total number
of hydrogen nuclei being fused every second in the Sun is 3-6 × 10
³⁸
– or if you want it in round figures, 360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.'

His eyes narrowed behind the blue lenses, a mannerism which reminded Frank of a schoolmaster making sure his pupil had grasped what he was being taught.

‘And from this we can estimate the number of neutrinos being produced each second in the Sun's core at 1.8 × 10
³⁸
, or in other words, 180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Unlike photons, the particles of light and heat formed in the core, which take about a million years to reach the surface, the neutrino takes three seconds, and travelling at the speed of light reaches the Earth in eight minutes. Because it has no mass and no charge it passes through the Earth as if it were a cloud of gas, in about 1/125 of a second, and carries on into space. But very occasionally a neutrino will react with an atom of chlorine and this absorption forms argon atoms which, being radioactive, we can detect with our equipment.'

‘Is it known how many neutrinos reach the Earth from the Sun's core?'

Professor Friedmann nodded. ‘Oh yes, quite a simple calculation. Every second the Earth receives 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 neutrinos from the Sun. Every square centimetre of the Earth's cross-section receives about sixty billion neutrinos each second.' He smiled briefly. ‘It's quite interesting to note that every second of the day and night we are being bombarded by several billion neutrinos which pass clean through us as if we didn't exist.'