The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails: Six Short Fantasies (6 page)

Subsequently, at intervals, I interviewed Drs. Boudreaux, Palmeiro, and Levko. The work continued to be successful: element 2.5 was isolated, and rather pragmatically named
two-and-a-halfnium.
 This element turned out to be a metal, liquid at room temperature, very dangerous to handle. The small quantity that was produced had to be kept in a magnetic containment vessel.

By this time, the uncooperative attitude of the team members was beginning to change. Dr. Levko actually sought me out for her interview. ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘I am beginning to worry about Drs. Boudreaux and Pringle.’

‘How so?’

‘I take it you didn’t see them at breakfast today. Were the cameras in the cafeteria turned off?’

I gave her a reassuring laugh. ‘You know we don’t monitor the team’s living quarters.’

‘Uh huh,’ said Dr. Levko drily. ‘Anyway, they had – I guess you could call it a food fight.’

‘Childish,’ I agreed, ‘but not harmful. Why does this worry you?’

‘It was the
way
they fought. Dr. Boudreaux bit his toast into the shape of an old-style handgun. He started pointing it at people and yelling, “Bang, bang, you’re disintegrated!” Then Dr. Pringle squirted himself with ketchup and pretended to be bleeding. Then Boudreaux shot Dr. Xi, and Pringle squirted 
him.
 He would have got ketchup on me, too, but I… well….’

‘What did you do?’

‘I beaned him,’ Dr. Levko admitted, ‘with a plastic coffee mug.’

‘I see.’

‘There was no coffee in it.’

‘Of course not. Tell me, Dr. Levko, what do you think this behaviour means?’

‘I think some of the team members are losing their grip. We’re all under a lot of strain here, but we don’t normally act out like that.’

‘Hmm, I take your point. Do you think it possible that your concern is excessive, Dr. Levko? You are, after all, a woman in what is still a male-dominated field—’

‘Is there something wrong with that?’

‘Now, now, you needn’t be defensive. There is an old saying that you don’t hear much anymore: “Boys will be boys.” Testosterone makes certain people susceptible to stress reactions of a type that you and I don’t usually have.’

‘Oh, don’t we? Then why did I throw the coffee mug?’

‘Reacting to stress is one thing. Reacting to physical assault is another.’

‘Even if you’re being assaulted with toast and ketchup?’

‘The human nervous system doesn’t care about that. Believe me, Dr. Levko, you have nothing to worry about. Drs. Boudreaux and Pringle are just horsing around.’

After the interview, I ordered two of our operatives to watch over Drs. Boudreaux and Pringle, in case it proved necessary to sedate them.

My last interview was with Dr. Khosruparvez. I had not expected him to seek me out, since by this time he was almost completely reclusive, and spent most of his time scrawling equations and mumbling to himself in Farsi. But when I came into my office on the morning of the 16th, he was already there, face thin and drawn, hands clasped together – a picture of high anxiety.

‘Good morning, Dr. Khosruparvez,’ I said. It is important in these cases not to appear surprised by a client’s behaviour, no matter how atypical or inappropriate.

‘Good morning, Doctor. This can’t go on.’

‘What can’t go on?’

He made a gesture that seemed to indicate the whole Institute. ‘All this. The work. The secrets.’

‘Do you want to be relieved of your duties?’

‘I want it to 
stop.
We have to tell everyone. We have to tell no one.’

‘Not easy to do both,’ I observed. ‘Would you care to elaborate?’

‘What we’re doing here. It’s too important to keep secret; the world should know what’s going on. But it’s too dangerous to let it into the wrong hands; so the world 
can’t
know. We have to publish our results, and we have to
not
publish. I’m afraid—’

‘What are you afraid of?’

His voice fell to a whisper. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said slowly, ‘of what we’re going to do next.’

‘How so?’

‘It’s the Anand Hypotheticals. I’ve found a new solution—’

‘Oh, yes? How interesting.’

‘You don’t understand. In theory, we could program the machines to produce
anything.
 We already have one particle with a fractional charge. We could produce particles whose charge is an irrational number.’

‘I don’t see the harm.’

‘Oh, don’t you? Dr. Boudreaux knows. He wants to synthesize Element Pi.’

‘It will be a feather in his cap if he does.’

‘It will be 
the end.
You know we have a bottle of two-and-a-halfnium?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then look.’ Dr. Khosruparvez bounded out of his chair and flung himself at the whiteboard on my office wall, on which he began to draw a hasty diagram. ‘See here, Doctor. Every element has a whole number of protons – an integer charge. When protons equal electrons, the atom is electrically neutral and everything is safe.’

‘I did take basic chemistry in high school.’

‘But listen! 
There is no such thing as half an electron.
We can manipulate energy to produce quarks with nonstandard charges, but the Anand equations don’t extend to leptons. We can’t 
make
 half an electron; we can’t even frame the idea of it, not in mathematical terms. That means that our new hemionic elements can 
never
be electrically neutral. They are always in an ionized state.’

Dr. Khosruparvez was drawing feverishly, stabbing at the board with his marker. ‘So long as you have an even number of hemionic atoms, they can bond with one another. Then the half charges add up to a whole charge, and an electron cancels it out. Everything is safe. But if you have an 
odd
number, there is always half a charge left over. Nothing can cancel it out, and the material is chemically unstable. Do you see? It’s the universal solvent. There is no conceivable container that can hold it without being dissolved.’

‘But aren’t you keeping this stuff in magnetic containment vessels?’

‘That’s just it. Half an electrical charge does 
disastrous
things to a magnetic field. I can’t explain it to you in detail; you couldn’t follow the mathematics. But the hemions can leak through a magnetic field.’

‘Only if there’s an odd number of them?’

‘True.’

‘Well, I don’t see the harm. One atom will leak out, and then there will be an even number left and you’re all right.’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’ He embellished his drawing with a series of wavy lines. ‘Atoms are always in a state of thermal motion. So are valency electrons, in effect. Lowdrogen and squealium are safe enough; the atoms bond together in nice neat pairs. But 
element 2.5 is a metal!
 The free electrons are in chaotic motion. And because it’s a liquid, so are the atoms themselves. There are always small regions containing an odd number of atoms – regions where the charge is 
not
an integer. Which means that the magnetic tunnelling effect goes on
constantly.’

‘That does sound serious. How quick is it?’

‘I haven’t studied it enough to say. The equations are highly dependent on the initial state of the system. One thing is certain: In time, a sample of two-and-a-halfnium will eat its way through any conceivable container. It will react with 
everything.
Given time, it will dissolve everything.’

‘How much time?’

Dr. Khosruparvez threw his hands up in a wild shrug. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe five quadrillion years from now. Certainly not more.’

‘That’s not very helpful,’ I said.

‘It’s the best I can do without further analysis. And that’s why this experiment has to be stopped. It’s too dangerous! We have to tell everybody. We have to tell nobody. We have to tell everybody 
and
nobody. And we have to requisition a rocket to fire this – this 
stuff
– into deep space, before it leaks out and destroys us all.’

‘You’re sure of all that, Dr. Khosruparvez?’

‘As sure as Schrödinger’s cat.’

Last Wednesday evening, the psychological stability of Team 5 took a decided turn for the worse. About 21:30 I was sitting in the surveillance room, going over my notes for the day, and watching the monitors for signs of deviant activity – the security technician having been sent home ill. All the members of the team had gathered in the staff cafeteria, where they were engaged in a drunken revel. Dr. Boudreaux was shooting his colleagues with imaginary zap guns, making
pew! pew!
noises. Dr. Pringle put on a sort of mime performance aided by sound-effects, in which he appeared to represent a whole crowd of people, whom Dr. Boudreaux massacred with glee. Other team members were acting in similarly wild and irresponsible ways. According to the time-stamp on the video, this activity broke up about 21:40, and the revellers sat down at a large table to rest for a moment.

Just after 21:42, Dr. Pringle threw a jar of mustard at the wall, and when it broke, led the others in a chant: ‘It’s out! It’s out! The two-and-a-halfnium’s out!’ They responded in various hysterical fashions which, it would seem, were meant to signify the breakdown of civilization in the aftermath of total contamination. Shortly after this, they formed a conga line and danced about the room, singing to the tune of an old drinking song:

‘For tonight we’ll merry be,

For tonight we’ll merry be,

For tonight we’ll merry be,

Tomorrow we’ll be ’sploded!’

Further hijinks ensued, followed by another interval of rest. At 22:18, Dr. Pringle threw a jar of mustard at the wall, and when it broke—

It is my fault entirely that I did not immediately recognize the significance of this action. The time-stamp on the monitor was still current and correct – but the video itself was repeating the events of half an hour before. As soon as I realized this, I proceeded to the cafeteria with all speed.

It was deserted, of course. I have not yet determined how the team members hacked into the security system, but it is obvious that they did so. Under cover of the video loop, they had left the cafeteria and moved to another room – masked, I supposed, by another hacked video track showing that the room was empty.

After a hurried search, I found the entire team in the office supply room, squatting in a circle around the light of Dr. Metharom’s emergency torch. ‘You can stop playing hide-and-seek, Doctors,’ I told them. ‘Follow me.’

We returned to the cafeteria. ‘It would be best,’ I told them, ‘if you told me voluntarily what you were doing in there.’

‘You don’t know?’ said Dr. Xi. ‘Good.’

‘Not a helpful attitude, Doctor.’

‘Neither is yours. If you want to know, we’ve decided to make a formal complaint. We want you off this site, and the surveillance stopped.’

‘Come, come. We don’t spy on our research teams.’

Dr. Xi answered with a mirthless laugh. ‘Of course not. And we didn’t hack the cameras that you don’t do it with. We’re not idiots, Doctor.’

‘You are showing dangerous signs of mental instability.’

‘Who would be stable in this nuthouse? We’re not allowed to leave the grounds – security. We’re not allowed visitors – security. No outside news links – security.’

‘Necessary measures.’

‘I agree. What’s
not
necessary is this constant game of cat and mouse. We are professionals: the best in our field.’

‘The best in
any
field,’ said Dr. Levko.

‘We don’t need a nanny watching our every move; still less a twisted nanny who denies that we are being watched. And you have the stones to call
us
crazy. I suppose it’s what your department asked for, eh? If anybody makes trouble, zip them off to a nice quiet hospital. Call it paranoid schizophrenia, or whatever clinical bull you’re using these days. Much easier than sacking us. Sedated men tell no tales.’

‘Really, Dr. Xi! A well-adjusted person—’

‘In this place, a well-adjusted person would go batty in a week.
We
can stand it because we were already crazy. But not crazy enough to work under your microscope. We want you out.’

‘Out of the question,’ I said. ‘Departmental policy—’

‘Requires that the work gets done,’ said Dr. Xi. ‘Call it a quantum problem. The presence of the observer changes the thing observed. You can let us work without being observed, or you can observe us not working. Take your choice.’

All the team members gave their assent to this ultimatum. I therefore judged it best to send a full report to the Institute, and until your response is received, temporize. ‘I can’t change policy,’ I told them. ‘The most I can do is discontinue our interviews. Will that do?’