Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (34 page)

           
When I could move I did so, stepping
away from that thing that shivered and keened on the lawn. I looked into the
dining room, where my five remained as before, and they had noticed nothing of
the events outside. Good.

           
I directed my attention back to the
former Rush. He would never be Rush again. He would never trouble
me
again. “I’m finished with you,” I
told him. “You may go.”

           
At once, the body ceased to tremble,
and grew slack. After a brief interval, a cockroach crept cautiously from its
dead nostril.

           
I broke one of the creature’s legs,
just as a reminder, but otherwise left it alone, and it hobbled away through
the grass.

           
So there was no need for Brad Wilson
here after all, no need to look in on my people. Rush was dealt with. I
permitted Brad to discorporate, then carried the body of Brother Rush back with
me to
New
York
,
leaving it in a neighborhood where it wouldn’t excite particular comment, and
made it back to Andy Harbinger just before the end of the movie.

           
“That was really good,” Susan said,
as we shuffled out of the theater with the rest of the audience.

           
“Yes, it was.”

           
Oh, no, no, no, no more, no more...

           
No more, no more, no more...

           
Hate hate hate hate hate hate—

           
No more!

           
No, no, not even
thoughts
, can’t— Brain doesn’t work,
can’t
think,
can’t stop running,
can’t stop—

           
No more, no more...

           
Have
to do it.
Have
to do it! But—

           
No more, no more...

           
But—

           
I must.

           
By the end of the newscast at
eleven-thirty, it seemed pretty clear that Rush wouldn’t be coming back, but no
one wanted to go to bed just yet, in case something happened after all. Had
Rush seen the police, and were they after him, and had he fled? Something like
that, probably, which meant he still might come back when the coast was clear.
In any event, everybody felt wide awake.

           
And besides, there was a program
about to come on that interested at least two of the people in the house. Both
Grigor and Maria Elena wanted to watch
Nightline
,
on which Ted Koppel’s guests would be a Dr. Marlon Philpott, the physicist who
was conducting the experiments at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant that had
caused all the demonstrations and more recendy the strike by better than
two-thirds of the plant’s workers, and in opposition to him another physicist,
Dr. Robert Delantero.

           
“Our program might be considered
somewhat strange tonight,” Ted Koppel told his audience, with his small smile,
“because the matter is strange. Our subject is a peculiar kind of thing known
to physicists as strange matter. Some scientists, like Unitronic Laboratories’
Dr. Marlon Philpott, believe that strange matter, once harnessed in the
laboratory, can become the cleanest, safest, and cheapest power source in the
history of the world. Other physicists of equal standing in the scientific
world, such as Harvard’s Dr. Robert Delantero, believe that strange matter, if
found, and if carelessly handled, could be more destructive than anything we’ve
ever imagined. Still other scientists believe that no such thing as strange
matter exists at all. Dr. Philpott, have you ever
seen
strange matter? And could you describe it?”

           
Dr. Philpott was a heavy man with a
spade goatee and dark-rimmed glasses. He looked more like a restaurant critic
than a scientist, as though he’d be more interested in the ingredients of a
French sauce than the contents of a Leyden jar. His manner was avuncular in a
heavily condescending way. He said, “If we ever got enough strange matter
together to
see
it, Ted, a chunk that
big, why, we’d be in business right now. But I can describe it, all right,
because we know it’s there. It has to be there, the math says so.”

           
“And what does this math say strange
matter is?”

           
“A different way of combining the
building blocks of matter,” Dr. Philpott told him, forgetting to call him
“Ted.” “As we now know, the basic building block of matter is the quark.”

           
“Not the atom.”

           
“No, Ted, the atom is composed of
protons and neutrons. If you imagine protons and neutrons as litde bags, what
each bag contains is quarks, two up quarks and one down quark in each proton,
two down and one up in each neutron. These bags are surrounded by a cloud of
electrons, and the whole package goes to make up one atom.”

           
“And what would be the difference in
strange matter? Would there be such a thing as a strange atom?”

           
‘That's precisely what we’re looking
for, Ted. And the difference would be, no bags. A strange atom consists of a
cloud of electrons around a large collection of up quarks, down quarks, and
some new quarks, known as strange quarks.”

           
“I’m not surprised. Dr. Delantero,
you agree these strange quarks, strange atoms, strange matter, exist?”

           
“I’m
afraid
they exist,” Dr. Delantero snapped. He was a bony
no-nonsense nearly bald man wearing a bright red bow tie. “The essential
question,” he said, staring sternly into the camera, “is which kind of matter
is the most stable. There’s every reason to believe that
we
are the more strange matter, and that matter composed of atoms
containing strange quarks is more stable than the matter we know. If that’s
true, and if Dr. Philpott does manage to isolate strange matter, then God help
us all.”

           
“You’ll have to forgive me, Dr.
Delantero, but I’m afraid I didn’t follow that. Dr. Philpott seems to think
strange matter would make a fine energy source, safer and cheaper than
conventional nuclear power. You don’t think the stuff is safe at all, but I
just can’t seem to understand why.”

           
Dr. Philpott horned in to say,
“You’re right not to understand, Ted, because it’s nonsense. He’s taking a
worst-case- possible scenario and acting as though it’s the
only
possible case.” “Yes, Doctor,”
Koppel said, “but let’s just let Dr. Delantero try to clear this up. Dr.
Delantero, assuming that you and Dr. Philpott are both right, and that strange
matter does exist, or can be made to exist, why does he think it’s safe and you
think it’s unsafe?”

           
Dr. Delantero looked more and more
like a hanging judge. He said, “I can only presume Dr. Philpott turns a blind
eye to the dangers here because he and Unitronic Laboratories see profit in it.
That’s why he’s—”

           
“Profit for all mankind.”

           
“Yes, Dr. Philpott, but let’s give
Dr. Delantero a chance.” ‘They threw his lab out of
Grayling
University
,” Dr. Delantero suddenly shouted, “because
he kept blowing things up! So some
idiot
decided he’d be better off at a nuclear plant!” ‘That’s the most outrageous,
most outrageous—” Dr. Philpott now looked like a restaurant critic who’d been
served a bad shrimp; he was so offended he could barely speak.

           
Which gave his host an opportunity
to say, ‘That is a question I’d been meaning to get to, thank you, Doctor. Dr.
Philpott, would you like to reply to this rumor about explosions?” “I certainly
would.” Dr. Philpott smoothed his shirt front with a shaking hand, stopped
hyperventilating, and said, “Clearly, no one has been blowing up strange matter
because we haven’t
found
it yet. Nor,
since my move to Green Meadow, not because I was
thrown out
of Grayling, I’m still tenured at Grayling, Dr.
Delantero, thank you very much, but because the facilities at Green Meadow are
better suited to my researchers, there has not been
one
incident, nor
shall
there be. Some very minor explosive incidents, causing no damage whatsoever,
did take place in the early stages, when we were experimenting with various
receptacles, pieces of equipment, gaseous elements for storage, but not one
since, and I defy Dr. Delantero to dispute that.”

           
Dr. Delantero too had grown somewhat
calmer by now. “All I’m saying,” he replied, “is that we’re babies with a
loaded gun in this situation, and we shouldn’t be taking the risks Dr. Philpott
is taking up there at Green Meadow. The people out on strike are the sensible
ones.”

           
Koppel said, “As I understand it,
and I freely admit I don’t understand the entire matter all that well, but as I
understand it, there are two distinct theories as to the effect of strange
matter when it comes into contact with regular matter, and that’s what the
dispute is all about. Dr. Philpott, if I had a drop of strange matter here, and
I spilled it onto the floor, what would happen?”

           
“Nothing. It would lie there, and
slowly evaporate away into harmless alpha particles. But if we put it into a
reactor, and fed it— The
point
with
strange matter is, it’s so much more dense than regular matter, it’s the
closest thing we can create on this planet to a black hole. A chunk the size of
a BB would weigh more than five million tons. The energy in that dense mass—”
“Yes, thank you, Dr. Philpott, but we’re running low on time here, and I’d like
to ask the same question of Dr. Delantero. You subscribe to a different theory,
and at this point there’s no way to prove which theory is correct, but in the
scientific world both theories are equally plausible, is that so?”

           
“It is.”

           
“And each theory has its
scientifically respectable supporters?” “That is correct.”

           
“So Dr. Philpott has just as much
chance to be right as you have.”

           
“He does. But so do I, and that’s
why we shouldn’t take the risk.”

           
“And what do
you
see happening, if I spill that drop of strange matter on the
carpet?”

           
Dr. Delantero squared his bony
shoulders. “As Dr. Philpott said, strange matter is much more dense than normal
matter. It is also likely to be more stable. That drop of yours would eat its
way through the floor, through the ground—”

           
“Oh, really, there isn’t the
slightest—”

           
“Dr. Philpott, you’ll have your
chance. Dr. Delantero?”

           
“Combining with the matter around
it,” Dr. Delantero said, “this extremely heavy, extremely dense drop of matter
would burn its way to the molten center of the Earth, where it would get hot,
and
really
go to work.”

           
“An explosion, you mean?”

           
“No, I do not. I mean that the one
drop would, in a very short period of time, convert this entire planet, and
everything on it, every tree, every person, the very atmosphere around us, into
strange matter.”

           
“And what effect would that have?”

           
“The Earth would become,” Dr.
Delantero said, “a featureless, smooth, glittering ball of incredible density,
the same weight as it is now, but measuring less than a mile in diameter.”

           
With his small smile, Koppel said,
“And you and I would be part of that featureless ball.”

           
“We would.”

           
To the camera, Koppel said, “As you
can see, the difference of opinion is quite marked here, and the scientific
stakes extremely high. On the one side, cheap safe fuel; on the other, the end
of everything. Is Dr. Philpott actually close to resolving these opposed
theories, and what safeguards is he employing to avoid the finish Dr. Delantero
so vividly described. What would Dr. Delantero like science to do about the
question of strange matter, if anything? We’ll get into all that, when we
return.”

           
During the commercials, Frank
looked over at Grigor and grinned: “Is that the joke you wanna pull? Drop the
drop?”

           
“It has already been dropped, on
me,” Grigor said. He didn’t sound amused.