One Step From Earth

Alone for the first time he felt a great relief. His training was finished, all those boring sessions with the gray little men. The operations on his face, the dieting to get down to exactly fifty-four and a half kilos. All that finished and to be forgotten. He brushed the dusty footprints from the seat, then washed his hands in the tiny sink. Sat down in the same spot where Ward had been sitting not five minutes earlier. There was a distant whistle and a clanking as the train started forward. Snow was starting to fall again. He had a brief glimpse of a dark figure putting a large suitcase into a car, then the buildings cut off the sight.

He jumped when there was a knock on the door.

"Porter, sir, come to do up your bed."

Now the real work would begin.

"I assume that you know the very important reason why you have been brought here?" Bhatta-charya asked. His twisted body rested at an odd angle in the wheelchair, his hands clawlike with ancient scars. Adam put aside any natural feelings of compassion and spoke the way Ward himself would have spoken.

"You assume, incorrectly, Professor Bhatta-charya. I was bullied by Federal agents until I agreed to come to this place, my students will take their examinations soon, my own research. ." He broke off as the fire-scarred hand rose in gentle admonition.

"I am very sorry for any inconvenience. But I assure you that the research you will so ably assist us with here will far surpass your wildest dream." His English was slightly accented, very old-fashioned. "You have met Dr. Levy already I believe. If you will kindly excuse me he will explain everything about the Epsilon experiments. I bid you welcome to our most interesting project."

Levy busied himself lighting an ancient and sulphurous pipe as the wheelchair whined down the corridor and out of sight. He was bald, skinny, relaxed, his face dominated by a nose of heroic proportions. He was one of the top mathematicians in the country — perhaps the world.

"You call me Hymie, I'll call you Adam, more friendly like. Okay?" Adam sniffed mild disapproval and was ignored. "First off we got some control problems and you may be just the guy we need to help. I read your paper on cmos gate arrays, good stuff. And fast, that's what we need. How many gates do you get into your six inch wafer?"

"About twenty thousand now. We use three levels of interconnects, two metal and one poly-silicon, with 600ps minimum gate delays."

"Marvelous." He nodded happily and puffed out a cloud of noxious smoke. "We can use all that operational speed — and more. Let me tell you why. The Epsilon project is one that went wrong— or rather right — by accident. What it started out to be is no longer relevant. They were hitting samples with high-energy proton streams, different samples, more and more power. They got from alpha to beta and on up to delta with no results. Epsilon gave them more than they bargained for. With this experiment they punched a hole into something or somewhere and no one, not even the great Professor Bhattacharya, has the foggiest of what has been done."

"Are you being facetious, Dr. Levy?"

"Hymie to my friends, Adam. Be a friend. We are like one big happy family here. And to answer your question — no I'm not. I'm a very serious guy. Come along and I'll show you what I'm talking about."

There must have been six inches of glass between the control room and the experimental laboratory, yet Adam could feel his hair stir as the electrical charge built up, then discharged with a most impressive display of sparking activity.

"You could light up Detroit for a week with all that juice," Hymie said. "I'm glad the government's paying the electrical bill. And what, you might ask, do we get for all that effort? We get that." He pointed to the monitor screen where a spot of light blinked for a second then vanished, the sort of spark you see when your television set is turned off. "Not too impressive. But let me amplify the picture and slow it down."

This time the screen showed a jagged metal hole with what resembled a pool of mercury at the bottom.

"Plenty of magnification. The biggest one of these we've done so far has been less than two millimeters wide and lasted all of five hundred milliseconds. That's when we made the temperature experiment. It worked too — though not in the way that we had expected." He searched through the video cassettes scattered on the table, found the right one and inserted it into the machine. "Very clear picture, very slowed down."

There were the rough metal walls again, the shining pool at the bottom. Suddenly a thick rod came into view, sliding down toward the surface. It came close, moving toward its mirrored image until they touched, kept moving downwards for an appreciable length of time. Then it stopped and withdrew — to show a truncated end. Most of the rod was missing.

"Melted — or burnt off," Adam said.