Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

Craig could hardly bear to watch. Awkwardly, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the gift he had bought at a strip mall. He stepped forward, placing the flat, squarish box on the table beside the hospital bed, weighing down the sheafs of experimental papers.

“I brought you something, Dr. Dumenco,” he said. As the scientist turned his attention, Craig opened the ends of the deceptively heavy cardboard box. Moving gingerly, he slid out a small but beautifully polished chessboard made of alternating squares of onyx and jade; two smaller boxes in his jacket pockets held the tissue-wrapped chessmen.

“I remember our first conversation, Doctor. You’re right, you should have a chance to play one last game on a fine chess set. My gift to you.”

The Ukrainian’s eyes, hideously damaged and barely able to see, filled again with tears. He reached a swollen hand toward the polished chess king. His fingers looked like pieces of meat that had begun to rot.

Dumenco spoke, having trouble forming each word, as if the thoughts kept eluding him before he could manage to get them out. “I’m afraid… I would not be a worthy opponent for you, Agent Kreident. A good investigator like you, sharp-witted… more than a match for me.”

“On the contrary”-Craig smiled-“judging from our previous game, I think the stakes now are a bit more even.”

Working diligently to distract himself, Craig set up the pieces on the slick stone board, though he didn’t know if Dumenco had sufficient dexterity to move them.

Trish watched him curiously. Behind her delicate glasses, her rich brown eyes held a warm and grateful expression.

The door opened and Paige Mitchell entered, escorting a shaken-looking Nels Piter. The Belgian scientist’s suave dress and cultured appearance looked disheveled, as if too much had been weighing him down for a few days.

Recognizing them, Dumenco grew indignant. “Come to see me off, Nels?”

Paige stepped forward. “Dr. Piter wanted to see you. He has something I think you’d want to hear.”

Craig wondered if the Nobel Prize committee had announced their decision. But the administrator scientist had something else in mind. “Professor… we’ve gathered some strange data at the Tevatron. Of course you wouldn’t find them surprising.” He stopped, at a loss for words.

When Piter paused, Dumenco closed his eyes and whispered, “My results. The p-bar production rate… far too low. Should be higher. Has to be higher. Something is wrong with the data, not the experiment.”

He glanced at where his papers lay stacked under the chessboard. Craig didn’t think Dumenco had touched them in the previous day, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the scientist had memorized enough data to work out the difficulties with no other tool but his own degenerating mind.

“I’ve been tracking the data myself,” Piter said with an effort. “Until recently, they seemed to fit within the parameters I had predicted, proving that your gamma-laser enhancement technique was ineffective.” Piter swallowed. “Until this morning.”

Dumenco jerked his hand sideways in a spasm that knocked the papers and the chessboard off the table and onto the floor. Paige and Trish bent over quickly to pick up the mess, but Dumenco only had eyes for the other scientist.

Craig watched the confrontation between the two titans of science. Even on his deathbed, Dumenco doggedly defended his work. “Your predictions were incorrect,” he muttered. “ Wrong .” His swollen hand clenched into a fist, and the skin cracked. He didn’t even feel the pain.

Trish stood up, her hands full of scattered papers. “Calm down, Georg. Don’t overexert yourself.”

Piter shook his head. “You had no data to back up your predictions, and yet you still insisted. I thought you were irrational, self-centered, and blind to the self-evident data-a disappointment to science.”

“The data was wrong,” Dumenco said, somewhat petulant.

Now Piter looked upset, and he stepped closer. “But how could you know ? This morning the p-bar production rate went up dramatically, reaching the levels you had predicted all along. I shut down the beam until we could understand the mechanism, discover what is happening. But with this result you’ve at least proved your theory viable. How did you know it would happen?”

With a great effort, Dumenco sat up in the bed, leaving stains on the crisp sheets. “You do not understand, Nels-I have already done these experiments at Aramazas 16. That was the work that brought me to the attention of the United States government. I already know the correct results…” He flopped back against the pillow.

Piter looked at him in stunned horror and dismay as Dumenco continued in a weak whisper. “I could not tell anyone about it, so I had to reproduce all the experiments here, from first principles.”

Piter took a step away from the bed, stricken. Paige looked from one scientist to the other, then at Craig. Craig tried to remain unobtrusive, attentively watching as the discussion unfolded, hoping some crucial clue would slip out.

“But how?” stuttered Piter. “The Soviets never had an accelerator large enough to act as a seed for your experiments.” Then he stopped himself. “Unless your enhancement technique worked from the start!”

“My work was to produce antiprotons to-” He hesitated, as if unwilling to fully explain to Piter. He struggled up in his bed. “I already knew what I was doing when I came here to Fermilab. I had good results at first, but when I went into full-scale production with the gamma-ray laser increasing the cross-section, a large fraction of my new p-bars… disappeared somewhere.”

Piter was intent now, his face flushed. His thin lips formed a concerned line, as if his whole world was falling apart. “But why haven’t I ever heard of your early work? Why didn’t you publish your results?”

“Those experiments were highly classified… for other purposes. My work ultimately came to naught because we did not have a way to store the additional p-bars efficiently. We did not have a mature enough technology to overcome a saturation instability.”

Dumenco paused, then laying back on the bed, whispered, “And neither do you. Your crystal-lattice trap comes close-but it is still unstable. Dangerously unstable. Your solid-state lasers are an improvement over our old cross-feeding laser system, but you need to have them phased together better. Otherwise, your trap easily saturates and becomes unstable. We learned this long before you invented your design.”

Piter reeled. Craig knew that Dumenco had struck the Belgian scientist to the core-the crystal-lattice trap for holding large quantities of antimatter was the breakthrough on which Piter had staked his reputation, the basis for his Nobel nomination. But the world had- supposedly-never produced enough antimatter to test it fully.

And Dumenco had just claimed Piter’s precious device would fail.

Craig drew a quick breath. “Dr. Dumenco, if you said your new technique was producing a lot of antimatter, but the data didn’t show it-is it possible the antimatter was diverted somehow, taken away before it could interact with the data-collection diagnostics?” Both Piter and Dumenco looked at him skeptically. He continued, “Could it have been collected in one of your crystal-lattice traps, skimmed out of the accelerator beam downstream somehow? And if the crystal-lattice trap is so unstable, could that have caused the explosion in the beam-sampling substation?‘’

“Preposterous!” Piter sniffed.

“Yes, it is possible,” Dumenco said slowly. He looked over at Craig, raising a finger as he stated his theory, letting the thoughts roll off as fast as they came to him. “If someone is indeed diverting antiprotons from the particle accelerator into a crystal-lattice trap, the best place to store them would be in one of the beam-sampling substations, or in one of the beam-shunt passages. But the trap is unstable. If the lasers ever became misaligned, or experienced a rapid current flux…”