Филип Керр - The Second Angel

With all four corners connected, the heat would now be conducted through the length of wire inside the tube of liquid nitrogen. Dallas severed the wire in the smart mortar with a short burst of electrons from his UHT gun.

‘Now it’s just dumb mortar, like any other,’ he said, and checking his dose rate, he pointed Cavor to the left-hand side of the concrete block. ‘You work on that side, and I’ll take the right.’

Cavor hardly hesitated. Taking his UHT gun in his prosthetic hand — this was now stronger and steadier than his natural hand — he held it to within a couple of inches of the mortar and squeezed the handle, focusing a series of heated electrons onto the vertical target area. The irony of what they were doing was not lost on him.

‘As if there aren’t enough boiling electrons and X rays in this room already,’ he grumbled.

Dallas said nothing. Unlike Cavor, he found it difficult to hold the UHT’s bright blue beam steady down the vertical line of the mortar, and after only a minute or two, he had to stop and rest for a few seconds. Glancing at Cavor’s better progress, he remarked upon it.

‘Seems like you’re just cut out for this kind of work, Cav. I had hoped you might be. And to be quite frank, we’ll need every bit of strength in that arm of yours to push out that block.’ Dallas took up his UHT gun and started work once more.

Such was the concentrated strength in his arm that Cavor could keep on firing an electron beam into the mortar while glancing briefly at his TLD. ‘Two hundred and ninety centigrays,’ he reported.

‘Don’t think about it. Put it out of your mind.’

‘Be a lot easier if I could put it out of my body.’ Inside his EVA suit, Cavor felt the sweat dripping off his face and running down his back like a rogue atom. The space fridge and the refrigerated electric car were already a distant, pleasant memory. ‘I wish I could wipe my face. It’s as hot as hell in here.’

‘That’s not the reactor, and it’s not radiation,’ Dallas said, trying to reassure his partner. ‘It’s the steam generator. It’s just like a hot-water tank.’ Shaking his head inside his helmet to dislodge a dewlap of perspiration from the tip of his nose, Dallas caught sight of his own TLD reading. Three hundred and ten centigrays. A lethal dose to an untreated 30 percent of people.

‘Done this vertical,’ declared Cavor. ‘I’ll take the upper horizontal. It’s at times like these I’m glad I’ve got this false arm. Only don’t you get ideas about it having any superhuman strength. My arm feels good. Since I started taking those pills of yours, it feels better than the real one, maybe. More easily controlled, certainly. But for pushing a dead weight, Gates’s arm would have done the job just the same.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Dallas. ‘Moving dead weight’s always a lot easier than shifting it for the first time. Even on the Moon. It requires a more applied kind of strength. The smallest force to overcome static friction between two surfaces at rest is always greater than the force required to continue the motion, or to overcome kinetic friction.’

‘That’s one of the things I like about you, Dallas. You’re always joking. But I’m beginning to see why I’m here. It’s not my mind you’re interested in at all. It’s my body, isn’t it?’

‘Something like that,’ said Dallas, and completing his own vertical section of mortar, paused again, breathing heavily. At least they didn’t have to breathe the contaminated air of the containment room. That way they might at least avoid receiving damage to their lungs. But time was growing short. Three hundred and fifty centigrays and they still hadn’t finished reducing the mortar to dust and melted metal, let alone moved away the concrete block.

‘It was bring you along, Cav, or find a second angel to help me move the stone.’ He began to work along the upper vertical toward Cavor. ‘Let’s pray you’re up to the job, or this might just turn out to be our own little holy sepulcher.’

‘If I was an angel, I’d dematerialize or something,’ said Cavor. ‘Appear on the other side of this damn wall.’

‘I feel more like Schrodinger’s cat [123] A famous thought-experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger, in 1935, describing the difficulties that are inherent in the field of quantum mechanics. A box contains a radioactive source, a gun (in some cases describing the paradox, a bottle of poison is preferred to a gun), and a live cat. The equipment is so arranged that the radioactive source may decay and emit a neutron, and in doing so will trigger the gun to shoot the cat. But if the radioactive source does not decay, the cat lives. Being a quantum particle, however, the radioactive source doesn’t have to choose between these two possible states: It may combine both positions — what is known as a superposition. If the experiment lasts just long enough for a 50 percent chance of radioactive decay then the nature of quantum mechanics suggests that the cat is neither alive nor dead until the box is opened — indeed that the cat occupies a ghostly position in a limbo between life and death. Some of the greatest scientific minds have wrestled with this paradox and failed to make sense of it. As Einstein said, ‘If quantum physics is correct, then the world is crazy.’ than any damn angel,’ confessed Dallas. ‘Some kind of weird quantum thing, anyway. Might be kind of useful to be in two places at once. What do they call it? A superposition?’

‘Shit, that’s my life’s ambition,’ remarked Cavor. ‘To find one of those superpositions and stay there.’

‘I’m coming around the other side of you, Cav. I need to start this bottom line of mortar.’

Dallas stepped back and to the right of Cavor. Approaching the wall he sucked some water from the mouthpiece inside his helmet. The heat and exertion had given him a strong thirst, and he would have drunk more if it hadn’t been for a reluctance to face the possibility that radiation was making him dehydrated. He extended the gun and squeezed the handle once again.

‘Here,’ said Cavor, observing Dallas’s slower progress along the bottom length of horizontal. ‘Let me finish that. I’m quicker than you.’

Grateful for the relief, Dallas straightened up and stood back. Four hundred centigrays. When Cavor finished with the UHT they would have less than six minutes to get themselves through the wall and into the labyrinth before their survival chance started to grow uncomfortably smaller.

‘Come on, come on,’ he murmured impatiently.

‘Just a few more inches,’ breathed Cavor. ‘You and yours sure know how to make a person feel welcome in a place.’

Dallas switched on his infrared flashlight in readiness and attached an infrared visor to the front of his helmet. ‘Four-thirty centigrays.’

‘There, it’s done.’

Immediately Dallas snapped off the containment room lights and knelt down beside Cavor, who was already pushing hard at the block with his prosthetic arm.

‘Push,’ grunted Dallas. ‘Push hard.’

For two precious minutes they strained to shift the concrete block, an unsuccessful effort that left them breathless with fear and exertion.

‘Five hundred centigrays,’ said Dallas. ‘Again.’

Once more they applied their strength to the block, which remained rigidly in place after the elapse of another ninety seconds.

‘You’re not trying,’ snarled Dallas.

‘Like hell I’m not,’ bellowed Cavor, and straightening his prosthetic arm like a piston, pushed hard against the block with all his might, as if he’d been Samson attempting to topple one of the pillars in the Temple of Dagon.

The five-hundred-pound block of concrete shifted perceptibly.