Lethal Exposure

CHAPTER ONE

Sunday, 8:23 p.m.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Batavia, Illinois

A whirlwind of high-energy particles coursed underground along the four-mile circular path. With each pass through the booster, superconducting magnets pumped the particles to higher and higher energies until they collided with a counter-rotating beam at nearly the speed of light, a quarter million of them each second.

The impact sparked microscopic fireworks far grander than anything Dr. Georg Dumenco had seen these Americans display on their Fourth of July celebrations.

The Ukrainian emigre devoted his time to worrying about physics instead of politics. His days of research for political expediency were long over, now that he had fled to America and made his home alone, near Chicago, where he could work at Fermilab’s magnificent Tevatron, the world’s largest particle accelerator-or, as the local newspaper called it, an “atom smasher.”

Even here after hours, twenty feet underground, the buried racetrack of the Main Ring and the parallel Tevatron hummed continuously. When the Fermilab teams had “good beam,” they liked to keep the accelerator running without interruption.

Dumenco worked down in one of the experimental target chambers, a dead-end bull’s-eye at the termination of a shunt path a quarter mile long. There, the main beam could be deflected like a high-energy bullet into a small target of metal foil. The crash of the beam into the foil was enough to shatter nuclei and pound protons into constituent elementary particles with a resulting shower of radiation.

With the Tevatron operating in its continuous loop, Dumenco could tinker with his own apparatus in the distant target chamber. He wasn’t supposed to be in this room when the beam was actually running, but the confusion of Fermilab’s new Main Injector Ring under construction allowed him to circumvent a few interlocks. Even with all the chaos of construction, sufficient checks and controls still operated to protect any personnel in hazardous locations. He felt safe.

Relatively safe.

Unlike back in the Ukraine, he did not waste time with paranoia. Not any more. Now, six years after the nail-biting time of his defection, and his dire worries about the safety of his family members, Dumenco knew he had made the right choice to flee, despite all the heartache.

At Fermilab he didn’t have to inflate his results, cope with incompetent technicians or shoddy apparatus, watch the administrators for bureaucratic bumbling, or protect himself from the suspicious eyes and narrow minds of the political police.

One of his coworkers had called Fermilab a “Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for high-energy physicists,” referring to a children’s film Dumenco had never seen. But he understood the reference-the Tevatron and the high-energy experiments provided a virtual playground for physicists like himself.

Dumenco walked down the low tunnel. Inside protective cages, the bright lights flickered with a barely perceptible rhythm, the pulse of the accelerator. Overhead, a heavy dirt berm shielded the beam tube itself, while a thick concrete housing surrounded the test area like a munitions bunker.

Munitions, weapons, high-energy power sources. It felt so rewarding to be working on pure science instead, fundamental studies, the creation of antimatter particles, increased production of antiprotons from the existing beam and collisions with targets in experimental chambers…

In the six years since he had left the Ukraine -after Chernobyl, after the fall of the Soviet Union -Dumenco had re-created his life’s work from scratch. He pushed to reconfirm his ground-breaking theories, his fantastic results about the nature of antimatter. He had sworn to keep that old research secret-to protect his family, if not himself-but he had already re-created the groundwork from first principles. The march of science swept on like a swollen river out of control.

Surrounded by motivated graduate students-some more motivated than others-Fermilab’s support staff, and a generous grant from the National Science Foundation, Dumenco had accomplished so much so quickly, in part because he had already made the time-consuming initial mistakes where no one in the West could see them. This year he was already under serious consideration for the Nobel Prize in Physics. And winning the Nobel would justify all that “other work.”

But right now, nothing seemed to be going right.

Growling, he took his tools and his diagram to inspect the antimatter flow, the diagnostics, the p-bar traps. If he hadn’t already secretly known the results to expect from his classified work years ago, he would never have suspected anything was wrong.

But his experimental runs weren’t producing nearly the amount of antimatter particles he expected.

Breathing heavily, tasting the sour leftovers of coffee in his mouth, Dumenco crawled into the beam-tube alcove. For the fifth time in an hour, he traced a complicated logic-flow diagram with a thin finger. The diagram outlined the complex interconnections, the feedback mechanisms, and the fault-tree circuitry of his experiment.

And he couldn’t find what was wrong.

Nicholas Bretti, his graduate student assistant, always grumbled that Dumenco did too much of the “grunt work” himself, but the truth was Dumenco didn’t have a terribly high opinion of Bretti’s competence, or his scientific intuition, or his imagination for solving unexpected problems.

Fermilab had few holdout scientists who tried to do everything by themselves. In the era of Big Science, breakthrough technical papers were more likely to carry dozens and dozens of coauthors. In March 1995, when international teams of experimenters at Fermilab had announced the long-awaited discovery of the top quark, each technical paper cited 450 names! Probably everyone down to the custodians and cafeteria workers, Dumenco snorted. Physics by lemmings!

He preferred working alone; that way he knew he could trust everyone around him.

He wheeled a metal tool cart into position and unfolded a sturdy stepstool beneath the beam tube. Dumenco used a hand tool to remove an access port in front of the foil target. Detectors stood dull and dormant, waiting for an experiment to begin. A portable radiation detector sat in place on the cart, occasionally sounding a click from the natural background level.

The painted white walls and sealed concrete floor gave the experimental target chamber a cold, sterile feel-like a newly constructed sewer. Rugged instruments protruded from ports in the beam itself, shielded from the radiation that scattered during a high-energy impact. Superconducting magnets and capacitors covered portions of the beam pipe.

Inside the beam line itself, Dumenco’s antimatter “sieve” stood ready to measure the flux of antiprotons in the stream, recording each blip on computers in the main control room, which was located behind gates, fences, and safety interlocks.

But the detectors simply weren’t encountering as many antimatter particles as he expected. It was all so straightforward, and it had worked years before-so what was wrong now? The nuclear resonances excited by the gamma-ray laser should generate orders of magnitude more p-bars than any other production method, but he had measured only a few million antiparticles. He should have found billions upon billions more. Even that amount would be measured in tenths of milligrams, but it was more antimatter than had ever been produced in the free world.

His diagnostics had to be malfunctioning.

He tried to concentrate on the intricate diagram, but he had difficulty blocking out the background chugging of vacuum pumps, the hum of electronics, the stealth of shadows.

As he stood precariously on his stepstool, Dumenco looked behind him, but the long, empty tunnel responded only with an oppressive silence. He hated the constant uneasiness of feeling like someone was watching him. He had been free for years, and his family was safe, but still the fear hadn’t gone away.

Putting the logic-flow diagram aside, Dumenco rubbed his eyes. Numerous steaming cups of coffee had been unsuccessful in masking his tiredness. In times like these he longed for Luba and the children. He had been alone so long.

Alone with his work. When he was deepest in thought, trying to unravel the most intricate details of a physics problem, the memories of his family came the strongest.

He stretched higher, grunting and wedging himself into the crawlspace where he shined a small flashlight into the beam tube. He decided to take another look at the crystalline wafers that made up part of the detector.

Dumenco shuffled around on the stepstool and peered toward the experimental cavity. Small discs were arranged at various angles to the incoming beam, some with shiny surfaces, some with a wafered texture. Braids of thin fiberoptic wires lay in twisted bundles, carrying data to diagnostic units throughout the shunting area before forwarding impulses to a gigantic farm of supercomputers that analyzed the millions upon millions of particle collisions. Here in the target area, the staff placed their “oh shitski” tests-high-risk, little-understood experiments used only when the particle beam was diverted from the racetrack and dumped into the shunt area.

As Dumenco traced the connections, he heard a loud click from somewhere in the shunting bay. The lights flickered. The distant, low-frequency drone of the accelerator changed-and before Dumenco could react, he heard a muffled explosion off in the distance, down the tunnel and outside the bay.

The lights in the tunnel blinked; the air-conditioning sighed to a stop. Magenta emergency lights flared on simultaneous with automatic alarms triggered by Continuous Air Monitors.

Startled, not yet terrified, Dumenco scrambled out of the beam tube as the air crackled indistinctly around him. He lost his footing on the stepstool, stumbled, then dropped from above, falling to his knees on the concrete floor. A siren wailed, running up and down the scale.

Then he heard ominous, frenzied clicks from the radiation monitor, like popcorn.

Dumenco crouched on the floor, his knees bent and his hands spread out on the cold concrete. What had happened? He tried to think, but his attention was fixed on the rotating light.

Within seconds, the radiation detector relaxed to a much quieter series of clicks. The rotating alarm light bathed the shunting bay with a magenta strobe, which then switched to amber. Use caution. Okay to enter.

With sweat prickling at the back of his neck, Dumenco looked up at the experimental cavity. He had been standing inside only moments earlier.

Magenta: Extreme danger. Radiation hazard.

He had heard an explosion. If an accident in the Main Ring had caused a beam dump, the stream of high-energy particles would have crashed into the experimental target area. Right here, where he was.

“Don’t panic,” Dumenco whispered to himself, proud to note that he had not slipped back into his native Ukrainian. “Keep calm and try to reconstruct the events.”

Shaky, getting back to his feet, he stumbled down the concrete tunnel, toward the locked gates and the exit to the cold October night. He still clutched his logic-flow diagram, and the rotating amber light splashed blotches of yellow across the pages.

He had been bombarded with an immense amount of radiation. He had a pen in his pocket-he could calculate the dosage in seconds if he could just collect his thoughts. He had dropped from the cavity quickly, but even sub-microseconds would have been much, much too long. It had all happened in an instant.

With shaking hands he jotted down the formulas: Bragg deposition, rad to rem conversion, Q quality factors…

How could this have happened? A mere accident, right when he was about to make a breakthrough on the dangerous Soviet work he had sworn never to repeat? A mere accident, right when he was likely to be nominated for the Nobel Prize? When his grad student Bretti was gone on vacation, when Dumenco himself was conveniently working late and alone in the experimental target area?

The accelerator had too many interlocking safety features, even with the Main Injector construction. He himself had checked the integrity of the protection mechanisms, even with the temporary bypasses.

It couldn’t have been an accident.

Dumenco continued to scribble calculations, literally on the back of an envelope, and arrived at a range of possible exposures. It felt as if his heart had crawled into his throat. He tried to swallow but couldn’t.

Even best case, the calculated exposure fell high on the lethality curve.

After receiving that much radiation, Georg Dumenco would die within a week.

If he was lucky.