Lethal Exposure

CHAPTER FIVE

Tuesday, 11:23 a.m.

Collider Detector at Fermilab

Once Craig followed Paige and Goldfarb into the experimental area, he felt as if he had entered another world, one detached from the prairie above them, away from the buffalo and tall, waving grass. This was the business end of the laboratory, the reason why Fermilab existed in the first place. Craig couldn’t tell how thick the concrete walls were, but they sprawled up in massive blocks, as if formed from an enormous mold.

“Feels like we entered the bowels of a power plant,” Goldfarb said.

The low ceilings were strung with piping and electrical conduits. The air smelled of cement, grease, and metal. An oppressive background of white noise droned around them.

Craig tried to reach a chain-link gate before Paige, so he could hold it open for her, but she beat him to it. After she telephoned in for access to the next section of tunnel, they walked briskly along the sealed concrete floor toward the Collider Detector. Racks of machinery and diagnostics stood next to a large cylindrical apparatus that resembled an iron lung.

“Nels!” Paige called, raising her voice to be heard over the background drone echoing in the confined tunnel. She moved to meet a dapper-looking, thin man who wore a lab coat like a costume over his brown suit. He stood behind the apparatus, glancing over the shoulders of the technicians actually running the diagnostics. His face and hands were tanned, his thinning sandy hair neatly combed. The man didn’t seem to belong down here at all with the intent technicians in their casual flannel shirts and old jeans.

His face brightened upon seeing her. Craig fought off his instinctive and immediate reaction to dislike the man.

“Craig, this is Dr. Nels Piter, one of our most respected scientists at Fermilab.” Paige reached out to brush her fingers against the scientist’s sleeve. “At CERN he made quite a name for himself with his crystal-lattice trap storage device.”

Nels Piter reached out to shake Craig’s hand with a soft, cursory grip. Craig spotted a gold Rolex watch on the man’s wrist. “That was just my early work. I’ve moved on to other things now.”

Craig fished his FBI ID from his jacket. “Thank you for taking time from your schedule to see us, Dr. Piter.”

Piter waved the FBI credentials away. “Any friend of Paige’s is certainly a friend of mine.” He slipped into a pleasant, chatty demeanor as he tried to establish rapport with the two FBI agents.

Craig encouraged the man to talk-it always amazed him how much people would reveal about themselves without being prodded. He quickly discovered that Piter, a native Belgian, had worked for years at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. His early research there had gained him attention from this year’s Nobel committee.

“So, do you actually do much science anymore, Dr. Piter?” Craig asked. “Or are you primarily involved in managerial functions?‘’

The Belgian smiled tightly. “Ah, Agent Kreident, a scientist is a scientist is a scientist, no matter what the surroundings. Perhaps I am more concerned now with details of an administrative nature, but we do what it takes to get the job done, even if that entails tedious paperwork.” When Piter smiled, he had amazingly white teeth. His pale blue eyes kept flicking back to the technicians, to the work.

Piter adjusted his lab coat, trying to make it neat over his jacket. On closer inspection, Craig saw that the brown suit was tailored of a tightly woven wool fabric, and the suit’s cut and hang were impeccable. He wore polished brown shoes with little tassels; the other technicians wore workboots or tennis shoes.

Piter cleared his throat, getting down to business. “Paige tells me you’re operating under certain time constraints, and so am I. Experimental deadlines are approaching, and I’m expediting things so one of our research groups can get a final paper submitted to Physical Review Letters before the end of the week. I think it’s best we get started right away.”

“Sounds good to me,” Goldfarb said.

The technicians suddenly chattered among themselves, rising half out of their chairs. They scrambled with controls, watching oscilloscope traces on their monitors overlaid on computer-generated statistics.

“What is it, Chang?” Piter turned, concerned and flustered. He spoke to one of the technicians. “More beam variation?”

A young man with long hair neatly tied in a ponytail, called over his shoulder. “We’ve got it under control.”

Piter turned apologetically to Paige and the two FBI agents. “The Tevatron has been touchy for the last day or so. The heavy construction is causing all sorts of problems, and our only consolation is that when the Main Injector is finished we’ll have even higher energies at our disposal.”

“You’ve trained your technicians well,” said Craig, watching the long-haired man quickly check over a bank of diagnostics.

“Graduate students,” corrected Piter curtly. “Mr. Chang and the others are working on their Ph.D. thesis topics. Their degrees ride on the success of this experiment.”

“Did the explosion at the substation cause any problems?” Craig asked. “We saw the crater.”

Piter sighed, maintaining his sidelong glance toward the grad students’ station. “Luckily, with more than three meters of dirt berm and the concrete shielding of the buried tunnels, neither the Main Ring nor the Tevatron suffered significant distress. My technical crew checked the bending magnets to insure that the vacuum pipes are sealed down to correct operating pressure. We’ve verified that the data ports, computer links, and optical diagnostics are all up and running. So far, the beam seems clean and consistent.”

“Can’t have a dirty beam,” Goldfarb muttered.

As if to bely Piter’s optimism, the grad students scrambled over each other to correct alignments and alter power outputs and sensitivities in probes within the flow.

Piter continued, “The FBI team out at the crater, however, wanted us to shut down the accelerator, the colliders, everything, while they investigate.” He chuckled scornfully. “Obviously, that is impossible. Every airport in the country doesn’t shut down because of one plane crash. Hundreds of people here and around the world depend on the results from these test runs. No technical flaw could have caused the explosion, and so there’s no reason to put our work on hold.”

The graduate students settled down, and Piter relaxed visibly. “My office is fielding phone calls from irate researchers, to crackpot groups that claim we’re leaking radiation into the environment, to the Physicians for Responsible Radiation Research-we were unfortunate to experience an accident while their annual gathering was taking place in Chicago.”

Craig kept his face expressionless, knowing that Trish LeCroix had come here for the PR-Cubed conference, and that she had stumbled into Dumenco’s case.

Paige took charge. “Nels, it would be very helpful if you could show us where Dr. Dumenco had his accident. Is the area safe, or are you running fixed-target experiments?”

“Those areas aren’t online yet.” He touched Craig’s elbow, guiding him down the claustrophobic tunnel. “Right this way, Agent Kreident. We’ll need a car. I’d like to be outside and away from all this noise and clutter.”

They parked outside another low building like a Quonset hut with curving channels on its roof and brilliant orange exterior walls framed with deep blue: Fermilab colors. An offshoot beam pipe from the Tevatron deflected high-energy particles away from the main stream and shot them a quarter mile down to the experimental target area.

Inside the locked building and underground again, Craig squinted down the long, garishly lit tunnel. Access doors, chain-link gates, and interlock codes prevented Piter from letting them inside until he had bypassed numerous safety procedures. “It seems kind of deserted around here for all the repair activity,” Craig observed. “Where is everybody?”

Piter’s eyebrows shot up. He had removed his out-of-place lab coat and now wore only his well-fitted suit jacket. “I suppose it does look deserted to a nontechnical person, but you must remember the sheer size of our facilities.”

Craig bristled with irritation-Piter had no idea that he had completed extensive scientific training.

“We have teams out in the diagnostic alcoves, a few in the beam-sampling substations around the Main Ring, but most of us just get our results and work in our offices. We’re interested in the data, not the… the hardware.” He said it like a dirty word. “Most of the people you’ll see here are contract workers for the Main Injector construction. Normally, this is a fairly quiet place.”

“Unlike some other labs,” Paige said. Craig caught her smiling as he noted the reference to their previous work at the Lawrence Livermore Lab and the Nevada Test Site.

As they walked down the long tunnel, their footsteps echoed in the enclosed space. Given an active imagination, night shadows, and a sickening fear after receiving a radiation exposure, Craig could imagine how Dumenco could have become suspicious, even paranoid. The place was so empty.

“Was this Dr. Dumenco’s experimental area?” Craig asked. “Did he work with any of the technical people directly?”

Piter swelled with pride. “Many of the graduate students and faculty members are continuing the work I started at CERN. Georg preferred to work alone, or with a very small crew. One of his graduate students, Nicholas Bretti, has been here for many years.”

Craig turned to Goldfarb. “Make a note for us to talk to Bretti.”

Paige interrupted. “I already checked, after you called this morning. He’s on vacation and not expected back for a week or two.”

Piter frowned, his lips pale with distaste. “Other than that, I can’t say that Georg has made many professional relationships. He’s the type who wants all the credit for himself, if you’ll pardon my being so blunt.”

Goldfarb flipped open a small notebook and looked at the Belgian scientist. “Why do other researchers have so many people working for them, Dr. Piter? Are their experiments more important than Dumenco’s?”

Piter paused in his tracks and brushed a hand down his suit jacket. “It’s not a matter of importance. As Director of High-Energy Research, I allocate people and money to projects. If successful, the experiments continuing my own work could have profound scientific consequences. It is just that their work is much more manpower intensive than Dumenco’s-they need the entire Tevatron.”

They reached a thick conduit that ran out of the concrete wall and splayed into several smaller pipes leading in different directions down branched tunnels. Piter pointed out a jumble of equipment. “When the Tevatron is running in fixed-target mode, the beam can be diverted to this location. The particles strike various targets with sufficient energy to create a shower of subatomic particles. We trace the collisions, looking for the secrets of the universe.”

“Unless some guy happens to be standing in the way,” Goldfarb said.

Nels Piter bridled. “Dr. Dumenco risked a great deal by working in here when the accelerator itself was running. Our safety interlocks are normally impossible to circumvent, but many of them have been kludged together so we could keep the Tevatron running during the Main Injector construction. Dumenco himself subverted the mechanisms designed to protect him, and unfortunately he is paying the price for his foolishness.”

Craig noted the man’s indignance with interest. “You don’t think the substation explosion was meant to cause Dr. Dumenco’s exposure?”

“Absolutely not!” Piter said, lifting his chin. “The two incidents are totally unrelated.”

Goldfarb dutifully scrawled a few comments on his notepad; Craig knew, though, that nobody would ever be able to read the words. “So if Dr. Dumenco was working on something different from the other experiments, what was he doing, exactly?”

“Well, it’s very technical,” Piter said evasively. “Dumenco was attempting to radically increase the number of p-bars present in our beam-”

“You’re going to have to define ‘peebars,’ please,” Goldfarb said. Craig suppressed a satisfied smile to see his partner playing the dummy and drawing the Belgian out. Paige seemed to know exactly what they were doing, but Nels Piter didn’t catch on at all.

“Antiprotons,” Piter said with a dismissive wave. “The antimatter analog to protons.”

“Like the antimatter in Star Trek,” said Goldfarb.

Piter said coldly, “Yes, I suppose so.” He turned back to Craig. “For years, Dumenco’s been publishing highly theoretical papers on how to pump up antimatter production by using a gamma-ray laser to excite certain resonances in the target nuclei. His results-which have not been verified-indicate that this should greatly increase the production of p-bars. Since obtaining a gamma-ray laser from Los Alamos, he has been involved in quite a number of experiments to verify the increase.”

“Any luck?” said Craig.

Piter shook his head. “This is frontier physics, pushing the envelope. After Fermilab discovered the top quark, some of the teams wanted to concentrate on the Higgs boson-although at these energy levels, I’d be surprised if they were successful. My own work in p-bar phenomena followed a much more traditional, and less risky, path. It’s the right way to go.”

“Well, I guess we can let the Nobel Committee decide,” Paige Mitchell said in her best peacemaker voice, then brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “Nels is being seriously considered for the Physics Prize this year, as is Dr. Dumenco. We’re very fortunate to have so many world-class scientists working at Fermilab.”

Craig’s interest clicked as Piter nodded. Was there more than professional jealousy between Dumenco and Piter?

Piter placed his hands on the railing in front of him, a ruler looking out over his kingdom. He came up to Craig’s chin, and his blond hair looked wild from the quick walk down the tunnel. Unconsciously, he combed it with his fingers.

“You never told us exactly what you worked on at CERN, Dr. Piter,” Craig said.

“Storage of p-bars, Mr. Kreident. Not just tens of thousands of antiparticles at a time, but a new way to hold them in a portable container. Until recently, people have been able to store only minuscule amounts of antimatter in magnetic bottles-Penning traps, they call them. The antimatter is cooled and injected into a long cylinder with specially designed magnets on either end. The particles bounce back and forth between the magnets, but they tend to leak out.”

Paige interrupted. “At CERN Dr. Piter demonstrated a more efficient storage device, the Howe crystal-lattice trap. Unfortunately, we’ve never had access to large enough amounts of antimatter to test the actual limits of his device.”

Piter’s face twisted, as though annoyed Paige had interrupted. “Yes, my design was based on an idea first suggested by a Los Alamos scientist, Larry Campbell. It was then popularized by another Los Alamos scientist, Steve Howe, who thought it might be possible to trap antimatter particles inside the molecular lattices of crystals-simple salt crystals.” He drew himself up. “But it was I who took the idea beyond theory, and actually made it work.

“Years ago, the initial experimental team that detected the first particles of antimatter won the Nobel Prize in Physics. My work is just as significant. My crystal-lattice trap stores its p-bars at crystal lattice sites, reinforced through resonances in crossed laser beams. In theory, enormous amounts of p-bars may be stored this way.”

“How much is an ‘enormous amount’?” Goldfarb asked with a faint mischievous grin. “Or would it be too technical for me?”

“The million million p-bars in a Penning trap amounts to mere picograms-my crystal-lattice trap could hold up to tens of milligrams, more than has ever been produced in the world.”

“Enough to power the Starship Enterprise.”

Piter ignored Goldfarb’s observation.

Craig looked out at Dumenco’s experimental area. Several small ladders gave access to the main beam pipe above the floor. Three carts of diagnostic equipment were spaced along the tunnel, each loaded with bundles of wire connected to laptop computers.

Craig watched Piter carefully as he mused, “I don’t suppose you and Dr. Dumenco had any rivalry going? A race for the Nobel Prize.”

Piter blinked in astonishment, as if Craig had somehow blasphemed the prestigious award. “One doesn’t compete for the Nobel, Mr. Kreident. The Prize goes to those who are worthy. It is an arduous process, and the Nobel committee ensures the best person is chosen for the best work. It is certainly not a race.” He hesitated, then stared coolly at Craig. “Surely you’re not implying that I would somehow engineer Dr. Dumenco’s accident for a physics award? I’ve won enough prizes to be beyond that.”

“Just asking, Dr. Piter. I have to probe all possibilities.” Craig was uncomfortable, though, at how the Belgian scientist’s gaze had lighted on Paige when he mentioned his prizes. “I think we’ve seen enough here. Ben, if you’re willing to check out one of the intact beam-sampling substations, I’d like to stop by Dr. Dumenco’s office now.”