A Hole in Texas, page 1
Copyright © 2004 by Herman Wouk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: April 2004
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and without any intent on the author’s part. Where celebrated public personages briefly appear or are mentioned, no historical accuracy concerning them is intended.
The author is grateful for permission to reprint “Me And Bobby McGee,” words and music by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster © 1969 (renewed 1997), TEMI COMBINE INC. All rights controlled by COMBINE MUSIC CORP. and administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
ISBN: 978-0-7595-1066-1
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1. The Particle Physicist
Chapter 2. The Crisis
Chapter 3. The Game
Chapter 4. The Congresswoman
Chapter 5. The Omelet
Chapter 6. The Apocalypse
Chapter 7. The Boson
Chapter 8. The Party
Chapter 9. The Falcon
Chapter 10. The Jet
Chapter 11. The Rock
Chapter 12. The Warning
Chapter 13. The Spill
Chapter 14. The Explanation
Chapter 15. The Ruin
Chapter 16. The Scenario
Chapter 17. The Vampire
Chapter 18. The Music
Chapter 19. The Trout
Chapter 20. The Lawyers
Chapter 21. The Strategy
Chapter 22. The Switch
Chapter 23. The Crunch
Chapter 24. The Hearing
Chapter 25. The Anticipation
Chapter 26. The Statement
Chapter 27. The Trap
Chapter 28. The Telescopes
Chapter 29. The Surprise
Chapter 30. The Robe
Chapter 31. The Turning
About the Author
Books by Herman Wouk
Novels
Aurora Dawn
City Boy
The Caine Mutiny
Marjorie Morningstar
Youngblood Hawke
Don’t Stop the Carnival
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance
Inside, Outside
The Hope
The Glory
A Hole in Texas
Plays
The Traitor
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
Nature’s Way
Nonfiction
This Is My God
The Will to Live On
To my brother
Victor Wouk, PhD,
California Institute of Technology ’42
with admiration and love
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
— MARK TWAIN
AUTHOR’S NOTE
At a rough guess, 99.9999 percent of all Americans don’t know what the hell a Higgs boson is. Nevertheless, when Congress voted several billion dollars to fund a search for the thing, American taxpayers footed the bill. Then, when this gargantuan project, the Superconducting Super Collider—the largest basic science project in world history—was well under way, Congress abruptly pulled the plug, killed the project, and voted another billion dollars just to close it down. That left some two thousand particle physicists high, dry, and unemployed on a forlorn plain outside Dallas, and these scientists were not used to such career jolts, or in blunter language, such jerking around. Ever since coming up with the atomic and hydrogen bombs, they had been the pampered darlings of Congress. But all that suddenly and rudely ended. The sole residue of their miscarried quest for the Higgs boson was a hole in Texas, an enormous abandoned Hole.
It’s still there.
1. THE PARTICLE PHYSICIST
We all have bad days, and Dr. Guy Carpenter awoke to rain drumming on gray windows, with a qualm in his gut about what this drab day might bring. Late at night an e-mail had come in, summoning him to an urgent morning meeting at the Jet Propulsion Lab with no reason given, an ill omen indeed to a survivor of the abort on the Texas plain. He was in pajamas at the desk in his den, gnawing at a slice of Swiss cheese on sourdough bread as he marked up a gloomy cost estimate of new space telescopes, when his wife burst in, her long black hair hanging in wet tangled ringlets, her soaked nightgown clinging transparently to her slim body. “Sweeney got out,” she barked.
“No! How, this time?”
“I took out the trash, that’s how. They collect it Wednesday at seven, or have you forgotten? It’s raining buckets, I hurried, I left the screen door unlatched, and the bastard slipped out. I tried to catch him and got drenched.”
“I’ll find him.”
“Don’t you have that meeting at seven-thirty? I’m wet through and stark naked, as you see, or I’d look for him.”
“No problem. Sorry about the trash.”
Dr. Carpenter threw on a raincoat and plodded out barefoot on slippery grass. The downpour was helpful. Sweeney hated the wet, so he would be holed up in some dry spot of the backyard instead of hightailing it over the fence for a major chase, and if that failed, a general neighborhood alarm. Penny’s obsession for keeping her cat indoors was a given of their marriage. Wonderful wife, Penny, with a human weakness or two such as a slight streak of jealousy and an unarguable dogma that outside cats were short-lived. Sweeney, a resourceful Siamese, ignored her for a doting fool, he knew he would never die, and he lay in wait for any chance to get out.
Poking here and there, Carpenter spied the bedraggled creature under a padded lounge chair. Okay, Sweeney! He crouched to grab the beast. Sweeney inched rearward just beyond his grasp, blinking at him. Standard cat maneuver, but this was no time for such foolery, so Carpenter kicked the chair aside and pounced on the cat. With an electric stab of pain, his back went out. Three weeks of slow healing, shot in an instant! He had pulled a muscle playing tennis, with an overhand smash at set point plunk into the net; and now this, no tennis for at least another three weeks. Standard Carpenter performance, he thought, clutching at his throbbing back. Guy’s colleagues regarded him as a top man in high-energy physics, his wife Penny adored him when he remembered to take out the trash, but he had a downbeat opinion of Dr. Guy Carpenter, due to a perfectionist bent always nagging at his self-esteem.
“Bad cat,” Penny said as he brought Sweeney in, meowing in outrage. Muffled in a bathrobe, she was drying her hair. “Good Lord, you’re drowned. I hope you didn’t catch your death. The Project Scientist phoned in a huge tizzy —”
“Call her back, say I’m on my way.”
Wincing at each move, he dressed, limped out to the garage, and eased himself into his car. When he pressed the garage-door opener, nothing happened. What now? Low battery? He lurched to Penny’s car and tried her remote. It did not work, either. The wall button goosed the door to rattle upward a foot, then it halted. He had never before tried using the manual lift. How did it work, exactly? He grasped the thick rough cord in both hands and with excruciating pain hauled the screeching door halfway up, where it stuck. His lower back aflame, pulsating, he called the Project Scientist on his cell phone to beg off from the meeting.
She was unsympathetic. “Guy, take a couple of Aleves. Peter’s on his way. Why don’t I alert him to pick you up? You’ve got to be here.”
“Why me, Ottoline? I’m crippled, I tell you —”
“You know more about the Superconducting Super Collider than anyone here.”
“The Super Collider? So what? It was killed back in ’93. It’s dead and forgotten.”
“Not anymore.”
“How’s that? For crying out loud, Ottoline, what’s up?”
“Not over the phone. I’ll page Peter and see you in a bit.”
Penny said, “Aleve, my foot,” and gave him two of her migraine capsules. “These will do the trick.”
“Codeine? I’ll be a zombie,” he protested, downing them.
“All the better. Don’t commit yourself to anything involving colliders.”
“Not with a knife at my throat.”
Soft soothing warmth gradually suffused his back as he waited for Peter Braunstein. Memories flooded him, memories long suppressed, released and made dreamily vivid by the opiate. Those years in alien Texas, years of working his heart out on that stupendous machine; years of the greatest fun and challenge in his life, and the worst frustration! He knew too much, that was the trouble. The monster might well have worked, but then again, every one of those ten thousand supermagnets had to function flawlessly, and they were his responsibility. He had fought in vain for more time, more careful designing, more testing. Hurry, hurry, national prestige at stake, get the thing going, then see! That was the word from on high, with unsubtle slurs about his foot-dragging —
“Guy?” Peter Braunstein on the cell phone. “I’m calling from my car. You okay?”
“I’ll live. What the devil’s going on, Peter?”
“I just asked Ottoline when she called me about you. She said, ‘Budget,’ and hung up. Be right there.”
Budget . . . The haunt of modern science . . . The delayed-action bomb that had sunk the SSC! The NASA budget review in Congress happened every year around this time. NASA supported the Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL supported the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and that project was Ottoline’s baby, so no doubt that was why she was on edge. Still, why the urgency? Their project had never yet run into a money problem. The Terrestrial Planet Finder was part of NASA’s Origins Program, which was exploring two grand questions about human existence:
(1) Are we alone? (2) Where did we come from?
A tall order, a noble endeavor, and their part of it was to search for signs of life on planets circling remote stars. The new space telescopes, if they could get the budget for them, would go a long way toward solving these riddles . . .
Honk, honk outside the garage. Stooping to pass under the half-raised door was pleasantly painless. Guy’s burly bearded tennis partner, a Cornell classmate and now an eminent astrophysicist, helped him into the high front seat of a battered camper. It was Peter Braunstein who, after the Texas debacle, had recruited Guy for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He said as he drove, “Well, let’s hope it’s NASA that’s getting the heat, not our project.”
“Peter, we’re small potatoes.”
“We’re NASA small potatoes, Guy. NASA’s been in trouble ever since the last Americans flew off the moon, you know that. No one big mission, a grab bag of dicey missions like ours, the media just yawn at the marvelous leaps ahead in space science, and every now and then a disaster throws the whole nervous bureaucracy into shock —”
“Go ahead, cheer me up,” said Carpenter. He was happy at JPL, proud of his work on the Planet Finder, and he tried not to think beyond his day-to-day work. For a high-energy physicist, relocating yet again at his age would be murder.
“Oh, Ottoline’s the worrier. I think we’ll be okay. It’s just that Congress is muttering more and more every year about money for NASA. Martian landscapes and floating astronauts are getting to be old stuff, Guy. Where’s the payoff?”
“A new more powerful bomb, you mean?” said Guy Carpenter. “Contact with aliens, maybe?”
“Something,” said Braunstein, swinging the car into the JPL parking lot.
2. THE CRISIS
Here we go,” said the Project Scientist as Guy Carpenter shuffled into her bleak windowless office, its gray-painted walls lined with discouraged greenery in long boxes. Peter Braunstein came in behind him. “Feeling better, Guy?”
“Passable.” His back was quite numb now, his brain thickly fogged by codeine.
“Okay, then. Tell them, Rafe.”
Lounging on a hard chair, his feet up on another chair, was the System Engineer, a short broad-shouldered Englishman in jeans and an old sweater. “Right. Gentlemen, the Chinese have got the Higgs boson.”
“What?” Braunstein all but yelled. Carpenter simply stared.
“You heard me.”
“The CHINESE?” said Carpenter.
Rafe chuckled, glancing at the Project Scientist. “The Chinese.”
“Ah, jokes.” Carpenter sounded relieved.
“You wish!” Ottoline’s face hardened. “That’s how I reacted at first. It’s very serious.”
“Ottoline, it’s inconceivable.”
“You’re here to tell us why,” she said, “and you’d better be convincing.”
“Oh, look, they haven’t got the machines, they don’t begin to have the technology—why, even the Europeans at CERN, when they shut down for an upgrade, admitted they were five years away from getting the Higgs.” He shook his head in disbelief. “The Chinese?”
“Stop saying that,” snarled the Project Scientist. “Yes, the Chinese!” Dr. Ottoline Porson was a big blonde in her fifties, with a huge behind, and gray streaks in her hair. She was one of America’s great astronomers. “Raphael knows what he’s talking about. Go on, Rafe.”
“I’m expecting a fax from London any minute,” said the System Engineer. “I got a call last night—late morning over there—and I phoned Ottoline straight off —”
“I took that call in the bathtub,” she put in. “I slipped in my hurry to get out and e-mail you fellows, darn near broke my neck —”
Carpenter demanded of the System Engineer, “Who called you?”
“Staff writer at Nature, to tell me that something bloody hot was in the wind.”
“Come on, Rafe.” A leak from the leading science journal in the world was a sobering surprise. “Are you saying that you have a mole at Nature?”
Raphael’s grin was a shade smug. “Female mole. Former girlfriend, truth to tell. Good science writer. We’re still on excellent terms. She’s the editor’s girlfriend now.”
“And she reported what?”
“An article has come in from the Chinese, so sensational that Nature is still debating whether to run it.”
Slumped in his chair, Guy Carpenter said slowly, “Is there coffee around? I’m not up to speed here —”
Peter Braunstein jumped up. “Coming, Guy.”
“Thanks, Pete . . . Ottoline, where shall I begin? They have no industrial infrastructure for such an effort. Not by miles. No scientists of outstanding calibre. Technicians by the horde, yes, but —”
“They’ve made ICBMs,” interrupted Ottoline. “They’ve exploded H-bombs.”
“Political stunts,” said Guy, “jump-started by the Soviets, when they were still friendly.”
“Wait, wait,” said Rafe. “You worked on an accelerator in China yourself, didn’t you?”
“Years ago. Primitive cyclotron. Department of Energy sent me over after Mao died, part of a detente that didn’t last. Fascinating country, beguiling people, but backward? Beijing was a city on bicycles.”
“That’s changed,” said Ottoline. “A lot has changed.”
Braunstein returned with the coffee. “Rafe, the fax in your office is chattering.”
“Here we go.” The Englishman hurried out.
Ottoline said, “Peter, Guy claims they don’t have the physicists to do the job.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Braunstein scratched his beard. “Just offhand, Guy, how about Liu Layu?”
“We know where Liu Layu is,” said Guy. “He’s heading their nuclear-weapons program.”
“You think we know where he is,” said Ottoline. “You’re talking about China, remember.”
“Then there’s Wendy,” said Braunstein.
“We know where she is too,” said Guy.
The Project Scientist shifted in her chair to look at Guy. “Wendy?”
“Wen Mei Li. She’s been kicked upstairs from high-energy physics to some big job in their Science and Energy Ministry. Or whatever they call it. She was in our physics program at Cornell.”
“Absolutely brilliant,” said Peter, looking to Carpenter. “Queen of the campus in those Chinese dresses of hers, with physics majors trailing her like baby ducks—why, even Professor Rocovsky had a case on her—but argumentative, prudish, never drank anything but water. She worked on the Stanford accelerator for a while, then went back to China —”
“Was she really that pretty?” asked the Project Scientist.
The hot strong coffee was clearing Guy’s head. “Look, Ottoline, are you regarding this as an emergency?”
“If Nature prints the article, yes indeed.”
“For our project?”
“Obviously.”
“Nothing’s obvious to me this morning. Explain why.”
“Guy, you worked on the Super Collider —”
“Yes, five and a half years of my life down the drain. So?”
“Could it be revived?”
Sipping coffee, Guy Carpenter took a long pause before answering. “Now listen, Ottoline, anything can be done, given the budget. The tunnel is still there in Texas, if that’s what you’re asking. About eighteen miles of it, and huge deserted buildings, and thousands of computers, and untold miles and miles of pipes and wires and magnets. If they haven’t been cannibalized or looted, that is. I’ve never been back. It was a tragedy, a catastrophe, a scientific Titanic. The Superconducting Super Collider is killed, murdered by Congress, gone forever. To get it going again might take eight to ten billion dollars, and even then —”
