The Devil Colony(94)

Not worth our time . . .

He pushed aside that nagging voice, staring at the small dots, looking for a pattern. One or two were out west, but the exact locations were obscured by the tsunami-like wave of neutrinos from out there, a flood that washed away all details. That was why Yoshida would fail.

“Riku?”

Someone touched his shoulder. He flinched away and turned to find Dr. Janice Cooper standing behind him.

“Sorry,” Janice said—she preferred to be called Janice, though he still found such informality uncomfortable. She removed her arm from his shoulder.

He pinched his brow, trying to interpret the small muscle movements in her face, trying to connect an emotional content to them. The best he could come up with was that she was hungry, but that probably wasn’t right. Due to his Asperger’s syndrome, he was wrong too often in his assessments to trust them.

She slid a chair over, sat down, and placed a cup of green tea near his elbow. “I thought you might like this.”

He nodded, but he didn’t understand why she had to sit so close.

“Riku, we’ve been trying to figure out why this surge out west happened.”

“The Iceland bombardment of neutrinos coursed through the planet and destabilized a third source.”

“Yes, but why now? Why didn’t this deposit destabilize earlier, following the Utah spike? Iceland went critical, but not this new deposit out west. The anomaly is troubling the other physicists.”

Riku continued studying his screen. “Activation energy,” he said, and glanced to her as if this should be obvious. And it was obvious.

She shook her head. Was she disagreeing or not understanding?

He sighed. “Some chemical reactions, like nuclear reactions, require a set amount of energy to get them started.”

“Activation energy.”

He frowned. Hadn’t he just said that? But he continued: “Often the amount of energy is dependent on the volume or mass of the substrate. The deposit in Iceland must have been smaller. So the quantities of neutrinos from the Utah spike were sufficient to cause it to destabilize.”

She nodded. “But the neutrino burst from Iceland was much larger. Enough to destabilize the deposit out west. To light that fatter fuse out there. If you’re right, this would mean that the western deposit must be much bigger.”

Again, hadn’t he just made that clear?

“It should be 123.4 times larger.” Just speaking the numbers helped calm him. “That is, of course, if there is an exact one-to-one correlation between neutrino generation and mass.”

Her face went a bit paler as he gave this assessment.

Uncomfortable, he turned back to his screen, to his own puzzle, to the tiny flickers of neutrinos.

“What do you think those smaller emissions are?” Janice asked after a long moment of welcome silence.

Riku closed his eyes to think, enjoying the puzzle. He pictured the neutrinos flying out, igniting the fuses of the unstable deposits, but when they hit the smaller targets, all they did was excite them, triggering minibursts.

“They can’t be the same as the unstable substance. The pattern is not consistent. I don’t see any parallelism. Instead, I think these blip marks are a substance related to those deposits but not identical to them.”

He leaned closer and reached to the screen but dared not touch it. “Here’s one in Belgium. One or two again out in the Western United States—but they’re obscured by the new burst. And an especially strong response from a location in the Eastern United States.”

Janice shifted forward. “Kentucky . . .”

Before he could fathom why she had to lean so close, his world shattered. Sirens blared, red lamps flashed along the walls. The noise cut through his earplugs like knives. He slammed his palms over his ears. To the side, the others began to yell and gesture. Again he could divine no meaning from their faces.

What is happening?

On the far side of the room, the elevator doors opened. Figures in black gear burst forth, spreading wide. They had rifles in their grips. The head-splitting rat-a-tat of their weapons drove him to the floor—not to dodge the barrage of bullets, but to flee the noise.

Screams only made it worse.

From beneath his desk, he saw Yoshida fall and roll. A large chunk of his skull was missing. Blood was pouring from his head. Riku could not take his eyes off the spreading pool.

Then someone grabbed him. He fought, but it was Janice. She snatched a handful of his lab jacket and dragged him around his desk. She pointed her arm toward a side exit. It led to an open cavernous space, a former mine, but now home to the Super-Kamiokande detector.

He understood. They had to flee the lab. It was death to remain hiding here. As if to underscore this thought, he heard the pop-pop of rifle fire. The invaders were killing everyone.