Shield
Dec 14th, 2008, 10:48:59 PM
11:42 PM December 12, 2008
University of Chicago
The snow sheeted down from the black sky in large flakes that glowed orange in the streetlamps. A generous layer already blanketed the carefully manicured campus of the University of Chicago, drifting off the red-tile roofs and piling in the colonnades. But most of the student body had already left for the winter break, leaving only a few hundred faculty and graduate students entrenched in their offices and laboring over the fall semester grades and their own research projects. The campus streets were sparsely traveled at this hour, especially in the middle of a hard December snowfall.
But the weather didn't matter to Dr. Michael Saint-Louis and his team of graduate assistants deep beneath the High-Energy Physics building. Drs. Chiang and Roebuck had already retired for the night, preferring to sleep in their offices upstairs rather than dig their cars out of the parking lot, but Dr. Saint-Louis knew he couldn't sleep - they were so close to a breakthrough he could practically taste it.
"Dr. Mike! I found some coffee!"
Sarah Ackleman - the brightest graduate student Michael had, he couldn't wait to see her in print in the Journal of Applied Physics - drifted into the lab carrying a steaming pot of black coffee. Michael set his pen down and reached for his mug, which was already coated in a tan patina.
"Oh, Sarah, you are a saint," Michael said, taking the pot in hand.
Sarah gave him a mercurial smile. "Aren't you an agnostic?"
"Dr. Faulkner down in Divinity tells me that, before he's had his morning coffee, he's an atheist," Michael replied, pouring an oily cup-full. "Right before I put my theories to a test, I like to hedge my bets."
He took a cautious sip and made a face - it was awful, like leftover spills squeezed through a dishrag. Sarah winced in empathy. "Sorry," she said, "I looked in every breakroom and that was all I could find. I could try running to Seven Eleven--"
Michael waved her off. "Don't bother. It was coffee like this that got me through grad school. Of course, that's about the time my hair fell out."
Sarah laughed and slid into a nearby task chair. "Sanjay was around here somewhere--"
"I sent him to feed the latest resistance patterns into RADMOL. I figured we could use some more simulations for the computers to crunch."
The lab door swung open to admit an Indian grad student holding a thumb drive. "Dr. Saint-Louis!"
"Ah! Just what I was looking for." Michael took the thumb drive and plugged it into his laptop. In seconds he'd loaded up a complex circuit map and a flood of data. The two grad students leaned over the professor's shoulder.
"My God, look at that," Sarah said. "Is that right? Ninety-four percent efficiency?"
"And look at the capacitance levels," Sanjay said. "Almost thirty percent higher than we've ever seen before."
"Then... is that it?" Sarah said. "Do we... Have we got it?"
Michael assimilated the data wordlessly. Then he got up and crossed the lab to an airtight cabinet built into the wall, guarded by a nine-digit keypad. He punched in a code and opened the outer door.
Inside the sterile container was a bank of trays. Delicately, he slid one out into the open. It held a sheet of foam with four shaped recesses; inside each recess was a wafer of glossy black material with a nonreflective pattern etched in, almost like a solar cell. He lifted one of the wafers in his hand as if it were as fragile as morning frost, more precious than diamond.
Because it was. What Michael held in his hand was nothing less than the answer to the waste of the Nuclear Age.
He stared at his dual reflection in the mirror-smooth surface. "There's only one way to find out."
University of Chicago
The snow sheeted down from the black sky in large flakes that glowed orange in the streetlamps. A generous layer already blanketed the carefully manicured campus of the University of Chicago, drifting off the red-tile roofs and piling in the colonnades. But most of the student body had already left for the winter break, leaving only a few hundred faculty and graduate students entrenched in their offices and laboring over the fall semester grades and their own research projects. The campus streets were sparsely traveled at this hour, especially in the middle of a hard December snowfall.
But the weather didn't matter to Dr. Michael Saint-Louis and his team of graduate assistants deep beneath the High-Energy Physics building. Drs. Chiang and Roebuck had already retired for the night, preferring to sleep in their offices upstairs rather than dig their cars out of the parking lot, but Dr. Saint-Louis knew he couldn't sleep - they were so close to a breakthrough he could practically taste it.
"Dr. Mike! I found some coffee!"
Sarah Ackleman - the brightest graduate student Michael had, he couldn't wait to see her in print in the Journal of Applied Physics - drifted into the lab carrying a steaming pot of black coffee. Michael set his pen down and reached for his mug, which was already coated in a tan patina.
"Oh, Sarah, you are a saint," Michael said, taking the pot in hand.
Sarah gave him a mercurial smile. "Aren't you an agnostic?"
"Dr. Faulkner down in Divinity tells me that, before he's had his morning coffee, he's an atheist," Michael replied, pouring an oily cup-full. "Right before I put my theories to a test, I like to hedge my bets."
He took a cautious sip and made a face - it was awful, like leftover spills squeezed through a dishrag. Sarah winced in empathy. "Sorry," she said, "I looked in every breakroom and that was all I could find. I could try running to Seven Eleven--"
Michael waved her off. "Don't bother. It was coffee like this that got me through grad school. Of course, that's about the time my hair fell out."
Sarah laughed and slid into a nearby task chair. "Sanjay was around here somewhere--"
"I sent him to feed the latest resistance patterns into RADMOL. I figured we could use some more simulations for the computers to crunch."
The lab door swung open to admit an Indian grad student holding a thumb drive. "Dr. Saint-Louis!"
"Ah! Just what I was looking for." Michael took the thumb drive and plugged it into his laptop. In seconds he'd loaded up a complex circuit map and a flood of data. The two grad students leaned over the professor's shoulder.
"My God, look at that," Sarah said. "Is that right? Ninety-four percent efficiency?"
"And look at the capacitance levels," Sanjay said. "Almost thirty percent higher than we've ever seen before."
"Then... is that it?" Sarah said. "Do we... Have we got it?"
Michael assimilated the data wordlessly. Then he got up and crossed the lab to an airtight cabinet built into the wall, guarded by a nine-digit keypad. He punched in a code and opened the outer door.
Inside the sterile container was a bank of trays. Delicately, he slid one out into the open. It held a sheet of foam with four shaped recesses; inside each recess was a wafer of glossy black material with a nonreflective pattern etched in, almost like a solar cell. He lifted one of the wafers in his hand as if it were as fragile as morning frost, more precious than diamond.
Because it was. What Michael held in his hand was nothing less than the answer to the waste of the Nuclear Age.
He stared at his dual reflection in the mirror-smooth surface. "There's only one way to find out."