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physicists: Thorne and Blandford and the rest. She hesi-
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GREGORY BENFORD
tated. Bright types, authorities, but what would they make of her story?
Implausible on the face of it, and with her quick-and-dirty at
Brookhaven on top of it all... She had jumped in her Miata and zoomed up here
without thinking it through.
Maybe somebody a bit more humble? At Caltech that would be hard.
Rooms were clogged with big computing systems. Every profession now had its
"quants," people who could handle the dizzying digital wilderness, interpret
it for their peers. "Crossover" was the hot buzzword. Computer hackers worked
with organic chemists to study molecular structure. Medical school graduates
worked with electrical engineers to design neural networks that worked
something like the brain. The new technologies dissolved disciplines.
From the corridor she could hear people talking to their computers in
customized pidgin. At its best, the new tech devoured complication and
delivered simplicity. Telephone answering machines were so programmable and
"smart," they now projected the listeners' style, not the machine's design
contrivance. They could sound like a stodgy
British butler's reserved politeness or a brisk secretary asking snappy
questions--or even like a robot, which it was.
She walked around some corners, into the section where Thorne held sway.
Two-to-an-office postdocs peered out at her curiously, robably wondering what
a black face was doing here, she thought.
Beyond was an assistant professor's office, Room 146, Max Jalon.
She peeked around the doorjamb and saw a thin, tall man in steel gray slacks
and soft, button-down blue shirt. Wire frame glasses perched on a narrow nose
and he absently brushed long brown hair back from his high forehead as he
wrote on a yellow pad. The office was not the usual piles-of-paper theorists'
haunt. Magazine boxes held crisply labeled papers on STRING TH, MATH BKGND,
and OBS.
Well, at least he knew something about style. She had always rather liked men
who were neater than she was, though that was not difficult. At UCI she had
taken a moment to look up the Caltech catalog, which listed Jalon's specialty
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areas as "gravitational waves, cosmology, astrophysics." OBS probably meant
observations, a sign
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COSM
that he was not another totally abstract math type. Okay, stop dithering.
Take the plunge.
"Uh, Dr. Jalon?"
He didn't even look up. "Go away."
"I have something that might interest you."
"Ten minutes." When she stepped inside the door, he added, "I'll see you
then," eyes still on the page, hand scribbling.
She spent the ten minutes irritably stalking the corridors, touring the
journal library, taking in the obscure joys of recent published papers
displayed on gray steel racks. By the time she came back she was fuming but
made her voice .say dryly, "Do I get ten for ten?"
He finally glanced up at her, then glanced back. Surprise at seeing a black
woman here? His mouth broadened into a half-smile. "You're a student?"
"Thanks for the unintended compliment. No, I'm a professor from
UCI."
They got through the usual sniffing-out of each other in a few minutes. Her
edgy opening move, "Can you keep a secret?" he countered with "Can you keep a
promise? Tell me all of it."
She had opted for a here's-a-mystery strategy, showing him pictures of the
sphere, listing the same properties she had on the blackboard at UCI, finally
springing where she got it. He sat with his Doc
Martens-clad feet up on his desk the whole time, hands behind his head, asking
nothing until she got to the uranium collisions. Then he quickly sucked the
relevant facts and assumptions from her with clipped questions, finishing with
a small smile. "And you got this away without telling anybody?"
"I figured it for a metal bubble or something, just an oddity--"
"Nope, that story won't play."
"What?"
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