Chapter 5

9

The professor broke eye contact with Julia for a moment to take a sip of his coffee. She took that moment to look across the table at Sarah, frowning because of the professor's sudden change in persona. Sarah looked back at her calmly, shaking her head with one minute turn left, then right. Her mouth moved slightly, though she didn't speak; Julia interpreted the silent words as "It's okay." Sarah then cocked her eyes toward the professor, urging Julia to return her attention to him. Puzzled, yet oddly reassured, Julia again focused on the man at the head of the table.

"Having already deduced that Johnson had withheld information vital to the successful replication of his project, I became more and more skeptical of the rest of his conclusions as well. As you just pointed out, it seems unlikely that someone could stand directly in front of a discharge from a particle accelerator and live to tell the tale. Yet, I didn't believe the man to be lying about what had happened to his girlfriend. To me, there seemed to be some facts missing that perhaps might be deduced by a careful examination of the evidence Johnson brought with him from the laboratory at Stanford.

"The day after Johnson unburdened himself to me in that Georgetown bar, I went back to project headquarters and dug through the documentation he had provided us. Among the reams of documentation of his girlfriend's successful predictions was the item for which I was looking: the particle tracking result from the date his girlfriend was allegedly inside the targeting chamber.

"What you have to remember is that, behind every target that is used to create subatomic collisions and their resultant particles sits a type of detector. Without it, there would be no way to determine if anything happened at all! The detector tracks the path of various particles as they travel away from the target, using various methods to determine their energy and charge.

"There are many things that the tracking result can tell you about what type of particles are produced in a fixed target experiment. But I was only interested in a few details, such as 1) were the particle results in this particular experiment noticeably different from any other experiment using the same target; and 2) were there any other anomalies that might explain what happened to Johnson's girlfriend if there were no other noticeable differences.

"To answer the first question, I called the head of SLAC in California, and asked if he could check on similar experiments using Johnson's catalogued combination of experimental factors. Since he was an old friend, the results only took five days to get, rather than the month it would normally take. The answer I received confirmed my working hypothesis - that the particles produced in Johnson's experiment were almost exactly the same in travel path, energy signature, and charge as five other experiments conducted using the same factors."

As the professor paused to take a breath, Julia hastily interrupted him. "But what did such a similar result actually tell you, professor?"

"To be blunt, Julia, it told me that there was no way that Johnson's girlfriend could have been standing in front of the target at the time the linear accelerator was fired. Had she been standing there, the collision of the accelerated particles with her body, followed by their contact with the target behind her, should have produced a different result. Given the random nature of some particle reactions, I could never theorize how much different. However, the fact that Johnson's experimental data did not vary in any significant measure from experiments using the exact same method and material confirmed my hunch - that wherever Johnson's girlfriend was at the time the accelerator fired, it was not in front of the target."