Chapter Two
For weeks after his night with Aurelia, or whoever she was, Jake alternated between either desperately trying to find her again, or firmly resolving that she was insane and he'd dodged a relationship bullet. Maybe that one spectacular night with the hottest and craziest woman he'd ever met was enough for one lifetime.
Either way, he couldn't get her out of his mind. The sight of a small form with short dark hair a half block down the street was enough to set his heart racing. He went back to the Hive on other nights and stood around, nursing his beer and feeling like an idiot, hoping to see her. But the crowd was totally different, the music deafening, the women uninteresting. He told himself he just wanted to get some closure, and worked through imagined conversations in his head in which he got her to explain herself when he finally met up with her again.
But he knew deep down he was just making up an excuse. He wanted her. She'd been right. She was unlike any other woman he'd ever met. He'd had more than his fair share of women of many kinds: ridiculously smart colleagues, business associates, artists, athletes, even once with a buxom redhead TV personality, and had been looking forward to enjoying even more, even more variety.
Now, he didn't want variety. He wanted
her
. She lit him up like a supernova, but was as enigmatic as a black hole. To further confuse himself, he had no idea what to make of her incomprehensible panic when he'd mentioned muons. Muonophobia could not be a real neurosis. How could anyone be afraid of a subatomic particle? He searched the Internet on a hunch, really a hope, that he would find some kind of flat Earth conspiracy, some group of health nuts that thought cosmic rays were a danger, or a cult that had a thing about a secret government lab producing muons to control people's minds. But the crazies didn't yet seem to have wandered that far into the weeds.
He resumed, or tried to, his normal routine, which meant spending time at the LASSO workshop, where he had an office. His part in the project, design of the muon detector, was done, but there were always questions and issues. He stopped by one of the assembly bays to watch the technicians prepare detector #5 for its final tests before shipping it up to Manitoba. The building they called the workshop was a giant shed that the University had built decades ago as a temporary structure to house the assembly of a NASA project. As often happened, the temporary structure proved too valuable and had been repaired and updated over the years and was now almost historic. It was just a rectangular shell on a concrete pad, but it kept the rain off and had plenty of electrical power piped to it, which they needed.
He stood back in a corner, staying out of the techs' way and contemplating what in his invention could possibly inspire such instant panic in an otherwise intelligent and apparently fearless woman.
Allison, the lead physicist on the detector, came up to him. "Any thoughts from the big brain?"
"On this one? No, just thinking." Allison, a devoted runner, was wearing sweats, which meant she was probably going to run home after work. She always wore her blonde hair in a ponytail and was often mistaken for an undergrad. They had a professional but flirting relationship. Her big brain quip was what was left from a night at a Canadian dive bar early in the project when they'd almost got it on together, a reference to big organs. Normally-- before the mystery woman-- he would have responded with a flirtatious reply, but nothing occurred to him now. "Is there any way," he wondered out loud, "this thing could, you know, hurt someone?"
"You were part of the failure analysis."
"Yes, but--" No way could he tell her about his night with the so-called Aurelia. "I keep thinking how there's a lot of energy passing through this thing."
"Well, if the superconducting coils quenched, they would dump a lot of energy. But we've been over that extensively and there are safeguards."
"I'm thinking of the muon stream itself."
"It's intense, for sure. I wouldn't advise spending a long time under one of these. But you know the calculations better than anyone else."
He had to nod. It was his invention, born at a conference he'd attended. He'd been looking for a new position after a startup he'd been in had folded. LASSO was well named from his perspective, since it had pulled him back into academia. He'd had help of course, but most of the important concepts were his, and he'd proved them out on his own during the early days of the collaboration when they were just a small team working remotely from all over.
"And we're pretty careful about calibrating the B-field," Allison continued. "We know within a fraction of a percent-- what? You've got that look."
"Nothing. Just a thought." Yes, they'd spent a lot of effort making the magnetic field as uniform and well-defined as possible, because that directly affected their ability to identify the particles the collector pulled in. But if they didn't care about that...
"Love to hear your thoughts." She put a hand on his arm and gave him a smile that was a bit warmer than needed.
"I'll let you know if it isn't a brain fart."
He went back to his office, which was one of a row of small compartments built into the side of the workshop behind the assembly bays. He was about to open the detector field simulation on his workstation to check that thought, but then sat back. He'd signed on to the collaboration after a career detour, as he thought of it now, to a startup using some new techniques to build a commercial-scale fusion reactor. He was soured on startups now-- the tech had been working fine and showed a lot of promise, but the VCs couldn't be convinced and pulled the funding, wasting over a hundred million dollars and years of effort from hundreds of talented people. Still, he'd learned all about intellectual property and the legal maze that surrounded it.
He could do a rough calculation in his head. And if it came out favorably it would be big. Really big. So big he should not follow it up on University software. He took out his phone and opened his favorite calculator. Within a few minutes he knew he was onto something. He switched to shopping for a new computer, a high-end laptop, one powerful enough to run his own sims on this new idea.
# # #
He was sitting at a table in one of the University cafes, having a sandwich and working out a calculation, when she appeared, standing across the table from him. He looked up from his laptop and there she was.
He'd given up actively looking for her, mostly because he'd run out of ideas of where and how to look. He'd instead hunkered down and focused on work-- not the second-generation cosmic ray detector, nor the other projects the collaboration was working on, but the new concept. Everything said it should work, but he just couldn't believe it, it was too good, so he analyzed and re-analyzed, in greater detail and depth than he'd ever gone to before. But the idea, crazy as it seemed, wouldn't die. It just kept giving him encouraging, positive results. He was beginning to accept that he was going to have to build it, if only to finally prove to himself that it didn't work.
She was dressed more modestly than at the Hive, a T-shirt with the University mascot-- some cartoonish cat that in his short time here he hadn't bothered to learn about-- and her hair was a bit longer. Her eyes showed the faintest possible smile. Her look may have been ever so slightly softer. Still gold around her neck, but a different necklace, lighter.
He closed the computer; he'd become instinctively wary of people seeing what he was working on. There was no way he could concentrate on physics anyway, not with his heart rate rising and the prickling in his scalp and the humming he could already feel between his legs. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff. He knew that soon he would be diving off that cliff, into what unknown depths he couldn't say. He knew that would happen. But first he had to somehow find out something about what he was diving into, some way to survive the experience.
She seemed to be waiting for him to start first. "Fuck you," he said. He couldn't think of anything else. Seemed appropriate.
"I hope you will. But first I'd like to clear the air."
He waited.
"I'm sorry. I panicked. I thought you were someone else. Maybe that name, 'Pavel', confused me. It won't happen again."
He remained silent. He had no idea why a random name from that night would have caused such an extreme reaction. It was just one more inexplicable anomaly with this woman. There was a word he wanted to say to her, one obvious word that might unearth something deeper in her, that might help explain her. He continued waiting. Maybe she would reveal more about herself first.
"I know it looked like I was acting crazy. But you can't imagine-- I mean really, you can't, not anyone from... from around here can, I'm not being insulting-- what led me to that, that... and it's very frustrating for me too. I want to tell you. I just can't."
He liked seeing her a little flustered. She did that face-wiping movement again, then brushed her hair back behind her ears. It was just barely long enough now for that. "Muons," he said, seeing he wouldn't get anything more from her without a little prodding.
"Yes, that."
She glanced around the room. People were watching them. Her, really. Yes, she was dressed like a typical undergrad coed, but that didn't fool anyone. It wasn't just her unusual and striking physical beauty. Nor the gold, which no coed would be wearing. She somehow quickly met every one of the dozen pairs of eyes on her, making instant personal contact, and took a simple, elegant pose for them all to admire. It was plain to see that she believed she owned any room she entered, and was able to radiate that attitude strongly enough to convince others that she did. She sat at the chair across from him. That simple act broadcast to the room that she was here for
him
, that
he
was special.
It was a heady feeling, that he was special for her. He fought it down. "Muonophobia," he tried. "Totally new to medical science. Is that what it is?"
She smiled a little at his sarcasm, just with her eyes. "Yes, I've been trying to hide it for years."
"You were scared by a muon when you were a little girl back home in... the Middle East?"
"So you're telepathic, as well as being awesome in bed? It's my lucky day."
"How big are the muons where you come from?" He motioned with his hands as if he were examining an animal on the table about the size of a raccoon. "Do you get the furry kind, or the striped?"
"I know what a muon is."
"Of course. Basic education for all historians. The Great Muon War. Emperor Mu-on of China."
That added a genuine smile to her beautiful features.
"Okay, I'll stop. But just to be sure, are there any other subatomic phobias I should know about? Positrons? Quarks? Neutrinos? I deal with neutrinos a lot. I don't want to cause another panic attack."
She made a slight shake of her head. Her smile widened. A superior, satisfied smile. He realized he'd just performed a little comic routine for her. He was already starting that dive into the unknown. Into
her
.
He glanced around. Yes, she was dressed as a coed, but the stares continued from the other tables, and not just from men. She had to be a supermodel taking some time off to go back and get her MFA, or an actress here shooting a movie. Anything but a common student. "Want to take a walk?"
