A machine called Z to return a message from the invisible world.
Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber
in the middle of the New Mexico desert
lies the heart of a machine...
It is never night inside the Machine.
... as yawning, befuddled scientists... sit in offices
in a nearby building, trapped by their own reflections
in the blackened windows... as this oesophageal dark
falls over coyote and jackrabbit and moves everything
towards sleep and dreams... the Z Machine is awake.
... in a ring like a metallic Stonehenge
... 20 Rexolite disks of the vacuum chamber
look like flying saucers.
... concentric pool of five-weight oil
and deionized water seems bottomless
... half-million-gallon tanks that sit one inside the other
like a wheel within a wheel
... depths in the Machine,
invisible worlds revealing themselves,
the secret body of the universe floating up.
Deuterium, tritium, helium
... the Machine takes control.
A siren sounds,
red lights flash,
doors automatically lock.
... their misgivings.
The electricity pours past the sharks' mouths,
is redirected downward, along the Z axis,
into the vacuum chamber, blitzing and bombarding
from all sides a three-dimensional target
in a gold-plated can,
a delicately strung array of tungsten wires
the size of a spool of thread,
hanging in black space like a tiny chandelier.
Driven so furiously in the Machine,
and then storming the array,
the pulse of electricity -
enough juice now to light up America like a birthday cake
- instantly vapourises the tungsten wire into plasma,
a superheated ion gas.
The ions hover and dance
along the invisible circumference
once described by the array,
while a relentless magnetic field
keeps pressing on them,
shoving them from behind.
Thrusting and squeezing and ramming
until the ions can no longer resist,
the centre cannot hold,
and in that hot nanosecond - Boom !
Everything becomes one.
This is not a gentle conjunction
but a Pandora's box
suddenly ripped open by nuclear passion,
an orgy of ions.
Boom !
Lightning fills the Machine,
veins out over the surface of the water.
Temperatures flare to those inside the sun.
The earth rocks once again.
And in few billionths of a second,
290 terawatts -
80 times the power generated on earth at any given time
- roar to life inside the Machine.
... you might as well be watching
the beginning of the universe.
Or the end of it.
Contained in that single flash of white light...
is everything we know - and everything we may become.
... and, with it,
the possibilities of time travel
and galaxy hopping
... Or the end of time as we know it,
a hole ripped in the universe by the Z Machine,
something many doomsayers predict,
and the earth sucked into oblivion.
Our downfall or salvation.
A fusion machine they call Z.
The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion.
... a funny thing happened on the way to the chop shop.
Maybe it was 11th-hour desperation,
or some invisible bolt of providence
visited on a few overworked scientists...
All of a sudden - Boom !
Forty trillion watts!
No one believed it.
... Boom !
Two hundred trillion watts in a single pulse!
Short of a nuclear blast,
it was the most energy ever released on earth,
... the Z Machine was a third of the way there.
In science,
if you do something once that's never been done before,
it's considered a mistake.
Do it twice,
and it's simply a mirage.
But the third time it becomes the truth.
With Z's new, seemingly...
Still there is... Douglas's nagging doubt,
... it is possible to believe that you
are merely trapped in the rubble of some cosmic joke
with no punch line...
... a race against the ticking internal clocks
of each scientist who entertains the question:
will I live to see it?
... we're going to have one serious pizza party
around here if it is."
... Last evening,
the Machine inhaled the sun,
this room filled with lightning,
and then everything exploded.
Now,
when the crown is unbolted,
hitched to a hook,
and lifted away by the crane,
a group of men tentatively peer down into the Machine,
goggle-eyed,
perhaps expecting to find some traces of gold dust
or... by some miracle of the universe,
maybe a fully formed angel,
sleeping with its white wings...
So the men look and look,
down into the centre of Z,
the womb of the Machine,
for some message there sent back
from the invisible world.
But it is just a well of black space -
plasma and atoms unable to hold the weight of their gaze, the chill of their wonder. |
