Lost and Wanted(115)

“You’ve got to see this, Mom,” he told me seriously, when he’d finished.

I was very familiar with the LIGO setup from all the lectures I’d attended, the schematic drawings in innumerable papers, but I’d never actually seen the interior of an interferometer in person. I found myself looking into the steel cavity of the vacuum chamber, a space maybe ten feet in diameter. In the center, between me and the dark opening to the beam pipe, were two mirrors: the size of a stack of dinner plates, but clear and fantastically strong. Each one was like a glass lozenge, or a gem. They hung suspended inside steel scaffolding, connected by pure glass threads. The penultimate mirror had a diamond clarity, but the optical coating on the lowest-hanging mirror—what made it so extraordinarily reflective—also lent the glass an opalescent, dark pink cast.

“The laser is bouncing off the mirror right now?” Jack confirmed.

Neel nodded. “It is. But to see an infrared beam, you need your Cyclops eye. Get on the stool first, and then I’ll hand it to you.”

He handed Simmi the monocular, and the children took turns looking at the laser. They asked smart questions: Why did the air look green around the red beam? If the laser was so powerful, why didn’t it burn the mirror?

When they’d both had a turn, Simmi wanted to look again. Jack obligingly returned the monocular, but as Simmi stepped up and put her eye to the instrument, we heard the sharp crack of the metal tube hitting the window.

Before I could react, Neel grabbed Simmi, swinging her violently to the floor. “Careful!” he barked, pushing the children out of the way; we stumbled backward, through the plastic, and I dragged the kids underneath the steel table, crouching with them there and instinctively trying to protect their faces. I braced myself for an explosion: breaking glass and the roar of the machine. But nothing happened. They cowered against me, pressed against my sides, but after a few moments they looked up, trying to determine from my expression whether they were safe.

    “Neel?” Vlad called out from across the lab. “Everything okay?”

Neel was checking the glass viewport, shaking his head. When he was satisfied, he replaced the protective cover. “All good,” he called back to Vlad. Simmi and Jack and I crawled out, and climbed unsteadily to our feet.

“What happened?” Jack said.

“Nothing,” Neel said. “No problem.” But he looked over their heads at me, and mimed wiping sweat from his brow.

“Did I break it?” Simmi asked in a small voice.

Neel put his hand on her shoulder. “No,” he said. “No—but I was actually more worried about you than the machine. If the viewport were to crack, the glass would implode. The pipe would start sucking in everything around it, like a giant vacuum cleaner. It would suck you right in with it.”

“And then the lasers would burn you up,” Jack concluded.

“Well, no,” Neel said. “The laser would shut off automatically. But your head wouldn’t be in very good shape with all that broken glass.”

I still had my arm around Simmi, and I hugged her to me. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.” But her voice was shaky.

“I’m so sorry,” Neel said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It was kind of exciting,” Jack said. “Right? Has the porthole ever actually broken?”

“The viewport,” Neel corrected automatically. “It happened once in Italy, at the VIRGO detector. No one got hurt, but the experiment shut down for a year.”

Simmi’s eyes darted around the lab, as if anticipating danger from another source. “Is the tour finished?” she asked.

“If you want it to be,” Neel said. He looked at me guiltily, and I understood: it had been going so well. “There’s more we could see—” he ventured, but the kids’ faces made it clear that they were finished with the lab. Neel changed his tack. “I wanted to talk to Helen about something. We have a computer with a really fast connection that you guys could use in the control room, if you want to play a game or something?”

    Simmi turned to Jack. “Do you like Fruit Smash?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I play it all the time.”

Neel took the kids back to the control room to set them up at the computer. “They’re having a great time in there, mutilating digital fruit,” he said when he returned, a few minutes later. “They won’t be able to reenter the lab without an ID card. But I told them to knock loudly if they need something.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

Neel had exchanged the safety goggles for his regular glasses, and taken off his cap, and so I took mine off as well. I noticed he was wearing the same sweater he’d worn to his engagement party.

“That was completely my fault, by the way,” he said. “I should have warned them to be careful of the monocular hitting the viewport. I probably should have held it for them.”

“You’ve never given a tour for children.”

But that didn’t seem to reassure Neel. He looked even more upset than I would have expected, given that no harm had been done. “I’m not very good with kids.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s like anything else—you just haven’t had any practice.”