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to merge us with the LHC. And everyone knows that Gestner from CERN was going to be taking over responsibility for MAAC. Dr. Quint told me that the only way he’d be able to hold onto his position was for Hercules to have immediate success with something higher profile than CERN’s Higgs discovery. According to him we needed to find the graviton now, not in two year’s time with Hercules II, but now. Which meant leapfrogging to thirty TeV.”
    “Even though it wasn’t safe,” John said.
    “We didn’t know it wasn’t safe,” Quint said, stony-faced. “We still don’t.”
    “Okay, Matthew,” John said as if Quint wasn’t even there. “What do you think happened this morning?”
    Matthew looked at him squarely. “Have you ever heard of strangelets?”

3
    Matthew raced through a layman’s primer on particle physics. John had heard some of the terms bandied about during staff meetings but he had always tuned out when the scientific patois thickened. Now he gave it his full attention.
    Matthew explained that quarks were the fundamental particles of matter. They combined to form hadrons such as protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. There were six different types of quarks, all of them identified with certainty and given quirky names during the latter half of the twentieth century: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom, each with a different spin and charge. Strange quarks were highly unstable and existed for fleeting moments before decaying into lighter up and down quarks. Strangelets were hypothetical particles consisting of equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks bound together.
    “Hypothetical,” Quint spitting out the word like a hairball. “Did you hear that, Camp? Hypothetical.”
    “I won’t deny it,” Matthew said, “but most elemental particles were hypothetical before they were proved real.”
    “Go on,” John said. “I’m listening.”
    Strangelets, Matthew continued, were thought to have occurred in certain high-energy scenarios, such as the early stages of the formation of the universe, or within neutron stars or with head-on collisions of cosmic rays.
    “How about inside the MAAC?” John asked.
    “That’s the important question,” Matthew said. “Yes, theoretically colliders can produce strangelets. However, to date, no collider, not even the LHC has been shown to generate them. But this morning we exceeded all previous collision energies.”
    “And?”
    “David Laurent and his people are analyzing the spectrometer data. He’s going to come see me when he’s got some conclusions.”
    “And what if strangelets were produced?” John asked.
    “Again, it’s hypothetical, but it’s always been one of those infinitesimally small risk factors out there in collider research. These strangelets, the theory goes, particularly negatively charged strangelets, would be highly unstable but the larger they were the more stable they’d become. So the disaster scenario goes like this: one strangelet collides with a nucleus of ordinary matter and catalyzes its transformation into strange matter. This liberates considerable energy producing a larger more stable strangelet that collides with ordinary matter catalyzing more strange matter. And on and on in a chain reaction, until all the ordinary matter in the world is converted into a molten lump of strange matter. Again, hypothetically, this could happen in the blink of an eye.”
    John arched his brows. “That doesn’t seem to have happened.”
    “Clearly not, but I’ve always been concerned about more subtle scenarios,” Matthew said.
    “Such as?”
    “Okay, I know I’m out on a limb here, and you can see from Dr. Quint’s face that he thinks I’m on the fringe, but far more likely than a cataclysmic chain reaction involving massive amounts of ordinary matter is a short-chain of strange matter production. This would involve minute amounts of matter. The strange matter formed would spontaneously decay