Earth Cult Read Online Free PDF

stink of the solution.’
    â€˜That’s right. You’ve got a lot of perchloroethylene down here.’
    â€˜Four tanks each containing 150,000 gallons of the stuff. Any spots or stains you want cleaning off?’
    This was a reference to the other more common use of perchloroethylene – as a dry-cleaning fluid. It was exactly the same chemical composition as the fluid which could be bought in any hardware store, the important thing being that it contained two carbon atoms and four chlorine atoms, the chlorine absorbing a neutrino to become an argon atom.
    The neutrino really was a ghost particle. Its name derived from the Italian
neutrino
, meaning ‘little neutral one’, proposed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. The existence of such a particle had been postulated back in the thirties by Wolfgang Pauli to maintain the laws of the conservation of energy, but it wasn’t till the mid-fifties that specific experimental evidence was forthcoming that the particle had actuallybeen detected. And its elusiveness wasn’t all that surprising when you considered that, on average, a neutrino would have to travel through 3,500 light-years of solid matter – something as dense as lead – before hitting and interacting with another particle. So even allowing for the fact that billions and billions of neutrinos were passing through the Earth every second it perhaps wasn’t to be wondered at that an infinitesimal percentage of them was detected in the tanks.
    Yet if this were so, why was Friedmann unhappy about discussing his results in detail? Had he discovered fresh evidence about solar neutrinos that he was unwilling to reveal, or was he trying to hide a paucity of hard factual data with bland assurances that the detection rate was ‘consistent with other findings to date’? Frank Kersh couldn’t figure it out; it was a tiny yet irritating puzzle whose solution eluded him.
    They rode in a small fibre-glass cab along an electrified track, moving at a steady fifteen miles an hour down the main illuminated gallery before turning into a smaller, darker tunnel which seemed to curve and descend deeper, though it was difficult to estimate distance and orientation because there were no points of reference with which to judge their progress. The tunnel became narrower still, the two powerful lights mounted on the roof of the cab probing the blank walls ahead, and it seemed to Frank that they had travelled a considerable distance. He asked the technical engineer which direction they were heading in and how much further they had to go.
    â€˜Nearly two miles from the shaft to the installation, which is slap-bang under the mountain. So you’re not only a mile underground, you’ve got another 14,000 feet of solid rock on top of that. That way the Professor figures we screen out most of the background radiation – gamma rays, X-rays and so on – and anything that gets through all that can only be our little elusive friend.’
    Frank stared ahead into the twin circles of light bouncing against the roof and walls. On the floor of the tunnel hecould see reflected the single steel track, like a smooth shiny metal ribbon vanishing into the blackness.
    He said, ‘How many people do you have working on the Project?’
    â€˜Upwards of twenty. There are eighteen of us in the research team, including the Professor and Dr Leach, and half a dozen engineers who look after the mine and see that the winding gear is properly maintained.’
    â€˜No women?’
    The technical assistant shook his head ruefully. ‘No women.’
    â€˜What’s your function?’
    â€˜I work with Dr Leach. He’s in charge of the detection equipment underground, so we operate a shift rota with four men permanently on duty. Gets to be pretty boring except for once a week when we flush the tanks with helium; that’s to collect any argon-37 present which we then run a