Intellivore - Diane Duane [56]
“I don’t have any appetite, Beverly, really.”
“I understand.” Probably she did, but Picard could just imagine what else Crusher was thinking on the subject: probably something a lot less tactful, and indeed, he’d often enough given her cause. He opened his mouth to agree, but never had a chance. “Your blood sugar must be down in your boots, though. Eat! That’s an order. A sandwich, a milkshake, I don’t care … just eat.”
“I will. I have something to take care of first … but I will.”
Picard walked away.
Down in engineering, a big, blocky pod assembly had been erected not far from the main warp emitter coils. Engineering crew were circling it in a wary way, as well they might have: inside it was nearly a cubic meter of antimatter.
There was a control panel off to one side, and Geordi La Forge was lingering over it like a mother with a sick child. Every now and then, he would look up from the panel and take his pulse to see if it had gone down any. It hadn’t. He was very nervous.
It’s all very well to talk about siphoning antideuterium slush around by the hektoliter, like so much beer moving from the keg to the tap. But the amounts usually used in any given day are reckoned by the microgram—amounts that could not only fit on the head of a pin, but could hold square dances on it. People tend to become blasé about the kind of energy produced by the total annihilation of matter and antimatter. Geordi was not blasé about it. He knew.
So it was with trepidation, but also a certain amount of excitement, that Geordi had gone down to the pod access area on Deck 42 and run about a cubic meter of the antideuterium slush into a magnetic bottle. He had taken his time about it; the failure of the magnetic field around the bottle, even just enough failure to let a single atom or particle of conventional matter into the antimatter while it was being transferred, would have given a new and less strictly astronomical meaning to the term big bang.
It had to be walked back to engineering, since it wasn’t really practical to put antimatter through the transporter. Slowly and with care, Geordi and one of his staff had taken the big bottle back up to engineering on a levitator pad, and people had looked out their doors at it, as it passed, with very dubious expressions indeed. Apparently, word got around this ship even faster than he had thought.
The engineering staffer helping him was Lieutenant Farrell. She was a young, cool-looking blonde, with a wicked theoretical sense; subatomic physics was her preferred field. She glanced back at some of the people who were watching them, and said under her breath, “You’d think they thought we were going to drop it.”
“Please … don’t even think about it.”
They got down to engineering without incident, and now stood at the control panel together, looking at the tank by the warp coils, set up where they could watch it and work on it in comfort… if comfort was the word.
“You and I,” Geordi said, “are going to be mad bombers.”
“I think we’ve got the mad part right,” she said, when he explained to her what they were going to be doing. “Isn’t it bad enough having this much antimatter out of the containment tanks in one lump—”
“Lump?” Geordi looked rather scornfully at the tank they were working on. “That’s slush. That’s not a lump … yet. But it will be.”
“So will we, pretty soon,” said Farrell, shivering. The tank’s refrigeration, needed for the supercooling required for the magnetic fields, chilled the air for a yard or two around.
“See,” Geordi said, “the problem is that if you’re going to stick an antimatter bomb into a large body and then expect it to blow up, you can’t use it in slush form. Slush sloshes. It’s unstable in its own matter configuration, and it’ll produce unpredictable annihilation results if it’s not stabilized. You’ll get an uneven energy output curve when it blows: one side of the explosion might be stronger than the other, the planet won’t crack evenly … and then where would we be?”
Farrell shook her head in a resigned way as Geordi peered