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He wiggles his carapace. He’s confused.
I try another approach. “Space has very very very fast hydrogen atoms. They move almost the speed of light. They were created by stars long long long ago.”
“No. No mass in space. Space is empty.”
Oh boy. “No, that’s wrong. There are hydrogen atoms in space. Very very fast hydrogen atoms.”
“Understand.”
“You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
I stare in shock.
How can a civilization develop space travel without ever discovering radiation?
—
“Dr. Grace,” she said.
“Dr. Lokken,” I said.
We sat across from each other at a small steel table. It was a tiny room, but spacious by aircraft-carrier standards. I didn’t quite understand its original purpose and its name was written in Chinese characters. But I think it was a place for the navigator to look at charts…?
“Thank you for making time to see me,” she said.
“Not a problem.”
As a rule, we tried to avoid each other. Our relationship had matured from “annoyed with each other” to “very annoyed with each other.” I was as much a part of the problem as she was. But we got off on the wrong foot all those months ago back in Geneva and never really improved.
“Of course, I don’t think this is necessary.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “But Stratt insisted you run this stuff by me. So here we are.”
“I have an idea. But I want your opinion.” She pulled out a file and handed it to me. “CERN is going to release this paper next week. This is a rough draft. But I know everyone there, so they let me see an advance copy.”
I opened the folder. “Okay, what’s it about?”
“They figured out how Astrophage stores energy.”
“Really?!” I gasped. Then I cleared my throat. “Really?”
“Yes, and frankly it’s amazing.” She pointed to a graph on the first page. “Long story short: It’s neutrinos.”
“Neutrinos?” I shook my head. “How the heck…”
“I know. It’s very counterintuitive. But there’s a large neutrino burst every time they kill an Astrophage. They even took samples to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and punctured them in the main detector pool. They got a massive number of hits. Astrophage can only contain neutrinos if it’s alive, and there’s a lot of them in there.”
“How does it make neutrinos?”
She flipped a few pages in the paper and pointed to another chart. “This is more your area than mine, but microbiologists have confirmed Astrophage has a lot of free hydrogen ions—raw protons with no electron—zipping around just inside the cell membrane.”
“Yeah, I remember reading about that. It was a group in Russia that found that out.”
She nodded. “CERN is pretty sure that, through a mechanism we don’t understand, when those protons collide at a high enough velocity, their kinetic energy is converted into two neutrinos with opposite momentum vectors.”
I leaned back, confused. “That is really odd. Mass usually doesn’t just ‘happen’ like that.”
