The conference room at the Creighton Mine had wall diagrams showing the network of tunnels and drifts. A hunk of nickel ore sat as a centerpiece on a long wooden table. A Canadian flag stood at one end of the room; the other had a large window overlooking the parking lot and the rough countryside beyond.
At the head of the table was Bonnie Jean Mah-a white woman with lots of brown hair who was married to a Chinese-Canadian, hence her last name. She was the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and had just flown in from Ottawa.
Along one side of the table sat Louise Benoit, the tall, beautiful postdoc who’d been down in the SNO control room when the disaster had occurred. And on the other side sat Scott Naylor, an engineer from the company that had manufactured the acrylic sphere at the heart of SNO. Next to him was Albert Shawwanossoway, Inco’s top expert on rock mechanics.
“All right,” said Bonnie Jean. “Just to bring everyone up to date, they’ve started draining the SNO chamber, before the heavy water gets any more polluted. AECL is going to try to separate the heavy water from the regular water, and, in theory, we should be able to reassemble the sphere and load it up with the recovered heavy water, getting SNO back on-line.” She looked at the faces in the room. “But I’d still like to know exactly what caused the accident.”
Naylor, a balding, tubby white man, said, “I’d say the sphere containing the heavy water burst apart because of pressure from the inside.”
“Could the displacement caused by a man entering the sphere have done that?” asked Bonnie Jean.
Naylor shook his head. “The sphere held 1,100 tonnes of heavy water; you add a human being, weighing a hundred kilos-one-tenth of a tonne-and you’ve only increased the mass by one ten-thousandth. Human beings have about the same density as water, so the displacement increase would only be about one ten-thousandth, as well. The acrylic could easily handle that.”
“Then he must have used an explosive of some sort,” said Shawwanossoway, an Ojibwa of about fifty, with long, black hair.
Naylor shook his head. “We’ve done assays on the water recovered from the tank. There’s no evidence of any explosive-and there aren’t that many that would work soaking wet, anyway.”
“Then what?” asked Bonnie Jean. “Could there have been, I don’t know, a magma incursion or something, and the water boiled?”
Shawwanossoway shook his head. “The temperature of SNO, and the whole mine complex, is closely monitored; there was no change. In the observatory cavern, it held steady at its normal value of 105 degrees-Fahrenheit, that is; forty-one Celsius. Hot, but nowhere near boiling. Remember, too, that the mine is a mile and a quarter underground, meaning the air pressure is about thirteen hundred millibars-30 percent above that at sea level. And at higher pressures, of course, the boiling point goes up, not down.”
“What about the flip side?” asked Bonnie Jean. “What if the heavy water froze?”
“Well, it would indeed have expanded, just like regular water,” said Naylor. He frowned. “Yes, that would have burst the sphere. But heavy water freezes at 3.82 Celsius. It just couldn’t possibly get that cold that far down.”
Louise Benoit joined the conversation. “What if more than just the man entered the sphere? How much material would have to be added before it would burst?”
Naylor thought for a moment. “I’m not sure; it was never specced for that. We always knew exactly how much heavy water AECL was going to loan us.” He paused. “Maybe… I don’t know, maybe 10 percent. A hundred cubic meters, or so.”
“Which is what?” asked Louise. She looked around the conference room. “This room’s about six meters on a side, isn’t it?”
“Twenty feet?” said Naylor. “Yeah, I guess.”
“And it’s got ten-foot ceilings-that’s three meters,” continued Louise. “So you’re talking about a volume of material as big as the contents of this room.”
“More or less, I suppose.”
“That’s ridiculous, Louise,” said Bonnie Jean. “All you found down there was one man.”
Louise nodded, conceding that, but then she lifted her arched eyebrows. “What about air? What if a hundred cubic meters of air were pumped into the sphere?”
Naylor nodded. “I’d thought about that. I thought maybe a belch of gas had somehow welled up into the sphere, although how it would get inside I have no idea. The water samples we took were somewhat aerated, but…”
“But what?” asked Louise,
“Well, they were indeed aerated, with nitrogen, oxygen, and some CO 2, as well as some gabbroic rock dust and pollen. In other words, just regular mine air.”
“Then it couldn’t have come from the SNO facility,” said Bonnie Jean.
“That’s right, ma’am,” said Naylor. “That air is all filtered; it’s free of rock dust and other pollutants.”
“But the only parts of the mine connecting to the detector chamber are in the SNO facility,” said Louise.
Naylor and Shawwanossoway both nodded.
“Okay, okay,” said Bonnie Jean, steepling her fingers in front of her. “What have we got? The volume of material inside the sphere was increased by, at a guess, 10 percent or more. That might have been caused by an infusion of a hundred cubic meters or more of unfiltered air-although unless the air was pumped in very rapidly, it would have been compressed by the weight of the water, no? And, in any event, we don’t know where the air came from-it certainly wasn’t from SNO-or how it was conveyed into the sphere, right?”
“That’s about the size of it, ma’am,” said Shawwanossoway.
“And this man-we don’t know how he got into the sphere, either?” asked Bonnie Jean.
“No,” said Louise. “The access hatch between the inner heavy-water sphere and the outer regular-water containment tank was sealed tight even after the sphere broke apart.”
“All right,” said Bonnie Jean, “do we know how this-this Neanderthal, they’re calling him-even got down into the mine?”
Shawwanossoway was the only one present who actually worked for Inco. He spread his arms. “The mine-security people have reviewed the security-camera tapes and access logs for the forty-eight hours prior to the incident,” he said. “Caprini-that’s our head of security-swears that heads will roll when he finds out who screwed up by letting that guy in, and he says even worse will happen when he finds out who’s been trying to hide it.”
“What if no one is lying?” said Louise.
“That’s just not possible, Miss Benoit,” said Shawwanossoway. “No one could get down to SNO without it being recorded.”
“No one could if he came down by the elevator,” said Louise. “But what if he didn’t come that way?”
“You think maybe he climbed down two kilometers of vertical air shafts?” said Shawwanossoway, scowling. “Even if he could do that-and it would take nerves of steel-security cameras still would have recorded him.”
“That’s my point,” said Louise. “He obviously didn’t go down into the mine. As Professor Mah said, they’re calling him a Neanderthal-but he’s a Neanderthal with some sort of high-tech implant on his wrist; I saw that with my own eyes.”
“So?” said Bonnie Jean.
“Please!” exclaimed Louise. “You all must be thinking the same things I’m thinking. He didn’t take the elevator. He didn’t go down the ventilation shafts. He materialized inside the sphere-him, and a roomful of air.”
Naylor whistled the opening notes of the original Star Trek theme.
Everyone laughed.
“Come on,” said Bonnie Jean. “Yes, this is a crazy situation, and it might be tempting to jump to crazy conclusions, but let’s stay down to earth.”
Shawwanossoway could whistle, too. He did the theme to The Twilight Zone.
“Stop that!” snapped Bonnie Jean.