May 31, 3:30 P.M.
Gifu Prefecture, Japan
"We should tell someone," Jun Yoshida insisted.
With his usual insufferable calmness, Dr. Riku Tanaka merely cocked his head from right to left, like a heron waiting to spear a fish. The young physicist continued to study the data flowing across the monitor.
"It would be imprudent," the small man finally mumbled, as if to himself, lost in the fog of his Asperger's.
As director of the Kamioka Observatory, Jun had spent the entire day buried at the heart of Mount Ikeno, in the shadow of the massive Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector. So had their Stanford colleague, Dr. Janice Cooper. The three of them had been monitoring neutrino activity following the early-morning spike. The source had been pinpointed to a mountain chasm in Utah, where some explosive event had taken place. But the exact details remained sketchy.
Was it a nuclear accident? Was the United States trying to cover it up?
He wouldn't put it past the Americans. As a precaution, Jun had already alerted the international community about the spike, refusing to let such knowledge be buried away. If this was a secret experiment gone awry, the world had a right to know. He glared a bit at Janice Cooper, as if she were to blame. Then again, her incessant cheeriness was reason enough for resentment.
"I think Riku is right," she said, speaking respectfully to her superior. "We're still struggling to pinpoint this new source. And besides, the pattern of this new burst doesn't look the same as the one in Utah. Perhaps we should hold off on any official announcement until we know more."
Jun studied the screen. A graph continued to scroll, like a digital version of a seismograph. Only this chart tracked neutrino activity rather than earthquakes-but considering what they'd found, it was earthshaking in its own right. For the past eighty minutes, they'd picked up a new surge in neutrino generation. Just as before, it appeared to be coming from earth-generated geoneutrinos .
Only Dr. Cooper was correct: this pattern was distinctly different. The Utah explosion created a single monstrous burst of neutrinos. Afterward it had died down to a low burble, like a teapot on a stove. This new surge of activity was less intense, coming in cyclical bursts: a small spike, followed by a stronger one... then a lull, and it repeated, like the lub-dub beat of a heart.
It had been going on for over an hour.