chapter 0

"Hey!" "Hey You!"

"Hey!, I'm talkin' to you, punk." You knew Joe was serious whenever he actually said "you" and not his normal "ya".

Joe Venitto was an old school cop who hadn't kept up with the times. He thought you could just yell and everyone would turn around to see who was yellin'. But with just about everyone wearing earphones and iPods, nobody heard him.

So he actually had to run up and tap the young man on the shoulder to get his attention. The kid turned around in disgust with a look of "who would dare touch me", but upon seeing the blue and gold of Boston's finest his look changed to one of "oh, no, what did I do now".

Joe, huffing and puffing from the hundred foot run, eyes bulged and darting, looked like he was going to have a coronary right in front of the poor kid. "Hey kid, didn't you know there's a city ordanance that you've got to take headphones or earphones out when crossing the street?" Having caught his breath Joe put his best intimidator look back on for the befuddled kid. "What? You gotta' be kiddin', you're kiddin', right?" "Hey, did Tommy set up up to dis?" Joe slowly shook his head side to side. "Look kid, I tell ya what. I'm feelin' good today so I won't write ya up. But if I see ya doin' it again, I'll throw da' book at ya."

So the kid nodded his agreement, said "yes sir", and turned to resume whatever he was doing before Joe injected himself into his life.

Joe turned with a grin feeling like he was one tough dude who was going to teach this younger generation how to respect the system he was dedicated to upholding. He sucked in his substantial gut, or "sixpack" as he liked to brag to his buddies, and started to walk down the street towards his favorite street vendor. The run had gotten him worked up and a nice cold Diet Coke would hit the spot about now.

Professor Norbert Abernathy, or Pro Abe as his grad students affectionately called him, had just finished his lecture and was dealing with the normal student queries and excuses cloaked in sincerely posed questions that only someone as smart as Norb could tell was actually demonstrating how little they knew.

"Pro Abe!" Varodi was Norb's newest Post-Doctoral assistant. Norb looked Varodi's way his eyebrows up noting his attention.

"We've got something you've got to see." Varodi was not prone to such declarations, normally a reserved "super geek" as his other students called him. So Norb knew this was something worthy of walking out right in the middle of the lowly undergrad whining.

Having made it into the hallway, which had mostly cleared of student life and was exceedingly quiet Norbert noted, Norb asked Varodi to explain himself.

"Well Pro Abe, we were running a simple startup test of the bubble chamber for the Lab, and something happended that we could not explain." The Lab was the word his students used as code for upper class particle Physics Lab. Norb's eyebrow went up since Varodi stating there was something that could not be explained was something of a suprise in itself. Varodi was widely regarded as one of the five brightest new PhD's in the world of Particle Physics, coming to Norb straight from Princeton's Applied Physics Lab, so for him to state there was something "we" could not explain was cause for concern.

"Well Varodi we very well can't have mysteries in the Universe can we? Hummmm?" Norb smiled broadly to disarm Varodi's apprehension and insecurity that there was something he did not know. Varodi came from a culture where you were indebted to your seniors, especially one who was clearly your intellectual superior, and to present yourself as weak to your "leader" could lead to your dismissal as an "inferior"; the most ugly of adjectives to be used to a academician-in-training.

As they entered the lab it was dead quiet, all the undergrads had left for "liquid refreshment", so they could review the results in peace and quiet.

"Look here Pro Abe, see this one trace", pointing to the gentle arc of small bubbles produced by the motion of a subatomic particle in water the fragments from a horrendously powerful impact that a proton makes with a nucleus.

"It should be here, but it suddenly disappears. I've checked and rechecked the system. Everything checks out." Varodi, frustrated, declared.

"Hummmm... I trust you Varodi, what do you make of it?" Norb probed his junior seriously now. Norb also saw that eveything was in order except for that little disappearing bubble trace.

"Well Pro Abe I've got some experiments I'd like to run to first verify everything's OK in the accelerator and bubble chamber, then I'll do some calc's on the trace and get back to you."

Norb knew this meant unstopped activity from Varodi until everything was completed. Sleep, food, sometimes even excretive functions took a back seat to experiments. Varodi's singular focus was commendable albeit slightly over-the-top in Norb's opinion.

"That's fine Varodi, but don't forget you have a wife and baby who need you more than I need to know the reason for disappearing bubbles. So if it takes a little longer nobody but us will know." Smiling, Norb brought Varodi back to reality as he sheepishly smiled his acknowledgement.

Norb left the lab wondering what Varodi would find...