“Wow,” I said from the threshold.
“Right?” chirped Tristan happily. Somewhat unnecessarily, he extended a hand to assist me back down to the floor. “The professor is giddy. Tell him he should throw the switch.”
“It is your project,” Oda-sensei said peaceably, sipping coffee from a blue thermos. “The honor should be yours.”
“It was your project first! We’ve been arguing about this all week,” said Tristan to me with a grin. “You call it, Stokes.”
I called it in favor of Oda, and Tristan saluted him with a flourish more Renaissance than military. Tristan then closed the ODEC door and engaged several massive mechanical latches.
With a childish, nervous smile, Oda-sensei handed off the thermos to Rebecca, then responded to Tristan with a gesture something between a nod and a bow. Console Max stood up, stepped back from the console, and made a similar gesture, inviting him to sit down. Oda, with a little don’t mind if I do smile, took the Seat of Authority behind the console and pulled on a communications headset.
There was one moment of potent, expectant stillness. What a thrill this must be for him, I remember thinking. I was desperately curious. The enormousness of it far exceeded my urgency to discuss Erszebet Karpathy.
“Exterior vent ports open,” Oda intoned.
I had no idea what he was talking about until I heard the familiar rumble and groan of the loading dock door being hauled up. “Check,” shouted a Max. He was echoed by another Max who had just opened the door that fronted the street.
“Atmospheric exchange augmentation systems to full power,” Oda said.
Tristan darted over to a white plastic window fan—one of a pallet load of such that we had acquired from Home Depot—and turned it on full blast. I saw now that several more were scattered around the room. Feeling a desire to be part of this momentous occasion, I turned on all that were in reach.
“Check!” Tristan called, when all of them were spinning. I could hear a much larger, industrial-sized fan humming out by the loading dock, and another “Check!” from that quarter.
“Burst disks and pressure relief valves are all green,” said Oda, glancing at his display. “Initiating cryogenic chill-down sequence in three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Cryogenic pumps began to hum, and a few seconds later we heard the sizzle and hiss of liquid nitrogen coming into contact with room-temperature plumbing. The idea was simple enough, now that I understood what was happening: we needed to pump the LN2 from the big storage tanks by the loading dock, through piping that the Maxes had installed, to the gap between the ODEC’s inner and outer vessels. But since the plumbing and the vessels alike were currently warmer than the boiling point of LN2, the liquid was going to boil off at first, until everything got chilled down. As before, clouds of milky, chilly fog spilled out of valves all over the facility. But the “atmospheric exchange augmentation systems” did a good job of pushing it out the “exterior vent ports.” Outside of these—as we could all tell by checking surveillance monitors that had been racked up on the half-shattered remnant of a nearby wall—several Lukes were standing guard to make sure that random people didn’t just wander in off the street. The Lukes had begun showing up a couple of days ago; they were big, beefy, taciturn, and dressed in rent-a-cop uniforms devoid of insignia. They seemed to think Tristan was cool.
The cryogenic drama lessened as (one inferred) the plumbing and vessels became super-cold, and then we could hear the fluid level rising between the ODEC’s inner and outer walls. Oda had purchased a large number of cheap digital thermometers from Home Depot and duct-taped them all over the place, and it was fun, for a while, to see their readings plummet into triple-digit negative numbers.
“How much farther?” I asked Tristan, during a lull.
“To what?” he inquired.
“To absolute zero.”
He shook his head. “Not going there today.”
“I thought that was the whole point.”
“Don’t pout. This is a dry run. With LN2. Which costs less than milk. If it works we’ll source the liquid helium and do it for real.”
“Vessel is full. Hatch is full. Both holding steady,” Oda announced. “Confirming criticality in lower magnet ring.”
“Criticality? Sounds very MLA,” I said.
“MLA?”
“Modern Language Association.”
Tristan sighed. “He just means that the magnets in the bottom-most ring have now been cold enough, long enough, that they have dropped through their TC—their critical temperature—and become superconducting.” He seemed mildly offended by my quip.
“Ah, so that’s the purpose of the dry run,” I said.
“Yeah. Until all of the magnet rings go superconducting, we can’t even turn the ODEC on in any meaningful sense of the word.”
This at least gave me something to watch. The vessels, of course, had filled from the bottom up, and so the magnets on the bottom had spent a longer time exposed to cryogenic temperatures. From bottom to top, there were thirty-two distinct rings of little magnets, each of which completely encircled the cavity—the ODEC’s inner vessel. The rings were stacked one above the next, spanning the full height of the cavity. The Maxes had mounted an LED on each ring. It was red when the magnets were warm, but turned blue when they had gone superconducting. Over the course of a couple of minutes we enjoyed the simple but weirdly exciting spectacle of watching that column of LEDs turn from red to blue, from the bottom to the top.
“We have full criticality,” Oda announced when the uppermost one turned blue.
I had found myself standing next to Rebecca. On an impulse, I turned toward her and raised my hand, palm facing out. Startled by the movement, she swiveled her head to place me under her blue-eyed gaze. It was like staring into a couple of those LEDs.
It occurred to me that she might not recognize the gesture. “High five?” I said weakly. She looked away as if hoping that the whole regrettable incident could be forgotten.
Meanwhile her husband was busy. “Internal sensor calibration matrix has been computed and flashed to embedded firmware. Ready to boot the renormalization feedback loop, Vladimirs?”
“Check!” shouted a Vladimir from the server room.