Britten stood there looking at Glover. "This is a hell of a time to tell me," he exploded, finally. "What's become so secret about this experiment?"
"Obviously, I can't tell you. I'm sorry, but we'll make it up to you somehow. We'll think of something you can do while you're here, and if necessary you can stay a little longer."
Stay longer! Outraged, Britten fled to his room. It was all he could do to stick out the remainder of his two years.
He could not sleep that night. Little teeth of anger nibbled into his mind, while the basic question repeated itself in endless circles. Why had his experiment been pulled out from under him?
Fundamental experiments in high-energy particle physics were not generally classified secret. What were they doing which had suddenly become so important?
The general purpose of the space laboratory was to gather basic information about the laws of nature. The optical telescopes studied the planets as well as the farthest nebulae, unimpeded by atmospheric disturbances. The tremendous twenty-five-mile-diameter radiotelescope pinpointed short-wave radio vibrations from all parts of space. The solid-state group could study the properties of matter in a vacuum chamber of rarity unattainable anywhere on Earth.
In Jim Britten's group, known variously as the Elementary Particle Division, the Lunatron group, or simply as the Lunatics, the topic of investigation was the meson. A long time ago people had considered atoms the most elementary particles. Then they found out about protons and neutrons, which were the bricks that made up the atomic nuclei. A little later, when scientists learned how to build atom smashers such as the two-billion-volt proton synchrotron, they found that they could knock mesons out of the nucleus, and they decided that the protons and neutrons were not so simple after all.
Year after year the atom smashers had become bigger and bigger. There came a time when they could not be built on the surface of the Earth any longer, so a space laboratory was conceived, built around the doughnut of the ten-thousand-billion-volt proton synchrotron. Protons, whirling around for thousands of cycles in this vast doughnut, eighty miles in circumference, could acquire energies equal to those of the most powerful cosmic rays. Even mesons shattered at this energy.
By inspecting the remnants of these broken mesons, scientists could begin to get some idea as to the ultimate structure of matter and energy.
Now, Jim Britten thought, what was there about this work that should suddenly become too secret to be published? Peace had reigned on Earth for many years, and it was once more fashionable to think of science as being free and unbound by security regulations.