The Mad Scientist Megapack: 23 Tales of Scientists, Creatures, & Diabolical Experiments! by Lawrence Watt-Evans & Edward M. Lerner

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans & Edward M. Lerner [Watt-Evans, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: science fiction, horror, short stories, mad scientist, monsters
ISBN: 9781479403769
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Alistair gestured grandly. “Think of a bullet shot into the air. It’s too slow to overcome Earth’s gravity, so it falls back. In the same way, there are forces that won’t let a particle escape from a nucleus. Still…”

We were circling around to our conversation of the other day, if not by a route as mundane as a circle. Maybe that was because Winkler grooved on tiny, wrapped-up-on-themselves, invisibly small dimensions. Seven or eight of them? Don’t ask me.

“Still?” I prompted hopefully.

Alistair nodded. “There is a low but real probability that the particle exists outside the nucleus. That’s why, occasionally, a particle simply appears far away. The farther away, the less likely, of course. Given enough atoms, and enough time, things will escape by quantum tunneling. Not that there are tunnels, of course.”

Of course, twice.

Alistair didn’t see me flinch. He was on a roll. “That’s radiation. That’s how a plutonium atom turns spontaneously into uranium. Its nucleus emits an alpha particle.”

“Really?” I asked. Double-declining-balance depreciation, I got, and the alternative minimum tax. But this?

“Oh, yes. That’s why there is virtually no naturally occurring plutonium on Earth. Over the eons, almost all of it has decayed into uranium.”

“And everything behaves quantum mechanically,” I said, tapping a Schedule B with my pencil, not much liking the skepticism in my voice. My car hadn’t been much, but I missed it. What the hell had I done? “Stuff shows up in places it can’t get.”

“If it’s made of atoms, it does,” Alistair said firmly. “It’s all only a matter of probability. Trust me on this.”

“I do,” I lied.

But soon I would believe. My office, when I returned that evening, thinking about measuring positions and about tunnels that weren’t—

Brimmed with cash. Made of atoms.

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