Cosmic microwave background surge¶
The cosmic microwave background surge (CMB spike) is a burst of cosmic microwave background radiation that Soviet detectors recorded and triangulated to the Marblehead nuclear incident, giving Boris Yeltsin his reason to question the Biz.
| Type | Lore / anomaly |
| Aliases | CMB spike |
| Detected by | Soviet (Russian) detectors |
| Traced to | Marblehead, Massachusetts |
| First appearance | Radford Horrors 01 |
Description¶
In the Metropol opera house in Moscow, Yeltsin asks Dick "The Biz" Baxter whether he knows what the galactic cosmic microwave background is. Ezra decides the Biz has only a vague memory of it from college, and Andre notes that it was discovered in 1964. Yeltsin explains it as "a kind of echo" of the Big Bang. The Soviets built detectors to study it, and "last year" they spiked, registering an unusual surge. When they triangulated the source, it coincided with the nuclear incident in Marblehead. "Nuclear reactors do not emit cosmic microwave background," Yeltsin says (Radford Horrors 01). See The Marblehead explosion.
Role in the Biz's interrogation¶
The surge leads Yeltsin into a longer conversation about Marblehead. The Biz sticks to a vague version of events: the military got involved, he was there in an advisory capacity, and he does not know what munitions were used. He does not admit that the team deployed a very small nuclear weapon against the creature in the water. Yeltsin already knows about the engineered, weaponized worms and says Russian intelligence suggests there was "another organism, or something like an organism". The Biz confirms there was a huge sea creature connected to the worms. He did not go down in the submarine, but he saw it chase their car, "a big, confusing grub creature with rings rotating around it" (Radford Horrors 01). See The angel thing.
Yeltsin never says outright that the creature caused the surge, and the episodes never explain it.
Trivia¶
The same conversation covers other matters: Yeltsin says Russia is "developing a test" for people who are not who they seem, and shows the Biz a broken, half-melted copy of the flashlight weapon, taken from a man wearing very dark, welding-style glasses (Radford Horrors 01).