CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel (14 page)

She had to stop them.

“I agree to your most generous offer.”

“Wonderful. Mr. Gufstafson here will show you how to get there and will arrange for enough food for you and your people for your journey there. You should be able to make it by tonight.”

She had to leave now.

“I’ll be back with you in a couple of minutes, but now I have to attend to another matter.” His voice sounded closer.

Melanie dashed for the exit. She leapt through the door and into the elevator. “I’m sorry, but I completely forgot my notes, which the senator needs,” she yelled to the guard. “I’ll be right back.” The door closed. She didn’t need to see how the guard responded, and she didn’t want to see Westerling.

The senator walked past the conference table to the door to the waiting room. He pushed on it, noticing that it was already slightly ajar, blocked by a doorstop.

“Thank you for waiting, Dr. Reid…”

The room was empty.

“Wait!” Max yelled. The two doctors made their announcement and ran out the door without saying anything further. “Hold up!” he hollered through the opening. They stopped.

He was startled when he saw Magdalena had waited outside, apparently equally intrigued by the two scientists spouting craziness. “You’re still here,” Max mused for just a moment. “Great. Get Preston and bring him to their lab… You know where that is, right?” Nodding, she burst off in the opposite direction.

When Max caught up with Merriweather and Stoneridge, he asked, “So, what’s with the CMEs?”

“Follow us to our lab and we’ll show you,” Monty said, and they both jogged to the side entrance of the Recreational Facility and School, rather than Research, where Max thought all the scientists had their labs. Although both buildings were similar four-story ultra-modern structures, it was Research where, as Max had told his friends during the tour, “most of the magic here happens.”

“Your lab is above Rec?” he asked.

Dr. Stoneridge was doubled over at the entry threshold, unable to move, completely out of breath. “No… below… by Library.”

Dr. Merriweather was about to open the door, when Max signaled a pause. “Let’s hold up for Preston. In the meantime, hello. Doctor Stoneridge, I presume?” Max took the doctor’s clammy hand.

“Oh sorry, where are my manners?” he said, recovering from the short run. “Mr. Thompson,” he puffed as he shook Max’s hand, “Ron is fine, or Dr. Ron. Many seem to like that, but I don’t have a preference.”

“Okay, Dr. Ron, I’m Max.” He turned to the other and said, “Dr. Merriweather, right?”

“Monty; pleasure to officially meet you. Great place you built here.”

“Thanks, Monty. And your lab is by the Library rather than in the Research building?”

“Oh, yes, I can see why that’s puzzling. It’s because of the computer power and the resources for research—we’re tapped directly into the Library’s servers.”

“And the Library’s space.” Dr. Ron smiled. “I like to go there for a break. Maybe it’s just a need for people. And yet it’s quiet.” He seemed to be composing himself.

“So, is there nothing you can tell me about what you’ve found while we wait for Preston?”

“It’s better if we show you,” Dr. Ron said adamantly.

“Fine. Until then, please tell me where you come from and what led you to Cicada.” Max really hated small talk, but he wanted to know more about these two men who he was sure were about to rock his world.

She blew into the reception area of Comms and bounded up the stairs to Preston’s open office door.

“Hi, Mags,” a voice softly slipped out from beyond the partially open door of the dark Comms room.

Magdalena slowed at the doorway, squinting to see inside, but she had just come out of the sunshine and it seemed black as a pre-Event night in there. “Webs, is that you?” She knew it was but didn’t expect him. “What are you doing here on your day off?” she asked but still stepped toward Preston’s door.

Webber appeared in the doorway. “I was waiting for Sally King. She came in yesterday with Max and his friends. She’s a techie from the outside world and showed interest in what we did. She even knew we had Crays.” He spoke like a happy child, anxious for his scheduled time to go play in the sandbox.

“It says Cray on the side of each supercomputer,” Magdalena said playfully.

“Don’t worry, Mags, no one wants to replace you.”

She was already in front of Preston’s door, but when he said this, she whipped her head back to him, not understanding what he meant.
Funny, I wasn’t even thinking that
. She shook her head and resumed her mission, knocking on Preston’s door. “Gotta go, Web. Enjoy your new girlfriend.” She hid her smile and walked in.

“Mr. Tanner,” she offered apologetically, “sorry to bother you, but…” She noticed someone else in the room. “Oh, sorry, Johnson. Please excuse me,” she said to both. “I need to borrow Preston Tanner.

“Sorry, sir, but you’re needed right now at Dr. Ron and Dr. Merriweather’s labs; they’re waiting with Max for you. It’s very important.”

“Johnson, are we good now?” Preston asked, rising from his seat.

“Thank you, sir, we’re good now,” Johnson replied meekly, much as if he were a puppy who’d just had its nose whacked with a rolled-up paper. Magdalena wondered if Mr. Tanner had tongue-lashed him.

“Let’s go,” she insisted, and they rushed out of his office. Just before they turned the corner to the stairs, Magdalena caught a glimpse inside the darkened Comms room, the door now closed.

She leapt down the stairs but still mentally chewed on the image. Other than what splashed through the clear door with the fluorescents off and no outside windows to provide illumination, the room, except for the first few feet in and the console, was dark. Webber was sitting alone at his console. It was not uncommon for him to be in the dark; he often told her he liked the solitude and listened to his music on headphones. But he didn’t have his headphones on. Instead, he had the large drawer in the console opened—one that was always locked—and from that drawer, Webber was holding what looked like a telephone.

“Have you all met?” Preston asked Max.

“Yes, of course,” Monty responded. “Please, Mister… I mean Max, let’s go; we need to show you this.”

After passing the Library, Monty fiddled with a key to a wood door protected by metal bars. Then they greeted another door, all metal and very solid looking. Dr. Ron stuck his thumb on a flat shiny plate above the door handle. A red light flashed and the door clicked open.

Max didn’t remember seeing this on the plans.

Dr. Ron already wore his lab coat, and so he waited for Max, Preston and Magdalena to grab one each out of a closet full of them, and then walked them through a fairly large laboratory.

Two women stood up as they approached. Monty announced, “These are our wives, Stephanie Merriweather and Dr. Betsy Stoneridge. Ladies, this is Maxwell Thompson.” They exchanged quick handshakes. “Both are quite adept in a laboratory and have been instrumental in—”

Dr. Ron, who was standing in front of a set of five computer monitors, some showing line graphs and some a series of numbers, cleared his throat and said loudly, “You see, my specialty is new power generation.”

Monty jumped in. “Yeah, you should have seen his last project; it was cutting-edge stuff.”

A longhaired Siamese cat rubbed up against Monty’s leg; he hoisted him up and they all walked to Dr. Ron.

“A long time ago, before that, I created a fission-type reactor. It was pretty amazing because it generated 1.05 times the energy it consumed.” He was looking at them with his back to the monitors, which continued to move, lines being drawn, sequences of numbers being splashed across the screens. It was calculating.

“Wait, you mean a perpetual motion machine?” Max asked, thinking he misheard what was said.

“Yes, I guess you could call it that. It was supposed to be a solution to the problem of efficient energy generation.”

“Why haven’t I heard about this? This should have changed the world.”

Preston remained quiet, listening attentively.

“Well, for a couple of reasons. First, all my research and my lab, including the prototype reactor, were burned in a freak accident and my backups went missing. Second, there was a problem with the device.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. What was the problem?” Preston chirped in, hands dug in his lab coat’s pockets.

“Gamma rays!”

“Gamma rays?” Max asked.

“Yes, I didn’t realize it at the time, but the generator produced off-the-charts excessive amounts of gamma radiation. We were lucky to have survived the one and only test we ran. Anyway, when I lost my lab, and subsequently the funding, I abandoned that project, until recently.

“With our current project, we have been testing a new version of this fission reactor, but we’ve been very careful to monitor gamma ray emissions. One day, we noticed spiked readings even though we knew it couldn’t be coming from us. Shingles helped us raise an antenna on the tower and another on the far wall. With these, we were able to triangulate the source of the emissions.”

He turned to face the monitor screens and bent over to tap a few commands on the keyboard. One of the two largest screens flashed and then started to resolve a topo map. Max and the rest of them leaned closer to see.

With each second, it became more defined until it was completely clear. “Here,” Dr. Ron pointed to a red “X” on the center of the screen at what looked like a large, elevated mesa, “is the origin of the gamma radiation.”

“Is that us?” Preston asked.

“No, this is us,” Max corrected, still facing Dr. Ron, listening. He had pointed to the lower left corner of the screen, to another mesa that looked similar but was a little smaller.

“So, what could be producing gamma radiation on top of a nearby mesa?” asked Magdalena.

“No, not on top of the mesa,” Monty answered. “Inside it.”

Preston looked jittery when the topo map first showed, and now he was unquestionably flustered. “So, what does this have to do with our permanent solar storms?”

Max had wondered this too.

“From seismic readings and some research you retrieved from the University of Colorado’s computers, that mesa is right over some old volcanic vents, which are believed to be still active. Okay, so some have posited that if enough gamma radiation was released so that it would reach our core, it would damage the magnetosphere. And as we all know, we rely on the magnetosphere to protect us from the sun’s damaging rays and plasma. Without it, we would be like…” Dr. Ron searched for the analogy.

“Venus,” Monty offered.

“Yes, Venus gets scorched daily by the sun; so much so that even if Venus had all the other elements necessary for life, nothing could survive the radiation.”

“And since the Event, our magnetosphere seems to be breaking down, more and more,” Monty finished his thought.

“Is that why,” Max chimed in, “our atmosphere is electrified and the sun’s radiation seems to be getting worse every month?”

“Yes, we believe so,” Dr. Ron answered, and Monty and their wives nodded.

“Are you telling me that the problems we have currently are because someone is generating gamma radiation using a machine like the one you developed?” As the question rolled out of Max’s mouth, he realized the enormity of what this meant.