Road Less Traveled (21 page)

“It's ridiculous,” Dr. Russell argued. “You want to use Sheriff Carter like a magnet, switching the charge he's built up, trusting that to lever everything back into place. What if the reversed charge is too strong, and it sends both worlds flying into the parallel realities beyond us on either side? What if all it does is warp their world and ours, pushing us farther apart here at the epicenter but closer together along the edges? What if—?”

“I know you'd like to run all of the calculations a few dozen times, just to be sure we've considered every possibility and accounted for every potential problem,” Allison interrupted. “And I completely agree.” She shook her head to stop the look of surprise and victory that was starting to form on Russell's face. “But we don't have time for that. We need to come up with what we think will work best, and try it as soon as we can.” She leaned in and put a hand on the tall blond researcher's shoulder. “Never mind the exact math. You're the expert on parallel realities. Do you think this could work?”

Russell frowned. “Well, yes,” she admitted slowly. “It could. But—”

“Then we'll go with it,” Allison insisted, letting just enough steel flow into her voice to make sure Russell understood that this wasn't a suggestion. “Between you and Zane, I know you'll figure out the calculations involved. Call Carter as soon as you've hammered them out, and let me know as well.” She glanced over at a side monitor, which was showing the energy fluctuations they were experiencing all around them, and the fluctuations from the other world as well. The two were beginning to sync up. “We don't have a lot of time left.”

 

“Anything?” Jo asked for the fifth time, tapping her
foot. She hated waiting.

Fargo sighed. “No, still nothing,” he answered, studying the voltmeter's screen. “Which doesn't make any sense.”

They were standing in the Thunderbird lab, and had been for the past few minutes. But despite being right where the first Thunderbird had hatched, Fargo still wasn't picking up any trace of the Thunderbird's energy signature. Which couldn't be accurate; it had been right there.

He tapped in a code, and waited as the voltmeter ran a self-diagnostic. Could he have put it back together wrong? He was sure he hadn't; he'd been building voltmeters since second grade. Perhaps he had entered the energy signature wrong? But he'd copied it directly from the reading Zane had given him. Had Zane screwed it up somehow? Or, worse, had he deliberately messed with the data?

Fargo's grip tightened on the voltmeter, and his jaw clenched. That had to be it. That smug bastard! He knew Fargo and Jo were working together on this case, and he'd wanted to make Fargo look bad. So he'd sabotaged him! Zane had given him faulty data, or introduced a worm virus, or done something so he wouldn't be able to track the Thunderbird and would look like a fool in front of Jo. Fargo's eyes narrowed. Ooh, he was going to teach Zane a lesson.

The voltmeter beeped, and Fargo checked the screen. The self-diagnostic was fine; the device itself was working perfectly. It had to be the data he'd used to program it. The data Zane had given him.

“You're a dead man, Donovan,” Fargo muttered as he backtracked to the hallway and plugged the voltmeter into a security panel between the Thunderbird lab and the next lab over. “A dead man.”

“What's that?” Jo asked, stepping closer. She hadn't quite heard him.

“Nothing.” Fargo called up the security logs—as Allison's executive assistant he had access—and pulled up the recording of the hallway right when the Thunderbird had hatched. Then he scanned those recordings with the voltmeter.

The little device began to chime immediately.

What the hell?

“You found something?” Jo asked eagerly, leaning in to see the small screen.

“Yeah, but it doesn't make sense,” Fargo answered. He angled the device so she could see it better. “I pulled up the footage from the break-in, and used the voltmeter to scan for the Thunderbird's energy reading. And it found it.”

“Well, sure.” Jo rolled her eyes. “That's where we got the readings, remember?”

“I know, but then why isn't it picking up anything now?” Fargo pointed out. “This means the voltmeter's working fine. And it means that really is the Thunderbird's energy signature.” He ignored Jo's questioning look, which clearly asked why he would have doubted that. “But I'm not finding any trace of it back in the lab where it happened.”

“Maybe the containment field being broken did something to change the energy readings?” she suggested. Despite the fact that he was already taken, Fargo marveled at Jo all over again. The face of an angel, the power of a warrior, and the mind of a scientist. She was perfect!

Unfortunately, in this case she was wrong. “That's a good guess,” he agreed, to make her feel better, “but the voltmeter's sensitive enough to filter out that kind of interference. It should be able to pick up traces of the Thunderbird despite whatever else is in the air.”

“Okay then, why isn't it?” The look she shot him indicated that she considered all of this to be just another example of his wasting her time.

“I don't know,” he replied, maybe a little sharply. He was doing his best. It's not like anybody, even Zane, could have built the voltmeter any better. Except that Zane probably would have jazzed it up somehow, given it a bigger screen or just a holographic display, upped the filters so they could screen out stronger energy signals, built in a—Fargo stopped in mid thought. Was that the answer?

“What're you doing?” Jo asked as he tapped a new command into the security console.

“I'm using the security systems to filter out any interference,” Fargo explained. “They're a lot bigger and a lot stronger than the screens I've got in the voltmeter itself.” He studied the results. “Damn!”

“What?” Jo looked like she was ready to wrestle the thing out of his hand—a contest she'd win embarrassingly easily—so Fargo held it out for her to see instead.

“Look at the readings,” he explained. “The security system ran them and reimaged them. See all the data it's receiving?” He indicated the wavy lines all over the screen. “That's normal background radiation, the kind you see everywhere, every day. Except that it's twice as much as it should be, and half of it is running counter to the regular signal noise.”

Jo's eyes narrowed. “The other reality.” Sharp as always.

“Exactly.” Fargo sighed and lowered the voltmeter. “It's too much. With the added background chatter, there's no way to isolate the Thunderbird's energy signature. The voltmeter just isn't strong enough to filter it out of such a high energy level.” He glanced up at Jo, then quickly looked away. “I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault,” she assured him. “Well, not this time, anyway.” She thought about it. “Is there any way to get something like the voltmeter but stronger? Something that could cut through all the chatter?”

“Sure,” Fargo admitted, then continued as she perked up, “if you've got a spare van to haul it around. To filter all that, we'd need something at least the size of a small couch. With power supplies to match.”

“Great.” Jo turned away and paced the corridor while Fargo disconnected his voltmeter from the security panel and sealed the panel shut again. “Another dead end, then.” She looked at him for confirmation, and he nodded miserably. “So we still don't have the first clue who took it, or where they are keeping it, or how to get it back.” She paced a bit more, then turned and kicked the wall. Hard. “Wonderful.” She delivered another powerful kick, actually putting a small dent in the wall. That, at least, seemed to cheer her up slightly.

Fargo considered pointing out that the walls here at GD were a flexible polymer with a low-level AI and a fleet of nanobots, and that the damage would be gone within the hour. He decided against it. Now wasn't the time.

Zane was immersed in the work. He liked collaborat
ing with the Drs. Russell, he decided. They had a quick mind, and an impressive grasp of intuitive math, even if they didn't like to use it without triple-checking their calculations first. True, both Russells were surprisingly hidebound for someone working on such cutting-edge research as extradimensional visualization, and he'd had to overcome their innate resistance to looking “outside the box,” but once they'd gotten past that, the Russells been a great sounding board and counterpoint. Plus, their knowledge of parallel dimensions far exceeded his own, so more than once they'd caught something he would have missed but that could have made a disaster out of anything they'd tried.

It was also fascinating to watch and listen to them work, because more than half the time the two Russells had the same idea at the exact same time, and even said it simultaneously. But a few times one of them thought of something and the other caught on halfway through the explanation. The product of ever-so-slightly different upbringings, he figured. Wacky stuff.

Plus, the Russells were
very
easy on the eyes.

A real physics challenge, high stakes, two attractive partners—Zane was having fun.

At one point, he glanced up to see Allison watching them. He started to say something to her about how a watched pot never boils, then realized that: (1) she was dressed more “down-home soccer mom” and less “no-nonsense top exec” than he'd ever seen her at work; and (2) she was in the monitor, rather than merely reflected against it. He glanced back over his shoulder to be sure. Yep, no Allison. This was her doppelgänger, her other self. The non-GD director self. Or at least the married-to-the-GD-director self. Which meant he didn't answer to her.

Russell, the other Russell, noticed Allison's presence in the lab doorway as well. But she didn't stop what she was doing, which at that point was running simulations of their latest configuration. She just nodded vaguely in that direction. Because, of course, Allison wasn't her boss in that world. She was just an interested bystander.

So Zane nodded as well, gave the other Allison a quick half smile hello, and went back to work.

When he looked up again, she was gone. And within seconds he'd forgotten all about her, losing himself once again in the intricate dance that was balancing equations across two different worlds.

“Remind me again—
ouch!
—why you have to—
hey!
—
zap me with—
darn it!
—electricity for this whole—
ah!
—thing to work?” Carter shuddered, his body still quivering from that last zap. He could feel each successive shock add to the vibrations that were racing through him, setting his teeth to chattering even though he wasn't in the least bit cold.

He was standing in Russell's lab again, arms out, and Allison had affixed those blasted sensors a second time. Why couldn't Eureka's super-science figure out a way to make electrodes and medical implements and dental tools work without being ice-cold? he wondered. Or was it deliberate? Did making the patient uncomfortable somehow aid the medical process?

“We're going to give you a burst of electricity,” Allison explained for the third time, patiently, while making sure the electrodes were all synced and functioning. “It'll essentially reverse the charge that's already running through your system, attuning you to our world again rather than theirs.”

“You'll still be magnetized,” Russell picked up, earning a momentary glare from Allison that she either totally missed or completely ignored. “But now you'll be repelling the other world's energies instead of drawing them in. You'll actually be pushing that world away from us, until it's close enough to its normal relative position for inertia to take hold and settle it back into its usual location.”

“Give me a fulcrum and a lever and I can move the world,” Carter muttered. Allison raised an eyebrow. “What? I did study geometry in school, you know.”

“It's ‘Give me a
lever
long enough and a
fulcrum
on which to place it, and I shall
move the world
,'” she corrected gently. “Archimedes. But I'm impressed.” Her smile was light and teasing, and helped offset the low-level anxiety Carter had gotten when they'd explained their scheme to him the first time around.

“I just didn't expect to be the lever,” he added, shivering slightly at the thought.

“If it helps any, you're actually the fulcrum,” Zane offered from where he perched on the console, tapping commands into his notepad. “The charge is the lever. We're just using you as the base.”