The Fall (14 page)

How can I cheat on Angie
with
Angie?

He just hugged her back, and they remained like that for a few moments, in silence.

“Jack,” she finally said, pushing away, her eyes drying up as the scientist suddenly emerged. “Tell me everything that happened after you jumped.”

He looked over to the foyer. “It was a suborbital jump, from sixty-one miles high. Pete was CapCom. The goal was to test the integrity of the suit during reentry, in particular the ablation layers on the outer shell. Up to that point we had performed several HALO jumps to test most of the suit's systems, but the highest had been from twenty-seven miles, so not much reentry heating to deal with.”

“Big difference going from twenty-seven miles to sixty-one,” she observed.

“Yep,” he said, getting up and retrieving the packed-up suit, before sitting back next to her while pulling out the upper and lower sections of the outer shell from inside the long helmet. “You designed it to be worn like a backpack after landing.”

“Interesting.” Angela retrieved the upper shell, leaning forward while inspecting the collapsible titanium ring around the neck that served as the base for the helmet. “Keep talking, Jack,” she said. “I'm just looking.”

He sighed. That was one of the things that annoyed him most about his wife. She could hold a perfect conversation while doing something else, and without making eye contact.

Clearing his throat, he continued. “There were a series of descent profile options, which you designed to compensate for the winds aloft. The idea was that a jumper would first check the winds in the projected pipe and select the right profile to reach a specific landing zone with an accuracy of ten feet.”

“I remember that. The Alpha adjustments,” she said, running her hands on the inside of the suit and extracting various modules almost with practiced ease, which she brought up to her eyes while squinting before snapping them back into their respective slots. “It's all modular, for easy assembly and field maintenance. Interesting.”

“For this jump, you'd selected Alpha-G, though there was some controversy with Hastings about changing the profile to Alpha-B.”

She looked up. “Come again?”

“General Hastings. He showed up at the Cape the night before the jump accompanied by a military detail as well as a couple of his own scientists from Los Alamos and—”

“What do you mean his
own
scientists?”

“Yeah. Like I said. There was some heated words exchanged, and you actually went ballistic when you caught his two gurus with their little snouts deep in the electronic guts of this suit.”

“Good,” she said. “They had no business being there. But about the Alpha adjustments—I had it programmed for Alpha-G and Hastings wanted Alpha-B?”

“Yep. That was the main issue.”

She looked into the distance and said, “If I remember correctly, and I'm pretty damn sure I do, the adjustments went from A to K, and they just had to do with the angle of insertion when hitting the atmosphere, with Alpha-K offering the most gentle ride and Alpha-A the roughest—but all still well within the design limitations of the suit. I'm sure that for the first suborbital jump, I would have selected something on the more gentle side, and then let the computers determine where you would have landed, and use those calculated coordinates as the landing site. You know, crawl, walk, run. So, what was Hastings's reasoning for the change?”

“You're going to have to ask him that. In the end—and I'm not sure how you pulled it off—the system instructed that I used Alpha-G, which I accepted at around mile forty-six.”

“Oh,” she said, the hacker in her grinning. “So, what happened next?”

“I became supersonic pretty quickly, peaking at around Mach three point two, and that's when things began to heat up—literally.”

“Energy exchange,” she said.

“Right,” Jack said. “There was also this purple glow. I think it began back at around mile fifty-three, right after I went supersonic.”

“A
purple glow
?”

“Yeah, shaped like a halo all around me. I asked the guys on the ground but no one could see that in the cameras from the descending pod, which was programmed to adopt a parallel path to my pipe until it burned up.”

“I have no idea what that could have been,” she said, before biting her lower lip, something she always did while thinking or worrying.

Unfortunately, that had a way of triggering something completely different in Jack. Now that action was compounded by that damn chocolate freckle shifting over her lip.

But he quickly pushed those thoughts away as he said, “Neither do I, but the halo never went away. It actually intensified as I dropped, almost washing out the stars. The fall got nasty at around mile forty-two, when the G-forces shot above nine and I couldn't talk anymore.”

“Could you blink?” she asked, pulling up the helmet now and looking at the miniature projectors of the faceplate display.

He nodded. “I blinked my ass off for the duration of the drop, at least while still communicating with Mission Control.”

Angela pointed at the small rear-facing antenna on the back of the elongated helmet. “You lost comm? What happened to the TDRSS link? I designed it to keep tabs on you all the way down, even through the ionization phase.”

“That's the problem. TDRSS worked just fine. But things began to get really bizarre at mile thirty, when we switched to feet to report altitude. The violet haze became almost blinding, swallowing even the incandescence of the reentry heat. When I reached one hundred and thirty thousand feet, I jettisoned the second set of ablation shields because they were already down to ten percent. That's when I entered a tumble.”

“A tumble?”

He nodded.

“But you were still supersonic and heavily depending on that third set of shields to protect you. The OSS would have burned up in an instant,” she said, holding the lower section of the suit. “This is flexible insulation blanket material, Jack, and just a quarter inch of it. Not good for any prolonged exposure to direct reentry heat.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “That's what's so strange. The Earth and the stars were swapping places, over and over, while outside temp was well beyond the rating of anything but my last remaining set of ablation shields on my shoulder pads and helmet. But the suit was never breached, and then the most bizarre thing happened when I reached one hundred and twenty thousand feet.”

“What?”

“I'm not sure. The telemetry turned red and began to flash the same readings again and again just as the purple halo increased in intensity and became a sort of entrance into a very strange electrical storm.”

“Okay. Slow down. First, are you saying that the telemetry stopped giving you readings?”

“No. I'm saying that it kept flashing the same numbers, even though it was pretty obvious that I was still falling.”

“What numbers?”

“Hold on.” Jack got up and went to the kitchen, where he pulled open a drawer and retrieved the pen and paper they used to keep their grocery list. As he returned, he realized what he had just done.

“Jack, how the
hell
did you know where that was?”

He paused, then said, “Because that's where we keep it … at least as of the moment when we left for the Cape.”

“Damn,” she said, leaning back on the sofa as he sat down.

“Yeah,” he said, “welcome to my little party.”

He wrote down the numbers and placed them on her lap.

MACH 1.2

G-METER 12.0

TEMPERATURE 1200 DEGREES

ALTITUDE 120,000 FEET

“I hope you can figure out what this means,” he added while she stared at it. “They continued to flash as I dropped down this bizarre storm that was pulsating with sheet lightning. And that's when I started to lose comm with Mission Control. I heard Pete a few times trying to make contact, and I was blinking the okay icon in return, but it was obvious he couldn't hear me.”

Angie held the piece of paper in her hands while looking away, lips pressed together. Then she said, “What happened next?”

“That was probably the most unusual thing. I kept falling and reached the bottom of this storm, which was also vibrating with bolts of lightning. But when I struck it, it felt more like a membrane, like something elastic that extended beneath my vertical momentum, stretching, before bursting open, letting me through. And then all systems returned to normal, though I'm not sure how much time passed because by then I was fading in and out. But I do recall the very first readings when the system returned to normal … at one hundred and eight thousand feet.”

“
One hundred and eight?
What happened in between? That's twelve thousand feet unaccounted for.”

He shrugged. “Tell me something I don't already know. But there's the chance that I may have imagined it all. Maybe I passed out from pulling so many Gs and dreamed the whole thing.”

“You didn't pass out, Jack,” she said with conviction while holding the upper section of the OSS's outer layer. “And you certainly didn't dream this.”

He cocked his head at her. “How … how do you know that?”

She pointed at the shoulder pads. “The third ablation shield.”

“What about it?”

“It's barely touched. When you jettisoned the second layer, at least according to this piece of paper, outside temp was twelve hundred degrees, which should have taken a good bite out of this honeycomb material. But it didn't. That means that whatever happened between one hundred and twenty thousand feet and one hundred and eight protected you from the final stage of reentry heat. And as for the tumble you reported, that's also impossible. There is no damage to the flexible insulation material. For reasons that I can't explain, you didn't experience any reentry heat during that time.”

Jack stared at the shoulder pads before also looking at the top of his helmet, confirming that the third ablation shield was intact, as was the rest of the suit. But how could that be when outside temperatures were still …

“Angie … what does this mean?”

“It means exactly what it means, Jack. You entered something different at that upper altitude and you exited it at a lower altitude. And in between, you didn't experience any reentry heating.”

“And when I did come out of … whatever
that
was,” he added, “I arrived at a world that wasn't quite the one I left at the launchpad.”

They leaned back on the sofa in unison and just stared at the ceiling for a while.

“This is beyond my pay grade,” Jack said first.

Angela reached over and took his hand.

“So … does this mean what I think it means?” he asked.

“I'm a scientist, Jack,” she said, sitting up sideways and crossing her legs again while facing him. “And the scientific process is very straightforward. First observe, then hypothesize, then experiment to prove or disprove your hypothesis, and keep iterating until you reach the answer. In this case, my first key observations is that the laws of physics, especially those that concern the conservation of energy, were violated during those twelve thousand feet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there was no energy transferred from vertical velocity to heat, Jack. The energy that you lost while falling for twelve thousand feet, or over two miles didn't turn into heat—and I gotta tell you, giving your supersonic speed, that's one
hell
of a lot of energy. This ablation shield should have been consumed, at least down to fifty percent.”

“So where did the energy go?”

“Don't jump into any hypothesis yet. That's just the first observation. My second observation is you, Jack. You sitting right here next to me violates every law of physics of the classical mechanics world—the world governed by the forces of gravity, by the engineering disciplines, from aeronautical and mechanical to electrical, thermal, computer, chemical, and even biochemical. None of the laws governing those areas can explain why you are here breathing next to me instead of being a pile of bones buried in some cave in Afghanistan.”

She paused, then added, “
Third
observation is your description of the world you left behind. There are mostly similarities, even down to the location of that pen and paper, but there are also critical differences, like the missing storm, Cuba, the metric system, my hair, and probably dozens more that you'll notice in the days and weeks ahead.”

Jack was going to mention the freckle but knew better than to interrupt her while she was on her scientific roll.

“The fourth observation is this,” she said, pointing at the numbers on the piece of paper. “The numeral twelve, which is also how many unaccounted thousands of feet you dropped, has a ton of significance in many disciplines, from mathematics to science, time, and even music.”

“For example?”

“You're jumping ahead again, Jack. But at the risk of violating my own scientific process … take music, for example, the numbers remind me of an octave harmonic.”

“What's that?”

“In music, an octave is the interval between one musical tone, or pitch, and another with either double or half its frequency. In some instruments, such as the guitar, this perfect octave is achieved by touching the harmonic of a note
twelve
frets above any open or fretted note.”

“I never knew you were musically inclined,” he said.

“I'm not. It's still just physics, Jack. Sound waves, in this case, but those same harmonic laws apply to all waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays at the upper end down to very low frequency waves. The observation here is that the number twelve has a lot of significances in several fields, but we're going to get to that later.”