The Man From Taured (12 page)

It was giving Noble more questions than it was providing answers and his head was pounding. Noble put away his laptop and then eased his seat back. He did not normally fall asleep on planes, but this time he was sound asleep in moments.

***

Noble was ten-years-old and playing outside on a hot summer morning. Like a lot of times, he was up earlier than his friends and he was out in the front yard before any of them were awake. That was fine with Noble because he often played on his own, relying solely on his imagination. This morning he was playing on the front porch, pretending he was a soldier battling the Russkies in a war on the Alaskan border.

Noble and his family had been living in this house for a few years now. It had been his grandmother's home and the one in which his mom had grown up. Then his grandmother had died of cancer and his parents bought the house. After they moved in his parents added an addition to the back of the home and remodeled the bathroom. It had taken some time, but Noble now thought of it as his home.

The block he lived on was populated with mostly old people, though, and that was frustrating to him. He had befriended a few of the older people and old couples, but he longed for friends his own age. There were kids on the block, but they were all girls and Noble had yet to reach an age when such a thing would not seem like endless torture.

There was an older couple living next door. They had no kids, but the man was really nice. He also had a basement filled with baseball stuff that Noble loved to look at. The man's nephew had been a major league baseball player at one time. They also sometimes babysat and he always had a good time with them.

The old couple and the others on the block were none of Noble's concern on that particular morning. Instead, he was lost in his game. Jumping off the porch and pretending to shoot enemy soldiers. The sky was bright, the color blue tinged with white and yellow from the pollution and humidity. It was warm, climbing into hot later that day as the sun grew higher in the sky.

Noble ran down the driveway and headed toward the backyard. Just as he entered the space between his house and the neighbor's house he felt that strange queasiness. It was just for an instant and then it was gone. Noble skidded to a stop, his brain suddenly worried and concerned about what had just happened.

There was something familiar about that sensation.

What was it?

There was a shuffling sound from behind Noble. He turned around and there was a woman in a blue robe with dark, curly, hair and wearing white slippers. She was middle-aged, perhaps, maybe at most 50. There was something about her that was sort of familiar, but he was sure that he had never seen this woman before.

She looked still half-asleep and she was shuffling along.

Noble kept walking, his brow furrowed, a look of confusion etched across his face. The woman just kept shuffling along, as the two of them passed, she raised her head and looked to her right.

"Hello," she said.

"Hi," Noble said.

He decided that maybe it was a friend staying with the neighbor or something. He turned and ran toward the backyard. As he reached the gate he stopped, his hand outstretched toward the latch.

"Grandma?" Noble asked.

She had been younger than when Noble last saw his grandmother, but there was something about the hair, about the way her face looked.  He had seen photos of his grandmother, in his mother's collection and photo books, back when she was younger, and he thought there was a resemblance. But he wasn’t sure. He had an active imagination, which was great, but it also sometimes played tricks on him.

Noble ran back to the front of the house. The woman was gone. As he reached the middle of the driveway he had that sensation of his stomach dropping once again. In a flash he was out in front of the house.

The street was empty.

The birds were singing. There was traffic on the busy road about four doors down. A breeze rustled the trees.

No woman.

No one.

Noble stood there looking around, studying the neighborhood and the street. He was alone.

***

Noble awoke as the plane touched down in Washington. He was mildly pleased, although his brain was still fuzzy and the dream he had been having was still prominent in his mind. He always hoped to sleep through flights, and was usually too nervous to do so, so this had been a pleasant surprise. It saved time worrying about each bump from turbulence.

He had not thought about that day when he saw the strange woman that reminded him of his grandmother in a long time.

How many more memories were there still hidden away inside his brain? How many more times had he felt that dropping sensation in his stomach?

The plane taxied to the right gate and the people around him immediately began turning on their cell phones, making calls and texting. Noble fished his out and sent a note to Olivia that he had landed.

He got his luggage and trudged into the airport. It was busy, like most airports, but Noble was lost in his thoughts. He had a million questions for Dr. Shaw. He felt as though he had a million more for Dashiell.

He was out of the airport in less than fifteen minutes. He flagged down a cab and was mercifully back in air conditioning before he had time to really sweat.

The ride was uneventful, but his head was spinning around and around like clothes in a dryer. So many thoughts, now added on top of the same litany of questions.

Noble barely remembered paying the cab driver as he got out of the car. The cab driver wished him a good day with a huge smile, which probably meant that Noble had tipped him quite well.

He walked through the halls, determined, building quite a head of steam. When he reached Dashiell's office he pushed through the door and stomped into the office.

Dashiell was standing there, as if waiting for him. Next to Dashiell was a portly man with a beard and glasses. Noble recognized him as Dr. Shaw.

"I want answers and I want them right fucking now!" Noble said, that weird feeling of being betrayed or part of something well beyond his control was strong. "Why am I remembering more and more times when things just weren't right and that I may have seen my dead grandmother at one point? Who are those shadow men that I keep seeing? Who the hell are the black-eyed children? What does this have to do with Francis Duveen? And what the fuck, Dashiell, have you been hiding from me? Oh, and finally, who the holy fuck are you Dr. Shaw?"

The outburst came in a rush and Noble had little regard for the volume of his voice. Shaw and Dashiell stood there agape. Dashiell raised both of his hands, but Noble kept shouting questions. Dash finally raised his voice and cut him off.

"Enough!" Dashiell said. "Noble, this is Dr. Shaw. Please come into the conference room so we can talk."

Noble was breathing hard, sweat running down his forehead. He was out of breath and forced himself to stop his shouting. He was more angry than he had ever remembered being before.

"Fine," Noble said.

He stormed past the two men and into the conference room. Noble sat down, throwing down his luggage. He crossed his arms across his chest and waited.

Dr. Lance Shaw, fresh out of college, stood in his laboratory. HIS laboratory. He said those two words over and over again in his mind. He was so proud.

He was years away from becoming a professor at MIT and just a couple of months away from publishing his papers about the supernatural that threatened to derail his career entirely.

Shaw had graduated with degrees in biology, chemistry and physics. He had never been the kind of person to do just one thing at a time. It had been difficult to get three degrees, but he would not have changed things for all the money in the world.

Then, when he graduated, the Gemini Corporation had offered him all the money in the world.

At least it had seemed that way to a kid in his early 20s and just starting out in the big city. He had been able to get a nice car and a great house. He had a lab all of his own and nearly complete freedom to perform any experiment that came into his head.

The Gemini Corporation was into all kinds of science. Much of it was top secret, for the government, but there were lots of things that made its way into the public sector. Outside the building that Shaw was in were two giant circles and beneath that were more labs. This was the giant collider that sent particles hurtling at each other to then collide and break into even smaller particles. Scientists were looking for the so-called "God" particle.

That was one of the most public experiments, the one that got written about in the big magazines and major newspapers. Inside the giant building in the middle of the campus were dozens and dozens of other experiments that the public never heard about. Some of the ones Shaw had heard muttered about at lunch and around the building made his blood run cold.

Lance Shaw had been recruited with some fanfare. The CEO himself had shown up at his desk on his first day, as Shaw stood in his lab with his orientation binder and name badge all shiny and brand new, and shaken his hand. He was told, repeatedly, that they were expecting big things out of him.

Shaw had been thinking about starting experiments to find a new way to grow plants bigger and to produce more fruit even in arid temperatures, but that had quickly grown boring to him. Instead, as he stared at the bright, shiny, new equipment, and then looked out at the circles of the collider, another idea formed.

Dr. Shaw had spent quite a bit of time rooting around online for information about genetically altered food. That had led him to a series of conspiracy theory websites. There were many who felt that genetically altered food was a source of mind control with the government behind it all.

Once you went down that rabbit hole there was a long, long way to go before you hit bottom. It wasn't long before Shaw had found himself enraptured with documents about alternate dimensions.

The theory was that this universe was not the only one. Just inches away, separated by meta-physical barriers, were other alternate dimensions and parallel universes. The entire universe was really like an onion and that if you peeled back one dimension, there were other dimensions and on and on and on, perhaps to infinity.

Sometimes, sometimes, those barriers got weak and one dimension leaked into the next.

The thought had sunk deep into Shaw's subconscious and it would not let go. The other dimensions, it was theorized, just vibrated at a different frequency from our own. If vibrations could be created in a localized area, he thought, a portal into one of these other dimensions could form.

What would be the practical application of such a thing? What if the other dimensions were nothing? Maybe there was nothing going on in them. But what if you actually went back in time? What if
entering an alternate dimension would allow you to enter at one place, travel what felt like a short distance there, but then emerge in your home dimension in a far away place. That could potentially make teleportation real. What if there were older and more advanced civilizations? What could be learned from them?

So, after weeks of letting his vegetable experiments sit unattended, Shaw stood in his lab and admired the equipment he had assembled and gathered. It had taken weeks of him cajoling, asking people about this stuff, begging, borrowing, promising and sometimes just outright stealing, and now here it was. It had taken a lot of lying and massaging the truth to people who knew that he was working on vegetables to get a radio wave generator and other equipment to alter the vibrations of the very air in the lab.

Shaw had taken more weeks putting the equipment together. The various frequency generators and machines meant to vibrate this dimension were set up in a circle in the middle of the lab. He smiled, thinking that this was like his own version of the collider. Perhaps it would pay off even more than the giant buried thing outside.

No one else knew what he was doing, as far as he could tell. However, his privacy was something Shaw did not take for granted. At Gemini, despite their generosity, big smiles and bigger promises, there was always the feeling that someone was watching you. There were more rumors that as soon as something groundbreaking was discovered the higher-ups came in and took it away, sending it off somewhere for military or government applications.

Shaw didn't care. Being in his early 20s thoughts about taking credit and whether or not he would have the rights to things were far from his mind. He just wanted to DO something. Something big. Something that would change things. The credit would come later.

"OK," Shaw said to his empty lab. "No time like the present."

Shaw walked over to a table and flipped a switch. The vibrating machine kicked into life with a soft hum. This flipped on the switches for the other machines in the circle. Computers kicked into life. The hum gradually grew louder and louder. The tables began to vibrate. He stepped back from the circle, but he could feel the vibrations in his teeth.

Shaw stepped back further from the circle, hoping that would ease the vibrations and, he told himself, so he could get a better view of things. Instead, it seemed as though the machines were now feeding on each other. The vibration, as it went around and around the circle, was growing in intensity. Each machine fed the next and then increased the power. The amount of energy that was now being fed into his circle was massive and the lights above Shaw's head flickered.

"Uh oh," Shaw whispered.

The floor began to vibrate. Not much, at first, but Shaw could feel the intensity growing and growing. One of the machines very visibly vibrated on the table, bouncing up and down as if it were having some kind of tantrum. Shaw looked up at the fluorescent lights and they were rocking back and forth as if the building were in the middle of an earthquake.

In the center of the circle, however, there was something truly interesting happening. The focus of the vibrations was creating a disc in the middle of the air. The inside of the floating disc was wavy, like looking at something in the distance on a hot day.

Shaw stepped forward again, ignoring the fact that the floor was vibrating quite a bit. There were waves of bright energy, like electricity, connecting each of the frequency-generator machines and he stepped close to that circle, some sense of self-preservation keeping him from stepping right into the beam where he likely would have been electrocuted if not vaporized completely. He stared at the waving disc with something like awe. The wavy air was now forming into something - an image. It was hazy, hard to see, but there was definitely something there. It was like looking at a very old television with rabbit-ears that were not properly adjusted.

Something in the disc was moving.

"What the hell?" Shaw whispered.

The image grew solid, but it was still very hazy. The portal was not opening any further.

"More power," Shaw muttered. "I need more power."

Shaw walked over to the wave machine and turned up the power as far as he could. The machine began to pound on the table like fists. He barely heard it.

The portal was become more distinct. Yes, there was something on the other side. There were people. People walking down the street. None of them seemed to notice the portal or Shaw.

He gasped. Then he giggled like a child. He realized he was giggling and clasped a hand over his mouth. Mustn’t fall into mad scientists stereotypes, he thought, but then giggled some more.

One of the fluorescent lights exploded into shards that rained down on Shaw's head. He let out a cry of pain as several of them cut his cheek, his jaw and across his forehead. There was another shattering noise and Shaw whirled around, his feet crunching on broken glass, and he saw that the windows of the lab had exploded outward. One of the machines leaped into the air and crashed to the floor and this was followed by another loud cracking sound. This one sounded much like metal snapping, with a horrific scream.

The portal vanished. There was a bright explosion of light and the force of it flung Shaw backwards where he landed on one of his lab tables. Immediately the table collapsed beneath him. There was another pop, another explosion, and his legs went up over his head and he sailed across the lab.

In the area where the wave machines were still vibrating, the floor cracked in a perfect circle. There was another loud snapping sound and part of the floor simply vanished, falling through the hole. There was a horrendous crash as it collapsed into the lab below.

There was more crashing as the wave machines fell into the hole, as if committing suicide, and clattered in the lab on the floor below. The vibrating stopped. Alarms went off.

Shaw was covered in debris and more glass and his head hurt.

He barely noticed.

He had almost formed a portal.

He had seen other people. Other people in an alternate dimension.

It had almost worked.

Shaw got to his feet. There was blood running into his eyes and his head was throbbing. His feet nearly gave way. For the first time he really noticed the damage that had happened in the lab. There were red lights flashing. He heard people yelling and calling out. The wind from the broken window was intense and cold.

"Oops," Shaw said.

***

"Look, Dr. Shaw, we brought you here because we want you to be free to experiment on whatever you want," said Frank Mackenzie, the director that Shaw reported to directly. "We encourage our people to think of the craziest stuff possible and encourage them to explore it. However, we want it done as safely as possible. We prefer that you bring your ideas to us and we talk it over and then we make the necessary arrangements."

Shaw sat in a chair in front of the man's desk. His head was covered in bandages that had soaked through with blood and there was an ice pack on his head. He had taken some aspirin several hours ago, but his head was still pounding.

The man's office was utilitarian at best. There was a metal desk and a standard-issue office chair. The decorations were likely there when Frank had first entered the office after accepting the job. He was a dullard in many ways, the kind of man who thought only of business and not about creative things like office decorations. There were plastic plants along an air conditioning unit just below a window. As if the plastic plants might need sunlight. There were a few photos of the man's family on his desk and a little glass sphere in which was a tiny plant and three small shrimp swimming around. An enclosed ecosystem that somehow seemed to speak more to Shaw about what Frank wanted as a manager than anything the man had said.

"We also have two things that all of our people work on here," Frank said. "The experimental stuff is great, but not a lot of it pans out and most of it doesn't make any money. That food stuff you were working on, that's a money maker. This alternate dimension stuff, while fascinating, doesn't have much of a practical application. At least not right away."

Frank sat back and folded his hands across his stomach. When Shaw had been brought here after visiting the infirmary, Frank's face had been red. The moment the director had seen Shaw's battered face, however, he had softened a bit.

"You just cost us a lot of money in repairs," Frank said. "Thousands, at least, but potentially millions. We have a lot of safety systems in between the floors and walls that will have to be replaced."

Shaw lowered his head, feeling very much like a kid who had been called into the principal's office. Fank’s chair hinges squeaked as he moved. Shaw wondered if the man left the hinges on the chair that squeaky for some kind of intimidation factor. Frank sighed and slapped his hands on the top of his desk and looked up at the ceiling.

"OK," Frank said, "we can't punish you for taking initiative. We try to do that here. So, here's what we can do. Consider this your one warning and then give me the specs for the experiment you want to perform. We will find you a facility that will allow you to conduct them without destroying the entire building."

Shaw raised his head slightly, a smile just barely hidden behind his lips. Frank was leaning forward again, once again the office was filled with the creaking of his chair. Frank's head was cocked to the side a bit as if he were studying Shaw.

"I like your initiative," Frank said. "Here's the rest of the deal, though. You have to continue working on the food thing. If you can get that developed to a level that we can use then we can make money off of it. That money can be used to help fix those damages. I'd rather do that than dock your pay, and I am assuming you agree?"