Wormhole (26 page)

Many tribes had suffered genocide. Oddly, that didn’t bother Tall Bear as much as the systematic theft of his people’s dignity. The great American government, with its spirit of free enterprise, had imposed communism on the Native Peoples, and like the system the Bolsheviks had imposed on the Soviet Union, it had yielded the same harvest. The once-proud native people learned to accept government handouts, then to rely upon them. The subsequent loss of pride, self-reliance, and initiative led inevitably to the current plague of alcoholism, obesity, and hopelessness infecting modern tribal societies.

His thoughts turned to the football game he’d been invited to last fall, the New Orleans Saints at the Arizona Cardinals. With the domed stadium filled with Arizona’s red-clad fans and the Cardinals driving, the words that sent a shiver down Tall Bear’s spine thundered through the huge stadium’s public address system.

“Rise up Red Sea!”

As Tall Bear watched the tribal leaders climb into their pickups and cars, fire up the ignitions, and drive off down the dirt road, spewing plumes of light brown dust in their wake, his jaw clenched in determination.

Rise up Red Sea!

It could have been his story.

So why did Freddy feel like a world-class fool for not breaking this one himself?

Maybe because it was the biggest story in history and he’d known about it for weeks. But instead of pouncing on it, he’d stayed quiet, letting the president make the announcement in a televised prime-time Oval Office address. Maybe because he had the deep-seated feeling he was on the trail of something even bigger. Or maybe he’d gone all soft and patriotic. One thing he knew: if his editor ever found out he’d sat on this, he’d be looking for a new line of work.

Leaning back against the pile of pillows stacked against the wood wall-board—he couldn’t bring himself to think of the brown wooden thing fastened to the wall as a headboard—Freddy stared at the television that blared breaking news on every channel.

The president had come right out and told the American people that a black hole was forming at the heart of the ATLAS detector in Meyrin, Switzerland. He’d also announced that effective immediately, he and the leaders of all the G7 countries were imposing martial law to ensure public safety and order during this crisis. The National Guard had been called out and the US military had been ordered to its highest readiness level, DEFCON 1. In addition, under his martial law decree, the provisions of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 were being temporarily suspended, thereby enabling the branches of the United States military to enforce the law.

As the nation watched in stunned silence, the president shifted to a gentler tone, assuring the public that the world’s major powers had developed a plan to deal with the black hole using technologies derived from the Rho Project. The plan involved the most ambitious construction project ever conceived: a project to build a device that would transport the micro black hole deep into space, far from our solar system, where it could no longer pose a threat to Earth. He, in conjunction with EU leaders, had placed Dr. Donald Stephenson, the man most intimately familiar with the alien technologies, in charge of the project to construct the Rho Device.

Then, closing his address with the typical
May God be with us all
crap, the president signed off to pandemonium.

Martial law? Did the US government even have a plan for implementing martial law on a national scale? Freddy didn’t think so. And he didn’t think the plan would be a very effective one even if it existed. Maybe it could be done in Europe, where everything was close together, but this was America, and America was one big-ass place.

Simultaneously with the president’s announcement, leaders across the EU issued proclamations of their own, timing that
must have been forced on them considering that prime time in the US market hardly corresponded to a similar situation in Europe. Then again, maybe the early-morning hour facilitated martial law implementation. Most Europeans would just wake up to find it in effect.

As Freddy continued watching the breathless commentary, stories about the black hole began to be replaced by news of looting breaking out in communities across the nation, gun shops and outdoor-supply stores being among the early targets. In some cities the police found themselves deluged with calls, having to pick and choose which situations they would respond to. The National Guard had been called up, but that took time.

Outside the Holiday Inn Express, Freddy heard the wail of distant sirens break the stillness of the Los Alamos night.

Shit, I hate being right
, Freddy thought as he strapped on his walkabout leg and reached for his pants. Well he was a reporter. Might as well get out there and cover what was sure to be the beginning of the end of the America he’d known and loved. For all he knew, reporting the news might violate martial law. As he buttoned his shirt and grabbed his digital recorder and camera, Freddy paused one more time to listen to the sirens. If that was the case, he wouldn’t be the only one engaged in criminal activity.

Then, striding across the red-yellow-and-orange-striped carpet, Freddy exited his hotel room, letting the door slam behind him.

Dr. Louis Dubois didn’t like the way his colleague Dr. Donald Stephenson was looking at the engineers gathered around the conference table. He looked like an apex predator evaluating prey—a falcon, perhaps, or a jaguar. The same bloodless, hungry look. He wondered, not for the first time, if Stephenson might be a high-functioning psychopath who, if he hadn’t turned to science, would be engaged in less savory pursuits.

Luckily, the engineers were studying the blueprints with fierce intensity and ignoring Dr. Stephenson. Side conversations shifted into French, German, and Spanish, then back to English for general discussion.

Finally, though, as Dubois had known would happen, Dr. Stephenson lost patience.

“Can you build it?” Dr. Stephenson snapped out his question to Gerhardt Werner, the lead engineer for Kohl Engineering, the
company responsible for building many of the largest and most demanding projects in the world, including the massive Francis turbine generators at China’s Three Gorges Dam.

The burly blond engineer turned to face him. “Hell, I don’t even understand how it’s supposed to work.”

“That’s not important. Can you build it?”

“Not important? For an engineer to build something that’s supposed to work?”

“Can you build the thing according to these specifications?”

The German’s steel-gray eyes met those of the physicist. “
Das ist klar
. Sure I can build the damned things to spec. But if they don’t work, it’s your mistake.”

“I don’t make mistakes. Make sure you do the same and we’ll get along just fine.”

“I doubt that.”

Dubois watched the American physicist eye the German for several seconds. Then Stephenson turned on his heel and strode from the room.

As the engineers turned back to the blueprints, Dr. Dubois’s eyes swept back over the table. Those engineering specifications represented the two most intricate construction projects ever attempted by man. Team One would enlarge the ATLAS cavern and then build the Rho Device around the anomaly, while maintaining the stability of the current electromagnetic containment field. Team Two would build the Matter to Energy Conversion Facility, the device that some young physicist had nicknamed the MINGSTER, short for matter ingester. It was the power generation station that would produce the awesome energy required to generate a wormhole.

The theory behind both devices was so far from the physics Louis had come to know that it bordered on quantum blasphemy. Stephenson had essentially reintroduced a variation of the old
ether theory with a little quantum foam rolled in for good measure. At its core, his model held that light was more than particles guided by waves of probability, that it waved an underlying ether substance that forms the fabric of our universe.

Stephenson’s model was all about the ether medium. All matter and energy were formed from variations in ether density. Where the ether was relatively compressed, a positive energy gradient existed. Where it was stretched, there was a corresponding negative energy gradient. It allowed for ether granularity, with subspace occupying the rift between ether grains. Stephenson’s ether model embraced the dual tenets that the speed of light is not constant and that energy within our universe is not conserved, but leaks in and out of subspace.

Stephenson proposed a simple test to illustrate that the speed of light was a function of ether density. The Stephenson version of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment used the classic mirror-and-interferometer arrangement. But across one of the light paths he applied an intense repulsive magnetic field, changing the ether density along that path. The resulting shift in the interference pattern demonstrated his predicted change in the speed of light.

Where the Stephenson ether model got really interesting was in the analysis of the wave packets that formed matter. It predicted that certain rare frequency combinations produced stable standing wave packets in the ether and that these special harmonic sets formed the particles and elements we observe in nature. Through understanding the frequencies that form a stable packet, it became possible to apply another set of frequencies, an antipacket, that canceled out the original packet, releasing the energy bound within it.

Moreover, it wasn’t necessary to produce a perfect antipacket to destabilize a particle. It merely required a sufficient subset of
disrupting or canceling frequencies and the packet would tear itself apart. Theoretically, this process was as reliable as clockwork.

Analyze the packet.

Add disrupting frequencies.

Harvest the expelled energy.

Rinse and repeat.

Stephenson had produced an algorithm and a design for doing precisely that. The MINGSTER’s job would be to ingest matter and disrupt its wave packets, producing energy on a scale the Earth hadn’t experienced since it was flung out of the cosmic explosion that created it. That energy would then be fed to the Rho Device so it could generate the wormhole that would transport the November Anomaly several light years out in space.

But if it was so cut-and-dried, why did the thing worry Louis so badly? Like the big German engineer, he didn’t like not knowing exactly how and why something worked. And nobody, including Louis, could understand all of Stephenson’s equations, a significant part of them constructed in an alien branch of mathematics for which he had no context and upon which Stephenson refused to elaborate.

“My dear Dr. Dubois,” Stephenson had said upon being pressed on the topic. “We are already desperately short on time. Why do you imagine I can afford to inject the additional delay of playing college professor for a semester, assuming you and your colleagues are even capable of grasping the topic?”

Anger had so engulfed Louis that only his professional pride kept his clenched and shaking hands at his sides instead of reaching out and tossing Stephenson through the adjacent plate-glass window. And thus the opportunity had passed.

With one last glance at the engineers shuffling through blueprints, Louis sighed, turned, and began the long walk from Building 33 back to his office.