Wormholes (14 page)

Dacey tapped her fingers on the sheaf of wire reports. She thought of the incredible phenomenon represented by the Gillard hole. And of the tragedy of the mother and her children there. And of the catastrophe the satellite images revealed. She took a deep breath.

“Oh, hell, Gerald, all right!”

• • •

On Neptune the distant sun casts but a dim radiance on the pale blue methane clouds carried by supersonic winds that stream across a featureless rocky surface. The huge frozen planet has rotated slowly on its axis for billions of years, drifting around the sun in quiet obeyance of the laws of orbital dynamics.

A fiery, violent blast shatters that ancient serenity, erupting from beneath the thick ice mantle. Matter alien to the universe contacts the crystalline ice, unleashing a planet-shattering explosion of heat and light that bursts the core into razorlike shards for thousands of miles and explodes away much of the atmosphere, sending it careening into space. The vast hammering blow rolls outward from the lacerated planet, hurling the smallest moon from its grasp and launching the largest moon on a new, crazily looping circuit that triggers deep shuddering moonquakes.

The deformed planetary corpse reels drunkenly in its orbit, wobbling and casting great masses of the icy jagged rubble spinning into space. The remnants of the planet scatter the planet’s moons and rings into a cloud of swirling particles. The immense turmoil produces flashes of cold lightning glittering across the atmosphere’s wispy remains.

Roiling waves of radiation stream outward from the planetary holocaust in an expanding light-speed bubble. By the time the visible light reaches earth, however, it has waned into the faintest shimmer, which is automatically registered along with billions of other emanations from the heavens by the few optical telescopes that happen to be pointed in that direction. The heat radiation is similarly detected by an Earth-orbiting infrared telescope, which records the arriving infrared wave as a faint ember-like glow from the previously frozen planet.

But the real messenger of cosmic violence are the gamma rays, the highest-energy radiation from space. They are registered as an anonymous burst on the detectors of an orbiting gamma ray telescope. But since the huge satellite cannot pinpoint the direction of sources, the telltale signals will not carry the news of the planetary cataclysm.

All the telescopes and satellites dutifully transmit their raw data to be stored in their respective computers.

But the planet is such a routine citizen of the solar system, and the various pieces of data so subtle and disparate, that the information lies unanalyzed, uncorrelated.

The computers, thus, do not tell their human masters of the titanic cataclysm, that has all but torn apart the giant, frozen planet.

T
he sleek Chinese Z-9 helicopter skimmed above the rugged Mongolian mountains touched with the first snows of winter and swooped down to roar across the valley below.

“Ah, yes,” shouted Li Feng, the Chinese army interpreter, to the passengers. “Yes. This is it. Look!”

They craned their necks to see out the windows a blasted surface of tortured, blackened rock. They saw no movement that would indicate any surviving life. The helicopter sped down the valley for miles, with the same frozen violence passing beneath, then lifted upward, banked left and circled back, returning more slowly.

Swathed in a thick wool coat that limited her movement, Dacey recorded the scene with her video camera, stopping occasionally to marvel at the heat that had created such devastation. Beside her, Gerald Meier, Gordon Haggerty and Brendan Cooper crouched unsteadily in the metal and canvas seats. At the scientists’ urging, Haggerty had reluctantly persuaded the Chinese government to lend the coats, the helicopter, and the interpreter. The government had gladly done so, since he was a top executive of a company they hoped would invest billions in their oil industry. The oceanographer, Cooper, was totally out of his element, but Dacey had encouraged him to come as a third set of scientifically trained eyes.

Staring grimly at the visitors from their seats were three nervous Chinese soldiers with their AK-47s and belts of ammunition. The northern province of Inner Mongolia was not a place they liked to go, even though things had been relatively peaceful there of late.

“Where to land?” asked the interpreter.

Dacey scanned the gray-black waste through the scarred window, searching for solid, smooth ground. She pointed to the left. “We’ve got a level-looking magma fan there.”

Cooper got up from his seat on the other side of the helicopter, deftly negotiating the unpredictable undulations of the hovering craft, and joined her. “Yeah, yeah. That’s as good as we’re going to get, I think.” He spoke to the interpreter who relayed the instructions. The helicopter eased forward, flared out and settled onto the rock. The Chinese soldiers pulled open the armored metal door and jumped out, scanning the area, their impassive expressions showing no hint of amazement at the alien terrain.

The others followed, standing beneath the lead-gray sky, each silently marveling at the landscape of blast-furnace-sculptured rock surrounding them.

Dacey set her large knapsack down and began video recording a full-circle pan of the valley for later study. She didn’t notice Haggerty stride out across the great wrinkled fan of lava, which looked like a dull, black bedsheet that had been draped across the ground. The helicopter’s engine died, leaving only the whisper of a cold breeze across a dead-quiet landscape.

“So this is what you brought me to see?” Haggerty called back to the group. “I’ve seen volcanoes. I know damned well—”

“
STOP RIGHT THERE!
” commanded Dacey, looking up from her camera.

Haggerty turned and cast a dark look at her. He turned away to walk farther.

“
DAMNIT, I SAID STOP!
”

“Better listen to her,” said Cooper.

“What the hell for?” Haggerty demanded.

With an exasperated expression, Dacey handed Cooper the camera and found a large jagged chunk of lava, pried it up and hefted it in her hand. She walked out toward Haggerty and stood beside him. Her annoyed gaze still on him, she lofted the rock five feet beyond where he stood. With a light crunch, the rock broke through and disappeared, leaving a jagged hole.

“Many times in these formations, the skin of a lava flow will solidify, and the melt underneath will flow away leaving a thin crust over a deep hollow. That would’ve been a thirty-foot drop onto the sharpest rock you could imagine. Like that stuff.” She gestured up the valley, where vapor bubbles had frothed the black rock into a vicious terrain of razor-sharp points and edges.

“All right. So, thanks.” His life saved, Haggerty was more amenable. “Let’s hear your story. Convince me this was some damned hole in the universe, same as killed my ship. Give me an act of God I can sell to the insurance company.”

“First of all, this isn’t a volcano.” Dacey waved her hand around the landscape. “You see any caldera? Any volcanic cones? Any ash? You smell sulfur? This wasn’t an eruption of magma. It was a melt of surface rock.” Gerald stepped up with his backpack and unrolled a map and Dacey continued. “We’re here, at the north end of the valley. Gerald has some satellite photos, so we could map the path of this surface melt. It’s a lot wider than the ocean-floor melt under the Castile, but it’s still a characteristic formation.”

“Characteristic of what?”

“A stellar transdimensional aperture,” said Gerald.

“A
what
?” asked Haggerty.

“That’s what I call it. I calculated what would happen if a star’s hundred-thousand-degree fusion furnace erupted through a hole, say, thirty feet in diameter. That temperature could do this.”

“How the hell do you get from a volcano to this stellar whatever?”

“We’ve got something to show you.” Gerald smiled, scratching his beard. He nodded to Dacey, who hefted her knapsack onto her back, attached her helmet camera, and led them down the center of the wide flow toward a distant ridge. She stopped occasionally to test the strength of the crust and to collect rock samples. She sealed the samples in plastic bags, marked them, recorded them in a small notebook and stuffed them into her knapsack. She had consulted a volcanologist at the
US
Geological Survey about the satellite images, and he had agreed with her initial interpretation. But the video recordings and rock samples would clinch it.

The others followed, picking their way among the rubble. They talked little during the ten-minute walk. They reached the ridge and climbed carefully up, keeping their footing on the slick lava flow. Several times they had to use their hands and found the rock still hot to the touch.

Dacey and Gerald reached the top first, and Dacey began to video their destination. Haggerty and Cooper pulled themselves up. Feng talked to the three soldiers, who stood guard at the bottom, looking out over the broad heat-blasted valley from where they had come. Feng trudged up the slope. “They said it is okay that we go up. They will watch.”

He found the group standing together, staring up in amazement at a yawning cave entrance some five hundred feet in diameter melted into the side of the mountain. Looking back, they could see that the path into the cave was over a flow of solidified lava that looked like a gigantic black tongue extruding from a mouth. Dacey pointed out that the sides were smooth and glassy.

Gerald turned to Haggerty and Cooper. “What happened here was that something round and extremely hot, about a hundred thousand degrees, and floating above the ground melted its way into the side of this mountain. I did a computer simulation of that scenario, and this is exactly the formation you get.” He reached into his knapsack and passed out large flashlights. “Now we’ll see where this thing goes.”

“Not just yet,” said Dacey. “Let me see what’s up there first.” She hauled her climbing harness out of her knapsack and strapped it on. She switched on her camera and headlamp and donned climbing gloves. Paying out a rope behind her, she gingerly picked her way up the great corrugated tongue of lava and disappeared over the lip into the blackness of the cave. The rope wriggled slightly with her movement. After half an hour, the group heard the faint sound of hammering. Shortly afterward, Dacey reappeared, carefully letting herself down by the rope.

“The floor’s slicker than snail snot,” she proclaimed. “You’ll be essentially walking on glass. I went as far as I could and belayed the rope. I’ve got to warn you. It slopes down, so if you let go, you’ll slide away.”

She turned and pulled herself hand-over-hand into the cave, and the others followed, clicking on their headlamps. The beams played about, reflecting off the black-mirror surface of the cave walls, revealing the absence of the usual rubble and rock formations. It was one great, smooth hole. The gray outside light waned as they made their way deeper into the hole, and soon only the headlamps illuminated the immense chamber.

A baking warmth from the cave’s sides enveloped them, and they smelled the smoky tang of melted rock. Dacey had them stop periodically and hold their lights still, so she could video sections of the cave and take samples.

Haggerty abruptly slipped and slammed to the floor, cursing and beginning to slip away into the cavern. Dacey lunged for the flailing man, catching his leg, sliding along with him. She reached out her gloved hand and grabbed the rope, straining to hold them both. Gerald grabbed her, and together, they hauled Haggerty back and helped him to his feet.

They recovered and continued. After a few minutes of more carefully making their way down the shallow slope, they reached the point where Dacey had hammered a piton into the rock to fasten the rope. The cavern appeared to begin tapering away to a point. Dacey pulled out a chemical glow stick, cracked the glass ampoule inside and pitched it forward. It slid away, growing fainter until it was no longer visible.

“See. It just stops,” said Dacey, her voice echoing in the chamber. “The hole started closing here. That’s where you would have ended up, Gordon.”

“Yeah, thanks again,” said Haggerty. “Closed?” They let the question hang in the darkness and silence.

Gerald finally answered, “I say it closed because I didn’t know what else to call it. ‘Closed’ will have to do for now.”

Inspecting the walls with his headlamp, Cooper said, “Well, I’m not willing to conclude anything just yet, Gordon. But something like this could easily have taken out the Castile.” Cooper pulled himself up toward the entrance and turned to peer back at the terminus. “But, hell, there’s got to be a more down-to-earth explanation.” His voice was amplified by the peculiar acoustics of the cavern’s end.

“We’re beyond ‘down-to-earth,’” said Gerald, his voice rising to echo louder in the cavern. “‘Down-to-earth’ doesn’t work, Brendan. Just look at the logic of this theory. A stellar …” He paused, realizing that the technical term seemed pompous. “… a sort of
gateway
into the interior of a star like the sun is what sank your ship, Mr. Haggerty.”

“Tell you what,” said Dacey, shining her headlamp in Cooper’s direction and climbing up toward the faint light of the cave’s mouth. “Nothing like a first-hand account. Let’s interview somebody who was there. I was talking to Mr. Feng on the helicopter. He says he heard of a village that had some survivors. Let’s go there.”

“Look, this is pretty goddamned far from an ocean and my ship,” grumped Haggerty.

“Hey, Gordon, you hired me for answers,” said Cooper. “Let’s just take a shot.”

“Yeah, well, it’s my nickel.”

“It’s also your ass if this doesn’t get solved.”

Haggerty’s response was to vigorously pull himself away toward the cave entrance. Cooper grinned. It was Haggerty’s way of agreeing and still maintaining his distance, should something go wrong. They followed him out of the cave and joined the soldiers to pick their way back down the treacherous lava flow toward the helicopter. They pulled themselves aboard and the helicopter roused itself from silence and spun its rotors up to a vicious whirling chop through the cold air. The helicopter hoisted itself into the sky and rose over the mountains to skim along over a vast grassy plain.

After half an hour, a small village of tents and mud huts came into view. The helicopter circled once and settled down nearby, drawing a crowd of curious people dressed in bulky woolens and heavy hide boots, with broad Mongol faces and eyes as black as obsidian. The children giggled and shouted, but the adults were wary, respectful. When the soldiers emerged, their rifles at the ready, the crowd shrank away, eyeing the guns and moving the children back in the crowd. The dogs barked and bared their teeth, and the children merrily whacked at them and sat on them to quiet them. Nearby, several mangy-looking fly-infested camels brayed their displeasure at the intruding helicopter.

Li Feng followed the soldiers out, moving among the crowd talking briefly to several, some of whom backed away, waving their hands in reluctance. Finally, Feng settled on an elderly man with a wispy white beard, wearing a large woolen cap and a thick frayed coat torn at both shoulders. The conversation was animated, with the old man jutting his chin forward, glaring at them with one open rheumy eye. He gestured angrily at the soldiers, who stood watching the increasingly sullen group with evident suspicion.

Feng turned back to Haggerty. “He says some people have, indeed, come here from the fire valley. He says there are two, a nephew of his and his son. The nephew was so close he was blinded. But the old man says he will not take you to them. He does not like the soldiers. There is great resentment of the central government here. He thinks you are from the government.”

“Tell him we are Americans,” said Haggerty.

Feng did so. The old man broke into a broad snaggle-toothed smile and began to chatter something to the other villagers. Smiles replaced the suspicious looks, and the crowd took up the phrase and became more animated, moving closer to the visitors. The words sounded at first like “Sian In In.”