Wormholes (15 page)

“What the hell are they saying?” asked Haggerty.

Feng laughed. “They think you are from
CNN
. I think they will want payment for their help.”

Haggerty muttered an obscenity. “Negotiate with them. Tell them we’re from
PBS
.”

Feng did so, and the crowd grew less enthusiastic. The old man continued to smile, but perhaps less effusively. He made a curt gesture that they could not interpret.

“He says they will accept less, but they want to negotiate commercial rights, in case the film shows up on a network. He says they have a person in the village who acts as a sort of agent.”

“Jesus!” said Haggerty. “I can’t believe this. Just work it out.”

Feng and the old man launched into a round of vigorous haggling, complete with animated gestures. Shortly, a slim young man dressed as the others, but with an earring and a moustache, arrived, and the bargaining became sharper.

“Neg myanga!” both the young man and the old man shouted. “In dollars! Twenties!” they added.

Feng shook his head and countered. “Zuu! Zuu!”

After several rounds of shouting, the young man abruptly turned and strode off through the crowd, toward a large, crude circular animal-hide yurt that sat beside an adobe hut. Feng followed and motioned for the others to follow him.

“We have reached agreement. They wanted a thousand dollars. I countered with a hundred. We settled on five hundred. The man will see us.”

“Fine, fine,” said Haggerty, fishing a wallet from the depths of his coat. He gave Feng the money and Feng paid the old man. As the old man counted the money and scrutinized the bills, the young man disappeared into the tent. After a moment he reappeared, holding open the embroidered felt flap. He exchanged a few words with Feng.

“We may go in. Remove your hats and do not step on the threshold. It is very bad manners.” They crouched and filed in. The tent was dark, lit only by a single candle and the dim yellowish light filtering through some of the thinner hides. The air was warm from glowing coals in a center pit in the earthen floor. Its smoke curled through a hole in the roof. The yurt smelled of the smoke, human occupation, the grease of a recent meal, and a faint odor of burned fabric.

Once their eyes became used to the dim light, the visitors discerned a man lying on a rug at the end opposite the door. He lay on his side, a plastic bottle of water beside him, as well as a battered metal dish with a few scraps of fried mutton in congealed grease. Feng squatted near him and greeted him with a “Sain baina uu,” and they exchanged words in Mongolian. Feng motioned the others to join him, and Haggerty, Cooper, Dacey, and Gerald crowded together in the small yurt, sitting across from him. The man’s brown face was blistered, and the burned skin was beginning to peel away, revealing lighter new skin beneath. Patches of cloth covered his eyes, and bandages of similar material, stained with grease, covered his hands.

The tent flap opened again, and a boy entered the tent and moved to sit warily beside the older man. They exchanged a few brief phrases, and the older man felt for his son’s shoulder and patted it. The boy moved to the fire and poured tea from a blackened kettle into small bowls for the guests.

“Bayarrila,” said Feng, and indicated for the others to say the same. They managed an approximation of the Mongolian for “thank you.”

Feng asked some questions, and the man answered in the affirmative. He turned to Haggerty.

“He is Damdi Choibalsan and this is his son.” The man nodded. “He is agreeable to the payment of five hundred dollars and he will answer truthfully all that you ask.”

Haggerty nodded curtly. “Looks like he’ll need it. Ask him just to tell us what happened.” Feng did so, and — with Dacey video-recording the interview — the man launched into a chatter of Mongolian in a strained voice. The memory apparently gave him pain, because of the way he stopped periodically and stiffened, trying not to show his anguish. Feng translated as the man spoke.

“He says he is camping with their flock just before begin shearing. Him and brother and wife and wife’s brother. And son. He and son left early in morning to check the goats and go hunt in mountain. They get far up in the mountains and hear huge sound down in the valley. He look at sound and see light … bright light … all of a sudden on east side of valley. He went back where he could see into valley. He looked too much. His eyes began to hurt and he became blind. His son had just come down the path, and he grabbed him and would not let him look. The heat came then and … burned them. He guided his son by telling him how to get across the mountain to get here. He thought the thing that came was a piece of the sun.”

The father said a few words to the boy, who also spoke, and Feng translated. “My father did not know that I saw. After the blinding light, there was great flame. Great clouds. The thing was mostly hidden by the clouds. That is what I saw.”

Gerald leaned forward intently. “That’s exactly what you’d expect. The gateway opens up, and the heat and light energy begin to come through. But then hydrogen is also pouring through, because that’s what’s in stars. The hydrogen catches fire in our atmosphere, making a fireball. And when you burn hydrogen, you get steam. That’s where the clouds come from. It fits. It all fits!”

Through Feng, Haggerty and Cooper began to question the man and his son more intensively. They had moved closer, trying to glean from the man as much detail as possible about the sound they had heard, when another sound intruded. The distant dull pop of gunfire. One of the soldiers entered the tent and barked an order at Feng.

“There is a group coming that we should not encounter,” said Feng, rising quickly to his feet and motioning for the others to do the same. “They are the local rebels and the soldiers say we should leave very quickly.”

“Well, let’s just do that, then,” said Haggerty. They hurried out of the tent into a crowd that importuned them with various versions of “
PBS
! I got story! I got story!”

They sprinted for the helicopter, which had already started its engine and begun turning its huge rotor up to speed, raising a cloud of tan dust into the late afternoon sun. They climbed in as the shooting grew perilously close. The last of the soldiers slammed the door shut and the helicopter vaulted into the air accelerating into a roaring ascent. A bullet twanged off the fuselage. And another. But they were safely away.

Haggerty talked briefly to Cooper and Feng and then made his way forward to sit beside Dacey and Gerald in the darkness lit only by a dim light over the door to the cockpit.

“If you consider me a test case, you made a little headway,” said Haggerty. “I still don’t know how, or even whether, I’m going to try to sell this to the company. But in any case, I’m sure easier to convince because I’ve seen some of this stuff. You two have a bitch of a job ahead of you if you think you’re going to get everybody else to believe this. I’m sure as hell not going to go public.”

“Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,” shouted Dacey over the engine noise. “Like Gerald says, it all fits.” She patted her knapsack containing the video camera and rock samples. “These’ll show that.”

Gerald said nothing, but his brow was knitted in a way that told her he was already immersed in plotting a strategy.

G
erald had been driving his new battered van for two hours that morning, wandering back roads that went east toward the sun, aiming himself generally back toward Boston. He was glad he’d decided to take a week or so and drive from Los Angeles, where the China flight had landed. Anyway, Dacey and he separated there, with her going to Oklahoma and him to Boston. He’d bought the old van for the trip from an ad on Craigslist. He felt comfortable in them. Maybe he wouldn’t give this one away. The camping trip had given him time to think on the road from California, seeing the scenery, walking in the high plateau country of Mesa Verde, eating a store-bought sandwich at a lonely rest stop.

He thought of his visit with George Voigt in Columbia, Missouri, the day before as he sipped a coffee from a McDonald’s drive-through. The arm was still a big mystery, George had said in quiet, gentlemanly frustration. No other body parts and few of the plane parts had been recovered. The man was a businessman from Ohio, flying himself to a meeting in Kansas City. Nothing unusual, except that almost all of him disappeared from the face of the earth. As they sat in George’s cluttered office going over the lab findings, Gerald had told George of his theory. The old pathologist hadn’t laughed, but he’d gotten a twinkle in his eye. George said he’d think about it.

Gerald was frustrated. A long trip usually gave him enough time to develop a new theory, see things from a new perspective. Maybe it was the other thoughts that intruded. About Dacey. Her wry smile, her terrific eyes, the sort of what-the-hell way she leaned her body against his desk, looking over his shoulder, the subtle fragrance of soap rising from her skin.

He brought himself back to the problem. The holes represented something totally alien from the usual physical theories. He had to come at the problem from an entirely different perspective. As he drove along the quiet road, the morning sun warming his face, he visualized the equations governing space-time, let them float in his conscious, rearranging themselves, the parameters altering, the multiple equations appearing and fading.

His mind wandered from the equations. He remembered that dream from the night before. How strange it was to dream of
Alice in Wonderland
, even though he’d loved the book as a kid. Maybe it was the rabbit hole. He remembered mainly the Cheshire cat, sitting beside him grinning. It had dark fur like the cat, Smokey, he’d had when he was a kid. The Cheshire cat ate a mouse. Then it faded, like the one in the cartoon sitting in a tree. And all that was left was its smile. And the cat yawned.

“
DAMN
!” he yelled, as the idea hit him like a physical object in the face. He swerved off the road, skidding on the long wet grass. A car honked angrily as it passed him. He took his hands off the steering wheel and sat staring straight ahead. “Wow … yeah!” he breathed to himself. His mind a tumult of ideas, he looked around. There was a store up ahead, a market with gas pumps. He gunned the van onto the road toward the store. Outside, a young man in a windbreaker and backward baseball cap was pumping gas into a small truck. Gerald pulled up and leaned out the window, his hair askew, his eyes wild.

“Uh … can you tell me what state this is?”

The young man looked at him strangely, then said. “It’s Illinois. You lost?”

“Which way to Oklahoma?”

The young man thought a second, then pointed down the road. “Well, you wanna get forty-four, so you go down that way—”

But Gerald nodded, thanked him and was gone before he could finish.

• • •

Dacey’s office was once more a mess, as it had been before the Deus Foundation man’s visit. But it was a necessary mess. Multiple glowing display screens, paper charts and maps, photo prints, and rock samples covered every flat surface and festooned the walls, even taped to windows. She needed the sprawling mess. She needed to be able to grab a rock from China, or scrutinize a topo map of the Atlantic seafloor, or a photo of the San Francisco hole. She was sure that they were all somehow puzzle pieces, and maybe by having them splashed across her office, she would understand how they fit into a scientific picture.

She sat at the desk in her usual jeans, t-shirt and flannel long-sleeved shirt, sorting through the latest seismic sounding maps of the Gillard cavern.

After ten days back in the office, she’d finally gotten a chance to really concentrate on the maps, which revealed a giant undulating tunnel that suddenly opened then closed. Like the object in China.

She spent the first days back catching up with her teaching and her graduate students. Then she’d had to deal with the university bureaucracy over the Deus Foundation grant. She’d almost given it back, but finally decided to keep it. The chance to understand these phenomena was too important to let her qualms about accepting money from Gerald’s foundation get in the way.

Besides holding classes and going over grad students’ research progress, she’d been pestered by the university grants office about the bureaucratic process of taking the money. And a university fund raiser had shown up to ask pointedly whether more money might be squeezed out of the foundation. For forty million, they could name a building after the foundation, for example.

Through all this, she wondered what the hell had happened to Gerald. He’d been quiet during the whole return trip from China. At the airport in
LA
, where they parted, he promised he’d let her know what was going on. She had kissed him on the cheek again and given him a sisterly hug, which he returned — with a sort of subtle catch in the rhythm of letting go, hinting he wanted to make it more.

Then he’d evaporated. She phoned his mother, but she’d only heard that he’d bought another van in California and was driving back. She mentally shrugged and immersed herself once more in the data.

Then, Gerald suddenly materialized in her doorway, grinning and haggard. She’d never seen him grin before.

“I’ve got it!” he breathed excitedly, his expression glowing with triumph. She’d also never seen the usually placid Gerald so exorcised. “I’ve got it!”

“Well, take a pill and get rid of it.” She stood up and gave him an exasperated grin, shaking her head. “Where the hell have you been? You look really grungy.”

He ignored the insult. “Driving. Thinking. Talking to some people I know. Listen, I know what’s going on!”

“The appearances and disappearances? The other …” She hesitated. It was weird to talk about these things. “… universes, dimensions?”

“Yeah, but I’ve still got a lot to work out. I wanted to tell you.” He looked at his palms, on which something was written in ink.

“What’s all that?” Dacey rose and took his hands, examining a series of equations penned in blue ink. Gerald peered at them slightly embarrassed.

“Uh, well, it’s a bad habit. I sometimes forget paper, and I have ideas, and I have to write them somewhere.”

“Well, here’s a pen and paper.” She found a scribbled-on yellow pad, tore off the used sheets and handed it to him with a pen. “Write them down, wash your hands and we’ll go eat dinner and you can tell me.” He did so and they walked downstairs to his van, parked at her building’s loading dock. He said he would drive her to her Range Rover parked in the nearby faculty lot. At first she planned for them to have dinner at one of the restaurants on the main drag near campus. But as she watched him hunched over the wheel, bleary-eyed and haggard from his day of driving, she decided that a dinner at home was better. She had some hamburger in the refrigerator that was probably still good, and maybe some buns. She needed to get some food into him.

They reached her Range Rover, and he followed her through the surface streets to her townhouse. Gerald parked at the curb and followed her in with a sheaf of notes.

He began to tell her about his theory, but she admonished him that his seminar would have to wait; that he looked like he needed some food first. So she went into the small kitchen and opened two beers, handing him one and beginning to put together a dinner of hamburgers and fried potatoes. He sat at the bar between the kitchen and dining room, and they talked about what they had done since they saw each other last. He enjoyed watching her move about the kitchen, making patties, sprinkling on Lawry’s salt, frying onions and potatoes, pausing occasionally to take a drink of beer.

The aroma of food was making him hungry, and he needed to stretch after the day of driving, so he wandered into her living room. Her brown corduroy overstuffed sofa and matching easy chair were made to be used, and they had been. The sofa was scattered with bright, print pillows, two of which had been piled at one end, under a large, brass reading lamp, where Dacey, no doubt lay in the evening and read from the pile of books, magazines and scientific journals on the light oak coffee table and end table. Bookshelves held a few travel books and a large collection of rocks and a few seashells, with some framed pictures of what Gerald took to be Dacey’s sister and mother. On the walls were a couple of Gauguin prints, some posters of Yosemite, and near the door a collection of children’s scrawled drawings taped in a jumble at child-height off the floor. Beside the door was a backpack and a pair of bedraggled hiking boots that had walked many miles.

He went up the narrow stairs to use the bathroom, whose shower curtain was imprinted with lyrics to rock ’n roll songs. He washed up in the sink, next to which was her hair brush with long light brown hairs in it, a small bottle of Charlie perfume, some silver earrings, and a used bar of Zest soap.

When he came downstairs, he heard her say, “Okay, old buddy, let’s get you fed,” as she brought out into the dining room two plates with hefty hamburgers and piles of fries.

He took a bite of the juicy hamburger and was glad she had insisted that he eat. They were halfway through the meal, when he said, “I’ve just got to tell you about this. It’s really incredible.” She smiled, rolled her eyes and made a face that indicated she had relented. He quickly spread out his notes on the dining table and she moved around beside him, bringing her plate. “I haven’t figured it all out yet.” He consulted the notes. “Now, remember about all these holes. The holes in China and at the ship. Those were holes into stars. And the vacuum holes in Gillard and San Francisco. Those opened up into outer space on the other side and sucked stuff out.”

Dacey nodded and chewed a bite of potato.

“I knew these might be space-time holes opening up, but they couldn’t be black holes, because they just suck everything in and it never comes back out. And black holes have incredible gravitational forces. They would rip everything around them apart. They couldn’t be the reverse, so-called ‘white’ holes that just spew stuff out.” He found the yellow pad with his latest scrawled equations.

“Then what?” asked Dacey.

He held up his equations in triumph. “They’re wormholes!”

“And what are they?”

“They’re wrinkles in space-time so extreme that they tear the fabric of space-time; they open up holes into other universes … or maybe to another part of our universe.” He held up the yellow pad. “Like punching a hole through two pieces of paper that are next to each other. But theoretically, wormholes couldn’t exist without huge masses of exotic stuff called negative-mass. We think that’s the case here.”

“So, why here, why now?”

“Well, I think the solar system is passing through a region of the galaxy where physical laws have glitched a little bit. The quantum foam — the stuff that makes up space-time at a subatomic level — is flawed. It provides negative-mass.”

“But why do they open up in Oklahoma, or China, or under the Atlantic? Why not everywhere?”

“I think it has to do with the magnetic field. If there’s a magnetic field like the magnetic field of earth, a dimension of space-time unravels, linking two universes … or maybe another part of ours. That explains why there are star-holes. The stars on the other side blast right through the holes. And the outer-space holes open into a vacuum!” Gerald smiled at his theoretical triumph.

Dacey was stunned. She sat back and tried to digest what she had heard. “Will we all die? Will we be swallowed up into another universe?”

Gerald’s expression grew somber. “Well, I think … I hope I’m right … that there’s a size limit. I think in this region of space, the flaws are such that the holes can only reach a maximum size. Like soap bubbles can only reach a maximum size. If the holes just kept growing, we would have seen other stars in the sky just disappear.”

“Look, this just seems so … weird … exotic. It seems that things this strange just couldn’t happen.”

“Yeah, well, we wouldn’t believe that tornadoes and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes could happen, unless we’d seen them happen. They’re weird, too.”

“Okay, so explain why they’re so different. Y’know, Gillard just sucked stuff up, but in San Francisco it went through like a bullet.”

He sat back and picked at the label on his beer. “They were both the same kind of vacuum hole … into the vacuum of outer space on the other side. But the San Francisco hole opened way outside Earth. It was carried along by Earth’s magnetic field. It had this incredible velocity relative to Earth and so it zipped through like a bullet.”