Wormholes (20 page)

“Nope,” said Dacey, surveying the sunbaked rock formations. “And this is really my kind of place.”

They got into the jeep and Gerald drove away from the huge, lone hangar out into the desert, where the low sun made the creosote bushes cast long shadows across the subtle tans of the sand and rock. They drove together for a long time, far beyond the complex and into a deep sandy arroyo where the sun had already set. They reached the end, and Dacey found a broad sandy area, where they could sit and watch the blue of the sky deepen and the first stars begin to come out.

“We haven’t talked for a while. I thought this might be a good place to go.”

“Yeah, thanks,” said Gerald. “I needed to get away.”

“I could tell.” She took his ink-scribbled hand, turning it over in hers. “You’ve been working so hard there’s layers of equations written here.”

He laughed, as she gave him back his hand before the gesture turned into handholding. They sat for a while and enjoyed the desert quiet and the dry, gentle breeze.

“You pissed about all this?” she asked.

“At Lambert? No, not really. I knew what he was like. You know where they got the idea to paint those carriers blue? His publicity people said they’d be more photogenic that way. And he insisted we put a capture unit in Houston, so he could show it to his friends. Anyway, I expected to go through something like this. It’s worth it.”

“You never really said much about him and your mom. You mind if I ask?”

“No. She never really told me the whole story, but my aunt did. He was this hotshot young oilman. Went to Boston looking for backers and my grandfather was one of his targets. He met her when she was home from Smith. I think basically he swept her off her feet, but that’s not what you can say these days. They were married for seven years. I think she was just a means to an end for him. A way to get with an old money crowd. Anyway, he messed around so much that she finally couldn’t take it anymore. So, she divorced him and she never remarried.”

“She loved him that much?”

“I think it sort of crushed her. She was this kind of sheltered person. Never knew somebody could be like him. Charming. Ruthless.” He paused and looked over at her with a half-smile. “May I kiss you?”

“No.”

He startled slightly “Why not?”

“Well, look, y’know, first … well, hell … I am not a demure person, y’know. It’s just that, well—”

“You’re afraid this is going to turn into something serious.”

Trying to recover from her previous stammer, she blew out a sigh and didn’t say anything. She was amazed at herself for being at a loss for words.

“Well, I’d be afraid it’s not,” he said. They looked at each other for a long moment without speaking, imagining each other’s touch. But with mute gestures — a shrug, a sideways cast of the eye, a subtle arch of the eyebrow — they tacitly agreed that for a tangled knot of reasons that a certain line could not be crossed … for now. But they both remained acutely aware that something extraordinary could lie beyond that line.

• • •

Within two months, gigantic
C
-5 Super Galaxy cargo planes had flown pairs of capture vehicles to Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Moscow, and San Francisco. Except for the Houston unit, whose vehicles were prominently displayed on the plaza of the Lambert building, they sat in warehouses at strategic points calculated to give them the quickest access to any part of the city that experienced an appearance of the holes. For substantial contributions to the city treasuries, and some under-the-table contributions to officials, they were assured priority routing through the cities.

During the third month, a subterranean seismic disturbance of some kind collapsed a shopping mall on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Geologists said it was subsidence.

That same month, a violent cyclonic disturbance appeared above Beijing, China, obliterating almost a city block of the most crowded section. Meteorologists said it was a freak weather pattern.

“We’re on the right trail,” Gerald told an international conference call of the project directors. “Just as we thought, these things are being reported quickly in cities.”

“Yeah, well, wrong goddamned cities,” Lambert’s voice growled over the speaker.

T
he deafening shriek shattered the pastoral stillness of the French countryside, driving cows to panicky clumsy galloping back and forth across their pastures, trying to escape it. Sunday picnickers bolted for their cars, rolling up their windows, their fingers in their ears trying to lessen the searing pain. They peered through their windshields at the cloudy sky trying to see the source of the malevolent noise. It seemed to pass northward into the Paris suburbs, prompting a flood of alarmed calls to the gendarmes. Their ears beginning to bleed, people screamed and collapsed writhing to the floor. Dogs howled in pain, cats hissed and spat in fear and the glass in window panes in houses rattled and cracked. Along with the unearthly shrieking, a strange wind rose, seeming to rush toward the object in a rising gale.

The monster passed overhead toward the center of Paris and those who could stand to be outside witnessed its source descend from the tortured sky. They saw a round object, but only vaguely, for it was obscured by a roaring influx of vapor and dust sucked into its maw. Enveloped in the wind and hellish noise, the observers screamed to one another that a tornado was approaching. A strange aerial tornado. The object descended into the Montparnasse section of the city, eating its way with a great grinding sound into the narrow streets of stone houses. The wall of noise swallowed up the screams of dying people, their bodies shredded to unrecognizable red pulp. No dust, no smoke arose from the area, although the skyline seemed to disappear as whole buildings collapsed away into nothing.

Four miles away, a seismograph in a large stone warehouse registered a subterranean disturbance. The attached computer recognized the characteristic pattern and triggered a whooping alarm. Within a minute, three huge vehicles — a van and two Russian artillery carriers with giant hemispherical dishes on their fronts — accelerated out of the warehouse. They followed speeding police cars with sing-song sirens and flashing lights down the broad avenues of Paris into the narrow side streets and toward the scene of unimaginable devastation.

Inside the van, a young brown-haired technician studied a computer screen issuing orders to the police car and the two artillery carriers. A sheen of sweat rose on his forehead. He glanced nervously at the other technician monitoring the magnetic fields. At his signal the police cars veered away, their occupants glad to be relieved of the duty. The van stopped, and the young man continued to issue radio orders directing the mammoth carriers along separate routes to a rendezvous.

Inside the carriers, even with the roar of the engines and diesel generators, the drivers could hear, and even feel, the deep rumbling destruction ahead. The beast was moving underground, slicing through the dense, intricate jumble of sewers and power lines as if they were made of smoke.

In one carrier, the driver touched the medallion around his neck, the one his young wife had given him. He held up a thumb to his colleague, a round-faced red-headed man who would monitor the magnetic field and make sure the dish was aimed correctly.

In the other vehicle, the burly driver gripped the steering lever with white knuckles, removing a hand only to nervously brush back the mop of dark hair. This was his chance to show what he could do. Behind him a young woman monitored the magnetic fields. She was a very brilliant and somewhat intimidating engineer, whom he’d been trying to impress. Now, she would be impressed.

Both carriers maneuvered into place northeast and northwest of the beast, which was relentlessly tunneling its way toward them below the city streets. If they understood its past behavior correctly, it should move beneath and between them.

They waited. In thirty seconds, it would reach the target position. All was happening as planned. It grew closer. Now it created bone-rattling vibrations in the earth which grew powerful enough to heave even the immense machines up and down like toys. But they stayed on station and manipulated the controls to point the hemispheres down to attract the beast to the surface. They switched on the magnetic fields, and the computer automatically shaped, balanced and rebalanced the magnetism according to the beast’s changing position as it came into range.

Suddenly the beast stopped. A tense silence fell. The controller in the van held his breath. Then with a roar, it rose from the earth, drawn from its hiding place by the fields. The technicians stared at their monitor screens in both anticipation and fear, following its approach.

It surfaced with a rumbling, crackling sound, eating away the pavement around it, tearing away at nearby buildings, as if raging against its captors. First came benches, signs, garbage cans and other miscellany of the street. Still the carriers held their positions, maintaining the fields.

But then the beast seemed to claw the very structures of the old stone buildings around it, rending their walls and sucking the stones toward it. The stones became its missiles, smashing into the carriers with a reverberating metallic clang, careening away, then arcing into the monster’s embrace to disappear. The bombardment became even more terrifying because it was cloaked in impenetrable clouds of swirling dust and smoke.

Inside the carriers, the deafening cannonade unnerved the operators, distracted them and slowed their reflexes. A large granite stone dislodged from a disintegrating church steeple, slammed down into one of the hemispheres and tore away a crucial cable, causing the magnetic field to falter. Another stone followed hard on the first, compounding the damage.

The beast had freed itself from the magnetic cage. Before anyone could react, it skewed toward the intact carrier, drawn by a remnant magnetic field that was not shut down fast enough. It ate harmlessly through one side of the hemisphere and continued to skirt along the south side of the vehicle, which was successfully resisting the vicious pull of its vacuum. But now the field was off and it could resume the steady northerly path that had been its nature. It veered in a deadly drift into the vehicle, slicing through the metal plate and eviscerating the carrier as a predator draws the soft living substance from a broken egg.

The young man with the medallion and his red-headed friend lived only an instant before they were crushed and swallowed into another universe.

Over the radios came the static-laden sounds of screaming, shouting, and sobbing from the remaining carrier, as the creature continued its unhampered drift northward, consuming houses, offices, stores. After a while, it wafted into the sky, again resuming the shriek that was its call.

Abruptly, the hellish sound ceased, as if it were choked off. The abrupt disappearance left the faint wail of sirens, an immense, jagged smoking scar of destruction across the city and the shattered remains of what had been a confidently designed scientific plan.

• • •

“Jesus, we can’t even talk to the people who were in the surviving carrier!” Brendan Cooper’s frustration spilled out of the phone line from Paris. In Nevada, Gerald and Andy Mullins sat huddled around the speakerphone in the small office just off the hangar. Outside the office, the engineers from Megamag and Deus crowded around the door, straining to hear the conference call. Cameron was linked from San Francisco, and Dacey was in Oklahoma. Cooper, who had sat agonized in the control room during the catastrophe, continued, “The doctors’ve got them sedated, and they’re not even sure the guys are going to come out of this sane.”

“Brendan, I know it was traumatic, but could they be rendered insane?” asked Gerald.

“Well, the way the docs told me, it’s major post-traumatic stress disorder. These people encountered something that turned their whole world … well, their universe … literally inside out. They couldn’t cope. Gerald, you’ve got to rethink this whole thing. You’ve got to rethink the equipment, but you’ve also got to rethink the people.”

“God. My God, what have I done.” Gerald whispered, resting his palms on the desk, staring down at the phone.

“C’mon, Gerald, it wasn’t just you,” said Mullins. “We all developed this thing … did the best we could with what we knew.”

“Yes, but people died.”

“Bullshit,” came a third voice through the phone. “This happens. I’ve had people killed on my rigs, and it’s a bad thing, but you just figure out what went wrong and you forge ahead.” The voice rose and fell in volume as Lambert apparently moved about in his office.

“Calvin, don’t you feel
anything
here?” asked Gerald.

“I feel like you people didn’t take everything into account. Hell, didn’t you ever expect these things to make crap fly around?”

“We thought the control system could handle it … shut down quick enough. We just didn’t realize the holes have no inertia. They’ll move instantly responding to the subtlest change in a magnetic field. We’ll fix it next time.”

“Fine, you do that,” said Lambert. “You also call a news conference. My people will be there inside an hour to run it. Make sure you emphasize that this … event … proves that these things exist. No fucking way this could have been some tornado.”

“Calvin, we will emphasize that it was a terrible tragedy that these people died,” said Gerald. “We’ll emphasize that we made mistakes, that—”

“For Christ’s sake don’t say
mistakes
. I’ve had my share of lawsuits. We’ll have the families, the damned French government, everybody, on our asses. My pockets are deep, but I’m not going to open them for this.”

“I
will
say that. I will tell what I think—”

“Gerald, you are an employee of Deus, Inc.” His voice grew louder. Lambert had leaned right into his speakerphone. “You will say what you are told to say, or I will fucking cut this project off. I will pull out and say that I was hornswoggled, that your theory doesn’t work worth a shit, do you hear me, Gerald? Your choice, Gerald?” There was a click. Lambert hadn’t waited for an answer.

“What a shithead,” said Cameron’s voice over the phone.

“I think that’s a reasonable assessment,” came Dacey’s voice. “Gerald, don’t worry about him. Look, I’m flying out. Let’s go over all the information; figure something out. There are answers here.” They talked for a while and agreed that they would all gather the following day to go over all the data about all the occurrences again. When he hung up, Gerald found he was as determined as ever.

Reporters packed the news conference that afternoon in the cavernous hangar. Footage of the Paris disaster had run all morning on
CNN
and the morning talk shows, complete with hastily called experts. So, the reporters were primed with full details of what had happened. The trail of devastation had run for three miles through urban Paris, with 937 people known dead and billions of dollars in damage.

Flanked by suited
PR
men from Lambert’s company, Gerald stood and delivered a statement on what was known about the failure of the Deus attempt to capture the hole. Then, he answered questions, choosing the questioners from the forest of insistent hands that would shoot up after each answer. He gave answers, some not his own:

Yes
, it was a terrible tragedy.

Yes
, it was reminiscent of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The two people in the doomed capture vehicle, Roger Cavendish and Emily Corot, gave their lives for science, as well as to stop the hole in its destructive tracks.

Yes
, it was obviously incontrovertible proof that the Meier theory was correct. Amateur video footage from the Eiffel Tower clearly showed the hole slice through its center.

No
, Calvin Lambert was not pulling out. However, he was not available at this time for his reaction.

Yes
, an enormous amount had been learned about the phenomenon to allow improvements in the system.

No
, Deus, Inc. did not make any obvious mistakes. An act of God cannot be controlled, especially one as entirely new as this one.

Then, the question that Gerald expected:

Yes
, he would somehow manage to be in one of the two capture vehicles that encountered the next hole. He wouldn’t ask others to risk their lives if he wouldn’t risk his.

• • •

“Nothing comes from nothing.” Ralph Gaston smiled inscrutably and leaned back in the chair, studying wall-sized screens full of maps and charts, and the incongruously ancient blackboard covered with equations. The others looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something else, but he didn’t.

“Damn, Ralph, you doing your Confucius imitation again?” Cameron perched on a nearby work table drinking a Coke. But Gaston didn’t reply, letting his proverb sink in.

They were all bleary from ten hours in the large briefing room in the former Air Force administration building. Besides the newly installed computer screens, it held several worn work tables, old metal arm chairs and a yellowing topographic area map on one wall.

Covering the tables were laptop computers, rock samples, photos, and anything else that pertained to the appearance of the holes. In particular, Dacey’s sheared-off rock from beneath Gillard sat in the middle of the largest table, a singular object of contemplation surrounded by coffee cups, sandwich wrappers, and yellow pads with pages covered with scribbles.