Wormholes (25 page)

E
nveloped in the thrumming roar of the
C
5
A
cargo plane, Gerald bent bleary eyed over the control panel. He stared obsessively at its instruments as if diverting his gaze for an instant would allow the wormhole to escape — or disastrously, to careen toward a planet in the other universe, attracted by its magnetic field.

For seven hours he had crouched on the metal stool, watching the glowing instrument console mounted near the furiously humming frost-shrouded sphere. Bolted on the back of the flatbed truck, it looked like a massive snowball, reflecting in glittering white the interior lights of the plane. It contributed its own alien coldness to the icy temperatures inside the huge cargo bay.

As when they had captured the first hole, he had touched it, feeling its resonant vibration. Again, he had brushed away the frost, glimpsing the hovering blackness within, obscured by the translucence of the marred surface.

Now he sat watching and listening for any hint of a change, poised to grasp the joysticks that controlled the sphere’s course through the other universe. The rattling overtones of the twin diesel generators added their reassuring sounds to the mix. Mullins had temporarily left his post beside Gerald to check their fuel levels.

Two months they had waited. Two months of round-the-clock building the new blockhouse and installing the new vacuum chamber. Two months of perfecting their new capture system. Two months of poring minutely over satellite data, seeking the telltale light flashes that would warn of the opening of a new hole. They had forecast several, but none was ideally positioned. They’d predicted two in the Pacific Ocean and one near the Arctic Circle.

A hole that opened in the ocean off the Marshal Islands had been a “sucker,” as the media had dubbed those that connected into the hard vacuum of outer space. That hole generated an immense whirlpool, drawing a cubic mile of water into its maw before closing.

The other north of the Galapagos had been a solar hole, erupting hundred-thousand-degree hydrogen that boiled the ocean for miles around, proving that the supertanker Castile had been destroyed by such a beast.

The Arctic Circle hole began as a vacuum, then abruptly exploded in a volcano of rock and lava. Dacey had flown there immediately, joining the expedition of planetologists and geologists to help collect the first pieces of a planet from another star system ever to arrive on earth.

Now she lay curled under a blanket sleeping, in the small passenger compartment at the front of the cargo bay. Soon she would be up, no doubt insisting that he get some sleep to prepare himself for the arrival in the desert of the new sphere.

For Calvin Lambert, two months was far too long. He had constantly harangued them in phone calls, demanding to know when the next hole would be captured. Alternately, he was declaring that they couldn’t possibly finish the new facility on time. He’d reluctantly delayed installing Aaron Cohen as project head, when even Cohen had agreed that Gerald’s new theory seemed sound. In fact, he’d publically distanced himself from the project, apparently wanting to give himself room to deny involvement should it fail.

But Gerald was determined that it wouldn’t! Shivering in the borrowed army jacket, clutching a styrofoam cup of cold coffee in his hand, he remembered with haggard triumph the hole they had captured. He remembered the faint flashes in satellite images of the Argentinean pampas; the launching of the cargo planes into the sky carrying the capture vehicles; their precarious landing on the buckling asphalt road that crossed the vast, lonely grassland.

And he remembered the same incredible violence of the hole’s birth, this time shrieking and tearing at the dry, tan earth, witnessed only by frightened cattle and the small capture team. Conditions were perfect, and they had made a good capture, but the moments after had been gut-wrenching. The new television cameras inside the sphere had revealed a looming planet on the other side, with an intricately swirling frigid atmosphere of red and yellow gases. The huge planet had grown closer by the moment, and it would have drawn the hole inexorably into it, erupting a monstrous gush of ultracold liquid methane through the hole.

But this time they had been prepared. They had designed the new sphere with electromagnetic steering probes sprouting from the inside — large metal fingers extending to the very edge of the hole. Immediately after capture, they had sent precise surges of electricity through the probes and into the magnetic coils at their tips, creating a carefully sculpted field that reached through the hole. With intense relief, they had found they could pilot the hole to reverse course, sailing smoothly away from the planet whose magnetic field had brought it to life in the first place.

And thus they had maintained the hole, holding its ferocity in magnetic stasis far from any planet, until they could install it safely in the new vacuum chamber.

Then they would enter it and even fly it!

The stunning prospect, as well as the six cups of coffee he’d consumed, had kept Gerald doggedly scanning the instruments, scrutinizing the monitor screens for any sign of the returning planet.

His life had become immersed in cameras. Besides the cameras trained on the sphere, there were cameras in the cargo bay and mounted on the truck. Their unblinking red lights reminded him that the entire world was watching. Lambert had sold television rights to the project for three hundred million dollars. The networks had complained bitterly, but had readily signed on, and billions of viewers had avidly watched the capture live. Now, they were glued to television sets around the world, staring at him as he stared at the instrument panel.

He had given them a good show, only allowing himself bathroom breaks. And even then, he had circled the truck, making sure it was still chained securely into the cargo bay of the huge transport. He had accepted sandwiches from Andy and chewed them absentmindedly at his post.

Mullins returned, climbing awkwardly onto the back of the flatbed, still favoring the injured leg, even though the cast was off, and plopping into the chair next to him. Dacey appeared at his side, clasping a hand commandingly on his shoulder. She handed him a cell phone. He looked up at her in hazy puzzlement, but held it to his ear.

“This is George,” said the distant voice of the old doctor. “I’m watching you on
TV
. Go to bed. Now!” He managed a sheepish smile as he handed back the phone and surrendered to fatigue, climbing slowly down from the trailer. He stumbled forward to the small cabin and lay down across two seats, not bothering to move the seat belts from beneath him, to fall instantly into a dead-solid sleep. The only fleeting thought that managed to find its way into his waning conscious was that the sphere would be well monitored by Dacey and Mullins. They had all trained intensively on the new capture system.

He plunged through a cycle of deep slumber lasting four hours before he surfaced far enough toward consciousness to remember where he was. He forced himself awake, unfolded himself creakily from the hard seats and went into the small lavatory to splash water on his face and with gulps of the cold water to wash away the brown morning taste. He made his way forward to the cockpit, where the crew sat vigilantly in a darkness festooned with the glowing lights from the instrument panels. Out the windshield lay a sky giving way to the first light of dawn.

The captain crisply informed him that they were two hours from landing. The information sparked him fully awake. He hurried back to the main cargo bay to find Mullins and Dacey still intent on the instrument panel.

“The sphere’s flyin’ good,” said Mullins, patting the instrument panel. “We passed near a moon or somethin’. The hole was being sucked in. Dacey piloted her free, though.”

Dacey sat with her hands resting lightly on the joysticks controlling the steering fields. She placed a finger on a video monitor showing a small, round white dot in a field of absolute black. “We’ll show you the recording. We didn’t get a close look at the moon, but it was big.” She looked up at Gerald, her eyes wide with excitement. “Jesus, the places we’re going to go! The things we’re going to see!”

The next hours allowed no such eager speculation. The massive gray-green air transport landed smoothly on the runway in the clear desert dawn and taxied ponderously across the concrete to the hangar holding the new vacuum chambers. At Gerald’s insistence, the pilots evacuated during the transfer for their safety. They sped away across the desert in a Humvee, passing Gaston and Cameron coming just as fast in the opposite direction. Gerald had learned not to argue with any of them. They had been with him before, and they were determined to be with him now. But he would be the only one to take the ultimate risk.

With Dacey video-streaming the process for the world to watch, Gerald lowered the massive rear gate to the transport. They all stood by, tension tightening their faces, as Mullins carefully backed the truck holding the vibrating, frost-covered sphere out of the transport and eased it into the hangar.

Months of practice made the next steps almost automatic. The engineers hoisted the capture sphere into the vacuum chamber, switched over the magnetic field, and sealed the chamber.

Back in the new blockhouse, Mullins flipped switches to pump the chamber down to a hard vacuum, unlatch the two hemispheres and pull them apart. As before, the hole floated in the chamber, suspended in the embrace of the chamber’s magnetic fields.

“It’s
beautiful
!” exclaimed Dacey, watching the screen. “So incredible.”

Even though they had seen it before, they remained awestruck at the void’s utter blackness, the shining points of light beyond, stars like gleaming diamonds scattered on black velvet. And as before, the glowing, undulating halo played delicately about the hole’s edge. Its luminous fingers seemed to invite them, to challenge them, and to taunt them all at the same time.

They all sat at consoles in the new blockhouse, its massive concrete walls offering more protection against disaster. Its two tiers of monitoring stations were also filled with Megamag engineers, and included every possible kind of sensor that could be trained on the hole — magnetic, thermal, chemical, radiation. Even the most subtle change in its status would be recorded. All in the room watched their instruments and the six wall-mounted video screens showing the outside and inside of the chamber.

Lambert, ever the entrepreneur, had filled the blockhouse’s glass-walled observation room with potential commercial clients. There was a nervous-looking man from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whom Lambert had persuaded of the holes’ potential to dispose of nuclear wastes. And there was the colonel representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He would report back on the weapons potential of the holes.

In fact, they would all report back to somebody. They were all second-tier people, as Dacey had noted, chosen because they were expendable, in case something should go wrong again.

Indeed, Lambert was not there, either. Aaron Cohen sat on the front row, observing all. He would report back to Lambert. Lambert had designated Cohen as his representative, and the slight old man with the eyes like obsidian had applied his penetrating intellect to every aspect of the project. He’d peppered Gerald with questions about his plans, his measurements and his theories.

And there were Lambert’s lawyer and public relations man, distinctive in their expensive dark suits, ready to install Cohen as head in a moment should there be problems.

Mullins decided that the time was right, and after checking with his technicians, flipped switches and placed his hands gently on two joysticks, easing them forward. The large-screen view inside the chamber showed a large cylinder, suspended on a jointed arm, moving up to the hole. Gerald switched on his microphone to explain the process.

“You’re seeing one of the propulsion units moving into place. Each cylinder has an array of electromagnets mounted on its end, which we can activate to drive the hole in the other universe.” He activated a camera at the end of the cylinder.

Stars filled one of the video screens, and the engineers scrutinized the image for any sign of a nearby planet or moon that would lure the hole into its magnetic grip. The propulsion unit circled the hole like some wary mechanical dragon.

Mullins activated another set of joysticks and two other propulsion units eased up to the hole, to give full maneuvering control. Two other video screens showed views from those cylinders.

“Ohhh, shit!” exclaimed Mullins, as gasps rose in the room. One of the screens showed a rapidly looming moon, the dappling of craters visible on its surface.

“It’s that moon! The hole reversed course!”

“Remember, the hole has no inertia,” Gerald said, his voice strained. “It’s going to move like nothing we’ve ever encountered. Take care of it, Andy.”

“Computer can handle it,” said Mullins, his stubby fingers dancing across the keyboard, feeding in navigation coordinates. The sulfur-yellow sphere grew to fill the screen, its crater-pocked surface showing a tracery of rifts.