Wormholes (33 page)

T
he Chinese military research complex at Zhengzhou was a jumbled mass of weathered brick buildings nestled against a green hillside, ringed with razor-wire-topped fences. Passengers in both the planes flew over the drab factory-like complex about the same time. Lambert’s 767 had caught up with the slower cargo plane, and the two touched down within minutes of each other on the long, stained concrete landing strip that ran down the center of the small valley.

A dank, cold drizzle fell as they emerged from the 767 to meet a line of six People’s Army trucks and three black, boxy Chinese Red Flag limousines. Soldiers trundled a rattling gray metal staircase up to the 767, and Mullins pounded down the steps and away to the cargo plane to supervise unloading of the equipment. He gestured urgently at Megamag engineers emerging from the plane, directing equipment to the various trucks.

Lambert, Dacey and Van Alston descended the stairs to find a short, round-faced Chinese man waiting for them at the bottom. He smiled, bowed and introduced himself as Li Chang, and extended a hand, at the same time motioning his lieutenants forward for introductions. Lambert took the hand, but ignored the other scientists, immediately asking to be taken to the laboratory complex. But before they could enter the cars, Mullins returned, out of breath, satisfied that unloading would proceed rapidly. He, too, wanted to see the hole as soon as possible.

Lambert looked at his watch as one would regard an enemy. Their faces all revealed the grim knowledge that time had run out more than five hours ago.

The motorcade sped along narrow potholed roads cleared of traffic by army troops, who stood beside their trucks and impassively watched the limousines pass.

But an altogether different reception awaited the cars as they rounded a sharp curve and arrived at the compound entrance. A battered army truck blocked the road, with a dozen troops arrayed menacingly on either side, their assault rifles held at the ready. A squat middle-aged man in a uniform festooned with colorful ribbons stood like a chunk of granite in front of the soldiers. He extended a commanding open hand, bellowing at the approaching cars in guttural Chinese, his jaw jutting forward in anger.

“What the hell is this?” Lambert leaned forward and looked across Dacey at Chang, whose expression revealed a growing worry.

“It’s … it’s.” He coughed nervously. “It’s the colonel in charge of the laboratory. I had to issue orders quickly and he was out of the province.”

“I thought you had control here! Well, settle things! Now!” Lambert looked at his watch again.

Chang opened the door and pulled himself out. He made his way forward through the gray drizzle to the colonel, his posture hinting at a vulnerability to the colonel’s whims. Dacey noticed that none of the other Chinese scientists followed Chang, remaining in the cars behind them.

The colonel jabbed a pudgy finger accusingly at Chang, his dark eyes narrowed, and began to shout and gesture, as two soldiers grabbed Chang by the arms.

Van Alston sat next to the driver, and Lambert leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. Van Alston knew without being asked that he was to translate: “The colonel accuses Chang of treason. Chang has endangered a national resource, he says. He will have Chang shot. He will hold the Americans.” Van Alston stiffened at the next torrent of words from the colonel. He turned around and looked at Lambert, alarmed. “He says he has impounded the equipment at the airport. He will order it disassembled to detect any weapons.”

“Jesus!” Lambert turned to Dacey. “Look, you and Mullins stay out of sight. I don’t want you hurt in any of this. We need you for the rescue.” He flung open the door and launched himself out, striding toward the colonel. The rain increased and soaked Lambert, streaming off his head and shoulders, but he paid it no mind. The soldiers leveled their weapons at him. Van Alston, taken by surprise at Lambert’s exit, scrambled after him, hesitating when a soldier pointed a weapon at him. But he stepped up next to his boss.

Lambert towered over the colonel. He bowed and smiled, and the colonel looked slightly quizzical for a moment. He began to talk, with Van Alston translating. The colonel stared fiercely at him. Lambert continued, making placating gestures. The colonel looked over at Chang, then paced back and forth several times.

The colonel made an imperious sweep with his hand, and guns were leveled at Lambert and Van Alston. The soldiers forced Chang, Lambert and Van Alston into the truck, which roared to life and swerved off the road into the compound.

A soldier sprinted up to the driver’s side of the limousine and shouted something to the driver. The car accelerated behind the truck. Dacey twisted to see if she could make out Mullins, who sat in the next car back. She couldn’t see him. She looked at her watch and felt an ache in her chest, a profound tearing pain of loss.

• • •

“My God. Twenty-one hours. It’s been twenty-one hours since they went into the lifeboat.” Mullins paced back and forth in the large storage room where the soldiers had imprisoned the Americans. Except for Van Alston and Lambert.

“Where is he? Damn!” Dacey stood at the door, debating whether to pound on it again. She’d done it three times, and three times a guard had appeared to brandish his rifle and utter what she took to be curses in Chinese. The rest of the engineers huddled in a tight, fearful group. At the same time, they stood ready to leap through the door when released, to do the work they’d determined to do.

The latch clicked, the door opened, and Lambert stepped through, an angry look on his face.

“What happened?” Dacey demanded. “What the hell happened.”

“Cost me another hundred million for the fruit salad. Son-of-a-bitch made me wait until it was in his bank account in Switzerland. Let’s go.”

They spilled out of the room to see Chang waiting, a chastened look on his face. They ran across a rainy courtyard and into a cavernous old brick laboratory.

Two lab-coated Chinese engineers met the group at the door, but Lambert and Dacey continued inside with Chang, while Mullins began to pepper the engineers with questions, as Van Alston interpreted.

In the far corner of the huge, musty building sat a massive cylindrical steel vessel, three stories high and fifty feet across. From the unused pipes and valves festooning it, the vessel seemed to have once held liquid, but to have been renovated as a vacuum chamber. Arrayed around the chamber were clusters of control consoles and computer monitors that were less technically advanced versions of the ones at the Deus base.

Mullins, Van Alston and the Chinese engineers moved quickly to the chamber. Mullins continued his rapid-fire questions, the Chinese answering succinctly.

Lambert and Dacey remained with Chang, back far enough so that they could see the entire laboratory.

“Doctor Chang, your equipment is sound?”

“Yes, of course.” Chang nodded. “We don’t have as much money as you Americans. Not as advanced in some ways. But we have contained the hole and maintained its stability.”

Mullins came up to them as the rumble of trucks could be heard outside. “Thank God, they didn’t screw with our equipment. We’ve got a few technical problems. We’ll solve them. Dacey, let’s get ready. The suits are in the first truck.”

Within ten minutes, they had stripped down in a corner beside a pile of metal parts and begun to don two space suits. For Dacey, the suit brought memories of the terrors of an alien planet, but she used the memory to steel her determination. She had survived then; she would survive now. Mullins struggled into his suit, which had been made for a slimmer person. But once in, he moved swiftly to the large airlock welded into the side of the tank. Fortunately, the Chinese had installed only one huge airlock with twenty-foot doors, so they could wrestle all their equipment in at the same time. The other trucks arrived, and the engineers hefted the three large packages to the chamber.

The time!
thought Dacey. Almost twenty-two hours now. She determined to ignore the tragic reality, to push as hard as she could. She persuaded herself that each minute lost could mean the difference between life or death. She comforted herself with the thought that if there was a way to survive up there Gerald would figure it out.

They donned their helmets and breathed in the dry oxygen, moving to the airlock. Technicians swung the giant airlock door open and helped them fill it with the three packages — the cylinder with the guidance computer and battery and the two folded hemispheres. The doors slammed with a reverberating clank, and Dacey and Mullins watched the technicians through thick ports as they hand-cranked the large wheel that sealed the door. Their turn would come with the balky airlock, a mechanical arrangement of latches, unlike the Deus system of servomechanisms.

A hiss of air and a loud rattle of a vacuum pump told them the airlock was being evacuated. The rattle faded into nothingness as the air that conducted sound waves disappeared from the airlock. Now they had no radio communication, except between each other. But they didn’t need any. Their desperation drove them to fierce self-reliance.

Dacey waved her hand impatiently indicating that she thought vacuum had been reached. Mullins held his hand up in caution.

“We go too early, we get sucked in there right through the hole.” Dacey waited but a moment, then grasped the large steel wheel of the inside door and began to yank at it. Mullins relented and joined her. Together, they wrenched it around three times until the door unlatched and clanged inward, driven by residual air in the airlock. They caught themselves on the door edge to keep from being drawn in.

The hole floated before them, a shimmering star-filled blackness into another universe, bobbing slightly in the middle of a forest of magnetic probes aimed at it.

“Don’t like that bouncin’ around,” said Mullins over the radio. “Hole’s damned small, too.”

“We’ve got no choice,” said Dacey clumping determinedly toward it.

“Yeah.” Mullins followed. “Seems stable in size at least.”

A large wooden scaffolding surrounded the hole, and a wooden ladder inserted into it from the bottom, encircled by wooden hoops to prevent people and equipment from contacting the hole’s edge when they went through.

“There’s no way to lower the equipment into it,” said Mullins over the radio. “We’ll have to push it up through.”

“Fine,” said Dacey, and with a powerful yank, lifted the computer cylinder and hefted it toward the hole. Mullins jumped forward and helped, and they quickly positioned it in place.

“I’m bigger,” said Mullins. “I can lift it up to you. You go first.”

Dacey tested the ladder with a foot, then hoisted herself up and in a quick sequence of steps pulled herself up through the hole. She forgot about the weightlessness and almost floated away before she caught the last rung and stopped herself. The last rung held several ropes that floated in space like lazy snakes. She tied one around her waist.

She turned to the alien universe, gasping at a gigantic globular cluster of stars lighting the entire sky almost to daylight. She willed herself not to be overwhelmed. She cursed loudly to bring herself back. She could not let herself see any of this. She could not let herself be sidetracked.

She waved down to Mullins, who with a grunt that sounded in her headset, heaved the computer cylinder through. She grabbed it, and floated it away from the hole, tethering it with another line.

Then came the two folded sections of the shell, and then Mullins. Finally, they both floated free, using an enormous effort of will to hold at bay their fear and awe, concentrating on the task ahead.

• • •

Lambert paced outside the chamber, trying to peer through the door, but seeing nothing. The single television camera in the chamber now showed only the inside of the enveloping shell. At least they’d successfully assembled that device around the hole. He couldn’t contact them by radio to learn anything else. The engineers hadn’t even had time to set up the communications.

“God,” he whispered. He’d not used that word much before. Never needed to. Now he did.

“Chang, don’t you have any way of knowing what’s going on in there? Any way at all?”

Doctor Chang sat with three other technicians at the console, his hands gripping its surface. “We will know by the light. The light they will signal.”

A flash lit the screen. They had shown a light through the hatch of the shell. They were ready!

Chang shouted a rapid-fire burst of Chinese to a crew of technicians next to the giant chamber door. He turned and shouted to another crew at the large doors of the laboratory. Chang flipped several switches on the main console.

“He said to open the chamber,” Van Alston translated. “He said to open the outer doors.”

A loud hiss filled the cavernous old building as air bled into the vacuum chamber. At the same time, the rattle of old wooden doors sliding on rusty tracks marked the opening of the other end of the laboratory. A cold wet breeze swept through the building.

The crew of Chinese and Deus technicians ran forward, cranking the wheel to unlatch the outer chamber door and swing it open, then moving to unlatch the inner door.