Class Fives: Origins (27 page)

Crawford sighed, glanced at his notes and began.

“We’ve begun developing the intel on that meteor trajectory alteration.”

“The what?” Marcos interrupted, his expression turning suddenly confused.

Crawford hesitated, inwardly doing a quick count to ten, then looked up at the other man.

“The bumping of the little space rocks?” he said, flatly.

Marcos’ eyes flared a moment, but slid quickly back to cool attention.

“Right. Go on,” he said briskly.

Crawford glanced back down to his notes.

“Well,” he said with a faint sigh, “We’ve determined the following. Thirty-five years ago, in the Bilyarsk region of Russia, there was a detonation of unknown origin. That released an unknown stream of energy that happened to be directed at the asteroid belt, where it altered the gravitational field and caused the displacement of a number of pieces of debris, putting them on new courses.

“That detonation was the result of a secret Russian experiment headed by one Alexander Karillan, something to do with multidimensional phasing.”

“What’s that?” Marcos cut in sharply.

“I have no idea, Senator, I do not possess a PhD in Physics. However, whatever it was intended to do, it resulted in the complete destruction of the facility and the death of everyone at the site, Dr. Karillan included.”

He flipped a page of notes.

“Now someone, we believe a Dr. Walter Montgomery, is attempting to recreate those original experiments. We believe he intends to conduct them as soon as he can construct- “

“Wait a second,” Marcos interrupted, “Some other egghead is going to try whatever it is again?”

Crawford nodded.

“Yes sir. In the near future.”

Marcos swung his legs to the floor and leaned over the desk.

“You mean to tell me,” he said in his best stern-teacher-to-unruly-student tone, “That some idiot brainiac is going to try and do again what knocked a bunch of asteroids out of orbit before? Is he stupid? Or just crazy?”

Crawford paused a moment before responding.

“I have no data about his mental condition, sir. In fact, I have no data on a Dr. Walter Montgomery at all.”

Marcos stared at him.

“Nothing?”

Crawford shook his head.

“Credit card receipts?” Marcos goaded, “Birth certificate? Something?”

Crawford regarded him expressionlessly.

“Sir, it’s obviously an alias. We’re currently running whereabouts checks on every individual in the world known to be doing this kind of research, cross-matching it against known incident locations, washing all of their phone records. It will take some time.”

“Well, pick up the pace,” Marcos snapped, annoyed. “We can’t have some idiot mad scientist out there firing off whatever the Hell this thing is supposed to be without proper clearance. My God, there’s an election coming up soon.”

Crawford gave a slow nod.

“I understand that, sir. But there’s more.”

Marcos leaned back in his chair, seeming to deflate slightly.

“What else?”

“Dr. Marvin Henry, of the Deep Look project, the one who originally discovered the orbital anomalies, recently got in touch with a Dr. Vernon Jenkins who is working on similar research. Dr. Jenkins told Dr. Henry, who made the connection between the asteroid deflection and the Russian experiment thirty-five years ago. But he also reported that he’d been working, through long distance communications, with Montgomery and assisting on the recreation of the original experiment.”

“Fine,” Marcos snapped, “Pick him up. Grill his ass. Find out what’s going on.”

“We would do that, sir, but it seems Dr. Jenkins has disappeared.”

“He’s what?”

“He told Dr. Henry he was going to get in touch with Montgomery and recommend they suspend any further work until they could check out that everything was correct. Apparently he did that. The following day he caught a plane to Montana.”

Marcos’ eyes closed down to predatory slits.

“Montana? What’s in Montana?”

“We don’t know, sir. Presumably, Dr. Montgomery.”

“So can you pick him up?”

Crawford shook his head.

“Montana is quite large, Senator. It’ll take some time to locate him.”

“And in the meanwhile?”

“We continue to develop the data.”

Marcos stared back at him, then seemed to sag in his chair.

“You never bring me anything but bad news, Crawford, you know that?”

Crawford favored him with a tight smile as he closed the folder and rose from the seat.

“That’s the job, Senator. That’s why we’re here. Good day, sir.”

He turned and moved briskly to the door.

He had been on the verge of flipping the page in the folder to reveal and discuss what was written on the final sheet, but after the other man had made that mad-scientist crack, he decided this moron would never know about what had been uncovered in Los Angeles. That there was a genuine Class Five anomaly living in that city. Perhaps the first in human history. In a way, the culmination of everything science had been working towards for thousands of years, before there ever was such a thing as serious science.

He had even been prepared to finally enlighten the dumb bastard politician on the broad strokes of what he was slowly assembling, using the massive appropriations this very same bonehead had approved the last time Crawford had sat in that chair.

A single unified facility to control and, hopefully, exploit as many of the new radical circumstances beginning to crop up as a result of man's bounding progress as possible.

There would be all kinds of new dangers to face in the time ahead, he knew, all falling into five basic categories.

The Class Ones would be all those immediate threats brought on by the cutting edge of current scientific capability. New man-made diseases, new toxic materials that could be weaponized. New electronic capacities that could be perverted. All those things that mankind, in its endless race to overreach its own grasp, might accidentally or deliberately turn up and want to play with before it understood them. The new particle accelerator at CERN had a file here, along with a considerable number of other highly sensitive scientific researches. It was this class where the most resources would be focused, as these represented the most viable possibilities of something nasty to be dealt with some time in the future.

The Class Twos took that same attitude toward the environment and nature. Not only was global warming rooted firmly in Class Two, so were the famines in Africa, the increase in tropical storms, and even the recent rash of tectonic plate movements. Also in this class were those little return slaps by Mother Nature herself, the West Nile virus, the various Bird Flus, even HIV. While some resources would be directed at these problems, the focus would be more on coordination of effort to solve them rather than protect against them. Humanity had already screwed up sufficiently for that opportunity to no longer be viable.

Class Three began to become a bit esoteric. Here were all the wilder speculations, culled from the furthest reaches of man’s most disturbing imagination. Homicidal intelligent computers, invasion by space aliens, that sort of thing. It was here that the current asteroid problem was making its home, the first open case of the class.

Class Four reached even further afield, and was what he had been referring to during his last visit to the Senator as the Kiss Your Ass Goodbye file. This was everything that might happen so far beyond mankind’s ability to cope with, let alone solve, that the best he could hope to do is recognize them before they blotted him into extinction. A black hole streaking through the solar system, a supernova erupting within the “you’re dead” radius of the Sun, spewing enough radiation to cook the planet to a cinder. All the Doomsday scenarios rested in this Class.

And then there was Class Five.

This was the class reserved for humans themselves. This was the repository for that both longed-for and dreaded outside possibility – the next evolutionary step in mankind itself. Sudden abilities popping up out of nowhere. Their origins wouldn’t matter. Whether they were the byproduct of something in Class One, or Class Two, even Class Three, they would represent nothing less than a leap forward for the entire species. Whether cobbled together in some laboratory, or accidentally bitten by a radioactive insect, what mattered was the human. What it caused him to be able to do, however fantastic. It would be Crawford’s job to find the cause, assess the danger and decide on next steps. And for the very first time, he now had a case for Class Five.

But there was no way in Hell he would tell this political asshole about it now. Let him stay ignorant and blissful. It was no more than he deserved.

Crawford grasped the knob and turned back to favor Marcos with a smug smile as he opened the door, passed through and shut it behind him.

Let him wonder what that meant, Crawford thought smugly, then turned his attention back to the tasks ahead.

The tiny phone in his jacket pocket buzzed quietly as he passed through the door of the outer office and into the long hallway.

“Crawford,” he said, flatly.

“Sir, it’s Jones.”

“Continue,” he said evenly.

He was surprised when Jones actually seemed to hesitate before responding. The man never did that.

“Sir,” Jones said at last, “I believe we have a second Class Five.”

Dr. Walter Montgomery sat behind his desk, staring at the computer screen, waiting. It was an inconvenience but one that he had learned to tolerate, especially considering the importance of what was going on at the other end of the communication.

He cast his mind back as he waited, considering the long, torturous road he had followed to this place.

All the years having to suffer, to toil, absolutely endlessly, to no purpose.

He’d discovered the truth as a young man, and it had haunted and driven him ever since.

And now the goal to which his entire existence had strained was at last within sight.

All it required was this final piece, and without it, all his efforts would produce little more than a repetition of that horrible failure all those years ago.

Because Karillan hadn’t known. Hadn’t been aware. Such a significant thing, and it had escaped him completely. It was almost embarrassing.

Only when he had read of the work of Dr. Vernon Jenkins and reached out to contact him did it all finally become clear.

Montgomery smiled wistfully.

The young man’s analogy of the painting was more right than he had known.

And Karillan had not even conceived of it.

Because Karillan hadn’t scraped the canvas clean. He had burned his way through the atoms and flattened the quantum level, but he had not cleaned it away. He had attempted to paint a canvas already bearing an image, albeit a faint one. But that had been enough to turn back his efforts on themselves and consume him.

He glanced over at the computer screen and saw the cursor blinking steadily.

What time is it where he is, he wondered? Still, he could not press. This one was not his employee, merely an acquaintance. And one had to placate those.

But if the prior reports had been accurate, then very soon it would be time to move.

And it really was a moderately interesting bit of research, he considered fairly. Certainly not his particular cup of tea, but in this case incalculably useful.

Montgomery’s correspondent was Dr. Stefan Svag, one of the world’s most eminent subatomic particle specialists, and his research was exactly that, research. It was not compromised by any corporate funding or government grant. It was not trapped in the constraints of having to produce something of value, either to build or destroy. It could be what it was meant to be, a man peering deeply into the fabric of existence just to see what was there.

And Montgomery paid the bills gladly, not only because of his need, but out of respect for a pure man of science, like himself.

To others, of course, the research would seem a stunning waste of time and resources, because it would appear to have no practical application.

Dr. Svag built atoms. Or more precisely, the nuclei of atoms. He was attempting nothing less than to create new and heavier elements, elements so dense they would collapse into bits if not pressed together with a strong magnetic field.

Dr. Svag had developed a portable magnetic generator that would allow the containment and transport of super-dense atomic nuclei, and had discovered it worked perfectly well as a capture mechanism when sequenced with a small particle gun.

And it allowed him to thumb his nose at basic physics.

Every atom consisted of a nucleus composed of positively charged protons and charge-neutral neutrons, stuck together by the strong nuclear force. Around them at vast distances whirled the negatively charged electrons, living their jittery half-existence being everywhere along their orbits at the same time, trapped to eternally dance around the nucleus.

But atoms are balanced. For every electron there must be a proton, and vice versa. Lose one, and the other makes the atom unstable. It must shed the extra particle to restore the balance, and in doing so becomes another element. Uranium, for example, became lead.

Amazingly, Dr. Svag had discovered how to fire tiny streams of neutrons and protons in packets into his magnetic field, and cause them to stick there, confined. And through patience and repetition he had managed to add another proton here, a neutron there, but with no electrons.

Svag had once described it to Montgomery as building a snowball with a pair of tweezers, one flake at a time.

The moment the magnetic field faltered, of course, the unwieldy mess of bits fell apart, but while it was maintained he had been able to stuff more and more particles onto it until he had more than doubled the weight of the largest man-made element.

And that was the sum of the good doctor’s work. A jumble of neutrons and protons, jammed tightly together inside the press of a magnetic field. Interesting but essentially useless.

Useless to everyone but Montgomery, that is.