Class Fives: Origins (32 page)

The problem, he knew, was the limitation of people. Systems could now converse at the speed of light, trading bytes of data in milliseconds and remembering it flawlessly. But they couldn’t put it together. All you could ask of them would be to listen for specific sounds, specific words, or cross-reference and filter lines of text. But you couldn’t ask them to use their intuition. Because they simply didn’t have any. For that you needed people. Human imaginations to just try something stupid and crazy, something a machine could never do. A human being could stumble upon something he didn’t even recognize, other than the fact that the hair at the back of his neck just stood up. But a machine never stumbled. On anything. They just locked up.

So he had to have his teams check not only Franklin’s place of work, but his residence, his vehicle, all of it. And even then it may turn up nothing.

But now he had the Karillan Foundation to reach for. What exactly is it, where did it come from, who owns it and how do I find them, were just a few of the cascading questions that roared through his thoughts.

If only, he considered, we had more time. The facilities would be fully operational. The pieces to deal with things like this would already be in place. Now he was playing catch-up, improvising his head off. That had to change. There had to be some kind of system already in place when this kind of thing started popping its head up. Because it only gives you one shot, and if you blow it, everything may go down the toilet.

That was the problem going way back, he told himself. Back to that horrible day when the Towers fell. They didn’t have a system or a plan because they couldn’t conceive of ever needing one. Nobody would ever consider resurrecting the Kamikaze, because it was insane. Yet someone did. With disastrous results.

And the threats looming today, he reassured himself, were popping up fully formed, like Hydras, from the severed neck of science, spewing its poison across the world. Because science had no head. It was a thing, a machine of discovery that lumbered constantly forward, unstoppable but with no one in control. And somebody had to try and figure out what to do whenever it started to go wrong. Like it was now. Like it had thirty-five years ago. And for now, that someone was him.

He took one more sharp glance over his shoulder at the tall, gleaming white finger pointed at the open blue sky, and allowed himself a smile.

It had to be protected. It had to be saved. There had to be good guys.

He allowed one tiny fleeting glimmer of a thought, something about hoping the thing he was building would never get into the wrong hands, then brushed it away and stepped through the wide, gaping door of the parking garage and was swallowed by the shadow.

Dr. Stephan Svag stood before the thick, shielded window, staring into the containment chamber. Sitting on the plinth in the center of the gray, barren room was the container. It didn’t look like much, merely a foot-long glass cylinder about the circumference of a small trash can with silver caps on either end. But it was, he considered, the thing that would win him a Nobel Prize. And without it, his current researches wouldn’t have been possible.

It was nothing less than a lensing device for directing the force of magnetic fields.

He still smiled whenever he considered what had inspired him to think along those lines.

During the development of the very first atomic bomb it was determined that two particularly unstable elements were most suitable for attempting a sustained fission chain reaction: uranium, a substance found in nature but in tiny quantities, and plutonium, an element that could be manufactured. Uranium came in two varieties, U-238 and the slightly heavier and much rarer  U-235. The bomb development teams quickly realized that the more-plentiful U-238 wasn’t as suitable for detonation as U-235. But after months of frantic effort, they only managed to isolate enough U-235 for a single bomb. However, by bombarding the U-238 with extra neurons, they could produce suitable quantities of a new element, P-239, Plutonium.

But whereas U-235 could achieve a critical chain reaction quite easily, requiring only the impact of two significant masses of it at high speed, Plutonium needed to be compressed many times to trigger a fission reaction.

That was where lensing came in. An explosive shockwave, such as from ordinary plastic explosives, could provide the force required to squeeze the plutonium to critical mass, but explosions were naturally very messy, the force flying off in all directions, their energy dissipating undirected.

By surrounding the plutonium with many small explosions, all detonated at the exact same moment, an internal shockwave of force directed inwards would provide equal, sudden compression from every angle, trapping and multiplying the impact, squeezing the plutonium on all sides evenly, all at once. This was called implosion.

What Svag had managed to accomplish was to provide the same sort of continuous implosion, not of explosive concussion, but of a magnetic field. It was the perfect way to capture and trap stray subatomic particles traveling at high speed. And it had allowed him to grow his currently unnamed element to an incredible size. In fact, within another week, if he stood where he was right now, looking through the thick window and across the twenty feet to the plinth, and squinted his eyes just right, at the very center of the cylindrical glass tube he would just be able to make out the tiniest flicker of something incandescent. It would become visible to the naked eye. A single nucleus of a single atom.

Without the container, his efforts would have been like trying to build a house of cards in the middle of a hurricane. Without his container the billions of protons and neutrons, all currently being forced together in the center of the magnetic field, would fly apart with tremendous force, most likely obliterating the lab, the control room and perhaps the entire facility.

Svag smiled.

That was why the container was, almost naturally, completely invulnerable. Because the magnetic field didn’t just push inwards. It pushed outwards as well, throwing a protective cordon around itself that was able to withstand penetration by almost anything. Bullets would ricochet off it, as would all forms of shrapnel. Heat would flow around it. Radiation would skid along its surface and be deflected. Almost nothing on earth could penetrate it, as far as he could determine, except for his particle gun, and then only because he had it tuned to a specific frequency. And only he knew what that was. He hadn’t even written it down, and had erased all the equations of his own design that had allowed him to determine it in the first place. Now the single number was recorded only within his own head, where it was safe.

He really did have to come up with some kind of name for the thing, he mused, and for the new element he had managed to create as well. He had toyed with the name Svagium
⁶⁷⁹
, but he knew that wasn’t even accurate, as with each passing hour more protons and neutrons were being spit into the container, and some were being trapped and slammed against the ever-growing clump at its center. It probably could no longer even be assigned an atomic weight, he considered. A new unit of measure might have to be devised. Why not a “Svag Weight”?

He chuckled quietly to himself and glanced down at the monitors. The particle gun was functioning normally, lazily shooting out its steady stream of bits, the container field was humming away nicely. All was right with the world.

He tapped a key on the panel and a fresh window popped up on one of the small screens.

Svag’s smile widened.

4.7 it read.

Wait until I tell W, he thought. He will be so pleased.

Roger and John moved down the sidewalk, turning into the parking lot even as John was digging his keys out of his pocket. It had been a long, wearing day for both of them. A second full round of tests at the same medical facility, all of them equally ineffective when applied to Roger, all of them equally exhausting for John.

But at least they had managed to convince White and Jones to allow them to arrange for their own transportation. The two government men had hesitated momentarily, but were intelligent enough to know if either John or Roger resisted their efforts to be controlled, there was very little that could be done about it. They had finally given a grudging consent after extracting pledges of confidentiality from the two.

“You know,” John said casually as they crossed the parking lot, “You really haven’t lived until you’ve had a camera shoved up your ass. You really have got to let them do that at least once.”

“Hey,” Roger said, smirking, “They had their shot. It’s not my fault they couldn’t make it work.”

“You were clenching,” John said.

“Big time,” Roger responded firmly.

They were both parked in the far corner of the sprawling, open lot. Around them the buildings of the numerous businesses that lined the long boulevard sat like squat lumps, except for the rising new structure under construction to the south of the lot. It was already three times as tall as the other buildings in the area, on its way to an impressive height, especially for this section of town, and it cast a deep shadow across the lot.

John approached his car just as Roger began to veer off toward his own, parked a few rows away.

“Well,” John called, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Hey, did they tell you how long we’re gonna be doing this? These tests?”

Roger shook his head, half turned to John as he walked.

“No idea,” he said.

“Great,” John muttered, his face screwing up sourly as he stepped toward his car.

From above them there came a sudden, sharp noise, like an impact of metal on metal. Both men froze, their attention being jerked upwards, scanning for the source of the sound. A loud, sharp scream of something metallic shot across the air, and both men’s attention fixed on the top of the looming, half-built structure that was already blanketing them with its shadow.

They both saw it at the same instant. The crane, resting atop the already constructed skeleton of steel that would be the supporting frame of the building, was moving, beginning to lean.

“Holy shit,” John whispered, as he saw the massive, metal arm beginning to sag toward him.

Instinctively he could see it was impressively long, intended to be able to reach over any edge of the building and lift heavy loads to the floor under construction, no matter how high it rose. And it was leaning, its supports twisting. It was collapsing, right into the parking lot.

John watched it tip, heard the screaming metal of twisting supports roar into the late afternoon air, saw the distance between it and himself diminishing.

It fell slowly over until its support was flat against the roof. There was an explosive bang as the place where the support was anchored to the steel of the building snapped off, and now the long arm of the crane fell freely.

The tip struck first, driving into the vehicles parked at the distant end of the lot with an unearthly metallic crunch, and the rest of the arm crumpled in a long line, flattening everything in its path as it roared down hard into the lot.

John managed to throw himself backwards, and jumped an instant before it crushed the car beside which he was standing.

John landed hard, his back slamming against the pickup truck that was parked next to his own car, stunning him momentarily. He slid down to the pavement, gasping for breath.

It took a few seconds for him to clear his confused thoughts and then his eyes shot upwards, toward where the half-constructed building loomed. He could see the crane that even now rested atop it, looking perfectly ordinary. But it was up there and it was going to give way in…

He snapped up his arm and shot a look at his watch. Eight minutes, maybe?

Instantly his mind fixed on Roger. Where were we eight minutes ago? Still inside the medical facility, he realized.

He struggled to his feet, pumping his lungs deeply to recapture his breath, and stumbled toward the street.

In a minute he had dashed across the wide boulevard, drawing a number of angry honks from the cars forced to jam on their brakes to avoid this crazy man darting through traffic, and was rushing toward the sliding doors of the medical facility.

Plunging into the lobby, he turned into the wide corridor and toward the elevator he and Roger had ridden down in together.

He stabbed at the button, hard, willing the small box to arrive quickly.

There was a soft ding and a moment later the door slid open with a quiet rumble, revealing a shocked-looking Roger.

“Rog!” John snapped, “You got to come with me. Right now!”

Roger’s eyes shot to where John stood outside the elevator.

“How did you – “, he began, confused, raising an arm to point next to where he was standing.

“Never mind!” John barked, shooting out an arm as if to take Roger’s and pull him from the elevator, “We got big trouble.”

Roger seemed to focus on him, then after a moment’s pause, nodded sharply.

“Lead the way,” he said.

John turned and dashed off toward the lobby, Roger falling into step beside him.

“What happened?” Roger said, as they fell into a jog beside one another. “You were standing next to me in the elevator, and then you were just gone.”

“I jumped,” John responded. “We were in the parking lot, so that’s where I landed.”

“But,” Roger protested, “How did you – “

“I land where I take off from. Everything else back to the instant I land gets wiped out.”

“I don’t understand,” Roger replied.

“Me either,” John snapped, “But right now we have to get to the top of that building,” shooting out an arm at the looming construction on the opposite corner.

Roger’s eyes swept up it. It must be twenty stories tall, ending in a jutting scaffolding at its top.

“How come?” he shot back.

“Because that crane is going to fall on our cars in about six minutes,” John snapped, pointing at where the end of the spidery steel network was visible, jutting over the edge of the construction site at the top of the structure.