Wormholes (10 page)

“Ah wanna repo ah messn pusn,” mumbled the face, the alcohol-reeking breath rolling into the car.

“You what, pal? You wanna what?”

“Messn pusn. Frinna mine’s gone. Jerry’s gone. Down inna hole like.”

“Missin’ person?” interpreted the cop. “Go down to the precinct station. File a report.” The New York cop had seen too many drunks not to know that most of them hallucinated most of the time. But this drunk would not be put off. He stood up to his full height, teetering and slapping the top of the car and shouting.

“He’s jus’ gone! He’s a goo’ guy, an’ ya gotta come help him! Yeah! C’mon. Lemme show ya.”

The cop looked over at his partner and shrugged.

“To protect and to serve, remember?” joked his partner.

“Shit. Well, by God, you gotta come, too.”

“Wouldn’t miss it!” The partner switched off the car’s engine and they both got out, slid their nightsticks into their belt holders and followed the drunk. He wobbled his way into an alley lined with dumpsters and dirty cardboard boxes. A snore emanated from one of the dumpsters and pairs of suspicious eyes peered blearily from some of the boxes.

“’S gettin’ cold,” explained the drunk stopping and looking over his shoulder to make sure they were still following. “Jerry, he looked for somewhere warm, ’n he found this hole; ’n now he’s gone.”

“Just show us,” said the cop, pulling his cap low over his eyes and plunging ahead. It was an odd sight, the weaving drunk leading the two tall crisply uniformed, fully equipped policemen through the grimy, garbage-strewn alleys.

They had gone about a block, when the derelict pushed hard against the rusty steel door of an abandoned building, scraping it open, and went in.

“Look buddy, this is far enough,” said the cop, peering into the murk. “We’re outta here.”

“Nah, nah. Jus’ a little farther here. Other side a’ this buildin’.”

The cops both flicked on their flashlights, scanning them about the inside of the building. They also both made sure their guns were loose in their holsters. The drunk lurched through the building, crunching over broken glass and kicking discarded cans. Muttered complaints floated from the darkness, emanating from beneath piles of dirty blankets in the corners. The drunk stumbled against a pillar, and cursing unintelligibly, staggered through the other doorway. The cops followed. The drunk stood triumphantly and pointed.

“Here. This here’s where Jerry went.” The cops followed his pointing to a dark place against the side of the building.

The first cop shined his flashlight into the gloom, revealing a perfectly round hole, about the size of a manhole. It was partly bored in the vertical side of the building and partly in the dirty asphalt of the alley.

“What’s this? A drain hole? Your buddy get stuck in a drain hole?”

“Nah, nah,” the drunk waved his hand. “We heard this damn noise and came out and this here hole was here. Right here, like this. Shit. Ain’ no fuckin’ drain hole.”

The first cop squatted down and shined the flashlight directly into the hole. Warm air wafted from it. The hole slanted down absolutely straight as far as he could see. The hole’s sides were as smooth as glass.

“Well, you guys did a damned good job of diggin’, I gotta hand it to you.”

“Nah, didn’t dig it, man. Couldn’a dug it. Look!” The drunk got down on his hands and knees and felt around, coming up with a wine bottle. He confirmed the bottle’s emptiness by tipping it up to his lips, then slid it into the hole, giving it a flick with his wrist. The clinking sound of the careening bottle reverberated from the hole, becoming fainter and fainter and fainter, until it faded completely. The drunk stood up and braced himself against the building. “’S too damn deep. Jerry’s in there. He got his blanket and got in there and I could hear him slippin’ away. He kept slippin’ and hollerin’. Then I didn’t hear ’im no more. I think maybe the devils got ’im.”

“Devils? What the hell is this, pal?” The cop shined his flashlight directly into the drunk’s face, revealing the scarred, dirt-stained geography of a ruined life. The drunk squinted and became indignant.

“Yeah, we seen devils come out. Damn right! Jerry had the mojo magic to put ’em back in there.”

“Aw, shit, this is some rummy’s nightmare,” said the partner. “I’m not goin’ down in some sewer after some drunk that may or may not be there.”

“Tell ya what pal,” said the cop loudly to the drunk, who was beginning to nod off. “You wait here for Jerry. Maybe pitch a rope down. If he doesn’t show, you go down and see Sergeant Ryan. You file a report with him.”

“Ryan’s gonna be pissed at you, siccin’ that drunk on him,” said the partner.

“That’ll teach him to screw me into holiday shifts,” said the cop. The two cops turned, got their bearings and headed out of the alley, avoiding the building, to the street to find their car.

The drunk slumped to the ground beside the hole, moaned once, and was soon asleep.

T
he four-ton Remotely Operated Vehicle settled onto the pitch-black ocean bottom like the most delicate of ballet dancers putting down a tentative toe onto a stage. The sediment stirred around the huge ungainly box, but not much, settling back quickly. The darkness was absolute two thousand feet below the Atlantic, but it yielded instantly to the SeaProbe’s brilliant floodlights that switched on, piercing the frigid gloom in front of the machine out to a dozen yards. A faint fog of sediment swirled through the lights, but the cameras could see clearly as the two large mechanical arms stretched out and moved back and forth experimentally, then refolded themselves. Powerful streams of water spewed from the robot’s cylindrical thrusters and it lifted itself, stirring the sediment once more and turned to its right, then its left, scanning the area. Then it settled quietly onto the bottom, waiting for further instructions.

Far above, however, was turmoil. Gerald paced back and forth inside the cramped shipping container that was the SeaProbe’s control room. The robot’s operator, diving expert K.C. Wang, sat tensely at the SeaProbe’s thruster controls, his eyes glued to the three-
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eyepieces that gave him a view of what SeaProbe’s twin cameras saw. Wang was a stocky, round-faced Chinese man with a luxurious head of thick black hair and an enthusiasm for anything that involved underwater exploration. The cumbersome SeaProbe wasn’t his favorite underwater machine, even though the three-
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view its cameras afforded made him almost part of its liquid world. However, it did allow him to do underwater exploration and still remain dry.

Sitting beside Wang at the SeaProbe’s manipulator controls, the Woods Hole oceanographer, Brendan Cooper, was just finishing an argument with the ship’s captain. They only heard his side of the conversation over the ship’s telephone, but they could imagine the captain’s.

“I don’t give a shit!” Cooper listened a bit, a scowl on his face. “Well, I still don’t give a shit!” He listened some more. “Listen, I know this ocean better than you do. I know these storm systems. I’ve seen the radar. Storm’s still way out there. You can damned well hold station for three more hours! So, do it!” He slammed down the receiver, especially frustrated because he knew that his bluster was hollow. The captain alone would decide where the ship would go, and he could only hope that bullying worked better than pleading. He turned his attention to Wang. “Let’s get on with it.” Wang said nothing, but tensed his jaw and went back to his eyepieces.

And Gerald continued to pace. A heave of the deck threw him off balance. He stumbled against Phillippe Togani, who was the only one who was quiet. The oil company structural engineer sat patiently behind Cooper and Wang, taking notes, watching the underwater robot’s progress. He was planning what structural inspection he would ask for when they encountered the sunken tanker.

“Gerald, will you sit the hell down!” barked Cooper, putting his eyes to a companion pair of three-
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eyepieces.

“Sorry. I’m thinking.” Gerald was, indeed, immersed in his own storm of conjecture. So much mystery here! So much to take into account. The briefing he’d received had set him to trying to recall his knowledge of thermodynamics, heat flow equations, metal matrix structure. A supertanker had been sunk by something that violently heated the water for a mile around. They were about to see this devastated tanker, and he had to know what scientific questions to ask, what data to gather. His instinct told him this disaster would somehow fit with the other bizarre phenomena. But it was a puzzle in which he only had pieces, with no overall picture. In fact, he didn’t even know the shape of the pieces. And he just couldn’t figure it out sitting down. The deck lurched again as the Acorn crested a wave caused by the oncoming storm. But he compensated this time.

“Okay, where from here?” asked Wang. Cooper consulted the SeaProbe’s sonar.

“Go ten degrees port, a hundred yards. Sonar shows a big blip.”

K.C. unlimbered his fingers and nudged the small joystick forward on his control panel, his eyes glued to the eyepieces. The robot’s cameras showed that it was easing forward. He looked up and watched the direction and distance register on the digital readouts, checking the view occasionally on one of two video monitors above the control panel. “I think we’re there,” he said, turning to Cooper. “I see some junk on the bottom.”

“Scan the cameras.”

Wang did so, and they each glued their eyes to their eyepieces, scrutinizing the murk for signs of their quarry.

“Look there,” whispered Wang. “Damn!” The robot’s cameras showed the faint outlines of an immense, shattered hulk reaching upward into the darkness. Gerald stopped pacing and sat in his chair, his gaze riveted on the video screen. The robot moved closer and the gigantic steel corpse became clearer. “That the bow?” he asked.

“Stern,” said Togani.

“Let’s do some exploring,” said Wang, pushing the joystick forward.

Two thousand feet below, the boxy robot, topped by a large chunk of orange, buoyant plastic foam, eased toward the giant wall of steel. Its thrusters — whining high-speed propellers housed in protective cylinders — rotated, and it rose along the wall. Finally, the scorched twisted railing of the lifeless ship came into the lights.

“Can I please see the stern superstructure?” asked Togani.

Cooper nodded, and Wang touched the controls shifting the robot ponderously to the right around the stern until the large shattered windows of the master’s cabin came into view. The curtains were singed. The bed linens flapped in slow motion from the wash of the thrusters. A wooden desk chair wavered back and forth trapped against the ceiling. It was the bedroom of a dead man. Togani bent and scribbled some notes.

“The stern section went down after it broke apart,” said Togani.

“Let’s just make sure we got the right ship,” said Cooper.

Wang worked the controls and the robot obediently sank downward, below the chilling sight. The painted legend, “Castile,” rose into view.

Above, Wang sat back in his chair. “As if there were any doubt.”

“Okay, let’s see what happened to her,” said Cooper, just as the deck lurched violently, and at the same time the phone to the bridge beeped insistently. Cooper ignored the sound. The dull roaring of the storm had risen, so that they had to speak louder now to be heard.

“You going to pick it up?” asked Wang.

“Sure,” said Cooper, picking up the receiver and laying it on a nearby desk. “Happy?”

“I’m pulling out,” said Wang. “We’ll come back next week.”

“C’mon, K.C. Haggerty’s on the warpath about this,” said Cooper. “And this is the Atlantic. That wreck could shift God-knows-where or go over the shelf in a week.”

“It’s true,” said Togani quietly. “Haggerty will be looking for the data or else.”

“It’s my robot,” said Wang. “It’s my ass. I’m hauling out.”

“Look, just check topside,” said Cooper. “Ask how the drum’s behaving.”

Wang radioed the technicians handling the robot’s cable and the huge underwater spool that maintained the cable’s tension. He got his answer over his headphones and looked at Cooper and Togani for a long time before answering. A faint sheen of perspiration rose on his forehead. The roaring rose and fell outside.

“I’ll give you thirty more minutes on the bottom,” said Wang. “Takes an hour to bring it up. That’s it.” Again, they felt the ship lift and fall, as a wave rolled under it.

Togani smiled. “Thanks. Let’s go right to the shear point where the stern broke away.”

Gerald remained quiet, his gaze intent on the screen. In his mind swirled the equations for the incredible pressures, the immense forces that ruled these depths.

Wang cranked up the robot’s thrusters and flicked the joystick to begin moving toward the place where the ship had been torn in half. “This ain’t no damn hot rod, y’know. It’ll take ten minutes to get there at full speed.”

“C’mon, K.C., I know what you can make that thing do,” said Cooper. All was silent in the room, except for the gentle whine of computer cooling fans. After a few minutes, Wang said quietly, “That’s the break that killed the Castile.”

In the three-
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viewers and on the video screen, they saw the huge portside gash that had caused the stern of the ship to violently rip away from the rest of the ship. The thick steel plates had been melted away, looking like dark gray melted candlewax. Large globs of tar, looking like black coagulated blood had oozed from the open tanks onto the light gray ocean floor. Some of the globs were as large as cars. Cooper gave Togani a look through the three-
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viewer.

“That steel plate was melted,” breathed Togani, peering into the eyepieces.

“Three, maybe four thousand degrees at least …” said Gerald. He did some mental calculations. “… applied for maybe ten minutes over a surface of a hundred feet.”

“Jesus,” said Togani.

The room heaved violently. The steady roar was punctuated by a crash.

“Let’s go,” said Wang, flicking a switch on the control panel to connect him with the deck crew. “I’m pullin’ out.”

“We need samples of that metal,” said Togani. Gerald nodded in agreement. Deep in the structure of that metal was a story beyond his experience.

“Screw the samples,” said Wang.

“You gave us thirty minutes,” said Cooper. “We’ve got ten left. You chicken?”

“I’m two point five million dollars worth of chicken! This is my machine and it’s my ass!”

His eyes still riveted on the eyepieces, Cooper made a chicken-clucking sound.

“Shit,” spat Wang. Cooper smiled, knowing that he had won. Wang directed the robot in toward the huge wall of torn steel. He set the thrusters to maintain station. Abruptly, the view on the video screen jerked. Wang spoke into his headphone mike and listened. “They’re having trouble maintaining slack in the seas.”

Cooper ignored the warning and inserted his fingers into the manipulator controls, which looked like thin plastic arms with fingerholds. He pushed his arms forward.

In the dark crushing depths below, the robot’s sturdy metal arms obediently reached outward for an extended blob of the melted metal. The left arm, with a two-fingered clamp grasped the segment. The right arm ended in a welding torch, which erupted into an intense white flame. The torch lit up the depths of the ship, revealing the twisted wreckage of pipes, valves and ladders, like the snarled intestines of a corpse that filled the interior of the ruptured tank. The torch applied itself to the thick steel and slowly began to cut a semicircle around the segment held by the other hand.

An alarm beeped.

“Shit!” cursed Wang again. “I got torque on the arms from the cable being yanked.”

“C’mon K.C., it’s within design specs.” Cooper’s eyes were glued to the viewer, his fingers deftly operating the arms far below.

Their view of the bottom jerked again. Wang gritted his teeth and maintained position. Within three minutes, the chunk broke free and Cooper directed the arm to stow it in the robot’s sample box, clamping the box shut with an expert flick of the manipulator.

“Okay, haul ass!” Cooper shouted into the microphone, drawing the manipulator controls toward him, which stowed the robot’s arms safely away. Wang pulled on the control joysticks and backed the robot well clear of the mammoth wreck.

“No,” said Gerald. “Not yet!”

“Hell, another member of the peanut gallery heard from,” said Wang. “Listen, I’m out of here.”

“No! no!” Gerald stood suddenly, marshaling his arguments. “Look, there’s got to be evidence around that’ll tell us where the heat source came from. It has to be nearby.”

“Well, it’ll just have to wait,” said Wang.

“If we get it now, we’re closer to a mechanism. Right now, all you’ve got is a destroyed ship. Just run a line out a hundred yards or so.”

“Screw you,” said Wang.

“Give him a hundred yards,” said Togani. “We’ve still got a few minutes.”

“You’re outvoted, K.C.,” said Cooper.

Wang cursed again, but he complied. The robot swerved away from the shattered hull and began a slow run across the bottom, which was littered with debris.

“I’m comin’ to the end of the tether,” complained Wang. “I can’t go any further. You understand?”

“Just keep on,” said Gerald. “Just a little farther. Wait! Aim the cameras down!”

In the darkness below, the robot paused in midwater, hovering off the bottom, its twin video cameras and floodlights angling downward. They revealed a segment of what appeared to be a massive scar of melted slag across the bottom.

“That’s it. That’s the track of what killed your ship.”

The picture jerked again as the ship lurched violently.

“Okay, okay, you got your picture,” said Wang. “We’ll come back with Deep Flight. Just let me get the fuck off the bottom.”

Gerald nodded and sat back, his gaze intense. The track had been about as wide as the holes. Where did that track lead? He had to know!

Wang threw the thrusters hard down and the robot rose rapidly away from the bottom, immersed once more in deep-ocean gloom. At the same time, he gave the order for the deck crew to begin reeling in the robot’s tether.