Wormholes (13 page)

N
o sound awoke her. The house was still, its solid stone walls impervious to outside noises, and its size damping any stirrings within. Maybe the stillness was what woke her. She was used to the morning traffic, the slamming of car doors, the sounds of children outside her townhouse. She sat up on the soft bed, swept her hair out of her face, stretched deliciously, and padded barefoot out into the hall wearing the oversized Dallas Cowboys jersey that was her nightshirt. She considered going back and getting dressed before exploring further, but the house was so utterly quiet, she sensed she was alone.

She stepped carefully down the narrow creaking stairs, one hand on the old bannister, one rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The living room light was still on, and a slew of books had been pulled from the bookshelf, left lying open on the oak coffee table. A sheaf of scribbled-on papers spread across the table, spilling onto the floor, and the decorous fan of scientific journals had been scattered, as Gerald had no doubt been reading them. A pair of socks lay on the floor, along with a tape dispenser. She grinned. Yes, this was the real Gerald. Not the pin-neat person who kept house for him.

In the kitchen, an empty coffee cup and plate with crumbs on it told her he’d already been up and gone. The refrigerator door had a sheet of yellow paper taped to it.

“I’ve gone to my mother’s house. Come on up when you’re ready. It’s the only house up the little road.” A scrawled map would guide her.

She went back upstairs and showered in the meticulously kept old bathroom, drying off with the same thick towel she’d used last night. She combed her hair and dressed in fresh jeans and blouse and put on sneakers and the battered leather jacket that had seen so many adventures.

She stepped out into a cool, brisk, sunlit New England morning to find Gerald’s rental car still in the driveway, so it must be a short walk. Looking forward to the exercise, she hiked down the narrow road that ran beside the house. On either side of the road ran low stone walls, and behind them a grove of large handsome oaks, their leaves touched with fall amber. As she walked, she drank in the crisp air redolent with the tangy organic fragrance of old forest. The land stretching away on either side of the woods seemed handsomely maintained with rolling meadow and tended shrubs, as if it were a park, she thought, and not some wild forest.

She’d walked about half a mile, enjoying the limbering of muscles that hadn’t been used in the day of travel. But still the house had not appeared. She was beginning to think she’d somehow taken the wrong road, when she glimpsed through the trees a large stone building away from the road on the left. The road wound around to the left, bringing the structure into full view. She stopped, stunned.

Arrayed before her was a massive mansion fronted with a white-colonnaded portico. The center of the mansion rose three stories, and it was flanked by two massive wings with high leaded windows. The mansion was topped by a slate roof, with large stone chimneys jutting from several places in the structure, and a thin curl of smoke rising from one. She looked around for a house, thinking that perhaps this was some school or college, and that the mother’s house was nearby. Then she realized that the road she had been walking wasn’t a road. It was a driveway!

“Woof!” she said to herself, taking a deep breath and walking the final block to the house, passing graceful marble statuary of nymphs, lions, and a cherub-topped fountain that had been shut down for the coming winter. She reached the portico, climbed the stone steps and pondered whether to use the massive brass doorknocker shaped like a swan. Fortunately, there was also a doorbell and she pushed it, hearing no sound.

The door was opened by a pleasant, round-faced woman in a gray uniform. She smiled warmly.

“I’m looking for the Meier house.”

“This is it, dear,” said the woman. “Gerald said to expect you. Please come in.” Still smiling, the woman led her toward the rear of the house. “Mrs. Meier is in the sun room. She said you should come in there and say hello and maybe have a little breakfast. You want some breakfast?” As the woman talked, they proceeded through a marble-floored, high-ceilinged hall with a large crystal chandelier and a broad carpeted staircase going up one side. The entry hall was spacious, as if meant to hold influxes of large numbers of people. French Impressionist paintings lined the hall, which was brightened by light streaming from open double doors at the rear of the mansion.

They went through those doors into a high-ceilinged sun room with large windows looking out over a lawn sloping down to a lake that lay still and gleaming in the morning sun. A trim, erect older woman sat primly at a glass-topped table, sipping coffee and writing in a leather notebook. She wore low heels and a conservative straight wool skirt and sweater that Dacey recognized as probably something like a Gloria Vanderbilt. Her gray hair was done in short, soft ringlets, carefully combed. She rose to greet Dacey, her fine features breaking into a smile. She approached, extending a small hand.

“You must be Gerald’s friend. Is it Dacey? I’m sorry, but Gerald sometimes doesn’t pay enough attention … doesn’t give me names right, so I’m sometimes rather embarrassed.”

“Yes, it’s Dacey, and you’re his mom?”

“Call me Katy. Gerald’s been shut away in the library since I got up. He keeps most of his books and computers in here. I’ll show you, but you must have breakfast first. Cook is marvelous, and she demands that we eat her breakfasts.” Dacey gratefully accepted, realizing she had worked up an appetite. The round-faced maid took her request — eggs and toast — but she and Katy encouraged Dacey to expand it to a three-egg Denver omelet, bacon, croissants and fried potatoes. “Cook will be happier that way,” said Katy Meier. Pleased at the successful order, the maid bustled off to the kitchen.

“This is a gorgeous house,” said Dacey sipping from a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice Katy had poured for her. “I don’t know how to say this, but Gerald doesn’t … well … act like he’s—”

“Rich? Dear me, he certainly doesn’t!” Katy Meier laughed and shook her head. “Well, I guess it is sort of irrelevant to him. Maybe it’s that he was raised with it. I think he feels like it gets in his way, and he’d prefer a simpler life. I know he was driving quite a woebegone van for a while.”

“Not any more. Gave it away.” Dacey took her first sip from a cup of hot, perfect coffee.

“That’s Gerald.”

“So he lives in the house down the road?”

“Used to be the caretaker’s house. I’m pleased he does. When you’ve only got one, it’s nice to have him nearby. I guess he felt he wanted to stay near, too. I do sometimes need help running this place, although Gerald’s contribution is in the area of advice. It made sense for him to stay here because he works at Harvard, anyway. It’s only about forty-five minutes away. But he didn’t want to live with Mom.” Her voice dropped the slightest bit in pitch, assuming a tone of gentle mocking. “And he
does
have his own ways.”

“I’ve noticed. Do you know what he’s working on?”

“He’s told me. I’m not sure I understand it all. But what I do know is that it sounds mighty peculiar to me. If anybody else had taken off on a wild hare chase like that, I’d have had the man with the net after them. But Gerald has always had a pretty good head on him. The director of his center tells me that his physics ideas have been invariably brilliant.” She smiled as a mother smiles when discussing a precocious child.

They continued to chat amiably as breakfast arrived and Dacey ate heartily. But she didn’t feel self-conscious. Katy showed an easy grace, thought Dacey, in how she formed the conversation into a warm, personal sharing designed to put Dacey at ease. She told how the house had been in the family for ninety years, so she didn’t feel she should sell it, even though it was a bit much. Anyway, she liked to keep it for special occasions like Christmas, when all the Meier relatives visited.

She drew from Dacey the story of her involvement with the Deus Foundation and the adventures in San Francisco and in the Atlantic. Katy shook her head in genteel wonder, expressing hope that Gerald, with all his notions, hadn’t gotten her involved in something too dangerous.

Finally Dacey folded the linen napkin and placed it on the table, thanking Katy for the fine breakfast. Katy showed her from the room and down a long side hall in the east wing to large mahogany doors at the end. She opened one and marched in, and Dacey followed. The library was a spacious room, awash in morning light from the leaded glass windows that occupied one wall. Beneath the windows sat overstuffed leather easy chairs with ottomans and sturdy side tables with carved legs. The other three walls were covered with bookshelves solidly populated with richly bound volumes of all sizes. A wheeled traveling ladder allowed access to the upper shelves. Dacey envisioned generations of bewhiskered, vest-wearing men climbing the creaking ladder to bring down a leather-covered volume, which they would take to the chair to read over an after-dinner brandy and cigar. Indeed, Dacey imagined she could smell the faintest aroma of tobacco amidst the mildly musty fragrance of books and leather.

She noticed that a section of one bookshelf wall was populated by an incongrously colorful collection of books that had obviously been shelved and reshelved in a jumble of horizontal and vertical modes, with hints of a rather intricate filing scheme that was probably perfectly clear to their owner. That wall was clearly Gerald’s.

In the venerable library, Gerald sat behind a computer at a large table in the middle of the room. His hair tousled from an apparent night of toil, he stared owlishly at the glowing screen of a high-end sophisticated computer work station. Certainly more expensive than the geology department would buy her, thought Dacey. The table was covered with books and papers with a scattering of Coke cans.

He looked up as they entered and smiled, but the smile had a hint of mildly lunatic inspiration.

“Dear, here’s Dacey,” said Katy, crossing the room to hug him. He squeezed her hand and she patted his face and left, excusing herself for her “morning chores.” Gerald motioned to Dacey to come look at the computer screen.

“Something’s happened! Something’s appeared!”

Dacey stepped across the oriental carpet to look over his shoulder at a satellite image showing a mountainous terrain with a thick pall of smoke swirling from one of the valleys.

“It’s in China. There was a huge explosion! I just downloaded this from the satellite image service. And look at these!” Gerald spread out printouts of wire service reports.

“My God,” said Dacey, scanning the reports. “This event was massive. It’s almost certainly not volcanism. It’s mid-plate. Volcanoes only happen where crustal plates collide.”

“Yeah, I think a hole opened up. Maybe to a star on the other side. The temperature calculations are right for a star like the sun.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Maybe it’s the same thing that killed that ship. We should go there. Take Cooper and the oil company guys. This would go a long way toward proving my theory.”

Dacey pulled up a chair and sat, as Gerald continued to call up satellite images, each showing the devastation in more detail.

“Well, I’ve got classes to teach,” she said dutifully, but she was becoming more and more fascinated with the incredible images. A whole valley had been decimated. Then she shook her head, as if rattling her brain to change subjects, and stood up. “Wait a second! I’ve got to get something else straight here! Gerald, you’re rich. What’re you doing being rich?”

Gerald tore his gaze away from the computer screen and looked sheepish.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry.”

“What I don’t understand is that if you’re rich why do you need …” Dacey stopped herself, paused, and threw back her head in a sudden dawning of realization. “Ohhh! Waaaiiit a minute!” She paused again for a long time, putting puzzle pieces together in her head. She looked Gerald square in the eye, arching one eyebrow. “Gerald …” she said with her best low, accusatory voice “… are
you
the Deus Foundation?”

Now Gerald looked downright embarrassed. He shifted in his chair and tapped a few commands on the computer keyboard to give himself time. “Well … um … yeah.”

“Why?”

“Um …” Gerald sat back in his chair, looking like a small boy who had been caught with contraband cookies. “Started four years ago. I decided the government was just too conventional. Wouldn’t fund bleeding-edge scientific research. Stuff that was maybe only wild speculation. So, I started the Deus Foundation. Called it that because I wanted to help understand the ultimate scientific questions — all the way to what we think of as God.” His brow knitted in puzzlement. “And when all these things came along …” He made a helpless gesture at the computer screen. “… I knew I needed to help people who wanted to find out about them. And I needed to investigate them myself, and when I told people I was from a foundation, I got more cooperation.” He looked at her hopefully, gesturing to the satellite image. “But you’ll stay with it, won’t you? You’ll go see what this thing was?”