Wormholes (21 page)

“He’s right, you know.” The elderly doctor George Voigt stood apart in an easy slouch, his hands in his pockets, gazing at the screenfuls of maps. He wore his usual white shirt, slacks, and bow tie, but also a brand new pair of hiking boots that Dacey had helped him buy. “In my experience, there’s never been a time when, say, a murderer didn’t give clues beforehand about what he was going to do. I had these deaths once in this hospital. Thirteen. It was the killer’s unlucky number. I had all the bodies exhumed and found traces of a muscle relaxant in most of them. The killer turned out to be an orderly. He wasn’t supposed to be near a hypodermic. But we got onto him because before he had even begun his killing, somebody once saw him practicing giving shots on an orange.”

“Okay, George, then you and Ralph are saying these things must give warning.” Gerald sat at the chair by the large computer terminal, rubbing his beard tiredly. “Where do we go from there? We can get anything we want from the government computers.
NASA
,
DOD
,
DOE
… everybody’s opened up to us. Sky’s the limit.”

“Yeah,” said Dacey. “Sky’s the limit, but we don’t know where to start to get there.” She took a sip of old coffee and seemed to shake herself awake. “Okay, then, let’s start at the sky. If we’re going to catch these things, we need a warning. That means we need surveillance that has to be from the sky. That only means satellites.”

Gerald sat back and began to scribble a list of earth-scanning satellites. “All right. We got
GOES
,
GPS
,
NOAA
—”

“What’s that alphabet mean?” asked Cameron.

“Uh. … satellites to study the atmosphere, global positioning satellites, weather satellites …”

Dacey went over behind Mullins, who sat in a chair off to one side. She slapped his beefy shoulders like a trainer would a boxer’s. Andy was fresh, having just spent half an hour snoring away in the chair. “Andy, imagine we got something that makes a magnetic disturbance. What would we see?”

“Yeah, well—”

“Wait, I know!” exclaimed Dacey. “Maybe lights! Before an earthquake, there are sometimes lights in the sky. Seismologists think they come from magnetic fields affecting the atmosphere. Gimme some data, guys. Gimme some help here.”

“Lights!” echoed Mullins helpfully. The engineer heaved his roly-poly bulk out of the chair with an oof and grabbed a yellow pad, flipping back the equation-covered pages and writing more of his own. “Let’s see. Got earth’s field. Got that. Then add field—”

“There
might
be a new field,” said Gerald. “From the other … side. The other …” He hesitated to say “universe.” It seemed so Star Trekky. “An added field that penetrates through to our side just like matter and energy can. Or, maybe a field generated by the hole itself when it warps space-time.”

“Maybe! Maybe!” Andy held up his yellow pad, although nobody could possibly have deciphered the wild scrawl of equations. “There could be light flashes!”

“Could we see them?” Dacey looked from person to person.

“Military satellites could,” said Gerald. “
DOD
has spy satellites that look for light flashes and infrared signatures of rockets being launched. And they’ve got the resolution to see even small flashes and pinpoint them immediately.” He grabbed a laptop and began pecking away at the keys. He quickly displayed a list of satellites on one of the big screens. The group leaned in. “Okay, yeah … there are military satellites up there that look for light flashes from launches. And
NASA
’s got satellites that detect lightning flashes. We’ve got to call the people who run them. Put in a request.”

“Like hell ‘put in a request’!” exclaimed Cameron, forcing a grin onto a face sagging with fatigue. He waved a cell phone. “We go right to the top. We get the damned President out of bed. I’d really like to do that.”

After some persuasion, Gerald made the phone call and in an hour they had results. He had triggered a chain of calls from the President, to his science advisor, to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the Secretary of the Air Force. The Secretary called Gerald with a code word, hung up the phone, and issued a priority order that rattled down the Air Force chain of command to a coffee-primed captain on night duty at the Strategic Air Command in Colorado. The captain called them back, his voice betraying suspicion at the odd order. But after Gerald offered the code word, he gave them passwords to access the archived digital images from the Air Force’s
IKON
spy satellites. Gerald and Mullins had already linked the computer to a secure
DOD
network connection. The captain also talked Gerald through the commands to analyze and compare the images for anomalous light flashes. He hung up and began the process.

The phone rang again shortly with another call from a
NASA
computer specialist who’d been rousted out of bed by another order that rattled down
NASA
’s chain of command to him. He gave Gerald instructions for accessing the earth-resources satellite images.

“This’ll take a couple of hours,” said Gerald without looking up from the computer. “Go get some sleep.” Suddenly, they all felt the weight of twenty-four hours awake, except for Mullins, who’d had the requisite periodic catnap that was his habit. Leaving Gerald typing and Mullins hovering over him like a cherubic vulture, they all wandered tiredly down the gray-painted hall to the dormitory wing where pilots had slept before missions. The wing consisted of rooms bare of decoration, save for double beds, worn dressers, mirrors and bedside lamps. Pairs of rooms had connecting doors, and Dacey and Gerald had earlier, without comment, taken a connecting pair, but had not opened the door between them. Dacey managed to remember her room number, as did the others, and they were soon all inert forms in their beds.

Dacey had lain for an hour in the deep sleep of dreams and soft paralysis, when a voice drew her awake. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

“We got ’em,” whispered Gerald conspiratorially in her ear, and she came wide awake, only having to take a deep breath to clear her head for conversation.

“Got what?” She sat up, seeing his form illuminated by the light from the hallway, as he crouched by her bed.

“Flashes! We found
flashes
!”

She leaped up, smoothing down her t-shirt over the top of her jeans and followed him in stocking feet over the worn linoleum tiles down to the briefing room. She heard sleepy moans behind her, as Mullins’ less-soothing commands rousted the others. Shortly, they all stood blearily before the large display screen, with Gerald at the laptop keyboard. He typed in a command. Two satellite images of a vast darkened landscape peppered with lights began alternately flashing on the large screen, one after the other.

“What are we seeing?” asked Gaston.

“Southern France,” said Gerald. “One image was a month ago. Another last week, a few days before the … uh … event. Both are the same region. I superimposed them so we can go back and forth.”

“Speed ’em up now! Speed ’em up!” demanded Mullins eagerly.

Gerald touched a key and the two dark images flashed one after the other on the screen. A few pinpoint lights blinked, indicating that the lights had been on during one image, off during the other.

It was George, used to studying subtle images of cells under a microscope, who saw it first. “I see a peculiar flash! It’s faint, but it’s there! That’s not artificial lights!” He pointed to an area on the screen. The others leaned in. A soft reddish glow appeared on one image, disappeared on the other.

“Right. That’s it,” said Gerald. “We also found something like this before China and before Gillard.”

“Damn, man!” exclaimed Cameron. “Damn! We got the suckers!”

“That we do,” said Gerald, a bone-deep fatigue permeating his voice. “That we do.”

“Y
ou’re going to thank him, aren’t you?” asked Dacey. “Gerald, you should thank him.” She and Gerald stood in the thickly carpeted outer office of the President’s science advisor. They watched the advisor’s gray-suited aide shuffle through a large blue folder containing briefing papers on their visit, to be taken into the advisor before they would be invited to enter.

“Sure, I’ll thank him. He helped us now. But I don’t know if I’ll shake hands with him. He basically told us to screw off before the Paris incident.”

“For once we agree on something.” They turned to see Lambert striding into the Executive Office Building waiting room with all the confidence of his billions of dollars. Trailing behind him were his assistant, Van Alston, and another large dark-suited man. “But you will still shake hands with me, won’t you?”

“Well, Calvin, I will say that although you are a son-of-a-bitch, at least you are open about it.” Gerald shook hands with his father. Lambert registered only a subtle surprise at Gerald’s new outspokenness.

“Thank you,” he said, with no hint of irony. He turned to Van Alston. “Tell them we’re all here and let’s get on with it.” Van Alston nodded and passed the information to the science advisor’s assistant, practically his clone, and the assistant disappeared into the science advisor’s office. While the large, dark-suited man stood in a corner facing the door, Lambert sat in one of the leather easy chairs and crossed his legs, ankle-on-knee. He looked up at Gerald. “So, my people say you’re a big deal now. Accepted by those scientists.”

“Yes, there was a colloquium today at the National Academy of Sciences. I was lead speaker.”

“I had somebody there. He said all the big-shot physicists claimed they believed you all along, eh?”

“Something like that. But in any case they’re all working on expanding the theory about these things. Doing some good science.”

“Whatever. But they’re with us?”

“Yes.”

The door to the science advisor’s office opened and the aide invited them in. They entered the large office, which included two wing chairs flanking a large fireplace and a large matching blue sofa directly across from the chairs.

The science advisor stepped forward from behind his walnut desk. He was a slightly plump middle-aged man with a fringe of white hair and a precise, confident way about him that marked one who had run a large aerospace corporation. He wore rimless glasses and a blue pinstripe suit with a maroon tie decorated with small, tasteful images of spacecraft.

“I’m Allen Randolph,” he said shaking hands all around. “I’m so pleased that you could come.”

Randolph and Lambert sat across from one another on the chairs and Dacey and Gerald took the sofa. Other various assistants, notebooks in hand, sat behind them around the room. They were brought coffee and made small talk about the trip and the colloquium. The science advisor took a few sips of his coffee, then set it aside and motioned to be given the blue folder, which he opened on his lap.

“Well, I see that there have been a considerable number of these … occurrences … in the month since the Paris disaster.” He flipped through pages of photocopied clippings. “There was this two-mile section of the Amazonian jungle in Bolivia that disappeared within ten minutes. The explosion in Antarctica. Our people on McMurdo Sound said they could feel the heat and read a newspaper by the light. And there’s that hole in the Bronx that’s still drawing quite a crowd. And there are dozens of astronomical sightings to date. Mostly basic thermonuclear events. Wormholes, I guess you call them?” He held up an iPad and scrolled through headlines, chuckling. “I see the media have named the different kinds. Big suckers, screamers, starholes—”

“We’ve been following all of that, Dr. Randolph,” said Gerald. “It’s all consonant with the theory. We’ve still got a lot of uncertainties. Like Neptune.”

“Yes, well I’m sure you’ll make progress,” Randolph smiled encouragingly. Gerald could tell he wanted to dismiss the Neptune business. His astronomer friends had no doubt declared that Gerald’s theory about antimatter remained just too far out, even given the wormholes’ existence. “Well, all these happenings just emphasize the need to understand what to do about all these things. There is a potential for more disaster.”

“No shit,” said Lambert, gesturing to his son. “That’s what Gerald’s been telling you for the last year.”

The science advisor’s cordial facade slipped for an instant. He knew Lambert as a heavy contributor to ultraconservative causes and a vocal opponent of the President’s energy policy. “Mr. Lambert, may I say that at some point you might learn something about scientific process. Things have to be proven; there have to be data. In any case, I hope the colloquium today gave us some ideas about how to head off those disasters.” The science advisor pointedly turned away from Lambert. “But I wanted your own assessment, Dr. Meier.”

“Well, clearly, holes into antimatter galaxies, like the one on Neptune, are the most potentially cataclysmic. I know most people still doubt their existence. True, they seem rare, but they’re real.” The science advisor’s stony expression signified his steadfast refusal to discuss the Neptune occurrence. So Gerald veered onto a track he knew would be acceptable. “Of course, now the most important thing is to catch an aperture that opens into a vacuum. That’s really the only kind we can hope to handle. Then we can analyze it and figure out what our options are.”

The science advisor closed the folder and leaned forward, smiling. “Ah, well, we’d like to help. We’d like to arrange for federal funds for you to do your work. We have the national labs at our disposal and we can help increase your technical capabilities.”

“Well, one reason for this meeting was about the facilities you’ve made possible,” said Gerald. “The planes and satellites. I wanted to thank you for all—”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Lambert. “About this federal funds thing. Now I’ve got your game. Look, when they were looking for money before, you were holed up somewhere incommunicado. Now that everybody believes them and you’ve had the thing blow up in your face, you’re suddenly ready to be his buddy, to clean his fish for him. You government types want to come in and then claim credit for catching one of these things. Hell, even ownership. Now, if you want to license Deus’s technology, maybe. The fee will be goddamned high.”

Randolph again assumed a poker face. He turned to Gerald. “You agree with that? What do you want?”

“I want to isolate a hole. The important thing is to figure them out, so we can prevent other …” He paused, his jaw tightening. The Paris disaster ate at his conscience. He recovered. “… sure, I’d like all the help I can get, and I think we can work something out. But Calvin did put up money when it wasn’t very popular to. He has controlling interest in the technology. It’s his call.”

“Yeah, you dance with them what brung ya,” said Lambert. “And I’m not going to let some damned government—”

“Just hold it, Calvin,” said Dacey. “I’ve sat here and watched you guys compare testosterone levels. Let’s get settled on what our priorities are. Catch one, figure it out, learn enough to close it. Right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Calvin, you can give up some of your precious technology rights, can’t you? And Dr. Randolph, you can write special rules that give the company commercial and patent rights to anything that comes of this, can’t you?”

Lambert and Randolph eyed each other warily, silent in their assent.

“Well, let’s try to work together and get as many resources on this as we can, shall we …
gentlemen
?” Her tone indicated she didn’t think either of the parties were, indeed gentlemen.

“I think we can work something out,” said Randolph finally, nodding to his assistant. “But I have to say one thing up front. You’ve had a chance already and it was a disaster. What’s to prevent it from happening again?”

“We’ve improved our methods.” Now Gerald was in his element and he warmed to the subject. “I announced at the colloquium that we can see precursors … faint light flashes, sort of a small aurora … a couple of days before what we call ‘breakthrough’ … when a hole opens up. So, now, we’ve got these capture vehicles and support vans sitting in Air Force cargo planes in each major city. They can take off in minutes and be anywhere within a day. And we’ve got
DOD
and
NASA
satellites programmed to detect the flashes real-time.”

“Tell them about the technical improvements,” prompted Dacey, noticing the faint outlines of a penned equation on one of Gerald’s palms as he gestured. He’d been making notes to himself again.

“We’ve made technical improvements, too. Each group has
three
carriers now, so one will be on the scene as a backup,” said Gerald. “And the magnetic capture system instantaneously changes the fields. We’ve also done some reengineering of the capture dishes to make them more structurally solid.”

“And we’ll have drivers inside who can take combat conditions,” said Lambert. “Ex-army tank drivers. Damned good nerves, fast reflexes. We’re givin’ ’em a hundred thousand a year, just to train. And I added a bounty of a hundred thousand for each man in the team that catches a hole.” He sat back with a satisfied grin. “I firmly believe in a capitalistic approach to these kinds of things.”

“Well, it’s been weeks,” said Randolph, a slight note of accusation entering his voice. “There have been events all over, including a couple in cities. But none that you’ve managed to get in ahead of.”

Gerald took a breath to reply, but an aide deferentially interrupted them, a cell phone in his hand. He gave it to Gerald, who took it and listened a moment. He smiled slightly, looking at Dacey, then the others, his dark eyes intense.

“A flash,” he said, his voice thick with tension. “They’ve seen a flash.”