Wormholes (24 page)

“A
re we there yet, Mommy?” Cameron slogged his way up the steep trail behind Gaston, who peered resolutely ahead. Cameron’s sunglasses were slightly askew and despite the crispness of the thin mountain air, a silver sheen of sweat had formed around the bandage on his dark forehead. He continually looked left and right, viewing every bush suspiciously.

“Don’t know,” said Gaston, his energy ebbing. He abruptly collapsed onto a boulder, bending over, head down.

“You shouldn’t have come,” scolded Cameron, sitting down beside him. “You could have rested down below.”

“I’m not doing that,” said Gaston, his voice catching with the pain in his stomach. “I’ll be resting a lot soon enough.”

“Hell,” spat Cameron. “You need another pill. Take another pain pill.”

“No, goddamnit! And you keep your yap shut about my condition!”

“
Yap
? Nobody says yap anymore, old man,” teased Cameron.

“Okay, then, button your lip, shut your pie hole, and keep it on the down low. Does that do it?”

“Yeah, that’s better.” Cameron was pleased that Gaston wasn’t hurting too much to still have a little humor left.

Gaston, heaved himself up, taking a pained breath, and peering into the brilliant blue cloudless sky of the Sierra Nevadas. He hiked on, placing his feet solidly on the loose rock of the rising trail. After a dozen steps, he stopped again, steadying himself by holding a juniper branch. The sun was well into its afternoon descent, but they had time to reach the camp if it was only a couple of miles, as the ranger had said.

Cameron followed, eyeing him with annoyance. “Well, we’ve come as far as the ranger guy told us. Maybe it’s the wrong trail. There’s no signs. They oughta put up street signs.”

“It’s the right trail. We saw his van in the parking lot. He’s up here.”

Cameron grunted, unconvinced. “The ranger guy said there were bears out here,” he reminded Gaston, who merely nodded. “Mountain lions, too. Remember they told us about that lady who got eaten?”

“She didn’t get eaten,” Gaston panted, understanding Cameron’s game, to get him to abandon the hike, to rest.

“Well, a big chunk of her did.” He peered dubiously up the trail. “Nature sucks. This city boy’s startin’ down in a few minutes. Phyllis’ll have dinner ready at the cabin. We could try again tomorrow with the ranger guy. You remember Phyllis’s barbecue?”

Gaston smiled back over his shoulder. “You can’t tempt me, Jimmy. We told Dacey we’d find him.”

“Y’know, Ralph, your problem is you don’t have a family to go home to. It’s just you and Wayne. You should start a family.”

“Now that would be a real miracle.” Gaston smiled grimly. It was Cameron’s way of expressing optimism.

“Naw, man, I mean adopt.”

“Right, Jimmy.”

“Well, you could do a trial run. You could take my kids for a while. They’re easy. All they do is play video games. What do you say?”

“I say I see smoke.” Gaston pointed to the left toward a forested outcropping. A faint curl of smoke rose from behind the trees.

“’Bout damned time.”

They reached the flat plateau on the side of the mountain and made their way among the thick fragrant evergreens, reaching a clearing below a steep cliff. A small red tent nestled near the cliff face, and nearby a ring of stones encircled a small crackling fire that had just been fed new sticks. A pot and a frying pan sat beside the fire. They stood for a moment scanning around, their city eyes unused to searching the forms and shadows of the forest. They heard a noise in the bushes, and Cameron tried to look nonchalant as he stepped closer to Gaston. Gerald pushed his way through the brush on the other side of the clearing, carrying an armload of wood. He stopped when he saw them, and his faint smile told them they were welcome.

They greeted each other, and Gerald showed them the view out the edge of a nearby cliff that looked out over the quiet valley, dotted with occasional houses, basking in the afternoon sun. To Cameron’s question about whether he’d seen any mountain lion, he answered a terse “nope.”

“So, Dacey told you where I was.” Gerald sat down on the ground, leaning against a flat rock, gazing out over the expanse below.

“Yes,” said Gaston, sitting down heavily beside him, as Cameron continued a nervous lookout. “She thinks you should try to get beyond the tragedies. I know the funerals devastated you. But you’ve been out here about long enough. Since we were nearest, she asked us to come up. There are things happening you need to know about. Things you need to do. She had to go back to the university. They’re not too happy about her involvement with all this.”

“The assholes are taking over,” said Cameron peering dubiously over the precipice. “And there’s a whole bunch of them. A herd of assholes. Or is it a flock?”

“Lambert is talking to Cohen about taking over the project.” Gaston took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Cohen says he wants to bring his own team in, to straighten things out.

“Well, you know I had to leave for a while, to do some thinking.”

“Sure, of course. I’ve been in one of those shit storms. The media won’t leave you alone. You handled it well, you know. I never got to tell you that.”

“Thanks,” was all Gerald said, but Gaston knew he was remembering the massive, accusing press conferences and the pointed public criticisms by the scientists. The physicist, Aaron Cohen of Caltech, had been perhaps the most vociferous, denouncing Gerald for sloppy planning and bad science. He publically blamed Gerald for the deaths.

“You’ve missed the coverage,” said Gaston. “All the morning shows got experts who think they know what’s going on. And there was an eruption of liquid nitrogen in the ocean two days ago. It made a big iceberg. A bunch of Cooper’s friends from Woods Hole flew over it. They say it seems to be a hole from a frozen planet like Jupiter or Saturn. And did you hear about the Chinese?”

Gerald shook his head, not taking his eyes from the view.

“They’re building a capture apparatus. They called Andy to ask him to engineer it, but he said no. So, they’re going ahead themselves. And Iran, too.”

“Iran? Jesus, that’s scary,” said Gerald. He tried to imagine how the holes could be used as weapons. He brought up his knees and rested his forearms on them, and said quietly, “I’ve figured out what happened.”

At this news, Cameron stopped pacing and plopped himself down beside them. “I’m all ears. Ralph’s all ears, too.”

“I did some calculations. I know why the holes open up. I know why so many open up near planets on the other side, and not in deep space.”

“Given the law of averages, they should almost all open up in deep space on the other side, shouldn’t they?” asked Gaston. “Because most of any universe is space?”

“I realized it takes a magnetic field on
both
sides to open a hole. It’s like one of those doors between hotel rooms. Until both sides are unlatched, it stays locked.”

Gaston paused a moment, then as the realization sank in opened his mouth and let out a quiet, revelatory, “Ohhhh.”

“No shit!” said an amazed Cameron. “It takes both sides being near a planet or something.”

“It’s both a blessing and a curse,” said Gerald. “It means the other side is almost automatically in a solar system, near interesting things like planets. But it also means we’re always in imminent danger of running into the planet or the star that made the hole open up. Like the planet that caused the methane.”

“So, we’re basically screwed, trying to catch one of these things,” said Cameron, pitching a rock over the edge of the cliff.

“No, there’s more. We can
navigate
these holes. And we can impose a magnetic field on the other side to keep them open.” He paused and looked at them, smiling faintly. Both looked back with puzzled expressions. “I’ve just about figured the whole thing out. Let me show you something.” Gerald stood up and motioned for them to follow, walking back to the clearing and crawling into the tent to fetch a tattered blue spiral notebook. He sat down cross-legged by the fire, which radiated a welcome warmth against the cooling mountain dusk. They sat beside him, and he opened the notebook, its pages mostly covered with scribbled equations. He flipped to a diagram showing an oval with arcing lines swooping through it. On either side of the oval were large solid circles, one labeled earth, encircled by its own lines.

“What do you mean navigate?” asked Gaston.

Gerald traced the arcing lines through the oval with his finger. “If we put an array of electromagnets up near a hole, we can extend magnetic field lines through to the other side. We can adjust the field to move the hole around in the other universe. To steer it. And the projected field will be enough to hold it open.”

“We can
fly
the son-of-a-bitch?” asked Cameron.

“We can fly the son-of-a-bitch in the other universe,” confirmed Gerald, his smile broadening. “Like a spaceship that has no mass. One that isn’t affected by gravity. I haven’t worked out the exact geometry of the magnets. I’ll need Andy to help me do that.”

“So, we can avoid planets?” But as Gaston asked the question, his face registered a dawning. “Jesus, wait a minute! We can do more!”

“Much more. We can explore the other side. We can fly a hole down to a planet surface. We can fly anywhere.”

“These aren’t just holes then.”

Gerald placed his fingertips on the paper, almost caressing the lines. “No. They could be the ultimate spaceships. They could be starships.”

G
erald’s faded blue van passed a motley collection of cars, trucks, tents, and campers lining the sunbaked highway for two miles before he, Cameron and Gaston reached the base. The makeshift city sprawled out into the surrounding desert, creating dusty avenues where people walked and greeted each other as they would on any city street. Dressed in shorts, baseball caps and sunglasses, they milled about, some lofting hand-painted signs proclaiming that the wormholes represented eternal salvation or damnation … or signs offering t-shirts for sale. Gerald slowed the van behind a car with Florida license plates, and they could read the t-shirts hanging in stalls shaded by portable awnings: “I Plugged the Hole,” or “Watch those Suckers,” or “Oops!” The last shirt, which made Gerald wince, had a large black hole in the chest, with bloody tatters as if it had punched through flesh.

One gaunt, bearded hawker held up two t-shirts, offering buyers opposite sentiments. In one hand was “Gateway to Heaven”; in the other “Gateway to Hell.” The slow line of vehicles eased past one tent selling beer, and another with a wooden cross staked out front, the vigorous singing of gospel songs emanating from within.

“It’s just been growin’ and growin’,” said Cameron, poking his head up from the back of the van between Gerald in the driver’s seat and Gaston in the passenger’s seat. “It’s lucky we’re not in Deus vans, or they would be cheering us or throwing stuff.”

A limping man with a shopping cart held up a booklet to their window. It said, “The Hole-y Gospel.” Gaston waved him away, as Gerald eased the van up to the chain-link gate with the Deus, Inc. sign. There were more guards than before, and they carried sidearms. Two Humvees were parked next to the gate and another had just left carrying armed guards along the fence line. A guard sauntered out of the air-conditioned shack, recognized Gerald, and hurried back in. Next, a beefy older man, clearly the supervisor, came out. He wore his guard’s cap low over his brow, his sunglasses reflecting the scene around him. His face was red with sunburn. He wasn’t a guard who had been there before.

“Dr. Meier?” He spoke with a raw Texas accent.

“Yes. We need to get back to work.” Gerald heard murmurs of recognition sweep through the crowd of reporters that had camped up next to the gate in television satellite vans, motor homes and tents. They called out questions, to a rising chorus of the staccato clicking of cameras, like so many insects.

The guard pushed his cap back on his head and looked confused behind his sunglasses. “Well, I tell ya. I got orders you’re not supposed to get in any more.”

“Whose orders?”

“Well … Mr. Lambert. He’s runnin’ the show.”

“He brought you in? He brought these new people in?” Gerald gestured at the other guards. “Look, I’ve got work to do in there. You know me.”

“I got my orders.”

Gerald climbed out of the van, and television cameras began to appear. He faced the guard, his hands open. “Look, two people died in there. It’s my fault they died. And you know many more could die. Don’t you?”

“Look, pal, just turn around—” They heard the roar of an approaching vehicle and turned toward the base to see one of the massive artillery carriers careening wildly across the desert, swerving left, then right, throwing up rooster tails of sand, then doing a series of tight loops that brought it progressively closer to the fence line. A Humvee appeared behind it, racing across the sand, attempting to catch it. A person riding the back of the bucking Humvee waved desperately toward the guardhouse and held a radio to his mouth. Unintelligible shouts erupted from the head guard’s portable radio, and he clicked it on and listened a moment. “Jesus H. Christ, the damn idiots let one of them damn things get away from them!”

The carrier veered abruptly, heading right for the gate, slamming into it and knocking it flat with a loud clang. The reporters scattered, taking care to keep their cameras trained on the sight. This would be great footage for the nightly news.

The guards scattered, too, when they realized that the armored carrier was headed for their guard shack, which at this moment seemed quite fragile.

Only Gerald stood his ground, looking impassively at the roaring, lurching, twenty-two-ton, sky-blue mass of steel.

“Gerald, get the hell out of there!” shouted Cameron. “The damned thing’s gonna run over your ass!” He sprinted a few steps down the road, but stopped and came back, waving his arms. He glanced over at Gaston, who’d emerged from the van and was standing as quietly as Gerald. Gaston was smiling. The carrier skidded to a stop before them.

“What the …” Cameron looked up to see a familiar head pop out of the carrier. It was Mullins, grinning a grin so wide that it enlisted his whole round face.

“Hi! How’s it goin’? Follow me!” He disappeared back into the carrier and the vehicle wheeled about and accelerated away down the road. By this time Gerald was back in the van’s driver’s seat, and Gaston and Cameron had leaped into the other side. The guards could only shout futilely as the van clattered over the fallen gate and sped away toward the research complex.

“How’d you know?” asked Cameron, turning to peer through the back window of the van.

“Those things don’t go out of control.” Gerald kept his eyes fixed on the road, glancing occasionally through the rear-view mirrors. “I figured something funny was going on. Andy must have seen us on the remote cameras. I’ve known him a long time, and he’d cook something up like that.”

“I figured as much,” said Gaston. “They’re not following. Their orders must’ve been just to keep us from getting in. Now, they’ll have to call Lambert for other instructions.”

They sped along the straight blacktop road for the three miles across the desert, reaching the hangar complex. The artillery carrier entered the huge main door of one hangar, and Gerald parked in its shade. They let themselves in the smaller metal side door. A Megamag engineer welcomed them heartily and guided them past half-opened crates containing electronic gear and huge Lexan spheres studded with magnets. Mullins cut the carrier’s engine and hauled his portly body out of the driver’s seat. He pulled out his crutches, accepted a slap on the back from one of his engineers, and hobbled toward them, hefting himself along with vigorous hops.

“Pretty good progress, huh? Glad you’re back! Lots going on here, y’know!”

“Andy, you do know how to put on a welcome,” said Gerald, shaking his hand. Cameron and Gaston followed suit.

“You know about Cohen?” Mullins scowled when he said the name.

“I know he’s coming in soon,” said Gerald. “To take over.”

“Well, yeah. Lambert told us. Gerald, we don’t want this to happen. But what do we do? We’re stuck. We’re rebuilding the vacuum chambers, but beyond that …” He shrugged as best he could, balanced on the crutches.

“Listen, I know what went wrong,” Gerald said. “I know why the eruption happened. And I know how to stop it.”

Mullins grinned and executed a semblance of a jig on his crutches. He waved at two of his engineers to join them, and they took the van and a Humvee over to the administration building.

Pacing before them in the briefing room, Gerald explained his new theory, showing the equations on the large display screen. Mullins sat at a table with his engineers, furiously executing diagrams of new magnets on one of the computers. Soon, rotating before them on the large screen were three-dimensional renderings of capture dishes with newly designed magnets. Sheaves of magnetic field lines swirled around the magnets, altering shape as the engineers fed in new parameters. With Mullins waving a half-eaten sandwich in the air for emphasis, the engineers created plans for the new capture and guidance system. Gerald suggested refinements, and Cameron and Gaston looked on, lost amidst the technical talk, asking for explanations as the work progressed.

“We’ve got a ways to go, that’s for sure,” said Mullins, picking up his cell phone. “But it’s a start. It’s sure a start.” He called his workshop in Cambridge, informing them that he was transmitting a plan for a design of a system to capture and steer a hole. “Tell the guys, we want it
now
. Tell ’em we’re depending on them,” he said, nodding happily at the answer. He ended the call and waved the phone at Gerald. “They said they’d go ’round the clock.” He chuckled. “Asked if they could take apart my car for parts. They’re good boys, y’know, but a little nuts.”

As they refined their plan, the base phone rang.

“It’s the front gate,” said Andy, looking questioningly at Gerald. “Aaron Cohen’s there. He says Lambert has asked him to take over.”

“Tell them he’s not to be allowed in,” said Gerald.

“Hey, tell him we’re not at home,” said Cameron, sipping a Coke nonchalantly.

Mullins did so and hung up the phone. They had worked for another half an hour, when the phone rang again. This time Cameron answered it. He listened for a moment.

“Say, Cal, how they hangin’, shithead?” The others scrambled to wrest the phone from him. “Are you pissed, Calvin? I’m real damn sorry, Calvin.”

Gaston was the first to reach him. “Jesus, Jimmy!” he scolded grabbing the receiver and punching the speakerphone button. The angry voice of Calvin Lambert filled the room.

“—let Cohen the goddamned hell in there, or I’ll bring in people to take the place by force if I have to.” The transmission was faint, crackling with static, but Lambert’s fury was crystal clear.

“Calvin, it’s Gerald—”

“And, look you little prick, I’ll have your—”

“Calvin, listen a minute—”

“What … Gerald? You’re not supposed to be there. I hired Cohen. He knows what the hell he’s doing.”

“Just listen Calvin, let me explain.”

“I don’t want explanations. Apparently …” There was a brief crackle of static. “… you fucked up. There’s nothing to explain.”

“But I know why.”

“Cohen’s coming in. He’s going to honcho this.”

“Calvin, give me some time. I can fix things.” Gerald explained his new theory, including the ability to steer the holes. There was another moment of crackling silence on the line.

Then, Lambert’s faint voice away from the phone. “Where the fuck am I?” They heard a muffled answer. Then Lambert came back.

“Look, I’m off the coast of Sumatra right now. I’m coming back in a week. You’ve got a week to convince me and Cohen. And get rid of that little prick, Cameron.” The line went dead.

They all breathed a sigh of relief, then returned to refining the new capture system. Gerald felt the old exhilaration of obsession rise in him once again. His weeks of solitude on the mountain had recharged him.

But as they worked, he knew there was a place he had to go, a place he couldn’t bring himself to visit until now. When they took a break in their planning, he excused himself and climbed into his van, driving out along the road past the airstrip and out into the desert. The sun was lowering behind the mountains, and the gentle desert breeze wafted through the van. He passed the battered blockhouse, with its cracked concrete walls, and continued on. He passed twisted chunks of metal scattered in the desert where the explosion had blown them. Then much farther on, he came to the crumbled, blackened wreckage of the huge hangar. He pulled the van up to the ruin and got out, standing for a moment in the dead stillness of a desert twilight. He stared at the crumbled, torn metal sheeting of the hangar walls and the jagged remains of the ruptured vacuum chamber. Weeks of desert wind and sun had already cleansed the site of smoke and vapor, but he thought he could smell death there.

He could hear his own breathing in the silence, feel his heartbeat. The hearts of the two dead men would never beat again. He felt his throat constrict in sorrow, and tears well in his eyes. He remembered the families of the men, how brave they had been. He had been so selfish. He had surrounded himself with theories — carefully woven, precisely constructed, but sterile and devoid of life. So inadequate.

He stepped over the pieces of metal debris, his shoes crunching in the burned grit, working his way toward the very center of the wreckage. He felt the two men’s presence. He reached the vacuum chamber, its thick steel plate torturously shredded from the blast.

What violence had struck here, he thought, forces more extreme than any he could imagine. And he had the arrogance to think he could easily contain those forces. Now he had been humbled. But he had not been beaten.

He had never been religious, but he bowed his head. He made a silent promise to the two dead men. He would push himself as far as he had to, do whatever was necessary to master these unearthly objects.

The breeze brought the faint sound of an approaching car. It pulled up and Dacey climbed out. She wore jeans and a t-shirt and her hair was in a ponytail that stuck out the back of her “Schist Happens” baseball cap. She smiled at him, her eyes participating happily in that smile. She picked her way deftly through the wreckage, stepping over the sharp slivers of metal in her small hiking boots, and reached his side. She said nothing, but put her arm around him, as he did around her. They stood there for a long time, drawing strength from one another’s embrace.