Wormholes (31 page)

They had jogged about a quarter mile, and the lights of the infirmary had receded far enough so that they could stop. They stood in the still desert, the breeze playing about them, the glow of the massive public encampment in the distance.

But they were far from alone. The scientists, engineers and technicians from the base were scattered across the desert in shadowy groups beyond the lights of the buildings, as a three-quarter-moon rose in the sky. But they ignored the moon. Like billions of other humans who stood in the darkness each night watching the heavens and praying, they saw only the moon’s savage new rival.

She had only seen the anti-hole on television before, because she was isolated in the infirmary.

It was like a malevolent gleaming eye floating in the black sky. She hadn’t realized the gut-level fear that it could arouse.

“My God,” was all she could say, and Gerald put his arm around her in answer.

The huge sphere was the antithesis of the constant moon. Its light was tauntingly capricious. When a bit of antimatter from the hole touched matter, the sphere would erupt a flaming burst of swirling colored light that surged into space. A moment later, the Earth would answer with a curtain of undulating colored auroral light, as the subatomic particles from the eruption streamed down the Earth’s magnetic field lines onto the planet’s poles.

But then the sphere would settle into an almost cunning quiet, like a lurking animal giving its prey a false sense of security. Then it would burst forth with another eruption, as if to reassert its domination.

“We’ve got maybe a few days,” said Gerald quietly. “The gamma rays are getting powerful enough to begin to penetrate the atmosphere. And the eruptions are more frequent.”

“You think its approaching something on the other side?”

“Yes. Maybe a planet. We don’t know. But there’s more matter coming through now.” He gestured at the anti-hole. “And this is small stuff, the size of dust particles. When the big stuff starts coming through … well, that’s it.”

After a few moments, she remembered that he had gotten her out of the infirmary for a reason.

“Okay, tell me. What do you need me for?”

“You can talk to Calvin. We need you to help persuade him.”

“About what?”

“We’re going through to the other side with equipment so we can fly the hole from there. From the other universe. We’re going to fly it to the anti-hole. We’re going to collide them.”

“H
ell no!” Lambert stood up to leave the briefing room, as did Van Alston, who carefully smoothed his suit coat and stowed his laptop in a briefcase full of papers. “I’m not even gonna listen to this bullshit.”

“Calvin, it’s the only way,” said Gerald, his voice calm in an attempt to evolve the discussion from anger to reason.

“Maybe the damned hole will close. Maybe we make the Chinese use their hole. If you even think about doing this, I’ll get the generals to commandeer the vacuum chamber; you won’t have a chance.” In response, Van Alston had pulled out his phone, preparing to call the appropriate numbers.

“Look, the Chinese have only made one entry into the universe on the other side of their hole. They don’t have the equipment or the expertise. They’re not even sure they can steer theirs precisely enough. And the anti-hole is getting too close. It doesn’t show any sign of closing.”

Gerald pressed a key to bring up on the display screen the latest telescope image of Neptune — or rather the shattered pieces of what once had been a whole planet. The image showed only a few separate points of reflected light, but it portrayed a planetary disaster well enough.

“This is the best-case scenario of what’s going to happen,” Gerald said. “The worst is that the whole solar system goes.”

“Fuck the solar system,” growled Lambert, but he did not leave. Van Alston wavered between opening the door and sitting back down.

“Calvin, it’s something we’ve got to try.”

“And the missiles? What about the missiles?”

“Everybody’s ruled that out. A nuclear missile might close the hole, but if it touched anti-matter …” Gerald shrugged his shoulders.

“Calvin,” Dacey leaned forward at the table, looking him in the eyes. But she said nothing else for a long moment. Calvin glared at her, but he seemed to understand some unspoken communication between them. “Just listen to the full plan. Just listen to it, okay?”

Calvin sat back down, and Van Alston unpacked his laptop and also sat down against the wall. Gerald nodded to Mullins, who typed commands into his laptop bringing up an image on the display screen. It was of the familiar oval depicting a wormhole.

“Okay, here’s the deal. We go through to the other side with an electromagnet array attached to a computer and steer the thing around in this universe.” He drew a set of radiating lines around the oval. “We’ve figured out how to surround the hole with electromagnetic steering probes. We’re working on how to seal off the hole on the other side … like with some kind of cover … so when it leaves the vacuum chamber here it doesn’t suck everything up.”

Mullins turned to gauge the effect of his talk on Lambert. He saw only the same glower as before. He turned around and sketched a larger circle around the smaller one.

“We’re pretty sure we can assemble a big spherical chamber surrounding the hole on the other side. Like thirty feet across. It’ll have the steering probes sticking down toward the hole from the inside. We make it from two hemispheres of Vectran. Twice as tough as Kevlar. Fold it up, put it through the hole.”

“But the damn thing’s not rigid.”

Mullins grinned and drew another slightly larger circle around the other two. “Yeah, well, doesn’t need to be. We let pressure into the vacuum chamber, it’ll be stiff like a balloon.”

“Balloons pop.”

Gerald stepped forward. “Not this one. And it won’t need to be fully rigid in outer space. We’ll include carbon-fiber ribs, so the shell will hold its shape when there’s vacuum on both sides. Like an umbrella. The steering probes are mounted on the inside of the ribs. So, we attached a control unit with a power pack and a computer, and I can control the magnetic field to fly it from there. I’ll be outside the chamber on the other side, guiding it toward the anti-hole in this universe.”

“What about the lasers? Don’t you need the lasers to keep the junk out there from putting a hole in your little balloon?”

Mullins paused, his round face showing frustration. Lambert had astutely revealed a critical flaw in their plan.

“Yeah, we can’t haul the lasers through. We’ll just have to hope we don’t hit anything.”

“
Hope
.
Jesus
,” said Lambert disgustedly. “And you’re telling me when these two things … these holes … come together …”

“We get a sort of dimensional short-circuit. At least I think so.”

“You
think
so,” spat Lambert. “What bullshit!”

“When the two holes meet, it’ll be like a couple of soap bubbles merging, but they’ll connect the other two universes to one another and bypass ours.”

“And so you’re out there—”

“
We’re
out there,” said Gaston, who had remained silent until now. “It’ll take two people to assemble all this equipment. Two experienced people.” Gaston looked steadily at Gerald, who smiled slightly and nodded in thanks.

Lambert shrugged and waved his hands dismissively. “So you two are out there stuck in the other universe going to this anti-hole where this anti-matter crap is coming through. And even if you get back you’re about a hundred thousand miles from Earth.” The last words were uttered with a subtle catch in Lambert’s throat, but only Dacey seemed to notice. She shot a knowing glance at him that he returned as a warning sideways glare.

“We have a lifeboat,” Gerald continued. “Andy’s people have made a cylindrical chamber that we can both climb into. It’ll have oxygen for two for twelve hours. It’ll have a small booster engine and a computer to aim and fire it to bring us back into low earth orbit. Just before the holes collide, we enter the shell and pull the lifeboat through to this universe. We get into the lifeboat, seal it up, and let the computer fire off the engine, and we’re safely away from the holes before they collide. And there’s a
NASA
Soyuz spacecraft on the launch pad right now. They’ve agreed to alter its mission and pick us up.”

“Well, you don’t have the stuff built, anyway.”

“We do … mostly,” said Andy, leaning back in his chair. “We started when Gerald first came up with the idea of flying a hole from the other side. Got a couple of sets of the equipment built already. All off-the-shelf. The company that makes inflatable space modules had leakproof seals and clamps. The lifeboats are missile casings. The retro engines are spare steering jets from an old Space Shuttle.”

“But it’s not tested.”

Mullins’ expression grew somber, the animated excitement disappearing from his face. “No, it’s not tested.”

“Sounds like a plan with lots more ways to fail and die than to succeed and live.”

“Calvin, look, it’s the only way,” said Dacey. “You know that.”

“Has Cohen seen this plan?”

“We presented it to all the scientists this afternoon,” said Gerald.

“What did Cohen say?”

“He said he didn’t have any better ideas.”

Lambert stared at Gerald, then at Dacey, then at the display screen. He stood up, his face an impassive mask. “Fine, then. Then do it.” But before anybody could answer, he was out the door, leaving Van Alston still sitting in the corner, his briefcase on his lap.

T
he feel of her soft touch on his cheek, of the last quick but meaningful kiss, lingered after Gerald put on the helmet. It was a gratifying memory to carry with him. Gaston stood outside the hangar door in his suit, holding his helmet at his side, watching the Humvee speed away. His husband, Wayne, had come to be with him, but the slim, bearded, middle-aged man couldn’t bear to watch his partner of twenty years step into the airlock.

Gaston came back into the cooler shade of the hangar out of the desert sun, his face serene, as it had been since their first entry through the hole. He strode across the broad concrete floor of the hangar to the dressing area and allowed the Deus engineer to help him put on his helmet.

The engineers examined the suits more meticulously than ever before. And they had Gerald and Gaston press buttons on small control panels on their chest to test-fire maneuvering jets on new backpacks. It was an unpracticed act. They’d used the maneuvering backpacks on only a single other foray through the hole. They needed to maneuver this time, because now they would have to float free in space. They couldn’t risk tangling themselves in a tether among the complex collection of equipment that would be floating with them. Now, however, they would risk the danger of a wrong kick or a jet misfire sending them careening away into the alien space of the other universe.

The engineers finally finished their checkout, and the comforting hiss of flowing oxygen filled Gerald’s ears. They both stood for a moment and looked through their faceplates at the huge metal vacuum chamber, its surface patched here and there from the impact of space debris.

With a last hug, Dacey was gone, sliding into the Humvee and following the last vanload of engineers across the desert into the distance. She didn’t look back, but that was her way. He knew that her prayers were with him.

They almost automatically went through the ritual of stepping clumsily into the small airlock, manipulating its controls, hearing the faint hiss as it evacuated, and opening the heavy steel door within. The hole floated as usual in the middle of the chamber, still trapped by magnetic fields. How incredible, thought Gerald, that this object had become usual to him.

He felt little fear. He had locked it away long ago, making it a prisoner of his will. In its place, he felt a profound sorrow rise within him. Soon, the incredible universe visible through the hole would be lost forever to them. When this hole melded with the anti-hole, the dimensional short-circuit would bring a gush of anti-matter erupting into the other universe. And into the other solar system that was a tiny part of it. Perhaps the anti-hole would close before too much damage was done. But perhaps it would destroy the bright young sun they had orbited and the beautiful wind-whipped planet with its strange, hardy animals. In either case, he would never know.

But it had to be. There was no other way. Soon the giant main doors of the vacuum chamber would open and they would pilot to its destruction the shimmering spherical hole that they had worked so hard to capture and hold.

As usual, they moved clumsily in the suits, checking the two large cylinders and two bundled fabric hemispheres that would be passed through the hole. Each package was ten feet long, four feet wide, and designed to pass through the protective framework and into the other universe.

The framework waited beneath the large star-filled black roundness of the hole, its ladder jutting into the sphere, a faint luminescence playing about it.

Gerald checked with Mullins in the control room. The hole was stable and had been flown far out in the solar system of the other universe. There would be no nearby planets, moons or asteroids to endanger them during their mission. The long-necked magnetic serpents had done their job of propelling the hole, and then withdrawn to the corners of the vacuum chamber. Now, long poles had been mounted on their heads, like the tusks on a unicorn, that would come into use later.

Gerald placed one boot heavily on the ladder, pulling himself up. Then another and another, until he began to feel once more the lightness begin at his head and pass down his body, until he perched weightless on the end of the ladder in the other universe, holding himself with one hand. He pushed off and once more floated alone and infinitesimal in the immense void of the companion universe. He tried to avoid paying attention to the gleaming stars and incandescent whirlpool galaxies. Before, they would be mesmerizing. Now, they were only distractions. He pressed the buttons on his chest to produce tiny bursts of the jets to maneuver himself around to the other side of the hole. He felt a twinge of space sickness from the weightlessness, and a rising panic from being unsecured by the tether, but he determinedly fought both off.

He reached the other side of the sphere and saw Gaston standing above him now on the catwalk overlooking the hole. The sight was disconcerting. He still couldn’t get used to the strange geometry of the holes. Gaston had the first cylinder suspended from a pulley over the hole. It swayed slightly, but he steadied it with a touch of his gloved hand.

“Ready?” It was Gaston’s voice in his headset.

“Yes.”

The cylinder began its journey downward, sliding through the hole. Gaston was obsessively careful. To nick this cylinder would end the mission immediately. It was their lifeboat, the titanium cylinder with the gimbaled rocket engine on one end.

The cylinder passed easily through as it became weightless. Gerald grabbed a handhold on its hull, detached the line and guided it away from the hole. The cylinder felt comfortingly solid in his hands. With a puff of propellant from his jet, he returned to the framework and guided another cylinder through — this one containing the computer and batteries that would power the electromagnetic probes. Then came the two bundles that would form the hemispheres. He felt his movements becoming more deft as he gained experience. He kept his breathing steady, controlled.

Gaston appeared through the other side of the hole, pulling himself up the ladder. They floated free together, holding onto one another in the black vastness, floating among the four white objects that would all have to work perfectly for their world to survive.

Gerald confirmed the successful passage to Mullins, and the three metal serpents came obediently to life, like jousting knights inserting the long poles mounted on their heads through the holes at widely divergent angles. The poles would prevent the shell from contacting the hole as they assembled it around the hole.

Gerald propelled himself over to one of the bundles and yanked a cord on it. It sprang open like an umbrella, forming a thirty-foot white hemisphere with metal probes studding its interior.

“Yes!” he whispered with satisfaction. He signaled to Gaston who did the same with the other bundle. It, too, blossomed instantly, and they drifted amidst the two huge white fabric hemispheres, examining them. The fabric was undamaged, as were the long electromagnetic propulsion probes sprouting from the carbon fiber ribs running along the inside.

“Okay, hold a second,” they heard Mullins say in their headsets. “Hold there.” He was studying the images from the cameras on the serpents’ heads. “Yeah, good … good.” He pronounced the structures sound. With delicate bursts from their jets, they brought the two hemispheres together, first attaching them at one point like a huge open clamshell. Now they were ready to close the shell over the hole, to seal it for its flight.

“You look like a couple of ballet dancers. Fat ones. But graceful.” It was Dacey’s voice, and Gerald allowed himself a smile.

It was brief. Once they closed the clamshell, there would be no more visual contact from the control room. The serpents’ cameras would see only the inside of the shell. And Gerald and Gaston would have only radio contact through an antenna that they would plug into from outside.

A few puffs of propellant drifted them into position, each taking hold of one side of the clamshell and carefully closing it. The heat and light that had shone from the other side disappeared, and a merciless cold enveloped them. Now there was only pale starlight and a yellow gleam from a distant sun. The suit heaters came to life, but instantly lost ground to the hundred-degree-below-zero cold. Gerald felt his fingers growing numb, and flexed them vigorously to maintain circulation

The cold only emphasized the overwhelming loneliness. He paused, looking at Gaston for reassurance. Gaston put his hand on Gerald’s shoulder. They were going to be all right.

They went to work switching on their helmet lights and circling the closed edges of the shell, latching the edges with cold fingers, forming an airtight seal. Occasionally, they could feel the gentle, saving bump of the shell drifting into one of the probes held by the serpents.

Finally, they checked the hatch in the side of the shell. This would be their escape route, through which they’d pass the lifeboat back into their universe. As they worked, Gerald could see the firm-jawed determination on Gaston’s gaunt face. He’d managed to stow his fear as had Gerald. But perhaps there was a difference. Gaston was under a death sentence as Gerald was not. Gerald brought himself back to his work and plugged his helmet radio into the antenna port on the side of the shell.

“Put a little pressure on and let’s see how it holds,” he said.

“Okay … tenth of an atmosphere,” he heard Mullins reply.

Even through his gloved hand, Gerald could feel the fabric skin tighten, as air was let into the vacuum chamber on the other side.

Gaston began to pull himself over every square inch of the thirty-foot sphere shell using hand straps on the surface, his helmet close to the fabric, examining it for leaks. Meanwhile, Gerald drifted over to the tethered cylinder containing the computer and batteries, shepherding it back and strapping it to the side of the sphere. The penetrating cold had become an implacable enemy, sucking the strength from his body, but he fought it with thoughts of his mission.

Gaston returned, giving him a thumbs-up. They opened a panel in the cylinder’s side to pull out electrical plugs, which they inserted into sockets in the side of the shell. Each went over the other’s work, double-checking every connection. Gerald opened another panel on the cylinder, revealing the computer controls — an array of buttons, joysticks and computer screen designed to be operated by a space-suited man strapped down in front of them, floating in the vacuum of space.

Gerald strapped himself to the side of the control unit, as did Gaston. He took a deep, shivering breath. His mouth was dry, perhaps from nerves, perhaps from the dry oxygen he had been breathing. He flipped a switch and the computer came to life, one screen showing views from video cameras mounted inside the shell. The other screen showed the status of the electromagnetic probes and the hole’s position coordinates. Gerald looked over at Gaston, who nodded in agreement at the silent question. They agreed that all was working properly. And they agreed that it was time.

“Go to one atmosphere.” He heard his own voice quavering with the cold. “Open the vacuum chamber doors.”

The shell tightened to become as hard as metal, as air was let into the vacuum chamber. Once more, Gaston made a quick, skimming hand-over-hand trip around the sphere. With the air came some faint warmth emanating from the sphere, but they knew it would disappear once they entered space on the other side. But it was enough to keep them going.

“It’s holding,” he said, as he arrived back and strapped himself in.

They watched the video screens, as the large chamber doors opened. They could see the familiar desert outside the hangar and the blue sky that was their destination.

“Power on,” Gerald recited, his voice recovering its steadiness. He adeptly pressed the large buttons with his gloved hands. “Vector entered. Propulsive field activated.”

“God be with you. I love you,” he heard in his radio, as static rose to cover the voice. It was Dacey’s voice.

He pushed one of the joysticks forward.

• • •

Everybody but Mullins deserted the control room, flinging open the metal doors and rushing into the bright sun to glimpse the departing hole. Their hands shading their eyes, they peered toward the distant hangar, straining to see it emerge.

“I see it! It’s there!” shouted one of the engineers who had brought binoculars.

The hole drifted out of the hangar, catching the morning sun reflected off the white fabric of the shell enveloping it from the other side. It floated slowly along the ground for a few seconds. Then it vaulted into the cloudless blue sky, effortlessly accelerating to an astonishing speed as it went.

From the small crowd came cheers and a few sobs. In the distance, they heard car horns and sirens as the crowds surrounding the base marked the departure.

Calvin Lambert squinted into the sky, watching the hole shrink into the distance, until it became a faint shining point, and finally disappeared.

Beside him, Dacey took his arm. The big man did not pull away and he did not look down, keeping his gaze fastened on the point where the hole had disappeared. She saw for the first time in the bright sun how haggard he looked beneath his tan.