Wormholes (9 page)

G
erald had driven all night to make it to Columbia, Missouri, the next day, but he had to see the arm. He had to talk to the man who was to autopsy it. It was something that had inexplicably “appeared,” and was thus of great interest. He drove the van slowly through the neat grid of streets, following the instructions periodically announced by the
GPS
receiver suction-cupped to his windshield. Taped to his dashboard was a printout of an Associated Press article describing how an arm had fallen from the sky in Melville, Missouri.

He took a corner particularly fast, and cans clattered about in the back of the van. It was time to do a housecleaning, but he didn’t know where he would find a steep hill in this flat area of the Midwest. He knew that if he accelerated up a steep hill and maybe let the van roll back down and hit the brakes a few times all the cans and much of the other trash would shift to the back. So, he could just open the rear door and sweep it into a garbage can — after, of course, sifting through it to make sure he wasn’t throwing away any valuable data or printouts.

Maybe he’d get the van tuned up, too. Or whatever was needed to quiet the uncharacteristic engine noise. He also needed to put more air in the air mattress.

He knew his wandering was weird. But when the compulsion came, he knew he had to leave his research at the Center and go wherever was necessary to gather data. At first, the compulsion had been a mere tickling at the edge of his conscious, a feeling that things were happening out there beyond his little office that just weren’t quite right. He knew from experience not to dismiss such tickles. In the past, even while he was working on the most difficult theoretical problem — for example, the mathematics of accretion disks around black holes — his unconscious was always taking in information, processing it, deciding whether it was significant. His unconscious had caused the tiny uneasiness that had exploded into this year-long journey of data-gathering.

He’d found all these anomalies to be really significant. They were beyond usual physics and they were concrete. Not like
UFO
s or Bigfoot, where the physical evidence was not quite there, not really something that a scientist could gather and analyze.

But nobody had put them together. They were just separate, strange phenomena, reported with passing interest by the media, but which so far only he had believed were connected … somehow.

So, he had left his job, his research, his family, his girlfriend. Fortunately, Lisa had already begun to pursue other interests. She didn’t seem to like being called his girlfriend, which was one sign, and she’d taken to going home at night, sometimes early, leaving him searching through news sites on the computer.

The other scientists at the Center for Astrophysics had been tolerant. They had seen such instances before, when one of their physicists veered off onto a strange tangent. Sometimes it proved incredibly important, sometimes a quirky dead-end.

Either way, they had all judged his explorations peculiar, but he was certain his compulsion wasn’t as mystical as it seemed on the surface — especially when he kept encountering other people who were puzzling over a weird phenomenon they had encountered. He would gather as much information as he could from them, connect them with the Deus Foundation, and move to another mystery. Someday soon, he knew a theory would crystallize itself out of all these multifarious happenings.

He returned from his reverie. There it was. The
GPS
’s last instruction had brought him to an anonymous, windowless, tan brick building with an ambulance entrance and a sign that said Boone County Morgue. He found a parking place, grabbed a new spiral-bound notebook and pushed through the front door. The guard at the front had his name and gave him a visitor’s tag, directing him to the basement examining room.

As he pressed a big black button that took the aging elevator down, he became aware of the strong smell of formalin and a disconcerting organic odor that he took to be the smell of cold, dead bodies. He found George Voigt sitting in a small, cramped office, shuffling papers about, peering down at them through rimless bifocals.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Meier. From the foundation. I did get the call from Massachusetts, from my colleague there. You’re interested in the arm.” George Voigt was a spare, small man in his late seventies, with a bald head encircled by wispy white hair. He was affable, easygoing, but Gerald’s contacts had told him that “Curious George” Voigt as he was known, was a legend in Missouri and, indeed, among pathologists. He was expert and he was thorough. His counterpart in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, had told Gerald that Voigt was famous for snooping incessantly around crime scenes and deeply annoying some police, especially when he proved innocent one of their prime suspects.

Voigt offered him coffee, tea or lemonade, but Gerald declined, given that he was about to see a part of a dead body. Voigt then buttoned his clean, starched lab coat, picked up a gray notebook and led Gerald into the aging, but meticulously clean, white-tiled examining room. Two stainless steel autopsy tables occupied the room’s center, and one wall was covered with stainless steel doors with refrigerated containers for bodies.

“I thought at first that maybe I should wait for the rest of this gentleman to turn up,” said Voigt, opening one of the steel doors and sliding out the body-sized tray that held only a small cloth-draped object. “But the police said they needed as much information as they could get
PDQ
, so I examined it. Most strange, Mr. Meier. Indeed, this is most strange.”

He undraped the object, and Gerald found himself staring at a grayish, lifeless arm that looked almost like a clever fake. The stubby-fingered hand was upturned and the fingers were curled into the kind of grip one might use to hold a violin bow. The fingertips were stained with ink. The bloodied stump was sliced clean through. Very cleanly through, even such that the bloodstained white shirt looked as if it had been sliced with a razor.

“Are you okay?” Voigt asked solicitously, and Gerald nodded. He was so fascinated with the arm, he forgot to be queasy.

“Well, let’s see now,” said Voigt opening his notebook. “Subject is a left arm and hand belonging to a white adult male …” he began describing in detail the hand, the arm, the few distinguishing birthmarks and scars, the amount of muscle and fat, the status of the nail beds, and the multitude of other factors that constituted a thorough autopsy. He went on for a few minutes, saving the most interesting part for last. “The arm is severed from the body above the shoulder joint, cutting through the clavicle and scapula and the pectoralis major muscle, and …” He paused and smiled at Gerald significantly over his glasses. “… the severing incision is remarkably clean, even cutting through parts of the fourth and fifth left ribs.” Gerald looked closely. Sure enough, embedded in the dry gray muscle were segments of rib that had been sliced so cleanly through that they looked polished.

“Actually, I’ve been waiting for your arrival to finish. I decided to take a closer look at this sliced bone. It could be a centerpiece to this mystery.” Voigt took up a scalpel in his small wrinkled hand and with deft, delicate strokes carefully sliced away at the muscle until he freed one of the rib slivers, wrapping it in gauze and placing it in a small plastic sample box. He handed the box to Gerald while he covered the arm and slid it back into the refrigerator.

Shortly, the sliver was under his microscope, where they saw a perfectly clean slice, with no discernible cut marks. After examining the sliver from all possible angles, Gerald sat on the old metal stool and stared at it.

“We need to see this with higher resolution. You know where we can use an electron microscope?”

Voigt smiled knowingly. “As a matter of fact, I happen to know this young lady who might help us.”

After Voigt made a brief phone call, they drove in Gerald’s van to the University of Missouri. Voigt sat in the seat that Gerald had swept clean of debris, holding the little box in his lap. As they negotiated the streets, Voigt described his interviews with the Zoners and everybody else involved with the limb from the sky. Gerald tried to drive with his notebook on the steering wheel, making scribbled notes at stoplights and sometimes, unfortunately, on wobbly turns. But Voigt, dressed in his herringbone sport coat and bow tie, didn’t seem to notice, chattering happily on.

“They think it was a plane crash?” asked Gerald.

“Well, I heard on the radio that there is a small plane missing that filed a flight plan over the area. They found pieces of a plane. One piece hit a barn. But they don’t think it’s all there. They’re still looking for more body parts. I hope they find them. I’d like to find out more about my gentleman and what happened to him.”

Within half an hour, they stood inside the university’s electron microscopy laboratory. His rheumy blue eyes twinkling, Voigt held up the box and worked his courtly charm on Gayle, the young, female microscopist who oversaw the laboratory. He had taught her pathology in graduate school, and she could never refuse Dr. George anything.

Within another hour, they had sliced the tip end off the rib, coated it in gold and inserted it into the sample chamber in the tall beige column that was the scanning electron microscope. The vacuum pump rattled busily as it evacuated the chamber and shortly the electron microscopic image of the rib tip appeared on the small green luminescent screen, looking like an immense plateau thrusting up from the middle of a broad desert. An
extremely smooth
plateau.

“This isn’t possible,” said Gayle, adjusting knobs to zoom in on the surface. Even at the highest magnitude there were no jagged edges, no slice marks. Only a glass-smooth slice through the bone, even beyond the highest polishing.

“But, dear, it
does
appear to be possible,” said Dr. George.

“Is there anybody else around who could look at this?” asked Gerald. “Anybody who’s looked at a lot of these things before?”

Voigt smiled, again knowingly. “Of course, I’ll just give a call to some of my old students.” Gerald wondered whether students might be appropriate judges of this exotic object, but said nothing.

Within another half an hour, the former “students” had arrived. Crowding into the room were the university hospital’s chief of surgery, the chief of orthopedics, and the director of the biomaterials program. All were brilliant men, with the extraordinary powers of observation afforded by dozens of years of medical education, and Dr. George’s venerable pathology course. They peered at the sharp black-and-white image, and for half an hour requested different views, different angles, different electron beam parameters.

Finally, Gerald polled them. “Any of you know of any cutting tool, bone saw, energy beam … anything at all … that could slice something that smoothly?”

“Nope,” said the chief of surgery.

“Got me,” said the chief of orthopedics.

“I’ll get back to you,” promised the director of the biomaterials program. But Gerald knew that meant he was stumped, too. Voigt left the small troublesome piece of bone with Gayle, and he and Gerald walked out of the medical center down the broad sidewalk toward the parking lot.

“Son, I’m stumped here. I’m going to go back to my office and look at some references. You’re welcome to stay, but I’m afraid that I couldn’t help you much.”

“Well, you did already,” said Gerald as they passed by the large brick science buildings. “You found something incredibly important.”

Voigt brightened. “Oh, indeed? That’s very nice, but what could it possibly be?”

“That seemed to be an infinitely smooth surface. Down to the molecular level. An infinitely smooth surface means that it was cut by something infinitely smooth. I’ve seen this before.” He told Voigt about Dacey Livingstone’s smooth rock and the smooth slice through the bridge. Voigt’s eyes widened. This was better than any simple murder mystery!

They returned to Voigt’s small office, and he began to pull dog-eared criminal pathology texts off his shelf. In the process of setting them on his desk, he spied a pink phone message slip. It was for Gerald and it was the phone number of the Deus Foundation, which was the only place he had kept apprised of his travels. He called the foundation on his cell phone.

“A Brendan Cooper called,” said the foundation secretary’s efficient voice.

“Cooper? From Woods Hole?” Gerald had worked with Cooper on fluid dynamics calculations several times. He liked the no-nonsense oceanographer.

“Yes. He’s got something for you to look at. Something he says is ‘right up your alley.’ He wants to send a plane to pick you up. Immediately, he said.”

• • •

The face looming unsteadily at the rain-dappled window of the police car was snaggle-toothed and with a scraggly beard flecked with dried food. The dirty hand rapped sloppily on the glass, and the cop lowered the window, unfortunately allowing the wet breeze to carry the fetid body odor into the squad car. A truck rumbled past, its tires hissing on the wet pavement, but the Bronx street was otherwise quiet.