Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  An earthworm crawled across the white divider by his knee, sublimely indifferent.

  The truck driver ground a cigarette under the heel of his boot and said, “It’s real, all right. Nobody’s driving south today.”

  Beyond this line of demarcation there was no road and had never been any road. That much was obvious. The forest was deep and trackless. Not so much as a deer trail passed through here, Dex thought.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” said the woman from the Pinto. She was hugging herself and kept glancing at the forest, furtively, as if it might disappear between peeks. The toddler pressed at her thigh.

  “It isn’t possible,” said the man in the business suit. “I mean, there it is. But it’s not, I mean, possible. I don’t think possible has anything to do with it.”

  Still cataloging details, Dex went to the side of the road where a string of telephone poles followed the right-of-way. The phone lines had been sliced as neatly as the road. The wires dangled limply from the poles.

  “That’s not all,” the truck driver said. “Even the trees don’t match. This side’s been burned off a couple of times, I think. Over there it’s all old growth. Go a little ways in that direction, there’s an old pine sliced right up the middle. All the heartwood exposed and the sap leakin’ out. The bugs aren’t at it yet, so it must have happened just recently. Like last night.”

  Dex said, “You come from out of town?”

  “Yeah, but I spent the night in Two Rivers. Had the alternator replaced. I sure as hell wish I could leave, but it’s the same at the other end of the highway, about three miles beyond the quarry. Dead end. I think we’re locked in, unless there’s some side road they missed.”

  “They?”

  “Whoever did this. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Maybe there’s still a way out of town, but I doubt it.”

  The woman repeated, “How is that possible?” By the expression on the truck driver’s face, Dex guessed she had been saying it for a while now.

  He couldn’t blame her. It was the right question, he thought. In a way, it was the only question. But he couldn’t answer it; and he felt his own great fear treading on the heels of the mystery.

  Howard Poole chased the ladder company as far as the old Ojibway reserve. As he came over the rise where Chief Haldane and his crew had recently been, and as he saw the research installation in its veil of blue light, a memory came to him unbidden.

  It was a memory of something Alan Stern had said to him one night—Stern the physicist, who might have perished in the trouble last night; Stern, his uncle.

  Howard had been sixteen years old, a math prodigy with a keen interest in high-energy physics, about to be launched into an academic fast track that both excited and frightened him. Stern had come to visit for a week that summer. He was a celebrity: Alan Stern had appeared in Time magazine, “preeminent among a new generation of American scientists,” photographed against a line of radio telescopes somewhere out west. He had been interviewed on public television and had published journal articles so dense with mathematics that they looked like untranslated Greek papyruses. At sixteen, Howard had worshiped his uncle without reservation.

  Stern had come to the house in Queens, bald and extravagantly bearded, infinitely patient with family gossip, courteous at the dinner table and modest about his career. Howard had learned to cultivate his own patience. Sooner or later, he knew, he would be left alone with his uncle; and the conversation would begin as it always began, Stern smiling his strange conspirator’s smile and asking, “So what have you learned about the world?”

  They sat on the back porch watching fireflies, a Saturday night in August, and Stern dazed him with starry sweeps of science: the ideas of Hawking, Guth, Linde, himself. Howard liked the way such talk made him feel both small and large—dwarfed by the night sky and at the same time a part of it.

  Then, when the talk had begun to lull, his uncle turned to him and said, “Do you ever wonder, Howard, about the questions we can’t ask?”

  “Can’t answer, you mean?”

  “No. Can’t ask.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Stern leaned back in his deck chair and folded his hands over his gaunt, ascetic frame. His glasses were opaque in the porch light. The crickets seemed suddenly loud.

  “Think about a dog,” he said. “Think about your dog—what’s his name?”

  “Albert.”

  “Yes. Think about Albert. He’s a healthy dog, is he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Intelligent?”

  “Sure.”

  “He functions in every way normally, then, within the parameters of dogness. He’s an exemplar of his species. And he has the ability to learn, yes? He can do tricks? Learn from his experience? And he’s aware of his surroundings; he can distinguish between you and your mother, for instance? He’s not unconscious or impaired?”

  “Right.”

  “But despite all that, there’s a limit on his understanding. Obviously so. If we talk about gravitons or Fourier transforms, he can’t follow the conversation. We’re speaking a language he doesn’t know and cannot know. The concepts can’t be translated; his mental universe simply won’t contain them.”

  “Granted,” Howard said. “Am I missing the point?”

  “We’re sitting here,” Stern said, “asking spectacular questions, you and I. About the universe and how it began. About everything that exists. And if we can ask a question, probably, sooner or later, we can answer it. So we assume there’s no limit to knowledge. But maybe your dog makes the same mistake! He doesn’t know what lies beyond the neighborhood, but if he found himself in a strange place he would approach it with the tools of comprehension available to him, and soon he would understand it—dog-fashion, by sight and smell and so on. There are no limits to his comprehension, Howard, except the limits he does not and cannot ever experience. So how different are we? We’re mammals within the same broad compass of evolution, after all. Our forebrains are bigger, but the difference amounts to a few ounces. We can ask many, many more questions than your dog. And we can answer them. But if there are real limits on our comprehension, they would be as invisible to us as they are to Albert. So: Is there anything in the universe we simply cannot know? Is there a question we can’t ask? And would we ever encounter some hint of it, some intimation of the mystery? Or is it permanently beyond our grasp?”

  His uncle stood and stretched, peered over the porch railing at the dark street and yawned. “It’s a question for philosophers, not physicists. But I confess, it interests me.”

  It interested Howard, too. It haunted him all that night. He lay in bed pondering the limits of human knowledge, while the stars burned in his window and a slow breeze cooled his forehead.

  He never forgot the conversation. Neither did his uncle. Stern mentioned it when he invited Howard to join him at the Two Rivers research facility.

  “It’s nepotism,” Howard said. “Besides—do I want this job? Everyone talks about you, you know. Alan Stern, disappeared into some government program, what a waste.”

  “You want this job,” his uncle told him. “Howard, you remember a conversation we once had?”

  And he had recalled it, almost word for word.

  Howard gave his uncle a long look. “You mean to say you’re pursuing this question?”

  “More. We’ve touched it. The Mystery.” Stern was grinning—a little wildly, Howard thought. “We’ve put our hands on it. That’s all I can say for now. Think about it. Call me if you’re interested.”

  Fascinated despite himself—and lacking a better offer—Howard had called.

  He had been investigated, approved, entered onto the DOD payroll; he had shown up three days ago and toured a part of the facility . . . but no one had explained its essential purpose, the fundamental reason for these endless rooms, computers, concrete bunkers and steel doors. Even his uncle had remained aloof, had smiled distantly: it will all be clear in time.


  He came over the rise and saw the buildings gilded with blue light; saw the smoke rising from the central bunker. Worse, he saw a fire department ladder truck and chase car inching down the access road, the image fluid and indistinct.

  He could not imagine what this veil of light might mean. He knew only that it represented some disaster, some tragedy of a bizarre and peculiar kind. No one was moving in the complex, at least no one out in the open. The facility had its own fire control team, but it wasn’t anywhere near the smoldering central bunker—at least, as far as Howard could tell. The blue light made his head swim.

  Maybe they were all dead. Including his uncle, he thought. Alan Stern had been at the center of this project, that much had been obvious; Stern had been its lord, its shaman, its guiding presence. If the accident was lethal it would have taken Stern first of all. All this fluorescence suggested some kind of radiation, though nothing Howard could pin down—something powerful enough to kick photons out of the air. He knew there was radioactive material at the facility. He had seen the warning labels on the closed bunkers. They had given him a film badge as soon as he passed the gate.

  That was why he’d chased the Two Rivers VFD all the way out here. He didn’t think small-town volunteer firemen were trained or equipped to fight radioactive fires. Most likely they weren’t even aware of the danger. They might blunder into an event more deadly than they could guess. So Howard had jumped into his car and rushed after, meaning to warn them—still meaning to.

  But he saw the trucks hesitate and stop, then reverse, wobble, retreat.

  He drove down the hillside to meet them.

  Assistant Chief Haldane saw the civilian automobile come over the rise, but he was too dazed to worry about it. He had climbed out of his car, vomited once into the young weeds by the side of the road, then sat on a wedge of natural granite with his head in his hands and his stomach still churning.

  He didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to speak to anyone. What mattered was that he was beyond the border of blue light, that he had found his way back into the world of sanity. His relief was immense. He took deep, cleansing gulps of air. Pretty soon he would be back in his sane house in the sane town of Two Rivers and this nightmare would be over. All these buildings could burn to the ground as far as he was concerned—the better if they did.

  “Chief?”

  He spat on the ground to clear the taste of puke from his mouth. Then he looked up. Standing before him in blue jeans and a pressed cotton shirt was a civilian, presumably the man from the automobile—more like a boy, though, Haldane thought, with his pink skin and his bug-eye glasses. Haldane didn’t speak, only waited for this apparition to justify its presence.

  “I’m Howard Poole,” the civilian said. “I work at the facility. Or I was supposed to—I would be, if this hadn’t happened. I came because I thought, if you were fighting the fire, you might not know—there might be some radioactivity in there, some particulate matter in the smoke.”

  Poole seemed exquisitely uneasy. “Particulate matter,” Haldane said. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poole, but I don’t believe particulate matter is our problem right now.”

  “I saw you turn back.”

  “Yessir,” Haldane said. “That we did.”

  “May I ask why?”

  Some of the firefighters had shaken off their queasiness and gathered behind Poole. Chris Shank was there, and Tom Stubbs, both looking demoralized and numb under their helmets and scuffed turnout coats. Haldane said, “You work here, you know more about it than me.”

  Poole said, “No—I don’t understand any of this.”

  “It’s like we crossed a line,” Chris Shank volunteered. Good old Chris, Haldane thought, never failed to open his mouth when he could just as well keep it shut. “We were heading down to size up the hazard, and it was weird, you know, with all this light and everything, but then we crossed some kind of line and suddenly it was—I mean, you couldn’t tell where you were going or coming from.” He shook his head.

  “There are things in there,” Tom Stubbs added.

  Haldane frowned. That had been his own perception, true enough. Things in there. But he hadn’t wanted to come out and say it. From here, the space between himself and the defense plant looked empty. Odd, in some shimmery way, but clearly deserted. So he had seen . . . what? A hallucination?

  But Chris Shank was nodding vigorously. “That’s it,” he said. “I saw . . .”

  “Tell the man,” Haldane said. If they were going to talk about this, they might as well speak plainly.

  Shank lowered his head. Awe and shame played over his face like light and shadow.

  “Angels,” he said finally. “That’s what I saw in there. All kinds of angels.”

  Haldane stared at him.

  Tom Stubbs was shaking his head vigorously. “Not angels! Nossir! Mister, it was Jesus Christ Himself in there!”

  Poole glanced between the two men without comprehension, and the Saturday silence seemed louder now. A crow screeched in the still air.

  “You’re both fucked up,” Chief Haldane said.

  He looked back into the no-man’s-land of the research facility, so thick with light that it seemed as if a piece of the sky had fallen onto it. He knew what he’d seen. It was quite clear in his mind, despite the nausea, the sense of no-direction that had overtaken him. He remembered it. He remembered it vividly. He would remember it forever.

  He said, “There’s no angels in there, and there sure as hell ain’t Jesus Christ. The only thing in there is monsters.”

  “Monsters?” Poole said.

  Haldane spat into the dry earth a second time, weary of all this. “You heard me.”

  What spread through the town that day was not panic but a deep, abiding unease. Rumors passed from backyard to main street to gatepost. By sunset, everyone had heard about the miraculous barricades of virgin forest north and south on the highway. Several had also heard about Chris Shank’s assertion that there were angels flying around the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. Some few even gave credence to Tom Stubbs’s claim that it was the Second Coming; that Jesus Christ, two hundred fifty feet tall and dressed in Resurrection white, was about to come striding into town—a point of view condemned Sunday morning at nearly every church service in town. That Sunday, all the churches were full.

  The weekend rolled on without electrical power, phone service, or adequate explanation. Most people stayed near their families and told each other it would all come clear soon, that the lights would flicker back on and the TV would make sense of things. Food stocks began to run low at the few grocery stores open for business. The big supermarket at the Riverview Mall remained closed, and without power for refrigeration, some said, it was just as well—after two days of warm spring weather it must stink like sin in there.

  Saturday night, Dex Graham and Howard Poole exchanged accounts of what they had seen. They were careful at first not to strain each other’s credulity; less cautious when they realized they had each witnessed miracles. In the morning they set out to map the perimeters of the town. Dex drove while Howard sat in the passenger seat with a recent survey map, a pencil, and a pair of calipers. Howard marveled at the southern interruption of the highway, then marked it with careful precision on his chart. Similarly the northern limit. Then they followed private roads, logging roads, and the east–west axis of the farm roads. Each ended abruptly in humid pine forest. At the western margin of County Route 5, Howard creased the map with his pencil and said, “We might as well quit.”

  “It does get a little monotonous.”

  “More than that.” Howard held the map against the dashboard. He had marked every dead end and joined them together: a perfect circle, Dex observed, with the town of Two Rivers in the southeastern quadrant.

  Howard used his calipers to mark the center of the circle, but Dex had already seen what it must be: the old Ojibway reserve, the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory, where Howard had seen veils of blue light, a
nd where the fire chief had seen monsters.

  Sunday, a charter pilot named Calvin Shepperd took off from the air docks at the western end of Lake Merced and flew southeast toward Detroit—or the place on the map where Detroit used to be.

  From the air it was easy to see the circle Dex Graham and Howard Poole had mapped. It was as clear as a cartographer’s line. Two Rivers—much of Bayard County—had been transplanted (that was the word that occurred to him: like his wife’s droopy ficus, transplanted) into the kind of white pine forest that must have covered Michigan when Jolliet and La Salle first crossed it. Shepperd, a calm man, understood none of this but refused to be frightened by it; only observed, took note, and filed the information for later reference.

  Another troubling piece of information was that his VOR receiver wasn’t registering a signal. Which was okay—Shepperd was old-fashioned enough to have calculated his course with a VFR chart and a yardstick, and his dead-reckoning skills were quite intact, thank you very much. He was not one of these modern pilots: RNAV junkies, lost without a computer. But it was peculiar, this radio silence.

  He flew south by compass along the coast of the Lower Peninsula, coming within sight of Saginaw Bay. He should have passed Bay City and he adjusted his course to take him over Saginaw, but neither town seemed to exist. He did see a few settlements—farms, mineheads, and some obvious forestry. So there were people here. But not until he was within sight of the Detroit River did Shepperd encounter anything he would call a town.

  Detroit was a town. Hell, it was a genuine city. But it was not Detroit as Shepperd had known it. It was like no city he had ever seen.

  There was air traffic here, large but frail-looking planes he could not identify, mainly to the south; but no tower chatter or beacons he could pick up, only hiss in the headphones—which made his presence here a danger. He flew a broad circle low over the city’s outskirts, over long tin-roofed buildings like warehouses hugging the river’s edge. There were taller buildings of some dark stone, narrow streets crowded with traffic, vehicles he didn’t recognize, some of them horse-drawn. Afternoon sun stitched the city with shadows. From Shepperd’s vantage point it might have been a diorama, something in a museum case, not real. Surely to God, he thought, not real.