by Patrick Lee
He was quiet for twenty seconds, lining it all up.
“You’ve been acting on limited information,” he said. “You knew that. You had no choice but to try connecting the dots anyway—the ones you had. Peter Campbell did the same thing, early in the Scalar investigation, and came to the same misunderstanding as you: that Ruben Ward did something bad.”
Paige looked at Travis and Bethany, then Dyer.
“He did do something bad,” she said. “My father was terrified about it.”
“In the beginning.”
Paige shook her head. “In the end, too, and long after. He was still scared of it five years ago.”
“He was scared five years ago, but not for any of the reasons you think.”
Paige started to reply, then just stopped and waited for him to go on.
Dyer shut his eyes for a few seconds. A last consideration of how to say it.
“The message Ward received had distinct halves. The first was a description of the place on the other side of the Breach, along with an explanation of why the message had been sent. None of which Garner shared with me. Those are the deepest parts of the secret. What he told me about was the second half: the instructions. They included a list of nine names, nine people who were alive in 1978, and directions for finding them.”
Travis looked at Paige and knew what she was thinking. Loraine Cotton.
“Ward’s task was straightforward,” Dyer said. “Take the message to each of these people and convince them it was for real. There were verifiers built into it, to help him do that. Specific predictions of things like aurora activity that summer, down to the minute. Things you couldn’t just guess about—things a human couldn’t just guess about anyway.”
“What were these people supposed to do with the message once they had it?” Travis said.
“Follow the instructions that were included for them. Which were more complicated than Ward’s. His part was done by early August.”
“Why did he kill himself?” Bethany said.
“For the reason everyone assumed, the day they heard about it. The Breach had fried him. Whatever gave him the means to translate the message—and dumped him into a near-coma for all those weeks—screwed him up in lots of other ways. Serious mood problems. Imbalances. It’s a wonder he lasted those three months. Did you know the message included an apology for that effect? Whoever sent it knew it would do that to a human brain. It couldn’t be avoided.”
The drilling atop the shaft suddenly changed tone. Became deeper, more guttural. The first bit had been swapped out for something bigger. Everyone listened for a moment and then tried to ignore it.
“So by August of 1978,” Dyer said, “the nine recipients had their orders in hand. These were nine pretty average people, but that was about to change. The instructions included ways for them to dramatically increase their financial and social status over the following years. The wording was pretty careful—the message’s senders may have anticipated that other people might see it along the way. It didn’t necessarily say ‘Invest in Apple on this exact date, or apply for this particular job,’ but it was in the ballpark. It read like a childishly simple riddle, if you knew to look past the surface, and for these nine people it was the recipe for becoming extremely rich, and politically connected, in just a matter of years.”
Travis thought of the three names Bethany’s data-mining had turned up. Three of the people Peter Campbell had met with here in Rum Lake, in December 1987. All three had been worth tens of millions by then, with ties to Washington.
And all three had begun amassing that wealth and power in the late seventies or very early eighties.
Suddenly Travis understood what the ping had been about, a while earlier when they’d learned about Loraine Cotton: they’d recognized that her steep financial climb started just after Ruben Ward met with her, and as a direct result of his doing so. But Travis hadn’t noticed the similarity with the other three. Hadn’t tied in the fact that their climbs had begun around the same time as hers. He’d overlooked it because those people were supposed to be Peter’s allies, whom he’d chosen in 1987. It hadn’t seemed to matter when and how they’d become powerful.
“Whoever’s on the other side seems to have at least some rudimentary knowledge of our future,” Dyer said. “They had it as of 1978, in any case. Some understanding of which technologies, even which companies, were about to break in a big way.”
“There are entities that can access the future,” Paige said. “With certain restrictions.”
“However it worked,” Dyer said, “the information was dead-on. These people were all major players by the mid eighties, which allowed them to begin following the next instruction: get close to the people who control the Breach. Stay informed on all that surrounds it, and gain as much influence over it as possible. That last part they were free to take their time with. They wouldn’t have to use the influence until quite a ways down the road.”
“How far down the road?” Travis said.
“Seven minutes past three P.M. mountain time, June 5, 2016.”
The three of them stared. None spoke.
Travis’s mind automatically sought a meaning for the date, but came up with nothing. It was a few months shy of four years from now. Beyond that, nothing about it stuck.
“What happens at that time?” Paige said.
“The Breach inside Border Town opens,” Dyer said. “Really opens, I mean. Becomes a two-way channel that a person can pass through from this end. But only one specific person, whom the instructions also name and describe. They made it very clear that no one else was to come through. Putting that person in front of the Breach at the right time falls to the other nine. That’s their entire purpose. It’s what all the power and influence are for.”
The notion of someone actually stepping into the Breach affected Travis to an extent that surprised him. Through the fabric of his shirt he could suddenly feel the stone wall at his back, radiating its chill.
“Who goes in?” he said.
Dyer looked at him. “You do, Mr. Chase.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The tunnel seemed almost to move beneath him. To rock gently left and then right, like a boat in a passing wake.
“The message that came through the Breach was about you,” Dyer said. “It named you. It specified your time and place of birth.”
A memory came to Travis. An image of the dark alley near Johns Hopkins, between the town houses. Ruben Ward staggering somewhere ahead of him, aware that he was being followed.
The man had called out: Who the hell are you?
And he’d answered: Travis Chase. Let me help.
There’d been an audible response on Ward’s part. Some expulsion of breath Travis had pegged for confusion, and then dismissed.
You’re only a kid, Ward had said. And a moment later: The instructions didn’t say anything about this.
Travis looked around at the others—Dyer just watching him, reading his response, Paige and Bethany staring with blank faces, still processing the information.
Then Paige’s expression changed. She looked at Travis and mouthed a single word: it.
Travis acknowledged her with a nod neither Bethany nor Dyer saw.
It.
Jesus.
No doubting the connection now.
Was that what the filter was about, then? Was it some consequence of entering the Breach from this end? An unavoidable result, like the brain damage Ruben Ward had suffered when the thing opened?
Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.
Travis looked at Dyer. “Did Garner ever say anything about a filter? Did that word ever come up, regarding the message?”
Dyer thought about it, but seemed to draw a blank. He shook his head.
Travis considered the notion for another second and then let it fall away—for the moment. The present conversation drew his full attentio
n again.
“I was a child when that message arrived,” Travis said. “How the hell could it be about me?”
“I’d tell you if I knew,” Dyer said.
“Does Garner know? Does he know what happens when I go through?”
“He knows something—whatever the first half of the message says.”
“We saw part of it,” Paige said. “I won’t go into the how, but we saw two separate lines from the notebook. One was about finding Loraine Cotton here in Rum Lake. The other was from earlier in the text. It said, ‘Some of us are already among you.’ ”
Dyer’s eyes tightened involuntarily. He’d clearly never heard that before.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Like I told you, Garner kept all that to himself. All he said about it was that it mattered. Like the biggest things in history matter. Things we can’t afford to get wrong.” He paused. “They wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. Everything was on the right track, at the beginning. The nine knew all they were supposed to, and were gaining power. No one else knew a thing. By the end, right before 2016, they’d have been well positioned to get you into Tangent, Mr. Chase, under whatever necessary pretense. To give you an idea of how well positioned, consider that Garner himself was one of the nine. In 1978 he was a retired Navy SEAL thinking about putting his law degree to use. The instructions rerouted him into politics. Everything was rolling smoothly. And then it wasn’t.”
“Scalar,” Paige said. There was a note of pain in her voice.
Dyer nodded. “Your father’s learning about the notebook, from Ward’s wife, threw everything off. He launched the investigation, came up empty, and got started on the project to create this second Breach the following year. Before it was long under way, a few of the nine had already gotten wind of it. They knew why Peter was doing it, and couldn’t blame him. Of course he’d want to find out what the message had said. Given the secrecy, how could it sound anything but ominous to him? Garner and the others debated meeting with him and telling him everything, but held back. What if he didn’t agree with their goal? Their advantage would be lost, just like that. So they waited instead, and watched over this project as closely as they could. They weren’t sure what would result from it, but they were confident it wouldn’t generate another Ward.” He shrugged. “In the end they actually exerted some influence on the construction. Peter had a team building the new ion collider in a secure location a few hundred miles from here—it could be taken apart and moved once he found a place to set it up for good. Secrecy around the search for a final site was incredibly strict. No one in Washington was privy to the memos. The nine were worried they’d end up never knowing how all this turned out, so they used indirect methods to suggest this mine shaft, by way of one of the engineering firms involved. Loraine Cotton knew the mine from her time as a biologist here.”
Dyer nodded at the red light streaming in nearby. “They installed the collider in about three months in 1987, and switched it on. You know how that went. Garner and the others figured that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. Even while he was containing the mess here, Peter began preliminary steps toward trying again somewhere else. And again and again, if need be. He was that rattled by not knowing what Ward had done. He couldn’t justify ever giving up. So Garner and the rest finally rolled the dice. A few of them met with Peter and told him the whole story.”
“How did he take it?” Paige said.
Dyer rubbed his eyes and leaned his head back against the stone. “Like he’d accidentally released plague rats from a lab.” He exhaled slowly. “Peter agreed entirely with their aim, and that all of his work on Scalar had to stop. But by then it wasn’t as simple as that. Things were worse than Garner and the others realized. They’d been watching Tangent’s dealings for a few years by then, especially as Scalar began to ramp up. They never thought Peter knew about them—but he did. And he’d countered their moves with his own. He’d been watching them. Remember, he had Breach technology at his disposal. Serious advantages no one outside Border Town knew about. He’d also involved contacts he had within the FBI, for things like background checks and financial record searches.”
“Oh shit,” Travis said. He could see the rough shape of the problem.
Dyer nodded. “Peter did that stuff long before Garner and the others came to see him. Before he knew any better. By the time they did meet with him, there were a handful of people in the United States government who knew all nine of their names, and knew they’d taken an unusual interest in Scalar—which a select few also knew about. You see the danger, right? And you see how even stopping the investigation in its tracks, ceasing work on new Breaches, wouldn’t make that danger go away. There would always be those few people out there, along with whoever they’d talked to, who might put the pieces together. Rumors of an alien message, its instructions carried out on Earth in 1978. Nine powerful people deeply involved with it somehow, all of whom had radically improved their standing right after the message arrived. There would always be the risk of someone connecting the dots and reacting out of fear. Of huge-scale action being taken against Garner and the others, and maybe against Tangent itself. All of that could happen years before 2016. Years before the culmination of their work.”
Dyer waved a hand to indicate the unseen chamber six hundred feet above. “So they all met to talk about it. Peter and the other Scalar investigators, and Garner and the rest of those who’d received the message. They came here in mid-December 1987 to figure it all out. The location worked because it was still secret to anyone in D.C. Only the engineers knew where this place was, and they’d all signed nondisclosure forms that threatened capital punishment. Between that and how damned scared of the place they were, by that point, they weren’t likely to ever talk. So, good place for the meeting. Peter and the others brought a report with them. A plan for how to proceed.”
“The cheat sheet,” Paige said.
Dyer looked puzzled.
“That’s what others in Tangent called it,” she said.
“A one-page plan,” Travis said. “Jesus, now I know why. It could’ve probably been a one-line plan: Stop everything and cross our fingers.”
“More or less,” Dyer said. “In the end it was all they could do. Like submarine combat. Rig for quiet and go dead in the water. Hope like hell they just lose you after a while.”
He went silent, and for a moment the four of them listened to the drilling up top. Droning, patient, relentless.
“I guess they didn’t,” Travis said.
A second later the drilling stopped.
Chapter Thirty-Five
They listened. A minute passed. No sound anywhere, except the scrape and rattle of insect bodies against the viewing booth. The drilling at both accesses had finished.
“Not much longer now,” Paige said.
They waited. Time slipped by. Sometimes they heard a metallic tapping from one access or the other. Mostly they heard nothing at all.
“This dream you had,” Dyer said. “You actually think it was real?”
“The door combo was real,” Travis said. “That’s all I have to go on.”
Dyer looked thoughtful.
“What?” Travis said.
“The drug you described,” Dyer said. “That’s real too. It’s called phenyline dicyclomide. They use it for interrogations. It’s been around for about twenty years, but they perfected it in the last ten, in places like Gitmo. Intel guys call it hypnosis in a vial.”
“It makes you talk?” Travis said.
“It can. But its selling point is that it makes you act. It hits you in two stages. The first one lasts a couple minutes. Mild hallucinations, with an amnesia effect; you don’t remember much of anything from before the drug kicked in. Then comes the second stage, maybe five minutes long, during which your short-term memory is fractured down to a second or less. Someone can speak to you, and you can forget each word as it passes. Very disturbing effect—with two kickers. One, you can still follow commands. Even c
omplex ones that are too long to remember. If I’ve got your laptop sitting there, I can tell you, ‘Log into your e-mail account and your banking site,’ and you’ll probably do it. Passwords and all. You’ll be forgetting the command even while I’m saying it, but you’ll follow it anyway. It’s a conditioning thing—it functions like a habit. They say you hear the command well enough to obey it, but don’t remember it well enough to resist.”
“Why am I not even vaguely surprised we develop shit like that?” Bethany said.
“The second kicker is even better,” Dyer said. “While your memory is crumbling by the moment during Stage Two, you can still remember Stage One. Stage One is really all you remember, during that time. Usually they’ll keep you in darkness, with no sound, so there’s not much to remember anyway. But if they want to, they can make use of the effect. They can feed you information in Stage One that you’ll use in Stage Two. They might say, ‘Your brother is flying into LAX tomorrow, United terminal, five thirty in the afternoon.’ Then when your memory starts to fracture and you’re open to commands, they give you a phone and say, ‘Call your brother’s usual driver and arrange to have him picked up.’ You’ll do it, because you remember hearing that he’s coming in. Just like that, they find out who his driver is.”
“Sounds useful,” Travis said.
Dyer nodded. “If they’re employing that drug on Garner and one of the others, I’m not surprised they know the door combo by now.”
“Couldn’t they just know everything?” Paige said. “Couldn’t they command Garner to start telling the whole story?”
“Getting directly into someone’s secrets is tricky,” Dyer said. “Like with real hypnosis—a person’s moral restraint weighs in. They say you can make someone in a trance state bark like a dog, since it’s no big deal, but you can’t make him kill his best friend. I think secrets are in the same vein—if it really matters to keep them, people do. So it’s one thing to type a password by habit; it’s something else to start spilling information you’ve protected for years.” He paused. “But they can use the drug over and over, and it can wear you down after a while. So yeah—in time they might know everything.” He looked at Travis. “If they learn your name, I think the game’s over. If not, there’s still a chance.”