by Greg Bear
Back in the truck, continuing the journey, Patricia spent much of the time doing problems on the processor, figuring volumes and masses and putting them all into a small table.
An hour later, Takahashi pointed out the first circuit, four wells at the quadrilateral points of a ring. Each well sat in the middle of a dimple about half a kilometer in diameter and twenty meters deep. In the center of the dimple was an inverted bronze-colored dish fifteen meters wide, suspended eight meters above the bowl. The dish hovered in empty air, unsupported.
The truck slowed near the rim of the dimple. At Takahashi’s request, Lake drove them around the well before stopping.
They climbed down and approached the rim.
“We’ve made about twenty trips to this circuit,” Takahashi said. “Beaten a path, almost.”
Patricia held her multi-meter before her. The value of pi held steady.
She knelt down and hung the instrument over the rim. The readout remained the same.
“Now step into the depression,” Takahashi suggested. The marines, Farley, Carrolson and Takahashi stood beyond the rim in a group. She wrinkled her nose at them. ”Another initiation? You first, then.”
“That would spoil the fun,” Carrolson said. ”Go ahead.”
Patricia pushed one foot forward, then put her weight onto the sloping, sandy soil.
“All the way,” Lake urged.
She sighed and walked into the dimple. Ten meters from the rim, feeling peculiar, she looked back. Her body was not inclined at the same angle as the others. Dizzy, she tried to right herself and almost fell over. The natural stance was along the radius of curvature, as if the corridor force followed the curve of the bowl. Yet there was no local distortion of space registering on the multi-meter. The rest of the group followed after.
In the shadow of the floating dish was a slightly protruding bronze-colored plug about half as wide. Takahashi walked across the plug to show it was safe. Patricia followed, multi-meter again at the fore. No change.
“Any idea what holds the dish up?” she asked. Farley and Carrolson shrugged. The marines sat in the sand around the well, looking bored.
“That may not be an appropriate question,” Takahashi said. “Look at the material of the dish and plug—up close. As far as we can tell, it’s the same stuff as the corridor walls.”
Patricia kneeled and ran her hands along the plug’s surface.
The color was not uniformly bronze. There seemed to be red and green streaks, even spots of black, merging, separating and twisting in the surface like worms.
“This stuff is geometry, too, then?” Patricia asked.
“It isn’t matter,” Carrolson said. ”We ruled that out just after the wells were discovered.”
“It took us all some time to get used to the idea of using space as a building material,” Takahashi said. Farley nodded emphatically.
“Not at all,” Patricia said coolly. ”I wrote about it four years ago. If nested universes are somehow kept from assuming one definite state a barrier against penetration will form due to continuous opposed spacial transforms.”
Takahashi smiled but Carrolson and Farley simply stared.
“So,” Takahashi said, “nothing supports the dish. It doesn’t have any real existence. It’s simply a shaped jam-up of probabilities. Makes perfect sense.”
“Oh,” Farley said.
Lake sat in the middle of the plug, Apple lying across his knees.
“I’m just a small-town boy from Michigan,” he said. “But it sure feels solid. It isn’t even slippery.”
“Good point,” Patricia said. She reached down to feel it with her palms. ”There apparently isn’t total separation of probabilistic states. Some interaction between matter and the surface is allowed, besides resistance to intrusion.” She put her multi-meter directly on the surface. The value of pi fluctuated wildly, then stabilized: 3.141487233 continuous.
“Pi’s down,” she said. She invoked the other constants.
“Gravitational constant is nominal, speed of electromagnetic radiation is nominal and stable.”
“Slash aitch?” Carrolson asked.
“The same. What purpose do the wells serve?”
“This circuit is capped, so it serves no purpose we can determine.”
“The wells may give access to something outside the corridor,” Takahashi said. ”We decided against finding out where they lead. But the wells were not plugged, and the sand was kept out of the central hole by a spongy field of force, nature unknown. The only thing we could see was red light coming up out of each well. We sent a little drone helicopter into one well. It didn’t come back. Our viewing angle was such that we couldn’t see after it traveled about ten meters. We decided against sending anybody after it.”
“Wisely,” Carrolson said.
Lake, still sitting, said laconically, “My men are ready to go as far as you’d like, any time you like.”
“We appreciate that, Lieutenant,” Carrolson said. ”But we have good reasons for taking these things slowly.”
“Give me an all-environment suit and a weapon, a couple of backups ...” He grinned.
“You’d really go down?” Patricia asked, turning to the officer with an incredulous expression.
Lake grimaced. ”If we were reasonably sure about the general category of things to see and experience, I’d go. We’d all go.” The marines nodded in unison. ”Duty here hasn’t been all that exciting. Outside of the obvious scenic values.”
“We dug all around the dimple,” Takahashi said, edging up the slope and pointing with extended arms to indicate placement of the holes. He picked up a handful of dirt and let it sift between his fingers. ”The dirt in all the wells is dry. No microorganisms, no large life forms, no plants.”
“No living things ... except us,” Farley said.
“And no radiation,” Takahashi continued. ”No traces of unusual chemistry. So maybe these closed wells are just survey markers.”
“Benchmarks of the gods,” Carrolson intoned.
“Each well is alike?” Patricia asked.
“As far as we know,” Takahashi said. ”We’ve only examined two circuits.”
Reynolds stood and brushed sand from his overalls. ”Hey, Lieutenant. Maybe this is where boojums come from.”
Lake rolled his eyes.
“Have you ever seen a boojum?” Patricia asked, looking intently at the marine.
“I don’t think anyone has,” Carrolson said.
“Mr. Reynolds?”
Reynolds glanced between Lake and Patricia. ”Am I really being asked?”
“Yes,” Patricia said. ”I’m asking.” She tapped her badge, uncertain whether that carried any weight with the marines.
“I’ve never seen one,” Reynolds admitted. ”But others have, others that I trust.”
“We’ve all heard about ‘em,” another marine named Huckle said. “Some guys are full of stories.”
“Still,” Lake said, “these men aren’t prone to seeing things that aren’t there. The reports are few, but interesting.”
Patricia nodded. ”Are there any plans to descend into a well?”
“Not so far,” Takahashi said. ”We have other problems to face.”
She looked down at the plug, rubbing her boot across the surface.
“I’d like to see the complete expedition report when we get back,” she said.
For the first time, a solution had presented itself—even as they talked—that had survived the first level of criticism. She looked up at the inverted dish, at the minutely active colors.
“Shall we return, then?” Takahashi asked.
“I think so,” Patricia said. If
The Frant used an adapted pictor to project the objects and landscapes around them and camouflage their activity in and about the tent. The two guards, dressed in black, might hear Olmy if he was especially noisy, but they wouldn’t see him. He walked within a few dozen centimeters of one guard on his way to the box th
at served Patricia Luisa Vasquez as a desk.
He was particularly interested in the young woman; from what he had heard, she was becoming central to the group’s endeavors. And if she was the same woman he had heard the Engineer speak of ...
On the box, notes filled perhaps fifty sheets of paper, arranged in no apparent order. Many of the notes were scribbled over or heavily blacked out; sometimes entire pages, except for a few square centimeters of equations or diagrams, were obscured by hard-pressed pencil marks. He leafed through the sheets quietly, puzzling over Patricia’s private notation.
A slate lay on one corner, its silver-gray screen blank. A memory block had been plugged into the aperture in the right side of the slate, just above the small keyboard. Olmy glanced around, checking for the position of the guards, and kneeled beside the slate, turning it on. Learning how to use the antique was not difficult; in a few minutes, he had it rapidly scrolling up the contents of the memory block. He recorded the series of files in his implant for later analysis; this took about four minutes.
From what he could see and understand of her work, she was quite advanced for her century.
He was arranging the papers into their previous order when a guard came around the corner of the tent and stared in his direction. Olmy stood slowly, certain the picted camouflage was still effective.
“You hear anything, Norman?” Sergeant Jack Teague asked his colleague.
“No.”
“Puff of wind or something? I could have sworn I heard these papers moving.”
“Just another boojum, Jack.”
Teague approached the box and looked down at the papers.
“Jesus,” he murmured. ”Wonder what this stuff is.” He bent and ran his fingers just above the line of symbols. There were cursive letters mixed with bold black lowercase letters; double upright bars reminiscent of the matrix symbols he had studied in flight school, integral signs, exponents containing German gothic letters and Greek letters, squiggles and triangles and lopsided circles with double dots in the middle, letters with single and double dots like umlauts over them ...
“What a mess,” Sergeant Teagne said, rising again. His neck hair bristled and he sniffed the air, twisting suddenly.
Of course, nothing was there. What did he expect?
Chapter Twelve
Lanier had slept through most of the two-day OTV ride, head full of weightless dreams indiscriminately mixing the Stone and Earth, past and future.
He looked at his watch and then at the face of the secret service agent sitting beside him in the limousine. There was an eighteen-hour lag between the time he had landed at Vandenberg and the time he would report to Hoffman’s office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Outside the smoke-colored car window, desert flashed by. The air pressure was high and the gravitation oppressive. Even through the dark windows, the sun was hot and yellow.
He missed the Stone.
“I have some spare time,” he said.
“Yessir.” The agent looked straight ahead, face pleasantly bland.
“You fellows are discreet.”
“Oh, yessir. We are that,” the driver said. The agent seated beside the driver glanced back at Lanier.
“Ms. Hoffman says we’re at your disposal, but we’re to have you in Pasadena, alive and sober, by eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Lanier wondered how Hoffman would react to being called “Ms.”
“Gentlemen,” he said. ”I’ve been celibate for more months than I care to count. Rank hath its responsibilities. Is there a safe place in Los Angeles where one can get ...” He searched for a phrase as antique as “Ms.”
“... one’s ashes hauled? Discreetly, charmingly, cleanly.”
“Yessir,” said the driver.
He was allowed two drinks in a fancy but ancient hangout known as the Polo Lounge, surrounded by aged relics of the bad old days of network television. By three o’clock in the afternoon, two suites in the Beverly Hills Hotel—directly opposite one another—were checked out. The agents efficiently inspected the suite where he would stay and pronounced the rooms safe with a nod to each other.
He finally had some illusion of privacy. He took a shower, lay on the bed, almost drifted off. How long would it take for him to get used to the extra weight? How would it affect his performance?
The woman who arrived at five was stunningly beautiful, very friendly, and ultimately—through no fault of her own—unsatisfying.
He judged his performance as adequate, but the act brought little joy.
She left at ten.
Lanier had never resorted to a prostitute before. His physical passions, with a few notable exceptions, had never been as persistent as those of other men.
At ten-fifteen, there was a light knock on his door. He opened it, and the agent who had driven the limousine from the desert landing site passed him information on two memory blocks. ”Ms. Hoffman sends these to you with her compliments,’’ he said. ”We’ll be just across the hall, if you need anything.”
The memory blocks he had brought with him from the Stone—more precious than Lanier himself—had been transferred to separate, more secure vehicles and driven carefully into Pasadena that day. No doubt, the Advisor would be going over the blocks even now.
He shut out all the lights and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering how many of the aged executives in the Polo lounge the call girl had serviced in her young life.
He had never been comfortable with desire. This time, he had not felt desire as much as obligation to the flesh. After so many months of deprivation—more like a year, actually—it seemed likely the body had requirements it was no longer communicating to him.
That at least would have hinted at normality. He had always felt vaguely guilty at his coolness—if that was the right word.
Guilty and grateful. It gave him much more time to think, without constant distraction or diversion of purpose.
The coolness had also kept him a bachelor. He had had his share of lovers, but work and accomplishment had always won out. Lovers had become friends more often than not—and had married other friends.
A very civilized situation.
Sleep. Gravid dreams, heavy and dark. He was captain of a huge luxury liner on a black ocean, and each time he peered over the side to check the water level, the ship dropped a meter or two. By the end of the dream he was in a panic. The Earth’s gravity was dragging the ship beneath the sea, and he was the captain, and the ship was the most beautiful he had ever commanded. He was losing it, and he simply could not abandon it by waking up ...
At eight o’clock the next morning, Lanier walked across the concrete quadrangle of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, briefcase in hand, accompanied by two new agents. He enjoyed the bright sun and the increased weight more now and almost regretted the thought of spending the day in air-conditioned offices. The first of two, perhaps three scheduled sessions would take place in the V.I.P conference room.
He popped a pill to knock down a runny nose, drank from a bronze fountain in a newly planted park, and slowed to a saunter past the broad black-background panel displaying JPL projects. Mars development activity schedules vied with Solar Sail reports and a hologram of the proposed Proxima Centauri probe.
There was no mention of the second ABE—asteroid belt explorer—launched two years ago.
Lanier and his gray-suited shadows climbed the steps slowly, allowing for his gravity fatigue, and passed through heavy-glass security doors.
He presented his card to a monitor, and the steel gate swung wide with a pleasant hum. The agents did not enter with him.
Beyond was a hallway lined by display cases. Intricate small-scale replicas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s past triumphs glittered in their plastic boxes: Voyager, Galileo, the Drae and the Solar Sail.
There were also OTV models and diagrams explaining the Star Probe concept.
He took an aging elevator to the sixth floor, staring up at the glowing
blue numbers.
Another secret service agent awaited him and asked for his ID again as the elevator door opened. Lanier took the card from his pocket and lined it up beside his badge. The agent thanked him and smiled as he walked on, unaccompanied, to the conference room.
Hoffman sat at the end of a long black table. Piles of paper, two slates and a clutter of memory blocks were arranged before her.
To her left sat Peter Hague, the President’s representative to ISCCOM, and on the other side, Alice Cronberry, advisor on aerospace security and project manager of the second ABE. Lanier walked around the table and shook hands, Hoffman’s first—warmly cupping her hand in both of his—then Cronberry’s and Hague’s.
“I see Joint Space Command and the Joint Chiefs have no representatives here,” he said, sitting at the opposite end of the table.
“We’ll get to that in a moment,” Hoffman said. She had aged since he last saw her; her hair was grayer, she looked more matronly and her wrinkles had transformed from smile to frown. ”You’re looking fit, Garry.” She was being polite.
“Feeling less fit.”
“How is Patricia Vasquez doing?”
“As well as can be expected. I was called away before I had much chance to see her at work, or before she came up with any results.”
“I take it,” Hoffman said, “that means you’re uncertain about her.”
“I am,” Lanier said. ”Not because I don’t think she’s capable, or the best in her field—whatever that may be—but because she’s young. The library was quite a shock to her.”
Cronberry put her right hand flat on the table, leaning away from him slightly. ”It was a shock to all of us,” she said.
Hoffman passed a sheet of paper down to him. ”We’ve studied the material you brought with you. We’ve already made our final report to the President.”
“Before Vasquez tells us anything?”
“I doubt she’ll tell us what we’d like to hear. Call it instinct, but I think we’re in deep trouble.” Hoffman’s eyes focused on an empty space over Lanier’s shoulder. ”We’ve verified some of the information from the library.”
Lanier inspected their faces intently. They were all unhappy; even trying to hide their emotions, they revealed that much.