After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  As soon as they found out about the Internet rationing, both Carter and Lovecraft booked their bandwidth for the next couple of weeks. Carter was expecting news from Harrelson, and Lovecraft wanted to be sure Petra hadn’t burned the bookstore down.

  “I thought you said she was reliable?” said Carter.

  “She is. I’m allowed to worry about my baby.”

  “Our baby,” Carter reminded her just as a technician was going by, earning them both an odd look.

  It would have been nice to sit on the veranda outside the “sheriff’s office” in a rocking chair with a shotgun across the lap, chewing tobacco and tipping their hats to the good citizens of Attu Station, but their office didn’t have a veranda, they didn’t have any rocking chairs or chewing tobacco, and the weather had turned, by popular agreement, “fucking freezing.” The good citizens of Attu Station stumbled around anonymously in huge parkas, buffeted by unfriendly winds and swirls of snow brought down from the North Pole. Unsurprisingly, leaving the buildings for anything short of real necessities became rare.

  One such necessity, indeed the whole point of their presence, was to set up the experiment. Carter and Lovecraft went up to the experimental site on the second day, both because it was important they be familiar with all the station’s areas and also purely out of curiosity.

  The drive the contractor had promised them would take twenty minutes took twice that time, largely because snow was beginning to collect on the freezing rock and nobody relished the thought of an uncontrolled skid on a steep mountainside. The road itself, thankfully, was well engineered, wide and even with a mild inside camber to drain it of rain, and plenty of boulders along the outside edge to act as improvised barriers. There were still plenty of large gaps between them, though, with anything from a 45-degree escarpment to a vertiginous drop of fifty or sixty feet onto rocks. None of it looked very survivable, so the driver, a technician called Bowles, took his time and whistled tunelessly under his breath the whole journey up to calm his nerves.

  Attu currently held a grand total of five motor vehicles, all of them Kübelwagens with the project logo painted on the sides. Dr. Malcolm had told Carter in an unguarded moment that the Reich had supplied the first logo. It had looked like the results of Wagner, Nietzsche, and Speer spending an afternoon playing with Photoshop after eating too much sugar. The American scientific community had seen the oddly familiar lightning bolts raining down across the Earth, quietly said “Nope,” and offered up something way more anodyne but less contentious. This had been accepted with diplomatic speed by the Germans, and so that particular barrier was hurdled.

  Trying to make conversation, Lovecraft said, “This is going to be a slow climb when the snow arrives.”

  Bowles paused in his whistling to grunt with dour amusement. “It’ll take two or three times as long. Don’t know why they couldn’t have waited until spring to do this project. It’s not like the mountain’s going to go away or anything. Got some solutions back at base I’ll break out when the snow comes—and it will come—but this is a bad time of year to be out here.” As he spoke, they turned the last corner of the road, and arrived at their destination.

  Bowles parked alongside a pair of the Kübelwagens outside an impressive concrete dome, some 150 feet in diameter, at the mountain’s peak. By it was an open area, concreted flat, with short lengths of steel girder thrusting up to the uneven end where it looked like they’d been severed with cutting gear. Bowles saw Carter looking at these and said, “That’s where the radar was, back when this place was operational. The dome’s where the operators worked. A hundred and fifty-five feet wide, that mother. Bigger’n the Pantheon in Rome.”

  They made their way to the entrance on the dome’s southern side. On the western side was a new building, which they guessed contained the generators to supply the large amounts of power the experiment might require. The northern side of the dome partially merged with a rocky spire, perhaps all that was left of the mountain’s original peak before the engineers finished blasting it flat.

  The entrance was accessed by a short stoop of steps descending ten feet into the rock. “It’s underground?” asked Lovecraft.

  “No,” replied Bowles, undogging the door’s heavy locking mechanism, “just kind of inset. Not really sure why they bothered with a dome since they went to all the trouble to dig down like this, but that was all sixty-some years ago. Nobody left to ask. Maybe the dome was the only prefabricated structure available or something. Here we are.” He swung the door open and waved them through. “Guys, welcome to ZPE Central.”

  Lovecraft, who had never seen the facility at Miskatonic U and who had been hoping for crackling Jacob’s ladders and massive bayonet switches like a Universal Studios Frankenstein set, was slightly underwhelmed that it looked like somebody had set up a sales office in a nuclear bunker, the base of an evil villain who was going to achieve global domination by cold-calling the world into submission. Yes, there was some sort of huge cylinder gizmo in the very center of the chamber that stretched almost all the way to the dome’s apex ninety feet above them. “This place was just for radar operators?” she asked Bowles. “But it’s huge.”

  He frowned. “Yeah. Does look overengineered, doesn’t it?” He shrugged off his parka and hung it on an array of hooks driven into the concrete by the door. “Amazing heat insulation, though. Once the contractors get the place up to a shirtsleeves temperature, we only have to warm the air up that comes through the ventilators to keep it that way. The dome itself barely bleeds any heat at all.”

  Lovecraft turned to hang up her parka and found Carter looking around the chamber as if he’d just been tricked into an ambush. She took his arm and led him to the hooks. “You’re gawping, Sheriff. What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t reply immediately, instead looking around the dome’s lower edge. “Those … what do you call them? The supports … stanchions? Buttresses.”

  “Uh-huh? What about them?”

  “There are twelve.”

  Lovecraft understood him at once. “It’s a very popular number. You should look at a clock face sometime.”

  “I know. I just…” He gazed around the dome, the air of a trapped man not diminishing at all. “Just, the coincidence of it. Round chamber. Walls curving into the ceiling. Twelve supports. Freaks me out a little.”

  “Yeah, I can see that, but you really need to suck it up before anyone else sees it. You got a pistol at your hip and people don’t need to see the armed guy have an episode, you understand me?”

  Carter felt the weight of the Colt .45 on his belt. Ironically it was the very model he had been thinking about getting, but now that he had been issued one, he’d gone completely off the idea. It really was too much gun for his usual work, was bulky, and he was glad he was permitted to open carry here at the back of beyond, because it was too big a lump of firepower to conceal easily. He found himself missing his Walther from MU, and feeling like a traitor for doing so.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I understand you.” He took his time shucking his parka so he could get over himself a little. It was just a coincidence. Domed rooms weren’t uncommon, and if you’re going to build a circular room, why wouldn’t you use twelve supports? It was just a coincidence that he’d recently seen a dozen people die in a …

  He took a breath. It was just a coincidence, he told himself, and left it there.

  He glanced at Lovecraft settling her own gun at her hip, and felt a small pang. Lovecraft, in contrast to a monstrous Colt .45 ACP, had been issued a British pistol, a Webley PD-12, which Carter was sure didn’t exist in the Folded World. It was a snug little .38 WS automatic that held twelve rounds in the box and was well regarded in the reviews he’d looked up. He’d called it “nice” several times while examining it, and he’d been reluctant to return it to Lovecraft, although he’d hidden that from her. He couldn’t help thinking that he’d made a mistake asking for the Colt and had definitely made a mistake about being dismissive of Lovecraft’s va
gue request for “something that will put people down if need be without making a song and dance about it. Oh, yeah, and a motherfucker of a semiauto twelve-gauge, please.”

  With all the technology manned by earnest scientists arrayed around the massive central cylinder, it made Lovecraft think of any number of low-budget sci-fi films and TV reruns from the seventies. “Needs more flashing lights that don’t do much,” she murmured to Carter. “Isn’t real science without flashing lights.”

  In fact it looked very familiar to Carter, all very similar to the equipment he’d grown used to at the lab in Arkham, right down to Dr. Giehl’s energy detector doohickey. It was exactly the same unit from Miskatonic University. After the Jenner incident, the bomb had been smuggled back into it and Giehl removed all traces of the tinker-detecting setup that had detected Carter’s tinkering but—critically—not Jenner’s. The unit had sat there with a bundle of dynamite in it for several days until it was due to be packaged up ready for the Aleutians journey, and then Giehl had spirited it away using her Abwehr connections, Carter guessed. Presumably New York and Washington were stiff with Abwehr stooges, so it wasn’t such a big deal for one to go up to Arkham long enough for a few sticks of dynamite to be surreptitiously handed over and subsequently dumped in the river or something. Carter didn’t much care about the logistics of how the Reich disposed of the bomb nearly as much as he was bothered that APD never bothered checking inside the detector despite all the clues that there was a) a bomb and b) that it was inside a German-manufactured piece of equipment. On the one hand, it was a relief; on the other, it pissed him off that they couldn’t seem to add two and two.

  That was all in the past, though. Now he and Lovecraft were in a concrete dome in a place that most people couldn’t find on a map with a dozen tries, overseeing an experiment that promised to change the world for the better forever, yet had shadows of high weirdness falling across it. He had no idea who Weston was working for, but he doubted you’d find them in the phone book.

  Chapter 22

  A VIEW FROM MOUNT TERRIBLE

  “Ah, good morning, Sheriff! Deputy!” Dr. Malcolm enjoyed the whole Wild West vibe far too much. He could only have been happier if the dome had been fitted with bat-wing doors. The physicist’s whole demeanor had changed from Arkham. There he had been a sensible, thoughtful man of science. Here, he was a frontiersman, metaphorically and very nearly literally. Apparently he was known for walking up the mountain before starting work rather than traveling by car, simply because it made him feel more … nobody was sure what. “Manly” had been suggested, but that wasn’t right. It seemed to be more something about rediscovering himself in nature, now that they were surrounded by the stuff and their work was scraping away layers of the natural world as it had been hitherto understood to expose something vibrant, primal, and exciting beneath. Malcolm had also been seen wearing a checked lumberjack shirt, and none of his colleagues were entirely sure how to process this new datum.

  Certainly the site having a couple of de facto law officers—even if most of their time was spent helping out with the maintenance with the technicians in Carter’s case and running administrative matters in Lovecraft’s—seemed to make Malcolm’s day every time he saw them.

  “Hello, Doctor.” Carter liked the man, even if he was personally expecting the Wild West shtick to grow thin much sooner than later. It seemed unkind not to let the man have his fun, though.

  Malcolm proceeded to show them around the facility. The ZPE wasn’t online as yet, but the components and the test gear were undergoing individual tests before everything was connected and, so far, it was all going exactly to schedule. As long as nothing failed at this stage, they would be starting two weeks of calibrations on the following Monday, and then it would be a solid four or five weeks of experimentation. The hope was that they would be detecting definite traces of zero point energy on the first day, and the rest of the time would be spent confirming those initial results and then proceeding through a thoroughly planned program of experiments intended to boost the energies released.

  “Realistically, if we finish the program and we’re producing as much power as a double-A cell out of thin air, that’s a shattering advance. But … but I have hopes this thing”—he gestured at the central column—“will actually be putting out as much as a small portable generator. Say, two or three kilowatts. If it turns out to be that easy, the world changes tomorrow. The old saw about nuclear energy and then fusion energy, ‘power too cheap to meter,’ might finally come true, just from a very different area of physics.” He turned to them, and there was a true, selfless joy there. “There are very few times you can say, that anyone can say, ‘What we are doing here will change the world for the better.’ I feel so lucky, so blessed that this might be one such time.”

  “Well, let’s hope so, Doctor,” said Carter, and smiled, and felt like horseshit for doing so. But what was he supposed to say? “Well, the truth is we’re all just pawns in a cosmic chess match and we don’t actually know the rules or even what ‘winning’ looks like, but it’s probably going to look a lot like losing from our perspective, because all chess matches look like massacres when you’re a pawn. And your project is either a fraud or the worst thing that will ever happen to the human race, unless it’s the best, which is also a possibility. In the meantime, Go, Science! Yay.”

  “Well, let’s hope so, Doctor,” just seemed a lot briefer and kinder to Carter.

  Malcolm showed them around the dome’s main room and the couple of small rooms off it—a room containing electrical gear and capacitors, a common room, and a restroom that could best be described as “functional.” Then he showed them around the main floor in more detail, but Carter was losing interest.

  This was all new to Lovecraft, but he’d seen this all before at Miskatonic U, albeit on a smaller scale. His attention wandered, and then he realized it had wandered onto Dr. Giehl, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor while she sorted out a bunch of cables that had just been thrown into a box instead of being properly coiled and tied off in Arkham. She looked up and caught him looking at her. A small smile appeared at the corner of her mouth, and she returned to her chore. Some conspiratorial tic in the expression solidified what he had already strongly suspected, that Giehl was under the impression that he’d been fully conscious during their encounter in his stateroom. While it did his ego good to think he was a satisfactory lover while on autopilot, it meant there was going to be a very difficult conversation between them at some point, and Carter knew it would be wiser for it to be sooner rather than later. So, feeling paradoxically more fearful than when he’d confronted Jenner at gunpoint, he went over to Dr. Giehl.

  “How’s it going, Doctor?” he asked. It sounded lame, and he suddenly felt like a fourteen-year-old again, asking out Sally Pine. That had been an unmitigated disaster, and he could feel another about to break.

  “Sheriff Carter,” said Giehl, smiling as she untangled a trio of leads, “how kind of you to mosey over and ask.”

  He sighed. “Did everybody hatch this cowboy theme while I was looking the other way?”

  “Welcome to Attu,” she said, still without shifting her attention from the cables, “population twenty-four. The biggest, wildiest, westiest town in the U.S. Yes, Dan. There were a couple of bottles of schnapps, a boring voyage, and we may have got a little drunk and silly. You didn’t know about it because”—she glanced up at him then, and there was steel beneath the smile—“you were avoiding me.”

  “Yeah.” He crouched by her and lowered his voice. “Yeah, I was. About that…”

  “You were virtually asleep and probably drugged with motion sickness medication. Yes, I worked that out a little too late to do anything about it. I thought you were taking ‘strong and silent’ too seriously.”

  Carter raised an eyebrow. The last thing he’d been expecting was that she already knew. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly.

  “No. I should apologize. You said yes—more than
once, in fact—and I thought we were mutually engaged in”—she half-smiled and perhaps blushed a little—“the activities. So I tiptoed back to my cabin and thought it wise to avoid you for a little while. I needn’t have troubled myself, as you had the same idea.” She returned her attention to the cables. “I have no idea how much you remember but, for whatever it is worth, I enjoyed myself. Even after I realized you were in some sort of dream state. Sneaking back, it all felt very transgressive.”

  “Oh.” Carter was wondering whether to feel complimented or insulted. “So, you and I?”

  “We’re both professionals, Sheriff Dan. If you are content to let things lie, then so am I. We shall, of course, continue to work together as we have done to date. And no”—she dropped a coiled cable back into the box and started on some more of the tangled mess—“it won’t be happening again, no matter what your level of consciousness. We shall put it down to a moment of weakness on my part.”

  “Okay.” Carter was now fairly sure he was being insulted, or at least his masculinity was, yet he didn’t think this was the time and the place to make an argument about it. When he thought about it more later, he doubted there was ever any suitable time or venue for arguments like that. “Well, if you need anything, Dr. Giehl, you know where to find me.”

  She said nothing, but he noted the half smile still at the corner of her mouth and realized that he had no idea what it meant. As he straightened up, he saw Dr. Malcolm was still deep in his spiel, but Lovecraft was only half paying attention. She couldn’t have heard a word of their conversation, but she still gave a small shake of her head, one corner of her mouth lifted in an expression of thoughtfulness, but her eyebrows down, overall giving an aspect of disappointed opprobrium. Carter had the feeling he had succeeded in disappointing two women in different ways in the space of a minute. This was a record.