by Peter Clines
“You seem like a decent person,” said Arthur. “I’ll try my best not to bite your head off when you ask questions. I’ll ask everyone else to do the same.”
“Thanks.”
“But we’re still not going to be revealing any technical information. Not one equation, not one line of code, not one blueprint.”
“You said the same thing at the review meeting. Exactly the same.”
“It’s become kind of a mantra for all of us here. And to be honest, everyone’s going to be more on guard with you once they hear about your…” He tapped two fingers against his temple.
“I get that a lot, don’t worry. Again, I don’t want to violate your agreement with Reggie, I just want to go back to him with a fair assessment of things.”
“Then I think we’ll get along just fine.”
Mike turned his head to look at a small diorama on another bookshelf. A miniature Wile E. Coyote had a fan and a sail strapped to his back as he roller-skated down a plastic hill, a set of silverware held out in anticipation. “I understand you’re also a big Bugs Bunny fan?”
“Now the small talk?”
“Sorry.”
Arthur smiled. Another real smile. “Almost any concept or idea in the world can be expressed through comparison with a classic Warner Bros. cartoon.”
“Even the Albuquerque Door?”
“Of course.”
Mike waved him on.
“Do you remember Foghorn Leghorn?”
The scotch traced a warm path across Mike’s tongue. “Think about who you’re asking.”
The older man settled back into his chair. “One of my favorite cartoons had Foghorn babysitting this tiny baby bird genius to impress the widow Prissy with a nice house. Do you know it?”
“There were a few with the widow Prissy. Her chick was named Egghead Jr. The first cartoon they were all in was ‘Little Boy Boo’ in nineteen fifty-four.”
Arthur arched an eyebrow at him.
Mike’s lips pursed. “Sorry. Annoying habit, I know.” He tossed back some scotch. “You were saying?”
“I was saying, at one point Foghorn and the chick are playing hide-and-seek. Foghorn hides in the woodbin. Egghead looks around for a few seconds, writes out a page of mathematics, and sticks a shovel in the ground about ten feet away. Out pops Foghorn. He tries to argue that what’s just happened is impossible, and the chick keeps showing him the page of calculations.”
“And that’s what you do?”
“That’s what we do,” Arthur said. “We take over six hundred pages of math and force-feed it to the universe through an electromagnetic funnel. We tell the universe ‘I don’t care what you think. I’m lifting my foot here and putting it down there.’ ”
“And the universe doesn’t object?”
Arthur finished off his whiskey. “Not so far.”
TEN
“Here you are.” Anne handed Mike a badge on a lanyard. “Your ID card. Dr. Cross gave you full coverage so you can open pretty much every door on campus.”
“Pretty much?”
“Some of the hazardous substance lockers need two cards to open,” she said. “If you need access to those, I can talk to Dr. Cross and update your privileges.”
“Are you this formal with them, too?”
She smiled. “Sorry. Still not used to you. I’ll try to be better.”
He shook his head. “Whatever makes you comfortable. I just don’t want you thinking you need to act this way around me.”
She smiled.
“Jesus!” said someone. “You’ve been here three hours and you’re already hitting on my woman?”
Mike turned to see the red-haired physicist at the hallway entrance, smiling. He glanced back, and Anne rolled her eyes. It was a perfect eye-roll, a careful balance of fed up and flirty, seasoned with just enough amusement. “I didn’t realize the two of you were—”
“We’re not,” said Anne, turning back to her desk.
“Another rejection,” said Bob. “Y’know, I can only take thirty or forty more.”
“Good thing you’ve got your girlfriend to fall back on, then.” Anne punctuated her sentence with a look that said the joke was done for the day. She had very expressive eyes.
Bob bowed his head and shifted his focus to Mike. “Arthur’s given me tour guide duty for the day. Ready to see your new home away from home?”
“Actually, can we go see it again? The Door?”
“Sure. We can cut through the lab to the trailer park.”
Mike waved goodbye to Anne but she’d already sunk back into work. He and Bob wandered down the hall. Mike took his new ID for its first test drive, and the square door opened with a click.
The air on the main floor was a good five or six degrees cooler than the rest of the building. The huge room was deserted. The silent shape of the Albuquerque Door loomed at the center of the chamber. Mike gazed at the rings as they walked past.
“What does it feel like? When you go through.”
Bob said nothing.
Mike glanced at him. “What it feels like is a trade secret?”
“It doesn’t feel like anything, to be honest.”
“Nothing? No visual effects? No dizziness? Not even a tingle from the electromagnetic fields?”
“Nope. There is one thing, but it’s not internal.”
“What?”
“D’you ever walk into a big store in the summer, and they’ve got the air conditioning vents right at the doors, pointing straight down?” He mimed an archway around himself with his hands. “Y’know, you walk in and there’s just this instant, blasting temperature change. And then you walk past it and everything’s normal again?”
Mike nodded.
“That’s kind of what crosswalking feels like, but no temperature change. Just this sudden whoof that tells you you’re somewhere else now. Even if your eyes are closed, you can tell the moment you’ve crossed.”
“Crosswalking?”
“Yeah. No pun intended, but I think he kind of likes it.”
They walked down a passage of electronics and power gauges, past a pair of closet doors to a fire exit. Bob hit the crash bar and glaring sunlight blasted into the lab. “We cut the alarm lines months ago,” he explained, nodding at the red and white stickers on the door. “It shaves a few minutes off the trip home every night.”
Behind the building was a gravel pit. Eight office trailers stretched across it in a double row. They were gray and bland, and Mike could glimpse curtains and sheets hanging in the small windows. A few hundred yards past the trailers stood another industrial-looking structure, newer than the main building. It looked like a cross between a warehouse and an aircraft hangar. The only thing that made it stand out was the seven foot tall “B” someone had painted along one side.
“That’s where the other machine is?” asked Mike.
Bob glanced over. “Yeah. Site B. We’ve got a couple bicycles and a golf cart that run back and forth between them, if you’re ever in a rush. Your card should get you in over there, too. And that’s the trailer park,” he said, waving at the double row of blocks. “Home away from home for those of us working on the Albuquerque Door.”
“They provide living quarters for everyone?”
“Sort of. The trailers were just for storage, or a place to crash if someone worked really late and didn’t want to drive home. Then about two years ago, Olaf staked one off as his personal space and just moved in. It gave him two or three extra hours a day, and by the end of the month he was so far ahead, the rest of us did, too.”
“How long have you been with the project?”
“Four years,” Bob said as they crunched across the gravel. “I joined up about a year before the SETH project folded, right out of grad school.”
“And now you all live here?”
“Well, I moved in for real a little over a year ago. Got rid of my place in Pacific Beach and just brought everything here. The trailer’s free and it’s bigger than my
old apartment. Arthur lives up in La Jolla with his wife in his big book-money mansion.”
“Really?”
Bob grinned. “No. But it’s a real house and it’s in La Jolla, so it wasn’t cheap.”
Someone had rolled out carpets of green Astroturf between the double row. The plastic grass rustled under their shoes. It was a welcome contrast to all the gravel.
“Nice touch,” said Mike.
“Yeah. I think Sasha found it somewhere. On the off chance it rains, be careful. This stuff’s cheap, so it gets slippery, and it’s all just gravel underneath.”
“That sounds like the warning of someone who’s fallen.”
“Twice,” said Bob. He pointed at the trailer in front of them. “Neil’s is there, but he’s got a wife and kids up in Oregon, so he’s not really ‘living’ here.” His fingers slid along the row. “That one’s me, right behind him. Olaf next to him. Jamie and Sasha have the two on the end, so they can have a bit of privacy.”
“Oh,” said Mike. “I didn’t realize they were a couple.”
“They’re not, sorry. Well, Sasha is. Not with Jamie, though. Jamie’s just…well she’s a bit…abrasive, y’know? Sasha’s on the end, Jamie’s on the…” He paused and shook his head. “Damn, no. Jamie’s on the end, Sasha’s on the left.”
“And one of these is mine?”
Bob nodded. “We had the cleaning crew freshen up the one next to Olaf for you. Congratulations, you’re a buffer.”
“Lucky me.”
“It won’t be that bad unless he’s listening to opera.”
“He’s an opera fan?”
“Opera and running, but I’d swear he just does the opera to be annoying.” The redhead unlocked the trailer. “You’re going to be here awhile, I guess?”
Mike shrugged. “A few weeks, in theory. Maybe a month or two. I guess we’ll see.”
Bob tossed him the keys. “Magnus wouldn’t spring for a hotel?”
“I think he wanted me close to everything.”
Inside was gray. Gray carpet holding up gray walls decorated with gray cabinets. Dull bungee cords held a folding cot shut in the far corner. In the nearer one, a gray office phone sat on the floor. The only spot of contrast was an oversized black roach trap halfway along the wall. “You’ve just got the basics,” Bob explained. “If you want a mini fridge or some more furniture, we can probably scavenge something up for you. And there’s a few thrift shops up on Clairemont Mesa and a Target on Balboa.”
“I think it’s bigger than my old apartment, too.”
“It’s not bad, really, for a free place. Olaf has no life, the rest of the guys are pretty quiet, and I’m gone a lot on weekends.”
“Miniature war games?”
“Complete geek, yes,” said Bob with a grin. Honest smiles were hard to come by, Mike realized. “Who told you?”
In Mike’s mind, a few red ants slipped into the colony of black ants. “There’s some paint under the fingernails of your right hand, but you’re left-handed,” he said. “That tells me you were painting something while you held it. Two different color paints, both shades of red, implies fine detail work of some sort. I already knew someone here played Warhammer games from the license plates on the Mini out front, so it wasn’t much of a leap.”
“No, of course not, Mr. Holmes,” said Bob. “You want help with your bags and stuff?”
“I wouldn’t turn it down, thanks.”
“Do you play 40K?” Bob asked as they stepped back out on the deck.
Mike shook his head. “Some of my students do. I looked through a couple of the books, so I could assure parents the afterschool gaming group wasn’t some kind of cult or fight club. And it’s fun to watch tanks driving over the scale model of the town.”
The redhead laughed and guided them across the Astroturf and toward the side of the building. “The door’s a pain to open from this side,” he explained. “The path leads right up to the lobby entrance and the parking lot.”
“What’s that?”
Bob followed his eyes. Just past the spare trailer on the end was a small wooden cross. A few stone tiles were arranged in front of it.
“The dog?”
“You heard?”
“Arthur said it died instantly.”
“Yeah,” the redhead said with a nod. “Faster, if that’s possible. We just wanted to do something, make sure he got remembered.”
“You always this attached to lab animals?”
“Laika was just a lab animal, if you think about it,” said Bob. “People write whole books about her, and she only went into a loose orbit on Sputnik 2. Tramp went through the fabric of reality and came out the other side.”
Mike walked over to the grave. The word TRAMP was written in Magic Marker on the pale wood. The soil was loose, as if someone had weeded it out.
The redhead took a few more steps up the path and glanced back. “It was a failure, but if he hadn’t died, we’d’ve never started following this path. We wouldn’t have the Albuquerque Door.”
He sensed Bob’s desperate desire to change the subject. “So they built this whole complex just for you guys?”
“Oh, hell no.” Bob shook his head. He waved his hand up at the concrete structure. “They built Site B, but back in the seventies this place used to be a Jack in the Box processing plant. They expanded into a bigger building, and then I think it was used as a warehouse for a while. The government grabbed it up right after Nine-Eleven and it got handed off to SETH back in…late two-thousand-eight, I think.”
Mike glanced up at the building as they came out into the parking lot. “Jack in the Box? The fast food chain?”
“Yup. Our control room was part of their marketing office or something like that. The main floor was the meat processing area.”
Mike smiled. “No symbolism there.”
“It’s been brought up,” said Bob.
ELEVEN
Mike debated leaving everything in his bags, but figured it would make a better impression if he unpacked. It took him half an hour to transfer his clothes into the cabinets and spread his shaving kit around the bathroom sink. He heard footsteps and voices outside, and saw Neil and Sasha. They ignored his trailer and headed for their own.
His stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten a meal since Logan Airport back in Boston. He’d passed eleven restaurants and franchises on the way to the complex, but the closest one was almost two miles away. He thought about using the new smartphone Reggie had equipped him with to find somewhere closer, but he didn’t want to start getting dependent on it. Or addicted. It took him ten minutes to find the Wendy’s two streets up. He put lots of salt and pepper on his fries and ate his chicken sandwich alone at a table.
Then he was back at the gray trailer.
Part of him wanted to go through the reports he’d been given and start comparing them to what he’d seen. The ants itched at his mind. They were eager to mix, to bring the elements together and watch them seethe.
Part of him missed his little apartment. And his summer job down in York, doing maintenance work on the rides at the Wild Kingdom amusement park. And nights just staring out at the Atlantic while the tourists walked around him.
Then the computer tablet chimed from his pillow. He sat on the edge of the cot, tapped his thumb against the screen, and was shown a picture of Reggie’s face with his office behind him. “Hey,” said the picture, “it’s me.”
“Yeah, I know,” Mike said. “I’m looking at you.”
“Just trying to be polite.”
“You’re there late.”
“Some of us work for a living. You have a good flight?”
“It was okay. Finally got to see the new Hobbit movie. Read some of the files you gave me.”
“Some?”
“All.”
“Stop holding back. I’m counting on you for this.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Mike. He thought of his quiet classroom, almost three thousand miles away, filled with boo
ks he hadn’t read in years. “Trying to break a lifetime of bad habits.”
“Got your car?”
“Okay flight, got the car, found the place. I’m here now.”
“So, how’s it going?”
“Oh, great people. All of them.” Mike used his toes to pry off his shoes. “I’m expecting the first brick through the window later this evening.”
“That bad?”
“I think Bob Hitchcock is willing to let me crawl out of here with only a beating, so he’s probably my biggest fan right now.”
“Are you always this pessimistic when I’m not around?”
“Well, I’m in a monotone trailer with no appliances and sitting on my one piece of furniture. It deadens the mood a bit.”
Reggie snorted. “You see that Amex card?”
Next to the cot was the briefcase Reggie had given him. The smartphone and computer tablet had been in it, along with some other odds and ends. The ants assembled a complete inventory of the contents. “Yeah.”
“It’s a prepaid card,” he said. “You’ve got fifteen thousand dollars on it for the next three months. If you want to drop a couple hundred at Target for a few bookshelves and a microwave, knock yourself out. Just save your receipts.”
“How long do I get to keep the card?”
“Until you annoy me too much, and I cut you off,” Reggie said. “If you need more on it, let me know.”
“Thanks.”
“Perks of the job. Speaking of which, anything yet?”
“Only been here a few hours. I’m still getting a feel for it. They know you’ve got worries about them, and they have perfectly rational explanations for your worry.”
“Anything odd about the tech?”
“I still don’t know enough about what they’re doing.” Mike set the tablet down, propping it up against the pillow. “Let me ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“You said you first saw them do this almost three years ago, yeah?”
“Just about.”
“They did it again for me today.”
“Did you do it?”
Mike shook his head. “Olaf Johansson. I watched from the control booth.”
“What’d you think?”