by Peter Clines
“You’re right. It’s damned amazing.”
“Told you.”
“So why does it need more testing? They’ve had it working for a year and a half. You saw it months ago. Today’s run was number 168 with a human subject. There’ve been no side effects or dangerous technical glitches. I’d say it works.”
“And they say it needs more testing.”
“But why? I mean, I gather there’s still the time limit issue, but so what?”
On the tablet screen, Reggie shook his head. “I’ve asked Arthur a dozen times since they first showed it to me. He insists it’s not ready to be revealed yet.”
Mike could feel the ants itching to get at it in his mind. “And you’re willing to release it now?”
“Yes. It takes care of the whole funding issue.”
“And they know this?”
“They’re not stupid. I would’ve done it the day after they first showed me, if Arthur hadn’t been so insistent about the testing.” Reggie had never been the type to waste time beating around the bush. He’d been slapped for it more than a few times in college.
“Huh,” said Mike.
“Wow,” Reggie said. “I am so glad I’m paying top dollar for your insight into this little puzzle.”
“I’m holding off diving in as long as I can,” said Mike.
Reggie’s face shifted. “I know. I appreciate you doing this for me.”
“You’d better.”
“I do. You still want to do it?”
“Yep.”
“If you haven’t looked at anything yet, you could still back out. I could have you back in Maine in time to watch the sunrise.”
Mike picked up the tablet. “I’m going to do it.”
“Good. Now stop complaining.”
“Yes sir, mister boss man, sir.”
Reggie shook his head. “You know it’s three times as offensive when you speak to a black man that way, right?”
“That was my goal. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to lay back on my piece of furniture, singular, watch a movie, and go to sleep.”
“Jet lagged?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s worse when you come back. You stay up until two in the morning.”
“I do that anyway.”
“So you’ll be staying up until five.”
“I’ll call you in a couple days, let you know how it’s going.”
“Okay.” Reggie paused. “I’m glad you’re out there. Really. Thank you.”
“Yeah, you’re thanking me now. Wait until you see my bill.”
“What bill? I just gave you a new tablet.”
“Oh, that reminds me…” Mike swept his fingers across the screen and ended the session. He tossed the tablet onto the end of the bed, then had second thoughts and shoved it in a drawer. Reggie probably had a way to turn it on remotely. He’d have to go through the tablet’s system tomorrow and see what kind of extras were in it.
Mike pulled off his shirt and stretched out. The cot squeaked and swayed beneath the thin mattress. After a moment he rolled the waferish pillow into a cylinder and braced it under his neck.
He closed his eyes, blocking off the gray ceiling of the trailer. In his mind, he scrolled back over all the movies he’d ever seen, and decided it might be worth watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier again. The darkness behind his eyelids became the flickering Marvel logo.
Mike relaxed into the springy cot and immersed himself in the adventures of Steve Rogers, slowing the images whenever Scarlett Johansson graced the screen to search for any resemblance to Olaf.
TWELVE
Mike found a small kitchenette in the main building with some breakfast basics. It was stocked better than the teacher’s lounge at his school, but not as well as the cafeteria. The delivery woman gave him a vague “Good morning,” as she opened a box filled with donuts, muffins, and other pastries. He glanced up from his bowl of cereal and examined the selection of pastries.
He was eyeing a sugar-crusted blueberry muffin when Jamie pushed past him to grab a black coffee mug that could hold a softball. THE MACHINE SEES EVERYTHING was printed across its broad expanse in a digitalesque font. “I wouldn’t,” she said.
“Wouldn’t what?”
Jamie emptied half of the coffeepot into her mug. “The blueberry muffin. It’s Sasha’s. You really don’t want to get between that woman and her breakfast.”
His fingers shifted targets. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No, not the old-fashioned. That’s Bob’s.”
“What about the bagel?”
“Olaf’s.”
“The cruller?”
“Mine,” she said, plucking it from the box and setting it by her mug. He stopped himself from grabbing it back and looked down at the box. “Is there anything here that someone doesn’t have dibs on?”
She peered into the box, then tore open three sugar packets at once over her mug. “I think that jelly donut’s up for grabs.”
“I hate jelly donuts. There’s nothing else?”
“Nope.” She grabbed the cruller and a napkin in one hand, her coffee in the other, and waved him out of the way. “Guess you should’ve been here earlier.”
“I was the first one here,” said Mike.
“I meant earlier in the project,” she called back from the hallway.
He finished his cereal, debated the jelly donut, and decided against it. He walked the halls, wondering when the scientists started their day. He wasn’t sure if there was any sort of daily schedule. He’d need to ask Arthur about that.
The control room was still locked. His key card didn’t work on it. Something else to ask Arthur about.
He wandered down to the main floor and found himself standing before the twin rings of the Albuquerque Door. The only sound was a faint crackle of cold from the nitrogen tanks. A spot of color on the floor moved, a roach scurrying back under cover.
Ten minutes ticked by on the clock in his head.
He walked back to the kitchen. The box of donuts and muffins was gone. The coffeepot was empty, but the machine gurgled as it worked on a new one.
Mike went back to the front desk. The receptionist, Anne, was speaking to someone on the phone. She smiled at him, held up a finger, and finished her call. “Good morning,” she said. “Did you get settled in last night?”
He nodded. “All things considered.” He glanced around the lobby. “I don’t suppose you know where everyone is?”
She glanced past him. “The conference room, I think. They’re always in there on Wednesday mornings.”
Mike bit back a sigh. “Where’s that?”
Anne checked her screen and stood up. “Come on. I’ll show you.” She led him back down the hall. Her hair reached all the way down her back, he realized. It was smooth and straight, like a silk scarf or shawl. He’d had one or two students who’d tried using their hair as a living accessory, but none of them pulled it off as well. Combined with her eyes, her hair made jeans and a collared shirt look elegant.
They stopped at a door across the hall from the kitchen. Anne rapped twice, and Arthur’s voice echoed a greeting from inside. She gave Mike a quick smile and headed back to the front. He opened the door.
The conference room was dominated by a long table and several swiveling chairs. A flatscreen hung on the wall near the door. The far wall held two of the rare windows that marked the front of the building.
The team sat around the table, filling every chair except the one at the far end. Mike glanced at the men and women, then singled out Arthur at the head of the table. “What’s this?”
There were a few glances around the table. Bob took a long, slow sip of his water, while Neil became engrossed in the two lines written on his notepad. Arthur cleared his throat. “It’s our weekly review and brainstorming session.”
“Oh,” said Mike. There was another pause. “Am I not supposed to be here for some reason?”
“I’m sorry,” Arthur said. “I
t just slipped my mind. We’re not used to having someone watching over our shoulders.”
Olaf coughed while Jamie sketched something in the corner of her own notepad.
Mike nodded. “Do you mind if I sit in?”
“We’re wrapping up, actually.”
“Okay. Anyone willing to share notes?”
More uncomfortable glances flitted around the table.
He sighed. “Look, I know none of you believe this, but I’m on your side. Reggie Magnus doesn’t want to see you shut down. He needs an informed second opinion. That’s it. But if nobody tells me anything, then I have to go back and tell him I didn’t hear anything that reassured me.”
“You saw the Door,” said Olaf. “It works. What more do you want?”
“I want to know history. Maybe some design. A little bit of the science behind it.”
“You wouldn’t understand it.”
“I might.”
“We can get you some of that,” said Arthur. “Neil could give you a tour of the machine.” He looked to the bearded engineer for agreement.
“No problem,” said Neil. He abandoned his notepad and rolled his chair out from the table.
“That’d be great,” Mike said.
“Jamie,” Arthur said, “could you show him Johnny?”
“Yeah, sure. Find me later this afternoon.”
Mike bobbed his head. “What about records of all the crosswalks so far? Could I get those?”
Arthur glanced at Jamie again. She nodded. “I’ve got the basic reports somewhere, yeah,” she said.
“Will that do for now?” asked Arthur.
“That’s great,” said Mike. “Thank you.”
“I’ll be in my office if you need anything else. The rest of you have your schedules.”
The chairs rolled and spun as everyone got up. Mike caught a simmering glare from Olaf and then turned to find the bearded engineer standing next to him. “Hi,” said Mike. “Neil, right?”
“Yep. Sorry we didn’t talk yesterday.” They shook hands and walked out of the conference room.
“No problem. I’m trying to ease my way in, as you probably noticed.” Neil’s lips twisted into a grin. “Good luck with that. You’re the enemy, remember?”
“So I’ve heard. You worked on the Z Machine, out in New Mexico, didn’t you?”
He gestured Mike down the hall. “With Gerry Yonas, yeah. You know your big machines, Mr. Erikson.”
“Just Mike. One of the only things I had to read on the flight out was everyone’s bios and work histories.”
“Good memory, then.”
“One of the best, so I’m told.”
“Yeah. Bob wouldn’t shut up about you.”
“You guys were talking about me behind my back? How sweet.”
The chief engineer swiped his card and pulled open the heavy door. “There’s a bar up the street some of us go to after work sometimes. You were the main topic last night.”
“Any details left I can fill in for you?”
“Is all the stuff he was saying true?”
“Yes it’s true. I’ve only seen two episodes of Game of Thrones and never saw any of Breaking Bad or True Blood.”
Neil smirked. “The other stuff.”
Mike shrugged. “That’s probably all true, too, but it’s not half as interesting, believe me.”
They paused, and Mike could see the rings just beyond a rack of electronics. Bob rolled a toolbox toward the rings while Sasha took a socket wrench to one of the off-white panels. The golden text on today’s T-shirt proudly declared her to be Starfleet Academy’s cadet of the month.
Neil turned to face him. “So how’s it work?”
“How do you mean?”
“When I was a kid I read a book about a guy with photographic memory. He described it as this huge set of encyclopedias that he could page through.”
Mike nodded. “I’ve heard it described that way. It’s just…memory. How do you remember stuff?”
“Usually with a lot of repetition.”
“Right,” said Mike. “But once it’s in there, do you do anything special? It’s not in your conscious mind right now, but if I ask you when your birthday is, you know, right?”
“August twenty-third.”
“So how’d you know that?”
Neil shrugged. “I just pulled it out.”
“That’s all it is for me. I just pull stuff out. Except I can pull out anything I’ve ever seen or heard.”
“Can you tell me who won the nineteen fifty-five World Series?”
Mike sighed and black ants skittered around in his mind. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I still need to know something first. I’m not a sports guy, and it’s not like I try to read every article on Wikipedia in my spare time.”
“I would,” said Neil with a smile.
“No,” Mike said, “believe me, you wouldn’t.”
Neil clicked his tongue and nodded. “Okay, then. What about school stuff? Who was Zachary Taylor’s vice president?”
“Millard Fillmore. He took over when Taylor died in office, so he never had a vice president himself.”
“Hamlet. What’s the first line of act three, scene four?”
“The Queen’s Closet scene,” said Mike. “Polonius says, ‘He will come straight.’ ”
“The Bible? Book of Judges, chapter twenty-three?”
“Is that a trick question? It’s not school stuff, and there are only twenty-one chapters in Judges.”
The engineer shrugged and grinned. “I was just pulling numbers out of my butt, to be honest. Ready for your tour?”
“Please,” said Mike.
The rings loomed before them. Bob and Sasha had removed a few of the plastic shell sections and were unbolting a large coupling. A replacement sat on the steel walkway near them, glinting in the light.
Mike glanced back. “Can I get closer?”
“Sure. You don’t have a pacemaker or any surgical pins, do you?”
“None that I know of.”
“Cool. Even shut off, this thing gives off a pretty strong magnetic field. About three and a half Tesla. It’d feel a little weird.”
“And when it’s turned on?”
“Then there’s effectively two fields fighting each other. Remember that scene in X-Men, when Magneto rips all the iron out of the guy’s blood?”
“Ouch.” Mike bit back the instinct to correct Neil and point out the scene had been in the second movie. Fifty-seven minutes into it.
“Yep.” Neil swung his hand along the swath of paint on the floor. “It’s not quite that bad, but if we’re up and running and you step past the white line there, you’ll know it. We need to replace components constantly because the fields ruin them.”
“How much can you tell me about their construction?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything, I guess.”
“I can’t tell you much about how it works, just about how it’s built. Although there’s a lot I’ll have to skim over because of our agree—”
“I know.” Mike waved his hand. “Just tell me what you can.”
Neil nodded. “The core of each one of the rings is composed of depleted uranium,” he said. “It’s a mass-density thing. Not really part of my field, but very important. There’s almost a ton of it between the four rings. Can’t tell you much more about that.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Cool. The core is sheathed in lead, which serves as our superconductor base material. Those silver tubes there and there? That’s where the liquid nitrogen circulates in and out.”
Neil pointed at the area where Bob and Sasha had removed the off-white plating. “The next layer you can actually see there, right under the carapace. That’s the copper wiring. ETP copper, ninety-nine-point-nine-seven percent pure, single strand, four gauge. We have to special order it, and there’s almost six miles in each mouth, letting them—”
“Mouth?”
Neil nodded. “These two rings are our mouth. The other mouth, two identical rings, is over in Site B. For the record, the two sets are almost perpendicular to each other, but that has nothing to do with how the bridge forms. It was just space restrictions in each building.”
“Got it.” Mike nodded. “Why call them mouths?”
“Mouth of a tunnel. You couldn’t work that out?”
“Sometimes I just like asking questions.”
Neil smirked. “As I was saying, just shy of six miles of copper wire in each mouth, allowing them to generate a continuous electromagnetic field in the forty-six Tesla range, about thirteen times what your standard MRI machine does.”
“Is that big?”
“The only comparable magnets are at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. They’ve got a hybrid that’s a bit smaller, strength-wise, but it’s continuous. The best we can manage with our arrangement is just under two minutes. Ninety-three seconds. When this baby’s turned on, it eats up about one-point-four megawatt hours in ninety-three seconds.”
“Megawatt hours?”
“Yeah. According to Olaf, when the Albuquerque Door is open, it uses as much electricity per minute as the island of Manhattan. I think he’s exaggerating a bit, though.”
“Not really an energy-efficient way to travel.”
Neil shrugged. “Neither are SUVs, but that hasn’t stopped anyone. Besides, if Arthur and Olaf are right, energy usage is a constant. It has nothing to do with how far you travel.”
“So it costs the same amount to go to Site B as it does to go to Tokyo,” said Mike.
“Yeah. Or the Moon. Or the Andromeda galaxy. The only real limit is how long we can keep the rings chilled. If all the funding goes through, we’re going to try setting up the other mouth in D.C.”
“Jamie mentioned that you get power spikes.”
“We did until I built those.” He gestured at a trio of solid boxes, each the size of a small refrigerator. “They’ve cut down on them a lot. Believe it or not, they’re just huge resistors. We had to custom build them to keep induction and noise to a bare minimum.”
“Why are the rings that size?”
“What do you mean?”
Mike gestured up at the machinery. “The inside diameter’s just over seven feet, yes?”