Countdown to Armageddon

by Edward M. Lerner

  Fire now blocked the entrance of the lab. Flames licked hungrily at the wreckage. A loud booming began somewhere behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder. The guard from the gatehouse was pounding on a small, high window. Embedded reinforcing wire kept the shattered glass from falling free. “Out! Out!” the guard screamed. “The building is coming down!” He battered and battered, the reinforced glass finally yielding to his fire ax.

  Harry grabbed the woman under her armpits and hoisted her over his shoulder. Mercifully, she fainted. Trying not to see any body parts fall, he stumbled through the smoke to the window. The guard dropped his ax to reach through for her. Harry pushed; with a ripping of fabric, the woman popped through.

  He took a final look around the lab. What had happened here? The scorched and shattered apparatus across the room was the epicenter of an explosion. Through the smoke, Harry recognized an arc of superconducting storage ring. Two of its superconducting magnets glowed white-hot. Near the magnets a wire-wrapped bulk smoldered. A drop of molten metal fell as he watched, disappearing into the sea of flames.

  “Out now!” The guard looked fearfully at something over his head. “Give me your hands!” He plunged his own arms through the broken window to reach for Harry. “Quick!”

  Harry no longer had the strength to boost himself the five feet to the window. Thick smoke choking him, he grabbed on to the guard’s arms. He was pulled roughly through the small opening, then dragged across the bumpy ground away from the conflagration. The ambulance roared away on squealing tires the moment the paramedics had belted him in.

  Harry was in no condition to notice the blanket-shrouded passenger in the other stretcher, her face covered.

  NEW YORK CITY, 2009

  “. . . when without warning, the lab exploded. I ran in to see if I could help.”

  Harry did not elaborate. The dead woman still came in his nightmares. She turned out to be—have been—the director of the institute. Harry stopped to sip some of the melted ice in his margarita glass. “Miraculously, there was only one fatality in the accident.

  “The explosion and resulting fire largely destroyed the institute and its records. Only two people were in the lab when it happened. Apparently only they had any knowledge of the experiment. The authorities, as far as I know, never assigned a cause to the explosion more specific than a catastrophic discharge of the storage ring.

  “I only got a quick look at the lab. When I told the investigators what I’d seen, they politely”—condescendingly—“expressed their doubts. One told me that if indeed I saw what I said I’d seen, the juxtaposition of equipment must somehow have resulted from the explosion, not preceded it.”

  His audience listened in rapt silence. “I couldn’t explain it, either—but I had seen it. All that stored energy, terawatts of it, petawatts for all I know, rigged to discharge through a single enormous coil, enclosing a volume little larger than a phone booth. Massive superconducting cables connected the cavity to the storage ring. The cavity itself was empty.

  “Two years passed before I believed. Guys, it was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Puzzled expressions quickly changed to tentative looks of understanding. “Okay, I think you see it. The common statement of the principle is that you can’t simultaneously determine the position and momentum of a particle. That’s not obviously germane, which is why you were all surprised. But the other formulation of the principle—that’s something else again.

  “The more precisely you determine a particle’s energy, the less exactly you can pin down that particle in time. That’s hardly news. We encounter it again and again inside our bubble chambers, in those strange, never-again-seen, subatomic fragments that somehow appear in the wreckage of particle collisions. They’re transient freaks of nature, doomed to disappear in the infinitesimal fraction of a second before they violate the law of conservation of energy.” Terrence, a prematurely balding Englishman who, Harry seemed to remember, was a post-doc from Cambridge, began smiling enigmatically. The fellow had deduced where Harry was going . . . or thought he had.

  “The people at Rothschild Institute must have applied this principle on a grand scale. Never mind subatomic oddities—they dealt with a macroscopic mass. Using enough energy, instantaneously discharging everything in the superconducting storage ring, they expected to observe a measurable temporal effect.” He looked each of them directly in the eyes. “Time travel, gentlemen.”

  One of his audience, a theoretician from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cleared his throat hesitantly.

  “Have a problem, Roger?”

  “You mentioned two casualties, but only one fatality. I gather that the survivor was seriously injured, but didn’t he ever say anything?” Beside Roger, and unseen by him, Terrence’s grin was fast outgrowing the bounds of English understatement.

  Harry did his best to look innocent. “I mentioned two experimenters, Roger, not two casualties. They never found the man.” Everyone except poor, oblivious Roger was smiling now.

  “Terawatts? Surely he was vaporized when the coil discharged! How could he not be considered a fatality?”

  Harry said, “The explosion bent the coil, exposing the enclosed space. It contained the only distinctly undamaged spot in the lab. I saw controls inside the enclosure.”

  “So?”

  “He traveled in time.” Harry shrugged. “If there was ever a way to return him, the explosion destroyed it.”

  Roger startled at Terrence’s sudden cackle, in which the others quickly joined. Roger scanned the laughing faces, then turned questioningly back to the storyteller. Harry just smiled.

  “Aw, shit.” Roger’s face turned beet red. He looked sheepishly into his empty glass. “I hate being so gullible. The least you can do is spring for my refill.”

  Disaster averted, Harry caught the eye of the cocktail waitress. He traced an imaginary circle over the table: Bring us another round. “This didn’t work out at all like I’d planned,” he groused. “I expected that story to get me a drink.”

  His new friends rewarded him with another chuckle. Even Roger.

  CHICAGO, 2009

  The two seated women were a study in contrasts. The first was boldly striking: tall, statuesque, with billowing waves of chestnut hair and aristocratically high cheekbones. Her companion exhibited a quieter beauty: short and slender, with flowing, shoulder-length blond hair. Shining blue eyes transformed what would otherwise have been an ordinary face. The first picked diffidently at her salad; the second attacked a slice of quiche—as she did life—with gusto.

  They were sisters.

  “Just eat it, Becky,” Julia Bowen said. “I come here often. The chef promised to omit the worms as a personal favor.”

  Rebecca grimaced. “You know very well these greens weren’t organically grown. There was a time when you wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like this. Eating eggs, yet.”

  Playfully: “Guess I shouldn’t expect you to stay for dinner, then. Chili and tamales.”

  The straitlaced sister shuddered. “It’s that mechanic you married.”

  Harry claimed—ad nauseam—that engineers and scientists didn’t know much about the arts and were privately embarrassed by it; fine- and liberal-arts types knew nothing about science or technology and were openly proud of it. Sure it was a stereotype, but some stereotypes have a basis in truth. Becky, for example.

  There, but for the grace of Harry, go I. Julia chose to misunderstand. “Physicist, quantum mechanic. Hah, hah. A very small joke.” A blank look showed that Becky hadn’t gotten it. “What have you heard from Mom and Dad lately?”

  The folks were a safe topic. They swapped anecdotes for a while, and childhood reminiscences, then fell silent. With a sigh, Becky set down her fork. “Tell me more about your show.”

  “What show? I’ve got some sketches in a shopping-strip storefront.”

 
“It’s a show if your stuff is on the walls, not in the bins.”

  “Thanks, Sis. I appreciate it.” Julia smiled. “Harry said last night that I’ve lost my amateur status. He figures that the gallery is making more money now from my sketches than from their frames.”

  “You really love that big lummox, don’t you?” Becky studied her intently.

  Now Julia grinned from ear to ear, like a sap. She didn’t care. “Yeah, I really do.”

  Harry Bowen tipped back in his office chair, its front legs airborne. His own legs rested at the calves on the accumulated clutter of his desktop. His dangling, shoeless feet wiggled to the heavy-metal beat from his iPod. Afternoon sun streamed through blinds behind him, lighting the room-temperature fusion article in Nature that held his complete interest.

  The tall visitor tapped gently on the frame of the open door. No response. He knocked harder. “Dr. Bowen?”

  Harry looked up and had a moment of déjà vu. “What’s this Doctor crap? Come in, Terrence!” He set the open journal facedown onto one of the shorter paper stacks, and stood.

  “My pleasure—Harry.” They shook hands. The Englishman’s sparse, windblown hair gave him a pixieish air. He wore casual slacks and a plaid sport coat more suggestive of a used-car salesman than of Cambridge. “I see you remember me. Got a few minutes?”

  “Absolutely.” He had not seen Terrence in over a week, not since his first night in New York. Harry pointed to a guest chair. “Take a load off. I’m dying to hear what airline flies from New York to England with a connection in Chicago.”

  Terrence passed on the chair, instead closing and leaning against the office door. “As it happens, you’re not the only one who told a whopper that night. I’m not at Cambridge. I don’t live in England anymore—haven’t for years. The truth is, I’m not even in physics.”

  “So you’re Catholic?”

  “My confession has nothing to do with guilt. It has everything to do with something we need to discuss. The Rothschild Institute.”

  Not Harry’s favorite topic. He’d woken up on the first full day of the conference, head pounding and stomach queasy, to what was definitely the morning after the night before. He had cursed himself out—quietly—as fourteen types of moron. What had possessed him to talk about the incident at Rothschild? Still, given the initial stupidity of having said anything, he thought he had recovered well.

  Terrence’s surprise appearance suggested otherwise. Harry waited in silence.

  His guest shrugged. “Shall I begin at the beginning?”

  “Please,” Harry said. “Then proceed through the middle to get to the end.”

  “Fair enough. For starters, I am Terrence Ambling. I’m a grad student and teaching assistant, both in European history, at NYU. I admit to being a bit ancient of days for such a bohemian existence, but I’d had a midlife crisis. Crossing the pond and hiding in academia have been therapeutic. And like most grad students, I’m often strapped for cash.”

  Harry made an educated guess. “The ersatz food at the conference brought you.”

  “Sad, isn’t it? Lots of the students do it, though—it’s so easy. Conferences all use the same name-tag holders—you know, the clear plastic, clip-on kind. Download a conference’s logo from the Web, print the logo and a name with a color printer and—voilà—gratis goodies. And there are often people off to dinner milling about the lobby, wearing their silly name tags, with unused drink tickets free for the asking.”

  “That got you inside. It didn’t require you to talk to anyone. For a historian, you make a fair physicist.”

  Terrence chuckled. “You never heard me talk physics. I am, however, a pretty avid science-fiction reader.”

  “So the starving grad student travels—hitches?—seven-hundred-plus miles cross-country because . . . ? To crash the Consumer Electronics Show for some chip ’n dip?”

  “Maybe, since I’m in town.” Terrence paused as voices in the hall passed the closed door. “It’s not what brought me, of course. That has more to do with my former life.

  “Have you ever heard of Interpol?”

  Harry’s living room was marginally less cluttered, somewhat larger, and much more comfortable than his office. He and his guest occupied the two well-worn armchairs; Julia puttered in the kitchen, stretching the chili with macaroni.

  Ambling had brought shocking news: Abdul Faisel, the vanished researcher from the Rothschild Institute catastrophe, was sought by Interpol. It seemed Faisel might know something about twenty kilos of missing plutonium.

  “Twenty kilos?” Harry was incredulous. “Surely even the Russians couldn’t misplace that much. But if they did, why haven’t I read about it?”

  “A few pounds of the stuff is practically a hobbyist A-bomb kit. If word got out, Harry, it would cause a panic. My former employer keeps these things quiet.

  “We think a corrupt Russian general first stole it in 2002. Russian intelligence didn’t discover the problem until fourteen months and two middlemen later. They contacted Interpol after tracing the shipment to a Hezbollah front organization.”

  “Hezbollah,” Harry repeated. “The Syrian-backed terrorists?”

  “Yes, and a very scary bunch. Iranian-backed as well.”

  Harry began pacing. “Explain something to me. Okay, so maybe Interpol could keep a situation like this quiet for a long time; I can understand why they would try. The buyers have no reason to be bashful. As you say, they can do almost as much harm by announcing they have plutonium as by using it.

  “The more I think about this, the more confused I get. If the plutonium had been recovered, you wouldn’t be here. Just knowing that such a theft is possible could encourage others to emulate it.

  “On the other hand, what if the plutonium weren’t accounted for? If you thought I knew anything useful, one call to a former coworker would start an official investigation. For stolen plutonium, an anonymous call would more than suffice.

  “Don’t think that I begrudge you the dinner,” Harry concluded, “but I have to ask. Why are you here?”

  And then, bingo, the lightbulb went on over his head. No, make that a giant flashing neon light—reading “Prank.” Harry plopped himself down in his easy chair. “Don’t bother answering, you old fraud. You’re good. You caught on to my tall tale in New York faster than anyone. Tonight you topped me.”

  The rattling of plates was reaching a definite predinner crescendo. “You certainly earned the meal. Let’s go into the dining room, and you can tell us what really brought you to Chicago.”

  “Oh, I was not joking about the reason for my visit. I truly am interested in that missing plutonium.”

  The deadly looking pistol that Ambling removed from a shoulder holster reinforced his seriousness.

  * * * *

  Terrence thumbed the safety and tossed the handgun into the lap of his very startled host. “I wasn’t allowed to keep my old identification. This was as convincing as I could get.”

  Julia picked that moment to enter from the dining room, where she had just set down a steaming tureen. “Harry! What in the world are you doing with that thing?”

  Harry returned the thing—gingerly—to its rightful owner. “As little as possible. Okay, Terrence, you’ve made your point.”

  “Good. I’m famished.” He wandered into the compact dining room, where he dutifully admired the two framed photos on the wall. “When do I get to meet the little tykes, Julia?”

  “It will have to be another time. Johnny is always fishing for a dinner invitation at his best friend’s house, so tonight I agreed. Melissa I sent off to my parents. A four-year-old and an eight-year-old aren’t conducive to adult conversation.”

  “You needn’t have exiled them on my account.” He silently added: but thank you. Terrence likened children to strychnine. They could be medicinal in small doses. In large doses, however . . .
He nibbled on a too-spicy tamale while Harry Bowen inexplicably doused his own food with Louisiana hot sauce.

  Over after-dinner coffee Terrence took pity on his new friend. Friends. “You’ve been more than patient with me. There was plutonium smuggled out of Russia. Your vanishing acquaintance at the Rothschild Institute was implicated.”

  Julia did a most interesting double take, but said nothing.

  Terrence faced Harry. “I’ve done a little checking since we met. You were very brave, and not a little foolhardy, that day in Metz. A French colleague who owed me a favor confirmed your involvement. Claude also indicated that you were hospitalized for a week after the incident.” He smiled at Julia. “You visited him daily.”

  Harry shrugged noncommittally.

  “While you were still in hospital, Interpol conclusively traced the missing plutonium to the institute. Several Dewar flasks in the lab showed slight, but compelling, evidence of low-level alpha emissions, consistent with transporting insufficiently shielded plutonium. The Dewars had been delivered two months prior to the explosion, in a van owned by a known Hezbollah sympathizer.” Not everyone could accept the measures required by a global war against terror. Eventually, neither could Terrence. That was why he had left. He chose his words carefully. “Two Iranian university students, questioned separately, were also quite convincing on the Hezbollah link.

  “The same driver and van returned the morning of the blast, supposedly to retrieve Dewars for refilling. The driver gave Dr. Faisel’s name to the guards, and Faisel okayed the pickup. By the time this came out, Interpol was quite curious about Dr. Faisel.

  “It seems that Faisel’s family—the entire village where he grew up, in fact—was killed by the Phalange, the Christian militia, in the Lebanese civil war. That was 1983. Three years later, he went on a hajj, the traditional Moslem pilgrimage, to Mecca and Medina. Returning from Saudi Arabia, he stopped over in Lebanon. He visited cousins in the Bekaa Valley, men with Hezbollah ties. It’s unclear who recruited whom, but Interpol is convinced Faisel was involved with Hezbollah thereafter.