by Chris Angus
“What is it?” Kraus asked without looking back. They had to keep moving. Who knew how long the light from the tentacles would last?
“We can’t just keep letting these things determine where we go,” said Jon. “They’re taking us deeper. We need to go up.”
Kraus stopped. In the dim, phosphorescent light, Jon’s eyes seemed to glow. They were round and panic-stricken.
“What do you recommend, my friend?” the German asked in a quiet voice.
“Why do I have to do all the thinking?” said Jon. “Any idiot can tell we’re being herded like cattle. Can’t you see? They want us to go lower. That’s where they’re waiting for us.”
Kraus considered the geologist. The man was showing real signs of paranoia. Of course, fearing for their lives under the current circumstances probably wasn’t exactly unreasonable. Still, it wasn’t helpful to run around screaming, “We’re all going to die!”
“Who, Jon? Who is waiting for us?”
“These damn tentacles! I tell you they’re herding us somewhere.”
“Well,” Kraus continued to speak in a level tone. “I’m open to suggestions, Jon. We don’t have a lot of choices here. We can’t go back to where Ernst fell through, and all the branch tunnels have been covered with tentacles. We can only go in the direction left open to us. Is that not clear?”
“No, goddamn it! We’re going to make our own choices from now on.”
Jon picked up a large rock and threw it at the accumulation of tentacles that blocked the most recent branch passage. Then he ran at the mass and began to tear at the pulsating, gooey substance. But as fast as he tore an opening, the tentacles filled it in even faster. Soon, pieces began to stick to him.
“Stop it!” Kraus yelled. He pulled Gudnasson away from the mass of throbbing tentacles and began to rip away the pieces that had stuck to him. For a moment, he thought he might lose the battle. But the branches seemed to lose their tenacity once they were separated from the main body.
Jon slumped to the ground, shuddering, and began to help Hans pull the remaining bits away. Finally, he was free, except for being covered in a sticky sort of glue left behind.
He looked sheepish. For the moment, the paranoia had dissipated. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Guess I lost it.”
Kraus gave him a smile. “For sure, we are in a tight spot. Enough to make anyone . . . lose it, as you say. When my turn comes, I will count on your help.”
The words seemed to buck his companion up, but Kraus was not at all confident he’d be able to count on this man when the time came. Jon was weak and not the sort of partner he’d have chosen to face such a challenge. He helped Gudnasson to his feet.
“We must keep moving,” he said. “If these things want us to go lower, there has to be a reason. The sooner we find out what it is, the better it will be. I for one would rather know than not know.”
Jon nodded glumly.
The tentacles lining the cave walls were now thick as a man’s arm and gave off enough light to allow them to see clearly. Indeed, the pulsating quality of the branches made them appear almost like muscular arms, flexing and extending.
“It’s as though they understand what they’re doing to us,” Jon said, plaintively.
“I agree, my friend. There appears to be some guiding force behind them. It is not like they are simply plants. I get the distinct feeling there’s a method behind every move.”
“But why?” Jon asked. “Why us? What did we do?”
Hans shrugged. “We are here.”
“Well, I’m perfectly willing NOT to be here. Why won’t they just let us go if they don’t want us here?”
“Perhaps that is too advanced a way of thinking. Beyond them. Like fire ants faced with some animal digging into their hill. The ants would rather the creature not do that and go away. But they’re not going to leave it alone. They will attack and keep on attacking until they kill it.”
“Jesus!” Jon said.
“Jesus has nothing to do with it,” replied the German.
Jon just stared at him.
“Whatever we are facing,” said Kraus, “it is the opposite, the antithesis of Christ. It is why the Conference of Bishops has invested so much of itself in trying to determine what is really down here.”
“You’re talking nonsense. Fire and brimstone, end-of-the-world fantasy. If you think Lucifer is down here somewhere, you’re even crazier than I thought.”
Kraus considered him. “It is your belief then, that all this is simply the result of some natural phenomenon?”
“Yes,” Jon said stubbornly.
“Well, I certainly hope you are right. In any event, we must keep going—wherever it is that the tentacles wish us to go—I see no alternative.”
They stood and began to trudge slowly along the tunnel, in the only direction open to them, lower. Each man retreated to thoughts guided by his own beliefs. Kraus relied upon faith and prayer. Jon, with little to support him other than reason, couldn’t suppress the fear. And as they moved lower, the paranoia returned.
***
Professor Hauptmann gazed upon the pile of student papers and scowled. Students seemed to get dumber every year. It was a wonder his own mind hadn’t atrophied from having to read such drivel.
He got up, paced around the desk to his office door, closed it firmly, and locked it. He was due for student advising in half an hour. To hell with them. He had more important fish to fry.
He took a pair of white linen gloves out of a box and pulled them on. Then carefully, almost lovingly, he unlocked a drawer in his desk and removed an ancient ledger. He laid it gently on top of the desk and opened the book.
This was his latest discovery, mined from the extensive archives of the university. It was a copy of the Heimskringla, the Icelandic sagas of the Norse kings that explained in pagan terms how the world was created.
He was familiar with the text, of course, written down by Snorri Sturlason, poet, lawyer, and lawspeaker of the Althing in Iceland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. It had long been known to scholars, and of course no one agreed as to what extent the text was accurate. Like all of the sagas, it related epic events that had occurred hundreds of years before they were recorded.
He knew the tortured early history of the work. The original manuscript was not known. The oldest extant copy of the Heimskringla was believed to have been written about 1260. In the sixteenth century, it was in Norway. It moved to Copenhagen in 1633 and was destroyed by the fire of 1728. By then, fortunately, it had been copied several times.
It was one of these early copies that had come to the university, though no one seemed clear on precisely how. No matter. What was important was that he, Ernst Hauptmann, historian extraordinaire, had made a significant discovery. Once his findings were published, he would become famous. No doubt about it. For now, however, there was wondrous fantasy in knowing something no one else in the world knew.
After years of studying the ancient book, he’d become increasingly frustrated by a break, an unexplained gap in the narrative. The gap was well known to experts. It made no sense. A line of text simply stopped and when the page was turned, the next line did not follow in context. None of the other extant copies of the Heimskringla contained the gap, suggesting something unique about the university’s copy.
Numerous scholarly papers had been written about this phenomenon, trying to explain the gap. But none had ever done so to Hauptman’s satisfaction.
The pages were of ancient vellum. The finest goatskin. Very delicate now, and it was necessary to handle them oh so carefully. Which was why no one had ever discovered what he had. To his carefully gloved hands, the page he had turned so many times seemed slightly more dense than the others. It was an almost indefinable thing. But one day he had decided to see if his suspicion might be accurate.
Using a special chemical bath and a commercial steamer, he spent long hours very gently treating the page. If anyone ever learned what he’d done, h
e might well have been refused permission to ever handle ancient texts again. Such treatment was sacrilege. He’d worked only on weekends, his office door locked and barricaded. Ever so slowly, an edge appeared where there had once been but a single page. It took three months to totally separate the pages.
But at last he was confronted with something extraordinary. Several completely new, never before seen, pages of text, deep in the heart of the Heimskringla that had been stuck together for centuries.
The first of the newly discovered pages was a continuation of the previous text and of little interest, mentioning mundane events in the life of one of the more obscure kings, as it did in the other extant copies of the rare book. But now there was an explanation for the famous gap. For the newly revealed pages had never before been seen.
The pages stunned him. It had taken many months to fully translate and understand them. The text further related the story of Amma, the Norse Holy Woman or shaman who had lived with her clan on the southern coast of Iceland in the tenth century. This was the same Amma about whom Hauptmann had previously found an unknown saga, in which the old woman related how unrest had come to her clan after many years of peace.
Now, Hauptmann read, his face inches from the aging vellum, as Amma related how her clan had come under attack from strange beasts that creep upon the tunnel walls.
The fears that infected Amma and her family leaped from the page. Their terror drove them underground. Paradoxically, they attempted to escape from the gods of Laki by retreating even further underground.
Their solution to the problem facing them seemed irrational. If the beasts came from beneath the Earth, why go lower still to escape from them? Amma’s words grew increasingly paranoid as it became clear she was growing delusional, insisting that her family go ever deeper in order to escape what obviously emanated from the depths.
Here they were attacked by the beasts that crawled the walls. She told how their greatest warrior, Afastr, fought the strange attackers and how, for a time, they broke through to a lower level.
At this point in the incredible tale, Hauptmann paused, as he always did. For he didn’t understand what Amma said next. He had translated the passage and translated it again, but still it made no sense. His best interpretation was that the clan had come upon:
A hole at the center of the earth. A hole filled with stars.
He shook his head in frustration. The words were inscrutable. Had Amma succumbed completely to delusion? It seemed likely, except for the fact that the Holy Woman went on to finish the narrative seemingly in control of her thoughts. She told of returning from the depths and of a pact between the family members to seal themselves in and die as one, on their own terms.
Ernst stared at the ancient pages of vellum. He needed to talk to someone. To Sam. They had been friends and sometime colleagues for many years. Her insights concerning the volcano of Laki were profound. Perhaps the strange words of Amma would mean something to her.
But he’d been unable to contact her. He was not completely cut off in his ivory tower. He knew what was happening, that the earthquakes had caused significant damage and even panic among some in Reykjavik. He hoped Sam was all right. There was no one else he could talk to about this. Not if he wanted to keep his academic and publishing intentions intact.
Someone must know where Sam was. If he could only find her friend, what was his name? Baldwin. Maybe he should go to the police, claiming he was worried about them. Yes. That was it. The authorities would know. He’d read in the paper that Sam had been detained. Maybe they still had her in custody. They would know where she was.
Chapter Seventeen
The Oval Office
Washington D.C.
Charles Finlay, Chief of Staff for Senate Majority Leader Shelby Graham, waited anxiously for entrée to the Oval Office. He knew why President Thurman had summoned him. He knew exactly what the President was going to ask him. What he didn’t know was the answer to the question.
The secretary looked at him. She’d said something he hadn’t registered. “You may go in now, Mr. Finlay.”
He hated the new headphones used by the President’s aides. They were all wired in together. No buzzer, no office intercom. Just a headset and a silent communication. He preferred to hear when a message was being transmitted, instead of this sudden, silent directive.
The President met him at the door. There were two other men sitting on the sofa in front of the fireplace. Finlay recognized both of them: Grant Lyndaker, Secretary of Energy, and Prescott Carlisle, the President’s Science Advisor.
“Charlie,” said President Thurman. “Good to see you. Thanks for coming over.”
“My pleasure, sir. Always at your disposal.”
The President was a Republican. Family money had essentially purchased the office for him six years ago. He liked to pretend he’d worked his way up, and in a sense he had, from mayor of Cincinnati to congressman to senator. But the money scared off any real competition. He’d never had an opponent who garnered more than thirty percent of the vote.
“I wasn’t happy about my education bill, Charlie,” President Thurman said, immediately broaching the question Finlay had anticipated. “We knew it was going to be close in the Senate. Frankly, I find it inexplicable that Senator Graham missed the vote.”
Finlay sat across from Lyndaker and Carlisle, nodding briefly to both men. “Sir, I confess it’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you. The senator has taken some personal time lately. I think it has something to do with his daughter, but I really don’t know. I believe he may be out of the country.”
“Damn right he is,” said the President. “I had to set my people to find out where he went. He’s in Iceland. You trying to tell me you knew nothing about that?”
Finlay squirmed. Shelby hadn’t taken him into his confidence. It was clear, however, that the President knew a great deal more about what was going on than he did.
“I confess, Sir, I didn’t know where the senator was.”
The President cocked his head at the other men in the room and raised an eyebrow. “So you’re out of the loop, eh, Charlie? Hard to be a Chief of Staff sometimes. Have you at least heard about the earthquakes in that country?”
“Of course, Sir.” The news had gone worldwide very quickly.
The President sat in an oversized wing chair and crossed his legs. He picked at an imaginary spot on his pants. “Why don’t you bring Mr. Finlay up to date, Grant,” he said.
“Since the first quake in Iceland,” said Lyndaker, “we’ve been recording the aftershocks. Quite a few. Actually, they’ve been almost continuous. Indeed, we’ve confirmed a worldwide confluence of seismic activity all seeming to radiate out from Iceland.”
Finlay’s mouth broke into a frown. “That would seem highly unusual,” he said, a baffled look on his face.
“The U.S. weather service has also recorded unusual weather patterns and temperatures,” Lyndaker went on. “Something seems to be precipitating a rapid change in the normal cycles across the Northern hemisphere. Our temperature gauges have recorded fluctuations as well in oceanic temperatures and levels.”
Finlay was well aware of the many possible causes of climate change. “Has there been the collapse of a major ice sheet somewhere?” he asked.
“Our first thought. We checked satellite pictures, however, and there has been no such collapse. Both the seismic activity and the unusual weather phenomena seem to be focused in the deep ocean off Iceland.” He looked at the President, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
Science Advisor Prescott Carlisle took over. Finlay knew Carlisle by reputation only. He’d been a highly regarded astrophysicist before coming to work for the President. He was a stooped, bookish-looking fellow wearing a traditional dark blue suit with a shirt open at the collar. Maybe advisors didn’t have to wear ties as Cabinet members did.
“We’ve also detected a surplus of particles from space invading Earth’s atmosphere,” Carlisle said. “Electrons
in higher numbers than usual, as well as two unexpected patches of high-energy protons.”
Finlay looked from Carlisle to the President and back again. His confusion was evident.
Carlisle continued. “The Earth is being bombarded with high-energy cosmic rays from an undetected source. No one knows where these rays come from or how they are generated. Many different theories have been put forth: pulsars, shock waves from supernovas, even dark matter. Finding a specific source is almost impossible because the magnetic fields of the Earth and the galaxy mix up the flight paths of the particles, almost like they were scrambled in a Mixmaster, making it impossible to trace their trajectories back to the source.”
“Let’s try to keep it simple for us non-eggheads, Prescott,” said the President.
Carlisle tilted his head slightly. “We believe the excess protons may be produced near a black hole. The electron spike could come from a nearby pulsar or microquasar. Another possibility is that the electrons were created by dark matter.”
“Dark matter?” asked Finlay.
“Dark matter is believed to make up eighty-five percent of the universe’s mass, though we really don’t know what it’s made of.” Carlisle hesitated, looking at the President. “Here’s where it gets a little complicated. One prime candidate for dark matter includes WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles. Two WIMPs colliding would produce a peak in the electron energy spectrum. Such a bump in the spectrum creates a signature that would emerge if a WIMP known as a Kaluza-Klein particle was a primary dark matter component.”
“You’re losing me, Prescott,” said the President.
“Sorry, Mr. President. Let me just say that if Kaluza-Klein particles are real, they would owe their existence to ‘additional’ dimensions beyond the three we are familiar with. The particles would travel in the extra dimensions, but collisions would cause electrons and positrons to spit out and travel through our ordinary dimensions where they can be detected.”
“Frankly,” Lyndaker interrupted, “we were wondering what Senator Graham might know about all of this, Charlie.”