Mercury Rises

by Robert Kroese

  Behind it was a metal gate, the kind used on old-fashioned elevators. While maintaining his hold on the door, he hooked his foot around a cardboard box that rested against the wall near the door and dragged it to prop the door open. He then slid open the gate and walked inside the small room that lay on the other side.

  The gate was spring-loaded, and it snapped shut as soon as he let go of it. The room was completely featureless except for a dim light bulb in the ceiling and a small metal panel on one wall. In the center of the panel was a single red button. Clearly he was in some sort of elevator.

  He stood for a moment, staring at the button. The sensible thing to do would be to get the hell out of here and hightail back to D.C. He had no rational reason to believe that pushing the red button would provide him with any meaningful answers. In fact, he wasn't even sure what question he was trying to find the answer to. You're a scientist, he told himself. This isn't how science works. First you identify the question. Then you form a hypothesis. Then you test the hypothesis. You don't go running around Los Angeles looking for Signs from Above. Still, intuition played an important role in scientific discovery, didn't it? After all, how did Einstein come up with the principle of relativity? He didn't methodically piece it together from bits of data; he just took a wild guess and then spent the next twenty years proving it. The idea came first, and the data followed. Einstein didn't let a lack of data stop him; he just dove in, confident that things would somehow work out. Jacob took a deep breath and pushed the button.

  The elevator dropped so fast that he felt like he was in freefall. It fell for three or four seconds at least, and then slowed so rapidly that his knees buckled. By the time it stopped, he estimated that he was a good hundred feet underground.

  The elevator opened into a large room filled with ancient-looking technical equipment of some kind. Rows of vacuum tubes protruded above control panels filled with banks of switches and levers, and copper pipes and wiring hung from the ceiling. In the far wall was a large pane of dirty glass that appeared to look onto an adjacent room. To the left of the window was a door ominously labeled:

  DANGER! DO NOT ENTER WHEN CCD IS ACTIVE!

  Jacob had no way of being certain, but he strongly suspected that CCD hadn't been active since some time before the Eisenhower administration. He tried the door and found it unlocked.

  It opened not onto a room, but rather a narrow hallway that was mostly taken up by a three-foot-diameter metal pipe that rested on steel supports every ten feet or so. There was just enough room on either side of the pipe for a person to walk. The hallway was dimly lit by incandescent panels in the ceiling, and appeared to extend indefinitely in both directions. It reminded Jacob of one of the gigantic particle colliders, like the Hadron Collider in Europe, which he had once toured with his mentor Alistair Breem, as a graduate student in physics.

  As he peered to his left down the hallway, he noticed that it curved slightly to the right. In the opposite direction, it curved left. He pulled out his now-tattered map and compared it to his surroundings. There was no doubt about it: the circle he had drawn corresponded perfectly with the curved hallway. But if the circle really did indicate the extent of the hallway, then the hallway was some fifteen miles in circumference, nearly as big as the largest particle accelerator in the world! Was this, then, some sort of particle accelerator, an "atom smasher," as they used to be called? The very notion was insane. Why would you build a particle accelerator under some of the most expensive real estate in the world? And how? Even in the 1940s or whenever this place was built, it would have been virtually impossible to undertake a project like this just outside of Los Angeles without somebody noticing.

  He was too far into this---literally and figuratively---to leave without getting some answers. He began walking down the hallway to his right.

  The tunnel went on and on, with very little variation in the scenery. After about two miles, he came upon another door, but it was locked. He kept walking. After another mile, he found that the tunnel was blocked by debris. Apparently there had been a cave-in. The location corresponded to the outskirts of the crater where Anaheim Stadium had once stood. Evidently the implosion had caused part of the tunnel to collapse. That explained the digging: HeadJAC had found shafts leading to the tunnel, but the tunnel itself was filled with dirt and rock. HeadJAC was clearly unaware, then, that there was at least one place where the tunnel was still accessible, which presumably meant that HeadJAC didn't know much more about the particle accelerator than he did. They probably didn't even realize that the tunnel was a circle; they had just found shafts leading deep underground and had started digging. He knelt on the ground and pressed his ear to the rubble, straining to hear the sound of the machines digging out the shaft, but he heard nothing.

  As he looked back the way he had come, his eyes alighted on something near the bottom of the pipe that didn't seem to fit the surroundings: a small LED display that displayed three numbers, 6:56.

  As he watched, the display changed to 6:55. Then 6:54. A sickening sensation washed over him as he realized he was watching a countdown. Countdowns, in Jacob Slater's world, were rarely good things.

  He got down on his knees and examined the device. It was a simple LED timer connected to a trigger device, embedded in a fist-sized glob of what looked like Silly Putty. C-4, thought Jacob. Plastic explosive. Enough to collapse another hundred feet or so of the tunnel, depending on its structural support.

  He delicately disconnected the trigger device and then hurriedly made his way back down the tunnel. After about fifty feet, he spied another timer. He left this one in place and jogged another fifty feet, finding still another timer.

  Jacob cursed at himself. The whole place was rigged to blow. How could he have missed it? And how could he have been so stupid to come down here in the first place?

  If the timers were to be believed, he now had five minutes and forty seconds to either disarm all of the charges or get out of the tunnel. Disarming only a few might spare a section of the tunnel, but that would only delay his doom: he would be trapped a hundred feet underground, where he would slowly die of thirst or, if he was lucky, asphyxiation. Unless...

  Jacob took off on a sprint. After a minute, his heart was pounding and his lungs were burning. In college, he could run a five-minute mile, but that was nearly twenty years ago. He checked his watch: less than four minutes left. Gasping for breath, his side aching and his chest feeling like it was on fire, he pressed on. After the longest three minutes of his life, he collapsed a few yards from the locked door he had found earlier.

  Drenched with sweat and barely able to see straight, he crawled to a C-4 charge that had been placed under the pipe a few feet from the door. He peeled the glob from the pipe and disconnected the timer. It read 0:44.

  Wiping the sweat from his eyes, hands shaking, he pulled the timer from the device and managed to reset it to fifteen seconds. Twisting the glob of C-4 in his fingers, he removed most of it and then reconnected the timer. He stuck the small glob just under the door handle. Then he got to his feet and stumbled a few yards down the tunnel before his legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground. Every muscle in his body screamed in agony. He didn't even have time to cover his ears before the charge exploded. The blast echoed deafeningly through the tunnel.

  Groaning in pain, barely able to control his shaking limbs, Jacob crawled back to the door. Fortunately, his estimate had been generous: the door had been blown clear from its hinges. Behind the door was a short hallway that ended at a steel grate: an elevator.

  Jacob pulled himself to his feet and staggered down the hallway. Mere seconds remained before the rest of the charges would blow. He felt like he was in one of those dreams he used to have as a child, where he was running as fast as he could from something, but his legs wouldn't do what he wanted them to do. He eventually managed to make his way down the hall. He pulled open the grate, stepped inside the elevator, and pressed the red button on the wall.

  Ther
e was a blinding flash and everything went dark.

  FIFTEEN

  Christine regained consciousness inside a mud hut in the Tawani encampment. She was weak but the dizziness had passed. Outside she heard Maya conversing with Horace Finch. Finch had donated the spare tire from his own truck, which fortuitously had the same size wheels as the Land Rover. Maya was leaving, but Finch was assuring her that "Christine is better off staying here for the night." He told her he'd take good care of her and she thanked him and said good-bye. Christine struggled to get up, but the dizziness returned and she had to lie down again. She heard the Land Rover drive away. She was stranded with a strange man in a primitive village miles from anything that even remotely resembled civilization.

  Finch entered a moment later and informed her that Maya would be returning for her tomorrow afternoon. "You have excellent timing," he said excitedly. Tomorrow morning the tribe is embarking on their yearly pilgrimage to the peak of Mbutuokoti."

  "Mbutu..." Christine mumbled, slowly sitting up.

  "Mbutuokoti. You probably saw it on your drive over. It's the highest mountain in the area, which frankly isn't saying much, as this area is flatter than my first wife. At its peak Mbutuokoti stands about five hundred feet above the surrounding plain. The Tawani believe that Mbutuokoti is where Earth meets Heaven. They believe that at the peak of Mbutuokoti, their shamans are able to tap into mysterious streams of spiritual energy that allow them to communicate directly with the gods."

  "Interesting," said Christine.

  "Oh yes," said Finch. "Of course, it's all bullshit, but try telling them that. I've been here for a month and I still haven't been able to get through to them."

  Christine was puzzled. "Why are you here, if you think it's bullshit?"

  "Oh, I didn't say it wasn't interesting bullshit. Worthy of recording anyway, before, you know, this culture is erased."

  "Erased? Who's going to erase their culture?"

  "Please, Christine. These people are doomed. More and more of their territory is taken by developers every year. There are only about four hundred Tawani left. And in any case, they're a primitive, superstitious, polytheistic culture. They haven't advanced a whit in five thousand years. Hell, they had never seen a wheel until a few years back when the first white people showed up in Jeeps. Can you imagine? They're a nomadic culture. They move their whole civilization back and forth a couple of times a year, and it's never occurred to them to put any of their shit on wheels. Every six months they look at their heaps of crap and ask, 'How the hell are we going to move all this stuff three hundred miles?' And the best answer they can come up with is, 'Well, we could drag it.' Ridiculous. It's a dead-end culture."

  It was a little ridiculous, Christine thought. Still, wasn't there something to be said for preserving the indigenous culture? She was used to a sort of thinly veiled cultural imperialism from fundamentalists like Harry Giddings, but she hadn't expected it from an atheist like Horace Finch. Weren't they supposed to be tolerant of cultural differences?

  "And don't start with the need to be tolerant of cultural differences," Finch went on. "I'm not saying their culture is in any way inferior to ours. What I'm saying is that, right or wrong, our culture is going to crush theirs. Facts is facts. The best we can do is to educate them about the crushing in advance, to make it as painless a process as possible."

  Christine was starting to understand the looks the Tawani men had flashed each other when Maya had asked about the silver-haired visitor. Finch had set himself up as the benevolent ambassador of an empire that was nevertheless going to destroy them. It was a wonder they tolerated him at all.

  Finch went on, "If these people spent as much time trying to develop a written language as they did making up deities, they wouldn't be in this jam. They've got rain gods, cloud gods, sun gods...I've documented three hundred different deities so far, and I'm not even close to covering them all. At this point there are probably more Tawani deities than there are Tawanis."

  In fact, the Tawani only had seven gods and goddesses in their pantheon; the remainder they had made up just to screw with Horace Finch. Finch had made it his mission to debunk their mythology, one deity at a time, and the Tawani had cleverly responded by manufacturing an unlimited number of deities. At first it had been an enjoyable diversion, but as Finch showed no sign of tiring of his debunking, it had become something of a chore. More worrying, they were on the verge of running out of natural phenomena that could be used as an excuse for supernatural intervention. Lately they had devised gods of acid indigestion, night sweats, and chafing, respectively. A recent secret meeting of the tribal elders had focused on whether the tribe should start reusing deities and hope that Finch didn't notice, or pretend to convert to pantheism.

  In truth, they had started inventing deities in an attempt to determine whether Finch could tell the difference between a real god and a fake one, a test that he decisively failed in their eyes. If the silver-haired stranger couldn't even determine which gods had been around since the beginning of time and which ones had been created in the last five minutes, what kind of spiritual wisdom could he possibly have to offer? Once they had determined he was merely a charlatan who was pretending to understand the spirit world, they decided there would be no harm in having a little fun at his expense. But now, a month into Finch's stay, the joke was getting a little old.

  The Tawani had also concluded that anyone who wanted so badly to believe that the gods did not exist must have done something very evil in their sight. Perhaps, they thought, Finch had murdered his own brother or given his seed to an ox. In an effort to get him to admit to the latter, in fact, they had created a god who was half ox and half man, an ominous figure called Tuwambo that they claimed crept into the huts of evildoers and gave them terrifying nightmares.8 In fact, tuwambo was the Tawani word for jock itch, which explained the confused looks Finch got from the local children when he facetiously urged them to "be good or Tuwambo will get you."

  If the primitive Tawani were confused by the motivations of Finch, Christine was even more so. Horace Finch was a multi-billionaire. Surely he had more important things to do than disabuse an African tribe of their superstitions. Finch seemed amused by the question.

  "What could be more important than furthering the advancement of science and reason?" he asked. "And tribes like the Tawani represent a unique opportunity: most of the world's people have progressed gradually from polytheism to monotheism on their way to a completely secular, scientific worldview. But by getting to the Tawani early, maybe we can get them to make a quantum leap over that intermediate step. Maybe if I can get them to dismiss superstition entirely, they can create an entirely new culture without any of the vestigial trappings of religion that still plague Western civilization. If that happens, then rather than Western civilization wiping out the Tawani culture, the new and improved Tawani culture will transform Western civilization as we know it!"

  Great, thought Christine. The only other Westerner for miles around, and he's...what did Mercury call it? Batshit crazy.

  "So you're a missionary, then," Christine said. "Except that instead of spreading Christianity, you're spreading atheism."

  "Something like that," agreed Finch. "But I'm more up-front about my motivations. I don't pretend to be interested in distributing food and medicine in order to smuggle in my beliefs."

  "Yeah," Christine replied dryly. "I know how people hate that make-believe food and medicine Eternal Harvest is distributing."

  Finch nodded, apparently not picking up on her sarcasm. "Exactly," he said. "Also, I happened to be in the area."

  Christine was skeptical. "You happened to be in the wilderness of Africa?"

  "A little project I've been working on," Finch said. "Maybe you've heard of it. I call it Eden Two."

  Christine had heard of it, but she hadn't realized that it was located in Kenya. She had read about the project several years earlier, but she only recalled that it was somewhere in remote Africa. In fact, she
had thought the project had been canceled some time ago in the wake of engineering problems and budget overruns.

  "I guess I'm a little out of it," Christine admitted. "I didn't realize you were still working on that."

  Finch grinned. "Not your fault," he said. "It was part of the plan, actually. Hiding in plain sight."

  "I don't follow you," Christine said.

  "I've learned that the best way to undertake a massive project without getting a lot of attention is to announce the project with great fanfare and then produce nothing for the next several years. Blame budget overruns or whatever. Keep promising the moon but never deliver anything. For a while I was offering free round-trip airfare to any journalist who wanted to visit the site."

  Now that she thought about it, she remembered Maria, a veteran Banner reporter, mentioning taking advantage of that offer. She had returned with stories of a massive boondoggle in the desert: workmen sitting idle while engineers bickered over structural concerns, problems getting materials and supplies to the remote location, and on and on. The Banner had done a half-page piece in their international news section predictably titled "Trouble in Paradise."

  "Eventually," Finch went on, "the journalists stopped showing up altogether. When we issued a press release announcing that we were finally breaking ground, it got almost no coverage. And when we really did break ground, eighteen months later, not a single respectable news organization covered it. We issued nearly two hundred press releases over the next three years detailing our progress in excruciating detail and got almost no coverage. Three weeks ago, to celebrate the impending completion of the project, I fired our entire marketing department. Everyone in the civilized world has heard of Eden Two, but the only thing anybody could tell you about it is that it was a colossal failure. And since that was exactly what I was hoping for, the project has phenomenal success."