“We need to see this with higher resolution. You know where we can use an electron microscope?”
Voigt smiled knowingly. “As a matter of fact, I happen to know this young lady who might help us.”
After Voigt made a brief phone call, they drove in Gerald’s van to the University of Missouri. Voigt sat in the seat that Gerald had swept clean of debris, holding the little box in his lap. As they negotiated the streets, Voigt described his interviews with the Zoners and everybody else involved with the limb from the sky. Gerald tried to drive with his notebook on the steering wheel, making scribbled notes at stoplights and sometimes, unfortunately, on wobbly turns. But Voigt, dressed in his herringbone sport coat and bow tie, didn’t seem to notice, chattering happily on.
“They think it was a plane crash?” asked Gerald.
“Well, I heard on the radio that there is a small plane missing that filed a flight plan over the area. They found pieces of a plane. One piece hit a barn. But they don’t think it’s all there. They’re still looking for more body parts. I hope they find them. I’d like to find out more about my gentleman and what happened to him.”
Within half an hour, they stood inside the university’s electron microscopy laboratory. His rheumy blue eyes twinkling, Voigt held up the box and worked his courtly charm on Gayle, the young, female microscopist who oversaw the laboratory. He had taught her pathology in graduate school, and she could never refuse Dr. George anything.
Within another hour, they had sliced the tip end off the rib, coated it in gold and inserted it into the sample chamber in the tall beige column that was the scanning electron microscope. The vacuum pump rattled busily as it evacuated the chamber and shortly the electron microscopic image of the rib tip appeared on the small green luminescent screen, looking like an immense plateau thrusting up from the middle of a broad desert. An extremely smooth plateau.
“This isn’t possible,” said Gayle, adjusting knobs to zoom in on the surface. Even at the highest magnitude there were no jagged edges, no slice marks. Only a glass-smooth slice through the bone, even beyond the highest polishing.
“But, dear, it does appear to be possible,” said Dr. George.
“Is there anybody else around who could look at this?” asked Gerald. “Anybody who’s looked at a lot of these things before?”
Voigt smiled, again knowingly. “Of course, I’ll just give a call to some of my old students.” Gerald wondered whether students might be appropriate judges of this exotic object, but said nothing.
Within another half an hour, the former “students” had arrived. Crowding into the room were the university hospital’s chief of surgery, the chief of orthopedics, and the director of the biomaterials program. All were brilliant men, with the extraordinary powers of observation afforded by dozens of years of medical education, and Dr. George’s venerable pathology course. They peered at the sharp black-and-white image, and for half an hour requested different views, different angles, different electron beam parameters.
Finally, Gerald polled them. “Any of you know of any cutting tool, bone saw, energy beam … anything at all … that could slice something that smoothly?”
“Nope,” said the chief of surgery.
“Got me,” said the chief of orthopedics.
“I’ll get back to you,” promised the director of the biomaterials program. But Gerald knew that meant he was stumped, too. Voigt left the small troublesome piece of bone with Gayle, and he and Gerald walked out of the medical center down the broad sidewalk toward the parking lot.
“Son, I’m stumped here. I’m going to go back to my office and look at some references. You’re welcome to stay, but I’m afraid that I couldn’t help you much.”
“Well, you did already,” said Gerald as they passed by the large brick science buildings. “You found something incredibly important.”
Voigt brightened. “Oh, indeed? That’s very nice, but what could it possibly be?”
“That seemed to be an infinitely smooth surface. Down to the molecular level. An infinitely smooth surface means that it was cut by something infinitely smooth. I’ve seen this before.” He told Voigt about Dacey Livingstone’s smooth rock and the smooth slice through the bridge. Voigt’s eyes widened. This was better than any simple murder mystery!
They returned to Voigt’s small office, and he began to pull dog-eared criminal pathology texts off his shelf. In the process of setting them on his desk, he spied a pink phone message slip. It was for Gerald and it was the phone number of the Deus Foundation, which was the only place he had kept apprised of his travels. He called the foundation on his cell phone.
“A Brendan Cooper called,” said the foundation secretary’s efficient voice.
“Cooper? From Woods Hole?” Gerald had worked with Cooper on fluid dynamics calculations several times. He liked the no-nonsense oceanographer.
“Yes. He’s got something for you to look at. Something he says is ‘right up your alley.’ He wants to send a plane to pick you up. Immediately, he said.”
• • •
The face looming unsteadily at the rain-dappled window of the police car was snaggle-toothed and with a scraggly beard flecked with dried food. The dirty hand rapped sloppily on the glass, and the cop lowered the window, unfortunately allowing the wet breeze to carry the fetid body odor into the squad car. A truck rumbled past, its tires hissing on the wet pavement, but the Bronx street was otherwise quiet.
“Ah wanna repo ah messn pusn,” mumbled the face, the alcohol-reeking breath rolling into the car.
“You what, pal? You wanna what?”
“Messn pusn. Frinna mine’s gone. Jerry’s gone. Down inna hole like.”
“Missin’ person?” interpreted the cop. “Go down to the precinct station. File a report.” The New York cop had seen too many drunks not to know that most of them hallucinated most of the time. But this drunk would not be put off. He stood up to his full height, teetering and slapping the top of the car and shouting.
“He’s jus’ gone! He’s a goo’ guy, an’ ya gotta come help him! Yeah! C’mon. Lemme show ya.”
The cop looked over at his partner and shrugged.
“To protect and to serve, remember?” joked his partner.
“Shit. Well, by God, you gotta come, too.”
“Wouldn’t miss it!” The partner switched off the car’s engine and they both got out, slid their nightsticks into their belt holders and followed the drunk. He wobbled his way into an alley lined with dumpsters and dirty cardboard boxes. A snore emanated from one of the dumpsters and pairs of suspicious eyes peered blearily from some of the boxes.
“’S gettin’ cold,” explained the drunk stopping and looking over his shoulder to make sure they were still following. “Jerry, he looked for somewhere warm, ’n he found this hole; ’n now he’s gone.”
“Just show us,” said the cop, pulling his cap low over his eyes and plunging ahead. It was an odd sight, the weaving drunk leading the two tall crisply uniformed, fully equipped policemen through the grimy, garbage-strewn alleys.
They had gone about a block, when the derelict pushed hard against the rusty steel door of an abandoned building, scraping it open, and went in.
“Look buddy, this is far enough,” said the cop, peering into the murk. “We’re outta here.”
“Nah, nah. Jus’ a little farther here. Other side a’ this buildin’.”
The cops both flicked on their flashlights, scanning them about the inside of the building. They also both made sure their guns were loose in their holsters. The drunk lurched through the building, crunching over broken glass and kicking discarded cans. Muttered complaints floated from the darkness, emanating from beneath piles of dirty blankets in the corners. The drunk stumbled against a pillar, and cursing unintelligibly, staggered through the other doorway. The cops followed. The drunk stood triumphantly and pointed.
“Here. This here’s where Jerry went.” The cops followed his pointing to a dark place against the side of
the building.
The first cop shined his flashlight into the gloom, revealing a perfectly round hole, about the size of a manhole. It was partly bored in the vertical side of the building and partly in the dirty asphalt of the alley.
“What’s this? A drain hole? Your buddy get stuck in a drain hole?”
“Nah, nah,” the drunk waved his hand. “We heard this damn noise and came out and this here hole was here. Right here, like this. Shit. Ain’ no fuckin’ drain hole.”
The first cop squatted down and shined the flashlight directly into the hole. Warm air wafted from it. The hole slanted down absolutely straight as far as he could see. The hole’s sides were as smooth as glass.
“Well, you guys did a damned good job of diggin’, I gotta hand it to you.”
“Nah, didn’t dig it, man. Couldn’a dug it. Look!” The drunk got down on his hands and knees and felt around, coming up with a wine bottle. He confirmed the bottle’s emptiness by tipping it up to his lips, then slid it into the hole, giving it a flick with his wrist. The clinking sound of the careening bottle reverberated from the hole, becoming fainter and fainter and fainter, until it faded completely. The drunk stood up and braced himself against the building. “’S too damn deep. Jerry’s in there. He got his blanket and got in there and I could hear him slippin’ away. He kept slippin’ and hollerin’. Then I didn’t hear ’im no more. I think maybe the devils got ’im.”
“Devils? What the hell is this, pal?” The cop shined his flashlight directly into the drunk’s face, revealing the scarred, dirt-stained geography of a ruined life. The drunk squinted and became indignant.
“Yeah, we seen devils come out. Damn right! Jerry had the mojo magic to put ’em back in there.”
“Aw, shit, this is some rummy’s nightmare,” said the partner. “I’m not goin’ down in some sewer after some drunk that may or may not be there.”
“Tell ya what pal,” said the cop loudly to the drunk, who was beginning to nod off. “You wait here for Jerry. Maybe pitch a rope down. If he doesn’t show, you go down and see Sergeant Ryan. You file a report with him.”
“Ryan’s gonna be pissed at you, siccin’ that drunk on him,” said the partner.
“That’ll teach him to screw me into holiday shifts,” said the cop. The two cops turned, got their bearings and headed out of the alley, avoiding the building, to the street to find their car.
The drunk slumped to the ground beside the hole, moaned once, and was soon asleep.
The four-ton Remotely Operated Vehicle settled onto the pitch-black ocean bottom like the most delicate of ballet dancers putting down a tentative toe onto a stage. The sediment stirred around the huge ungainly box, but not much, settling back quickly. The darkness was absolute two thousand feet below the Atlantic, but it yielded instantly to the SeaProbe’s brilliant floodlights that switched on, piercing the frigid gloom in front of the machine out to a dozen yards. A faint fog of sediment swirled through the lights, but the cameras could see clearly as the two large mechanical arms stretched out and moved back and forth experimentally, then refolded themselves. Powerful streams of water spewed from the robot’s cylindrical thrusters and it lifted itself, stirring the sediment once more and turned to its right, then its left, scanning the area. Then it settled quietly onto the bottom, waiting for further instructions.
Far above, however, was turmoil. Gerald paced back and forth inside the cramped shipping container that was the SeaProbe’s control room. The robot’s operator, diving expert K.C. Wang, sat tensely at the SeaProbe’s thruster controls, his eyes glued to the three-D eyepieces that gave him a view of what SeaProbe’s twin cameras saw. Wang was a stocky, round-faced Chinese man with a luxurious head of thick black hair and an enthusiasm for anything that involved underwater exploration. The cumbersome SeaProbe wasn’t his favorite underwater machine, even though the three-D view its cameras afforded made him almost part of its liquid world. However, it did allow him to do underwater exploration and still remain dry.
Sitting beside Wang at the SeaProbe’s manipulator controls, the Woods Hole oceanographer, Brendan Cooper, was just finishing an argument with the ship’s captain. They only heard his side of the conversation over the ship’s telephone, but they could imagine the captain’s.
“I don’t give a shit!” Cooper listened a bit, a scowl on his face. “Well, I still don’t give a shit!” He listened some more. “Listen, I know this ocean better than you do. I know these storm systems. I’ve seen the radar. Storm’s still way out there. You can damned well hold station for three more hours! So, do it!” He slammed down the receiver, especially frustrated because he knew that his bluster was hollow. The captain alone would decide where the ship would go, and he could only hope that bullying worked better than pleading. He turned his attention to Wang. “Let’s get on with it.” Wang said nothing, but tensed his jaw and went back to his eyepieces.
And Gerald continued to pace. A heave of the deck threw him off balance. He stumbled against Phillippe Togani, who was the only one who was quiet. The oil company structural engineer sat patiently behind Cooper and Wang, taking notes, watching the underwater robot’s progress. He was planning what structural inspection he would ask for when they encountered the sunken tanker.
“Gerald, will you sit the hell down!” barked Cooper, putting his eyes to a companion pair of three-D eyepieces.
“Sorry. I’m thinking.” Gerald was, indeed, immersed in his own storm of conjecture. So much mystery here! So much to take into account. The briefing he’d received had set him to trying to recall his knowledge of thermodynamics, heat flow equations, metal matrix structure. A supertanker had been sunk by something that violently heated the water for a mile around. They were about to see this devastated tanker, and he had to know what scientific questions to ask, what data to gather. His instinct told him this disaster would somehow fit with the other bizarre phenomena. But it was a puzzle in which he only had pieces, with no overall picture. In fact, he didn’t even know the shape of the pieces. And he just couldn’t figure it out sitting down. The deck lurched again as the Acorn crested a wave caused by the oncoming storm. But he compensated this time.
“Okay, where from here?” asked Wang. Cooper consulted the SeaProbe’s sonar.
“Go ten degrees port, a hundred yards. Sonar shows a big blip.”
K.C. unlimbered his fingers and nudged the small joystick forward on his control panel, his eyes glued to the eyepieces. The robot’s cameras showed that it was easing forward. He looked up and watched the direction and distance register on the digital readouts, checking the view occasionally on one of two video monitors above the control panel. “I think we’re there,” he said, turning to Cooper. “I see some junk on the bottom.”
“Scan the cameras.”
Wang did so, and they each glued their eyes to their eyepieces, scrutinizing the murk for signs of their quarry.
“Look there,” whispered Wang. “Damn!” The robot’s cameras showed the faint outlines of an immense, shattered hulk reaching upward into the darkness. Gerald stopped pacing and sat in his chair, his gaze riveted on the video screen. The robot moved closer and the gigantic steel corpse became clearer. “That the bow?” he asked.
“Stern,” said Togani.
“Let’s do some exploring,” said Wang, pushing the joystick forward.
Two thousand feet below, the boxy robot, topped by a large chunk of orange, buoyant plastic foam, eased toward the giant wall of steel. Its thrusters — whining high-speed propellers housed in protective cylinders — rotated, and it rose along the wall. Finally, the scorched twisted railing of the lifeless ship came into the lights.
“Can I please see the stern superstructure?” asked Togani.
Cooper nodded, and Wang touched the controls shifting the robot ponderously to the right around the stern until the large shattered windows of the master’s cabin came into view. The curtains were singed. The bed linens flapped in slow motion from the wash of the thrusters. A wooden desk
chair wavered back and forth trapped against the ceiling. It was the bedroom of a dead man. Togani bent and scribbled some notes.
“The stern section went down after it broke apart,” said Togani.
“Let’s just make sure we got the right ship,” said Cooper.
Wang worked the controls and the robot obediently sank downward, below the chilling sight. The painted legend, “Castile,” rose into view.
Above, Wang sat back in his chair. “As if there were any doubt.”
“Okay, let’s see what happened to her,” said Cooper, just as the deck lurched violently, and at the same time the phone to the bridge beeped insistently. Cooper ignored the sound. The dull roaring of the storm had risen, so that they had to speak louder now to be heard.
“You going to pick it up?” asked Wang.
“Sure,” said Cooper, picking up the receiver and laying it on a nearby desk. “Happy?”
“I’m pulling out,” said Wang. “We’ll come back next week.”
“C’mon, K.C. Haggerty’s on the warpath about this,” said Cooper. “And this is the Atlantic. That wreck could shift God-knows-where or go over the shelf in a week.”
“It’s true,” said Togani quietly. “Haggerty will be looking for the data or else.”
“It’s my robot,” said Wang. “It’s my ass. I’m hauling out.”
“Look, just check topside,” said Cooper. “Ask how the drum’s behaving.”
Wang radioed the technicians handling the robot’s cable and the huge underwater spool that maintained the cable’s tension. He got his answer over his headphones and looked at Cooper and Togani for a long time before answering. A faint sheen of perspiration rose on his forehead. The roaring rose and fell outside.
“I’ll give you thirty more minutes on the bottom,” said Wang. “Takes an hour to bring it up. That’s it.” Again, they felt the ship lift and fall, as a wave rolled under it.
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