Wormholes

by Dennis Meredith

  She’d walked about half a mile, enjoying the limbering of muscles that hadn’t been used in the day of travel. But still the house had not appeared. She was beginning to think she’d somehow taken the wrong road, when she glimpsed through the trees a large stone building away from the road on the left. The road wound around to the left, bringing the structure into full view. She stopped, stunned.

  Arrayed before her was a massive mansion fronted with a white-colonnaded portico. The center of the mansion rose three stories, and it was flanked by two massive wings with high leaded windows. The mansion was topped by a slate roof, with large stone chimneys jutting from several places in the structure, and a thin curl of smoke rising from one. She looked around for a house, thinking that perhaps this was some school or college, and that the mother’s house was nearby. Then she realized that the road she had been walking wasn’t a road. It was a driveway!

  “Woof!” she said to herself, taking a deep breath and walking the final block to the house, passing graceful marble statuary of nymphs, lions, and a cherub-topped fountain that had been shut down for the coming winter. She reached the portico, climbed the stone steps and pondered whether to use the massive brass doorknocker shaped like a swan. Fortunately, there was also a doorbell and she pushed it, hearing no sound.

  The door was opened by a pleasant, round-faced woman in a gray uniform. She smiled warmly.

  “I’m looking for the Meier house.”

  “This is it, dear,” said the woman. “Gerald said to expect you. Please come in.” Still smiling, the woman led her toward the rear of the house. “Mrs. Meier is in the sun room. She said you should come in there and say hello and maybe have a little breakfast. You want some breakfast?” As the woman talked, they proceeded through a marble-floored, high-ceilinged hall with a large crystal chandelier and a broad carpeted staircase going up one side. The entry hall was spacious, as if meant to hold influxes of large numbers of people. French Impressionist paintings lined the hall, which was brightened by light streaming from open double doors at the rear of the mansion.

  They went through those doors into a high-ceilinged sun room with large windows looking out over a lawn sloping down to a lake that lay still and gleaming in the morning sun. A trim, erect older woman sat primly at a glass-topped table, sipping coffee and writing in a leather notebook. She wore low heels and a conservative straight wool skirt and sweater that Dacey recognized as probably something like a Gloria Vanderbilt. Her gray hair was done in short, soft ringlets, carefully combed. She rose to greet Dacey, her fine features breaking into a smile. She approached, extending a small hand.

  “You must be Gerald’s friend. Is it Dacey? I’m sorry, but Gerald sometimes doesn’t pay enough attention … doesn’t give me names right, so I’m sometimes rather embarrassed.”

  “Yes, it’s Dacey, and you’re his mom?”

  “Call me Katy. Gerald’s been shut away in the library since I got up. He keeps most of his books and computers in here. I’ll show you, but you must have breakfast first. Cook is marvelous, and she demands that we eat her breakfasts.” Dacey gratefully accepted, realizing she had worked up an appetite. The round-faced maid took her request — eggs and toast — but she and Katy encouraged Dacey to expand it to a three-egg Denver omelet, bacon, croissants and fried potatoes. “Cook will be happier that way,” said Katy Meier. Pleased at the successful order, the maid bustled off to the kitchen.

  “This is a gorgeous house,” said Dacey sipping from a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice Katy had poured for her. “I don’t know how to say this, but Gerald doesn’t … well … act like he’s—”

  “Rich? Dear me, he certainly doesn’t!” Katy Meier laughed and shook her head. “Well, I guess it is sort of irrelevant to him. Maybe it’s that he was raised with it. I think he feels like it gets in his way, and he’d prefer a simpler life. I know he was driving quite a woebegone van for a while.”

  “Not any more. Gave it away.” Dacey took her first sip from a cup of hot, perfect coffee.

  “That’s Gerald.”

  “So he lives in the house down the road?”

  “Used to be the caretaker’s house. I’m pleased he does. When you’ve only got one, it’s nice to have him nearby. I guess he felt he wanted to stay near, too. I do sometimes need help running this place, although Gerald’s contribution is in the area of advice. It made sense for him to stay here because he works at Harvard, anyway. It’s only about forty-five minutes away. But he didn’t want to live with Mom.” Her voice dropped the slightest bit in pitch, assuming a tone of gentle mocking. “And he does have his own ways.”

  “I’ve noticed. Do you know what he’s working on?”

  “He’s told me. I’m not sure I understand it all. But what I do know is that it sounds mighty peculiar to me. If anybody else had taken off on a wild hare chase like that, I’d have had the man with the net after them. But Gerald has always had a pretty good head on him. The director of his center tells me that his physics ideas have been invariably brilliant.” She smiled as a mother smiles when discussing a precocious child.

  They continued to chat amiably as breakfast arrived and Dacey ate heartily. But she didn’t feel self-conscious. Katy showed an easy grace, thought Dacey, in how she formed the conversation into a warm, personal sharing designed to put Dacey at ease. She told how the house had been in the family for ninety years, so she didn’t feel she should sell it, even though it was a bit much. Anyway, she liked to keep it for special occasions like Christmas, when all the Meier relatives visited.

  She drew from Dacey the story of her involvement with the Deus Foundation and the adventures in San Francisco and in the Atlantic. Katy shook her head in genteel wonder, expressing hope that Gerald, with all his notions, hadn’t gotten her involved in something too dangerous.

  Finally Dacey folded the linen napkin and placed it on the table, thanking Katy for the fine breakfast. Katy showed her from the room and down a long side hall in the east wing to large mahogany doors at the end. She opened one and marched in, and Dacey followed. The library was a spacious room, awash in morning light from the leaded glass windows that occupied one wall. Beneath the windows sat overstuffed leather easy chairs with ottomans and sturdy side tables with carved legs. The other three walls were covered with bookshelves solidly populated with richly bound volumes of all sizes. A wheeled traveling ladder allowed access to the upper shelves. Dacey envisioned generations of bewhiskered, vest-wearing men climbing the creaking ladder to bring down a leather-covered volume, which they would take to the chair to read over an after-dinner brandy and cigar. Indeed, Dacey imagined she could smell the faintest aroma of tobacco amidst the mildly musty fragrance of books and leather.

  She noticed that a section of one bookshelf wall was populated by an incongrously colorful collection of books that had obviously been shelved and reshelved in a jumble of horizontal and vertical modes, with hints of a rather intricate filing scheme that was probably perfectly clear to their owner. That wall was clearly Gerald’s.

  In the venerable library, Gerald sat behind a computer at a large table in the middle of the room. His hair tousled from an apparent night of toil, he stared owlishly at the glowing screen of a high-end sophisticated computer work station. Certainly more expensive than the geology department would buy her, thought Dacey. The table was covered with books and papers with a scattering of Coke cans.

  He looked up as they entered and smiled, but the smile had a hint of mildly lunatic inspiration.

  “Dear, here’s Dacey,” said Katy, crossing the room to hug him. He squeezed her hand and she patted his face and left, excusing herself for her “morning chores.” Gerald motioned to Dacey to come look at the computer screen.

  “Something’s happened! Something’s appeared!”

  Dacey stepped across the oriental carpet to look over his shoulder at a satellite image showing a mountainous terrain with a thick pall of smoke swirling from one of the valleys.

  “It’s in China.
There was a huge explosion! I just downloaded this from the satellite image service. And look at these!” Gerald spread out printouts of wire service reports.

  “My God,” said Dacey, scanning the reports. “This event was massive. It’s almost certainly not volcanism. It’s mid-plate. Volcanoes only happen where crustal plates collide.”

  “Yeah, I think a hole opened up. Maybe to a star on the other side. The temperature calculations are right for a star like the sun.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Maybe it’s the same thing that killed that ship. We should go there. Take Cooper and the oil company guys. This would go a long way toward proving my theory.”

  Dacey pulled up a chair and sat, as Gerald continued to call up satellite images, each showing the devastation in more detail.

  “Well, I’ve got classes to teach,” she said dutifully, but she was becoming more and more fascinated with the incredible images. A whole valley had been decimated. Then she shook her head, as if rattling her brain to change subjects, and stood up. “Wait a second! I’ve got to get something else straight here! Gerald, you’re rich. What’re you doing being rich?”

  Gerald tore his gaze away from the computer screen and looked sheepish.

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry.”

  “What I don’t understand is that if you’re rich why do you need …” Dacey stopped herself, paused, and threw back her head in a sudden dawning of realization. “Ohhh! Waaaiiit a minute!” She paused again for a long time, putting puzzle pieces together in her head. She looked Gerald square in the eye, arching one eyebrow. “Gerald …” she said with her best low, accusatory voice “… are you the Deus Foundation?”

  Now Gerald looked downright embarrassed. He shifted in his chair and tapped a few commands on the computer keyboard to give himself time. “Well … um … yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Um …” Gerald sat back in his chair, looking like a small boy who had been caught with contraband cookies. “Started four years ago. I decided the government was just too conventional. Wouldn’t fund bleeding-edge scientific research. Stuff that was maybe only wild speculation. So, I started the Deus Foundation. Called it that because I wanted to help understand the ultimate scientific questions — all the way to what we think of as God.” His brow knitted in puzzlement. “And when all these things came along …” He made a helpless gesture at the computer screen. “… I knew I needed to help people who wanted to find out about them. And I needed to investigate them myself, and when I told people I was from a foundation, I got more cooperation.” He looked at her hopefully, gesturing to the satellite image. “But you’ll stay with it, won’t you? You’ll go see what this thing was?”

  Dacey tapped her fingers on the sheaf of wire reports. She thought of the incredible phenomenon represented by the Gillard hole. And of the tragedy of the mother and her children there. And of the catastrophe the satellite images revealed. She took a deep breath.

  “Oh, hell, Gerald, all right!”

  • • •

  On Neptune the distant sun casts but a dim radiance on the pale blue methane clouds carried by supersonic winds that stream across a featureless rocky surface. The huge frozen planet has rotated slowly on its axis for billions of years, drifting around the sun in quiet obeyance of the laws of orbital dynamics.

  A fiery, violent blast shatters that ancient serenity, erupting from beneath the thick ice mantle. Matter alien to the universe contacts the crystalline ice, unleashing a planet-shattering explosion of heat and light that bursts the core into razorlike shards for thousands of miles and explodes away much of the atmosphere, sending it careening into space. The vast hammering blow rolls outward from the lacerated planet, hurling the smallest moon from its grasp and launching the largest moon on a new, crazily looping circuit that triggers deep shuddering moonquakes.

  The deformed planetary corpse reels drunkenly in its orbit, wobbling and casting great masses of the icy jagged rubble spinning into space. The remnants of the planet scatter the planet’s moons and rings into a cloud of swirling particles. The immense turmoil produces flashes of cold lightning glittering across the atmosphere’s wispy remains.

  Roiling waves of radiation stream outward from the planetary holocaust in an expanding light-speed bubble. By the time the visible light reaches earth, however, it has waned into the faintest shimmer, which is automatically registered along with billions of other emanations from the heavens by the few optical telescopes that happen to be pointed in that direction. The heat radiation is similarly detected by an Earth-orbiting infrared telescope, which records the arriving infrared wave as a faint ember-like glow from the previously frozen planet.

  But the real messenger of cosmic violence are the gamma rays, the highest-energy radiation from space. They are registered as an anonymous burst on the detectors of an orbiting gamma ray telescope. But since the huge satellite cannot pinpoint the direction of sources, the telltale signals will not carry the news of the planetary cataclysm.

  All the telescopes and satellites dutifully transmit their raw data to be stored in their respective computers.

  But the planet is such a routine citizen of the solar system, and the various pieces of data so subtle and disparate, that the information lies unanalyzed, uncorrelated.

  The computers, thus, do not tell their human masters of the titanic cataclysm, that has all but torn apart the giant, frozen planet.

  The sleek Chinese Z-9 helicopter skimmed above the rugged Mongolian mountains touched with the first snows of winter and swooped down to roar across the valley below.

  “Ah, yes,” shouted Li Feng, the Chinese army interpreter, to the passengers. “Yes. This is it. Look!”

  They craned their necks to see out the windows a blasted surface of tortured, blackened rock. They saw no movement that would indicate any surviving life. The helicopter sped down the valley for miles, with the same frozen violence passing beneath, then lifted upward, banked left and circled back, returning more slowly.

  Swathed in a thick wool coat that limited her movement, Dacey recorded the scene with her video camera, stopping occasionally to marvel at the heat that had created such devastation. Beside her, Gerald Meier, Gordon Haggerty and Brendan Cooper crouched unsteadily in the metal and canvas seats. At the scientists’ urging, Haggerty had reluctantly persuaded the Chinese government to lend the coats, the helicopter, and the interpreter. The government had gladly done so, since he was a top executive of a company they hoped would invest billions in their oil industry. The oceanographer, Cooper, was totally out of his element, but Dacey had encouraged him to come as a third set of scientifically trained eyes.

  Staring grimly at the visitors from their seats were three nervous Chinese soldiers with their AK-47s and belts of ammunition. The northern province of Inner Mongolia was not a place they liked to go, even though things had been relatively peaceful there of late.

  “Where to land?” asked the interpreter.

  Dacey scanned the gray-black waste through the scarred window, searching for solid, smooth ground. She pointed to the left. “We’ve got a level-looking magma fan there.”

  Cooper got up from his seat on the other side of the helicopter, deftly negotiating the unpredictable undulations of the hovering craft, and joined her. “Yeah, yeah. That’s as good as we’re going to get, I think.” He spoke to the interpreter who relayed the instructions. The helicopter eased forward, flared out and settled onto the rock. The Chinese soldiers pulled open the armored metal door and jumped out, scanning the area, their impassive expressions showing no hint of amazement at the alien terrain.

  The others followed, standing beneath the lead-gray sky, each silently marveling at the landscape of blast-furnace-sculptured rock surrounding them.

  Dacey set her large knapsack down and began video recording a full-circle pan of the valley for later study. She didn’t notice Haggerty stride out across the great wrinkled fan of lava, which looked like a dull, black bedsheet that had
been draped across the ground. The helicopter’s engine died, leaving only the whisper of a cold breeze across a dead-quiet landscape.

  “So this is what you brought me to see?” Haggerty called back to the group. “I’ve seen volcanoes. I know damned well—”

  “STOP RIGHT THERE!” commanded Dacey, looking up from her camera.

  Haggerty turned and cast a dark look at her. He turned away to walk farther.

  “DAMNIT, I SAID STOP!”

  “Better listen to her,” said Cooper.

  “What the hell for?” Haggerty demanded.

  With an exasperated expression, Dacey handed Cooper the camera and found a large jagged chunk of lava, pried it up and hefted it in her hand. She walked out toward Haggerty and stood beside him. Her annoyed gaze still on him, she lofted the rock five feet beyond where he stood. With a light crunch, the rock broke through and disappeared, leaving a jagged hole.

  “Many times in these formations, the skin of a lava flow will solidify, and the melt underneath will flow away leaving a thin crust over a deep hollow. That would’ve been a thirty-foot drop onto the sharpest rock you could imagine. Like that stuff.” She gestured up the valley, where vapor bubbles had frothed the black rock into a vicious terrain of razor-sharp points and edges.

  “All right. So, thanks.” His life saved, Haggerty was more amenable. “Let’s hear your story. Convince me this was some damned hole in the universe, same as killed my ship. Give me an act of God I can sell to the insurance company.”

  “First of all, this isn’t a volcano.” Dacey waved her hand around the landscape. “You see any caldera? Any volcanic cones? Any ash? You smell sulfur? This wasn’t an eruption of magma. It was a melt of surface rock.” Gerald stepped up with his backpack and unrolled a map and Dacey continued. “We’re here, at the north end of the valley. Gerald has some satellite photos, so we could map the path of this surface melt. It’s a lot wider than the ocean-floor melt under the Castile, but it’s still a characteristic formation.”