Wormholes

by Dennis Meredith

  “Characteristic of what?”

  “A stellar transdimensional aperture,” said Gerald.

  “A what?” asked Haggerty.

  “That’s what I call it. I calculated what would happen if a star’s hundred-thousand-degree fusion furnace erupted through a hole, say, thirty feet in diameter. That temperature could do this.”

  “How the hell do you get from a volcano to this stellar whatever?”

  “We’ve got something to show you.” Gerald smiled, scratching his beard. He nodded to Dacey, who hefted her knapsack onto her back, attached her helmet camera, and led them down the center of the wide flow toward a distant ridge. She stopped occasionally to test the strength of the crust and to collect rock samples. She sealed the samples in plastic bags, marked them, recorded them in a small notebook and stuffed them into her knapsack. She had consulted a volcanologist at the US Geological Survey about the satellite images, and he had agreed with her initial interpretation. But the video recordings and rock samples would clinch it.

  The others followed, picking their way among the rubble. They talked little during the ten-minute walk. They reached the ridge and climbed carefully up, keeping their footing on the slick lava flow. Several times they had to use their hands and found the rock still hot to the touch.

  Dacey and Gerald reached the top first, and Dacey began to video their destination. Haggerty and Cooper pulled themselves up. Feng talked to the three soldiers, who stood guard at the bottom, looking out over the broad heat-blasted valley from where they had come. Feng trudged up the slope. “They said it is okay that we go up. They will watch.”

  He found the group standing together, staring up in amazement at a yawning cave entrance some five hundred feet in diameter melted into the side of the mountain. Looking back, they could see that the path into the cave was over a flow of solidified lava that looked like a gigantic black tongue extruding from a mouth. Dacey pointed out that the sides were smooth and glassy.

  Gerald turned to Haggerty and Cooper. “What happened here was that something round and extremely hot, about a hundred thousand degrees, and floating above the ground melted its way into the side of this mountain. I did a computer simulation of that scenario, and this is exactly the formation you get.” He reached into his knapsack and passed out large flashlights. “Now we’ll see where this thing goes.”

  “Not just yet,” said Dacey. “Let me see what’s up there first.” She hauled her climbing harness out of her knapsack and strapped it on. She switched on her camera and headlamp and donned climbing gloves. Paying out a rope behind her, she gingerly picked her way up the great corrugated tongue of lava and disappeared over the lip into the blackness of the cave. The rope wriggled slightly with her movement. After half an hour, the group heard the faint sound of hammering. Shortly afterward, Dacey reappeared, carefully letting herself down by the rope.

  “The floor’s slicker than snail snot,” she proclaimed. “You’ll be essentially walking on glass. I went as far as I could and belayed the rope. I’ve got to warn you. It slopes down, so if you let go, you’ll slide away.”

  She turned and pulled herself hand-over-hand into the cave, and the others followed, clicking on their headlamps. The beams played about, reflecting off the black-mirror surface of the cave walls, revealing the absence of the usual rubble and rock formations. It was one great, smooth hole. The gray outside light waned as they made their way deeper into the hole, and soon only the headlamps illuminated the immense chamber.

  A baking warmth from the cave’s sides enveloped them, and they smelled the smoky tang of melted rock. Dacey had them stop periodically and hold their lights still, so she could video sections of the cave and take samples.

  Haggerty abruptly slipped and slammed to the floor, cursing and beginning to slip away into the cavern. Dacey lunged for the flailing man, catching his leg, sliding along with him. She reached out her gloved hand and grabbed the rope, straining to hold them both. Gerald grabbed her, and together, they hauled Haggerty back and helped him to his feet.

  They recovered and continued. After a few minutes of more carefully making their way down the shallow slope, they reached the point where Dacey had hammered a piton into the rock to fasten the rope. The cavern appeared to begin tapering away to a point. Dacey pulled out a chemical glow stick, cracked the glass ampoule inside and pitched it forward. It slid away, growing fainter until it was no longer visible.

  “See. It just stops,” said Dacey, her voice echoing in the chamber. “The hole started closing here. That’s where you would have ended up, Gordon.”

  “Yeah, thanks again,” said Haggerty. “Closed?” They let the question hang in the darkness and silence.

  Gerald finally answered, “I say it closed because I didn’t know what else to call it. ‘Closed’ will have to do for now.”

  Inspecting the walls with his headlamp, Cooper said, “Well, I’m not willing to conclude anything just yet, Gordon. But something like this could easily have taken out the Castile.” Cooper pulled himself up toward the entrance and turned to peer back at the terminus. “But, hell, there’s got to be a more down-to-earth explanation.” His voice was amplified by the peculiar acoustics of the cavern’s end.

  “We’re beyond ‘down-to-earth,’” said Gerald, his voice rising to echo louder in the cavern. “‘Down-to-earth’ doesn’t work, Brendan. Just look at the logic of this theory. A stellar …” He paused, realizing that the technical term seemed pompous. “… a sort of gateway into the interior of a star like the sun is what sank your ship, Mr. Haggerty.”

  “Tell you what,” said Dacey, shining her headlamp in Cooper’s direction and climbing up toward the faint light of the cave’s mouth. “Nothing like a first-hand account. Let’s interview somebody who was there. I was talking to Mr. Feng on the helicopter. He says he heard of a village that had some survivors. Let’s go there.”

  “Look, this is pretty goddamned far from an ocean and my ship,” grumped Haggerty.

  “Hey, Gordon, you hired me for answers,” said Cooper. “Let’s just take a shot.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s my nickel.”

  “It’s also your ass if this doesn’t get solved.”

  Haggerty’s response was to vigorously pull himself away toward the cave entrance. Cooper grinned. It was Haggerty’s way of agreeing and still maintaining his distance, should something go wrong. They followed him out of the cave and joined the soldiers to pick their way back down the treacherous lava flow toward the helicopter. They pulled themselves aboard and the helicopter roused itself from silence and spun its rotors up to a vicious whirling chop through the cold air. The helicopter hoisted itself into the sky and rose over the mountains to skim along over a vast grassy plain.

  After half an hour, a small village of tents and mud huts came into view. The helicopter circled once and settled down nearby, drawing a crowd of curious people dressed in bulky woolens and heavy hide boots, with broad Mongol faces and eyes as black as obsidian. The children giggled and shouted, but the adults were wary, respectful. When the soldiers emerged, their rifles at the ready, the crowd shrank away, eyeing the guns and moving the children back in the crowd. The dogs barked and bared their teeth, and the children merrily whacked at them and sat on them to quiet them. Nearby, several mangy-looking fly-infested camels brayed their displeasure at the intruding helicopter.

  Li Feng followed the soldiers out, moving among the crowd talking briefly to several, some of whom backed away, waving their hands in reluctance. Finally, Feng settled on an elderly man with a wispy white beard, wearing a large woolen cap and a thick frayed coat torn at both shoulders. The conversation was animated, with the old man jutting his chin forward, glaring at them with one open rheumy eye. He gestured angrily at the soldiers, who stood watching the increasingly sullen group with evident suspicion.

  Feng turned back to Haggerty. “He says some people have, indeed, come here from the fire valley. He says there are two, a nephew of his and his son. The nephew
was so close he was blinded. But the old man says he will not take you to them. He does not like the soldiers. There is great resentment of the central government here. He thinks you are from the government.”

  “Tell him we are Americans,” said Haggerty.

  Feng did so. The old man broke into a broad snaggle-toothed smile and began to chatter something to the other villagers. Smiles replaced the suspicious looks, and the crowd took up the phrase and became more animated, moving closer to the visitors. The words sounded at first like “Sian In In.”

  “What the hell are they saying?” asked Haggerty.

  Feng laughed. “They think you are from CNN. I think they will want payment for their help.”

  Haggerty muttered an obscenity. “Negotiate with them. Tell them we’re from PBS.”

  Feng did so, and the crowd grew less enthusiastic. The old man continued to smile, but perhaps less effusively. He made a curt gesture that they could not interpret.

  “He says they will accept less, but they want to negotiate commercial rights, in case the film shows up on a network. He says they have a person in the village who acts as a sort of agent.”

  “Jesus!” said Haggerty. “I can’t believe this. Just work it out.”

  Feng and the old man launched into a round of vigorous haggling, complete with animated gestures. Shortly, a slim young man dressed as the others, but with an earring and a moustache, arrived, and the bargaining became sharper.

  “Neg myanga!” both the young man and the old man shouted. “In dollars! Twenties!” they added.

  Feng shook his head and countered. “Zuu! Zuu!”

  After several rounds of shouting, the young man abruptly turned and strode off through the crowd, toward a large, crude circular animal-hide yurt that sat beside an adobe hut. Feng followed and motioned for the others to follow him.

  “We have reached agreement. They wanted a thousand dollars. I countered with a hundred. We settled on five hundred. The man will see us.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Haggerty, fishing a wallet from the depths of his coat. He gave Feng the money and Feng paid the old man. As the old man counted the money and scrutinized the bills, the young man disappeared into the tent. After a moment he reappeared, holding open the embroidered felt flap. He exchanged a few words with Feng.

  “We may go in. Remove your hats and do not step on the threshold. It is very bad manners.” They crouched and filed in. The tent was dark, lit only by a single candle and the dim yellowish light filtering through some of the thinner hides. The air was warm from glowing coals in a center pit in the earthen floor. Its smoke curled through a hole in the roof. The yurt smelled of the smoke, human occupation, the grease of a recent meal, and a faint odor of burned fabric.

  Once their eyes became used to the dim light, the visitors discerned a man lying on a rug at the end opposite the door. He lay on his side, a plastic bottle of water beside him, as well as a battered metal dish with a few scraps of fried mutton in congealed grease. Feng squatted near him and greeted him with a “Sain baina uu,” and they exchanged words in Mongolian. Feng motioned the others to join him, and Haggerty, Cooper, Dacey, and Gerald crowded together in the small yurt, sitting across from him. The man’s brown face was blistered, and the burned skin was beginning to peel away, revealing lighter new skin beneath. Patches of cloth covered his eyes, and bandages of similar material, stained with grease, covered his hands.

  The tent flap opened again, and a boy entered the tent and moved to sit warily beside the older man. They exchanged a few brief phrases, and the older man felt for his son’s shoulder and patted it. The boy moved to the fire and poured tea from a blackened kettle into small bowls for the guests.

  “Bayarrila,” said Feng, and indicated for the others to say the same. They managed an approximation of the Mongolian for “thank you.”

  Feng asked some questions, and the man answered in the affirmative. He turned to Haggerty.

  “He is Damdi Choibalsan and this is his son.” The man nodded. “He is agreeable to the payment of five hundred dollars and he will answer truthfully all that you ask.”

  Haggerty nodded curtly. “Looks like he’ll need it. Ask him just to tell us what happened.” Feng did so, and — with Dacey video-recording the interview — the man launched into a chatter of Mongolian in a strained voice. The memory apparently gave him pain, because of the way he stopped periodically and stiffened, trying not to show his anguish. Feng translated as the man spoke.

  “He says he is camping with their flock just before begin shearing. Him and brother and wife and wife’s brother. And son. He and son left early in morning to check the goats and go hunt in mountain. They get far up in the mountains and hear huge sound down in the valley. He look at sound and see light … bright light … all of a sudden on east side of valley. He went back where he could see into valley. He looked too much. His eyes began to hurt and he became blind. His son had just come down the path, and he grabbed him and would not let him look. The heat came then and … burned them. He guided his son by telling him how to get across the mountain to get here. He thought the thing that came was a piece of the sun.”

  The father said a few words to the boy, who also spoke, and Feng translated. “My father did not know that I saw. After the blinding light, there was great flame. Great clouds. The thing was mostly hidden by the clouds. That is what I saw.”

  Gerald leaned forward intently. “That’s exactly what you’d expect. The gateway opens up, and the heat and light energy begin to come through. But then hydrogen is also pouring through, because that’s what’s in stars. The hydrogen catches fire in our atmosphere, making a fireball. And when you burn hydrogen, you get steam. That’s where the clouds come from. It fits. It all fits!”

  Through Feng, Haggerty and Cooper began to question the man and his son more intensively. They had moved closer, trying to glean from the man as much detail as possible about the sound they had heard, when another sound intruded. The distant dull pop of gunfire. One of the soldiers entered the tent and barked an order at Feng.

  “There is a group coming that we should not encounter,” said Feng, rising quickly to his feet and motioning for the others to do the same. “They are the local rebels and the soldiers say we should leave very quickly.”

  “Well, let’s just do that, then,” said Haggerty. They hurried out of the tent into a crowd that importuned them with various versions of “PBS! I got story! I got story!”

  They sprinted for the helicopter, which had already started its engine and begun turning its huge rotor up to speed, raising a cloud of tan dust into the late afternoon sun. They climbed in as the shooting grew perilously close. The last of the soldiers slammed the door shut and the helicopter vaulted into the air accelerating into a roaring ascent. A bullet twanged off the fuselage. And another. But they were safely away.

  Haggerty talked briefly to Cooper and Feng and then made his way forward to sit beside Dacey and Gerald in the darkness lit only by a dim light over the door to the cockpit.

  “If you consider me a test case, you made a little headway,” said Haggerty. “I still don’t know how, or even whether, I’m going to try to sell this to the company. But in any case, I’m sure easier to convince because I’ve seen some of this stuff. You two have a bitch of a job ahead of you if you think you’re going to get everybody else to believe this. I’m sure as hell not going to go public.”

  “Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,” shouted Dacey over the engine noise. “Like Gerald says, it all fits.” She patted her knapsack containing the video camera and rock samples. “These’ll show that.”

  Gerald said nothing, but his brow was knitted in a way that told her he was already immersed in plotting a strategy.

  Gerald had been driving his new battered van for two hours that morning, wandering back roads that went east toward the sun, aiming himself generally back toward Boston. He was glad he’d decided to take a week or so and drive from Los Angeles, where the China flight had l
anded. Anyway, Dacey and he separated there, with her going to Oklahoma and him to Boston. He’d bought the old van for the trip from an ad on Craigslist. He felt comfortable in them. Maybe he wouldn’t give this one away. The camping trip had given him time to think on the road from California, seeing the scenery, walking in the high plateau country of Mesa Verde, eating a store-bought sandwich at a lonely rest stop.

  He thought of his visit with George Voigt in Columbia, Missouri, the day before as he sipped a coffee from a McDonald’s drive-through. The arm was still a big mystery, George had said in quiet, gentlemanly frustration. No other body parts and few of the plane parts had been recovered. The man was a businessman from Ohio, flying himself to a meeting in Kansas City. Nothing unusual, except that almost all of him disappeared from the face of the earth. As they sat in George’s cluttered office going over the lab findings, Gerald had told George of his theory. The old pathologist hadn’t laughed, but he’d gotten a twinkle in his eye. George said he’d think about it.

  Gerald was frustrated. A long trip usually gave him enough time to develop a new theory, see things from a new perspective. Maybe it was the other thoughts that intruded. About Dacey. Her wry smile, her terrific eyes, the sort of what-the-hell way she leaned her body against his desk, looking over his shoulder, the subtle fragrance of soap rising from her skin.

  He brought himself back to the problem. The holes represented something totally alien from the usual physical theories. He had to come at the problem from an entirely different perspective. As he drove along the quiet road, the morning sun warming his face, he visualized the equations governing space-time, let them float in his conscious, rearranging themselves, the parameters altering, the multiple equations appearing and fading.

  His mind wandered from the equations. He remembered that dream from the night before. How strange it was to dream of Alice in Wonderland, even though he’d loved the book as a kid. Maybe it was the rabbit hole. He remembered mainly the Cheshire cat, sitting beside him grinning. It had dark fur like the cat, Smokey, he’d had when he was a kid. The Cheshire cat ate a mouse. Then it faded, like the one in the cartoon sitting in a tree. And all that was left was its smile. And the cat yawned.