Wormholes

by Dennis Meredith

  In the other vehicle, the burly driver gripped the steering lever with white knuckles, removing a hand only to nervously brush back the mop of dark hair. This was his chance to show what he could do. Behind him a young woman monitored the magnetic fields. She was a very brilliant and somewhat intimidating engineer, whom he’d been trying to impress. Now, she would be impressed.

  Both carriers maneuvered into place northeast and northwest of the beast, which was relentlessly tunneling its way toward them below the city streets. If they understood its past behavior correctly, it should move beneath and between them.

  They waited. In thirty seconds, it would reach the target position. All was happening as planned. It grew closer. Now it created bone-rattling vibrations in the earth which grew powerful enough to heave even the immense machines up and down like toys. But they stayed on station and manipulated the controls to point the hemispheres down to attract the beast to the surface. They switched on the magnetic fields, and the computer automatically shaped, balanced and rebalanced the magnetism according to the beast’s changing position as it came into range.

  Suddenly the beast stopped. A tense silence fell. The controller in the van held his breath. Then with a roar, it rose from the earth, drawn from its hiding place by the fields. The technicians stared at their monitor screens in both anticipation and fear, following its approach.

  It surfaced with a rumbling, crackling sound, eating away the pavement around it, tearing away at nearby buildings, as if raging against its captors. First came benches, signs, garbage cans and other miscellany of the street. Still the carriers held their positions, maintaining the fields.

  But then the beast seemed to claw the very structures of the old stone buildings around it, rending their walls and sucking the stones toward it. The stones became its missiles, smashing into the carriers with a reverberating metallic clang, careening away, then arcing into the monster’s embrace to disappear. The bombardment became even more terrifying because it was cloaked in impenetrable clouds of swirling dust and smoke.

  Inside the carriers, the deafening cannonade unnerved the operators, distracted them and slowed their reflexes. A large granite stone dislodged from a disintegrating church steeple, slammed down into one of the hemispheres and tore away a crucial cable, causing the magnetic field to falter. Another stone followed hard on the first, compounding the damage.

  The beast had freed itself from the magnetic cage. Before anyone could react, it skewed toward the intact carrier, drawn by a remnant magnetic field that was not shut down fast enough. It ate harmlessly through one side of the hemisphere and continued to skirt along the south side of the vehicle, which was successfully resisting the vicious pull of its vacuum. But now the field was off and it could resume the steady northerly path that had been its nature. It veered in a deadly drift into the vehicle, slicing through the metal plate and eviscerating the carrier as a predator draws the soft living substance from a broken egg.

  The young man with the medallion and his red-headed friend lived only an instant before they were crushed and swallowed into another universe.

  Over the radios came the static-laden sounds of screaming, shouting, and sobbing from the remaining carrier, as the creature continued its unhampered drift northward, consuming houses, offices, stores. After a while, it wafted into the sky, again resuming the shriek that was its call.

  Abruptly, the hellish sound ceased, as if it were choked off. The abrupt disappearance left the faint wail of sirens, an immense, jagged smoking scar of destruction across the city and the shattered remains of what had been a confidently designed scientific plan.

  • • •

  “Jesus, we can’t even talk to the people who were in the surviving carrier!” Brendan Cooper’s frustration spilled out of the phone line from Paris. In Nevada, Gerald and Andy Mullins sat huddled around the speakerphone in the small office just off the hangar. Outside the office, the engineers from Megamag and Deus crowded around the door, straining to hear the conference call. Cameron was linked from San Francisco, and Dacey was in Oklahoma. Cooper, who had sat agonized in the control room during the catastrophe, continued, “The doctors’ve got them sedated, and they’re not even sure the guys are going to come out of this sane.”

  “Brendan, I know it was traumatic, but could they be rendered insane?” asked Gerald.

  “Well, the way the docs told me, it’s major post-traumatic stress disorder. These people encountered something that turned their whole world … well, their universe … literally inside out. They couldn’t cope. Gerald, you’ve got to rethink this whole thing. You’ve got to rethink the equipment, but you’ve also got to rethink the people.”

  “God. My God, what have I done.” Gerald whispered, resting his palms on the desk, staring down at the phone.

  “C’mon, Gerald, it wasn’t just you,” said Mullins. “We all developed this thing … did the best we could with what we knew.”

  “Yes, but people died.”

  “Bullshit,” came a third voice through the phone. “This happens. I’ve had people killed on my rigs, and it’s a bad thing, but you just figure out what went wrong and you forge ahead.” The voice rose and fell in volume as Lambert apparently moved about in his office.

  “Calvin, don’t you feel anything here?” asked Gerald.

  “I feel like you people didn’t take everything into account. Hell, didn’t you ever expect these things to make crap fly around?”

  “We thought the control system could handle it … shut down quick enough. We just didn’t realize the holes have no inertia. They’ll move instantly responding to the subtlest change in a magnetic field. We’ll fix it next time.”

  “Fine, you do that,” said Lambert. “You also call a news conference. My people will be there inside an hour to run it. Make sure you emphasize that this … event … proves that these things exist. No fucking way this could have been some tornado.”

  “Calvin, we will emphasize that it was a terrible tragedy that these people died,” said Gerald. “We’ll emphasize that we made mistakes, that—”

  “For Christ’s sake don’t say mistakes. I’ve had my share of lawsuits. We’ll have the families, the damned French government, everybody, on our asses. My pockets are deep, but I’m not going to open them for this.”

  “I will say that. I will tell what I think—”

  “Gerald, you are an employee of Deus, Inc.” His voice grew louder. Lambert had leaned right into his speakerphone. “You will say what you are told to say, or I will fucking cut this project off. I will pull out and say that I was hornswoggled, that your theory doesn’t work worth a shit, do you hear me, Gerald? Your choice, Gerald?” There was a click. Lambert hadn’t waited for an answer.

  “What a shithead,” said Cameron’s voice over the phone.

  “I think that’s a reasonable assessment,” came Dacey’s voice. “Gerald, don’t worry about him. Look, I’m flying out. Let’s go over all the information; figure something out. There are answers here.” They talked for a while and agreed that they would all gather the following day to go over all the data about all the occurrences again. When he hung up, Gerald found he was as determined as ever.

  Reporters packed the news conference that afternoon in the cavernous hangar. Footage of the Paris disaster had run all morning on CNN and the morning talk shows, complete with hastily called experts. So, the reporters were primed with full details of what had happened. The trail of devastation had run for three miles through urban Paris, with 937 people known dead and billions of dollars in damage.

  Flanked by suited PR men from Lambert’s company, Gerald stood and delivered a statement on what was known about the failure of the Deus attempt to capture the hole. Then, he answered questions, choosing the questioners from the forest of insistent hands that would shoot up after each answer. He gave answers, some not his own:

  Yes, it was a terrible tragedy.

  Yes, it was reminiscent of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The tw
o people in the doomed capture vehicle, Roger Cavendish and Emily Corot, gave their lives for science, as well as to stop the hole in its destructive tracks.

  Yes, it was obviously incontrovertible proof that the Meier theory was correct. Amateur video footage from the Eiffel Tower clearly showed the hole slice through its center.

  No, Calvin Lambert was not pulling out. However, he was not available at this time for his reaction.

  Yes, an enormous amount had been learned about the phenomenon to allow improvements in the system.

  No, Deus, Inc. did not make any obvious mistakes. An act of God cannot be controlled, especially one as entirely new as this one.

  Then, the question that Gerald expected:

  Yes, he would somehow manage to be in one of the two capture vehicles that encountered the next hole. He wouldn’t ask others to risk their lives if he wouldn’t risk his.

  • • •

  “Nothing comes from nothing.” Ralph Gaston smiled inscrutably and leaned back in the chair, studying wall-sized screens full of maps and charts, and the incongruously ancient blackboard covered with equations. The others looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something else, but he didn’t.

  “Damn, Ralph, you doing your Confucius imitation again?” Cameron perched on a nearby work table drinking a Coke. But Gaston didn’t reply, letting his proverb sink in.

  They were all bleary from ten hours in the large briefing room in the former Air Force administration building. Besides the newly installed computer screens, it held several worn work tables, old metal arm chairs and a yellowing topographic area map on one wall.

  Covering the tables were laptop computers, rock samples, photos, and anything else that pertained to the appearance of the holes. In particular, Dacey’s sheared-off rock from beneath Gillard sat in the middle of the largest table, a singular object of contemplation surrounded by coffee cups, sandwich wrappers, and yellow pads with pages covered with scribbles.

  “He’s right, you know.” The elderly doctor George Voigt stood apart in an easy slouch, his hands in his pockets, gazing at the screenfuls of maps. He wore his usual white shirt, slacks, and bow tie, but also a brand new pair of hiking boots that Dacey had helped him buy. “In my experience, there’s never been a time when, say, a murderer didn’t give clues beforehand about what he was going to do. I had these deaths once in this hospital. Thirteen. It was the killer’s unlucky number. I had all the bodies exhumed and found traces of a muscle relaxant in most of them. The killer turned out to be an orderly. He wasn’t supposed to be near a hypodermic. But we got onto him because before he had even begun his killing, somebody once saw him practicing giving shots on an orange.”

  “Okay, George, then you and Ralph are saying these things must give warning.” Gerald sat at the chair by the large computer terminal, rubbing his beard tiredly. “Where do we go from there? We can get anything we want from the government computers. NASA, DOD, DOE … everybody’s opened up to us. Sky’s the limit.”

  “Yeah,” said Dacey. “Sky’s the limit, but we don’t know where to start to get there.” She took a sip of old coffee and seemed to shake herself awake. “Okay, then, let’s start at the sky. If we’re going to catch these things, we need a warning. That means we need surveillance that has to be from the sky. That only means satellites.”

  Gerald sat back and began to scribble a list of earth-scanning satellites. “All right. We got GOES, GPS, NOAA—”

  “What’s that alphabet mean?” asked Cameron.

  “Uh. … satellites to study the atmosphere, global positioning satellites, weather satellites …”

  Dacey went over behind Mullins, who sat in a chair off to one side. She slapped his beefy shoulders like a trainer would a boxer’s. Andy was fresh, having just spent half an hour snoring away in the chair. “Andy, imagine we got something that makes a magnetic disturbance. What would we see?”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Wait, I know!” exclaimed Dacey. “Maybe lights! Before an earthquake, there are sometimes lights in the sky. Seismologists think they come from magnetic fields affecting the atmosphere. Gimme some data, guys. Gimme some help here.”

  “Lights!” echoed Mullins helpfully. The engineer heaved his roly-poly bulk out of the chair with an oof and grabbed a yellow pad, flipping back the equation-covered pages and writing more of his own. “Let’s see. Got earth’s field. Got that. Then add field—”

  “There might be a new field,” said Gerald. “From the other … side. The other …” He hesitated to say “universe.” It seemed so Star Trekky. “An added field that penetrates through to our side just like matter and energy can. Or, maybe a field generated by the hole itself when it warps space-time.”

  “Maybe! Maybe!” Andy held up his yellow pad, although nobody could possibly have deciphered the wild scrawl of equations. “There could be light flashes!”

  “Could we see them?” Dacey looked from person to person.

  “Military satellites could,” said Gerald. “DOD has spy satellites that look for light flashes and infrared signatures of rockets being launched. And they’ve got the resolution to see even small flashes and pinpoint them immediately.” He grabbed a laptop and began pecking away at the keys. He quickly displayed a list of satellites on one of the big screens. The group leaned in. “Okay, yeah … there are military satellites up there that look for light flashes from launches. And NASA’s got satellites that detect lightning flashes. We’ve got to call the people who run them. Put in a request.”

  “Like hell ‘put in a request’!” exclaimed Cameron, forcing a grin onto a face sagging with fatigue. He waved a cell phone. “We go right to the top. We get the damned President out of bed. I’d really like to do that.”

  After some persuasion, Gerald made the phone call and in an hour they had results. He had triggered a chain of calls from the President, to his science advisor, to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the Secretary of the Air Force. The Secretary called Gerald with a code word, hung up the phone, and issued a priority order that rattled down the Air Force chain of command to a coffee-primed captain on night duty at the Strategic Air Command in Colorado. The captain called them back, his voice betraying suspicion at the odd order. But after Gerald offered the code word, he gave them passwords to access the archived digital images from the Air Force’s IKON spy satellites. Gerald and Mullins had already linked the computer to a secure DOD network connection. The captain also talked Gerald through the commands to analyze and compare the images for anomalous light flashes. He hung up and began the process.

  The phone rang again shortly with another call from a NASA computer specialist who’d been rousted out of bed by another order that rattled down NASA’s chain of command to him. He gave Gerald instructions for accessing the earth-resources satellite images.

  “This’ll take a couple of hours,” said Gerald without looking up from the computer. “Go get some sleep.” Suddenly, they all felt the weight of twenty-four hours awake, except for Mullins, who’d had the requisite periodic catnap that was his habit. Leaving Gerald typing and Mullins hovering over him like a cherubic vulture, they all wandered tiredly down the gray-painted hall to the dormitory wing where pilots had slept before missions. The wing consisted of rooms bare of decoration, save for double beds, worn dressers, mirrors and bedside lamps. Pairs of rooms had connecting doors, and Dacey and Gerald had earlier, without comment, taken a connecting pair, but had not opened the door between them. Dacey managed to remember her room number, as did the others, and they were soon all inert forms in their beds.

  Dacey had lain for an hour in the deep sleep of dreams and soft paralysis, when a voice drew her awake. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “We got ’em,” whispered Gerald conspiratorially in her ear, and she came wide awake, only having to take a deep breath to clear her head for conversation.

  “Got what?” She sat up, seeing his form illuminated by the light from the hallway, as he crouched by her b
ed.

  “Flashes! We found flashes!”

  She leaped up, smoothing down her t-shirt over the top of her jeans and followed him in stocking feet over the worn linoleum tiles down to the briefing room. She heard sleepy moans behind her, as Mullins’ less-soothing commands rousted the others. Shortly, they all stood blearily before the large display screen, with Gerald at the laptop keyboard. He typed in a command. Two satellite images of a vast darkened landscape peppered with lights began alternately flashing on the large screen, one after the other.

  “What are we seeing?” asked Gaston.

  “Southern France,” said Gerald. “One image was a month ago. Another last week, a few days before the … uh … event. Both are the same region. I superimposed them so we can go back and forth.”

  “Speed ’em up now! Speed ’em up!” demanded Mullins eagerly.

  Gerald touched a key and the two dark images flashed one after the other on the screen. A few pinpoint lights blinked, indicating that the lights had been on during one image, off during the other.

  It was George, used to studying subtle images of cells under a microscope, who saw it first. “I see a peculiar flash! It’s faint, but it’s there! That’s not artificial lights!” He pointed to an area on the screen. The others leaned in. A soft reddish glow appeared on one image, disappeared on the other.

  “Right. That’s it,” said Gerald. “We also found something like this before China and before Gillard.”

  “Damn, man!” exclaimed Cameron. “Damn! We got the suckers!”

  “That we do,” said Gerald, a bone-deep fatigue permeating his voice. “That we do.”

  “You’re going to thank him, aren’t you?” asked Dacey. “Gerald, you should thank him.” She and Gerald stood in the thickly carpeted outer office of the President’s science advisor. They watched the advisor’s gray-suited aide shuffle through a large blue folder containing briefing papers on their visit, to be taken into the advisor before they would be invited to enter.