He panted with excitement and took another step. The effort was far easier. He felt dizzy. He stopped to give himself a chance to reorient, but realized it was impossible. Too much was happening. Again instructions from Gaston guided him to avoid the edge.
He stepped up again and his whole body was through, its weight vanished. He felt the shift of flesh on his body, the slight puffiness in his face and hands, the change in blood distribution that came with freedom from weight. Now he clung to the ladder for security not support. With a gentle tug, he pulled himself to the end and bent to look back. Confusion overcame him for a moment, before he managed to restore his retreating intellect. The ladder to which he held fast extended itself from a perfect glowing sphere floating in space, visible within, the ladder, Gaston, and the vacuum chamber. But he knew he had gone into a sphere on the other side. It was a real-life Escher painting, a real dimensional paradox. Of course, he had expected the alien geometry. After all, the hole had to be a sphere on this side as well as the other.
“I’m behind you,” he heard Gaston say in his helmet radio. He decided it was time. He pushed off from the ladder and floated free.
“Oh my God,” he heard himself say. “Oh my God!” He spread his arms to the new universe and lost himself in its magnificent immensity. He spun very slowly, watching with moist eyes as the stars passed before him in stately procession. His mind told him they were inanimate objects, immense globes of roiling thermonuclear fire, but his imagination heard them whisper of possibilities beyond his experience. They whispered to him of the amazing worlds that they harbored, and they promised him that now he and his kind would see them.
He caught his breath as a spiral galaxy slid into view, an opalescent whirlpool of a hundred billion stars. The spiral’s center glowed with the heat of a cosmic firestorm of colliding suns. Its wispy starry arms curved away far into space, shining crystalline necklaces on celestial display against black velvet.
There were stars in his helmet now, faintly shimmering points of light floating across his vision. He realized they were his tears, drifting away from his eyes to become tiny perfect droplets floating in weightless space.
He felt the tug of the tether and knew he had floated far from the hole. The tether’s pull rotated him around so he could look back toward his origin. He gathered his wits and gave Gaston the same guidance to avoid the edge.
Then, Gaston was through, too, holding onto the end of the ladder. A realization struck him like a physical blow. They were so alone! No comforting earth loomed nearby; no massive white spaceship hovered to take him onboard. Only a small hole in the indifferent vastness that could collapse away at any second.
“We’re going to be different now,” a voice said.
“What?” asked Gaston. The voice penetrated his vision, bringing back reality.
Gerald realized he had said the words. “I … guess I said we’re going to be different now.”
“Yes.” The single word told him Gaston had experienced something, too.
“Get back in! Now!” Mullins’s voice pierced the moment.
“What’s wrong?” As Gerald asked the question, he sensed some change in the hole, something besides the glow of the light from his universe. The ladder swayed back and forth, the framework almost touching the edge of the hole. Gaston held on, his grip revealing the precariousness of his situation.
“The vacuum chamber! We’ve got a leak!” said Mullins.
Gerald suddenly realized that floating free at the end of the tether, he had no way to get himself back quickly and accurately to the hole. The ladder lurched to one side, one rail grazing the edge of the hole. It sliced cleanly away, the ladder crumpling slightly. Gaston held on, leaning to one side to compensate. If the ladder went, if the frame broke, their reentry would be suicidal, given the lethal edges.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Mullins. “We’re sending a team to patch the chamber. You have to get back … now!”
Gerald felt a tug. Gaston was hauling him back by his tether, slowly, carefully, so that he wouldn’t veer into the edge.
“Just hold still,” Gaston said. “I think I can …” The ladder abruptly lurched again, slicing a shallow tear in the leg of Gaston’s suit. But the suit held, for now. Gaston stepped down two rungs, half his body now in the hole. If the framework gave any more, he would be sliced in half, but he remained in place, pulling Gerald in hand-over-hand.
Gerald touched the ladder, grabbed the top rung, and swung himself ponderously around in the weightlessness. He couldn’t see down now, because of the helmet. He didn’t know whether Gaston was alive, or whether he would have a way back.
“Ralph?” he asked.
There was no answer.
“Ralph!”
Then Gaston answered “I’m almost down. I’m going to hold …” The ladder tilted sideways and Gerald held on. “I’m going to hold onto the ladder. Step down.”
Gerald did so and felt the ladder swaying violently beneath him. Something flew upward past his face; something white. The vacuum chamber was leaking, spewing air into the hole, along with whatever debris was caught up in the maelstrom. His breathing grew ragged and he felt sweat trickle down his temple, joining the wetness already inside his helmet. A panic clutched his gut like a vice.
“Step again.” Gaston’s voice was calm, reassuring. Gerald did so. “And again. And again. Stop.” The ladder canted to one side, then righted itself.
Gaston continued to guide Gerald down. He felt the weight return to his legs, his waist, his chest. Finally, his helmet was at the edge. The ladder lurched again and his helmet listed over close to the edge and he jerked back to avoid having it cut through.
But finally, the welcome tug of gravity had returned to his entire body. He was through! He realized how hard Gaston had worked to steady the ladder beneath him, hauling back and forth to compensate for the swaying from his weight and the whirling gush of air out of the hole.
Gaston stumbled back against the wall and leaned against it. Gerald backed away in time to see the framework lurch so badly, the ladder sliced clean away and float into the darkness of space. He leaned against the wall, too, feeling the vicious winds buffeting their suited bodies.
“Get into the airlock! Get out of there!” shouted Mullins. They hauled themselves across the chamber against the hellish wind of the leak, and entered the airlock, shutting the door. Gaston operated the controls and after a minute they stumbled out of the chamber and into the arms of Megamag technicians. The technicians hustled them far away from the chamber, fighting a gale-force wind flowing toward the huge metal structure. Once they were a safe distance from the chamber inside the huge hangar, the technicians helped them to sit down and remove their helmets. Gerald relished the delicious, sweet desert air drying the sweat from his head, cooling him. Gaston’s helmet came off and he opened his mouth in relief, his eyes closed, his long brown hair plastered to his skull, the sheen of sweat on his thin face testifying to his exertion.
With the helmets removed, they became more aware of a vicious high-pitched hissing sound, like a hundred steam valves going off at once. Gerald laboriously turned in his suit to see two technicians wearing harnesses approaching the chamber. They were tethered by steel cable to a girder on the hangar wall, which were being payed out by a motorized winch operated by other technicians, who were also tethered on shorter cables. The two carried a metal plate in front of them like a shield. They aimed the plate at a spot on the chamber just above their heads. The cables zinged taut and they were both dragged toward the chamber. A wooden crate tumbled past them and leaped into the air at the spot on the chamber wall, slamming into it, crumpling into splinters and being sucked away through the small hole. The men fought to keep their balance and to keep the plate in front of them. Abruptly the plate, too, slammed against the side of the chamber. The hissing grew fainter, then stopped.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered the young frizzy-haired technician standing by Gerald. “W
e never ever thought that would happen!”
Gerald and Gaston looked at each other. They smiled knowingly. Then, the smiles blossomed into exultant laughter. The technicians looked on puzzled, as they stood and slapped each other on the padded shoulders and shouted in utter, glorious triumph.
• • •
“Best we can figure, it was about the size of a grain of sand,” said Mullins, gesturing at the projected image of a tiny round rupture in a gray-painted steel surface. He bobbed restlessly about the room full of scientists and engineers crowding around the long conference table and sitting in chairs lining the wall. At the table’s head were a haggard Gerald and Gaston, still wearing the blue coveralls they’d donned after taking off the space suits.
“Any sense of where it came from?” asked Gerald.
“Well, it almost certainly came out of the hole, traveling maybe a thousand miles an hour. You guys were really lucky it didn’t go right through either of you!”
Gerald and Gaston shared a glance that combined shock and relief. They had been so close to death.
“There’s more,” said Mullins. He screwed up his face and peered nearsightedly at the keyboard of his laptop, located the key to advance the image and tapped it decisively with his pudgy finger. Other, similar images, one by one appeared on the screen. They also showed close-ups of the chamber’s metal plate, with a welter of dents, furrows and mars in the smooth surface. Mullins punctuated them with “Here. Here. Here.” He stopped at an especially dramatic image. “Inside of the chamber is pitted. Took a number of other hits, but none of the others penetrated.”
“Lotta space crap out there, eh?” asked Cameron. “You guys better figure out how to stop it.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve already started.” Mullins tapped a few keys and brought up a three-D diagram of the hole, the magnetic field lines and the steering apparatus. “Particles are coming through, usually from the direction we’re traveling, relative to the local flow of stuff. Say, stuff orbiting a star. The particle that made the hole may have been going around the star where we were.” He stopped, grinning, realizing that he had dropped a bombshell. “Oh yeah, we’re doing computer enhancement of the helmet video. Didn’t want to say anything till it was done. Guess the cat’s out of the bag. The video picked up a nearby star and planets. Now we know our hole is in the outer reaches of a star system, with planets, moons, stuff like that. We’re, like, out where Uranus would be if we were in our solar system.”
“Whoa! Wait a minute!” Dacey leaned forward over the table. “We’ve got planets? Let’s look at that data!” Mullins nodded his head vigorously and waved at the screen.
“Yeah, first let me tell you how we figured to protect ourselves. We’ll deflect particles by directing energy through the hole in the direction of travel. Head ’em off.” He clicked to an animation of arrows streaming through the oval. “We’ll use lasers. Light exerts a pressure, like water from a hose. We figure we’ll use a combination of high-powered lasers, different colors, shining through the hole. It’ll deflect particles before they get to the hole.”
“Headlights,” said Cameron. “You’re installing headlights on the thing.”
“Yeah! Exactly!” said Mullins happily. “We called Lawrence Berkeley Labs. They do big lasers for fusion research. They said they could gin up a combination of lasers that could fit inside the vacuum chamber. Expensive. But it’s better than getting pinged at all the time. It’ll be a really intense white light.”
“You got low beams and high beams?” cracked Cameron. Mullins laughed along with the others in the room, shrugged, hitched up his pants and continued. “Okay, about those planets. Dr. Cohen has been looking at the images.” He nodded to the Caltech physicist, Aaron Cohen, who stood up, as Mullins brought up images that looked very familiar.
“It’s a yellow dwarf like the sun, a bit younger from what we can tell.” More images of dots floating in space. “The cameras picked up four or five planets, but the images were fuzzy.”
Dacey scribbled furiously on a yellow pad. She stopped Cohen and efficiently ticked off the next steps. They would need to train telescopes through the hole to get better images. Her planetologist friends would go absolutely bonkers. They would have to find out as much as possible about the alien planets.
Then they would visit them! They would sail down to their surfaces, riding their magnetically propelled “transdimensional aperture.” And they would step out onto the surface of another world!
The debriefing ended when Mullins realized that they had subjected a sagging Gerald and Gaston to four hours of questions, and the rest of the world was waiting eagerly to see the two. They walked out into the bright sun to a nearby hangar and the ebullient crowd of engineers and technicians, who were already polishing off their second case of champagne. There were toasts and congratulations and deeply felt thanks.
Gerald seemed to gather a second wind as he sipped champagne with Dacey and a raucous group of Megamag engineers. But then his brow knitted and he grew quiet. He abruptly got up and whispered something to Mullins and they retired to a small office in the hangar. Dacey could see them through the window bent over a desk, Gerald drawing something and Mullins nodding vigorously. The little man held up his hands, palms open, fashioning an imaginary large globular object in the air. They emerged and Mullins beckoned to one of his engineers and hurried off with him.
Gerald returned to Dacey and Gaston, but he wouldn’t answer when Dacey persistently quizzed him about the meeting. He couldn’t talk; it was time for the news conference, he said.
They drove to the news conference site, a hangar near the entrance gate that had been turned into a media center. Lambert’s Boeing 767 was already parked nearby, and he stood at the bottom of the stairway giving interviews to reporters.
The news conference went as before, except the attendance now was massive, a restless, aggressive gang of some three thousand reporters aiming their professional attention at Lambert, Gerald and Gaston. Standing before the forest of microphones, Lambert offered congratulations and explained how he had faithfully supported the project from the beginning. Gerald and Gaston stood to a rattling chorus of clicking cameras and patiently answered questions ranging from the magnetic parameters of the propulsive system (Physics Today) to why Gerald had shaved his beard (People).
A question from the Los Angeles Times, stopped him: “Do you think these holes represent an opportunity or a threat to humanity?”
For a long moment, he stared at the questioner, a tall, dapper man with a salt-and-pepper beard.
“Both,” he finally said, his dark eyes glancing around the group, as if searching for answers. “I’m not a philosopher. Talk to some philosophers for a good answer. But I know that these are incredibly powerful things. The wormholes could represent a way out for our species. I think we’re in danger on this planet. From ourselves. We’re trapped in our own foolishness. This is a way out of the trap. But they also represent a way in for things we just don’t understand.” He shrugged at the inadequacy of his answer and shifted uneasily.
The reporters continued their questioning, thrusting their hands in the air, shouting for attention. After Lambert’s public relations man stepped forward to call a halt there was a mass exodus to file their stories.
Lambert, showing a hearty good cheer from the press conference, invited Gerald, Gaston and Dacey onboard his jet. They entered to find four slickly groomed men in dark, expensively tailored suits and two generals in military uniforms festooned with ribbons. They sat at a confident ease in the leather chairs of the main lounge, sipping champagne or more substantial glasses of scotch.
Lambert introduced the men, naming the conglomerates or military branches they represented. He did not give titles. It was understood that they were the heads. They offered perfunctory handshakes and coolly cordial greetings.
“We’ve been talking about the commercial possibilities,” said Lambert, with the barely concealed relish of a bargainer with the upper
hand. “There’s nuclear waste disposal. We could assure that the wastes we put through would be completely disposed of. It would open up the nuclear industry; make it possible to start building reactors again.”
“But there’s so much we don’t know yet,” said Gerald, quietly, glancing over at Lambert’s assistant, Van Alston, sitting quietly to the side, an open leather notebook on his lap, taking notes. “This is only the beginning. There’s the physics of these holes, the astronomy of the other universe. First, we have—”
“Sure. Right. Of course,” interrupted Lambert. “But to do all that, we need support. We need income. We’ll charge the scientists.”
“There’s government support,” said Dacey, who like Gerald, remained standing, leaning against the bulkhead, watching the proceedings with evident suspicion. “The government will fund the basic research.”
A flicker of disdain crossed the faces of some of the men.
“Nah, I already nixed that, remember? No dice,” Lambert sat down in his chair and took up his scotch. “If the university types want to get money from the government, that’s fine. But we’ll charge an entrance fee. We’re contractors like any other contractors.” He nodded smiling at the two generals. “And there may well be military uses.” The pointed reference seemed designed to emphasize some discussion that Gerald suspected had been going on before he arrived. He understood from the generals’ stoic non-response that pressures were being brought to bear. He also realized that the military might well invoke national security to commandeer the holes.
“Look,” he said tersely, moving toward the exit. “I’m sure we can all talk about the possibilities. You can, anyway. But all this will have to wait. First we have to understand these holes, how they work. Most of all, we have to know how to close them once they open. Do you want another Paris?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and ducked out the door and down the stairs. Gaston and Dacey followed. They stood at the bottom of the stairs taking in the vista across the desert to the distant mountains, finding it refreshing after the close confines of the airplane and its powerful men.
Wormholes Page 27