Blasphemy wf-2

by Douglas Preston

  “As such it always interested me—helped us win World War Two.”

  The Jeep shrieked to a stop in front of a casita, small and neat, with a fenced yard enclosing a patch of artificially green lawn, along with a patio, picnic table, and barbecue.

  “The Ford residence,” Hazelius said.

  “Charming.” In fact, it was anything but. It looked crushingly suburban, this tacky little subdivision done up in imitation Pueblo-revival style. But the setting was magnificent.

  “Government housing is the same everywhere,” Hazelius said. “But you’ll find it comfortable.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Down in the Bunker. That’s what we call the underground complex that houses Isabella. By the way, where are your bags?”

  “They’re coming tomorrow.”

  “They must have been anxious to get you out here.”

  “Didn’t even give me time to collect my toothbrush.”

  Hazelius gunned the Jeep and took the final curve of the loop at rubber-stripping speed. Then he stopped, shifted into four-wheel drive, and coaxed the vehicle off the pavement onto two uneven ruts through the brush.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They spun their wheels in gullies and bounced around boulders as the Jeep climbed up through the strange, twisted forest of junipers and dead piñons. They bounced along for a few miles. A long steep slope of red slick-rock sandstone loomed ahead.

  The Jeep stopped, and Hazelius hopped out. “It’s just up here.”

  His curiosity growing, Ford followed him up the slope to the summit of the peculiar sandstone bluff. The top was a huge surprise: he found himself unexpectedly at the edge of Red Mesa, the cliffs dropping away almost two thousand feet. There was no sense that the mesa edge had been coming up, no warning that a cliff lay ahead.

  “Nice, eh?” Hazelius asked.

  “Scary. You could drive over the edge before you knew it.”

  “In fact, there’s a legend about a Navajo cowboy, chasing a maverick on horseback, who rode off here. They say his chindii, his ghost, still rides off the edge on certain dark, stormy nights.”

  The view was breathtaking. An ancient land spread out below them, humps and pillars of rock the color of blood, windblasted and sculpted into strange shapes. Beyond lay mesas layered on mountains beyond mountains. It could have been the edge of Creation itself, where God had finally given up, in despair of bringing order to an unruly land.

  “That great island mesa in the distance,” said Hazelius, “is No Man’s Mesa, nine miles long and a mile broad. They say there’s a secret trail to the top that no white man has ever found. To the left is Piute Mesa. Shonto Mesa is the one in front. Farther back are the Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Cedar Mesa, the Bears Ears, and the Manti-La Sal mountains.”

  A pair of ravens rode an air current up, then dipped and glided back into gloomy depths. Their cries echoed among the canyons.

  “Red Mesa is accessible at only two points—the Dugway, back behind us, and a trail that starts a couple of miles over there. Navajos call it the Midnight Trail. It ends in Blackhorse, that little settlement down there.”

  As they turned to go, Ford noticed a series of marks on the face of a huge boulder that had split down the bedding plane.

  Hazelius following his gaze. “See something?”

  Ford walked over and laid his hand on the uneven surface. “Fossil raindrops. And . . . the fossilized track of an insect.”

  “Well, well,” the scientist said in a low voice. “Everyone’s been up here to look at the view. But you’re the first person to have noticed that—beyond myself, of course. Fossil raindrops from a shower that fell in the age of dinosaurs. And then, after the rain, a beetle walked across the wet sand. Somehow, against all odds, this little moment in history got fossilized.” Hazelius touched it reverently. “Nothing we humans have done on this earth, none of our great works—not the Mona Lisa or Chartres Cathedral or even the pyramids of Egypt—will last as long as that beetle’s track in wet sand.”

  Ford was strangely moved by the thought.

  Hazelius traced his own finger along the insect’s wandering path, and then straightened up. “Well!” he said, grasping Ford’s shoulder and giving it an affectionate shake. “I can see you and I are going to be friends.”

  Ford remembered Lockwood’s warning.

  Hazelius turned southward, gesturing back across the mesa top. “In the Paleozoic, all this was an immense swamp. It gave us some of the thickest coal seams in America. They were mined out in the fifties. Those old tunnels were perfect for retrofitting Isabella.”

  The sun lit Hazelius’s nearly unlined face as he turned to smile at Ford. “We couldn’t have found a better place, Wyman—isolated, undisturbed, uninhabited. But to me the most important thing was the beauty of this landscape, because beauty and mystery have a central place in physics. As Einstein said, ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true science.’ ”

  Ford watched the sun slowly die in the deep canyons to the west, like gold melting into copper.

  Hazelius said, “Ready to go underground?”

  5

  THE JEEP JOSTLED BACK TO THE road. Ford gripped the roof handhold, trying to look relaxed as Hazelius accelerated hard past the airstrip, hitting eighty on the straight road.

  “See any cops?” Hazelius asked with a grin.

  A mile beyond, the road was blocked by two gates in a double set of chain-link fences topped with concertina wire, walling off an area along the edge of the mesa. He braked at the last minute, the wheels squealing.

  “All that’s inside is the Security Zone,” said Hazelius. He punched a code into a keypad on a post. A horn squawked and the gate rolled open. Hazelius drove in and parked the Jeep next to a row of other cars. “The Elevator,” he said, nodding toward a tall tower perched on the edge of the cliffs, festooned with antennae and satellite dishes. They walked up to it, and Hazelius swiped a card through a slot beside the metal door, then placed his hand on a palm reader. After a moment a husky female voice said, “Afternoon, sugar. Who’s the cat with you?”

  “This is Wyman Ford.”

  “Gimme some skin, Wyman.”

  Hazelius smiled. “What she means is, lay your palm on the reader.”

  Ford placed his hand on the warm glass. A bar of light moved down it.

  “Hold on while I check with the man.”

  Hazelius chuckled. “You like our little security interface?”

  “Different.”

  “That’s Isabella. Most computer voices are of the HAL variety, too white-bread for my taste.” He mimicked a stage-trained white voice: “‘Please listen carefully, as our menu items have changed.’ Isabella, on the other hand, has a real voice. Our engineer, Ken Dolby, programmed it. I believe he got some rap singer to lend him her voice.”

  “Who is the real Isabella?”

  “I don’t know. Ken’s rather mysterious on that point.”

  The voice rolled out like honey. “The man says cool. You in the system now, so don’t get yo ass in no trouble.”

  The metal doors swished open, revealing an elevator cage that ran down the side of the mountain. A small porthole window showed the view as they descended. When the elevator halted, Isabella warned them to watch their step.

  They stood on a spacious outdoor platform cut into the side of the cliff in front of the huge titanium door Ford had seen from the air. It appeared to be twenty feet wide and at least forty feet high.

  “This is the staging area. Another nice view, eh?”

  “You should build condos.”

  “This was the opening to the great Wepo coal seam. They took fifty million short tons of coal from this seam alone, and left huge caverns behind. A perfect setup for us. It was critical to get Isabella deep underground, to protect people from radiation when Isabella is running at high power.”

  Hazelius approache
d the titanium portal set back into the cliff. “We call this fortress the Bunker.”

  “I need yo number, sugar,” Isabella said.

  Hazelius punched in a series of numbers on a small keypad.

  A moment later the voice said, “Come on in, boys.” The door began to rise.

  “Why such high security?” Ford asked.

  “We have a forty-billion-dollar investment to protect. And much of our hardware and software is classified.”

  The door opened on a vast echoing cavern carved out of stone. It smelled of dust and smoke, with a hint of mustiness that reminded Ford of his grandmother’s cellar. It was cool and pleasant after the heat of the desert. The door rumbled down, and Ford blinked to adjust to the sodium lighting. The cavern was huge, perhaps six hundred feet deep and fifty feet high. Straight ahead, at the far end of the cavern, Ford could see an oval door, which opened into the side of a tunnel filled with stainless steel pipes, tubes, and bundles of cable. A fog of condensates poured out of the door, flowing over the ground in little rivers that vanished. To the left a cinder block wall had been built across another opening in the rock, with a steel door in it. The door was marked THE BRIDGE. Along the other side of the cavern there were stacks of steel caissons, I-beams, and other leftover construction materials, along with heavy equipment and half a dozen golf carts.

  Hazelius took his arm. “Straight ahead is the oval opening to Isabella itself. That fog is condensation from the superconducting magnets. They have to be cooled with liquid helium at close to absolute zero to maintain superconductivity. That tunnel runs back into the mesa, forming a torus fifteen miles in diameter, where we circulate the two particle beams. The fleet of electric golf carts over there is transportation. Now let’s go meet the gang.”

  As they strolled across the cavern, their footfalls echoing in the cathedral-like space, Ford asked casually, “How are things going?”

  “Problems,” said Hazelius. “One damn thing after another.”

  “Like what?”

  “Software, this time.”

  They approached the door marked the bridge. Hazelius opened it for Ford, exposing a cinder block corridor painted slime green and illuminated with fluorescent strips in the ceiling.

  “Second door on the right. Here, let me get it for you.”

  Ford stepped through into a circular room, brightly lit. Huge flat-panel computer screens lined the walls, giving the room the appearance of the bridge of a spaceship, with windows looking into deep space. The screens were not operating, and a starship screen saver running simultaneously on them completed the illusion of a spaceship passing through a starfield. Below the screens were massive banks of control panels, consoles, and workstations. The room had a sunken center, with a retro-futuristic swivel chair in the middle.

  Most of the scientists had paused in their work to look at Ford curiously. He was struck by their haggard appearance, their pale, cave-creature faces and rumpled clothes. They looked worse than a bunch of grad students at the bitter end of final exams. His eyes instinctually searched for Kate Mercer, and then he immediately upbraided himself for his interest.

  “Look familiar?” Hazelius asked, an amused twinkle in his eye.

  Ford looked around, surprised. It did look familiar—and he suddenly realized why.

  “To go where no man has gone before,” he said.

  Hazelius laughed delightedly. “Right you are! It’s a replica of the bridge of the original starship Enterprise from Star Trek. It happened to make an excellent design for a particle accelerator control room.”

  The illusion that this was the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise was partly spoiled by a trash barrel overflowing with soda cans and frozen pizza boxes. Papers and candy wrappers lay scattered about the floor, and an unopened bottle of Veuve Clicquot lay on its side against the curving wall.

  “Sorry about the mess—we’re wrapping up a run. Only about half the team is here—you can meet the rest at dinner.” He turned to the group. “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you the newest member of our team, Wyman Ford. He’s the anthropologist I requested to act as a liaison with the local communities.”

  Nods, murmurs of greeting, a fleeting smile or two—he was little more than a distraction. Which was just fine with him.

  “I’ll just go around the room and introduce everyone quickly. We can get better acquainted at dinner.”

  The group waited wearily.

  “This is Tony Wardlaw, our senior intelligence officer. He’s here to keep us out of trouble.”

  A man as solid as a butcher’s block stepped forward. “Nice to meet you, sir.” He had a whitewall marine haircut, military posture, no-nonsense expression—and the gray face of exhaustion. As Ford expected, the man’s grip tried to crush his hand. He crushed back.

  “This is George Innes, our team psychologist. He leads weekly chat sessions and helps keep us sane. I don’t know where we’d be without his steadying presence.”

  A few exchanged glances and rolled eyes told Ford where the others felt they’d be without Innes. Innes’s handshake was cool and professional, just the right pressure and length. He looked outdoorsy, in neatly pressed L.L. Bean khaki pants and a checked shirt. Fit, well groomed, he looked like the type who thought everyone but himself had problems.

  “Good to meet you, Wyman,” he said, peering over the rim of his tortoiseshell glasses. “I imagine you must feel a bit like a new student entering school in the middle of the semester.”

  “I do.”

  “I’m here if you ever feel the need to talk.”

  “Thank you.”

  Hazelius swept him forward toward a wreck of a young man, early thirties, thin as a rail, with long greasy blond hair. “This is Peter Volkonsky, our software engineer. Peter hails from Yekaterinburg, Russia.”

  Reluctantly Volkonsky detached himself from the console he had been hunched over. His restless, manic eyes roved over Ford. He didn’t offer his hand, merely nodded distractedly, with a curt “Hi.”

  “Good to meet you, Peter.”

  Volkonsky shifted back to his keyboard and resumed typing. His thin shoulder blades stuck out like a child’s under his ragged T-shirt.

  “And this is Ken Dolby, our chief engineer and the designer of Isabella. Someday there’ll be a statue of him in the Smithsonian.”

  Dolby strode over—big, tall, friendly, African-American, maybe thirty-nine, with the laid-back air of a California surfer. Ford liked him immediately—a no-nonsense kind of guy. He, too, looked frayed, with bloodshot eyes. He extended his palm. “Welcome,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind we’re not at our best. Some of us have been up for thirty-six hours.”

  They moved on. “And this is Alan Edelstein,” Hazelius continued, “our mathematician.”

  A man Ford had barely noticed, sitting away from the others, raised his eyes from the book he was reading—Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He raised a single finger in greeting, his penetrating eyes steady on Ford. His arch look suggested supercilious amusement with the world.

  “How’s the book?” Ford asked.

  “A real page-turner.”

  “Alan is a man of few words,” said Hazelius. “But he speaks the language of mathematics with great eloquence. Not to mention his powers as a snake charmer.”

  Edelstein acknowledged the compliment with an incline of his head.

  “Snake charmer?”

  “Alan has a rather controversial hobby.”

  “He keeps rattlesnakes as pets,” said Innes. “He has a way with them, it seems.” He said it facetiously, but Ford thought he detected an edge in his voice.

  Without looking up from his book, Edelstein said, “Snakes are interesting and useful. They eat rats. Which we have quite a few of around here.” He shot a pointed glance at Innes.

  “Alan does us a double service,” said Hazelius. “Those Havahart traps you’ll see in the Bunker and scattered about the facility keep us rodent—and hantavirus—free. He feeds them to his snakes
.”

  “How do you catch a rattlesnake?” Ford asked.

  “Carefully,” Innes answered for Edelstein, with a tense laugh, pushing his glasses back up his nose.

  Once more Edelstein’s dark eyes met Ford’s. “If you see one, let me know and I’ll show you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Excellent,” said Hazelius hastily. “Now let me introduce you to Rae Chen, our computer engineer.”

  An Asian woman who looked young enough to be carded jumped off her seat and stuck out her hand, her waist-length black hair swinging. She was dressed like a typical Berkeley student, in a grubby T-shirt with a peace sign on the front and jeans patched with pieces of a British flag.

  “Hey, nice to meet you, Wyman.” An unusual intelligence lurked in her black eyes, and something that resembled wariness. Or maybe it was just that she, like the others, looked exhausted.

  “My pleasure.”

  “Well, back to work,” she said with artificial brightness, nodding at her computer.

  “That mostly does it,” said Hazelius. “But where’s Kate? I thought she was running those Hawking radiation calculations.”

  “She took off early,” said Innes. “Said she wanted to get dinner started.”

  Hazelius circled back to his chair, gave it an affectionate slap. “When Isabella is running, we’re peering into the very moment of creation.” He chuckled. “I get a kick out of sitting in my Captain Kirk chair, watching us go where no man has gone before.”

  Ford watched him settle in his chair, kicking his feet up with a smile, and he thought—he’s the only one in this room who doesn’t look worried sick.

  6

  SUNDAY EVENING, THE REVEREND DON T. SPATES fitted his bulk into the makeup chair so as not to crease his pants and handmade Italian cotton shirt. Once in, he adjusted his large bottom, moving it from side to side with a flurry of creaks and squeaks in the leather. He carefully leaned his head back against the headrest. Wanda stood to one side, holding the barbershop robe.

  “Do me good, Wanda,” he said, closing his eyes. “This is a big Sunday. A real big Sunday.”