Wave of Terror

by Jon Jefferson

  “Ouch,” he said. “A low blow.”

  “Sorry. I’ve had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week, David.”

  “Take two aspirin and the first flight home. But no need to call me in the morning. And now I gotta go—seriously. Bye.” He hung up before she had a chance to protest.

  She stewed for five minutes, mad and hurt and confused about what to do next. Something was percolating its way up from her subconscious, but she had no idea what. Suddenly she muttered, “Eureka!” and hit “Redial.”

  David didn’t pick up until the sixth ring. “Now what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the dragon bowl,” she said.

  “Swell.”

  “I just had an epiphany.”

  “Make it stop,” he groaned. “I knew I should’ve dumped this to voicemail.”

  “You said the dragon would spit out the ball when the bowl got jolted sideways by an earthquake, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So basically it was a primitive accelerometer?”

  “Basically. Very primitive.”

  “Indicating the direction of the quake.”

  “Right-ee-o. Do you actually have a point, or are you just trying to prove that you were paying attention?”

  “My point, Seismo-Genius, is that I had a dragon bowl on La Palma,” she said, her excitement rising.

  “Come again?”

  “My telescope. It was the world’s biggest dragon bowl.”

  “Uh . . . not for the first time, I’m not quite following you, Megs.”

  “Don’t you see? It skewed toward the origin of the vibrations. Skewed? Slewed?”

  “Either,” he said. “Okay, maybe it did. A tiny bit.”

  “A tiny bit that was amplified a huge amount by the telescope’s magnification.”

  “Hmm. Interesting idea.”

  “Work with me on this,” she said. “Seismometers pick up tiny movements in the ground and then amplify them, right?”

  “Yeah. Electronically.”

  “Electronically, optically—what’s the diff?” She was speaking in rapid, excited bursts now. “If I magnified my images from La Palma, I could see which way the stars shift. The tracks—”

  “Tracks?”

  “Star tracks. Trails of light. Like tiny comet tails. They’d point directly toward the quakes.”

  “They would,” he said slowly. “If there were any quakes. But there weren’t. You don’t believe me, see for yourself. Earthquake.USGS.gov.”

  “David, I’m telling you—”

  “Stop,” he said. “I’ve got a grant application to submit by midnight, a journal article due tomorrow, and my tenure review is next week. I don’t have time for this.”

  “But David—”

  “Stop picking at it. Goodbye.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Twenty-four hours later

  O’Malley shrugged off her jet lag and shrugged on her backpack, then hoisted her bicycle over her shoulder and descended the stairs from her third-floor apartment. It was a pain to lug the bike up and down the steps, but theft was rampant in the neighborhoods around Johns Hopkins, and her bike—a featherweight $5,000 machine (three hundred bucks a pound, she sometimes marveled)—would be a prize to any thief who knew beans about bikes. Besides, with its carbon-fiber frame and lustrous aluminum components, the machine was as beautiful as it was functional, and O’Malley had made it the centerpiece of her interior-decorating plan. When it wasn’t transporting her, the bike perched on the living room fireplace mantel, gleaming beneath halogen accent lights.

  Wrestling the balky door at the bottom of the stairs, she felt as if she’d been overserved the night before—the week before—and indeed she had. But it was an excess of frustration and an overdose of fatigue, not a surfeit of partying, that had her dragging ass. The two-mile ride to campus would help.

  Gripping the hand brakes, she clipped her left foot onto the pedal and, in one smooth, familiar motion, released the brakes and swung her right leg over the bar. Turning onto Roland Avenue, she stood on the pedals, sprinting to pick up speed, then leaned into the turn onto University Parkway. From here, University swooped downhill for nearly a mile, the lanes divided by an oak-studded median. The grade was steep enough for serious speed—O’Malley had once clocked herself at forty miles an hour—and curvy enough to send her adrenaline spiking.

  When she reached the bridge at the base of the hill, she rose to a crouch, letting her knees absorb the jolt of the expansion joints. On the far side of the short span, she leaned sharply into a right turn onto San Martin Drive, a winding road bordered on one side by woods and the creek, and on the other by the Georgian brick buildings of the main Johns Hopkins campus—including O’Malley’s building, where more than a hundred physicists and astronomers pondered problems and explored realms beyond all explaining to most people. A critical mass of brainpower, she thought at times. The world’s highest concentration of nerds, she thought at others.

  The place where my career’s going to hell if I can’t explain why I’ve got nothing to show for my ten-thousand-dollar junket to La Palma, she amended as she walked in the door, her bike slung over her shoulder.

  Her call went straight to David’s voicemail. She tried three more times, over the course of half an hour, with the same result. Finally, in desperation, she tracked down the main number for UC Berkeley’s Seismology Center and called it. When the secretary answered, O’Malley said, “Hello, I’m trying to reach Dr. David Solomon about an urgent matter. Is he in?”

  “Let me check,” said the secretary. “May I tell him who’s calling?”

  “Just tell him I’m with the National Science Foundation. It’s about his grant.”

  “One moment, please.” O’Malley was put on hold.

  It was a very brief hold. Five seconds later, David picked up the call. “Hello, this is Dr. Solomon,” he said, sounding serious and dignified.

  “I lied—it’s me,” she said. “Don’t be mad.”

  “Christ,” he said. “You beat everything, you know that?”

  “Listen,” she pleaded, “this is important. You agreed that if there was a quake on La Palma while I was taking photographs with the telescope, and if the star tracks shifted in a discernible straight line . . .”

  “In theory, it could,” he said, “if there were a quake. Which there wasn’t. But if there had been, it would give you a vector—a compass direction toward the source of the event—but not a distance.”

  “Ha,” she said, her voice triumphant. “I knew it!”

  “Megan, slow down. You’d have to measure—”

  “I already did. I enlarged my images and plotted the direction. The quakes came from the south. Compass heading of one hundred seventy-three degrees. Every single time.”

  “Megan, listen to me. There were. No. Quakes.”

  “David, I’m looking at seventeen images, all of them skewed the same way. Tiny, zigzag jolts, less than a second long. Lots of them.”

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “Short pulses? How short?”

  “Very short. A fraction of a second. Maybe a microsecond.”

  “You’ve just proved my case. Those are not earthquakes, Megan.”

  “David—”

  “Megan, would you for once in your life just shut up and listen to me? Earthquakes are not short pulses. Earthquakes are long, slow events—multiple seconds, sometimes even minutes in duration. It’s the earth quaking; get it? That doesn’t happen in a microsecond. If you’re seeing some sort of events in those photos—which I’m still not convinced you are—they’re for damned sure not earthquakes. Maybe—maybe—construction. Roadwork. Blasting a highway cut through the mountains. Short pulses are a signature of dynamiting. ‘Ripple shots,’ they’re called. A wave of sequential explosions, microseconds apart, to break up rock.” She could hear his keyboard clattering. “I’m looking at La Palma on Google Earth. Zooming in on the caldera . . . I see the observ
atory complex on the north rim . . . a heading of one hundred seventy-three degrees from there runs right through the center of the caldera.” He paused. “God, that’s one humongous hole in the ground. Could there be a construction project happening in the caldera?”

  “You think somebody’s building luxury condos inside an old volcano? Give me a break, David.”

  “No, smart-ass, I think maybe somebody’s building a visitor center. The caldera’s part of a national park, according to Google Earth.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t—”

  “I’m looking closer at the caldera itself. There’s an overlook and parking area near the south rim, across from the observatory. Maybe they’re building an interpretive center. Blasting a shelf in the rock, or holes for foundation footers.”

  “At night? Why would they be dynamiting a cliff in the middle of the night, David?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have a fucking clue. Ask them. Ask anybody but me.”

  “David, something weird and scary is happening on La Palma. You yourself said that the island’s a seismic shitstorm waiting to happen.”

  “That’s not—”

  “There’s more,” she interrupted. “The quake I felt the last day I was there. I felt it, David. That means it wasn’t some tiny microblast—”

  “Ripple shot,” he corrected.

  “Ripple shot, whatever you call it. It lasted twenty, thirty seconds. That whole island was shaking, hard enough to topple a stack of rocks. A USGS website—the United States Geological Survey—”

  “I know what the damn USGS is,” he snapped.

  “The USGS says if you can feel a quake, it’s gotta be magnitude three or higher. You need to take another look at the seismic data, David.”

  “No, I don’t, Megan, ’cause I already did. This is what I need to do.” She heard a click. The line went dead. David—her favorite ex-husband, or, rather, her former favorite ex-husband—had hung up on her. Again.

  She felt better after venting about David to Gracie—her former roommate and best friend, now a middle school science teacher in Delaware—and then sublimating, churning out thirty brisk miles on the bike. Her thighs protesting, O’Malley staggered up her staircase and showered. But in the shower, a place where she often thought through problems, her frustrations came back. Then an idea came to her, and she threw on jeans and a sweater and climbed into her Prius for a trip to Baltimore’s Middle Harbor.

  Going against the rush-hour traffic on the Jones Falls Expressway, she made it to the waterfront in only fifteen minutes, arriving just at sunset. She spied an open parking spot at the corner of Thames and South Ann Streets—a stroke of luck, given that the Middle Harbor tended to be crawling with tourists, especially on an unseasonably warm evening like this one—and nosed the car into it.

  The sidewalk tables outside the bars along the north side of Thames Street were jammed with happy-hour drinkers lingering over their brews as the sunset faded and the first stars appeared. The last of the Lite, punned O’Malley, eyeing a can of low-carb beer.

  She walked west for a block—past the Cat’s Eye Pub and an ice-cream shop and the Oyster House—then crossed South Broadway and entered Broadway Square, a brick-paved park with a dozen or so trees and a few benches, some occupied by homeless people. It was there, opposite the hot dog stand, that she found Herman.

  Even though darkness was just now falling, he was already peering through the eyepiece of a stubby, tripod-mounted telescope—an eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector, O’Malley happened to know, whose eighty-inch light path sped neatly back and forth three times within the length of its twenty-inch tube. It was a portable, or at least luggable, version of the vastly bigger instrument she had gone to La Palma to use. A sign taped to the instrument proclaimed HERMAN HEYN, BALTIMORE’S STREET-CORNER ASTRONOMER—HAV-A-LOOK! Positioned between the legs of the tripod was an upside-down cowboy hat containing a few one-dollar bills and a sprinkling of change. A man wearing faded jeans, a sweatshirt, and a dark-blue beret bent over the lower end of the tube, peering through an eyepiece.

  O’Malley looked in the direction the telescope was pointing. In the west, just above the rooftops, Venus blazed in the indigo twilight, as bright as a helicopter searchlight. O’Malley dug deep into her memory for a line from Shakespeare. “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright,” she quoted. The image was Romeo’s description of Juliet, but it fit the planet perfectly. “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night . . .”

  “Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear,” finished the man, still peering through the lens. O’Malley clapped with delight, and the man straightened. His eyes were edged with crow’s-feet, and the huge smile he gave O’Malley was surely deepening them. “Dr. O’Malley, what a nice surprise!”

  “Good to see you, Herman.” She reached out and hugged him. “But you gotta stop that ‘Doctor’ nonsense.”

  “Not a chance.” His grin widened. “Proudest moment of my life, when you told me I was the one who inspired you to become an astronomer.”

  O’Malley smiled. “God’s truth. You changed my life. Twenty years ago, but I remember like it was yesterday. Standing on a stool—is that the very same stool?” She pointed to a battered, shoebox-size wooden stool tucked beside the cowboy hat, and he nodded. “Standing on that stool, looking through the eyepiece, and seeing Saturn, this gorgeous Christmas tree ornament glowing in the sky, with honest-to-god rings around it. It seemed too beautiful to be real.”

  He chuckled. “I must have done a really good job of focusing that night. The sharper the image, the faker it looks. How are you? What are you doing these days?”

  “I’m good. Mostly.” She gave a half nod, half shrug. “Still at Hopkins. Still looking for Planet Nine.”

  “Well, if anybody can find it, it’s you,” said the aging astronomer. “I wish I could help, but you’ve got heavy artillery, and all I have is this tiny peashooter.” He eyed her closely. “Why do you say ‘mostly’? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m hitting a wall, Herman,” she said. “Beating my head against it.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “So just quit.”

  “Quit? My job at Hopkins?”

  “Goodness no. Quit beating your head against the wall. Climb over it instead. Or take it down, brick by brick by brick.”

  It was 3:00 a.m., and O’Malley sat hunched over the desk in her living room, a hundred or more mouse clicks down a dizzying maze of online rabbit holes—holes her new lightning-fast laptop allowed her to descend with head-spinning swiftness.

  After hearing the details of her frustrations with La Palma and David, Herman had repeated his advice—“climb over the wall, or take it apart”—but instead of doing either of those, she seemed instead to be burrowing deep beneath it, and she was starting to wonder if she’d ever find her way back to the surface. At the moment, it seemed more likely that the wall itself, plus the shaky ground it stood on, would collapse and bury her alive.

  Her dive down the rabbit hole had started innocently enough, with a few Google searches about seismic activity and earthquakes. David had been right about one thing, she quickly learned: the short, pulsing shocks that had jolted her telescope almost certainly came from small, controlled explosions. She had gleaned that insight from an article in a geology journal, illustrated with seismograms comparing the brief, uniform jolts of dynamite ripple shots with the slower, more random rumblings of natural earthquakes. But the insight raised more questions than it answered: Who was blasting on La Palma—in the middle of the night—and why? And what was the connection, if any, between the explosions and the tremor that had awakened her from her nap beside the volcano trail?

  Next, she began picking in earnest at that tremor. She revisited the USGS website, the one explaining how to estimate the intensity of an earthquake’s shaking. According to the website, earthquakes were harder to detect outdoors than indoors—surprising but reasonable, she concluded, since trees and dirt weren’t as prone to r
attling as, say, pictures on a wall or dishes on a shelf. To be felt outdoors, a quake needed a Richter-scale magnitude of 4 to 5—not a small number. And to be awakened from a sound sleep, she reasoned, she must surely have felt a jolt of at least that scale. And yet . . . and yet David insisted that there had been no recent seismic activity on La Palma. He had even sent her a series of email attachments after their last call—no message, just attachments—showing readings from the seismic station on Tenerife, one island away from La Palma. The seismograms, which plotted activity for the prior seven days—including the day O’Malley had been awakened from her labyrinthine nap—showed no activity. “But the Earth does move,” O’Malley muttered, quoting Galileo’s famous response to the Vatican inquisitors who had challenged his assertion that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

  She glared accusingly at the seismograms David had sent, zeroing in on the day and time she had been jolted awake. The graphs—three sets of squiggly lines, not just one, representing three different frequencies—reminded O’Malley of audio waveforms, like the squiggly soundtrack animation in the Disney classic Fantasia. If the small squiggles she was looking at had actually been sound waves, they’d have been whispers, she concluded—and if they’d been EKGs from a hospital patient, that patient would be in serious need of speedy CPR . . . or perhaps leisurely transport to the morgue. “I don’t get it,” she muttered. “Either I’m insane or the data’s off.”

  Having no objective way to evaluate her sanity, she decided to drill down into the data. What David had sent were only screenshots. O’Malley sought out the database itself. On one of the images, she found the website address and entered it into her browser bar. The address took her to the data archive for the GSN, the Global Seismographic Network—specifically, to the data recorded by the seismic station on Tenerife, eighty miles from La Palma. Scanning the search options, she was pleased to see that by simply entering a calendar date, she could see a plot showing seismic readings for the entire twenty-four-hour period. She began by studying the day she’d been hiking the volcano trail, focusing intently on the time when she estimated her nap had been interrupted. Not surprisingly, the plot in the data archive matched the screenshot David had sent, with three plots for each date, showing three different data channels. O’Malley pored over them, memorizing every small squiggle in the black lines. She stared until her vision grew blurry, and when she closed her eyes, the same lines—this time in white, on a black background—were etched on the inside of her eyelids.