Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  You are only a step away from the house in Ann Arbor, he had said. Was that a lie? A joke? His idea of a cruel taunt?

  “One small step for a man,” I muttered to myself. How is the universe constructed? It’s made of atoms. And atoms are made of smaller particles, tiny bits of frozen energy that can be made to thaw and flow and surge…

  This room had been created by warping the energies of the atoms in the Earth’s crust. Those energies were now reverting back to their natural form; slowly the room was turning back into hot, viscous rock. I could feel the air congealing, becoming hotter and thicker by the second. I would be imbedded in rock thirty miles below the surface, rock hot enough to be almost molten.

  Yet I was only a step from safety, according to Ahriman. Was he lying? No, he couldn’t have been. He had walked directly through the rock wall of this room. He must have returned to the cellar of the house inAnn Arbor. If he could do it, so could I. But how?

  I already had!I had stepped from the cellar into this underground dungeon. Why couldn’t I step back again?

  I tried doing it and got nothing but bumps against solid rock for my efforts. There was more to it than simply trying it.

  But wait. If I had truly traveled thirty miles through solid rock in a single step, it must mean that there is a connection between that house and this chamber. Not only are the atoms of Earth’s crust being warped to create this cell, but the geometry of space itself is being warped to bridge the thirty-mile distance.

  I sat on the couch again, my mind racing. I had read magazine articles about space warps, speculations about how someday starships would be able to fly thousands of lightyears almost instantaneously. Astrophysicists had discovered “black holes” in interstellar space that warped space-time with their titanic gravitational fields. It was all a matter of geometry, a pattern, like taking a flat sheet of paper and folding it into the form of a bird or a flower.

  And I had seen that pattern! I had gone through it on my way into this chamber. But it had happened so quickly that I could not consciously remember it in detail.

  Or could I?

  Data compression. Satellites in orbit can accumulate data on magnetic tapes for days on end, and then spurt it all down to a receiving station on the ground within a few seconds. The compressed data is then played at a much slower speed by the technicians, and all the many days’ worth of information is intact and readable.

  Could I slow down my memory to the point where I could recall, miscrosecond by microsecond, what had happened to me during that one brief stride from the house to this underground tomb? I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes. It was getting more and more difficult to breathe, but I tried to ignore the burning in my chest and concentrate on remembering.

  A thirty-mile stride. A step through solid rock. I pictured myself in the cellar of that house. I had ducked under a heating pipe and stepped into darkness…

  And cold. The first instant of my step I had felt a wave of intense cold, as if I had passed through a curtain of liquefied air. Cryogenic cold. Cold so intense that atoms are frozen almost motionless, at nearly absolute zero temperature.

  In those few microseconds of unbearable cold I saw that the crystal structure of the atoms around me had indeed been frozen, almost entirely stilled. All around me the atoms glowed dully like pinpoints of jeweled lights, faint and sullen because nearly all their energies had been leached away from them. The crystal latticework of the atoms had formed a path for me, a tunnel wide enough for my body to take that thirty-mile-long step in a single stride.

  I opened my eyes. The tiny room was glowing now; the air itself seemed afire. I held my breath, wondering how long my body could function on the oxygen stored within its cells and in my blood.

  I understood how I had gotten here. There was a crystal latticework of energy connecting this crypt with the house in Ann Arbor — a tunnel that connected here with there, using the energies stolen from the atoms in between to create a safe and almost instantaneous path between the two places. But the tunnel was dissolving just as this room was dissolving. The energies of those tortured atoms was returning to normal. In seconds all would be solid rock once again.

  How to find the opening into that tunnel? I concentrated again, but no sense of it came through to me. I was sweating, both from the intense heat and from the effort of forcing myself to understand. But it did no good at all. My brain could not comprehend it.

  My brain could not… Wrong! I realized that I had so far been using only half my brain to attack the problem. I remembered Ormazd telling me that I could consciously employ both hemispheres simultaneously, something that ordinary human beings cannot do. I had been using one hemisphere to visualize the geometric pattern of the energy warp that connected this underground chamber with the surface. But that half of my brain could only perceive geometrically those relationships involving space and form.

  With a conscious effort I forced the other hemisphere of my brain to consider the problem. I could almost hear myself laugh inside my head as the unused portion of my mind said something like, “Well, it’s about time.”

  And it was about time. The solution to the problem of finding the gateway to the crystal latticework of atoms was a matter of timing. All those dully glowing atoms were still vibrating slowly, unnaturally slowly, because most of their energies had been drained from them. But still they vibrated. Only when they had all moved to a certain precise formation was their alignment such that the tunnel’s entrance could open. Most of the time they were shifted out of phase, as unaligned and jumbled as a crowd milling through a shopping mall. But once every second they reached precisely the correct arrangement to open the tunnel that led back to safety. The arrangement dissolved within a few microseconds.

  Only during that incredibly tiny moment of time was the tunnel open. I had to step into the crystal latticework, through the searing hot wall of the chamber, at precisely the exact moment — or not at all.

  I got to my feet and forced myself close to the wall. The heat was enough to singe the hair of my eyebrows and the backs of my hands. I kept my eyes closed, picturing with one side of my brain the crystal pathway itself, while simultaneously calculating with the other side of my brain the precise moment when the lattice would be open for me to step through.

  With my eyes still closed I took a step forward. I felt an instant of roasting heat, then cold beyond the most frigid ice fields of Antarctica. Then…

  I opened my eyes. I stood in the shadowy cellar of the STOPP house. For the first time in what seemed like years, I let out my breath and took in a double lungful of sweet, cool air.

  I found a back door to the cellar and stepped out into the cold night. It felt wonderful. An alley led between the house and its next-door neighbor to the street. My rented car was still there, adorned with a yellow parking ticket affixed to its windshield wiper. I stuffed the ticket into my jacket pocket and got behind the wheel, glad that no one had towed the car away or stolen it.

  It took me ten minutes to get back to the fusion lab. Once in the deserted lobby of the building, I phoned for Tom Dempsey, Mangino the security chief, and the lab’s director of research. It was close to midnight, but the tone of my voice must have convinced them that something important was happening. I got no arguments from any of them, although the phone’s computer had to try three different numbers before it located Dr. Wilson, the research director.

  They all arrived in the lab within a half-hour — thirty minutes during which I checked personally with every security guard on duty. No one had reported the slightest problem. They were on constant patrol around the laboratory, inside and out, and everything appeared to be quite normal.

  Dr. Wilson was a lanky, ruddy-faced, tousle-haired Englishman who spoke softly and seemed totally unflappable. He arrived first. As I was explaining that somebody would try to detonate the fusion reactor — and he smiled tolerantly at the ridiculous idea — Dempsey and the security chief came into the lobby together. Dempsey
looked more puzzled than upset. His dark hair was an uncombed, tangled mop; he must have been asleep when I called and pulled his clothes on helter-skelter. Mangino was definitely angry. His narrow brown eyes snapped at me.

  “This is a lot of hysterical nonsense,” he growled, when I explained my fears. I didn’t tell them about Ormazd and Ahriman, of course, nor about the underground chamber I’d just escaped from. It was enough to convince them that a real danger existed. I didn’t want them to bundle me off to a psychiatric ward.

  Dr. Wilson tried to tell me that the reactor simply could not explode. I let him talk; the longer he explained, the longer we stayed on the scene, available to counter Ahriman’s move.

  “There simply is not enough deuterium in the reactor at any given moment to allow an explosion,” Wilson repeated in a his soft, friendly voice. He sat slouched on one of the plastic couches that decorated the lab’s lobby. I stood by the receptionist’s desk. Dempsey had stretched out on another couch and apparently had gone back to sleep. Mangino was behind the desk, checking out his security patrols on the picture phone.

  “But suppose,” I stalled for more time, “there was a way to boost the power of the lasers…”

  “They’d burn out in a minute,” Wilson said. “We’re running them at top capacity now.”

  “…and an extra amount of deuterium was put into the reaction chamber.”

  Wilsons hook his head, and a mass of sandy hair flopped down over his eyes. Pushing it back with one hand, he told me, “That simply cannot happen. There are fail-safe circuits to prevent it. And even if it did, all that would happen is that you would get a mild little poof of a detonation — not a hydrogen bomb.”

  “What about a lithium bomb?” I asked.

  For the first time, his eyebrows knit worriedly. “What do you mean?”

  “If things worked out the right way, couldn’t the deuterium detonation trigger the lithium in the shielding around the reaction chamber?”

  “No, no. That would be impos—” He checked himself, hesitated, then said slowly, “That would be very unlikely. Very unlikely. I’d have to work out the calculations, of course, but the chances against that must be…”

  “Twenty-four, report.” Mangino’s razor-sharp voice sliced into our conversation.

  I turned and looked at the security chief. He was frowning angrily into the phone’s picture screen. “Dammit, Twenty-four, answer me!”

  He looked up at me, as if I were responsible. “One of the guards outside doesn’t respond. He’s supposed to be patrolling the area around the loading dock.”

  “The loading dock!” Wilson shot to his feet. I could see that he had started to tremble.

  Mangino held up a hand. “Don’t get excited, now. I’ve got the area on one of the outside TV cameras. Everything looks normal. Just no sign of the guard. He might be taking a leak or something.”

  I went around the desk and peered at the TV screen. The loading bay was brightly lit. There were no cars or trucks anywhere in sight. All seemed quiet and calm.

  “Let’s take a walk down there anyway,” I said.

  We roused Dempsey and told him to stand guard over the phones and TV screens. He rubbed his eyes sleepily but nodded okay. Then Dr. Wilson, Mangino and I hurried down the building’s central corridor toward the loading dock. Mangino reached inside his coat and pulled out a slim, flat, dead-black pistol. He flicked the safety off and then slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  Lights turned on automatically ahead of us as we hustled along the corridor, and switched off behind us. The loading bay was a miniature warehouse: stacks of cardboard cartons, steel drums, packing cases, strange-looking equipment wrapped in clear plastic.

  “You could hide a platoon of men in here,” Mangino grumbled.

  “But everything seems to be in order,” Wilson said, glancing around. I started to agree, but felt the slightest trace of a breeze on my face. It came from the direction of the loading dock doors, big metal roll-up doors that were closed and locked tight. Or were they? I walked slowly toward the hangar-like doors and saw that a man-sized doorway had been cut into one of them. A person could slip in or out without needing to raise the entire rig. This smaller door was windowless. And shut. I reached for its handle.

  “It’s locked,” Mangino said. “Electronic time lock. If anybody tries to tamper with it…”

  I touched the handle and the door swung open effortlessly. Mangino gaped.

  Kneeling, I saw that the area around the edge of the lock had been bent slightly, as if massive hands had pried it open, bending the metal until it yielded. I had felt the stray breeze through the bent area.

  “Why didn’t the alarm go off?” Mangino wondered aloud.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “He’s inside the lab! Quick; we don’t have a second to lose!”

  We ran to the fusion reactor area,Wilson protesting all the way that no one could tamper with the lasers or the reactor to cause an explosion.

  The doors to the laser control room had been pulled off their hinges. A quick look inside showed that no one was in there. The control boards seemed untouched. While Wilson inspected them, Mangino yelled into his palm-sized radio, “All security guards converge on the reactor area. Apprehend anyone you see. Shoot if they resist. Call the local police and the F.B.I. at once!”

  We entered the big double doors that led to the long, cement-walled room where the lasers were housed. Again the overhead lights snapped on automatically as we crossed the doorway.

  “Those doors should have been locked,” Dr. Wilson said, an edge of alarm in his voice.

  The lasers were long, thin glass rods, dozens of them, mounted on heavy metal stands, one over another like a series of parallel gymnasium bars. Every ten feet or so the glass rods were interrupted by groupings of lenses, Faraday rotators, and diagnostic sensors. The multiple line of lasers marched down the length of the long room and focused on a narrow slit cut into a thick, steel-reinforced cement wall. On the other side of that wall was the reactor itself, where the energy from the lasers was concentrated on micropellets of deuterium fuel.

  The three of us stood there uncertainly for a moment. Then suddenly an electrical hum began vibrating through the air. I caught a whiff of ozone, and the laser tubes began to glow with an eerie, uncanny greenish light.

  “They’re turning on!” Wilson gasped.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mangino and I swung our attention to the far end of the room, where the control center was. In the shadows back there, behind thick protective glass, bulked the heavy, dark form of Ahriman.

  Mangino pulled out his pistol and fired. The glass starred. He emptied the gun, finally shattering the glass. But in those few seconds Ahriman was gone. The lights went out. All we could see was the brightening glow of the lasers, multiple paths of intensifying energy aimed at the slit and, beyond it, the reactor core. We stumbled out into the hallway. It was dark everywhere. For all I knew, Ahriman had caused a blackout throughout the region to pour power into the blazing lasers.

  Over the whining hum of the electric generators I heard running footsteps. Then shots.

  “They’ve got him!” Mangino yelled. But to me it sounded as if the running and shooting were going in the direction away from us. The sounds grew fainter. They hadn’t caught Ahriman, I knew.

  “I’m going after him,” Mangino said, and he sprinted off into the darkness.

  “We’ve got to turn off the lasers,” I told Wilson, “before they build up enough power to set off the lithium.”

  In the eerie green light from the open doorway, his eyes looked wide with fright. “That can’t happen!” he insisted.

  “Let’s turn them off anyway,” I said.

  He didn’t argue. We went to the laser control room, only to find that the equipment was a shambles. The control consoles had been smashed, dials shattered, metal paneling bent out of shape. Wires sagged limply from broken modules. It was as if an elephant had gone berserk inside the tiny room. And th
rough the smashed window, we could see that the lasers were pulsing now, their light growing more intense, feverish.

  Wilson’s jaw hung slackly. “How could anyone…”

  The electrical whine of the generators suddenly went up in pitch several notches and the lasers began to glow even more fiercely. I heard a glass lens pop somewhere down on the floor of the room. The light was becoming painful to the eye. I pulled Wilson away from the shattered controls and together we staggered down the darkened hallway toward the reactor chamber.

  “How do we turn the thing off?” I shouted over the generators’ insane shrieking.

  He seemed dazed, bewildered. “The deuterium feed…”

  “That’s been tampered with too, I’ll bet. We won’t be able to turn it off any more than we can turn off the lasers.”

  He shook his head and ran a hand through his unruly hair. In the garish green light he looked sickly, deathly ill.

  “Main power supply,” he mumbled at last. “I could get to the main switches and shut down everything.”

  “Good! Do it!”

  “But it will take time. Ten minutes. Five, at least.”

  “Too long! By then it’ll be too late. It’s going to blow up in another minute or two!”

  “I know.”

  “What else can we do?” I had to shout to make myself heard over the screaming of the generators.

  “Nothing!”

  “There’s got to be something…”

  “Damper,” he shouted at me. “If we could place a damper inside the reactor chamber to block off the laser light…”

  I understood. Cut off the light that the lasers were pouring into the deuterium fuel pellets and the reactor would shut down.

  “A damper,” I yelled at Wilson. “All right. You find the main power switches. I’ll find a damper.”

  “But there’s no way…”

  “Get moving!” I shouted.

  “You can’t go inside the reactor! The radiation would kill you in less than a minute!”

  “Go!”