by Scott Mackay
Nolan stopped rubbing his fist in his palm, lifted his chin in a manner that was quick and resolute, and examined Cam with the fatalism of a Buddhist monk. ‘‘Centauri A went red giant.’’
The image that came to Cam’s mind was a field of white clover, and in the middle of it all, a single pink clover, Centauri A, the sun’s neighboring star, swelling on them.
‘‘Why?’’ And then, as if it really mattered, ‘‘How?’’
‘‘How? Just like Tau Ceti. A massive hydrogen bleed. As to why?’’ Nolan shook his head, a scientist at last baffled by the nature of the universe. ‘‘I have no idea. Centauri A was supposed to burn as a main-sequence star for the next few billion years, just like Tau Ceti.’’ His eyes widened. ‘‘But Blunt and the rest of his team are blaming the Builders.’’ A look of resignation came to his face. ‘‘And they’re coming to see you about it. You’re the closest thing to a Builder spokesperson. And to tell you the truth, they’re a little mad about that.’’
General Morris Blunt came with Oren Fye, Brian Goldvogel, and Dr. Ochoa the following day. General Blunt was a man in a blue Air Force dress uniform, but instead of Air Force insignia, he had Orbops insignia. His appearance and manner were that of a kindly grandfather. He had a round pink face, and a white goatee. His features were elfin, and reminded Cam of Santa Claus. Oren Fye was twenty years younger, a man battling a weight problem. He was bald. He had small eyes screwed into his pudgy face, and his forehead was moist with perspiration, even though the air-conditioning in Johns Hopkins Hospital was now operating normally after the crash. Goldvogel, a man roughly Fye’s age, had startlingly blond hair that looked laminated in place. It was Goldvogel who for some reason came and held him steady, like they were going to extract a bullet from his stomach without anesthetic. That’s when Ochoa came around Goldvogel with a hypodermic needle poised in his right hand.
‘‘Don’t worry, Dr. Conrad. This is perfectly safe. It’s just going to help you talk.’’
His body tensed, and Goldvogel held him tighter, and before he could struggle further, Ochoa shoved the needle in his leg. He sighed. Seconds later, he felt jittery, full of energy.
General Blunt, in a voice filled with nothing but goodwill, explained to him that the Worldwide Crash, as the media had called it, had been a curious phenomenon indeed. And while he viewed the change in Alpha Centauri A with grim suspicion, and in fact told him it was the reason Dr. Ochoa had shoved the needle in his leg—time seemed to be of the essence—Blunt took a more lenient view toward the Worldwide Crash. ‘‘You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve decided it’s an attempt by the Builders to communicate with us, and not an overt act of aggression. Our computer analysts have now begun decoding what appears to be a dump of some kind. It’s become apparent that the Builders have provided us with a vast system of symbols. Many of these symbols, now that the Builders have rifled through our databases, have been correlated in superscript to some of the more difficult mathematical symbols we use here on Earth to describe the kind of work you’re pioneering in hyperdimensionality. Dr. Ochoa tells us they’ve shown you some of their symbols.’’ Blunt pointed up to the corner of the room. ‘‘On the television. Our Pentagon mathematicians, while they understand part of them, don’t understand all of them, and so have drawn up a short list of world-renowned mathematicians to help them. You, of course, are at the top of that list, Dr. Conrad, which doesn’t surprise us at all, as it seems they’ve targeted you specifically for your mathematical ability.’’
Cam now grew intensely curious, but it was a curiosity he didn’t entirely trust because it seemed to be compelled from somewhere outside himself, a Builder-instigated interest. ‘‘You have . . . samples?’’
Blunt gave Fye a kindly glance. Fye opened a large briefcase and, sighing, took out a custom-made computer.
Meanwhile, Cam’s mind raced more and more. He had to wonder what drug Dr. Ochoa had given him, whether it was designed to momentarily suppress the more sluggish effects of that strange shadow clouding his sylvan fissure, or if it had methamphetamine in it.
Fye put the computer on his dinner trolley, wheeled it over, and booted up the rugged-looking unit.
The computer didn’t default to a desktop but went right into a galaxy of strange symbols, a lot like the ones he had seen while in contact with the Moon tower, and on the television here in the hospital, but slightly misrepresented because of the way they had to be re-created on the screen, pixel by pixel.
In superscript above various sections of this code, he saw several phrases of human mathematical language. He was surprised to see that some Builder equations mirrored a few of his own rough but incomplete ideas about hyperdimensionality. There was a shorthand description of anti-Ostrander space, something he usually used pages and pages to describe, but which in this instance had been rendered deftly in a terse sprinkling of quantum mechanical cuneiform. As he studied it more and more, he felt a growing excitement. And he got the sense, through the heightened features of his modified sylvan feature, that the Builders were indeed trying to tell him something important. Something big, as Ochoa phrased it. It was, in a sense, somewhat like the prime number sequence he had tried to send, for there appeared to be a definite and deliberate effort to establish a common language and shared terms of reference, only on such an advanced level, it was at first hard for him to follow.
There was a mathematical description of time, how time was like a coil after all, and how you could detour past the linear route by jumping from each individual turn of the coil, something described as a sixth dimension, the so-called sequential drop, and which he himself had described in a number of articles using a cumbersome mathematical language that took columns and columns to render, but which here, in the new and natural framework of the hyperdimensionality in which the Builders seemed to exist, was sketched in quickly, with all the complex terms of reference implied. And the strangest thing of all about reading this particular equation was that it wasn’t only an intellectual equation but an emotional one as well, as if once one entered the realm of hyperdimensionality one had to use all one’s intellectual and emotional power to truly comprehend it, or at least to feel all the implied hyperdimensional terms of reference. That quantum physics could have an emotional component struck him as one of the craziest theories he had ever heard. Yet he remembered what Niels Bohr had always said: It wasn’t that a theory was crazy, but that it wasn’t crazy enough. The Builder description of time wasn’t like reading a mathematical equation but like a line of poetry.
He was instantly transported. He felt a shivering weakness through his body. He was hypnotized by what he was reading, and only dimly perceived the kafuffle that was now taking place in the room around him—Dr. Ochoa racing forward because of his shivering, examining him, checking his blood pressure, his pulse, and Oren Fye mopping his brow in a sudden excess of nervous energy. It was, in a sense, like having another attack, and he could feel the Builders buzzing through his body like low-voltage electricity. He also had the distinct feeling that he was now on a runaway train, that even if he wanted to stop ciphering this mystical mathematical language, he was locked in, a prisoner, attached to the rails of its idiomatic, intrinsic, but ultimately alien logic.
He moved on. Past the terms-of-reference section— that section where it seemed as if the Builders were trying to test him, to see if, as a three-dimensional creature he might, like those prehistoric fish that first crawled out of the sea millions of years ago, be able to breathe the air of hyperdimensionality. Left that section and went on to a more specific section.
And that’s when one particular equation caught his eye.
It stabbed him like the point of an arrow, and it at last revealed to him the true danger of their situation. He didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to admit that the Builders could be so indifferent to the human race. Especially after they had made such overtures toward him. Didn’t want to accept that they could go ahead and do something like this, especially when they were putti
ng out such intense mathematical feelers. But he couldn’t deny it. And he hated to think Colonel Pittman might be right about them after all.
He tapped the segment, and he looked at Blunt through the welter of his growing apprehension. He tried to express to the general in clear English what they were up against, but the Latin and Greek got all mixed up in his mind again, and what emerged from his alien-bedazzled mind was a hybrid of the two.
‘‘Omega Sol.’’
The words, though soft, were fraught with fear. He tried again, wanted desperately to explain to them that what the Builders had done to Tau Ceti and Centauri A they were now about to do to their own sun.
‘‘Omega Sol!’’
This time with an exclamation mark.
He didn’t know why, he didn’t know when, but it was now a certainty that their hyperdimensional visitors were going to bleed the hydrogen out of their own sun. They were going to take away its fuel so the sun would implode. And when its gravity reached a critical point, it would turn into a red giant, and consume the Earth. He had no idea why. The intermittent mental snippets he received from the Builders told him only that the destruction of the human race wouldn’t be an aggressive act but simply an inadvertent one, like cutting down a rain forest to put through a superhighway.
Omega Sol. Something that didn’t concern humans, but which would end by destroying them.
He was more mystified—and frightened—by the Builders than ever.
PART TWO
Nuclear Vox
14
Pittman walked along corridor 6 on patrol, letting everyone but Haydn take in a bit of early-morning rest, the guide lights on either side of his helmet casting beams through the darkness. He liked walking around in curfew conditions, making sure the scientists didn’t stray from their dormitories, enjoyed in a serious but satisfying way maintaining order during this emergency situation. Haydn walked beside him. He glanced at his adjunct. Haydn was like having his own human pit bull, smart in the areas he had to be smart in, a fierce fighter, and absolutely loyal.
‘‘Carbon dioxide levels are reaching critical, sir. Permission to suggest our breathers.’’
Pittman grinned in the cold. He liked the way Haydn phrased things. Permission to suggest our breathers. He was a soldier through and through.
‘‘Dr. Weeks might need a breather, Gunther.’’ He was feeling philosophical, and whenever he felt this way, he liked to address Haydn by his first name. ‘‘And so might the others. But we don’t. Did I ever tell you I climbed Mount Baker once? The air’s really thin up there. In thin air, the mind starts to go. You get altitude sickness. And then this cold, too. Reminds me a lot of Mount Baker. We lost a man during the climb. Froze to death. The helicopter couldn’t make it in time. The snow was thick. Worst blizzard Mount Baker had seen in years. Eighty centimeters of snow. We tried to sled him down the south face. I did most of the pulling. Everybody else was too bagged from the thin air.’’
The lieutenant jerked his head oddly and held his hand to his ear. ‘‘It’s just that . . . remember this ringing I told you about, sir? This thrumming I have in my ears?’’
‘‘You still have that? I thought when we wrapped things up in Beijing it was as good as gone.’’
‘‘It’s come back, sir. And the cold seems to bother it. Also the thin air.’’
Pittman frowned. ‘‘Blame Alpha Vehicle, son.’’ He considered. ‘‘I don’t think we’re ready for breathers just yet, Gunther. We can’t show them we’re weak.’’
‘‘No, sir, we can’t.’’
‘‘And you can stand a little thrumming in your ears, can’t you?’’
‘‘Yes, sir, I can.’’
They walked a bit.
He pondered the situation. ‘‘I think there can be no doubt about it now.’’
By this time, they had reached corridor 9 and were on their way to the tower.
‘‘No doubt about what, sir?’’
‘‘That the Builders are anything but our friends. I think I’ve shown admirable restraint. Enough to demonstrate to Dr. Weeks that I’m taking her seriously. But this is starting to go on a bit long. Are they going to make us live in the dark forever?’’
Then, to his great frustration, and as if to make him eat crow, the lights came back on. After three days in this glorious bloodcurdling darkness; after telling everybody, including the painfully alluring but irritatingly proper Dr. Lesha Weeks, that the Builders were monsters from Planet Evil and not superintelligent and godlike hyperdimensional beings from NGC4945—after all that, the Builders were flinging it in his face by turning the lights back on. The air vent hummed as well, and the stale atmosphere inside Gettysburg sweetened like the desert after a rainstorm. He also felt heat.
The comlink strapped to his wristpad vibrated, and glancing down, he saw he had full access to the Moonstone mainframe once more. He heard the hubbub of voices—scientists leaving their rooms.
‘‘Do you remember Die Zwei Hunde, that tavern in Germany when we were stationed there before the first deployment?’’ he asked Haydn.
‘‘I do, sir.’’
‘‘And how you lost that money?’’
‘‘Yes, sir.’’
‘‘It was three-card monte, wasn’t it, Haydn?’’
‘‘I didn’t know that particular con at the time, sir.’’
‘‘That’s what the Builders are doing now. Playing three-card monte. Remember the patter? The black for me, the red for you? Ten gets you twenty. And twenty gets you forty. Just keep your eye on the lady?’’
‘‘My eyes weren’t fast enough, sir.’’
‘‘Mine are.’’
They got to the hub. They climbed into the tower. The lights were on. The emergency lights out in the Sumter Module and Command Port were on as well. All the computer screens glowed, defaulted to their regular desktops.
The first thing he did was engage the communications console and establish links with his various emplacements around Alpha Vehicle.
Pittman spoke to Merryman, Newman, and Weisgarber, and was relieved to learn that they had all survived the shutdown, and that, as with Gettysburg, their systems were all coming back online one by one. He spoke to Wain, Kalp, and Christner, all good men, tough soldiers, officers who would easily have made it down from Mount Baker in the middle of the century’s worst blizzard. They were all up and running again as well.
So began what turned into a long morning. Status reports. Damage and readiness reports. And finally Greenhow came back online and they got views of various areas around Earth—but primarily he focused on Saudi Arabia, the huge plume coming out of the Eas Tanura oil refinery, because he didn’t like the look of that at all. The military couldn’t do without oil.
‘‘Can we magnify?’’
Newlove magnified and they saw the entire refinery engulfed in flames, the plume drifting westward in the prevailing winds like a black thumb over the Indian Ocean. Were the Builders tough military strategists after all? Because this was one of the first installations Pittman would have taken out as well.
They saw other satellite evidence of catastrophe. The wreckage of over two thousand airplanes. And thousands upon thousands of house fires. All in grainy satellite imagery, the only thing they had to go on until they at last reestablished communications with Arlington.
General Morris Blunt said, ‘‘Three hundred and twenty five thousand dead.’’
‘‘General, we have to launch against them. Those deaths have to be avenged.’’
‘‘I’m afraid all those deaths may have been inadvertent, Colonel.’’
Inadvertent. The word now galled him.
The general recounted the strange tale of the Worldwide Crash, with its bizarre dénouement featuring Dr. Cameron Conrad as its central character, and its even stranger catchphrase of Omega Sol. It seemed Dr. Conrad was talking to the enemy after all, which didn’t surprise Pittman in the least.
‘‘As I say, the deaths from the Worldwide Crash wer
e inadvertent. But this Omega Sol business doesn’t seem inadvertent at all. I’ve told the president that I view it as a deliberate act of aggression, and he’s now weighing his options. It doesn’t look good, Tim. First Tau Ceti. Then Centauri A. Now the sun? Dr. Conrad was able to understand the figures as plain as day. The equations are all there. They’ve told us what they mean to do. They’re throwing it in our face. It’s their damned arrogance I can’t stand. What gives them the right to come here and do this to our sun? I don’t like the way they’re simply ignoring us while they go ahead and exterminate us.’’
‘‘So, what exactly did Dr. Conrad say about the equations?’’
‘‘His speech is still a little bit of a problem, and we’ve had to get our speech therapist to help him a lot, but he says that according to the Builder numbers, the whole red-giant process will happen at an accelerated rate, in a matter of months. In a mathematical subset, they’ve even outlined what will happen to each and every planet in the solar system, as if the whole thing is just some kind of great experiment or hypothesis they’re trying to prove.’’
‘‘So what can we expect on Earth?’’
The general now outlined that particular part of the equation for Pittman. ‘‘As the Builders bleed the sun’s hydrogen away, Earth will experience an initial cooldown. Like Oren told us when we first found out about the Tau Ceti thing. For two or three weeks, we’ll go into a deep freeze. This deep freeze will wreak havoc on customary weather patterns. Multiple major hurricanes will brew in the equatorial latitudes of both oceans, but once these hurricanes move north and hit the deep freeze, they’ll turn into major snowstorms. Then as the sun begins to collapse through the force of its own gravity, it will heat up again, as Oren explained to us as well, and Earth will go from a deep freeze to a blast furnace. What I don’t get is why they would tell us what they plan to do. Why would they deliberately reveal their attack plans to us? It doesn’t make military sense.’’
This perplexed Pittman as well. ‘‘Has the president decided anything?’’