“Concentrate, my lad!” came Merlin’s calm loud voice over the noise of the sea and the storm, though Paul could not see him. “There is land only 23.456 miles to the southwest. You can make it that far! Keep your head above water! That’s it! Now, put your heart and soul into it, my lad! Push! Middleton Reef! Picture it! It ain’t much, but it’s the closest land around. Focus!”
Reaching downward deep within himself, Paul tensed his body, his back screaming in overwhelming pain. He shook his clenched fists at the tempestuous sky and shrieked in anger and vexation.
Straining every muscle, he cast the spell, a portal opening wide in response. His lips twitched in pain as it swept over him.
• • • •
The komatiite rock burst forth out of the ocean and sailed through the air, to land gently at Capie’s feet.
“Done and done!” she said with hands on hips, staring down at the rock in satisfaction. It was too hot to touch so she levitated it back into the air, waist high.
“Hundred proof, Mom,” Daneel said, praising their work. “Three of the components of the first chutzpah are now complete!”
Capie nodded with a smile. They still needed to lay hands on a pallasite meteorite and convert it too. That could take a few days or so. Far better than the several weeks’ worth of effort that Paul had invested back in Chicago converting over the tantalum block! She felt really good about all the improvements she had discovered to speed up the process. It would certainly help things along when they were on Mars!
So, in a few days, after the pallasite conversion, they could have the ceremony and create the most powerful talisman that any wizard on Earth had ever seen. The first chutzpah. And, if Israel was still around at that time, they would go to her defense, stopping this senseless war that Errabêlu was fostering.
She really wished Paul had picked a different name for the super-talismans. It seemed so impertinent to call them that.
Examining the rock, she decided to take it to Paul and do a little bit of well-deserved crowing. Perhaps she could convince him to take a break and go out for lunch.
Smiling at the wild and rugged landscape around her, she snapped her fingers, opening a portal back to the Staging Area and stepped through—
—emerging next to the foot of the Sirius Effort, with Daneel hot on her heels.
However, there was no sign of Paul.
“Where is he?” she muttered in frustration, noting in irritation that his satellite phone was sitting on a nearby table. If he didn’t have his phone with him, she couldn’t even call him.
“Offbeat, Mom. No Dad. Humph.” Daneel created a portal into the ship, on Deck 6. “I’ll look for him on the inside.”
Capie blinked in confusion. Had Paul gone back to Esperance, to the motel? Maybe he had already decided to go out for lunch? It was, after all, just after noon.
But it wasn’t like him. He typically didn’t do lunch, at least not without inviting her along.
For a few moments, she was tempted to start searching for him, but then remembered the platinum chip implanted between his shoulder blades.
“Now, how did that work again?” she muttered. Casting her arms out wide, she created a display in front of her, like a radar screen, superimposed on the map of Western Australia. “Let me see all sources of platinum isotope 190, one gram in size, out to a radius of 800 miles.”
The screen was blank, except for herself. Capie blinked in total surprise. Paul was not in Western Australia? Really? But then, where was he?
Obviously, he was on an errand of some sort, she told herself. He would be back. After all, the Sirius Effort was still here. It was his brainchild, his latest project. He wouldn’t be far from it, not for long. She would wait.
THIRTY-ONE
The Sound Cay
Middleton Reef
350 miles east of Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
October
Saturday 1:14 p.m. AWST
Paul dropped heavily through his portal, collapsing clumsily on the rocky islet and roughly scraping his arms and hands on its gritty surface. This was The Sound, a very small island only 100 meters long and 70 wide in the center of Middleton Reef, more or less east of Gold Coast, Australia.
He tried to push himself to his feet, but the tremors in his arms and legs made it impossible to even achieve a sitting position. Instead, he collapsed, his face in the gravel, his muscles unable to do more than twitch uncontrollably.
For several minutes, he simply laid there, doing absolutely nothing. Here, at Middleton Reef, the storm was much weaker, the rain less acute, the wind less than gale force.
He needed help! Ah, but who? Not Capie, obviously. She was somewhere 2,000 miles to the west of him. Much too far even for a microportal in his weakened state. If not her, then who? He needed to find help and fast.
Not only was he exhausted and in deep pain, but he was totally exasperated with how difficult it had been to lose his pursuers. It shouldn’t have been all that hard! Especially with a full-fledged wizard’s talisman, such as he wore now. His very first portal should have taken care of that! How had they tracked him all the way to the Tasman Sea?
With another effort, one that Achilles himself might have admired, Paul climbed to his knees and then into a sitting position, sweeping his gaze around the dreary landscape.
The islet he was on was indeed small. He could see all of it from where he sat. And low! He himself was only a foot or so above sea level. If those black waves pounding the reef around the island were any higher, they could sweep him off the rocks and into the ocean.
Low gray clouds raced over his head, seemingly just out of reach, the wind whipping his hair in berserk surges. He had to find help soon! So weak, he was!
And then, it came to him.
Daneel. He could reach Daneel and at a fraction of the power it would take to try and reach Capie.
“Merlin?” he said, barely above a whisper.
“Here!” came the firm strong voice. Merlin appeared, floating through the air, drawing closer to Paul. “Young man, you make me proud! That portal, under those conditions! Stuff of legends, that one.”
“Thanks,” groaned Paul, shrugging half-heartedly. “How far is the Australian coastline?”
“335 miles. Much too far for you to portal in your weakened condition.”
Closing his eyes, Paul shook his head. “Any ships in the area?”
“In this storm?” Merlin asked with a chuckle. “Not likely. But there is Lord Howe Island, to our south, only 145 miles away. Still too far for you, as worn out as you obvious are—”
“Only 145 miles?” asked Paul feebly as his head snapped up, his eyes focused on infinity. “Perfect. There are probably several hotels there. They’ll have WiFi available. And I can reach them with a microportal.”
He closed his eyes, uttering a silent spell, mentally reaching out to form a WiFi link, scanning all the standard frequencies, starting in the 5 GHz range first.
And found one.
Somehow, and only after four tries too, he managed to link to the network and send out a ping to Daneel’s IP address. That would certainly get the Scottie’s attention. He would, no doubt, try to answer the ping. Okay, so Paul wasn’t in any position to receive anything, not even something as simple as a network ping. But he could follow up the ping with a three-way TCP handshake.
Logically, the next step would be to send a TCP data packet, complete with an embedded message. However, the structure of TCP data packets were beyond Paul’s current capability, with all their requirements for header and port information and checksums. However, there wasn’t any real need for that. Paul would just keep sending handshake messages, one right after the other, until Daneel became curious enough to track them down.
And it shouldn’t take him long to track down the source IP address to Lord Howe Island. The microportal would likely give Daneel a bit of trouble to track, in order to pin down Paul’s exact location. Still, Paul felt that the Scottie could
do it. If might take a while but, in the meantime, Paul could work on recovering his strength a little.
The best, most effective and natural method for such a recovery was sleep. Climbing into a nice cozy soft bed, however, in his current location was not an option. Moreover, even if he could, it would take too long. Capie and Daneel were in danger and the sooner he got back to Kalgoorlie, the sooner he could do something about it and the sooner he could get some rest!
Sleep was out. Was there another solution?
Yes, there was. A faster albeit more temporary solution, one he could produce here, was to make a few body chemistry changes. The first such change to make was to increase his levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, linked to the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. The ability to sleep was also impacted by dopamine levels. By increasing dopamine production and release in his brain chemistry, Paul could directly improve his mental fatigue factor.
Not for long. Perhaps a few minutes. If he were careful, perhaps an hour or so.
For physical fatigue, the adrenal gland output increase of adrenaline and cortisol would increasing his energy level and strength, while lowering his level of pain, including that from his right side.
Closing his eyes, he concentrated on those changes and, after a few minutes, felt better, enough so that he was able to climb to his feet and then, with a wave of his hand, create an invisible umbrella over his head. Oh, to be sure, he was nowhere near feeling ‘normal.’ Worse, the effect would not last long. Nonetheless, his condition had distinctly improved!
A flash of light in the sky to the east drew his attention. He magnified the image in that direction and was appalled, his face turning ashen.
Two Oni.
Spinning to the right, he saw two more. As he spun around he saw a total of twenty Oni scattered around all points of the compass, all of them roughly two hundred feet away and all of them moving steadily in his direction.
His heart began to beat rather rapidly, the palms of his hands starting to itch and feel downright cold. It was impossible for them to have tracked him here! Just impossible! But here they were.
Drawing heavily from inside himself, he snapped his fingers to cast a portal at his feet, the end point 25,000 feet up but the only response was a flash of light and a fizzling noise. No portal formed.
A short distance back to the east, he saw another portal open and McDougall stepped through, grinning in triumph.
Paul lowered his arm in dismay. Okay, mystery now solved. The Oni had trailed him here because a wizard had helped them do it. That had never happened before, a wizard directing the hunt against him. Clearly, it was far harder to throw a wizard off the track than just Oni. Evidently.
“Uncle Sam! Where art thou?”
“Here, Paul,” said the image, standing to his right.
“Okay, so what am I going to do now?! Whatever it is, it had better be something really quick! What are my options? Not a vacuum permittivity spell. The Oni are too scattered. There are too many of them for that spell to work. I could never hit all of them simultaneously. Plus, it probably wouldn’t even work against McDougall.”
Paul glanced back over at McDougall, still steadily levitating in his direction. Only seconds were left to him.
A deuterium-fusion spell might work, but he would have to create one really great big detonation, say the equal of a kiloton or so, that might get them all. Of course, one that large, with him at practically ground zero…
The 4D Man spell again? Sink into the Earth? No good, they’d just track him and wait for him to come back up.
“Time,” Uncle Sam said to him with conviction. “You need time on your side.”
The cryptic remark made Paul blink in surprise and bristle in irritation. “Time? What…”
Time. There were no known ways to make it go faster but there were two ways to slow it down. The first was through speed, accelerating an object towards the speed of light. The second was the use of intense gravity fields, like that of a black hole. For a moment, he wondered which principle that the stasis field used, to slow the passage of time. That would be worth experimenting with, assuming he survived long enough.
And then the idea came to him in a flash and he turned it over in his mind, examining it carefully but hurriedly. After all, his life was at stake here. A stasis field. Yes, that could work. And he already had experience creating stasis spells, eight times, using Hamadi and those Oni as his experimental subjects. And once more, to release Capie. This spell would be different, of course, but only in application, not in theory.
The incense? Was that piece of it still in his wallet?
He frantically dug the wallet out of his rear pants pocket, searching all of the small compartments inside and pulling out the one remaining piece of incense, though it was sopping wet.
Yes! He was in business!
“Stop!” yelled McDougall at the advancing Oni, using an amplification spell to make himself heard. “If he tries to escape, you can hurt him but don’t kill him, understand?”
Paul focused on the small rope of incense, drying it out and lighting one end of it with a spell, then watching it smolder.
McDougall grinned in triumph, continuing to approach Paul through the air. “I don’t see my talisman but I do see another one. That’s the first question you’re going to answer, pinhead! Who else’s talisman have you stolen?”
But Paul extended his tired arms out to his sides. “In the name of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Hugo Gernsback, may there be a shell around me, a foot…no, make it two feet thick and let the interior of that shell hold a special stasis field that slows the passage of time by two orders of magnitude!”
A golden aurora formed around Paul, quickly assuming a roughly egg-shaped appearance standing on its smaller end.
McDougall laughed and pointed derisively. From the outside looking in, the stasis field had all the appearance of being solid, trapping Paul in a conventional stasis field of his own creation.
“That’s not going to help him any,” the Errabêlu wizard roared in amusement, as he landed on the island a few feet from the field. “Child’s play, getting that open.”
And then McDougall noticed a curious thing. Instead of being frozen inside the field, Paul was still moving. Very slowly, to be sure. But still moving. That wasn’t supposed to be possible inside a stasis field.
From Paul’s perspective, it was McDougall that was moving at one hundredth speed, time inside the shell between the two of them slowed by a factor of a hundred to one.
Paul gasped, struggling to stay conscious, to push the pain away. He still had to act fast before McDougall figured it all out. Reaching out with his powers, physically and mentally mustering everything he could, he concentrated on a small puddle of water standing in a depression in the island’s rocky surface a few yards to his right, outside the shell. With a spell, he instigated deuterium fusion, with the equivalent energy release of a kiloton of TNT.
However, the spell didn’t instantly trigger a detonation. It too had to pass through the time dilation field. Paul estimated roughly six more seconds for that to happen.
As it was, the stasis field was not going to be enough to protect him from the blast, but only enough to delay the moment it could reach him.
“Let the field be three feet thick and let its dilation factor be increased two more orders of magnitude.”
The cavity of space he was standing in grew considerably smaller. Hopefully, that would be enough. He wasn’t sure how much higher he could crank the size of the field or further slow the passage of time.
The shock wave, which might occur 100 milliseconds after the blast, would now take over 16 minutes to reach him. More than enough time to outlast the explosion itself.
• • • •
Thoughtfully rubbing his chin with one hand, McDougall was still studying the slowly moving figure of the rogue wizard inside the field, trying to puzzle out what was going on.
“No matter,” he f
inally concluded coolly. “I’ll rip you out of there like a rotten tooth.” And he waved a hand at the stasis field. But then, just as he was casting the spell, there was a bubbling noise off to his left. He blinked and started to turn in that direction—
• • • •
The one kiloton explosion vaporized the entire Middleton Reef and threw tiny pebbles and dust in all directions as well as ten thousand feet into the air. Even Paul’s stasis field was launched like a cannon ball in a parabolic flight path, the outside of it being incrementally worn away by the blast, layer by layer.
Inside the field, Paul watched as McDougall stood in front of the field, to all intents and purposes, frozen in time. Paul glanced at his watch. If he had caught McDougall off guard enough, then the explosion had already happened, The Sound was gone and the stasis field he was in was on its way high into the air, hurled there at fantastic speed.
None of which he could feel or see from inside the field itself. So he didn’t know if his plan was working or not.
If it wasn’t working, then he should know soon. Time inside his cocoon was the same as outside. So, in a minute or so at the most, McDougall would pry open the field to get to him.
He kept a constant eye on the second hand of his watch. A minute dragged by. Then two. Then three. And still, nothing seemed to happen.
Paul began to breathe easier. The blast must have occurred after all. In a few more minutes, the turbulence would dissipate enough for him to emerge.
Of course, there was the little problem of where to go next. There was no other land masses in range, not in his current condition, not until he had more rest. He would hold out as long as he could before he dropped into the ocean. What was that old line in the Bill Cosby skit about Noah? “How long can you tread water?”
Paul was afraid that he was going to get the chance to find out the answer for himself.
Internally, he was starting to feel very miserable. If the explosion had indeed happened, then, for the first time in his life, he had deliberately killed someone. And not just one person, but at least twenty of them. Despair began to fill his soul.
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 39