Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  “It matters a great deal,” Swain snapped.

  Norton stepped in. “What my uncle’s trying to get at, Mrs. Burke, is that within a few weeks you could tell Dr. MacPherson had it in for Gregor. Like a lot of these big-time physicists, he liked to badger people he considered intellectually inferior to him.”

  “That’s not true,” Swain said, indignant.

  “Hell it isn’t,” Norton shot back glaring at his uncle in a way that surprised Whitney. “And you could see Gregor just taking it, or when he tried to defend himself, getting so crippled by his stammer. He’d turn beet red with frustration.”

  “This still doesn’t give us the connection,” Whitney said.

  Swain sighed. “The connection, Mrs. Burke, is that Gregor’s doctoral thesis focused on lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts. In October, after he’d worked for Carson for about ten weeks, Gregor suggested at an open staff meeting that he begin to focus some attention to the possible superconducting qualities present in the rare ores that make up asteroids and moon rocks.”

  “Sounds reasonable enough, given your methodology,” Angelis said.

  “Not to Dr. MacPherson,” Norton retorted. “Uncle Jeff was in Japan at a meeting, but I was there and MacPherson dumped all over Gregor’s idea, all but called him an idiot. You could just see the disbelief and hurt in Gregor’s face.” He pointed at Whitney and Finnerty. “But the real story, the one you’re looking for, is based on research logs Gregor secretly kept between October 2004 and mid-January 2005.”

  “If you don’t mind, Chester,” Swain cut in. “You should know that NASA’s Lunar Sample Laboratory in Houston safeguards every rock brought back from the moon. Getting samples to test is a complicated procedure. For a junior researcher such as Gregor, a written affidavit of support from the head of a recognized facility is required. Unbeknownst to me, Carson refused to sign the affidavit.

  “According to the research logs Chester mentioned,” Swain went on, “Gregor continued to think about the hundreds of stones that had been brought back from the moon during the Apollo missions. He wrote that he knew that several dozen of the rocks had never been touched. NASA had set these aside to be tested as technology advanced.”

  Whitney said, “So, what? Gregor got hold of one of these rocks anyway?”

  “Very good, Mrs. Burke,” Swain replied. “In mid-November, Gregor forged Carson’s signature on his application to test one of those untouched moon stones. After a review of the request, the curator of lunar samples went to a liquid nitrogen tank and with long metal tongs plucked out a Teflon bag that had been sealed in 1972 and marked ‘Moon Rock 66095.’ According to Gregor’s logs, the rock arrived at our laboratory in a small crate six days before the Christmas break.”

  Norton said, “It was finals week. Very chaotic. Everyone trying to finish up work before Christmas. It’s easy to see how Gregor could have intercepted and hidden the stone before anyone knew of its presence at the lab.”

  “You got this all from his research logs, right?” Finnerty asked.

  Norton nodded. “Say what you want about Gregor. But he was very detail oriented and a visionary.”

  Swain snorted. “Gregor was and is a madman who just got lucky. My nephew has a fine mind, but remains a shitty judge of character, I’m afraid.”

  Norton reddened and shook his head, but his uncle seemed not to notice and went on with his story. “Gregor waited to work on the rock until the dead of night the first evening of the Christmas break Carson had left for Scotland, where he would spend the holiday week before pushing on to a conference in Geneva. Chester and I had gone back to La Jolla, California, to visit my mother.

  “Anyway, Gregor’s logs show that his initial analysis of the stone indicated that it was made up of whitloctite, a calcium carbonate that contains low levels of uranium, and two oxide ores—illemnite and armalcholite—that are rare on Earth, but abundant on the moon.

  “About two o’clock in the morning of Christmas Eve, he crushed a tiny bit of moon rock 66095, then created a film and ran an electric current through it at one hundred degrees below zero. It superconducted.”

  Whitney saw Finnerty shrug. Norton saw it, too, and said, “He’d raised the temperature of superconductivity nearly fifty degrees, Marshal. I mean, he’s already got the Nobel at this point, but he tells no one. Doesn’t e-mail Uncle Jeff or Dr. MacPherson. He goes on alone, basically living in the lab round the clock. His head isn’t on prizes. It’s on the boundaries of the thing.”

  Whitney nodded, understanding how easy it was to get swept up in the power of a new discovery. It had been exactly the same way in the first years she and Tom had explored Labyrinth Cave. She flashed on an image of Tom and herself hugging each other when they’d found the entrance into Christmas Tree Lane and almost broke down again.

  “Yes, well,” Swain said. “For the next five days, Gregor continued his experiments, altering the composition of the ore compound. On his twentieth try, on New Year’s Eve, he took the temperature of superconductivity to an astounding fifty-eight degrees above zero.”

  Angelis shook his head in awe. “Room-temperature superconductivity.”

  “Closest you’ll ever come,” Norton agreed.

  Now Whitney allowed impatience to creep into her voice. “Fascinating. But my family is underground with a bunch of animals. What does this have to do with—?”

  “Please, Mrs. Burke, I’m almost finished,” Swain interrupted. “On January third, Gregor made a cryptic notation in his logs that reads: ‘66095 equals composite Fullerene’.”

  “Which means what?” Finnerty demanded.

  Norton cleared his throat “We take it to mean that because the rock itself was roughly the shape of a soccer ball, Gregor was hypothesizing that the stone as a whole might have superconductive properties.”

  The physicist’s nephew then described Gregor’s activities on January 6, 2004: “He built a spherical matrix of electrical wire around the stone, then ran a substantial current through it. He had sensors, recorders, and computers arranged around the rock.” At that Norton stopped, ran his fingers over his cheeks, and stared at the floor.

  “Well, what happened?” Whitney demanded.

  Swain shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “Gregor’s notes indicate that under the presence of the electrical matrix, the rock seemed to enter a state beyond what we would call superconductivity. The data he recorded indicates that it somehow fed on the energy, breaking it down into its base parts, then accelerated the speed and power of certain of those parts to stupefying levels, causing them to act in a way we’ve never seen before.”

  “What way?” Angelis asked.

  Swain said, “Do you all know what a quark is?”

  Whitney and Angelis nodded, but Finnerty said, “No.”

  “It’s a subatomic particle, one of the most basic building blocks of matter, never known to rot or break apart before,” Swain said. “But Gregor wrote that the stone showered off huge quantities of energy, including quarks that appeared to be disintegrating. Gregor wrote that it showed up on his sensors as bizarre spiral markings girdling the main flow of accelerated energy. He called the phenomenon ‘quark decay’.”

  “Extraordinary!” Angelis said.

  Whitney did not understand all of this, but grasped enough to nod in agreement.

  To her surprise, a look of disappointment crossed Swain’s face. “Yes, it is extraordinary,” he said. “About the most extraordinary thing to happen in the world of physics since Einstein postulated relativity, and it was discovered by a poor boy from the backwoods of Kentucky.”

  “But he told no one about this?” Whitney asked.

  Norton said, “Not one person. He just kept experimenting and over the next six days he developed a theory. He wrote that the quark decay, because of its effect on the energy flow, seemed to be the key to the stone’s power. He believed that if he could figure out a way to control the quark decay, he might b
e able to make the stone act like a cannon, battering the subatomic composition of elements around it.”

  “To do what?” Whitney asked, confused.

  Swain laughed caustically. “To transmute them. To change one element into another. At the subatomic level.”

  “Impossible,” Angelis said.

  “Completely,” Whitney agreed. “Elements cannot be broken down and reconfigured. That’s why they’re called elements.”

  “Yes and no,” Norton interjected “Back in 1941, three Harvard scientists showed that elemental transmutation was feasible. They bombarded four hundred grams of mercury with a blizzard of high-velocity neutrons. The neutrons knocked about the mercury at a subatomic level and the mercury was changed into isotopes of gold.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Finnerty moaned. “Gregor convinced the guard and the inmates that escaped with him that he had a moon rock that could turn things into gold.”

  “That belief is unproven, at least according to the logs,” Swain said. “Before he could attempt transmutation, Gregor was surprised by Dr. MacPherson, who had arrived home early from his conference in Switzerland. According to Gregor’s notes, Carson was going to steal credit for the discovery and therefore control of the stone.”

  Norton said, “Gregor just couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take the idea of Dr. MacPherson, this man who’d belittled and run roughshod over him, taking credit for his discovery. We figure he just snapped, went nuts, and decided to kill Dr. MacPherson.”

  Swain nodded sadly. “Gregor’s repeated exposures couldn’t have helped his mental state.”

  “Exposure to what?” Whitney asked.

  “The quark decay,” the physicist replied. “Essentially it’s a form of radiation we’ve never seen before, Mrs. Burke. You study Gregor’s logs and you realize that he took very few precautions to protect himself.”

  “Because he didn’t know what to expect,” Norton interjected.

  “That’s your theory, Chester,” Swain said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘The point is, he kept exposing himself. Gregor wrote that he put Carson in the trunk of his car, then drove north with the stone and hid it in a place where he believed it would never be found. He wrote that he designed an entirely new matrix and energy source for the rock and let it run in his presence without adequate precaution for almost a week before leaving it to get resupplied.

  “A state trooper pulled Gregor over January 22 near Louisville,” the physicist went on. “He was driving as if he was drunk. The trooper said Gregor was in a terrible state mentally and physically. Grossly dehydrated. Lost all his hair. His skin was completely leached of pigmentation and—”

  “That’s when the trooper noticed the smell,” Norton cut in. “Dr. MacPherson’s decomposing body was in the trunk of Gregor’s car. The research logs were in there too. But no stone.”

  There was a prolonged, heavy silence in the tent. Whitney struggled to digest everything the physicist and his nephew had said. It was all so fantastic. It must have struck Finnerty the same way, because he asked, “You believe everything Gregor wrote?”

  “Initial skepticism was my reaction as well, Marshal,” Swain admitted. “But at the government’s request, I repeated Gregor’s experiments with mixtures of armalcholite and illemnite gleaned from other rocks from the Descartes Highlands. There’s no doubt about it. The composite ore superconducts at close to room temperature and because of that, we’re returning to the moon. Because of that we’re all here right now, trying to find out if Gregor’s stone still exists.”

  Whitney saw the connection. “You think Gregor hid the stone here, in the Labyrinth, don’t you,” she said, then pushed on before either Swain or Norton could answer her. “You said the moon rock enters a superconducting state at just below fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Labyrinth Cave has a constant temperature of fifty-six degrees. And then there’s the insulating qualities of the cave. Two hundred feet of rock makes it darn tough to use sensors to detect it, doesn’t it? Gregor’s taken Tom and Cricket hostage because he wants them to lead him back to wherever he’s hidden his moon rock. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Burke,” Swain said. ‘That’s exactly right.”

  At that, it all became overwhelming and Whitney hung her head and began to shake it back and forth like someone who’s just suffered a concussion. Then she felt a hand on her back and a presence by her side. Finnerty knelt next to her once again. “You see now you’ve got no choice, don’t you, Mrs. Burke?” he said. “Without you to lead me, I can only guard the entrances and hope that after Gregor gets to his stone, he allows your husband and daughter to emerge alive. Given his ruthlessness in the past, I’d say that’s a big if.”

  Whitney felt the irrational need to pluck at the fabric of her sleeve, but she couldn’t allow herself to dissolve. Not now. Not when her child’s life was at stake. Not when her husband’s life was at stake. Not when their future as a family was at stake.

  She raised her head and gazed at him. “Guarding the known entrances may not be enough, Marshal,” she said. “There may be more than four ways into the cave.”

  “How many more?”

  “I don’t know. But Tom was convinced that we hadn’t found all of the entrances and we might not in our lifetime. The Labyrinth lies under a large area, more than two hundred fifty square miles, and the ridges are so steep, and the hollows between them so choked with vines and thorns, that he believed there could be dozens of ways in and out of the cave we don’t know about.”

  “What would you do if you were me?” Finnerty asked. “To save Tom and Cricket, to recapture these men?”

  Whitney swallowed hard and looked all around the tent, petrified by what she was about to say. “If I were you, I’d go inside,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “I’d go inside, ambush those bastards, and rescue my family before it’s too late.”

  1:30 P.M.

  JENKINS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  For the next six hours, Tom kneaded at his aching stomach muscles while leading the inmates and Cricket slowly west through dry subterranean canyons. Every minute or so he’d look back to make sure Cricket was all right. That had become a fixation, making sure that Cricket came out of this cave safe and sound. He’d promised Whitney that. He owed Whitney that. He didn’t know if Whitney could tolerate anything but that. He wondered how she was coping. He imagined she knew by now and prayed that the news had not sent her into another tailspin.

  In the early evening, they came to a grotto nearly two hundred yards long and one hundred fifty feet wide. The cavern’s ceiling was nearly forty feet high and smooth. The walls were dull flat gray. The floor was covered with thousands of small rock disks. The disks themselves were coated by thousands of years of dried bat guano, which lent the air a chemical quality. Alert for any slip that would cause a snapped ankle, Tom led them across that treacherous place. For many minutes, the sound of the cave wind was drowned by the inmates’ cursing and the noise of the rocks clunking together underfoot.

  At last they reached the end of the loose disks and rested before a giant, floor-to-ceiling mineral formation that resembled a waterfall. Some of the individual draperies that created the petrified cascade were a dull white, but most carried a red or bluish gray tone, which lent the place its name: Patriot Falls.

  Cricket came toward Tom. He noted to his satisfaction that she seemed barely winded by the rigors of the long hike. But the toll was clearly beginning to surface on their captors, who were covered with dust and sweaty grime. Mann, Kelly, and Lyons held themselves this way and that to cradle the bruises the cave had scrimshawed on their bodies. Score one for us, Tom thought. It’s a particular skill to be able to move your body cleanly over stone, and none of them yet had it.

  Except for Gregor. If Tom had to point to the one who had obviously been in caves before, it was this physically contorted albino of a man. Despite his sickly appearance, he moved with economy and balance. He used his headlamp to plot a way f
orward before he took any steps; he checked his handholds constantly; he never crawled when he could stoop; he never stooped when he could walk upright

  But what interested Tom more was the sense he’d gotten that Gregor’s entire being seemed to ebb and flow as if it were a tide connected to the pull of the moon’s gravity. At times he seemed about to explode with nervous energy. At other moments he turned sullen and spent and appeared on the verge of collapse. Every hour or so, Kelly would take Gregor’s blood pressure, his temperature, and his pulse. The vital signs he called out were wildly erratic. Lyons kept feeding Gregor pills in an effort, Tom supposed, to level out his system. But from what Tom knew of basic physiology and emergency medicine, the pills were having minimal effect. The guy could have a stroke at any moment.

  Then Tom asked himself if he might create enough stress to cause Gregor to have a stroke. The thought chilled him. But he had to defend himself, didn’t he? He certainly had to defend Cricket by any means necessary.

  Cricket sat down and rested her chin on Tom’s shoulder. “You okay, Dad?”

  “Stomach feels like a truck plowed into it, but I’m fine,” he said. “You?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, then knitted her brows. “You think Mom knows?”

  “She must.”

  Tears welled in Cricket’s eyes. “You think we’ll ever see her again?”

  Tom put the knuckle of his index finger under her chin and stared directly into her eyes. “We’ll see her again because we’re coming out of this alive. Don’t you dare ever think different, you hear me?”

  Cricket snuggled into the crook of his neck. “I hear you,” she whispered.

  Ten feet away, Tom caught Lyons watching them, then turning when Mann asked Gregor, “How far we gotta walk? My feet are killing me.”

  “How far would you journey to hold the universe in your hands?” Gregor said.

  “What kind of answer is that?” Mann grumbled.