Security was beefed up. VIPs arrived, mostly by helicopter, from major universities, research facilities, state and federal agencies. Foreign dignitaries dropped in, and at one point a flustered Max was introduced to the French president. April put together a slide presentation, which highlighted Tom Lasker’s boat, results of the various tests of the material used to construct the boat and the Roundhouse, early stages of the excavation, and aerial views of Johnson’s Ridge at night.
By now, April had been granted leave by Colson Labs. She was the only person with the excavation group who was even remotely qualified to address the various researchers. (The waiting list to visit the Roundhouse, and with it the new world, had already grown into the thousands.) On the sixteenth she announced that a committee of prominent scholars would meet in ten days to formulate an investigative and developmental strategy. The immediate questions posed to the committee would be, “What should we do about the world across the bridge?” and “How do we prepare for first contact?”
Columbus, Ohio, Mar. 16
President Matthew R. Taylor
The White House
Washington, DC 20003
Dear President Taylor,
I know that you are very busy, but I hope you can find time to help my dad. He lost his job last week at the paper mill. It happened to some other kids, too. I am in the fifth grade at the Theodore Roosevelt School, and I told some of my friends I was going to write to you. We know you will help. Thank you.
Richie Wickersham
April Cannon had planned to treat everyone, Max and the Laskers and Arky Redfern, to dinner the evening after the tribal council voted down Wells’s offer. But she hadn’t counted on the effects of rising from the status of minor celebrity to international fame.
Once the pictures of the wilderness world, taken by a pool camera crew, flashed around the globe, any chance of anonymity for her and Max was shattered forever. Reporters appeared at the Blue Light in Grafton while patrons crowded around her table and asked for autographs.
There were more reporters at the Prairie Schooner. In the end they went to the Laskers’ home and held a good-natured impromptu press conference from the front porch. When April, hoping for some privacy, suggested they cut the celebration short, Max demurred. “This is part of the story,” he said. “Let them have it. It costs us nothing and gains their good will. We may need it before we’re done.”
In talking to the press, Max had planned to deliver a bromide, a general comment about someone having left behind an inestimable gift for the human race. But when he got up in front of the cameras and the recorders, his emotions took hold. (He had perhaps drunk a little too much by then, not enough to induce a wobble, but enough to loosen his inhibitions.) “You’ve seen pictures of the new world,” he said. “But the pictures don’t really carry the effect. The sea is warm and the beach is wide, and I suspect we’re going to discover the fruit is edible. I was fortunate to find a beautiful woman on the beach, and I was not anxious to come back to North Dakota.” The reporters laughed. April caught his eye and smiled and must have known where he was going because her lips formed a no. But it was too late. Max was rolling. “The place is like nowhere you’ve ever been before. It’s pure magic.” He glanced out through the window at the plain and watched the wind blowing snow around the corner of the barn. “It’s Eden,” he said.
Within a few minutes, every major television network on the planet was breaking into its regular programming.
The Reverend William (Old-Time Bill) Addison, former beer truck driver, former real-estate salesman, former systems analyst, was the founder and driving force of the television ministry he called Project Forty, a reference to the years in the desert and the flagship TV channel which carried his show. He was also pastor of the Church of the Volunteer, in Whitburg, Alabama. Bill was a believer. He believed the end was near, he believed people were intrinsically no damned good and needed divine help every step of the way, and he believed Bill Addison was an exception to the general rule.
He was a recovered sinner. He had been a womanizer. He had known the evils of drink, and he had hotwired more than one Chevrolet during his adolescent years in Chattanooga. He had defied authority in all its manifestations. Even the divine.
And it happened to him, as it had happened to Paul, that a highway had led him directly to the Lord. In Bill’s case, the highway was I—95. Bill was headed to Jacksonville on a rainswept evening, planning a night in the company of sinful women, when his car spun out of control and rolled into a ditch. He should have died. The car exploded and Addison was thrown at the foot of a tree a hundred feet away. But between the moment of the explosion, and the arrival of the police some ten minutes later, the Lord spoke to him, and gave him his mission. Now that mission went forward from a small country church on the south side of Whitburg to 111 affiliated stations across the nation and in Canada.
The morning after Max’s injudicious remark, Bill broached the subject to his electronic flock. He was standing in the book-lined study set that he habitually used to lend a scholarly glow to his perorations. “Last night,” he explained, “I could not sleep very well. I don’t know why that should have been. I usually have no trouble sleeping, brothers and sisters, because I never go to bed with a heavy conscience. But last night something kept me awake. And I wondered whether someone was trying to speak to me.
“Now I don’t say it was God.” He pronounced the name as if it had two syllables. “Hear me well, friends, I don’t say it was God. But, as St. Paul tells us in the book of Romans, it was time to awaken out of sleep.
“I went downstairs and read for a while. The house was quiet. And I put on the television, CNN, that I might have the company of a human voice.
“If you read your newspapers this morning or looked at the news broadcasts, you know what I saw. Scientists claim to have found a door into a new world. I watched, fascinated. They showed pictures of this new world, of its broad purple forest and its blue sea. And its brooding sky.
“Now I don’t know what it is that we, in our insatiable curiosity, have blundered into. But it is disquieting to any good Christian. At first I thought it was a joke, but that cannot be, because it would be too easily found out. To those of you who have asked, therefore, I say yes, I believe the reports coming out of North Dakota are true.
“Some of you have also asked, ‘Reverend Bill, what do you think about this news? What is this place they call the Roundhouse?’ I have no answers. But I will tell you what I suspect and why I think we should close that door forever.
“These scientists are, by and large, godless men and women. But one of them seems to have had an inkling of what I believe is the truth about the land across the Dakota bridge. He was attracted by it, and said he would have liked to stay among its quiet forests. And he called it Eden.
“Brothers and sisters, I propose to you that that is exactly what it is. That some part of this man, atheist as he may be, as he probably is, some living part deep in his soul recognized its long-lost home and yearned, no, cried out, to return.
“We know that God did not destroy Eden. Perhaps He wanted it to remain to remind us of what we had lost. What our arrogance had cost. I do not know. No one knows.”
The faithful caught their cue. “Amen,” they cried.
“You may say, ‘But Reverend Bill, the Bible makes no mention of purple forests. Nor of strange cloud formations.’ But neither does it exclude them. It says that the Lord God made two great lights, one to rule the day and the other to rule the night. Do we really know that the second light was our present-day moon, and not the great cloud that we saw on our televisions earlier today?
“Brothers and sisters, I tell you, we take a terrible risk if we go back through that door. If it is indeed Eden, we are defying the will of the Almighty.”
Akron, OH, Mar. 17 (UPI)—
Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company today denied reports that massive layoffs announced last week were tied to revelations coming out of
Johnson’s Ridge. “Laughable,” said a company spokesman. “We are reengineering and reorganizing. But we are confident there will always be a strong market in this country for tires.”
The stock market is down 650 points as of this hour. The biggest losses have been in the auto and airline industries. Analysts attribute the sell-off to fears that a revolutionary new transportation system is on the horizon, based on Roundhouse technology.
In Boston, United Technologies denied today that massive layoffs are planned.
(CNN Noon Report)
Jeremy Carlucci was so excited he was having trouble breathing. He had been an astronomer, he liked to tell people, since he was four years old, when he sat out back on the open porch of his grandfather’s farm north of Kenosha to look for Venus and Mars. Carlucci was near the end of a long and distinguished career.
Now he stood on a beach five thousand light-years from Kenosha, in a night filled with diamonds and stellar whirlpools. The great roiling clouds beneath the Horsehead were lit by inner fires, summer lightning frozen in place by distance.
“Magnificent,” someone said behind him.
A cloud-wrapped globe was rising in the east.
The young Class A blue giants were particularly striking. The nebula was a cradle for new stars. Jeremy’s joy was so great that he wanted to cry out. “We need to put an observatory here,” he whispered to Max.
“A Hubble,” said Edward Bannerman, who was from the Institute for Advanced Study. “It should be our first priority. We have to figure out how to enlarge the port so we can get equipment over here.”
The wind worked in the trees, and the sea broke and rolled up the beach.
Bannerman, who was a diminutive, sharp-featured man with thinning white hair, watched it come, and then glanced out at the Horsehead. “We are less than two miles from Johnson’s Ridge,” he said.
The wave played itself out and sank into the sand.
“It’s absurd,” he continued. “What happened to the laws of physics?”
MIRACLE IN NORTH DAKOTA
The port works.
A team of eleven people stood today on the surface of a world that astronomers say is thousands of light-years from Earth….
(Wall Street Journal, lead editorial, Mar. 18)
Are there people in Eden? If so, we may be hearing from them shortly. Whoever built the bridge between North Dakota and the Horsehead Nebula will probably be less understanding than the Native Americans were when their neighborhood went to hell.
(Mike Tower, Chicago Tribune)
Tony Peters left his office in the Executive Office Building just after the markets closed. His face was ashen, and he felt very old. His cellular telephone sounded as he strode out onto West Executive Avenue. “The Man wants you,” his secretary said. The president was at Camp David for the weekend. “Chopper will be on the lawn in ten minutes.”
Peters had known the call would come. He dragged his briefcase wearily through the crowds and the protesters along Pennsylvania Avenue (“Bomb the Roundhouse”) and entered through the main gate just as a Marine helicopter started its descent toward the pad. The wildest of wild cards had been introduced into the global economy. And he could think of only one recommendation to make to the president.
“The world needs to be reassured,” Peters was telling him a half-hour later in the presence of a dozen advisors. “The wheels came off the markets last fall because people thought that automobiles might not wear out every five years. Now they think automobiles might become obsolete altogether. And aircraft and elevators along with them. And tires and radars and carburetors and God knows what else. You name it, and we can tie it to transportation.”
The people seated around the conference table stirred uneasily. The vice president, tall, gray, somber, stared at his notebook. The secretary of state, an attack-dog trial lawyer who was rumored to be on the verge of quitting because Matt Taylor liked to be his own secretary of state, sat with his head braced on his fists, eyes closed.
The president looked toward James Samson, his treasury secretary. “I agree,” Samson said.
When the secretary showed no inclination to continue, the president noted something in the leather folio that was always at his side and tapped the pen on the table. “If we assume this device really works, and it can be adapted to ordinary travel, what are the implications for the economy?”
“Theoretically,” said Peters, “technological advance is always advantageous. In the long run we will profit enormously from developing a capability for cheap and virtually instantaneous travel. The equipment requires, as I understand it, no more power than would be needed to turn on your TV. The benefits are obvious.”
“But over the short term?”
“There will be some dislocation,” he said.
“Some dislocation?” Samson smiled cynically. He was small, washed-out, possibly dying. He’d been wrong during the winter in the reassurances given the president concerning the Roundhouse, but he was nevertheless generally credited with having the best brain in the administration. “Chaos might be a little closer to the truth.” His voice shook. “Collapse. Disintegration. Take your pick.” He coughed into a handkerchief. “Keep in mind, Mr. President, we are not concerned here with the next decade. Allow this to continue, and there may be no United States to benefit in the long term. And there certainly will be no President Taylor.” He subsided into a spasm of coughs.
Taylor nodded. “Who else has a comment? Admiral?”
Admiral Charles (Bomber) Bonner was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was right out of central casting for senior military officers: tall, well-pressed, no-nonsense. He appeared to be still in good shape, although he was in his sixties. He walked with a limp, compliments of a plane crash in Vietnam. “Mr. President,” he said, “this device, if it exists, has defense implications of the most serious nature. Should this kind of equipment become generally available, it would become possible to introduce strike forces, maybe whole armies, into the heart of any nation on earth. With no warning. And probably no conceivable defense. All that would be necessary, apparently, would be to assemble a receiver station.” He looked around to gauge whether his words were having the desired effect. “No place on earth that could be reached by a pickup truck would be safe from assault forces.”
Taylor took a long, deep breath. “You are suggesting we appropriate the device, Admiral? And do what?”
“I am suggesting we destroy it. Mr. President, there is no such thing as a long-term military secret. When this device becomes part of anyone else’s arsenal, as it will, it negates the carriers, the missile force, SAC and TAC, and everything else we have. It is the ultimate equalizer. Go in there, buy the damned place from the Indians if you can, seize it if you must, but go in there, get the thing, and turn it to slag.”
Harry Eaton shook his head. Harry was the White House chief of staff. “The Sioux just turned down two hundred million for the property. I don’t think they’re interested in selling.”
“Offer them a billion,” said Rollie Graves, the CIA director.
“I don’t believe they’ll sell,” Eaton said again. “Even if they did, this is high-profile. Give them a billion, and the media will be asking questions right up to election day about what the taxpayers got for their money. What do we tell them? That we did it to protect General Motors and Boeing?”
“I don’t much care what you tell them,” said Bonner. “That kind of capability converts the carrier force into so much scrap metal. Think about it, Mr. President.”
Mark Anniok, secretary of the interior, leaned forward. Anniok was of Inuit heritage. “You can’t just take it away from them,” he said. “It would be political suicide. My God, we’d be pictured as stealing from the Native-Americans again. I can see the editorials now.”
“We damned well can take it away from them,” said Eaton. “And we should immediately thereafter arrange an accident that blows the whole goddamn thing off the top of the ridge.”
&n
bsp; “I agree,” said Bonner. “Put a lid on it now while we can.”
Elizabeth Schumacher, the science advisor, sat at the far end of the table. She was a gray-eyed, introspective woman who was rarely invited to strategy meetings. The Taylor administration, committed as it was to reducing the deficit, was not generally perceived as a friend of the scientific community. The president knew this, and he was sorry for it, but he was willing to take the heat to achieve his goal. “Mr. President,” she said, “finding the Roundhouse is an event of incalculable importance. If you destroy it, or allow it to be destroyed, be assured that future generations will never forgive you.”
That was all she said, and Peters saw that it had an effect.
They talked inconclusively for two more hours. Eaton was on the fence. Only Anniok and Schumacher argued to save the Roundhouse. Tony Peters was torn, and he gradually came around to the view that they should try to exploit the ridge and take their chances with the economy and whatever other effects the artifact might have. But he was cautious by nature, and far too loyal to the welfare of his chief executive to recommend that course of action. Everyone else in the room argued strenuously to find a way to get rid of the artifact.
When the meeting ended, the president took Peters aside. “Tony,” he said, “I wanted to thank you for your contribution tonight.”
He nodded. “What are we going to do?”
Taylor had never been indecisive. But tonight, for the first time that Peters could recall, the president hesitated. “You want the truth? I don’t know how to proceed. I think this thing will disrupt the economy, and nobody knows how it will look when we come out the other side. But I also think Elizabeth is right. If I allow the Roundhouse to be destroyed, history is going to eviscerate me.”
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