Class Fives: Origins (12 page)

An energy powerful enough to literally knock asteroids, millions of miles away, out of their orbits, yet was utterly undetectable by current scientific instrumentation, would give anyone pause. As one of the people charged with scanning the endless skies to try and alert all of humanity about an approaching cosmic threat, it was positively unsettling.

It had to be Dark Energy, he told himself again, feeling the thought burrow further into his mind, rooting itself, slowly making itself something as close to a solid fact as the unprovable could ever be. And if that’s what it was, and if somehow someone had managed to find a way to control it, unleash it, then there was no telling what kind of universal havoc could be wrought by its misuse, or worse, by design.

At last he heaved a tired sigh, turned and moved to the door, leaving the hopelessly crippled equations stuck uselessly to the dark surface.

The moment he reached his office just down the corridor he picked up the phone and dialed. It was answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” the familiar voice said crisply through the flatness of the little speaker next to his ear.

Marvin felt a tiny flush of some good feeling, comfort and relief, at the sound of the reedy tone with its moderate Germanic accent,

“Professor Manstein, hi. It’s Marvin Henry. How are you?”

“Marvin!” the voice brightened instantly. “My dear boy, I’m quite well. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Professor, thank you. Listen, the reason I was calling was…”

His voice trailed off as he suddenly realized he didn’t quite know how to ask what he wanted to.

Would it be a security violation to even broach the subject with his old teacher? Was someone even now listening in on the conversation, sitting in some little room somewhere and keeping an eye on what he said, whom he talked to?

Marvin knew his beloved former instructor was no more a security risk than he was himself. The old man had managed to escape from East Germany decades before, and had found a home here in the United States before Marvin himself was even born. And the work he had done for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been crucial in getting human beings access to the vast reaches of the empty Heavens.

“My boy?” the voice coaxed gently, “Are you all right?”

Marvin shook himself to fling off the distracting thoughts that were beginning to collect in his mind, and fixed his attention on the problem he faced.

“No, I’m fine, Professor. Listen, I’m going to be in your area tomorrow, and I was wondering if I could meet up with you for a bit. I have something I wanted to run past you, get your thoughts on it.”

“Of course, Marvin, I’d be delighted to see you again. Tomorrow, you say?”

Marvin quickly calculated that he could catch the first flight out in the morning, land in New York and make his way over to Princeton by early afternoon.

“Yes,” he responded brightly, “I thought we could grab something to eat and catch up, if you’re free. Say, around five tomorrow afternoon?”

“Certainly, my boy, I would be delighted. You know I always have time for my favorite students.”

The old man’s chuckle caused Marvin’s lips to quiver up in a half-grin.

“All right, then. Anywhere in particular we should meet?”

“There’s a brand new restaurant just off campus, I believe it is called ‘Eddie’s Place’. We could meet there. I hear they have a very satisfying assortment of pastas I’ve been meaning to try.”

“Okay, Eddie’s Place. I can look it up. Well, then I will see you tomorrow at five o’clock.”

“I’m looking forward to it, dear boy.”

“Me too, Professor.”

After a brief, slightly awkward pause the voice probed gently.

“So, everything is going well for you these days? You are enjoying your new position out there in the wilderness?”

Marvin emitted a quiet laugh.

“Yes, Professor, it’s nice out here. Good clean air. Almost no light pollution.”

“Ah, I envy you. Around here the night sky is like bean soup. I can’t see a thing, not even with the fifty-inch scope. The only data I can get anymore is from those damned radio telescopes from the Bell labs, and I hate not being able to actually see what’s going on up there.”

“I know what you mean, Professor. A lot of what I get is non-visible and it kind of takes all the fun out of it, you know?”

“I do indeed, my boy. Ah, if only we could have another major blackout, I might actually get to see something exciting again.”

“Listen, Professor, I have to go for now, but I will meet you at Eddie’s Place tomorrow at five PM, all right?”

“Of course, Marvin. I look forward to it.”

“Wonderful. Take care, Professor.”

“And you, Marvin.”

Marvin hung up, letting his mind pore over the gathering thoughts.

Professor Maxwell Manstein had been one of the titans of astronomy and physics, having come into his own after being schooled under Werner Heisenberg himself, the man who had developed the Uncertainty Principle, which said that when observing subatomic particles, one could either determine where they were or which direction they were traveling, but never both. That the very act of observing events on those minute levels automatically changed the outcome. After graduating at the head of his class, Manstein had transferred to Leipzig where he was put to work helping the scientists there work out the calculations needed to develop a new generation of rockets whose purpose was, he later learned, little more than an attempt to deliver atomic weapons to targets around the world more efficiently.

After a decade of toiling on this hateful effort, he had managed to slip across the border to the west and settled in the United States, quickly being incorporated into the theoretical team working at NASA. After a distinguished career serving his new homeland, he had semi-retired to a tenured chair of Astronomy at Princeton University in New Jersey, the same college where Albert Einstein had spent the concluding years of his celebrated career.

Now the old man was retired but was often presented as a guest lecturer for many of the science courses offered by the Ivy League university. Marvin had been drawn to the man’s energy, his boundless imagination and his wry sense of humor. They had formed a kind of bond as Mentor and Apprentice - which seemed to fulfill something in both of them - and had kept in touch over the years.

Now Marvin needed the old man’s help.

He wondered if he should now call and report the pending meeting to someone at the Pentagon, but quickly dismissed the thought. If the Professor couldn’t help him then there would be nothing to report. But if he could, the information he got would be more critical than simply a casual mention of an unstructured meeting with an old friend.

He glanced at his watch, then picked up the phone to call the travel office at the university administration building, wondering if he would eventually be able to expense the trip back to the government.

The moment his backside dropped into the passenger’s seat of the cruiser, and he had pulled the door closed with a slam, Jim was already whirling to where Dan sat behind the wheel, and balled his hand up into a frustrated fist.

“All right,” he said hotly, “What the fuck was that in there?”

Dan raised an arm and flapped it gently, if not to silence his partner, at least to fend off his anger momentarily.

“I know, let me explain.”

“You damn well better,” Jim fumed, pushing back against the seat, his temper simmering.

It had been a rough afternoon for both of them.

After he had left Roger and returned to the accident site, Dan hadn’t had a chance to get his partner aside and agree on how this most bizarre of incidents needed to be explained to those in the various departments that had been pulled into dealing with it, before Jim had been ordered by the Lieutenant to escort the woman and her kids to the hospital and take their statement there, while Dan remained on the scene to coordinate the various complicated elements that always arose in the wake of unforeseen disaster.

By the time Dan had managed to get back to the precinct, Jim had already babbled the incredible tale of what he had witnessed to a dozen or more other cops, plus two investigators from the National Transportation and Safety Administration. The one thing they all seemed to have picked up from the excitedly blurted retelling, was that some guy had walked into the accident and pulled a Superman, dragging the blazing tanker truck off the crumpled cars and literally carrying a smashed SUV to safety.

It had taken Dan a while to convince those he managed to buttonhole that maybe Jim had been a bit over-excited and misinterpreted what he thought he had witnessed. The total unbelievability of the story had helped, and the long verbal report he had finally made to the Lieutenant, complete with hints that maybe Jim was letting his imagination run away with him a little bit, had calmed down a lot of the wild speculation that was already beginning to filter through the precinct gossip mill.

He felt bad that, when it was Jim’s turn to report what he’d observed, the Lieutenant’s attitude was clearly more tolerant and understanding than it would have been if he actually believed the crazy story of some kind of superhero swooping in to save the day.

If only the Lieutenant hadn’t suggested, when Jim had finished his tale, that maybe the young patrolman should take a few days off to clear his head from the traumatic events of the morning. If he’d just nodded and dismissed Jim, it might have been easier for Dan now. Instead, the Lieutenant had called Dan in to verify what he had seen, and Dan had gently inferred that maybe Jim had just misinterpreted the events, which could happen to anybody.

By the time they had been ushered out of the office Jim’s face was a cold, fuming mask.

“All right,” Jim said sharply. “Why didn’t you back me up with the Lieutenant? You know what we saw. It was fucking incredible but you ratted me out. Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“Look,” Dan responded, a bit sharply, “I tried to get to you before you did your report but you were already shooting your mouth off, not just to our people but those TSA guys, too.”

“So what?” Jim snapped back, “I was just telling them what I saw!”

“That’s right,” Dan countered, “And do you have any idea how crazy it sounds?”

“But it’s true!”

“I know it’s true! And
you
know it’s true. But where’s your evidence? Can you prove it?”

Jim hesitated, his logical cop’s instinct starting to reassert itself above his anger.

“I don’t have to prove it! We’re not prosecuting the guy!”

“No, we’re not,” Dan countered, “But unless you can prove it, it just sounds crazy. Or
you
sound crazy. And I’ve got too many years in to have people start thinking I’m going batshit now. That’s something you need to learn. If you can’t prove it, then it remains ‘alleged’, as in the ‘alleged perpetrator’ or the ‘alleged incident’. You understand? You start insisting something that insane was real, the only thing you’re going to do is make everyone think you’re losing it. You can tell people by saying ‘it looked like’, or ‘it appeared’, but you start telling people like it’s a fact, they aren’t going to believe you. They’ll just think you’re a moron.”

Jim visibly deflated, the anger flowing away like water vapor above a hot springs. Slowly he leaned his head back against the seat and sighed.

“Right. You’re right. I didn’t think of that. Sorry.”

Dan gazed at him a moment, then continued gently.

“Listen,” he went on, “You’re going to see a lot of crazy shit in this job. A lot. And some of it will be so nuts you won’t know how to even describe it. But all anyone will want to know about is what you can prove. Not what you saw, but what you can prove you saw. And if you can’t do that, then just stick with whatever facts you can prove and forget the rest.”

“I thought you’d back me up,” Jim muttered, a bit sullenly.

“Well, you thought wrong. Sorry.”

They remained silent, feeling the electric crackle of the tension between them slowly begin to dissipate. At last Jim turned and stared at Dan.

“So you didn’t lose the guy, did you?” he asked flatly.

Dan shook his head.

“Nope.”

“Well, at least tell me what happened. You owe me that much.”

Dan considered this a moment, then nodded.

“Ok. He finally pulled over, way down by Rosemead, and we went and got a cup of coffee together.”

“You’re kidding,” Jim said, his tone a little awed.

“Nope. Oh,” Dan added, reaching to dig in his trouser pocket and extract the smooth lump of gleaming metal that had been his handcuffs and holding it out. Instinctively Jim extended a hand and Dan dropped the lump into it.

“He did that to my cuffs. While I sat there.”

Jim stared down at the small, heavy mass.

“You’re shitting me.”

Dan smiled.

“Nope. Took him a couple seconds. It was like he just put it in his palm, worked it around a second and that’s what was left.”

“My God,” Jim breathed. “So he really did it. Moved that truck and all that.”

“Yes, he did.”

Jim shot a confused, tight glance at his partner.

“Why didn’t you bring him in?”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. Material witness.”

Dan turned and fixed his partner with a wry expression.

“Bring in the guy who flipped a tanker truck up a hillside, carried an SUV out of fire, ripped off the door like it was nothing and, oh yeah, squashed my handcuffs into that. Bring in
that
guy.”

Jim stared at him and after a moment his expression changed to one of dawning understanding.

“Oh, yeah. I see your point.”

“And by the way, he’s invulnerable.”

“He’s what?”

“Can’t be hurt. By anything.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“And you believe him?”

Dan merely directed his gaze, pointedly, at the glistening metal lump still seated in his partner’s palm.

Jim slowly leaned back, turning to gaze out the windshield, his mind racing.

“This is fucking unbelievable,” he said quietly.