Class Fives: Origins (18 page)

Vernon’s face screwed up and he shook his head sharply.

“Not like this. This man, my patron, the one who gave me Karillan’s notes. He wanted me to work out a way of detecting an undetectable energy emission.”

“And did you?”

Vernon sighed and nodded.

“Yes. Based on what I read of Karillan’s notes I was able to work out that direct contact of certain subatomic particles, if excited to a certain frequency, would become repellant to every other kind of matter. They’d push every other subatomic particle and every frequency of energy away violently. They’d be so repellant that they could, theoretically, rip open space-time. We’d rip a hole in the canvas. Just a tiny hole, but enough for a bit of whatever’s out there to come through.”

Marvin felt a sick churning start in his stomach.

“And Karillan actually did it. Thirty five years ago.”

Vernon nodded.

“I knew he had done some sort of experiment at some secret particle accelerator somewhere in Russia, but then it supposedly had a power accident and blew up. Flattened the whole area, created this huge sinkhole. The whole facility was underground.”

“Like Chernobyl,” Marvin prompted.

“No, Chernobyl emitted huge amounts of ordinary radiation, they were able to read that in a couple of days just from air sampling. Nobody read anything from Karillan’s goof. They just put the devastation down to an earthquake that damaged the facility and caused the explosion. The ground above it collapsed, caused this massive forest fire. But it was in the middle of nowhere, so who cared?”

“I think I heard about that once, when they were about to turn on the CERN collider in Switzerland. It was somebody’s evidence that the things are unsafe. But there were no details.”

Vernon nodded, thoughtfully.

“I’d heard about it too,” Marvin said. “But I thought it was just an accident. You know, Russian engineering. But I didn’t know that it had caused any kind of emission. Nobody ever detected one.”

“I did,” Marvin said quietly. “Well, the aftereffects of it. But it happened long before Deep Look came on-line. I only found it by backtracking the trajectories of multiple objects with one Hell of a piece of software.”

“My patron said,” Vernon continued, as if he hadn’t heard, “Something had gone wrong that first time. Karillan had missed something, or done something wrong, and the whole facility just blew.”

He let his mind shuffle rapidly through the multiple calculations and equations stored in his memory, fixing on one operation, leaping to another.

“But it didn’t go wrong,” he finally whispered. “It worked. He actually did it.”

“Did what?” Marvin asked, breathlessly.

Vernon turned to stare at him.

“Poked a hole in the universe,” he said, his tone almost awed. “He actually did it. Probably just a tiny hole, maybe only a couple microns across, but – “

“But what came through,” Marvin interrupted, “Was enough to knock celestial bodies millions of miles away out of their orbits.”

“Like a quasar,” Vernon muttered thoughtfully, referring to the super-dense dark stars that release incredible streams of radiation in narrow beams shot from the poles of the mass.

“And only for a very short time. Maybe just a fraction of a second,” Marvin concluded.

They sat there, beside one another, on the grass at the edge of the walkway outside the science building in the middle of the campus, each gathering up the new mounds of concepts that had just been dumped into their brains, and trying to shuffle them around into a sensible mass.

“The detector,” Vernon finally said. “I gave it to him a couple of months ago.”

“How exactly does it work?” Marvin prompted.

Vernon shrugged.

“It reads the ambient background radiation and filters out everything except a certain narrow range of energy signals caused by these very light, almost massless particles. Those signals are highly susceptible to gravity, so if there were a fluctuation in the overall gravitational field they’d be pulled down, you wouldn’t see many of them. The detector just looks for places where those particles are missing.”

“What would that indicate?” Marvin encouraged.

Vernon thought a moment.

“That there had been a change in the gravitational field in that location. Like a tiny leak in something.”

He turned to Marvin once more.

“I figured that if gravity really is an aftereffect of Dark Matter leeching into our universe, then if there was a pinprick somewhere and whatever it was became able to actually get in, the gravity around it would go off the charts.”

“So,” Marvin said, “You’ve built a device that can detect actual fluctuations in the gravitational field. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Vernon smiled, but the light quickly dropped from his face.

“And the only reason he would need that kind of detector,” he went on, “Is if there was a continuing emission that was keeping the gravitational field in flux.”

Marvin regarded him sharply.

“A leak?”

Vernon nodded.

“To continually reinforce the emission. Otherwise it would dissipate and levels would drop back to background normal. Anyway,” he continued, “My work is generally theoretical. I’m basically a cosmologist. I can guess how things are and try to prove it with the mathematics, but if you wanted to do actual experimentation you’d need – “

He stopped suddenly, his eyes narrowing in thought.

“He’s got to have others working on this,” he muttered. “Engineers, technicians.”

“Working on what?” Marvin said.

Vernon turned back to stare at him.

“He’s rebuilding Karillan’s work,” Vernon replied. “He’s taking it experimental.”

“He’s going to try and recreate the thing that blew up before?”

Vernon nodded.

“And if he has Karillan’s blueprints and technical notes… with my equations…”

“He could do it,” Marvin said flatly, feeling a sudden chill.

Marvin fixed on the thought.

“And if he succeeds, what would happen?”

Vernon swallowed.

“Karillan could only have punched a tiny hole for a fraction of a second. He didn’t understand about having to clean the canvas first. If you could actually rip a sizable hole…”

He fell silent as Marvin realized that an almost infinitely small puncture had emitted something powerful enough to punch asteroids out of their orbits. If a sustainable opening of any appreciable size was created…

“It would destroy the planet,” he whispered.

Vernon nodded gravely.

“But he’d need an incredible power source.”

“How much power?”

Vernon thought a moment.

“All of it.”

Marvin’s mind quickly retreated to the well-known equations governing the flow of energy, and felt a little better. A supercollider would require incredible amounts of energy in order to accelerate the tiniest particles of matter in the universe to speeds approaching those of light itself, so that they could be slammed head-on into other tiny particles fast enough to overcome the repulsive force that kept atoms from slamming into one another in nature, and explode them into the even smaller bits of which they were constructed. The old, standard analogy was slamming a pocket-watch into a wall hard enough to split the case, so you could sift through the tiny cogs and wheels that would scatter all over the floor.

“So we don’t have to worry, then,” Marvin said quietly. “There’s not enough power to get the thing to work.”

Vernon considered this a moment.

“Unless,” he finally said, “He’s found a way to use the leak itself.”

“In which case…” Marvin mused uncomfortably.

“He could do it.”

Both men watched the inescapable conclusion loom up in their thoughts, darkening them.

Thirty five years ago, a Russian scientist had tried to punch a hole in the very fabric of reality. His work was so secret, so closely protected, most likely by a government who perhaps were hoping they had a chance to obtain the true ultimate weapon, that hardly anyone in the scientific community had ever heard of it. But not too long ago someone had discovered the long-dead scientist’s notes, perhaps everything the Russian had learned, and was now trying to recreate it. But why? What possible use could it be to anyone? Such a power, unleashed into a reality unprepared for it… what could that do? Rip it apart? Blow vast chunks of it away, like a hard breath of pure air in a room full of smoke?

And what if it didn’t close? What if, like a canvas, once torn it was permanently torn?

“My God,” Marvin breathed, stunned.

“So,” Vernon said from beside him on the grass, “What do we do?”

Marvin turned to glare into the other physicist’s eyes, and Vernon saw he was, for the first time, looking into a face void of all but intensely focused resolve.

“What was his name?” Marvin said. “Your patron?”

“Montgomery,” Vernon replied. “Doctor Walter Montgomery.”

White didn’t even turn to where Jones was seated at his own computer, just scanned the report briefly.

“Our officer witness requested an identification of a vehicle plate an hour after he was off duty. Received the owner information but no follow up since.”

Jones stopped his own typing to turn and regard the older man.

“Date?”

“Same date as the event.”

Jones considered a moment.

“First thing tomorrow,” he said, and turned back to his own researches.

Vernon gripped the phone, listening to the sharp artificial ring repeat itself.

This was not what he had agreed to, he told himself. He was not one of those idiots who took reckless chances in the pursuit of some distantly sensed truth. Hell, he told himself, if he’d been around for the Manhattan project he’d have probably done what he could to prevent it, war or no war. For him the quest for pure knowledge had to be limited to what was not only possible, but possible without the risk of doing harm. And now he chillingly realized this research was not.

Certainly he longed to reach beyond what was known and pluck up some tiny sliver of the vast remaining mysteries that were the universe, even if that truth would, in some way, diminish our view of ourselves as human beings even further. Because that was our right, as conscious creatures: to know, to discover, to understand. But when obtaining that understanding required the destruction of the searcher, and perhaps even more, then it was a point at which one had best turn back or risk their sanity and, perhaps, their membership in the species.

Well, it was time to make a decision, and he needed one final portion of data to weigh the scales.

He would assume as a premise, that Dr. Montgomery had no knowledge about the displacement of the asteroids Karillan’s experiment had caused. It had, after all, only recently been discovered, and as part of a high security project, it would not have been widely circulated. Vernon would tell him, let him make the inevitable connection between that effect and the work that had been its cause, work which must now be abandoned to prevent another failed outcome.

Would Montgomery be shocked? Would he stutter in amazement and immediately agree to shut down his researches?

Or did he already know?

The handset clicked and a moment later the voice rattled in his ear.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Montgomery? It’s Vernon.”

“Ah, yes,” Montgomery said pleasantly, “I apologize for taking so long to answer, I was momentarily indisposed.”

“That’s okay, Doctor. Listen I just heard about something and wanted to make sure you knew as soon as possible.”

“Heard about what, dear boy?”

“Well, Doctor…” Vernon sighed, then steeled himself and plunged in.

It took no more than a minute to disclose everything he and Marvin had discussed. The Deep Look probe, what it had discovered, and the consequences of Karillan’s initial failure.

“So that’s it,” he concluded. “I think we should back off for a while, until we can rerun the calculations and make sure we’re not going to blow up the whole world or something.”

There was an icy pause on the line.

“Doctor?” Vernon ventured cautiously.

“Yes,” the voice said simply, thoughtfully. “I’m here.”

Vernon hesitated.

“Did you understand what I said, Doctor? “

“Yes,” Montgomery replied, coolly. “I understand.”

“So we can’t proceed, then, right? We have to at least find some way to control all the variables first. And that’s going to take a while.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Montgomery mused quietly. “All right. Why don’t you come see me? We can go over it together.”

Vernon felt a wave of relief.

“Okay,” he said, sighing, “And it’ll be nice to finally meet you. So, where are you?”

He heard Montgomery chuckle.

“Believe it or not, I’m currently residing in a genuine piece of human history.”

White sat behind the wheel, his gaze fixed down the street toward the plain, unassuming little house in the middle of the quiet suburban neighborhood.

Jones, beside him in the passenger’s seat, also stared the twenty or so yards toward the cozy little building.

“How long?” White asked, flatly.

Jones did not respond, which itself told White there would be no deadline to this surveillance. They would remain here, observing the structure and making note of any movement they happened to observe for the balance of the day, and perhaps tomorrow. Unless some additional information arose that necessitated their presence elsewhere, or they learned that the subject, one Roger Malloy, freelance web page designer and computer programmer, needed to be confronted directly, they might be here the rest of the week. Only if they managed to actually observe some behavior that verified their suspicions would they consider directly approaching him.

Neither bothered to engage in any small talk. Such was unnecessary to their fulfillment of their jobs, which, for the first time, might at last bear fruit.

Both men had been recruited into the clandestine organization they now worked for from other jobs related to the security of the United States. White had come over from the Operations Directorate of Central Intelligence, where he had managed to accomplish a number of covert successes so adroitly that almost no one beside his former supervisor was even aware of his involvement in them. A few had been terminations done so quietly that only one was even suspected of involving foul play, the others recorded as unusual fatal accidents. Jones had transferred from another department of Homeland Security where he had functioned as an analyst, poring over the mountains of seemingly disconnected and meaningless incoming data pulled from phone lines and computer servers across the globe, and had pieced out several potential threats long before they had reached a point where they might pose a genuine risk to the safety and security of the nation.