Cowboy Angels (31 page)

After checking their IDs, two of the men led Stone and Linda down a spiral stair that descended to a trucking subway that had once run between the loading platform of a freight company to the express platform of the lower level of the terminal. A steel-clad door near the end of the subway led into a low-ceilinged concrete bunker that had been much extended since Stone had first used it. Wooden packing cases of various sizes were stacked at either end; in the middle, where there had once been a wall and a cupboard full of disused electrical switching gear, was a perfect silver mirror two yards across, framed by a steel collar and reflecting a neat little electric forklift and a man in a canary-yellow suit and red shirt, who told Stone and Linda to go straight through.

‘We sent Mr Lipscombe’s shipment through ten minutes ago, and our friends on the other side of the mirror do not like to keep it open long,’ he said. ‘I would suppose they dislike clocking up a fortune in power bills.’

Stone stepped through first. Reflex clamped his eyes shut when he met his own reflection in the Turing gate’s mirror; then black light exploded in his head and he opened his eyes and saw that he was standing on a metal platform raised in the middle of the big, brightly lit vault of the interchange in the Real.

It resembled a thirty-year-old mock-up of how the control room of a fusion power station or a space station might look in 2001. Racks of fluorescent tubes bounced harsh light off white-tiled walls two storeys high. Steel-mesh walkways and platforms were hung at different heights where technicians were tending control panels that sported acorn-sized red and yellow and green lights, dials, chunky throw switches, and cathode-ray monitors filled with lines of chunky orange script. There were metal desks, black Bakelite telephones with rotary dials. There was a row of teletype printers hooded with plastic covers turned yellow and brittle.

All of this was dominated by the hulking machines that generated the Turing gates. Only a couple of steps up from the famous prototype that, in a laboratory shed in Brookhaven on January 5, 1963, had opened the first, microscopic portal to another history in another universe, the gates were massive steel-framed rectangles packed with racks of primitive electronics and skull-sized condensers, looms of wiring, and piping swaddled in silvery insulation, and were pierced by circular apertures six feet across. They stood in a miniature switching yard of narrow-gauge track in a pit that took up half the vault, two standing one behind the other to the left, two to the right, the gate from which Stone had just emerged locked down in the centre. Now Linda stepped through its silvery mirror, blinking in the bright light, grinning at Stone.

They were back in the Real. The Nixon sheaf was just a step away.

The bone-deep hum of the active gate cut off. The mirror blinked out, its aperture shrunken to a single Planck length, held open by a trickle charge equivalent to the output of a couple of automobile batteries. Stone looked around and said, ‘Who’s in charge here? We need to buy another ride.’

 

Stone and Linda paid for their transit to the Nixon sheaf with the cash Tom Waverly had left behind: fifty thousand dollars. While technicians moved the gate through which he and Linda had just stepped, and lined up the gate to the Nixon sheaf on the identical universal coordinates, Stone asked the gate chief who he was working for now.

‘The interchange was sold off to a cartel after the trouble with the Church Committee. We work for the cartel.’

‘Who owns the cartel?’

Stone was wondering what conspiracies and bribes were involved to keep this antique facility running, how the massive power requirements of active gates were finessed.

‘Best not to ask,’ the gate chief said.

Linda described her father, asked if he’d recently come through. The gate chief shrugged and said that all kinds of people came through, all the time.

‘Anyone who can afford to pay the fee. Business people, journalists, university professors, celebrities . . . And Company people, of course, such as yourselves.’

‘Who said we were with the Company?’ Stone said.

‘It would be pretty obvious, even if I didn’t remember sending you through the mirror a couple of dozen times.’ The gate chief was tall and cadaverous, with thick black hair brushed back in a wave from his pock-marked face, tinted glasses, and the sour, fatalistic air of someone who has learnt from bitter experience always to expect lemons rather than lemonade. ‘One thing I discovered during my long, illustrious career is that when you know where all the bodies are buried, you really don’t want to remember anything,’ he said. ‘Another is that you glamorous field-operative types never take any notice of the people who really run the show. That’s how we get by. We’re invisible, and we have the memories of goldfish.’

‘Maybe our friend here owns this place,’ Stone said to Linda. ‘That’s why he’s being so secretive.’

‘If I owned this place,’ the gate chief said, ‘do you really think I’d be down here getting my genes fried by virtual photons while I fielded your dumb questions? If I was the owner, I’d be living it up in a castle in some wild sheaf. Me, and thirty of California’s most nubile cheerleaders.’

Linda, watching the technicians who were making the final, finicky alignment of the gate, wondered why it was taking so long.

‘It’s taking so long because we take pride in our work,’ the gate chief said. ‘People today take Turing gates for granted, but old-school guys like your partner know they’re tremendously dangerous. Right now, my people are making sure that the gate will be centred on a certain doorway on the other side of the mirror, so that the edges of its aperture will be contained within the frame of that doorway. Know why that is, young lady? Because of quantum shear. The aperture of a gate may be vanishingly thin, thinner than a hydrogen atom, but the quantum shear at its circumference is enormously powerful. Strong enough to cut diamond; easily strong enough to slice and dice you if you hit it at the wrong angle. The very first gates, we simply let the apertures hang in the air on the other side of the mirror and sent through people like your partner strapped to stretchers that ran on tracks, to make sure they didn’t touch any place near the edge. But these days we make sure that every gate exits through a pipe or a door, a hole in a wall, anything with a frame that’s smaller than the diameter of the gate’s aperture.’

‘Listen to the man,’ Stone told Linda. ‘He’s one of the original wizards.’

‘You know, I really resent that term,’ the gate chief said. ‘It’s derogatory. It implies that what we do here is magic, that we don’t really understand it. Although, of course, only three people in the world ever really understood the quantum theory, and two of them are crazy and one is dead. Have you been in the Nixon sheaf before?’

‘Once or twice,’ Stone said.

‘Then you’ll know to leave through the electrical service shaft that connects the old trucking subway with the platform of the 51st Street subway station.’ The gate chief dug in his pocket and handed Stone four keys strung on a steel ring. ‘These open the doors along the route. Don’t use the Waldorf-Astoria exit. That platform is occasionally used by VIPs in the Nixon sheaf, so the local Secret Service checks it out at unpredictable intervals, and the elevator is run at least once a day. But if you go through the subway station, you shouldn’t have any trouble. You have any kind of flashlight? Here, take this. We’ll reopen the gate at noon tomorrow. Make sure you’re there, or you’ll have a long trip to White Sands, which is where the only other gate is located.’

The deep hum started up again and a circle of silver light suddenly blanked the maw of the gate that had been painstakingly cranked into alignment. Stone and Linda climbed back onto the platform. After a technician used a fibre-optic probe to check out the scene on the other side of the mirror, Stone stepped through.

He emerged from the frame of a large cupboard into a small, sooty room lit only by the glow of the gate’s silvery circle, this feeble light dimming as Linda emerged from it. Stone switched on the penlight that the gate chief had given him. A few moments later, the gate’s mirror popped like a two-dimensional bubble, revealing thick cables and meter boxes bolted to concrete at the back of the cupboard.

It would open again at noon tomorrow. They had less than twenty-four hours to complete Tom Waverly’s treasure hunt.

‘How much longer are we going to wait?’ Linda said.

‘Give it ten minutes more,’ Stone said. ‘I want to be absolutely certain that Walter Lipscombe hasn’t put anyone on our tail.’

He and Linda were standing on the steps of the Holy Cross Church on 42nd Street, hanging back, watching the street parade of commuters, hustlers, panhandlers and bewildered tourists, the snarled tides of traffic, the plate-glass windows of the post office on the other side of the street. Linda was excited and impatient, drinking everything in with an eager, uncritical gaze. She reminded Stone of the way he’d felt on his first few trips through the mirror, of the peculiar, dreamlike dislocation of finding himself on streets at once familiar and utterly different, as if some crazy set-designer had snuck in behind his back, redressed the city, and populated it with costumed strangers acting out parts in a drama in which he was the central character but whose plot he didn’t understand.

Linda had changed out of her army uniform into a pearl-grey pantsuit and a pale yellow blouse with a frilly collar she’d bought with her father’s dollars in Sak’s Fifth Avenue. Her hair was scraped back from her face and done up in a French braid. Stone, dressed in a dark blue business suit and crisp white sea-cotton shirt and club tie, a briefcase containing his pistol and the shock gizmo set between his feet, was leafing through a late edition of the
New York Times
, looking over the top of it every now and then to check for standouts. There was one guy who’d been hanging around a magazine stand, but now a woman in a red dress walked up to him and they hugged, kissed, and walked off arm in arm through the heedless crowds into the rest of their lives. Stone was reminded of what he had lost and felt a desolate pang.

Linda nudged him and said, ‘See that man? Is that a phone or a radio?’

Stone shook out the newspaper, turned a page. ‘They don’t have cell phones. At least, they didn’t last time I was here.’

‘Maybe it’s some kind of walkie-talkie,’ Linda said. ‘The thing’s the size of a shoe.’

Stone spotted the guy she meant. He was standing beside a traffic signal at the northeast corner of the block: slicked-back hair and a deep tan, a sharp black suit with lapels so wide you could land a jet fighter on them, talking with considerable animation into a big box he was holding against the side of his head. Cell phones. Jesus. What next, quantum computers? Turing gates? Another American empire expanding across the infinity of sheaves? It was a weary thought.

Richard Nixon had been President in this sheaf’s version of America when the Real had first opened a gate into it and Stone and Tom Waverly had spent six months there, doing basic research. America had been caught up in an unpopular war in Vietnam and there’d been an air of revolution in the streets of major cities, the National Guard had been deployed on university campuses across the country, and men had just landed on the Moon, an amazing feat the Real had not yet bothered to duplicate, caught up as it was in imposing its idea of freedom in countries across the globe and in different Americas in different sheaves. When Stone had returned for a second time, some four years later, the Vietnam War had ended, but the Nixon sheaf had been embroiled in a full-blown crisis in the Middle East and (according to the game theories of the Cluster) a rapidly growing risk of nuclear war. Now Ronald Reagan, the same ex-movie actor who in the Real had served a single term before Floyd Davis and had encouraged the expansion of the Company in the early days of exploring other sheaves, was in his second term as President, fighting a not-so-clandestine war in Central America against armies of Communist peasants that according to him were threatening to sweep through Mexico and topple the US.

As in so many other sheaves, the political strategy of this version of America was shaped by fear. When Stone and Tom Waverly had been doing research there, back in 1969, Americans had been fighting in Vietnam because they’d been afraid that Communists would topple countries in Southeast Asia like a series of dominoes, and they’d been fighting their own children at home because their children, grown strange and discontented, had refused to buy into the American Dream. From Stone’s quick study of the
Times
it seemed that little had changed. The silent majority was still brimful of patriotic sentiment, proud of the powerful presence its country had in the world, deeply indignant if anyone dared point out that other countries might feel nervous in its shadow, utterly convinced that its way of life was the only right way to live, and that the rest of the world, driven by hate and envy, was conspiring to destroy everything it stood for. In 1969, ordinary Americans had been frightened of Ho Chi Minh and his Asiatic hordes; now they were scared silly by a handful of barefoot guerrillas, and as always, they were in mortal dread of the Soviet Union, their nemesis, their shadow self. Here was an op-ed piece quoting Reagan, who called it the Evil Empire . . .

‘That’s your ten minutes,’ Linda said. ‘If there were any lurkers, we would have spotted them by now. So please, can we go check out that box?’

Stone folded up his newspaper. ‘Before we do anything, I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say. If for any reason we have to split up, don’t go back to Grand Central Station. The people who run the interchange aren’t trustworthy, Freddy Layne wants to get hold of this thing your father stole, and I’m worried that Walter Lipscombe does too. If there’s any trouble, get out of the city and head for New Mexico. There’s a gate at White Sands, mostly used by comparative-culture teams en route to LA or the Midwest. You know where to find it?’