Earth Cult (10 page)

Professor Friedmann said anxiously, ‘We've been quite open with you, Kersh, and in return I'd like your assurance that everything we've told you will remain strictly confidential – at least till Dr Leach and myself have reviewed the situation and decided how we plan to proceed. If we decide to release the information I see no reason why we can't do it through
Science Now
but I need to have your word that none of this will go any further until you hear from me again. I think that's fair and equitable. Do you agree?'

Frank nodded. ‘Yes, I think it is, Professor. But what if you decide not to release the information? Would you still expect me to say nothing? Keep it under wraps?'

‘We'll think about that if and when the situation arises.'

‘Pretty much in the same way that you thought about rescuing the four men trapped underground,' Frank said, this time the irony undisguised.

‘It's a sad loss, I agree,' said Professor Friedmann with what appeared to be genuine feeling. ‘If I could have done
anything at all to save them from drowning I wouldn't have hesitated for one second.'

‘I believe you,' Frank said, standing up. ‘Only you're forgetting that drowning is the one thing they didn't die from.'

Frank stood at the high counter and thought what he wanted to say, and more importantly, how it should be expressed. The cable had to be couched in terms of a routine inquiry so as not to arouse undue curiosity and yet it was vital that Fred Lockyer clearly understood the need for an urgent, immediate response. Perhaps if he included a small joke; no, that wouldn't be right. The message had to be serious and to the point without giving anything away.

He didn't feel that he was breaking his word. Professor Friedmann had asked him not to reveal anything of the research carried out at the Deep Hole Project and he was keeping faithfully to the agreement: he was simply asking for up-to-date information on neutrinos and antineutrinos and the latest findings of physicists investigating that range of subnuclear particles known as hadrons – those which strongly interacted with other particles within the atomic nucleus. Fred Lockyer wasn't himself actively engaged in such research, but as Lecturer in High Energy Physics at the University of Illinois he kept abreast of what was happening all over the world and would know, if anybody did, what were the latest theories and hypotheses put forward by the particle physicists.

The question was, would Frank's present location give the game away? Fred wouldn't have heard of Gypsum (at least it was most unlikely) but all he had to do was glance at a map of the area to realize that it was within spitting distance of the Solar Neutrino Research Station funded by the US Institute of Astrophysics. It was a risk Frank would have to take – and so, unwittingly, would Friedmann and Leach.

Eventually he composed the message, reasonably satisfied
that he had got the tone just about right. The crucial factor was whether Fred Lockyer would reply quickly. He had tried to imply a degree of urgency instead of stating it openly by saying MOVING ON SOON STOP PREFERABLE YOU CABLE REPLY IF POSSIBLE CARE OF CASCADE HOTEL. That should do it, he hoped; Fred was an amenable sort of guy who would bust a gut for a friend.

After sending a cable to his editor, saying he'd been delayed, he came out into warm, gentle sunshine and paused for a moment to survey the street. There was a quiet bustle of mid-morning activity as housewives did their shopping at the Self-Save Supermart and across at the bank a small group of businessmen stood on the sidewalk. A customer was testing a pair of binoculars in front of the Gypsum Camera Center store, and on the corner a couple of dogs were fornicating.

It was a normal everyday scene, no different to what was happening in a thousand small towns all over America, and yet in a curious way it seemed unreal, almost dreamlike, for he couldn't rid his mind of the images of musty sub-terreanan passages and the detection chamber with its stainless steel tanks and the four bloated bodies huddled on the gantry. He thought: This is another world, this bright sunny outdoors, so friendly and reassuringly familiar. These people are living on the skin of the planet, unaware of what lurks beneath them, like insects skating on the surface of a pond. The vast bulk of the Earth is hidden away, directly beneath their feet, extending downwards for thousands of miles, but for them it doesn't exist because they never give it a moment's thought. This is their ‘real world' and they never suspect it's mere surface show, literally skin-deep, and that the actual living core of the planet is shut away from their sight, trillions of tons of it upon which a humanoid form of life is permitted to crawl.

And what would they say if he told them that thousands of neutrinos and antineutrinos were passing through their bodies at this instant of time? Equally unreal, of course, because they couldn't see or feel them. This was the
real
world (they could see it and feel it) and anything that didn't affect them might just as well not exist. But the interesting question – which Frank Kersh would have liked to have put to them – was on what basis does one judge reality? The thin envelope of the biosphere was one limited and severely restricted slice of reality; the inner hidden core of the planet was another, much greater one; and the invisible neutrinos and antineutrinos moving at the speed of light were a form of reality which pervaded all space – every single cubic centimetre of space throughout the Universe. So what, in reality, constituted the real?

These people living out their tiny lives inhabited a stratum of spacetime which was so incredibly insignificant as to be almost ethereal. Had they been granted an extension to their feeble range of sensory perceptions they might have gained an inkling of what lay beyond this narrow plane of existence which they called reality. And not only beyond them in the sense of being ‘out there', but all around them, occupying the same space and time … the waves of cosmic radiation washing over them from space, the subnuclear particles passing through their ‘real world' as if it were a patch of mist, the entire array of microwaves, infra-red rays, X-rays, ultra-violet rays, gamma rays, particles and antiparticles for which this sunny street with its people, stores, cars and copulating dogs had less basis in reality than a momentary passing dream and no more substance than images projected on to a blank wall.

It was a truism that people couldn't stand too much reality, but in truth they experienced hardly any reality at all. They possessed a smaller range of perception of the Universe around them than did a blind burrowing mole of its dark earthy environment. They looked out at the world with blind eyes, listened to its whisperings with deaf ears, and all along believed themselves to be the focal point of consciousness, the arbiter of intelligence, the only true and valid constant against which to measure objective reality.

And what of himself? Frank thought wryly. Perhaps he was blind too, in a different sense. He glanced around him,
suddenly apprehensive, feeling he was being observed. There was no one watching, his instincts had deceived him. Then it hit him: he raised his eyes above the rooftops and there was the presence of the mountain, remarkably near in the clear morning light, the flimsiest wisp of cloud, like a brushstroke, obscuring the peak. The Tellurians believed the Mount of the Holy Cross to possess some kind of dynamic force. He had scoffed at their beliefs but now he understood how continually living in its shadow could evoke such strange and powerful emotions. The rational man of science, he mocked himself. He was no better than the people in the street; at least their ignorance excused them, but being aware of his own ignorance should have made him a wiser person. He doubted that it did.

The office of the
Roaring Fork Bulletin
was farther along the main street, indistinguishable from the store-fronts either side – a gunsmith's and a dry-cleaner's – except for the absence of a window display and instead the front page of last week's issue taped inside a glass-fronted frame:
Recreation Resort for Great Eagle Dam? Lightning Kills Dot-sero Farmworker. Rifle Wins Rio Blanco County League.

Still wearing the creased white cotton suit, which Frank reckoned must be the newspaper editor's badge of office in these parts, Cal Renfield was seated at a large oval desk contemplating a rough page layout, some of which was already blocked in with half-tones and criss-crossed areas indicating copy. A mug of black coffee cooled at his elbow.

He levered himself into a semi-standing position, and when they had shaken hands flopped down again, his belly reverberating with the shock-wave.

‘My staff have taken the day off,' Cal Renfield said, gesturing at the empty office with a hand that reminded Frank of a small pink pin-cushion.

‘You have staff?' Frank said good-naturedly.

‘Sure I have staff. All one of them. Do you want some coffee?'

‘No thanks,' Frank said, and then changed his mind.

Cal Renfield nodded towards the electric coffee pot and
invited him to help himself. As Frank was doing this the small balding man said, ‘Don't you slick city reporters ever wear suits? All I've ever seen you in is denims, polo-neck sweaters and wind-cheaters. Is that the new hip style for Chicago newspapermen?'

Frank did a mannequin's twirl. ‘Today's ensemble is leather,' he intoned in the arch portentous tones of the fashion commentator. ‘Note the neat little coloured leather side-panels sewn into the body of the garment,
so
useful for carrying all the essentials of the writer's trade: pens, pencils, notebooks, erasers, portable typewriters.'

‘From what I heard, a safety-helmet, a pick-axe and a pair of miner's boots would be a darn sight more useful.' Cal Renfield offered a pack of cigarettes, his grey eyes shrewd and watchful.

‘So you heard about that?' Frank said. He took a cigarette and lit them both. His hand was perfectly steady.

‘I'm the local newshound,' Cal Renfield reminded him. ‘They wouldn't allow me to visit the Project but I spoke with Lee Merriam, who's a regular guy, and he gave me the salient facts. As we newshounds say.' His soft round features sobered and his eyes became flat, without expression. ‘It didn't help the men trapped below ground much.'

Frank drank his coffee.

‘What happened exactly?'

‘I thought you said Lee Merriam told you.'

‘He did. Some of it.'

‘The salient facts.'

‘Lee wasn't underground when the tremor started. You were.'

‘We were underground,' Frank said. ‘There was an earth tremor. End of story.'

Cal Renfield nodded his head slowly. He sniffed. ‘For a reporter your power of recall isn't what I'd call shit-hot.'

‘I keep telling you, Cal, I'm not a reporter – I'm a feature writer with a science magazine. What happened is probably
what Lee Merriam told you. I don't want to bore the ass off of you by repeating it.'

‘But you found the bodies?'

‘Yes. They were on the gantry.'

‘What gantry is that?'

‘You've never been down to the detection chamber?'

Cal Renfield smiled. ‘Do you think they'd allow the editor of the local newspaper to look at that vital top secret installation of theirs? No way, brother. No chance.'

‘Who told you it was top secret?'

‘Friedmann. When they moved in I went up to interview him and he gave me a long rigmarole about top secret this and classified that. I got the impression they were engaged on some kind of advanced research for the government. Isn't that so?'

‘In a way it is,' Frank said, reminding himself that caution was the watchword of the day. ‘They're funded by a government agency, the Institute of Astrophysics. But I'd hardly describe the work they do as top secret.'

‘Okay,' said Cal Renfield, blowing a plume of smoke at the ceiling. ‘You found the bodies on the gantry. Which is in the detection chamber.'

‘There isn't a lot to say about dead bodies.'

‘Presumably they were drowned.'

‘They were found at the bottom of a flooded mine,' Frank said, sticking to the literal truth.

‘Did the tremor have anything to do with it?'

‘In what way?' Frank asked, sipping his coffee and squinting at a large blow-up photograph of what looked like a steel smelting plant. He turned it over and read the typed caption:
US Bureau of Mines Shale Oil Plant, Grand Valley, Col

Cal Renfield sighed. ‘You're not the easiest of people to extract information from, you know that? I want the background stuff, not the official version. Was there anything at all that struck you as being out of the ordinary? Hell, Frank, you were first on the scene, practically an eye-witness.'

‘I've told you, they were already dead when I got there.
The chamber had been flooded by the storm and there was no way of reaching them until the water subsided. Didn't Lee Merriam tell you all this?'

‘Yeah.' Cal Renfield drank the last of his coffee and studied the half-completed layout in front of him. ‘I just got the feeling there was more to it than that.' He glanced up at Frank with his shrewd grey eyes. ‘You know, my news-hound's sixth sense?'

Frank moved round the office looking at the files of cuttings and news agency reports. He was on Cal Renfield's side: he was sympathetic to the man and wanted to help him but at the same time it would have been a mistake – and a betrayal of confidence – to have revealed anything of what he had learned about the Project's research programme. And it was unlikely that the editor would have grasped the significance of a concentrated emission of antineutrinos reaching them from the centre of the Galaxy. For the moment Frank had to play it cool, giving the appearance of an interested if slightly bemused bystander.

He approached the desk where Cal Renfield was working, saying casually, ‘You mentioned the other evening that some kids had been born round here who exhibited strange behaviour patterns. Where are they, local hospital?'