Ghost Country (15 page)

“And you remember the Doubler,” Paige said, not asking.

Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.

“Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled,” Paige said. “In the future, the bottom three floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of mâché, though by volume it’s probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the mâché would weigh about 250,000 pounds—almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank.”

Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach’s existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach’s chamber sealed off. That would’ve been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would’ve done very bad things to the world had they been left alone—even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?

He saw in Paige’s expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.

“So at some point,” Travis said, “probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?”

Paige nodded. “It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds.”

“But why the hell would someone do that?” Travis said.

Paige was silent for a moment. “Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense,” she said. “Which is why I thought of it.”

Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.

“The fallback option,” Travis said.

Paige nodded again. “The Heavy Rag mâché idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I’ve felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we’d do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?” She shrugged. “The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you’d do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can’t get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday.” She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. “I guess the end of the world would suffice.”

The whine of another airliner filtered in from behind them. The sound rose to a scream and then a 747 slid overhead, big as the world, its jetwash ruffling the umbrellas over the tables.

“That’s a hell of a thing to have learned,” Travis said. “That it actually works, I mean. That you can seal off the Breach, and that the seal would hold for several decades, at least. If we figure out what happens to the world a few months from now . . . if we learn how to prevent it . . . then you could choose to leave the Breach open, or go ahead and seal it anyway, just to get rid of it. It’s something to consider.”

Paige nodded slowly, her eyes far away. No doubt she
had
considered it, and at length.

“It
would
hold for decades,” she said. “That much we know for sure. But after that it’s still a guess. I imagine you could plug a small shield volcano, if you had enough concrete to dump in. And
that
might hold for decades, too. But the pressure would only keep building. And then what would happen? Nothing good, though at least with a volcano we understand the forces in play. With the Breach we understand almost nothing.” A little tremor went through her shoulders. “No, if we manage to keep the world on track, I have no intention of sealing the Breach off. Even after seeing that it works—
especially
after seeing that it works—it just feels too dangerous.”

She stared off a few seconds longer, then refocused to her hands on the table, and shrugged. “So that’s what we found at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Then we climbed to the top and found
that
sealed too, though not as dramatically. There’s just a metal slab across the opening on the surface, and a couple inches of regular concrete poured over it. A stranger up top could walk right by it and think it was just an old footing pad for some shed that used to be there. We saw it from above, the next day, when we took the cylinders up into the desert. And it was up there that things started to get interesting.”

Chapter Twenty-One

T
he two of you probably guessed pretty quickly how far in the future it is, on the other side,” Paige said. “You probably got within ten years of the right number.”

“Seventy years ahead, we figured,” Bethany said.

Paige nodded. “There’s a lot that changes in a place like D.C. Nature reclaims its turf pretty fast, gives you evidence to base a guess on. But the desert above Border Town was
always
nature’s turf. Civilization never modified it, so there was nothing for it to change back to when civilization went away. When we took the cylinders up to the surface on Tuesday, and switched one of them on, the opening we looked through might as well have been a pane of glass. Other than the blank concrete slab where the elevator housing should’ve been, nothing in the desert looked different. Nothing at all. So we still had no idea how far in the future the other side was. Could’ve been twenty years. Could’ve been a few thousand.”

She took a sip.

“The fact was, we didn’t even know whether the world had ended, at that point. Border Town being abandoned wasn’t a good sign, but who knew for sure? We sure as hell didn’t. And seeing the desert empty didn’t tell us much, either. It
would
be empty, under almost any circumstance. I stepped through the opening up there and the first thing I did was stare at the sky for over a minute, hoping to see a jet contrail. Imagine if I had.”

The notion struck Travis hard, and he wondered why he hadn’t considered it until now: what if the future on the other side of the iris
hadn’t
been a ruined one? What if Paige and the others had encountered a thriving world instead, decades and decades ahead of the present day? What would they have learned from a world like that? What would they have gained?

He saw in Paige’s eyes a ghost of the optimism she must’ve felt, standing there under the desert sky Tuesday morning.

Then it faded.

“We started running the obvious tests after that,” she said. “First an easy one: we switched on a handheld GPS unit, on the other side, and tried to pick up satellites with it. And we found some. But the position readings were a mess. The satellites were up there, but they weren’t where they were supposed to be. One of the four of us, Pilar Guitierrez, spent about twenty years with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. She knew everything about orbital dynamics, drift and decay rates, that kind of thing. Orbits are a lot more fragile than most people think. Satellites get tugged around by all kinds of things. The moon’s gravity. The sun’s gravity. The tilt of the Earth plays hell with their inclinations. All that stuff has to be dealt with, all the time, by a process called
station-keeping
. Satellites are equipped with small rockets for corrective burns, to nudge them back onto course once in a while, and the commands for those burns come from human operators on the ground. But given what we were seeing on the handheld unit, the GPS satellites hadn’t heard from anyone on the ground in a long, long time.”

She exhaled slowly. “So that was that. We tried other things. We took radio equipment through. We listened to every frequency range with the most sensitive gear we had. Certain bandwidths, those that are popular with ham radio operators, we could’ve picked up from halfway around the world—if there were anyone out there transmitting on them. We didn’t hear anything.”

She finished off the Pepsi and set it aside.

“The only other thing we could do from a remote location like that was try to get through to a communication satellite. Our hope was that we might find one with some retrievable data on board. Something we could make sense of. Anything. But signals from those satellites are a lot harder to receive than GPS. You can’t pick them up with a handheld unit bouncing around in your pocket. You need a dish, and you need to know exactly where to point it. Engineers handle that problem by putting comm satellites in geostationary orbit, right above the equator and matched to the spin of the Earth. That way the satellite is always in the same place, relative to the ground. But that wasn’t going to help us: if those orbits had decayed much at all, the satellites would be lower, and orbiting faster. They wouldn’t be stationary anymore. So when it came to aiming the dish, we’d be shooting in the dark at moving targets.”

Her eyebrows went up in a shrug. “We had to try, though. So we did. We picked a spot above the equator, well below geostationary altitude, and we transmitted a maintenance ping every thirty seconds. A universal signal most satellites would respond to, if they heard it. We did that for hours and hours, all through the afternoon and into the evening, but there was no reply. We kept it going anyway. There was reason to believe it could take a while. In the meantime we tested other things. We figured out the use of the delayed shutoff button. We also figured out what the sequence of tones had been all about, the first time we’d switched on one of the cylinders.”

Paige looked past Travis to the backpack lying in the empty chair next to him. She stared at the shape of the cylinder inside.

“It was locking out changes,” she said.

Travis glanced at Bethany, then looked at Paige again. “Locking out changes?”

Paige nodded. “It’s hard to explain. Hard to understand in the first place. In my case, I just saw it in action. While Pilar was working with the satellite gear, I had an idea I wanted to try. I took the second cylinder, and in the present time I drove one of the electric Jeeps to a little sandstone boulder about half a mile north of Border Town.”

Travis recalled the rock she was talking about, though he’d only seen it a few times. It was about the size of a compact car, and it was the only thing larger than a scrub plant within miles of the elevator housing on the surface.

“The idea was pretty simple,” Paige said. “I wanted to see an action in the present reflected in the future. I came up with one that should’ve been foolproof. I turned on the cylinder and positioned it facing the boulder. I looked at it in the present and in the future. The two versions of the rock were identical; whatever amount of erosion is going on out there, it doesn’t happen fast. Anyway, I got out the Jeep’s tire iron, and you can probably guess what I did with it.”

Bethany’s face lit up as the idea came to her. “You scratched the rock in the present time, so you could see the same scratch appear in the future.”

“You’d think it would show up there, wouldn’t you?” Paige said.

“How could it
not
?” Bethany said.

Paige shrugged. “I can only tell you that it didn’t. I scratched the hell out of the boulder in the present. I chipped a crevice two inches deep into its surface. But in the future, the scratch wasn’t there. It just wasn’t. The rock was as smooth as ever.”

Bethany stared. Met Travis’s eyes. Looked at Paige again. She couldn’t seem to find the words for her level of disbelief.

“Changes are locked out,” Paige said. “I think it’s that simple, however the hell it works. I think when those tones were sounding, the first time we switched these things on, the cylinders were locking onto whatever future we were on track toward
at that moment
. Independent of changes we’d make later on, once we could see the future for ourselves.”

“Changes locked out . . .” Bethany said. “But you don’t mean
our
future is locked . . . do you?”