Mysterium (34 page)

The containing walls had been breached, but sections were still standing. Everything else—debris, dust, shrapnel—had been scoured away by the explosion. The containment unit stood alone in a sort of black slag crater within the larger ruins of the laboratory building. Howard stepped into that circle, reached the tattered containment room, felt a new wash of terrible heat as he moved through air thick with ghosts and stars, to the crenellated walls, through a vacancy that had once been a doorway, and inside, to the heart of the world:
axis mundi
.

Inside, Stern was waiting for him.

It was Stern, even though it was not human any longer.

He must have been here when the fragment was bombarded with energy—closer than he should have been, by design or by accident.

The fragment had become an egg of blue-green phosphorescence. It was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, or seemed to be—appearances, Howard knew, were immensely deceptive. It was hot and vividly alive. It looked as fragile as a bubble but much more menacing, a bubble of spun glass containing the substance of a thousand stars.

It was patently radioactive and Howard assumed it had already killed him. No matter what happened here—even if a miracle happened here—he would not live longer than another few hours.

Alan Stern stood outside the sphere. He was touching it.

Howard knew this was Stern, although there was not much left of him. In some sense Stern probably
was
dead; some incomprehensible event or process had preserved only a fraction of him here: his mind, but not much of his body. What Howard saw against the glare of the sphere was a body as translucent as a jellyfish. The nervous system—the brain and bundles of nerves—pulsed with a strange luminosity. Stern’s arms touched the sphere and seemed to merge with it, and so did a dozen other limblike projections that had grown into and from his body, fixing him in place like the roots of a tree.

Stern’s
presence
was more nebulous; it enveloped Howard and seemed to speak to him. Howard sensed a terrible stasis, an entrapment, a speechless fear. If the sphere was a doorway, Stern was powerless to pass through it and couldn’t retreat. He was caught between flesh and spirit.

He turned his head—a fleshless bulb in which even the skull was only a dim shadow—and, somehow, eyeless,
looked at Howard.

He was pleading for help.

Howard hesitated for a time he couldn’t count or calculate.

All his speculation, and all of Stern’s, had circled around a truth: that the object in this room was a passage between worlds—or even a means of creating a world. The idea seemed to flow from the object itself. Wordlessly, the sphere announced its nature.

But if that was so, the only way he could help Stern (this thing, this tortured essence of Stern) was to step into that doorway, perhaps to open it wider. To succeed where Stern had failed.

And how could he do that? Stern was the genius—not Howard. Stern had revised and elaborated the work of Hawking and Guth and Linde. Howard had barely understood them.

Stern was the wizard. Howard was only an apprentice.

The intangible bodies of the ghosts pressed closer around him now, as if the question interested them. Howard took a dizzy breath. The air was blisteringly hot.

The memory that came to him was of his mother at the kitchen sink washing dishes while Howard dried. Years ago. How old was he? Fifteen, sixteen. Better days.

Stern had just accepted the Nobel Prize—his picture had been on television—and Howard was babbling about how great it was to know this man, this genius.

His mother rinsed the last porcelain dish and began to drain the soapy water. “Alan is smart all right. But he’s also . . . I don’t know a word for it.” She frowned. “For him, everything was always a puzzle. A trick. Show him a stone, he could tell you what it was made of and how it came to be at your feet, or how its atoms worked or what it would weigh on Mars. But just to pick it up? To look at it, to hold it in his hand, to
feel
it? Never. It was beneath him. It was a distraction. Worse, an illusion.” She shook her head. “He understands the world, Howard, but I will tell you this: he does not love it.”

Contemptus mundi:
contempt for the world and the things of the world. When Howard read the words in an undergraduate philosophy text, he thought immediately of Stern.

He hesitated, but there was nothing to turn back to; only the Proctors, their terror, a fiery wasteland. He was surprised the detonation hadn’t come sooner.

The entity that had been Stern regarded him with a pain as tangible as this awful heat.

Howard put out his hand. The skin of it pulsed with new veins of light.

Now the light was all around him, a sudden presence of it.

A world of light.

The bomb,
Howard thought.

Sophia wept, and was in pain, because she had been abandoned alone in the darkness and void; but when she thought of the light that had abandoned her, she took comfort, and she laughed.

A field of fire.

He touched something. Everything. He held it in his hands, a stone.

CHAPTER 30

Ellen Stockton cried when she saw Clifford running for the car. The cold air had made her sober; she knew how unlikely this reunion was. She opened the door for him and he ran into her arms.

Dex stood outside with Linneth. She looked at him as if awaiting some verdict. He said, “Fifteen minutes—if the countdown can be trusted.” He lowered his voice so the boy and his mother wouldn’t hear. “We’re too far east. These roads, the snow . . . we can’t make the town limits in that time, much less a safe perimeter.”

Linneth was almost ethereally calm. “I agree. Is there anything else we can do?”

“Drive and hope for a miracle.”

“The Proctors won’t delay this explosion. Not if they have a choice. Too much has gone wrong already.”

“Drive and pray,” Dex said, “or else—”

“What?”

“I keep thinking about Howard. You remember what he said? ‘The only way out is in.’ ”

“He meant the ruined laboratory. Do you think that would offer us some sort of protection?”

“I can’t imagine how. But maybe. Who knows?” He touched her shoulder and said, “Something else we should think about is that it’s closer to the bomb.”

“Hardly an advantage.”

“Linneth, it might be. If the worst happens—it would be faster.”

She looked into his eyes. Irreclaimable seconds ticked away. She said, “You may be right. But I want this to be because there’s a chance. Do you understand? Not just suicide. I think some part of you wants that. But I don’t.”

Did
he want to die, out there on the wooded Ojibway reserve? The strange fact was, he did not. For the first time in many years, he would have preferred to go on living. Wanted desperately to live.

But the roads were thick with snow, and he remembered the yield predictions Evelyn had smuggled out of Symeon Demarch’s study. He remembered everything he had ever read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A quick death would surely be better than some lingering, blistered agony. He couldn’t bear to see Linneth die like that.

And there
was
a chance, he thought; at least a long shot—at least, Howard had seemed to think so.

The snow was soft and seemed suspended in the air. The air itself seemed to tremble with anticipation. He said, “We’re wasting time.” The research lab was not much closer than Coldwater Road. It would take some fancy driving to get them there in—what? He checked his watch. Thirteen minutes.

Linneth pressed her face to the window as the car passed along Beacon Road. Much of the commercial district was on fire. The flames reflected wildly on the snow. Smoke fanned across the road.

Dex was driving at a perilous speed, but he knew the route. She avoided looking at the strange digital clock on the dashboard. She couldn’t change the time and didn’t want it to obsess her.

Instead, oddly, she thought of her mother, dead years ago in some Bureau prison.
Something lives in everything,
she had said. Perhaps something lived in that tangle of ruins Dex was driving toward; perhaps it was the man Howard had called Stern. Who was a sort of Demiurge, if she had understood correctly. A mortal god.

A good or malevolent angel.

Low clouds rolled across the sky. The snow fell in a gentle curtain. The car turned onto the highway.

Clifford understood soon enough where they were headed.

He didn’t question it. He had seen enough to know Dex Graham meant him no harm. But when the car left the highway for the narrow road into the forest—a road Clifford knew too well—he could not contain a sigh of resignation.

“It’s all right, Cliffy,” his mother said, as a roof of pine boughs closed over the car. “It’ll be okay now.”

She didn’t know any better.

The trees had sheltered this road from much of the snow, but the road itself was deeply rutted. The military vehicles had a wider wheelbase than Dex’s car, which kept wandering in and out of the ruts. The old snow here had been beaten down to black ice. More than once, the wheels began to spin freely and the car slowed and Dex had to fight it forward, patiently, carefully.

Like Linneth, he tried to ignore the clock. Not as successfully. The time available had slipped below five minutes.

Clifford had guessed their destination. He said, “There’s a hill before you get to the lab where the road cuts through the escarpment. It might be slippery.”

Dex saw it ahead. Not a steep rise, but a long one. The angle was maybe thirty degrees. He eased his foot down on the accelerator, carefully, carefully. The car picked up speed. It wobbled alarmingly from side to side, but he kept the nose pointed forward.

The car was doing sixty through the snow when it reached the foot of the hill. He was counting on the momentum to carry them forward, and it took them a long way up before he began to lose traction. Linneth held her breath as Dex worked the gas pedal and the car slowed to a crawl.

Now the front wheels lurched sideways and the car slid back a foot or so. Dex stepped on the gas. Let the wheels spin: maybe they would grind down to a solid surface. Blue smoke roared from the exhaust pipe. The car jumped forward, hesitated, jumped another yard or two. The peak of the hill was tantalizingly close.

Dex made the mistake of glancing at the dash clock.

They were on overtime now, and the bomb was less than half a mile away. Clifford had been staring out the back window. From here, he could see the gantry above the trees.

Linneth’s hands were clenched into fists in her lap.

Another yard forward and another. The motor screeched as if it had been burned clean of oil—which was possible, by the look of the steely blue smoke in his rearview mirror.

Almost there now. He pushed the gas pedal all the way down. This wasn’t strategy, it was panic—but the car surged over the summit of the hill in a series of spastic leaps, and suddenly it was the brake he was fighting.

The ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay ahead. This blister of strange light was more energetic than Dex had expected from Howard’s description of it. It was like liquid lightning—frightening to drive into. More accurately, to
slide
into. The car was gathering speed and he was on the verge of losing control.

“Everybody hold on,” he said.

Linneth whispered something about
“time.”
Ellen Stockton held her son against her. Dex took his foot off the brake. If the wheels locked now the car would tumble. We’re a sled, Dex thought madly. This is free fall.

A timeless moment passed. Then the sky was full of light, and the pine trees caught fire and burned in an instant.

CHAPTER 31

Milos Fabrikant followed the Censeur, M. Bisonette, to a trench that had been carved into the cold, bare hillock in front of the bunker.

The snow had stopped. The clouds were high and thinning. The countdown proceeded with a relentless precision, and Fabrikant listened to the numbers unreel from the mouth of a metal-horn loudspeaker. When the count reached twenty seconds, Fabrikant and Bisonette and a half dozen other privileged observers crouched with their backs to the west wall of the revetment.

The light from the detonation was sudden and shockingly bright. Shadows flared to the east. A revision of nature, Fabrikant thought. Silent at first. It was his thoughts that were loud.

Bisonette stood up immediately, cupping his hands around his amber-colored goggles. Fabrikant’s joints were agonized by the cold; he was slower to stand.

The fireball glowed like sunset in the far undulations of the pine forest. Incredibly, the clouds above the blast had been torn open. A pillar of smoke boiled into the sundered heavens.

The sound came at last, a battering roar, like the outrage of the offended Protennoia.

Fabrikant touched the sleeve of the Censeur’s greatcoat. He felt Bisonette’s unconcealed tremor of delight.
He is as full,
Fabrikant thought,
as I am empty
.

“We should take cover again, Censeur,” he said.