Return of the Ancients (6 page)

There was no one . . . There will be no one
. That scornful voice in his head again, filling him with dread and pessimism:

Stay here and die.

The warm breeze wafted again, and he turned his face into it. He remembered a science class on weather, and the droning teacher telling them that wind usually blew from the coast – if that was true, then that’d be a pretty good place to head towards.

Arn looked back at the hole for a second. There was water down there; maybe he should . . .

Forget it.
The thought of climbing back down into that labyrinth was both frightening and repellant. Instead, he used his foot to make an arrow in the sand.

‘I went this way,’ he said, to no one but the sterile breeze.

I’ll head towards the coast
, he thought
– see what sort of land this is. And if there are any rivers, that’ll be where they’ll empty.
Besides, if this was still home, then the coast was to the east – twenty-five miles; sure, a long way, but he was young and fit. He turned into the breeze and started to walk.

‘Winds always blow from the coast, and the coast is east,’ he repeated automatically.

Unless its winter, then breezes blow towards the coast, not from it – you’re going the wrong way, dummy.

Arn groaned.
Heads you win, tails I lose
, he thought and kept walking into the breeze.

*****

No one spoke or moved for many minutes after Arn had vanished from the observation screens.

Edward was in shock, but excited – an idea forming in his mind. Becky closed her mouth, and pushed through the crowd of bewildered teenagers, scientists and administrators, to stand before one of the large screens.

‘What happened? Where did he go?’

One of the technicians got to his feet. ‘Vaporised.’

‘Stop that sort of talk.’ Dr. Harper frowned and took a step towards the screen.

Beescomb was still regaining his wits. ‘Where . . . where’s my student, Harper? What just happened here? Can we get someone down there?’

Harper ignored him and squinted at one screen, then the next. He barked some instructions to his team, and moved to a control panel, quickly ordering a lockdown of the facility. One of the screens began to flash, and Harper said to his senior scientist: ‘All right, Takada, shut it down . . . All of it.’

Jim Takada nodded, rapidly tapping in the command sequence on his computer, before stopping and frowning, and then repeating his movements again, this time with more care. He swore under his breath and lifted his hands from the keys for a second, and then he tried it again.

Harper, dragging his eyes away from his screen, noticed Takada’s frustration and turned to him. ‘What’s up? What’s wrong?’

Takada shook his head. ‘It’s just . . .’ He entered an alternative sequence into the computer, then shook his head again. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, ‘It’s just not shutting down. In fact it’s still running as if there’s a high-speed, high-energy collision taking place – but that’s impossible. The energy draw is phenomenal . . . and it’s building.’

Harper looked back at the screen, and then brought one hand up to his face. ‘Oh no, no, no – where’s our diamond? What the hell happened to the acceleration lens?’

Takada spoke over his shoulder. ‘The kid must have it. Maybe that’s why we can’t shut the track down; he’s done something to the collision acceleration instrumentation.’

The rise and fall of a siren could now be heard in the corridor outside. Further along the room, a female technician in thick spectacles skidded along the floor on the wheels of her chair to a different position at a long wall of electronics. She flicked some switches, then read some numbers off one of the small screens – speaking loudly, trying to be heard over the raised voices, the pulsing beeps now coming from most of the control panels in the room.

‘I’ve got radiation – something is bleeding high gamma down in the pipe room.’

Edward heard Harper swear, and then saw him rub his chin in nervous indecision. That concerned him more than anything he had seen – if Harper was worried, then so should they be.

Edward felt a rising panic, and looked back at the screens that had showed his friend disappearing only moments before. The more he stared, the more the image looked . . . wrong.

Harper also looked along the bank of screens, shaking his head slowly. He turned back to the bespectacled technician. ‘I don’t see anything. There can’t be a leak . . . There should be nothing
to
leak.’ He shook his head again. ‘Doesn’t make sense at all. Regardless, I’ll have a team go in and shut it down manually.’

‘Well, we’d better hurry; we’ve got an enormous power drain going on.’ She turned back to her station; between her and the other technicians, the activity was now furious.

Edward took his glasses off and wiped them. Replacing them, he moved closer to the screen. He frowned, took his glasses off again, and rubbed them even harder on his shirt. This time after he put them back on his nose, he squinted and then spoke softly, ‘Look.’

Even in all the confusion, Harper must have heard him, and turned to stare at Edward for a moment, his eyebrows shooting up in recognition, as though remembering the students were still in the control room.

‘I need everyone cleared from this room – authorised personnel only.’

An electronic voice intoned from a speaker overhead, the phrase repeated in an emotionless repetition:
secure lockdown initiated – secure lockdown initiated
. . .

Harper turned to a small black-and-white screen showing sets of enormous doors sliding shut at several exits to the building, and larger, two-foot-thick blast doors moving into place in the deeper areas of the underground facility. Harper swore again and turned to the group, urgency now in his movements.

Edward spoke the word again, ‘Look.’

Harper looked briefly at Edward and made motions to herd the teenagers from the room. ‘Sorry all, but we’re going to have to evacuate you immediately. Looks like we have some sort of,
ahh
, electronic or magnetic disturbance. Nothing to worry about, no danger. We’ll find your friend. He’s probably just managed to wander off into some section of the tunnel that isn’t under surveillance.’

The school group started to move backwards towards the door. Edward stood his ground, and pointed to the screen that had once shown his friend. This time he yelled it: ‘Look!’

Harper studied the screen, and then turned back to face Edward. ‘There’s nothing to see, son.’

Edward kept on pointing. ‘That’s just it. It’s not what we
can
see . . . it’s what we
can’t
.’ He looked from Harper to Beescomb. Many of the technicians had swivelled in their chairs to listen to him. ‘There’s something missing from the room . . . other than Arn, I mean. C’mon, look.’ He pointed at the screen to where his friend had been standing.

The entire room had fallen silent, and every eye was following the line of his pointing finger. No one heard the pinging, beeps or sirens anymore.

Edward walked right up to the screen and jabbed his finger at it. ‘Near the collision recording section – see? There’s something missing . . . like a small bite has been taken out of the machinery and background. But if the device was damaged, you’d know about it, right?’

Harper frowned, and leaned so close to the screen that his nose was almost touching the glass. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘Takada, take a look at this. What do you make of it?’

Takada leapt to his feet and hurried over. He nodded and spoke softly to his boss. ‘There’s an anomaly there, all right. Might be a fault in the film recording, though.’

Harper pressed some buttons, causing the screens to switch to a different angle. The same golf-ball-sized section was missing from every angle, like something oily was masking a section of the room or distorting the air.

Harper rubbed his chin and whispered, ‘I think I know where the boy went . . . and our diamond.’

*****

Arn stumbled in the sand and fell to his knees. His lips were beginning to crack; when he swallowed, it felt like the dryness in his throat was caught halfway and refused to be pushed down any further unless accompanied by the reward of some water.

He blinked several times, and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand – they felt gritty and dry. In the distance, he could make out a large boulder sticking up from the sand. He felt somewhat elated – at least there were
some
features other than an endless, baked earth. He could use it for shelter, or climb it to see if there was anything over the horizon. He plodded on, still feeling the breeze on his face.

Shielding his eyes, he looked up at the sun; it was no longer directly overhead. It must have been morning when he set out, and he bet it was some time past midday now.

He wiped his dry face – he had stopped perspiring long ago, and he knew this meant his body was starting to seriously dehydrate. He’d need a drink soon, or his mind would become foggy.

Foggier
, the little voice sneered. It was constantly with him now, never letting him be for a second.

Along with the voice, there was the dull pain. His head throbbed – another sign of dehydration.

There’s water inside you.

‘Huh?’

You know what I mean.

‘Oh no, no, no. No way.’

Did you know you could drink your own pee three times before it became toxic?

‘Urk. Now I’m really losing it.’

Drink it – it’ll keep you alive.

Arn laughed dismissively. ‘And do you think that would improve my chances with Becky if she ever found out?’

I wont tell if you don’t.

Arn ignored the voice, and looked up at the huge stone that loomed before him. He had wandered so far in his mind, he hadn’t noticed how close he was to it now.

His dry mouth fell open.
This can’t be real
. . .

It wasn’t a boulder at all. It was a skull – gigantic, and bleached by a million sunshines. Just behind it, the tops of waist-thick bones stuck out of the ground for a good forty feet before they gradually sunk below the sand.
Huge ribs
, Arn thought.

He ran his hand along the skull, perhaps to see if it
was
real. It was warm and rough to his touch, and tilted slightly onto its side. He could see inside the mouth that it still had a few sharp teeth.

A dinosaur? No. A whale, maybe.

And that’ll be you soon, if you don’t find water.

Arn remembered why he came to the skull, and climbed up onto it. Still facing into the breeze, he squinted. In the distance, something gleamed.

The room had been cleared and Harper and his senior scientist huddled around one of the screens. Takada tapped the glass with his knuckle.

‘I think we’ve got a topological paradox.’ He folded his arms and peered at the blurred area on the screen.

‘A wormhole?’ Harper whispered, and ran his hands up through his thinning hair. ‘Maybe; after all, we knew it was theoretically possible. But one that stays open – that’s not supposed to happen . . . even on paper.’

‘Well, the visual evidence sure points to something being there that wasn’t there before. Or rather I should say, something
not
being there, that
was
before.’

Harper blinked a few times at the oily distortion. ‘And the boy and our diamond fell through it, or were pulled through?’

‘I know, I know, it’s all crazy. But it could have all been a lot worse: if the collision had generated a black hole, even a miniature one, and it failed to evaporate in nanoseconds, it could have given off enough gamma radiation to fry the planet. So we should be thankful for that at least.’

Harper grunted. ‘So, you think it’s safe to go down there?’

Takada shrugged. ‘None of the instruments are registering lethal gamma or X-rays anymore. The anomaly gave off just enough rads to cause the blast doors to activate, but not enough to harm anyone.’

‘Yet.’ Harper raised his eyebrows.

‘And that’s the problem, isn’t it? The
non-mass
is somehow causing our systems to be drained of power, and refuse their shutdown orders on the collider. We somehow opened a wormhole, and now something is causing it to be wedged open. It’s drawing ever more power, and I don’t now what’ll happen when it reaches a tipping point.’

Harper leaned on his fists and looked hard at the screen, which had now been recalibrated to focus on the small area of blurred disturbance next to the collision point.

‘Give me some options, people.’

Takeda sat forward. ‘The collider is moving at a speed that has surpassed light. That’s pretty cool.’

Harper turned to glare at him, and he swallowed and went on.

‘But the fact is, the particles we have created are still accelerating. Don’t know why, but each rotation in the chamber means more power is drawn, more speed is achieved, and more fragility enters the system. So . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We need to slow them down. We need a brake.’

Harper’s eyebrows went up.

Takeda nodded as he spoke. ‘We need to refire the laser. Derail or slow those particles down, and remove the paradox’s energy source.’

‘Perfect. Now if only we had a red diamond we could calibrate. Anyone got a year and ten million bucks?’ Harper rubbed his forehead and sighed. ‘Okay, so, we need to do something – at least get in to take a look at it. Before it reaches this unknown tipping point.’ He leaned back. ‘You know, it still may close by itself.’

Takada nodded. ‘That’s right; it may evaporate any second, or . . .’

‘Or?’

‘Or it could swell and absorb more of the facility, or all of the facility. Or maybe generate a nuclear meltdown, causing a chain reaction that could irradiate the rest of the planet.’ Takada wiped his brow. ‘Or it could do something else we can’t even imagine.’ His voice was rising. ‘We’ve got to get in there.’