Wormholes (27 page)

Gaston stumbled back against the wall and leaned against it. Gerald backed away in time to see the framework lurch so badly, the ladder sliced clean away and float into the darkness of space. He leaned against the wall, too, feeling the vicious winds buffeting their suited bodies.

“Get into the airlock! Get out of there!” shouted Mullins. They hauled themselves across the chamber against the hellish wind of the leak, and entered the airlock, shutting the door. Gaston operated the controls and after a minute they stumbled out of the chamber and into the arms of Megamag technicians. The technicians hustled them far away from the chamber, fighting a gale-force wind flowing toward the huge metal structure. Once they were a safe distance from the chamber inside the huge hangar, the technicians helped them to sit down and remove their helmets. Gerald relished the delicious, sweet desert air drying the sweat from his head, cooling him. Gaston’s helmet came off and he opened his mouth in relief, his eyes closed, his long brown hair plastered to his skull, the sheen of sweat on his thin face testifying to his exertion.

With the helmets removed, they became more aware of a vicious high-pitched hissing sound, like a hundred steam valves going off at once. Gerald laboriously turned in his suit to see two technicians wearing harnesses approaching the chamber. They were tethered by steel cable to a girder on the hangar wall, which were being payed out by a motorized winch operated by other technicians, who were also tethered on shorter cables. The two carried a metal plate in front of them like a shield. They aimed the plate at a spot on the chamber just above their heads. The cables zinged taut and they were both dragged toward the chamber. A wooden crate tumbled past them and leaped into the air at the spot on the chamber wall, slamming into it, crumpling into splinters and being sucked away through the small hole. The men fought to keep their balance and to keep the plate in front of them. Abruptly the plate, too, slammed against the side of the chamber. The hissing grew fainter, then stopped.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered the young frizzy-haired technician standing by Gerald. “We never ever thought that would happen!”

Gerald and Gaston looked at each other. They smiled knowingly. Then, the smiles blossomed into exultant laughter. The technicians looked on puzzled, as they stood and slapped each other on the padded shoulders and shouted in utter, glorious triumph.

• • •

“Best we can figure, it was about the size of a grain of sand,” said Mullins, gesturing at the projected image of a tiny round rupture in a gray-painted steel surface. He bobbed restlessly about the room full of scientists and engineers crowding around the long conference table and sitting in chairs lining the wall. At the table’s head were a haggard Gerald and Gaston, still wearing the blue coveralls they’d donned after taking off the space suits.

“Any sense of where it came from?” asked Gerald.

“Well, it almost certainly came out of the hole, traveling maybe a thousand miles an hour. You guys were really lucky it didn’t go right through either of you!”

Gerald and Gaston shared a glance that combined shock and relief. They had been so close to death.

“There’s more,” said Mullins. He screwed up his face and peered nearsightedly at the keyboard of his laptop, located the key to advance the image and tapped it decisively with his pudgy finger. Other, similar images, one by one appeared on the screen. They also showed close-ups of the chamber’s metal plate, with a welter of dents, furrows and mars in the smooth surface. Mullins punctuated them with “Here. Here. Here.” He stopped at an especially dramatic image. “Inside of the chamber is pitted. Took a number of other hits, but none of the others penetrated.”

“Lotta space crap out there, eh?” asked Cameron. “You guys better figure out how to stop it.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve already started.” Mullins tapped a few keys and brought up a three-
D
diagram of the hole, the magnetic field lines and the steering apparatus. “Particles are coming through, usually from the direction we’re traveling, relative to the local flow of stuff. Say, stuff orbiting a star. The particle that made the hole may have been going around the star where we were.” He stopped, grinning, realizing that he had dropped a bombshell. “Oh yeah, we’re doing computer enhancement of the helmet video. Didn’t want to say anything till it was done. Guess the cat’s out of the bag. The video picked up a nearby star and planets. Now we know our hole is in the outer reaches of a star system, with planets, moons, stuff like that. We’re, like, out where Uranus would be if we were in our solar system.”

“Whoa! Wait a minute!” Dacey leaned forward over the table. “We’ve got
planets
? Let’s look at that data!” Mullins nodded his head vigorously and waved at the screen.

“Yeah, first let me tell you how we figured to protect ourselves. We’ll deflect particles by directing energy through the hole in the direction of travel. Head ’em off.” He clicked to an animation of arrows streaming through the oval. “We’ll use lasers. Light exerts a pressure, like water from a hose. We figure we’ll use a combination of high-powered lasers, different colors, shining through the hole. It’ll deflect particles before they get to the hole.”

“Headlights,” said Cameron. “You’re installing headlights on the thing.”

“Yeah! Exactly!” said Mullins happily. “We called Lawrence Berkeley Labs. They do big lasers for fusion research. They said they could gin up a combination of lasers that could fit inside the vacuum chamber. Expensive. But it’s better than getting pinged at all the time. It’ll be a really intense white light.”

“You got low beams and high beams?” cracked Cameron. Mullins laughed along with the others in the room, shrugged, hitched up his pants and continued. “Okay, about those planets. Dr. Cohen has been looking at the images.” He nodded to the Caltech physicist, Aaron Cohen, who stood up, as Mullins brought up images that looked very familiar.

“It’s a yellow dwarf like the sun, a bit younger from what we can tell.” More images of dots floating in space. “The cameras picked up four or five planets, but the images were fuzzy.”

Dacey scribbled furiously on a yellow pad. She stopped Cohen and efficiently ticked off the next steps. They would need to train telescopes through the hole to get better images. Her planetologist friends would go absolutely bonkers. They would have to find out as much as possible about the alien planets.

Then they would visit them! They would sail down to their surfaces, riding their magnetically propelled “transdimensional aperture.” And they would step out onto the surface of another world!

T
he debriefing ended when Mullins realized that they had subjected a sagging Gerald and Gaston to four hours of questions, and the rest of the world was waiting eagerly to see the two. They walked out into the bright sun to a nearby hangar and the ebullient crowd of engineers and technicians, who were already polishing off their second case of champagne. There were toasts and congratulations and deeply felt thanks.

Gerald seemed to gather a second wind as he sipped champagne with Dacey and a raucous group of Megamag engineers. But then his brow knitted and he grew quiet. He abruptly got up and whispered something to Mullins and they retired to a small office in the hangar. Dacey could see them through the window bent over a desk, Gerald drawing something and Mullins nodding vigorously. The little man held up his hands, palms open, fashioning an imaginary large globular object in the air. They emerged and Mullins beckoned to one of his engineers and hurried off with him.

Gerald returned to Dacey and Gaston, but he wouldn’t answer when Dacey persistently quizzed him about the meeting. He couldn’t talk; it was time for the news conference, he said.

They drove to the news conference site, a hangar near the entrance gate that had been turned into a media center. Lambert’s Boeing 767 was already parked nearby, and he stood at the bottom of the stairway giving interviews to reporters.

The news conference went as before, except the attendance now was massive, a restless, aggressive gang of some three thousand reporters aiming their professional attention at Lambert, Gerald and Gaston. Standing before the forest of microphones, Lambert offered congratulations and explained how he had faithfully supported the project from the beginning. Gerald and Gaston stood to a rattling chorus of clicking cameras and patiently answered questions ranging from the magnetic parameters of the propulsive system (
Physics Today
) to why Gerald had shaved his beard (
People
).

A question from the
Los Angeles Times
, stopped him: “Do you think these holes represent an opportunity or a threat to humanity?”

For a long moment, he stared at the questioner, a tall, dapper man with a salt-and-pepper beard.

“Both,” he finally said, his dark eyes glancing around the group, as if searching for answers. “I’m not a philosopher. Talk to some philosophers for a good answer. But I know that these are incredibly powerful things. The wormholes could represent a way out for our species. I think we’re in danger on this planet. From ourselves. We’re trapped in our own foolishness. This is a way out of the trap. But they also represent a way
in
for things we just don’t understand.” He shrugged at the inadequacy of his answer and shifted uneasily.

The reporters continued their questioning, thrusting their hands in the air, shouting for attention. After Lambert’s public relations man stepped forward to call a halt there was a mass exodus to file their stories.

Lambert, showing a hearty good cheer from the press conference, invited Gerald, Gaston and Dacey onboard his jet. They entered to find four slickly groomed men in dark, expensively tailored suits and two generals in military uniforms festooned with ribbons. They sat at a confident ease in the leather chairs of the main lounge, sipping champagne or more substantial glasses of scotch.

Lambert introduced the men, naming the conglomerates or military branches they represented. He did not give titles. It was understood that they were the heads. They offered perfunctory handshakes and coolly cordial greetings.

“We’ve been talking about the commercial possibilities,” said Lambert, with the barely concealed relish of a bargainer with the upper hand. “There’s nuclear waste disposal. We could assure that the wastes we put through would be completely disposed of. It would open up the nuclear industry; make it possible to start building reactors again.”

“But there’s so much we don’t know yet,” said Gerald, quietly, glancing over at Lambert’s assistant, Van Alston, sitting quietly to the side, an open leather notebook on his lap, taking notes. “This is only the beginning. There’s the physics of these holes, the astronomy of the other universe. First, we have—”

“Sure. Right. Of course,” interrupted Lambert. “But to do all that, we need support. We need income. We’ll charge the scientists.”

“There’s government support,” said Dacey, who like Gerald, remained standing, leaning against the bulkhead, watching the proceedings with evident suspicion. “The government will fund the basic research.”

A flicker of disdain crossed the faces of some of the men.

“Nah, I already nixed that, remember? No dice,” Lambert sat down in his chair and took up his scotch. “If the university types want to get money from the government, that’s fine. But we’ll charge an entrance fee. We’re contractors like any other contractors.” He nodded smiling at the two generals. “And there may well be military uses.” The pointed reference seemed designed to emphasize some discussion that Gerald suspected had been going on before he arrived. He understood from the generals’ stoic non-response that pressures were being brought to bear. He also realized that the military might well invoke national security to commandeer the holes.

“Look,” he said tersely, moving toward the exit. “I’m sure we can all talk about the possibilities. You can, anyway. But all this will have to wait. First we have to understand these holes, how they work. Most of all, we have to know how to close them once they open. Do you want another Paris?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and ducked out the door and down the stairs. Gaston and Dacey followed. They stood at the bottom of the stairs taking in the vista across the desert to the distant mountains, finding it refreshing after the close confines of the airplane and its powerful men.

“I’ll tell the others what happened in there,” Gaston said shaking his head. “They’ll have to be prepared.”

Gaston started off, but Gerald stopped him. “Ralph … thanks … thanks for
everything
.”

Gaston nodded, managing a half-smile and started off across the runway to a Humvee.

“Gerald,” came Lambert’s stern voice from the top of the stairs, his husky frame filling the doorway. Lambert peered down at him for a moment, then descended.

But before he could speak, Gerald struck. “Okay, you provided the funding, but this is my project. All these plans you’re hatching, the possible military involvement, you could be endangering not just the project but huge numbers of lives. You just—”

“But there’s something you don’t know,” interrupted Lambert. “The fruit salads in there told me their satellites intercepted some transmissions, but it’ll be public soon.”

“What’s that?”

“China’s captured a hole. Two days ago in the Gobi desert. We don’t know what it means.”

“Well, it means we can find out more about them.”

“It also means we’ve got to figure out
now
whether these things can be used as weapons.”

“I’m sure we’ll know soon enough, thanks to you and them.” Gerald, squinted up at the plane’s doorway. He turned and strode away.

Dacey remained long enough to catch a certain twinkle in Lambert’s eyes, a faint smile. “I’ve got your number, y’know,” she said conspiratorially.

“What the hell’s that mean?”

“You know damned well, Pop.” She grinned, made a tongue-click out of the side of her mouth and set off after Gerald.

• • •

Gerald turned on the shower, stripped off his jumpsuit and underwear, and stepped in. The shower was hot and powerful, and it felt good. He had soaped his face, when he heard the shower curtain rustle and felt warm skin on his, arms encircling him. He cleared his eyes to look down at Dacey’s face, her clear blue-gray eyes, her slightly bent nose, the lovely mouth smiling puckishly, gently up at him.

“Hi,” he breathed, kissing her deeply.

They took turns using the soap to wash away each other’s stresses. And they stayed together in the shower much, much longer than they needed to, deeply enjoying each other’s bodies.

Finally, they gently dried each other and slid between the sheets of the bed, as the last vestiges of dampness evaporated from their bodies, leaving a dry softness.

“So, you going to tell me?” She shifted her body against his, so she could see his face.

“What?” he asked woozily, sinking slowly toward sleep. But his tone revealed that he knew exactly what she was asking about.

“You were excited about something at that party. You talked to Andy and he got excited. C’mon, tell me.”

He stroked her back gently and smiled, his eyes closed. “Okay. You know how you can fly the holes from this side. Fly them around in the other universe?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I figured, you could go into the other side. Into the other universe. Take magnets, apply a controlled magnetic field from there, and fly a hole through
this
universe. Andy’s gonna build the system.”

“Wow!” She disentangled herself and propped herself up on one elbow, wide awake. “Wow!” she said again as the idea sank in. “We could go anywhere! This universe or another one! We could land on any planet; we could …” She looked down. His eyes were closed, his face in repose, his breathing regular. He was asleep.

She couldn’t tell him about
her
plan!