Wormholes (23 page)

“Y
ou got a good seal, Brendan?” Mullins spoke into the microphone, watching the bulky space-suited figure on the large video screen. It was bigger than life, the high-definition picture showing every detail. The wall of the control room held four such screens — one showing a distant view of the vacuum chamber hangar, and another the men in space suits outside the vacuum chamber airlock. The third screen, however, showed the most mesmerizing scene — the inside of the chamber, with the star-filled hole floating almost seductively in the middle. The fourth screen was dark, soon to display an image from Cooper’s hand-held camera.

“I’m okay,” said Cooper, checking a reading on his wrist. Mullins looked expectantly at George, who peered through the bottom of his bifocals at the instruments monitoring the men’s vital signs.

George shook his head slowly, a worried look on his face. “They’re frightened,” he said. “Heart rate’s up, blood pressure’s up, body temperature’s high, too.”

“Make sure they’re okay,” said Gerald, who sat between Mullins and George, his eyes scanning intently back and forth from one set of instruments to the other. “If they’re not okay, take them out.”

“C’mon guys, we know it’s tough in there,” said Mullins into the microphone. “Brendan? K.C.? Can you guys make it okay?”

Cooper put his gloved thumb up, his face barely visible behind the helmet faceplate. “Yeah. We’re jazzed. It’s like a deep ocean dive, except in space. Instead of starfish, we got stars, right K.C.?”

K.C. nodded as best he could and took a few tentative steps. “We’ve got a little balance problem, here, though.”

“Yeah,” said Mullins. “It’s different than floating around underwater. Just you be careful, okay?” Fortunately, the prototype suits loaned from
NASA
for planetary exploration were slimmer and more maneuverable than the suits made for
EVA
s in orbit. But still Mullins worried about the two oceanographers’ ability to precisely maneuver in a vacuum chamber with a lethal portal to outer space.

“Switch on my camera,” said Cooper, holding up his video camera.

Mullins touched a button and the fourth screen glowed to life, showing the camera’s bobbing view of the metal hangar. “You’re okay. Get ready to go in.”

Lambert paced behind them, watching the process and talking on his cell phone. He’d been unable to sit all morning. The sight of the hole had made him forget his plans to leave. George more than made up for Lambert’s edginess, sitting serenely, watching the instruments.

Mullins ran through checks of the magnetic field and the vacuum chamber. “Everything’s optimal,” he said.

“Okay, guys. You can enter the chamber,” said Gerald.

Cooper threw a switch, and the chamber’s airlock door opened. Both men stepped through and closed it behind them. The hand-held camera showed random, skewing views of helmets, gloves, airlock doors, and ceilings, as the men concentrated on operating the airlock controls.

“We got vacuum,” said Cooper finally. “We’re opening the inner door.”

Gerald touched a button to zoom back the view of the chamber’s fixed camera to a wide-angle. The screen showed the two men clumping awkwardly into the large vacuum chamber. Cooper aimed his camera at the hole. The control room fell dead silent. Lambert forgot his cell phone and stood transfixed.

Close-up, the wormhole was even more stunning. Its edges were absolutely sharp, and feathery curls of colored light swirled about its periphery. The hole maintained a perfect, elegant roundness. The stars showing through it were diamond-bright, glowing in subtly different colors of reddish, blue, and yellow. The space between the stars was of an utter blackness, but with small patches of pearly opalescence.

“Their heart rates are high,” said George, breaking the silence.

“Ain’t everybody’s,” said Dacey.

“Jesus!” breathed Cooper. “This is totally unbelievable!”

“We agree,” said Gerald. “Walk around it.”

The fixed camera showed Cooper begin to circle the hole with the camera. His camera showed the view through the hole shift as well. Multitudes of new stars rotated into view.

“Jesus, it’s like walking around a crystal ball,” said Cameron. “You can see in all directions.”

“It’s a sphere! Why is it a sphere?” asked Gaston.

“If you had universes in two dimensions … like sheets of paper … a hole punched from one to the other would be a circle, right?” said Gerald, his gaze still fixed on the screen.

“Yeah.”

“Well, this is a hole between three-dimensional universes. So it’s a three-dimensional circle … a sphere.”

“Gotcha,” said Cameron.

“Brendan, K.C., you okay to proceed?” asked Mullins.

“Fine,” said Cooper.

“Your body temperature’s down,” said George.

“It’s colder’n hell in here. But the suit heaters are compensating,” said Wang.

“Then let’s try the bar,” instructed Mullins.

“Roger,” said Wang.

With Cooper holding the camera on him, Wang stepped to the side of the chamber and bent with effort in the bulky suit to pick up a seven-foot steel bar. He hefted it under his arm like the jousting lance of a knight, holding it with both hands. He settled his grip.

“Ready,” he said.

“Okay, then, see what happens.” Gerald glanced at the others. “Let’s see if we can put matter into another universe and keep it in control.”

The hand-held camera bobbled a bit but steadied, showing a closeup of the steel bar advancing toward the hole. The bar’s end reached the hole and crossed an invisible membrane, faint swirls of light playing about it.

“We’re through! We’re through!” shouted Wang.

There was a collective sigh in the control room, as many of them realized they had been holding their breath yet again.

“Damn,” Mullins said quietly. “It’s still intact!”

Through the hole, they could see the bar’s other end extending into the darkened realm of the other universe.

“It’s lighter!” exclaimed Wang. “I can feel that it’s lighter in there!”

“It’s in the other universe’s gravitational domain,” said Gerald. “You’ve crossed the dimensional threshold.”

The change in the bar’s balance caused Wang to overcompensate in controlling it, and it drifted upward against the hole’s edge. The edge sliced the bar neatly in half, and the other end floated lazily away in the gravity-free space on the other side, receding into darkness.

“It just sliced away!” exclaimed Gaston.

“I thought it would,” said Gerald. “The hole’s edge is a dimensional discontinuity. It’s the sharpest edge in the universe. Infinitely sharp.”

Dacey leaned forward in her chair. “So that’s why it could go through a house, or a building—”

“Or any other substance,” said Gerald. “Passing through these things is going to be really dicey. You slip too far toward an edge and you’re sliced in two pieces.” He spoke into the microphone. “Let’s do a three-sixty survey of the view from the hole. I want to see where this thing is in the other universe.”

“Roger that,” said Wang, setting the sliced bar down. “I’ll get the frame.” He stepped to the side and with exquisite care slid an aluminum scaffolding from the side of the chamber to encompass the hole. The scaffolding consisted of broad steps up either side and a platform bridging over the top of the hole. At the same time, Cooper brought the camera in close to the hole, crouching down as best he could to up shoot through the bottom. Again, the hand-held camera showed a rich panoply of stars against the blackness.

“This is going to be incredible once we can go through,” said Cooper. He finished the low-angle survey and with Wang steadying the frame, carefully made his way up one set of steps to the top. He stood with one hand on the platform’s railing and slowly brought the camera pointing down to shoot through the top of the hole.

Cooper suddenly screamed and fell backward dropping the camera. The camera disappeared into the hole, the video image it transmitted showing a confusing swirl of tan and suddenly going black.

“What?” shouted Gerald, Mullins and Wang simultaneously.

“
IT’S … IT’S …
” but the rest was garbled as Cooper tumbled down the stairs, trying to recover himself at the bottom.

Wang had just bent to help him when the hole erupted from all sides with an explosive burst of seething brown liquid. The fixed camera lasted only long enough to record the wave slamming the two men against the walls of the chamber, then it went black, too.

“My God, their body temperature’s gone to zero!” shouted George.

“Chamber temperature’s minus a couple of hundred!” exclaimed Mullins. “They’re frozen solid!”

They all stared helplessly at the screen showing the view outside the chamber. The metal of the chamber abruptly grew a thick shroud of white frost and began to crack. The camera recorded the brown liquid spewing, then bursting through the cracks, washing out of the chamber and inundating the inside of the hangar. Then that image went dark. The remaining monitor trained on the outside of the hangar showed a thick cloud of vapor expanding outward.

The control room filled with shouts of “
WHAT IS IT?
” “
WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?
”

Gerald frantically scanned the instruments and the monitor screens, trying to glean something from their wildly fluctuating data. “It looks like …” He gave Mullins a shocked look.

“Methane,” said Lambert. They all turned to look at him, puzzled. “I saw a field test where they cracked open a tank of liquid methane … natural gas. To test a transporter. It looked like that.”

“Where the hell would liquid methane come from?” asked Cameron.

“Oh, my God! A planet!” breathed Gerald watching the growing cloud. “The hole must have been near a planet that had an ocean of liquid methane. Like Titan … Jupiter’s moon.”

“What’s going to happen?” asked Dacey.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Lambert. “The methane will evaporate into a gas. If this keeps up, it’ll make a damned big cloud. The first spark that it meets, sets it off. Basically a fuel-air bomb.”

“You mean like in the bomb where they explode a bunch of gasoline, then ignite the vapor?” asked Gaston.

“Yeah. They call it a poor man’s nuke. The concussion’ll take this place out like a nuclear bomb.”

“Jesus, Calvin, what can we do?” Dacey looked at him with terror, her mouth agape, her eyes wide. They all fell silent.

“Die.”

“T
hat’s not quite true, Calvin.” They turned to Gerald, who had been sitting quietly, watching the swirling vaporous shroud grow around the distant hangar.

“You got an answer?” Lambert had begun the mental process of bargaining with death and the quiet statement unnerved him.

“Yes. Use the missile countermeasure system I know you’ve got installed on your plane. It releases flares to decoy heat-seeking missiles.”

“What do you mean?”

“You use the flares to ignite the cloud before it grows too big. It’s like an old gas stove. When you first turn on the burner, you hold a match to it, first you get a whoosh, but then it just burns. But you wait a while and light that match and the house blows up.”

“He’s right! He’s right!” exclaimed Mullins. “Just fly over and release the flares!”

“So just a few people die,” said Lambert. “Anybody want to draw straws?”

“Nobody’s likely to die,” Gerald stood up and paced before the control panel, his eyes casting about, as if searching for the pieces to a solution. He stopped. “You’d have to fly low because the flares are short-burning. But you should have time to get to a safe altitude by the time they hit the cloud.”

“
Should
have time? Bullshit!” spat Lambert. “Our best hope is to hunker down here and hope this blockhouse holds. I’m not about to go on some half-assed bombing run—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Lambert, sir.” Cameron raised his hand in mocking irony. “I don’t want to seem disrespectful or nothin’, but it looks to me like you’ve traded your balls in on a bunch of money. Maybe you could use all your money to buy some back somewhere, you damn coward.”

“
YOU LITTLE BASTARD!
” Lambert lunged at Cameron, managing to grab his shirt before the others wrestled him away. From the viewing gallery, Lambert’s bodyguard burst into the room, pulling a pistol.

“
HOLD IT! DAMNIT, JUST HOLD IT!
” Dacey shouted. She turned to Lambert, her withering stare challenging him. “Calvin?” she queried tartly.

There was silence. Lambert glared fiercely at Cameron. Then with a curt flip of his hand, waved his bodyguard back.

“Start the plane,” he growled. The bodyguard didn’t realize the order was aimed at him “
CALL THE PILOT, TELL HIM TO START THE FUCKING PLANE!
” The bodyguard took out a cell phone and did so.

“Just make sure you don’t just fly your rich white ass away, motherfucker!” Cameron hissed.

Lambert gave them all a final scowling look, then without a word spun on his heel and left.

“Think he’ll do it?” asked Mullins.

Cameron suddenly grinned. “Sure he’ll do it. Chumps like that, you question their manhood, you can con ’em into doin’ about anything.”

“Jimmy, for once I’m glad you’re a bullshit artist,” said Gaston.

By now the icy swirling white cloud of methane had expanded far beyond the distant hangar, and Mullins transmitted a warning to the Nevada state police to attempt to evacuate the crowds of tourists lining the distant perimeter of the base.

Gerald switched one of the darkened screens to a camera on the blockhouse roof, panning it toward the airstrip. They sat in breathless silence, watching Lambert’s jet, gleaming white in the sun, speed to the end of the runway, swerve sharply and vault into the sky.

“Jesus, if he gets near that cloud with that jet, it’ll blow. It’ll take him out,” said Mullins.

“He knows that,” said Gerald. “He also knows that methane is heavier than air. And this stuff is colder. It’ll tend to hug the ground.” Indeed, the camera trained on the hangar showed the vapor rolling toward them, reaching icy fingers of fog across the desert. On the other screen, the jet grew more distant, shrinking to a mere speck.

“Damn! He’s flyin’ away!” Cameron slammed his hand on the back of a chair in disgust.

“No,” said George. “He’s circling to gain altitude. You did your job well, son.”

The speck grew once more into a jet, now higher in the sky. Gerald zoomed in the camera view and tried to manipulate the controls to follow the jet’s path. At the higher magnification, the image of the small craft bounced and jerked in the camera’s frame. A string of brightly burning objects sailed away behind the jet, floating downward. The jet banked sharply away and climbed.

“He’s done it! Get down!” Gerald grabbed Dacey and they flattened themselves against the floor, as did the others. They craned their necks upward to see the screens.

The hangar disappeared in a roaring flash, and the small armored-glass slits in the blockhouse blazed with a blinding yellow light.

The walls shuddered and cracked under the thundering blow of the explosion, as from the impact of a wrecker’s ball. Light fixtures tore from the ceiling, clattering onto the floor, their fluorescent tubes shattering. The instrument consoles pitched forward slamming onto the floor. Thick choking dust erupted from the buckling concrete walls. The ceiling slumped downward, large steel rebars knifing out from the smooth gray surface.

Then the hellish blast subsided and a blanket of silence settled in, interrupted after a stunned moment by groaning and coughing. Dacey opened her eyes, brushing away the concrete dust coating her face. She coughed to bring out the choking dust in her lungs. The glow of the battery-powered emergency lights dimly lit the room through the cloud.

She reached over to touch Gerald’s back, which was covered with small chunks of concrete. Thankfully, she felt the rise and fall of breathing beneath her hand. He rolled over, pushing away a chair that had fallen on him, and laid his hand gently on her face. They were both alive. They got up, debris falling from their bodies, to the sound of the slow stirring of dazed people. Again, they heard a groan and made their way toward it. Mullins lay half beneath a huge console, with George already bending over him. Gaston and Cameron bent to try to lift the console, Cameron’s forehead showing a bloody gash, red against his gray-dusted brown skin.

“His signs are all right.” George leaned down to Mullins. “My boy, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer you as a live patient, not as an autopsy subject.”

Mullins managed a small laugh and then winced, his round face screwed up in a pain that he tried desperately to hide beneath a brave mask.

“Jimmy, you’re cut,” said Dacey, and Cameron put his hand to the gash on his forehead, dully examining the blood on his fingers.

“I’ve had worse. Let’s just worry about Andy for now.” Gaston found a wad of napkins, and Cameron pressed those to his head, waving away any further help. George directed as they joined to lift the control console off Mullins, taking care to protect him from the shards of glass falling from shattered monitors.

George had crouched to examine Mullins’ legs when the sound of a telephone beeping arose somewhere in the room. It came from the pocket of the bodyguard Lambert had left behind in the observation room. The muscular man was still dazed from a strike by a chunk of concrete, but he managed to haul himself up, slowly wipe off his dark suit, and pull the phone from his pocket. He pressed its button and mumbled a dazed hello. He stiffened slightly, coming to attention. After a moment listening, he came into the control room, stepped across the shattered remains of a fluorescent light fixture and handed the phone to Gerald.

“Looks like you fucked up,” said the voice on the phone over the throaty hiss of a jet engine. It was Lambert.

“Yes,” said Gerald, and let the thick silence hang between them.

“Well, listen, I’m heading back to Houston. I’m having my people put out the story about what happened. How you didn’t figure on something like this happening. How I saved your ass. How I’m reassessing the project, and so forth.” He hung up and Gerald stood mutely with the phone in his hand before absentmindedly handing it back to the bodyguard.

“Who was that?” asked Dacey, who cradled Mullins’ head in her lap, brushing his hair back, while George checked his legs.

“It was Calvin,” Gerald sat down heavily beside Mullins, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “He wanted to make sure we were all right.”

After a while, they managed to pull themselves together and wrench open the steel door to the blockhouse. They emerged into an enveloping blowtorch of heat and the distant roar of an inferno. Even two miles away, the heat from the burning hole beat in blistering waves against their bodies. Squinting their eyes, they could make out the billowing ball of fire, fed by the methane that continued to erupt through the hole. Now they had no control over the beast. It was drifting slowly northward for the moment, out into open desert.

They ducked around into the protection of the ruined blockhouse, with the men carrying a grimacing Mullins. Dacey started one of the Humvees and they carefully laid him inside. She accelerated across the desert, the breeze cooling their overheated bodies, aiming toward the distant complex of hangars.

• • •

“God,” Gerald whispered, sitting on the side of the bed, staring blankly ahead. “Again. More dead … Brendan … K.C. … Why? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. You couldn’t have known.” Dacey closed the door of her room and sat down beside him. After George had checked them both out, she had gotten him to the dormitory. Physically, he might have been fine, but she had seen the psychological trauma in Gerald’s desperate look, and brought him to her room so he could recover. The whine of a departing ambulance siren reassured them that Mullins was being looked after. But Dacey knew no physician could treat his wound. “Gerald, nobody’s seen these things before. Never. Nobody can predict what they can do.”

“But I’m supposed to. That’s what all these theories …” He didn’t finish. The theories had obviously not worked. “It’s my own stupidity. My own stupid damned
arrogance
.” He stood up. “Well, I’m just going out there and tell them that.”

“No you’re not.” She stood facing him and rested her arms on his shoulders. “Wait a while. Think. Get cleaned up.” She patted away a spot of dust that remained on one shoulder. “Go shower. Think about the real facts, Gerald … the facts that these are totally unknown things. That you’ve started something incredibly important. That you have to finish it. You can pick yourself up.”

He smiled appreciatively. “Yeah. You know about that … how to pick yourself up.” She patted him on the shoulder and put her arm around him, leading to the door between their rooms. He fumbled with the doorknob, but it wouldn’t open.

“Guess it’s locked from the other side. You have to unlock it from both sides to open it between rooms.”

He held the knob for a long moment, staring down at it. A faintly perplexed look passed across his face, as if he were trying to figure something out. Then he turned, opened the door to the hallway and left.

After a moment, the lock on the door between the rooms rattled, the door opened, and he appeared, mumbling something about “Figuring it out.” Saying goodbye, he shut it slowly. The door that separated them again made her think of the barriers and whether they could ever be overcome. Could she help him recover from this catastrophe, from the deaths of two men he had allowed to confront the monster? Could he help her overcome the traumatic memory of her brutal marriage? It had left her fearful of allowing anyone to touch her deeply; left her settling for safe, casual relationships with safe men, to maintain a distance.

This was not the time to think about that, she finally decided. She realized how tired she was and how grimy, and she stripped off her clothes and showered, letting the hot water run down her face, washing away the smell of concrete dust and scorched desert. She washed her hair and stepped out, toweling herself off. She emerged into the room, combing out her hair, letting the desert air finish drying her body before she dressed. It brought memories of how pleasant it had been on field trips to scrub away trail dirt in a desert stream and lie on a rock in the warm sun to dry. If only this were one of those idyllic times.

As she dressed, she became aware of an abrupt silence that had replaced the rumbling hiss of the distant flame. Gerald would know what the silence meant. She knocked on the door between their rooms and peeked in. He stood at the window, the amber light of the fading day illuminating his face. He wore fresh jeans and a shirt, but it had been haphazardly buttoned. Water droplets still glistened in his dark hair.

“The fire’s gone. The hole has closed,” he said quietly. “Don’t know why. Don’t know anything.” He shook his head in frustration.

She joined him, and by looking out the window at an angle, they could see in the direction of the fire. The fiery glow they had seen on the horizon when they first got to the rooms was now gone. His gaze was distant, seeing beyond the fire to the ordeal to come. He would soon face a mob of shouting reporters demanding that he explain the disaster; and a denigrating crowd of scientists demanding that he explain his theory’s failure. And he would have to visit the families of the dead men, explaining that failure and expressing his sorrow. He took a deep, tired, trembling breath.

“I guess it’s time. I guess I’ve got to face them.” She put her arm around him, and they went out the door together.