by P A Vasey
“What’s he gotten himself into?” she said.
Hubert looked at me and nodded, which I took as tacit instruction to lead the conversation. “When did you last see him?” I said, somewhat evasively.
She looked upwards and to the right. I’d read somewhere that this meant the person was lying. Or was it upwards and to the left?
“Six months ago, more or less,” she said. “He came to see me here in Vegas. We spent the weekend together. Went on a helicopter ride out to the Canyon. It was great. He’s a good father.”
I saw Hubert glance at Connor who shook his head fiercely. Something about this wasn’t gelling.
“Amy, how old are you?” I said.
“Twenty-four.”
“How long have you been a hooker?”
‘None of your business.”
“Does your father know?”
Amy paused. “Yes. But he doesn’t judge me.”
Connor looked at Hubert who nodded his assent. He sat down on the bed and folded his arms.
“Amy, I was with your father recently and he didn’t talk about you. We talked about anything and everything, but not you. I find that strange.”
Amy’s face darkened. “I don’t know Gabe, he never talked about you neither, and I’ve not fucking seen you for years.”
Connor winced, and then took a deep breath. “Did you know Cora had died?”
A shrug. “Sure.”
“Were you at the funeral?”
Another look upwards and to the right. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Well, there was the lie, but something else wasn’t right and I couldn’t put my finger on it. Hubert stood up and walked over to the window. He pulled back the drapes and stared down at the glitzy lights of the Strip, pulsating neon and LED, the heartbeat of another city that never slept.
“Amy, you need to come with us,” he said.
She crossed her arms. “Are you going to tell me what sort of trouble my father is in?”
“Not yet. And this is non-negotiable. Grab the rest of your gear.” His phone trilled, and he pulled it out of his jacket pocket and listened. He acknowledged it curtly and looked at me. “That was Holland. At the crater. He’s found something. Wants us to go there.”
I looked up sharply, “Adam?”
Amy glanced warily between Hubert and me. Then she smiled slyly, “He’s missing, right? So what’s the big deal?”
I ignored her and strode over to join Hubert at the window. He leaned in and spoke softly. “I’m not sure she’s going to be much help, but whatever, we’ll keep her here under lockdown, just in case.”
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked
He looked at me, sighed, and slowly shook his head. “Do any of us?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nevada Test Site
I grabbed the chance for a quick sleep in the adjoining room and woke up a few hours later feeling refreshed but hungry. The minibar was well stocked so I set about devouring every chocolate bar and packet of potato chips that I could find. It was still dark outside, but my watch said five am so I spent five minutes reading the instructions on the coffee percolator before firing it up. It was bubbling away when there was a knock on the door and Stillman poked her head in.
“How you doing?”
I gave her a little smile. “Yeah, I’m doing OK. But I’m worried. Has anyone heard about Adam?”
Stillman shook her head. “Nothing. And that worries me too. Maybe he didn’t survive the helicopter. Prelim crash reports didn’t show any organic remains, just burnt twisted metal and plastic. Hubert reckons he’s dead.”
My eyebrows furrowed, so I flicked the TV on, and tuned to CNN. The anchor was giving a summary of the state wide weather reports, before promising to go live to Paris where there had been rioting overnight. There had been a brief mention of the helicopter accident before I went to bed, but it had been a very vague, non-story, with no details. I threw the remote on the bed and leaned on the tabletop cradling my coffee mug.
“He’s not dead, Colleen. I’m sure of that. But what’s he up to?”
Stillman pursed her lips and nodded agreement. “Wish we knew. Obviously best case scenario is that he didn’t survive. Sorry. But we’ve got to work with what we have. SETI is locked down, and Amy’s here, safe and sound.”
“So it’s the crater for us, then,” I said.
“For you,” she replied. “I’m babysitting Amy.”
The UH-60 Black Hawk of the FBI Tactical Helicopter Unit touched down with an accompanying dust storm of biblical proportions. Its four bladed main rotor continued to spin as I scuttled out along with Hubert and two agents, our heads bowed as we sought to avoid decapitation. Mike Holland waited a safe distance back, his shirt pulled up over his mouth and nose in an attempt to minimise inhaling a significant proportion of the desert floor. Behind him were a silver-sided van and a black Lincoln town car, both with drivers ensconced in their seats, windows closed, air conditioning cranked up to the maximum. As we approached, Holland was waved off by Hubert who pointed to the car, covering his ears from the rotor noise. Holland opened the back door of the Lincoln for us and then ran round to the passenger door to slide in. The other agents got into the van behind and the convoy pulled away at speed, kicking up more dust and obscuring the view of the helicopter powering up and lurching into the sky on it’s return journey to Creech.
Holland turned in his seat to us, his face slick with perspiration, dust and unconcealed excitement. “How was your flight in?”
Hubert looked out of the window, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Shitty. The G-5 was unavailable, so we flew that bird from McCarran.” He turned to stare at Holland. “It better be worth it, Mike.”
Holland’s face split with a grin so wide his face looked cracked in two. “This is the best day of my entire life, sir. You are not going to believe what we’ve discovered.”
Hubert nodded, non-plussed. “Well I hope this year’s science budget has been well spent then.”
The Lincoln suddenly made a hard right and climbed up a dirt road towards a group of modular mobile offices and trailers huddled together at the top of the rise. Behind these I could make out what looked like a couple of portable generators and another three FBI vans with satellite dishes on their roofs linked by thick wires and cables and a perimeter fence of poles hammered into the dirt and tied together by fabric tape. FBI agents wearing ballistic vests and big black guns were hanging around the fence watching us arrive.
I teased Holland, “I see you’ve gone for the low key approach.”
He pulled a face. “You’ve been with the FBI, what, less than twelve hours? This is how things get done.”
The vehicles stopped at the tape and Holland directed us towards the nearest trailer, a fifty-foot long modular unit with three side windows and two doors connected by a ramp to the ground. Another agent was standing guard by the foot of the stairs and he nodded to Holland and walked us up the ramp to the door. The interior was dark and I squinted to get my eyes dark-adjusted at the same time shivering with the sudden drop in temperature. Facing me was an Aladdin’s cave of electronic equipment and video monitors, all noisily bleeping and squawking. There were screens everywhere, dozens of wireless keyboards, racks of buzzing and humming hard drives, fans and power strips. Duct-taped cables were laid haphazardly across the floor connecting to a long desk manned by three techs dressed in lab coats and sporting FBI lanyards. The smell of ozone and stale coffee permeated the atmosphere. Soft classical music piped from somewhere in the ceiling.
With the door closed, Holland beckoned one of the lab technicians over. “Jo, can you access the video as we discussed on this monitor here, and bring up the feed from the Chinese detector as well.”
Hubert was pulling his jacket back on, frosted breath coming from his mouth. I flipped my hoodie up. We pulled over a couple of chairs, and Holland sat in the middle but sideways with one arm on the desk supporting the bank of monitor
s. A tech was flicking switches and making seemingly random adjustments to a piece of hardware linked to three desktop computers. The screen came to life, showing a picture of a subterranean rocky floor illuminated by spotlights. Dotted around the floor were various pieces of equipment linked by cables and running to a spot out of sight of the cameras. There was a timer/clock at the bottom right of the screen, which read 8:42:33AM:PDT. The adjacent monitor was displaying pulsing red and yellow lights and numbers, overlaying a blue and black kaleidoscope whorl pulsing in and out hypnotically every few seconds.
“All right,” said Holland, rubbing his hands together. “We triangulated all our detectors last night at the bottom of the crater. Video, IR, EMS, everything, and had it all plugged in and running at around four am. I was planning to run some validation scans and algorithms this morning, after a couple of hours in the sack.” He clicked on a mouse button and the timer on the screen started to run. He smiled, and pointed at the video monitor. “But then it happened.”
For a minute nothing changed on the screen, but then a sphere of white light appeared out of nowhere above the cavern floor. It was on a level with the spotlights, about fifteen feet or so in the air, and seemed to be approximately the size of a baseball. The timer ticked over for another minute, then two.
“Is that it?” I said.
“Wait,” said Holland.
As the timer flicked to 8:45 the sphere grew in size and intensity, swelling to the size of a basketball. It started to cycle through the colours of the spectrum, shimmering and glistening, at times looking transparent and watery, then crimson and fiery like a red giant sun. Over the course of the next two minutes or so it pulsed larger and larger, increasing in intensity and size, until I found it hard to look at the screen. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone, vanishing into its own central point as if sucked down a plughole.
Holland looked more excited than a pre-schooler given a puppy for Christmas. He swivelled his chair so that he was facing another keyboard in front of the monitor with the whirling pattern. He deftly made a few keystrokes and the whirling stopped, and a column of numbers and mathematical symbols started scrolling done the side of the screen.
“This is the feed from the Chongqing detector. It was developed in China a decade or so ago, and refined and improved by a couple of ex-Harvard geniuses at NASA. There’s one in orbit in the International Space Station, and we’ve got the other one.”
“What does it detect?” I asked.
“Gravitational waves.”
Hubert looked puzzled. “What are they?”
Holland was beaming. “Ripples in the curvature of space-time. Massless and very hard to detect because when they reach the earth they usually have small amplitude and an almost infinitesimally small volume. Detectors have to be extremely sensitive, and usually other sources of white noise overwhelm the signal.”
“What produces them?” I was racking my brain to remember physics lessons. Twenty years and a lot of water under the bridge since then.
“Spinning objects in space,” said Holland. “Binary black holes, rotating supernovae, revolving neutron stars, those kind of things. Gravitational waves carry energy away from them. Astronomy has been revolutionised by the finding of these waves. They’re giving us incredible insights into the workings of the universe. New ways to observe and quantify the very early universe, which isn’t possible with conventional astronomy.”
“Save the lecture for another time Mike, and get to the point,” interrupted Hubert, giving him a stony look.
Holland sat back. He pointed to the screen with the frozen whirling pattern and with a mouse click set the image running. “This is a two dimensional representation of the gravitational waves generated by that object. We’re seeing the effect of a polarised wave on a ring of inert particles in the detector. These waves are travelling at the speed of light and oscillating roughly once every two seconds, with a wavelength of about five hundred thousand kilometres.” He turned back and pointed to the picture of the rocky cavern floor, which now was missing a couple of spotlights but otherwise looked undisturbed. “By evaluating red shifting and blue shifting, and analysing the absorption, re-emission and refraction of the waves, we can say without doubt that these waves came from that sphere.”
Hubert shook his head. “How can that be possible? There’s no way there’s a black hole or supernova in that cavern. Has to be a measurement error, doesn’t it? You said yourself that you hadn’t had time to calibrate the detector.”
Holland raised his hands in surrender. “I know, but there it is. We’ve been cross checking the algorithms for the last couple of hours. The data are real. These are quantum fluctuations.”
“Quantum fluctuations?” I said. “Fuck, Dr Holland, you’d make a shitty science teacher.”
“Well you know what they say,” he replied with a smirk. “‘If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory’.” He leaned over and activated another monitor sitting directly above the one displaying the cavern floor. He turned to the technician again, “Jo, if you would be so kind… replay at one third speed please.”
The technician’s fingers flew over another keyboard and the screen lit up with an image of the sphere at almost its maximum size. It appeared as a hellish orange-red colour, it’s surface rippling with auroral beauty. She started the clock running and we had to look away as the sphere changed to an incandescent pure white light before contracting and condensing into nothingness.
“Rewind, and stop at t-minus half a second before it starts to deflate,” said Holland.
The image slowly reversed, and a white light appeared to grow out of nothingness, mushrooming into to a sphere almost the diameter of the cavern itself. The instant before it transitioned from white to blazing crimson there was a flicker of what appeared to be a watery, glass like refraction pattern.
“Stop there,” he said, moving closer to stare at the picture.
I noticed that the other lab technicians in the room had stopped their activities and had gathered around to watch. On the screen was an obsidian globe, dotted with pinpricks of light and gaseous opacities.
“Are they… stars?” I said, leaning in.
Holland nodded energetically. “Stars, but not our stars. This is the exact co-ordinate in space that the anomaly is vectored towards. It’s a galaxy millions of light years away, almost at the edge of the observable universe. By using the HUBBLE Space Telescope and vectoring the line of sight from the portal’s opening with the sky directly above the crater, we’ve identified a cluster of optically dark point sources just outside the Milky Way’s galactic plane. Nothing anywhere in the sky resembles this, and so initially we thought it was just a molecular cloud, or an unmapped stellar nursery filled with protostars.” There was a tinge of awe in his voice now, and you could have heard a pin drop. “We’ve complete databases of the night sky around our planet because Hubble and other telescopes have been cataloguing these for decades. I asked the mainframe to identify the systems and constellations you can see here, and they came up blank. Those aren’t our stars.”
“Not our stars,” I repeated.
Hubert sat back. “Could this be an Einstein-Rosen bridge? A wormhole?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
There was a knock on the door and one of the agents opened it bringing in a welcome, warm dusty breeze. I could make out the sound of a helicopter, approaching fast.
The agent addressed Holland. “She’s here, sir.”
Holland nodded. “Excellent, I’ll be out to get her in a sec.”
Hubert arched his eyebrows. “Expecting guests, are we?”
“I didn’t have time to tell you sir, but you’re going to want to meet her. I really had to twist her arm to come here you know.”
I looked at them both, head moving back and forwards like at a tennis match. “Who’s coming?”
“Someone who might just have the answers we need,” said Holland with a big, s
hit-eating grin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nevada Test Site
I watched from the edge of the security fence as two soldiers helped an elderly woman, wrapped in a tan shawl to protect her from the dust storm, down from the Black Hawk. They gently supported her arms and walked her over to the Humvee, where Mike Holland was holding open the door. I suppressed a laugh as she irritatedly pushed them away and made her way up the hill to our office, Holland in tow. The occasional strand of once golden hair was still visible through the lifeless grey mane that limply framed her ageing face. She regarded me with piercing clear blue-grey eyes deeply set into a leathery face sculptured by wrinkles and painted with age spots. I held out a hand, which she took and gave a firm shake.
“Professor Cohen, nice to meet you,” I said.
“Retired Professor,” she shot back, adding, “and very happily retired. The knock on the door at two in the morning brought back unpleasant memories.”
Holland had caught up and leaned in. “I’m sorry Professor, but I hope it was impressed upon you the urgency and seriousness of this situation?”
She snorted derisively. “You lot like your secrecy, don’t you. No, the exact nature of why I was kicked out of my very comfortable bed, whisked to a private airfield, and flown here, wherever here is …”
“Nevada,” I said, smiling.
“Nevada, then. Well, it was not explained to my satisfaction, no.”
We headed up the path towards one of the larger trailers, allowing Cohen to dictate the pace. She was surprisingly fast; I was expecting a wonky gait due to arthritic joints and failing eyesight but she was as quick a mountain goat up the hill. As we approached, Holland ran around her and opened the door, beaming like a school kid eager to please. I followed a few steps behind and watched her as she strode in, head held high, and took in her surroundings. There was a conference table in the centre of the room, with a multi-view television monitor on the wall behind flashing various news reports, tactical maps and a CCTV picture of the inside of the crater. Hubert was sitting at the table with a dozen or so other men and women.
