He gave a weak smile.
“I just don’t want to be alone while… whatever happens.”
Dan felt a crawling uneasiness ripple along his chest.
“Don’t you have anybody else you’d want to be with you? A girlfriend or something?”
Roger gave him a sour look as if Dan was missing something ridiculously obvious.
“Family?”
Roger shook his head.
Dan glanced around the room, feeling awkward, his mind flicking over fragments of ideas that might be assembled into an acceptable excuse to beg off this particular request.
“You’re the closest thing to a friend I got,” Roger said quietly.
Dan regarded him.
In his life as a police officer he’d encountered a great number of extremely sad situations. Domestic violence cases where you could feel the pure, concentrated misery pour over you like a rancid shower, homicides of victims whose bodies fairly screamed with the sense of wasted, lost and stolen life. But this was a new kind of sadness for him, standing in a room that seemed to drip loneliness from the very walls.
“Okay, sure,” he said crisply. “But if they try to make me eat any of that jello shit, I’ll shoot ‘em.”
Roger snapped with a barking laugh flecked with the receding tears and fell into a quiet chuckle.
“You won’t have to,” he said. “I happen to like jello. I’ll take yours.”
Dan returned the chuckle, and he could almost feel the light in the room rising slightly.
“So,” he said, “You going to be all right?”
Roger nodded, carefully rose from the couch.
“Yes, I’m fine,” he said, as Dan turned back toward the door and Roger fell into step behind him.
“Okay,” Dan said, “So call me when you hear something and I’ll arrange to go with you.”
“I appreciate it,” Roger said, stopping to allow Dan to open the front door and step outside.
He stopped on the porch and turned back to regard Roger.
“And again, I’m sorry about all this. I just…”
He fell silent for a moment, then fixed his gaze on Roger’s eyes.
“All my life, I’ve hoped that… I don’t know… all that stuff I used to read in the comic books was real. Or at least possible. That there really were special people out there somewhere, helping keep everything together, keeping us safe. Protecting us. That there was somebody who could fix things, no matter what they were. Because I look at the world and see how much crap there is to deal with… and I just wanted to be able to… fix it somehow. You know. I wanted there to be good guys. Real ones.”
He hesitated before plunging ahead.
“I just never thought… what it would be like for them. What it’s like for you.”
“I’m not a hero,” Roger said uncomfortably.
“I know,” Dan said, encouragingly. “I know you would rather you weren’t who you are. But that Jones prick was right about something. You are no threat to anybody. You’re a good guy, Roger. What you choose to do with that… Well, that’s up to you.”
He looked around, noticing the long, black car was gone and Jim was standing by the open passenger door of the cruiser.
“Well, you take care,” he said, turning back to where Roger stood in the doorway to the small, cozy house. “And call me when you get something set up, okay?”
Roger nodded.
“Right. And thanks.”
“For what?”
Roger gave a weak shrug.
“Just thanks.”
Dan regarded him a moment, puzzled, then returned the shrug.
“Well, I don’t know what for, but you’re welcome. I’ll talk to you soon.”
He turned and started off down the walkway toward the cruiser.
Roger watched him go a moment, then stepped back inside and gently closed the door.
Jim regarded him as he approached.
“Should we write any of this up?” Jim asked, his tone slightly stunned.
“Hell no,” Dan said, pulling open the driver’s door and flopping behind the wheel.
Jim settled into the other seat and closed the door.
“I just wonder...” he said, thoughtfully, “If this guy really does ever go over the edge, what the Hell would we be able to do about it?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” Dan said calmly. “But he won’t.”
Jim regarded him.
“You don’t think so?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Based on…?”
Dan started the engine and slipped the vehicle into gear.
He gave a small smile.
“Based on he’s one of the good guys.”
“You sure about that?” Jim prompted. “After everything we’ve both seen?”
Dan shook his head.
“Nope. Based on who he is.”
“And what’s that?” Jim responded.
Dan turned to regard his partner.
“An ordinary guy. Never underestimate the goodness of the ordinary guy.”
He pressed the gas pedal, and the cruiser began to glide gracefully down the street.
Even before they had pulled away from the curb, Jones had already extracted the secure satellite phone from his pocket and hit the single speed dial number programmed into it.
It was answered on the first ring.
“Yes?” the voice said, and Jones instantly recognized it as Crawford himself.
“Sir,” Jones said crisply, “We will be filing a report shortly, but I wanted to inform you myself. We have a Class Five anomaly.”
There was a brief pause before Crawford responded.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, sir. It’s confirmed.”
“I see,” Crawford replied slowly.
It was almost too much to believe, as though a worst nightmare scenario, not expected to ever really be encountered, had suddenly reared its head and roared. Fortunately his job had been to develop plans for every contingency, no matter how ridiculous or remote a possibility, and although little more than the rudiments of a structure had been worked out, it had long ago been decided that such cosmically unlikely situations could really only be dealt with as they occurred, that the unknown doesn’t come in neat little packages, and the best you can do is get ready to throw whatever you happen to have at them when they pop up.
So an actual Class Five anomaly existed, he mused. The impossible biological anomaly really was out there. Whether created by science leaping far ahead, out of control, or perhaps as Mother Nature’s answer to mankind’s presumptuousness, something other than human was among them. And unfortunately it was his mess to deal with.
“All right,” he said at last, “Proceed with the analysis. Report whatever you discover directly to me, understood?”
“Understood, sir,” Jones responded.
“And good work,” Crawford added, almost absently, lowering the phone and breaking the connection.
Jones hung up and pocketed the phone. He might have even, in his own way, been smiling.
7
Cry For Attention
Marvin sat in the outer office, nervously clutching the envelope that contained not only his equations and printouts from the Deep Look system, but also the notes he had jotted down following his conversation with Vernon. He had called the contact number given to him by the liaison officer after the Pentagon meeting, and begun to explain the essence of what Vernon had told him, but was surprised when the anonymous voice on the other end of the line had cut him off, instructing him to say nothing more and simply wait for a return call. When it had come, he had been instructed to attend a meeting the following day at a particular address in Washington, D.C.
Now he sat in this small but impressively furnished suite of offices in a nondescript building just across the Potomac river from the nation’s capital. Across the room from him, the receptionist worked busily on her computer and smilingly deflected his questions, even to the p
oint of avoiding letting him know exactly to whom he would be making his hastily assembled presentation.
At last there was a small buzz from the receptionist’s phone, which she answered pleasantly in a voice too quiet for Marvin to make out any words, then raised her attention to where he sat.
“Dr. Henry?” she said pleasantly, “You can go in now.”
Marvin rose and moved to the inner door, which emitted a faint buzz as he approached, indicating some kind of automatic locking mechanism.
He grasped the knob, paused, drew a deep breath and pushed it open.
The inner office was larger than the reception room, a sanctuary of rich, dark paneling and heavy, impressive furniture. Clearly this was the sanctuary of some quietly important individual.
Seated behind the desk was a mature man in a plain but tasteful suit who looked up at him unsmiling, and nodded sharply at the low, plush chair opposite him.
“Have a seat,” the man said. “My name’s Crawford. I’m nominally your boss.”
Marvin returned the nod, unsure how else to respond, and moved to the chair, settling himself into it.
The man leaned back in his massive leather seat and fixed on Marvin a pair of sharp, calculating eyes.
So, Marvin thought quickly, this is the head of… what? He didn’t seem military, and his office was in a small, nondescript building well away from both the Pentagon and the halls of power across the Potomac river a few miles away. There hadn’t even been any nameplates or signs on the suite of offices he was now within, only the suite number. So whatever this is, he told himself, it’s on the other side of the looking glass.
“I understand,” Crawford said, “You have something additional to report related to the Deep Look event?”
“Yes sir,” Marvin responded, fumbling with the envelope and finally extracting his jumbled collection of notes and papers. “And I think it’s serious.”
Crawford nodded.
“Go ahead,” he said, almost briskly, his attitude denoting his full attention was now at Marvin’s disposal.
“Well,” Marvin began, “I met yesterday with a Dr. Vernon Jenkins. He’s Professor of Physics at Cambridge University. I was directed to him by an old professor of mine, Maxwell Manstein, because he’d recently given a lecture related to – “
“How much,” Crawford cut in, “Did you reveal to Manstein about the Deep Look operation?”
Marvin’s attention caught and he paused, feeling a sudden sense of alarm shoot through him.
“Not a lot. Just enough to get his opinion about my conclusions related to the orbital anomalies of the asteroids.”
Crawford eyed him a moment, then gave a sharp nod.
“Go on,” he said.
Marvin collected his thoughts and plunged onwards.
“Dr. Jenkins is working on Dark Matter. Do you know what that is?”
Crawford hesitated before giving a small nod.
“Refresh my memory,” he instructed.
Marvin paused to organize and mentally compress the essence of his standard lecture about the mysterious substance only recently determined to exist throughout the universe, then began.
“Dark Matter is, currently, only theoretical. It can’t be observed directly but we can see some of its effects on celestial bodies.”
He continued for another minute, providing a brief background about the still-mysterious possibility that the bulk of what we know as the universe, that shaped and controlled its larger structure, was completely beyond our ability to observe through anything other than complex, obscure equations and the unexplained aberrations in the motions of stellar bodies throughout the galaxy.
As he finished, Crawford responded with a sharp nod, finally leaning forward in his chair.
“All right. Continue,” he said, an edge of impatience in his tone.
“Well,” Marvin said, “Dr. Jenkins told me about something he’d learned from a colleague, someone he’s been working with, that seems to relate directly to what I discovered from Deep Look.”
“What’s that?”
Marvin paused, considering how to impress upon this stranger the seriousness of what he had learned, despite its esoteric nature.
“There was a Russian physicist, Alexander Karillan, who was working on the idea of multiple universe theory. The multi-verse. The idea is that there is more than one universe, maybe even an infinite number of universes all occupying the same location, but invisible to one another because of some factor we can’t even begin to understand yet. Karillan conducted some sort of experiment thirty-five years ago, in Siberia, way out in the middle of nowhere. Only something went wrong and it blew up. Destroyed the entire facility, killed everybody, including Karillan.”
“Go on,” Crawford prompted briskly.
“According to the Deep Look backtracking software, that experiment is what caused the bumping of the asteroids.”
Crawford’s attention seemed to sharpen behind his eyes.
“How is that possible?” he cut in. “They’re millions of miles away.”
Marvin paused for a moment, searching for a halfway suitable analogy to communicate what was actually an incredible mass of equations.
“Okay, think of a water balloon,” he finally said, seizing upon the simple image. “It’s full of water under high pressure. If you take a pin and poke a tiny hole on one side, one of two things will happen. If there is a weakness in the balloon close to where you pricked it, it could tear, and the pressures from inside would rip it apart, so you’d wind up with a shredded balloon and a big puddle of water. But if the structure of the balloon is solid enough, all you get is this one, tight stream of water shooting out that tiny hole and across the room.”
“And you’re saying this Karillan character poked a hole in the balloon and got a stream that hosed the asteroids.”
“Exactly, yes,” Marvin sighed, leaning back.
“Okay,” Crawford said, finally leaning back himself to ponder what he’d just been told. “So what does that have to do with anything current? I mean, if it happened three and a half decades ago, then whatever damage was done is concluded, correct?”
Marvin hesitated.
“Possibly,” he said, his tone uncertain.
Crawford eyed him intently.
“Explain,” he said.
Marvin licked his lips, leaning slightly forward in his own seat.
“Dr. Jenkins said this colleague of his might be trying to recreate Karillan’s experiment.”
A silence fell over the plush room as Crawford absorbed the statement.
“Would that result,” he finally said slowly, “In another stream of water, or a shredded balloon?”
Marvin could feel a queasiness begin to rock back and forth in his stomach.
“I don’t know. It would depend on if there was any kind of permanent damage from the first time.”
“Where would this experiment be conducted?” Crawford prodded.
“Most likely, the same site as before.”
“In Russia.”
Marvin nodded.
“Yes, I think so. The idea is that Karillan discovered or created something at that site, some condition, that made it suitable to his experiment. And that an… emission of some kind is still leaking from it.”
He quickly explained Vernon’s work on the detector, designed to locate what couldn’t be observed in any other way.
“He gave this detector,” Marvin concluded, “To his colleague some months ago. What happened after that, he doesn’t know.”
“And what is the name of this colleague?” Crawford said evenly.
Marvin hesitated only a fraction of a second, feeling the momentarily uncomfortable sense that he was about to commit some sort of betrayal. He was about to cross some invisible but palpable line from scientist in an elite, exclusive community that preserved and nurtured universal secrets, to an informant in league with dark, unknown forces of hidden power. Because whoever this man was, he would never unders
tand the yearning to know things merely to know them, not exploit or shape them to some unseen agenda.
But he knew all this was beyond him, and his ability to do anything about it. And if it was true, what it implied scared him half to death.
“Dr. Walter Montgomery,” he said at last.
Vernon rode the escalator down to the bare, low-ceiling space where luggage is delivered down long shoots to large rotating turntables, to be plucked up by any passing hand and whisked through the doors and into the world.
He spotted the large, bald man in the dark suit holding the sign bearing his name, and felt a wave of relief.
The directions Dr. Montgomery had given him stopped at the small airport, but he had been assured he would be met. Vernon was beginning to think he might wind up stuck in this distant place, surrounded by nothing more than open, flat wilderness, until he noticed the large, muscular, bald-headed man.
Vernon doubted he was a limousine driver. He looked more like what someone with a suspicious nature might call “muscle”. A bodyguard maybe?
For a moment as he stepped off the escalator and walked to where the man was now eyeing him, he wondered what he might be getting himself into, but shook off the sudden, creeping feeling when the man smiled warmly.
“Dr. Jenkins?” he said, in a low, rich baritone.
Vernon nodded, glancing around.
The man’s smile widened.
“Dr. Montgomery is waiting to meet you. Do you have any additional bags?”
“Uh, no,” Vernon said, glancing down at the duffle slung over his shoulder and hanging heavily by his side. “Just this.”
The man nodded again and leaned to expertly slip the strap from Vernon’s shoulder and take the loose bag, then half turned, gesturing toward the sliding glass doors that led to the parking lot.
“Shall we?”
Vernon followed him out into the sudden, harsh sunlight and slitted his eyes against it, raising a hand to cover his brow.
“So this is Montana,” he said absently.
“This is Montana,” the driver confirmed. “God’s country.”
Vernon glanced around. He’d never seen an environment so utterly flat in all directions.
Class Fives: Origins Page 17
