After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Carter felt how Lovecraft had looked a few minutes earlier. “I don’t understand, Mr. Lukas. If you’re Gestapo, why do you need me?”

  “Because…” For somebody in one of history’s most feared secret police forces, Lukas didn’t seem very self-assured. “I’m a scientist. My Gestapo rank is more of a … detached role.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I am not a field agent exactly. More akin to an intelligence gatherer.”

  A snitch, thought Carter, but he kept that intelligence to himself.

  “You’ve reported your concerns?”

  Lukas looked more uncomfortable. “In a manner of speaking. I have written in my reports that the results the detector has been giving have been far, far better than we might have expected.”

  “That sounds more like an endorsement.”

  “I begin to fear that is how my reports have been interpreted. The desk I report to is a policeman, not a scientist. I do not think he understands my concern.”

  Carter tried his coffee. “Explain this to me from the ground up, Mr. Lukas. What exactly are you working on?”

  Lukas seemed surprised by the question for a moment. He tilted his head to the side, and Carter felt sure he was going to say it was irrelevant and none of his business. Instead, he looked at the tabletop in silence for a moment, opened his mouth, hesitated, and finally said in a quiet voice, “Mr. Carter, we intend to steal power from God.”

  Inevitably, images of Indiana Jones appeared in Carter’s mind, although in this world he was disappointed but unsurprised to discover that Jones mainly went up against the Japanese, except for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which rabid Bolsheviks hunted the Holy Grail in an attempt to resurrect Stalin.

  “That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that will turn out well,” said Carter, thinking of Ronald Lacey’s face melting. Lukas smiled hesitantly, and Carter suddenly knew he was in for a lecture.

  “Have you heard of ‘zero point energy,’ Mr. Carter?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “Allow me to explain. Classical physics predicts a state of no energy at absolute zero, which is to say, zero degrees Kelvin, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. Indeed, the very definition of absolute zero is this predicted temperature. But, it doesn’t actually work. Real matter doesn’t behave like an ideal gas. Even at zero, there is still entropy and enthalpy, because there is still energy there, even though there theoretically shouldn’t be. The famous example is helium. At absolute zero, everything should be a solid, yet helium is still a liquid. Something must be moving those atoms around. This is ‘zero point energy.’”

  He took a draft of his coffee, but Carter didn’t take the opportunity to jump into the conversation; sometimes it’s just better to let a man run.

  “For many years, it has been a dream to use this energy, this literally free energy, but there have been difficulties. Taking the idea seriously has been a major problem in itself, Mr. Carter. As you might imagine, to many physicists the whole thing smacks of a perpetual motion engine. Getting this project off the ground took a lot of work. German academia wasn’t prepared to look kindly upon it, but luckily Miskatonic University has a reputation for taking chances and carrying out research in new, sometimes problematical fields. With a cooperative program like this, we were able to move ahead.

  “A very necessary part of research like this is obviously being able to detect the tiny amounts of energy we hoped to liberate, and that was part of the Reichsuniversität’s responsibilities, to build such a detector.” Here he paused, and his expression, which had been full of enthusiasm for his subject up to this point, grew thoughtful and troubled.

  “It wasn’t built in Berlin. The first time any of the team saw it was when it was unpacked in Arkham. We think it was built at a reputable instrumentation manufacturer in Bavaria—that is what the plate with the serial number upon it says, anyway—but the way it just turned up with an operator was … troubling.”

  “This is the operator you’re suspicious of?”

  “Yes. Perhaps I’m wrong to be, but suddenly the government—”

  “Ours or yours?”

  “Ours. The Reich—the Ministry for Science, Education, and Public Instruction, to be exact—provided the funds for the detector and…” He trailed off, took a moment to organize his thoughts, and said, “Lurline Giehl. A spotless curriculum vitae. We were glad to have her, at first. That was before she proved so jealous of the machine.”

  “Jealous? How d’you mean?”

  “She won’t let anyone else near it. If one is blessed, she will permit his readings to be verified, but she does all the calibration herself.”

  “Let’s go back a little. What exactly is the detector detecting?”

  Lukas looked surprised. “Energy, of course. Our experimental rig is a variation on the Casimir experiment. Without going into technicalities, there is a pair of conducting plates in vacuum very, very closely mounted to one another, but with the tiniest gap between them. Classically, there should be no field, but there is one.”

  “This … zero point energy?”

  “Exactly. Our experiment is to not just detect the field, but to draw upon it. The yield is tiny, but that’s unimportant.”

  “You’re just demonstrating a principle, right? If you can get a little out of this, then scaling up is an engineering problem, not a theoretical one?”

  Lukas nodded, clearly pleased at not having to spell everything out. Then his expression darkened once more. “There is a political element to all this. My government seems very, very keen that we should succeed. I am concerned that Giehl might be producing numbers to match her own ambitions. It will prove very embarrassing if she is exposed as a fraud. It will taint the whole team and field of inquiry, and damage prospects of future cooperation between our countries.”

  Carter was having misgivings; this was all beginning to sound pretty career threatening to anyone involved, including himself if he took the case. “I’m not clear on what you expect me to do, Mr. Lukas. It’s a closed site and whatever evidence there is is going to be on that detector. Which I know nothing about. What do you expect me to do?”

  “I have the machine’s schematics. There’s nothing wrong with those. If that’s how it’s built, then it’s giving accurate results. What I need is to see inside the detector. If you can get me pictures of the circuit boards, good high-resolution pictures showing the components, then I can check it against the schematics. If there are any discrepancies, then I have something to take to the project leader.”

  “It’s still a closed site. If you’re expecting me to rappel in through a skylight during the night, Mr. Lukas, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m an investigator, not James Bond.”

  Lukas looked at him blankly. Carter belatedly summoned from his new memory the knowledge that the James Bond novels never became a big deal in the Unfolded World. Something else to dislike about it. “What I mean is, I’m not going to break the law to get these pictures. I’m sorry, Mr. Lukas, but I don’t think I can help you.”

  Lukas sighed, disappointed but not surprised. “I told Mr. Weston I doubted you would be able to. What I’ve told you, you understand that it is in complete confidence?”

  “Absolutely, sir. Client confidentiality comes as standard, even if I don’t actually end up taking you on as a client.”

  Carter walked him to the door, mainly as a courtesy but also to shield him from the Medusan gaze of Emily Lovecraft, which was currently frosty enough to be close to absolute zero itself. As Lukas stepped out onto the sidewalk, Carter asked, “One thing. Something about the science. You say this energy is always there, even when there shouldn’t be any. Where does it come from?”

  The corner of Lukas’s mouth turned down. “We are talking of the quantum world, where things are very different, Mr. Carter. There are theories, of course, but to speak frankly, we do not really know. All we do know is that the energy is there, and that it comes from somewhere else. Goodbye, Mr.
Carter.”

  Chapter 5

  HELIUM ICE

  Dave Koznick had the cushiest job in Arkham. Not the best paid—far from it—but definitely cushy. He was the security officer for a building full of things too big and too boring for anyone to steal. This was the good life. All he had to do was wander around once every ninety minutes during the night shift (his contract said hourly, but the route didn’t include any checkpoints to monitor him, so fuck that), make sure the big, boring stuff was still where it was supposed to be (most of it was bolted down, which made it suddenly vanishing even less likely), and make a note that it was exactly where it was last time, being careful to lie about his patrol times, and completely fabricate one for every three he had actually done. This complete fabrication consisted of an incorrect time and some ditto marks in the Comment column—“Nothing unusual.” It was the best job he had ever had, and it was improving him as an individual, too, giving him time to do an online course in website design. He worked shifts with a couple of other stiffs like himself, but the ten-to-six was far and away his favorite. Nobody to hassle you, nobody to ask dumb-ass questions, nobody to bother you while you’re wrestling with HTML.

  He checked his watch. One o’clock and time for his third patrol. He was doubly glad he wasn’t on days that week; the previous week he’d had the two-to-ten, and a lot of the brainiacs hung around past normal office hours. He got on okay with the home team, but the Krauts bothered him. With all the stuff about how efficient they were, he had got the idea—weird and unsubstantiated though it was—that they knew he skimmed on his night patrols and were judging him for it. They watched him a lot, and—his second paranoid theory—he wondered if they thought he was an OSS plant. Either way, he felt like an intruder when all he was there to do was to look after their stupid, heavy, boring shit. He was also kind of glad they didn’t know his surname. His family had never really cared about their roots, so he didn’t have an ax to grind about the Germans dissolving Poland as a state and scattering its citizens. That was history, and wartime. Thing was, if the Kraut scientists found out his name, they might think he did, and he’d lose this easy and very fulfilling job.

  The route was always the same, although he liked to randomly decide whether he was going to go around it clockwise or counterclockwise on the flip of a coin at the beginning. He left the reception cubby that doubled as the security station in the hall and looked through the glass frontage of the building out onto the Miskatonic campus. He saw a couple of students walk by, heading away from the math building, talking intensely about something, bless their nerdy little hearts. He smiled as he dug into his pocket, found a quarter, and flipped it. Heads, he’d turn left and go around his usual route counterclockwise, tails and he’d go clockwise.

  As the coin dropped, its path seemed to kink in the air as if caught in a breeze, and it fell past his waiting hand. It landed on its edge and rolled a couple of yards before coming to a rest, still on its edge.

  “Well, lookit,” he said to himself, looking at the coin. He considered taking a picture on his phone, but decided not to. If he’d filmed it happening, fair enough, but any fool can balance a coin on its edge and claim that was how it landed. Oh, well. Looked like he wouldn’t have a reason to make a YouTube channel this week, either. Still, it had made his choice for him, covering the beginning of the counterclockwise path. Good enough. He picked up the coin and started walking.

  The building had four stories, if you included the basement offices, which—as he had to patrol them—he did. The clockwise patrol went up to the top of the building first, then spiraled and zigzagged its way down to the basement before coming back up one flight of stairs and a well-deserved coffee. He preferred that way—it got the climb out of the way early on and after that it was mainly a descent. Going the counterclockwise route meant going to the basement, then a series of small slogs upward, and then the deferred gratification of coming all the way down in one go. He liked that part, but the fragmented ascent irritated him for its incoherence.

  These were the concerns of a solitary security guard looking after a building full of shit too big and boring to steal.

  So then, the basement. He didn’t envy the guys who had to work down in the basement. It was laid out with the work area around the edges so they could glory in the few rays of sun that came through the long, narrow windows running along the upper walls, the center of the floor being taken up with windowless storage rooms, toilets, and a kitchen area. It was mainly about as open a plan as it could be, given it was holding up the rest of the building including all the big, boring, heavy shit in the upper stories, but there were still some rooms down there—a meeting room and three offices. The Krauts had grabbed two of the offices, he knew, because he’d heard some of the homegrown nerds bitching about it. They didn’t mind the main guy from the German university having an office, but there was another dude the Americans called “the political officer” behind his back who’d got the other. Koznick was pretty sure they were exaggerating for gossip; the guy seemed like he’d have to fill out forms in triplicate before even thinking about saying “boo” to a goose. Really, if he was Gestapo, then it was a much less scary organization than he’d been led to believe.

  The offices were shut and locked, and he only had keys to the meeting room and the American project leader’s. That was cool; he wasn’t going to go into them, anyway. He just stopped by the door and shone his flashlight through the glass panels. Yep, no desperate thieves making off with a box of paper clips to be seen. Cool.

  The Germans usually pulled down the blinds on their doors when they left them, although one wasn’t consistent about that—the one they called the political officer, so that was another strike against him being Gestapo, Koznick figured. What kind of secret policeman would be sloppy about security, huh? That’s right—none of them. He flashed his light inside to see if any juicy secrets of the Reich had been left out where he could read them from the window, but there was nothing. The guy might have been laid back about the blind precisely because he was so careful about clearing his desk before leaving. Koznick mentally erased the mark against him being an agent. He nodded respectfully; a clever move, Herr Gestapo. You play a deep game.

  The meeting room earned only a brief glance. As usual, it looked like the garbage monster had shat on the table, but the one time the cleaners had gone in there to tidy the mess, they’d been screamed at like they’d entered a holy place. Okay, brainiacs. Just wait until the mice move in.

  He shone his flashlight on the whiteboard in there and saw it covered in equations and weird squiggles, freehand graphs, and a cool one with a sort of descending spiral like a tornado that he kind of liked. He had no idea what it was—there was a mass of numbers and Greek letters next to it that meant squat to him—but it looked good, unlike the graph next to it, which was just a pile of lines this way and that making an ugly mess. He clicked off his flashlight, did a circuit to check the windows were secure, and moved on.

  He skipped the first floor, as he’d give it a quick once-over when he returned to the security station. Besides, he spent most of his time there and was sick of the sight of it.

  The second and third stories were where all the science happened. He didn’t know what kind of science, exactly, apart from physics, because it was a physics building. It was something they weren’t supposed to talk about, either, and he knew that because he was supposed to report any open files, loose papers, or unsecured computers. Plus, there was the guy who might or might not be the mildest Gestapo agent in history. So, secret physics.

  Koznick had zero interest in physics. He’d patrolled the chemical engineering building before being assigned to this one, and that was way cooler. That place had big distillation columns that made weird plumbing noises at night, and he had kind of liked that once he got used to it. In contrast, the physics building had fuck all. The second story was largely floor space for a two-story-high volume big enough to hold the big, heavy, boring shit that no one in
their right mind would want to steal. It was bland and didn’t interest him at all. A big cylinder over here. Some kind of pump, he guessed, over there. Lots of instruments. When he first got the job and was told he would be covering the science buildings, the first image that had jumped into his mind was a Frankenstein-type lab with fuming bottles and stuff bubbling. Maybe something with sparks coming off it. The reality was that modern science didn’t live up to that, and he resented it maybe a little for that unwitting betrayal.

  The one good thing about the big rig the physicists were playing with was that at least it didn’t take too long to walk around, and the floor above wasn’t much more than a ring of offices with a walkway overlooking the floor below, the rig standing proud almost to the glass roof. Like the basement, there were low-power emergency lights burning 24/7, but they didn’t do much except lead to the fire exits. If he’d been a stickler for the hourly tour he was supposed to do, he might have switched on the room lights when he entered. Those did too much to advertise when he actually made his rounds, though, so he patrolled in the murky green illumination of the emergency lights and used his flashlight sparingly. It slowed him down a little, as visibility wasn’t great, and he had to walk around every desk to make sure that the sheet of paper left on a desk was just a lunch order and not something classified. In fairness, they’d been pretty good about putting away sensitive material at the end of the day, and he hadn’t had to report anyone yet. This he was fine with. They were all working stiffs in their own way, after all.

  Now up the last flights of stairs to the topmost level. Nothing much to do there—just some more lab space, a couple of offices, and the server room, which was another one he didn’t have a key for, just a list of things he should do in a series of possible events, like fire, power cut, and so on. It mainly consisted of calling people who could come out and do some informed panicking, he guessed. Just so long as he got to pass on responsibility as soon as the shit got within a mile of the fan, he was good.