Linkage (The Narrows of Time Series Book 1)

by Jay J. Falconer

  Trevor nodded.

  Abby slipped Drew a folded piece of paper before gathering up her belongings and walking to the door. Trevor held the door open and waited for her to walk through, then they both disappeared to the right as the doors closed behind them.

  SIX

  After Abby left the lab, Drew opened her handwritten note and saw a phone number with a tiny heart symbol drawn just below it. His face flushed, then his breath turned shallow as his palms began to sweat. A thousand fantasies leapt unbidden into his mind.

  “So, what do you think we should do?” Lucas asked.

  Drew thought about Abby’s smile, the swell of her breasts in her tight t-shirt, the sway of her hips as she walked, and the alluring way she’d wiggled into the Hazmat suit as he’d watched over the monitor. He had no idea how she’d managed to make the ugly suit into something sexy, but she had.

  “Hello? Earth to Drew,” Lucas asked.

  Drew snapped out of his reverie. “What?” He glanced down at the slip of paper in his hand, memorizing the number before folding and stuffing the note into his shirt pocket.

  “I asked . . . what do you think we should do? About the experiment?”

  “Not sure. After all those months of planning and testing, I really expected this to wo—” he said, pausing as an idea took shape in his mind. He knew it would be risky, but he didn’t see another way. There was no guarantee Kleezebee would ever get approval from the Advisory Committee to resume the project, so that left only one choice. They had to try again, right then, before they were locked out of their own lab. For all he knew, their security codes might’ve already been cancelled, meaning they’d never get back into the lab once they left for the evening. He wouldn’t put it past a weasel like Larson.

  Plus, Drew’s Quantum Energy thesis was due in less than a month, and he needed the neutron beam technology to show positive results. Otherwise, he’d never be awarded his PhD at the end of the year. Everything he’d worked for his entire collegiate career depended on it.

  He looked at his brother, but didn’t say anything.

  Lucas flared his eyes. “Hey, I know that look. You got something, don’t you? Come on, brother, out with it.”

  Drew cleared his throat, doubling checking with himself that he actually wanted to utter the words that were about to erupt from his lips. After careful reflection, he let ‘em fly, adding in a mix of conviction and anger to his tone. “Well, we can’t quit now. We’re so close I can taste it. We’ve worked too darn hard for too darn long. If they shut us down now, our project will be a total failure. I’ve never failed at anything in my life, and I’m not about to start now! If it were up to me, I’d re-engage the EM system, charge the capacitor, this time to full strength, and hit it again. Unless someone checks the power logs, which is highly unlikely, nobody will ever know about it unless we succeed.”

  “Holy crap! Where did all that come from?” Lucas said with a look of shock on his face.

  “I don’t know, it just did. Stress I guess.”

  Lucas smiled, like he understood the motivation. Or maybe the desperation. “Try again? Full power? I don’t know about that. Kleezebee’s orders were very specific.”

  Drew had never used an obscenity in his life, but was ready to cuss like a sailor if it would persuade his brother to try again. He’d do anything to convince Lucas he was right. “I know he was, but what are our options? Just give up and give in? Let someone like Larson ruin our lives? You know as well as I do that we may never have this chance again. There’s no guarantee Kleezebee will ever be able to get the committee to give us the go-ahead. Who knows how they’re gonna react.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, but—”

  “You know what Dad always said? Don’t be afraid to go after what you want, because nobody else will do it for you.”

  Lucas sighed but didn’t answer. He shook his head slowly.

  “Please, we’re running out of time, Lucas. We have to try before they lock us out of our own lab. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Larson wants us shut down. Permanently.”

  Lucas still didn’t respond.

  “Look, if it works, we can sell the patent and pay off Mom’s medical bills. If it doesn’t work, no one will ever know we even tried. I think this is what’s called a win-win proposition.”

  Lucas appeared to be considering the idea. After a minute, he said in a matter-of-fact way, “It would be nice to get rid of those vultures, once and for all. I don’t know how else we’re gonna clear all that debt. Certainly not with my measly paycheck.”

  “Then you agree?”

  Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe . . . So, you think full power is the way to go?”

  “Absolutely. There’s no sense in replicating what we just did. We have to make some sort of change if we expect a different result, and running the experiment at full power seems like the simplest thing we can do in the limited time we have. They could lock us out at any minute. This might be our one and only chance.”

  “All right. Let’s go for it. I’m with you a hundred percent,” he said, giving Drew a knuckle bump. “All for one and—”

  “One for all,” Drew finished, wearing a full smile.

  The brothers spent the next forty-five minutes preparing for their next attempt. They crosschecked and completed each step in the procedure manual, except this time around, they charged the beam’s capacitor to full power.

  Drew completed the last step and was ready to begin. He recorded the new time into the logbook: 11:52 p.m., December 21.

  Just then, Drew wondered if Abby’s suggestion to reverse the polarity might actually work. He knew her proposal was a long shot, but it was worth considering. He flipped through the procedure manual, stopping on page sixteen to review the equations. Then something caught his eye.

  “Hey, wait a minute. That can’t be right,” he mumbled. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a copy of their original work. After comparing the two versions of the manual, he said, “Holy cow, DL changed our calculations.”

  “What?”

  “How the heck did I miss this?” Drew asked, using a yellow marker to highlight the changes. He handed both copies of the manual to Lucas. “Here, see for yourself. He changed our wave displacement factors.”

  Lucas spent a minute reviewing the calculations. “You’re right. Why would he do that and not tell us?”

  “I have no idea. But it might have caused the failure.”

  “It certainly would explain the conflicting data.”

  “We should use our original equations and run it again.”

  “Do you still want to use full power?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes, definitely,” Drew said, plowing forward on his keyboard to enter the correct calculations.

  They spent the next fifteen minutes reconfiguring their experiment.

  “Okay, we’re ready,” Drew said.

  “Let ‘er rip,” Lucas replied in an old man’s voice, sounding like he was trying to do an imitation of Kleezebee from earlier.

  Drew pressed the green READY switch to fire the charged neutron beam, listening for the sound of the pulse. Once he heard it, he sat back to watch the steady stream of data fill the center monitor.

  So far, so good. Everything was going according to plan. Maybe his idea to run the experiment at full power was going to pay off. Then a few of the readings changed. His excitement started to change into nervousness. Then more of the readings scrolled into view, but were off a bit. Then he realized something wasn’t right. He wasn’t sure what it was until some anomalies in the data values jumped out at him from the right column. His heart skipped a beat. The reactor’s internal mass readings were low—much too low.

  No, he thought. That can’t be right. Maybe the monitor was malfunctioning. It would explain the change in numbers. He scrambled to enter commands into his keyboard, trying to validate the readings. But the checksums validated—the numbers shown on the monitor were correct.

  He sa
t forward to lean in close to the screen, looking over the data values one final time, making sure he wasn’t misinterpreting the results. There was no denying it—the mass of the material inside the reactor had dropped by almost a hundred percent.

  He changed the screen to show the video feed from inside the core. He was afraid to look, but did anyway. “Are you kidding me?”

  “What’s wrong?” Lucas asked.

  Drew pointed his finger at the screen. “Look, it's gone!”

  “What’s gone?” Lucas asked, scooting his chair closer to Drew’s station. “You need to be more specific.”

  Drew couldn’t stop the barrage of cuss words he’d been storing up his entire life. They came flying out of his mouth with force. “The goddamned, bitch-ass E-121 is not fucking there anymore!”

  Lucas’ jaw dropped, his face frozen in time like he’d just seen a UFO.

  Drew looked at his brother and shrugged, pretending he didn’t know what had just stunned Lucas. “What?”

  “I don’t believe what I just heard. You spewed like a drunken sailor.”

  A sickening feeling began to churn in Drew’s stomach. “Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I feel awful, but I couldn’t help it. It just came out before I could stop it.”

  Lucas chuckled with a smirk on his face. “It’s okay, bro. You made your point. It’s gone. I get it. Now I need you to show me what the hell happened.”

  Drew turned his attention to the video replay, using frame-by-frame mode to show the recording from inside the chamber. The evidence showed that just before E-121 and its container disappeared, an instantaneous white flash of light filled the core. It originated as a microscopic point near the center of the container before expanding vertically and then horizontally, like a four-pointed star. A few frames later, the brightness vanished, and so did E-121 and its receptacle.

  “Where did it go?” Lucas asked.

  Drew zoomed in the camera. “Beats the shi—I mean crap—out of me.”

  “What’s that stuff covering the base?”

  “Looks like some type of black film.”

  “I need to get in there,” Lucas said, pointing. “Prep the chamber.”

  Drew flipped several switches on the riser panel to power down the reactor’s subsystems.

  * * *

  Lucas rushed to get into the safety gear, before snatching two electronic devices from the equipment cabinet and a plastic sample container from the supply cabinet.

  He went to the chamber, stepped inside and completed decontamination procedures before hurrying back to the reactor. When he arrived, he paused to take a few deep breaths before opening the core’s protective shield. He didn’t want to face reality, but it was about to look him dead in the face. Drew was never wrong, but Lucas still couldn’t keep himself from wishing that wasn’t the case, just this once. His entire future was inside the core—at least it used to be.

  When he looked inside, he confirmed the reactor was empty. Shit. No sign of E-121 or its container. Only the black residue remained. He couldn’t help but stare at the emptiness, hoping the material would somehow return to set things right. But it didn’t. He gulped, wondering how he was going to explain this to Kleezebee.

  A series of painful flashes from his past roared through his thoughts, making him relive some of the more difficult moments from his days in the orphanage: the beatings, the lonely nights, the crappy food and the overcrowded bedrooms. Everything he’d survived thus far had led up to this moment, and now . . . complete failure. He took another few seconds to let it all sink in. Then he decided to press on and try to determine what happened.

  Lucas used the portable multi-spectrum analyzer from storage to scan for all known forms of radiation, but found none. Next, he used the Radon detector to check for signs of the toxic gas. He held up its sensor probe while walking the length of the chamber, but the results were negative.

  He turned to Drew and gave the thumbs down signal, waiting to see his brother’s reaction. Maybe Drew wasn’t as disappointed as he was, but his brother’s face told a different story. Drew looked downright depressed, which was saying something since he was usually the happiest man in the room. Even at a funeral, Drew could somehow push through the heartache and project an upbeat attitude. Drew’s happy demeanor was usually infectious, but it was nowhere to be seen today. Not now—not after this.

  Lucas opened the plastic container and used his glove-covered finger as a scoop to retrieve a sample of the black powder. He left the reactor with the specimen in hand, completed decontamination procedures, and changed back into his clothes.

  He put the sample container on the desk in front of his brother, trying to think of something witty or clever to say to alleviate the suffocating tension in the room. However, the words failed him, so he went with an old standby line. “Here, don’t say I never gave you anything.”

  Drew picked up the plastic container, held it close to his eyes, and shook it gently. “What do you think happened to E-121?”

  Lucas sat down and leaned back in his chair while rubbing the back of his neck and shoulders. “I have no clue. Do you think we used too much power and vaporized it?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Kleezebee’s going to be royally pissed.”

  “Yeah, at me. This was my idea,” Drew said, looking petrified.

  “That’s not how it’s gonna be, bro. DL put me in charge and ultimately, I’m responsible.”

  “Are you sure? Because that doesn’t seem right. I talked you into this.”

  “Look, I know you want to be a stand up guy and all, but bottom line, this was my call. I need to take the heat, not you. Besides, I don’t want anything to jeopardize your PhD candidacy,” Lucas said, thinking about the thesis he submitted to Dr. Green. Blowback from the article was coming and this latest failure was the least of his worries. If he was going down for it, might as well be for everything. No reason to let Drew’s future be affected. “Trust me, this isn’t the first time I’ve screwed the pooch, or the last. I’m sure it’ll all blow over eventually. It’s not like they’re going to fire me. They need us. Both of us. It’s all good, bro.”

  Drew hesitated, then let out a concerned smile. “Thanks, Lucas. I owe you one.”

  “But it probably wouldn’t hurt to figure out what happened and see if we can’t reverse it. Or stop it from happening again in the future. Mistakes happen in labs all the time. That’s how breakthroughs and discoveries happen—on the heels of failure. We’re no different, right?”

  Drew nodded.

  They spent the next hour checking the available data logs, instrument readings, and video feeds.

  “The answer has to be in here somewhere.” Lucas flipped through the final pages of data on the computer screen. He sat back in his chair, yawned, stretched, and then rubbed his watery eyes. When he looked back at the computer screen, he noted a single nonconforming data value just below the top edge of the screen. He almost missed it. He scrolled back a page and found another strange value just above it.

  “Holy shit!”

  “What?”

  “There was a massive power spike inside the reactor.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, deadly.”

  “How massive?” Drew asked.

  “According to the readings, about a trillion times the level we were using at the time.”

  “That’s not possible. You must be misreading the results.”

  “Hey, all I can tell you is what the log says. Somehow, the reactor was hit with a huge power spike.”

  Drew tilted the computer screen toward him and stared at it for good minute, before flipping through several of the data pages. “You’re absolutely right. The spike’s timing does seem to coincide with E-121’s disappearance. Now what?”

  “Well, a few minutes ago, I was thinking we should run it again, and try to recreate the conditions that led to the sudden loss of mass. However, the energy spike changes things,” he said, handing the black po
wder container to Drew. “I think the first thing we need to do is figure out what this stuff is. You should go see if Griffith can identify it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because it’s your turn. I’ve had my fill of Griffith for the day,” Lucas said, smiling. “Have fun, little brother.”

  * * *

  A short while later, Lucas was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed when he heard Drew come through the lab door. He sat up and turned to face the entrance. “What’s the verdict?”

  “It doesn’t exist.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Drew gave the container to Lucas. “It means it doesn’t register at all. Griffith ran it through his mass spectrometer, but it didn’t detect any chemical or biological compounds. It’s as though the stuff wasn’t even there.”

  “Okay, let me ask you this. If we don’t know what this stuff is, how do we know if it’s safe to be handling it right now?”

  “We don’t. There’s no way to tell.”

  “Well then, I guess if it doesn’t exist, it can’t hurt to inspect it a little closer,” he said, opening the lid. He retrieved some of the black substance and rubbed it around between the tips of his fingers. It felt smooth, almost like baby powder, but heavier. He held his fingers up to his nose and took a whiff. “Kind of smells like . . . oranges.”

  Drew leaned in and sniffed the sample. He shook his head. “I don’t smell anything.”

  “Well, I do. Your sniffer must not be working.”

  “So what’s next?” Drew asked.

  Lucas reattached the container’s lid and cleaned off his fingers with a paper towel. “I don’t know about you, but I’m totally spent right now and can’t think straight. It’s been a brutal night. Let’s close up shop and come back tomorrow to see if we can figure this out before DL gets back from Washington.”

  “Sounds like a good plan. But we’ll have to wait until Sunday to come back, though.”