The Gods of Laki

by Chris Angus

  “Incredible,” Hauptmann gasped. “It is Amma’s hole at the center of the Earth. Just as she described it. A hole with stars. The sagas were correct.”

  “Correct, yes,” said Sam. “But what is it?”

  As they stared into the depths, the pinpoints of light that appeared to be stars began to coalesce. Soon, they were swirling into patterns.

  “My God,” Dagursson said. “Look. They’re forming . . .”

  “Galaxies,” Hauptmann said softly, his voice almost disappearing in the wind.

  The stars had begun to come together into shapes. Familiar shapes . . . clusters that looked like spiral galaxies, one that had the appearance of a butterfly, others that appeared to be colliding, pulling each other apart like taffy being spun out.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Dagursson in a voice filled with awe. “It . . . it’s almost like being in a planetarium. As though someone’s putting on a show for us.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sam. “I think what we’re seeing is real.”

  The others managed to tear their eyes away from the incredible spectacle long enough to stare at her.

  “Carlisle said something I didn’t completely understand,” she went on. “Something about cosmic particles bombarding us, about Kaluza-Klein particles and another dimension. That’s why I wanted to come back here, to see it again. I think we’re looking into the heart of the universe. Some sort of portal to another dimension.”

  “How can such a thing be possible?” asked Hauptmann. “It is contained. How can the entire universe be contained in a hole in the ground?”

  “Maybe it’s not contained,” Dagursson said. “At least not in any way we can identify with. Maybe we’re seeing into another dimension . . . like a window. We’re being offered a view through a window into another universe.”

  “But why? How?” Hauptmann asked. “For what reason?”

  For this, no one had a reply, but Sam said, “I don’t know what it all means . . . but it just might represent salvation for us.”

  Before anyone could think of something to say to this, she added, “Come on. I want to return to Amma. Ernst, you said you wished to ask her questions. Well, so do I.”

  Sam felt as though she were actually beginning to know her way around this nether world. It took only a few minutes to find their way to Amma’s side. The gruesome sight of the ancient woman was no less heart-stopping than it had been the first time she encountered it.

  Dagursson and Hauptmann held back, unable to absorb what they were seeing.

  “It’s all right,” Sam said. “It won’t hurt you. This is Amma, Professor. She’ll answer your questions . . . at least if you understand the answers.”

  But for the moment, Hauptmann appeared to have forgotten the questions. He peered at the strange apparition, reached out one hand, and touched it. Amma’s eyes opened abruptly and the professor backed away quickly.

  He stared at Amma for perhaps a full minute before finally finding his voice. “What . . . what happened to your clan?” he asked.

  Amma responded in her disembodied voice with a stream of words in ancient Norse.

  Hauptmann turned to Sam. “She speaks too quickly. I cannot understand her.”

  “Wait,” Sam said. “You’ll begin to understand.”

  And indeed, almost at once, Hauptmann realized he was starting to comprehend what the figure was saying. Again, he asked, “What happened to your people?”

  “They are all here,” came Amma’s reply. “Even Skari.”

  “They were absorbed, as you were? By what?”

  “We are not absorbed. We are one . . . with Laki,” said Amma.

  “What is Laki?”

  Amma’s eyes seemed to roll back in her head, as though she were entering a trance, though truth be told, the entire setting was as surreal and trancelike as anything any of them had ever experienced.

  “I . . . am . . . God,” said the figure.

  They all stared at her. If this was the answer they might have been expecting, it wasn’t one they were prepared to accept.

  “But you are Amma,” Hauptmann said.

  “It is the same,” said the voice.

  “Does . . . does your clan worship Laki?” Hauptmann asked.

  “We revered him . . . in our other lives . . . feared him at first. We shut ourselves off, buried ourselves alive. To us, our deaths were real, and we mourned as each of us passed. But then we were reborn here.”

  “You call this a rebirth?” asked Dagursson. “A living hell would be more like it.”

  “What do you want?” Sam asked. “What does Laki want of us?”

  “Nothing,” Amma replied.

  “Do you want us to worship you?” Hauptmann asked.

  “No.”

  “But why are you here? Why are we here?” asked Sam.

  “I am here because I am here,” said the voice of Laki. “You are here because of me.”

  “You created us?”

  There was a long silence. Amma’s eyes rolled back down out of her forehead and stared at them. “It was nothing,” she said.

  “Jesus!” Dagursson said.

  “Then why did you do it?” Hauptmann asked softly. “We were not created for a reason? For a purpose?”

  “It was nothing,” the voice repeated. Then Amma’s eyes closed once again, and she seemed to go to sleep.

  “So,” Hauptmann said in a small voice. “We are nothing.”

  Sam put one hand on his shoulder. “Isn’t that what you always believed, Ernst?”

  “I do not believe in God, or that we have some higher purpose. But I always believed we might, someday, evolve into something . . . better.” He rubbed his eyes. “I would have preferred that we rose from the depths to become what we could become. On our own merit. Not this. Not that we were created . . . for no reason. For what? A whim? A mistake?”

  “We are nothing,” Dagursson repeated, shaking his head.

  “Perhaps,” Sam said softly. “Perhaps that is all there is. But even so, we may be able to make use of Laki. We may be nothing to it, but it may be everything to us.”

  Hauptmann looked at her blankly, but Dagursson seemed to take her meaning.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right.” He looked around. “We need to get back to the others.”

  ***

  They found Andy Pryne still huddled over the device, a series of inscrutable tools spread out before him on the passage floor. Ryan sat next to him, ready to assist at a moment’s notice. When he saw Sam, he leaped to his feet and greeted her with a bear hug.

  “I was worried,” he said. “You were gone too long.” He looked past her at Professor Hauptmann. “Did you get the answers you were looking for?”

  Hauptmann merely shook his head and slumped to the ground. Dagursson did the same.

  “It wasn’t what we expected,” said Sam. “Amma considers herself one with Laki . . . and she considers Laki to be God. But he’s not the sort of God you or I might envision.”

  Ryan looked puzzled. “How do you mean?”

  She sighed. “Amma says Laki created us, but doesn’t care what we do, doesn’t want us to worship him. He would rather that we just went away. He said that creating us was nothing.”

  “Nothing? But then, why bother?”

  “I do not believe that thing is God,” said Hauptmann. “The devil maybe.”

  “We saw something else,” said Sam. “Something you and I didn’t see before. When we looked into the hole, the pinpoints of light? They began to coalesce into the shape of galaxies. Oh, Ryan, it was like looking into the center of the universe. I . . . I have no explanation for what we saw.”

  “Perhaps it was Carlisle’s other dimension,” said Dagursson. “That makes as much sense as anything.”

  “Which is why we came back as fast as we could,” said Sam. She looked down at Andy. “How much time do we have?”

  He sat staring at the device, his shoulders slumped. “Not enough,” he repl
ied. “I can’t figure out a way to disarm it. It seems that Rashid may have been right. The damn thing’s impregnable once the counter is started.”

  She knelt beside him and looked at the counter. It showed less than ten minutes left.

  “So little time,” she said. “We have to hurry.”

  “Yes,” said Dagursson, standing up abruptly. “There’s not a moment to waste.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Andy. “I tell you, there’s nothing we can do.”

  Ryan stared at Sam and Dagursson. “Maybe there is,” he said. He picked up one end of the device and Dagursson picked up the other.

  “Follow me,” said Sam.

  “I don’t understand,” said Andy. “Where are you going?”

  But the others were already heading down the passage. All Pryne and Hauptmann could do was follow.

  Sam moved as quickly as she could. She knew which way to go. She just didn’t know if they would have enough time.

  Ryan read out the digital numbers as they went. “Seven minutes left. Hurry!”

  They raced down the passage with their deadly cargo as fast as they could go. The device was heavy and unwieldy. Several times they bumped into the cavern walls and nearly dropped the thing.

  “Be careful!” said Andy, as if bumping the device might somehow shorten the few minutes they had left. “Where are we going?” he cried again in exasperation.

  “To the hole,” Sam shouted back. “We’re going to throw the bomb into the hole.”

  “What bloody good is that going to do?” asked Hauptmann. “You’re talking about a nuclear weapon, for Christ’s sake. It will destroy half of southern Iceland. Throwing it into a hole won’t help.”

  “Maybe . . .” Andy said, a light coming on in his head. “Maybe it will. If Carlisle is right. That the hole is another dimension.”

  Ryan’s muscles burned with the effort. The device was awkward to carry and footing in the tunnels was uneven. Sam’s flashlight flickered against the walls, making it hard to see obstructions on the passage floor. He tried to read the digital counter as it bobbed up and down with their movement.

  “Four minutes!” he cried.

  Then they were pushing against the wind, struggling past the giant boulder and right up to the strange opening in the earth. Dagursson and Ryan lowered the device heavily to the ground, staggering and gasping for breath from their effort. Ryan wasn’t at all certain his burning shoulders had enough strength remaining to lift the device one more time. He stared at the counter.

  “Ninety seconds!” He peered into the hole and caught his breath against the wind and against the incredible sight of galaxies spinning so close he felt as though he might reach out and touch them.

  It was a mind-numbing vision. Here in the heart of an active volcano on an island in the middle of the cold North Atlantic Ocean was something too inexplicable to be believed. In the flickering light, they looked a little like demons themselves, wide-eyed, dirt-and sweat-covered from their efforts, their eyes flicking from one to another as if seeking some respite from their collective nightmare.

  Mutely, Ryan and Dagursson struggled to lift the weapon up. The object felt heavier than it had. The resistance of the gale-force winds made their job all the harder. Then Hauptmann put his hand on the bomb, pressing against them.

  “Wait!” he said. “We need to think about this. We need to think what could occur if such a thing were to come into contact with another dimension. Anything might happen. We could cause a rift in space or time. We might destroy not just Iceland but the whole bloody world.”

  The weight of the German’s hand was enough to force Ryan and Dagursson to lower the device to the ground once again. They slumped beside it, their shoulders quivering.

  Sam looked into Hauptmann’s eyes. He’d been her mentor for many years, and she valued his insight, the strength of his mind. For an instant, she wondered if he could be right. Then Ryan’s voice brought her back to the moment.

  “Twenty seconds!” he cried.

  “We have to do it, Ernst,” she said. “We don’t know what will happen if we throw it in. We do know what will happen if we don’t. We have to take the gamble.”

  Slowly, painfully slowly, Hauptmann removed his hand from the device.

  “Eight seconds!” Ryan cried.

  Sam leaned in and lifted with the two men. The weapon teetered on the edge of the rock wall. She saw the counter register three seconds, as it toppled into the void.

  They all grabbed on to the wall and peered after it. The device began to spin counterclockwise. There was a momentary flash of light, but it instantly turned to blackness, as though absorbed completely by the emptiness of the swirling galaxies below. Then Rashid’s climate changer was gone.

  They collapsed together on the passage floor and stared at one another.

  “Damn,” said Ryan. “We’re still here,” and he began to laugh with relief. In a moment, they were all laughing.

  “So,” Hauptmann said. “I was wrong. Thank God I was wrong.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Though I believe God had nothing to do with it.”

  “No. He had something to do with it,” said Sam. “If he exists at all that is. He made this hole or other dimension or alternate universe. Whatever it is. Without it, we’d all be dead now. We may be nothing, but I think Laki controls what happens to us more than we know. Maybe more than he knows.”

  ***

  Prescott Carlisle watched as the exhausted group of four stragglers crossed the barren, seemingly demented landscape of Laki to the parking lot. One of his men had informed him that Sam and the others had reemerged from the underground and Carlisle had immediately rushed outside to greet them. Senator Graham was close behind him.

  Graham went straight to Sam and latched onto her as though he’d never expected to see her again.

  “What happened?” asked Carlisle.

  “A miracle,” Hauptmann replied.

  “I don’t know what to call it,” said Sam. “Maybe Ernst is right. Andy couldn’t deactivate the device. Time was running out, so we carried it to the hole and threw it in.”

  “You threw it into the magma chamber?” said Carlisle, his voice filled with disbelief.

  “Call it whatever you want,” said Sam. “It’s not like any magma chamber I’ve ever seen. Anyway, we’d run out of options, so we took a gamble.”

  “But what happened to the bomb?”

  “Obviously, it didn’t explode. It simply disappeared, as though it was completely drained of energy somehow.”

  Carlisle’s face took on an indefinable look. He shook his head slowly and stared out at the dark clouds surrounding Laki. “Maybe not completely,” he said finally.

  The others gave him a puzzled look.

  “I had a call from the President a few minutes ago. How long since you threw the weapon into the chamber?”

  Sam looked at her watch. “About an hour. We made good time coming back.”

  “Yes, well, what the President said may be difficult for you to accept.”

  Again, there were blank faces.

  “What are you going on about, Prescott?” Ryan asked.

  “The President informed me that an hour ago seismographs and satellites recorded a thermonuclear blast in the Southern Ocean about one hundred fifty miles off the coast of Antarctica. His people pinpointed the location as almost precisely the opposite side of the globe from Iceland.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, as Carlisle’s words sank in.

  Ryan was the first to find his voice. “You can’t seriously be suggesting there’s a connection. That’s absurd. It has to be a coincidence. Some other nation must have set off a bomb. There are plenty of countries suffering from nuclear envy that have no place to test their devices on land. Someone must have conducted a test in the Southern Ocean.”

  Sam looked at him. “You know what the odds are that something like that would occur at the precise moment we threw our weapon into Laki?”
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br />   “You’re saying our bomb traveled all the way through the Earth, a distance of eight thousand miles, and just popped out the other side?” Ryan’s incredulous look reflected what the other non-scientists were thinking.

  “I think Miss Graham is correct,” said Carlisle. “We must go on the assumption that the explosion was from your device. No one’s saying it traveled through the Earth’s core. You say it disappeared or seemed to be drained somehow. Well, there’s another possibility. That it passed through some sort of portal to another place. Another name for such a portal would be a black hole.”

  Dagursson stared at Carlisle in disbelief. “I’m just a simple cop,” he said. “I know nothing about all this scientific mumbo-jumbo. Maybe such things are possible. God knows I’ve seen things here I never would have believed without seeing them with my own eyes. But this . . .” He just shook his head.

  “There are plenty of bizarre theories,” said Hauptmann, “regarding extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter, and black holes that could destroy the Earth . . . from the inside out, so to speak. Here’s just one example that you may have heard about. The world’s biggest physics experiment is known as the Large Hadron Collider. It was designed to smash protons together in a search for particles created during the first trillionth of a second of the so-called Big Bang.”

  “Even I’ve heard of that,” said Dagursson.

  “Yes,” the professor continued, “but have you also heard that all the problems they’ve had with the collider breaking down may be the result of the device being sabotaged by its own future?”

  Dagursson’s look clearly showed that this was beyond his limited purview.

  Hauptmann nodded. “The Higgs boson, sometimes called ‘The God Particle,’ was actually detected only recently by physicists. One theory these scientists had was that the Higgs boson would be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would cause ripples backward in time and stop the collider before it could make one.”

  “The classic case of a man going back in time and killing his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth,” said Sam.

  Hauptmann nodded approvingly.

  Carlisle had been listening intently. “A good explanation, as far as it goes,” he said. “By the standard rules of physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. Some theorists have predicted that any machine designed to produce the Higgs boson would have an endless run of bad luck. No reasonable explanations could account for it . . . only that the past was forbidding it.”