Mercury Rises

by Robert Kroese

  "Don't get ahead of yourself, Finch," said Jacob. "Your machine is useless without a receptacle for the chrotons."

  Finch smiled wickedly. "Oh, didn't I tell you? I happened to find such a thing, just a few days ago. It must have slipped my mind." He walked to a wall safe, tapped a combination into a keypad, and pulled open a thick steel door. Reaching into the safe, he pulled out a square metal box about half the size of a shoebox.

  Finch proclaimed, "Babylonian prophecies foretell that the key to the secrets of the Universe will be found hidden beneath a sacred shrine guarded by an ancient race of people since the beginning of time. Behold!" He opened the box to reveal, resting on a cushion of velvet, what appeared to be an apple made of crimson colored glass. "This is a device from beyond our own reality, constructed specifically to harness the power of chrotons," he crowed. "My moment of triumph is at hand!"

  Allie glared at Jacob.

  Jacob paled.

  "Uh oh," said Mercury.

  "Your triumph!" said a voice behind them. They turned to see three figures enter the room from the southern hallway. It was Uzziel, flanked on either side by Izbazel and Gamaliel. "No, Horace. This is the moment of my triumph!"

  "Uzziel, you jackass," said Mercury. "I knew you had something to do with this."

  "I wouldn't miss this for the world," said Uzziel. "The Apocalypse Bureau has been watching the Order of the Pillars of Babylon for thousands of years. I knew that the OPB's plan to tear open the veil concealing the higher reality was nearing fruition, but they were missing a key element: a receptacle for the chrotons. The Babylonian prophecy states that the key to the portal is hidden under a mountain between two streams, and the OPB had of course assumed that the two streams were the Tigris and Euphrates. But even after searching for centuries, they had turned up nothing. It was I who realized that the two streams were not rivers but energy streams. There are lots of mountains on Earth between two energy streams, but I figured it was most likely someplace known to the Babylonians---which left the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa. The likeliest candidate became Mbukuoto, the holy site of the Tawani people. The prophecy foretells that the key will be guarded by an ancient people, and that it will fall into the hands of a 'silver-haired stranger,' who will hold the fate of the world in his hands. Clearly the prophecy referred to Horace Finch. All I had to do was guide Finch to the Tawani."

  "Clearly," said Mercury. "Isn't this scheme a little out of your jurisdiction, Uzziel? You know, while you hang out here on Earth, reports are going unfiled and files are going unreported."

  "Silence, Mercury!" Uzziel growled. "I did my job without complaint for seven thousand years. I followed every rule, every bylaw, every regulation. I attended all the meetings, filled out all the paperwork, reported to all the committees. But when the Apocalypse fell through, I realized I had been a fool. In the end, I had no more control over Armageddon than anyone else. My whole existence had been a joke, a fraud. Well, I'm done following orders. I want to see the man behind the curtain. I want to see who's really in charge of the Universe. And if I have to break a few rules---or risk the annihilation of our reality---then so be it."

  Mercury shrugged. "Well, as long as you've thought it through."

  Uzziel went on, "I knew you'd have interfered if I had given you a chance, Mercury. But I couldn't have you and Christine detained without raising suspicion. That's why I assigned you to get the Attaché Cases of the Apocalypse. As soon as you left my office, I had Izbazel and Gamaliel released from holding and assigned them to track you down. Everything is going according to my plan!"

  "Your plan!" hissed a voice from the side of the room. The assembled group turned their respective heads to see a severe-looking but not unattractive middle-aged woman enter the room, flanked by two cherub guards.

  "Tiamat!" gasped Uzziel. "What are you doing here?"

  "Oh, Uzziel," Tiamat said smugly. "As endearing as it is that you believe that you've played a key role in bringing about the culmination of OPB's plan, I'm afraid I must steal the spotlight. After all, it was I who started the Babylonians on the path to seeking a higher reality. There would be no OPB if it weren't for me. If anyone can claim this as a moment of triumph, it is I!"

  "Ah, Tiamat," said a voice from the opposite end of the room "Always eager to take more than your share of the credit. You abandoned the Babylonians nearly four thousand years ago, and now that their efforts seem to be about to bear fruit, you rush in to take credit. Classy."

  A tall, blond figure entered the room, flanked by two demons.

  "Lucifer!" exclaimed Tiamat. "Come to sabotage my plans, as you always do?"

  "On the contrary," replied Lucifer. "I am here to see that my plan is brought to its proper conclusion. Your piddling efforts to break through Mundane reality are of no interest to me. You see, a while back, I had a bit of a disagreement with the authorities in Heaven. I had hopes that we'd be able to work things out satisfactorily, but I implemented a failsafe plan, just in case. I stole an anti-bomb and hid it where no one would ever find it. For seven thousand years, that glass apple remained unmolested inside a remote mountaintop in Africa. If my surprise attack failed, I still had an ace up my sleeve: an anti-bomb powerful enough to destroy the entire world!"

  For a moment the room was silent, as everyone tried to make sense of what had just happened. After a few seconds, Mercury spoke.

  "I'm afraid I must disappoint you all," he announced. "Truly I tell you," he said, "the moment of triumph is mine!"

  All eyes turned toward him.

  "And then I pull off a mask and it turns out I'm really Hitler," said Mercury. "What do you think? Too much?"

  Uzziel nodded at Gamaliel, who punched Mercury in the stomach. Mercury doubled over and fell to the floor.

  Horace Finch spoke up. "Look," he said. "I don't know who most of you are or how you got in here, but if you don't mind, I was about to flip this switch and uncover the deepest secrets of the Universe. Does anyone have a problem with that?"

  Jacob stood up. "I do," he said, trying to keep his voice from quavering. "Listen, Mr. Finch. I'm a scientist. My job is to analyze disparate data and make sense out of it. I understand the desire to break things down and then try to put them together again, in order to better understand them. But there are some things that can't be put back together, and I'm pretty sure the Universe is one of those things. If that means we're doomed to never fully understand the Universe, then so be it. Maybe there are some mysteries that were never meant to be solved."

  Finch nodded at one of his guards, who punched Jacob in the stomach. Jacob doubled over and joined Mercury on the floor.

  "Anyone else?" said Finch.

  Lucifer shrugged. "Regardless of whether your little science experiment works, the anti-bomb will soon implode, destroying the Earth. All you're going to do is speed things up a bit. Heaven loses. I win. Do it."

  No one else spoke up.

  "OK, then let's do this," said Finch. He removed the glass apple from its padded box and held it aloft in his hand. The apple began to sparkle in the dim light of the control room. "Interesting," said Finch, regarding the transfigured anti-bomb.

  "What does sparkling mean?" Jacob whispered to Mercury, who was lying next to him on the floor. "Sparkling can't be good."

  "Sparkling is never good," said Mercury. "It means that the anti-bomb is about to blow. Or suck, as it were. We have maybe an hour left, tops."

  "Wait a minute," said Jacob. "The apple is an anti-bomb? You mean that's...?"

  "Yeah," Mercury replied. "That's what imploded Anaheim Stadium. Except this one is about ten thousand times as powerful. When that thing goes off, it's good-bye, Earth."

  "My God," gasped Jacob. "But maybe the CCD will neutralize it."

  "Maybe," said Mercury. "Or maybe it will increase its potency by a factor of a billion. Care to place a bet?"

  Finch pressed a button on the CCD control panel. A metal arm with circular receptacle about the size of a cu
p holder slid out from the panel and Finch placed the anti-bomb into it. He pressed the button again, and the arm slid into the CCD.

  Finch turned to Alistair Breem, who had been sitting in silence at the control panel. "Would you care to do the honors, Allie?" he asked.

  "Go to hell, Finch," said Allie.

  "Fine, then," replied Finch. "I'll do it." He reached for the switch and everyone in the room held their breath.

  "Not so fast, Horace Finch," said a small but authoritative voice from the north end of the room.

  Everyone turned to see a diminutive, hooded figure enter the room. To the figure's right was Christine Temetri, and flanking them were a dozen cherubim wielding fiery swords. The figure removed her hood, revealing locks of curly black hair.

  "Michelle!" gasped Mercury, struggling to his feet. "And Christine! And...I'm sorry, I don't know the rest of your names, but I'm totally happy to see you all!"

  "Whoever you are, you're too late!" hissed Finch. He flipped the switch.

  The display now read:

  CAUTION! CCD IS ACTIVE

  A low-pitched, almost subaudible hum filled the room. Lights on the control panel blinked crazily as dozens of preprogrammed processes woke from their slumber. Below the surface of the panel, millions of electrons shuffled from place to place, like commuters in a vast city of copper and silicon. If these individual particles had any idea that all their efforts were part of an incomprehensively complex machine whose goal was to direct a train car filled with their quantum cousins to a subatomic concentration camp, they might have hesitated a bit, but insulated by ignorance and propelled by urges beyond their understanding, they all did their parts to bring the monster to life.

  "No!" Christine screamed.

  Before anyone else even knew what was happening, Jacob leaped onto the control console and launched himself at the ceiling, his arms stretched as high as they would go. His goal, the rest of the congregants belatedly realized, was a clear plastic tube about four inches in diameter that ran the length of the ceiling. It looked like the vacuum tubes that used to be used for transporting messages between floors in office buildings.

  Jacob wrapped his fingers around the tube and hung there, willing himself to weigh more than his one hundred and forty pounds. As if in answer to his prayers, Horace Finch grabbed him by the ankles, trying to break his grasp on the tube.

  There was a CRACK! and the tube came apart at a joint a few inches from Jacob's fingers. The section of the tube he was hanging from bent downward and the glass apple, now sparkling brightly, rolled from the opening toward the floor. Jacob fell on top of Horace Finch, knocking him out cold.

  The display now flashed:

  ERROR! CCD OFFLINE

  Mercury dove across the room, his left hand outstretched, landing on his back and sliding nearly a foot across the floor. The apple landed without a sound in his hand.

  For several moments, no one dared breathe.

  At last, Mercury spoke. "I wasn't sure the infield fly rule applied in this case," he said, "so I thought I'd better catch it."

  "Nicely done, Mercury," said Michelle. "I will open a temporary portal and have the anti-bomb transported somewhere safe. Then I will be taking Lucifer, Tiamat, and Uzziel into custody. These wicked schemes stop right now."

  Lucifer stepped forward. "Please do," he said. "If you try to transport the anti-bomb through a portal at this point, you'll set it off. I'm afraid these pointless heroics have only delayed Earth's doom by a few minutes. There is no stopping the anti-bomb from imploding now."

  "He's right," said Uzziel. "The anti-bomb is too unstable to be transported. There's nothing we can do but wait for it to go off. The end of the world is at hand!"

  "My work is done here," said Lucifer. "I'll be heading back to the Infernal Plane if no one has any objections."

  "I've really got to be going as well," said Tiamat. "As much as I'd love to stick around and be ripped apart by a massive rift in this plane with the rest of you, I've got work to do."

  "No one is going anywhere," declared Michelle. "If anyone sets a foot outside this room, I'll call down a Class Five pillar of fire and take out this whole place."

  "Wouldn't that set off the anti-bomb?" Christine asked. "And, um, kill us all?"

  "It seems you mortals are going to die either way," said Michelle. "And I can't let Lucifer and Tiamat escape. They must pay for what they've done. A pillar of fire will transport them to Heaven, where they can be dealt with."

  "You wouldn't dare," said Lucifer. "You'd be killing all of these innocent people."

  "You've forced my hand, Lucifer," Michelle replied. "I won't let you escape again, whatever the cost."

  Mercury stepped forward. "OK, let's not forget who's holding the sparkly apple here," he said, the anti-bomb sparkling brightly in his hand. "Now, hear me out. While it's true that we can't stop the anti-bomb from imploding, that doesn't mean we have to let it implode here."

  "Where do you recommend?" asked Michelle. "This is perhaps the most remote location on Earth."

  "I was thinking someplace not on Earth," replied Mercury. "I could fly the anti-bomb into space and let it implode there."

  Uzziel shook his head. "That's not how an anti-bomb works," he said. "It's not like a conventional bomb that can safely detonate in a vacuum. The anti-bomb creates a vortex that reaches out to suck in any available matter. It keeps expanding until it finds enough matter to equalize the pressure between this plane and the plane it's opening a rift into."

  Jacob interjected, "You're contradicting yourself. If the anti-bomb goes off in a vacuum, creating a rift onto an empty plane, then the pressure is already equalized. You've got a vacuum on both sides, so there would be no implosion."

  Uzziel replied impatiently, "When I say 'pressure,' I'm not talking about air pressure. This isn't conventional physics. Each plane is made up of its aggregate total of matter and energy. The total is different for each plane, and when you open a rift between two planes, matter rushes out of the higher density plane into the lower density plane. That's why opening portals between planes is so expensive: it takes a tremendous amount of energy to create what is essentially an airlock between the two planes. Except that it's not an airlock; it's a matterlock."

  "Ah," said Mercury wistfully. "Where is the folksy wisdom of Matterlock when we need it most?"

  Uzziel, who was accustomed to Mercury's non sequiturs, went on, undeterred, "On the higher density side, the anti-bomb vortex expands until it has consumed a sufficient amount of mass. The older the anti-bomb, the more mass it takes. With an apple of this vintage, it's going to take somewhere around a hundred trillion kilograms of mass to satisfy it. Even if you transported it ten thousand miles into space, it would still suck in a hundred trillion kilograms of Earth's atmosphere, setting off thousands of massive hurricanes across the globe. The death toll would be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. And that's if you could get it ten thousand miles into deep space, which is impossible, even for an angel. There's no time."

  "What if I aim for the moon?" Mercury asked. "If I can get close enough to the moon, then the anti-bomb vortex will wreck the moon instead of Earth, right?"

  "There's no time, you fool!" Lucifer snapped. "This discussion is futile. Michelle, if you're going to call down a Class Five, go ahead and do it. Otherwise, I'm leaving."

  "He's right, Mercury," said Uzziel. "We've got maybe half an hour until the anti-bomb goes off. Even flying at top speed, you don't have a chance to get anywhere near the moon."

  "I've got to try," said Mercury. "Matterlock would have wanted me to."

  "Mercury, you're not listening," said Christine. "It can't be done. We just need to accept the fact that the end of the Earth is at hand."

  "Well, what's the point of that?" Mercury asked.

  "Actually," Tiamat said, "he just might be able to do it."

  All eyes turned toward Tiamat.

  "We've got twelve angels here," she said, "not counting Mercury. If he
were to fly straight toward the moon, and we were all to push him, he might be able to get close enough to the moon to save the Earth."

  "What do you mean, 'push'?" said Christine.

  Tiamat explained, "Flight is just a matter of using the interplanar energy to overcome gravity. Mercury pushes against the ground, and we push against him."

  Christine now understood how Gamaliel had been able to catch Mercury outside the WHO building: Izbazel had been pushing him. With the combined power of two angels, Gamaliel had been able to fly twice as fast as Mercury.

  "We're right between two energy streams," Tiamat was saying, "so there's plenty of power. In essence, we transfer our power to him. If each angel pushes as hard as we can, we may be able to get him to the moon before the anti-bomb goes off." She paused and then said, "Let me stress that he would need the help of every angel here."

  "What's your game, Tiamat?" Lucifer asked.

  "We help Mercury get to the moon," Tiamat said. "In exchange, Michelle drops all charges against us. We get to leave, scot-free."

  "Forget it," Michelle said, shaking her head vigorously. "I'm not letting you slip between my fingers again."

  "Then the Earth dies," said Tiamat. "And good luck explaining that to the Senate. See if you hold onto your job after that one."

  "Please," said Christine to Michelle. "It's the only way. You'll have another chance to catch Tiamat and Lucifer. You can't let seven billion people die because of a grudge between angels."

  "Let me know what you come up with," said Mercury. "I'll catch you all later." He made his way to the elevator that led to the floor of the dome. The angels looked expectantly to Michelle for a cue.

  "Fine," she said at last. "But I don't have the authority to absolve you of your crimes. All I can do is give you a head start. If Mercury succeeds, I'll let you open portals and get out of here. Even you, Uzziel, if you can find someplace willing to take you. But if Mercury fails, I'm calling down a Class Five and taking you all in. Take it or leave it."