Into the Looking Glass votsb-1

by John Ringo

  As Weaver had been assembling the materials he needed for his experiment he had kept one eye on the news and came away with an even greater cynicism than was his wont. The fact that the bosons were generating muons had become common knowledge and it had created a real hysteria, exceeding, if possible, the hysterias about the use of nuclear weapons. Which was far greater than the hysteria generated by invading aliens, although of the three they were by far and away the greatest threat. Muons were subnucleic particles. They didn’t generate “radiation,” they didn’t cause cancer, they didn’t make two-headed babies. Hell, there are about 10,000 muons per square meter at sea level continuously coming from active galactic nuclei and quasars and other cosmic stuff and that hasn’t caused us any problems in five billion years. But try to tell that to reporters.

  They had found a slew of so-called “scientists” who had trotted out elaborate… lies about the danger from muons and bosons. Did they bother to tell people that light particles were bosons? Hell no! They were based on no scientific evidence but the falsehoods were much more interesting to the news media than the occasional countering truth from physicists who actually knew what they were talking about. People who had never heard the term “muon” until they saw it on the evening newscast were now running around hysterically trying to find muon detectors and calling up environmental companies to have them come in and check their homes for muons and bosons.

  Bill had been at a scientific conference where a psychologist had laid out the theory of hysteria. In chimpanzee society when faced with an overwhelming or previously unknown threat, such as the first time they heard a rifle shot, the tribe would act in a hysterical manner. Some would try to fight, some would run, some would bluff, others would hide or simply collapse. With no way to logically evaluate the threat, the very randomness ensured that some would survive and, presumably, reproduce. It was an evolutionary method to ensure survival.

  It was a pain in the ass in humans, though.

  And the protests. Oh my God. Rioters had trashed the physics department of the University of California, destroying hundreds of man-hours of work, some of it directly linked to boson research which might have helped fix the anomaly in Florida. Antiscience hysteria was sweeping the nation, hell, the world. The anomaly site was an armed camp now that protesters had decided it was safe to picket there.

  In Horse Cave, Kentucky, however, things were placid. The area that the boson had generated on was an open field just up the road from Park, a natural depression, a shallow forty acre sinkhole, with a stream running through it. The county road had a sign about a quarter mile north that had a horse and buggy on it, indicating that Amish used the area. The county had sent over a couple of sheriff’s cars and a few reporters had come down from Louisville, asked him some questions, most of which he’d either lied about or avoided answering by invoking national security, and left. Fortunately they left before the units from Fort Knox showed up.

  The boson had been chosen for the experiment for several reasons. The area was rural, well away from major roads, so if the worst happened minimal damage would occur to humans and their possessions. Even if they got a Cthulhoid entity through the gate, the worst that it would mean was having to change the route of I-65 by a few miles. The depression meant that the boson was easily defended. And it was only two hours from Fort Knox which was the Armor Home of the U.S. Army and which had a vast stock of armored vehicles for the Kentucky Army National Guard. A goodly few of them were being arrayed on the slopes around the depression.

  “This is a track one site,” Bill said to the National Guard battalion commander. “The Titcher attacking in Mississippi are coming through a track one, but that seems to be a world that was held by another civilization; there wasn’t a Titcher organism on the far side. So far all the gates they’ve opened have come from track three. So we’re pretty sure that there aren’t Titcher on the other side of this gate. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean there’s not something hostile. On the gripping hand, most of the gates have been neutral. We may not be able to open it. We may find that there’s nothing on the other side. We just don’t know.”

  “Okay,” the lieutenant colonel said. “When do you open it?”

  “As soon as you’re in position,” Bill answered.

  “We’re as ready as we’re gonna get,” the colonel replied. “Blast away, Doctor.”

  Particle accelerators were delicate things that were normally only found in laboratories. And the rest of the mechanisms involved were even worse, not to mention being hastily thrown together by the team from Columbia. There was, therefore, an inflatable shelter, courtesy of the United States Army, thrown up over the boson.

  Bill walked down the hill, which was knee high in grass and covered in lovely white flowers, to where the team was making final adjustments. The equipment also required enormous quantities of energy, which was another reason for using this boson; there was a high-tension power line trailing across the back side of the property. Army electrical power specialists along with some bemused electricians from the local power cooperative had tapped into the line, run it through an Army field substation and trailed arm-thick power cables down to the devices in the tent. They were now all connected and would soon be drawing enough power to brown out the surrounding area.

  “All set?” he asked.

  Mark Rosenberg was a member of his team at Columbia. The heavyset, just below medium height, brown-haired man was an electrical engineer with a background in the nuclear industry. After getting laid off in a round of cuts he had submitted his resume to Columbia, expecting to end up working in one of their few remaining defense factories. Instead, he had ended up working with Bill doing whatever they were doing that week. The team’s purpose, up until the opening of the gates, was finding problems that the U.S. military had and then solutions. It had all been highly classified work which sometimes resulted in major successes but often resulted in minor failures. However, the military had a host of problems it wanted fixed and much preferred to dump them on what were generally called “Beltway Bandits” than detail officers who had real day-to-day jobs to trying to find solutions. Good, problem solving, officers were always in short supply. It made more sense to have them fix those problems that only the military could solve, like figuring out exactly how much firepower to use against Iraqi guerilla forces by trial and error, than sitting in offices trying to figure out how to determine the whichness of where. Occasionally the team’s problem-solving skills had a great effect and thus the military felt their money had been well spent. One soldier’s life saved was equated to just about a million dollars. The team’s output had probably saved, here and there, over a hundred lives if not more.

  But since getting the call to go to Orlando, Mark had been on what the military called “the sharp end.” He’d suited up more times than he ever did working at Savannah River, he’d watched two nuclear detonations and he’d scrounged more weird materials, from more sources, than he’d ever imagined. The linear accelerator, for example, had had to be hand built on site from parts scrounged from research laboratories and factories ranging from Missouri (at a steel plant) to England (Reading University). And the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, its temporary official name, had started off life as a device to wrap tubes with in plastic. He’d found it on e-Bay being sold by a company in Seattle that was tired of it jamming all the time. The express overnight shipping had cost more than the machine.

  “Probably,” he said, checking a connection. “This is the most jury-rigged piece of crap I’ve ever seen in all my born days.”

  “It only has to run for a few seconds,” Bill replied. “It either will work or it won’t.”

  The boson generated muons in every direction. But by careful study they had found that in one direction, more or less pointed west and down towards the earth, it was generating over one hundred times the output of any other direction. The devices had been aligned carefully. The circular magnetic whatchamacallit was aligned perpendicula
r to the stream while the accelerator was aligned opposite of it. In a few seconds they were going to find out if it was possible to open a gate intentionally. If they could open one, they might be able to close one as well.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Bill said, gesturing to the door of the shelter.

  “I’m sure not going to stick around,” Mark replied, closing the door to the connection and wiping his hands on a scrap of rag. The one thing he’d enjoyed about the recent jobs was getting his hands dirty. Both working for Savannah River and Columbia had involved far more time sitting in offices than building things. And he dearly loved to tinker with electrical contraptions.

  They walked up the hill and through a stand of old trees where a farmhouse had apparently once stood, then across the road and down the slope on the far side. In the tobacco field on the far side the army had kindly constructed a bunker. It was a hole in the ground, covered with scrounged heavy timbers, I-beams and corrugated steel, which had been piled six layers deep with sandbags. Bill had been surprised and amused to find that the Army had an automatic sandbag filler. Construction of the bunker, using civilian backhoes, the sandbag filler and a small army of soldiers, had taken less than six hours. It was large enough for the team and all their gear. Another bunker a short distance away, connected by a reinforced and covered trench, held the military command post.

  Bill picked up a field phone and cranked it.

  “Bravo Company,” a voice answered on the other end.

  “All your people ready?” Bill asked.

  “Hold one,” the soldier answered. In a moment he was back. “All clear.”

  “Initiating,” Bill said, nodding at Mark.

  Mark nodded back and pressed a button on a hastily rigged control panel.

  There should have been an explosion or a blast of light. Some sort of decent special effect. But there wasn’t. The cameras in the inflatable shelter showed the whatchamacallit starting to spin. It got up to full speed and then, suddenly, as the lights in the bunker dimmed slightly, there was a round mirror hanging just off the ground.

  “Kill it,” Bill said. “Send in the evaluation team.”

  Bill walked out of the shelter and up the hill where the trees were and watched as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Five men in environmental suits, carrying a selection of heavy weapons, jumped out of the Humvee and entered the inflatable shelter. Bill waited impatiently and then one came out of the shelter and waved a hand.

  Bill caught a ride with the battalion commander as he drove by on the way down the hill. When he got to the bottom he waved a hand at Command Master Chief Miller who was stripping out of his environment suit. Miller had lost quite a bit of what remaining hair he had left but otherwise was recovering nicely from his exposure to a blast of neutrons and fairly hard gammas.

  “Desert environment,” Miller said. “Some mountains nearby. What look like ruins at the base of the mountains. No animals seen or plants. And no Titcher for sure. Air monitors say it’s got enough oxygen, slightly elevated carbon dioxide. Pressure is about earth normal. Cold as hell, though; temperature on the far side reads five degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Did you say ruins?” Bill asked.

  * * *

  “We can’t say that the entire world is desert,” Bill noted over the secure link. “We can only see the tiny slice on the other side of the gate. The archeologist we conscripted from the University of Kentucky estimates that the ruins are at least ten thousand years old. We’ve found some biologicals at this point, but they’re all lower order, our equivalent of insects and lichen.”

  “Did the Titcher wipe them out?” the President asked.

  “No, there’s no sign of Titcher biology,” Bill said with a shrug. “Everything has a lifespan, Mr. President. Species rise and fall, at least if you look at the evolutionary record,” he noted, carefully. “Civilizations rise and fall, too, as do planets. Eventually, our sun will go cold and the earth will pass into history. It won’t happen for millions of years but it appears that it already has happened on that planet. I’d be surprised if the ruins don’t turn out to be older than they appear. I suspect that the race that made them died out or left, to somewhere warmer at a guess. The boson that we connected to was a remnant from when they had lived on that planet, raised their children, built their civilization.”

  “It feels sad,” the national security advisor said. “But it doesn’t do much for us at present.”

  “It tells us we can open gates,” Bill pointed out. “I don’t think that the Titcher can come through a gate that is opened to a world that they don’t control. On the other hand, quiescent bosons are a threat.”

  “So are gates,” the secretary of defense said, dryly. “We don’t know that the Titcher are the only threat. Look at the Mreee. Not to mention the Boca Raton anomaly. We need to figure out a way to close them and keep them closed.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible with any near future technology, Mr. Secretary,” Bill said. “I’ve spoken to several other specialists and it’s a general agreement that it would take orders of magnitude more power, precisely applied, to close a wormhole, permanently. The quiescent bosons that we’ve connected to indicate that it is possible, but the how remains a mystery. What we have been able to do, based on these experiments, is figure out how to channel the boson output from the Orlando generator. The bosons seem to choose their channels based upon maximum probability in the local environment. By applying an induction field, a very high order induction field, we’ve managed to get the bosons to avoid track three. So there are no more bosons generating on the track the Titcher use. But there are over a hundred quiescent bosons currently scattered around on that track, from Florida to France. It continues, apparently, to be closed, but it might open at any time.”

  “Any suggestions what we can do about that?” the President asked.

  “Remember that great big Van Der Graff generator I was talking about?” Bill said. “We think that the bosons are moveable if they have a charge applied, same with the gates. But we need some huge Van Der Graff generators to apply that charge. After that I’d suggest moving them somewhere remote, Frenchman Flats comes to mind, and leaving them. Maybe even bury them in an old mine or something, with a nuke set to detonate. We won’t be able to do that in weeks, maybe not in years, we may be talking about decades, but it’s doable. Assuming that the reality matches with theory.”

  “And you can’t turn off the Orlando generator?” the national security advisor asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Bill said. “Same problem. I’ve looked at some of Ray Chen’s surviving notes; he had some on his home computer. And I’ve talked it over with Dr. Hawking and Dr. Gonzalvez. But it comes to the same conclusion. We’d need about one GAEE, that’s pronounced gee, or a Global Annual Energy Expenditure — that is about 1x1018 Joules… a hell of a lot in other words, and something that could actually channel it, which doesn’t exist even in theory, to pump enough power into one of those gates to close it. There are some very out there theoretical materials that might be used, but I think even then all we’d get is destabilization and the materials vaporizing in a microsecond or two. And the vaporization would be a high energy event, think explosion. We could drop a nuke on the other side of some of the gates that are on other tracks and try to destabilize those tracks. But we already know about the secondary effects. How many areas do you want to irradiate? There’s a gate in the suburbs of Los Angeles, now, and another in Cleveland. Both of them open onto abandoned worlds. But drop a nuke in one on that track and we might end up with neutron pulses on all the others.”

  “Not good,” the President said.

  “No, Mr. President,” the national security advisor replied. “Especially since some have opened in Europe as well. I can imagine the reaction of the French.”

  “Did you know that one of the planets has been tentatively identified?” the President said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Bill answered, excitedly.

  “I
don’t know the jargon,” the President added. “But it’s supposed to be relatively close.”

  “BT-315-9,” the national security advisor said, consulting a note. “It’s a star something like ours…”

  “G class?” Bill asked.

  “Yes, that’s what it says here. About sixty light-years away. It’s on track one. The gate is in Missouri. One of the survey team knew something about stars and thought she recognized some of them. So a team of astronomers went through and took a look. They’re pretty sure that it’s that star. They took readings on some others and they all tracked back to that location. Now they’re sending in excited reports, something about triangulation, and they want to somehow establish a major astronomy base on the other side.”

  “I can understand why they’re excited,” Bill said. “And I agree. But it has some impact on the other problem. I’d like to get some research done at the other open gates. It might turn out that they’re all relatively local. By the same token, it might tell us how much power is required to open a gate that’s not relatively local. And it tells us that we’re at least in the same universe. He… heck, that’s practically right next door. As far as we knew before that, we might have been opening into other universes, much less in the same galactic quadrant.”

  “And this is important, why?” the defense secretary asked.

  “Well, I’d personally like to know where the Titcher are in ‘real’ space, Mr. Secretary,” Bill pointed out. “Just in case they have space travel technology as well.”

  “Oh, how truly good,” the secretary said.

  “They might and they might not,” Bill said, excitedly. “But it clears up the major point that the gates can open in this universe. And that, Mr. President, is a very, very good thing indeed.”