A hesitant sun was now struggling through the morning clouds and promised a sunny afternoon. The first two days of their trip had been rainy and now the idea of riding on the top level of the bus seemed perfect. Meagan had been eager to do it and now Joan liked the idea too. Such a London thing to do. Sure it was a little stereotypical, but who cared; it would be fun. And with the sun coming out it seemed to prove going on this trip had been the right thing to do. They had almost cancelled the trip when they saw on television the news reporting about the massacre at the Paris Airport and then just as they were leaving from JFK details about the bomb at Time Square were coming out. Their apartment was only a few blocks away!
She had also heard something yesterday about a bomb exploding at some train station in Germany. She hadn’t really followed what happened there; she and Don had been too wrapped up in watching the Times Square news footage. As a New Yorker it reminded her of when the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Only now it seemed worse somehow. She knew more people had died there but now the terrorists seemed to be hitting everywhere.
Joan found herself fretting about these terrorist acts as she stood there in the line holding Meagan’s hand. It wasn’t like her to be feeling apprehensive. Her husband was a very successful lawyer at one of the top New York firms. Meagan liked her school and was doing well there and she was busy with the work she did at their church and at the food bank. And she did love the shopping and Don seemed to like that her secret fashionista tendencies were coming out now that they had some money. She had dressed like a mouse when she was working to put him through law school at NYU. So why the anxious feeling?
She looked at the crowds of people standing around this historic square honoring Britain’s most famous naval hero. Her sense of anxiety increased as she thought about the terrorism. This was the kind of place where terrorists would strike. She shuddered.
There were about ten people in front of them in the bus queue and she hoped the next bus wasn’t too full, but a lot of people would probably get off there too. Suddenly she just wanted to get back to their hotel and away from the crowds of people. Then she saw the bus pulling up; it was very full. When it pulled to a stop about a dozen people started getting off and Joan figured they would be fine, they’d be able to board the bus. Then she noticed the sun had gone back behind a cloud and the world looked a little greyer. The line started to move forward to get on the bus.
Joan couldn’t shake the dark feeling coming over her and she gave into it. She tugged Meagan’s hand to pull her out of the line and told her all of a sudden she wanted to walk. The hotel wasn’t that far. Meagan resisted but Joan felt she had to walk. She hustled Meagan away and almost found herself running; then when they were about thirty yards from the bus stop, the bomb that had just been left behind under a seat on the bus exploded. The blast knocked both Joan and Meagan to the ground, breaking Meagan’s arm and giving Joan a concussion. They were among the lucky ones.
Khalil sat by himself at the same outdoor café in Beirut where he had first talked to the man who called himself Hasan. Khalil had been trying to reach Hasan by calling the cell phone number Hasan had given him and he had left numerous messages but Hasan had never called him back. He didn’t really expect Hasan to just show up at this café but Khalil had been going there every afternoon for the last two weeks anyway.
Khalil was consumed by the big idea he had. He hungered to regain the sense of joy that he had felt in the first few hours after destroying the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. But when he started to tell people that he was the one who did it, very few believed him! And then there were the rumors that some secret cell of Iranians had done it. Looking back now he realized he had not handled that well. He had lost his temper and had screamed at people he should not have screamed at. Quite reasonably they thought he was deranged. He was claiming credit for the greatest act against both Israel and the Americans and he had no proof. And he had not told anyone ahead of time. So no one gave him any recognition or credit. But he knew he had been the one!
He knew and it gave him confidence that he could do it again. And the act would be even bigger! But he knew he needed the help of Hasan. He needed the special missile that was so powerful and left that strange blue-tinged mushroom-like cloud of smoke. And he needed other help as well, but he believed Hasan could help him do it. He had thought a lot about Hasan in the last two months and believed that he understood what Hasan was doing. Though Khalil didn’t know how, he suspected that Hasan might have been involved with the acts of terrorism in New York and Paris and London. Khalil had to admit he was jealous of those acts. How he wished he had been part of that!
Khalil figured that Hasan had been very busy recently. Hasan wanted all these acts of terrorism to happen. It bothered Khalil that he did not know why. Hasan had told him he was helping to do the work of the Great Prophet because that was his beliefs too. Maybe so, but Hasan’s Earth was not Khalil’s Earth, so Khalil feared trusting him too much. But he could ask for Hasan’s help without trusting him too much. The target was worth taking many risks! To strike inside America at one of its mightiest landmarks would stun the world. Khalil’s reward in both this life and the next would be great – and this time he would make sure that there would be no doubts that he was the one.
Khalil ordered another cup of espresso and watched the people going by. At times he envied those people who led normal lives. He would have liked a wife and sons. Looking back he wasn’t sure when his path had been chosen. He didn’t think he had ever made the decision. Perhaps it was like they said: a man’s life was written in the sands of time before he was ever born. His fate was unavoidable. He could believe that. And he would not seek to change it. His destiny was to do great things. When he had done them, then he could have a wife and strong sons.
A man came from behind Khalil and slid into the seat next to him at the small table.
“Hello Khalil, you wish to talk to me?” Hasan asked.
David looked up from his desk where he was reading the latest news stories on his laptop and studied Gabriela as she was reading a physics paper while lying on their couch. She wasn’t going to like what he was thinking. She saw him looking over at her and put down her iPad.
“I think I need to try to get another interview with Captain Ragnar. And I think I need to try to meet with the Captain of The Lucky Dragon too.”
Gabriela looked at him like he was crazy, “No you don’t. You really don’t. Things are too dangerous now. This isn’t about science anymore. The massacre at the Paris airport wasn’t about science. The bombing at Times Square wasn’t about science. And whatever it was that happened in Beijing, that wasn’t about science either!”
Gabriela straightened up to a sitting position on the couch, “David, I’m scared. And you should be too. What’s going on now isn’t like anything we had before. The cable news stations can’t even keep up with it all. Last week was horrible. I love New York, but I’m afraid to walk down the street.”
David rose up from the desk and came to sit in the armchair close to Gabriela. “Now that’s crazy. The odds are far against anything happening to you. Or to me. You know that.”
“Sure I know that. But I don’t feel that. I feel like suddenly the world is a much more dangerous place!”
“It was always dangerous. We just didn’t focus on that.”
“Exactly. It wasn’t happening here. Well now it is happening to us. And I can’t ignore it now.”
David looked at this woman whom he loved and didn’t really have anything to tell her that would make her feel any better. Instead he was offering something that would scare her more. “I know. I feel it too. It is happening to us now. But I do think it is connected to the arrival of these other Earths – if only because the timing can’t be coincidental. And I feel I have to do everything I can do to help. And if I can meet with Captain Ragnar and whoever is the boss on The Lucky Dragon, then I need to do it.”
“But they aren’t
going to tell you anything.”
“I won’t know that until I ask.”
“Why can’t you just go talk to Plato? What does he think about all this?”
“I think this is what he was warning us about. But you’re right; I should talk to him too.” David breathed out slowly as he thought about what he knew he had to do. He felt like he had no choice. Somewhere earlier he had started down a path that led him now to meetings with these leaders from other Earths and he knew he just had to stay on the path. Even as he knew the path was getting more treacherous, he had to stay on it.
“Good. Then we can go to Planck’s island.”
“Yes, but not until after I go up to The Freya and The Lucky Dragon.”
Gabriela could see he was not going to change his mind. “But after that we can go to the island, right?”
“What is this ‘we can go’ thing?” David teased.
“Don’t even pretend to think you can go without me!”
The same shuttle came to pick David up at the same place as the last time. The same soldier was on board and once again gave him a quick security check. The soldier seemed as bored with his task as any airport security guard. The only real difference was there was no x-ray machine and he was allowed to keep his small bottles of water.
David sat at the same table in The Freya’s lounge as he had the last time he had interviewed the Captain. This time he had more time to look around as Captain Ragnar had not yet arrived. He was struck how similar this lounge looked to that of the U.S. Navy ship lounges he had been on when he was researching an article on an advanced model of a Destroyer class ship. There was even what looked like a big refrigerator and next to it a microwave oven. The few tables and chairs looked made out of aluminum and plastic. It certainly did not look particularly space age.
It also struck him this time that the ship was probably not that large. The lounge looked like it could only accommodate about twenty people at a time and he thought he recognized a couple of people from the last time he was there. He wondered if there was some minimum number of people required to meditate together to move the ship through the dimensions necessary to transport the Freya from its world to this Earth. He made a note to talk to Plato about that.
He also started noticing that the people he had seen walking in the hallways or sitting in the lounge seemed to fall into two groups. Though all wore the same uniform, some looked much more militaristic in them than others. The ones who looked like they didn’t belong in a uniform had a more calm and slow moving way of being. David noticed too that the two groups didn’t mix. The non-militants seemed to be there at the sufferance of the real soldiers. To David’s perception they seemed a recent adjunct to the crew.
After a five minute wait, the Captain arrived. He greeted David with a handshake and a quick and limited smile and took a seat. Captain Ragnar looked across the table at David Randall. He had quickly agreed to be interviewed this second time by David because he preferred putting his message across in the press rather than the TV media. With the press, messages could be more carefully crafted and one could always claim to have been misquoted or not understood. Visual media was too immediate and too subject to impressions. And he knew that he did not come across sufficiently amiable and friendly. He liked the indirectness of the print media.
He liked the timing of this interview as well as the fact that the interviewer was the foremost science writer and not a writer who wrote the usual front page news. Though very satisfied with the onslaught of recent terrorism, he did not want to be closely tied to it. He very much wanted to appear to be above it all. And he knew he needed to make that point.
David started by asking some warm up questions about how he was finding this Earth to be different from his Earth. As he had before, his answers made it appear that the two Earths were pretty similar. And he shared how he missed his wife and two children and looked forward to seeing them soon. He found he like talking about his non-existent family.
He was waiting for David to bring up the issue of the upsurge in terrorism and soon David did.
“So Captain, as you probably know a lot of people think that this recent wave of terrorism is somehow the result of your arrival and that of the other two ships from other Earths. What do you have to say about that?”
The Captain gave David his most concerned and sincere look. “The recent events are horrible to be sure. And I cannot really say what actions might have been taken by The Lucky Dragon or by The Bucephalus, but I can assure you we had no direct hand in any of it. But that is not to say that the increase in terrorist activity is unrelated to our arrival and the arrival of the others.”
“And how is that?” David asked.
“The political situation on your planet is very unstable. With the arrival of what your people think of as three ships from outer space, tensions and anxieties and uncertainty is certain to increase. Plus there is the very strangeness of the Participatory Physics that they are learning about. These raise very unsettling issues and concerns. One’s very worldview is shown to have been wrong at a fundamental level. Put all that together with religious extremists and long simmering nationalistic rivalries and it is like lighting a match in a fireworks factory. There are bound to be explosions. Our arrival is the incendiary factor – even though we took no provocative actions. When we have arrived in similar circumstances on other Earths where the local governments are more in control, there has not been any sudden increase in violence.”
David considered the response, and then said, “So you think that we are essentially responsible for these recent acts of terror?”
“You must admit the problems preceded our arrival.”
David nodded, “That is certainly true. But there are rumors of heightened provocations by unknown participants.”
“I don’t know of such rumors,” the Captain said.
“For instance, “David persisted, “It seems that there is circulating through the Islamist extremist community the idea that on other Earths, Islam is much more powerful and that the Muslims here are somehow deficient in their commitment to Allah.”
“Again, I’m sorry I don’t know of that. But it is true that Islam is far more powerful on other Earths.”
David decided he needed to change directions. “So Captain, what are your plans here now that you’ve been here a while?”
“Well we are still learning about your Earth. But I will tell you confidentially that we are in discussions with companies here over the sharing of intellectual capital. Our scientists have gone down different paths and I believe we have much to trade.”
“Could you give some examples of that?”
The Captain waved the subject off. “That would be premature for now. But we are quite satisfied with how things are progressing.”
David thought about the Captain’s assessment. Even allowing for cultural differences, the Captain seemed rather smug in his final comment.
Looking around at The Freya’s military austerity and the uniforms and demeanor of the crew who passed through the lounge, David couldn’t quite reconcile what he saw with the Captain’s statements that their mission was to find trading partners for intellectual property.
The Captain watched David leave with one of the men he had ordered to escort David back to his car. He was pleased with the interview and wondered how much more media he should do. He didn’t like the attention and he didn’t like dealing with the media. Though necessary, he thought nothing good could come of it. Still, he had needed to be public in his denials. As things continued to worsen, it would be increasingly important to have his denials on record. And as he knew better than anyone, events were going to get much worse. So he would place blame on everyone but himself. In fact he needed to think more on how to do that best. People would believe what they read in the newspaper.
Chapter Thirteen
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastro
phe.”
Albert Einstein
Hank Scarpetti sunk down into the corner of the sofa across from where the President was sitting in a facing sofa in the Oval Office. Though only the middle of the afternoon, he was bone deep tired. Still, he thought he looked and felt better than the President. The last ten days had been brutal and it showed on the President’s face. He looked like he had aged ten years in just the ten days. He was slumped down, his face pale and slack and his eyes seemed to just randomly stare at things without any real comprehension of what he was looking at. Scarpetti realized he probably looked the same way. Right then both men had centered their gaze into the unlit fireplace at the north end of the room.
They had both just come out of another emergency meeting in the Situation Room. The meeting had accomplished nothing. Thoughtless recommendations had been tossed around by the cabinet members desperate to act as if they knew what to do. But they didn’t. All they really accomplished was to share with each other all the real and imagined security threats that seemed to be popping up everywhere now. The intelligence briefings were jammed with fact-less rumors of devastating events and fearful ‘what-ifs’ that showcased real vulnerabilities. And then there were the things that were certainly true. And they were horrible as well.
After a few long silent moments the President turned his gaze from the formless depths of the fireplace to the haggard face of his Chief of Staff. “We need to do something!” President Morningstar declared. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
Quantum Times Page 25
