by Scott Mackay
‘‘Don’t do that. There’s no point in upsetting the apple cart this late in the game.’’
‘‘We’ll let the president decide that.’’
While Fye was gone, Cam fretted about the outcome. He considered the possibility of mutiny, going ahead and doing what he had to do despite whatever the president decided on. He stared out the polycarbonate dome at deep space. He tried to feel the Builders. If only they would come to him again. Give him some sign. Reach through the multiple dimensions in which they lived and finally proclaim the human race worth saving. But they felt distant, inaccessible, and by the time Fye came back a couple hours later, his stomach was tight with anxiety.
Fye’s brow was knuckled toward the middle. ‘‘They’re not happy with you. They feel they’ve been misled. I’m to relieve you of responsibility.’’
A stab of panic shot through Cam’s body. ‘‘What?’’
‘‘Nolan Pratt has submitted a report.’’
‘‘And?’’
‘‘We’ve reduced the hydrogen drain by only six percent. It’s statistically insignificant and won’t make any difference to the red giant process going on in our sun. God, I wish I knew why they were doing this. Why us? Why our sun?’’
‘‘And you told the president that we’re missing three of our accelerators?’’
‘‘Even if we had the other three online . . . the president was under the impression you’d given him ironclad guarantees. He’s worried about the political fallout.’’
‘‘Oren, listen carefully to what you’re saying. Political fallout’s not going to matter if we don’t bring the Builders into focus.’’
‘‘All I see is a big lie. Your own theoretical work was driving you all along. And we fell for it.’’
‘‘I’m telling you, the Builders are going to notice this. It’s the anomaly they’ve been looking for. This is like a black marble in a pile of white ones. They’re going to notice. They can’t not notice.’’
‘‘I’m going to need all your access codes.’’
‘‘So you’re going to put me in cuffs?’’
Fye looked away. ‘‘I don’t want to die.’’
‘‘Then just let me do my work.’’
‘‘You want me to collude in mutiny.’’
‘‘Yes, I do.’’
‘‘They want you yanked. They say you’ve failed.’’
‘‘In my gut, I know I haven’t.’’
Fye frowned. ‘‘Don’t talk to me about your gut. You’re a scientist.’’
‘‘Yes, but the Builders left planted in me a seed . . . an idea . . . that beyond the fringe of Euclidian, Newtonian, and quantum physics, way out there at the frontier, things are better explained by the gut than by mathematical equations so complicated that only a few people in the world can understand them. It’s where physics meets the spirit. And they’ve sensed this in us. This is what hyperdimensionality is.’’
Fye, showing an originality that surprised Cam, didn’t relieve him after all. ‘‘Carry on, Doctor.’’
‘‘What about the president?’’
The corpulent agent sighed. ‘‘I’ll draft my resignation this afternoon.’’
Over the next fourteen hours, ninety-two Builder energy cells arrived. While Cam felt within himself the same indescribable sense of expansion again, he also felt immense relief because Guarneri seemed to be doing what it was meant to do after all. Just as Alpha Vehicle had come to inspect Stradivari, so these energy cells flocked around in shades that flickered between ultramarine and turquoise to inspect Guarneri. Stranger still, they seemed to quiver in and out of sight as they came close to Cremona’s polycarbonate dome. Cam understood that they were really quivering in and out of time, reminding him of the way electrons crossed transits instantaneously in atoms, without traversing the space in between. Each one was about the size of a car, and within the ultramarine plasma, blue lightning branched in a thousand rootlike patterns. Where he moved within the Tecumseh, so they followed around the outside hull. Were these the sensory organs of the Builders, then?
Fye grew anxious. ‘‘It’s like we’re in a small raft surrounded by dozens of whales.’’
When Fye communicated with Blunt, he discovered that his messages came and went instantaneously. It was as if the mere presence of the energy cells created a local medium of hyperdimensionality that bent time and curved space.
‘‘Langdon says he finds current developments promising and asks that you resume your duties.’’
‘‘So he hasn’t accepted your resignation?’’
‘‘Gielgud turned it down. The president didn’t even see it.’’
While Fye might have felt anxious about being surrounded by this strange pod of space-faring blue whales, Cam, for the first time since his Navasota Builder-induced episode, experienced a release of all tension.
Lesha told him he was being remote. ‘‘It’s like you’ve gone away some place.’’
He reached up and stroked her face, and experienced love not as an emotional reaction but as a physiological change, a further sense that he was undergoing a great expansion, that though he was small on the outside, he was infinitely big on the inside. His love for her was like a thing alive, a phenomenon that had taken root so deeply and was so fundamentally a part of the universe’s flux around him that he began to think that maybe it had a physical basis, that if they had instruments sensitive enough to see beyond the gluons and quarks, they might at last break through a barrier and observe a completely different realm of particles that had to do with love and other emotions. Crazy, but maybe just crazy enough.
His anxiety returned when the rest of the crew began to flicker. This happened a few hours after the approach of the last energy cell.
He pulled himself down the hub to the mess bay to get some juice, and found Stella Watson and Daniel Uttal investigating one of the vents, holding up a maintenance scanner.
‘‘What’s the problem?’’ he asked.
Stella said, ‘‘For reasons we can’t readily explain, the oxygen-nitrogen mix of our air supply has changed significantly, and we’re now registering more oxygen in the constituents. In other words, things are happening on an atomic level.’’
That’s when Stella, dark, intense, with the body of an Olympic gymnast, flickered. She became like a Christmas tree light with a faulty connection. In addition, she and Daniel seemed to red-shift. Then blue-shift. Then become normal again.
‘‘Did you see that?’’ Cam asked.
They were staring at him. Daniel said, ‘‘You disappeared.’’
‘‘What?’’
Then both of them flickered again, and they were again surrounded by red and blue. He realized it was himself who was actually doing the flickering. He couldn’t help thinking of the 3-D comics he had owned as boy, what they looked like before you put on the red and green 3-D glasses, with all the images blurred by scarlet and beryl. It made him anxious, but he also thought that it was starting to happen, that for whatever reason, the Builders had chosen him yet again as a conduit.
Ochoa and Lesha took him to the surgery. Ochoa ran the battery on him. When the doctor was finished, he glanced at Lesha. Ochoa’s face was set.
He said something to Lesha, but just as he spoke, the music started up again, and Cam was so startled by its return, he didn’t immediately understand what the doctor said. It was like he was looking at Ochoa from the wrong end of a telescope. The music commenced with a single tone, and in timbre it reminded him of a piano, the pure crystal sound of a felt hammer striking a metal wire, perfect in its fullness and sustainability. This single tone was followed by two other tones, both the same pitch but each half the length of the first tone. This pattern was repeated for quite some time, one long, two short, as if this were the only possible combination. He couldn’t help thinking of binary code, the on, and the off.
He went somewhere. He wasn’t in the room anymore. For several seconds, the Tecumseh disappeared, and he floated in space by himself.
He looked around. He lifted his hand. He was unprotected, adrift in the merciless void, but no tissue damage occurred. He took a deep breath and felt as if he were breathing something far more rarefied than air. To his right, he saw the sun festering like a boil about to burst, angry, red, awash with solar hurricanes. He saw slanting bands of purple immediately above him, the same purple bands he had seen during the last episode. These bands seemed both impossibly distant yet excruciatingly near. The Builders. He was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of anticipation. He knew that this was it, that a truly meaningful First Contact was about to occur.
Then he heard someone calling him.
‘‘Dr. Conrad.’’ The purple bands in outer space dimmed. ‘‘Dr. Conrad . . . can you hear me?’’
He felt suddenly squeezed into a tight space, as if, having existed in all times and all spaces for eternity, he was now in a definite moment, a definite space, and that the overall dimensionality of his existence had been drastically reduced. The Tecumseh coalesced around him, red-shifting and blue-shifting, finally coming back into focus.
Lesha, Ochoa, and Fye leaned over him. Lesha’s eyes were wide, terrified, and she said, ‘‘You vanished, then came back.’’
She gripped his hand; he loved the feel of her hand, the fleshy part at the ball of her thumb, the pressure of each individual finger.
The doctor made him understand that he was suffering from a dangerous arrhythmia, and was injecting him full of drugs.
‘‘Arrhythmia?’’
‘‘It’s like your body can’t take the stress of what they’re doing to you.’’
In other words, he wasn’t necessarily designed to survive in hyperdimensionality.
Fye was standing over him like a buddy-soldier. ‘‘You’ve got to hang in there, Dr. Conrad. In the last two days, since you’ve been gone . . .’’ And Cam had to wonder, had it really been two days? Floating out there in space with the purple bands? Those spectral analogies by which the Builders seemed most comfortable in representing themselves? ‘‘And the energy cells are all over the place. Another ninety-two, and then another ninety-two after that.’’ So, really two days? He decided that time, and the experience of time, were two different things, and that if he was ever going to understand the Builders, he would have to embrace the concept. ‘‘You spoke in the different languages again, Dr. Conrad. And Dr. Ochoa has detected increased activity in your sylvan fissure. The outflow of hydrogen from the sun has shown periods of stabilization, and we think the Builders are doing that. It’s like they’re trying to make up their mind. So you’ve got to hang on, Dr. Conrad. You’ve got to talk to them. Let them know we’re here.’’
Yet as the chosen nexus for interdimensional contact, Cam couldn’t hang on, even though the stakes were so desperately high. The arrhythmia got the better of him, and he realized that floating out in the void with the Builders had indeed been a great strain, and that some of his family history of cardiac disease might at last be catching up with him, just as Johnsie Dunlap had suggested after the first episode. An excruciating pain enveloped the left side of his chest, and he came screaming back to his own dimension with all the vulnerability of a biological creature in the grip of a heart attack he simply didn’t have the wherewithal to fight.
32
Back on Earth, Lesha sat in a critical care room at Johns Hopkins staring at Cam, wondering if he would ever reemerge. Special equipment from Brookhaven National Laboratory had been moved in, instruments she used to measure what she was now calling the Fade. She couldn’t explain it, only that it seemed to have something to do with what Cam had been saying about virtual particles fluxing in and out of existence.
The Fade was happening right now.
She analyzed the data on her screen. While certain particles around Cam seemed to materialize out of their own quantum potential, others were sucked into a subgravitational skin that was just below the event horizon of the whole bizarre phenomenon, and disappeared forever. Her equipment gave her an imperfect approximation.
In terms of naked visual assessment, he seemed to vanish, but only because he reflected with minute precision and exact resolution all the things around him, like Alpha Vehicle did. She tossed a pencil toward him as he faded, and the pencil was pushed away as if by a strong breeze, a hypergravitational effect similar to what Alpha Vehicle produced. Her heart contracted, and her throat thickened with anguish, and she was so afraid of losing him she could hardly breathe.
Dr. Jeffrey Ochoa came a few hours later.
As he entered the room, his lips were set, and his green eyes focused, drilling through the air with uncharacteristic intensity. Ochoa, usually so impeccably groomed, had let his beard grow, as if, with the end so near, he felt he could let himself go.
Coming to within a meter of his patient, Dr. Ochoa looked at Lesha with mounting anticipation. ‘‘Any sign of what we would call normal consciousness?’’
This was the other thing—the way Ochoa spoke now, everything always qualified, each sentence, phrase, and word accompanied by implicit caveats, quid pro quos, and loopholes.
‘‘No. But he’s been flickering again.’’
‘‘You understand this is beyond my expertise.’’
The heartfelt concern in his voice was genuine—it wasn’t a question of medical responsibility anymore, but the compassion of one human being for another in a situation nobody could control.
‘‘Did you get the scans back?’’ asked Lesha.
Ochoa’s head shifted. ‘‘Yes. Would you like to see them?’’
Lesha hesitated.
‘‘Don’t worry,’’ said Ochoa. ‘‘I’ll call the nurse to watch him.’’
Lesha said, ‘‘I’m worried he’s going to flicker out of existence, or to a higher plane, or to wherever they are.’’
Ochoa gave Lesha’s worry a moment, then said, ‘‘I don’t know what to make of the scans. But you’re a scientist. And you and him . . . maybe you can . . .’’
Lesha took a deep breath and stroked Cam’s head. ‘‘Sure.’’
A few minutes later, they were looking at slice-by-slice views of Cam’s brain.
‘‘None of the normal structures are visible,’’ said Ochoa. ‘‘In fact, you can hardly make out the left and right hemispheres at all. As you can see, our scanning equipment has recovered nothing but a brilliant wash of light. Laser measurement has come back off the scale. We don’t know whether it’s a machine malfunction, a technical error, or in fact an accurate reading. If so, certain structures of his brain—those same internal structures that are now obscured by this . . . zone of light—can no longer be measured in centimeters, but must be calculated in parsecs. What’s particularly striking is how his brain, like the universe, seems to be expanding.’’
Lesha stared at the scans. She saw the shape of Cam’s skull. But within the cranial casing, his brain was like a star. She reached out and pressed her fingertips against one of the images. She wanted to go with him, wherever he was going, but she knew he had to make the journey alone.
She turned to Dr. Ochoa. ‘‘He’s with them, isn’t he?’’
Dr. Ochoa lifted his chin as he contemplated the scan. ‘‘I certainly hope so.’’
The president came the following day. A small entourage accompanied him. There was no media, but the presidential photographer was there, and he took a number of stills of the leader standing beside Cam, some with Langdon looking thoughtful, others serious, one with a cell phone pressed to his ear. Cam stabilized dimensionally while this activity took place.
It wasn’t until the photographer went away that the president actually came over and had a few words with Lesha.
‘‘I’ve spoken to Dr. Ochoa. You’ve seen the Fade?’’
‘‘Several times.’’
‘‘Has Dr. Conrad shown even a trace of consciousness while you’ve been with him?’’
‘‘No. He’s comatose.’’
‘‘Dr. Ochoa says he can’t get this arrhythmia un
der control, that every time Dr. Conrad comes back from one of these flickering episodes, it starts up.’’ With a bluntness the president was known for, he added, ‘‘He says he might have another heart attack. And if he does . . .’’
She looked at Cam. He was now hooked to a ventilator. And a catheter. And a feeding tube. Despite the feeding tube, he had lost weight. He looked like an old man. Each day, she shaved his face. She turned back to the president. Standing next to him like this, she was again unsettled by how short the man was, no more than five-one or -two. The scrutiny in Langdon’s eyes made her quiver. World leaders were only human, but Langdon seemed to be a breed apart. She felt the insistence of his will as his eyes bored into hers.
‘‘What’s your gut feeling?’’ he asked.
Her eyes widened as she remembered the way Cam always talked about gut feelings. Perhaps the president understood the universe after all. ‘‘I don’t know if they’re going to take him away for good, Mr. President, like they did Dr. Tennant.’’
‘‘If they were going to take him away for good, he would have been gone by now. Like Dr. Tennant.’’
She shook her head. ‘‘If only he weren’t weakening.’’
‘‘Lieutenant Colonel Fye says you and he are . . .’’
She nodded.
‘‘Then do what you can to keep him alive. Sometimes it takes more than medicine. I know my wife prays for me every day. And it seems to help.’’ He motioned out the window where the world was white with warm steam. He looked like he was about to say something but then gave up. His lips came together, and he glanced at his staff; she had the sense he just wanted to get away from them, that some time alone was all he really needed. ‘‘Guarneri has been destroyed, by the way. The Builders knocked it out at oh four hundred hours this morning.’’ His face reddened suddenly. ‘‘If he’s in touch with them . . . if there’s anything he can do . . .’’
Her body released low-level doses of adrenaline into her bloodstream at the news of Guarneri’s destruction. ‘‘So the hydrogen drain?’’
A tired grin came to Langdon’s face. ‘‘Guarneri was only ever marginally effective with that.’’
