“… creating the very wealth that makes for generosity, and incidentally giving us the stars …”
Alex stood up. “Manella! What are you doing!”
“He’s stealing my valise!” June yelled. “He wants my data so he can scoop tonight’s presidential speech!”
Alex sighed. That sounded like Manella, all right. “Pedro,” he began. “You’ve already got an inside story any reporter would die for—”
Manella interrupted. “Lustig, you better have a—” He stopped with a gulp as June swiveled full circle to elbow him sharply below the sternum, then stamped on his foot and snatched the briefcase during her follow-through. But then, instead of rejoining the others, she spun about and ran away!
“S-stop her!” Pedro gasped. Something in his alarmed voice turned Alex’s heart cold. June held the valise in front of her, sprinting toward the towering resonator. “A bomb?” Teresa blurted, while Alex thought, But they checked for bombs!
At another level he simply couldn’t believe this was happening. June?
She leaped the railing surrounding the massive resonator, ducked under the snatching arm of a Maori security man, and launched herself toward the gleaming cylinder. At the final instant, another guard seized her waist, but June’s expression said it was already too late. People dove for cover as she yanked a hidden lever near the handle.
Alex winced, bracing for a sledgehammer blow.…
But nothing happened!
In the stunned silence, Glenn Spivey’s voice rambled on.
“… so with this message I’m sending a library of all the surface-coupling coefficients we’ve collected. Naturally, you’re ahead of us in most ways, but we’ve learned a few tricks too …”
June’s face flashed from triumph to astonishment to rage. She cursed, pounding the valise until it was dragged from her hands and hustled outside by some brave and very fleet security men. It was Pedro, then, who finally wrestled her away from the resonator and forced her into a chair. Alex switched off the sound of the colonel’s words, which now, suddenly, seemed mockingly irrelevant.
“So this was all a hoax, June? Spivey holds our attention while you sabotage the thumper?” His pulse pounded. To be deceived by the military man’s apparent sincerity was nothing next to the treachery of this woman he thought he knew.
“Oh Alex, you’re such a fool!” June laughed breathlessly and with a note of shrill overcompensation. “You can be sweet and I like you a lot. But how did you ever get to be so gullible?”
“Shut up,” Teresa said evenly, and though her tone was businesslike, June clearly saw dark threat in Teresa’s eyes. She shut up. They all waited silently for the security team to report. It seemed better to let adrenaline stop drumming in their ears before dealing with this unexpected enormity.
Joey came back shortly, bowing his head in apology. “No bomb after all, tohunga. It’s a liquid-suspension catalyst—a simple nanotech corrosion promoter—probably tailored to wreck the thumper’s piezogravitic characteristics. The stuff was supposed to spray when she pulled the lever, but the holes had been squished shut, so nothing came out. A lucky break. Lucky our reporter friend’s so strong.” Joey gestured toward Manella, who blinked in apparent surprise.
“His hand print covers the holes,” Joey explained. “Broke the hinge, too. Don’t nobody challenge that guy to a wrestling match.”
June shrugged when they all looked at her. “I got the idea from those scrubber enzymes Teresa keeps asking for, to clean her old shuttle. Your guards grew used to me bringing chemicals in little packages. Anyway, just a few drops would put you out of business. It takes days to grow a new resonator—all the time my employers needed.”
“You’re not trying to hold back much, are you?” Teresa asked.
“Why should I? If they don’t get my success code soon, they’ll assume I failed and shut you down by other means … a lot more violent than I tried to use! That’s why I volunteered to do this. You’re my friends. I don’t want you hurt.”
The murmuring techs obviously thought her statement bitterly ironic. And yet, at one level Alex believed her. Maybe I have to believe someone I’ve made love to cares about me … even if she turns betrayer for other reasons.
“They agreed to let me say this much if I failed,” June went on intensely. “To convince you to give up. Please, Alex, everybody, take my word for it. You’ve no idea who you’re up against!”
Someone brought a chair for Alex. He knew he must look drawn and unsteady, but going passive would be a mistake right now. He remained standing.
“What’s your success code? How would you tell them you’d succeeded?”
“You were planning to phone Spivey after hearing his pitch, no? I was to slip in a few words, to be overheard by my contact there—”
“What? You mean Spivey’s not your real boss?”
June’s eyes flicked away before returning to meet his. “What do you mean?” she asked a little too quickly. “Of course he’s …”
“Wait,” Pedro Manella interrupted. You’re right, Alex. Something’s fishy.” He moved closer to glower over June. “What did you mean when you said, ‘You have no idea who you’re up against’? You weren’t just speaking figuratively, were you? I think you meant it quite literally.”
June attempted nonchalance. “Did I?”
Pedro rubbed his hands. “I spent two months interviewing that kidnapper-torturer in London. You know, the one who called himself the ‘father confessor of Knightsbridge’? I learned a lot about persuasion techniques, writing that book. Does anyone have any bamboo shoots? Or we’ll make do with what’s in the kitchen.”
June laughed contemptuously. “You wouldn’t dare.” But her uncertainty grew apparent when she met Manella’s eyes.
“What do you mean, Pedro?” Teresa asked. “You think Spivey was telling the truth? That he’s as much a dupe as—as we’ve been?”
Alex appreciated her use of the plural. Of course, he deserved singling out as paramount dupe.
“You’re the astronaut, Captain,” Manella answered. “Did the colonel’s purported passion for new launch systems make sense? Given what you know about him?”
Teresa nodded grudgingly. “Y-e-e-s. Of course, maybe I want to believe. It makes Jason’s last work more noble. It means our leaders aren’t just TwenCen-style, nationalist assholes, but were trying a plan, however misguided—” She shook her head. “Glenn sounded sincere. But I just can’t say.”
“Well, there’s something else a lot less subjective, and that’s the question of why? What motive could Spivey and his bosses have to put this site out of business, if everything comes under international jurisdiction tonight anyway?”
“There’s only one reason possible,” Alex answered. “If taking us out was part of a scheme to stop those controls. Spivey admitted he didn’t want them.”
Teresa shook her head again. “No! He said he wanted them delayed, till gazer space launching was proven. But remember, he accepted the principle of long-term supervision.” Her brow furrowed. “Alex, none of this makes sense!”
He agreed. “What could anyone gain by causing turmoil now? If the president’s speech doesn’t disclose all, the Net will explode.”
“Not just the Net,” Manella added. “There will be chaos, strikes … and a gravity laser arms race. Poor nations and major corporations will blow city blocks out of their rivals’ capitals, or set off earthquakes or—” He shook his head. “Who on Earth could profit from such a situation?”
“Not Glenn Spivey,” Teresa affirmed, now with complete certainty.
“Nor any of the space powers,” Alex put in.
One of the techs asked, “Who does that leave, then?” They regarded June Morgan, who scanned the circle of nervous faces and sighed. “You’re all so smart, so modern. You’ve got your info-plaques and percomps and loyal little ferret programs to go fetch data for you. But what information? Only what’s in the Net, my dears.”
Alex frowned. “
What are you talking about?”
She glanced at her watch, nervously. “Look, I was supposed to report in well before this. At any moment, my—masters—will know I’ve failed, and move to settle things more dramatically. Please, Alex. Let me finish my job and call them—”
She was interrupted by a sudden, blaring alarm from one of the consoles. A technician rushed over to read its display. “I’m getting hunt resonance from two—no, three—large thumpers … in the Sahara, Canada, and somewhere in Siberia!”
June stood up, pulling when a guard grabbed her arm. “Too late. They must be getting nervous. Alex please, get everybody out of here!”
Teresa pushed close to the blond woman. “Who do you mean, they? I say we let Pedro do it his way …” She glanced to one side, but Alex was no longer there.
“Give me a projected resonance series for that combination!” he demanded, throwing himself into his work seat, slipping the subvocal device over his head. “Zoom onto the mantle-core boundary under Beta. Show me any likely power threads.”
“Putting it on now, to hunga.”
The recorded message had frozen on its last frame—depicting a hopeful-looking Glenn Spivey smiling into the camera. That image now vanished, replaced by the familiar cutaway Earth, resplendent in fiery complexity. From three northern points at its surface, pulsing columns of light thrust inward toward a rendezvous far below. The dot where they converged wavered as the beams kept sliding off each other.
“I’ve never seen those sites before,” one Tangoparu scientist said. But another commented, “I … think I might’ve. A couple of quick pulses yesterday, just after we hit the glacier. But the traces looked like those strange surface echoes we’ve been getting, so I assumed …”
To a trained eye, the intruder beams could be seen hunting for alignment in the energized, field-rich lower mantle. The Beta singularity, still orbiting through the enigmatic electricity of those zones, obliged by serving as their mirror, focusing the combined effort. The purple dot shimmered.
“They’re less experienced,” somebody near Alex muttered. “But they know what they’re doing.”
“Extrapolating now.… Gaia!” The first tech cried out. “The amplified beam’s going to come this way!”
Alex was too busy to turn his head, which would throw off the subvocal anyway. Using the delicate input device was a lot like running full tilt along a tightrope. Ironically, it was easier to order up a simulated image of his face than to use his own voice to shout a warning.
“Rip!” the imitation self cried out as he worked. “Get everyone but the controllers out of here. Take them west, you hear? West!”
Someone else might have had some romantic impulse to argue, but not Teresa. She’d evaluate the situation, decide there was little she could do here to help, and obey without hesitation. Sure enough, Alex heard her voice of command driving the others outside leaving his truncated team to work in relative peace.
The peace of a battlefield. Alex sensed the big, cylindrical resonator swing about at his command and begin throbbing its own contribution to a struggle being joined thousands of kilometers below. There followed something like a gravitational fencing match—his own beam countering and parrying the opposing three as they attempted to unite. Bouncing off Beta’s sparkling mirror, they passed through threadlike filigrees of transient superconductivity, which of late had taken on new orders of intricacy, rising from the core boundary in gauzy loops and splendid, shimmering bows.
Some time ago, Alex had likened the loops to “prominences”—those arcs of plasma one saw along the sun’s limb during an eclipse, which drove fierce currents from the star’s surface into space. Similar laws applied near the Earth’s core, though on vastly different scales. The comparison would have been interesting to contemplate if he weren’t busy fighting to save their lives.
Thousands of the mysterious strands vibrated as fingers of tuned gravity plucked them, stimulating the release of pent-up energy. Some rays scattered off Beta, sending augmented flashes spiraling randomly. There was no time to wonder how his opponents had learned to do this so quickly, or even who they were. Alex was too busy fending off their beams, preventing them from combining to create something coherent and cohesive and lethal.
Alex watched more and more shimmering filaments pulsate in time to his rhythms. Other flashes sparkled to the melodies of his unknown foes. Each flicker represented some great expanse of semimolten rock, millions of tons altering state at the whim of entities far above.
“We can’t hold them much longer!” One of the techs cried out.
“Wait! We have to work together,” Alex urged. “What if—”
He stopped talking abruptly as ripples flowed across the display, and the subvocal sent his amplified speech throbbing deep into the Earth’s interior. Alex switched to communicating with slight tremors in his larynx, letting the machine transmit a message to the others.
Take a look at this! He urged, and caused the Easter Island resonator to suddenly draw back from the acherontic struggle.
His opponents’ beams floundered in the abrupt lack of resistance, momentarily discomfited in overcompensation. Then, as if unable to believe the way was now clear, the three columns came together again tentatively.
Everybody else … out! He commanded. I’ll take it from here!
He heard chairs squeak and topple as his assistants took him at his word. Footsteps scrambled for the door. “Don’t wait too long, Alex!” someone shouted. But his attention was already focused as it never had been before. The enemy beams touched Beta, hunted, and at last found their resonance.
At that same moment, though, Alex felt a strange, fey oneness with the monster singularity. No matter how much the enemy must have learned—no doubt by snooping his files—he still knew Beta better than any living man!
If I wait till the very last millisecond …
Of course no human could control the beam with such fineness. Not in real time. So he chose his counterstroke in advance and delegated a program to act on his behalf. There was no chance to double-check the code.
Go! He unleashed his surrogate warrior at the last possible moment. Behind him, the resonator seemed to yowl an angry, almost feline battle cry.
It was already too late to flee. Alex quashed the adrenaline rush—a reaction inherited from ancient days when his ancestors used to seek out danger with their own eyes, meeting it with the power of their own limbs and their own tenacious wills. The last of these, at least, was valid still. He forced himself to wait calmly through the final fractions of a second, as fate came bulling toward him from the bowels of the Earth.
The Snake River Plain stretches, desolate and lined with cinder cones, from the Cascades all the way to Yellowstone, where outcrops of pale rhyolite gave the great park its name. As near Hawaii and several other places, a fierce needle here replaced the mantle’s normal, placid convection. Something slender and hot enough to melt granite had worked its way under the North American Plate, taking several million years to cut the wide valley.
That pace was quick, in geologic terms. But there was no law that said things could not go faster still.
• EXOSPHERE
They stopped running a kilometer or so to the west, but not because it was safe. No amount of distance offered protection against what might now be hurtling their way.
No, they halted because sedentary intellectuals could only run so far. Teresa took some satisfaction watching June Morgan pant, pale and winded. The woman was in pathetic shape. Serves her right, she thought, rationing herself a small dollop of cattiness. Since she was in charge, Teresa counted heads and quickly came up short.
Manella. Damn! She turned to the Maori security chief, “Keep everyone here, Joey. I’m going after Pedro. The jerk’s probably recording it all for posterity!”
She finished the thought as she ran downhill. Recording what it’s like to be at ground zero. The only ones to view his tape may be ETs at some distant star!
; Halfway to the resonator building, she saw a dozen men and women suddenly spill into the late-afternoon sunlight, tripping and scrambling as they fled her way. Good. Alex shouldn’t have stayed in the first place.
Then she realized that neither Pedro nor Alex was among them. “Shit!”
Now she sprinted, rushing past the fleeing technicians so quickly they seemed to blur. But then, the blurring wasn’t entirely an effect of motion. A tingling in her eyeballs and sinuses barely preceded a sharp ringing in her ears, which grew until church carillons seemed to boom around her. Even the dry grass bent and swayed to the pealing notes. Her feet danced of their own accord across the shifting surface.
The next thing Teresa knew, she had tumbled to the ground and was having a terrible time figuring out which way was up. It felt as if the earth had dropped away beneath her. Strong winds whipped at her clothes.
Is it my turn to go, then? The way Jason did?
Maybe I can stay conscious long enough to see the stars. To see my ultimate trajectory before I pass out.
She drew a deep breath, preparing to meet the sky.
But then the whirling seemed to settle. Teresa felt sharp-stemmed blades of grass cut her fingers as she clutched the stony soil. Her next hasty breath felt no thinner. Lifting her head despite a roaring vertigo, she saw a tipped slope, a patch of sea … and a great horrible face!
One of the giant statues, she realized in an instant. She’d fallen near some of the aboriginal monuments. More monoliths came into view as her visual distortions shifted from focus over to color.
Now everything was clear, crisp, but tinted in a flux of unaccustomed hues—eerie shades that surged and rippled across a much enlarged spectrum. Somehow, Teresa knew she must be seeing directly in the infrared, or ultraviolet, or other weird bands never meant for human eyes. The effect encouraged illusions … that the row of statues were trembling, shaking, like ancient sleeping gods answering an Olympian alarm.