It was a sphere of metal—titanium, perhaps, or something even more precious—roughly ten feet in diameter. It was polished to a mirror finish, so bright it shone like a second sun within the confines of the bay, and Crane could only look at it through squinted eyes. It appeared to be absolutely round. The only blemish on its surface was a tiny forest of sensors, lights, and robotic equipment that hung from its underside like moss on a ship’s hull. Two other identical metal spheres sat in cushioned and reinforced berths against a far wall.
“What is that?” he asked in a whisper.
“That, Dr. Crane, is the Marble. It’s what everything else here—everything else—works in support of.”
“Is that what is doing the digging?”
“No. A double-shielded tunnel-boring machine, depth modified, does that. The Marble’s current job is to follow the boring machine, shoring up the fresh sections of shaft with steel bands. Later—when the shaft is complete—the Marble’s job will shift to exploration and, ah, recovery.”
“Is it autonomous?”
“No. There is no way all its functions can be automated. It has revolving crews of three.”
“Crews? I don’t see any hatch.”
Admiral Spartan gave a dry bark that might have been a laugh. “At the depths we are working, Doctor, there can be no ‘hatch.’ Because of the pressure, the Marble must be perfectly round—it can’t depart from the spherical in any way.”
“So how do you get the crew in and out?”
“Once the crew is inside, the skin of the Marble is welded shut, then the weld is polished to a mirror finish.”
Crane whistled.
“Yes. That’s why each shift is twenty-four hours: entry and exit is so time-consuming. Luckily, as you can see, we have two backups, so while one is at work another can be prepped and resupplied. That way, work can continue around the clock.”
They lapsed into silence. Crane found himself unable to take his eyes from the brilliantly shining sphere. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Even so, it was hard to imagine three people crammed into such a tight space. He noticed a nearby viewscreen, showing a grainy image of the technicians hovering around the Marble: apparently, it was a video feed from inside the Marble itself.
“I gather you’re not convinced it’s Atlantis we’re after,” Spartan said drily. “But what we’re after is not your concern. The medical situation, on the other hand, is very much your concern. You’re not just answering to Asher anymore—you’re answering to me. It goes without saying that you are to discuss none of what you see here with anyone in the unclassified section. Your movements here will be monitored and you will need escorts to the more sensitive locations—at least at first. We’ll of course provide the tools or instruments you require. You’ve done classified work before, so you know the privilege—and responsibility—it entails. Abuse that privilege, and the next set of lights you’re hauled before won’t be for taking your photograph.”
At this, Crane at last pulled his eyes from the Marble and glanced at Spartan. The admiral wasn’t smiling.
“What has happened, exactly?” Crane asked.
Spartan swept his hand across the wall of glass, down toward the hanger deck below. “Until now, the Drilling Complex has been unaffected by whatever is making our people sick. But over the last twelve hours, three people in the complex have fallen ill.”
“What are the symptoms?”
“You can ask them yourself. There’s an emergency medical station on deck four. We’ve activated it, and you can use that as a temporary infirmary. I’ll have the workers report to you there.”
“Why wasn’t I told about these new cases?” Crane asked.
“You are being told about them. The workers are high security and, as such, aren’t permitted access to the unclassified levels.”
“I could use Dr. Bishop’s help.”
“She has limited access beyond the portal, on an emergency-only basis and accompanied by marines. We’ll deal with that situation if and when it becomes of critical importance. Now, if I may continue. In addition to the cases I mentioned, I have noticed others in the Complex who are becoming…psychologically affected.”
“Does Corbett know?”
“No, and he’s not going to. Corbett is, shall we say, porous. Any expertise he can offer should be filtered through you.” Spartan glanced at his watch. “I’ll have a detail take you back to your quarters. Get some sleep. I want you back at nine hundred hours tomorrow, and I want you fresh.”
Crane nodded slowly. “So that’s it. You’ve given me access because the rot’s setting in here, too.”
Spartan’s eyes narrowed. “You have a new job now, Doctor. It’s not enough just to learn what’s making people sick. You have to keep them healthy.” And he gestured again toward the Marble and the technicians that surrounded it. “Because everything, and everyone, in this Facility is dispensable—except the drilling. That must continue at all costs. This work is of vital importance, and I will not allow anything or anyone to slow us down. I’ll drive the Marble myself if I have to. Do I make myself clear?”
For a moment, the two men stared at each other. Then Crane gave a small nod.
“Crystal clear, sir,” he said.
24
Crane lay back wearily in his bed. It was almost three in the morning, and the Facility was quiet. He could just make out the slippery, seductive sounds of a jazz clarinet filtering through the shared bathroom: Roger Corbett was a fan of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.
The day had been filled with more surprise and wonder than any other he could remember. And yet he was so weary that the moment he closed his eyes he felt sleep steal toward him. But he could not sleep, not quite yet. There was one thing he had to do first.
He reached toward the desk and retrieved a manila folder. Opening it, he pulled out a short document: the eyewitness account Asher had mentioned of the actual sea-burial event. Rubbing his eyes blearily, he glanced at the top page. It was a large photograph of a sheet of illuminated manuscript: tiny blackletter script offset by colorful—if disquieting—border illustrations and a lavish initial capital. The vellum was badly worn along two horizontal lines where the sheet had apparently been folded, and its edges were darkened with handling and long years. The text was in Latin, but thankfully Asher’s researcher had supplied an English translation, which was appended to the photograph. Crane turned to the translation and began to read.
It was in the year of our lord 1397 that I, Jón Albarn, fisherman of Staafhörn, was made witness.
I had broken my arm most grievously at that time and was unable to sail my boat or ply my nets. Being on a day gone out to walk the cliffs, I at once noticed the heavens grow full bright, albeit the sky was cloud obscured. There came to my ears the sound of strange singing, as if of a multitude of voices, which made the very empyrean tremble.
I tarried not, but ran back forthwith to acquaint all the people of this revelation. But many folk of the village had heard with their own ears and seen with their own eyes and were making their way to the shingle beach. It being a Sunday, all the men of the village were at home with their families. And it was in but short order that the village was empty and all had gathered by the waters.
The heavens grew yet brighter still. There was a heaviness in the air that was passing strange, and many amongst us remarked at how the hair on our flesh grew light and stood on end.
All at once there came many bolts of lightning and thunderclaps. Then the clouds over the ocean came asunder, casting off rainbows and boiling mists as they did fall back. A hole appeared in the heavens. And through that hole shewed a giant Eye, wreathed in white flame. Pillars of light shone down from it, straight as any column, and the seas upon which the holy light fell grew most strangely calm.
All the people of the village were passing glad, for the Eye was of a great and wondrous beauty, bright beyond measure and girdled with dancing rainbows. And they all did talk of how the
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Almighty God had come to Staafhörn to favor us with His grace and benediction. The menfolk of the town began to speak amongst themselves of how we should sail out to the wondrous light, to praise the Lord and receive His blessing. One or two amongst us said, nay, the distance is too great across the sea. But the Eye was of such surpassing beauty, and the encircling fire of such purity and whiteness, that soon all had taken to the boats, eager to touch the divine light with their own hands and contrive that it should fall upon them. Only I was left behind: the boats were filled with all the town, men, women, and children, and with my arm sadly broken I could not sail myself. And so I made my way up to the cliffs in order to better behold this miracle.
In minutes the boats were laid out across the sea, three dozen or more, and all within singing hymns of praise and thanksgiving. And all the time from the cliff head I too gave thanks, that of all the towns in the Kingdom of Denmark the Lord had graced Staafhörn with His favor. It seemed as if the line of sailboats was being carried forthwith across the water at marvellous speed, despite a sore lack of wind, and whereas I prayed I also felt a melancholy in my heart, at being the only soul left behind.
Some short time passed, and the boats were less than a league away from land, when the great Eye began to slowly descend from the heavens. The clouds that wreathed it were still all a-boil, and great curtains of mist hung around it, shot through with countless rainbows. But now the column of white light that fell from the Eye to the surface of the sea was wont to change. I beheld that it began to twist, and bend, as if a living thing. And the face of the sea upon which it fell began to change also. Calm no longer, it started to boil, as if consumed by a great furnace. The sounds of ethereal singing grew louder, and yet the sounds no longer bespoke of heavenly voices. They rose higher and higher until they became like unto the shriek of a hare in a trap, so overmastering I fell to my knees and stopped my ears.
From the head of the cliff I could see the boats hesitate in their forward course. One or two stopped, while others tried to turn back. But it was as if the sea now lay in a great anger. Waterspouts began to appear around the column of light, rippling out with unseemly haste, like unto when a boulder is dropped into a small pond. And as the vast Eye descended, the column of light beneath turned into a pillar of white fire, all consuming and terrible to behold.
Now the boats were in full retreat. But then came a great earthquake, and the clouds parted with a monstrous roar, and it seemed that in an instant all the stars of heaven fell into the sea. Fantastical flames rose up where each fell, and there came a great multitude of steam, billowing outward from the center and obscuring all the boats from view.
I had fallen prostrate on the ground with the violence of the earthquake, but though I was sore afraid I could not take my eyes from the scene. The devouring mist was spreading even toward the shore, and through it I could see gouts of red and purple fire, shooting into the air like unto heaven, then falling back into the sea with a thousand tongues of flame. And through it all the great Eye descended, surrounded by flames so white and bright they pierced all, even the great mist. It seemed to me it dropped with a great deliberation. And when it did hit the surface of the sea, the firmament was riven by a shudder of such force and magnitude that it far surpassed any power of description. And these roars and quakes did continue for nigh unto an hour, shaking the earth with such violence I was certain the fabric of the land would tear itself apart. Only with the long passing of time did the groaning slowly pass away and the mists begin to clear.
O strange and terrible! It seemed the devil had falsely deceived the people of Staafhörn, luring them to a most lamentable end under angelic guise. Because when at last the mists did clear, the sea had turned a deep red and was covered as far as the eye could see with dead fish and other denizens of the deep—but of the fishing boats, or my fellow villagers, there was not the slightest sign. Yet in my lamentation and grief I was also sore perplexed, for would not Lucifer have stayed to gloat over his victory? But of the great Eye of white fire there was no sign. It was as if the awful fate of those in the three dozen boats was but a matter of indifference to the foul fiend.
For many days thereafter I wandered Denmark, telling my story to all that would listen and heed my warning. But forthwith, I was branded a heretic and quit the kingdom in fear of my life. I stop here at Grimwold Castle only briefly, for succor and sustenance; where I go from here I know not, but go I must.
Jón Albarn
Committed to paper by Martin of Brescia, who hereby gives solemn oath that this account has been faithfully recorded. Candlemas, anno Domini 1398.
When Crane at last put the pages aside, lay back, and turned off the light, the great weariness he felt had not abated. And yet he lay in bed, awake, his head filled with a single image: a vast eye, unblinking and wreathed in a pure white flame.
25
The door to John Marris’s lab was open, but Asher knocked anyway.
“Come in,” the cryptologist said.
Marris had the neatest lab in the Facility. Not a speck of dust was visible. Other than a half dozen manuals stacked carefully in one corner, his desk was empty except for keyboard and flat-screen terminal. There were no photographs, posters, or personal mementos of any kind. But, Asher reflected, that was typical of Marris: shy, withdrawn, almost secretive about his personal life and opinions alike. Wholly devoted to his work. Perfect qualities for a cryptologist.
What a shame, then, that his current project—such a short and apparently simple code—was proving so elusive.
Asher closed the door behind him, sat down in the sole visitor’s chair. “I got your message,” he said. “Any luck on the brute-force attacks?”
Marris shook his head.
“The random-byte filters?”
“Nothing intelligible.”
“I see.” Asher slumped in the chair. When he’d gotten the e-mail from Marris asking him to stop by at his earliest convenience, he’d felt a surge of hope that the man had deciphered the code. Coming from the phlegmatic Marris, “earliest convenience” was practically a shouted plea for immediate consultation. “What is it, then?”
Marris glanced at him, then looked away again. “I was wondering if, perhaps, we were approaching this decryption from the wrong angle.”
Asher frowned. “Explain.”
“Very well. Last night I was reading a book on the life of Alan Turing.”
This was no surprise to Asher. A consummate academic, Marris was working toward a second doctorate, this time in the history of computing—and Alan Turing was a seminal figure in early computer theory. “Go on.”
“Well…do you know what a Turing machine is?”
“You’d better refresh my memory.”
“In the 1930s, Alan Turing posited a theoretical computer known as a Turing machine. It was composed of a ‘tape,’ a paper ribbon of arbitrarily extendable length. This tape was covered with symbols from some finite alphabet. A ‘head’ would run over the tape, reading the symbols and interpreting them, based on a lookup table. The state of the head would change, depending on the symbols it read. The tape itself could store either data or ‘transitions,’ by which he meant small programs. In today’s computers, the tape would be the memory and the head the microprocessor. Turing declared this theoretical computer could solve any calculation.”
“Go on,” Asher said.
“I started thinking about this code we’re trying to decrypt.” And Marris waved his hand at the computer screen, where the signal emitted by the sentinel’s pulses of light sat, almost taunting in its brevity and opacity:
“I wondered: what if this was a Turing tape?” Marris continued. “What would these zeros and ones do if we ran them through a Turing machine?”
Slowly, Asher sat forward. “You’re suggesting those eighty bits…are a computer program?”
“I know it sounds crazy, sir—”
No crazier than the very fact of our being down here, Asher thought. ?
??Please continue.”
“Very well. First, I had to break the string of zeros and ones down into individual commands. I made the assumption that the initial values, five zeros and five ones, were placeholders to signify the length of each instruction—each digital ‘word’ thus being five bits in length. That left me with fourteen five-bit instructions.” Marris tapped a key, and the long string of numbers vanished, to be replaced by a series of ordered rows:
Asher stared at the screen. “Awfully short for a computer program.”
“Yes. Clearly, it would have to be a very simple computer program. And in machine language—the most basic, and universal, of digital languages.”
Asher nodded. “And then?”
“When I got to my office this morning, I wrote a short routine that would compare these values against a master list of standard machine-language instructions. The routine assigned all possible instructions to the values, one after another, and then checked to see if any workable computer program emerged.”
“What makes you think these—whoever is sending us the message uses the same kind of machine language instructions that we do?”
“At a binary level, sir, there are certain irreducible digital instructions that would be common to any conceivable computing device: increment, decrement, jump, skip if zero, Boolean logic. So I let the routine run and went on with my other work.”
Asher nodded.
“About twenty minutes ago, the routine completed its run.”