CHAPTER TWENTY
On the surface—literally—Border Town was not an impressive place. It was a faded red pole barn with a pile of rusted automobile parts drifted against its back wall, the property bounded at the perimeter by a few cracked and leaning posts that had once been a split-rail fence. Just visible against the flatlands that planed to the horizon on all sides, a gravel track wandered southwest across fifty miles of nothing.
Nothing that could be seen, at least. The barren landscape probably concealed enough firepower to repel a military assault. Even American military.
Travis stood at an open bay door of the barn, alongside Paige and fifteen others who made up a larger version of the teams he’d met in Alaska. He’d heard the proper terms for them now: the units were called detachments, and their members were known as operators. At the moment, each of the fifteen was dressed casually, weapons and armor stowed in green plastic carrying cases, though their bodies and expressions marked them as hardened, well trained. Paige had the same look. No doubt she’d come up through their ranks, though it was obvious now that she outranked everyone present.
Something glinted in the washed-out blue sky to the west. It resolved into what Travis expected: a blank, white 747.
Two F–16s accompanied it. As it began its final approach, they broke away and went into a circling pattern high above the desert. Travis had an idea that such escorts would be standard procedure for Tangent flights from now on, after what’d happened to Box Kite.
A minute later the 747 landed a quarter mile away on what looked like unmarked scrubland. Travis and the others drove to it in three electric vehicles with all-terrain wheels, the same sort of vehicle he’d ridden in earlier, while hooded. Only as they closed the last fifty feet to the aircraft, and the ground beneath the carts smoothed out to unnatural perfection, did Travis realize he’d been staring at a runway all along. The tarmac had been mixed with an additive so that it matched the landscape perfectly, and even landform shadows and patches of vegetation had been painted onto it. To any aircraft or satellite, it would be invisible, day or night. He wondered how the pilots who landed here lined up on it, and then saw the answer: tiny lights lined the edge, their plastic casings roughened and browned like their surroundings. They weren’t shining. Hadn’t been a moment ago, either. They were probably ultraviolet, visible only with the right gear.
In the deep shadow of the 747’s wing, a door opened, pulled in by a crewman standing in what should have been the luggage hold. Travis could see an interior staircase behind the man, leading up to the main level. Had he investigated further aboard Box Kite, no doubt he would have found an identical setup.
Paige and the others began unloading their gear and taking it to the plane. Travis helped. Among the carrying cases he saw two that were different: black instead of green. He didn’t need to ask their significance.
A few minutes later they were climbing, the F–16s falling in at the 747’s wingtips again. The aircraft banked into a northeast line, bound for Switzerland by the shortest route, across the top of the world.
The plane’s floor plan was the same as Box Kite’s. Travis sat in a large chair, facing Paige, in the counterpart to the room where he’d found Ellen Garner wide-eyed and dead. Out the window, Wyoming stretched east toward Nebraska, vast and brown and empty.
“You really never wonder?” Travis said.
Paige looked up at him. “I’m sorry?”
“The Breach. You said you don’t even try to guess what’s on the other side. That’s hard to believe.”
She thought for a moment, then said, “We all wonder. But if there’s no way to test any one guess, no way to measure them against each other, it all comes to the same thing. We just don’t know.”
“Whoever’s on the other side,” Travis said, “the tunnel would’ve had to open on their end too, right? You’d think they’d notice. And how are these objects coming through it? Is someone over there feeding them in, three or four times a day?”
“The popular guess is that we tapped into an existing network of tunnels. Some alien equivalent of those pneumatic tubes they use at the bank. Could be a delivery system limited to non-living objects. Maybe, right? Maybe not. Maybe’s a common word in Border Town.”
“Maybe you tapped into a garbage chute,” Travis said. “Maybe all this amazing stuff is just their trash.”
She smiled, seeming to surprise herself as she did. It was the first smile Travis had seen from her, and he thought it made the entire flight worthwhile.
“Haven’t heard that one before,” she said.
“Fresh eyes,” Travis said.
They were quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why can’t someone go through from this end?”
“There’s a resistance, right at the mouth of the tunnel. When you try to push something through, the resistance pushes back with something close to gravity force at first. But the force doubles about every three centimeters the further you go, so you don’t get very far. The woman we passed in the hallway, with the red hair, is Dr. Fagan. She’s done the most work studying the resistance force. She wants to break through it, find a way to contact whoever’s on the other side of the Breach.”
Somehow that notion affected Travis more deeply than anything they’d spoken of yet. Real contact with whoever—with whatever—was on the other end.
He saw recognition in Paige’s eyes, like it was obvious what he was thinking. Maybe it was. Maybe that idea struck everyone the same way, the first time they heard it.
“It’s not likely to work,” she said. “Even Fagan accepts that. If you could get past the initial barrier, the math would still be stacked against you. It gets into really strange stuff—Einstein, general relativity, time dilation—things we can calculate but not actually understand. Anyway, it all points to the same conclusion: whatever you sent through the Breach would just come back before it reached the far end. It might return months or years later, or—and this is more of a guess—it could actually come back before you sent it. Maybe long before.”
She watched Travis’s expression, then added, “Like I said, lots of maybes in Border Town.”
Travis nodded, then stared out at the country falling farther and farther below. A freeway crept by, running east to west, all but devoid of traffic.
“So, what exactly is at Seven Theaterstrasse?” he said at last.
Paige was quiet a moment before replying. “It’s not so much what’s there, as what the building itself is.”
“Which is?”
Another silence. Then: “A weapon.”
He turned from the window and looked at her. Waited for her to go on.
“Seven Theaterstrasse is where it’s all going to be decided,” she said. “It’s the choke point at the center of everything our enemy is planning. If we win there, everyone wins. And if we lose there—” She cut herself off, unwilling to say the rest, or maybe even think it.
After a moment she said, “None of this will make sense unless I start with the beginning. The essentials, at least.”
She thought about how best to get into it, and then began the story.
Two strange things happened in the spring of 1978: the first occurred five hundred feet beneath Wyoming, the second, five hundred feet south of Pennsylvania Avenue. The most powerful bureaucracy in the world, presented with the most important asset in history, chose to limit its own influence.
Over the weeks following the catastrophic failure of the Very Large Ion Collider facility at Wind Creek, the president of the United States and most of his cabinet were briefed on the details as they came in from inspectors on site. The trapped DOE personnel had all been hospitalized and released; along with thick nondisclosure agreements, they’d been provided with trauma counseling, some of which would probably be long-term. Ruben Ward remained in a coma; he’d been flown to Johns Hopkins, where so far there’d been no change in his condition.
On April 3, the first scientific inspection team entered the VLIC site. They
found that more than ninety objects had accumulated beneath the Breach—that term was well cemented even by then. If it hadn’t already been clear to everyone involved that this situation would call for delicate handling, the team’s findings brought the picture into razor-edged focus. In the eighty-seven-page report they filed after that first object survey, the word dangerous appeared more than two hundred times.
Upon receipt of the report, the president’s most senior advisors settled into discussion along predictable lines. How tight a stranglehold should be kept on this project? How limited should Congress’s awareness be? Which defense contractors should be brought on board, and how central a role should they play in making use of this strange new resource? Obviously those that had been the most generous during the election would have to be first in line, but how far back did the line go? Two companies? Maybe three?
Several hours into the first such meeting, the president turned to a man who’d said almost nothing so far: Peter Campbell, an MIT professor and, at thirty-three, the youngest member of the Science Council.
“You don’t appear to agree,” the president said.
“I don’t.”
“Then say what you’re thinking.”
Campbell chose his words carefully before he began.
“Does anyone in this room really believe we can keep this secret?” He allowed a few seconds of silence for an answer. None came. “Consider the spec data on the Manhattan Project. If there was ever a secret we needed to keep, that was it. How long did we manage? Two years. The Russian bomb program was under way within two years, at the latest. Think of the amount of knowledge they had to obtain from us to make their project work, and then consider that they need only learn two facts this time: that the Breach exists, and that the VLIC created it. After that, all the information they need is there for the taking. The specs on the VLIC were published in Scientific American five years before we finished building it.”
The vice president spoke up. “Russia developing its own Breach is problematic, but—”
“Russia, China, India, North and South Korea, Israel, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Saudi Arabia,” Campbell said. “Probably a few more I’m leaving out. Count on each of them to have it up and running inside of ten years. Our VLIC took a decade to build with Department of Energy funding. DOD would’ve gotten it done in half that time, and we should expect the same urgency in all of these countries.” He waved his own copy of the object report in front of him. “You want all their most generous defense contractors fucking around with this kind of stuff?”
Even years later, Campbell would lie awake wondering if one calculated use of the word fuck had saved the world. Certainly something in those few hundred words had struck a nerve, because the conversation tipped at that fulcrum and never managed to tip back. He’d aimed for their fears, that was all. He’d aimed for their fears and hit.
In the end, the president turned the inevitable question back to Campbell. What alternative approach did he propose?
Campbell had an answer. Take away the incentive for any other country to waste resources creating its own Breach. Share this one with all of them. Hold a secret summit with the leaders of these nations and their most respected scientists—but not their military-industrial tycoons. Be straight with them. Be upfront. Set in stone the only policy with a chance of avoiding chaos: the Breach should be overseen by a single organization loyal to the world as a whole and to no nation in particular. Let this group be composed of people with impeccable backgrounds in science and ethics—real ethics of human needs and liabilities, not the limited scope of any one culture’s religious morality. Let no one actively seek to join; anyone craving that much responsibility should never be trusted with it. Instead identify excellent candidates and recruit them. The member nations should protect and finance this group, but none should control it. Not even America.
“But the Breach is on our soil,” the defense secretary said. “We paid for what created it.”
“All the more legitimate our stance will be,” Campbell said. “Look, to whatever extent we flex our egos over this thing, we increase the chance of some other superpower saying, ‘Forget it, we’ll make our own.’ Once one of them does that, others will follow. The only way to prevent it is to be evenhanded. Think about it: wouldn’t we be grateful if one of them did the same, if one of their research facilities had accidentally generated this thing?”
“I don’t believe any other country would do that,” the president said.
“I don’t either,” Campbell said. “Which is why history will think so highly of you.”
The debate didn’t quite end that day, but over the spring and summer of 1978, nearly every decision ultimately went Campbell’s way. The group that would oversee the Breach was designated Tangent. Its objectives were simple: to organize and study everything that emerged; to draw scientific insight—if possible—from those observations and advance human knowledge; to prevent the Breach from ever becoming a wishbone between opposing parties.
And it worked.
For a while.
“My father’s strongest ally in the fight to create Tangent was a man named Aaron Pilgrim,” Paige said. “He was the president’s chief science advisor, and also one of the founders of the original VLIC project. Like my father, he went on to become one of Tangent’s highest-ranking decision makers, and was generally considered the smartest member of the organization. He was exceptionally good at figuring out the purposes of the strange and unique entities that came out of the Breach. In time, those were brought to Aaron Pilgrim first, by default.”
She paused. Stared out into the harsh sunlight on the plains.
“The Whisper came through in the summer of 1989. It had an attachment that kept it separate from its key, at first. But even switched off, it was dangerous as hell. The key only turns on the intelligence; the self-destructive aspect of it is always on. The first person who held it barehanded murdered two lab assistants and then cut his own throat with a pen. With its intelligence on, it triggers the same murder-suicide impulse, but on the scale of the entire world.”
Travis tried to recall the thing’s possession of him. He couldn’t. His memories of it, vague only a few hours earlier during the interrogations, were simply gone now. All he had left were memories of his own descriptions of the experience, but even those were going.
Paige saw his expression. “No one ever remembers,” she said. “In a few more hours, you’d forget you ever held it at all, without others reminding you. No idea why it does that.”
“Why did it save my life?” he said. “From the killer in the suit?”
“If we understand anything about its pattern, it works like this: first it addresses any needs on the part of the user. The more desperate the need, the better. So it helped you kill your attacker. And then—I’m guessing a little here—it gave you the ability to read the language you saw on my wall, because that’s a need too, if we’re going to prevent what’s coming.”
“But is that my need, or yours?”
“It’s everyone’s need now.”
The way she said it didn’t lend itself to doubt.
“So then what?” he said. “When it’s done with the user’s needs, it gets busy with its own?”
“Something like that. It may toy with the person for a while. Reveal some painful insight into an old wound, things like that. That may be why it uses a voice from the person’s past, one with a strong emotional impact. But yeah, it turns toward its own goals pretty quickly, and they’re always the same: cause as much harm in the world as possible, as quickly as possible.”
“Nice.”
“We understood all that about it, early on. The danger was so obvious, we considered locking it away and never studying it at all. But the potential for good was too big to ignore. It knows everything. And everything about everything. It knows how many blades of grass are in Kansas right now, and the length, angle, and arc of each one, and how the arc would change if the wind were
half a mile an hour stronger. It knows the cure for cancer. The cure for everything.”
“I assume you asked it.”
“We asked. We brought in late-stage cancer patients and let them hold it. Should’ve worked, right? But it didn’t. Either it didn’t consider their need compelling enough, or . . .” She hesitated to say the next part, then exhaled and went ahead. “Or it just didn’t want to tell us things like that.”
Travis waited for her to continue. She looked outside again, maybe reliving the angst the thing had inspired in her over the years.
“You probably don’t remember,” she said, “but when it switches from help mode to kill-the-world mode, the light changes.”
He didn’t remember, but took her word for it.
“The focus of our research, of Aaron Pilgrim’s research, was figuring out how to extend the first part, indefinitely if possible. How to control it, as a user, and not let it change. Pilgrim was the only one who ever gained any ground on it, in that regard. He learned how to keep it tame for minutes on end. And then indefinitely. He mastered it, by some combination of focus and . . . who knows? He said he didn’t even know. He just got to where he could control it, keep it talking to him as long as he wanted.”