Chapter 11

Pat Danielson was home. Her relief had turned to elation during Drefke's lecture to them the previous Friday afternoon. As he droned on in sombre tones, she slowly realized that he was not only reinstating them, he was granting Isaacs full authority to pursue Project QUAKER. She had invited Janine out to one of their favourite spots and had got gaily tipsy before dinner. Returning to the apartment, she had succumbed to a spontaneous urge and called her father in Los Angeles and made plans to spend the weekend with him.

She enjoyed it immensely, being back in the small house so flooded with childhood memories, now gently nostalgic in her buoyant good mood. She and her father took walks down familiar sidewalks, the cracks in them so much closer together than when she had played hopscotch along them. They talked long and avidly, sharing experiences past and present. More balm on the wound in their relation, now nearly invisible. Long Beach and the ocean were only two miles away. She spent Sunday afternoon on the beach, alternately body-surfing, jogging, and soaking up the sun, a teenager again. She rediscovered the simple pleasure of sitting on the seawall and watching the world go by — sunburned throngs on bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, even a few ordinary pedestrians, all in constant motion up and down the miles of beachfront sidewalk. She thought a lot about Project QUAKER and their scheduled meeting with Jason to renew their consultation. She thought about Alex Runyan. She looked forward to seeing him again.

Late Monday morning, she flew down to Son Diego and met Isaacs's incoming flight. By early afternoon, they were back in Ellison Gantt's room closeted with the same members of Jason. Both Wayne Plumps and Alex Runyan had greeted them on their arrival. Runyan, again in. shorts, T-shirt, and thongs, had attached himself to Danielson, escorting her with friendly chatter up the stairs and to a seat on the comfortable, slightly frayed sofa next to the portable blackboard. She had self-consciously enjoyed the attention. Now she looked around noting with amusement the tendency for people to resume the positions they had previously established, even three weeks before, some instinctual territoriality, she supposed. Noldt and Fletcher sat in the same chairs, next to the sofa. Noldt's round face beamed as he greeted her again. Fletcher had just come in from a run on the beach, his dark lean face still flushed and his hair wet from a shower. Gantt was again seated at his desk, looking as grey and undistinguishable as ever. Zicek and Leems came in. Leems scowled and took the chair by the door, but Zicek smiled and joined the pair on the sofa.

Plumps and Isaacs remained standing by the door until Zicek was seated, then Plumps spoke. 'Gentlemen, you remember Dr Danielson and Mr Isaacs and the novel problem they brought to us before. There have been a number of developments, among which is the change in status of this situation. They came to us informally before to seek what wisdom we had to offer. Now they are here on highest priority official status. I urge you to listen carefully to their new information and to address this problem with all the acumen at your command. I've no doubt that when you have heard the latest developments you'll need no further goad from me. Mr Isaacs.'

'Thank you. Professor Plumps.' Isaacs clasped his hands behind his back and looked around the room, last and longest at Harvey Leems seated close to his left side. 'You'll recall that Dr Danielson had predicted that our regular seismic, sonar signal was to impinge on Nagasaki on July 7 and on Dallas July 26, just a week ago.

'For Nagasaki we stationed a ground observer in the area and obtained high resolution aerial reconnaissance photographs. At about the predicted time, a chlorine tank in a nearby warehouse sprang a leak. A workman in the warehouse was killed by gas inhalation, and a number of others were hospitalized with lung damage. The tank was punctured with two holes approximately a centimetre in diameter. A vertical line through these holes was aligned with a similar hole in the concrete floor. The hole appeared to extend into the subsoil beneath the foundation, but there is a high water table and moist soil obliterated any sign after a few centimetres. The skylight above this line of holes was broken out. In the street we found a truck with its engine blown. There were signs of odd damage to it, but it had been moved and we can't determine with certainty that there is a connection. The aerial survey photos showed nothing.'

'While you're on that point,' Runyan interrupted. 'I had some astronomical colleagues take photos of the points in space the signal seems to travel between. Same result, zip.'

'I see,' said Isaacs. 'That's interesting.' And maybe not too smart, he thought to himself. If they had found something, a big goddamn cat could have been out of the bag.

'In Dallas ,' he continued, 'the details were different, but the overall picture was the same. Two buildings were damaged. In one, there is a hole roughly a centimetre across from the roof down through the basement. Again, evidence for penetration into the subsoil, but in Dallas it was too sandy to support the tunnel, or whatever it was. Once again there was a death, incidental, but related. A young woman was crushed when a structure collapsed on her.'

'How's that?' asked Noldt, his owlish face screwed in concentration.

'Well,' Isaacs paused, 'this was a two-storey place with a bar underneath and a strip joint upstairs.' He gestured with his hands flat, one above the other. 'The woman was, uh, dancing upstairs. This tunnel, or whatever it was, weakened a support structure on the stage and it collapsed on her.'

'I see,' said Noldt, sitting up straighter in his seat, a little embarrassed.

'A hundred metres away,' Isaacs continued, 'the rear quarter of a seven-storey building gave way and collapsed into the alley behind it. In this case, fortunately, no one was injured. The cause of the structural failure has not been positively determined, although some pieces of masonry show elongated gashes which bear similarity to the holes in the concrete floors in the other damaged buildings in Dallas and Nagasaki. Two agents in the area reported hearing a whistling noise of some kind. Their impression was that it receded up from the bar, and one of them thinks he heard it again about forty seconds later, prior, he believes, to the collapse of the building. There is no question now in my mind that this thing, whatever it is, causes physical damage, and that it was similar effects that damaged the Russian aircraft carrier, the Novorossiisk, and sank our destroyer, the Stinson.'

'You say,' remarked Zicek, 'that this phenomenon seems to have gone up and then down in Dallas , in consonance with your feeling that something goes back and forth in the earth.'

Isaacs nodded. 'I remind you that I remarked before I didn't see how any beam could do such a thing, reverse directions. That feeling seems to be reinforced with your new evidence.'

'Wait a second, now,' Leems broke in. 'What about satellite locations? I need to be convinced that more than one source isn't involved somehow, one shooting one way, one, the other.'

'I checked that,' Danielson responded to him. 'There are hundreds of Soviet satellites in orbit. Occasionally, there was a marginal coincidence of position with a single event, but no pattern that could explain all the incidents we know of. And no case when two satellites lined up on the trajectory simultaneously on opposite sides of the earth to account for the reversal of direction.'

She looked down and brushed a piece of lint from her skirt and then looked back at Leems.

'I also tracked all US, European, and Japanese satellites, with again the same null result. Nothing currently in orbit can account for what we have seen, even discounting the question of what the technology could be, something that could propagate through the earth.'

Beside her, Alex Runyan smiled lightly, taking pleasure in her neat parry. Leems scowled more deeply, but did not respond. After a long quiet moment, Danielson leaned around Runyan to address Zicek.

'Excuse me, Dr Zicek, but there's another thing that I'm not sure came out clearly just now. The marks that we've investigated, the holes in the concrete, look very clean. There's no sign of a great release of energy, no blackening, no melting or fusing of the material. Perhaps that makes the situation more confusing, but there's no indication of explosion or burning which you'd expect of radiation from a beam of energy. It looks more like the material was drilled out; it's just gone.'

The group of scientists fell silent, thinking. Fletcher and Noldt muttered to one another.

The idea hit Runyan like a physical blow. Suddenly he was encased in a suit of armour from neck to groin, three sizes too small. He stared at Danielson, and she returned his look, her right eyebrow arched quizzically.

Runyan felt as if he were balanced on a vertex. He sensed the grip of forces of which he had been unaware until moments ago. Danielson's words had lifted a curtain to reveal the crest and the chasm yawning immediately before him. Random moments from his career flashed out of his subconscious, and he perceived them as stepping stones that had led him inexorably up to this teetering edge. He had no choice but to take the step that would send him plummeting headlong down the other side.

He knew the antagonist. He knew the mathematical structure of its bones and sinews, its space-time stretched tight on this frame. He knew the roaring cauldron.deep inside which marked the boundary where knowledge stopped, but from where new beginnings would inevitably arise. He knew the men and women, past and present, who had pieced it together in their imaginations, fragment by careful fragment.

But this was not imagination. This was not mathematics. This was the most delicate dreams of the intellect come real in nightmare fashion. And that reality changed everything. Everything.

He had an urge to close his mind, as if by sealing off the thought he could seal the abyss, but he knew it was there. A dynamic, hurtling, all-consuming void.

'Do you have a pen, some paper?' Runyan whispered hoarsely to Danielson. He was scarcely breathing.

Danielson rummaged in her purse and produced a pen and a small airline cocktail napkin she had salvaged on the flight down.

'I only have -' she started to say.

'Fine' Runyan breathed, grabbing the pen and napkin, 'that'll do.'

He pressed the napkin onto his bare knee and began to scratch symbols and numbers on it, oblivious to the uncertain, dispirited conversation in the room. Danielson was confused by his action, but could feel a new tension radiating from him. She had trouble following the discussion. Even though he was completely ignoring her, she felt partially mesmerized by Runyan's newly focused intensity. She found this intensity, contrasted with a potential for warm amiability, strangely attractive.

Runyan was uncertain how much time had passed when he finally drew a long breath and let it out slowly. He banded the pen back to Danielson and locked eyes with her for a long moment. Then he stuffed the napkin into a pocket of his shorts and waited for a break in the discussion. At an appropriate point he poked a finger up.

Phillips nodded at him. 'Dr Runyan. You have a thought?'

Runyan lapped his fingers together and leaned forward, forearms on his bare knees. He pressed his thumbs in opposition, looked down at his hands and then up towards Phillips. His terrible conclusion was inescapable. Now he had to lead his colleagues down the same path.

'Let me see if I can speak to what is bothering all of us,' he said slowly and reflectively. 'We've been unable to account for any extraterrestrial source, natural or artificial. The fact that we're dealing with something that has a fixed direction in space suggests an origin out there.' He jerked a thumb towards the ceiling. 'But the basic phenomenon occurs within the depths of the earth.' He jabbed a long forefinger towards the floor. 'It only comes to the surface periodically.'

Danielson sat tensely on the sofa, partially turned towards Runyan, watching his eyes and mouth as he spoke. The words were neutral enough, but seemed darkly ominous to her, a cold vapour filling the room.

'Incredible as it seems,' Runyan continued, 'I think the conclusion we've been avoiding is that there is actually something inside the earth, something moving around through the earth, triggering seismic waves and tunnelling holes as it goes.'

He glanced sideways at Danielson, his eyes crinkled by a faint smile. 'I don't remember whether it was Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe who argued that one should throw out every impossible explanation, and the remaining one, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.' The smile faded. 'I've done something like that in my own mad and reached a conclusion, but it's bizarre, and I don't want to prejudice you with it yet. I'd like you 'o follow this line of reasoning and see where you think it leads.'

Runyan seemed to be sitting calmly, looking around at his colleagues, but Danielson happened to glance down at his feet. His toes were curled around the end of the thongs, gripping them, pale splotches on the knuckles contrasting with the tanned skin.

Across the room, Isaacs was staring at Runyan, mentally groping, trying to grasp the implications of the scientist's statements. The quiet was broken by Fletcher who sat up straight in his chair and muttered, 'Oh, Jesus.' He swivelled to look at Runyan. The two locked gazes and stared at one another for an extended moment. Then Fletcher broke off and waved a hand inviting Runyan to take the floor.

Runyan stood and made his way slowly to the blackboard, deep in thought. With a habit born of long hours in the classroom, he selected a moderately long piece of chalk from the tray before turning to face his audience.

'Let's forget the seismic signal itself and concentrate on the derived trajectory for a moment,' he began, unconsciously slipping into a pedagogical tone. He turned to the board and sketched a circle representing the earth, with a curved arrow above it indicating the direction of rotation. Then he added a straight line beginning a third of the way from the equator to the North Pole which passed through the centre of the circle and out the opposite side.

Watching the tip of the chalk, Danielson suddenly pictured a stiletto, piercing the earth. Her shoulders contracted in a brief shiver.

'The source moves like this,' Runyan tapped the line with the chalk, 'with a period of eighty minutes and thirty seconds. We can think of the earth as a sphere of roughly constant density which produces a certain gravitational potential. An object falling freely in that harmonic potential would oscillate back and forth along a line. To close approximation, the line would point to a fixed direction in space. The period would be eighty some-odd minutes.' He looked at Fletcher, then at Leems. 'Essentially the same as that of an earth-orbiting satellite.'

There were scattered rustlings in the room as a couple more individuals began to see where Runyan's arguments were leading.

'Now, if we consider the real earth,' Runyan continued, 'there would be some differences. A minor factor would be that the density of the earth is not constant. An orbiting object would feel a somewhat different gravitational pull than the idealized case I've described. That would alter the period of the trajectory somewhat. There could also be processional effects on the orientation, but all that's negligible for now.'

He looked around the room, focusing briefly on Danielson. Her stomach tightened as if his gaze were a physical grip. ml face was a sharp image against blurred surroundings. She could make out beads of sweat along his hairline.

'The significant feature,' Runyan continued, 'is that the path is anything like a free orbit since, as we all know, the earth resists quite effectively the attempt of any material. body to move through it. If I'm on the right track, the orbiting body can't be ordinary material.'

'Let me get this straight,' said Gantt. 'You're proposing that something is actually orbiting within the earth?'

'C'mon!' snorted Leems.

'That's the only picture that makes sense to me,' Runyan replied, his voice tensing at the implied scepticism. He turned to the board and drew heavily, repeatedly, on the line that slashed through the circle. 'Back and forth on a line fixed by the inertial frame of the stars, independent of the rotation of the earth. That's been one of the strangest features of the story Dr Danielson has told us.