9
GHOST
The universe-seed comes into being vested in inconceivable heat and light and beauty. No physics can describe it. Poetry comes closer: “Infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.” Yet it is more than even Blake could know or say. It is all of space and time encapsulated in a nexus of infinite density and infinite power and infinite fecundity. It is the source, the wellspring, the place where everything begins.
To Dr. John C. Adler, to any cosmologist really, it was the Holy of Holies. And now here he was, thirteen billion years hence, sitting on a small blue speck circling a dim ember of that long-ago glory, straining to catch the faintest echo of creation’s final chord.
And failing utterly.
Jack tossed on top of his bedroll — it was too sweltering to climb in — haunted by the specter of imminent defeat. Tonight even contemplation of the Infinite seemed powerless to quiet his churning thoughts, or break his mind free of their downward spiral.
To make matters worse, every time he was on the brink of dozing off, the generator would cycle on and haul him back to wakefulness.
Finally he sat up, pulled his boots on, and crawled out of his choum.
The endless subarctic twilight had given way to full night. Jack gazed up into darkness lit only by the ancient light of faraway suns. He heaved a sigh, then walked over to the table holding his laptop. Reached up to the sixty-watt bulb he’d strung on a cross-pole and tightened it in its socket. If the generator was going to keep him awake all night, the least it could do was supply the light needed to make the insomnia productive.
With yet another sigh, he sat down to resume his computer-mediated contemplation of the misbehaving SQUID. The laptop was still reporting all systems nominal, no repeats of last night’s ‘hiccup.’
Jack glanced over at the breadbox-sized insulated housing that contained the business end of the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device. Please, please, let it not be the SQUID. He’d all but signed his life away to get the highly experimental, half-million-dollar instrument released on loan from IBM’s Watson Research Center.
It had to be working!
And no reason it shouldn’t be. The device was so sensitive to magnetic anomalies that, until he’d programmed the computer to ignore them, it had been tracking the near-earth satellites passing overhead in their polar orbits. If the SQUID could do that across a hundred or so miles of empty space, what were a few miles of permafrost and solid rock?
A problem, evidently. The thing had already produced one false reading late last night. Jack hadn’t been awake to see the “ghost” go tracking across the display. Coming on top of three days worth of jetlag, the dust-up with Medvedev had completely done him in. It had been all he could do to start the calibration run before dragging himself into the choum and falling into a dreamless sleep.
But the SQUID, unsleeping, claimed it had tracked ... something.
A fluke. Had to be. Some glitch still lurking in the initialization routines, maybe, or the detection software itself. Sure, the signature matched his models for an object ‘orbiting’ far down within the earth. But that was the only thing that did match.
Deep as his quarry must’ve sunk by now, only the merest whisper, the slightest scintilla of distortion in the background geomagnetic field would mark its passage. His ‘ghost,’ on the other hand, was tracking way too big, or way too close.
This had all looked so good on the drawing board back in Austin. What the hell was going haywire out here in the field, where it counted?
Jack pondered a moment more, then got up to retrieve his Stetson from where it lay on the packed-earth floor of the choum. Logic wasn’t working, he might as well try magic. He put on his lucky hat and snapped the brim.
The flashing of the GPS told Yuri he had arrived. He found a secluded spot to beach the canoe, got out, and hauled it up on the Khushmo’s pebbly bank — slowly, so as to minimize the noise its bottom made scraping along. Then he straightened and stood listening.
At first all he could make out were the night calls of birds or beasts in the depths of the devil-take-it forest. Then he heard it, far off: the faint chug of a diesel generator.
The sound that would guide him the final half-kilometer or so to the killing ground.
A few things to do here first. Puffing and grunting, Yuri rolled the canoe on its side and eased the heavy steel cage out onto the bank. Its rank-smelling occupant uttered a low complaining growl, but continued to doze. No problem: Yuri had just the thing to wake it up.
A shake of the cage, and the sleeping beast shifted around enough to pin the haunch of one hind leg up against the bars. Perfect. Yuri withdrew a hypodermic from its shockproof sheath and administered the shot.
Now, one last thing. He slid the weapon case out from under the canoe’s single seat and, by the light of his flash, peered at the strange implement it contained: A set of spring-loaded metallic jaws, not unlike a miniature bear trap. Except that where any normal trap would have a stylized zigzag of teeth, here the metal had been shaped into replicas of real ones — a gleaming row of incisors bracketed by wickedly-curved canines.
A perfect match for those of the wolf now slowly awakening in its cage.
Yuri’s own steely grin made it a threesome.
Jack’s lucky Stetson seemed powerless against whatever Siberian voodoo had jinxed his instruments. His vision was beginning to blur from fatigue: he could barely make out the diagnostic readouts on the laptop’s display. Still he pushed himself. It was something simple, he was sure of it. Something so obvious he’d laugh out loud once he had it figured out.
He cocked an ear then. Had that been a sound from over in the trees? He sat stock-still, hardly breathing, listening for the snap of a twig, an animal cry, anything.
Nothing.
Jack shook his head to clear it. Darkness, fatigue, and solitude were conspiring to play tricks on his mind. Maybe he should bag this, try to get some rest. Things would make more sense in the morning, after whatever he could salvage of a night’s sleep.
Exhausted as he was, he nearly missed it. He was just reaching out to close the laptop’s lid when a flicker caught his eye. The Proximity Alert icon was flashing in the upper right corner of the screen. He froze midway through the motion that would have sent the computer into sleep mode.
Proximity Alert?
A glance at the menubar timestamp confirmed it. The exact same time, to the second, as last night’s ‘ghost’ event. Jack felt tiny hairs rising on the back of his neck. This was no ghost — not twice in a row like clockwork.
There was something down there!
A click, and the icon expanded into a window. Columns of figures scrolled by, too fast to read. Jack frantically typed in the key-sequence for graphical display.
And there it was! The little blip tracked across the screen for an instant, then was gone.
He hit replay. Gaped in disbelief. Hit replay again.
It was real!
Jack only realized he’d been holding his breath when his lungs began clamoring for air. Only knew how broadly he was grinning once his face began to hurt. Hoots of laughter echoed off the trunks of the pitch-pines. Real. Real, by God!
Real. But — so close? Jack reviewed the numbers: Judging by the signal strength, the thing was less than three kilometers down. That just didn’t seem right.
Jack had expected to find his mini-hole in a relatively stable orbit within the earth, an orbit tracing a series of looping curves like a pattern on a Spirograph. An orbit that, hopefully, would from time to time crest here far beneath the permafrost of Tunguska, where the whole thing began.
He had not been prepared for the improbable regularity of the orbit, or how little it had degraded in nearly a century. It was almost as if some external force had been at work on his micro-hole, truing up its trajectory, holding it up or even hoisting it, maybe?
No matter. He’d work all that out in time. The important thing was that he’d found it.
And what a find! Jack was suddenly filled to overflowing with a wild elation. He could see himself ascending the stage of Stockholm’s Konserthus to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics from the hands of the King of Sweden.
Then he sobered: He’d spent years refining the theory, designing the experiment, sweating the details, pulling together the funding. Years ramping up to this culminating act of discovery.
And, in all that time, he’d treated the whole thing as an intellectual exercise, scarcely giving a moment’s thought to what the discovery itself might mean.
For, if it was true — and the proof was right there on the display in front of him — if the Tunguska Object was a primordial black hole still trapped within the earth, then it represented a terrible danger to all life on the planet. To the planet itself.
What would they — what could they — do about it?
Distracted by the exhilaration of his discovery, distraught at its implications, Dr. Jack Adler did not even notice as a second figure stepped into the circle of light cast by the naked sixty-watt bulb.