An Accidental Alliance (2 page)

     
“Why didn’t it work out?” Iris pressed.

     
“Most people will tell you that people are divided up into leaders and followers, alphas and betas,” Park told her. “I’m neither. When it comes to a leadership structure, I’m more like the lone wolf who prefers to hunt on his own.”

     
“An omega then,” Iris concluded, nodding.

     
“So some might say,” Park agreed. “I see that whole classification system as just a lazy man’s way of peg boarding people. It’s easier than to consider we are all individuals. I’m just a bit more individualistic than most, I guess.”

     
“I think I could give you a run for your money,” Iris chuckled as though to a private joke. “What is your specialty.”

     
“I don’t have one,” Park laughed. “Not really. I have degrees in Classics, Religion, Linguistics, Military History, of course, Chemistry and Biology and had I bothered to put the academic hours together, another five or six fields as well.” When Iris looked impressed, Park chuckled and shrugged the matter off as inconsequential, “I like to think of myself as a professional dilettante. How about you?”

     
“I’d love to call myself that too,” she laughed, “but all my training is in mechanical and civil engineering.”

     
“Schools?” he pressed.

     
“MIT and Case Tech,” she replied.

     
“So this is not your first trip to Cleveland either, then?” Park asked.

     
“Hardly,” Iris chuckled. “I know the Mistake on the Lake like a dear old friend. If we had the time, I’d take you to some of my favorite off-campus dives.”

     
“Sounds like fun,” Park admitted. “It will be the project’s cafeteria for us though, I’m afraid. Have you been out here before?”

     
“Not yet,” Iris admitted, “I trained in the smaller facility in Vermont. Not that much training was required and it gave me a chance to visit family.”

     
“So you’re from Vermont originally?” Park asked.

     
“A Green Mountain girl born and bred,” she told him proudly. “How about you? I have you pegged as growing up in a desert.”

     
“Not hardly,” Park laughed. “I grew up on Cape Cod, compared to some of our compatriots we’re practically neighbors.”

     
“Well, I always did prefer New England boys,” she told him flirtingly.

      
It took nearly an hour to get to a small gatehouse behind which there was nothing to see except for a low, grass-covered hill, but as their bus drove around the hill a wide door came into view. The passengers disembarked and walked through the large doorway where they were quickly directed to their rooms.

     
The main hold-up was in waiting for the elevator. It was large for its breed and could accommodate fifty adults but it was slow to arrive and even slower to begin its long descent into the subterranean base of Project Van Winkle.

     
“Just how far down are we going?” Iris asked after the first minute.

     
“The base is actually inside an old abandoned salt mine about three thousand feet down or more,” Park told her. “Well I say it’s an old salt mine, but from what Arn told me last time I was here, the mine was just a start. We excavated in every direction once the elevator shaft was cut.”

     
“Wasn’t there a mine shaft here already?” Iris asked.

     
“The salt wasn’t mined by hand or physical equipment,” Park explained. “The Morton company sunk pipes down here and sent tons of water down to dissolve the salt and carry it back up to the surface. There the water was evaporated out of the brine and the resulting salt was purified and processed for its various uses. What the builders actually found down here were seams and chambers filled with somewhat salty water. They might have been better off building elsewhere for all the headstart the old mine gave them, but I was not part of the project ten years ago when they were doing that. Ah! We’ve hit bottom at last.”

     
The base might have been built in an old mine, but the halls the people in the elevator found were all brightly lit, clean and dry. Aside from the lack of windows, there was no sign, in fact, that they were even underground and could have been in any large office building.

     
“This way,” a short woman with light red hair directed them toward several tables. “Last names beginning with A to E table on; F to K at the second table and so forth.”

     
“Ah, they’ve given me my usual room,” Park noted as he stepped away from the second table with an information packet. Then he asked Iris, “Where will you be staying?”

     
“Room 506,” she replied. “Where’s that?”

     
“Well, it seems we’re still neighbors,” Park remarked delightedly.

     
“You couldn’t have arranged adjoining rooms,” Iris told him.

     
“Hardly,” he laughed. “None of these temporary quarters has doors directly between them. You are, however, conveniently across the hall from me and only one door down. Direction there, to the communal bathrooms, cafeterias and all and in the briefing packet, but I’ll show you the way and then give you the two-bit tour as well.”

     
The base of Project Van Winkle was transforming from a nearly deserted, albeit well-furnished, hole in the ground into a bustling miniature city with more bus-loads arriving almost constantly. To avoid the in-coming confusion, Park and Iris ate in the cafeteria quickly before going off to a makeshift theatre room to watch a film. The feature was three years old and had not been very well received at the time, but the cartoons that came before and after were worth the time. Finally they ended up in one of the fifty lounges where they met some of the other members of the project.

     
Everyone there knew more or less what they had signed up for, but it was not until the next evening that they got the specifics. “Ladies, gentlemen,” Arn Theoday called for attention, “Welcome at last to Project Van Winkle. You have already been briefed about our purpose but our grant from NATO requires me to tell you once more. Please bear with me.

     
“Eight years ago, July of 2089, a large near-earth object or NEO was discovered and named Asteroid 2089JL43. As you may recall, the asteroid came very close to earth and actually passed through the upper atmosphere. Its close proximity to Earth combined with another near miss with the Moon put 2089JL43 into a new orbit, one which will bring it perilously close to striking the Earth in just two weeks.

     
“Further, I doubt any of us are unacquainted with the current political situation in the world,” Arn went on. “Even before the discovery of 2089JL43 there had been increasing tensions between the nations of NATO, Russia, China and the so-called Arab Axis and, of course, all their allies. These tensions have brought our world closer to a nuclear war than the new agencies would have you believe. I can tell you with certainty that the United States’ nuclear arsenal has been fully armed and ready to deploy five times in the last decade and has been on stand-by for most of the rest of that time.”

     
There was a collective gasp from around the large auditorium. Only about half of the volunteers had come from the United States, the rest had been culled from the best the other NATO nations had to offer. Everyone had known there were tensions in the world and small wars had broken out here and there for most of the Twenty-first Century, but to think nuclear arms had been seriously close to deployment was more than any wanted to believe.”

     
“At the moment our best guess is that there is a fifty/fifty chance of a direct strike by 2089JL43,” Arn told them. “As bad as that sounds, most scientists believe it will miss and that the resulting change in orbit will send it out of harm’s way. Because of its size, a direct impact is expected to destroy civilization as we know it and possibly cause mass extinctions comparable to a similar impact at the end of the Cretaceous Epoch.”

  
   
“What’s the good news?” Park asked from his seat near the back of the hall. Iris snorted as she tried to stifle a laugh, but in the rest of the hall many of the people were chuckling openly.

     
Arn scowled a moment before flashing everyone a strained grin. “The good news is that the experts tell us that fifty-fifty is a long shot and that they are constantly revising their estimates as the asteroid comes closer. Officially we had a sixty percent chance of a strike yesterday and most expert feel that the chance of a strike will drop to nil within the next week and a half. It will be a bright object streaking across the sky and a few loose pebbles may cause some fireworks, but they’re pretty sure we’re safe this time.

     
“Even so,” Arn continued, “We have been assembled in case someone is wrong. Project Van Winkle was conceived over ten years ago for the purpose of safely protecting sufficient experts in a wide variety of fields so that if the worst should happen our technology and civilization can be rebuilt.”

     
“From only five thousand people?” Iris asked skeptically, her voice floating though the large hall.

     
“Fifteen thousand would have been preferable, but we have not had the time to find that many,” Arn explained, holes showing in his patience. “According to the projections I have read forty-five hundred is the minimal number we will need.”

     
“What?” another woman closer to the front of the hall asked challengingly. “To repopulate the Earth?” She sounded indignant at the suggestion. Park and Iris craned their necks to see who had spoken.

     
“I recognize her,” Iris whispered to Park. “Veronica Sheetz. She’s an excellent engineer. We were at MIT together. The only way Arn will get her to repopulate the earth will be if he can figure out parthenogenesis.”

     
“Not really Arn’s specialty,” Park told her. Then what she had said sunk in. “Oh, she’s more likely to have a girlfriend? I doubt she’s the only one.”

     
Arn, however was already answering the question, “We do not expect to be the only humans left in the world and there is a safety buffer for those of us unable or without the inclination to reproduce even if that is the case. People, we’re getting off the subject. The asteroid is not considered sufficiently dangerous to have gathered you all here. The state of international politics is.

     
“That one of the other four great powers and their allies will try to use the confusion caused by the approaching asteroid to launch a conflict with the goal of increasing their power and influence. Since all four alliances have nuclear weapons, it is feared that conflict may well involve their use,” Arn concluded.

     
“Arn,” Park called from the back, he and Iris walked forward through the hall as he continued. “What are the real chances of that happening.”

     
“It’s not about dropping the bomb, Park,” Arn told him tiredly, “but about making the other sides think you will. It’s an International game of chicken. The first one to blink loses.”

     
“It would be better if everyone blinks together,” Park replied, “and then goes and puts their silly, dangerous toys away.”

     
“Yes that would be better,” Arn agreed reluctantly, “and it is likely that’s precisely what will happen again. Our job, however, is to wait until they do just that or else until the consequences of their stupidity have passed.”

     
“How long will we have to stay down here?” a man near the front asked. “The radiation from a nuclear war would last a very long time. How do we know we have enough food and water and air?”

 
    
“That is the least of our worries,” Arn assured him. “Project Van Winkle was so named because we will be stored here in stasis until the danger has passed and will then be released.”

     
“Stasis?” the man argued. “Do you mean cryogenic suspension?”

     
“No. Cryogenesis doesn’t work as well as we once hoped,” Arn replied.

     
“I’ll say!” another man cut in. “It’s certain death.”

     
“Actually, test subjects had a sixty percent survival rate,” Arn told him, “but obviously that was not good enough even for government work.” Finally Arn managed to get a chuckle out of the crowd. “Instead there has been a break-through in temporal physics in the last year, leading to something we are calling a stasis chamber.”

     
“Did you get the name for that out of a comic book?” Veronica Sheetz asked, unimpressed.

     
“As a matter of fact, we did,” Arn nodded, “but all you need to know is from the moment we close the door to the moment it opens not so much as a nanosecond will have passed.”

     
“Really?” Park asked curiously. “How does that work?”

     
“It’s something to do with magnetic fields and certain kinds of energy,” Arn replied evasively. He took a deep breath and continued, “Well to tell the truth I didn’t understand the explanation, but the fact is it works. I’ve already tried it for myself and I can assure you all that you won’t even have a chance to dream. You see the door close and you see it open and that’s it.”

     
“You say we have a very small chance of a direct strike by 2089JL43,” someone in the middle of the hall pointed out, “and then there’s a small chance of a nuclear war. Let’s say the worst happens and both occur, how will we know it is safe to come out?”

     
“That will be taken care of automatically by our base computer,” Arn told him. “Our computers are in constant touch with an array of satellites, microwave relays and landlines that connect us with the outside world. In the remote chance that the base loses contact with all of those, it will continue to monitor the external environment and wake us up when conditions outside have become survivable once more.”