Mysterium (27 page)

“Bob Hoskins must have a fair amount of confidence in you.” Shepperd sighed and folded his arms. “Go on.”

Evelyn had come to his apartment three times with fresh information, much of it gleaned from documents Demarch had left unattended on his desk. Dex described the firebreak, the bomb—the apocalypse bearing down on Two Rivers like a runaway train.

Shepperd leaned against a shelf that harbored a single gallon can of pinto beans and listened with a fixed expression. When Dex finished, he cleared his throat. “So what are we talking about—a week, two weeks?”

“I can’t pin it down, but that sounds like the right range. We might not have much warning.”

“They’ll have to evacuate the soldiers.”

“I don’t think they’re planning to.”

“What, you mean leave ’em here? Let ’em burn?”

Dex nodded.

“Jesus,” Shepperd said. “Cold-hearted bastards.” He shook his head. “Bet any money the Proctors move out, though. So there’s some warning there . . . if any of what you’re telling me is true.”

Dex said nothing.

Shepperd put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “I suppose I should thank you.”

Dex shrugged.

“Incidentally, Hoskins said he was surprised when you came to him with this. He figured you were mainly talk, not much action. So what changed your mind?”

“Twelve kids hanging from the City Hall lampposts.”

“Yeah, well—that’ll do it.”

Twelve kids hanging from the lampposts, Dex thought as he walked the snowy streets.

Twelve kids, some of whom he had known personally; three of them his students.

Twelve kids: any one of whom might have been his son.

Might have been David.

If David had lived.

“He didn’t believe you?” Linneth asked.

She sat at Dex’s kitchen table warming her hands over a pot of ration tea. The sky beyond the window was blue; a cold wind rattled the loose pane.

“He believed me,” Dex said. “He didn’t want me to know it, but he believed me.”

“How large is his group?”

“Maybe thirty, forty adults plus their families. According to Bob Hoskins, they’ve scared up some hunting rifles and even a couple of automatic weapons. Amazing what some people keep in their basements.”

“They hope to escape?”

“So I gather.”

“It isn’t very many people, considering the size of the town.”

“There are other groups like Shepperd’s, but they don’t talk much to each other—and it may be better that way.”

“Still, no matter what, too many people will die.”

He nodded.

She said, “Even the scholars from outside. I don’t think they mean to let us leave. We’ve seen too much and we’re too likely to talk about it.”

Dex said, “We’ll get out. A few lives saved is probably the best we can hope for.” He shrugged into his jacket.

She said, “Where are you going now?”

“Unfinished business. I’m going to look for Howard Poole.”

“Let me come with you.”

He thought about it. “There’s another jacket in the closet. Leave yours here. And keep a scarf around your head. I don’t want us to be recognized.”

She walked beside him in the street, head down, her arm in his. She was small and perfect, Dex thought, and probably doomed, like everybody else in these quiet winter houses.

CHAPTER 18

So much had become clear in the last few days—Howard didn’t know how to begin to tell Dex.

Dex had come out of a cold afternoon without warning. He brought a woman with him: Linneth Stone, an outsider but not a Proctor, Dex said. “You can talk in front of her. She’s an academic, Howard—she has tenure.”

He looked at her. “What’s your subject?”

“Cultural ethnology.”

“Oh. Kinship systems. Yuck.”

“Howard’s a physicist,” Dex said.

“Oh,” Linneth said. “Atomic particles. Yuck.”

But the news was more important than all this. Howard turned to Dex and said, “Listen, I found her.”

“Her?”

“The woman Stern was living with. She’s only a couple of blocks away. And she has all his notes.”

“Howard, that doesn’t matter now.”

“But it does. It matters a lot.”

Dex exchanged a look with Linneth, then sighed. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you found out.”

Stern wasn’t the only physicist obsessed with God. Think about Einstein’s objection to quantum theory, or Schrödinger’s notion of the hidden unity of the human mind. If you look hard enough at the cosmos, Howard said, all these metaphysical questions emerge—
religious
questions.

But Stern’s obsession was much stranger than that. He had been God-haunted from his earliest childhood, driven by what could only be called a compulsion: by dreams or visions or maybe even a hidden physical problem: a tumor, temporal-lobe epilepsy, borderline schizophrenia. Stern had studied the world’s religious texts for clues to a mystery that must have seemed omnipresent, urgent, and taunting . . . the mystery of what might lie beyond the borders of human knowledge.

He had looked for answers with equal vigor in Einstein and the Talmud, in Heisenberg and Meister Eckehart. Physics gave him a career, but he never set aside his volumes of esoterica. He had been especially fascinated by the wild cosmogonies of the early Christian Gnostics, creation myths cobbled together from fragments of Judaism, Hellenic paganism, eastern mystery religions. In the flourishing mystical thought of the late Roman Empire Stern had perceived a fertile metaphor for the universe behind the quantum and before creation.

“He must have been a brilliant man,” Linneth said.

“Terrifyingly brilliant. A little scornful of his colleagues. He was capable of eccentric behavior—he never wore any clothes but jeans and T-shirts, even when he accepted the Nobel prize. But he had the brains to get away with it.”

“Intimidating,” Linneth said.

“Always. It was part of his shtick. It made him a reputation. And it was his reputation that brought him here.”

Dex said, “I’m surprised he accepted government work.”

“He didn’t want to. Especially during the Cold War, government research was often the equivalent of dropping into a black hole. If your work is classified, you can’t publish, and if you can’t publish, it ain’t science. But they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They promised him a long look into the heart of the mystery.”

Howard described the Turkish fragment, an object so defiantly strange that it beggared comprehension.

“You can imagine how it fed Stern’s obsessions. By day he took measurements and made cautious, rigorous hypotheses. By night he installed himself in the study in Ruth Wintermeyer’s house and composed rambling notes about the Plenum, the fragment as a divine artifice, literally a piece of the Appennoia. The journal he left is partly autobiography, partly scientific chronicle, partly the ravings of a lunatic. He was losing the ability to distinguish speculation from fact. It all became one thing, the
mysterium tremendae
—the outer limit of rational thought.”

Linneth said, “But ultimately, did he discover what the fragment
was
?”

“Not with any certainty. He came to believe it was a piece of what he called a ‘wormhole boat.’ ”

“Wormhole?”

“Call it a device for traveling between parallel worlds. But that rests on some highly speculative physics and a lot of Stern’s own bizarre ideation. He did prove one interesting thing—that the fragment responded in minute but detectable ways to the proximity of living beings. It knew when someone was close, in other words. Stern took this as evidence for another of his pet notions, that consciousness is tied to reality in some way more profound than we generally suppose. Whether it really proved any such thing is questionable, of course.”

“And the accident?” Dex asked.

“Ah. Interesting. There’s no way to reconstruct it from his notes, but he was talking about pouring radiation into the fragment to see how it responded. He had these enormous power lines installed. Ultimately, I guess he provoked a bigger response than he anticipated. Crossed some threshold.”

“And brought us here?”

“Yes.”

“You mean,
personally
?”

“Well,” Howard said, “it’s a puzzle, but the pieces are in place. The fragment responds to Stern’s presence—to his mind, Stern would claim. He applies a tremendous amount of energy and some kind of catalysis takes place, and in some unimaginable way, we’re transported here. But more than that. I think the process isn’t finished. It’s still happening.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Isn’t it obvious? The lab is still enclosed in that dome of light. And think about what happened when the filling station caught fire. Energy was liberated, and it took a strange form. People saw God or the Devil, but to me—” He looked at the table, then raised his eyes defiantly. “To me it looked like Stern himself.”

Howard’s reasoning had gone deeper than he wanted to admit.

From the scant evidence in the journal he had decided that Stern might be right: the fragment
was
part of a device meant to cross between avenues of creation, the infinite universes of Linde or the multiple alternatives of the uncollapsed wave function—or, somehow, both. And it had interacted with human consciousness, with Stern himself.

It was a boat, and Stern had become its pilot, had taken this piece of northern Michigan with him into a world that echoed, but imperfectly, all his stubborn obsessions.

He pictured Stern as a lingering presence inside the ruined lab, preserved somehow . . . as alive as he had seemed in Howard’s dreams.

“When the Proctors were investigating the lab, they sent people inside in protective clothing. It must have helped, if only a little. I want to get hold of one of those suits.”

“Howard, that’s ludicrous,” Dex said. “What could you possibly achieve?”

He hesitated. Did it make sense to say that he
knew
he should do this? Not only that he wanted to but that he felt asked to? Compelled to?

“I can’t explain it,” he said finally, “but I have to try.”

Linneth said, “You don’t have much time.”

Howard looked blankly at her. “What do you mean?”

“She means the
town
doesn’t have much time,” Dex said. “The Proctors mean to destroy it. They have some kind of atom bomb out on the old Ojibway reserve. That’s what we came to tell you. Howard, even if Stern
is
alive—there’s no way to help him. All we can do is try to get out.”

Howard thought of all that random energy, the white heat of nuclear fission, flooding the ruined lab and whatever mystery still pulsed at the heart of it.

He remembered a dream of his uncle in a globe of light.

Dex said, “We can’t stop them. The only way out is to
get
out.”

Howard took a breath, then shook his head. What he had heard in his dreams was a cry for help: Stern, lost at the edge of the world, looking for a way home. He had turned away from it once. Bad decision. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong, Dex. Maybe not for you. But for me. I think, for me, the only way out is in.”

CHAPTER 19

The temperature dropped steadily, but the clouds parted and for three days the sun shone from a flawless blue winter sky. Last week’s snow receded from the streets and Clifford was able to take his bike out again.

He started early in the morning and rode eastward through the silent town. Each storefront, each dusty window, glittered in the sunlight. Clifford wore his warmest winter jacket, plus gloves, boots, and a knit cap. Pedaling was a little awkward under all these clothes. And he tired easily, but maybe that was because of his diet: there hadn’t been meat for two weeks, except what Luke brought; no fresh vegetables for months.

The town, encased in winter, was doomed. Clifford knew what the firebreak meant. Two Rivers was going to burn. He had been certain of it as soon as he saw the teenagers hanging by their necks from the City Hall streetlights. If that could happen, Clifford thought, anything could happen.

He pedaled east toward the highway and the old Ojibway land. Luke had said the Proctors were building something out there. Something the soldiers weren’t supposed to know about.

He reached the highway before noon and ate lunch—a sandwich of stale bread and old cheese. He stood off the road in a pine grove enclosed by snow, eating his sandwich in big bites. Bars of sunlight came through the pine branches and the moist air.

After lunch he rode in the direction of the ruined lab, but turned left where a new track had been cut into the woods. There was not much traffic here and he had plenty of warning when a truck or car approached; the roar of the motor and the crunch of tires on old snow carried a long way in the afternoon air. The rutted, wet road was difficult for his bike, however, so he left it in a shadowy copse and walked a distance among the trees.

He was about to turn back when he came to the crest of a low hill and saw the steel gantry above the distant pinetops. Clifford approached more cautiously now, aware of the din of voices and clatter of tools. He moved close enough to see all of the tower, its girders entwined like metal scrollwork against the sky.

He guessed its purpose. He had seen a movie about the first atomic bomb test and he knew the Los Alamos bomb had been dropped from a gantry like this one. Maybe this wasn’t a bomb, maybe it was something else, but what else would burn a territory as large as Two Rivers?

He stood a long time looking at the gantry and the enclosure above it, which might contain the bomb itself, so much destruction to fit in a simple steel box. He half hoped the explosion would happen now; that it would carry him away in one white-hot instant.

But it didn’t.

He thought of the town and all the people in it, all with no future. Including his mother—himself.

Then, suddenly tired, he turned and headed for home.

Shortly before curfew, he knocked at Howard Poole’s door and told him what he had seen. But Howard had already heard about the bomb.

Clifford said, “Are you still trying to save the town?”

“In my own way.”