"Immense
glaciers...," Clissot murmured, absorbed, "glaciers with
U-shaped erosion... Look at those cirques and nunataks. Look, Nadja,
what does it remind you of? You're the real paleogeologist..."
"Those
mounds are drumlins," Nadja replied in a tiny voice. "But
they're enormous. And those moraines on either side of them... It
looks like a ton of sediment has been washed in from really far
away."
What's
going on?
Elisa
gave a nervous giggle. It was absurd, but she couldn't help it. There
was something very disturbing about those red-tinged snowy summits.
She felt faint and confused.
She
saw Nadja tremble and wondered if it was just excitement at these
findings, or if something similar was happening to her. Valente
looked like he'd been affected, too. She heard someone gasp.
This
is ridiculous.
But
it wasn't. There was something very strange about that landscape.
"There
seem to be signs of water in the crevasses," Nadja whispered,
disconcerted.
"My
God, that glacier is melting!" Clissot cried.
Silberg's
voice, anxious and barely audible yet steady and clear, came from
beside the screen.
"Those
are the British Isles, eight hundred thousand years ago."
"The
Gunz glaciation...," she whispered. "Exactly. Pleistocene.
The Quaternary period."
"Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph," Clissot whispered. "Oh my God, oh my
God, oh my God!"
Nausea.
It's nauseating
.
But
what?
When
the lights went on, Elisa realized she'd been hugging herself
tightly, as if she'd been naked in public and was trying to hide.
"THIS
is
the second reason that Project Zig Zag has to be kept a secret. We
don't know what creates it. We're calling it 'Impact.'" Silberg
wrote the word on a small whiteboard on the wall, beside the screen.
"We always write it like that, 'Impact,' with a capital I.
Everyone experiences it, to a greater or lesser degree. It's an
unusual reaction to images from the past. I could venture a theory to
explain it. Maybe Jung was right; we have a collective unconscious
that's full of archetypes, sort of like the species' genetic memory,
and the images from the open time strings somehow disrupt it. Keep in
mind that this particular part of our unconscious has been inviolate
for generations, and, suddenly, for the first time, the door opens,
light filters into the darkness..."
"Why
didn't we feel anything with the Unbroken Glass?" Valente asked.
"Well,
in fact we did," said Silberg, and Elisa realized that this
could explain part of her excitement when she saw that image. "Just
with less intensity. It seems that the strongest Impacts come from
the remote past. The symptoms we've detected so far include anxiety,
depersonalization, a disconnect from reality—that is, the
feeling that we are unreal, or that the world around us is—insomnia,
and, occasionally, hallucination. That's why I started off by telling
you that this isn't like the movies. Opening time strings is a much
more complex phenomenon."
Elisa
saw Nadja rubbing her eyes. Clissot had sat down with her and was
whispering into her ear.
"We
still don't know if there are other, more important side effects or
not," Silberg continued. "Grave Impacts, I mean. And that
means we have to set out a series of security measures that we must
all obey. The most important one is this: when we see an image for
the first time, we'll always do it as a group, just like today. That
way we can observe each other's reactions. In addition, our behavior
outside this room, even in private, will be subject to certain
controls. That's why there are peepholes on our doors and no locks.
It's not about spying on each other. It's so that no one is isolated.
If the Impact affects any of us especially strong, the others need to
know as soon as possible. Still, there's a margin of unknown risk.
We're confronting something totally new, and we can't predict all of
the effects it will have on us."
At
first, people muttered, but shortly thereafter the general atmosphere
changed. The project that lay before them made everyone undeniably
excited. Elisa's eyes were welling up and she had a knot in her
throat.
I've
seen a landscape from the Quaternary period. Good God. And I'm still
here, this isn't a dream... I've seen Earth, the planet I inhabit,
almost a million years ago.
Sergio
Marini's voice rang out good-naturedly above the rest.
"Well,
now we've heard the cons. What are we waiting for? Let's get to
work!"
Elisa
stood up, inspired. But just then Valente whispered, "They're
hiding things, sweetheart. I'm absolutely sure they're not telling us
the whole truth."
15
THE
night
of July 25, Elisa saw the shadow for the first time.
Later
on, she realized that it was another sign: Mr. White Eyes had
arrived.
Here
I am, Elisa. It's me. I'll never leave your side.
LIGHT
and
silent, like a soul on one of those "astral voyages" that
her mother believed in, it floated for a second in the peephole at
her door and then disappeared. She smiled.
Someone
else who can't sleep.
It
didn't seem strange. The room was comfortable, but you couldn't
really think of it as a home. It was hot within those metal walls
because, as Valente had said, they turned off the air-conditioning at
night, and her window was one of those tilting ones that didn't open
all the way. Wearing only her panties, Elisa lay sweating on the bed,
in a mix of light and darkness: to her right, the glare of the
spotlights on the fences; to her left the faint rectangle cast by the
peephole.
She'd
seen it head toward the door that separated the two wings of the
barracks, so it was probably one of her colleagues, Nadja, Ric, or
Rosalyn. Everyone else slept in the other wing.
Where
was it going?
She
strained to hear. The doors weren't creaky, but they were metal,
after all, so she assumed that in a few seconds she'd hear some sort
of click.
But
she didn't.
The
silence intrigued her. It made her think it was more than sheer
consideration for those who were sleeping. It was as if the insomniac
in question were being cautious.
She
got out of bed and walked over to the peephole. She could see the
faint emergency lights in the hallway, which looked empty, although
she was sure she'd seen a silhouette go past.
She
put on her T-shirt and walked out. The door that connected the
barracks' two wings was closed. Someone, though, must have opened it
just a second ago. It wasn't a ghost.
She
hesitated for a second. Should she try to find out if someone was
missing from his or her bed? No, but she knew she wouldn't be able to
rest easy if she did nothing. She opened the door that led to the
next wing. Before her stretched the darkened hallway, feebly lit by
tiny bulbs. To the right, the bedroom doors. To the left, the way to
the next barracks.
She
felt uneasy.
She
wanted to laugh.
They
ordered us to spy on each other, and that's exactly what I'm doing.
In
her T-shirt and undies, barefoot in the hallway, it was like...
A
noise.
This
time she was sure, though it was far off. It could have been coming
from the next barracks over.
She
walked toward the end of the hallway that led to the second barracks.
Her anxiety refused to leave, like the last guest at a party, but she
hid it well. She was a fairly calm person. Being an only child had
taught her how to walk alone on dark, quiet nights.
But
she was about to lose that ability entirely.
She
reached the hallway and peeked in.
About
six feet away, a strange creature that seemed to be made of shadows
held its arms out wide, waving them around, and staring at her with
an intense, all-consuming look. And the worst thing (later she would
realize that this was another warning) was seeing that it had no
face, or at least she couldn't make out any of its features in the
darkness.
"Be
quiet!" a gruff voice said in English. There was a flash of
light and she realized, now, that she'd been screaming. "I'm
sorry to have scared you..."
She
had no idea the soldiers patrolled the inside of the barracks at
night. The flashlight he turned on cleared up the mystery. His rifle
was what she'd thought were outstretched arms; the "intense"
look came from his infrared visor; the lack of face was some sort of
walkie-talkie that covered his mouth. He wore a nametag on his shirt
front: Stevenson. Elisa knew him. He was one of the five soldiers on
the island, and one of the youngest and cutest. Until that moment,
she'd never spoken to any of them. All she did was wave when she saw
them, aware of the fact that they were there for her safety and not
the reverse. Now she felt deeply embarrassed. Stevenson lowered his
flashlight and raised his infrared visor. She could see that he was
smiling.
"What
were you doing wandering around the hallways in the dark?"
"I
thought I saw someone outside my room. I wanted to know who it was."
"I've
been here for an hour and I haven't seen anyone." She thought
she could detect an edge to his voice.
"Maybe
I made a mistake. Sorry."
She
heard the sound of other doors, people alarmed by her ridiculous
scream. She didn't even want to know who they were. Apologizing once
more, she went back to her room, got into bed, and, thinking she'd
never be able to fall asleep, promptly fell asleep.
THE
next
day, Tuesday, July 26, 6:44 p.m.
She
yawned, got up, and put her computer into sleep mode. She'd
programmed it to keep working on the complicated calculation by
itself.
The
Shadow in the Night Incident was still floating around in her head.
She decided she'd tell Nadja about it at the beach, at least for
entertainment value. For the moment, she needed to rest. She'd been
on New Nelson for only six days, but it felt like months. She
wondered if she might be getting sick from exhaustion.
No
problem, though. I've got the hospital right here.
She
looked at the paleontologist's silent lab, which doubled as a clinic
and even had an examining table. If she didn't feel better soon,
maybe she'd ask Jacqueline for some kind of pep pill. "I've used
up all my energy on calculating energy," she'd joke.
She
left the lab and went back to her room, grabbed her towel and bikini,
and walked out of the barracks and into the fading sunlight. It was
one of those rare days during the monsoon season when it hadn't
rained, and she wanted to take advantage of that. Seeing the soldier
on guard duty at the fence reminded her of the previous night's
incident again, but this time it wasn't Stevenson but Bergetti, the
stout Italian that Marini sometimes played cards with. She said hi to
him on her way past (she was terrified of those human porcupines, so
heavily armed), walked through the gate, and then wandered down the
gentle slope to the most amazing beach she'd ever seen.