He took it in, his expression not changing.
Not a good sign.
On they marched, meek little Rominy like a little lamb to the slaughter, software cubicle-ista to her newest duty, proud feminist a dutiful two steps behind.
She began trying to guess how to blow things up.
She didn’t even have chewing gum.
Down an elevator again, much farther this time, dropping three hundred feet into the bedrock of the Swiss-French border. They came out into the nave of this colossal church of physics.
An enormous room, four or five stories high, and atop it a shaft the size of a missile silo that clawed toward the surface like the spout hole of a whale. To look at the origin of the sky, the physicists had delved underground like Tolkien’s cursed dwarves. But what a wonderland they’d created. The chamber was lined with tiers of catwalks like the balconies of an opera house, plus pipes, ducts, great metal troughs crammed with cables, cranes, stairs, ladders, columns, beams, grids, tanks, levers, air conditioners, hatches… it was a cornucopia of technology. And the colors! They were taken from a crayon set. Red, green, blue, and yellow, bright as Legos, and then spotless stainless, shiny copper, burnished bronze, reflective blacks, all glinting at each other like a hall of mirrors. How had they ever conjured such magnificent complexity? It was like the riot of color she’d seen in the temples of Lhasa. It was not just science, it was art, not just instrument but beauty. It hummed and buzzed and clicked and crackled like a child’s toy and had the smell of a place entirely unnaturaclass="underline" concrete, paint, oil, grease, rubber, and plastic. The particle detector was scrupulously clean, absolutely sterile, and yet as sensory as a field of wildflowers. Fluorescent light cast everything in a cold, metallic glow.
It was another secret city, like Shambhala.
And somehow Kurt Raeder had penetrated this, to corrupt it. To re-create his lost ruin.
Another scientist saluted them. My God, how many physicists had signed on for this craziness? But then Raeder, if it was really Raeder, had been building toward this moment for seventy years. An incongruous thought occurred.
“Did you ever open a bank account?”
He turned. “What?”
“When you got back from Tibet. With compound interest, you might be a rich man by now if you’ve really lived all those years. Hood did that, or Beth Calloway. I inherited.”
He wasn’t sure if she was joking and for the first time looked off-balance. “I’ve spent ever pfennig, every moment, every drop of sweat and blood on this dream.”
“Too bad. You could have retired by now and left us all alone.”
Jakob, or Jake, pushed her from behind. “Pay no attention to her, Kurt. She’s an idiot who will completely waste your time.”
“ I wasted your time?” But then she felt the press of a gun barrel in the small of her back.
“Shut up and do as you’re told,” her ex-lover said.
They walked a balcony, heels drumming on textured metal, walking into the technology like sperm penetrating the gigantic egg of this vast, bulky machine. Centenarian Raeder obscenely spry like an animated cadaver, Jake/Jakob robotic, Rominy mournful. If the cathedral nave was complicated, this tighter area deeper into the machine works was incomprehensible. There were steel panels, copper conduits, and brightly colored pistons, bobbins, and spools. She was making the words up because she had no idea what she was looking at. The riotous assemblage of finely machined parts reminded her of pictures of rocket engines and submarines. The barrel-shaped thing was as big as the cross section of a small ship. On its face, triangular pie-piece panels, each the size of an apartment, radiated out like the petals of a flower. The stamen in the middle was a narrow pipe that jutted out and ran toward a tunnel beyond.
“It reminds me of a sun wheel,” Jake said. “All worship, rightfully so, goes back to the sun. All life originates there.”
They came to a smaller gallery leading to the jutting pipe. There was an arched ceiling twenty feet overhead, with a tracked crane spanning the gallery’s width. An orange-colored hook to hoist things dangled from it. Cables and chains dropped down to a narrow pipe, little bigger than a household waterline, which ran from the center of the vast machine. This extended to a much larger pipe, the size of a sewer line with the diameter of a manhole. The big pipe was painted blue and extended into a tunnel as far as she could see.
It was like being inside a giant mechanical cocoon. A section of the silvery smaller pipe had been removed and technicians were bolting a new apparatus in its place. This new piece was about the size of a submarine torpedo and consisted of a cylindrical bundle of rods. There was space between each rod, connected with colored wires. Inside was a clear Plexiglas tube.
The bundle reminded her of the fasces that Sam had talked about.
She hoped his scheme had worked, but she suspected Otto had killed her friend by now. The sadness added to her feeling of hopelessness.
Then she noticed that there was another rod, a staff, lying horizontally in the midst of this new device. Its ends lined up with the narrow pipe.
It was the amber-colored staff Jake had stolen from the chamber below the nunnery at the edge of Shambhala. It was Kurt Raeder’s magic wand, the wizard’s staff, the gun of Vril. My God. They were going to recharge it.
“Hurry, before the radiation levels climb too high,” Raeder told the technicians.
They nodded. “We have our REM badges. But you can hear the machine accelerating.” And indeed the background whine was rising. There was a deeper rumble, too, of huge generators and pumps, the lungs of the whale.
Radiation? Her heart began to hammer.
“Rominy, we’re at the end of our journey and I can’t follow you any longer,” said Jake. “Not yet.” He was still pointing a pistol at her. It looked like the kind the Germans used in the old World War II movies. What were they called?
A Luger.
At least he wasn’t hanging around to have some kind of weird SS sex. With Raeder talking about spawning a new master race, she’d worried she was supposed to get it on with her kidnapper. But then that couldn’t be true, could it? She was part Asian, thanks to Great-grandma Keyuri, and mongrel American to boot.
So just what was she doing here?
The technicians twisted a few final bolts and stood. “That’s it. Really just a harness to hold the staff in place. The rest is up to the accelerator itself.”
“You may watch from the control room,” Raeder said. “Jakob, you’d better remove her handcuffs.”
“What if she panics?”
“There’s nowhere for her to go. I’m worried that with the electromagnetic energies involved, that much metal might trigger something we haven’t planned for. Take the tracking device, too. I don’t want the large amounts of electricity involved arcing into her body.”
“Maybe I should stay with you, Kurt.”
“It’s too much of a gamble to risk both of us on Vril’s first manifestation,” Raeder replied. “I’ve staked my life on this, but if it doesn’t work as expected, I want you to survive to carry on. Rominy must be the seed carrier.”
“The what carrier?” she protested.
Kurt turned to her as Jake removed the cuffs and stooped to take off the ankle bracelet. “Of the next evolution. You’re going to experience the fundamental energies of the universe as I have, Rominy. It will stun you, and frighten you, but it’s quite survivable, as you can see by looking at me. You will be transfigured, transformed. It will feel good when it’s over. You’ll absorb dark energy like a plant. You’ll have a longevity that the ones left behind will long for. And then you’re going to carry my first child. You are going to be as revered as the Virgin Mary.” He smiled, plasticky lips stretched over worn teeth, eyes sunken, skin like wax.
She looked at him with horror. “And stay a virgin, right?”
“We all know you’re no virgin and no, I’m not a god to inseminate you with my spirit. I’m afraid we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”