The sergeant who came running up with two privates trailing him was panting.
“What do you got, Parrish?” the sergeant said, looking askance at Weaver’s mussed desert camouflage BDUs, missing such items as nametags or rank insignia and worn over tennis shoes and a civilian T-shirt.
The guard pulled the sergeant aside and carried on a low voiced conversation of which Weaver caught only the exclamation: “Who? Are you sure?”
“Dr. Weaver?” the sergeant said. “Could I see some ID?”
Weaver pulled out his driver’s license and Pentagon pass, then waited as the sergeant examined them and the list that the guard handed him.
“Sir, we’ll get this straightened out,” the sergeant said, handing back the IDs. “For the interim, I’ll provisionally add you to the pass list on my authority. Please see that you get the proper paperwork as soon as possible.”
“Will do,” Weaver said. “Can I go in, now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks.”
“Sir, can I ask a question?”
“Yes.”
“Was that really the secretary of defense?” the sergeant asked, clearly hoping that it was not.
“Yes,” Weaver replied. “Want me to call him back so you can make sure?”
“No, sir!”
“Sergeant, I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off since Saturday when the SECDEF, the national security advisor and the President had me flown down here in an F-15. I’ve been blown up, had to learn to use a pistol and a shotgun to keep aliens from eating me, learned more than I want to know about gate teleportation and had about four hours’ sleep, and three hours recovering from a concussion, since. Could you do me a small favor?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, smiling.
“Get somebody to find me the appropriate paperwork or something? If you need to talk to General Fullbright, do it. As the SEAL I was with said when we busted down the gates to Disney to find this latest gate, I don’t have time for Mickey Mouse. Okay?”
“Got it, sir.”
“Thanks,” Weaver said, walking in the trailer.
There were three people crowded in the main room. Two of them he vaguely recognized; the third was a total stranger, a blonde female. Not at all bad looking, little light on top but easy on the eyes. She was running some sort of track calculation on a new computer that had been installed while he was away.
“Dr. Weaver,” one of them said, standing up and coming over to shake his hand. “I’m Bill Earp from FEMA, you might remember me…”
“From that remarkable safety lecture you gave Sanson,” Bill said, shaking his hand. “Good to see you again.”
“Good to see you,” the FEMA rep replied. “First word we had from Eustis was that you were a gonner.”
“The report of my demise was exceedingly exaggerated,” Weaver replied. “I’m sorry to say that Howse and, apparently, Lieutenant Glasser bought it. Sanson, Chief Miller and I were in Shands hospital. Where’s Garcia?”
“Getting some rest, sir,” the other male, a young soldier replied. “I’m Crichton. I was at the site…”
“You did the initial survey, sure,” Bill said.
“I’ve got some radiological background,” Crichton said. “I’m just trying to help out, keeping an eye on the boson count, mainly.”
“FEMA sent me over to coordinate with finding the bosons,” the safety specialist said. “I’m a chemist, not a physicist but I know the tune and can dance to it.”
“Robin Noue,” the young woman said, waving. “I’m a programmer… I was a programmer at UCF, in the AI Lab.”
“Good, okay,” Bill said. “What’s the count on bosons and have they surveyed any more sites?”
“The count is up to over a hundred,” the FEMA rep said. “We’ve managed to pick out thirty probable sites. Twenty have been surveyed. Five open gates, one into vacuum which displeased the guys that found it immensely; one of them nearly got sucked in. We sent out muon detectors to two of the ones that weren’t open, all the detectors we had and we’ve got a call in for more. They found inactive, I guess you’d call them, bosons at both. Close enough to the course track.”
“I’ve been trying to refine the course programming,” Robin said. “I’m getting it fined down somewhat. What bugs me is that it seems to be following a uniform sphere, congruent to the gravitational field.”
“It bugs me, too,” Weaver admitted. “And five open gates from twenty bugs me more. Because I think that means the others are ‘available’ and that means that the Titcher can open them.”
“That would be bad,” the FEMA rep said.
“Understatement of the century,” Bill replied. “Maybe of the millennium. How many base tracks are there?”
“Sixteen so far,” Crichton said. “Every now and again a boson takes off on its own merry way. But most of them have been sitting in those sixteen base tracks and most of them have been following a ‘top four.’ ”
“Which track is the Titcher track and is it the same as the Mreee track?”
“The Titcher track is designated track three,” Crichton said. “And, yes, the Mreee gate is on the same track. Disney and one other open, near Miami out in the Everglades are on track one. Boca and the Georgia eruption appear to be six and they’re the only two bosons that have come out of six.”
“Any dead bosons on track three?” Weaver asked.
“Oh, a shit-pot full,” Crichton said. “Sorry ma’am.”
“It’s okay,” Robin said.
“Okay, I’d say that those are a probable threat,” Bill said. “Just a hunch. But I’d say it’s a good area to point the military and local police towards. Open gates I don’t think the Titcher can attack. But closed ones they can and the ones that they’re most likely to be able to touch would be the ones on track three; those are the only ones that have been intentionally opened from the other side. Maybe the bosons on that one are really easy to detect or something; that would explain the Mreee as well. Oh, and maybe Boca, I’ve got no idea what Boca is.”
“I do,” Crichton said. “But it doesn’t help.”
“What?” Weaver asked noticing the pained looks on the faces of Earp and Noue.
“They don’t like the answer,” Crichton said, seriously. “It’s Cthulhu.”
“What?” Weaver said then shook his head. “Come on!”
In the 1920s a series of horror short stories had been written by a writer named Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The stories involved alien beings which had controlled earth in the depths of time and then died out or been driven out by other aliens, leaving the way open for the development of man. The aliens were also reported to be sealed away in remote places, such as the depths of the ocean, and from time to time tried to “awaken.” The best known of the stories was “The Call of Cthulhu” about just such an awakening.
“No, listen to me,” the sergeant snapped, shaking his head. “I’m not saying it’s actually Cthulhu but do you know the reason why H.P. Lovecraft started writing those stories?”
“No,” Weaver admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy your logic. On the other hand, say your piece.”
“Lovecraft was a minor student of astrophysical science,” Crichton pointed out, earnestly. “He came to the conclusion that if man ever actually did meet aliens they were going to be so different that there would be no way that man could interact with them. And if they could cross the stars they would be so powerful and so advanced that they would consider us as no more than ants. Total indifference. The ‘evil’ aliens in the Lovecraft stories aren’t evil; they’re indifferent. But their indifference and power, not to mention weirdness, kills us. Just like we kill ants. I’m saying that whatever is in Boca Raton meets the Lovecraftian definition of an alien; a powerful alien being that is indifferent to the secondary effects it is causing. And those secondary effects are not a defense but a function of what it is.”