Bill walked down the hill, which was knee high in grass and covered in lovely white flowers, to where the team was making final adjustments. The equipment also required enormous quantities of energy, which was another reason for using this boson; there was a high-tension power line trailing across the back side of the property. Army electrical power specialists along with some bemused electricians from the local power cooperative had tapped into the line, run it through an Army field substation and trailed arm-thick power cables down to the devices in the tent. They were now all connected and would soon be drawing enough power to brown out the surrounding area.
“All set?” he asked.
Mark Rosenberg was a member of his team at Columbia. The heavyset, just below medium height, brown-haired man was an electrical engineer with a background in the nuclear industry. After getting laid off in a round of cuts he had submitted his resume to Columbia, expecting to end up working in one of their few remaining defense factories. Instead, he had ended up working with Bill doing whatever they were doing that week. The team’s purpose, up until the opening of the gates, was finding problems that the U.S. military had and then solutions. It had all been highly classified work which sometimes resulted in major successes but often resulted in minor failures. However, the military had a host of problems it wanted fixed and much preferred to dump them on what were generally called “Beltway Bandits” than detail officers who had real day-to-day jobs to trying to find solutions. Good, problem solving, officers were always in short supply. It made more sense to have them fix those problems that only the military could solve, like figuring out exactly how much firepower to use against Iraqi guerilla forces by trial and error, than sitting in offices trying to figure out how to determine the whichness of where. Occasionally the team’s problem-solving skills had a great effect and thus the military felt their money had been well spent. One soldier’s life saved was equated to just about a million dollars. The team’s output had probably saved, here and there, over a hundred lives if not more.
But since getting the call to go to Orlando, Mark had been on what the military called “the sharp end.” He’d suited up more times than he ever did working at Savannah River, he’d watched two nuclear detonations and he’d scrounged more weird materials, from more sources, than he’d ever imagined. The linear accelerator, for example, had had to be hand built on site from parts scrounged from research laboratories and factories ranging from Missouri (at a steel plant) to England (Reading University). And the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, its temporary official name, had started off life as a device to wrap tubes with in plastic. He’d found it on e-Bay being sold by a company in Seattle that was tired of it jamming all the time. The express overnight shipping had cost more than the machine.
“Probably,” he said, checking a connection. “This is the most jury-rigged piece of crap I’ve ever seen in all my born days.”
“It only has to run for a few seconds,” Bill replied. “It either will work or it won’t.”
The boson generated muons in every direction. But by careful study they had found that in one direction, more or less pointed west and down towards the earth, it was generating over one hundred times the output of any other direction. The devices had been aligned carefully. The circular magnetic whatchamacallit was aligned perpendicular to the stream while the accelerator was aligned opposite of it. In a few seconds they were going to find out if it was possible to open a gate intentionally. If they could open one, they might be able to close one as well.
“Let’s get out of here,” Bill said, gesturing to the door of the shelter.
“I’m sure not going to stick around,” Mark replied, closing the door to the connection and wiping his hands on a scrap of rag. The one thing he’d enjoyed about the recent jobs was getting his hands dirty. Both working for Savannah River and Columbia had involved far more time sitting in offices than building things. And he dearly loved to tinker with electrical contraptions.
They walked up the hill and through a stand of old trees where a farmhouse had apparently once stood, then across the road and down the slope on the far side. In the tobacco field on the far side the army had kindly constructed a bunker. It was a hole in the ground, covered with scrounged heavy timbers, I-beams and corrugated steel, which had been piled six layers deep with sandbags. Bill had been surprised and amused to find that the Army had an automatic sandbag filler. Construction of the bunker, using civilian backhoes, the sandbag filler and a small army of soldiers, had taken less than six hours. It was large enough for the team and all their gear. Another bunker a short distance away, connected by a reinforced and covered trench, held the military command post.
Bill picked up a field phone and cranked it.
“Bravo Company,” a voice answered on the other end.
“All your people ready?” Bill asked.
“Hold one,” the soldier answered. In a moment he was back. “All clear.”
“Initiating,” Bill said, nodding at Mark.
Mark nodded back and pressed a button on a hastily rigged control panel.
There should have been an explosion or a blast of light. Some sort of decent special effect. But there wasn’t. The cameras in the inflatable shelter showed the whatchamacallit starting to spin. It got up to full speed and then, suddenly, as the lights in the bunker dimmed slightly, there was a round mirror hanging just off the ground.
“Kill it,” Bill said. “Send in the evaluation team.”
Bill walked out of the shelter and up the hill where the trees were and watched as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Five men in environmental suits, carrying a selection of heavy weapons, jumped out of the Humvee and entered the inflatable shelter. Bill waited impatiently and then one came out of the shelter and waved a hand.
Bill caught a ride with the battalion commander as he drove by on the way down the hill. When he got to the bottom he waved a hand at Command Master Chief Miller who was stripping out of his environment suit. Miller had lost quite a bit of what remaining hair he had left but otherwise was recovering nicely from his exposure to a blast of neutrons and fairly hard gammas.
“Desert environment,” Miller said. “Some mountains nearby. What look like ruins at the base of the mountains. No animals seen or plants. And no Titcher for sure. Air monitors say it’s got enough oxygen, slightly elevated carbon dioxide. Pressure is about earth normal. Cold as hell, though; temperature on the far side reads five degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Did you say ruins?” Bill asked.
“We can’t say that the entire world is desert,” Bill noted over the secure link. “We can only see the tiny slice on the other side of the gate. The archeologist we conscripted from the University of Kentucky estimates that the ruins are at least ten thousand years old. We’ve found some biologicals at this point, but they’re all lower order, our equivalent of insects and lichen.”
“Did the Titcher wipe them out?” the President asked.
“No, there’s no sign of Titcher biology,” Bill said with a shrug. “Everything has a lifespan, Mr. President. Species rise and fall, at least if you look at the evolutionary record,” he noted, carefully. “Civilizations rise and fall, too, as do planets. Eventually, our sun will go cold and the earth will pass into history. It won’t happen for millions of years but it appears that it already has happened on that planet. I’d be surprised if the ruins don’t turn out to be older than they appear. I suspect that the race that made them died out or left, to somewhere warmer at a guess. The boson that we connected to was a remnant from when they had lived on that planet, raised their children, built their civilization.”