“It feels sad,” the national security advisor said. “But it doesn’t do much for us at present.”
“It tells us we can open gates,” Bill pointed out. “I don’t think that the Titcher can come through a gate that is opened to a world that they don’t control. On the other hand, quiescent bosons are a threat.”
“So are gates,” the secretary of defense said, dryly. “We don’t know that the Titcher are the only threat. Look at the Mreee. Not to mention the Boca Raton anomaly. We need to figure out a way to close them and keep them closed.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible with any near future technology, Mr. Secretary,” Bill said. “I’ve spoken to several other specialists and it’s a general agreement that it would take orders of magnitude more power, precisely applied, to close a wormhole, permanently. The quiescent bosons that we’ve connected to indicate that it is possible, but the how remains a mystery. What we have been able to do, based on these experiments, is figure out how to channel the boson output from the Orlando generator. The bosons seem to choose their channels based upon maximum probability in the local environment. By applying an induction field, a very high order induction field, we’ve managed to get the bosons to avoid track three. So there are no more bosons generating on the track the Titcher use. But there are over a hundred quiescent bosons currently scattered around on that track, from Florida to France. It continues, apparently, to be closed, but it might open at any time.”
“Any suggestions what we can do about that?” the President asked.
“Remember that great big Van Der Graff generator I was talking about?” Bill said. “We think that the bosons are moveable if they have a charge applied, same with the gates. But we need some huge Van Der Graff generators to apply that charge. After that I’d suggest moving them somewhere remote, Frenchman Flats comes to mind, and leaving them. Maybe even bury them in an old mine or something, with a nuke set to detonate. We won’t be able to do that in weeks, maybe not in years, we may be talking about decades, but it’s doable. Assuming that the reality matches with theory.”
“And you can’t turn off the Orlando generator?” the national security advisor asked.
“No, ma’am,” Bill said. “Same problem. I’ve looked at some of Ray Chen’s surviving notes; he had some on his home computer. And I’ve talked it over with Dr. Hawking and Dr. Gonzalvez. But it comes to the same conclusion. We’d need about one GAEE, that’s pronounced gee, or a Global Annual Energy Expenditure — that is about 1x1018 Joules… a hell of a lot in other words, and something that could actually channel it, which doesn’t exist even in theory, to pump enough power into one of those gates to close it. There are some very out there theoretical materials that might be used, but I think even then all we’d get is destabilization and the materials vaporizing in a microsecond or two. And the vaporization would be a high energy event, think explosion. We could drop a nuke on the other side of some of the gates that are on other tracks and try to destabilize those tracks. But we already know about the secondary effects. How many areas do you want to irradiate? There’s a gate in the suburbs of Los Angeles, now, and another in Cleveland. Both of them open onto abandoned worlds. But drop a nuke in one on that track and we might end up with neutron pulses on all the others.”
“Not good,” the President said.
“No, Mr. President,” the national security advisor replied. “Especially since some have opened in Europe as well. I can imagine the reaction of the French.”
“Did you know that one of the planets has been tentatively identified?” the President said.
“No, I didn’t,” Bill answered, excitedly.
“I don’t know the jargon,” the President added. “But it’s supposed to be relatively close.”
“BT-315-9,” the national security advisor said, consulting a note. “It’s a star something like ours…”
“G class?” Bill asked.
“Yes, that’s what it says here. About sixty light-years away. It’s on track one. The gate is in Missouri. One of the survey team knew something about stars and thought she recognized some of them. So a team of astronomers went through and took a look. They’re pretty sure that it’s that star. They took readings on some others and they all tracked back to that location. Now they’re sending in excited reports, something about triangulation, and they want to somehow establish a major astronomy base on the other side.”
“I can understand why they’re excited,” Bill said. “And I agree. But it has some impact on the other problem. I’d like to get some research done at the other open gates. It might turn out that they’re all relatively local. By the same token, it might tell us how much power is required to open a gate that’s not relatively local. And it tells us that we’re at least in the same universe. He… heck, that’s practically right next door. As far as we knew before that, we might have been opening into other universes, much less in the same galactic quadrant.”
“And this is important, why?” the defense secretary asked.
“Well, I’d personally like to know where the Titcher are in ‘real’ space, Mr. Secretary,” Bill pointed out. “Just in case they have space travel technology as well.”
“Oh, how truly good,” the secretary said.
“They might and they might not,” Bill said, excitedly. “But it clears up the major point that the gates can open in this universe. And that, Mr. President, is a very, very good thing indeed.”
“We’re opening another one?” Chief Miller groused.
“Yep,” Bill said. The current boson was located in Indiana, well out in a cornfield. A forty-acre section had been hastily mowed down and revetments constructed for units of the Indiana National Guard. A presidential order had been signed calling all units of the National Guard to federal service. There had been barely a squeak from Congress over the supplemental appropriation bill; at this point just about every state in the Union had one or more gates open in it and multiple identified bosons, many of them what the news media referred to as “Titcher bosons.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Miller asked as Bill and Mark checked the alignment of the linear accelerator. The accelerator had been modified so that it could be pivoted over a narrow arc, both horizontally and vertically.
“Yep,” Bill answered. “You wanna go get suited up?”
“How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?” Chief Miller muttered, but he went to get suited up.
“You gonna tell him?” Mark asked as soon as the SEAL was out of the building.
“Nope,” Bill answered. “I might be wrong. I don’t want him letting his guard down.”
They were looking at the screens on the same hastily cobbled together control panel. Mark had taken a few hours that were otherwise unoccupied to run up a CAD diagram of a properly designed gate opening system. Columbia had dithered for a few days about whether to patent it or classify it and decided on the former. Now a construction firm in Taiwan was working on a new and improved version. Given that Columbia had the patent on the process, if the next experiment worked his option shares were going to go through the roof.
“Initiating,” he said, flipping the switch. The Circular Inductance Generator, formerly known as the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, began to spin. The lights briefly dimmed. Nothing.
“No formation,” Mark said.
“Track it around a little,” Bill answered. “Our aim might have been off.”