The device, still operative, was tracked back and forth.
“We’re using a hell of a lot of juice,” Mark pointed out.
“The government’s paying,” Bill replied.
Then a looking glass appeared in the air.
“Formation,” Bill said over the radio as Mark started shutting down the systems. “Survey team in.”
They watched external monitors as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Then a group of five heavily armed men in environment suits, their body posture making them appear as if they were being hard done by, walked into the shed and then into the looking glass.
It was sort of like doing a tactical entry. Sort of. You never knew what was on the other side of the door. Miller knew that he should be getting blasé about it, but instead each successive entry was getting more and more on his nerves. And something about Weaver’s attitude, they’d been around each other enough at this point to tell when the Doc was planning something devious, had him worried.
So he took point. If it was going to be really bad, better that he be the one figuring out what to do about it than the newbie they’d just gotten in from Coronado.
He hefted the MG-240 that he had started carrying as a personal weapon and looked over his shoulder at the team, most of whom were similarly armed.
“Anybody head sweeps me and I’ll kill you even if we survive,” he growled, then stepped into the looking glass.
He automatically stepped forward to let the team out into the area around the gate then dropped to one knee. Sweep left, impressions, very earthlike, sweep right, green grass, blue sky, look outward, hill, guns, tanks!
He raised the MG-240, his finger going to the trigger, and then stopped.
“Everybody freeze,” Miller snapped over the radio. Then he looked around and swore as he lowered the machine gun. “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”
“Kansas!” Miller snapped over the cell phone. “I thought I was going to another fucking planet and you sent me to Kansas?”
“You’d have preferred another planet?” Bill asked.
“No, not really,” Miller admitted. “ ‘What did you do, today, Daddy? Oh, went to another planet. This one had a gravity that was high enough I got squashed flat which is why I look like a pancake.’ It’s gonna happen sooner or later.”
“Agreed,” Bill said. “Which is why we’re going to start shifting the bosons to internal gates. Instantaneous transportation! What man has been dreaming about for decades!”
“One or two persons at a time,” the SEAL noted. “From gates in some really odd places. It’s not going to take the place of planes any time soon.”
“Yeah, but we’re having more bosons produced all the time,” Bill pointed out. “Spreading out all over the world. We’ve already got the ability to open one, in say Virginia, and one in, say, France. And people can just walk in one and out the other. But movement can also be controlled. Set up customs, that sort of thing. And now there’s a direct link between Kansas and Indiana. Don’t know what use that will be, admittedly, but I could see a shipping company setting up a conveyor belt that shifts stuff across the gate. FedEx, maybe.”
“Yeah, open one up in New York and another in California and they won’t even have to look at ‘flyover country’ anymore,” Miller said, grumpily.
“I even know which two gates,” Bill replied. “They’re next on the list. The only problem will be crowd control.”
“Rental car agencies are going to love you.” The SEAL grinned.
“So does my boss,” Bill replied. “The contract with the DOD had a normal disclaimer about ‘civilian use’ of anything learned from my research. The accountants at Columbia are already having spasms. They’re looking at it as a license to print money. A fee for opening the gates and a percentage of any profits.”
“People from other countries opening up clandestine gates to the U.S.,” Miller noted. “The new illegal Zimbabwean problem.”
“You’re such a grump.” Bill laughed.
“Open up the Titcher gates, first,” Miller said.
“Oh, definitely,” Bill replied. “Just a question of from where to where. Once opened, we still don’t know how to close them. And moving them will be… difficult.”
Bill had called Sheila, finally, and told her that he was a little busy with some stuff he couldn’t talk about and that he wasn’t going to be in Huntsville any time soon. She’d taken the hint and dropped him an e-mail detailing all the reasons she was glad he was out of her life, including that his best friend in Huntsville was much better than he was in bed.
Columbia had a division that was supposed to handle civilian uses of any of their developments. They had taken over the gate opening system as soon as the first one was opened between a farmer’s field in the Hudson Valley and a suburban backyard in East Orange County, California. They were, in Bill’s opinion, handling it badly and the news services were paying more attention to that than the still quiescent Titcher gates. But Bill had figured out the theory; it was up to other people to mishandle the marketing and public relations.
He’d gotten sorely out of shape lately so he’d picked up a mountain bike in a sporting goods store in South Orlando and brought it up to the anomaly site. After reading the e-mail from Sheila he took the bike down off its rack, clipped his cell phone to his waist and went out biking.
Most of the remaining roads around the anomaly site had been closed but the majority of the TD area was still off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Which meant it was perfect, except for the terrain, for biking. He headed down a track towards the river to the west and rode along what had once been suburban streets. Nature had already started to prevail in the area. Grasses that had not been uprooted were starting to sprout green and along the river, which had been partially shielded, saplings were starting to grow. A few trees that had merely been pushed over were sprouting new growth upwards. Life goes on.
But not if the Titcher came back. The Titcher would turn this all into their green fungus, if not their vast strip mines. The records from the Mississippi gate had been studied and the conclusion was that it was a world the Titcher had destroyed and abandoned.
He stopped down by the stream and looked at the water, thinking. The water had run brown with silt for the first few weeks after the explosion but now, with the majority of runoff that would occur having happened and the plants coming back, it was clear as gin. Clearer, he suspected, than before the explosion. There were fish in it, as well, big guppy-looking things, some of them with bright blue tails.
They had been unable to close the remnant Titcher bosons. The destabilization seemed to spread along the “track.” Which meant that besides the gates in Tennessee, Eustis, Staunton and Archer, presumably, they had to worry about thirty inactive bosons scattered from Northwest Florida to Saskatchewan. And he had no idea how soon the destabilization would go away. Just a pretty strong gut feeling, based on very limited theory, that it wouldn’t be long.
He got back on the bike and pedaled up the shallow hill towards where UCF used to stand. And the anomaly was still pumping out bosons, although they had limited it to three tracks at least: one, two and four. They were all over the western hemisphere at this point, except Tierra Del Fuego, and had spread as far as the Philippines and Tibet. They were coming out a shade more slowly, now, having lost nearly four seconds in the past month. Which meant the rate wasn’t going to change appreciably any time soon. In the meantime, since they weren’t closing them as fast as they were being produced, the bosons were a menace that might produce more things like the Titcher, or the Boca Raton anomaly, at any time.