“I’ll talk to Kevin and light a fire under him,” the secretary of defense said. “If there’s something holding it up besides lawyers, money I guess would be the answer, I’ll talk about that as well.”
“I think that’s all we have,” the President said. “Let’s hope the Titcher gates don’t open soon.”
“Robin,” Bill said, from his office. “Could I see you for a second?”
“Sure,” the programmer replied, walking to the open door.
“Come on in and close the door,” Bill said, opening the refrigerator by his desk. “You drink Pepsi, right?”
“He said as he slipped in the strychnine?” Robin asked.
“No,” Bill said, chuckling. “I got a call from the Columbia rep in Paris. The Adar are asking about the boson generator. Communication is still spotty so they’ve asked me to go over there and try to figure out how to communicate what’s going on and what we think happened. You’re better at 3-D modeling than I am. I’d like to just make up a little cartoon to show what we think happened and what is happening now. Could you do that?”
“Sure,” Robin said, smiling. “It doesn’t require modeling at all. I’ll just do a rip on an Unreal Tournament engine; that will give enough detail for what you’re asking about.”
“Great,” Bill said. “Can you do it on a plane?”
The biggest problem had been passports; Robin didn’t have one. By the time they were in D.C., though, one had been prepared and they took a trans-Atlantic flight, First Class, on British Airways.
It was a hell of a lot better than his first flight to Paris when they’d loaded him in another F-15 and flown nonstop with one aerial refueling. The service was much better, from some very pretty young English stewardesses, and Robin was good company.
They’d laid out the script for what they wanted to impart on the way to D.C., then Robin had started modeling it on her laptop. By the time they got to Paris the video, which had had some glitches, was working fine. They spent the night at the embassy, then took a French Alouette helicopter to the Adar gate site.
The French military was, apparently, not taking the Adar at their word. The vineyard was now ringed by entrenchments and a large concrete bastion was under construction. But the Adar representative, wearing a respirator, was apparently willing to ignore the formalities. Perhaps that was because when they stepped through the gate, also wearing respirators since the Adar atmosphere was high in carbon dioxide compared to Earth, there was a similar military buildup on the Adar side. There was also a large device that looked vaguely like a tank without the treads. The weapon it mounted had a large bore but no larger than that on an Abrams. Bill suspected, though, that it was something much more powerful than a 120mm tank cannon. If the humans turned out to be less friendly than it appeared, the Adar were clearly willing to close the gate with all due force.
Rather than flying casual diplomats all over their globe, the Adar had set up a meeting center near the Terran gate. Bill saw quite a few humans, most of them apparently international diplomats uncomfortable in their respirators, moving around the grounds. The Adar that had greeted them on the Terran side accompanied them by ground vehicle to the meeting center, which was a large building that had the vague feel of a hangar, sectioned up by hasty plastic panels, and turned them over to another guide. He, in turn, led them to the back of the center where a more substantial office was located.
In it were Dr. Avery, wearing an oxygen nosepiece and toting an oxygen bottle, and three Adar. There was also an Adar-sized conference table surrounded by chairs for the Adar and a few human swivel chairs that had been brought through the gate. All the Adar looked the same to Bill and he suspected that it was the same with them. But one of them stepped forward and crossed his chest, bowing slightly.
“This is Tchar, Dr. Weaver,” Avery said. He was a slim man with an erect carriage, a former Army officer who had attained the rank of rear admiral before retiring. He weighed 173 pounds, which was the same weight he had been upon entering the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. “You met him before.”
“A pleasure to see you again, Tchar,” Bill said, pulling aside his respirator then clamping it back down. “I see you’ve found a better solution, Admiral Avery.”
“A necessity of the mission, Doctor,” Avery replied. Before he did he took a breath through his nose which slowed his speech, but it was better than shouting through a respirator or pulling it aside. “Do you think we can explain the gate phenomenon to the Adar?”
“We can’t even explain it to ourselves, Admiral,” Bill admitted. “Miss Noue?”
Robin set her laptop on the table as Avery and the Adar sat down. The laptop was nearly at Avery’s eye-level due to the height of the Adar table. She keyed the video and then sat down herself.
The scene was a daytime, apparently viewed from the air. The notional camera swooped in over some suburban tracts and roads and then showed a stylized college campus. A few students were walking around the campus, carrying books or laptops. The camera zoomed in on a building and then through the wall into a laboratory. A few people were grouped around a device. The only portion that was clear was a linear accelerator. A man that didn’t look like Ray Chen but did have vaguely Asian features said: “Let’s see what happens,” and pressed a button.
The camera cut back to outside the building and there was a flash. It cut to farther away and watched the shockwave roll out from the building and the mushroom cloud form.
The next sequence was video from the news choppers on the day of the event. They showed the police helicopter closing in on the base of the dust cloud and then the shot of the Chen Anomaly. And the bug that first fell out.
The next sequence was computer animation again. The anomaly was shown and then particles zipping out. The “camera” showed one of the particles zipping away down between and through buildings, then zoomed out to show that it was covering a portion of the globe. It came to rest at a random spot and then, a few moments later, a gate opened.
Another was shown zipping not far from the anomaly on the map and then a gate opening in a dark wood. Dog-demons, and they had been the hardest to create of all the images, came out of the gate sniffing the ground. They went into a house and came out dragging two people, taking them into the gate. Last there was a shot of the fighting in Eustis.
“And the rest you know,” Bill said as the video stopped.
One of the Adar said something to Tchar and he made a gesture like a horse tossing its head. He said something to Admiral Avery, crossing his arms in front of him.
“Tchar says that he grieves for the pain inflicted to us,” Avery translated. “But he is also puzzled.” The translator nodded for the Adar to continue.
“He says that he is puzzled by the scene in the laboratory. Unless we have something to use great power, I think he means something like superconductors, that he is unaware of, there did not seem to be enough power available to create a single boson, much less many of them. He also asks how many bosons we have generated. I’m not sure that we can answer that. Also, be aware that the other gentleman is called Tsho’futt. He appears to be picking up English rather quickly.”
“It’s common knowledge in general on our world,” Bill pointed out. “They’ll find out sooner or later and I don’t even have an exact number. Tell him over thirty for each one of their days. And, no, Ray Chen’s accelerator should not have been able to make a single boson, much less many.”