“To what end?”
“That’s what Dad asked me and I’ll tell you what I told him. It pissed him off, so let’s see what it does to you.”
“I’ll be sure to listen with an open mind,” said Greene.
They smiled at each other for a moment. Genuine smiles on both sides.
Prospero said, “If there are infinite worlds and if through quantum physics and the science of superstring theory we can access them, then why would we need to ever fight another war?”
“I don’t follow. How does one relate to the other?”
“Natural resources,” said Prospero. “Imagine if no one had to fight wars over limited supplies of oil, natural gas, coal. Imagine if no one ever had to fight for a place to stand, for a place to build a home. For land to raise sheep and cows and things like that. Imagine if there were infinite oceans in which to fish. If there was enough for everyone and more than anyone could ever use, why would people like my father and his cronies ever have to build bombs or fighter planes or any of that stuff?”
Greene nodded. “That is an appealing thought, of course. An end to the cause of war. By inference it would cancel out greed because there would be no limit to the things one person could possess.”
Prospero brightened and nodded enthusiastically. “Then you do get it.”
“I understand the benefits of such a scenario,” said the doctor. “But it’s a dream, Prospero, and dreams are only dreams.”
“That’s just it,” said Prospero, a strange light igniting in his eyes. “What if they’re not dreams? What if, when we dream, we’re somehow looking from our world into another world? What if everything people dream is that? What if all dreams, no matter how weird or wild or crazy, are people seeing other versions of the world, other universes where maybe the same rules of physics don’t apply?”
The boy leaned forward, his fists clenched.
“Doc, that’s what is going on in my dreams,” he continued, his voice dropping to a terse whisper. “The people of my world, the gods of my world, and even the slaves — the shoggoths — they all whisper to me. They want me to build the God Machine. They know I can do it. They want me to come home.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A city?
It made no sense.
None.
Bunny said, “Who built this?”
“No one,” whispered Top. “You know how deep we are, Farm Boy? We’re beneath a hundred million goddamn years of ice. Maybe twice that. No one had ever built no city down here. No one ever lived here.”
The presence of the city — the sheer scope and complexity of it — made a lie of Top’s words.
We stood there, dwarfed by it. It was as if the builders of ancient Egypt had constructed a megalopolis on the scale of New York or Hong Kong. Only bigger. Much, much bigger. We stopped talking about what we were seeing. It was an impossible conversation, and the echoes of our voices seemed incredibly tiny in that vastness. It made us feel like ants. It took us ten more minutes to reach the bottom of the slope.
“All that excavation equipment,” murmured Top. “And the tunnel we followed to get down here. Erskine and his crew were looking for this. Maybe the Chinese and Russians, too.”
“How’d they know?” wondered Bunny. “With all the iron in the rock, they couldn’t have seen it with ground-penetrating radar. How’d they know it was here, Top? How’d they know?”
Top shook his head. “That’s one more question to add to a long damn list.”
He cut a sideways look at me as he said that.
Fair enough. I needed those same answers, and for the same reasons.
“Spread out and scout the area,” I ordered.
Aside from a confusion of bloody footprints and a few pieces of dropped or discarded gear, we saw no further traces of people down here. That should have been a comfort, but it wasn’t.
Top called, “Hey, Cap’n, you seeing this?”
“Yeah,” I said, gaping at the city. “Of course I see—”
“No,” he said, “over there.” He pointed to a space between two of the titanic blocks. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was nestled closer to the ground and was dwarfed by this impossible architecture. There, half-hidden in shadows, was a machine. We approached it with caution. My heart was still beating wildly and there was cold sweat on my upper lip.
Bunny stumbled a couple of times because he kept looking at the city instead of where he was going. Guess I wasn’t the only one who was out of it. And that was deeply troubling. Even with everything we were seeing, we were above becoming slack-jawed tourists. Except right now that’s what we were.
“Get your fat head out of your white ass, Farm Boy,” snapped Top.
Bunny twitched and gave Top a brief, blank stare that showed a lot of fear and a lot of incomprehension, then his eyes cleared and he nodded.
“This is nuts,” he murmured.
“Well, no shit,” said Top. He was trying to sound casual, offhand. He didn’t. There was a quaver in his voice.
“Come on,” I said, walking down a steep granite slope toward the object. Our shoes had gum-rubber soles but they still managed to send rhythmic echoes up into the frigid air, and distance warped the sounds as they bounced back to us. The noise sounded like the muffled heartbeat of some sleeping thing.
Because everything down there was on such a cyclopean scale, it took longer to reach the machine than I expected. And when we got there it was larger than I thought. It was built like the mouth of a tunnel, thirty feet high, with a series of inner rings that stepped back at irregular intervals. The primary structure looked to be made of steel, but there were other metals, too. Lots of exposed copper, some crude iron bands, gleaming alloy bolts, and long circular strips of what looked like gold. Heavy black rubber-coated cables were entwined with the rings of metal, and coaxial cables as thick as my thigh snaked along the ground and ran farther down the slope to where a series of heavy industrial generators were positioned on a flat stone pad. Sixteen generators. Lots of power.
The tunnel stretched back so far it disappeared into darkness. Top shone his flashlight down the gullet but the beam simply faded out after fifty yards. I leaned around the outside to see that the tunnel was built into the wall. There were blast and drill marks on the stone to show that they had bored into the heart-stone of the mountain. The throat of the machine looked like it ran deep into the bedrock.
“What the hell is this?” asked Bunny.
Top cut me a look. “Hadron collider? I mean, what else it could be?”
Bunny touched the bundles of copper wire. “Doesn’t look right, does it? Different than the big one at CERN. I read about that.”
“So you’re an expert in damn collider design now, Farm Boy?” Top smacked Bunny’s hand away from the machine. “Don’t touch nothing. We don’t know shit about this thing. Might be something nuclear. Don’t know, can’t say, so don’t touch. Besides, you already been bitch-slapped by a mutant penguin. You want to get your balls blown off, too? No? Good, then stop getting grabby.”
“Copy that,” said Bunny, taking his hand back.
I tapped my earbud for Bug. It took a few tries and when he came on the line I couldn’t understand a word he said because of the static.