Now, to cap it all, he had gone down with some kind of sickness. It had started a few days earlier, he had woken aching all over and with a sore throat that even the coffee from the enlisted men’s mess hall couldn’t cure. He had reported to sickbay where his illness had been diagnosed as the common cold and he’d been given a couple of aspirin tablets and told to get back to duty. The next day he had been running a fever and felt too exhausted to move. Again, he’d reported sick. Although he didn’t know it, his immediate NCO was a kindly man who felt badly over seeing a young man ruining his life by his own stupidity and had tried to give him some well-meant advice. “Look kid, spend your life doing work that’s worth what you’re paid and you’ll never be paid what you’re worth.”
Chestnut, wrapped up in his grievances and self-righteous indignation, hadn’t listened and he’d carried on doing as little as he could while descending deeper into his malaise. His fever levels were slowly increasing as well and his muscle aches were getting so bad that he was finding it difficult to walk. When reveille blew, he tried to get up but the effort exhausted him. He lay on his bunk, gasping for breath.
“Get your lily-livered ass off that bed Chestnut, you’ve got…” The Sergeant’s voice tailed off. Chestnut’s face was dead white, his eyes deeply sunk and heavily shadowed, his finger nails, lips and ears blue-tinged. For the first time, it was apparent that he was seriously, indeed dangerously ill. “What’s up kid?”
“Headache, so bad can’t think straight. Keep coughing. Can’t swallow, threw up. Please…”
Something clicked in the Sergeant’s mind. “Kid, I want to see your arms now.”
Chestnut flailed at his bedding, managing to extract one arm. Half way between wrist and elbow was an ulcer, one with an ugly black necrotic center. He looked at it, stunned. “That was just a bump last night.”
The Sergeant took one look at it and stepped back, almost in a panic. “Johnson, get the medics here double-fast. Tell them to bring Cipro. And get through to Fort Detrick, tell them we have a red alert here.”
DIMO(N) Headquarters, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, January 2009
Dr Kuroneko stared at the chalkboard, frowning. There was something strange going on here… The green board was covered with colorful diagrams and scribblings in the arcane language of tensor mechanics and diagrams; the front half of the room was covered in chalk dust from the layers of revision he had added to his thoughts over the last two hours. Absentmindedly, he rolled a fresh stick of chalk between his fingers as he pursed his lips, wrinkling his forehead. Turning, he looked back at the worn textbook, bending close to the dog-eared page to read a note scribbled in the margin.
His face broke into a smile, and he gave a little cry as he jumped toward the chalkboard, erasing an equals-sign with the heel of his hand and replacing it with a carat. Then he moved to the other side of the board and made some modification to a long expansion of Christoffel symbols, muttering to himself as he did. “No, the mass-energy is different. Take into account the… ” – scribbles – “… energy of the system’s curvature…” – more scribbles – “… embedded into a seven-dimensional space-“
He nearly lost his train of thought at a polite cough behind him, but he held onto the end of it and threw up one finger behind him to forestall any comments as he finished frantically writing. Then he turned, blinking owlishly through dusty glasses at the intruders.
There were two men standing there. One, dressed in a working military uniform with two stars, looked impatient and uncomfortable in the messy office. The other, dressed in rumpled business casual with a tie awkwardly sitting at his throat, had a sheaf of folders by his side, by was craning his neck to follow the argument Dr Kuroneko had laid out. Before the military officer could speak, his companion said, “Is that Crane’s argument?”
Dr Kuroneko smiled. “Not quite, Surlethe. I’ve modified it a little so it applies to our situation.”
Dr Surlethe set down his folders and moved up to the chalkboard. “You’ve modified the metric tensor?”
“Not quite – the chief changes are in the mass-energy tensor. Basically, we have to -“
“I’m sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, but we really need to get to business,” said Dr Surlethe’s companion, General Schatten. “We have a change of plans for the DIMO(N) science team. Shall we have a seat in the conference room and discuss it?”
They filed out of the Dr Kuroneko’s office, as Dr Surlethe cast a longing glance back at the chalkboard, and down the stairs to the conference room next to the general’s office. He took a seat at the head of the table; the two doctors sat beside him. Dr Surlethe started. “We have a new direction for the physics team to take. The work you’ve done so far on portals and modeling the storm influence is excellent, but we need more actionable material on the weather.”
Dr Kuroneko nodded his understanding.
“I’ve come here straight from a meeting with the President and President-Elect. General Schatten has agreed that he would have pursued it anyway even if the politicians hadn’t decided for us, but at this point the portal research needs to take a back seat to figuring out just what Yahweh is doing to our weather and how exactly he’s doing it.”
“What sort of data are we working with?”
“We have access to all of the data that NASA, the NOAA, and the NWS have collected,” said General Schatten, “as well as anything that university meteorological departments have gathered on their own. There are also several governments eager to share data and work with us – Japan, India, and Indonesia in particular, since they’re worried about the potential for geological assaults – and we’ll put their physics teams in contact with you. If you want to share any models, though, it will need to pass by my desk. The portal modeling in particular does not leave DIMO(N).
“Do you have any questions?”
Kuroneko said, “No. By the way, speaking of portals, I think a young man on our team – a Princeton undergraduate, actually – has reached a breakthrough just yesterday.”
Surlethe leaned forward. “Do tell.” General Schatten tapped his foot slightly.
“Well, I won’t bore you with the mathematical details” – he glanced over at General Schatten with a slight twinkle in his eye – “but basically, we’ve had to rework cosmology. General relativity is still true – as far as we know – but it is a specific case of a more general theory. It looks now like the universe is something like a styrofoam ball. We live on the outside of granules, while Hell and Heaven exist on the inside of bubbles. We’re sort of in the same space but not quite. The implications are fascinating, there could be millions of Hells and Heavens out there.”
“That’s great,” said Schatten, “but how can we use this?”
“That’s what I’m getting to. The really nice thing about this model is that it makes a particular set of predictions we can test just by monitoring the opening or closing of a portal. And if it does work, it doesn’t require any stellar energy densities or subatomic length scales to apply: we should be able to start engineering immediately.” Dr Kuroneko smiled. “Gentlemen, we should be able to open portals straight to Heaven within two years. All we have to do is to find it.”
“Great,” said Surlethe. “But please do bear in mind that the weather is more important than an abstract model of portal transitions.”
“We’ll do that,” replied Kuroneko.
“Okay, gentlemen,” said General Schatten, “I have business to attend to. I’ll leave you to discuss the particulars of the weather modelling.” He stood and shook hands before leaving.
“All right,” said Surlethe when he’d gone, “we’ve already talked about the rough mechanism – body of hot air injected beneath the base of the storm. By mid-January, we need to have a pretty good idea of just how Yahweh’s doing this, injecting hot air or warming it up…”