“Some kind of missile, torpedo?”
“Seems like it, doesn’t it? But there’s no indication of any launching craft. Besides this starts from really deep down, miles.”
“How about an underwater volcano, maybe spewing out blobs of lava, or rocks?”
“There’s probably too much drag in the water for that to be possible, but I’d give some credence if the reports were from one spot. They’re not, though. They’re from all over the globe. Several from mid-Atlantic shipping lanes, a few near Japan, a couple from the Sixth Fleet in the Med, one south of Madagascar, another in the Sea of Tasman between Australia and New Zealand. The latest one came from a sub north of Hawaii, that’s why it’s on my mind. A particularly close call, poor bastards thought they were being attacked. Anyway, the thing seems to hop all over.”
The men fell silent. Rutherford leaned over to examine a chipped nail on his big toe. Isaacs had not really been concentrating on the conversation. Now snippets of it rolled around in his head. Suddenly, a surge of adrenalin went keening out of his belly and through his body. His eyes snapped open and, despite the heat, he felt as if someone had just raked a large icy comb down his back.
He sat up and faced Rutherford who still bent over his foot.
“Those reports you just described, they seem to be either north or south of the equator, about equal distances.” He tried to keep his voice casual.
“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention another curious feature. This thing appears at random times, but always near the same latitude, sometimes north, sometimes south.”
“Thirty-three degrees.”
Now Rutherford swiveled his head in surprise.
“Hey, friend, you’ve been holding out on me!”
Nervous energy drove Isaacs off the bench. “Nothing like it,” he said intently, “just slow to make the connection.” He paced the small room randomly, oblivious to his steamy surroundings, his mind racing. “Good lord, in the water, too! What the hell does that mean?”
Rutherford had witnessed his friend’s bursts of intensity before and, failing to understand what had set him off, watched bemusedly as Isaacs moved about, his cock flipping drops of sweat and condensed steam at each sudden turn.
Isaacs stopped in front of him.
“Up to last week we were analyzing the seismic equivalent of your phenomenon. Something’s moving through the Earth, generating seismic waves.”
He sat suddenly next to Rutherford and continued.
“I had some of my people keeping an eye on it, even though we didn’t know what to make of it.”
Then he was thinking out loud.
“The seismic data only told us what was happening in rock. I convinced myself that, whatever it was, it was confined to the Earth’s crust, that the seismic waves were its essence. Now you tell me something about it continues into the water.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it. I don’t like this at all.
“Listen, we’ve learned some things you apparently haven’t stumbled onto yet. This thing is always there, and very methodical. It just goes back and forth, back and forth, always on the same path through the Earth.” He waved his arms. “And then out into the ocean! Shit! No reason to think it doesn’t continue into the atmosphere! No telling how far it goes.”
He leaned back against the wall. “Our problem is that McMasters scuttled our operation, claimed it wasn’t Agency business.” He paused for a moment. “Damn, it’s hot in here! Let’s go someplace where we can do a little serious talking. Better make it your office, since the subject is officially ‘verboten’ on my turf.”
As Rutherford steered his staff car through the prerush hour traffic, Isaacs explained animatedly how his interest in the seismic signal became aroused during his duty at AFTAC. He then outlined the progress Danielson had made, culminating in her conclusion that the phenomenon followed a trajectory fixed in space. They finished the drive in silence while Rutherford ruminated on this new information.
A half hour later they entered Rutherford’s office. Rutherford ordered up the Navy file on the acoustic phenomenon. He sat behind his desk while Isaacs remained standing, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. Rutherford spoke first.
“Boy, I’m really having trouble absorbing this. I had a notion of a random, infrequent occurrence, and now you describe something punching through the surface like clockwork, every eighty minutes or so. I guess I still don’t get the picture. Tell me again how this fixed motion works.”
“Let me use this globe,” Isaacs said as he lifted a fancy relief model of the Earth off its shelf and put it on Rutherford’s desk. He grabbed a pencil and held it pointed toward the surface of the globe, about a third of the way above the equator. “The thing always moves along a line, like this.” He moved the pencil in and out, parallel to itself, “Zipzip, zipzip. But as the Earth turns,” he spun the globe slowly with his free hand, “the thing always comes up in a different place.” He tapped the pencil rhythmically as he spun the globe, each tap hitting it an inch further on than the last.
“Let me see that,” said Rutherford, reaching for the pencil. He held it alongside the globe so that he could project it in his imagination into the center of the globe. Then he moved it back and forth along its length as he spun the globe slowly, eraser to the northern hemisphere, then point to the southern, eraser to the north, point, south. “Okay, I think I get the picture, but what could possibly do that? Through the center of the Earth? Jesus Christ!”
He jerked his head up as a knock sounded at the door.
“Come in.”
An aide came in bearing a file folder.
“Bob, Lieutenant Szkada. Lieutenant, Bob Isaacs, Central Intelligence.”
Isaacs nodded at him.
“Sir.” The young man placed the folder on Rutherford’s desk.
“That’ll be all,” Rutherford said to him with a note of paternalism.
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant turned and left.
“Sharp young man, that,” Rutherford confided. “My right arm.” He pulled the file toward him. “Let’s see what we have here.” He extracted a list of reported detections and handed it to Isaacs. Rutherford leafed through the corresponding write-ups, looking for ones that were not hopelessly sketchy.
As Isaacs scanned down the list of sonar reports, he let out a loud exclamation.
“I’ll be damned!”
“What?”
“One of life’s little ironies. Several of these reports are from the undersea arrays of acoustic monitors.”
“Sure, we have those babies all over, bound to pick up something like this. So?”
“That system is also operated by AFTAC. The whole ball of wax was right under my nose, both seismic and sonar data. I’m kicking myself, I was so hung up on the seismic signal propagating through the Earth. I had my people trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing.”
Isaacs threw the list on the desk and pulled a chair around beside Rutherford. They spent fifteen minutes checking the time and position on Earth for each of the reports and converting that data into a projected position on the celestial sphere, to see what stars were overhead. As near as they could tell, it was always the same patch of stars. All the sonar events fell on the path predicted by the seismic data. Trying to estimate whether the influence was precisely at the phase that brought Danielson’s seismic signal to the surface was more difficult, but the evidence they had seemed damning enough.
“So what did you say you are doing about all this?” Rutherford wanted to know.
“Not jackshit.” Isaacs described his skirmish with McMasters.
When he finished, Rutherford inquired, “Can’t you get McMasters to reopen the file, now that you have this confirmation from our data?”