Phillips and Isaacs remained standing by the door until Zicek was seated, then Phillips spoke. “Gentlemen, you remember Dr. Danielson and Mr. Isaacs and the novel problem they brought to us before. There have been a number of developments, among which is the change in status of this situation. They came to us informally before to seek what wisdom we had to offer. Now they are here on highest priority official status. I urge you to listen carefully to their new information and to address this problem with all the acumen at your command. I’ve no doubt that when you have heard the latest developments you’ll need no further goad from me. Mr. Isaacs.”
“Thank you, Professor Phillips.” Isaacs clasped his hands behind his back and looked around the room, last and longest at Harvey Leems seated close to his left side. “You’ll recall that Dr. Danielson had predicted that our regular seismic, sonar signal was to impinge on Nagasaki on July 7 and on Dallas July 26, just a week ago.
“For Nagasaki we stationed a ground observer in the area and obtained high resolution aerial reconnaissance photographs. At about the predicted time, a chlorine tank in a nearby warehouse sprang a leak. A workman in the warehouse was killed by gas inhalation, and a number of others were hospitalized with lung damage. The tank was punctured with two holes approximately a centimeter in diameter. A vertical line through these holes was aligned with a similar hole in the concrete floor. The hole appeared to extend into the subsoil beneath the foundation, but there is a high water table and moist soil obliterated any sign after a few centimeters. The skylight above this line of holes was broken out. In the street we found a truck with its engine blown. There were signs of odd damage to it, but it had been moved and we can’t determine with certainty that there is a connection. The aerial survey photos showed nothing.”
“While you’re on that point,” Runyan interrupted. “I had some astronomical colleagues take photos of the points in space the signal seems to travel between. Same result, zip.”
“I see,” said Isaacs. “That’s interesting.” And maybe not too smart, he thought to himself. If they had found something, a big goddamn cat could have been out of the bag.
“In Dallas,” he continued, “the details were different, but the overall picture was the same. Two buildings were damaged. In one, there is a hole roughly a centimeter across from the roof down through the basement. Again, evidence for penetration into the subsoil, but in Dallas it was too sandy to support the tunnel, or whatever it was. Once again there was a death, incidental, but related. A young woman was crushed when a structure collapsed on her.”
“How’s that?” asked Noldt, his owlish face screwed in concentration.
“Well,” Isaacs paused, “this was a two-story place with a bar underneath and a strip joint upstairs.” He gestured with his hands flat, one above the other. “The woman was, uh, dancing upstairs. This tunnel, or whatever it was, weakened a support structure on the stage and it collapsed on her.”
“I see,” said Noldt, sitting up straighter in his seat, a little embarrassed.
“A hundred meters away,” Isaacs continued, “the rear quarter of a seven-story building gave way and collapsed into the alley behind it. In this case, fortunately, no one was injured. The cause of the structural failure has not been positively determined, although some pieces of masonry show elongated gashes that bear similarity to the holes in the concrete floors in the other damaged buildings in Dallas and Nagasaki. Two agents in the area reported hearing a whistling noise of some kind. Their impression was that it receded up from the bar, and one of them thinks he heard it again about forty seconds later, prior, he believes, to the collapse of the building. There is no question now in my mind that this thing, whatever it is, causes physical damage, and that it was similar effects that damaged the Russian aircraft carrier, the Novorossiisk, and sank our destroyer, the Stinson.”
“You say,” remarked Zicek, “that this phenomenon seems to have gone up and then down in Dallas, in consonance with your feeling that something goes back and forth in the Earth.”
Isaacs nodded.
“I remind you that I remarked before I didn’t see how any beam could do such a thing, reverse directions. That feeling seems to be reinforced with your new evidence.”
“Wait a second, now,” Leems broke in. “What about satellite locations? I need to be convinced that more than one source isn’t involved somehow, one shooting one way, one, the other.”
“I checked that,” Danielson responded to him. “There are hundreds of Soviet satellites in orbit. Occasionally, there was a marginal coincidence of position with a single event, but no pattern that could explain all the incidents we know of. And no case when two satellites lined up on the trajectory simultaneously on opposite sides of the Earth to account for the reversal of direction.”
She looked down and brushed a piece of lint from her skirt and then looked back at Leems.
“I also tracked all US, European, and Japanese satellites, with again the same null result. Nothing currently in orbit can account for what we have seen, even discounting the question of what the technology could be, something that could propagate through the Earth.”
Beside her, Alex Runyan smiled lightly, taking pleasure in her neat parry. Leems scowled more deeply, but did not respond. After a long quiet moment, Danielson leaned around Runyan to address Zicek.
“Excuse me, Dr. Zicek, but there’s another thing that I’m not sure came out clearly just now. The marks that we’ve investigated, the holes in the concrete, look very clean. There’s no sign of a great release of energy, no blackening, no melting or fusing of the material. Perhaps that makes the situation more confusing, but there’s no indication of explosion or burning that you’d expect of radiation from a beam of energy. It looks more like the material was drilled out; it’s just gone.”
The group of scientists fell silent, thinking. Fletcher and Noldt muttered to one another.
The idea hit Runyan like a physical blow. Suddenly he was encased in a suit of armor from neck to groin, three sizes too small. He stared at Danielson, and she returned his look, her right eyebrow arched quizzically.
Runyan felt as if he were balanced on a vertex. He sensed the grip of forces of which he had been unaware until moments ago. Danielson’s words had lifted a curtain to reveal the crest and the chasm yawning immediately before him. Random moments from his career flashed out of his subconscious, and he perceived them as stepping stones that had led him inexorably up to this teetering edge. He had no choice but to take the step that would send him plummeting headlong down the other side.
He knew the antagonist. He knew the mathematical structure of its bones and sinews, its space-time stretched tight on this frame. He knew the roaring cauldron deep inside which marked the boundary where knowledge stopped, but from where new beginnings would inevitably arise. He knew the men and women, past and present, who had pieced it together in their imaginations, fragment by careful fragment.
But this was not imagination. This was not mathematics. This was the most delicate dreams of the intellect come real in nightmare fashion. And that reality changed everything. Everything.
He had an urge to close his mind, as if by sealing off the thought he could seal the abyss, but he knew it was there. A dynamic, hurtling, all-consuming void.