He said nothing.
“I don’t expect you to confirm or deny that. And I’m not going to tell you how I know about it. What I want you to think about is what we could achieve with such a technology.”
He frowned. “Instant access to news stories, wherever they break.”
She waved that away. “Much more than that. Think about it. If you could open up a wormhole to anywhere, then there would be no more barriers. No walls. You could see anybody, at any time. And crooks like Billybob would have nowhere to hide.”
His frown deepened. “You’re talking about spying?”
She laughed. “Oh, come on, Bobby — each of us is under surveillance the whole time anyhow. You’ve been a celebrity since the age of twenty-one; you must know how it feels to be watched.”
“It’s not the same.”
She took his arm. “If Billybob has nothing to hide, he’s nothing to fear,” she said. “Look at it that way.”
“Sometimes you sound like my father,” he said neutrally.
She fell silent, disquieted.
They walked forward with the throng. Now they were nearing a great throne, with seven dancing globes and twenty-four smaller attendant thrones, a scaled-up version of the real-world display Billybob had mounted out in the stadium.
And before the great central throne stood Billybob Meeks.
But this wasn’t the fat, sweating man she had seen out on the sports field. This Billybob was taller, younger, thinner, far better looking, like a young Charlton Heston. Although he must have been at least a kilometre from where she stood, he towered over the congregation. And he seemed to be growing.
He leaned down, hands on hips, his voice like shaped thunder. “The city does not need the sun or the Moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp…” Still Billybob grew, his arms like tree trunks, his face a looming disc that was already above the lower clouds. Kate could see people fleeing from beneath his giant feet, like ants.
And Billybob pointed a mighty finger directly at her, immense grey eyes glaring, the angry furrows on his brow like Martian channels. “Nothing impure will ever come in to it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Is your name in that book? Is it? Are you worthy?”
Kate screamed, suddenly overwhelmed. And she was picked up by an invisible hand and dragged into the shining air.
There was a sucking sensation at her eyes and ears. Light, noise, the mundane stink of hot dogs flooded over her.
Bobby was kneeling before her. She could see the marks the Glasses had made around his eyes. “He got to you, didn’t he?”
“Billybob does have a way of punching his message home,” she gasped, still disoriented.
On row after row of the old sports stadium’s battered seats, people were rocking and moaning, tears leaking from the black eye seals of the Glasses. In one area paramedics were working on unconscious people — perhaps victims of faints, epilepsy, even heart attacks, Kate speculated; she had had to sign various release forms when applying for their tickets, and she didn’t imagine the safety of his parishioners was a high priority for Billybob Meeks.
Curiously she studied Bobby, who seemed unperturbed. “But what about you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve played more interesting adventure games.” He looked up at the muddy December sky. “Kate, I know you’re just using me as a way to get to my father. But I like you even so. And maybe tweaking Hiram’s nose would be good for my soul. What do you think?”
She held her breath. She said, “I think that’s about the most human thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Then let’s do it.”
She forced a smile. She’d got what she wanted.
But the world around her still seemed unreal, compared to the vividness of those final moments inside Billybob’s mind.
She had no doubt that — if the rumours about the capability Hiram was constructing were remotely accurate, and if she could get access to it — she would be able to destroy Billybob Meeks. It would be a great scoop, a personal triumph.
But she knew that some part of her, no matter how far down she buried it, would always regret doing so. Some part of her would always long to be allowed to return to that glowing city of gold, with walls that stretched halfway to the Moon, where shining, smiling people were waiting to welcome her.
Billybob had broken through, his shock tactics had gotten even to her. And that, of course, was the whole point. Why Billybob must be stopped.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter 6
The billion-dollar pearl
David, with Hiram and Bobby, sat before a giant SoftScreen spread across the Wormworks countinghouse wall. The ’Screen image — returned by a fibreoptic camera that had been snaked into the heart of the Wormworks’ superconducting-magnet nest — was nothing but darkness, marred by an occasional stray pixel, a prickle of colour and light.
A digital counter in a corner display worked its way down toward zero.
Hiram paced impatiently around the cramped, cluttered countinghouse; David’s assistant technicians cowered from him, avoiding his eyes. Hiram snapped, “How do you know the bloody wormhole is even open?”
David suppressed a smile. “You don’t need to whisper.” He pointed to the corner display. Beside the countdown clock was a small numerical caption, a sequence of prime numbers scrolling upward from two to thirty-one, over and over. “That’s the test signal, sent through the wormhole by the Brisbane crew at the normal gamma-ray wavelengths. So we know we managed to find and stabilize a wormhole mouth — without a remote anchor — and the Australians have been able to locate it.”
During his three months’ work here, David had quickly discovered a way to use modulations of exotic-matter pulses to battle the wormholes’ inherent instability. Turning that into practical and repeatable engineering, of course, had been immensely difficult but in the end successful.
“Our placement of the remote mouth isn’t so precise yet. I’m afraid our Australian colleagues have to chase our wormhole mouths through the dust out there. Chasing fizzers over the gibbers, as they put it… But still, now we can open up a wormhole to anywhere. What we don’t know yet is whether we’re going to be able to expand the holes up to visible-light dimensions.”
Bobby was leaning easily against a table, legs crossed, looking fit and relaxed, as if he’d just come off a tennis court — as perhaps he had, mused David. “I think we ought to give David a lot of credit, Dad. After all he has solved half the problem already.”
“Yes,” Hiram said, “but I don’t see anything but gamma rays squirted in by some broken-nosed Aussie. Unless we can find a way to expand these bloody things, we’re wasting my money. And I can’t stomach all this waiting! Why just one test run a day?”
“Because,” said David evenly, “we have to analyse the results from each test, strip down the Casimir gear, reset the control equipment and detectors. We have to understand each failure before we can go ahead toward success.” That is, he added silently, before I can extricate myself from his complex family entanglement and return to the comparative calm of Oxford, funding battles, ferocious academic rivalry and all.
Bobby asked, “What exactly is it we’re looking for? What will a wormhole mouth look like?”