Behind Walter, other Aussie technicians could be seen now, heavily distorted shadows, applauding in silence.
David grinned, and submitted to Hiram’s whoops and bear hugs, all the while keeping his eye on the lead-glass slab containing the wormhole mouth, that billion-dollar pearl.
Chapter 7
The wormcam
It was 3 A.M. At the heart of the deserted Wormworks, in a bubble of SoftScreen light, Kate and Bobby sat side by side. Bobby was working through a simple question-and-answer setup session on the SoftScreen. They were expecting a long night; behind them there was a heap of hastily gathered gear, coffee flasks and blankets and foam mattresses.
…There was a creak. Kate jumped and grabbed Bobby’s arm.
Bobby kept working at the program. “Take it easy. Just a little thermal contraction. I told you, I made sure all the surveillance systems have a blind spot right here, right now.”
“I’m not doubting it. It’s just that I’m not used to creeping around in the dark like this.”
“I thought you were the tough reporter.”
“Yes. But what I do is generally legal.”
“Generally!”
“Believe it or not.”
“But this -” He waved a hand toward the hulking, mysterious machinery out in the dark. “ — isn’t even surveillance equipment. It’s just an experimental high energy physics rig. There’s nothing like it in the world; how can there be any legislation to cover its use?”
“That’s specious, Bobby. No judge on the planet would buy that argument.”
“Specious or not, I’m telling you to calm down. I’m trying to concentrate. Mission Control here could be a little more user-friendly. David doesn’t even use voice activation. Maybe all physicists are so conservative — or all Catholics.”
She studied him as he worked steadily at the program. He looked as alive as she’d ever seen him, for once fully engaged in the moment. And yet he seemed completely unperturbed by any moral doubt. He really was a complex person — or rather, she thought sadly, incomplete.
His finger hovered over a start button on the SoftScreen. “Ready. Shall I do it?”
“We’re recording?”
He tapped the SoftScreen. “Everything that comes through that wormhole will be trapped right here.”
“…Okay.”
“Three, two, one.” He hit the key.
The ’Screen turned black.
From the greater darkness around her, she heard a deep bass hum as the giant machinery of the Wormworks came on line, huge forces gathering to rip a hole in spacetime. She thought she could smell ozone, feel a prickle of electricity. But maybe that was imagination.
Setting up this operation had been simplicity itself. While Bobby had worked to obtain clandestine access to the Wormworks equipment, Kate had made her way to Billybob’s mansion, a gaudy baroque palace set in woodland on the fringe of the Mount Rainier National Park. She’d taken sufficient photographs to construct a crude external map of the site, and had made Global Positioning System readings at various reference points. That — and the information Billybob had boastfully given away to style magazines about the lavish interior layout — had been sufficient for her to construct a detailed internal map of the building, complete with a grid of GPS references.
Now, if all went well, those references would be sufficient to establish a wormhole link between Billybob’s inner sanctum and this mocked-up listening post.
…The SoftScreen lit up. Kate leaned forward.
The image was heavily distorted, a circular smear of light, orange and brown and yellow, as if she were looking through a silvered tunnel. There was a sense of movement, patches of light coming and going across the image, but she could make out no detail.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” she said querulously.
Bobby tapped at the SoftScreen. “Patience. Now I have to cut in the deconvolution routines.”
“The what?”
“The wormhole mouth isn’t a camera lens, remember. It’s a little sphere on which light falls from all around, in three dimensions. And that global image is pretty much smeared out by its passage through the wormhole itself. But we can use software routines to unscramble all that. It’s kind of interesting. The software is based on programs the astronomers use to factor out atmospheric distortion, twinkling and blurring and refraction, when they study the stars.”
The image abruptly cleared, and Kate gasped.
They saw a massive desk with a globe-lamp hovering above. There were papers and SoftScreens scattered over the desktop. Behind the desk was an empty chair, casually pushed back. On the walls there were performance graphs and bar charts, what looked like accounting statements.
There was luxury here. The wallpaper looked like handmade English stuff, probably the most expensive in the world. And on the floor, casually thrown there, there was a pair of rhino hides, gaping mouths and glassy eyes staring, horns proud even in death.
And there was a simple animated display, a total counting steadily upward. It was labelled CONVERTS: human souls being counted like a fast-food chain’s sushi burger sales.
The image was far from perfect. It was dark, grainy, sometimes unstable, given to freezing or breaking up into clouds of pixels. But still…
“I can’t believe it,” Kate breathed. “It’s working. It’s as if all the walls in the world just turned to glass. Welcome to the goldfish bowl…”
Bobby worked his SoftScreen, making the reconstructed image pan around. “I thought rhinos were extinct.”
“They are now. Billybob was involved in a consortium which bought out the last breeding pair from a private zoo in France. The geneticists had been trying to get hold of the rhinos to store genetic material, maybe eggs and sperm and even zygotes, in the hope of restoring the species in the future. But Billybob got there first. And so he owns the last rhino skins there will ever be. It was good business, if you look at it that way. These skins command unbelievably high prices now.”
“But illegal.”
“Yes. But nobody is likely to have the guts to pursue a prosecution against someone as powerful as Billybob. After all, come Wormwood Day, all the rhinos will be extinct anyhow; what difference does it make?… Can you zoom with this thing?”
“Metaphorically. I can magnify and enhance selectively.”
“Can we see those papers on the desk?”
With a fingernail Bobby marked out zoom boxes, and the software’s focus progressively moved in on the litter of papers on the desktop. The wormhole mouth seemed to be positioned about a meter from the ground, some two metres from the desk — Kate wondered if it would be visible, a tiny reflective bead hovering in the air — so the papers were foreshortened by perspective. And besides they hadn’t been laid out for convenient reading; some of them were lying face down or were obscured by others. Still, Bobby was able to pick out sections — he inverted the images and corrected for perspective distortion, cleaned them up with intelligent-software enhancement routines — enough for Kate to get a sense of what much of the material was about.
It was mostly routine corporate stuff — chilling evidence of Billybob’s industrial-scale mining of gullible Americans — but nothing illegal. She had Bobby scan on, rooting hastily through the scattered material.
And then, at last, she hit pay dirt.
“Hold it,” she said. “Enhance… Well, well.” It was a report, technical, closely printed, replete with figures, on the adverse effects of dopamine stimulation in elderly subjects. “That’s it,” she breathed. “The smoking gun.” She got up and started to pace the room, unable to contain her restless energy. “What an asshole. Once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer. If we can get an image of Billybob himself reading that, better yet signing it off. Bobby, we need to find him.”