“It all seems to work,” she said a minute or so later. “Why? What is it?”
“Great,” he exclaimed grabbing her hand and pulled her in the direction of the door. “Come on. We need to wake some people up.”
“You really have to stop doing this to me,” said a haggard looking Horatio Mabry as he flopped his huge bulk down into a chair in the conference room.
“There, there” chided Adrianna, patting his hand with her own, her face a picture of mock sympathy and understanding.
Jim passed Horatio a cup of coffee and addressed the assembled scientists. “When I was a kid, I had this teacher. A great guy who helped me understand a lot of things. First time I met him he showed me an experiment that stuck with me.” Briefly, Jim outlined the experiment involving the two speakers.
Lorentz said, “It’s called co-phasing. It’s just simple waveform canceling—Oh! My goodness.”
Jim smiled at Lorentz as he saw realization dawn on the scientist’s face. “Exactly! The action of one waveform canceling out another.”
“How’s that going to help us?” asked Adrianna.
“It’s really kind of simple. If we can set up and transmit a second tachyon stream equal and opposite to the one that’s heading toward us, it should have the same canceling effect as the sound waves from the speakers.”
“In theory,” said Lorentz.
“Will it stop the slip?” asked Mabry.
“Dead in its tracks,” answered Jim, and then echoed Lorentz, “In theory.”
It was stupendous, magnificent news.
Lorentz pushed open the door to his office and sat down in the plush leather chair. Finally, there was hope. The burden of responsibility had weighed so very terribly on his mind, and Jim’s news was like a glimmer of light to a man trapped deep beneath the earth. It represented freedom from his personal prison, the chance to redeem himself for his own miserable failure. But most of all it symbolized hope for the billions of men, women, and children who would never know just how close the human race had come to being finally run.
Picking up one of the three phones on his desk, Lorentz quickly punched in a set of numbers and waited for the person to answer.
“Hello,” he said, the call answered after just two rings. “I have wonderful news.”
Thirty-One
A large mahogany desk occupied the center of the office, its plinth as bare and arid as an African desert, except for a telephone and an empty in/out tray. Seated in his black leather executive chair, Homeland Security Deputy Director John Humphreys replaced the telephone receiver into its cradle, his ample belly straining the fabric of the white button-down—collar shirt he wore beneath his three-piece suit. The aged leather of the chair creaked as he leaned back, his fingers steepled in front of his face while he stared distantly at the corner of his office.
He could not have hoped for better news; the President would be very pleased. Lorentz had sounded excited. He had begun to have some misgivings about the gap between the scientist’s intelligence and his actual capabilities. Humphreys was concerned the scientist could not handle the stress his position created and had come very close to removing him from his post. That was all behind them now and, for the first time, there was hope.
Reaching a pudgy hand to his desk, he pressed a button on the intercom system. “Ms. Brahms, would you come in please.”
No sooner had his finger left the machine than the door to the office swung open and a ramrod straight woman, gray hair tightly tied behind her head accentuating her sharp, bony features, entered the room, electronic notebook in hand.
In her early sixties, Ms. Brahms exuded a sense of perfect secretarial efficiency. Everything about her confirmed this was a woman of competence, from the stride of her walk and aloof jut of her chin, to the way she immediately took the seat on the opposite side of the bureaucrat’s desk and flipped open the screen of her notebook, her fingers paused over the keys ready to begin transcribing her boss’ words.
Humphreys’ did not acknowledge her presence, taking not even a moment to thank her for staying so late at the office, instead he continued staring through the triangle of his fingers before finally, with a sharp intake of breath that made the jowls of his sallow face jiggle, he began: “Mr. President…”
Ursula Brahms was shaking as she left Deputy Director Humphreys’ office; she was trembling all the way to her very core. She had worked for many powerful men in her lifetime—from CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, to the personal secretary of senators and the odd captain of industry, but never before had any position placed such a great burden of responsibility on her as she now felt.
She had been chosen. She could feel God’s gaze focused on her like a spotlight; almost hear his words in her mind: Your time has come, Ursula. The ecstasy of His love welled up within her heart.
Her last job had been for the Director of the FBI at the J. Edgar Hoover building, but that had come to an abrupt end in 2027 when, stepping out of the shower one spring morning, she slipped on a wet patch of tile and crashed to the floor of her bathroom, smashing her head against the porcelain sink unit.
Ursula had never married, never felt the need, and with no close friends to call on her, she lay on the floor of her apartment’s bathroom, unable to move while an ever greater pool of blood spread around her head.
She prayed for someone to come and find her.
No one came.
Almost thirteen hours after her accident—by that time she was falling in and out of consciousness—Ursula died.
The next thing she knew, Ursula had found herself walking to her car, keys in hand and her clutch bag in the other, on her way to some suddenly forgotten destination. The cold floor of the bathroom was replaced by the warm rays of the early morning sun, and the pain in her head was gone. She felt young and energized. She felt… ALIVE.
Ursula had always been a firm believer in God. A regular attendee of her local Presbyterian church every Sunday, she was convinced she was one of the chosen. When she had died alone on the cold tiled floor, there had been no real fear in her heart because she had known she would be going to heaven. So as the days after the Slip had passed by and, as much as she tried, she could summon no memory of her ever having been to Heaven, Ursula began to worry. She had begun to worry that maybe she was not in God’s favor. She had worried that her life spent in piety and denial—denial of both her own desire and of the few men whose interest in her had seen beyond her frozen exterior—had not met with the approval of the Almighty. She worried that maybe, just maybe, there was no afterlife beyond death, that the preachers and priests had all been wrong, and the atheists had been right all along. It had been too terrible a thought to contemplate—what a terrible waste of her life, if the unbelievers had been right all along.
Ursula had thrust the thoughts from her mind. But gradually, as the days ticked by, despair began to overtake her. A despair so dark and depressing it enfolded her like a funeral shroud, dragging her down into an abyss she knew she could never escape.
Deeper. Deeper. Deeper.
Until one warm spring afternoon, as she sat staring at her TV screen with the curtains of her room closed against the sunshine of the day, Ursula saw an angel of the Lord. Admittedly, for all outward appearances he was just a man, but as she listened to him talk so eloquently and knowingly, she knew he was an angel sent to save her, that the sign from God she had been waiting for had finally arrived.