Mysterium

“I don’t understand.”

“Isn’t it obvious? The lab is still enclosed in that dome of light. And think about what happened when the filling station caught fire. Energy was liberated, and it took a strange form. People saw God or the Devil, but to me—” He looked at the table, then raised his eyes defiantly. “To me it looked like Stern himself.”

∞

Howard’s reasoning had gone deeper than he wanted to admit.

From the scant evidence in the journal he had decided that Stern might be right: the fragment was part of a device meant to cross between avenues of creation, the infinite universes of Linde or the multiple alternatives of the uncollapsed wave function—or, somehow, both. And it had interacted with human consciousness, with Stern himself.

It was a boat, and Stern had become its pilot, had taken this piece of northern Michigan with him into a world that echoed, but imperfectly, all his stubborn obsessions.

He pictured Stern as a lingering presence inside the ruined lab, preserved somehow … as alive as he had seemed in Howard’s dreams.

“When the Proctors were investigating the lab, they sent people inside in protective clothing. It must have helped, if only a little. I want to get hold of one of those suits.”

“Howard, that’s ludicrous,” Dex said. “What could you possibly achieve?”

He hesitated. Did it make sense to say that he knew he should do this? Not only that he wanted to but that he felt asked to? Compelled to?

“I can’t explain it,” he said finally, “but I have to try.”

Linneth said, “You don’t have much time.”

Howard looked blankly at her. “What do you mean?”

“She means the town doesn’t have much time,” Dex said. “The Proctors mean to destroy it. They have some kind of atom bomb out on the old Ojibway reserve. That’s what we came to tell you. Howard, even if Stern is alive—there’s no way to help him. All we can do is try to get out.”

∞

Howard thought of all that random energy, the white heat of nuclear fission, flooding the ruined lab and whatever mystery still pulsed at the heart of it.

He remembered a dream of his uncle in a globe of light.

Dex said, “We can’t stop them. The only way out is to get out.”

Howard took a breath, then shook his head. What he had heard in his dreams was a cry for help: Stern, lost at the edge of the world, looking for a way home. He had turned away from it once. Bad decision. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong, Dex. Maybe not for you. But for me. I think, for me, the only way out is in.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The temperature dropped steadily, but the clouds parted and for three days the sun shone from a flawless blue winter sky. Last week’s snow receded from the streets and Clifford was able to take his bike out again.

He started early in the morning and rode eastward through the silent town. Each storefront, each dusty window, glittered in the sunlight. Clifford wore his warmest winter jacket, plus gloves, boots, and a knit cap. Pedaling was a little awkward under all these clothes. And he tired easily, but maybe that was because of his diet: there hadn’t been meat for two weeks, except what Luke brought; no fresh vegetables for months.

The town, encased in winter, was doomed. Clifford knew what the firebreak meant. Two Rivers was going to burn. He had been certain of it as soon as he saw the teenagers hanging by their necks from the City Hall streetlights. If that could happen, Clifford thought, anything could happen.

He pedaled east toward the highway and the old Ojibway land.

Luke had said the Proctors were building something out there. Something the soldiers weren’t supposed to know about.

∞

He reached the highway before noon and ate lunch—a sandwich of stale bread and old cheese. He stood off the road in a pine grove enclosed by snow, eating his sandwich in big bites. Bars of sunlight came through the pine branches and the moist air.

After lunch he rode in the direction of the ruined lab, but turned left where a new track had been cut into the woods. There was not much traffic here and he had plenty of warning when a truck or car approached; the roar of the motor and the crunch of tires on old snow carried a long way in the afternoon air. The rutted, wet road was difficult for his bike, however, so he left it in a shadowy copse and walked a distance among the trees.

He was about to turn back when he came to the crest of a low hill and saw the steel gantry above the distant pinetops. Clifford approached more cautiously now, aware of the din of voices and clatter of tools. He moved close enough to see all of the tower, its girders entwined like metal scrollwork against the sky.

He guessed its purpose. He had seen a movie about the first atomic bomb test and he knew the Los Alamos bomb had been dropped from a gantry like this one. Maybe this wasn’t a bomb, maybe it was something else, but what else would burn a territory as large as Two Rivers?