Dr Kuroneko stared at the chalkboard, frowning. There was something strange going on here… The green board was covered with colorful diagrams and scribblings in the arcane language of tensor mechanics and diagrams; the front half of the room was covered in chalk dust from the layers of revision he had added to his thoughts over the last two hours. Absentmindedly, he rolled a fresh stick of chalk between his fingers as he pursed his lips, wrinkling his forehead. Turning, he looked back at the worn textbook, bending close to the dog-eared page to read a note scribbled in the margin.
His face broke into a smile, and he gave a little cry as he jumped toward the chalkboard, erasing an equals-sign with the heel of his hand and replacing it with a carat. Then he moved to the other side of the board and made some modification to a long expansion of Christoffel symbols, muttering to himself as he did. “No, the mass-energy is different. Take into account the… ” – scribbles – “… energy of the system’s curvature…” – more scribbles – “… embedded into a seven-dimensional space-“
He nearly lost his train of thought at a polite cough behind him, but he held onto the end of it and threw up one finger behind him to forestall any comments as he finished frantically writing. Then he turned, blinking owlishly through dusty glasses at the intruders.
There were two men standing there. One, dressed in a working military uniform with two stars, looked impatient and uncomfortable in the messy office. The other, dressed in rumpled business casual with a tie awkwardly sitting at his throat, had a sheaf of folders by his side, by was craning his neck to follow the argument Dr Kuroneko had laid out. Before the military officer could speak, his companion said, “Is that Crane’s argument?”
Dr Kuroneko smiled. “Not quite, Surlethe. I’ve modified it a little so it applies to our situation.”
Dr Surlethe set down his folders and moved up to the chalkboard. “You’ve modified the metric tensor?”
“Not quite – the chief changes are in the mass-energy tensor. Basically, we have to -“
“I’m sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, but we really need to get to business,” said Dr Surlethe’s companion, General Schatten. “We have a change of plans for the DIMO(N) science team. Shall we have a seat in the conference room and discuss it?”
They filed out of the Dr Kuroneko’s office, as Dr Surlethe cast a longing glance back at the chalkboard, and down the stairs to the conference room next to the general’s office. He took a seat at the head of the table; the two doctors sat beside him. Dr Surlethe started. “We have a new direction for the physics team to take. The work you’ve done so far on portals and modeling the storm influence is excellent, but we need more actionable material on the weather.”
Dr Kuroneko nodded his understanding.
“I’ve come here straight from a meeting with the President and President-Elect. General Schatten has agreed that he would have pursued it anyway even if the politicians hadn’t decided for us, but at this point the portal research needs to take a back seat to figuring out just what Yahweh is doing to our weather and how exactly he’s doing it.”
“What sort of data are we working with?”
“We have access to all of the data that NASA, the NOAA, and the NWS have collected,” said General Schatten, “as well as anything that university meteorological departments have gathered on their own. There are also several governments eager to share data and work with us – Japan, India, and Indonesia in particular, since they’re worried about the potential for geological assaults – and we’ll put their physics teams in contact with you. If you want to share any models, though, it will need to pass by my desk. The portal modeling in particular does not leave DIMO (N).
“Do you have any questions?”
Kuroneko said, “No. By the way, speaking of portals, I think a young man on our team – a Princeton undergraduate, actually – has reached a breakthrough just yesterday.”
Surlethe leaned forward. “Do tell.” General Schatten tapped his foot slightly.
“Well, I won’t bore you with the mathematical details” – he glanced over at General Schatten with a slight twinkle in his eye – “but basically, we’ve had to rework cosmology. General relativity is still true – as far as we know – but it is a specific case of a more general theory. It looks now like the universe is something like a styrofoam ball. We live on the outside of granules, while Hell and Heaven exist on the inside of bubbles. We’re sort of in the same space but not quite. The implications are fascinating, there could be millions of Hells and Heavens out there.”
“That’s great,” said Schatten, “but how can we use this?”
“That’s what I’m getting to. The really nice thing about this model is that it makes a particular set of predictions we can test just by monitoring the opening or closing of a portal. And if it does work, it doesn’t require any stellar energy densities or subatomic length scales to apply: we should be able to start engineering immediately.” Dr Kuroneko smiled. “Gentlemen, we should be able to open portals straight to Heaven within two years. All we have to do is to find it.”
“Great,” said Surlethe. “But please do bear in mind that the weather is more important than an abstract model of portal transitions.”
“We’ll do that,” replied Kuroneko.
“Okay, gentlemen,” said General Schatten, “I have business to attend to. I’ll leave you to discuss the particulars of the weather modelling.” He stood and shook hands before leaving.
“All right,” said Surlethe when he’d gone, “we’ve already talked about the rough mechanism – body of hot air injected beneath the base of the storm. By mid-January, we need to have a pretty good idea of just how Yahweh’s doing this, injecting hot air or warming it up…”
As he left the room, General Schatten shook his head at the scientists. They were always so… loopy. That was a good word.
As he entered the next room, he said, “I’m sorry, I was slightly detained.”
James Randi, sitting in front of Schatten’s desk, inclined his bald head to accept the apology. “No apology necessary.”
“You wanted to see me?” asked Schatten, leaning over his desk.
Randi nodded. “Yes. I have come to tender my resignation.”
“Why?”
“The war against Hell is won,” said Randi. “There can’t be any more need of experts in paranormal fraud; my organization has already started to shrink as people have been reassigned to other parts of the occupation effort. My work here has been done for some months, you have all the methodologies you need to find and utilize the sensitives who can punch the portals through as and where needed.”
Schatten smiled. He’d been expecting something like this. “On the contrary, Mr Randi, you may not resign.”
Randi had been expecting many answers, but this was not one of them. “I may not?”
“No, sir, for three reasons. First, the war is not over. You haven’t been privy to all of the reports, but the war against Heaven is just starting, and we’ll need all the expertise that your branch of DIMO(N) has accumulated over the last year in order to pursue it successfully. Second, there’s speculation around – I’m sure you’ve heard it – that Heaven and Hell aren’t the only hostiles out there, which means that we’re not going to let you go even after we’ve crushed Yahweh. Third, even if the war ends and everything is just fine, we still need you to filter through populations and help us find people who can make portals.
“They’re a vital national asset, you know that. Portalling is a vital national security issue, as I’m sure you understand, and we need to keep tabs on everybody who’s like kitten just to make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands.”
Randi looked slightly taken aback at this, and blinked at Schatten. Schatten smiled back. “No, Mr Randi, you aren’t going anywhere. Other than back to your office in the Pentagon of course, it’s there, still waiting for you.”
SecDef’s Office, Pentagon, U.S. Jamuary 2009
“So it was a concerted attack by angels?”
“That appears so, Secretary Warner. So far we have reports of twenty angels being detected and shot down over Europe, Russia and the United States. All over populated areas. Six came at us, four each at Russia and Europe, two each at China and India, one at Japan and one at Singapore. We lost eleven aircraft in the air battles.”
“Eleven?” Warner was astonished. Humans owned the air, mastered it completely. Hostile daemons who flew
