was very far from the redoubt in West Virginia, where the whole dismal picture was on everybody’s mind all the time. These people were winners. They were used to victory. They had no idea they were on the damn Titanic, and he tried to project confidence he did not feel. Nothing must disturb morale like this.
A young captain led him down into the test area. She looked maybe thirty, she was clean and well groomed, she smiled and she moved along ahead of him, her static-free shoes whispering against the pavement.
It was in this test bed that human beings would, today for the first time, remove a living soul from the body that contained it. Once the soul was extracted, they would find its frequency and destroy it. This would be the first such execution. The prisoner was a monster, presumably from the Federal ADX in Florence, Colorado, and after this death, not even what of him that had been eternal would remain.
This might have extended benefits, because if reincarnation was real, it would mean that this horrible soul would never return to life. Maybe the reason that crime was always with us was that the souls of criminals returned just like everybody else, and were criminals again. Maybe, if the war was won, we could learn to pick and choose who would survive in eternity and who would not.
But this was only one aspect of the experiment. Of greater importance was understanding just how souls and bodies connected, so that some defense against the light could be devised. The disks were methodically following the night around the world, striking the entire planet all the time, and so far no attack, not with hydrogen bombs, not with neutron bombs, not with any form of conventional weapon, had affected them.
The British and French had concentrated on the most isolated lenses, exploding nuclear ordnance over them, in the ground near them, pulsing them with electromagnetic waves, even firing artillery shells into them.
The U.S. had concentrated on the one on Easter Island, going back again and again and with full imperial approval, but with equally dismal results.
A unit of Marines had deployed around the lens and opened fire when the disks came out, but they were themselves made of light and ordnance simply passed through them.
Now, however, all that was ended. Communications had been jammed, planetwide. Satellites were dark, broadcast transmitters had been disrupted by artificially induced changes in the earth’s ionosphere, and landlines by powerful electromagnetic pulses being continuously emitted from deep space. The objects responsible ringed the planet, fourteen of them, each one twenty-two thousand miles above one of the lenses. Even though they weren’t in precise geostationary orbit, astronomers using old-fashioned backyard telescopes, which were the only ones that still worked, said that they showed no sign of moving off course. Military communications had been reduced to single sideband radio—sometimes—and a couple of fiber-optic networks that had pulse-hardened switching stations that so far were impervious to the electromagnetic energy being beamed from above.
The beautiful young captain paused before a steel door, input a number code. The door slid open.
Beyond it was a tunnel with a pronounced downward slope. At the head stood a small stainless steel car. It was mounted on a black strip that descended, it seemed, into oblivion.
“This is the railhead,” she said as she got into the car.
It looked like an amusement park ride, he thought, but when she closed the door, the seal seemed very tight. He found himself looking out a small windshield at a concrete tunnel with conduit running along its ceiling.
She pressed a button, and the car began moving with startling silence and smoothness.
“What propulsion?”
“Maglev.”
He’d never seen any of this before, but just the scope of it all, riding this silent, efficient little train deeper and deeper, made him dare to consider again the possibility of victory.
“We’ve reached cruising speed, Sir.”
“Which is?”
“Two hundred and eighty clicks, Sir.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Sir, you’re gonna see a lot of wonderful machinery today. I mean, some of the stuff down here—Sir, this is a new world.”
He glanced at his watch, calculating in his head. Two hundred and eighty clicks an hour was a little over four and a half kilometers a minute, so they’d gone almost three miles. He made a note of the time.
“What’s your first name, Captain?”
“Jennifer, Sir. General Burt Mazle’s my old man. I’m third-generation Air Force, Sir.”
He’d never heard of Burt Mazle, but all generals were supposed to know each other. The mythical first name club. “Old Burt,” he said. “Sure.”
Whoever he was, old Burt had surely produced a handsome specimen of a daughter. Bright, too, or she wouldn’t be in the Mountain. Al had not thought about sex in a long time. He’d been attracted to many women, but every time he tried to start a relationship, he just lost direction.
He still kept his picture of his Sissy in his wallet, with her brightness and her smile, looking up from their table in the Wright Pat Officer’s Club where they used to go dancing. Her expression held surprise at being photographed, her eyes joy. Her skin shone with sweat, because they’d just come back from a vigorous rumba. A year later she had said, “Al, I need you,” and fallen over in the middle of the bedroom, dead before she hit the floor. It had been a massive aortal aneurysm. She was thirty-eight years old.
“You doing okay, General?”
“I’m fine.”
“You weren’t need-to-know on this part of the project, were you?”
“Apparently not. I thought I was need-to-know on everything.”
She smiled at him. “Then look at this as the adventure of a lifetime, because that’s what it’s going to be.”
“What about our prisoner?”
“Gonna die die, that’s what we call it.”
“What’s his crime?”
“Dunno, sir. Bad boy, though. Not a friend of ours.”
“No, I suppose not. Do we know for sure that the soul persists outside the body?”
“For sure, Sir. We’ve taken them out and put them back in.”
“Really!”
“We’re making strides, Sir. Catching up fast. We know for certain that when the body is killed, the soul does not die or lose its integrity. It can be destroyed, though.”
“How?”
“Certain frequencies make it fly apart. Trillions of electrons. All organization gone, tiny bits of consciousness flying off into space forever.”
He had to think that this progress was brilliant. They were racing against time down here, but at this rate they might just learn enough to actually win this thing. “Could we give the wanderers back their souls?”
“It’s conceivable.”
“That would be a hell of a victory, right there.”
“It’d ruin somebody’s day, for sure.”
“The God-for-damned enemy’s day.”
“That would be true.”
Another glance at his watch: they’d traveled seven miles, meaning that they weren’t under Cheyenne Mountain anymore.
He put his foot against the footrest and leaned back. The little transporter, about the size of a jeep, was now passing under the thickest conduit he’d ever seen, a black, endless river affixed to the cut stone of the wall with heavy steel wrapping that flashed past hypnotically as they sped along. On either wall were light fixtures about every fifty feet, but glowing so softly that they did not completely penetrate the darkness. Looking ahead through the windshield, it was as if an endless stream of lit portholes were coming up on either side, then speeding past the side windows as a continuous streak.
“That conduit carry power?”
“A lot of power. You need it to change the patterns of the electrons. Disrupt the frequency of a soul, it becomes confused. Then you just keep ratcheting up the power until—bang, it flies apart. Humpty Dumpty.”
