The room became distant, the voices like memories.
“Doctor Winters?”
He fought to pull himself together. The first one of them he saw was the beady-eyed general, gazing at him like a guard might at a dangerous prisoner. He swallowed, looked around for water, saw none. “All right,” he said, “I know what that would be. That’s the Sacred Circle. You’d have Ollantaytambo, Easter Island, Preah Vihear—are you telling me that all of these sites have been destroyed?”
“All,” the president said. “Our interest is this. Are these lenses a matter for concern, as I certainly think they are. If so, would you be willing to speculate on defense implications?”
Wade was portrayed by the media as an idiot, but that was an impressive question. “Sir, we know that there was some sort of advanced civilization on earth fifteen thousand years ago, that abruptly disappeared in a catastrophe. All of those sites except the pyramid are later structures built at specific geodesic points. The why of that, we have never known.”
The snake-like General Samson almost spat his words. “I think this is largely speculation.”
“General Samson,” the president retorted, “you’re here to gather information that’ll help you execute your orders. Thank you, General.”
“This man’s work is highly controversial,” Samson snapped.
“Actually, um, it’s not,” Martin said.
“Well, I read my share of science journals and I say it is!”
Martin didn’t know how to react to a yelling general. It made him mad, though, the rudeness of it.
The president asked, “Doctor Winters, tell us what you think these lenses might be?”
“From strictly an archaeological point of view, I don’t know. But if you read old chronicles, a lens like this could have been the mechanism of destruction.”
“Of what?”
“The civilization. It ended in a day, you know. In a matter of minutes. It happened on an afternoon in June, actually. Over five minutes, perhaps a little less.”
That silenced even the blustering general.
“What is our risk now?”
Martin recognized his responsibility here. “I’ve been, frankly, a little thrown, here. I-you know-the shock, and now this…”
“Let me rephrase,” the president said. “Do you see a possible risk now, and, if so, on what do you base your speculation? Is that a little easier to handle?”
“There is a calendar—the Mayan—that marks the end of this age as being this coming December 21. The winter solstice occurs on the day earth crosses both the galactic equator and the solar ecliptic. A highly unusual conjunction.”
“What’s so absurd about this,” Samson said, “is that it assumes that the ancient Maya knew about galaxies. A bunch of blood-soaked head-hunters. The very idea is ridiculous.”
Martin decided that he loathed this man, a rare intensity of emotion for him. He reserved his intensity for love of wife and kids. He did not indulge hate. But General Samson invited it. “The date is there,” he said. “And no matter what the Maya knew or didn’t know, the position of the earth is there, too.”
“What does it mean,” the president asked. “You’re telling me a whole human civilization was killed in a day, Doctor. What should that be saying to me in the here and now?”
An aide finally produced water and Martin drank all of it at once. “I’ve still got the desert in my throat,” he said.
“All right,” the good general said. “You can do this, you can say it.”
“Yes. This prophecy—the 2012 thing—it’s always been a mystery that it was so exact. And it required tremendous calculational ability—the whole Mayan long-count calendar—and apparently a knowledge of the position of the earth in relation to the rest of the galaxy—and I’m sorry if that gives offense—”
“Which astrophysicists are still arguing about,” Samson said.
“Tom, will you stop interrupting him?”
“I’m trying to help, here, Mr. President!”
“Doctor Winters, please continue,” the president said.
Martin swallowed. His throat was dry again. He was not used to intensity like this. There was terror in every eye, and the stink of sweat rising in the room. “Yes. I’m looking at these things coming up out of the ground, and thinking about the fact that so many ancient cultures speak of beings that came through gateways—”
“Aliens, as per NASA?”
“Not aliens, as from another planet. Given the distances involved, present thought leans more in the direction of UFOs being projections of some sort from parallel universe or universes. All right here, right around us. Now.”
“Aw, come on! Mr. President, we don’t need this kind of speculation,” Samson said.
The president exploded. “General, for God’s sakes, will you shut up!”
Samson would not be silenced. “I think this man needs to be removed, he’s obstructing—”
“You listen to him, Tom, god damn you!” The president roared.
Samson’s mouth snapped shut.
“Go on, Doctor,” Bo Waldo said softly.
“Uh, the, uh—the Sumerians called them Annunaki, the Babylonians Akpallus, the Hebrews Nephilim—the list is long. Always, they were powerful, dominating people—somewhat human looking, but with a reptilian cast of eye—who came from another reality. Some were hostile, others more benevolent. Almost as if there were two warring factions, with different agendas for us. They fought among themselves, at one point, and then were no longer present here.”
“And this relates to our situation?”
“Maybe the reason that the end-of-world predictions in the old calendars are so exact is that there is something in the astrophysical situation that opens these gateways. Maybe that’s what the lenses are. If so, then we can expect that they’re the worst things it is possible to imagine.”
Silence.
He didn’t say it, but as he spoke the words, they just tasted right. He paused, then decided to take the plunge. “Um, I would therefore say that a machine has been turned on. I think, between now and December the twenty-first, we can expect them to become increasingly active, and on that day, to destroy human civilization. Attempt to.”
The president stood up, went to the window. “Bo?”
“Sir, we don’t have any information like that.”
“Tom?”
“This is—I can’t call it a fantasy, obviously. The things are there. But I think we need to wait a little longer. If we have to fight, we also need to know what to fight, and how.”
“Al, I want to revise your orders. I want you to do the following. You execute a nuclear strike against the most isolated of these things—”
Tom Samson leaped to his feet. “That’s out of the question!”
“Tom, you already have your orders.”
“Sir, not if I’m seeing this dangerous, impetuous tack you’re taking—no, sir, I will not!”
“Al, will you execute?”
“Sir, I’m a notch down in the chain.”
“I want you people to understand something here. I am not hearing what I need to hear. And I’m not just going to be asking for resignations. In just another minute, I’m going to be carrying out arrests. Here. My Secret Service, your ass!” He glared straight at Tom, and Martin thought that he would not like to be in that man’s shoes.
Al came to his feet. “Sir, I’ll get the strike going at once.”
“And you’ll continue to fulfill your oath, Tom?”
“As I understand it.”
“‘I will faithfully execute lawful orders…’ That’s the part that’s relevant here.”
“Sir, I will issue the alerts and the War Warning. But I urge you to address this other matter to the National
