How to stop this madness before it escaped into the world?
How to ambush Kurt Raeder before Raeder ambushed him?
And then he had an idea.
He ran down Shambhala’s main surface avenue, broken ruins rising to his left and right, the walls snaggletoothed and sad-looking. Had its inhabitants buried what was too terrible to have in the open? Had they fled when the energies they unleashed proved uncontrollable? Or had they made something they needed and simply returned to the stars?
Then there was a crack, like a thousand whips being swung at once, and light seared by him and boomed off a valley wall. The whole cauldron shook. Snow and ice broke off the surrounding glaciers and avalanched down, bringing rock with it.
Raeder had taken a shot at him.
Hood turned and swept his own staff back at the ruins, letting loose a rippling sheet of fire that played over the devastation and turned the uppermost ramparts into shrapnel. Thunder rolled and reverberated. It was a battle of demons. Then he turned and ran again, down the river that ran through Shambhala.
He was making for the narrow slit of a canyon where Raeder had dynamited the only path.
Sheer blocking cliffs rose in front of him a thousand feet high. In the night it looked as if the river disappeared into a cave, so dark was the canyon, but he knew the cleft was like a sword stroke in the edge of a shield. He waited as the noise of their Vril shots grumbled away, trying to hear Raeder over the rush of the river. Where was the German hiding? Then he turned toward the gorge and lifted his staff, summoning every ounce of his will into bringing down those canyon escarpments. He pointed and thought.
The universe seemed to flash into rebirth, light blazing. His arm snapped, broken, and the staff flew wide, sailing into darkness. He roared with pain. The rock walls that gripped the river fractured and leaned precipitously, but didn’t fall.
One more, but he didn’t have it. His staff had broken on the boulders by the river. All the light had gone out of the amber crystal. His arm was shattered, his hand once more gushing blood. Hood turned to face the valley. The ground was shuddering from earthquakes below, and there was grinding as the machine in the deeps kept accelerating into overdrive.
“I still have the machine gun, Kurt!” he yelled to give away his position by the damaged cliffs. It was his bravest lie. “I can still shoot you!”
And then the biggest corona of all pulsed out toward him, the earth shook like a shocked muscle, and the mountain shattered.
37
A Boeing 747, over the Pacific
September 7, Present Day
N o, Jake, I have not heard of Vril. Unless that’s the new cleanser that cleans the bathroom so you don’t have to.” Rominy was smart, but she didn’t spend her pretty little brain cells worrying about Nazi power sources. At least, not until now.
“It’s a fictional name, a kind of code for what German theosophists hoped might be out there somewhere.”
“German what?”
“Just guys who provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of National Socialism, the creed of Hitler’s party. It did have a philosophy, you know.”
“You bet. Blow up the world.”
“In the 1930s many highly educated people took race and evolutionary theories quite seriously. After Darwin, it seemed self-evident that if you wanted to improve the human species-if you wanted it to evolve-then you bred the best with the best. People do exactly that every day. They want to mate with the prettiest or the smartest or the strongest or the richest. The Nazis simply thought you could apply that common sense to the group.”
“Master race? Aryan supermen? Sore point for Jews?”
“And Vril.”
“Did I miss that Oprah episode?” She glanced out the window. The view over the Pacific looked exactly as it had hours ago. God, it was a long way to China.
“It sounds goofy, like looking for a way to turn lead into gold, or the legend of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. Yet for thousands of years humans believed in a much more spiritual world than we do, in which gods or ghosts manifested themselves. Then along came science, everything opposed to science was labeled superstitious heresy, and ideas of exotic power sources like Vril were dismissed. Until modern physics came along.”
“Cyclorama.”
“Cyclotron. But it’s not just particle accelerators or atom smashers. It’s our whole concept of the universe. Now some people think the Nazis were on to something. Maybe Himmler’s Lewis and Clark expedition to Tibet wasn’t so wacky after all. Maybe Vril, or whatever you care to name it, really exists.”
“And you think Benjamin Hood discovered this?”
“Maybe. You know what an atom is, Rominy?”
“Jake, I am literate.”
“Bear with me. It was the Greeks who came up with the term. They looked at the world and saw that big things could be made of smaller things. Buildings out of bricks. Beaches out of grains of sand. And even sand could be ground down into dust or flour. Tiny and tinier. But was there a point at which things couldn’t get any smaller? Such a fundamental particle, they proposed, could be called an atom.”
This was a moment in which women learned to humor men. You nodded as they held forth, and if you were really interested in the guy, you could smile in amazement or widen your eyes. If guys were smart, they learned that the inverse of this seduction was to pretend to listen sympathetically while the girlfriend kvetched about her day, and then rub her feet.
Barrow plunged on. “It turns out the Greeks were right. There are fundamental particles called atoms. They come in nature in about ninety-two sizes, or weights, and out of them you can build anything we see in the universe. It’s like how you can make any English-language book from just twenty-six letters, or any song from just eight notes. You take the atoms of the periodic table and you can make anything. But here’s the problem. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists knew atoms weren’t the smallest thing after all. Do you know what they believed was smallest?”
“The unholy heart of Ronnie Hoskins, my two-timing high school boyfriend?”
He laughed. “Hey, I’m being serious, here.”
“I’ll say.”
“Electrons, protons, and neutrons. Their number in an atom controls the type of atom it is. Now we’re down to everything being made from just three things.”
“Amazing.” She widened her eyes.
“But then they wondered what would happen if they smashed those particles together.”
“Boys do that with trains.”
“It turns out there’s smaller stuff still. Quarks, and there are at least six varieties of those. Neutrinos, muons, leptons, a whole bunch of stuff physicists call a particle zoo. There are separate families of particles, called tribes. It’s bizarre, and confusing. A quark is a thousand times smaller than the nucleus of an atom, and remember I said that’s just a pinprick of the fuzz we call atoms. More than 99.99 percent of an atom is empty space.”
“Jake, this is sweet, but why are you telling me all this?”
“Because it drives physicists crazy. They’re romantics. They believe the universe is not only simple at the tiniest level, but that it needs to be simple to be aesthetic and neat and religious and right . They want to explain the whole shebang with a single equation so short you could fit it on a T-shirt.”
“Like E=mc 2.”
“Exactly! That explains the relationship of energy to matter, that they’re two sides of the same coin. But then scientists have found four basic kinds of energy, too, the weak, the strong, electromagnetic, and gravity. It drives
