Deep Sky

The tunnel seemed almost to move beneath him. To rock gently left and then right, like a boat in a passing wake.

“The message that came through the Breach was about you,” Dyer said. “It named you. It specified your time and place of birth.”

A memory came to Travis. An image of the dark alley near Johns Hopkins, between the town houses. Ruben Ward staggering somewhere ahead of him, aware that he was being followed.

The man had called out: Who the hell are you?

And he’d answered: Travis Chase. Let me help.

There’d been an audible response on Ward’s part. Some expulsion of breath Travis had pegged for confusion, and then dismissed.

You’re only a kid, Ward had said. And a moment later: The instructions didn’t say anything about this.

Travis looked around at the others—Dyer just watching him, reading his response, Paige and Bethany staring with blank faces, still processing the information.

Then Paige’s expression changed. She looked at Travis and mouthed a single word: it.

Travis acknowledged her with a nod neither Bethany nor Dyer saw.

It.

Jesus.

No doubting the connection now.

Was that what the filter was about, then? Was it some consequence of entering the Breach from this end? An unavoidable result, like the brain damage Ruben Ward had suffered when the thing opened?

Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.

Travis looked at Dyer. “Did Garner ever say anything about a filter? Did that word ever come up, regarding the message?”

Dyer thought about it, but seemed to draw a blank. He shook his head.

Travis considered the notion for another second and then let it fall away—for the moment. The present conversation drew his full attention again.

“I was a child when that message arrived,” Travis said. “How the hell could it be about me?”

“I’d tell you if I knew,” Dyer said.

“Does Garner know? Does he know what happens when I go through?”

“He knows something—whatever the first half of the message says.”

“We saw part of it,” Paige said. “I won’t go into the how, but we saw two separate lines from the notebook. One was about finding Loraine Cotton here in Rum Lake. The other was from earlier in the text. It said, ‘Some of us are already among you.’ ”

Dyer’s eyes tightened involuntarily. He’d clearly never heard that before.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Like I told you, Garner kept all that to himself. All he said about it was that it mattered. Like the biggest things in history matter. Things we can’t afford to get wrong.” He paused. “They wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. Everything was on the right track, at the beginning. The nine knew all they were supposed to, and were gaining power. No one else knew a thing. By the end, right before 2016, they’d have been well positioned to get you into Tangent, Mr. Chase, under whatever necessary pretense. To give you an idea of how well positioned, consider that Garner himself was one of the nine. In 1978 he was a retired Navy SEAL thinking about putting his law degree to use. The instructions rerouted him into politics. Everything was rolling smoothly. And then it wasn’t.”

“Scalar,” Paige said. There was a note of pain in her voice.

Dyer nodded. “Your father’s learning about the notebook, from Ward’s wife, threw everything off. He launched the investigation, came up empty, and got started on the project to create this second Breach the following year. Before it was long under way, a few of the nine had already gotten wind of it. They knew why Peter was doing it, and couldn’t blame him. Of course he’d want to find out what the message had said. Given the secrecy, how could it sound anything but ominous to him? Garner and the others debated meeting with him and telling him everything, but held back. What if he didn’t agree with their goal? Their advantage would be lost, just like that. So they waited instead, and watched over this project as closely as they could. They weren’t sure what would result from it, but they were confident it wouldn’t generate another Ward.” He shrugged. “In the end they actually exerted some influence on the construction. Peter had a team building the new ion collider in a secure location a few hundred miles from here—it could be taken apart and moved once he found a place to set it up for good. Secrecy around the search for a final site was incredibly strict. No one in Washington was privy to the memos. The nine were worried they’d end up never knowing how all this turned out, so they used indirect methods to suggest this mine shaft, by way of one of the engineering firms involved. Loraine Cotton knew the mine from her time as a biologist here.”

Dyer nodded at the red light streaming in nearby. “They installed the collider in about three months in 1987, and switched it on. You know how that went. Garner and the others figured that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. Even while he was containing the mess here, Peter began preliminary steps toward trying again somewhere else. And again and again, if need be. He was that rattled by not knowing what Ward had done. He couldn’t justify ever giving up. So Garner and the rest finally rolled the dice. A few of them met with Peter and told him the whole story.”

“How did he take it?” Paige said.

Dyer rubbed his eyes and leaned his head back against the stone. “Like he’d accidentally released plague rats from a lab.” He exhaled slowly. “Peter agreed entirely with their aim, and that all of his work on Scalar had to stop. But by then it wasn’t as simple as that. Things were worse than Garner and the others realized. They’d been watching Tangent’s dealings for a few years by then, especially as Scalar began to ramp up. They never thought Peter knew about them—but he did. And he’d countered their moves with his own. He’d been watching them. Remember, he had Breach technology at his disposal. Serious advantages no one outside Border Town knew about. He’d also involved contacts he had within the FBI, for things like background checks and financial record searches.”

“Oh shit,” Travis said. He could see the rough shape of the problem.

Dyer nodded. “Peter did that stuff long before Garner and the others came to see him. Before he knew any better. By the time they did meet with him, there were a handful of people in the United States government who knew all nine of their names, and knew they’d taken an unusual interest in Scalar—which a select few also knew about. You see the danger, right? And you see how even stopping the investigation in its tracks, ceasing work on new Breaches, wouldn’t make that danger go away. There would always be those few people out there, along with whoever they’d talked to, who might put the pieces together. Rumors of an alien message, its instructions carried out on Earth in 1978. Nine powerful people deeply involved with it somehow, all of whom had radically improved their standing right after the message arrived. There would always be the risk of someone connecting the dots and reacting out of fear. Of huge-scale action being taken against Garner and the others, and maybe against Tangent itself. All of that could happen years before 2016. Years before the culmination of their work.”

Dyer waved a hand to indicate the unseen chamber six hundred feet above. “So they all met to talk about it. Peter and the other Scalar investigators, and Garner and the rest of those who’d received the message. They came here in mid-December 1987 to figure it all out. The location worked because it was still secret to anyone in D.C. Only the engineers knew where this place was, and they’d all signed nondisclosure forms that threatened capital punishment. Between that and how damned scared of the place they were, by that point, they weren’t likely to ever talk. So, good place for the meeting. Peter and the others brought a report with them. A plan for how to proceed.”

“The cheat sheet,” Paige said.

Dyer looked puzzled.

“That’s what others in Tangent called it,” she said.

“A one-page plan,” Travis said. “Jesus, now I know why. It could’ve probably been a one- line plan: Stop everything and cross our fingers.”