Blasphemy

“Nice, eh?” Hazelius asked.

“Scary. You could drive over the edge before you knew it.”

“In fact, there’s a legend about a Navajo cowboy, chasing a maverick on horseback, who rode off here. They say his chindii, his ghost, still rides off the edge on certain dark, stormy nights.”

The view was breathtaking. An ancient land spread out below them, humps and pillars of rock the color of blood, windblasted and sculpted into strange shapes. Beyond lay mesas layered on mountains beyond mountains. It could have been the edge of Creation itself, where God had finally given up, in despair of bringing order to an unruly land.

“That great island mesa in the distance,” said Hazelius, “is No Man’s Mesa, nine miles long and a mile broad. They say there’s a secret trail to the top that no white man has ever found. To the left is Piute Mesa. Shonto Mesa is the one in front. Farther back are the Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Cedar Mesa, the Bears Ears, and the Manti-La Sal mountains.”

A pair of ravens rode an air current up, then dipped and glided back into gloomy depths. Their cries echoed among the canyons.

“Red Mesa is accessible at only two points—the Dugway, back behind us, and a trail that starts a couple of miles over there. Navajos call it the Midnight Trail. It ends in Blackhorse, that little settlement down there.”

As they turned to go, Ford noticed a series of marks on the face of a huge boulder that had split down the bedding plane.

Hazelius following his gaze. “See something?”

Ford walked over and laid his hand on the uneven surface. “Fossil raindrops. And . . . the fossilized track of an insect.”

“Well, well,” the scientist said in a low voice. “Everyone’s been up here to look at the view. But you’re the first person to have noticed that—beyond myself, of course. Fossil raindrops from a shower that fell in the age of dinosaurs. And then, after the rain, a beetle walked across the wet sand. Somehow, against all odds, this little moment in history got fossilized.” Hazelius touched it reverently. “Nothing we humans have done on this earth, none of our great works—not the Mona Lisa or Chartres Cathedral or even the pyramids of Egypt—will last as long as that beetle’s track in wet sand.”

Ford was strangely moved by the thought.

Hazelius traced his own finger along the insect’s wandering path, and then straightened up. “Well!” he said, grasping Ford’s shoulder and giving it an affectionate shake. “I can see you and I are going to be friends.”

Ford remembered Lockwood’s warning.

Hazelius turned southward, gesturing back across the mesa top. “In the Paleozoic, all this was an immense swamp. It gave us some of the thickest coal seams in America. They were mined out in the fifties. Those old tunnels were perfect for retrofitting Isabella.”

The sun lit Hazelius’s nearly unlined face as he turned to smile at Ford. “We couldn’t have found a better place, Wyman—isolated, undisturbed, uninhabited. But to me the most important thing was the beauty of this landscape, because beauty and mystery have a central place in physics. As Einstein said, ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true science.’ ”

Ford watched the sun slowly die in the deep canyons to the west, like gold melting into copper.

Hazelius said, “Ready to go underground?”

5

THE JEEP JOSTLED BACK TO THE road. Ford gripped the roof handhold, trying to look relaxed as Hazelius accelerated hard past the airstrip, hitting eighty on the straight road.

“See any cops?” Hazelius asked with a grin.

A mile beyond, the road was blocked by two gates in a double set of chain-link fences topped with concertina wire, walling off an area along the edge of the mesa. He braked at the last minute, the wheels squealing.

“All that’s inside is the Security Zone,” said Hazelius. He punched a code into a keypad on a post. A horn squawked and the gate rolled open. Hazelius drove in and parked the Jeep next to a row of other cars. “The Elevator,” he said, nodding toward a tall tower perched on the edge of the cliffs, festooned with antennae and satellite dishes. They walked up to it, and Hazelius swiped a card through a slot beside the metal door, then placed his hand on a palm reader. After a moment a husky female voice said, “Afternoon, sugar. Who’s the cat with you?”

“This is Wyman Ford.”

“Gimme some skin, Wyman.”

Hazelius smiled. “What she means is, lay your palm on the reader.”

Ford placed his hand on the warm glass. A bar of light moved down it.

“Hold on while I check with the man.”

Hazelius chuckled. “You like our little security interface?”

“Different.”

“That’s Isabella. Most computer voices are of the HAL variety, too white-bread for my taste.” He mimicked a stage-trained white voice: “‘Please listen carefully, as our menu items have changed.’ Isabella, on the other hand, has a real voice. Our engineer, Ken Dolby, programmed it. I believe he got some rap singer to lend him her voice.”

“Who is the real Isabella?”

“I don’t know. Ken’s rather mysterious on that point.”

The voice rolled out like honey. “The man says cool. You in the system now, so don’t get yo ass in no trouble.”

The metal doors swished open, revealing an elevator cage that ran down the side of the mountain. A small porthole window showed the view as they descended. When the elevator halted, Isabella warned them to watch their step.

They stood on a spacious outdoor platform cut into the side of the cliff in front of the huge titanium door Ford had seen from the air. It appeared to be twenty feet wide and at least forty feet high.

“This is the staging area. Another nice view, eh?”

“You should build condos.”

“This was the opening to the great Wepo coal seam. They took fifty million short tons of coal from this seam alone, and left huge caverns behind. A perfect setup for us. It was critical to get Isabella deep underground, to protect people from radiation when Isabella is running at high power.”

Hazelius approached the titanium portal set back into the cliff. “We call this fortress the Bunker.”

“I need yo number, sugar,” Isabella said.

Hazelius punched in a series of numbers on a small keypad.

A moment later the voice said, “Come on in, boys.” The door began to rise.

“Why such high security?” Ford asked.

“We have a forty-billion-dollar investment to protect. And much of our hardware and software is classified.”

The door opened on a vast echoing cavern carved out of stone. It smelled of dust and smoke, with a hint of mustiness that reminded Ford of his grandmother’s cellar. It was cool and pleasant after the heat of the desert. The door rumbled down, and Ford blinked to adjust to the sodium lighting. The cavern was huge, perhaps six hundred feet deep and fifty feet high. Straight ahead, at the far end of the cavern, Ford could see an oval door, which opened into the side of a tunnel filled with stainless steel pipes, tubes, and bundles of cable. A fog of condensates poured out of the door, flowing over the ground in little rivers that vanished. To the left a cinder block wall had been built across another opening in the rock, with a steel door in it. The door was marked THE BRIDGE. Along the other side of the cavern there were stacks of steel caissons, I-beams, and other leftover construction materials, along with heavy equipment and half a dozen golf carts.

Hazelius took his arm. “Straight ahead is the oval opening to Isabella itself. That fog is condensation from the superconducting magnets. They have to be cooled with liquid helium at close to absolute zero to maintain superconductivity. That tunnel runs back into the mesa, forming a torus fifteen miles in diameter, where we circulate the two particle beams. The fleet of electric golf carts over there is transportation. Now let’s go meet the gang.”

As they strolled across the cavern, their footfalls echoing in the cathedral-like space, Ford asked casually,