She led him up the stairs to a door at the end of a dim corridor. “It used to be a spare bedroom,” Ruth said. “He made it into his study.”
The door opened on a tiny room crowded with bookcases, the bookcases overflowing with volumes Howard supposed had been his uncle’s. There were physics journals shelved with religious esoterica, philology texts next to photo reproductions of Aramaic codices. Had Stern taught himself to read Aramaic? It was unlikely, Howard thought, but far from impossible.
The room was obviously Stern’s. There was a sweater hanging from the back of the wooden chair that faced an oak desk, an electric typewriter—no computer.
The room even smelled like Stern, a musty echo of pipe tobacco and crumbling paper. Howard felt dizzy with the memories it evoked.
“I never went in here much,” Ruth said. “He didn’t like me to. I didn’t even clean. Even now, I don’t go in here very often. It feels funny. But I’ve looked at a few things.” She picked up a thick bundle of typewritten pages bound with a rubber band. “He left this.”
Howard took the manuscript from her. “What is it?”
“His diary,” she said. “The one he never showed the people at the lab.”
The single word
“Only a little. It’s technical. I don’t understand it.” She looked at him solemnly. “Maybe you will.”
Part Three
Our work yields a harvest of impossibilities, speculation is that the fragment may not be matter as we conventionally know it—apart from its measurable mass and volume, it lacks qualities we would call material. It cannot be subdivided. Its structure is grainless, undifferentiated even at great magnification, though optical scanning might be misleading for several reasons. Its radiation violates the inverse-square law as if the curvature of local space were being disturbed by an immensely greater mass, though the fragment can be lifted by four reasonably strong men (although none of us would be so unwise as to touch it). It seems to conjure high-energy photons from the surrounding air and shifts them toward the red as it radiates them. The effect includes reflected light: the fragment actually seems disproportionately more distant as you back away; that is, it shrinks too quickly with distance! The inverse is also true and makes nearfield measurement almost impossible. At microscopic distances, the fragment appears as a homogeneous structure as large as the surface of a star, though fortunately not as energetic! Although this makes it hard to handle, perhaps the miracle is that it is not much harder.
What a privilege to be allowed to witness these mysteries. How strange that the fragment should have come from an excavation in a Middle Eastern desert. Draw a radius of a thousand miles around the dig site and it encloses centuries of religious thought: Moses, Jesus, Mithra, Manx, Valentinus. …
Recall Linde’s idea of the observable cosmos arising from a chaotic “foam” of possible configurations of space and time: embedded in, tangled up with, other universes similar and dissimilar. In a dream I saw the fragment as something whole, as a sort of “wormhole boat” for traveling between adjacent islands of creation.
In the dream the vehicle was assembled by luminous beings, strange and unknowable: dwelling in the Pleroma? Using the device to penetrate the mystery of Created Matter—but unsuccessfully—broken fragments of ur-substance scattered through countless islands of space-time including our own…
We mean to bombard the fragment with high-energy particles. Knocking on Heaven’s door.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When the Bureau de La Convenance collaborates with the War Department, Symeon Demarch thought, anything is possible.
The test gantry had been assembled in his absence. It rose from a bald patch of ground in the forest two miles west of the wreckage of the laboratory facility, and it looked deceptively simple: a steel tourelle that might have passed for a watchtower. A crane was in place to lift the weapon into its cradle.
The weapon itself—or its parts, prior to final assembly—had arrived on two fiercely guarded trucks from the airstrip in Fort LeDuc along with a cargo of nervous technicians. The bomb parts resided now under the roof of a tin shed nearby, tended under glaring banks of lights by the same white-smocked civilians.
Demarch walked the grounds with Clement Delafleur, the Ideological Branch attache who had become his chief rival in Two Rivers.
A gentle snow encircled the two men and softened the harsh angles of the gantry on its concrete pad. The snow did nothing to soften the equally harsh lines of Clement Delafleur. He was at least ten years older than Demarch and much closer to confirmation as a fully fledged Censeur. The lines of his face were a geology of ancient frowns and disapprovals. Etched there by decades of political maneuvering, no doubt. Delafleur had more friends at the Centrality than Demarch himself—perhaps even including Censeur Bisonette, whose branch loyalties ran in one direction and personal loyalties, perhaps, in quite another.
All of which meant that Demarch could not openly question the wisdom of hanging twelve of the town’s children by the neck until dead. He could only allude to it—delicately.
Delafleur chose to be more blunt. “What they were doing was insurrection and the actions I took were well within our brief. You know that as well as I do.”
The noon bell-sounded across the camp. Demarch listened as the ringing faded into the perimeter of snowy trees. He wondered what he ought to say. His own position was still unclear. He remembered riding back into town and seeing the small corpses dangling like wheat sacks from the street lamps. He had ordered them cut down.
He said, “I won’t debate the justice of it. Or your authority to give the order. Only whether it was wise to generate more ill feeling.” He nodded at the test gantry. “Especially now.”
“I fail to see why I ought to be concerned about the sensibilities of people who are next door to annihilation.”
“To avoid provoking counterattacks, for one.” A military patrol had already taken rifle fire from a grieving parent. The parent had gone the way of his offspring, but on a less public gallows.
“We can deal with that,” Delafleur said.
“But should we have to?”
“It’s moot.” And Delafleur looked at the test gantry as if it answered all objections.
Perhaps it did. Demarch had learned a few things about the nature of the weapon. “Difficult to believe …”
“That it can do what they say? Yes. I don’t understand it myself. To think of everything within such a vast radius leveled or burned. The engineers have cleared a firebreak all around the perimeter, or else we might lose much of the forest—we might burn the entire Peninsula.” He shook his head. “They say it operates on the same principle as the sun itself.”
“Incredible.” These trees would be kindling, Demarch thought; and the town a brick oven—an oven full of meat. The image made him wince.
“You deserve some of the credit,” Delafleur said, looking at him slyly. “It was your idea to plunder the libraries, was it not? Which, I’m given to understand, helped advance the work on the bomb. At least by a few months. They were already well along, of course. So it isn’t
