silence of a missed shot.
Isaacs knew the other man’s tactics, however, and back-pedaled furiously to cover most of the distance to the left rear corner before the ball left the front wall. This gave him time to plant his feet firmly, eye locked on the descending sphere. The ball bounced on the floor, then off the back wall, nicely clearing both it and the side wall. Isaacs made the shot at hip level, putting into it everything his weaker left hand could muster. The ball rifled cross court, just missing Rutherford’s left knee. It struck almost dead in the corner, the front wall a fraction of a second earlier than the right, two inches above the floor. It skittered once and then meekly rolled across the court to bump gently into Rutherford’s toe.
The sudden denouement caught Rutherford by surprise and he just stared at the ball. Then he scooped it up and turned.
“Damnation, Bob, that was a hell of a shot!”
“Thanks,” Isaacs grinned. “Amazingly enough, that’s just what I wanted it to do.”
They played two more games for exercise, but without quite the fire. Isaacs took the first by a comfortable margin, Rutherford the last.
After the game, they left sweat-sogged piles of gym clothes in front of their lockers, grabbed their towels and stepped into the steam room. They sat on the bench and rehashed their play, each enthusiastically recalling the other’s good points and mixing in an occasional soft-pedaled critique.
They fell silent for a couple of minutes. Then Rutherford swiveled his head and looked at his companion.
“Do you mind a little shop talk, off the cuff?”
Isaacs leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed.
“Of course not, what’s on your mind?”
“Well, we’ve had scattered reports of a strange acoustic phenomenon, sort of an underwater sonic boom. This thing’s been kicking around. Nobody’s done anything about it because no one knows what to make of it. I just wondered whether it might ring a bell with you?”
“No,” said Isaacs lethargically, “I haven’t heard anything about it. We’ve been up to our ears counting screws and bolts in Tyuratam, waiting for them to launch the other shoe. Some kind of explosion?”
“No,” Rutherford shook his head and pinched some sweat out of his eyes, “it’s not localized like that. Something seems to be moving through the water, making a hell of a racket as it goes. It comes from the ocean bottom and apparently disappears momentarily at the surface. Then, it reappears and proceeds back down to the bottom.”
“Some kind of missile, torpedo?”
“Seems like it, doesn’t it? But there’s no indication of any launching craft. Besides this starts from really deep down, miles.”
“How about an underwater volcano, maybe spewing out blobs of lava, or rocks?”
“There’s probably too much drag in the water for that to be possible, but I’d give some credence if the reports were from one spot. They’re not, though. They’re from all over the globe. Several from mid-Atlantic shipping lanes, a few near Japan, a couple from the Sixth Fleet in the Med, one south of Madagascar, another in the Sea of Tasman between Australia and New Zealand. The latest one came from a sub north of Hawaii, that’s why it’s on my mind. A particularly close call, poor bastards thought they were being attacked. Anyway, the thing seems to hop all over.”
The men fell silent. Rutherford leaned over to examine a chipped nail on his big toe. Isaacs had not really been concentrating on the conversation. Now snippets of it rolled around in his head. Suddenly, a surge of adrenalin went keening out of his belly and through his body. His eyes snapped open and, despite the heat, he felt as if someone had just raked a large icy comb down his back.
He sat up and faced Rutherford who still bent over his foot.
“Those reports you just described, they seem to be either north or south of the equator, about equal distances.” He tried to keep his voice casual.
“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention another curious feature. This thing appears at random times, but always near the same latitude, sometimes north, sometimes south.”
“Thirty-three degrees.”
Now Rutherford swiveled his head in surprise.
“Hey, friend, you’ve been holding out on me!”
Nervous energy drove Isaacs off the bench. “Nothing like it,” he said intently, “just slow to make the connection.” He paced the small room randomly, oblivious to his steamy surroundings, his mind racing. “Good lord, in the water, too! What the hell does that mean?”
Rutherford had witnessed his friend’s bursts of intensity before and, failing to understand what had set him off, watched bemusedly as Isaacs moved about, his cock flipping drops of sweat and condensed steam at each sudden turn.
Isaacs stopped in front of him.
“Up to last week we were analyzing the seismic equivalent of your phenomenon. Something’s moving through the Earth, generating seismic waves.”
He sat suddenly next to Rutherford and continued.
“I had some of my people keeping an eye on it, even though we didn’t know what to make of it.”
Then he was thinking out loud.
“The seismic data only told us what was happening in rock. I convinced myself that, whatever it was, it was confined to the Earth’s crust, that the seismic waves were its essence. Now you tell me something about it continues into the water.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it. I don’t like this at all.
“Listen, we’ve learned some things you apparently haven’t stumbled onto yet. This thing is always there, and very methodical. It just goes back and forth, back and forth, always on the same path through the Earth.” He waved his arms. “And then out into the ocean! Shit! No reason to think it doesn’t continue into the atmosphere! No telling how far it goes.”
He leaned back against the wall. “Our problem is that McMasters scuttled our operation, claimed it wasn’t Agency business.” He paused for a moment. “Damn, it’s hot in here! Let’s go someplace where we can do a little serious talking. Better make it your office, since the subject is officially ‘verboten’ on my turf.”
As Rutherford steered his staff car through the prerush hour traffic, Isaacs explained animatedly how his interest in the seismic signal became aroused during his duty at AFTAC. He then outlined the progress Danielson had made, culminating in her conclusion that the phenomenon followed a trajectory fixed in space. They finished the drive in silence while Rutherford ruminated on this new information.
A half hour later they entered Rutherford’s office. Rutherford ordered up the Navy file on the acoustic phenomenon. He sat behind his desk while Isaacs remained standing, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. Rutherford spoke first.
“Boy, I’m really having trouble absorbing this. I had a notion of a random, infrequent occurrence, and now you describe something punching through the surface like clockwork, every eighty minutes or so. I guess I still don’t get the picture. Tell me again how this fixed motion works.”
“Let me use this globe,” Isaacs said as he lifted a fancy relief model of the Earth off its shelf and put it on Rutherford’s desk. He grabbed a pencil and held it pointed toward the surface of the globe, about a third of the way above the equator. “The thing always moves along a line, like this.” He moved the pencil in and out, parallel to itself, “Zipzip, zipzip. But as the Earth turns,” he spun the globe slowly with his free hand, “the thing always comes up in a different place.” He tapped the pencil rhythmically as he spun the globe, each tap hitting it an inch further on than the last.
“Let me see that,” said Rutherford, reaching for the pencil. He held it alongside the globe so that he could project it in his imagination into the center of the globe. Then he moved it back and forth along its length as he spun the globe slowly, eraser to the northern hemisphere, then point to the southern, eraser to the north, point, south. “Okay, I think I get the picture, but what could possibly do that? Through the center of the Earth? Jesus Christ!”
He jerked his head up as a knock sounded at the door.
“Come in.”
An aide came in bearing a file folder.
“Bob, Lieutenant Szkada. Lieutenant, Bob Isaacs, Central Intelligence.”
