Isaacs nodded at him.
“Sir.” The young man placed the folder on Rutherford’s desk.
“That’ll be all,” Rutherford said to him with a note of paternalism.
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant turned and left.
“Sharp young man, that,” Rutherford confided. “My right arm.” He pulled the file toward him. “Let’s see what we have here.” He extracted a list of reported detections and handed it to Isaacs. Rutherford leafed through the corresponding write-ups, looking for ones that were not hopelessly sketchy.
As Isaacs scanned down the list of sonar reports, he let out a loud exclamation.
“I’ll be damned!”
“What?”
“One of life’s little ironies. Several of these reports are from the undersea arrays of acoustic monitors.”
“Sure, we have those babies all over, bound to pick up something like this. So?”
“That system is also operated by AFTAC. The whole ball of wax was right under my nose, both seismic and sonar data. I’m kicking myself, I was so hung up on the seismic signal propagating through the Earth. I had my people trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing.”
Isaacs threw the list on the desk and pulled a chair around beside Rutherford. They spent fifteen minutes checking the time and position on Earth for each of the reports and converting that data into a projected position on the celestial sphere, to see what stars were overhead. As near as they could tell, it was always the same patch of stars. All the sonar events fell on the path predicted by the seismic data. Trying to estimate whether the influence was precisely at the phase that brought Danielson’s seismic signal to the surface was more difficult, but the evidence they had seemed damning enough.
“So what did you say you are doing about all this?” Rutherford wanted to know.
“Not jackshit.” Isaacs described his skirmish with McMasters.
When he finished, Rutherford inquired, “Can’t you get McMasters to reopen the file, now that you have this confirmation from our data?”
“I doubt it.” Isaacs frowned in concentration and rubbed his prominent nose. He got up and paced the room. Post handball thirst nagged at him. He wished he had a cold beer.
“You’ve told me something new. The source of energy driving the seismic waves somehow proceeds into the ocean. That banishes my lingering suspicion that we were dealing with an ordinary, if highly regular, seismic phenomenon. But we’re no closer to understanding what’s really happening. Without a more substantial change in the situation, McMasters would stand to lose face if he backs down. I’ve got to have something beyond the fact that this thing is amphibious before I can go back to him and convince him to reopen our investigation.”
He crossed the room twice more, thinking.
“He’s right that there’s no obvious reason to consider this Agency business. But dammit! It’s got to be somebody’s business.”
Rutherford rubbed his chin. “Is this thing dangerous?”
Isaacs stopped pacing and faced the man seated at the desk. “Not clear, is it? Whatever it is, it makes a lot of noise that travels through rock and water. But noise alone doesn’t make it dangerous.” He resumed his pacing.
“The scary part is that something is moving through that rock and water, making the noise. We haven’t the faintest idea what. That doesn’t make it a threat, but it sure as hell makes me nervous!”
Rutherford leaned forward on his desk, watching Isaacs perform his epicycles. “Listen. Your seismic data were ideal to track this thing over large distances coherently and establish that it moves along a fixed direction. But with your hint of where and when to look, our sonar detections should give a higher precision. We could put a ship right on top of it and find out what we’re actually up against.”
Isaacs sprawled stiffly in a chair, as if he might leap out of it again at a moment’s notice. “Actually, we could do something like that on land, too, if McMasters hadn’t tied my hands,” he responded. “You’re right, though, you’re in a position to proceed, and I’m not.
“There is a practical point,” Isaacs continued. “As it stands now, you don’t formally have enough information to move on your own. You need our knowledge that it behaves in a systematic way.”
Rutherford nodded his assent.
“But I can’t give it to you officially because of this roadblock McMasters has thrown up.”
Isaacs smiled and leaned forward in his chair. “I think you’re going to have to wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden insight. Your past brilliant record would presage such a breakthrough.”
Rutherford gave an exaggerated “aw shucks” gesture. “Actually, it might be better if it didn’t come directly from me. McMasters knows we’re friends, and he might fit things together and give you a hard time for leaking information. I think I can handle it so that one of my associates has the inspiration.”
The two men grinned at one another and then lapsed into a contemplative silence. After several minutes, Rutherford stirred and walked over to a window and looked out.
He turned and asked, “What in hell are we getting into here, Bob?”
Isaacs returned his look, unspeaking.
Rutherford continued, “I keep coming back to the fact that this thing is locked to a fixed direction in space. That must be a crucial hint. And the fact that it moves easily through solid Earth and miles of water. What does that mean?” He turned to the window again, anxious to express disturbing thoughts, but subconsciously unable to face his friend at the same time.
“You know the image I get? A beam. A beam of some kind, focused into the Earth and playing back and forth.”
He turned suddenly, angry at a situation that departed so profoundly from his experience, forcing him to strange, uncomfortable extrapolations.
“Damn it, Bob, you know I’m a hard-nosed, practical man. But don’t we have to face up to the idea that something is out there? Doing this to the Earth?”
Isaacs ground his right fist into his left palm. “I confess, Av, when I first heard about the selective orientation in space, I found myself toying with such a notion. I put it out of my mind as idle fantasy. Now I don’t know. I do know the more I learn about this thing, the more scared I am.”
Avery Rutherford stood next to the captain of the USS Stinson and gazed out across the ocean as it reflected the early morning Sun. Rutherford delighted at being able to spend these long days of mid-June where he loved to be the most. His job was challenging and important, but it kept him behind a desk far too much. He had grown up in boats of all sizes in the waters off Newport and the only time he felt fully alive was at sea. A hectic week had been required to feed Isaacs’ hint to his aide, Szkada, then to work up a plan and arrange for the ship, but it was worth it. Rutherford felt great!
The captain barked commands as they closed on the chosen position. Finally, the trim craft lay dead in the water, and they waited and watched and listened. The ship, a Spruance class destroyer, was designed for intelligence work and bristled with sophisticated tracking and detection devices. At last, word came up from the sonar room that their target had appeared, moving incredibly rapidly, headed for the surface in a scant thirty seconds. Rutherford gritted his teeth and trained his field glasses on the water a thousand yards away where they had calculated the influence would reach the surface.
The sonar data were automatically fed into the ship’s computers to plot the trajectory. He listened to the tense messages on the intercom from the sonar room, the voice clipped, rapid, hurrying to keep up with something moving too fast. The new prediction showed the point of surfacing to be several hundred yards further from the ship than originally estimated, but still very close. Ten seconds. Rutherford felt a knot of tension as beads of sweat grew on his forehead. He tried to keep his mind neutral, but an image kept intruding, that of a ray guided by an unseen hand. He could sense that ray arcing through space like nighttime tracer bullets, then cutting a swath through the Earth.
Over the intercom came the tinny squawk as the sonar operator counted down the time to contact with the surface:
“Five.”
“Four.”
“Three.”
