Linkage: The Narrows of Time (14 page)

“What else did you say?”

“That was it. I didn’t mention E-121 or the
lab accident. Do you think we’re responsible for all this? That we
killed Abby and all those other people?”

“I don’t know, maybe. None of this makes much
sense.”

“Maybe we should leave town.”

“And go where? We don’t know if this fucking
thing will appear again, or where. If it starts jumping around,
then no place is safe. Besides, if we did cause this, then we have
to stay and find a way to stop it. The only place we can do that is
here, in our lab.”

“No, you’re right. It’s our duty to stop
it.”

Lucas heard their phone ringing inside when
they finally made it to their apartment’s front door. He struggled
to find his keys, but eventually opened the deadbolt lock and ran
inside. But by the time he made it to the phone, the caller had
hung up. “Was probably Mom,” he said.

“Knowing her, she saw the news and has been
calling every five minutes. She must be worried sick.”

“Why don’t you give her a quick call while I
make backups?”

Lucas logged onto his computer and copied the
DVD video evidence to his hard drive. Once there, he uploaded the
movie files over the Internet to his private cloud storage space,
which he rented for his computer’s weekly offsite backups. He kept
backup copies of all their research material there as well.

Drew rolled over to the desk after hanging up
the phone. “Mom’s good; I told her not to worry. Is the backup
almost done?”

“Just about,” Lucas said, opening the desk
drawer. He searched through the pile of junk in the drawer.

“Looking for something?”

“Where the hell’s that sixty-four gigabyte
thumb drive we just bought? I want to make a copy of everything so
we have it all in one place.”

“It’s still in my backpack. I’ll get it.”

Lucas heard footsteps walking across the
floor of the apartment above them. His neighbor then flushed the
toilet, sending a noisy stream of water down the sewer pipes in the
wall.

Drew handed the flash drive to Lucas. “If you
need the space, delete my study folders. I don’t need them
anymore.”

“Why don’t you see what the news is saying?”
Lucas suggested, inserting the drive into his computer’s USB port.
“The remote’s on the couch. Hit the MUTE button so I can work in
peace.”

A few minutes later, Drew called out to Lucas
from the couch. “You’d better come see this.”

“What’s wrong?” Lucas answered with only
partial interest. He was still in the middle of his USB drive’s
download.

“They’re setting up roadblocks around
campus.”

Lucas grabbed his laptop, flew out of his
chair, and raced over to the couch where he set his computer down
in front of him on the coffee table. The broadcast showed four
soldiers patrolling the street in front of the north entrance to
the university, while two other soldiers erected sawhorse-style
barricades from one side of the street to the other. Three green
Humvees were parked perpendicular to the street, just behind the
barricade.

“Hey, isn’t that our entrance on Speedway?”
Lucas asked.

Drew nodded.

Along the bottom of the screen, the news
ticker displayed the words: “
BREAKING NEWS: Suspected Terrorist
Attack in Tucson . . . National Guard Activated . . . Arizona
Governor Declares State of Emergency . . .
”

“Shit. Now we’ll never get back into the
lab,” Lucas said.

“Better call Dr. Kleezebee.”

Lucas dashed to their wall phone and picked
up the receiver. He did not have Kleezebee’s hotel information in
Washington, so he dialed the professor’s cell phone, only to have
his call redirected to the professor’s voice mailbox. He left a
message. “Dr. Kleezebee, this is Lucas. Please call me at the
apartment when you get a chance. It’s urgent.”

Next, he tried calling Bruno on both his cell
phone and his home phone. There was no answer on either number.
“Damn it, where is everybody?”

“You could try Trevor. He’s home,” Drew said,
looking up at the ceiling.

“Worth a shot,” Lucas said before grabbing a
broom leaning against the wall, next to the fridge. He walked to
the center of the room and stood between the couch and coffee
table. Above him, the ceiling was dinged with dozens of shallow,
nickel-sized indentations. He picked a new spot, then raised the
broom handle and rammed it into the ceiling three times, careful
not to punch a hole in the drywall. “You know this would be a lot
easier it he would just get a damn phone.”

He sat down on the couch and checked his
laptop to see if the video download had finished. The progress bar
showed 100% complete. He removed the USB thumb drive and put it
into his front pocket.

Less than thirty seconds later, there was a
knock at the door.

“Trevor?” Drew asked.

“Jesus, he must have sprinted down here.”

When Lucas opened the door, he found Dr.
Kleezebee standing there, holding one of the E-121 transport cases.
“You’re back already, Professor?”

Kleezebee unlatched the container’s lid and
opened it. “Where the hell is it?”

Lucas needed a few seconds to think, but his
mind wasn’t cooperating. “Why don’t you come in?”

Kleezebee scowled and brushed past him. The
professor took the middle seat on the sofa while Lucas sat down
across from him in a wooden rocking chair his father had made for
them in the workshop back home in Phoenix.

Kleezebee put the material case on the coffee
table. “With President Lathrop closing campus, I went to your lab
to retrieve the E-121 samples. Imagine my surprise when I found
this container empty.”

“Sir, there’s something I need to explain.
But before I do, let me say that Drew, Trevor and Abby had nothing
to do with it. It was my decision, and I take full responsibility
for what happened.”

“What the hell did you do?”

“Friday night, after you left for DC, I
decided to run the experiment again.”

“You did what?”

“Maybe it’s best if I show you,” Lucas said,
queuing up the reactor’s video feed on his laptop. The recording
showed the core’s flash of light in slow motion, and the
disappearance of the E-121 and its canister.

Kleezebee’s nostrils flared and his face
turned a deep shade of red. He just sat there, shaking his head
with his jaw clenched, staring at the wall across from him.

Lucas thought his boss was about to blow a
gasket, so he quickly explained, hoping to diffuse the situation.
“We felt we had to try again while we still had access to the lab
what with the committee shutting us down and you going to
Washington. So we cranked up the juice and used full power.”

“And we corrected your wave displacement
calculations,” Drew said.

Kleezebee lowered his head and began to rub
his forehead with his right hand. Almost a full minute later, he
said, “You know, there was a damn good reason why I changed your
specs. I specifically told you to use only half power. You never
should’ve done that without checking with me first.”

“Yes, sir, we know. We’re sorry. But there’s
more we need to show you,” Lucas said, starting the video of the
theatre’s flash event using frame-by-frame mode. He stopped the
playback at the point right before he used the student’s video
camera to capture close-up footage of the body parts. He wanted to
prepare the professor for what came next.

“How’d you get this?” Kleezebee asked.

“Drew and I were on scene when that first
blast of light hit the Student Union.”

“Why were you there at that time of
night?”

“We were meeting Abby and her roommate at the
theatre for the midnight movie. It was a double date of sorts.”

Kleezebee sighed. “Were they already
there?”

“Yes. She was on the steps with her roommate
when the flash appeared. They’re both dead,” Lucas said, lowering
his head in shame. He waited for a reprimand that never came.

Kleezebee did not respond. He just stared at
the floor.

“Somebody should call Abby’s parents,” Lucas
said.

“She doesn’t have any. They’re both dead,”
Drew replied.

“So I take it, one of you brought the video
camera to the scene?”

“No, sir. I found it there, on a step. It
belonged to one of the people waiting in line. They were using it
when the light exploded the . . . place.”

“What happened next?”

“I recorded the scene. Here’s what I shot,”
Lucas said, clicking the
PLAY
button on his laptop’s screen.
“Notice the lack of rubble and the bloodless body fragments?
Clearly, this was not an explosion. Despite what the police think,
I doubt a terrorist cell could have caused this type of
destruction.”

Kleezebee gasped and then turned away when
the close-up shot of Jasmine’s severed torso appeared on the
screen. “Okay, enough. I get the picture.”

Lucas queued up the Channel 9 news video
before asking Kleezebee, “Did you hear about the energy field that
leveled the mall this morning?”

Kleezebee nodded.

Lucas played the video footage. “This was
shot from one of Channel 9’s news helicopters. Notice the dome’s
transparent crown, which lets us see what’s happening inside. It
might also be a possible weakness, which could be exploited.
Inside, you can see that matter is stripped from the Earth, and
then it gets twisted and compacted before being sucked through the
vortex.” He stopped the playback just before the grand finale.

“Did you notice any change in air pressure
following the event?” Kleezebee asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did, both times. It
was more pronounced after the second one. It felt like I was being
pulled toward the energy field, not pushed.”

Kleezebee smirked, as if he’d expected that
answer.

“There’s something else you might find
interesting,” Lucas said, replaying the last few seconds of the
video. He froze the recording just after the camera zoomed in and
revealed the pyramid-shaped heap of tissue and bones. “The energy
field leaves behind some form of bio-excretion when it
dissipates.”

Lucas double-clicked his laptop mouse to
replay the video file containing the theatre’s flash event. He
fast-forwarded to the very end, and then paused the recording on a
scene showing the black powder sitting inside the crater. “Drew,
can we have the sample, please.”

Drew opened his backpack and handed Kleezebee
the plastic container of black powder.

“We found this black residue inside the
reactor core, after the E-121 vanished,” Lucas said.

“Did you have it analyzed?” Kleezebee
asked.

“Yes, by Griffith’s mass spectrometer—you
know, that weird guy across the hall?” Drew replied. “But the
results were inconclusive. It didn’t detect any chemical or organic
compounds. It’s as if it doesn’t even exist.”

Kleezebee held up the container and shook it
before his eyes; much like Drew did earlier in the lab.

“We also found the same substance inside the
theatre’s crater, and it was all over the mall today after the
energy field disappeared,” Lucas said.

Kleezebee opened the container and smelled
the residue, before rubbing some of it between his fingers. “It
certainly appears the E-121 disappearance is somehow linked to the
two incidents on campus. Wouldn’t you agree?” he asked Lucas.

“Yeah, it does. Have you ever seen a
substance like this before, Professor?”

“Once, a long time ago, when I was not much
older than you are now. We never were able to identify it,”
Kleezebee replied, closing the lid to the container. “I’d like to
run this by an old friend at the FBI. Substance identification has
come a long way in the past fifty years and maybe he might be able
to tell us what it is.”

“His name wouldn’t happen to be Mulder, would
it?” Lucas asked, hoping to lessen the tension.

The look on Kleezebee’s face indicated he was
not amused by the Hollywood reference.

“There’s one more thing you should know,”
Drew said. “Right before the E-121 vanished in the reactor’s core,
there was a massive power surge.”

“How massive?”

“Hard to say. It was off the chart.”

“Give me an estimate.”

“Based on the power acceleration curve, and
factoring in the composition and density of the E-121 and its
receptacle, I’d say at least six times 10
³¹
terajoules.”

“That’s over a trillion times more energy
than our sun releases in an hour. How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what the data
indicates.”

“What was the source of the spike?”

Drew shrugged. “We have no idea.”

“Was it from some type of cascading
reaction?”

“We don’t think so,” Lucas answered. “We
reviewed all the data, but found nothing to suggest that. I just
don’t see how our experiment could have generated that level of
energy.”

“You do realize that I can’t cover this up.
We’ll have to report this to the Advisory Committee and to the
authorities. Larson is going to want your heads on a silver
platter, and I don’t think I can protect you from that festering
pustule of a man.”

“We understand, sir,” Lucas replied in a
solemn voice.

“I need you to put together a copy of all the
evidence and get it to me ASAP. I want to review it with my
colleagues on the committee and get everyone’s input.”

Lucas retrieved the thumb drive from his
pocket and handed it to Kleezebee. “It’s all on here, Professor,
including the data logs.” He was hopeful that the committee’s
senior professors would be able to assist. Two of them were Nobel
Laureates who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics a few months
earlier.

Just before he walked out the door, Kleezebee
turned and said, “Let’s meet tomorrow at nine a.m. in your lab. We
can sit down and go through all the data together.”