End Time (19 page)

Nothing special in the fridge, a mix of old and new: The oranges were still good, but say good-bye to the avocado, the artichokes—going black. The milk sour. The kitchen in general, pretty clean.

Back in the living room the entertainment center with its large flat-screen dead. A wheelchair stood in the living room by the window, against the wall, a pair of crutches. Billy sighed; he was getting nothing from this.

He closed the front door on the way out, crushing the wasps' nest. And a few buzzed angrily about his head, but didn't pursue him.

Billy walked across the deserted street to the ruins of the Chen house, a tangle of charred timbers. Didn't look safe. He looked up and down the subdivision street. No cars in the driveways, no conversations, no kids playing, noise, or life. Even the TVs were turned off. Front doors open. Houses abandoned. The whole kit and caboodle packed up and vamoosed. A ghost town.

Everywhere he looked the lawns were still green as if everyone had left their automatic sprinkler systems on. As if to confirm this, every sprinkler head in every lawn in front of every house turned on at once. A rushing, cool sound. A kind of empty Eden. Moreover, animals seemed to have returned to suburbia. Cats slunk in and out of shadows. He spotted a badger looking at him from under a hedge. A family of mule deer tiptoed quietly among the landscaping and shrubbery. An armadillo trotted purposefully across the paved street on its little stumpy armored legs. Birds chirped brightly from every rain gutter and flower box.

Then with some sixth sense he looked up, his eyes drawn down the shimmering asphalt. A pack of wild dogs gathered at the end of the subdivision. Coming together for a moment, they sniffed the air and in a heartbeat spotted Billy standing alone by the ruins of the Chen house.

Billy leapt to his rental van; three seconds later the dogs jumped up on the driver's window, snarling and leaving foam. He popped the glove compartment and pulled out his piece. A long-barrel Ruger Blackhawk six-shooter. Then looked stupidly at it. Twelve dogs, six shells. Then what? Close the window and fumble with bullets? He put the gun back and waited for his heart to slow.

After a few moments, the dogs got the deer scent from the shrubs and bounded between two houses in a pack. The street now empty, Billy turned the key in the ignition and put the Dodge Caravan in drive. There were other places to look-see. The ghost town of subdivision suburbia slid by; he'd soaked his shirt with sweat. The air conditioner roared on high, cold air chilling his skin.

And to think he'd almost rented a convertible.

*   *   *

The R&D hangar at Escape Velocity was the same kind of desolate normal. On any weekend the security guards at the gate should have been on duty with their clipboards and visitor ID tags. Not today. Billy Shadow's Lattimore Aerospace identification let him go everywhere except Clem's personal computer. Every door, every locked filing cabinet, every restroom. The automatic video camera at the gate whirred on its base to capture his face as he slid his card into the security reader. After a moment the gate rolled open.

No employee cars in the lot. No ambitious souls working their Sunday instead of playing golf. Another card swipe, and the electric door opened to the large R&D hangar, welcoming him inside. A row of steel lockers stood by the door where the scientists and techs kept their lab coats. An inviting cube of translucent foundation bricks: the bathrooms with showers. Down at the far end a floor-to-ceiling thick plastic partition, and behind that the Aerogel vats, sealed clear canisters with large hoses going in and out. In front of the partition a chemistry lab, long tables, gas jets, lots of racks and vials. Very neat.

He checked Bhakti's locker and then Mrs. Bhakti's, with an extra set of crutches. Inside Chen's locker: deodorant, Tums, Kleenex, a white lab coat. A photo of daughter Lila was taped inside, clinging to Daddy's neck, both mugging for the camera.

All the workstations were empty, a half-dozen PC terminals on sleep mode. Billy picked one at random. It turned out to be Wen Chen's. The über-swipe Lattimore Aerospace ID card overrode Chen's password, and the desktop flashed on and started its boot-up protocol.

Better call the office while he was at it. Billy Shadow reached the Lattimore Aerospace corporate techno chief at home outside of Sioux Falls. Jasper was where he always was on a weekend: sitting in his basement playing Master of the Universe in his pajamas. And he picked up his phone with a question in his voice: “This is Jasper.”

Billy Shadow's iPhone blocked caller ID. Better if his wireless communications didn't show his name, better if people didn't know who was calling until Billy's voice told them. Maybe Jasper could play with the code and jimmy the system, but he never said, “Hi, Billy,” or “Yes, Mr. Shadow,” or his Lakota name, “Hello, Mr. Howahkan.” Just, “This is Jasper.”

“It's me.” Then…, “Here's what I need, Jasper. I gather you've noticed the brain drain down here at Escape Velocity Aerogel R&D?”

“Yep, no activity for … a while. Everyone gone fishing?”

“Something like that. I want all the hard drive files and URLs locked down. Then transferred to a firewall stand-alone server. Do it from a throwaway laptop; don't use the office terminals. We need a total virus scan.”

“So you think we've been compromised?”

“Not sure right now. But I'll need direct access from a remote. Access at specific times, so you'll have to plug in and pull the plug by hand. And stand by while I comb through everything on my throwaway terminal. Understand?”

“Uh-huh.” Jasper understood. “It'll take me twenty minutes to get down to the office. Does Lattimore know we're going for the fire-sale protocol?”

“He will by the time you get there. I'm going to play around from here until you call me when you're ready to transfer.”

The fire-sale protocol was simple: Take everything in every PC at the R&D facility and transfer it to a single stand-alone emergency hard drive/server. Dip in and out when necessary and only to expendable laptops in case there was some kind of virus. Lattimore was smart; he kept all the company's computer records in their various divisions and subdivisions, answering to different server farms that weren't connected, putting all his eggs in different baskets. And the power towers all lived in a lead-lined room at the lower levels of the Lattimore Building. Safely cocooned in case of an EMP blast, natural or man-made. In any case, even in the event of thermonuclear war, on Lattimore's farm one rotten apple in the barrel wasn't going to ruin the produce.

In the twenty minutes before Jasper's hard-drive, gut-sucking operation, Billy Shadow found out a couple of funny things about Wen Chen. The Chinaman was a conspiracy nut. And a manic researcher. One file, named WR 104, was Chen's granny-notion box, but instead of old buttons, fancy thread, and bits of lace, the file contained all the elements of Armageddon and the Apocalypse. The street-corner prophet in the sandwich board shouting, “
The end is near!”

The file's name, the notorious WR 104, was the designation of a binary star 8,000 light-years from Earth. And yeah, Billy had to Google it. In cosmic terms close enough to count. The star itself emitted immense radiation; only its binary companion kept the thing from lighting up the heavens. What you saw was a spiral of dust as the two stars played tug-of-war. That spiral of dust was like a safety blanket.

What got some stargazers all hot and bothered was that the poles of this star were pointing at bull's-eye Earth. Should the thing go supernova, should a gamma ray erupt, the death gasp of this star would rip the skin off our planet. By the time you saw the flash you were toast, even if it took 8,000 light-years for the eruption to jump the distance. Fifty thousand Earth years of human evolution gone in seconds, everything on Earth burnt to inanimate carbon.

So all in all, WR 104 was a pretty good name for a doomsday crackpot file. And the stuff inside kept the promise of every scary eventuality. Like a hundred road signs pointing to an event-horizon singularity, where time and space, past and future danced one last jig before the universe expired.

Wen also had files on Gray Goo, the hair-on-fire theory that molecular nanotechnology would self-replicate, engulfing everything in existence. A file on various plagues in history: black plague, bubonic plague, crimson fever, yellow fever, influenza, ebola … Histories of the Mayan doomsday calendar and a biography of Edgar Cayce, along with links to his foundation in Virginia Beach. Naturally lots of stuff on Nostradamus and the Oracle at Delphi. And the requisite ancient alien pics of the “airport runways” at Nazca, Peru. Not to mention the incredible interlocking granite stones of Puma Punku in the Andes.

Then the WR 104 file went tech-heavy.

Billy Shadow felt a headache coming on.

A dozen Soviet reports on underwater UFOs—USOs, actually: unidentified submerged objects—some documents even in the original Russian. In English: the famous report on the sightings from the USS
FDR
aircraft carrier. Scanned photos and addresses of some of the sailors who had testified. Hell, even President Eisenhower was on board at the time.

The range of Chen's obsessions went on and on. Files on the Vril Society, Nazi time machines, gravity benders, and doomsday rays. Well, to be honest Billy had picked over some material on this in Lattimore's private library. But he'd never seen a map of Glacka, Poland, where some of the slave-labor research was accomplished. There was a massive sealed-up tomb of Third Reich experiments down there somewhere.

A file on Nikola Tesla, the incredible Serbian-American scientist. The inventor of alternating current and the man single-handedly responsible for bringing power to the masses without a coal-fired electric plant on every city block. A file from the Library of Congress: Tesla's epic battle with Edison. Edison didn't like the alternating current idea; it conflicted with his own investment in direct current. Massive lawsuits ensued.

Notes on Tesla's experiments in earthquake machines, and the dubious claim he could transmit electrical energy around the globe without power lines or wires. The address of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, first Yugoslavia and later Serbia, where the great man's papers, trunks, and scientific instruments were taken by his nephew—not surprisingly a KGB agent—after WWII. A refusal for research from the Serbian curator of said museum in the new spirit of East-West cooperation.
Get lost, Chinee-American Data Man.
No tickee, no laundry.

A menu from Delmonico's Restaurant in New York City, where Tesla ate every day, and a bill for starched napkins. Tesla was famous for the stack of white napkins at his elbow that he used once and threw away. Billy had found a book on Tesla in Lattimore's library and was struck by that fact. A new nappy for every dab of the lips. Well, there in the file was the bill from Delmonico's scanned into Chen's PC. Hey, if you invented/discovered alternating current you were entitled to eat however you wanted.

Extensive files and a bibliography of articles on HAARP. Sounded like an Irish ale. Christ, if it wasn't right there, he'd have to look it up online. No, not an Irish beer: instead the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Located in a dozen remote Alaskan tundras or valleys were various kinds of antenna arrays. The program was one of a few facilities on Earth that could do what it did: study ionospheric physics and radio science.

Extracts from various PhD eggheads warning that bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere would stimulate intense ultra-low-frequency (ULF) electromagnetic anomalies, inducing local earthquakes. The real war plan for the U.S. Air Force. Beam it up; bounce it down in a certain place; rock the planet. Why invade Baghdad when you could break it from underneath? But who knows if it worked?

The next file Billy clicked on was a Reuters news report on the building blocks of life discovered within comet tails; the building blocks were captured by NASA spacecraft as they flew through the ionized trails. Microscopic particles of glycine, the most common of twenty amino acids;
Glory Be
same said glycine as on Earth, discovered in particles snatched from a flying ball of ice. Glycine, glycine everywhere—common as dirt and every place you looked. Bits of stuff just aching to burst into protein, and thence into life itself.

The latest NASA mission was to the comet named Wild 3 with the spacecraft probe called
Stardust
—mission accomplished, it had snagged some primordial dust in a fly-by a couple of million miles out in space. The glycine-laden particles were trapped in a dish lined with Aerogel. The design for the lining had been tested right in this lab. Instead of “light as air and hard as steel,” Professors Chen and Bhakti had made the lining in micron perforations so it trapped things, like an air filter. More accurately, a space filter.

Then the comet probe trajectoried back to Mother Earth; after a zillion-mile journey through the heavens, the probe was due to fall on safe old Utah in some kind of reentry parachute canister any day now.

Okay, that was a legit file entry having something to do with Professor Chen's day job.
Lattimore Aerospace made the damn space filter
. Still, all this effort, so many documents, so many searches, so much material. And for what?

“Jesus,” Billy said under his breath. “When did this Chinaman ever have time to do the laundry we were paying him for?”

The last file Billy clicked on showed a note from Clem Lattimore to his factotum in the R&D facility, scanned in from an original. A simple note scrawled in Lattimore's hand, and Billy recognized it. The note read:

From: Lattimore

To: Wen Chen, PhD

Research at will. Keep Files.

Clem

Ah, the whole basketcase was a legit research project. Okay, whatever the boss wanted.