The Fold: A Novel Part 37

He nodded. "Did Site B get locked up?"

"I thought Olaf did it," said Neil. "He was over there, too."

Olaf shook his head. "I didn't."

"Are we sure it's dangerous?" asked Sasha. "I mean, swapping quarters, that's more of a party trick, right?"

Mike looked at her. "You want to end up wherever radioactive Bob came from?"

"No."

"Then it's kind of dangerous."

"How can it be growing bigger?" said Jamie. "I mean, it took me two days to wrap my head around the rings working without any power."

"It can't," said Neil. "That's the whole point of the rings. They focus the fields."

"But the rings aren't doing anything as it is," said Jamie.

"Hang on," said Mike. "Safety first, yes?"

"Yes," said Arthur after a moment. "Of course."

"Who wants to go make sure Site B's locked up?"

"I'll go," said Sasha.

"No," Neil said, "I'll do it."

"You should be part of this discussion," Arthur said.

Neil shrugged. "Anything I know Sasha knows. Besides, I could use the fresh air."

"Are you okay?"

"No. Not sick. Just..." He looked at the blueprints. "This is all making my head spin a bit. The fresh air will be good for me."

"Okay, then."

"I'll take one of the bikes. I'll be back in ten minutes, tops." He stepped out into the hall. A moment later the sounds in the hallway s.h.i.+fted as the front door opened and drifted closed.

Mike closed his eyes. The large blueprints called the ants out like a picnic. They added the new design specs to the model of the rings he'd built in his mind, filling in final details and labels. "Let's forget how," he said. "For the moment I think we can all agree how is beyond us, yes?"

"We can figure it out," said Arthur. "Nothing's unknowable."

"Except all those things men weren't meant to know," said Jamie.

Arthur glared at her. Mike held up his palm. "Forget how. Why is it growing bigger?"

"What's the difference?" said Sasha. "We don't know either."

"How might be beyond us, but we should be able to come up with a why. Something's changed. There's a new variable that's causing all this."

"Weak logic," said Olaf. "Whatever caused the Door to stay open this long could also be what's causing the expansion."

"They're two different things, though," said Jamie.

Olaf shook his head. "They appear different because they seem to be two separate effects, and we don't know what's causing either. It's just as likely this is the same effect, building in force or intensity."

Mike looked up and took in the room. The five of them were standing around the table. Him, Jamie, and Olaf on one side, Arthur and Sasha on the other. A chair lurked by each of them, plus the ones on either end. An image blossomed in his mind, his first time in the conference room, the Albuquerque Door team filling every chair except the one at the far end. The one beneath the clock with its ticking second hand.

There was only one spare chair.

Arthur had omitted Koturovic from his book because of the early scientist's bizarre theories.

"How much time did Ben Miles spend here?" he asked.

Arthur and Olaf traded a look. "Four days," said Arthur.

"But how much of it was here? Was he staying in one of the trailers?"

Sasha shook her head. "He had a room at a hotel down in Mission Valley. The Sheraton, I think."

"So he wasn't here a lot of the time?"

Olaf shook his head. "It was more like two days here, with a travel day on either end. On the first day he stopped by for about an hour, just to meet everyone."

"The other days he spent maybe eight or nine hours on site," said Jamie. She looked at Arthur. "I don't think he actually came here on the last day."

Arthur shook his head. "He and I had breakfast together at his hotel and talked a bit. He had a morning flight out of Lindbergh."

"The guys at the gate would probably have his exact in and out times," Sasha said, "if that's important."

The ants took note but he waved it away. "Who watched the timer tests?"

Arthur looked up from the blueprints. "Timer tests?"

"When you tried to run the Door on automatic," Mike said, "was anyone watching?"

Arthur, Jamie, and Sasha pa.s.sed a confused look back and forth among themselves.

"Simple question," said Mike. "Was anyone on the main floor or Site B when you ran the tests?"

"No," said Sasha. "We just watched the video logs the next morning."

"We ran them at night so we could get more work done," said Olaf. "The whole point was that it was an automatic test."

"And you never found out why it didn't work." It wasn't a question. He stared at the blueprints.

"To be fair," Jamie said, "we didn't try that hard."

"I looked at your code for the timer," Mike said. "There was nothing wrong with it."

"Thanks."

"It didn't work," said Arthur, "because of how it interacted with something else."

Mike shook his head. "It wasn't the timer. It was the Door itself. It was missing one key element."

Sasha frowned and looked at the blueprints. "What?"

"People. The Albuquerque Door only works when there are people around it."

"Again, weak logic," Arthur said. "That's like saying the refrigerator only works in the kitchen because you've never seen it work in my office."

"Except we all know the refrigerator would work in your office," said Mike, "and you can't get the Door to open if there's no one around."

Sasha put her fists against her hips. "Are you trying to say it knows when there are people around it?"

"No," said Mike, "no more than a flashlight knows it has batteries in it. But it still won't work if they're not there. It's not a consciousness thing, it's just mechanics. A boat doesn't know it's in the water, but it only works there, not on land."

"That's kind of a big leap," said Jamie.

He looked at Sasha, then Arthur. "You said Aleksander Koturovic had a hypothesis about gestalt minds. That's why you didn't use him in your book, because his ideas sounded too crazy."

"Not exactly a gestalt," said Olaf. "More of a mental energy-critical ma.s.s issue. It was nonsense."

"Did it relate to the equations you used for the Door?"

Olaf stared down at the blueprints. Another look pa.s.sed between Jamie and Sasha. "Yes," Arthur said. "All of his work was based around the same ideas."

"So you got the Door working by programming it with equations that somehow involve levels of mental energy, and when there's no one present, the Door won't work." He looked at each of them. "Does that still sound like much of a leap?"

Arthur's eyes fell to the blueprint.

Mike waved his hands around the room. "There's only one spare chair," he said. "It's just for visitors, right? You've been so secretive, you'd never have any sort of temps or extra personnel. Except for an odd day now and then, like with Ben Miles, there's never been more than the six of you around the Door for any length of time."

"No, not until Magnus sent you," Arthur said.

"It was me," said Mike. "I was here long enough and helped the Door hit critical ma.s.s, or some level of it. Now there were seven people here all the time." He glanced toward the front of the building. "Maybe eight if Anne's desk was close enough to count."

Olaf shook his head. "It's nonsense," he said again. "There's no such thing as 'mental energy.' The brain gives off weak electrochemical signals that barely reach a few inches."

"But you can build voltage by connecting weak sources in series," said Sasha. "That's basic electronics."

"This is a bunch of unconnected guesses based off the ravings of a Victorian madman."

"A madman who you proved right," said Mike. He tapped the Door blueprints. "At least partly. We know there's something to his ideas about other dimensions. And it would explain why you lost control of the Door after I arrived."

A loud honk came from outside the conference room. It rose and faded, then rose again. If it had been from the other direction, Mike would've a.s.sumed it was pa.s.sing cars blaring their horns out on the street.

Arthur's brow wrinkled up. Then his eyes went wide. His eyes flitted from Jamie to Sasha.

"What?" asked Mike.

Arthur strode out into the hall, with Olaf a few feet behind him. Sasha followed, pus.h.i.+ng past Mike. Jamie grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along.

THIRTY-EIGHT.

The sirens were louder in the hall. The emergency lights had switched on. They made bright patches in the already-lit hallway.

Arthur was at the front desk looking over Anne's shoulder. There was a flas.h.i.+ng icon on the screen. "It's at Site B," she told him. Her eyes were wide.

Olaf and Sasha ran past the desk and out the door.

Mike looked at Jamie. "What is?"

"Hazardous material leak," she said. "Coolant, welding gas, radioactive material. Something bad's happened and it's warning us all to stay out of the area if we're not in hazmat suits."

They headed out the door and caught a glimpse of Sasha sprinting down the path toward the trailers and the golf carts. Mike and Jamie dashed after her. Olaf was already around the corner and out of sight. Some of the overgrown branches along the path reached for them, pushed out by the wind.

The sirens were sounding outside, too.

They ran around the corner and collided with Sasha. Jamie caught Mike before he fell. Mike grabbed Sasha. The older woman regained her balance and pointed across the gravel lot. "What the f.u.c.k?" she yelled over the building wind.

They followed her gaze and her finger.

Olaf had made it halfway across the lot before stopping. Past him Mike could see the bulk of Site B. It was shaking. The corrugated sheets that made up its roof rippled and buckled. One of the domed skylights shattered. The cinder-block walls trembled and cracked.

Sasha lunged back into action, running across the lot. Mike and Jamie followed. Their feet crunched in the gravel, then scuffed on the dusty supply road. They were five hundred feet from the building, then four fifty, and then four hundred.

This close, Mike could see even more fractures on the walls. What he'd thought were cracks at a distance were large breaks up close. Another one formed while he watched, crisp and clean even at this distance.

The black ants brought out a few memories, but the red ants overwhelmed them.

Olaf grabbed Sasha's arm as she tried to pa.s.s him. "Wait," he yelled. She yanked it away but now Mike was close enough to grab her. "Wait, G.o.ddammit," Olaf snarled.

"Neil's in there!" She waved her free arm at the bicycle parked by the door.

"Where's the dust?" asked Mike.