Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Paige ate two huge slices of pizza in a few minutes. She hadn't eaten since early the night before. She washed them down with most of a large Pepsi.

The food court looked straight down the airport's busiest runway, eighty yards from its approach lights. Airliners passing overhead in the last seconds of their descent made the glass tabletop rattle.

Paige waited silently for one-a DC-10, Travis thought-to land, and then she said, "Most of what I know you've already figured out for yourselves. I'll tell you the rest. Then at least we'll have the same gaps."

She spent a few seconds considering how to begin.

"We started testing the two cylinders Monday morning, in the labs. The first time we turned one of them on, it didn't project the opening right away. Instead it made a sound. A sequence of high-pitched tones, like some kind of start-up process. We realized after a few seconds that both cylinders were making the sounds, in perfect unison, even though we'd only switched on one of them."

"Were they synchronizing with each other?" Bethany said. "Matching up so they'd open onto the same point in the future?"

"They might have been doing that," Paige said. "But there's something else they were definitely doing, which we didn't figure out until later. I'll explain it when I get to that part." She took a sip of her Pepsi. "The tone sequence lasted a little over three minutes. Then it stopped, and immediately after that, the projection appeared, from the one cylinder we'd switched on. Through the opening, all we could see was darkness. And then the smell hit us. Stale, dead air, like what it might smell like in a disused mine. We all put on ventilators. It helped a little. Then we shone flashlights into the darkness, and it didn't take us long to realize what we were looking at." Her eyes went back and forth between Travis and Bethany. "You know how it works, and you know we eventually determined that it was safe to go through, so I can skip to the relevant stuff. For starters, Border Town is empty in the future. The equipment is gone. The computers and paper records are gone." She paused. "All the entities are gone."

Travis felt the wind shift around. Felt it blow cool across the back of his neck.

"We checked out the whole place," Paige said. "We spent the better part of Monday down there, walking the empty rooms and hallways of the complex. There are no bodies. No signs of any struggle. Basic furniture is still there. Some of the beds are made, some aren't. It looks the way it would on any random afternoon, if everyone just left and shut off the power on their way out. That's how it was in every lab, every residence, every common area. And then we went to look at the thing we were most anxious to see."

"The Breach," Travis said.

Paige nodded.

"We couldn't get to it," she said. "We climbed down the elevator shaft, and three stories from the bottom we saw that it was a lost cause. Starting at Level 48 the shaft was filled in, and there was no way in the world to excavate it. It'd be impossible, even if you could move heavy equipment into the future through the projected opening, bit by bit."

"Why?" Travis said. "What's filling it?"

"Do you remember Heavy Rags?"

He nodded. Heavy Rags were the most common type of entity to emerge from the Breach. They'd been coming through almost daily since 1978. Each one was dark green, about the size of a washcloth, and weighed over 2,800 pounds. The nature of the material had eluded all attempts at understanding, even after three decades of study by physicists within Tangent. The most they could say was that Heavy Rags weren't made of atoms. They were dense sheets of some smaller kind of particle-maybe quarks, but that was a guess at best-that were somehow stabilized in that arrangement. Handling them was a logistical chore. There was a wheeled chainfall down on Level 51 with a specially made titanium claw, there for the sole purpose of moving the rags around. They couldn't be stored anywhere in the complex but the bottom floor, and most of them weren't even kept there. Over the years, Tangent personnel had bored dozens of foot-wide shafts into the concrete floor of Level 51, all the way to the granite bedrock that lay beneath Border Town. These shafts were the final resting place for nearly all of the roughly ten thousand Heavy Rags that'd come through the Breach over the years.

"And you remember the Doubler," Paige said, not asking.

Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.

"Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled," Paige said. "In the future, the bottom three floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of mache, though by volume it's probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the mache would weigh about 250,000 pounds-almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank."

Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach's existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach's chamber sealed off. That would've been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would've done very bad things to the world had they been left alone-even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?

He saw in Paige's expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.

"So at some point," Travis said, "probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?"

Paige nodded. "It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds."

"But why the hell would someone do that?" Travis said.

Paige was silent for a moment. "Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense," she said. "Which is why I thought of it."

Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.

"The fallback option," Travis said.

Paige nodded again. "The Heavy Rag mache idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I've felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we'd do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?" She shrugged. "The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you'd do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can't get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday." She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. "I guess the end of the world would suffice."