Patrick Lee - The Breach

Something glinted in the washed-out blue sky to the west. It resolved into what Travis expected: a blank, white 747.

Two F-16s accompanied it. As it began its final approach, they broke away and went into a circling pattern high above the desert. Travis had an idea that such escorts would be standard procedure for Tangent flights from now on, after what'd happened to Box Kite.

A minute later the 747 landed a quarter mile away on what looked like unmarked scrubland. Travis and the others drove to it in three electric vehicles with all-terrain wheels, the same sort of vehicle he'd ridden in earlier, while hooded. Only as they closed the last fifty feet to the aircraft, and the ground beneath the carts smoothed out to unnatural perfection, did Travis realize he'd been staring at a runway all along. The tarmac had been mixed with an additive so that it matched the landscape perfectly, and even landform shadows and patches of vegetation had been painted onto it. To any aircraft or satellite, it would be invisible, day or night. He wondered how the pilots who landed here lined up on it, and then saw the answer: tiny lights lined the edge, their plastic casings roughened and browned like their surroundings. They weren't shining. Hadn't been a moment ago, either. They were probably ultraviolet, visible only with the right gear.

In the deep shadow of the 747's wing, a door opened, pulled in by a crewman standing in what should have been the luggage hold. Travis could see an interior staircase behind the man, leading up to the main level. Had he investigated further aboard Box Kite, no doubt he would have found an identical setup.

Paige and the others began unloading their gear and taking it to the plane. Travis helped. Among the carrying cases he saw two that were different: black instead of green. He didn't need to ask their significance. A few minutes later they were climbing, the F-16s falling in at the 747's wingtips again. The aircraft banked into a northeast line, bound for Switzerland by the shortest route, across the top of the world.

The plane's floor plan was the same as Box Kite's. Travis sat in a large chair, facing Paige, in the counterpart to the room where he'd found Ellen Garner wide-eyed and dead. Out the window, Wyoming stretched east toward Nebraska, vast and brown and empty.

"You really never wonder?" Travis said.

Paige looked up at him. "I'm sorry?"

"The Breach. You said you don't even try to guess what's on the other side. That's hard to believe."

She thought for a moment, then said, "We all wonder. But if there's no way to test any one guess, no way to measure them against each other, it all comes to the same thing. We just don't know."

"Whoever's on the other side," Travis said, "the tunnel would've had to open on their end too, right? You'd think they'd notice. And how are these objects coming through it? Is someone over there feeding them in, three or four times a day?"

"The popular guess is that we tapped into an existing network of tunnels. Some alien equivalent of those pneumatic tubes they use at the bank. Could be a delivery system limited to non-living objects. Maybe, right? Maybe not. Maybe's a common word in Border Town."

"Maybe you tapped into a garbage chute," Travis said. "Maybe all this amazing stuff is just their trash."

She smiled, seeming to surprise herself as she did. It was the first smile Travis had seen from her, and he thought it made the entire flight worthwhile.

"Haven't heard that one before," she said.

"Fresh eyes," Travis said.

They were quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Why can't someone go through from this end?"

"There's a resistance, right at the mouth of the tunnel. When you try to push something through, the resistance pushes back with something close to gravity force at first. But the force doubles about every three centimeters the further you go, so you don't get very far. The woman we passed in the hallway, with the red hair, is Dr. Fagan. She's done the most work studying the resistance force. She wants to break through it, find a way to contact whoever's on the other side of the Breach."

Somehow that notion affected Travis more deeply than anything they'd spoken of yet. Real contact with whoever-with whatever-was on the other end.

He saw recognition in Paige's eyes, like it was obvious what he was thinking. Maybe it was. Maybe that idea struck everyone the same way, the first time they heard it.

"It's not likely to work," she said. "Even Fagan accepts that. If you could get past the initial barrier, the math would still be stacked against you. It gets into really strange stuff-Einstein, general relativity, time dilation-things we can calculate but not actually understand. Anyway, it all points to the same conclusion: whatever you sent through the Breach would just come back before it reached the far end. It might return months or years later, or-and this is more of a guess-it could actually come back before you sent it. Maybe long before."

She watched Travis's expression, then added, "Like I said, lots of maybes in Border Town."

Travis nodded, then stared out at the country falling farther and farther below. A freeway crept by, running east to west, all but devoid of traffic.

"So, what exactly is at Seven Theaterstrasse?" he said at last.

Paige was quiet a moment before replying. "It's not so much what's there, as what the building itself is."

"Which is?"

Another silence. Then: "A weapon."

He turned from the window and looked at her. Waited for her to go on.

"Seven Theaterstrasse is where it's all going to be decided," she said. "It's the choke point at the center of everything our enemy is planning. If we win there, everyone wins. And if we lose there-" She cut herself off, unwilling to say the rest, or maybe even think it.

After a moment she said, "None of this will make sense unless I start with the beginning. The essentials, at least."

She thought about how best to get into it, and then began the story.

Two strange things happened in the spring of 1978: the first occurred five hundred feet beneath Wyoming, the second, five hundred feet south of Pennsylvania Avenue. The most powerful bureaucracy in the world, presented with the most important asset in history, chose to limit its own influence.

Over the weeks following the catastrophic failure of the Very Large Ion Collider facility at Wind Creek, the president of the United States and most of his cabinet were briefed on the details as they came in from inspectors on site. The trapped DOE personnel had all been hospitalized and released; along with thick nondisclosure agreements, they'd been provided with trauma counseling, some of which would probably be long-term. Ruben Ward remained in a coma; he'd been flown to Johns Hopkins, where so far there'd been no change in his condition.

On April 3, the first scientific inspection team entered the VLIC site. They found that more than ninety objects had accumulated beneath the Breach-that term was well cemented even by then. If it hadn't already been clear to everyone involved that this situation would call for delicate handling, the team's findings brought the picture into razor-edged focus. In the eighty-seven-page report they filed after that first object survey, the word dangerous appeared more than two hundred times.

Upon receipt of the report, the president's most senior advisors settled into discussion along predictable lines. How tight a stranglehold should be kept on this project? How limited should Congress's awareness be? Which defense contractors should be brought on board, and how central a role should they play in making use of this strange new resource? Obviously those that had been the most generous during the election would have to be first in line, but how far back did the line go? Two companies? Maybe three?