Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

“Ma’am, it’s Saint Elmo’s fire,” he said. “We’ve got incoming solar energy again.”

She looked pained. “We should have taken the car, Andy.”

“Impossible, Ma’am. Too slow, too dangerous.”

David glanced down at what he supposed was the New Jersey Turnpike far below. There was no sign of movement in the long, gleaming snake of vehicles. He said nothing.

She jabbed the intercom. “What does this Saint Elmo’s fire mean? Is it going to cause a crash?”

“We’re trying a lower altitude.”

“I hate these damned solar flares. It’s hideous, all of it. Hideous.” She twisted about in her seat where she sat, a spidery old creature in silk and diamonds. She looked at him, suddenly as intent as a snake.

“Where’s it all going to end, Doctor, do you know?”

“It’ll fade away eventually.”

“That’s one opinion. But perhaps you haven’t seen this.”

She handed him a document in a beige folder. When he opened it, he saw red classified stamps.

“I can’t read this.”

She waved her fingers at him. “You’d better.”

“I haven’t got a clearance.”

“Don’t you understand, David? That doesn’t matter anymore. All of that’s gone.”

The paper was only three pages long, a quick series of paragraphs. It was from the chairman of the National Security Council, directed to the president.

“Where did you get this?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, young man, read the damn thing!”

According to the paper, the solar system was entering the atmosphere of a supernova—information which was hardly classified. Everybody knew it. But then came a more shocking sentence: “The last time we passed through this cloud 12,600 years ago, debris from the body of the exploded star impacted the glaciers. An area of the great northern glacier, the Laurentian ice sheet, was transformed from ice to superheated steam in under a second. This area was as large as Rhode Island and the impact resulted in enormous icebergs being thrown as far afield as New Mexico. A storm of smaller pieces created the million craters of the Carolina Dells.”

Still, he was not surprised by this. Since the publication of Firestone, West, and Warwick-Smith’s Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes in 2006, it had been a generally known, if debated, explanation for the abrupt end of the Ice Age.

He read on.

“The ice melted so rapidly that the entire North American continent was flooded. In North America, all human life was destroyed. Elsewhere, man survived, and the catastrophe gave rise to all of the world’s flood legends.”

He looked up. She had knocked back his drink. She regarded him out of shadowed, appraising eyes.

“Does any of this ring a bell?”

“Sure. It’s one of the theories about why the Ice Age ended. Why it would be classified, I can’t imagine. It’s been in the news for years.”

“Read on.”

“As our last advanced civilization was being destroyed by the upheaval, scientists made detailed observations of the stellar debris field. They mapped it and found it to be irregular in shape, and it became clear that we would reenter it in another twelve thousand years. But they could not pinpoint the exact date without taking extraordinary measures.

“There is evidence that they created some sort of substance that enabled them to see very accurately into time itself, and actually looked forward into the future to determine the precise moment of reentry.

“Whatever this was, it is why later users were able to draw glyphs of modern military equipment at the Temple of Hathor in Egypt. But more importantly, some truly exotic use of it may be why certain people, such as many of the priestly class in the late Mayan period, simply disappeared. They went elsewhere in time physically.

“So far, our efforts to determine what this was have failed.

“In any case, its use enabled the people of the past, at some very distant point, to make the exquisitely careful observations that pinpointed the precise date that the danger would return. They marked this as the final end of the world.

“However, they also understood that mankind had much history to live before that day came, and they realized that all of their learning centers, clustered as they were along shorelines that would soon be under hundreds of feet of water, were doomed. They created a calendar now called the Zodiac, that measured the ages. This was further refined as the Mayan Long Count calendar, which revealed the exact moment the solar system would re-enter the cloud.

The tone was ponderous with official importance. But there was a problem—it was based on an absurd notion.

“The ancient civilization they refer to—I assume they mean Atlantis? Plato’s little speculation?”

“What do you remember?”

“About Atlantis? Nothing. It was before my time.” His contempt was growing.

“Please keep reading, young man, if you don’t mind.”

As the jet sped on, its old engines blaring, its airframe shuddering, he returned to the document.

“The beginning of reentry was first detected as an increase in cosmic background radiation by Dimitriev in 1997. Then, precisely on December 21, 2012, as the Mayan Long Count calendar suggested, an unusual spike took place. Since then, the density of the field has continued to grow, and all indications are that this will continue, possibly for thousands of years, with unknown consequences. In fact, the solar system is headed directly into the center of the cloud. In a very short time, we will begin to actually see the core of the exploded star, and it will be flooding Earth with radiation.”

This last paragraph had changed his opinion of the document. In fact, he was eager now to know more and flipped the page—and sat staring at the back of the folder.

Mrs. Denman took it from his hands.

“Let me ask you this, David. Do you recall Herbert Acton? Bartholomew Light?”

“I want to know more about this document. Because if this last part is confirmed—”

“It’s confirmed. Please answer my question.”

“Who confirmed it? How?”

“The way you give me the space I need to address that is to answer my question.”

“I know who Mr. Acton is, certainly.”

“But you recall nothing else? No childhood memories?”

“Of Herbert Acton? Mrs. Denman, I was born in 1984. He’d been dead for—what? thirty years or more.”

“Charles Light, Bartholomew’s son?”

David was mystified. “No, I don’t remember him. Should I?”

She reached over and touched his face, drawing her fingers along his cheek. It was an oddly suggestive sort of a thing to do, and David was embarrassed.

“As far as you’re concerned, you were never at the home of Herbert Acton?”

“No.”

She regarded him. “No memory at all?”

He shook his head.

A small, sad smile came into her eyes.

“There were thirty-three families, all associated with Herbert Acton in one way or another. Your family was one of them.”

“My family?”

“Your great-grandfather sold Herbert Acton the land the estate is built on. That connects you.”

“A very tenuous connection.”

“You remember nothing of your childhood?”

“I remember my childhood perfectly well. I was raised in Bethesda. My father was a GP. He was a good doctor and I’ve been trying to be the same.”

“But you don’t remember Charles Light? Or the class? Or Caroline Light?”

“Absolutely not.”

She smiled. “You will meet Caroline, and when you do, I’m sure it’ll all come back to you. In any case, you were hired because it’s time, and you’ve been carefully prepared.”

He absorbed this last and most mysterious statement. When she had originally interviewed him, she had a list of obviously professionally written questions about medical qualifications. Frankly, she could have gotten them from any hospital personnel department, or even a book. He had thought her interview technique a poor one and had doubted her qualifications to select a physician provider for any decent sort of mental health facility. Now he really doubted those qualifications.