“He was running a major computer repair section and he was afraid of electricity. The fact that all of our equipment ran on five volts, and was as safe as a flashlight, didn’t faze him. He knew that the stuff could electrocute you, so he wouldn’t touch it. He made sure that we kept the floors clean, though, so no one of any importance suggested replacing him.
“My Officer In Charge was a college graduate, as per regulations. Only there weren’t any Degreed Electrical Engineers around who wanted to take on a low-rent job like Second Lieutenant, and the Air Force, with no sensible candidates available, had to take what it could get. The only officers we got were those who had taken degrees in fields where there were no civilian jobs available. My OIC, who was in charge of a quarter acre of computers supposedly defending North America, had his degree in Marine Biology and didn’t know for shit about computers. His boss had a degree in Forestry and his had a master’s in Music Appreciation.
“Then, at the bottom of this strange pyramid, surrounded by a half billion dollars worth of inoperative equipment, were us four hundred misfits. None of us had the social graces to get a college degree of our own and every one of us had a sad story as to how he ended up in uniform. Yet all of us had IQs of over one forty! All of us were subordinate to sergeants with IQs of under ninety. All of whom were commanded by officers who hadn’t the slightest idea of what was going on.
“The result was obvious chaos, and there are stories to be told about it, but not just now, breakfast being over and it being Jim’s turn to do something about the mess. But on some future date I shall relate the tale of the atomic clock that failed.”
“Tom, you fry a good pancake, but they weren’t worth having to listen to your bullshit.”
“Every word of it is true, I swear it! Do you think that I could have invented a story like that?”
“Hmm. You have a point there. You’re not that smart. In fact, I don’t think that anybody could invent a story like that one. Yet could such a situation actually be?” Jim said.
“There could and there is, for I was just there and it’s not likely to change. But my point is that each step of the above was sensible, or at least not thoroughly insane when looked at in its own small context. But when an organization gets so large that nobody can possibly know everything that is happening elsewhere, many small sensible steps generally congeal into a major conglomeration of mass stupidity.”
CHAPTER FOUR
An Explosion in Time
We were packing up after breakfast when we heard the explosion.
Sort of a deep, heavy, ground shaking FUMP!
“Is there some sort of mining operation going on around here?” Hasenpfeffer said.
“Not in the last forty years, Jim, and certainly not on a Sunday,” Ian said. “I doubt if there’s a farm or factory within ten miles of here.”
“Hey, we’re not that far from Kincheloe Field,” I said. “Could be some Weekend Warrior broke his bird. We’d better check it out. I think it came from that way.”
A BMW isn’t ideal for cross-country work, but Ian’s Harley was worse. Anyhow, I got there first.
It wasn’t like any explosion that I’d ever heard of. There was a hole there—maybe ten yards across and five deep—clean and hemispherical. It hadn’t been there long, because there wasn’t any erosion to speak of. Just a little rubble at the bottom.
But there wasn’t any blast damage around it. If you blow a hole in the ground, the dirt has to go somewhere. I was standing on what looked like a lawn, and the grass wasn’t even dirty.
Hasenpfeffer came up.
“Strange. Look at that. The rocks are polished,” he said.
There was some stone work at the end of the hole, made of rounded field stones, the sort that I had seen used locally for chimneys. It was as though somebody had sliced and polished the stones in the same plane as the edge of the hole. No, let me take that back. It wasn’t a plane. It was as though the hemisphere of the hole just sort of continued up through the fireplace and chimney. Spooky.
Ian came in from the other direction, skirting a newly planted garden. He killed the ignition on his overheated Harley and it knocked a dozen times before it died.
“Either you’ve got the wrong hole, or this is some kind of a joke.” Ian was on the far side of the pit.
“How so?”
“There wasn’t any explosion, Jim. Explosions blow things outwards. This was an implosion. Look at his garden here. The sticks with the seed envelopes on them are all lying toward the hole.”
We had to go the long way around the pit because there was an old station wagon in the way. Half of the front bumper was missing. In fact, the bumper ended exactly at the same invisible sphere that the hole and the fireplace did.
We heard a “pop” and a thin oval of shiny wire fell from the bumper into the hole. It slid to the bottom and was half buried by some sand and thin slices of stone.
“Hey, it’s getting bigger!” I said.
“Bullshit. It’s getting smaller, Tom. The stuff fell into the hole, not out of it.”
Nothing happened for the next few minutes. There wasn’t much to see, so I said, “Look, anybody got a rope or something? I’m going to go see what’s down there.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ian suggested.
“Uh, what do you mean?”
“I mean whatever is down there can slice steel like cheese, and now you want to put your whole body into it.”
“Huh. You’ve got a point there.”
There was another pop and more rubble fell into the hole.
“Maybe we should get the police,” Ian said.
“Has a crime been committed?” Hasenpfeffer asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. And until we have positive evidence of criminal activity, I suggest that we leave the authorities out of this.” Hasenpfeffer dug out his notebook.
“But, just sit here, Jim?”
“And observe. This could be the basis of an excellent paper, even though it probably does not concern my own field. One’s progress in Academia is largely dependent on what one has written.” Hasenpfeffer dug out the tape recorder and camera that he’d planned to use recording our “interactions.”
“They had to spend a lot of time getting the hole this smooth.” Ian crumbled the edge of the pit in with the heel of his engineer’s boot.
There was another “pop” and Ian’s scream must have been heard in Sault Sainte Marie.
“The ‘pops’ seem to be happening at eight-minute, forty-second intervals,” Hasenpfeffer noted.
Ian would have fallen into the hole, except that I happened to be right there and a lot bigger than most people. I managed to get a hand on his belt and carried him over to the lawn. Across the arch of his boot there was a quarter-inch wide stripe where the leather and rubber were puffed out and dirty. Ian had stopped screaming and started swearing, so I figured that it wasn’t too serious.
When I got his boot and sock off, I saw that his right foot had the same quarter inch stripe, only now it was black and purple, as well as puffed out and dirty. Nothing seemed to be broken or cut, but I got out my canteen and first-aid kit. I washed and bandaged the guy’s foot, just for form’s sake.
Ian still wasn’t all that coherent. The only anesthetic I had was a forty-ounce bottle of Jim Beam that I’d bought along with a carton of Pall Malls at the tax-free shop at the Canadian border, and he was a teetotaler. I got the bottle out of my saddle bags anyway.
“Come on, amigo. It’s a good pain killer.”
“You know I never touch the stuff, Tom.”
“Hey, this is purely medicinal.” I took a drink to demonstrate its virtues.
“I’ll pass, Tom.”
“But Ian, my boy, this is the true ancient panacea, historically proven to cure cancer, ease childbirth and improve virility in your old age.”
“Crawl off and die a lonely death, Tom.”
“Why, this elixir is so beneficial that were you cleaved from head to knave, I would only have to fit the two halves precisely together, and then by placing only the smallest of drops on your sadly mutilated tongue . . .”
“God Dammit!” He grabbed the bottle. “If it’ll shut you and Don Quixote up . . .”
My purposes accomplished, I wandered back to Hasenpfeffer.
“I think Ian’ll be all right,” I said. “How’s the hole?”
“Filling in. The time between ‘pops’ is decreasing, logarithmically I think. It is down to eight minutes, twelve seconds. Do you think that you could retrieve some samples of the debris without injuring yourself?”