Hiram, immersed in whatever project he was progressing now, looked hunted, ratlike. His mannerisms were strange, repetitive, obsessive: he was a man who had spent too much time alone. He’s the subject of an experiment himself, Kate thought sourly: a human being deprived of companionship, afraid of the darkness subject to constant, more or less hostile glares from the rest of the planet’s population, their invisible eyes surrounding him. He was being steadily destroyed by a machine he had never imagined, never intended, whose implications he probably didn’t understand even now. With a pang of pity, she realized there was no human in history who had more right to feel paranoid.
But she could never forgive him for what he had done to her-and to Bobby. And, she realized, she had absolutely no idea what Hiram intended for them, now that he had trapped his son.
Bobby held Kate’s hand tight, making sure her body was never out of contact with his, that they were inseparable. And even as he protected her he was able subtly to lean on her without allowing the others to see, drawing strength she was glad to give him.
They reached a part of the Wormworks Kate had not seen before. A kind of bunker had been constructed, a massive cube half-set into the floor. Its interior was brightly lit. A door was set in its side, operated by a heavy wheel as if this was a submarine bulkhead.
Bobby stepped forward cautiously, still clutching Kate. ‘What is this, Hiram? Why have you brought us here?’
‘Quite a place, isn’t it?’ Hiram grinned, and slapped the wall confidently. ‘We borrowed some engineering from the old NORAD base they dug into the Colorado mountains. This whole damn bunker is mounted on huge shock-absorbent springs.’
‘Is that what this is for? To ride out a nuclear attack?’
‘No- These walls aren’t to keep out an explosion. They’re supposed to contain one.’
Bobby frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The future. The future of OurWorld, Our future, son.’
Bobby said, ‘There are others who knew I was coming here. David, Mary. Special Agent Mavens of the FBI. They will be here soon. And then I’ll be walking out of here. With her.’
Kate watched Hiram’s eyes, glancing from one to the other of them, scheming. He said, ‘You’re right, of course. I can’t keep you here. Although I could have fun trying. Just give me five minutes. Let me make my case, Bobby.’ He forced a smile.
Bobby struggled to speak. ‘That’s all you want? To convince me of something? That’s what this is all about?’
‘Let me show you.’ And he nodded his head to the goons, indicating that Bobby and Kate should be brought into the bunker.
The walls were of thick steel. The bunker was cramped, with room only for Hiram, Kate, Bobby and Wilson.
Kate looked around, tense, alert, overloaded. This was obviously a live experimental lab: there were whiteboards, pin boards, SoftScreens, flip charts, fold-up chairs and desks fixed to the walls. At the center of the room was the equipment which, presumably, was the focus of interest here: what looked like a heat exchanger and a small turbine, and other pieces of equipment, white, anonymous boxes. On one of the desks there was a coffee, half-drunk and still steaming.
Hiram walked to the middle of the bunker. ‘We lost the monopoly on the WormCam quicker than I wanted. But we made a pile of money. And we’re making more; the Wormworks is still far ahead of any similar facility around the world. But we’re heading for a plateau, Bobby. In another few years the WormCams are going to be able to reach across the universe. And already, now that every punk kid has her own private WormCam, the market for generators is becoming saturated. We’ll be in the business of replacement and upgrade, where the profit margins are low and the competition ferocious.’
‘But you,’ said Kate, ‘have a better idea. Right?’
Hiram glared- ‘Not that it will concern you.’ He walked to the machinery and stroked it. ‘We’ve gotten bloody good at plucking wormholes out of the quantum foam and expanding them. Up to now we’ve been using them to transmit information. Right? But your smart brother David will tell you that it takes a finite piece of energy to record even a single bit of information. So if we’re transmitting data we must be transmitting energy as well. Right now it’s just a trickle-not enough to make a light-bulb glow.’
Bobby nodded, stiffly, obviously in pain. ‘But you’re going to change all that.’ Hiram pointed to the pieces of equipment. ‘That’s a wormhole generator. It’s squeezed-vacuum technology, but far in advance of anything you’ll find on the market. I want to make wormholes bigger and more stable- much more, more than anything anybody’s achieved so far. Wide enough to act as conduits for significant amounts of energy.
‘And the energy we mine will be passed through this equipment, the heat exchanger and the turbine, to extract usable electrical energy. Simple, nineteenth-century technology-but that’s all I need as long as I have the energy flow. This is just a test rig, but enough to prove the point of principle, and to solve the problems- mainly the stability of the wormholes.’
‘And where,’ Bobby said slowly, ‘will you mine the energy from?’
Hiram grinned and pointed to his feet. ‘From down there. The core of the Earth, son. A ball of solid nickel-iron the size of the Moon, glowing as hot as the surface of the sun. All that energy trapped in there since the Earth formed, the engine that powers the volcanoes and earthquakes and the circulation of the crust plates … That’s what I’m planning to tap ‘You see the beauty of it? The energy we humans burn up, here on the surface, is a candle compared to that furnace. As soon as the technical guys solve the wormhole stability problem, every extant powergenerating business will be obsolete overnight. Nuclear fusion, my hairy arse’ And it won’t stop there. Maybe some day we’ll learn how to tap the stars themselves. Don’t you see, Bobby? Even the WormCam was nothing compared to this. We’ll change the world. We’ll become rich.’
‘Beyond the dreams of avarice,’ Bobby murmured.
‘Here’s the dream, boy. This is what I want us to work on together. You and me. Building a future, building OurWorld.’
‘Dad.’ Bobby spread his free hand. ‘I admire you. I admire what you’re building. I’m not going to stop you. But I don’t want this. None of this is real-your money and your power-all that’s real is me. Kate and me. I have your genes, Hiram. But I’m not you. And I never will be, no matter how you try to make it so … ‘
And as Bobby said that, links began to form in Kate’s mind, as they used to as she neared the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of the most complex story.
I’m not you, Bobby had said.
But, she saw now, that was the whole point.
As she drifted in space, Mary’s mouth was open wide. Smiling, David reached out, touched her chin and closed her jaw. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said.
‘It’s a nebula,’ he said. ‘It’s called the Trifid Nebula, in fact.’
‘It’s visible from Earth?’
‘Oh, yes. But we are so far from home that the light that set off from the nebula around the time of Alexander the Great is only now washing over Earth.’ He pointed. ‘Can you see those dark spots?’ They were small, fine globules, like drops of ink in colored water. ‘They are called Bok globules. Even the smallest of those spots could enclose the whole of our Solar System. We think they are the birthplaces of stars; clouds of dust and gas which will condense to form new suns. It takes a long time to form a star, of course. But the final stages- when fusion kicks in, and the star blows away its surrounding shell of dust and begins to shine-can happen quite suddenly.’ He glanced at her. ‘Think about it. If you lived here-maybe on that ice ball below us-you would be able to see, during your lifetime, the birth of dozens, perhaps hundreds of stars.’
‘I wonder what religion we would have invented,’ she said.
It was a good question. ‘Perhaps something softer. A religion dominated more by images of birth than death.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’
He sighed. ‘Everybody should see this before they die.’
‘And now we have,’ Mary said, a little formally. ‘Thank you.’
He shook his head, irritated. ‘Not them. Not the Joined. You, Mary. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.’
‘What is it you want to say to me, David?’
He hesitated. He pointed at the nebula. ‘Somewhere over there, beyond the nebula, is the center of the Galaxy. There is a great black hole there, a million times the mass of the sun. And it’s still growing. Clouds of dust and gas and smashed-up stars flow into the hole from all directions.’