Odyssey

Bingo. “Yes. Eliminate all that have to do with the design of the facility itself. How many are left?”

“Four thousand three hundred seven.”

“Pick one at random. Let me see what they’re talking about.”

“The vast majority are simply technical documents.”

“Pick one.”

George put up a title page: Blueprint, credited to two names with which she was unfamiliar, and filled with text and equations that meant nothing to her, references to hybrid tangles and monolith reversals.

She looked at a few more documents, all similar, all incomprehensible, and called Amy back. “Answer a question for me, Love.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What do you know about Origins?”

“Just what I learned on the flight. Why?”

“Were you aware of any of the initiatives they’re involved in? Any of the things they’re doing?”

“I know they bounce particles off one another. That’s all.”

“Blueprint appears to be the name of one of their projects.” Amy bit her lip. “My question is, could you have learned about it somewhere else? Before you got to the museum?”

“No,” she said. “I never heard of it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

SHE CALLED ERIC. “They have a Blueprint,” she said.

“Whoa. Who has a blueprint? What are we talking about?”

“Origins.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t aware of that. She probably saw it somewhere and remembered it.”

“That was my first thought. Eric, she insists that didn’t happen.”

“That’s very strange.”

“You guys checked with the AI, right? We have no record of this visitation other than Amy’s word.”

“That’s correct.” Eric took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. “Hutch, they have a lot of people out there. At Origins. If there’s even a chance she might be right…”

“Okay. We’d better look into it. I’m going to talk to the commissioner. You make some calls. Use your contacts. See if you can find out what Blueprint is about. And ask them when they’re doing it.”

“The public information office is in Paris. It’s closed at this hour. I can try to track down some of the people who are involved.”

“Do it. Get back to me as soon as you have something. But Eric —?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t say anything to them about moonriders. Okay?”

SHE USED HER time to inform herself about the Origins facility. How many people were currently there. Whether they routinely kept a ship on station. (They didn’t.) What kind of person the groundside administrator, Hans Allard, was.

Eric called back. “I talked with Donald Gaspard,” he said. “He’s part of the consulting team for Blueprint.”

“Okay. So what’s it about?”

“How’s your physics?”

“Try me.”

“It has something to do with using the collider to make small black holes.”

“Black holes?”

“Small ones. Micros. Apparently they’ve been doing it all along. For years, according to Gaspard. Blueprint will be an extension of the effort. But he says there’s no danger to the facility. The holes dissipate quickly. Almost right away. I think he said within microseconds.”

“Why are they doing it? What’s the point?”

“It helps them figure out the parameters of the other dimensions. He said there are eight or nine of them. Other dimensions.”

“Nine,” she said.

“The point is that they’re trying to push back past the Big Bang. To find out how it happened. What’s on the other side. And how we arrived at the settings for our universe.”

“That’s why they call it Blueprint.”

“I guess. I’m not sure what it means.”

“But they haven’t started it yet?”

“Not Blueprint, no.”

“When are they going to begin?”

“Gaspard didn’t know. He’s not sure they’ve set a date yet.”

“Okay, thanks, Eric. I’ll take it from here.”

GASPARD WAS IN New York. She jotted down his code and asked George to co

He was a physicist acting as liaison between Manhattan Labs and a consortium based in Marseilles. She was surprised by his appearance. He looked not much older than a high school kid. He had a bright smile and a lot of energy. Ci

“We’re fascinated by what you’re doing, Professor.” It seemed an odd title for one so young. “Do you really expect to be able to penetrate beyond the Big Bang?”

He lit up. His favorite subject. “Yes,” he said. “There is no doubt.”

“Can you explain it to me? Tell me what you plan to do?”

It would be his pleasure, madame. He launched into a description of particles, equations, evaporating holes, collider capabilities. She tried to follow but quickly got lost. It didn’t matter. She asked i

“That’s impossible to answer, Madame Hutchins. We are only at the begi

She wondered why anyone would want to destroy the effort. It seemed harmless enough. “Do you foresee the possibility that we will acquire weapons capabilities from this?”

“Weapons?” He let her see the question was absurd. “I can’t imagine how. But who knows? Why do you ask?”

“Idle curiosity, Professor. I’m impressed that you can manipulate black holes. I would have thought that would entail a level of risk.”

“At no time,” he said. “It was never an issue. The black holes we have always worked with. They are quite small. Microscopic. They are by nature unstable.” He shrugged and smiled. Voilà.

“You told Eric you weren’t sure when they would run Blueprint?”

“That is correct. They haven’t set a date yet, but I suspect it’s imminent. Most of their support perso

“You’re not going?”

“Oh, yes. I’m leaving Tuesday. But I’ll be there purely as an observer.”

“I see.”

“If everything goes according to plan, it will be an historic occasion.”

“That makes it sound as if they’re going to be working with a more massive hole.”

“Ah,” he said, “holes do not have mass. But for practical purposes, that’s true. We need more energy than we’ve been able to produce previously. Blueprint will be bigger than anything we’ve done before. That is the advantage of having the hypercollider. And this is only the begi

“You’re referring to the construction of Origins.”

“Yes. When it is finally done, I think everything will lie open to us.”

“Is the larger hole safe?”

“Oh, yes. There’s no question about that. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe.”

“It’ll dissipate on its own.”

“Absolutely.”

“You look doubtful, Professor.” Actually, he looked supremely confident.

Gaspard waggled his head back and forth. Gri

“What could go wrong?”

“Nothing, really.”

She smiled at him. Come on, Gaspard, we’re all friends here. “Worst-case scenario.”

He considered it. “There’s a remote chance, extremely remote, the experiment could cause a tear.”

“In —?”

“The time-space fabric. But the chance of that happening is so slight that it is essentially zero.”

“If that did occur, Professor, a tear in the time-space fabric, what would be the result?”

He looked uncomfortable. Tried to wave it away. “It would disrupt things.”

“What things?”

“Pretty much everything.”

“Are we talking about losing the facility?”

“Well, yes. Along with — ”

“Everything else.”

“Yes. But it’s not going to happen.”

“It would proceed how? Instantaneous lights out for all of us?”

“Oh, no. It would be limited to cee.”

“Light speed.”

“Yes.”

“We’re talking about the possibility of destroying, what, the entire cosmos?”

“I keep trying to explain, that is not really a consideration — ”

“Maybe it should be.”

THE TRUTH WAS, Hutch didn’t want to believe Amy’s experience had actually happened. Not only because the prospect of a shoot-out with a species that appeared to have advanced technology was not a happy thought, but also because the whole idea of an apparition in a lonely museum just begged to be written off as someone’s imagination.

She had to decide whether she believed the story or not. If she did, she was going to need the commissioner’s support. There could be no cautious statements with him, no observation that we have reason to believe. Either it was so, or it wasn’t.

She found him in a downtown restaurant. He had company and wasn’t happy about being disturbed. “Yes, Hutch,” he said wearily. “What is it?” She could hear the murmur of conversation in the background and the occasional clink of dishes or silverware.

“Sorry to bother you, Michael. I thought you should know what’s happening.” They were audio only, but there was no mistaking the resignation in his voice. “There was a direct encounter, a conversation, with the moonriders.”

“We talked to them?” His voice became simultaneously hushed and high-pitched. “Wait a minute.” She heard his chair scrape the floor. He assured someone he’d be right back. Then: “We talked to them by radio? Are you sure?”

“Not radio. At the museum.”

“They stopped by the museum?”

“Yes. In a ma

“Hutch, what are you talking about?”

She described the incident, holding back only that the moonrider had resembled her. “If she’s right, they’re all in danger out there.”

“Amy?” He sounded despondent.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s just great. Does the senator know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll have to tell him.” He sounded like a man in pain. “Why on Earth are they doing these things?”

She hated to mention her suspicions about Blueprint. He’d want to dismiss it. And might use it to dismiss everything. But it would come out eventually. So she told him everything. To her surprise, he listened quietly. When she had finished, she could hear him breathing. Then: “God help us. You really think there’s something to it?”