"Perhaps with something like the Float Car?" Jocasta suggested.
"Exactly, Amelia, darling." Then a perplexed look came over the scientist's face. "Of course the Float Car doesn't react well with water, so it couldn't have been that."
Distracted by his own tangent, Newcombe began speculating aloud on other rational explanations for divine manifestations, but Jocasta wasn't really listening. Her interest in the subject was strictly practical and it was limited to the potential uses for the object in her pocket. She already knew it could be used for flight and evidently to make a person impervious to bullets; what else could it do?
Walk through walls maybe? Now that would be a trick.
"So you're saying that we could one day develop the technology to cross over into the spirit realm?" asked Fuller. "Move back and forth between heaven or hell and earth?"
"Not precisely. I think it very unlikely that heaven and hell exist anywhere except in the minds of believers, but yes, if it is possible to move between these different planes of existence, then we will someday figure out the means to do so. Of course, there's a difference between what is theoretically possible and what can actually be done. Frankly, I wouldn't want to mess around with energy on that scale. Quantum mechanics allows for the possibility of alternate universes, but not in the same space. One would annihilate the other."
"It could blow up in your face?"
Newcombe laughed. "If you didn't know what you were doing, it could destroy everything. Opening a door to another universe could mean the end of this one."
"Ah, so only as a last resort then."
Jocasta suddenly had an idea. "What about mental energy?"
"Eh? Psychokinesis? Mind over matter? Well, again, I suppose it's theoretically possible. Brain waves are a sort of electricity, so I imagine it might be possible to build a device that can interpret those waves, the same way a radio can turn sound into electrical energy and then back again. I suppose you could then focus that energy to affect an object over a short distance. It's a question of energy."
She moved away from the two men, Newcombe still rattling on about the laws of physics and surreptitiously placed a hand on the metal rod.
Show me your secrets.
A tingling sensation shot up her arm, as if she had touched an electric wire and she reflexively jerked her fingers away. Nevertheless, whether it was the result of her own psychic prowess or simply the proximity of the device, the Outpost responded.
The floor at the center of the chamber, only a few inches from where Jocasta was standing, abruptly fell away, as though it had melted instantaneously, to reveal a spiraling ramp descending deep into the heart of the ice. She jumped back, letting out a surprised yelp.
Newcombe and Fuller both turned to see what was the matter, prompting her to give an innocent shrug. "Look what I've found."
Newcombe regarded the newly created passageway as though it was a personal insult. "That wasn't there before."
"No it wasn't." Jocasta flashed her most winning smile. "Let's see where it goes, shall we?"
"We should probably wait for Dodge to come back." Newcombe looked to Fuller to back him up, but the G-man only shrugged.
"Oh, Findlay Dear, where's the fun in that?" And with a trill of laughter, the Fallen Angel started down the ramp.
Despite being made of solid ice, the sloping surface was not the least bit slippery. Jocasta could barely contain her enthusiasm as she swept down the ramp. She stopped counting the number of orbits, but given that there was about twenty feet of clearance between the floor and ceiling of the passage, she estimated that she had descended almost three hundred feet before the tunnel let out onto the floor of a high-domed chamber. The circular ice cave was about a hundred feet in diameter, without any other exits and featureless but for one unusual adornment.
Situated at the exact center of the chamber was a pillar of metal, about twenty feet high, topped with something that looked like a coiled snake. The base of the column was buried in the ice, like the tip of Excalibur in the anvil, just waiting for the true king to arrive. It was the same kind of metal as the concealed staff and as she approached, she could feel the magnetic attraction between the pillar and the item in her pocket.
"That's got to be it!' Newcombe declared as he joined her on the floor of the domed chamber. "The source of the energy."
Throwing his scientific caution to the wind, he hastened toward it.
"Findlay Dear, I'm not certain you should—"
"Nonsense. It's the same metal as the exoskeleton device. It's perfectly safe."
"I think this might be a little more—"
"Stop right there, Miss Palmer."
Jocasta ignored Fuller's shout, but she could not so easily disregard the iron grip that suddenly clamped onto her upper arm. So focused was she on Newcombe, however that it took a moment for the full impact of the FBI agent's words to hit her. She turned slowly to face him, her denial silenced by his steely stare. Instead, she whispered only one word. "You."
"Congratulations on a job well done, Miss Palmer. Now, if you'll just hand over the Staff, I'll settle your account."
Newcombe paid no heed to the drama unfolding behind him, but instead rushed forward and began examining the column. Without a moment's hesitation, he reached out and placed his palms against it.
CHAPTER 13 — UPSIDE-DOWN
It was a family tradition in the Dalton household to gather the extended family together for Sunday dinner at least once a month, if not more often. Invariably, after the dishes were cleared away, but before the pies and cakes were divided up, Dodge's grandmother would bring out an Einson-Freeman jigsaw puzzle — a different puzzle every time — and everyone would join in the task of trying to connect the tiny pieces of pasteboard together. Dodge enjoyed puzzles; linking the pieces together in an orderly fashion was similar in many ways to what he did with words when writing. But unlike the articles and stories he wrote, puzzles were unique in that the hundreds of pieces could only be arranged in a specific way to produce a solution. There might be dozens of pieces that were all exactly the same shade of sky blue, but it was their unique shapes that determined where they would eventually go. More than once, he had sat staring at the partially assembled puzzle, knowing that the piece in his hand belonged in a certain spot, but until other pieces were added, the exact position for that piece was impossible to determine.
He felt that way now.
He felt as though he had been looking at pieces of the puzzle for days now, but without the benefit of knowing what the completed picture would look like. Many of the pieces just didn't seem to fit the way he thought they would.
Something about Burton the pilot had been nagging at him for several days. Yet, as he walked down the ice tunnel beside the man, he saw nothing devious or deceptive in the fellow's manner. He seemed perpetually and completely calm, almost disinterested in everyone and everything. Something about his manner reminded Dodge of something or someone — another piece of the puzzle — but he couldn't quite make the two fit together.
He has a gun.
In and of itself, that was perhaps not such a strange thing. Burton was reputedly a smuggler and a rogue and surely guns went with the territory. And yet, something about that picture just didn't seem to fit.