“That’s handy,” Vandenberg said.
“Not really. For one, she needs a special flight suit now, otherwise she’ll hurt herself due to the pressure and friction. She still can’t carry anything or anyone with her, and she’ll really do a number on herself if she collides with anything. She can just fly really fast now.”
“All right. So their Enhancements are changing. What else?”
Bronk pulled out a series of readouts and charts. “We’re still using the same monitoring equipment that Kurt Schreiber put in place back in ’48. There’s better equipment out there now. I suppose, to their credit, Berkner and Wenzel tried to get better gear, but the Defense Department budget’s been constrained over the past few years, what with Korea. They’re in limbo. But I made a few calls to some friends at General Electric, and we got new monitors up and running yesterday. These are the results.”
Vandenberg looked at the squiggly lines and series of numbers and immediately gave up. “What am I looking at?”
With a smile and a sigh, Bronk circled three similar-looking patterns of lines on one page, then found others on subsequent pages, followed by groupings of numbers throughout. “We know that the vortex simply churns out low levels of nonionized radiation as it sits there and spins and defies physics,” Bronk said. “When it creates a new Variant, it sends out a huge pulse, directionally. Between that and Wallace, we’re usually able to track down the new Variant and get them in here before too long.”
“Right. So?”
“These patterns are similar in wavelength and frequency, but they’re happening at the extreme ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is why our gear couldn’t detect them. They’re also happening a lot. These are just the instances we’ve had over the past twenty-four hours, since we got our new detectors up and running. Twenty-seven transmissions.”
“And these are new?”
“Not entirely. There’s a tiny bit of this pattern that could be picked up on our old gear, just a fraction. I had the boys here look back over the data to find spikes in that piece of the EM spectrum. We’ve had hits like that going back to ’46, but it looks like background noise against everything else — except for this.”
Bronk pulled out a hand-drawn bar chart, with each bar labelled annually. The bars were pretty small — until 1952, which rose considerably. The bar for 1953 was even larger — and it was only May. “So you think that this activity’s increased,” Vandenberg said. “Is it creating new Variants? Maybe different kinds of Variants?”
“We don’t think so. If it were, then we just had twenty-seven new comic book superheroes created in the last day, and there’s no way in hell you could cover that up,” Bronk said with a smile. “Unless I’m not cleared for that sort of information.”
Vandenberg wasn’t laughing. “So what is it, then?”
“We don’t know.”
“Theories? Shot in the dark?”
“Dan Wallace confirmed that there’s some kind of intelligence behind all this, but we’ve been unable to communicate with it,” Bronk said. “What if these patterns are communication? What if the vortex is communicating with our Variants? Variants all over the world?”
Leaning back, Vandenberg closed his eyes and counted to three — a tic he used to calm himself when under stress. And this was a doozy. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t even know if we have the gear to interpret it, if it’s really communication at all,” Bronk said. “It could be anything. We can’t even say for certain if it’s related to the variability we’re seeing in Enhancements, and we’re still trying to nail down the vectors, since the signals are so weak. But this,” he added, stabbing the stack of papers with his finger for emphasis, “is a real, material change in this phenomenon, and we need to make it a priority to get to the bottom of it.”
“Yes, you do,” Vandenberg said. “What do you need from me?”
Bronk pulled another piece of paper from his briefcase and handed it over. Vandenberg scanned it and realized he’d have to do some serious budgetary and logistical maneuvering to get everything squared.
Then he got to the last item.
“Schreiber? Really?”
Kurt Schreiber was a former Nazi scientist who’d conducted early research into paranormal abilities as part of Hitler’s Übermensch drive. He had been brought over as part of Operation PAPERCLIP after the war, and had been attached to MAJESTIC-12 until 1949—when he’d tried to ally with a captured Soviet Variant and sell out the program to the Russians, but had gotten caught up in a sting orchestrated by Wallace.
Schreiber’d spilled everything he knew, eventually, thanks to Maggie Dubinsky’s sometimes brutal emotional manipulation. But the interrogations had left him a complete basket case, and the former Nazi had spent the last four years in lockdown right there at Mountain Home, monitored by the psych staff and generally ignored by everyone else.
Until now.
“I know he’s round the bend, Hoyt, and we wouldn’t let him anywhere near the vortex. But if he has some insights into any of this, no matter how cracked, I think we need to use him. I mean, if Danny’s right about the changes he’s seeing and what Beria’s telling them, this could spiral out of control fast.”
Vandenberg leaned back in his seat and winced through the pain that shot through his body. Do we use an insane Nazi to figure out if some kind of alien intelligence is trying to manipulate our agents through a freakish hole in the fabric of space?
Retirement was starting to look better by the second. This was a horrible way to spend one’s remaining days.
At first glance, the room looked normal, if Spartan. The bed looked comfortable, with a homemade quilt giving it a homey touch. The writing table didn’t have drawers, but it did have a radio and lamp, and the chair was padded leather. There were shelves, though lacking in the usual knickknacks beyond a handful of paperback books, copies of the Idaho Statesman, and some old photographs — without frames, oddly enough. The bureau had the usual collection of men’s clothing, all neatly folded, and the wooden floor was covered by a knock-off Persian-style rug.
But the walls were completely bare, and if you looked closely, you’d find the radio and lamp were bolted to the table — which in turn was bolted to the floor, as was the chair. The bed, too, was firmly fixed to the floorboards. Open the drawers, and you’d see no belts or suspenders, and the corners of the furniture were all rounded.
The man in the room didn’t seem to notice or care, busy as he was writing in pencil on a legal pad, covering the paper with mathematical formulae, sketches, notations, and a jumble of words in several languages. There were four other legal pads next to him, all filled. That was just yesterday’s output.
There was a knock on the door, but the man didn’t stop his work, only began to write faster, more frenetically and sloppier, a rush to finish his thought before the next thing happened. Already, his mind jumped ahead — it was not meal time, nor bathroom time, nor was he scheduled for an exam or evaluation. It was a Tuesday, and nothing was supposed to happen on a Tuesday. That and Sunday were the days he could truly be productive, so whatever was coming was going to be new.
New was in such short supply these days.
Finally, the man stopped writing and turned to see who interrupted him — and smiled. New, indeed.
“I can only imagine one plausible reason for your visit. Let’s get to work, then, shall we?” Kurt Schreiber said.
Detlev Bronk just scowled.
16
Getting up every morning was a little bit tougher. Old age did that to you — especially when you were aging a couple weeks every day. And sleeping on a thin mattress thrown onto a wooden floor hadn’t been helping much either.