She beat at him feebly with her left fist. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.” She cursed with metronomic regularity as she pounded his chest. “Why do you do this to me?”
He wrapped his arms around her and held her. “I’m sorry, Jenny.”
“He said I was beautiful,” she said softly.
“Jenny, if—”
“Alan, I didn’t want him to die. I moved as fast as I could. It’s just that the signal from their radio was so tiny, so weak that it was hard to get a lock on it from up here.”
“You did a wonderful job, Jenny. No one else could have done it.”
“To think that I was so naive as to think that my Door would be used for good.” She shook her head, sobbing. “It’s been one long descent ever since the Door first opened—commerce, tourism, thrill seeking, riots, and now, warfare. I wanted us to go outwards, into space, not into the deepest, darkest parts of the human soul.”
“Jenny, your Door didn’t cause the Brazilians to start a war. With a little luck, it may even help to end the war.”
“That’s what they said about the atom bomb a hundred years ago, you idiot! It took fifty years of living in daily fear of nuclear holocaust before tensions calmed down enough for governments to put away their missiles. And they still worry about terrorists. How long will it take before people learn to live with my Door? What have I done? How many people will die because of me?”
“How many people will live because of you, Jenny? There’s a war on down there. People need you.” He lifted her chin with his fingertips. “If we move fast enough, we might even save a few next time.”
Alan Lister was haggard. It was two in the morning and there were dark circles under his eyes. His jumpsuit was stained with blood and mud. They had just made the sixth drop in two hours, placing small commando units at carefully selected pressure points. Between drops, they had evacuated the tattered remnants of American and Mexican forces from what had been Mexico City.
The capitol had fallen at dusk. The Brazilians had wasted no time bringing in heavy artillery. Clearly, they were expecting to have to fight to hold their prize. It was up to those running the Door to accomplish by stealth what could not be accomplished openly, with brute force.
The commando teams were setting up to attack critical supply routes. Brazil, lacking a Door, was restricted to using conventional transport methods, mainly over land, to bring in new troops and provisions. If those routes could be choked off, the very rapidity of the Brazilian advance would be its own undoing; they would use up their supplies rapidly and be vulnerable when no more were forthcoming.
The strategy was old. The new wrinkle was the Door itself. With virtually instantaneous transit between two points, they could accomplish things that had only been strategists’ dreams in the past.
The runner came from the hastily arranged command post down the corridor from the Door. He dodged a crate full of medical supplies and came to a stop face to face with Lister. “Sir?”
Alan Lister turned and smiled tiredly at the young man. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Alan?”
“Sorry, sir… I mean Alan. Uh, they want you to pick up Charlie Two now.”
“Seems like we just dropped them.”
The runner glanced at his watch. “Forty-seven minutes ago.”
“Any casualties?”
Involuntarily, the youngster grinned. “No, sir. Not a one.”
“So we’re just taking them home?”
“Fort Bragg, sir. They need to get some sleep. I gather they’re going to be busy again tomorrow.”
“Alan,” Lister reminded him.
“Yes, sir, Alan.”
Lister shrugged helplessly. “I can’t get you to do it, can I?”
“Force of habit, I guess.”
Lister sighed good-naturedly. “Pick up Charlie Two and take them home,” he repeated. “All right, let me go tell Jenny.”
Her reception towards him was considerably different than it had been earlier. “Who and where and where to?”
“Charlie Two…” he ran a finger down a marker board propped against the wall of the control booth and called off the coordinates. “Take ’em back to Bragg.”
She nodded. “Can do.”
He turned to go, but stopped when she said, “Alan?”
“Yeah?”
“About what I said earlier… I’m sorry.”
“No problem, Jenny.”
“I mean it.”
He smiled in understanding. “I know.”
She tried to smile back. “We’re saving some of them. I feel like I’m accomplishing something worthwhile.”
Anne burst through the control booth door, arms laden with containers. “Coffee, anyone?”
Alan said, “You should be in bed, babe. It’s late.”
She looked surprised. “You think you’re telling me something?” To Jenny, she said, “Want to take a break? I’ll run the Door for a bit.”
“Let me make the pickup—it’s rough terrain, and controlling the singularity will be tricky. I’ll let you take them home.”
Anne grinned saucily. “I know enough not to be insulted. I’ve watched you feather this thing in enough times that I’ve acquired a healthy respect for your ability at the controls.”
“You’re learning fast. I just want you to get some more daylight practice before doing a night drop.” She turned to the controls and set the coordinates for the pickup. As she slapped the key to initiate the singularity, she said, “It would be nice if we could take time out and rig an automatic circuit to handle all this. Things would go a lot faster. As it is, we have to home in on a radio beacon on the ground. Even then, we tend to drift a bit.”
Anne held up her hands. “I’m not arguing. Let’s just get the job done. We’ll fine tune the process as we go along.”
“Let’s hope this is over before we have a chance to get good at it,” Jenny replied.
It wasn’t fair.
Commander James Hoffman stood in an unmarked warehouse on the Naval base in Charleston, South Carolina. Before him, half covered by a tarp, was the front end of a car. A Ford. The physical embodiment of his ill fortune.
The Navy, after bitter infighting with the other service branches, had won the Door project. It was to be a crash priority program. The Navy had placed the project with NA-VELEX—Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Center—in Charleston, South Carolina.
It should have been easy. Knowing that something can be done is half the battle. They had indeed managed to create a Holmes singularity. Controlling it, however, had been their undoing. It flew about like a thing possessed. For reasons that they did not understand, it tended to home in on electromagnetic fields. It was drawn to them as a moth is to flame.
The remnants of the car in front of him had been the result of their third test run. They had tried to place the Door singularity in an open field west of the city. Before they could shut off the power, it had whipped across the field, drawn to the electric field thrown off by the drive motors in a car—this car. The driver had lost his legs as a result, leaving NAVELEX with a grisly souvenir that they could not admit to having.
The next day, they had tried again. This time, they had set the singularity to appear in midair. It had seemed safe enough. They had checked scheduled flights and found a time slot when nothing would be in the area. Needless to say, Murphy’s Law dictated that a commercial jet had been late on takeoff from Charlotte. The singularity had swooped in on the jet from behind and devoured it.
But the jet, unlike the car, had not come to rest in the underground bunker where they had set up their test rig. Such a huge mass had overloaded the circuit driving the singularity. Voltages had spiked as the regulators in the power supplies failed. Oscillations had raged through the circuits in the scant seconds before they burned out, creating an echo, an uncontrolled mirror image of the Door. The jet had passed through the Door, then through its doppleganger, a distance of only centimeters. Then the Door system had failed utterly, leaving stunned technicians staring at smoking metal fragments dropped by the plane as it passed through; the Door had not been large enough to accept the entire wingspan.