And sure enough, Caleb found him doing exactly that. Outside, up the stairs to the balcony around the immense bulb.
“Quite the view, son!” He had his back to Caleb, his arms spread wide. “Just imagine though that we’re overlooking the Mediterranean, with Alexandria and all of Egypt at our backs.”
“Dad…”
He held up one finger. “Wait a second, something’s about to happen.” The finger pointed now, aiming along with his arm, to a smoke trail in the sky and a blazing light dropping toward the center of the water.
“Here we go…”
Caleb couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Everything had gone terribly silent and still. He heard the thunderclap before he saw anything, in reverse of what he expected. The massive mushroom cloud, complete with rings of billowing angelic halos as the force blasted out following a burst of pure energy and whiteness that surprisingly, caused no pain or even the need to blink.
He was just an observer, inserted as if with a visual only. The lighthouse itself seemed protected, as if an energy field of sparkling particles deflected the winds, the fire and the fury.
His dad turned around slowly, and pointed over Caleb’s shoulder.
Caleb wanted nothing more than to rush to his father, to throw his arms around him and hold him and tell him everything, all the sadness and guilt and admiration and love that he hadn’t been able to before, before his father had been taken so early.
Instead, he turned and dutifully followed to see what he was pointing at, in the wake of such a monstrous detonation.
But the scene was suddenly and seamlessly different. They were back in some kind of laboratory with stainless steel walls, white floors and two huge metallic pylons framing something in the center, something that looked like a doorway. A rectangular-cubical tear in the air itself, sparkling with electrical-plasma energy. Inside the framed, charged door was a series of images, scrolling rapidly north and south like a slot machine’s final turns, as if deciding where to land.
In each, his lighthouse stood on a hill against varying backdrops: a blood red sky in one, emerald clouds roiling in another, still another where the bright blue overhead sported three giant airship-zeppelins in a surreal aerial battle with each other; in still other glimpses, the lighthouse was a demolished wreck or more missile-shaped with some other domed structure at its side; a final series showed an icy apocalyptic scene with a glacier up to the cliff’s edge, with the ice-covered lighthouse a weak glow in the world’s frozen gloom.
A flash, and Caleb floated high over the curvature of the Earth, looking down on North America and seeing shimmering lines appearing, east-west strands of glowing energy traveling not across the rigid latitudes but along different trajectories, crisscrossing the earth, spreading out over familiar locations. The globe spun, and the lines continued.
“World Grid,” Caleb whispered, noting the lines zipping through Stonehenge, Cornwall, Cairo, and lower — Easter Island, Teotihuacan, back to America, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York, Roswell, Sedona, around and around, to central Australia and even Xanadu in China…
He took it all in, eyes darting around, and then — descending, he saw flare ups of fiery energy peppering other areas along or near the lines. Again and again, in the ocean, in the atmosphere, on the land, under the ground. Over and over and over, cloud after cloud after mushroom cloud.
“Why?” his father asked him gently into his ear, in Boris’s voice. “Why did we test so goddamned many of those things?”
Caleb continued to watch, this time from a ground-level view in what had to be the New Mexico desert. A sign read Trinity over his shoulder as he perfunctorily donned blast glasses and as the following explosion consumed the horizon.
Again, a hand on his shoulder turned him from the blast — to witness an underground location. Another set of Tesla-like pylons spitting out electrical fields as scientists with their hair on end watched for the shimmering doorway manifesting between the constructs. Monitors revealed the atom bomb blast topside — and measured the resulting output.
Again, the whirling images inside the portal. Another man, in a radiation suit with a tether to his waist, was preparing to step inside.
“I don’t understand,” Caleb started to say, but in fact he did. So he reached out with his mind, asking to be shown similar scenes from similar tests, around the world. From different powers perhaps, it didn’t matter, just that he be shown this again.
What were they looking for?
The images came relentless and fast.
He stands on the prow of a US naval destroyer, and raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes, surveying the distant atoll, a peaceful island jutting out from the perfect blue ocean, just an instant before the flash of pure white, and the swirling tornado-like funnel takes its place, erupting in an angry yet majestic crown.
And next, he stands at the edge of a metal walkway, leaning against the railing looking down into the rocky crevasse below, all the way a mile distant to the dig site, the bore hole and the scaffolding above the drilled shaft, capped and deserted. A muffled sound breaks the eerie silence as a flock of crows scatters overhead, and the ground makes an immense circular decompression. A massive puff of dirt and debris rises, then falls as the earth around it collapses..
Another blast over a water-starved terrain, as a pair of kangaroos leap in terrified bounds across his vision; the sky turns violet as the distant cloud, impossible to say how many miles out, looms like a giant protrusion attempting to connect sky to the earth.
Now he’s on a great field of green, with a crowd gazing skyward as if watching the aftermath of daytime fireworks… Countless cloud trails fall from the high atmosphere, impossibly high, and the day turns to night, the explosive remnants gone and leaving in their path the more glorious sight of an unnatural aurora, a kaleidoscope of brilliantly charged and colored particles dancing with their partners in the ionosphere.
The scenes shift now more rapidly: one after another, flying back and forth across the globe, watching from space even as detonation follows detonation, peppering the land, the seas, the atmosphere, underground and across the globe, one nation vying with another (until others joined in the game).
“So many,” he whispered, and the voice in his ear whispered back.
“Exactly. How many tests do you need? How much data can you collect on something that makes a huge boom? It wiped out two cities in Japan, and there was your ultimate test on its killing power and its after-effects. Should have been enough, but we kept going, kept testing, even so close to your own people.”
Another shift, and this time he’s among a crowd of revelers at a neon-colored rooftop party, high atop some casino hotel. The Vegas strip, ever sleepless, bustles in greater activity at his back while all around, dancers writhe to a jazzy 60’s era beat, some wearing tacky mushroom-cloud hats, until everyone stops and points out to the desert. To the massive flash of light. The wind rises and strikes, even at this distance. The crowd cheers and drinks and laughs and kisses as the great cloud expands and shakes to the rhythm…
“Testing,” Caleb responded as he continued to stare out at the monstrous atomic signature, “other things, other aspects and under different conditions. Official thinking is that we needed to have definitive collection of data for all scenarios and varying levels of payout as well as transmission through mediums such as the earth or upper atmosphere. What effect it had on the seas, whether the blasts could cause tsunamis, or how the residual effects could impact satellites or EM waves.”