“Yeah, yeah,” his dad/Boris responded — this time dressed as one of the waiters atop the Vegas hotel, with slicked back hair and a tuxedo. “Over two thousand such tests the world over. Us, the Russians, the Koreans, the Japanese, the French and Brits, everyone getting in on the game to blow stuff up. Like pre-pubescent boys in a playground setting off fireworks.”
Caleb nodded. “But let’s cut to the chase, what you showed me before…” He glanced away from the waiter-father image, past a pair of bikini-clad girls dancing for businessmen high on something, to the distant cloud, still poised over the New Mexico desert. Was it the Roswell or Dulce base? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter.
“You’re saying these tests…”
A flash in his mind, as if to prod him back on course: a glimpse of the globe again, crisscrossed with glowing lines of energy, with dots now pulsing red, presumably where these tests occurred along those lines…
“…performed at specific locations on the earth—”
“Were discovered to give off vastly enhanced levels of radioactive energy, enough even, to force open rifts in the fabric of time-space…”
Caleb blinked, and looked back at his father. “Those energy pylons? Collectors of the waveform energy?”
“You know this,” his dad said. “Tesla predicted it. Scalar wave frequencies. HAARP style energetics. The true reason for all those tests. We could have shared the data with other powers if we were concerned about the by-then known effects of the blasts, especially once it was discovered that the earth had these power centers and lines of internal consistency and harnessable energy.”
Another flash in his mind, and the enigmatic megalithic structures of the ancients flew past in succession, travelling in milliseconds across lines that linked old and new world sites: through the forepaws of the Sphinx, with the Great Pyramid in the background, through to the Alexandrian Lighthouse Base, to Stonehenge and over to the Statue of Liberty; from Angkor Wat to Teotihuacan to Easter Island and — and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and Uluru in Australia…
“All those sites of power, in the past they could have channeled and enhanced the Earth’s natural energy, then bombarded it with destructive scalar waves, creating a massive localized reaction that could generate tremendous free power, enough to shatter the laws of time and distance — and create wormholes through the quantum structure of reality itself.”
A flash and they were back in the interrogation room at the Pine Gap facility; however his father was still there, hand tightly gripping Caleb’s shoulder.
“I need to show you one more thing.”
He pulled then pushed Caleb around, and turning — they were back in Sodus at the top of the lighthouse. The bulb extinguished itself and in the ensuing gloom, by starlight they walked around the cupola to the tripod and the small kids’ telescope there. It was aimed toward the northeast sky, a cloudless night full of brighter-than-usual twinkling stars.
“Take a look-see, kid.”
Caleb swallowed.
“Go on, big brother,” said a voice at his back, and Caleb tried to turn and see his sister, but his body was not under his control. His muscles moved on their own, as he bent to the toy telescope’s eyepiece.
He peeked in, adjusted the focus slightly and the distant object came into clarity, the dim ball of rock and ice shouldn’t have been visible with this little device.
“Say hello to Icarus.”
His dad reached down and spun the eyepiece counter-clockwise, which made no sense, but somehow enhanced the image another 20x.
There he could see the NASA rover crash-landed on the surface, the instruments and cameras still working, catching the pyramid-shaped structure looming out of the gas-emitting, melting ice, more and more of its hieroglyphics revealed. Then…numerous cracks and fissures appearing in the upper layers of Icarus.
“It’s tearing itself apart.”
An immense piece chipped off in a cloud of gas, a huge spike tumbling away, turning as if to aim…and then it continued roaring through space on a new trajectory.
“Last time this happened,” his dad said, “was eleven thousand five hundred years ago, I’d say.” Another voice, in his right ear: this one familiar too as Diana Montgomery’s. “Right about the time of the last ice age cataclysmic extinction event, the Younger Dryas—”
Caleb stood up and found himself alone again in the Pine Gap 50’s era room. Turning around and around, he located the blinking light up at the corner of the room. A camera.
“All right,” he said. “I think I get it. Where’d you go?”
He blinked at the red light as it blinked back. The curtains blew slightly in forced air, but when Caleb glanced to the window he noticed something he hadn’t before. A bluish haze and tint to the corners of his vision.
Wait a second…
Glanced around some more, trying to find an angle or an area of the room that didn’t have that haze. Then he stepped to the window and looked out across the desert. It was there as well.
Which meant…
“What do you get?” came the voice from the man in black sitting now in the chair behind him.
Caleb closed his eyes. He sighed. “Enough games, Boris.”
“I’m your father,” a hand again on his shoulder.
Caleb shook it off.
“Stop.”
Suddenly a smell of sulfur and his hair was on end, and when he opened his eyes he was in that lab room where the doorway sparkled with electro-plasma spider webs, and inside that portal-wormhole was his Sodus room, and Dad was there cradling his four-year old son and reading a book far too advanced for his age.
“This could be yours,” Boris said, wearing a white lab coat now and standing at the control panel. “We don’t need the bombs anymore. No more tests. We’ve found other ways, discovered the right frequencies, and now nuclear power plants and supercolliders, placed at the right locations, can do what the warheads previously managed with imprecision and brute force.”
“Didn’t they try that already? What happened at Nine-Mile Island? Chernobyl?”
Boris nodded sadly. “Learning efforts. We’ve advanced.”
Caleb shook his head, looking back at the image. “So all this… you’ve found a way to create doorways to other times?”
“More than that, Caleb dear.” His mother’s voice in his head now, as the scene shifted again, and again they were in the kitchen. Only this time, it was a modern kitchen, a flat screen TV, smart phone in a charger, and…
“Dad?”
He came down the stairs, beaming and holding up his iPad. “Just got that review from the university. And my grant is going to be approved, and then we—”
He froze in mid-step. Everything froze at once.
“This is one such frequency we’ve isolated.” Boris was at his side, all in black again, hair pulled back in a pony tail. “You could be here, with them again. No Morpheus Initiative in this quantum reality, this alternate universe. Just the happy Crowe family who never suffered the psychic curse. Never felt the obsession to go digging where they didn’t belong. Where—”
“The Emerald Tablet never was found?”
“Oh, maybe it was found…”