Endworlds - Nicholas Read [44]
Lion led them hurriedly back to the subway access, pausing only for Castle to dispose of the canine remains down the hole Tucker had made before they multiplied.
They felt the smallest vibration as a sinkhole opened up in a suburb several blocks behind them, swallowing the garden and rear quarter of a foreign lawyer’s holiday home.
Safely on a morning train, the Longcoats gathered around Eastwood, the smaller boy nearly disappearing as coats flapped against him. Questions came quickly and furiously. Answering them was a simple matter.
“I don’t know,” he said repeatedly, helplessly. “I just don’t know.” It was not a very satisfying response, either to his questioners or to him.
Hummer shouted above the din of screeching brakes as the carriage rounded a curve. “You knew how to beat selagote, and how to defeat the—what you call it—a teeleoth?”
His right hand rested on the pistol in his coat pocket. “If dangerous intrusions are on rise, we going need all help we can get. Is shame I guess you can’t teach us your tricks.”
Across the aisle Tucker was nodding.
“If the Foundation expects us to cope with this kind of increase we’re going to need better equipment.”
“Yes,” said Jax as she jabbed at wristband buttons that pulled each pocket’s contents across the aether to her central stash. In turn these would drawn back to the Chimney, replenished and redeployed before the Longcoats got back there themselves.
“We used to be able to see a seam forming well before they broke through,” she said. “These days we’re lucky to scramble to a gig in time.”
Eastwood listened to this exchange above the din of the rattling subway train as he searched the reach of memory, something nagging at him so close he almost had it. Now he looked up, meeting gazes individually, bemused and assured all at once.
“You need better gear? I think I can help.”
Somehow they were not surprised.
13 Learn more by pointing a search engine to “Calabi Yau space”, “compactification” or “Kaluza-Klein theory”. A layman’s introduction to this branch of spacetime physics is available at “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compactification_(physics)”.
14 Immanuel Velikovsky (1895—1979) was a respected psychiatrist who studied in Vienna under a pupil of Freud’s. He worked with Albert Einstein to stock the library of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but is best remembered as the controversial author of Worlds in Collision (1950, Macmillan), Ages in Chaos (1952, Doubleday) and Earth in Upheaval (1955, ibid). Citing ancient calendars and histories, plus geological and astronomical events, he argued a revised chronology for ancient cultures that is very different to what is generally taught; that Earth has suffered cataclysmic disasters in ancient times; and that electromagnetism plays an important role in celestial mechanics (his writing pre-dated knowledge of dark matter). His revisionist and creationist approach incited a furore in the academic establishment, fanned at first by intellectual rivalry and later by conflicting scientific discoveries. Despite the controversy, Velikovsky’s books became best sellers.
BURROUGHING DEEP
SOMERSET, ENGLAND
SEPTEMBER, 2007
“THIS IS CRAZY.”
Standing just within the cover of a thicket of woodland, Jax peered across the open field that was swathed dark grey in the starlight. Two days had passed since their encounter with the teeleoth, and in that time Monarch had listened to Eastwood’s proposal with interest. Which was why they had come to find themselves in this southwestern county in rural England.
Zooming in with the visor that peeked out from beneath her cowling, she could see the grass was kept closely cropped to avoid anyone sneaking across the field, as they planned to do.