Endworlds - Nicholas Read [71]
Yet as active as they seemed, they had no website and paid no taxes. When his people had looked into where they maintained offices, they appeared to hold property around the world for which no titles were on file, but which each government listed by as not being public land either. According to the public records, these sites simply didn’t exist.
Kriegmacher’s masters had listed the Foundation as irrelevant to the mission and told him to ignore them. But when one of his aides had furnished a map of the world with each Foundation site circled, it was a geometry he had seen before. In many locations their properties overlaid a different map GRID had made of ley lines and natural vortices—weak spots where the dimensional membranes were naturally thin22. That couldn’t be coincidence. It painted the Foundation as a player in his world. But both gut and reason inclined him to relegate the Foundation to the least likely category when it came to assigning blame for common thievery.
Terrorists, then. Ordinary, garden-variety, homegrown terrorists seeking advanced weaponry to utilize for their own unknown nefarious purposes. But that explanation tended to contradict itself. It would seem that any group capable of so thoroughly defeating Burroughs Labs tightest security already had access to technology more advanced than anything they were attempting to steal. It made no sense. The whole business made no sense.
Whoever was responsible for the thefts had left behind no clue as to their identity, purpose, or origin. To Kriegmacher as well as the baffled McGregor who he called this same morning, the absence of a single image of the intruders was the most ominous indicator of their capabilities. In his frustration, McGregor had said it was almost as if the thieves were capable of entering the lab facilities via ‘another dimension’.
Kriegmacher let out a gruff exhalation, the theft now squarely in his domain because if that possibility were to be considered it meant someone else had beaten his own scientists in a race where they had thought themselves the only runner.
He needed answers. Locking the door to his office, he went to a source most extraordinary. But to understand that source, one must first comprehend where it came from . . .
GRID PHYSICISTS using Fermilab’s facilities had made much progress in developing gating technology over the past years. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles had successfully flown through small seams opened into the world on the other frequency, and for minutes before the windows had collapsed they had collected instrument feedback. On one such sortie there had been the briefest blip, never repeated, of what appeared to be the thermal image of a human shape disappearing over the lip of a hill just before the camera feed was lost.
He had originally kept this knowledge from his masters until he had something concrete to report. But it reminded him of an oddity he had recently seen on the Internet, supposedly newly found footage from an old 70’s show about spirit photography, also known as Kirlian imaging.23
It was a fringe theory that had led scientists like genius energy physicist Nikola Tesla, Princeton’s Robert Van de Graaff and others to postulate that living things give off a coronal discharge that can be filmed when electrical current is used to accelerate electrons and protons. The television show’s silent unaired footage revealed a man sitting in a chair filmed through a normal lens, then on a split screen he was shown through a Kirlian lens. Blue and red shimmers radiated around him like an aura. Kriegmacher had seen films like this before.
What caught his attention was when the white-coated scientist running the session rolled up the man’s left trouser to reveal he was an amputee. Yet on the aural image, the whole leg appeared in place. He had heard of