Timeline - Michael Crichton [70]
“That’s from the liquid helium,” Gomez said. “Chilling the metal to superconduction temperatures.”
Abruptly, the screaming ended and the chattering sound began.
“Infrared clearance,” she said. “This is it.”
Chris felt his whole body begin to tremble involuntarily. He tried to control it, but his legs were shaking. He had a moment of panic—maybe he should call it off—but then he heard a recorded voice say, “Stand still—eyes open—”
Too late, he thought. Too late.
“—deep breath—hold it. . .. Now!”
The circular ring descended from above his head, moving swiftly to his feet. It clicked as it touched the base. And a moment later, there was a blinding flash of light—brighter than the sun—coming from all around him—but he felt nothing at all. In fact, he had a sudden strange sense of cold detachment, as if he were now observing a distant scene.
The world around him was completely, utterly silent.
He saw Baretto’s nearby machine was growing larger, starting to loom over him. Baretto, a giant, his huge face with monstrous pores, was bending over, looking down at them.
More flashes.
As Baretto’s machine grew larger, it also appeared to move away from them, revealing a widening expanse of floor: a vast plain of dark rubber floor, stretching away into the distance.
More flashes.
The rubber floor had a pattern of raised circles. Now these circles began to rise up around them like black cliffs. Soon the black cliffs had grown so high that they seemed like black skyscrapers, joining overhead, closing off the light above. Finally, the skyscrapers touched one another, and the world was dark.
More flashes.
They sank into inky blackness for a moment before he distinguished flickering pinpoints of light, arranged in a gridlike pattern, stretching away in all directions. It was as if they were inside some enormous glowing crystalline structure. As Chris watched, the points of light grew brighter and larger, their edges blurring, until each became a fuzzy glowing ball. He wondered if these were atoms.
He could no longer see the grid, just a few nearby balls. His cage moved directly toward one glowing ball, which appeared to be pulsing, changing its shape in flickering patterns.
Then they were inside the ball, immersed in a bright glowing fog that seemed to throb with energy.
And then the glow faded, and was gone.
They hung in featureless blackness. Nothing.
Blackness.
But then he saw that they were still sinking downward, now heading toward the churning surface of a black ocean in a black night. The ocean whipped and boiled, making a frothy blue-tinged foam. As they descended to the surface, the foam grew larger. Chris saw that one bubble in particular had an especially bright blue glow.
His machine moved toward that glow at accelerating speed, flying faster and faster, and he had the odd sensation that they were going to crash in the foam, and then they entered the bubble and he heard a loud piercing shriek.
Then silence.
Darkness.
Nothing.
In the control room, David Stern watched the flashes on the rubber floor become smaller and weaker, and finally vanish entirely. The machines were gone. The technicians immediately turned to Baretto and began his transmission countdown.
But Stern kept staring at the spot in the rubber floor where Chris and the others had been.
“And where are they now?” he asked Gordon.
“Oh, they’ve arrived now,” Gordon said. “They are there now.”
“They’ve been rebuilt?”
“Yes.”
“Without a fax machine at the other end.”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me why,” Stern said. “Tell me the details the others didn’t need to be bothered with.”
“All right,” Gordon said. “It isn’t anything bad. I just thought the others might find it, well, disturbing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s go back,” Gordon said, “to the interference patterns, which you remember showed us that other universes can affect our own universe. We don’t have to do anything to get the interference pattern to occur. It just happens by itself.”
“Yes.”
“And this interaction is very reliable;