The Rising(78)

“The way you looked at me, the way you looked at that bracelet.”

The professor sat back down. Alex and Sam joined him on the blanket next to each other, with the older man centered across from them.

“I’ve been coming here every day for fifteen years,” he said, spooning a hand through his beard. “Around the last time I shaved. I don’t want to believe you. I want to believe you’re full of shit. I want to believe that bracelet’s something your tutor cooked up for a science fair project.”

Alex stuffed the crumpled dollar bill back into the tiny pot. “Do you think I’m full of shit?”

The professor shrugged. Sam realized the crown of his scalp was bald and he had a pointy, long nose with a pair of reading spectacles dangling on the tip. She thought he looked more like Mr. Wizard, the cartoon character who invariably rescued Tooter Turtle from all manner of mishap with a wave of his magic wand.

“I paid for an answer, Professor,” Alex told him.

“Then do yourself a favor and just accept another refund.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes, it is.” He ran his eyes from Alex to Sam before settling his gaze somewhere between them. “How much do you know?”

“I told you what we know. The short version. There’s more if you want to hear it, lots more.”

“I meant about Laboratory Z. Let’s start there.”

“I know about the explosion, the fire, and my mom rescuing me,” Alex said, swallowing hard as he tried to fit all the pieces of what he’d learned together. “I know there was some experiment going on there, something big. I know that had something to do with the fire and the lab’s destruction.”

“Then you know more than just about anyone alive, except for me and one other man.”

“You worked there,” Sam put forth, “didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did, young lady. I had a particular area of expertise the lab was most interested in.”

“What’s that?” asked Alex.

“We need to back up first, young man. Laboratory Z was actually a NASA installation, a secret NASA installation that had existed already for more than a generation when you were born. Young lady,” he said to Sam, “what was the significance of 1960 to the space program?”

“The election of John Kennedy.”

“Exactly!”

“Do you owe me a dollar now?”

The professor didn’t seem to hear her. “It was one of JFK’s personal obsessions, and not just winning the race to the moon, either. But he had the foresight and vision to realize the logistics and realities of deep space travel, anything beyond the moon, really, brought challenges and costs that barely qualified it as a pipe dream. So Kennedy assembled a group of experts to come up with alternatives to rocket ships and star cruisers even as work continued on those as well.” The professor paused long enough to meet both Alex’s and Sam’s gazes. “Here, my young friends. On these very grounds that had been housing an amusement park destroyed by an earthquake. Laboratory Z was built under the cover of a Western Electric company manufacturing plant and continued in operation after the Sunset Development Company created Bishop Ranch in 1978.”

“Not exactly the New Mexican desert,” Sam noted, contrasting the infamous Los Alamos facility in New Mexico with the million square feet of modern office space before them.

“No, but the scientists who worked here didn’t have as clear an agenda, either. We were basically poking at the wind to see if anything poked back.”

“And did it?” Alex asked the professor.

“I can safely report that virtually every experiment conducted here was a failure, often abysmal. It’s why the government, and NASA, didn’t dare show us on the books. We were a financial black hole—no pun intended, since black holes were among the subjects we studied extensively.”

“You said virtually,” Sam noted. “Meaning…”

“Meaning all but one.”

“And were you involved in that one?”

“Intimately. It was my specialty, accounted for why they brought me and another scientist to Laboratory Z as project supervisors in the early nineteen nineties.”

“What was your specialty?” Alex asked him.

“Wormholes,” said the professor.

*

“Let’s start with the basics,” he continued, turning his focus on Sam. “Feel free to jump in at any time, young lady.”

Alex’s shoulders snapped erect. “Why didn’t you say that to me?”

“Feel free to jump in at any time, young lady,” the professor repeated. “But for now all you need to know is that the purpose of a wormhole is to facilitate travel to and from distant areas of space—I mean, really distant, as in different universes, potentially. Like this.”

The professor reached behind him and grabbed one of the signs staked into the ground that read, LOOK UP AND SOMEBODY’S LOOKING DOWN. He stripped the thin cardboard from its post and turned it over so the blank side, with just a smidge of black washed through, was up.

“Picture this as space,” he resumed, “the goal being to get from an originating point at one end to a destination point at the other. Since they could be light-years away, the journey would be all but impossible. Even traveling at the speed of light, you’d be gone hundreds, even thousands of years of Earth time by the time you got home.”