The Rising(84)

WAITING

FOR DR. THOMAS DONATI, EVERYTHING was on hold, including, it seemed, the world itself. He felt as if he’d been frozen in a form of suspended animation, waiting for the phone to ring, buzzer to chime, or team to show up. Of course, he more than anyone should’ve known this day was coming; its inevitability, he supposed, had been sealed eighteen years before in Bishop Ranch.

He hadn’t told the faceless voice grids he’d been speaking with over the course of the past day the entire truth, not even most of it. And now he was left to wonder how much of what was happening, and about to happen, was his fault. Because if the wormhole was about to open again …

Donati didn’t complete the thought; he couldn’t. The prospects were just too real and terrifying. He imagined that’s why he’d missed the warning signs a high school student, a NASA intern, had found. He missed them because he’d wanted to, unable to bear the thought that the inevitable was upon him, perhaps ultimately of his own making from trying to reach what no man was ever meant to touch.

He was glad the faceless voice grids couldn’t read his mind, couldn’t see into his memory to the moments that had followed the first shrill emergency alarm sounding before the destruction of Laboratory Z. How’d he raced down to the basement sublevel containing the massive tubular chamber he and Orson Wilder had constructed, essentially a particle accelerator and mini-supercollider that formed a potential doorway to other worlds. The testing had only been in the most rudimentary and fundamental stages. Expectations were low; in point of fact, nobody knew what to expect and most familiar with the project expected nothing at all.

As a boy, Donati had been obsessed with model trains and, later, with the transcontinental railroad’s construction. Even then, before his interest in space exploration had turned obsessively into his life’s work, he’d been fascinated by the idea of all that wilderness, all that untamed frontier, being linked together. Worlds connected. Impossible journeys made possible.

For Donati, Laboratory Z was an extension of that same romantic adventure where man expanded his horizons by forging routes between worlds. Back then it had merely been east and west, north and south, while today it involved roads built to connect planets and galaxies. His and Orson Wilder’s early work trying to theoretically construct a transworld was similarly about creating connections that just a decade or so before had been unthinkable. And they’d been wrong and right at the same time.

Right, because they had indeed opened the door.

Wrong, because something was waiting on the other side.

And now the day of reckoning for their oversight and myopic vision had come. Ever since that day eighteen years ago, he had ceased seeking other life forms in order to build bridges; he sought them instead to prevent those bridges from ever being built. The very real danger the prospects of such contact created had already been demonstrated, proof enough for him.

But that wasn’t the problem at this point. The problem at this point was that the signs, the pattern, were reoccurring, which could only mean one thing.

They were coming back, perhaps through a wormhole entirely of their own creation. And right now he had to find Samantha Dixon before someone else did.

Or some thing.

But her phone was going straight to voicemail and she’d returned none of his e-mails or texts, the latter being a practice Donati utterly deplored but knew teenagers these days normally preferred.

Donati’s phone rang and he jerked it to his ear, answering it quickly.

“Yes. Donati here.”

“It’s Samantha, Dr. Donati.”

“Who?”

“Dixon, Samantha Dixon, Doctor. I think we need to talk.”





ELEVEN

REBELS

Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.



—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST





85

PLAYGROUND

“WE CAN WAIT FOR the girl to get back if you want,” Raiff said, uneasily taking the swing next to Alex in the Live Oaks Elementary School playground, just a few miles from Bishop Ranch.

Alex rocked slightly in his swing, legs scrunched up to compensate for being so close to the ground. “She has a name. It’s Sam.”

“We can wait for Sam to get back,” Raiff corrected, having lent her his phone so she could make a call to someone she thought might be the only person, on this planet anyway, who could help them.

Alex steepened his rock. “No, talk. Just know that whatever you tell me, I’m telling Sam. I’m sick of secrets, starting with the fact that I’m not human.”

“You are human.”

“But I come from another planet. Through a wormhole in space. And a doctor didn’t deliver me; you did, to my mother.”

“I’m human too, Alex, both of us as much as anybody here.”

Alex pushed harder, riding a swing for the first time in longer than he could remember. It seemed to him that Raiff was moving and he wasn’t. Raiff had the hard look of a soldier mixed somewhat with the hardscrabble appearance of a fisherman. His face, even in the sunlight, seemed bathed in shadows, all angles and ridges. His wavy hair was untamed, his eyes big and set far back in his face. The kind of guy who didn’t care what he looked like and didn’t care what other people thought, either.

“So even though I come from another planet,” Alex continued, forcing himself to focus, “I’m human because your people seeded Earth millions of years ago to create another version of the human race.”