The Didymus Contingency Read online

  Had Tom been more aware, he might have noticed Mpundu streaking down the runway in the Cessna. He might have noticed the crunch of moving brush and the smell of gunpowder. He sat in the grass, cradling Megan and rocking back and forth like a caged animal.

  It wasn’t until Tom felt warm metal against the back of his neck and heard the click of weaponry that his attention was thrust back into reality. He could see four sets of bare feet standing around him. His head was too heavy to look up.

  Standing above Tom were Megan’s four pursuers, led by the Yankee fan.

  “Do you believe ahs dis wuman deed?” asked the Yankee fan, as he pressed the barrel of his rifle into Tom’s temple. “Ansah me now.”

  Tom looked up toward the voice. The Yankee fan’s face was silhouetted by the bright sun behind him. “W—what?” Tom asked.

  The Yankee fan walked to the side. The sun cleared and Tom could see the man’s dark face, painted brightly with dry, red ink. What was most striking about his face were the expressions—twisting and contorting with confusion. The Yankee fan looked at Tom from all angles. Then he smiled and stood up straight.

  “Do you balieve as dis wuman deed? Do you balieve en her God?” The man’s voice seemed deeper, more demanding. “Ah you not a disciple?”

  Tom’s lip began to bleed as he bit down.

  “Tell us! We want to know!” the man screamed.

  “No, damnit! I don’t believe what she did! I never will!”

  The four men instantly lowered their rifles. The Yankee fan squinted his eyes skeptically, then relaxed and smiled a rotting grin, “Thun tuday es your lucky day.”

  The other men laughed and patted each other on the back for a job well done. Satisfied, all four turned and walked away, disappearing back into the tall grass.

  Tom was left on his knees with Megan in his arms. His muscles began to shake. His eyes twitched to a maddening rhythm and blood pumped adrenaline through his veins. He let his wife, who he clutched to his chest so fondly moments ago, fall to the ground. Tom stood to his feet and cut into the tall grass.

  The four men walked away slowly. Tom caught them quickly. He pounded his fist into the head of the first man before they heard a sound. The man toppled over and dropped his rifle, which fired upon impact with the ground. The bullet split several shoots of grass and then shattered the ankle of another man who fell backwards into the grass.

  The third man swung around and raised his rifle, but he was too slow. Tom was upon him. Tom’s left hand held the rifle at bay while his right hand smashed the man’s throat. The man fell to the ground gasping for air, leaving his rifle in Tom’s shaking hand.

  Tom raised the rifle toward the Yankee fan, who had already taken aim at Tom. They paused. Breathing. Staring. Listening. A dragonfly flew between them and both men fired.

  Tom was clipped in the shoulder and screamed in pain. The Yankee fan stood unmoving with a hand held to his chest. Tom quickly regained his composure and raised his rifle a second time. But the Yankee fan stood still with a look of shock frozen on his face.

  “So it’s true,” the Yankee fan said with a smile, “You ah not a disciple.”

  The Yankee fan’s hand slipped from his chest, revealing an open wound. He fell to his knees and slumped over dead.

  Moans from the other three men writhing in the grass regained Tom’s attention. He aimed the rifle. One man raised his hands over his head and begged in his native tongue. Tom looked away from the men, toward the area of crushed grass where Megan’s body still lay. Tom took aim again and asked, “Do you believe as she did?”

  “W—what?”

  Tom pressed the rifle into the man’s head. “Do you believe as she did?”

  “No! No! We do not!”

  “Then, maybe I’ll see you in Hell.”

  The gunshots could be heard for miles away. Three. And then three more.

  That was all twenty years ago…today.

  —TWO—

  Precipice

  2005

  7:00 A.M.

  Arizona

  David Goodman knew what day it was. Tom told him the story ten years ago and David had since learned how to treat his partner on this day: just like every other day. As David threw away the soggy cereal he never got around to eating, he thought about Tom and wondered how a man who had no hope for the future, could bear the burden this day represented.

  Tom had thrown himself into his work since Megan’s death, but that was required of them both. David had never been married and probably never would be. He was fond of saying, “Fifteen hour days locked in a secret facility, six days a week aren’t exactly conducive to dating.”

  Whatever the case, they were each all the other had. The only variation in the pair’s schedule was that David drove forty miles every Sunday morning to attend the nearest church. Tom did not. God was often a source of heated debate.

  It was a topic David would attempt to avoid today. He quickly adjusted his paisley tie, slipped into his perfectly polished black shoes, attached his LightTech Industries ID card to his blazer and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked old. Older than he should. His blue eyes seemed to have faded nearly to gray. The crow’s feet stretching out from his eyes, which deepened when he smiled, looked good on Hollywood actors, but not on him. They made him feel old. He turned sideways and sucked in his gut. The old skinny David was in there somewhere, buried beneath a few inches of chub.

  With a sigh, David left his bedroom and grabbed a 20oz. bottle of Wild Cherry Pepsi from the fridge. With the recent addition of a breakfast soda, this had been his morning routine for the past fifteen years—as boring and stale a routine as the average person’s. But it never bothered David. Particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, black hole generators, heavily armed guards and secret tunnels kept the rest of David’s day a tad more interesting.

  As soon as David left the front door of his smooth, adobe home, the morning heat struck his head. David grumbled under his breath as his armpits instantly began to perspire. It took David ten years of Arizona heat before he had found a deodorant that could keep him dry. Last year they stopped selling it. He had never been fond of heat and even lobbied to have the whole operation moved to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The official LightTech response was a hearty laugh and pat on the shoulder.

  It took David ten seconds to walk from his air conditioned home to his burgundy Land Rover, which was parked as close to the front door as possible without crushing his collection of cacti. In years past, he parked the vehicle in the attached garage, but it had become so full of old computers and spare parts that there was little room to walk. He had considered cleaning out the garage on several occasions, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. The computers in the garage were part of his past—LightTech’s past—and if he and Tom succeeded, all of it would be part of history.

  David hopped into the Land Rover, slammed the door shut and glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. His neatly bearded face looked as if he had just run a race through the Australian outback during the rainy season. David wiped the sweat from his pasty, white forehead and felt glad that those ten seconds represented his daily time spent in the sun. He started the engine with a surge of gas and cranked the air to full, so that it blew his graying hair back and dried his skin.

  It took David five minutes to navigate through the LightTech owned and operated neighborhood. The neighborhood was the only visible group of buildings for twenty square miles and housed two thousand employees, from physicists to janitors. Tom was waiting by the sidewalk as usual.

  Tom was dressed casually, as he tended to, in blue jeans, a white T-shirt and an open, plaid, button-down shirt. Of course, LightTech had a dress code, but Tom had never cared about codes, rules or outside guidance. Besides, he knew they couldn’t fire him. He was too important. His eyes had narrowed over the years, his face was more carved and his cheeks were rough with stubble. David was sure Tom was going for a Clint Eastwood look, minus the gray hair—Tom’s
was still solid black and wavy. Tom had also managed to stay fit, which vexed David because he never saw the man exercise and they had similar diets.

  Seconds after Tom entered the SUV, David cracked open his Wild Cherry Pepsi, signifying the start of their morning banter.

  Tom looked at David with amused disgust. “You’re going to rot your teeth out,” he said.

  “What do you know?” David retorted with his thick Hebrew accent, dodging any real response.

  “I know that I’m going to keep my teeth longer than you,” added Tom, with a gleaming grin.

  “We’ve been friends since we both came to this country, what, fifteen years ago? Don’t presume to come between me and my true love,” David replied, as he took another swig.

  David and Tom were both born and raised in Israel. Their homes there were two miles apart, yet they had never met until LightTech hired them both. They came to America and both quickly adopted it as their home country. David had been sent to a prestigious private school from which he graduated top of his class, while Tom was home-schooled by his father, an ex-Rabbi, who no longer held the Jewish faith. David remembered their excitement in the early days, when freedom to do groundbreaking research in a privately owned facility was somewhat of a novelty.

  Tom smiled and leaned back into the plush leather interior of the Land Rover, enjoying the conversation. “And what if I do, old man? Will you cane me?”

  David fumed. “Cane you? I don’t use a—old man! I’m your senior by three years and you presume to call me ‘old man’?”

  “I suppose I presume too much?” asked Tom.

  David nodded as he sucked down some more cherry-flavored liquid sugar.

  “About as much as you use that word,” added Tom.

  “What word?”

  “Presume.”

  David shifted in his seat and said, “Don’t presume to tell me how to… Huh, I guess you’re right.”

  Tom smiled, “Aren’t I usually?”

  “Bah,” David blurted, “The only thing your brain is good for is quantum mechanics and attacking Chri—”

  David managed to stop his sentence short, but Tom’s jagged facial expression revealed he already knew how it ended. The silence that ensued was nerve-wracking. How could David forget! Of all the days… It was Tom who finally spoke, “Better step on the gas; we have to meet the bitch in a half hour.”

  David was immeasurably relieved that his transgression had done no permanent damage, and he gladly resumed his role in the conversation. “Language!” David shouted.

  “C’mon, David. You have to admit she’s—”

  “Just doing her job. I admit she’s forceful at times. I’m just saying, watch your tongue,” David said in his best patriarchal voice before taking another drag of soda. “You know, if you had all the responsibility she does, you might not be nice all the time either.”

  Tom looked at David, waiting for the punch line. “You’re serious?”

  David nodded and Tom laughed, relaxing and turning in his seat.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  The motor hummed and the crunching of soil beneath the tires rumbled for what felt like ten minutes, but was closer to ten seconds.

  “You’d be grouchy too, if you worked for you,” David stated.

  Tom raised an eyebrow and cracked a smile. David saw him. “You know what I mean!”

  Silence resumed as dust blew over the windshield, kicked up by a warm gust of wind.

  “What do you mean?” Tom asked.

  “You can be hard to deal with sometimes. That’s all I’m saying.” David guzzled some soda.

  Tom smiled, “Yes, well, at least I won’t be sucking my food through a straw soon.”

  David huffed and turned his full attention to the road.

  Tom watched David drive, smiling at his friend’s wrinkled brow, knowing that David would never give up his Pepsi habit, even if it did take his teeth. All of David’s convictions ran that deep. It was one of the things Tom liked most about David, but would never tell him. It reminded him of someone he knew once.

  * * * * *

  For miles in every direction, there was nothing but red dirt, craggy rock formations and deep blue sky. Dust sprayed up behind the Land Rover and covered the vehicle as it came to a stop in front of the only landmark for miles, a rundown wooden shack with a missing wall. The wooden structure looked as though a strong breeze could blow it over, but it had stood in this very spot for twenty years, never collecting dust, never losing a nail and never drawing any attention.

  David steered the Land Rover into the shack and put it in park. Tom and David unbuckled their seatbelts, leaned forward toward the windshield and continued a conversation already in progress, paying no attention to the loud clacks and whirs emanating from all around them.

  “All I’m saying is that I’m not sure,” Tom explained.

  “It will work. It’s our design,” David replied.

  “That’s what concerns me.”

  A small device, disguised to look like a knot of pine, lowered over the Land Rover’s hood from the shack’s ceiling. A shimmering green laser investigated the vehicle from top to bottom, front to back. The laser passed across the windshield and into the SUV. Tom and David looked forward, eyes wide open, allowing the laser to scan their facial features and retinas.

  “You know what you need?” David asked rhetorically. “Faith. Just a little would do you some good. You always have to see it, touch it, smell it, before you believe anything.”

  “It’s called science, David. It’s what we scientists are paid to do.”

  “You got here through science. I got here by faith,” David said with a wink and a smile.

  “Well then, should we go see what your faith has to say about the malleability of space-time?”

  “Gladly.”

  The laser disappeared, and the knot of pine retreated into the shack’s ceiling. Seconds later, a cloud of dust exploded up around the Land Rover and the ground beneath it lurched downward. Light poured out from under the ground in a circle so perfect, it might have been drawn by a compass. The light grew brighter as the platform, which the Land Rover rested on, moved downward.

  The vehicle descended into a bright, white, open cavern. The rounded walls were smooth, like the inside of an egg. The round platform was held aloft by a tall, white, hydraulic pole, which was disappearing into the floor, and four support cables strung from holes in the ceiling to the platform’s edges. Two hundred feet below, every make and model of vehicle, belonging to thousands of employees, filled the football-stadium sized parking lot.

  As they reached the first floor level, simply designated Parking Level One, they exited the Rover and left it with Fred, the wiry thin valet parking attendant. He had the physique and style sensibilities of a young Bill Gates, which was a common look for not just the scientists in the facility, but also the support staff. Aside from security, and Tom, most of the men working for LightTech, whether men of science or valets, perfectly fit the nerd stereotype.

  “Any news from the future?” Fred asked.

  “Not yet,” Tom replied, “We might be paddling up the quantum stream in the wrong direction.”

  Fred snorted gleefully. Even the parking attendants at LightTech Industries were smart enough to understand quantum humor. “Good one, Dr. Greenbaum.”

  “Not to worry, Fred,” David added, “Today is the day.”

  Fred brimmed with excitement. “Really?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Tom said, “Dr. Goodman here thinks we’ll succeed because he has faith and we all know faith is more important than science.”

  Fred laughed again and found an opportunity to brownnose, “Two for two, Dr. Greenbaum. Faith more important than science? Please.”

  David responded with a scowl directed toward Tom. Fred wished them well as they entered the complex through a pair of glass doors that were etched with the LightTech logo—three beams of light converging to a poi
nt to form a cone. Through the doors, they entered into a bright white tunnel that appeared to continue infinitely. Both men strolled fifty feet and stopped, seemingly for no reason.

  “Think she’s here yet?” David asked.

  “A snake can usually be found in its den.”

  “Especially when the snake has spent two billion dollars building the den,” David said with a smile.

  “She’s going to kill us if we don’t come through today,” Tom said, as he shook his head. “Two billion dollars on a project we proposed... We should have been salesmen.”

  David forced a grin. “We may still get our chance.”

  The illusion of an infinite hall faded away as the image turned milky and then solidified to reveal a single door, which opened automatically. Tom and David entered, the door closing behind them with a clunk and the hallway reverting to its never-ending appearance.

  Tom and David entered the control center, waving hello to fellow scientists bustling around the room and working at various computer consoles. The day had just begun and it was already a madhouse. The control center was a masterpiece of modern engineering and electronics, the science for which wouldn’t be available to the outside world for another twenty years. The walls and ceiling were rounded like a black half-shell amphitheater. Level after level of computers and workstations were staggered down the floor like an audience, all culminating in a sheet of four-foot thick glass separating the control center from Receiving Area Alpha. Light streamed from the grated floor like glowing square waffles, illuminating faces from below. David sometimes joked about how the lighting made the team look like they were about to start telling ghost stories.

  Descending down the center aisle, David and Tom headed for the wall of glass where Sally McField stood over the shoulder of a very nervous scientist. David thought Sally was beautiful in a power-suit kind of way. She stood six inches taller than him and her taut calf muscles hinted that a fit body hid beneath her masculine suits. He was often tempted to compliment the woman on her bunned black hair that hung straight when freed from the bun, or how the shade of maroon lipstick accentuated her full lips and softened the stern look of her frequently furrowed brow line, but he held his tongue for fear she might have him executed. Only one man dared ruffle her feathers.