The Fold: A Novel Part 11

More uncomfortable glances flitted around the table.

He sighed. "Look, I know none of you believe this, but I'm on your side. Reggie Magnus doesn't want to see you shut down. He needs an informed second opinion. That's it. But if n.o.body tells me anything, then I have to go back and tell him I didn't hear anything that rea.s.sured me."

"You saw the Door," said Olaf. "It works. What more do you want?"

"I want to know history. Maybe some design. A little bit of the science behind it."

"You wouldn't understand it."

"I might."

"We can get you some of that," said Arthur. "Neil could give you a tour of the machine." He looked to the bearded engineer for agreement.

"No problem," said Neil. He abandoned his notepad and rolled his chair out from the table.

"That'd be great," Mike said.

"Jamie," Arthur said, "could you show him Johnny?"

"Yeah, sure. Find me later this afternoon."

Mike bobbed his head. "What about records of all the crosswalks so far? Could I get those?"

Arthur glanced at Jamie again. She nodded. "I've got the basic reports somewhere, yeah," she said.

"Will that do for now?" asked Arthur.

"That's great," said Mike. "Thank you."

"I'll be in my office if you need anything else. The rest of you have your schedules."

The chairs rolled and spun as everyone got up. Mike caught a simmering glare from Olaf and then turned to find the bearded engineer standing next to him. "Hi," said Mike. "Neil, right?"

"Yep. Sorry we didn't talk yesterday." They shook hands and walked out of the conference room.

"No problem. I'm trying to ease my way in, as you probably noticed." Neil's lips twisted into a grin. "Good luck with that. You're the enemy, remember?"

"So I've heard. You worked on the Z Machine, out in New Mexico, didn't you?"

He gestured Mike down the hall. "With Gerry Yonas, yeah. You know your big machines, Mr. Erikson."

"Just Mike. One of the only things I had to read on the flight out was everyone's bios and work histories."

"Good memory, then."

"One of the best, so I'm told."

"Yeah. Bob wouldn't shut up about you."

"You guys were talking about me behind my back? How sweet."

The chief engineer swiped his card and pulled open the heavy door. "There's a bar up the street some of us go to after work sometimes. You were the main topic last night."

"Any details left I can fill in for you?"

"Is all the stuff he was saying true?"

"Yes it's true. I've only seen two episodes of Game of Thrones and never saw any of Breaking Bad or True Blood."

Neil smirked. "The other stuff."

Mike shrugged. "That's probably all true, too, but it's not half as interesting, believe me."

They paused, and Mike could see the rings just beyond a rack of electronics. Bob rolled a toolbox toward the rings while Sasha took a socket wrench to one of the off-white panels. The golden text on today's T-shirt proudly declared her to be Starfleet Academy's cadet of the month.

Neil turned to face him. "So how's it work?"

"How do you mean?"

"When I was a kid I read a book about a guy with photographic memory. He described it as this huge set of encyclopedias that he could page through."

Mike nodded. "I've heard it described that way. It's just...memory. How do you remember stuff?"

"Usually with a lot of repet.i.tion."

"Right," said Mike. "But once it's in there, do you do anything special? It's not in your conscious mind right now, but if I ask you when your birthday is, you know, right?"

"August twenty-third."

"So how'd you know that?"

Neil shrugged. "I just pulled it out."

"That's all it is for me. I just pull stuff out. Except I can pull out anything I've ever seen or heard."

"Can you tell me who won the nineteen fifty-five World Series?"

Mike sighed and black ants skittered around in his mind. "No."

"Why not?"

"I still need to know something first. I'm not a sports guy, and it's not like I try to read every article on Wikipedia in my spare time."

"I would," said Neil with a smile.

"No," Mike said, "believe me, you wouldn't."

Neil clicked his tongue and nodded. "Okay, then. What about school stuff? Who was Zachary Taylor's vice president?"

"Millard Fillmore. He took over when Taylor died in office, so he never had a vice president himself."

"Hamlet. What's the first line of act three, scene four?"

"The Queen's Closet scene," said Mike. "Polonius says, 'He will come straight.'"

"The Bible? Book of Judges, chapter twenty-three?"

"Is that a trick question? It's not school stuff, and there are only twenty-one chapters in Judges."

The engineer shrugged and grinned. "I was just pulling numbers out of my b.u.t.t, to be honest. Ready for your tour?"

"Please," said Mike.

The rings loomed before them. Bob and Sasha had removed a few of the plastic sh.e.l.l sections and were unbolting a large coupling. A replacement sat on the steel walkway near them, glinting in the light.

Mike glanced back. "Can I get closer?"

"Sure. You don't have a pacemaker or any surgical pins, do you?"

"None that I know of."

"Cool. Even shut off, this thing gives off a pretty strong magnetic field. About three and a half Tesla. It'd feel a little weird."

"And when it's turned on?"

"Then there's effectively two fields fighting each other. Remember that scene in X-Men, when Magneto rips all the iron out of the guy's blood?"

"Ouch." Mike bit back the instinct to correct Neil and point out the scene had been in the second movie. Fifty-seven minutes into it.

"Yep." Neil swung his hand along the swath of paint on the floor. "It's not quite that bad, but if we're up and running and you step past the white line there, you'll know it. We need to replace components constantly because the fields ruin them."

"How much can you tell me about their construction?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything, I guess."

"I can't tell you much about how it works, just about how it's built. Although there's a lot I'll have to skim over because of our agree-"

"I know." Mike waved his hand. "Just tell me what you can."

Neil nodded. "The core of each one of the rings is composed of depleted uranium," he said. "It's a ma.s.s-density thing. Not really part of my field, but very important. There's almost a ton of it between the four rings. Can't tell you much more about that."

"Don't worry about it."

"Cool. The core is sheathed in lead, which serves as our superconductor base material. Those silver tubes there and there? That's where the liquid nitrogen circulates in and out."

Neil pointed at the area where Bob and Sasha had removed the off-white plating. "The next layer you can actually see there, right under the carapace. That's the copper wiring. ETP copper, ninety-nine-point-nine-seven percent pure, single strand, four gauge. We have to special order it, and there's almost six miles in each mouth, letting them-"

"Mouth?"

Neil nodded. "These two rings are our mouth. The other mouth, two identical rings, is over in Site B. For the record, the two sets are almost perpendicular to each other, but that has nothing to do with how the bridge forms. It was just s.p.a.ce restrictions in each building."

"Got it." Mike nodded. "Why call them mouths?"

"Mouth of a tunnel. You couldn't work that out?"

"Sometimes I just like asking questions."

Neil smirked. "As I was saying, just shy of six miles of copper wire in each mouth, allowing them to generate a continuous electromagnetic field in the forty-six Tesla range, about thirteen times what your standard MRI machine does."

"Is that big?"

"The only comparable magnets are at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. They've got a hybrid that's a bit smaller, strength-wise, but it's continuous. The best we can manage with our arrangement is just under two minutes. Ninety-three seconds. When this baby's turned on, it eats up about one-point-four megawatt hours in ninety-three seconds."

"Megawatt hours?"

"Yeah. According to Olaf, when the Albuquerque Door is open, it uses as much electricity per minute as the island of Manhattan. I think he's exaggerating a bit, though."

"Not really an energy-efficient way to travel."

Neil shrugged. "Neither are SUVs, but that hasn't stopped anyone. Besides, if Arthur and Olaf are right, energy usage is a constant. It has nothing to do with how far you travel."

"So it costs the same amount to go to Site B as it does to go to Tokyo," said Mike.

"Yeah. Or the Moon. Or the Andromeda galaxy. The only real limit is how long we can keep the rings chilled. If all the funding goes through, we're going to try setting up the other mouth in D.C."

"Jamie mentioned that you get power spikes."

"We did until I built those." He gestured at a trio of solid boxes, each the size of a small refrigerator. "They've cut down on them a lot. Believe it or not, they're just huge resistors. We had to custom build them to keep induction and noise to a bare minimum."

"Why are the rings that size?"

"What do you mean?"

Mike gestured up at the machinery. "The inside diameter's just over seven feet, yes?"

"Two hundred twenty-one and a half centimeters," called out Sasha.

"Right," said Mike. "But why aren't they three hundred or five hundred? Why not build one big enough to drive a truck through?"

She shrugged. "Because that's how big the blueprints said to make them."

"Olaf worked out the math for a larger Door," said Neil. "This size was the most efficient for our work. It's a balance of power requirements for the electromagnets and the size of the field they generate."

Mike nodded. "And you're sure it's safe?"

"One hundred sixty-eight tests so far and not one problem."