The Fold: A Novel Part 9

He shook his head. "Whatever makes you comfortable. I just don't want you thinking you need to act this way around me."

She smiled.

"Jesus!" said someone. "You've been here three hours and you're already hitting on my woman?"

Mike turned to see the red-haired physicist at the hallway entrance, smiling. He glanced back, and Anne rolled her eyes. It was a perfect eye-roll, a careful balance of fed up and flirty, seasoned with just enough amus.e.m.e.nt. "I didn't realize the two of you were-"

"We're not," said Anne, turning back to her desk.

"Another rejection," said Bob. "Y'know, I can only take thirty or forty more."

"Good thing you've got your girlfriend to fall back on, then." Anne punctuated her sentence with a look that said the joke was done for the day. She had very expressive eyes.

Bob bowed his head and shifted his focus to Mike. "Arthur's given me tour guide duty for the day. Ready to see your new home away from home?"

"Actually, can we go see it again? The Door?"

"Sure. We can cut through the lab to the trailer park."

Mike waved goodbye to Anne but she'd already sunk back into work. He and Bob wandered down the hall. Mike took his new ID for its first test drive, and the square door opened with a click.

The air on the main floor was a good five or six degrees cooler than the rest of the building. The huge room was deserted. The silent shape of the Albuquerque Door loomed at the center of the chamber. Mike gazed at the rings as they walked past.

"What does it feel like? When you go through."

Bob said nothing.

Mike glanced at him. "What it feels like is a trade secret?"

"It doesn't feel like anything, to be honest."

"Nothing? No visual effects? No dizziness? Not even a tingle from the electromagnetic fields?"

"Nope. There is one thing, but it's not internal."

"What?"

"D'you ever walk into a big store in the summer, and they've got the air conditioning vents right at the doors, pointing straight down?" He mimed an archway around himself with his hands. "Y'know, you walk in and there's just this instant, blasting temperature change. And then you walk past it and everything's normal again?"

Mike nodded.

"That's kind of what crosswalking feels like, but no temperature change. Just this sudden whoof that tells you you're somewhere else now. Even if your eyes are closed, you can tell the moment you've crossed."

"Crosswalking?"

"Yeah. No pun intended, but I think he kind of likes it."

They walked down a pa.s.sage of electronics and power gauges, past a pair of closet doors to a fire exit. Bob hit the crash bar and glaring sunlight blasted into the lab. "We cut the alarm lines months ago," he explained, nodding at the red and white stickers on the door. "It shaves a few minutes off the trip home every night."

Behind the building was a gravel pit. Eight office trailers stretched across it in a double row. They were gray and bland, and Mike could glimpse curtains and sheets hanging in the small windows. A few hundred yards past the trailers stood another industrial-looking structure, newer than the main building. It looked like a cross between a warehouse and an aircraft hangar. The only thing that made it stand out was the seven foot tall "B" someone had painted along one side.

"That's where the other machine is?" asked Mike.

Bob glanced over. "Yeah. Site B. We've got a couple bicycles and a golf cart that run back and forth between them, if you're ever in a rush. Your card should get you in over there, too. And that's the trailer park," he said, waving at the double row of blocks. "Home away from home for those of us working on the Albuquerque Door."

"They provide living quarters for everyone?"

"Sort of. The trailers were just for storage, or a place to crash if someone worked really late and didn't want to drive home. Then about two years ago, Olaf staked one off as his personal s.p.a.ce and just moved in. It gave him two or three extra hours a day, and by the end of the month he was so far ahead, the rest of us did, too."

"How long have you been with the project?"

"Four years," Bob said as they crunched across the gravel. "I joined up about a year before the SETH project folded, right out of grad school."

"And now you all live here?"

"Well, I moved in for real a little over a year ago. Got rid of my place in Pacific Beach and just brought everything here. The trailer's free and it's bigger than my old apartment. Arthur lives up in La Jolla with his wife in his big book-money mansion."

"Really?"

Bob grinned. "No. But it's a real house and it's in La Jolla, so it wasn't cheap."

Someone had rolled out carpets of green Astroturf between the double row. The plastic gra.s.s rustled under their shoes. It was a welcome contrast to all the gravel.

"Nice touch," said Mike.

"Yeah. I think Sasha found it somewhere. On the off chance it rains, be careful. This stuff's cheap, so it gets slippery, and it's all just gravel underneath."

"That sounds like the warning of someone who's fallen."

"Twice," said Bob. He pointed at the trailer in front of them. "Neil's is there, but he's got a wife and kids up in Oregon, so he's not really 'living' here." His fingers slid along the row. "That one's me, right behind him. Olaf next to him. Jamie and Sasha have the two on the end, so they can have a bit of privacy."

"Oh," said Mike. "I didn't realize they were a couple."

"They're not, sorry. Well, Sasha is. Not with Jamie, though. Jamie's just...well she's a bit...abrasive, y'know? Sasha's on the end, Jamie's on the..." He paused and shook his head. "d.a.m.n, no. Jamie's on the end, Sasha's on the left."

"And one of these is mine?"

Bob nodded. "We had the cleaning crew freshen up the one next to Olaf for you. Congratulations, you're a buffer."

"Lucky me."

"It won't be that bad unless he's listening to opera."

"He's an opera fan?"

"Opera and running, but I'd swear he just does the opera to be annoying." The redhead unlocked the trailer. "You're going to be here awhile, I guess?"

Mike shrugged. "A few weeks, in theory. Maybe a month or two. I guess we'll see."

Bob tossed him the keys. "Magnus wouldn't spring for a hotel?"

"I think he wanted me close to everything."

Inside was gray. Gray carpet holding up gray walls decorated with gray cabinets. Dull bungee cords held a folding cot shut in the far corner. In the nearer one, a gray office phone sat on the floor. The only spot of contrast was an oversized black roach trap halfway along the wall. "You've just got the basics," Bob explained. "If you want a mini fridge or some more furniture, we can probably scavenge something up for you. And there's a few thrift shops up on Clairemont Mesa and a Target on Balboa."

"I think it's bigger than my old apartment, too."

"It's not bad, really, for a free place. Olaf has no life, the rest of the guys are pretty quiet, and I'm gone a lot on weekends."

"Miniature war games?"

"Complete geek, yes," said Bob with a grin. Honest smiles were hard to come by, Mike realized. "Who told you?"

In Mike's mind, a few red ants slipped into the colony of black ants. "There's some paint under the fingernails of your right hand, but you're left-handed," he said. "That tells me you were painting something while you held it. Two different color paints, both shades of red, implies fine detail work of some sort. I already knew someone here played Warhammer games from the license plates on the Mini out front, so it wasn't much of a leap."

"No, of course not, Mr. Holmes," said Bob. "You want help with your bags and stuff?"

"I wouldn't turn it down, thanks."

"Do you play 40K?" Bob asked as they stepped back out on the deck.

Mike shook his head. "Some of my students do. I looked through a couple of the books, so I could a.s.sure parents the afterschool gaming group wasn't some kind of cult or fight club. And it's fun to watch tanks driving over the scale model of the town."

The redhead laughed and guided them across the Astroturf and toward the side of the building. "The door's a pain to open from this side," he explained. "The path leads right up to the lobby entrance and the parking lot."

"What's that?"

Bob followed his eyes. Just past the spare trailer on the end was a small wooden cross. A few stone tiles were arranged in front of it.

"The dog?"

"You heard?"

"Arthur said it died instantly."

"Yeah," the redhead said with a nod. "Faster, if that's possible. We just wanted to do something, make sure he got remembered."

"You always this attached to lab animals?"

"Laika was just a lab animal, if you think about it," said Bob. "People write whole books about her, and she only went into a loose orbit on Sputnik 2. Tramp went through the fabric of reality and came out the other side."

Mike walked over to the grave. The word TRAMP was written in Magic Marker on the pale wood. The soil was loose, as if someone had weeded it out.

The redhead took a few more steps up the path and glanced back. "It was a failure, but if he hadn't died, we'd've never started following this path. We wouldn't have the Albuquerque Door."

He sensed Bob's desperate desire to change the subject. "So they built this whole complex just for you guys?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l no." Bob shook his head. He waved his hand up at the concrete structure. "They built Site B, but back in the seventies this place used to be a Jack in the Box processing plant. They expanded into a bigger building, and then I think it was used as a warehouse for a while. The government grabbed it up right after Nine-Eleven and it got handed off to SETH back in...late two-thousand-eight, I think."

Mike glanced up at the building as they came out into the parking lot. "Jack in the Box? The fast food chain?"

"Yup. Our control room was part of their marketing office or something like that. The main floor was the meat processing area."

Mike smiled. "No symbolism there."

"It's been brought up," said Bob.

ELEVEN.

Mike debated leaving everything in his bags, but figured it would make a better impression if he unpacked. It took him half an hour to transfer his clothes into the cabinets and spread his shaving kit around the bathroom sink. He heard footsteps and voices outside, and saw Neil and Sasha. They ignored his trailer and headed for their own.

His stomach reminded him that he hadn't eaten a meal since Logan Airport back in Boston. He'd pa.s.sed eleven restaurants and franchises on the way to the complex, but the closest one was almost two miles away. He thought about using the new smartphone Reggie had equipped him with to find somewhere closer, but he didn't want to start getting dependent on it. Or addicted. It took him ten minutes to find the Wendy's two streets up. He put lots of salt and pepper on his fries and ate his chicken sandwich alone at a table.

Then he was back at the gray trailer.

Part of him wanted to go through the reports he'd been given and start comparing them to what he'd seen. The ants itched at his mind. They were eager to mix, to bring the elements together and watch them seethe.

Part of him missed his little apartment. And his summer job down in York, doing maintenance work on the rides at the Wild Kingdom amus.e.m.e.nt park. And nights just staring out at the Atlantic while the tourists walked around him.

Then the computer tablet chimed from his pillow. He sat on the edge of the cot, tapped his thumb against the screen, and was shown a picture of Reggie's face with his office behind him. "Hey," said the picture, "it's me."

"Yeah, I know," Mike said. "I'm looking at you."

"Just trying to be polite."

"You're there late."

"Some of us work for a living. You have a good flight?"

"It was okay. Finally got to see the new Hobbit movie. Read some of the files you gave me."

"Some?"

"All."

"Stop holding back. I'm counting on you for this."

"Yeah, I know," said Mike. He thought of his quiet cla.s.sroom, almost three thousand miles away, filled with books he hadn't read in years. "Trying to break a lifetime of bad habits."

"Got your car?"