"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

When the private deposited Bill at his door, the man hesitated and said: 'Uh, sir, what the captain said about the showers -- '
Bill smiled at the boy. He seemed hardly more than a year or two older than Ben. 'That's all right, son, I know.'
'The rain -- '
'Really, I quite understand. My friend the captain has a distorted sense of humour.'
The private smiled uncertainly.
To Bill's delight, he found a tray waiting for him when he emerged from the shower, replete with ham, flapjacks, maple syrup, a tall glass of orange juice, and a pot of coffee. A serviceman had bundled up his sweaty shirt and underclothes, and laid out fresh garments. The new shirt was white, and in the correct size. Someone had been doing some forward planning.
'Sir, the general conveys his compliments and would like you to make yourself familiar with this information before the conference begins.' The soldier handed him a sealed package. 'If you need anything at all, sir, there's a buzzer by the door.'
'Fine.' The moment the door was closed Bill threw the package on the bed and sat in front of his breakfast. He scoffed the orange juice (freshly squeezed!) and single-mindedly pushed food into his face. Belching, he got out of his towel and into his clothes, opened the seals, poured another cup of coffee, and sat back on the bed to read. His face still felt hot and tight, but the electrical flicker had gone.
The document had been printed on premier stock, bound sturdily, and stamped SITUATION REPORT in gold. Much of it bristled with hideous equations. Bill stopped flicking the pages and started in at the beginning. He skimmed the historical resume Hugh Lapp had covered, but forgot his coffee when he hit the details on Uluru.
The events following the discovery and exploration of Selene Alpha moved straight into tragedy. A year earlier, and a little more than five kilometres from where he now sat, the search for the alien base on earth triggered a totally unexpected disaster.
The map on the moon had shown that the aliens of Selene Alpha were deeply interested in Uluru. Yet the Rock itself was nothing more than a monolith of hardened sandstone rising almost vertically 348 metres above a virtually barren desert plain that extended for more than 150 kilometres. It was little more than an enormous mound but its size was startling: nearly nine kilometres around the perimeter.
The Oligocene hologram showed it as an eroded pyramid. Clearly, it had been there for scores of millions of years before Alpha was built on the moon.
Had it been carved into that shape? The conjecture seemed insane, but it led to testable hypotheses. Perhaps an alien base might exist inside the Rock, like the tombs of pharaohs found buried deep inside pyramids. X-rays were not powerful enough to penetrate such a massive outcrop. Instead, the team employed natural radiation: cosmic rays pouring down isotropically from space, solar neutrinos detectable in huge tanks of industrial tetrachloroethylene. Such techniques were fairly new and presented great practical difficulties, but eventually one essential fact was established. Uluru was solid stone.
Yet the aliens had marked the place distinctively. Assuming a ground installation existed, it had to be under the Rock. The research crew began concentrated probing of the deep strata.
As the probes echoed back from 2500 metres the twenty one men at the instrumentation post died in a single explosion. Their equipment fused into melted desert sand.
The data they had been telemetering out, however, showed results at the moment of the explosion. There was a mass discontinuity at 2.8 kilometres. The Vault.
Nor did tragedy close there. Cautiously, heavy machinery was brought in to begin drilling an access tunnel. Another ten men died confirming that the Vault would not tolerate substantial electromagnetic activity in its immediate vicinity.
A raft of speculations had been advanced to account for that effect. Bill found most of it, as described in the Situation Report, utterly beyond his grasp. The best bet seemed to lie in Lennox Harrington's realm. Most phenomena in the universe, perhaps all, appeared to be generated by a limited number of underlying symmetrical interactions. But that symmetry was not visible; it was 'broken spontaneously', and expressed itself in radically variant forms. The Vault suspended symmetry-breaking between two forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity.
'I can't stand it,' Bill said aloud. He put down the report and went for a piss. For a moment he regarded the buzzer, and wondered if he could persuade someone to bring him a drink. It seemed unlikely. The coffee had gone tepid, but he refilled his cup anyway. Groaning, he picked up the report.
By pretending the equations weren't there, he managed to get some sense out of it. The Vault unkinked kinks. But only in the presence of electromagnetic fields, charges in motion. The fields suffered a 'gauge glitch'. Maybe it's like a laser, he thought, and the power comes from the Vault. EM forces suddenly thought they were weak nuclear forces, and multiplied. Nuclear protons turned into neutrons, emitting positrons and neutrinos. Neutrons did the reverse. The beta-particles, plus and minus, got together fast and annihilated, turning into gamma showers of hard radiation. The neutrinos and antineutrinos ran off at the speed of light. In a brief, lurid flash, flesh and metal and glass and plastic convulsed in radioactive meltdown.
It was appalling. However it managed it, the Vault was a killer. But only if you offended it with electromagnetic fields, or by venturing into its proximate defence zone. That last, it seemed, was optional. The child and his uncle had come through unscathed. Others who'd breached the zone had left it babbling, and were now full of fluphenazine. Three had come out only mildly dazed; sent in again, they'd died instantly. It didn't make any sense, but it looked as if there were rules.
There was a knock at Bill's door. The astronaut came into the small room. He had a black wiry man with him, apparently another civilian.
'Sorry for the delay.' Hugh glanced at the remains on the tray. 'Just as well you've eaten, it could be a long session.'
'When can I see the kid?'
'Later today, maybe. He's scribbling again. It's almost as though we wound him up. Or he heard the jet arriving. Bill, this is Alf Dean, the guy who teleported into the Vault.'
'Hi.' Bill regarded the Australian with interest. It had not occurred to him that Dean had joined the team. Given the man's gruelling ordeal, he'd assumed Dean had been flown out for medical and psychiatric treatment. 'Tell me, Alf, have you noticed any peculiar sensory effects since you were brought out of the Vault?'
'I spent several days hallucinating pretty wildly, if that's what you mean. They tell me I was rather sick.' Slumped in the doorway Alf Dean still looked ill.
'Sure. More specifically -- when you were back on your feet, did you notice anything when you were in the vicinity of electrical equipment?'
The anthropologist considered him warily. 'Yeah, for a while. Flickers of light, a sort of, uh, visual hum. I was worried about epilepsy for a few days. How did you know?'
'The same thing happened to me after I came out of the gluon field. Hugh?'
The astronaut shook his head. 'Believe me, I would have hollered.'
Bill tucked the Situation Report under his arm. 'Let's not keep the general waiting, or they'll cancel our leave.'
The conference room was long and dull, furnished in pale Scandinavian dreck. Half a dozen men lounged at a table bearing briefing folders, pads and felt-tipped pens, jugs of orange juice, classy notepads. A huge flat-screen monitor stood in one corner next to a shredder and color copier.
Sevastyianov rose from a foam-and-blonde-wood armchair as they entered. 'Gentlemen, I would like you to welcome Dr Bill delFord, whose field of competence is altered states of consciousness.' A restrained mutter of welcome. The Russian gestured around the table as the three men found their places, naming names. A couple were recognisable; one was electrifying. A grey-bearded civilian studied the newcomers with focused, intent intelligence, pushing his glasses more firmly to the bridge of his nose. Victor Fedorenko, Bill thought, impressed. The man everyone was tipping for the Nobel in physics, following his astounding experimental success in proving the reality of faster than light non-local connectivity. Not to mention his much-publicised criticism of the continuing racism and thuggery in Russia, and corruption at the highest levels. They must have needed him badly, Bill thought.
'Let us begin this morning's session with a review of the group trial under the gluon shield. Dr delFord, you have the floor.'
Bill stuck to the facts, and was brief. He remained unsure of the connection between the Vault enigma and the experience he'd shared with Anne and Hugh. Presumably the Caltech field was seen as a diminutive version of the Vault's primary defences. His report evoked animation in the men before him.
'Sounds like the stuff we got from the guys who came out of the Vault with their wires crossed,' said one of them. 'Except that they stayed that way. Bill, you seem to be relating this to your previous research. Can you amplify that point?'
DelFord glanced at the general. 'Is this the right moment to -- ?'
'Go ahead, doctor. Until Mr Lapp suggested your special expertise might be helpful, I do not believe any of us had heard of out-of-body-experience. Personally, I must confess that I am still highly sceptical.'
Someone hummed the _X Files_ theme. The astronaut winked at Bill. You bastard, delFord thought with some affection.
'Okay, I don't blame you. The study of OOBEs isn't new, but it's been dogged by crackpots. It got a boost in the right direction a couple decades back, when some of us were awarded the estate of a miner named James Kidd who'd set up a bequest to investigate survival after death.'
There was a snort from further down the table.
'Don't blame me, brother, I'm an agnostic. The fact is, though, a hell of a lot of people have reported the experience of, well, physically leaving their bodies and trucking around the neighbourhood with nothing on but their souls. Fallout from our tank experiments in sensory deprivation and overload led us to correlate the details. We found considerable consistency from astonishingly diverse sources.'
'Sergeyev's bio-plasmic body hypothesis,' said a heavily accented Russian voice. 'The Kirlians proved that long ago.'
'Wrong,' said Bill. 'Radiation field photography is completely irrelevant. The so-called "aura" is the creation of fields applied externally, with a lot of volts.'
'Corona discharge,' said Lapp. 'The air molecules are ionised, and get mixed up with organic crap and out-gassing. I thought,' he added with a satirical scowl, 'your commie atheists would have got on to that back in the good old days when you _had_ commie atheists.'
Bill cut them both off before a dispute could get started. 'Let's stick to OOBEs for the moment. My Institute has concluded provisionally that some cases of "astral projection", as it used to be called, are authentic. We've had people identify distant places in great detail while they experienced projection. And the vital signs agree. We get decrease in alpha rhythms, and a drop in electrical activity in the occipital or visual cortex. The greater decrease is in the right hemisphere, where most ESP data seems to be handled.'
'Damn, it does correlate. We found the same states from EEG printouts on the guys from the Vault.'
Alf Dean said, 'The same thing has happened with Mouse. They get a drastic reduction in his EEG when he's in trance.'
Bill sat back, and poured himself an orange juice. Christ, I've got to get my hands on that kid, he told himself. An engineer began a droning report on the status of some new protective clothing his group was testing, aimed at the paramount task of getting a man into the Vault, and out again, without poaching his brains. His attention drifting, Bill became conscious of the white buzz, the flicker hazing the table. A recording system, he decided. The absence of a secretarial flunkey had surprised him, but of course these days the tapes went direct to secure word processors. He gazed along the table. That sleek prick LowenthaI, the psychologist, looked away. The bastard thinks I'm a madman, Bill thought with a breath of anger. My god, the ancient Egyptians knew more about OOBEs than that Skinner rat freak. I wonder what the aborigines thought about it? They were here long enough. 'Shit,' he said, lurching up in his seat.