Ghost Country tc-2 Page 5

  He watched. Bethany watched.

  Nothing happened.

  The black disc just hovered there at the end of the projected beam.

  It wasn't reflective, Travis noticed. The way they were sitting, with large windows full of daylight spanning half the room, a reflective surface would have bounced nothing but glare at their eyes. A glass-screened television, positioned like the disc, would've been impossible to watch.

  But the disc bounced nothing. It was no more reflective than cloth. And even cloth would've picked up plenty of the room's light and appeared much brighter than true black. It would've looked gray, no matter how dark it was colored.

  The disc was simply and purely black.

  Only one explanation came to Travis's mind.

  "Holy shit," Bethany said.

  Travis turned and saw that she'd drawn the same conclusion he had, and at the same moment.

  For a few seconds neither spoke.

  Then Travis stood from the couch. The move was almost involuntary. The couch cushion responded to the sudden loss of his weight on it, and as it rose, some of its movement transferred to the middle cushion, where the cylinder rested. Travis saw the black disc-or what looked like a disc-bob up and down a few inches as the light cone shifted and settled. It happened again a second later when Bethany stood.

  Travis moved forward. He gave the cone of light a wide berth as he went. He saw Bethany do the same on her side. Then she drew a sharp breath and stopped. Travis looked at her.

  Her hair was moving in a steady breeze, though none of the windows in the suite were open. She turned her face directly into the slipstream of air, which was at least as strong as a current driven by a table fan. The wind appeared to be coming from the disc itself. But that wasn't exactly true.

  Because it wasn't a disc.

  It was an opening. T ravis felt the rational parts of his mind gradually coming back to life after their initial freeze-seeing the impossible could have that effect. Now as the seconds drew out he found himself trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Whatever sense could be made of it.

  The projection was an opening. A hole in midair. Like a doorway between rooms. On this side was the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. On the other side was-what, exactly?

  The wind through the opening continued blowing Bethany's hair around. It ruffled the fabric of her shirt. Her expression was nearly blank, as if she wasn't sure yet what to feel. Travis imagined his own looked similar.

  He took another step forward. It put him two feet away from the opening. He could reach it from here. Could reach through it, if he wanted to.

  Being closer to it made no difference in its appearance. Still black. Like an open window on a moonless night, seen from inside a brightly lit room.

  Bethany came closer on her own side. So far neither of them had put so much as a hand into the projection beam.

  The angled windstream was still mostly affecting Bethany, but Travis could feel the edge of it, too, at this distance.

  Bethany spoke, just above a whisper. "What's over there?"

  Travis could only shake his head.

  Whatever the place was, it had to be outdoors. There was wind there. And it was nighttime, which narrowed the location down to half the Earth at any given moment.

  Assuming the place on the other side was on Earth.

  Travis wondered if the air coming through was safe to breathe. Probably too late to worry about it, if it wasn't.

  And it hadn't killed the test animals in Border Town. Travis suddenly understood what they'd been used for. Paige and the others had put them through the opening, to test the safety of crossing the threshold.

  He glanced at Bethany and saw her staring through into the darkness, eyes narrowed, no doubt thinking all the same things he was.

  She turned to him. "Remember the end of the phone call? Paige said something like, 'You can go through and come back.' She practically screamed it."

  Travis nodded.

  The wind through the opening shifted a bit toward him. He felt it tug at the arms of his T-shirt. It also gave him the scent of the place on the other side-a number of scents. Strong vegetation smells: pine boughs, dead leaves, ripe apples, all of it sharp and crisp on a wind that was maybe ten degrees cooler than the air-conditioned hotel room. The other side of the opening felt and smelled like an autumn night in the country.

  "What location on Earth right now would have a climate like fall in the northern United States?" Travis said.

  Bethany thought about it. She shrugged. "Maybe western Canada, a few hundred miles up the coast from Seattle. I really don't know. It would still be dark there, for what it's worth."

  Travis took another breath of the chilly wind.

  "It doesn't make sense," he said. "Even if it really is an opening to someplace thousands of miles away-as impressive as that is-what could Paige and the others have learned from this thing? What could anyone learn from it that they couldn't learn by just flying to wherever it leads?"

  "There must be more to it than we're thinking," Bethany said.

  Travis nodded. There had to be. And they weren't going to find out what it was by just standing here. T ravis turned and looked around. There was a leather-bound room service menu on the nearest end table. He crossed to it, picked it up and came back to where he'd been standing beside the opening.

  He held the menu by one end. He put the other end into the projected cone of light. It blocked a big chunk of the beam, maybe a third or more. That portion of the light no longer reached the black opening.

  But the opening was unaffected.

  In a way it was the most surreal thing Travis had seen yet. It was like sticking your hand into the beam of a movie projector, seeing the shapes of your fingers cast down the length of the light-but seeing no shadow on the screen.

  "It makes sense," Bethany said. "They'd have to build it so that the hole stayed open, even if part of the beam were blocked. Otherwise, think about it: you'd block the beam with your body before you could climb through the opening."

  Travis wondered how much of the beam could be cut off before the opening failed. Keeping the menu in the light cone, he moved it slowly toward the couch. Toward the cylinder's lens, and the narrow part of the beam.

  He watched the opening as he did it. Watched the rectangle of blocked-out light grow until it was well over half of the beam. Then three fourths. The opening showed no effect at all. It didn't so much as flicker.

  It stayed that way until only a sliver of blue light reached the hole. Maybe five percent of the total. When Travis blocked it further, the opening vanished. At the same time the projected light on the leather menu began to flash symbols in the same text that was engraved on the cylinder. Maybe it said obstruction error. Maybe it said stop blocking the light, asshole. Travis pulled the menu out of the way and the opening immediately reappeared.

  He pressed his other hand to the menu. It felt as cool to the touch as when he'd picked it up. He held it close to his eyes and tilted it so that the gleam of sunlight showed him the surface in detail. It didn't appear damaged.

  He went back to the opening. He still held the menu. He shared a look with Bethany: Here goes.

  He put the menu fully into the cone of light, and then he put half of it through the hole in the air.

  It met no resistance. The leading half of the menu simply went through, as if the opening were no more than a hole in a wall, with a darkened room on the far side. They could still see the entire menu. It was right there with them-even if part of it was also far, far away from them, in the night air of some rural place halfway around the world.

  Travis drew it back into the room and tossed it onto an armchair a few feet away.

  He turned back to Bethany. "Unless you know a place in D.C. to get lab mice, I'm out of things to try."

  "I think we're the lab mice at this point."

  Chapter Nine

  They closed all the drapes in the suite's livi
ng room and shut the doors to the adjoining areas. The resulting near darkness allowed their eyes to adjust a little, but it made no difference as far as the opening was concerned. The place on the other side still looked pitch-black.

  Travis stepped into the projected beam of light and faced the hole directly. If the blue light had any effect where it shone on his back, he couldn't feel it. Even the exposed skin on his neck and arms felt normal.

  Travis stood there a moment and let the wind rush over him. He closed his eyes. He listened. Behind him he could hear the ambience of D.C., even through the closed windows of the suite. The rumble of traffic. The beeping of some kind of construction vehicle on a build site. The drone of a propeller aircraft.

  But there were sounds coming from in front of him too, through the opening. Night sounds of insects and maybe frogs. They were very faint. He hadn't noticed them earlier. He tried to isolate them now. The sounds seemed to come from only a few point sources, far away in the darkness. Which made sense. If it'd been a summer night on the other side, the chorus of insect song would've been overwhelming. Literally billions of tiny noisemakers within the nearest mile, any one of them loud enough to be heard at a distance. But the location on the other side of the opening-Canada or wherever it might be-was long past its local summer. The night air called to mind the trailing edge of the living season, when most things had already gone to ground or simply died off. Travis had the sense that he was listening to the region's last few holdouts. A few nights from now, even those would probably be silenced, and there would be nothing but the dead quiet of the oncoming winter.

  Travis put his hand through the opening.

  In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany flinch a little, even though she'd expected the move.

  His hand felt fine.

  He lowered it to the bottom edge of the hole, but stopped just shy of touching it. He wondered what the margin was like. Was it a kind of blade-edge between the space on this side and the space on the other? If he ran his hand into it, would it pass right through, cutting his fingers off and dropping them away into the darkness over there? It seemed like Paige would've warned them about something like that, but she hadn't had a lot of time to go into details.

  Travis was tempted to grab the bound menu again and test the edge of the hole with it. Instead he lowered his hand another inch, slowly, ready to retract it.

  His fingers settled onto a smooth, rounded edge. Like the tubing of a hula hoop. It was cool and rigid as steel. Travis applied a few pounds of force to it. It didn't budge. Strange-the cylinder's movement on the couch a few minutes earlier had made the opening bob up and down easily, but the opening itself couldn't be moved by direct force against it. It was as fixed as a hole cut into an iron wall.

  Travis ducked and leaned his upper body through the hole, into the night on the other side.

  At once he saw what'd been impossible to see from inside the suite: a sky shot full of stars, sharp and clear in the unhindered darkness. The hazy band of the Milky Way defined a long arc from one horizon to the other. A crescent moon hung like a blade, an hour from setting or having risen-Travis wasn't sure which. But it was definitely the same moon he'd grown up under. He was staring at a nightscape somewhere on Earth, at least.

  His eyes were already adjusting to the dark, much deeper on this side of the opening than in the suite, even with the drapes closed.

  As the seconds drew out he began to discern details in the night around him, both near and distant. He saw the canopy of a forest, the treetops maybe twenty feet below his viewpoint. Spires of pine trees and the rough curves of hardwoods, all of them pale in the faint light of the moon.

  There were other shapes, but he couldn't make sense of them. Strange geometric forms, like huge scaffolding assemblies or bamboo towers, jutted up from the forest here and there. The light was too poor to offer any detail about them. Even their distances were hard to gauge. Travis looked down and saw the footings of one of the structures right below. Its complex form rose into the darkness just behind his position.

  The only other shape he could resolve was something very tall and narrow, and solid in appearance, standing on the horizon at least a mile away. Its height was imposing even at that distance: it towered above the trees, easily five times their height. He focused on it but could perceive no detail beyond its bulk and rough size. He thought of an enormous smokestack rising from a factory complex. The problem was that there was no smoke, and no factory, either, unless all its lights were shut off.

  He saw movement in his peripheral vision and then Bethany was there, leaning into the darkness beside him. He edged over a few inches to give her room.

  For a moment they just stood there in silence, side by side. They listened to the night. Travis looked at the moon again and judged that it was higher than when he'd first seen it. The crescent was very narrow, which meant the sun couldn't be far below the horizon. Dawn was no more than an hour away, though there was no hint of it yet.

  "I've never seen any place this dark," Bethany said. "There's not the least bit of light pollution on the horizon. We'd have to be over a hundred miles from even a mid-sized town for it to look like this. But at the same time it's a place where people have built large structures, whatever these are. And whatever that is." She waved a hand to indicate the towering form in the distance. "It has to be forty stories tall. Maybe taller." She was quiet for a moment and then she turned to him. "Where the hell are we?"

  Travis had no answer. He had a vague notion that it could be a military installation, built in remote wilderness out of concern for public safety or-more likely-secrecy. But why would an alien-made device just happen to show them a place like that? Why would it show them any place in particular, as opposed to some random location? Even if the place on the other side were some fixed distance and direction from here, it should still be someplace purely random. Simple probability said they should be looking out at the ocean right now, or a wide-open prairie, or an arctic tundra, or a city street with a McDonalds and a Starbucks and half a dozen stoplights.

  "I don't know," Travis said.

  Bethany started to speak, but before she could, a high-pitched cry rose from the trees right below them. Bethany flinched hard and grabbed onto his arm. Travis was glad for that: it masked the fact that his own muscles had tensed pretty damn hard.

  He grew calm at once, recognizing the sound: a wolf's howl. As it died away Travis cocked his head and listened. He heard the clatter of running footsteps as the pack went by right beneath their position. Their claws scrabbled on ground that sounded unusually hard. Stone, he'd have guessed-if a forest could grow from stone.

  A hundred yards off, the wolves stopped and howled again, first one and then another. Seconds passed, and then a series of answering cries resonated from the trees half a mile away. The nearer set of wolves had just begun to respond when a new sound erupted somewhere between the packs, silencing both of them. Bethany didn't exactly flinch, but Travis felt her body shudder. He felt his own blood go cold, and wasn't surprised that it did. He was biologically wired to fear this sound, courtesy of a long chain of ancestors who'd survived to pass on their genes. It was the guttural bass wave of a lion's roar.

  A lion. Among wolves. In a temperate forest far enough north that it felt like late fall during the month of August.

  "Okay: Where the hell are we? is the wrong question," Bethany said. "Where the fuck are we?" T en minutes later the first glow of dawn came to the horizon. Five minutes after that there was enough light to show them everything. They saw what the scaffoldlike things around them really were. And they recognized the towering shape on the horizon. They'd seen it in movies and on television all their lives.

  They knew exactly where they were.

  And they knew that where really was the wrong question to ask.

  Chapter Ten

  Travis paced at the windows on the west side of the room. The drapes were open again. There was no reason to keep them closed now-the place on the
other side of the opening had its own daylight, though it was dulled by cloud cover that'd come in with the dawn.

  Travis wondered how Paige and the others had first reacted to what the cylinders did. They were long familiar with Breach technology. They'd been dealing with it for years. Maybe it hadn't been hard for them to get their minds around what was beyond the open circle.

  It was hard for Travis.

  It looked like it was hard for Bethany, too. She was sitting in the armchair Travis had tossed the menu onto earlier. She was staring at nothing in particular. Her eyes kept narrowing as she considered new angles of the situation.

  Travis went to the south end of the room and stared out the windows. Not quite a mile and a half in that direction stood the Washington Monument. For height it dwarfed everything else in the city. It was over five hundred fifty feet tall. Its white marble was nearly blinding in the summer sunlight.

  Travis turned and walked to the projected opening, which was aimed more or less to the south. He ducked and leaned through it and stared at the Washington Monument there, rising from the canopy of pines and brightly colored hardwoods, its marble dull and gray beneath the overcast autumn sky.

  Nearer by, the rusted girder skeletons of high-rises reared from the trees in various states of decay. Strangler vines had enveloped all but the tallest of them. Travis looked down at what remained of the Ritz-Carlton beneath him. Much of the southwest corner had collapsed, but otherwise the framework still held. Here and there a few sections of concrete flooring remained in place, though mostly there were just stubs of rebar where the concrete had long ago cracked and fallen away.

  Through gaps in the trees Travis could see the ground ten stories below. He could see the remnant of Vermont Avenue, fractured by years of plant root invasion and ice expansion. He recalled the sound of the wolves clattering over it in the darkness.

  "There's a city in Russia called Pripyat," Bethany said. "It's right next to the Chernobyl power station."

  Travis drew back in from the opening and turned to her.