Chapter 6: The Promised Land

That Monday dawned bright, but not early. As soon as we were brought outside, I recognized where we were and smiled. We were taken to one of the bunkers on the base, although they had added two more layers of fence and guards.

Surprisingly, there were a lot of civilians in the briefing room, not just Claire, but she was the youngest by far.

General Mendoza and Doctor Chou were there, standing in front of the room.

“I’m General Nita Mendoza; I command the New Hampshire Project completely and utterly. One last warning — you have signed the National Security Oath and Non-Disclosure Agreement. There are currently twenty-five detainees at Leavenworth, including a US Senator and two US Congressmen who didn’t understand the repeated warnings that we are not fooling around. Five reporters they talked to are keeping them company, along with a half dozen other reporters. The other ten were motor-mouths who wouldn’t stop talking.

“Now is the time if you feel you just can’t keep a secret, to bow out. Those folks in Leavenworth are in solitary. Just now, you know nothing, so you would go into the general prison population. A lot of fellows named ‘Spike’ I believe — at least you would have someone to talk to.”

She gave everyone a chance to speak, and then waved at Dr. Chou. “Dr. Harold Chou, the chief scientist of the New Hampshire Project.” The general vanished out the back of the room.

The doctor smiled at them. “I know we harp on this, but more than two dozen people didn’t understand the seriousness of our intent. I will give you some background — this is crossing the figurative Rubicon.”

He waited a moment and launched into what was obviously a prepared spiel.

“OCD sufferers can ask for more details later, but I will not be initially giving names and dates — I hated ancient history and won’t inflict it on anyone.

“A year and a half ago, a young man was in love. He was a post-doc expert in superconducting magnet design, she was a professor of physics in Japan. The Japanese were not satisfied with the extent of their allowed participation in various high-energy physics projects, including ITER. They were working on a design for their own collider. The Japanese were cautious and built a prototype first.

“The American young man was permitted to be there when the prototype Japanese collider experienced ‘First Light,’ a significant milestone in such an enterprise. He observed several of the Japanese researchers behaving oddly. He himself was guilty of lese-majesty in regard to the head of the project.

“He was ejected from the lab; actually, so was most of the staff. His girlfriend was not. The next morning, he was awoken by a pounding on the girlfriend’s door — he was gathered up by the Japanese police and American Embassy State Department functionaries, frog-marched to the airport, and put on the first flight back to the US, declared persona non grata.

“Tellingly, the last thing the Japanese did before the aircraft took off was to give the young man a manila envelope and tell him not to open it before he got home.

“To make a long story short, the young man found that he had been exposed to a significant dose of radiation - LD50 — half of those so exposed die in weeks. It was a three-day wonder at the US State Department — they thought the Japanese had suffered a significant radioisotope spill.

“Thinking he was doomed, he sent his thesis advisor the numbers from the Japanese super-conducting magnets. That thesis advisor forwarded those numbers to me, knowing I was working on models to predict such super-conducting magnets’ behavior.

“My lab staff and I tried those numbers, and our model died. Again, not to bore you with details, we eventually made the model work. It was an important breakthrough, and we contacted other labs to confirm our results. Eventually, we held a meeting on Labor Day on Lake Champlain. From the location, we named the Project.”

I spoke up. “Lake Champlain is between Vermont and New York.”

He laughed. “Physicists are a little weak on geography.”

Dr. Chou turned serious again. “The math was clear at the meeting. If you activated a particle accelerator, with such and such energy densities, for want of a better term, a wormhole forms.

“A researcher from USC, along with all of his doctoral candidates, was killed a few weeks later in an accident. When I heard the description of the accident, I was concerned.

“Please, raise your hand and be recognized, but what is the most common state of matter in the universe?”

“Hydrogen,” someone said.

Dr. Chou looked angry. “Not even close. State of matter, not an element. Wait to be recognized.”

I raised my hand, and he waved at me. “Plasma,” I said. I read science fiction!

“And the most common density of that plasma?”

Again, I held up my hand and was waved to. “I have no idea. Near a star, there is a relative lot, but away from a star, it drops off. In either case, it is considered a hard vacuum.”

“That’s right! The moron from USC figured out how to open up a stable wormhole. Too bad most of the universe is hard vacuum with less than an atom per cubic kilometer — an ionized atom — plasma.

“The moron at USC opened his unshielded, unsecured, naked wormhole to interstellar space. Our atmosphere started circling the drain. Only the collapse of the building stopped the event. Alas, too late to save that idiot and his equally dim graduate students.”

It was clear to me that I was not the only one to understand the danger we had been in.

“Wormholes that form in parallel with a horizontal accelerator aren’t stable. The Earth’s gravity interferes with them. That’s what happened in Japan. The researchers were losing atmosphere to the vast majority of wormholes that formed. At some point, they formed one too close to a star and got a massive radiation dose.

“We have made rapid advances in such things as instrumentation, and the value of keeping our people far away from wormholes when they first form. We have created stable wormholes by the hundreds of thousands. Most are too far from anything to see anything interesting. About two-thirds of all wormholes form in intergalactic space.”

“So far, we have one about a galactic diameter from another galaxy — except the galaxy is a globular and not a spiral. We have another about an AU distant from a gas giant — with two rocky planets closer to the star. The gas giant is pulling away from our POV.

“We have programs that can sift star fields in about a second looking for something familiar. We have opened nearly a million wormholes to date; we haven’t seen anything that we recognize. We can’t tell if we are looking in any direction where something familiar exists.

“Our research is centered here, but we have several additional locations that we have established. We are opening wormholes at an increasing pace. We move a probe through the wormhole and look backwards, after having initially looked forward. The time that takes us is less than a second.”

Dr. Chou scanned the room. “We have currently launched twenty instrument packages through wormholes. These packages are run by the New Hampshire Project, not NASA.

“I hope no one here is fond of NASA — they have suicided. The president is fascinated by our results. NASA was asked for a number of probes — they spent billions of dollars on a study where the probes were launched by Delta Heavies. We just toss the probe through the wormholes. A conceptual failure, which they keep repeating.