Astronomy(36)

Her knees started to tremble. “What happened up here?” She tried not to whisper. Whispering sounded weak and intimidated. She coughed and spoke louder. “What the hell happened up here?”

“A misalignment,” Malmagden said. He was quiet for a moment after that, as if getting out that one word had taken all his strength. Had it been up to him, he would have stopped there. He had to force himself to go on.

“The Faulkenberg laboratory was nothing more than a lensing instrument, designed to focus the tidal forces of a body of three billion solar masses oscillating at relativistic speeds. I was responsible for the actual lensing of the energies that poured from that breach,” he said. “A group of mathematicians, the Opal Group, was assigned the task of breaching the stress fractures in space-time through which this super-massive body normally travels. Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group researched the protocols for attracting this body, which determined the lensing platform’s stability and usefulness. Really, Leder is the man to talk with. He can give you the underlying principles better than I can.”

“Leder,” she hissed in exasperation, “is clinically insane.”

“To the contrary. Carl Leder is quite lucid. You categorize his analysis as crazy because it is beyond your experience.”

What had Leder described to her on that plane out of Denmark?

—A cognizant universe, born in fire and primordial density, expanding at relativistic speeds to the size of a proton, then an atom, then to a size large enough to encompass worlds. A cinder of exhausted intellect left behind at the center of this expansion, at once dreaming and intimately aware, malevolent and indifferent.

He had called out names Susan had known from her counter-research projects: The Blind Leviathan. The Daemon Sultan . . .

Susan felt the hairs rise on her forearms.

“Malmagden, you crazy—”

Azathoth.

She didn’t realize she had shoved Malmagden to the ground till Charley pushed her back.

“Do you know what they were doing up here? Do you know what they tried to do?”

Charley nodded at the pistol in her hand. “You don’t need that,” he said. She hadn’t realized it was out. Of course, Charley was only doing the sensible thing, protecting their prime witness. She must have seemed like a crazy woman.

“I’m all right.” She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes a moment to clear her mind. All she saw was her favorite walk along the banks of the Charles River looking like this smoldering valley. “Like hell I am.” She shoved Malmagden to the ground again. Charley grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her away from him. He held on while she leaned over his shoulder to glare. “Do you know how lucky we were? Do you know what could have happened? Not just to the First Army, or the Eighth Air Force, or whomever you thought you’d take revenge on, but to the entire planet? Malmagden, you crazy bastard.”

Malmagden gave Charley a beseeching look. But Charley seemed to have latched onto what she was raving about. He might have been enjoying a few awful visions of his own. At some point Susan realized she was hanging onto him as tightly as he was to her.

Perhaps Malmagden realized this as well. He became suddenly talkative, confiding: “I am with you on this, believe me. I knew the chief administrator at this facility, a man named Jürgen Kriene. I warned him he was not prepared for a full power test of this device. I warned Reichsführer Himmler, who oversaw all our activities in Zentralbund. But the war effort was collapsing. Kriene convinced his superiors to move ahead with his reckless project.”

Malmagden held up his hands at the result.

“So, let me get this right,” Charley said, “they tapped into one of these stress fractures in space-time. They called forth Azathoth, and the tidal forces of Its passing washed over the laboratory, destroying the castle, the reservoir, the Artifact, everything . . .”

Malmagden shook his head. “The Artifact survived the catastrophe. It has been destroyed since.”

“How do you know that?” Susan did not believe this for a second. Still, she kept her pistol out, for purposes of encouragement.

“The Artifact was not a summoning device, but a—like a heat sink, or a lightning rod. It siphoned off energy into alien realms. Europe would have looked like this valley if the Artifact had failed.”

Malmagden hooded his eyes against the glare of moonlight. “There is one man who could have evaporated the Artifact in this manner,” he said. His lips peeled back into a leer. “Kriene!” he exclaimed. “I did not give him credit for sorcery on this level. He has surprised me.”