“The fallback option,” Travis said.
Paige nodded again. “The Heavy Rag maché idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I’ve felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we’d do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?” She shrugged. “The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you’d do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can’t get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday.” She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. “I guess the end of the world would suffice.”
The whine of another airliner filtered in from behind them. The sound rose to a scream and then a 747 slid overhead, big as the world, its jetwash ruffling the umbrellas over the tables.
“That’s a hell of a thing to have learned,” Travis said. “That it actually works, I mean. That you can seal off the Breach, and that the seal would hold for several decades, at least. If we figure out what happens to the world a few months from now . . . if we learn how to prevent it . . . then you could choose to leave the Breach open, or go ahead and seal it anyway, just to get rid of it. It’s something to consider.”
Paige nodded slowly, her eyes far away. No doubt she had considered it, and at length.
“It would hold for decades,” she said. “That much we know for sure. But after that it’s still a guess. I imagine you could plug a small shield volcano, if you had enough concrete to dump in. And that might hold for decades, too. But the pressure would only keep building. And then what would happen? Nothing good, though at least with a volcano we understand the forces in play. With the Breach we understand almost nothing.” A little tremor went through her shoulders. “No, if we manage to keep the world on track, I have no intention of sealing the Breach off. Even after seeing that it works—especially after seeing that it works—it just feels too dangerous.”
She stared off a few seconds longer, then refocused to her hands on the table, and shrugged. “So that’s what we found at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Then we climbed to the top and found that sealed too, though not as dramatically. There’s just a metal slab across the opening on the surface, and a couple inches of regular concrete poured over it. A stranger up top could walk right by it and think it was just an old footing pad for some shed that used to be there. We saw it from above, the next day, when we took the cylinders up into the desert. And it was up there that things started to get interesting.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The two of you probably guessed pretty quickly how far in the future it is, on the other side,” Paige said. “You probably got within ten years of the right number.”
“Seventy years ahead, we figured,” Bethany said.
Paige nodded. “There’s a lot that changes in a place like D.C. Nature reclaims its turf pretty fast, gives you evidence to base a guess on. But the desert above Border Town was always nature’s turf. Civilization never modified it, so there was nothing for it to change back to when civilization went away. When we took the cylinders up to the surface on Tuesday, and switched one of them on, the opening we looked through might as well have been a pane of glass. Other than the blank concrete slab where the elevator housing should’ve been, nothing in the desert looked different. Nothing at all. So we still had no idea how far in the future the other side was. Could’ve been twenty years. Could’ve been a few thousand.”
She took a sip.