“What?”
For a long moment she couldn’t reply. She was sorting it all out in her mind. Lining the ideas up, like toy cars on a track. Because she knew where she’d come across that name recently—and it was the worst place of all to hear it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Leland Hager had been in a good mood until thirty seconds before. He had been standing in his office, at the inward-facing window, looking down over the work floor. A few years earlier, when this compound was still being carved out of the wilderness, engineers had used this building as a garage for earthmovers. Now the earth movers were long gone, and the vast floor space was full of glass-walled rooms, twelve in all. From this window, Hager could look down on all of them in a single glance.
The rooms were arranged in three clusters of four. The three clusters corresponded to the three test sites in the continental United States.
Red City, Wyoming. Cold Spring, Utah. Cook Valley, North Dakota.
The three antennas.
In the eighteen months he’d been in charge of the compound, Hager had found he was at his happiest when he was standing there looking over the glass rooms—the stations, as everyone called them. In each occupied station lay a controller, flat on his back, electrodes stuck to his forehead with conductive gel. The stations were lit with dim red light, like darkrooms—like wombs, Hager sometimes thought.
It was quite the feeling, staring at all that through his own reflection in the office window—the reflection of a paunchy little bald man who’d come out of Dartmouth three decades earlier with a degree in finance. A hedge-maze of rational career choices later, here he was, like Oppenheimer out in the desert at Alamogordo with his tinted goggles on. Maybe his own name would end up in metaphors, decades down the road.
The work Western Dynamics was doing, at this place and others just like it, was exciting to the point of being scary. There were the antennas, and the controllers, and then there was the other thing—the thing that unnerved everyone who heard about it. Hager had to admit, at least to himself, that the other thing even unnerved him, a little. When it was finally rolled out and put to use—which could be any time now—there would be no putting the genie back in the bottle. Yeah, no question about it, it was scary as hell. All big things were scary, though. If you let that kind of fear get in your way, what would you ever amount to?
Hager had been in the middle of that thought when the commotion started, down in Cluster Two. The only controller on duty in that section, Seth Cobb, had suddenly sat upright as if someone had jolted him, and started yelling about something wrong at the antenna site.
Now, thirty seconds later, Hager was standing in Cobb’s station, trying to calm him. The kid had pulled the paddles off his forehead; one of them had smeared gel into his eyebrow.
“What happened?” Hager asked.
“I don’t know. It just felt like … somebody was reaching for me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like there was somebody on the other end of the line—at Cold Spring. Like they were … coming right through the connection toward me.”
That didn’t make any sense, a fact Cobb seemed well aware of. The guy could only shrug, though, looking rattled. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t making it up.