Isle of Man

CHAPTER 9

Meteors and Antimatter



“Wake up!” The professor shakes me in my bunk.

“Ah, come on,” I say, rolling over. “It took me three hours to fall asleep. And why is it so hot in here?”

“Because your little misadventure on the reef damaged the cooling system,” he replies. “I’m working on it. Now get up already. You sleep like a dead man.”

“Is it my turn at the helm, or whatever you call it?”

“No,” he says. “You need to join us on the deck.”

“Why?”

“Just come up,” he says, abruptly leaving the room.

My head still aches from the other day’s punishment. First, I slammed it into the submarine window when we wrecked on the reef. Then one of those pig people clobbered me. And, as if that weren’t enough, the coconut tree fell on top of me when we freed the submarine. Thinking maybe I’m dehydrated too, I hop off my bunk and drink from the bathroom faucet before pulling my shirt on and heading for the deck.

Jimmy and the professor are already there, the submarine left pilotless, moving at fifteen knots on a set course. The night sky is punctured by a million twinkling stars, some so bright they’re actually reflected in the black water.

“This is why you woke me?”

“Look,” Jimmy says, spinning me around to face the back of the submarine.

A green phosphorescent trail glows in the water behind us, brightest directly behind the screw, fading as it narrows into the distant night. It appears we’re painting the ocean with light as we cut a shimmering path through the black water.

“What is it?”

“Phytoplankton,” the professor says. “Tiny creatures that are responsible for much of the oxygen you’re breathing. These ones happen to be bioluminescent.”

“We called ’em sea ghosts,” Jimmy says. “I used to swim through ’em and watch myself glow.”

“Oh, how sweet to be clothed in the nakedness of youth,” the professor opines. “But as beautiful as these plankton are, they’re not why I called you up here.”

“Why did you?”

“Look up and you’ll see,” he says.

I stare up at the starlit sky and search the constellations. It never gets old, the novelty of looking at the stars. I remember growing up down in Holocene II and gazing up at the glowing benitoite in our cavern ceiling and squinting to pretend that they were stars. I never believed I’d really see one, let alone a night sky ablaze with them.

A streak of light catches my eye.

Then another.

Appearing to originate from a single point, shooting stars blaze their fiery arcs across the night. It’s an amazing scene, to be standing on the dark deck of the submarine moving through the black water with a tail of green following us and meteors streaking overhead. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine us riding on a comet through the deep mysteries of space.

“My mother said those were souls returnin’ to Earth,” Jimmy says. “But she didn’t know nothin’ about science and stuff, like you two do.”

“Who knows,” the professor says. “Your mother may have been right after all.”

“But aren’t they meteors?” I ask. “Particles of cosmic dust entering the atmosphere and burning up?”

“They’re certainly that, also,” he says.

“But how can they be both?” I ask.

“How could they be only one?”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “Are you telling us you believe in human souls?”

“No,” he says, “I’m telling you I believe in physics.”

“Did you ever believe people had souls?” I ask.

“That’s a long story,” he says.

“We’ve got time,” Jimmy says,

There’s a drawn out silence where I’m sure the professor has decided to keep his long story to himself. But at last, he clears his throat and speaks:

“I was raised by my German grandmother in Michigan.”

“Where’s that?” Jimmy asks.

“Nowhere now,” the professor says. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”

“Yes,” I say. “Please continue.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Jimmy adds.

“My grandmother was a devout Catholic and brought me religiously to Mass. She was a woman of very few words, but her actions spoke loudly of her love. I don’t know if I believed in God, or human souls, completely, but I sure believed in my grandmother.” He lets out a long, sad sigh. “The fire started in the neighbor’s bedroom. Probably a cigarette, they said. By the time an alarm was raised, it had traveled across the shared attic into the other townhomes. I don’t remember anything about my escape except standing in the snow and looking back at the entire block burning. I was nine.”

He pauses as a particularly bright meteor crosses the sky, his head turning to follow it. Then he continues:

“I’ll never forget the neighbors blabbing on and on about how they’d been spared by God. ‘Thank God this, and thank God that.’ Even so, I prayed for the first time ever that night. I prayed that God had also saved my grandmother. I searched through the crowd, becoming frantic with each stranger’s face that looked down as I tugged on familiar nightgowns. My bare feet went numb in the snow. My young teeth chattered out of my head. A man caught me up and took me to his home. We warmed ourselves beside the stove. He told me it was a miracle that I’d survived.”

“What about your grandmother?” I ask.

“It was three days before they officially broke the news. She’d likely died of smoke inhalation, but there was little left of her to bury. In that moment, I gave up on believing in God.”

“I felt jus’ the same way when the Park Service killed my family,” Jimmy says.

There’s a long silence where I wish I could make out the professor’s face to see if he shows any pain of responsibility for his and Jimmy’s shared horrors, but it’s too dark.

“I’m sorry about your family,” he says, finally breaking the silence. “It somehow seems different, having met you. Amazing how detached things seem when they’re on a little screen.”

“Thanks,” Jimmy says.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“To me?”

“Yeah, after your grandmother was gone?”

“I went to live with a foster family.”

“Did you like them?”

“They were fine as far as foster parents go. They had a lot of state kids, so none of us got much attention. But we were looked after all right. I dove into my schooling then. I think the sciences appealed to me because I wanted to disprove God, at least to myself. It seemed better that there be no God than a God that I could only hate. But then I discovered physics and a new world of possibilities opened in my brain.

“I was young. Easily excited, perhaps. My mind began to see mysteries in science. Questions began to keep me up late at night. What if there was no single judging force that controlled worldly events? No God like we’d been taught? But what if it wasn’t all pointless chance, either? Perhaps the universes were ruled by a cosmic set of likelihoods? Clouds of probability? What if there were multiple realities, only one of which we perceive? Then perhaps my grandmother was saved from that fire after all. Or perhaps the fire never even happened.”

“What do you mean, never happened?” I ask.

“If a particle can exist in two places at once, couldn’t a person be both dead and alive?”

“Dead and alive?” I ask, thinking about my mother and father and hoping it could be true. “How could that be?”

“Well, it might have been juvenile thinking, and many of my contemporaries certainly laughed me out of their collegiate discussions. Still, I wondered. If we were able to truly transcend what we perceive, might it be argued that anything possible is not only possible, but in fact, is? If my grandmother believed in a heaven where her soul would carry on for eternity, is it too much to think that her belief made it so? What if everything that could possibly happen is happening and always has been and always will be? What if those meteors are particles ablating in the upper atmosphere? But what if they’re also the reentering souls seen by Jimmy’s mother?”

“So you do believe in souls,” I say.

“I don’t know what I believed then,” he replies. “But I’ve learned enough now to not believe in anything.”

“I hope I never learn that much,” Jimmy says.

“Me either,” I say. “But I do like your idea about multiple realities. About nothing really ending, but going on forever and ever. If that’s what you meant.”

“It has a darker flip side,” he says. “Might not suffering be also eternal? Might not evil play out again and again?”

“Is that why you agreed to go along with Dr. Radcliffe and the Park Service?”

“I’m not sorry,” he says. “If that’s what you’re asking me.”

“Well,” Jimmy pipes in, “ya should be.”

“You didn’t see the horror of humankind,” he says. “I did. When we came up from Holocene II and began touring the devastation, I went back to my hometown, but my hometown wasn’t even there. Then I went to the cities. I’ll tell you here and now I saw the apocalypse on display. You have no idea the destruction leveled by thousands of thermonuclear bombs. Bomb isn’t even the right word, they’re such hell. And there were many more of them than anyone thought, too. How ignorant we were to feel safe all those years before. And if you were a survivor, you’d have wished to have been inside the blast radius instead. Awful mutations. Cancer. And the crimes we unearthed! You’d be surprised what people will eat when no crops will grow under a blacked-out sun.”

“It sounds to me like you don’t agree with our stopping the drones,” I say. “So why are you helping us?”

“I don’t know what’s right anymore,” he sighs. “But I have no interest in leading anything, so I’m happy to let you try and figure it out. And who knows, maybe we were wrong. It doesn’t look as though it’s worked after all these years. Plus, as I’m sure you know, my brain is suffering now after nearly a millennium of thought, if you can call it that. I used to believe I’d get wiser with all this time, but it doesn’t seem so. Besides,” he says, pausing to lift his shadowed arm up toward the night sky, “I’m ready to join my grandmother up there. Or wherever she is or isn’t, alive or dead, always being or never having been.”

The meteors fade with the close of his story until we’re all standing in the sparkling dark, listening to the screw churn up the glowing waves behind us. After a short while, and without another word, the professor leaves us and heads inside. Jimmy and I linger for a few quiet minutes, watching the stars.

I toss and turn in my bunk, trying to fall back to sleep. My mind is running with images that I’d rather not see. Nuclear blasts catching cities by surprise. The professor’s grandmother burning in her townhouse. Eden on fire and my mother and father’s brains melting away in the boiling pool. The slaughter of Jimmy’s family in the cove, the pile of their burning corpses. Dr. Radcliffe shooting Gloria. Mrs. Radcliffe setting off the wave. The images roll across my mind and melt into each other like some kind of kaleidoscope of horror. I lean over the edge and look down on Jimmy.

“Are you hot?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Not as bad as earlier though.”

“It’s hotter than hot up here.”

“Go bunk in the torpedo room.”

“Torpedo room?”

“That’s what the professor called it when he chased me outta there. Last door in the forward passage. It’s nice n’ cool. But take yer pad, the floor’s got them traction thingies on it.”

The torpedo room is dark and cool, but the only place to lay my mat is between the stored torpedoes themselves, which means I’m cuddled up to a damn warhead.

I press my cheek against the cold metal casing and imagine the destructive power hidden inside, just inches from my face. Would I even feel it? No way. It’s strange to think what things we build with our big brains. That someone once picked up a rock and realized it could do much more damage than their fists alone. Then they sharpened it. Then they attached it to a stick. And here we are all these centuries later, and I’m sleeping next to a live torpedo.

There are times when I can almost understand where the Foundation was coming from when they dedicated the world as a park and formed the Park Service to protect it. But violence can’t be the right solution to violence. Or can it? I don’t know. Sometimes I wish other people would just tell me how to think. Tell me what to believe. I can see why it was so easy for the professor to go along with Dr. Radcliffe.

I open my eyes and see a blue light pulsing against the ceiling in the far corner of the dark torpedo room. At first, I think it must be my mind playing tricks on me. Some lingering view of glowing plankton, or a strain on my eyes from staring at too many shooting stars. But then the light begins to annoy me, and I’m already feeling short on sleep.

When I get up and turn on the LED room light, of course the blue light seems to disappear, making me hunt around for its source. I step over torpedoes, kick around the miscellaneous supplies stored between them, finally coming to a tarp covering something in the far corner. I pull the tarp free, exposing the black box labeled ANTIMATTER. Its translucent window glows with a rhythmic pulse of blue light.

I storm into the control room, shouting: “What is that damn thing doing on here!”

The professor’s head jerks up from his chest, where he’d been sleeping at the wheel.

“Huh? What?” He franticly checks the controls.

“I said: what is it doing here!”

“What are you talking about?” he asks, once he’s satisfied by the gauges that we haven’t run up on another reef. “And more importantly, why are you yelling?”

“In there!” I shout, pointing. “In the torpedo room. The antimatter. Why is it here? With us? On the submarine?”

“It’s nothing,” he says, waving it off as no big deal. “Just a simple precaution is all.”

“A precaution?”

“Yes. We thought it would be wise to have a deterrent on board, in case something goes wrong.”

“Who’s we?”

“Myself and Hannah, of course.”

“Oh, is that so? You and Hannah? You mean Hannah who didn’t even want to come with us? Hannah who’s back safe at the Foundation, but she sends the antimatter along instead?”

“It’s perfectly safe,” he says, trying to be reassuring.

“I don’t care. I should have been told. And since when did you take orders from Hannah anyway?”

“Since Dr. Radcliffe was her father.”

“Well,” I huff. “We’ll see about that when we get back.”

“If we get back,” the professor corrects.

“What do you mean ‘if’?”

“I mean we have absolutely no idea what we’ll find on the Isle of Man. And that’s precisely why Hannah thought it wise to have some insurance on board. A bargaining chip of sorts. And frankly, even though I wouldn’t have challenged her either way, I agree with her reasoning.”

“Is that right? Her reasoning? Well, aren’t you two just thick as thieves? I’m beginning to distrust you, Professor. And when exactly did you find the time to haul that thing on board beneath our noses anyway?”

“We looked for you, but you we’re gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Your little boat trip with Jimmy. The morning we left.”

“Well, even so, you could have told us.”

“It didn’t seem important at the time.”

“Important?” I ask. “I’m not the physicist here, but I’d say enough antimatter to annihilate us and the entire Isle of Man is important. Wait? Is that the deterrent? If we find people there, you intend to threaten to destroy the island?”

“There is no plan,” he says. “It’s just another tool. Let’s not forget the mission. We need to get that encryption key, if it’s even on the island. And then we need to get back safely with it so you can take control of the drones. Otherwise, it’s business as usual up here, and your people are stranded down in Holocene II. Isn’t that why you came? To free them?”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing,” he says. “Every tool we can bring that may help is worth having. Wouldn’t you agree? I should say you would. Let’s just hope we don’t need it.”

“Is everything okay?” Jimmy stands in the doorway with his eyes half shut and his hair tousled. Junior skulks at his feet.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Sorry if my yelling woke you.”

Jimmy turns without another word and shuffles off back the way he came. Junior follows him.

I spin back to the professor and speak in a lower voice. “We’re going to have a talk about not keeping things from one another when we return. You can bet on that.”

“Whatever you say,” he shrugs. “But that sounds like a talk you’ll need to have with Hannah.”