Free Wormholes by Dennis Meredith

other end. The card read “Deus Foundation” and gave a New York address and phone number.
    • • •
    “Patrick, I’ll give you just ten more minutes, then you just have to go to bed.” Patrick’s mother stood at the door from the kitchen, peering into the darkened back yard, barely able to make out her son.
    “Mom, you should come look,” came back the voice from the darkness. “This is radical!” His mother had used the long version of his name, but she hadn’t really hollered it, so he knew he still had some time.
    “I’m sure it is.” She closed the screen door, smiling. Patrick had fallen in love with his new telescope. She hoped the enthusiasm lasted. It got him outside and she liked it better than video games.
    “Mom! I’m not kiddin’! Come look! There’s a cloud on the moon! Get Dad!” Patrick closed one eye and peered once more into the Celestron telescope at the great, bleak expanse of the half moon spread out before him. He could see the vast maria, or flat plains, and the violently produced punctuation marks of the immense craters. And across one of the maria was a wispy cloud of what looked like mist or steam. It must have been huge. He’d planned to look at the moon just to calibrate the new telescope and then on to the planets. But he’d seen this fog thing.
    “The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere,” a deep voice behind him said. “It’s probably just a cloud in front of the telescope. Let me look.” Patrick backed away and let his father peer into the eyepiece. After a few adjustments of the eyepiece, his father settled in and looked for a long time. First casually, then more intently. “Hmm,” he said. “You may have something here, pal.” Patrick itched to get back to the telescope, but his father wouldn’t relinquish it, so he looked up at the moon to see what he could see with the unaided eye.
    Finally, his father stood back and Patrick peered once more at the strange sight. It was still there, floating above the surface, seeming to emanate from a single spot. “I’m gonna send out a message. See if anybody else has looked at it!” He left the telescope to his father and ran into the house. Within a minute, he’d logged into his Twitter account. He laboriously pecked out a query about whether anybody else had seen the cloud on the moon. He knew he might be ridiculed. Nobody looked at the moon. Nothing important happened on the moon.

“I sn’t he ready yet?” Cameron shivered and clasped his arms around himself to ward off the cold, damp wind swirling over the darkened platform. Skinny ballistics experts weren’t supposed to find themselves standing atop a thirty-story tower of the San Francisco Bay Bridge in the middle of the night. “Damn, I thought we were gonna get this thing over quick.”
    Dacey stood beside him, somewhat warmer in her climbing suit, and together they peered out over the glittering San Francisco cityscape. She had to admit it was probably the most incredible view she’d ever had of a city. The streaming lights of the cars on the busy streets, the colorful neon of Chinatown, the faint gleam of the windows on the skyscrapers, the shimmering reflections of the city from the bay waters, the halo of light the city cast into the night sky. It was well worth the cold.
    Ralph Gaston and Gerald Meier ignored the weather, busy conferring with the warmly jacketed bridge maintenance supervisor who had brought them up the small creaking elevator inside the steel tower. He’d been only too happy to help them in their quest. He loved his bridge and was deeply concerned that something violent had been done to it.
    Dacey was surprisingly calm, considering she was about to climb over the side of this steel tower and be lowered down its face like a spider down a wall. Cameron continued to gripe about the cold. He was a funny guy and they’d hit it off the minute they’d met.
    But what was she doing here?
    It had been two weeks since she had gone down into