Free Wormholes by Dennis Meredith Page A

the crater in Oklahoma, since she had hog-tied Gerald. Two weeks since she woke up the following morning to find Gerald sleeping in his van out front, probably because he couldn’t spring for a motel. She’d taken him in, fed him breakfast, then taken him to the university to show him her data. He reminded her of Bobby Lister in high school, the quiet, nerdy kid in calculus. Lister had helped her ace the course and she’d taken him under her wing as a friend.
    And it had been two days since Gerald called her up out of the blue to tell her he’d found something in San Francisco that reminded him of the Gillard crater. A hole through an office building. Sitting at her desk, running her fingers over the glass-smooth piece of granite from the cavern, she’d scoffed at first. “Come on, Gerald, a hole in an office building?”
    But he’d sent a seismogram — a trace of the ground motion in San Francisco that day — and that had convinced her something strange was up. Whatever made the hole in San Francisco had burrowed underground. And it had left the same characteristic jagged up-and-down lines on the seismogram as had the event that made the Gillard hole. She’d gotten the Gillard trace from the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado. Neither of the traces were earthquakes, or an underground explosion. Damnit, they looked like some giant gopher rooting around, grinding through the earth, south to north.
    So it was seismic squiggles on a computer screen that brought her to this high, cold bridge tower … and the fact that she had applied for a grant from the Deus Foundation, and it couldn’t hurt her chances to cooperate with an existing grantee! But she also knew that deep down it was also the haunting agonized faces of Anita Lafferty and the kids, especially Jenny. This phenomenon had torn a hole in their lives. She couldn’t fix it, but she could damned well find out what it was!
    “Maybe he’s still lining it up,” said Gaston coming up to stand beside them, concentrating on the tall, graceful Bank of America building that jutted above the skyscrapers around it. As a ballistics expert, he was always calculating trajectories, and he couldn’t fathom how a projectile that had pierced a building would travel all the way to the bridge. But they had seen evidence of an impact through their binoculars.
    “Call him,” demanded Cameron.
    “I just did.”
    “Call him again. He’s probably screwing around with the gadget and we’re up here freezing.”
    “Then it would slow him down. We’d be up here longer.”
    “Shit.” Cameron jogged around the platform, stopping to look at the winch that had been bolted on the city side of the platform. He shook his head and kept jogging.
    Gerald came up to stand beside Dacey, and she looked over at him with more than a little interest. His bearded face was dramatically lit by the city glow, his dark curls shining. He turned to her, his gaze intent with concern.
    “You okay with this?”
    “Piece of cake, Gerald. I’ve climbed down rock faces taller than this. And it’s a motorized winch. Piece of cake.”
    “Well, you saw the crater in Gillard. You saw the hole in the building. You can tell us a lot, maybe.”
    Dacey could tell he was trying to convince himself as much as her. He was worried about her. That was sweet.
    Gerald looked up at the three-quarter moon, shining steadily.
    “Lot of strange things going on. You hear about the cloud on the moon?”
    “The one the kid found? The gas vent? Hasn’t everybody? You think that’s one of your mysterious ‘appearances’?”
    But before he could answer an intense green laser beam pierced the night, emanating from the distant building and striking the bridge tower somewhere below them.
    “There!” Gaston smiled, but he didn’t have to point. The glittering beam seemed almost a shaft of solid matter, for it did not spread, but maintained its tight columnar shape. It seemed to declare its own