Fountain Society Read online

  Damn, his gut hurt. Was it his guilt talking or the illness? Or were they now hopelessly intertwined? You made this bed, he thought, so now you lie in it. So what if the enemy troops hadn't been his idea? When the notion had first come up, three months ago, he had argued against including live subjects, to the point at which Colonel Oscar Henderson, the bean counter in charge of funding this project, pushed the issue to the level of a deal breaker. There were several ways to interpret Henderson's stubbornness: as a sign that he had lost faith in Peter's vision, doubted his abilities, even his loyalty; or merely as a desire to piss on Peter's project so it would have his scent. Power has to be arbitrary, as Peter had come to realize-otherwise it's just sound policy. A lifetime of struggling to maintain his vision while being accused of biting the hand that fed him had driven home that truth. His wife, Beatrice, on the other hand, leaned toward the theory of the loyalty test to explain Henderson's insistence on live subjects. They had spent a week debating the issue, Peter arguing that it tainted all of them and was unnecessary. Beatrice, of course, called him a pompano-their pet word for a pompous ass-and as usual, she was right. After all, he could turn around and walk back down the hill, couldn't he? Call Henderson's bluff? And was he going to? No. As a matter of fact, the result of his wife's chastisement was to make him more determined than ever to see this project through to the end. All the concerns he had voiced to Beatrice-just so much ritual self-doubtwere merely an attempt to quiet the churning in his gut by flattering his conscience. With the result being, of course, that his symptoms were flaring up more painfully than ever. The pills he was taking put his inner ear on gimbals, and now, plodding skyward through the sand, he had to pee again, despite the fact he'd done so five minutes before leaving the bunker. "Dr. Jance? Maybe we could slow down a little bit?" Peter glanced back down the hill. His support team were slogging behind him as best as they could, and one of them, Alex Davies, had apparently decided to take on the job of their spokesman. Peter smiled. Only Alex, in all the world, had the familiarity to suggest he slow down. Peter had known him since he was a kid, and Alex was banking on that. He was a decent kid, despite his pestering. Peter suspected that he might even have a conscience, which was unusual among scientists in this generation. It made Peter like him for it and-come to think of it-for his lack of qualms about speaking up. Despite their constant, collective pissing and moaning, no one else on his team had voiced a serious complaint about any part of this enormously difficult and demanding project on which they labored like indentured servants. Of course, Peter reflected now, he had looked for just such a gung ho, unquestioning quality during the screening process. Wild-card geniuses scrounged from universities all over the United States, this team constituted the best and the brightest scientists working in weapons development today. Wet behind the ears, yes, and in Alex's case somewhat unpredictable, but who else was willing to put in outrageous hours for peanuts just for the opportunity to work with Peter Jance? Cap Chu, his accelerator specialist, he had shanghaied from MIT. Cap was a secondgeneration Chinese-American from Oakland, whose unchanging uniform was a Raiders T-shirt and cutoff Levi's, and whose unconscious tendency to mimic his boss's speech patterns often made Peter want to laugh aloud. But in tens years or less, Cap Chu was a shoo-in to write the book on particle weaponry for the next century-and as Beatrice put it, the kid was a steal. Hank Flannagan, pausing to light a Marlboro, was another diamond in the rough. Flannagan understood the weapons applications of fusion the way angry boys understand a rock's applications to a picture window. His form of relaxation was stretching out on his dirt bike at sixty miles an hour while he sailed through the pucker bush, or jumping ravines so wide fellow riders braked and covered their eyes in horror. Peter, no stranger to physical risk, encouraged him in this hobby. Flannagan returned from these forays not only unscathed, but bristling with solutions to some of the most challenging mathematical problems the team confronted. The woman among them, just now hooking her arm through Alex Davies's, was Rosemarie Wiener. The fact that Peter was funding a project to achieve an unprecedented kill factor didn't bother her one bit. She was herself a protean thinker in the tactical applications of microwave and ultrasound beams and an avid fan of sophisticated military mayhem. The correlation between raw force and long term survival was not lost on her. She had been raised on a kibbutz and took shit from no oneexcept maybe Alex Davies, with whom, at this moment, she was flirting hard, the sound of her delighted laughter rising sharply through the shimmering heat. Peter wondered if it was lust or political instinct. With this generation it was hard to tell. Certainly if there was one among these nascent whiz kids headed for real power, it was Alex Davies, so even if Rosemarie was only networking, she had chosen well. Alex was the grand-son of Dr. Frederick Wolfe, a scientist spearheading his own top secret project for the Army, both at other bases and here at White Sands. If Alex himself was something of a catch on his own merits, as a future father-in-law Frederick Wolfe made the kid an all-time trophy. Anyone near Wolfe moved up quickly, and this particular project, code-named Fountain, was legendary on the base, both for the deferment and funding it received and for the cachet it gave to all who Were associated with it. As to what exactly the Fountain Project was, it was a mystery. It was Wrapped in secrecy so extreme that even Peter, who warily counted Wolfe among his oldest friends, could only guess at what it might be all about. To make things even more intriguing, Peter's own wife Beatrice was employed by Wolfe as a neurobiologist on the Fountain Project. But she, too, was kept on a need-to-know basis-at least judging by what she disclosed to Peter. Her specialty was spinal regeneration, so Peter speculated that maybe it had something to do with trying to cure battle injuries to that stem of stems. But that was only one possibility. Beatrice swore only Wolfe knew the big picture, but Peter found that hard to swallow, considering the ranks of brass coming in and out of Wolfe's compound. Clearly Wolfe and his Fountain Project were the darlings of someone bigperhaps even the Commander in Chief-and that meant its purpose was not only known in detail by some, but considered important. Hugely important, judging from the amount of funding Wolfe seemed to enjoy. Good luck to him. Peter was never one to begrudge a friend's good fortune. Besides, the fact was the two had known each other since their twenties, and often shared test ranges and personnel--even, as in this case, family members. Wolfe had given Beatrice a position of power within the Fountain Project, and Peter had agreed to take Alex aboard in return. Peter gave the kid the room he needed to be his own quirky self, while Wolfe had assigned Beatrice to a lab in the Caribbean. On their end, it was an arrangement that permitted the couple to remain close, but not so close they would tear each other's heads off from propinquity, which was what they tended to do when they worked on the same project. This was a great boon to Peter, for he and Beatrice needed each other desperately, and thrived on distant proximity of just the right kind. Too close to each other and they were miserable; too far apart and they were lost. "Hey, Uncle Peter? Are we there yet?" Saying it with just the right tone of irony and fondness, the kid somehow got away with it. Alex Davies was a wild card, to be sure, but one Peter was glad he'd drawn. Any regrets Peter had personally harbored about having the kid more or less foisted upon him had vanished within a week of the young man's arrival. For one thing, Alex knew the base's labyrinthine cluster of Cray supercomputers like the back of his hand. That knowledge allowed Peter to throw dozens of theorems, algorithms and mathematical models at this project each week, rather than once a year through the usual channels. For that alone, Alex was a godsend. So the fact that Alex got a little cheeky from time to time was of little import. In his own quirky way, Alex Davies was vital to the project's chance for survival and also for its eventual success. Ignoring the twisting pain in his stomach, Peter kept walking at the same killer pace he had set at the bottom of the hill. Despite his illness, he had more energy than most men half his age. Six feet tall, with no suggestion of a stoop, he had spent his youth and much of his middle age accepting every physic
al challenge he could find. He had bicycled through Nepal when it was known only to National Geographic photographers, trekked halfway across Borneo surveying for an oil company. He had run marathons all over the East Coast just for the hell of it-and until just recently, he played squash with a ferocity that appalled his opponents. Not that he'd worked at any of it very hard. His first love, his obsession, in fact, was physics, the source of all the challenges that truly mattered. It just happened that he was gifted with one of those almost freakishly athletic bodies, capable, it seemed for many years, of anything he asked of it. It had given him a lifetime of pleasures and mobility and, most important, had afforded a superb platform for his brain, bathing it in rich, super-oxygenated blood, allowing its undisputed genius to run at full throttle for six decades. Until the pancreatic cancer.

  Yes, too bad about that, wasn't it? In the game of cellular roulette, he had come up double zero. Not that he'd expected to go to his grave intact-that much of an optimist he wasn't. Still, coming out of nowhere as it had, and in the midst of the most important work of his life, the cancer had felt like an undeserved punishment. It was playing hob with his body at the moment, an infuriating distraction to the workings of his mind. Come on, Jance, he berated himself, clamping his teeth against the pain, stop feeling sorry for yourself. He struggled to focus on the business at hand, the hundreds of tasks needing completion before he could begin his countdown. He assailed his own disease by reimagining it. If it was some ravening beast tearing him from within, he'd see it as something without imagination or charisma-the pain in his entrails nothing but a dark ham- lives of a few animals that would have died anyway, not even his own life. It was the work that mattered. And success. He watched intently, ignoring the black spiral of pain that was working its way through his gut again, as his team fanned out, checking tethers and adjusting telemetry devices. It was zero minus fifty minutes, and time was racing through his fingers like quarks through an accelerometer. His Nobel Prize, his international awards, the laboratory that bore his name at MIT-none of it mattered now, if it ever had. Beyond the acclaim, beyond the misgivings, there was only the idea, moved toward reality through painstaking research and development that had gone on seemingly forever until this approaching moment. In just fifty minutes, the instant when everything might come to fruition would arrive. And in that instant, the idea could become substance. If it happened, he knew, the realization of that idea would dominate military thought for the foreseeable future. But the time factor-the necessity for those hours, months and years of cerebration and calculation and fiddling and trying and trying again-made everything one great race against the very limitation of a man's life span. Stupidly small budgets, arbitrary deadlines, the ignorant carping of the Army brass had all conspired to undermine his work, his dream, his place in the history of science. Experiments that could have worked brilliantly if they had been adequately funded were rushed headlong from the drawing board into the field and discarded forever if they failed just once. The process was nothing short of insane, and it had all come down to this: if this day's trial shot didn't work, he and his research would be worthless and the last decade of his life would be declared an utter waste. The pain clawed at his belly. Inwardly, he snarled back at it. You're here, he swore to himself. You're going through with it, and your doubts be damned. He turned around and pissed against a yucca, ignoring the burn. Somewhere behind him a sheep was bleating as if its throat were cut. Perkins was right. Time to get going or they would all be dead from the heat.

  SOUTHERN ACCESS ROAD, WHITE SANDS

  Ten miles south of where Peter was working, the desert flattened until it was a griddle spreading as far as the eye could see, bleached sand blinding and barren to the horizon of the Tularosa Basin. This desolate moonscape was bisected by a single two-rut track, and on this a dust-blasted Range Rover heaved, roiling a plume that stretched a half-mile behind it into the blistered air. Inside the Range Rover were Peter's wife, Dr. Beatrice Jance, and Dr. Frederick Wolfe, who was doing the driving. Wolfe was in his early seventies, gaunt and pale, with hair like steel wool, thick eyelids and a mouth turned down darkly with an expression of perpetual disdain. His surgeon's fingers were long and large-knuckled; the huge dome of his skull was dotted with liver spots the size of quarters. He had the air of a man who expects the best while he listens for the worst, and whose slightest disapproval had the force of a curse. Nosferatu was the nickname given him by one brash young geneticist who had been employed by him for just a week. That man soon found himself teaching high school biology in Mexico. Better to be feared than loved, as Machiavelli, one of Wolfe's few heroes, advised. Better still to love oneself so completely, so faithfully, that the question never mattered. And, in fact, that was the way it worked for Wolfe. Scientists from all over the world had flocked to the side of this implacable genius, whose experiments in biogenetics were so bold and far-reaching that no one but he could grasp their complete significance. And with Machiavellian dexterity Wolfe pitted these scientists against each other, ego to ambition, in such a way that he got the best of their work and kept his secrets to himself and his inner circle. Virtually no one he had asked to join him had refused; no one who had come aboard had quit him voluntarily. Beatrice Jance was no exception.

  As he maneuvered the Range Rover across the desert sands, Wolfe Watched her from the corner of his eye. Beatrice was still magnificent-her glorious ash-blond hair had long since turned a blazing white, and there were fresh wrinkles pursing her broad pale mouth, but her athletic grace was intact, the soft gray eyes still remarkably energetic. But she hadn't returned his smiles, not once in the last thirty minutes. No, of course, her thoughts would all be of Peter. She looked over at Wolfe, catching him looking, and smiled as he looked away, What that smile meant, though, Wolfe was damned if he knew. "If I swallow much more dust," she shouted over the noise of the wind, "I'll pass a brick." Wolfe winced faintly, Her offhand coarseness when she wanted to be vulgar was jarring. It was the same with Peter. The problem with these two was, no matter how far apart they were in the course of their work, they were always somehow together. It baffled him, really, and irritated him as well. There was such a thing as being too close. They fed on each other's doubts and anxieties, in his view, especially now with Peter's illness looming over all of them. Touching, how they'd tried to keep Peter's cancer a secret from him, the one man on whom nothing was ever lost, and the one man who could actually do something about it. "Fortunate for both of us we've arrived," Wolfe said, pulling himself back to the here and now. He produced an ID from his pocket and braked the Range Rover at a weed-choked fence. A man appeared and scrutinized the credentials. Wolfe eyed him with Olympian impatience. "Obviously, you're new.

  The guard, wiry and humorless, ignored Wolfe's withering glance. From somewhere inside his civilian vest came the crackle of a walkie-talkie. He ignored that, too, until he had finished inspecting Wolfe's ID.

  "Six-month rotation," he finally said, and flashed his own ID. Wolfe waved it away. "How was D.C., Dr. Wolfe?" "Benighted and besotted," Wolfe muttered. "As always." The guard flicked an uneasy eye toward Wolfe's passenger. "Beatrice," sighed Wolfe, "Mr. Greenhorn wants your credentials, too." Beatrice dug into her battered leather satchel, pulling out paperbacks, a scientific calculator, a Spinhaler, a tube of sun block-every-thing but her papers. "Dr. Beatrice Jance," she said, as if that explained everything. The guard stiffened brightly.

  "Wife of Dr. Peter Jance?"

  She smiled, not threatened. "And he is married to me as well." "No kidding. Sorry." The guard stepped back, star struck, and saluted. "You both have a nice day now," he added, pulling out his walkie-talkie to announce them. Wolfe saw Beatrice blink as she glimpsed the automatic weapon slung vertically under his vest. He put the Range Rover in drive, and within moments, guard and shack and razor-wire hurricane fence disappeared in the dust. "Everyone seems to know Peter," Beatrice declared, still shouting over the wind. Wolfe looked at her impassively, Was this an instance of s
imple wifely pride, or was she trying to put a dent in his vanity? "Any kid admires an adult who likes to blow things up," he said. "That's probably it," she returned.

  Her tone was level, no hint of irony or regret. As faithful to the cause as she is beautiful, concluded Wolfe. Feeling as empty as a used-up pack of cigarettes, he put the pedal to the floor.

  Two miles deeper into the desert, Wolfe and Beatrice arrived at the compound of corrals, pens and living quarters Wolfe had called his second home for the past five years. The Fountain Compound, whose low-lying sprawl and air of bland guardedness suggested a prison for white-collar felons, was actually an unlisted unit of the Army's Battlefield Environment Directorate, or BED, one of the many Army research laboratories sprinkled across White Sands. The Army had begun its residency at White Sands in 1946. In the early years, its Signal Corps had supplied radar and communications support for the American conversion of captured German V-2 rockets at the dawn of the U.S. space program. Now its projects ranged far from rocketry, to weapons systems research and on into biological and chemical means of warfare that were beyond the wildest dreams of even Hitler's architects of death.

  WHITE SANDS, DELTA RANGE

  Fifteen minutes after leaving the animals tethered on the hill, Dr. Peter Jance and his support team were a quarter mile away on a mass of steel, ceramic and exotic materials that cost the U.S. government and its taxpayers more per ounce than gold. Dubbed The Hammer, the whole apparatus weighed one ton, which was about a hundred tons lighter than anything else that had been cooked up during the ill-fated Star Wars period, and that lightness translated into its supreme feasibility as a military weapon. The Hammer, in essence, was the most advanced Directed HighEnergy Weapon system ever conceived, and singly the product of Peter Jance's unique vision. That vision, and the knowledge that informed it, had their roots in the Manhattan Project, where Peter had begun his scientific career, in 1943, as a twenty-one-year-old mathematician; Einstein himself had announced that Peter was the only scientist at Los Alamos who had caught an error in his calculations. They had exploded the first thermonuclear device just thirty miles north on this very testing ground, at a site called Trinity, and a month later had seen two Japanese cities atomized by their device.