"I think it was," she said, "but I guess who did what is up for debate now."

Olaf snorted.

Arthur straightened up in his chair and looked around. "Most of us were there at that point, and we were all pretty drunk. We started talking about how we were going to go down in history as a bunch of crackpots. Maybe mad scientists if people were feeling particularly kind. And we were right there in my office. With my book collection.

"One of them," Arthur said, "is a treatise by a man named Aleksander Koturovic. Limited run. I think only two or three hundred were ever printed, and most of them were destroyed. I found it in a used bookshop in England while I was doing research for The History of What We Know."

Mike waited a moment for him to continue. Everyone was staring at Arthur. Olaf made no move to pick up the thread.

"Koturovic did a lot of early work in neuroscience and biochemistry back in the late eighteen eighties, but he also dabbled in physics, mathematics, a bit of everything. Dabbled being the key word. Half of his ideas were brilliant, even by today's standards. The other half..." Arthur pushed his gla.s.ses back onto his face. "Well, I didn't even bother to include him in my book. Let's say that."

"He was a doomsday nut," said Sasha. "He thought someday humanity was going to form some kind of telepathic gestalt, a collective unconscious, that'd open a dimensional breach between worlds. And then monsters from those other worlds would come attack us."

Mike glanced at her. "You've read it?"

"We've all read it at this point," said Jamie. "Two or three times."

"If he was alive today," said Neil, "he'd be showing up on the History Channel all the time, talking about mermaids and pyramid power and Bigfoot and all that c.r.a.p."

"Or he'd have a movie deal with SyFy," Sasha said.

Arthur cleared his throat. "Olaf made some comment, something that reminded me of the treatise," he said. "I can't remember what. But we pulled it off the shelf and read some pa.s.sages out loud. A large part of Koturovic's work is his doomsday theory, and he had a lot of math backing it up. It was all nonsense, of course, and we imagined people reading about us the same way in a hundred years. Then we reached a few pages of his raw calculations for breaching dimensional barriers. I stumbled over them for a few minutes, and then Sasha said we should just use his equations to run the Door."

She shrugged. "I'd had three or four drinks at that point," she said. "It sounded like Koturovic had a better grip on how to create a dimensional breach than we did."

"We were all drunk," said Olaf. "Drunk enough that it made sense to try it, not so drunk that we couldn't do it."

"We took a pair of bottles down to the main floor," Jamie said. "Arthur read off thirty-seven pages of equations and I typed it all in."

"Jamie's the fastest typer," said Neil. He twisted his wedding ring off and flipped it back and forth between his fingertips. "Our Jamie was, anyway."

Her lips twitched and her gaze dropped to the table for a moment.

"I think," said Arthur, "on some level I was hoping it would destroy the system. That it would all overload, seize up, short out, something. That was my high hope, that we could just end in failure rather than disgrace. Jamie entered the equations, we all made one last toast, and we turned it on."

"And it worked," said Mike.

Arthur nodded. "Yes. And to this day we don't know how. We all stood there and stared at it. It stayed open for fourteen seconds before we blew a fuse."

"We caused a blackout," said Neil. "Everyone for half a mile lost power."

"The next morning we weren't sure if it really happened or not," Arthur said, "but there were too many things we all agreed on. So we spent two days replacing everything that had burned out and tried it again. And there it was.

"We agreed to keep it secret right then and there. We didn't know how it happened, just that all our careers were saved. At least for a while longer. I approached Magnus with our requirements for complete secrecy. He saw one test and agreed. We all signed the nondisclosure agreements and there it was." He looked around the room. "We had a conspiracy."

Jamie and Sasha nodded. Neil bowed his head.

"Over the next few months we improved the tech side of it, made it more energy efficient, and doubled the time. Then we tripled it and eventually got it to where it is today." Arthur pulled his gla.s.ses off again, remembered he still wasn't wearing a tie, and pushed them back on. "But we still don't know why or how it works."

"You've had almost three years to study it," said Mike. "You must have figured out some of it."

"There's nothing to figure out," said Olaf. "The man's hypotheses were-are-gibberish. Even back then, people said they were gibberish. Psychic energy and dimensional barriers and giant alpha predators. His science is weak at best and a third of his equations aren't even finished. He published a volume of loose premises with nothing to back them up except a few mathematical coincidences."

"And yet," Mike said, "it works."

Olaf managed a bitter smile and nodded. "It works."

"Why didn't you just say something? Come clean and get some more people in here?"

Arthur took a deep breath and sighed. "Pride," he said. "Ego. We were so sure we could crack it, then too embarra.s.sed that we couldn't."

"Suddenly we'd go from being the people who created the Albuquerque Door to a footnote," Olaf said. "We'd just be the people who laid the groundwork for someone else to figure it out."

"Nothing wrong with that," said Mike.

"You don't publish a lot, do you?" smirked Olaf.

"We kept running trial after trial, hoping to learn something," said Arthur. "Olaf and I spent weeks combing through the treatise and going over every crosswalk again and again. It gave us material to feed to DARPA. If nothing else, we hoped an overwhelming series of successful tests would deflect attention away from the fact that we didn't understand why they were successful."

"Really?"

"Lots of inventions went public before people fully understood them," said Neil. "Three-quarters of the pharmaceutical industry is just ma.s.s-testing random compounds and seeing what kind of effects they have. When the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were less than two hundred people in the world who understood all of the science and engineering behind the atomic bomb. No one in Washington did. But everyone understood the explosion."

"We've made almost no progress," said Arthur. "There's something missing. Some element that's just beyond us."

Mike raised a brow. "How do you mean?"

"I have a premise," he said, "a bare-bones one for another book, that certain ideas can only happen at certain points in history. We don't see the sun the same way the ancient Egyptians did. We don't see the night sky the same way the ancient Greeks did. We don't see the ocean the same way the Vikings did. The scientific views of a time shape how people view things enough that once society gets past a certain point, it's almost impossible for us to think in the same way."

"I've heard similar ideas," said Mike.

"Some key paradigm has shifted in the hundred-plus years since Koturovic wrote down his theories," Arthur said. "Something about how we see the world. And it's keeping us from fully understanding what he was saying."

"It probably didn't help that every now and then one of you came through the Door with slightly different research priorities," Mike said. "Just enough to keep throwing things off, and adding to the sense of memory issues."

Arthur raised his shoulders, and let them slump back down.

"Still, though," Mike said, "three years? How's that possible?"

"Fermat came up with his 'last theorem' in sixteen thirty-seven," said Olaf. "It took three hundred and fifty years for someone to solve it again. That was a scribble in a margin. We're dealing with almost nine pages of equations."

"With nothing to back them up," Arthur added. "As I said, most of his work was destroyed. I'd be amazed if there were thirty copies of his treatise left in the world. There's no early research or further studies or later experiments. Koturovic's almost a nonent.i.ty, historically. He dropped out of sight in England, reappeared briefly in America, and died in eighteen ninety-nine."

"We just needed more time," Jamie said. "We figured if we had more time, if we could run more experiments, eventually we had to find a pattern. We'd figure out how the equations work."

Mike looked at her, and the ants carried out more images. Computer towers. Talking about code. Pages from different reports.

"Johnny doesn't just run the crosswalks," he said. "It's a.n.a.lyzing them. It didn't take you long to go over the code because most of his functions don't involve running the Door at all."

Jamie and Arthur both nodded.

Another moment pa.s.sed.

"So," Arthur said, "now you know everything. What happens next? Are you going to turn us in to Magnus?"

Mike shook his head. "I think the Door itself is the big issue right now." He looked at each of them. "No one else should go through it, and we need to figure out how to shut it off."

"Tough," said Olaf, "since we don't know how it works in the first place."

THIRTY-SIX.

"Okay," Jamie said. "I might regret this, but can I ask you a question about her?"

Mike looked away from his terminal. "Her?"

"The other me?"

They were watching the Door again. Olaf was at Site B. Sasha was with them, checking the cables and hoses for the ninth time, to make sure something hadn't been left connected.

"You can ask," said Mike, "but I don't know if I can answer."

"I might be able to," Sasha said.

"Why would she name the cat after a doctor?"

"What?" Mike yawned. They were all working on five hours of sleep. He hadn't been too surprised when Jamie spent it alone in her trailer.

"Spock," she said. "Why would a kid name their cat Spock?"

"I thought it was the Star Trek character," said Mike, "not the doctor."

"Pretty sure it was," said Sasha. "You...she was a fan of the original series."

Jamie looked at Sasha, then over to Mike, and back. "What's Star Trek?"

There was silence on the main floor.

"You are f.u.c.king kidding me," said Sasha.

"What?"

"'s.p.a.ce, the final frontier...'" said Mike. "Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, the Enterprise."

Jamie shook her head.

"Okay," he said, "where'd you come up with Isis?"

"a.s.signment: Earth," she said. "I loved it when I was little. I named him after the cat on the show."

"a.s.signment: Earth?"

"Yeah, you know. The old sci-fi show. Gary Seven. Isis." She tilted her head to the left. "'Our mission is to guide mankind into the twenty-first century....'"

It was Mike's turn to shake his head.

She stared at him. "Robert Lansing, Teri Garr, Julie Newmar. It ran for six or seven years. They made movies out of it. And a spin-off series."

"Wait." Sasha furrowed her brow. "You're talking about the old Star Trek episode, 'a.s.signment: Earth'?"

"Yes!" Jamie snapped her fingers. "That's right. I always forget it was a spin-off."

"But you've never heard of Star Trek?"

"No, no, no," she said. "I remember it now. It was that s.p.a.ceship show Roddenberry did for two seasons before a.s.signment: Earth replaced it."

"So no Captain Picard?" asked Sasha. "Deep s.p.a.ce Nine? Wrath of Khan?"

Jamie straightened up. "The Wrath of Khan, yeah, of course."

Sasha put her fists on her hips. "How do you have Wrath of Khan but not Star Trek?"

"It was the second a.s.signment: Earth movie, when they tried to stop the Eugenic Wars. Ricardo Montalban came back and played the same character from that Star Trek show. They had to dye his hair black so it'd match the old episodes."

Another moment of silence spread itself thin across the main floor.

"The universe you come from sucks," said Sasha. "I'm going up to the booth to check the main readings again."

Jamie settled back in her chair and sighed. She flipped a quarter off her thumb, caught it, and worked it back to her thumb again. It spun into the air two more times, and she blew air out of her nose.

Mike glanced at her. "Problem?"

"Well, yeah. Apparently I'm stuck in an alternate universe where there's no a.s.signment: Earth."

"That's all?"

She looked at him. "What are we doing?"

He tilted his head. "Us?"

"It's not on!" she said, waving a hand at the rings. "The power's not on, the coils are cold, there's no magnetic flux past the standard residual. We can't shut the Door down when everything already says it's shut off."