Haven Days

(June-July 2020)

10-Zero Hour 9 A.M.

"Status report," Ford said, his voice tight.

"Everything's green across the board," Fiddleford replied. "Uplink is optimal. We can grab 1,802, no, 1,806 now, sats. That leaves enough over so no nuclear wars or anything will break out. How's th' virus drain?"

"Powered and ready," Ford said. "I hope we'll be safe this far from the mini-portal."

"Well, I calculate that since we got 'er in th' auxiliary power bunker yonder, if th' stream ain't broke, then we should be fit as a possum in a sweet 'tater field."

"I'm sending the alert to the Agents now," Ford said, using the enhanced encrypted phone line. "And . . . here come the acknowledgments."

"Here's hopin' they'll get the cover story in place afore th' astronomers an' suchlike weigh in."

"We have leverage with the most influential scientists around the globe. I think they'll carry the day. Last of the acknowledgments is in. Ready?"

"Say th' word an' I'll start 'er up. Any time you want."

"Let's go for . . . nine o'clock on the dot," Ford said. "I'll count you down."

Fiddleford poised a finger over the ENTER key. "Start the count."

"T minus one minute thirty seconds," Ford said. Then "One minute twenty seconds."

"Dang," Fiddleford said. "Ten seconds seems a right long time."

"One minute ten."

And so the count went, until it dwindled down to "Twenty seconds. Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. All good?"

"Roger that."

"Thirteen. Twelve . . .."

From the New York Sentinel front page:

SUPER SOLAR FLARE HITS SATELLITES

Today's nearly two-hour disruption of cable television, the Internet, and 87% of satellite telephone communications was not caused by international spies, aliens, or a government conspiracy.

It resulted from a rare, very powerful natural phenomenon called a coronal mass ejection, experts explained.

Dr Ephraim McKintry, chairman of the European Center for Helioseismology, explains the incident as "an eruption."

"The sun has a strong magnetic field. Evidence of this may be seen both in sunspots and solar flares," he told the Sentinel.

Although such features are natural, this time the event had two qualities that marked it as unusual, McKintry said. First, it occurred suddenly, with little warning. Second, it burst out at the right moment and position to affect the Earth.

Fifteen hours before the event affected the Earth, Dr. McKintry and other scientists warned that the magnetic disturbance was likely to temporarily affect telecommunications . . ..

Agent Hazard had been the top pilot for the Agency for years. On the day of the event, she and a dozen others took a risky flight, their routes taking them over population centers in high latitudes. Each aircraft fired six missiles. Each missile reached the fringe of space. Each one released clouds of two chemicals, trimethyl aluminum and a barium/strontium mixture, which would reinforce the cover story of a solar discharge being behind the satellite disruptions.

"Birds are flying," she reported before her plane hit its ceiling—sixty thousand feet, about twenty thousand feet above the ceiling for passenger jets. The sky up here was a deep azure, and steaking through it she could see the trails of her six rockets. She had reached an altitude of nearly eleven and a half miles above the surface. The rockets would ascend another hundred and eighty miles and a bit.

Then the payloads would explode.

At an average altitude of 200 miles above the surface of the Earth, the chemicals ionized, producing glowing, moving patterns of green and purple lights.

The next day, the Internet lit up too, with posters presenting photos, observations, and wild speculations.

Brilliant aurora here in N Dakota! Beautiful. Almost worth loosing 2 hrs of online SkyMasters play yesterday!-Gamergeek3143

Smart money is on a Chinese military action vs alien ship. See similarities to space nukes1-Conspirawatch

Prof chemtrales R real! Wak up sheeple!-MasterDB8r2254

And more, much more. A majority, bare, true, but more than fifty percent, accepted the natural, though unusual explanation. And people from as far south as Massachusetts had glimpsed the auroras.

And, fortunately, after one hundred and nineteen minutes, the satellites began to come back on line, a few at a time. By noon, everything was running again. Some interruptions continued for a few hours, chiefly affecting satellite phones, but by the next day, everything had settled down.

Except for one geostationary satellite. Its primary mission was to send weather imagery to the Earth from 22,000 miles away. Its behavior puzzled the engineers.

"It's doing something," one of them said. "I don't know what."

"Looks like a data stream," his partner said. She rattled a keyboard. "Could almost be a laser?"

"Some kind of beam," he agreed. "But it's not weather data, that's for sure. Assume it's a laser. Where is it focused?"

She shrugged. "Can't quite localize that. West coast? Washington State? Oregon? Northern California?"

"Wait, wait. Not Two Peaks?"

Impatiently, she said, "Henry, I told you, I can't—could be that, I guess. Or, what was that burg in Oregon that the you-know-who kept under observation for so long?"

"Uh—something Falls, was it? Don't remember. Anyhow, they haven't bothered us for years now. Hell, what could the sat be sending to Podunk, Northwest USA?"

"Wait, it's starting to tail off."

"Yeah, yeah, I see. So—do we, uh, make an issue of this?"

She thought this over. Then she grinned. "We could. Our we could tell the bosses we've fixed the transmission."

He checked the readings. "Yeah, yeah, it's winding up. Let me see if we can get the weather feed up again. Hey, hey, look at this—coming back to normal now!"

"Yeah, got the real-time feed. Look at that! As pretty a picture of western U.S. weather patterns as you could ask for! We did it!"

He was already on the phone. "Hi, Joe. Hey, guess what? Barb and I fixed it! Oh, you know . . . just did our techno-magic. Yeah, sure, start the feed now . . . one hundred percent stable, and you can take that to the bank. Thanks, Joe. Yeah, right here, I'll give you to her."

He handed her the phone. She took it. "Hi," she said. "We did it."

Joe's voice was never very cheerful, but he was at least upbeat: "Congratulations, the idiots in Tech-3 told me it would take a week. Good going, you two."

"So, how about a raise?" she asked.

"Don't push it, Barbara," Joe said. Then, grudgingly, he added, "Maybe a bonus. A small one."

"Thanks, Boss."

When she hung up, he said, "Back to normal now. So . . . uh. How about, I don't know, maybe—"

"Dinner tonight?" she asked.

He blushed like a teenager. "Um, that would be, yeah, good. Want to?"

"Sure," she said.

"Uh, what's a good place—?"

"Mine," she said.

He was so surprised by her suggestion that for a few minutes he could not speak coherently. Finally, he squeaked, "Yeah, good, good, that sounds, yeah. Uh, yeah."

She kissed his cheek, thinking At last! But with Henry, this is going to be harder than bringing the satellite back online.

Everything went well.

But—

There's always a "but," isn't there? And the course of science, like that of true love, never does run smooth. An hour and seventeen minutes into the dump—a stream of particles streamed down from the sky, like a pillar of pale fire—Fiddleford said, "Whoa, Nelly!"

"What?" Ford asked.

"The temperature's a-runnin' extry high. I figgered for two hundred C, but it's done 227 and climbin'."

"Within tolerance, though?"

"So far, yeah. But if she hits three hundred, I reckon all bets are off."

"What if we ran water into the shaft? There are drains, and if I could direct a stream on the receiver and the Portal frame, that should hold the temperature down."

"Yeah, good idea, but you ain't goin' out there."

"Give me one good reason!"

"'Cause I got the onliest hazmat suit in th' lab, and you ain't got time to drive back to the Falls, nor to have somebody deliver one yore size. She's still a-climbin', up to two thirty-one. Help me suit up."

"Fiddleford, I can't let you—"

"Aw, hesh up. Iffen somethin' should happen to me, you jest promise to take care of Mayellen. An' tell her I always loved her, even when I was plumb crazy. Wait a second, figger out a way to rephrase that."

Fiddleford was almost into the orange suit when Ford said, "Wait a minute—look. The temperature's leveled off at two-forty. It's—I think it's declining."

Fiddleford, suited except for the helmet, studied the readout. "Yeah, yeah, down to two thirty-seven again . . . two thirty-six . . . two thirty-three. What th' ding-dong's a goin' on?"

They hurried to the window that gave them the best view of the long sweep of lawn, past the library and the student center, to the chain-link fence enclosing the square, four-foot-tall concrete wall enclosing the power center. It held one of the zero-point generators, and the pit had been made twenty feet deep because once or twice one of those things had gone wild back in the old days, flaring off dangerously high levels of electrical discharge.

Of course, those were the prototypes. The ones built after Weirdmageddon had proved stable. Mostly.

"Is it on fire?" Ford asked, staring at billows of clotted vapor surging from the pit, making the stream of charged particles more visible.

"Naw, that's steam. Somebody else beat us to th' punch. Git me into my helmet. I gotta go out for a look."

"Make sure the radio's activated."

"It's on. Help me here."

A few minutes later, with the temperature in the pit now down to under two hundred Celsius—well, 199.4, but that was something—Ford, gazing anxiously out the window, saw Fiddleford, looking strange in the orange hazmat suit as he took his bowlegged steps, nearing the chain link.

The handheld radio crackled. "Ford! Th' gate's open!"

"We didn't leave it unlocked—"

"Naw, but th' lock's jest hangin' loose in th' hasp. I can't see much at the base, too much steam, but there's one o' th' campus firehoses snakin' out to it. I—wait a minute, wait—"

"Fiddleford?" Ford asked. "What's wrong?"

"OK," the old man's voice came back. "Th' hose ain't on full pressure. I done fed it down into th' shaft, so it'll spray and cool everything. I'm comin' back and I'm bringin' somebody with me. You better get a hypodermic of my nanobot solution ready. I reckon fifty cc's should do it. I jest hope we're in time."

Ford dashed to McGucket's lab and opened the first-aid cabinet. The vials, 200 milliliters each, stood next to smaller ones labeled "Activating catalyst. 1 cc per 25 of vaccine."

Ford grabbed both, found a box of 100 syringes—though some had been used and discarded—and then two different hypodermic needles, one an 18-gauge drawing needle, the other a 23-gauge injection one.

He rattled down the stairs and met McGucket at the back door, struggling to hold the weigh of a body carried over his shoulder.

"Oh, no!" Ford groaned. "Not Dipper!"

"Nope," McGucket said. "It's th' one-eyed boy. Billy."

He lowered Billy, who appeared to be unconscious, to the floor. "Thankee, Ford. Load me up a hypo—two cc's of that 'un and then fifty of the nano solution. I'll jab this here young'un, and meanwhile you scramdoodle back up to my lab an' load up another hypo with four cc's of th' catalyst and a hundred of the nanos. Change that there needle for me, and for yourself use the thin one, twenty-three gauge or twenty-four, to inject yourself. Best place is the vastus lateralis muscle. Scat, now! I gotta try to save this boy's life."

Twins are different.

Stanley Pines was not afraid of a fight. He'd wade in, dole out and take punches, and spit blood and grin. But put him in a doctor's or a dentist's office and if the practitioner dug out the old hypodermic needle, Stanley would squirm and fidget and protest, "Hey, I'm feelin' better, doc!" He'd even donate blood.

But he always said it made him sick to his stomach, to have a needle probing into his flesh.

Stanford shied away from violence when possible. Oh, pushed to the wall, he could throw punches and take them, but afterward, win or lose, he always felt guilty. "There must have been some better way," he invariably lamented after a fight.

But needles? No problem. In Fiddleford's lab, he unfastened his trousers, pushed them down, and sat on a stool. He meticulously swabbed a spot on the outside of his upper right thigh. Then, with the thinner needle affixed to the hypodermic, he calmly stabbed himself to the full length of the inch-long steel shaft. He pressed the plunger slowly but steadily, feeling the burn as the nanobots entered his muscle tissue. When the hypodermic was empty, he tugged it out, covered the spot with a Band-Aid, and disposed of the needle in a MEDICAL WASTE SHARPS container. He was halfway back to the stairs until he remembered to check his fly. Since going into the classroom as a teacher, he had already discovered a certain absent-mindedness in that respect. Often he'd pat himself on the back when the entire classroom of students leaned forward, smiles on their faces, rapt—

Then he would redden, turn his back, and zzzzip! "I apologize, class. But for what it's worth, Einstein once gave an entire lecture in a jacket, tie, and red-and-white striped pajama bottoms and bunny slippers."

Fiddleford met him in the back entry hall. "Now me," he said. "I'll go up and take care of myself. You look after this boy. He's still passed out. I hope he didn't get none o' the virus, but—he was awful dang close."

"How'd he even get here?"

Fiddleford sighed. "Rode his bike, I reckon. I saw one out near th' back door."

"Go vaccinate yourself," Ford said. "I ought to be safe enough now."

While Fiddleford went upstairs, Ford took a trip to his office and came back with a sofa cushion and one of his several long coats. He covered Billy Sheaffer and put his head on the cushion. He took his pulse rate—eighty—and felt his forehead. Warm, but maybe just from being in the sun.

"Why did you do it?" he asked. "How did you know?"

The air turned purple for a moment. And then a female voice, calm, spoke from behind him: "I can answer those questions."

Ford almost didn't dare turn around. But he knew that voice.

Jheselbraum. The Oracle. Bill Cipher's greatest enemy in the Multiverse.

And her title was—the Unswerving.