Wormholes by Dennis Meredith Page A

her leg through, hooked it gingerly into the hole and leaned out so her helmet camera would get a good shot of it. She could feel the extreme sharpness of the edges through her thick climbing suit pants. She couldn’t stay like this long. She grabbed the hole and brought the helmet camera in for closeup shots. She also fished out a tape measure, payed it out and held it up against the hole. Diameter of 38 centimeters. Same as in the building, if she remembered Gaston’s briefing correctly. She reported the measurement to Gaston.
    Finally, she hauled herself up as best she could to peer through the hole, leaning over sideways in the harness. Her eyes came into line with the hole. Her head blocked part of the laser beam, but she could see that the hole passed all the way through the tower. Beyond, she could see the shimmering waters of San Francisco Bay. That’s where whatever-it-was had gone into the ground, making the seismic trace. Maybe the next phase of this search would be underwater. If she got the Deus Foundation grant. She took more pictures. This was getting weirder and weirder.
    “Pull me up,” she said tersely into the microphone. “We’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

D inner on the supertanker was mock turtle soup, Caesar salad, veal marsala, asparagus with hollandaise, a potato soufflé the chef had invented on the last voyage, and peach melba for dessert. The drink was an excellent sparkling water.
    With a final sip from the crystal goblet, the captain stood and nodded contentedly to the officers, who were preparing to adjourn to the wardroom for after-dinner sodas, and the nightly card game, and later a movie. They didn’t ask him to join. He had clamped his pipe between his teeth. They knew it was a sign he would spend the next hour strolling the vast deck in the darkness, breathing the cool sea air and thinking about whatever it was he needed to think about.
    At that moment he was thinking of his pipe. He would have dearly loved to light it. He admitted he was simply torturing himself. But given that the supertanker Castile carried four million barrels of thick Arabian crude in its cavernous steel tanks, there was the usual rule that it was a no-smoking ship, and even though he was the captain, he was not about to break that rule. He thought of the pipe as a reminder that in two weeks they would be docked at Fos-sur-Mer. The chief officer and the pumpman would do their duty, and he could leave the tanker to the experienced men and go ashore to meet his wife and smoke his pipe.
    He was a small, spare man, with sharp Mediterranean features, thinning dark hair, and intense, dark eyes. But the crew swore that he grew much larger when he became angry, which was seldom. When a seaman did well, he offered as reward a half-smile. Together with the twinkle in his eyes, it was a sufficient communication of approval for any of his longtime crew.
    And so he was happy tonight. Four days to the Strait of Gibraltar, good seas, and only the single significant valve problem, which would be fixed long before they reached the sea dock.
    He climbed the stairs to the bridge deck, entering the darkened control room with its long row of monitors, indicator lights, buttons and switches. The radiance from the computer screens was more than sufficient to overwhelm the faint starshine outside. And there was not much of a moon to contribute its light. He sauntered along the row of instruments. At each station, the mate on duty tensed slightly, prepared to report verbally if necessary the status of his watch. But the captain merely nodded at each and glanced at the screen to glean the information himself.
    Although the captain had begun his career before the age of computer controls, he had taken great care to learn them.
    He completed his control room inspection and stepped out the door into the night. He descended to the main deck, walking around to the catwalk. Under the single tall deck light amidship, the catwalk stretched