Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 47 - Breaking News

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“Excuse me,” James said as he approached the television producer at the very edge of Navy Pier. “A word?”

“Busy at the moment, friend,” the slender man answered.  His sizeable brown mustache, thick and bushy like a walrus, trebled as he spoke.  

“I believe we have some information that would be helpful.”

“You know, I should have stayed home,” the man said to James.  “I had another chance to fix things handed to me, like a free ticket or, or something like a free pass.  You know?”

He stopped talking and looked at Tabitha, then back to James, then back to Tabitha again.

“You related?” the man asked.

“What?” James answered. “No. Colleagues.  Well, we used to be.  Then I retired, but she still is.  Working, that is.  Or rather, she was before all this.”

The producer looked at Tabitha up and down.

“That’s some red hair,” he said.

“I can tell you how this all started,” she said.

“Yeah, and that, and a nickel, will get you a cup of coffee,” the producer said.

“What does that mean?” Tabitha asked.

“It’s an old saying, you know?” the producer said.  “Listen, no offense, but all I’ve heard the last few days are crazy theories and, and, you know, postulancies.”

“Postulancies?” Tabitha asked.  “You mean prognostications?”

The skinny little man looked at Tabitha again.  His mustache twitched.

“We’re both astrophysicists,” James said.  “Have you ever heard of a large hadron collider?”

“No idea,” the man said.

“Well, we made the one that caused these black holes,” James said.

“Wait a minute,” the man said incredulously.  “You saying that you, you, you did all this?”

“Not us, personally,” Tabitha told him.  “But we suspect we know the person who, in fact, used the large hadron collider to do so.  And I’m guessing you can help us find her.”

“I’ll put you on the air right now,” the producer said, pointing to his cameraman and reporter who stood at the edge of the pier filming the anomalies floating over the water.  

“But not here,” Tabitha told him.  

“But this is where the black holes are,” the man said.  

“We can take you to where it all started,” James said.  

“Well, now you’ve really got my attention,” the man said. He pulled a small reporter’s notepad and pencil from his back pocket and held them ready. “What are your names, then, doctors?”

“Tabitha Small and James Harbash,” Tabitha told him.  “Again, we’re astrophysicists.”

After scribbling down their names, the man reached into his back pocket and produced a small wallet from which he pulled two business cards. 

“I’m Tony Schaufwater, by the way,” he said as he handed them each a card.  “I was obviously a news producer in my younger days.  So here I am again.” 

Tony pointed toward his news crew: the attractive blonde teenage girl wearing a shoulder-pad-laden business suit and the young boy, who was as small as Tabitha, who struggled to balance the enormously cumbersome camera upon his shoulder.  

“They showed up at the station, so I’m working with what I got at this point,” he said.  He held up his notepad and pencil again.  “So what’s your deal, then?”

“Dr. Harbash led the development of the North American Hadron Collider, a companion to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe,” Tabitha explained.  “Our work deals with developing and using superconductors, magnetic field theory, and the like.” 

“Sounds more like you’re engineers,” Tony responded.

“That kind of tech serves our particular interests,” Tabitha said. 

“We have, in turn, overseen the North American Collider for a scientific development firm not far from here,” James said.

“Okay, so explain what this Large…” Tony looked down at his notebook.  “What this Large Hadron Collider is exactly, and what it has to do with those black circles over the water.”

“It’s the world’s most powerful particle accelerator,” James said.  

“Or it will be,” Tabitha added.  “The tech available now is, of course, forty years younger than what we had before.”

“I would think that was a problem,” Tony said.   

“Some of that tech is still available,” James said.  “We just need access to see where we stand.”

“But what does that do, specifically?” Tony said.  “I’m a layman here, so speak plainly, docs.”

“The inside of the accelerator has two particle beams,” James said.  “High-energy particle beams that move nearly at the speed of light before - bam! — We make them collide.”

“Again, for what reason?” Tony asked.

“Oh, a myriad of reasons, for sure,” James said.  “These particle beams are guided around a ring — the actual accelerator ring itself, you see — by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets.”

“Magnets,” Tony repeated as he wrote the word in his notebook and circled it.

“There are thousands of magnets in the collider,” Tabitha said.  “All different sizes, different types.”

“That does what?”

“They direct the beam around the accelerator.”

“This all sounds like a fun little science fair experiment,” Tony said. “But I must be too dense to see the connection here.”

“There,” James said and pointed back out over the water.  “What are those?”

“We’ve been calling them black holes,” Tony said.

“Right,” James responded.  “And what are black holes?”

“My understanding after talking about nothing but those things all day is that black holes are a place in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from it,” Tony said. “Like light, for instance.”

“Exactly!” James said excitedly.  “And at the event horizon of a black hole, the boundary around which no light or radiation or anything can theoretically escape, there is an intense magnetic field.”

“Like in your Large Hadron Collider,” Tony said.  He smiled widely, his mustache flaring out to the sides like wings on a small hairy bird. “I think I’m following you now.”

“Precisely!” James said with a wide grin of his own.

“We can take you to the lab where we began construction of the North American Collider in the late 70’s,” Tabitha said.

“Which in our new timeframe was just a few years ago,” Tony deduced.  “And you have access to this?” 

“Full access,” James said.  He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and jingled them.  “I was a senior fellow overseeing the initial development of the LHC with a firm called ENH Initiative.”

“And what’s there to see now?” Tony asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Tabitha said.  “We hadn’t made our way there before we saw you broadcasting the black holes over the water there.”

At that moment, a roar of screams came from the crowd.  The mass of people scrambled backward.

“Something’s happening!” the blonde news reporter screamed as she ran from her post at the wooden rail overlooking Lake Michigan.  The cameraman in the body of a little boy dropped the camera from his shoulder and dragged it at his side as he scrambled to catch up with her.

“The black holes are moving closer together,” Tabitha said.

“Why would they do that?” Tony asked.  “They’ve stayed separated all day.  Why are they doing that?”

They watched in horror as ten black holes, previously spaced equidistant at least a hundred feet from each other, moved as fast as a clap of thunder and suddenly merged into one massive singularity, now towering nearly five stories high in the span of a second. Upon merging, it immediately began to spin clockwise and pulse.  

Nearby, a small row boat with an adventurous, thrill-seeking passenger was sucked into the now massively pulsing hole in the span of a second.  The man and his boat vanished from existence faster than anyone watching could fully comprehend.  Similarly, across the harbor, first one boat and then another was snatched up into the black hole, which then grew with every object it overtook.  

Across Lake Michigan, other groups of black holes did the same, merging instantaneously as fast as a shooting star, first one and then another.  Moments before, over fifty smaller singularities had floated in mid-air, all across the lake from the view of Navy Pier.  Now, they’d merged into a half dozen monstrosities quadrupled in size, hovering threateningly as they cast shadows upon the water and the pier, blacking out the sky behind them and swallowing anything within a hundred feet.

On the pier, the crowd started running.  James, Tony, and Tabitha were carried along into the mass of people quickly moving away from the waterfront.

“We have to pull the black holes apart from each other!” Tabitha yelled over the frantic screams of the panic-stricken crowd.  

“There’s nothing we can do here,” James said.  He huffed for breath as Tabitha’s tiny form pulled him by the hand through the seemingly endless multitude.  

Undulating and pulsing like the now-giant black holes, the crowd moved and pushed against each other, but their movement was unpredictable and slow.  A hopeful gap would suddenly open within the mass of people and immediately disappear before they could reach it.  Movement repeatedly clogged and stopped while the screaming continued.  

Finally, they broke through the throng and into Jane Adams Memorial Park, where the crowds pushed onto the narrow city streets. In every direction, it was one bottleneck after another.  

They were off the pier now, in the midst of the city.  Tony turned his head in all directions.

They could still see the black holes from behind them, less than a hundred yards away from the end of the pier.  A low surging hum emanated from the floating orbs and filled the air with electricity, dry and charged like the moment before lighting strikes.

“My crew!” Tony yelled over the noise.  “I lost my crew!”

Sucked into the movement of the crowd, Tony’s reporter and camera boy were nowhere to be seen.  In the distance, they saw the black hole closest to Navy Pier unexpectedly double in size.  The city darkened around them. 

“I need to go back!” Tony called.

James twisted his head and saw a sea of people cascading toward them like a crashing wave.

“There’s no getting through that,” he said to Tony.  

“How far are we going, then?” Tony yelled out from behind them. He again looked back toward the pier.  “This isn’t right!”

“West!” James called as Tabitha continued tugging his hand through the crowd.  “Toward the university.”

“But my crew!”

“We have no choice,” Tabitha said, now the apparent leader of their small contingent despite her diminutive size. 

“We won’t get far going that way,” Tony said.  His skinny body swiftly swerved to catch up to them, maneuvering through the crowd more easily than James with his significantly greater girth.  “The roads are completely jammed.  Could we take the ‘L’?” 

“Those will be log-jammed, as well,” James said.

“We can make it on foot,” Tabitha said confidently.  “It’s less than five miles to the west.”

“The university?” Tony asked.

“The ENH Initiative,” Tabitha answered.  “We need to get to where this all started.”

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