"As soon as you're in position," Bill answered.

"We're as ready as we're gonna get," the colonel replied. "Blast away, Doctor."

Particle accelerators were delicate things that were normally only found in laboratories. And the rest of the mechanisms involved were even worse, not to mention being hastily thrown together by the team from Columbia. There was, therefore, an inflatable shelter, courtesy of the United States Army, thrown up over the boson.

Bill walked down the hill, which was knee high in grass and covered in lovely white flowers, to where the team was making final adjustments. The equipment also required enormous quantities of energy, which was another reason for using this boson; there was a high-tension power line trailing across the back side of the property. Army electrical power specialists along with some bemused electricians from the local power cooperative had tapped into the line, run it through an Army field substation and trailed arm-thick power cables down to the devices in the tent. They were now all connected and would soon be drawing enough power to brown out the surrounding area.

"All set?" he asked.

Mark Rosenberg was a member of his team at Columbia. The heavyset, just below medium height, brown-haired man was an electrical engineer with a background in the nuclear industry. After getting laid off in a round of cuts he had submitted his resume to Columbia, expecting to end up working in one of their few remaining defense factories. Instead, he had ended up working with Bill doing whatever they were doing that week. The team's purpose, up until the opening of the gates, was finding problems that the U.S. military had and then solutions. It had all been highly classified work which sometimes resulted in major successes but often resulted in minor failures. However, the military had a host of problems it wanted fixed and much preferred to dump them on what were generally called "Beltway Bandits" than detail officers who had real day-to-day jobs to trying to find solutions. Good, problem solving, officers were always in short supply. It made more sense to have them fix those problems that only the military could solve, like figuring out exactly how much firepower to use against Iraqi guerilla forces by trial and error, than sitting in offices trying to figure out how to determine the whichness of where. Occasionally the team's problem-solving skills had a great effect and thus the military felt their money had been well spent.

One soldier's life saved was equated to just about a million dollars. The team's output had probably saved, here and there, over a hundred lives if not more.

But since getting the call to go to Orlando, Mark had been on what the military called "the sharp end."

He'd suited up more times than he ever did working at Savannah River, he'd watched two nuclear detonations and he'd scrounged more weird materials, from more sources, than he'd ever imagined. The linear accelerator, for example, had had to be hand built on site from parts scrounged from research laboratories and factories ranging from Missouri (at a steel plant) to England (Reading University). And the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, its temporary official name, had started off life as a device to wrap tubes with in plastic. He'd found it on eBay being sold by a company in Seattle that was tired of it jamming all the time. The express overnight shipping had cost more than the machine.

"Probably," he said, checking a connection. "This is the most jury-rigged piece of crap I've ever seen in all my born days." "It only has to run for a few seconds," Bill replied. "It either will work or it won't."

The boson generated muons in every direction. But by careful study they had found that in one direction, more or less pointed west and down towards the earth, it was generating over one hundred times the output of any other direction. The devices had been aligned carefully. The circular magnetic whatchamacallit was aligned perpendicular to the stream while the accelerator was aligned opposite of it.

In a few seconds they were going to find out if it was possible to open a gate intentionally. If they could open one, they might be able to close one as well.

"Let's get out of here," Bill said, gesturing to the door of the shelter.

"I'm sure not going to stick around," Mark replied, closing the door to the connection and wiping his hands on a scrap of rag. The one thing he'd enjoyed about the recent jobs was getting his hands dirty.

Both working for Savannah River and Columbia had involved far more time sitting in offices than building things. And he dearly loved to tinker with electrical contraptions.

They walked up the hill and through a stand of old trees where a farmhouse had apparently once stood, then across the road and down the slope on the far side. In the tobacco field on the far side the army had kindly constructed a bunker. It was a hole in the ground, covered with scrounged heavy timbers, I-beams and corrugated steel, which had been piled six layers deep with sandbags. Bill had been surprised and amused to find that the Army had an automatic sandbag filler. Construction of the bunker, using civilian backhoes, the sandbag filler and a small army of soldiers, had taken less than six hours. It was large enough for the team and all their gear. Another bunker a short distance away, connected by a reinforced and covered trench, held the military command post.

Bill picked up a field phone and cranked it.

"Bravo Company," a voice answered on the other end.

"All your people ready?" Bill asked.

"Hold one," the soldier answered. In a moment he was back. "All clear."

"Initiating," Bill said, nodding at Mark.

Mark nodded back and pressed a button on a hastily rigged control panel.

There should have been an explosion or a blast of light. Some sort of decent special effect. But there wasn't. The cameras in the inflatable shelter showed the whatchamacallit starting to spin. It got up to full speed and then, suddenly, as the lights in the bunker dimmed slightly, there was a round mirror hanging just off the ground.

"Kill it," Bill said. "Send in the evaluation team."

Bill walked out of the shelter and up the hill where the trees were and watched as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Five men in environmental suits, carrying a selection of heavy weapons, jumped out of the Humvee and entered the inflatable shelter. Bill waited impatiently and then one came out of the shelter and waved a hand.

Bill caught a ride with the battalion commander as he drove by on the way down the hill. When he got tothe bottom he waved a hand at Command Master Chief Miller who was stripping out of his environment suit. Miller had lost quite a bit of what remaining hair he had left but otherwise was recovering nicely from his exposure to a blast of neutrons and fairly hard gammas.

"Desert environment," Miller said. "Some mountains nearby. What look like ruins at the base of the mountains. No animals seen or plants. And no Titcher for sure. Air monitors say it's got enough oxygen, slightly elevated carbon dioxide. Pressure is about earth normal. Cold as hell, though; temperature on the far side reads five degrees Fahrenheit."

"Did you say ruins?" Bill asked.

"We can't say that the entire world is desert," Bill noted over the secure link. "We can only see the tiny slice on the other side of the gate. The archeologist we conscripted from the University of Kentucky estimates that the ruins are at least ten thousand years old. We've found some biologicals at this point, but they're all lower order, our equivalent of insects and lichen."

"Did the Titcher wipe them out?" the President asked.

"No, there's no sign of Titcher biology," Bill said with a shrug. "Everything has a lifespan, Mr. President.

Species rise and fall, at least if you look at the evolutionary record," he noted, carefully. "Civilizations rise and fall, too, as do planets. Eventually, our sun will go cold and the earth will pass into history. It won't happen for millions of years but it appears that it already has happened on that planet. I'd be surprised if the ruins don't turn out to be older than they appear. I suspect that the race that made them died out or left, to somewhere warmer at a guess. The boson that we connected to was a remnant from when they had lived on that planet, raised their children, built their civilization."

"It feels sad," the national security advisor said. "But it doesn't do much for us at present."

"It tells us we can open gates," Bill pointed out. "I don't think that the Titcher can come through a gate that is opened to a world that they don't control. On the other hand, quiescent bosons are a threat."

"So are gates," the secretary of defense said, dryly. "We don't know that the Titcher are the only threat.

Look at the Mreee. Not to mention the Boca Raton anomaly. We need to figure out a way toclose them and keep them closed."

"I'm not sure that's possible with any near future technology, Mr. Secretary," Bill said. "I've spoken to several other specialists and it's a general agreement that it would take orders of magnitude more power, precisely applied, to close a wormhole, permanently. The quiescent bosons that we've connected to indicate that itis possible, but the how remains a mystery. What we have been able to do, based on these experiments, is figure out how tochannel the boson output from the Orlando generator. The bosons seem to choose their channels based upon maximum probability in the local environment. By applying an induction field, a very high order induction field, we've managed to get the bosons to avoid track three.

So there are no more bosons generating on the track the Titcher use. But there are over a hundred quiescent bosons currently scattered around on that track, from Florida to France. It continues, apparently, to be closed, but it might open at any time."

"Any suggestions what we can do aboutthat ?" the President asked.

"Remember that great big Van de Graaff generator I was talking about?" Bill said. "We think that the bosons are moveable if they have a charge applied, same with the gates. But we need some huge Van de Graaff generators to apply that charge. After that I'd suggest moving them somewhere remote,Frenchman Flats comes to mind, and leaving them. Maybe even bury them in an old mine or something, with a nuke set to detonate. We won't be able to do that in weeks, maybe not in years, we may be talking about decades, but it's doable. Assuming that the reality matches with theory."

"And you can't turn off the Orlando generator?" the national security advisor asked.

"No, ma'am," Bill said. "Same problem. I've looked at some of Ray Chen's surviving notes; he had some on his home computer. And I've talked it over with Dr. Hawking and Dr. Gonzalvez. But it comes to the same conclusion. We'd need about one GAEE, that's pronounced gee, or a Global Annual Energy Expenditure-that is about 1x1018Joules . . . a hell of a lot in other words, and something that could actually channel it, which doesn't exist even in theory, to pump enough power into one of those gates to close it. There are some very out there theoretical materials that might be used, but I think even then all we'd get is destabilization and the materials vaporizing in a microsecond or two. And the vaporization would be a high energy event, think explosion. We could drop a nuke on the other side of some of the gates that are on other tracks and try to destabilize those tracks. But we already know about the secondary effects. How many areas do you want to irradiate? There's a gate in the suburbs of Los Angeles, now, and another in Cleveland. Both of them open onto abandoned worlds. But drop a nuke in one on that track and we might end up with neutron pulses on all the others."

"Not good," the President said.

"No, Mr. President," the national security advisor replied. "Especially since some have opened in Europe as well. I can imagine the reaction of the French."

"Did you know that one of the planets has been tentatively identified?" the President said.

"No, I didn't," Bill answered, excitedly.

"I don't know the jargon," the President added. "But it's supposed to be relatively close."

"BT-315-9," the national security advisor said, consulting a note. "It's a star something like ours. . . ."

"G class?" Bill asked.

"Yes, that's what it says here. About sixty light-years away. It's on track one. The gate is in Missouri.

One of the survey team knew something about stars and thought she recognized some of them. So a team of astronomers went through and took a look. They're pretty sure that it's that star. They took readings on some others and they all tracked back to that location. Now they're sending in excited reports, something about triangulation, and they want to somehow establish a major astronomy base on the other side."

"I can understand why they're excited," Bill said. "And I agree. But it has some impact on the other problem. I'd like to get some research done at the other open gates. It might turn out that they're all relatively local. By the same token, it might tell us how much power is required to open a gate that's not relatively local. And it tells us that we're at least in the same universe. He . . . heck, that's practically right next door. As far as we knew before that, we might have been opening into other universes, much less in the same galactic quadrant."

"And this is important, why?" the defense secretary asked.

"Well, I'd personally like to know where the Titcher are in 'real' space, Mr. Secretary," Bill pointed out."Just in case they have space travel technology as well."

"Oh, how truly good," the secretary said.

"They might and they might not," Bill said, excitedly. "But it clears up the major point that the gates can open inthis universe. And that, Mr. President, is a very, very good thing indeed."

"We're opening another one?" Chief Miller groused.

"Yep," Bill said. The current boson was located in Indiana, well out in a cornfield. A forty-acre section had been hastily mowed down and revetments constructed for units of the Indiana National Guard. A presidential order had been signed calling all units of the National Guard to federal service. There had been barely a squeak from Congress over the supplemental appropriation bill; at this point just about every state in the Union had one or more gates open in it and multiple identified bosons, many of them what the news media referred to as "Titcher bosons."

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Miller asked as Bill and Mark checked the alignment of the linear accelerator. The accelerator had been modified so that it could be pivoted over a narrow arc, both horizontally and vertically.

"Yep," Bill answered. "You wanna go get suited up?"

"How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?" Chief Miller muttered, but he went to get suited up.

"You gonna tell him?" Mark asked as soon as the SEAL was out of the building.

"Nope," Bill answered. "I might be wrong. I don't want him letting his guard down."

They were looking at the screens on the same hastily cobbled together control panel. Mark had taken a few hours that were otherwise unoccupied to run up a CAD diagram of a properly designed gate opening system. Columbia had dithered for a few days about whether to patent it or classify it and decided on the former. Now a construction firm in Taiwan was working on a new and improved version. Given that Columbia had the patent on the process, if the next experiment worked his option shares were going to go through the roof.

"Initiating," he said, flipping the switch. The Circular Inductance Generator, formerly known as the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, began to spin. The lights briefly dimmed. Nothing.

"No formation," Mark said.

"Track it around a little," Bill answered. "Our aim might have been off."

The device, still operative, was tracked back and forth.

"We're using a hell of a lot of juice," Mark pointed out.

"The government's paying," Bill replied.

Then a looking glass appeared in the air.

"Formation," Bill said over the radio as Mark started shutting down the systems. "Survey team in." They watched external monitors as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Then a group of five heavily armed men in environment suits, their body posture making them appear as if they were being hard done by, walked into the shed and then into the looking glass.

It was sort of like doing a tactical entry. Sort of. You never knew what was on the other side of the door. Miller knew that he should be getting blase about it, but instead each successive entry was getting more and more on his nerves. And something about Weaver's attitude, they'd been around each other enough at this point to tell when the Doc was planning something devious, had him worried.

So he took point. If it was going to be really bad, better that he be the one figuring out what to do about it than the newbie they'd just gotten in from Coronado.

He hefted the MG-240 that he had started carrying as a personal weapon and looked over his shoulder at the team, most of whom were similarly armed.

"Anybody head sweeps me and I'll kill you even if we survive," he growled, then stepped into the looking glass.

He automatically stepped forward to let the team out into the area around the gate then dropped to one knee. Sweep left, impressions, very earthlike, sweep right, green grass, blue sky, look outward, hill, guns, tanks!

He raised the MG-240, his finger going to the trigger, and then stopped.

"Everybody freeze," Miller snapped over the radio. Then he looked around and swore as he lowered the machine gun. "I'm gonna kill that motherfucker."

"Kansas!" Miller snapped over the cell phone. "I thought I was going to another fucking planet and you sent me toKansas ?"

"You'd have preferred another planet?" Bill asked.

"No, not really," Miller admitted. "'What did you do, today, Daddy?' 'Oh, went to another planet. This one had a gravity that was high enough I got squashed flat which is why I look like a pancake.' It's gonna happen sooner or later."

"Agreed," Bill said. "Which is why we're going to start shifting the bosons to internal gates. Instantaneous transportation! What man has been dreaming about for decades!"

"One or two persons at a time," the SEAL noted. "From gates in some really odd places. It's not going to take the place of planes any time soon."

"Yeah, but we're having more bosons produced all the time," Bill pointed out. "Spreading out all over the world. We've already got the ability to open one in, say, Virginia, and one in, say, France. And people can just walk in one and out the other. But movement can also be controlled. Set up customs, that sort of thing. And now there's a direct link between Kansas and Indiana. Don't know what usethat will be, admittedly, but I could see a shipping company setting up a conveyor belt that shifts stuff across the gate.

FedEx, maybe."

"Yeah, open one up in New York and another in California and they won't even have tolook at 'flyovercountry' anymore," Miller said, grumpily.

"I even know which two gates," Bill replied. "They're next on the list. The only problem will be crowd control."

"Rental car agencies are going to love you." The SEAL grinned.

"So does my boss," Bill replied. "The contract with the DOD had a normal disclaimer about 'civilian use'

of anything learned from my research. The accountants at Columbia are already having spasms. They're looking at it as a license to print money. A fee for opening the gates and a percentage of any profits."

"People from other countries opening up clandestine gates to the U.S.," Miller noted. "The new illegal Zimbabwean problem."

"You're such a grump." Bill laughed.

"Open up the Titcher gates, first," Miller said.

"Oh, definitely," Bill replied. "Just a question of from where to where. Once opened, we still don't know how to close them. And moving them will be . . . difficult."

Bill had called Sheila, finally, and told her that he was a little busy with some stuff he couldn't talk about and that he wasn't going to be in Huntsville any time soon. She'd taken the hint and dropped him an e-mail detailing all the reasons she was glad he was out of her life, including that his best friend in Huntsville was much better than he was in bed.

Columbia had a division that was supposed to handle civilian uses of any of their developments. They had taken over the gate opening system as soon as the first one was opened between a farmer's field in the Hudson Valley and a suburban backyard in East Orange County, California. They were, in Bill's opinion, handling it badly and the news services were paying more attention to that than the still quiescent Titcher gates. But Bill had figured out the theory; it was up to other people to mishandle the marketing and public relations.

He'd gotten sorely out of shape lately so he'd picked up a mountain bike in a sporting goods store in South Orlando and brought it up to the anomaly site. After reading the e-mail from Sheila he took the bike down off its rack, clipped his cell phone to his waist and went out biking.

Most of the remaining roads around the anomaly site had been closed but the majority of the TD area was still off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Which meant it was perfect, except for the terrain, for biking. He headed down a track towards the river to the west and rode along what had once been suburban streets. Nature had already started to prevail in the area. Grasses that had not been uprooted were starting to sprout green and along the river, which had been partially shielded, saplings were starting to grow. A few trees that had merely been pushed over were sprouting new growth upwards. Life goes on.

But not if the Titcher came back. The Titcher would turn this all into their green fungus, if not their vast strip mines. The records from the Mississippi gate had been studied and the conclusion was that it was a world the Titcher had destroyed and abandoned.