"I don't like it," said Vincent Duffy, taking off his hat to wipe perspiration from his forehead. "I get the creepy sensation that it's watching me."
"Yeah," replied David Jeffcott, standing beside him. "I get that as well."
"It just feels, I don't know." Duffy ran his hand over his almost bald head, then replaced his hat as the hot Arizona sun began to burn his scalp. "It feels wrong. You know?"
Jeffcott nodded his agreement. The army had set up a perimeter around it. It looked like a straight line of soldiers and vehicles standing in the dusty prairie, their engines constantly running so they could be moved forward as the anomaly advanced behind them. The line of uniformed men, spaced around twenty metres apart, looked almost straight because the anomaly was so big. At least twenty miles across, they'd told him, and growing bigger all the time. Even as he watched, the infantryman in their dusty, sweat stained uniforms were edging warily away from the shimmering, rippling surface behind them, following their orders to remain ten metres away from it and to turn aside any foolhardy members of the public who tried to go in.
They glanced nervously behind themselves as they did so, as if the mere proximity might affect them. And who knows? Jeffcott thought. Maybe it would. Even as they came to a halt at their new posts, standing smartly, trying to give the impression of calm self assurance, Jeffcott saw their eyes shifting uneasily, all too aware of the whatever-it-was getting closer behind them. Creeping steadily, inch by inch. Silently, stealthily, like an assassin with a knife in his hand. So far it had grown at a steady, predictable pace, but who knew if it might suddenly leap forward, to engulf everyone with the audacity to stand so close to it?
They could actually feel it behind them. Jeffcott knew. He knew because he could feel it too. It reminded him of a time back in school, twenty years before, when his physics teacher Mr Bannister had been teaching him and his classmates about static electricity. He'd had a huge Van De Graaff generator standing on a desk in the middle of the room and as he cranked it up he'd told them to touch it, one at a time, or in a chain holding hands. The static charge had made their hair stand on end, even the small hairs of their arms and legs.
It had been a tickly, prickly feeling, he remembered. It wasn't quite the same as the feeling the anomaly was causing him, but it was the closest sensation he could think of even though they'd said there was no static electricity associated with it, or anything else they could measure. He wondered whether it was partly caused by adrenalin. Fear of the unknown. The unmistakable feeling that it was violating the world somehow. The deep, ingrained knowledge coming from some ancient and primitive part of the brain that this thing was not supposed to exist.
They'd come for him while he was giving a lecture to his college class. Three big men in black suits, slipping into the lecture hall and standing quietly at the back. He remembered it reminding him of that scene in the movies when they wanted the implausibly attractive expert to talk to the newly arrived alien spaceship. They'd waited patiently for him to finish his lecture, ignoring curious glances from the eighteen year olds in his physics class. Then they had come striding forward while he was packing away his notes. He had already guessed what it was about, of course. The anomaly had been in the news for days beforehand. There was no way you could hide something that big. Especially not when towns of thousands of people had had to be evacuated. And he'd known he was specialised in the same very narrow field of physics as the people who were almost certainly responsible for the anomaly. He'd been expecting to be picked up, therefore. They'd barely had to say a word to him. He had just nodded, told them he needed to pop home to get a few things, and went with them.
They had driven him to the airport and put him on a plane to Arizona, where the anomaly had popped into existence. More men in black suits had met him at Phoenix airport and put him in a big black hummer that drove right up to the aircraft on the tarmac. As Jeffcott had climbed down the steps he'd seen that the airport was full of soldiers, mostly standing around as if on guard, and that the sky above him was humming with helicopters.
As they'd driven out of the city, on a lane kept clear for the use of official vehicles, he'd seen that every other lane was choked with traffic trying to get out of the city. They passed a car that had tried to use the official lane, a desperate father trying to get his family out of the city faster. Soldiers had forced the car off the road onto the desert and two beefy Sergeants had the father sprawled across the bonnet while his wife and two daughters, still in the car, watched helplessly.
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The hummer had quickly left the main road, though, to wind its way south through several small towns that were also in disarray as the anomaly approached. Then they turned west to the mobile command post that had been set up on Interstate 10, at the edge of the affected area.
They'd gathered quite a crowd of experts, he saw. About a dozen men and woman, all with the academic look that told him they were scientists, each presumably near the top of the field in their respective specialities. Two of them were people he recognised. Vincent Duffy and Cheryl Robinson, both world class physicists like him. Jeffcott had actually worked with Duffy a few years before when they had both been at Cern. He was brilliant, Jeffcott thought, but had some eccentric ideas that had kept his career from advancing as much as it might. That was probably why he was here, he though. If the mystery of the anomaly was to be solved, it would be by someone like him.
His eyes were drawn irresistibly to Robinson, though, who was pulling a baseball cap lower over her eyes to shade them from the glaring sun. She looked even better in real life than the photographs she customarily placed at the end of her published papers. He'd never actually met her before. They had both been at the 2018 Hamburg plasma conference, but somehow they'd never been in the same room at the same time despite him having actively tried to hunt her down. As it was, they had only ever communicated by email until now, but now that they were standing in the desert, just a few feet away from each other, his imagination conjured up some interesting possibilities that allowed him to forget about the anomaly for a few minutes.
The people in charge let them stand and stare at the phenomenon for a few moments as the line of soldiers settled into their new positions. The other visitors were just as disturbed and awestruck as he was, Jeffcott wasn't surprised to see. Some of them were going pale and were staring as if it was a huge monster that might attack them at any moment. One man was edging towards a trailer piled high with packing crates as if he wanted to hide behind it. He saw Jeffcott looking at him and smiled with embarrassment but Jeffcott didn't blame him. He felt a strong desire to join him there. He was as freaked out as if the anomaly had fixed a pair of narrow, hungry eyes on him and was poising itself to strike.
The soldiers seemed to understand because they began to urge them away from the strange new phenomenon, as if offering them a face-saving excuse to get out of its sight. Jeffcott saw gratitude on the faces of the other guests, a gratitude he shared, as the soldiers showed them the way to the conference room. It had been set up in a portacabin that was still sitting on the back of a lorry by the side of the interstate where a fair sized crowd of vehicles was gathered. More portacabins on the backs of trucks had been outfitted as hospitals, laboratories and offices, and among them were police cars, army trucks and vans with big satellite dishes on top belonging to various international news agencies. Every vehicle had its engine running so they could retreat back along the wide interstate as the anomaly advanced relentlessly towards them. People were walking back and forth between them, or just standing and staring as if hypnotised by the wall of weirdness that the eye somehow couldn't quite focus on.
As they filed towards the portacabin, Jeffcott saw where crowds of reporters and spectators were being held back by anxious looking police officers and a length of 'Police Line - Do Not Cross' ribbon that had been strung between road cones. The reporters, many of them from foreign news agencies, were shouting questions at them as a Captain showed them in, but Jeffcott had no answers for them. He knew no more than they did.
Inside, a long table had been placed in the centre of the room. A computer and a printer stood on it, along with untidy, overlapping sheets of printed paper bearing graphs and tables of numbers. On the back wall was a large map of the local area on which concentric circles had been drawn showing how the anomaly had grown. As the guests looked for their name tags on the table and took their assigned seats a man in a creased suit was drawing a new circle that almost reached the edge of the map. They were going to need a larger one before the end of the day.
There was a fridge just inside the door and a woman in military uniform smiled as she offered them bottles of cold water and fruit juice from it. Jeffcott took one gratefully, being both hot and thirsty, and drank most of out in one long swallow. Until you'd actually experienced the Arizona heat, he reflected, it was impossible to understand how it sapped the strength, especially for someone who'd only ever experienced the mild summers of England and New York, which had been his home since taking a teaching post at Columbia University five years before.
Jeffcott's place was between a man whose name tag identified him as Mark Summers and a woman called Lucy Dennings, whose name he recognised but couldn't quite place. Before he could ask her, though, a couple of military men followed them in through the door and everyone stared at them as they waited to hear what they were going to say.