American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,121

party here, decades and decades ago; and at some point two engineers probably stood in one of the laboratories scratching their heads, teasing out the problem before them.

And perhaps, if time is indeed broken here, those events could echo down through the years to be witnessed by Mona herself. Maybe she is seeing ghosts, but they’re ghosts of moments and seconds rather than people. The past is still happening here in some unseen way. Her path just happens to convene with those taken by the people who worked here long, long ago.

She is not comforted by the idea, but she feels it’s the right one. The things she’s glimpsed and heard have not responded to her or acknowledged her in any way. They’re just doing what they did decades ago, over and over again. She finds the thought a little horrifying.

Something cold calcifies in her belly. What if one of the little moments that gets replayed before her happens to feature none other than Laura Alvarez herself? What if she catches some ghostly imprint of her mother, going about her daily duties? Mona is both disturbed by and attracted to this thought: it would be practically the same as seeing her on film, but it would feel a little more real, wouldn’t it? And she could finally see what she was like, here at work, before marrying Earl…

She returns to the door. It is substantially thicker than the others, and its metal is a bit darker. She wonders if it’s made of lead; the others appeared to be steel. She is not eager to walk into a room that’s still hot, and it would be, wouldn’t it, because doesn’t radioactivity take centuries to die out? That was what they taught her in school. They have to stick radioactive waste in some giant round canister, like a poisoned, malicious Easter Egg, and drop it down a mine shaft out in the desert. It suddenly feels as if all of America’s nasty secrets could be found out here among the rock and sand, buried in the wilderness, forgotten.

She grips Weringer’s key a little tighter. The dozens of little teeth bite into her fingers. She braces herself and slides the key in the lock.

The lock gives with the slightest amount of force, and the door, though it must weigh hundreds of pounds, silently falls open, smoothly gliding through the air.

Mona walks to the threshold, and looks in.

It is a wide, low room with a ceiling, walls, and floor all made of the same metal as the door. The room is rounded, with no distinguishable corners. It is completely bare except for the large apparatus hanging in the center, lit by the beams from tiny spotlights in the ceiling.

It is a mirror. But it is a mirror unlike any Mona has ever seen before.

The mirror portion is a wide, gleaming, silvery circle with a diameter of about ten feet. It hangs from the ceiling by a long, triple-jointed arm that looks like it would allow for rotation in many directions. The mirror is mounted on a thick copperish-looking plate, which is fed by dozens of thick wires that wind down the arm. A variety of machinery and equipment hangs off the arm as well: wires and tubing and chambers and pressure plates. Surrounding the apparatus are numerous steel frames stacked with old analog devices (to Mona they look like VCRs), but she does not get the impression that they are part of it: they sport microphones, lenses, electronic readouts. No, these devices, whatever they are, were meant to monitor the mirror and record it.

And if you record things, Mona thinks, then you have to keep your recordings somewhere…

She hesitates, again worrying that the room is radioactive. She holds a flat palm out, which she knows is stupid because you can’t feel radiation on your bare skin. As she expected, she feels nothing. Still, she is reluctant.

She notices that the mirror apparatus is not whole. A second arm branches off the main one, and it looks as if it held a mirror once, yet the mirror is gone, as if it’s been unscrewed or ripped off. She wonders where it went

(Would you like to see a magic trick?)

and who has it. From the look of things, the door to this room hadn’t been opened in a while.

Mona realizes she is breathing quite hard. She stuffs the Glock in the back of her pants (she no longer trusts her shaking hands), shuts her eyes, and steps