Dante's Equation

1 We are like Midas . . . Humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality because everything we touch turns to matter. Physicist Nick Herbert 1.1. Denton Wyle March Aboard the Coast Guard MLB Invincible II, off the coast of Florida Denton Wyle was seriously reexamining his choices. His fingers were wrapped like living clamps around a pole, his blond hair dribbled water down his patrician nose, and his back pressed hard against the cabin of the rescue ship as sea spray slapped him on the cheeks like an outraged Englishman and the deck beneath his feet pitched like a bucking bronco. He was on a ship, in a storm, smack dab in the Bermuda Triangle. The Coast Guard crewmen, bright orange specks in a wet, gray world, moved about the tilting slippery deck with ease. They were on a mission to locate a yacht, the Why Knot Now, in distress off the Florida Keys. A sailing ad- visory was in effect and the yacht, manned by a couple and their teenage daughter, had radioed that their compass appeared to be in error, because they were lost and didn't know which way to go to find land. It was the call Denton had been waiting for, hanging out in the Coast Guard station for weeks now, schmoozing with men who had sea salt in their eyebrows. A bad compass? A lost vessel? Denton Wyle, intrepid reporter for Mysterious World, was all over it. Only now he realized, as his fingers spasmed from being clenched so tightly around the pole, that the two key words in this entire scenario were not bad compass or even Bermuda Triangle but sailing advisory. Sailing advisory meaning: "our advice is, don't go out on a freaking ship." "Wyle?" A rain-soaked face in a blue hard hat appeared. It was Frank, a burly New Yorker. Denton had spent an afternoon watching him hose down nylon netting. "Yeah?" "Get. Inside. The cabin." The words were shouted over the howl of the wind and symphonic crash of waves. Frank hung lightly with one hand to the pole just above Denton's white knuckles. With the other he jabbed an index finger at the cabin behind them. "I'm fine," Denton shouted back, because moving anywhere meant letting go of the pole. But Frank had been trained in dealing with the hapless. He grabbed Denton's upper arm and pulled. Behind Frank the side of the rescue boat was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and its thin, insubstantial metal rail kept dipping in and out of churning water. Denton could so clearly imagine sliding into that maw if he let go, just like the scene from Jaws where the fishing boat captain slides down the deck into the shark's mouth. "Come on!" Frank yelled. Denton let go. There was a panicked moment of sliding feet; then the cabin door was in his hand and Frank shoved him through, slamming the door behind him. Inside, Denton stood panting, trying to get a firmer grip on his breakfast. He made no pretensions of bravery. The right stuff had been left out of his genetic code; he could admit that. But he was also not a boat person. Even growing up on the shores of Massachusetts, where yachting clubs got better attendance on Sundays than churches, he had not liked boats. What on earth had he been thinking? He hadn't been thinking about the Bermuda Triangle or the sea. He'd been thinking about woods, about a little girl and flashes of light. The rain lashed the windows so hard you couldn't see a thing on deck from inside the cabin, only great watery swells as they blocked out the sky. "They keep fading in and out of radar," one of the crewmen reported. Captain Dodd looked from the window to the radar screen and back again, peering ouJane Jensen is the author of 'Dante's Equation', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345430373 and ISBN 0345430379.