Mike Erikson's an English lit teacher with a really high IQ and perfect memory recall. He's got an old school chum who works with the Department of Defense that's been trying for years to get Mike to bring those talents to work for him, and thinks he's finally found the project, the Albuquerque Door.
A small group of scientist claim to have built a machine that can open doorways between two points in space, allowing for instantaneous travel between them. But they won't explain how it works, or share any of the research or data, which makes justifying funding difficult. Especially when the last guy sent to check it out is now in a psychiatric hospital after he returned home and pulled a gun on his wife, demanding to know what she did. . .with his wife.
Clearly, I've spent too much time thinking about this kind of sci-fi, because I knew what was going on by the end of the first chapter (which is written from the terrified and confused perspective of the wife when her husband's pointing a gun at her.) Fortunately, Clines only spends half the book on Mike figuring out what's going on. The remainder is spent on just how much worse it can get, and the team's desperate race to close the Door before the worst case scenario occurs.
Most of the characters other than Mike get fairly bare-bones characterization. This one likes wearing Star Trek-themed shirts. This guy is constantly a grouchy asshole. The leader of the project plays things close to the vest, but he likes Looney Tunes. Everyone is guarded to an extent around Mike, even as he insists he was sent here to assure the higher-ups the project should continue getting funding, playing up his role as outsider
Clines uses Mike's photographic memory as a way to introduce little details to act as big clues later on. He typically sets things up so you could possibly notice those things as well, so it doesn't feel entirely out of left field when Mike comes to a conclusion or starts a line of questioning that confuses the scientists. Part of me wishes he'd done more with miscommunication and conflicts arising from the problem with the Door. It could have fed into the aspect of Mike as the outsider, people keeping secrets or giving him conflicting information, but Mike and the reader not being sure of the motive.
But, that approach would have risked revealing the answer to the problem too soon, if that was something Clines really wanted to save for the midpoint. The story would be less a race against time to save the world, and more a paranoid thriller where alliances and motives shift constantly.
It was a light read, pretty easy to burn through in a few days, but it didn't dissuade me from trying one of Clines' other books at the library.
'"I'm sorry," interrupted another of the reviewers, the senator. "HD?"
"Oh, it's. . .uhh." Arthur examined the table. "Well, it's an unofficial term we coined for when test objects dispersed rather than reintegrated."
"What does it stand for?" This from the man with glasses.
"Well, it's. . ." he glanced at Jamie.
"Humpty Dumpty," muttered Olaf Johansson.
"What?"
Mike's mind leaped ahead and found a childhood copy of the nursery rhyme. He looked at all six pages of the picture book at once and crossed it with the topic at hand. He winced.'
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