Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, CA
Throughout the long flight from the Devil’s Sea Gate to San Diego, Professor Ahana had kept in contact not only with the crew aboard the FLIP but with her comrades manning the Super-Kamiokande in Japan. Dane had taken the opportunity to catch up on much needed sleep. Earhart did the same, neither knowing when the next opportunity for rest would come.
When they were less than an hour out from the West Coast of the United States, Dane cracked open one eye and looked about the inside of the navy transport aircraft. Ahana had two laptop computers open, one on each seat next to her and wore a headset that was linked to the plane and the MILSTAR communications system. Earhart was nowhere to be seen.
Dane stood and stretched, then walked forward to the door leading to the cockpit. He opened it and wasn’t surprised to see Earhart in the co-pilot’s seat, her hands on the controls, the crew watching her respectfully. It wasn’t every day you had a legend of aviation--one supposedly long dead--in your cockpit.
Dane stood there for a while watching as the pilot showed her the latest gadgets the plane was outfitted with. He supposed that other than the controls, everything in the cockpit was pretty much new to Earhart, but she seemed a bit unimpressed with the technology.
“Having fun?” Dane asked.
Earhart glanced over her shoulder. “Too much stuff. Hell, all my navigator had when I did my round the world attempt was a basic radio set with which he tried to raise whatever transmitter he could pick up to try to triangulate our position. We’d be lucky to figure it out within a hundred miles. That was flying. Now you’ve got this GPR thing that updates a gazillion times every second and locates you to within three feet. Where’s the challenge to that?”
“Takes some of the fun out of it?” Dane asked.
Earhart smiled. “No. I knew from the first time I went up in a plane that this was where I belonged. That hasn’t changed. And flying will always be dangerous.”
Dane jerked his thumb toward the rear of the plane. “We probably ought to see what Ahana has come up with before we land.”
Earhart reluctantly let go of the controls as the pilot took over. She thanked the crew then headed back with Dane. They sat down across from Ahana and waited as she completed another radio call. The Japanese scientist then took off her headset and glanced down at first one and then the other of her computers before closing both screens.
“You say you sensed from the sphere map that there is a gate near San Diego?” she asked Dane, never one to waste words.
“That’s what I sensed when I held the portal strand--that the clicks were coming from there. Or going to,” he added as he realized he really didn’t know in which direction, if not both, they were being transmitted.
“And the other end of that strand?” Ahana asked. “To the Space Between?”
Dane shook his head. “No. The other end was”--he searched for the word, then shrugged--“blocked I guess. When I tried probing in that direction I hit darkness. Like a solid wall of black.”
“Well,” Ahana began, “the Super-Kamiokande has nothing, no muonic transmissions anywhere near San Diego.”
The Super-Kamiokande was a device buried three miles below the planet’s surface, in northern Japan, in an abandoned mine that had opened into a natural cavern. There was a control room at the top of the cavern where Ahana’s cohorts worked, their computers. Desks and chairs set on a steel grate that covered a highly polished stainless steel tank, sixty meters wide by sixty deep and filled with water. The walls of the tank were lined with twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes-PMTs. The tubes were very sensitive light sensors that could pick up a single photon as it traveled through the tank’s water. The Super-Kamiokande was essentially a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light is produced when an electrically charged particle travels through water. The reason the Super-Kamiokande was so far underground was to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by human devices on the surface of the planet. While they knew little about the gates and the Shadow, they did know that activity by the Shadow produced muon emissions, which the Super-Karniokande could trace. During the last several battles with the Shadow, they had used the Super-Kamiokande to try to anticipate attacks. It could read muonic activity throughout the planet.
“It would make sense that the Ones Before are transmitting in a somewhat different mode than the Shadow,” Dane said. “You don’t want to transmit on the same frequency as your enemy.”
Ahana nodded. “I agree it would make sense. Muons are part of the second family of fundamental particles. Most of what we are used to here in our timeline is in the first family, consisting of electron, up quarks and down quarks. The second family consists of muons, charm quarks, and strange quarks. And all these things are not single points according to string theory but rather tiny one-dimensional loops that are vibrating, which gives them several characteristics that allow us to merge relativity and quantum mechanics.”
“So have you checked the charm and strange whatever you call them?” Earhart asked.
“Yes,” Ahana said. “Nothing so far. However, let us take this to a deeper level.”
Dane exchanged a glance with Earhart. He’d listened to Ahana and her late-professor Nagoya discuss the cutting edge physics with which they were trying to understand what was going on with the gates and the Shadow and he’d had a hard time, especially considering the two scientists themselves didn’t completely understand what they were dealing with and most of the time were just theorizing out loud.
“There are four base forces in nature,” Ahana said. “Gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. Each has a force particle. For electromagnetic there is the photon. For gravity it’s postulated that there is a particle called the graviton but only because of effect, as we’ve never seen one. For strong the particle is the gluon. And for weak we have weak gauge bosons.
“Professor Nagoya believed the Shadow can manipulate the strong and weak forces,” Ahana said. “We can do so, but only in a rudimentary fashion. For example a nuclear weapon explodes when atoms are suddenly split and the strong forces are released in a very short amount of time. When uranium decays in a reactor, we are using weak forces, releasing the power in a slower mode. We are nowhere close to controlling these forces like we do electricity. But I think--and so did Professor Nagoya--that the Shadow can control those forces quite readily.”
“And the Ones Before?” Earhart asked.
“We’ve been searching,” Ahana said, “but nothing so far.”
Dane frowned. “What about high frequency?”
“We’ve checked high frequency,” Ahana said. “Nothing there either.”
Dane knew a little about radio transmissions from his time in the military and doing rescue work. A radio transmission is just frequency modulation on an energy wave, correct?”
“Basically,” Ahana agreed.
Earhart picked up on that. “You haven’t said anything about gravity,” she noted. “The fourth power.” She pointed out the window at the wings. “Gravity is something every pilot is very concerned with.”
Ahana sat back in her chair and shifted her focus from the two computers, even though they were closed, to the two people. “As Professor Nagoya would advise if he were here, we must look at the basics first. Sir Isaac Newton proposed his law of gravitation in 1687. He said that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that depends on the product of the mass of each particle divided by the square of the distance between them. The exact formula is F equals G times mass one times mass two divided by the square of the distance between them. G is the universal constant of gravitation, which Newton had no clue as to the value of.
“According to this theory, gravity is a linear force, directly between the two centers of gravity between the two masses. As I said, the one thing Newton wasn’t able to figure out was the value of G. An apple falling from a tree is fine, but not exactly scientific data. Over a century after Newton, the English physicist Henry Cavendish finally managed to measure G and it was a very, very small number.”
“So gravity isn’t very powerful in a way,” Dane said.
“It’s a strange force,” Ahana said. “You can look at it as the force between two objects, but you can also look at it as a field. As Ms. Earhart notes, the gravitational force around the earth produces a downward force on objects near the surface. Also, objects can affect each other across distance. This is the essence of the how the solar system stays in balance around the sun. In fact, before anyone ever saw Neptune, scientists were able to postulate it existed by noting unexplainable variations in the motion of the planet Uranus due to Neptune’s gravitational field.”
Dane had closed his eyes as he listened to Ahana. They were in transit with nothing else to do and he had learned that golden nuggets of vital information were often mixed among the deluge brought forth by scientists. In his gut he knew they were on the right path and that what Ahana was saying was important in a way he would only understand after other pieces of this puzzle fell into place.
“A problem with Newton’s theory,” Ahana continued, “involved relativity. According to his theory, two observers making measurements of the speed of an object will end up with different numbers depending on their own motion relative to each other. For example, a person standing on a platform observing a stationery ball on a train passing by will measure the speed of the ball as the same as that of the train, while a person on the train will measure the ball’s speed as zero. Thus Newton would say there is no constant, fundamental speed in the physical world because all speed is relative. However, near the end of the nineteenth century this came under attack and the Scottish physicist Maxwell proposed a complete theory of electric and magnetic forces that contained just such a constant, which he called c. He estimated this to be one hundred and eighty thousand, two hundred and eighty-two miles per second. That was how fast electromagnetic waves, including light waves, traveled. This feature of Maxwell’s theory caused a crisis in physics because it indicated that speed was not always relative.
“The scientific community struggled with this until Einstein came up with his theory of relativity in 1905. An important aspect of Einstein’s theory was that no object could travel faster than c. This conflicted with Newton’s gravity theory, which implied gravity moved at infinite speed.”
“But you said no one’s been able to find this particle that is the essence of gravity,” Earhart noted. “So how can anyone know it moves at infinite speed?”
“A good point,” Ahana said. “We can measure light waves directly but not gravity--only the effect. Einstein did see the discrepancy, and in 1915 he formulated a new theory of gravity in which he said the force of gravity moves at speed c. Another important difference between Einstein and Newton was that Einstein described gravity as a curvature of space and time, not exactly a linear force.”
“The portals,” Dane said. “Could they be curves that cross time and space?”
“It is possible,” Ahana admitted, “that the portals are some effect of the manipulation of the force of gravity at levels we cannot comprehend. Einstein proposed, in his general theory of relativity, that space and time are united in a single, four-dimensional geometry consisting of three space dimensions and one time dimension. This geometry is called space-time, and particles move from point to point as time progresses along curves called world lines. If there were no force of gravity, then the particle lines would be straight, but gravity causes the curvatures.”
Dane looked out the plane’s window. All he could see was water so he knew they were still a distance out from San Diego. He felt very isolated contemplating trying to take a war to an entity that could control forces the best minds of his timeline were still struggling to understand.
Ahana continued. “Einstein proposed that gravity’s effect should not be represented as the deviation of a world line from straightness, as it would be for an electrical force. Gravitation changes the most natural world lines and thereby curves the geometry of space-time. In a curved geometry, such as the two-dimensional surface of the earth, there are no straight lines. Instead, there are special curves called geodesics, an example of which are great circles around the earth. These special curves are at each point as straight as possible, and they are the most natural lines in a curved geometry. The effect of gravity is to influence the geodesics in space-time. Near sources of gravitation the space is strongly curved and the geodesics behave less and less like those in flat, uncurved space-time.
“The problem is that even using our most modern technology we still find it very difficult to test these theories with experiments and observations. But Einstein’s theory has passed all tests that have been made so far. Einstein’s theory of gravity revolutionized twentieth-century physics.
“Following it another important advancement that took place was quantum theory, which states that physical interactions, or the exchange of energy, cannot be made arbitrarily small. There is a minimum interaction that comes in a packet called the quantum of an interaction. For electromagnetism the quantum is called the photon. Gravity has also been quantized. We call a quantum of gravitational energy a graviton.
“What scientists have been searching for lately is the T-O-E-the theory of everything-- in which all four of the fundamental forces are just different aspects of the same single universal force. We have made some progress unifying electromagnetism and weak nuclear forces and strong nuclear forces. But gravity, with its complex math and geometry has been more difficult to unify.”
“But it will happen,” Dane said.
Ahana nodded. “I would assume so. If we have the time,”
“I think the Shadow is either a timeline that is also in the future,” Dane said, “or a timeline that advanced much more quickly in the field of physics than us.”
“It is most likely,” Ahana said.
Dane could see land ahead, the shoreline of California. He had a little better understanding of the big picture of what they were involved in, but he knew theory would do them little good.
The plane banked and swooped toward a military airfield on an island just off of San Diego. Dane could see the warships in the harbor, then he closed his eyes and began to search outward with his mind. He dimly felt the plane touchdown and the deceleration as they went down the runway.
“Do you feel it?” Dane asked Earhart, opening his eyes.
Earhart shook her head. “What?”
“There’s a gate nearby,” Dane said.
Ahana was looking at her computers. One of them was linked to a portable muonic detector that could pick up activity in the immediate area. “We’re not picking up anything.”
“There’s one close by,” Dane said. “But it’s different than the other gates. I don’t get the bad feeling I’ve always had when I got close to a gate.”
The door to the plane opened and two military policemen escorted them to a waiting car. They drove from the airfield toward the waterfront. Dane noted the armed guards at the doors to the building they pulled up to and knew they weren’t rent-a-cops, but professionals. That, combined with the other obvious security measures around the facility, told him that whatever the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center was working on was highly classified. Dr. Martsen led the way through the gates.
The facility was located inside the Naval Base in San Diego and Dane felt strange to be on a military post after so many years as a civilian. Two guards escorted them to a typically drab three-story military building next to the harbor.
While the exterior was unimpressive, the inside was a totally different matter. Martsen led them along a white-painted corridor to a pair of steel doors that slid open when she placed her eyes against a retina scan. They entered an elevator and it descended, taking them below sea level in a matter of seconds. They remained still for a few seconds as air was pumped in.
“We’re equalizing pressure,” Martsen said. “We’re down forty feet, deep enough so that our work can’t be observed by satellites. We need to equalize the pressure--well, you’ll see.”
When the doors opened once more, Dane took one step, then halted, staring about in amazement. The facility was a melding of air and water, with clear glass tunnels crisscrossing the room and there were several open places in the floor that gave access to the water below -- the reason the atmosphere needed to be pressurized. There were about fifteen humans in the room, doing various things, and a half dozen dolphins, either in the tubes or at the access points.
However, what caught everyone’s attention was in the center of the complex. There were two large, clear, vertical tubes. A man in a white coat stood next to them giving some idea of the dimensions. One was about fourteen feet high by six in diameter. The other eight feet high by four in diameter. In both there was a thick-looking, greenish liquid inside. And floating inside the larger tube was a dolphin covered with a black body suit. Various lines and leads went to the creature’s body. The dolphin’s head was totally enclosed in an oversize black helmet out of which ran several tubes and wires. The dolphin floated freely, back slightly hunched over. In the other tube there was a human, also wearing a black suit and with head covered by a black helmet. Numerous wires ran from the tubes to a console between them.
A tall black man in navy whites walked up to greet them. “Dr. Martsen,” he said, acknowledging her. Then he turned to Dane, Ahana, and Earhart. “I’m Commander Talbot. Welcome to Dream Land.”