Decipher (21 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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In the northern hemisphere at the peak of the last major glaciation, 18,000 years ago, a continental ice layer several kilometers thick covered much of northern America, down to the middle part of the United States, as well as much of northern and western Europe, to the latitude of Paris and Berlin. In the present-day situation, continental ice is confined essentially to Greenland. Furthermore, it is known that, as far as continental ice extent is concerned, the present situation was essentially established 10,000 years ago. In other words, we are forced to conclude that the planet Earth, a physical system, has in a few years (a short time on a geological scale) undergone a transition between two extraordinarily different states whose difference extends over the dimensions of the Earth itself.
The above remarks suggest that any reasonable model of the climatic system should be able to account for the possibility of such large-scale transitions.
 
 
Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine
Exploring Complexity: An Introduction,
1989
“How's your wife?” It was the most malicious thing she could think of to ask while she gazed at her fresh lobster, cracked straight down its back on her platter. A bottle of vintage Dom Perignon chilled in the ice-bucket.
It was amazing what money could buy in an alcohol-free state. But then, the Egyptians had always been a fun-loving people. Sarah was sure this fundamentalist thing wasn't going to last. It couldn't. The Egyptians just didn't have the discipline for it.
Thorne pulled a hunk of quivering white flesh from the claw in his hand without so much as a missed beat. “Julia's doing great,” he said cheerfully. “Y'know she's really on this tennis kick right now.” He licked his fingers clean.
“Tennis?” Thorne had met someone at the country club. He had to. “I didn't think you liked tennis.”
“I didn't say I did,” he replied, having more lobster. He poured the champagne and toasted her.
She downed hers nervously, set the long-stemmed crystal glass down maybe a bit too forcefully. Pushed the lobster around her plate. She really wasn't in the mood for this. She could feel the butterflies in her stomach flapping relentlessly. How many relationships had she thrown away because she couldn't get this man out of her mind?
Sarah glanced down over the balcony at everyone else in the cafés and restaurants below. Music and laughter wafted up. He'd brought her up here for a reason. They hadn't seen each other in several years. But he knew, up here, it would make her feel more alone, more dependent on him. And he was right. Thorne was always right.
“How was your meeting at the AOI?” she asked, having seen his stack of paperwork over on a far lamp-lit table. “You got what you wanted?”
Thorne smiled in that way that told her, even if he had, he wasn't telling.
“Why did you request I come to Cairo?” she probed further.
“You mean, was it so I could see you?” he retaliated.
She flashed a smile back. As genuine as she could muster. “You can request to see me whenever you want,” she pointed out. “My question is purely business. What is the Egyptian government getting out of all this? Do they fully realize what they've got on their hands here?”
“No, I doubt they realize the full implications, Sarah. Why would they? All they can see are dollar signs. Just not on the scale I can see them.”
“Do they know about China?”
Now Thorne hesitated. That felt good.
“So,” he replied. Measured. “You know about China.”
“Word gets around,” she said. “After all, you've nearly started a war.”
Thorne called the waiter over for more champagne. The man briefly explained they only had vintage Krug left. Thorne said that was okay and eyed Sarah directly. “You always were very smart, honey. Very perceptive.”
Just lucky, she guessed. So Ellen was right. Nonchalantly he took her by the hand and seemed surprised to find that her delicate fingers were cold. He rubbed them gently, while his eyes told his staff that they were dismissed. They let themselves out quietly.
“You're not staying, are you?” she asked with a dawning realization.
“No,” Thorne confessed. “I have to go in the morning. I wanted to see you before I left. It's been so long … I needed to see you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Rome.”
“Rome?” Besides spaghetti and the Vatican, she couldn't see what was waiting for him there. She scoffed back a nervous laugh. “You wanna brief the Pope? Let him know civilization goes back a little farther than Jesus Christ?”
Thorne wasn't laughing. “Something like that. The President's already there.”
“What? In between starting a war in Antarctica?”
“Wars are fought on many fronts, Sarah.” He stood. “Would you care for some dessert?” Sarah was rubbing her forehead. She felt dizzy. “Look, it's just dessert. Do you want some?”
He pulled her to her feet. Held her close. That faint aroma from his skin that she knew so well swelled in her heart.
“I want dessert,” he said huskily. “I want you.”
It was such a cheesy line. And the fact was, if she hadn't been so damn well turned on by him she'd have reached for the nearest bucket. But as it was she responded, like he knew she would. Eventually pulling away she asked: “Why did you really want me to come out here?”
He stroked her hair. “I thought it might make a pleasant change for you,” he confided. “I know how you enjoy your history. It must have been tough in Siberia.”
It was enough to let him kiss her again. And more. And after the first rampant session up against the wall, they both agreed that it would probably be more comfortable if they went to bed. After all, they weren't teenagers anymore.
He knew what champagne did to her. Goddamnit. The bastard knew.
They were called quasicrystals.
They were materials that could not be called true crystal because they were not made up of repeated identical unit cells, like a cube in the case of sodium, or plain old salt. The units in quasicrystals had much more complex symmetry. Twelvefold symmetry. Making shapes like double spirals and hexagonal honeycombs. The odd-shaped units were irregular, but still linked together to form crystal-like structures.
But that was with metals.
The Coke in November's glass exhibited all the signs of having transformed itself into a quasicrystal. And since it was a liquid, it meant looking at the work of a much older scientist.
Michael Faraday, in 1831, first discovered that standing waves, waves that appeared to be entirely motionless, could be produced in fluids. This meant the use of vibration, by its
very nature an element of sound. And
that
was the link Hackett was looking for.
 
The doctor was closing his case as the physicist and engineer arrived to see what all the commotion was about. Scott explained what had happened, while November dabbed back tears with a screwed-up tissue.
The doctor from CERN'S medical center said: “She's fine. No burnmarks. No abrasions. Blood pressure's high, but no respiratory problems. She's in perfect health.”
“I
told
you it didn't hurt,” November explained irritably. Her body was still wracked with tearful convulsions. “I couldn't move my hand,” she said, “no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't move my joints. It was like my arm was completely frozen, but it didn't hurt.”
“Then why'd you scream?” Scott asked compassionately.
“Because I was scared,” she replied in a small voice. “I was scared because I couldn't move my arm.”
Hackett crouched down in front of the counter. Though the tune had changed, the set-up had been left exactly the way it was. Radio—C60—glass of Coke. Pearce stood to one side, watching. Not wanting to get in the way, but not wanting to leave either. Everyone was mesmerized by something that simply wasn't normal. And it was almost as if he could actually see their elite minds working overtime.
A steel ball bearing was sitting on top of a liquid that had, for all intents and purposes, solidified without freezing.
“Good God,” Matheson murmured.
“God may have nothing to do with it,” Hackett retaliated, jabbing a pencil in the direction of the C60. He eyed the set-up again, carefully, before shooting a look to Pearce and ordering quietly: “Okay, Bob, turn the radio off.”
Pearce located the white plastic power supply. The plug. Gripped the switch firmly. Then flipped it to “off.”
The radio went dead.
Suddenly the ball bearing shot to the bottom of the glass with such a tremendous crack that for a moment it looked like it might shatter the container. It rolled around the bottom before coming to a stop.
Hackett raised his eyebrows and let out a deep breath,
which was a surprise to him if nobody else. He hadn't realized he was holding it.
There was a long plastic rod over to one side, amid a collection of odds and ends. Holding it by his fingertips, Hackett lowered it into the Coke and washed it around. Bubbles fizzed to the surface.
He extracted the rod. Nodded to Pearce again. “Turn the radio back on.”
Within seconds the hissing and high-pitched whine returned. And this time when he tried to jab the rod back into the liquid, making sure his hand wasn't in the path of the sound wave, it made a crunch like it had hit a solid.
He asked Pearce to switch the radio off again and Hackett took the glass of Coke away. He nodded to one of the chemists, who had gathered by the door, and in turn okayed an assistant to bring over the rat that he was holding in a cage.
He set it down in front of the stone.
It was a large brown rat. Racing around its cage it sniffed the air as if it sensed something was wrong. Scampering to the front of the cage, it squeaked at the C60 and lashed out.
“You can't! That's horrible!” November shrieked.
Hackett wasn't fazed. “Experiment,” he explained without looking at her, “is the only method of attaining certainty.”
The radio was flipped on again. And the rat stood frozen solid, locked into its pose. Its eyes were glassy and transfixed. November looked away as Hackett counted out a full thirty seconds.
“What the hell's going on?” Matheson demanded quietly.
Hackett ran the rod along the set-up and explained. “Sound waves are produced here—in the radio. The sound enters the Carbon 60 and is ‘altered' somehow. Then it's projected back out in this direction. Until it hits the rat. Or the Coke. A living organism is approximately seventy-five percent fluid so it's going to react in a similar fashion to a glass of Coke. The altered sound has been tuned harmonically to produce standing waves in fluid. In other words the use of sonic technology has been applied to temporarily and artificially crystallize a fluid object.” He asked for the sound to be cut again.
The rat went about its business as though nothing had happened.
“Hmm.” Hackett eyed the glass of Coke in his hand, the ball bearing still rolling around at the bottom. He took a sip apparently without thinking. “Strange,” he murmured. Then gagged. “Ugh!”
“What is it?!” November yelped, grabbing the man by his shoulder.
Hackett set the glass down quickly and stood. “This is Diet,” he complained. “I can't drink Diet. Got any regular?”
November slapped him up the back of the head. Nobody else found it funny either. Casually removing the C60 and shunting the radio closer to the rat, Hackett switched the radio back on, and nothing happened. “Well, that confirms it,” he announced. “There's nothing special about the radio, or the station it's tuned to.” He let a sour smile cross his face. “The military's gonna just love an application for this.” He eyed Scott darkly. “You realize when we get to Antarctica, we're gonna be lucky if there's any of Atlantis left.”
“So let me get this straight,” Pearce said fussily. “We have a city built out of a substance that reacts to—get this—gravity waves, light, electricity, and now … sound waves.”
“Correct.”
“Shit! That's wild!”
“Well,” November said sharply, “I've had enough. I want to go back to my hotel room.”
Scott was already nodding in sympathy. “I'll come with you. Let me grab my coat.”
“And there was me, thinking scientific discovery was exciting,” Hackett commented as he watched them leave.
“What about the translation?” Pearce called after them anxiously.
“It can wait!” Scott tossed back over his shoulder.
Hackett dug his hands in his pockets as Pearce sidled up next to him. “You reviewed the solar data, right? It
can't
wait, can it?”
Hackett simply shook his head. No, it couldn't. He stepped out into the main lab and watched briefly as Scott and November disappeared up the metal staircase toward the exit. And that was when he became aware of the sound of
snaps of electricity and cries of: “This stuff sucks!” from across the lab.
“That's one way of putting it,” Hackett commented, realizing something was up. He turned to Pearce. “What's been going on, Bob?”
He was led over to Hawkes who bitterly snatched the chunk of Carbon 60 he'd been using out of their laser cutting assembly.
“It's this crystal,” Hawkes explained, adjusting his goggles. “Every time we go to slice through this stuff we get some kind of feedback in the laser beam.” He unlocked the cover plates on the access drawer and unclipped the crystal housing. Withdrew it carefully from the chamber.
“Have you been getting this all the time or has it only just started to happen?”
The other chemists busily uncoupled power cables, gearing up for a major recalibration.
“Aw, we've been getting it right from the start,” Hawkes complained without looking up.
“Why didn't you mention it before?”
“Didn't seem important.”
Matheson stepped up to the fray for a clearer look. “Out of interest, what kind of feedback have you been getting? A single long pulse? Or choppy?”
Now Hawkes looked up. “You mean like bits? Pulses?” Matheson nodded. “Pulses.”
“Regular?”
“Uh-uh. No. If it was regular we could compensate for that. But it's different every time. Why, you seen this kind of thing before?”
Pearce was confused as Matheson explained: “Sounds like intermittent reflection. Each time they try to cut into the crystal it bounces the laser light back at the emitter—”
“Almost burnt us out, too.”
“Sounds like it doesn't
want
you cutting into it,” Pearce observed.
The chemist looked disbelieving. But didn't comment.
“Or it's trying to tell you something,” Hackett added. “Pass on information.”
Matheson was keyed up almost immediately. “You mean like data storage on a light computer?”
Hackett shrugged.
“On a what?” Pearce interjected. “You're talking theoretical—”
But Matheson's eyes never wavered from the physicist as he demanded: “Do they even
have
a light computer on this site?”
 
Thorne was asleep in bed.
Sarah knew he wouldn't be awake anytime soon because she'd purposely worn him out. Which meant it was now open season on his computer and paperwork …
She found a bottle of water in the refrigerator over in one corner and sat herself down with it, casting a quick eye over the documents on the table. And then she spotted it—the dog-eared magazine jutting out from one of the folders, buried in one of the stacks.
She pulled it out. It was a copy of a research paper written by Ellen Paris.
Sarah suddenly remembered the envelope Ellen had given her. She carefully ripped it open and there it was again.
Ellen's paper documented the theory of Earth Crust Displacement by Charles Hapgood, a Professor of Science History, who put forward the notion in the 1950s and won the support of Albert Einstein. It was the same theory Sarah had told Houghton about in Siberia.
The premise was simple. A build-up of ice at the Poles caused a savage destabilization effect, resulting in the crust of planet Earth being ripped away from its liquid core and shifted like the skin on custard. It would explain many geological and paleontological anomalies, like tropical plant matter being found in the Antarctic.
Hapgood's theory eventually gave birth to the standard geological theory of plate tectonics and led to the discovery that certain rock compositions gave a magnetic reading indicating the time at which they were created. Since they were formed within the earth's magnetic field, they reflected where the North and South Poles were once situated.
The data confirmed the North Pole was once in the Hudson Bay, then once near the British Isles 2,500 miles farther
west, and 60 million years ago was as far south as LAT 55°, in the Pacific Ocean. Other geological evidence showed Africa and India were once under ice and that Antarctica used to be 2,500 miles farther north.
The geological record proved that the magnetic North and South Poles completely reversed position on a regular basis. But the mechanism for Pole reversal was totally unknown. Were the two phenomena, a shifting crust and Pole reversal, linked? And if so, why was Thorne interested in this stuff?
Earth Crust Displacement Theory required the entire crust of the earth to be sitting on top of a sea of molten rock. Some geologists would have dismissed this notion except that in the mid-1990s John Van Decas led a team down to South America to the Parana Basalt Province in Brazil where they used a series of monitors, like a CAT scan, to chart the passage of waves from earthquakes as they passed through the ground. This was easier than most people suspected because it was a little-known fact that every single day there was an earthquake somewhere around the globe. And every fourth day it was at least magnitude 6:4.
What Van Decas discovered was a semi-viscous plume of molten rock, 190 miles across, extending 370 miles down from South America to the molten mantle. It explained why South America had moved west 1,800 miles in 130 million years. It meant South America was directly linked to the currents that affected the earth's liquid mantle. Over the next ten years similar plumes were uncovered connecting other continents to the mantle. So the earth's crust really could be said to be “floating” on molten rock after all.
Sarah was about to read on when she suddenly caught a glimpse of her own thesis in Thorne's mountain of paper. “What the hell … ?”

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