Pandora's Temple (19 page)

“A lie?” McCracken said.

“For sure. They found something all right—they found that they could indeed prove the existence of dark matter, even create it, but containing it proved the real wild card. And when a bunch of atoms got loose in the system, they ended up spending a couple years repairing the damage.”

“How much is a bunch?”

“Maybe one one-thousandth the size of a pinhead.” The captain shook his head. “You cannot make this shit up, I kid you not. So they’re ready for the big dramatic restart with all the fanfare, champagne on ice again. This time, the geniuses at CERN are going to be cautious. Take things by the numbers and start up slow, building the energy beams of protons gradually toward reaching record-setting collisions.”

“Collisions,” McCracken repeated.

“That’s what it’s all about if you want to remake the big bang. You get these photons slamming into one another with enough force to create a boom. The faster they hit, the bigger the boom.”

“Where’s dark matter fit into all this?”

“Well, MacNuts, a bunch of their experimenting has been in the area of antimatter, which is something else entirely. See, prevailing theory says both matter and antimatter must have been created in equal amounts in the big bang, but antimatter went bye-bye. Half the universe, in other words, disappears and the nursery school students at CERN want to know what happened to it. Along the way they manage to actually isolate and trap some antihydrogen atoms for the first time. Lo and behold, parts of the prevailing theory go out the window because they realize what they’ve really got on their hands is dark matter. That antimatter didn’t leave the building, it just went into hiding in another room, another form. Dormant like bees in the winter.”

“Until somebody bangs their hive with a stick,” McCracken picked up. “Just like the
Deepwater Venture
penetrating that pocket more than six miles below the surface of the sea.”

“I always thought that was a billion to one shot, as much chance of it happening as the sun flaming out tomorrow. Now I’m thinking maybe I should get my thermals ready. Take notice, B-rat.”

“I’d pay attention to him if I were you, Hank.”

“Pay attention to what exactly?”

Captain Seven took it from there. “To me telling you to get on the horn and seal the area around the
Deepwater Venture
’s position, as in lock it down tight to a two-mile radius. Call your friends at Homeland, the Coast Guard, the Imperial Navy, the Barbary pirates, and the ghost of motherfucking Jean Lafitte if you have to, but just get it done.”

“What’s the point?” Folsom challenged. “The rig’s gone, the crew’s dead.”

“But what killed them is still there, B-rat, in a very big way.”

“Under the sea,” Captain Seven continued. “More of those thermal pockets originating at the earth’s core where somebody else with a drill bit might get seriously unlucky. Once word gets out about dark matter, you’re gonna have a scientific feeding frenzy that’ll turn the Coast Guard into traffic cops. And everybody who shows up will be sure they won’t make the same mistake as the
Venture
, that they can control a force we now understand went away for a very good reason. Man, I could use a joint right now. . . .

“The existence of the planet,” he went on when none miraculously appeared, “of life, of everything is based on a constant push and pull of forces, energies, confronting each other. Picture a massive combustion engine, your car on a scale of a quadrillion, and you’ll have some idea of the force holding the planet together.”

“Gravity,” said McCracken.

“But what is gravity, what creates it? One prevailing theory says dark matter and light matter struggling to exist together in the same plane. That explains everything, including life itself. Our very existence, in other words.”

“What happened on the
Venture
is nothing about life,” Wareagle said, his tone hushed. “Quite the opposite.”

“Ah, but it is, kemosabe. It is indeed. Prevailing theory has it that dark matter is composed of neutrinos: tiny particles that have no electric charge and little or no mass. They interact with atoms of matter so rarely that the average neutrino can pass through Earth without hitting anything. Scientists assume that great numbers of neutrinos constantly stream through human beings and everything else on Earth, causing neither sensation nor discernible injury.

“Now comes the fun part.” Captain Seven rose from his chair and began pacing up and back across the length of the room, careful to avoid the darkened window for some reason. “Part of the neutrino flow reaching the earth comes from the thermonuclear reactions that fuel the sun, but there are too few solar neutrinos with high enough energy to cause appreciable biological damage. On the other hand, the torrents of neutrinos produced by the quick collapse of massive stars are a more serious matter. In such a star’s final stage of collapse when it has used up its nuclear fuel, the star’s ordinary atoms are crushed by gravity into a kind of superdense neutron soup, and most of the binding energy that had held together the original atomic nuclei is released in the form of neutrino particles.”

“Does he always talk like this?” Folsom asked McCracken.

“You get me some of that high-end government dope and I will change your world forever.”

“Just tell what this has to do with dark matter.”

“Weren’t you listening to what I said before, B-rat? Neutrinos, according to theory,
are
dark matter; at least they compose it. And the collision of any one of these neutrinos with an atom anywhere in the universe is highly unlikely. But because stellar collapses produce such astronomical numbers of high-energy neutrinos, the chances that some would hit other atoms are greatly increased. Neutrino detectors built at laboratories in various parts of the world usually consist of enormous tanks of water, in which the rare impact of a neutrino produces a tiny flash of light.

“That’s because when a high-energy neutrino hits an atom, it transfers most of its recoil energy to the atom, which then becomes a microscopic but potentially deadly projectile. A recoiling atom can rip deeply into biological tissue, releasing its damaging energy very rapidly along its track, destroying cells essential to life, causing mutations of DNA genetic material.”

“I think he’s getting to the point,” McCracken told Folsom.

“I am indeed, MacNuts, I am indeed. Working this shit out is better than drugs. I’m flying on an incredible natural high on the express train to Pluto.”

“Get to the point, please,” Folsom said, rolling his eyes.

“Back to CERN for that. They built the world’s largest Hadron collider under the Swiss-French border. We’re talking a seventeen-mile tunnel where high-energy beams of protons are sent crashing into one another at virtually immeasurable speeds. In a nutshell, CERN scientists are trying to re-create the big bang that created the universe when light and dark matter collided in an incredible moment. Call it the ultimate cosmic fuck. The dark matter ended up concentrating from the center around, organized like an incredibly dense ball that kept sucking in billions upon billions of neutrinos like a vacuum. Forming a core. Have I enlightened you sufficiently yet?”

“You’re talking about the
earth’s
core.”

Captain Seven stuck his hands in the pockets of his bathrobe. “If you were stoned, you would’ve figured that much out five minutes ago. That’s where the energy, the heat, the weight that gives ballast to the planet originates. Gravity, B-rat; only even Einstein never envisioned the center of the planet as the actual source for every major theory he ever developed. Dark matter is the ultimate power in the universe, even though we can’t see it. Harness that power and, well, fossil fuels will be as extinct as the dinosaurs. But dark matter doesn’t like to be harnessed, and every time scientists from CERN and elsewhere have managed to isolate it for a single nanosecond, it disappears. Violently. Harmless enough with a single particle and resulting single flash of light. But consider multiplying it geometrically as more particles join the party. Same nanosecond, bigger boom. Way, way, way, way, way, way, way bigger.”

“The missing six seconds,” McCracken remembered.

“What happened on the
Deepwater Venture
didn’t take even that long, MacNuts. More than six miles down, deepest any rig has ever gone, their drill cut straight into a thermal pocket and released a fractional amount of dark matter contained since the dawn of time under incredible pressure, which pushed it up the line at a speed too fast to calculate. Remember that single flash of light? Well, boys, multiply it on the order of a billion and you get the idea of what essentially melted everything on board the rig in the shadow of a second. And I do mean everything and I do mean shadow and I do mean we face the very real possibility of the same thing happening to the entire planet if enough dark matter gets released.”

“You said
essentially
melted, Captain,” noted McCracken.

“The qualification comes from the fact that melting is associated with heat. Heat had nothing to do with the cosmic convergence that took place on the
Venture
. In fact, there was no heat or even air—all that got sucked up by the vacuum effect in the same split second the rig’s molecules were scrambled and re-formed.”

“That’s impossible,” snapped Folsom.

“Only to small-minded bureaucrats who aren’t convinced they’ve got an asshole since they can’t see it in front of their faces.”

“I think you’re making this up as you go along.”

“Am I?” Captain Seven shot back, enjoying the challenge Folsom presented. “Okay, drop an ice cube in a bowl, wait for it to melt, and refreeze it. Altogether different shape, right?”

Folsom nodded grudgingly.

“Even though it’s otherwise the same, identical amount of water but in an entirely different configuration. Have I slowed the speed down enough for you to follow, B-rat?”

“I start my day reading the SIT reports from the best theoretical weapons minds in the world,” started Folsom. “And I’ve never heard of anything like this being possible. Not even close.”

“That’s because it’s not a weapon, B-rat, at least not until yesterday. And as for those minds of yours, they’re functioning in a realm of reality that cannot conceive of harnessing the power of dark matter, even if you could contain it, ’cause therein lies the problem. Scientists who’ve been able to isolate dark matter for a nanosecond have no clue whatsoever as to how to contain it. Whoever figures that one out and . . . well, let’s just say all bets are off. And I mean all. Nuclear power would become today’s version of black-and-white televisions. You could wipe out an entire nation the size of Texas, scramble it like eggs, with a device no bigger than a Coke can. Sounds tempting, B-rat, doesn’t it?”

Folsom remained silent.

“Bad idea,” Captain Seven told him. “Perish the very thought. You send a team to go poking around down there around the same spot the
Venture
struck and they could end up releasing a bunch more dark matter than what it took to take out the
Venture
. Like sticking a pin in a balloon to the nth degree. Release too much and you could end up rupturing the earth’s crust to the point where tsunamis the size of the Empire State Building roll toward every coast in the hemisphere. A genuine extinction event. Level Six million. Need I go on?”

“I think what the captain is saying,” picked up McCracken, “is that you need to throw a blanket over this whole mess. Forget investigation, exploration, dissemination—all the usual suspects. You need to button this up and contain the damage, Folsom.”

“Will do,” said Folsom. “But I think I’ll leave mention of dark matter out of the reports for now.”

“No need,” Captain Seven told him. “People a lot higher up the food chain than you have been after it for years.”

“How could you know that?”

“Who do you think sent me to the Mediterranean five years ago? That almost got me killed, and I have no intention of repeating the experience.”

“Thank you for coming, gentlemen.”

The two scientists, Gunthar Bol and Peter Whitcomb, sat side by side on a couch in Sebastian Roy’s hyperbaric home, facing a man they’d heard much about but were meeting for the first time.

“You didn’t leave us much choice,” said Whitcomb, his shoulders stiff and expression locked in a caustic sneer to show his annoyance. “Our experiments at CERN have reached a critical juncture. We’ve finally isolated a new subatomic particle we believe to be Higgs boson, and us being here serves no one’s best interests.”

“You mean the experiments that
I
am funding? And I’ll decide what lies in our best interests, Doctor. That’s why I had you brought here. There is exciting, if not earth-shattering, news to report. The theory of dark matter being contained at the earth’s core since the planet’s origins has been confirmed: a small pocket was uncovered six miles down in the northern Gulf Stream.”

The two scientists sat in stunned silence, shocked and barely able to exchange even cursory glances with each other in the well-appointed chamber that made them feel they were in a commercial airliner, right down to the steady whir of constantly recirculated air.

“There was chatter about an incident in the Gulf yesterday,” said Dr. Gunthar Bol.

Bol was tall, thin, and balding. He wore thin glasses in gunmetal frames that looked terribly out of fashion. Bol supervised the largest particle physics lab in the world, known by its French acronym CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Bol’s immensely qualified team there had been trying for years to re-create the big bang in an attempt to understand the true origins of the universe. That incredible explosion and release of energy had dominated much of Sebastian Roy’s thinking for years. Harnessing such energy would render all other sources obsolete, and the man who controlled it would control the world.

“Chatter?”

Bol nodded, exchanging a brief glance with Whitcomb, a Harvard-educated Swiss American who’d written books aimed at explaining quantum mechanics and theory to laypersons. He was boyish in appearance with red, ruddy cheeks and a shock of blond hair he wore overly long and parted from left to right. “Something specifically pertaining to an oil rig.”