The Krone Experiment (12 page)

Boswank had gone off to attend to other
concerns. Several of his deputies remained, continually updating a
list of target material amenable to investigation by clandestine
networks on the ground. They conferred often with Henry Sharbunk,
the representative from the National Security Agency, where a
similar emergency operation progressed.

Isaacs looked again at the box Curly was
operating on. If it held a power supply, as Baris maintained, what
would that tell them? How the hell could they learn anything useful
if they didn’t know what it powered? He had a strong urge to shout
down at Curly, to force him to turn his face up, so he could see
him, talk to him. Demand to know where he intended to install that
box, what it would do.

He snapped out of this fantasy when he felt a
gentle hand on his shoulder. He looked up into Kathleen’s eyes. She
was deeply somber. He looked down at the note in her hand and took
it from her. His chest constricted and his stomach felt a wince of
sympathetic nausea. He had been expecting this, but he sickened
anyway. Ed Jupp was dead.

Isaacs dropped his head onto his hand,
replaying in his thoughts a fortnight of increasing agony. He had
never met the man, but followed the progress, through messages such
as these, as his hair fell out and the pain turned his guts to
liquid fire.

Isaacs finally looked up at Kathleen and
nodded to her. She gave his shoulder a brief, hesitant pat, and
then left.

Isaacs finally cleared his throat and raised
his voice above the hubbub of muted conversations.

“Excuse me!” He waited until he had their
attention. “I just got a note from Walter Reed Hospital. Major
Edward Jupp died an hour ago from radiation poisoning.”

Everyone in the room lowered their eyes from
Isaacs and did little things with whatever objects lay immediately
in front of them.

“It’s late Sunday. None of us have seen our
families in a while. We’ve accomplished a lot in the last few days,
and this rocket’s not going anywhere,” he gestured at the
photograph of Curly before him. “Let’s break and get a good night’s
rest. We’ll hit it again tomorrow.”

A riffle of shuffling and glances passed
around the table. Despite the fatigue, putting down such an
all-consuming task was not easy. Finally Martinelli spoke.

“Damn good idea. I came just that close to
ordering up a new photo of the grounds in my coffee cup.” He turned
to his aide. “Let’s just leave these in the piles as we have them,”
he pointed at the stacks of sorted photographs. “Lord knows
there’ll be a fresh batch tomorrow.” He got up and stretched.

Slowly the other groups around the table
began to arrange their material so that they could pick up again in
the morning. They filed out one at a time, disoriented by the need
to cease the intense effort and think of home and rest.

Isaacs sat staring at the top of Curly’s
head. He finally realized that everyone had left but Danielson. She
moved over and sat down next to him.

“I’m sorry about Jupp,” she said, her voice
throaty. Isaacs nodded and looked at her, not quite seeing. Finally
she spoke again. “Do you have enough energy to give me some
advice?”

Isaacs rubbed his eyes with the palms of his
hands and worked his shoulders. “I can try.” He gave her a wan
smile. “I have this vague feeling I’m not at the peak of
efficiency.”

Her voice was apologetic. “I’m sorry to
trouble you, but I have a conflict. Maybe you can help me resolve
it. I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on that seismic signal
you asked me to investigate. I had to drop that when this rush came
up, of course. The problem is the people I’ve been working with at
the Cambridge Research Lab. They know I’ve got an emergency down
here, but they don’t know what or how severe. They’ve assembled
seismic data from a lot of universities and apparently feel there
is significant new information in it, more thorough coverage.
They’ve been pressuring me to go back up and work on it, as I
originally promised. I don’t quite know what to tell them. Should I
tell them to put the whole thing on indefinite hold? Should I try
to get up there for a little while if we can see a break here? I’m
not sure how I should respond, but I don’t think I should just keep
putting them off.”

Isaacs thought for a moment. His pleasant
days in Florida seemed another era, another world. “We’re going to
be at this until the launch, a month, six weeks, several months if
they get hung up somehow. Then a different show once it’s in orbit.
On the other hand, we’re over a hump here in terms of sorting the
procedures at the launch site.” He looked at her intently. “Baris
has been particularly pleased with your work, by the way, thinks
you have a real flair for isolating important ingredients in the
photos.”

Danielson smiled in pleasure.

“That means you’re especially valuable to us
on this project, but we can’t keep going with the intensity we have
the last four days, and shouldn’t have to. If you took a break to
do something else, you might come back fresher. How would you feel
about that?”

“I understand how crucial this effort is, but
I’m just one member of the team and I’m still fascinated by this
seismic thing.” She looked at him, searching his eyes. “I’d hate to
see it dropped.”

He pushed back in his chair. “Let me talk to
Baris. See if he thinks he can spare you. We’ll have a better
feeling of developments by midweek. Maybe we can work in a break
for you.”

“Thank you. I’d like that. I’ll hold the Lab
at bay and check with you later in the week.”

She rose and left the room at a surprisingly
fresh pace. Isaacs picked up the picture of Curly between his index
and middle finger and sailed it gently to the middle of the
conference table, a thousand dollar frisbee, one of several hundred
stacked around the room. He checked that the door was locked on his
way out, bid good evening to the security guard posted outside, and
headed for his office, picturing a tall drink and cool, soothing
sheets.

Sometime after lunch in the middle of May,
Pat Danielson paced down the long central corridor that carried her
through the multi-numbered interconnected buildings of MIT. She
barely recalled catching the ride from the lab in Lexington into
Cambridge. With little sleep in the last three days, she felt the
hollow tension of deep fatigue. Atop that fundamental, like
frosting on a cake, rode the giddy feeling of accomplishment that
accompanies an intellectual breakthrough. That feeling provided the
motive force that directed her numb legs to maintain a reasonable
pace.

She crossed the main lobby decked with
illustrations of ongoing student projects and pushed out the door.
Pausing at the top of the steps, she blinked in the hazy Sunlight.
After gazing a moment at the busy traffic on Massachusetts Avenue,
she leaned back against one of the tall fluted pillars and closed
her eyes. Her head buzzed with the lack of sleep.

A brazen honk snapped her eyes open. She
stood for a moment trying to sense if she had actually fallen
asleep on her feet. Then she focused on the cab parked on the far
side of the street. She gave a quick salute to the driver and
proceeded down the steps where she stopped to push the walk/ wait
button. As the flash of red and yellow lights signaled a halt to
the flow of traffic, she crossed to the taxi and climbed in the
rear from the driver’s side.

The driver cocked an ear and Danielson
mumbled, “Airport—Eastern shuttle.”

On the plane she tried to practice what she
would say to Isaacs. Every time she began to assemble her excited
thoughts into coherent English sentences, the words would drift and
dissolve as her brain fought to sleep. Back in her office in the
Langley headquarters she dropped her briefcase on her desk and,
still standing, punched the phone for Isaacs’ office.

“Yes, Miss Kate?” Isaacs fingered the
intercom in answer to the buzz.

“Pat Danielson, sir. On the phone.”

“Put her on the line,” Isaacs said, reaching
for his telephone. “Hello, Pat? Isaacs, here.”

“We’ve completed the analysis on the periodic
seismic signal,” Danielson reported. “We’ve got something big, but
I don’t know what.” She sounded excited, only an occasional slurred
word indicated fatigue.

Isaacs looked at his watch. “It’s four-thirty
now, do you want to talk this afternoon, or wait until
tomorrow?”

“Well, I thought you might not be free until
tomorrow, but I’d rather get it off my chest. That might help me
get some rest tonight. I’ve lived with the computer here and at the
Cambridge Research Lab the last week and haven’t had much sleep. I
could at least give you the bottom line, then we could go into
detail tomorrow sometime, after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

“Okay, come on up.” Isaacs buzzed Kathleen to
show Danielson in on her arrival and cleaned his desk of the latest
summaries concerning the new Russian laser being readied for launch
at Tyuratam.

Danielson arrived two minutes later. She
looked haggard, but an intensity burned in her eyes. She dropped
into the proffered chair, took a deep breath, and held it
momentarily before exhaling slowly through pursed lips.

Isaacs waited for her to compose herself.
Danielson’s mind spun with the reams of data she’d lived with over
the last few days as she endeavored to decide where to begin.

“It’s not a surface effect,” she blurted out.
“In places we can clearly track it from the mantle to the core. It
then seems to head on back to the surface. A scattered wave would
have an attenuated amplitude. This grows in strength as it leaves
the core and passes into the mantle.”

“Does it move between two fixed points?”
inquired Isaacs, already calculating the surveillance apparatus
that could be used once a location was specified.

“On the contrary,” replied Danielson,
destroying that train of thought. “At first it seemed to move
around randomly although confined to certain latitudes. It’s too
weak to follow continuously and it seemed to be taking arbitrary
trajectories.

“I racked my brain trying to find a
systematic effect that would tie all the data together. I only hit
upon it late last night and finished working it out this morning.
The path is fixed all right, but not to the Earth.”

Isaacs’ brows rose slightly in surprise. He
didn’t speak but fixed his gaze on Danielson as he waited for her
to continue.

“At first I thought it always pointed in the
same direction with respect to the Sun. Not at the Sun, but at a
fixed angle to it. But that wasn’t quite it, so I tried a position
fixed to the distant stars and that fits like a glove, as nearly as
I can tell.”

“Aaah, wait a minute,” Isaacs leaned forward
on his desk and clasped his hands. “Run that by me again.”

“Okay,” Danielson pointed her left index
finger at the ceiling and moved her right index finger in a circle
around it, pointed at the floor. “As the Earth rotates exactly once
on its axis, marking a sidereal day, a given point on its surface
will fall on the line of motion we have determined,” she moved her
right finger back and forth past her left, “and a fixed distant
star will be directly overhead once more. Because of the Earth’s
motion in orbit around the Sun, the interval between times when the
Sun is directly overhead, the solar day, is four minutes longer.
Sidereal time represents a more basic inertial clock, uncomplicated
by the orbit of the Earth, and that is the time this phenomenon
keeps.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Isaacs.
“You’re claiming that this motion is fixed in space? Just as the
axis of the Earth’s rotation points in a fixed direction, towards
Polaris?”

“Absolutely.” Danielson gave an assertive
nod, which caused a curl to slip down on her forehead. She pushed
it back with a gesture that suddenly recalled her femininity to
Isaacs, but continued at a professional clip.

“Something moves on a line through the center
of the Earth. It always comes up near thirty-three degrees north
latitude, goes down through the center of the Earth, and comes out
again at thirty-three degrees south latitude. Then it goes back to
the center and comes out once again at thirty-three degrees north
latitude. But since the Earth rotates and the direction along which
it moves is fixed, it never comes up at the same point twice.”

The woman’s fatigue receded as she endeavored
to elaborate her argument. She jammed a slim finger onto Isaacs’
desk. “Not only is this trajectory independent of the rotation of
the Earth on its axis, it’s also independent of the motion of the
Earth around the Sun. We have good data now spanning three months.
In that time the Earth has moved one quarter of the way around the
Sun in its orbit, an angle of ninety degrees. Yet the seismic
trajectory has pointed to the same direction in space, a point
somewhat to the north and midway between the constellations of
Gemini and Cancer. If you extend the line of motion through the
Earth’s center and out the other side, it intersects the sky at a
point just south of the constellation of Capricorn.”

Danielson leaned back and looked out the
window over Isaacs’ shoulder, as she sought an analogy.

“It’s as if there were a string tied at two
opposite points in space, Cancer and Capricorn, and passing through
the center of the Earth. That string intersects a different point
on the Earth’s surface every second as the Earth rotates, but the
direction in which the string leads is independent of the rotation
of the Earth on its axis or its revolution in orbit about the
Sun.”

Isaacs and Danielson stared at each other and
then diverted their gazes to random points in the room. Danielson,
convinced of the certainty of her conclusions, nevertheless
abandoned herself to retracing mentally the steps she had taken
over the last few days. She hadn’t the mental energy presently to
contemplate the impact of her efforts. Isaacs’ thoughts took two
tracks simultaneously, trying to absorb the significance of the raw
conclusions just presented and beginning to catalog the
possibilities for weakness or errors in the analysis leading to
those conclusions.