by Steve Alten
‘The black hole is our galaxy’s power train. Like the nucleus of a great atom, its gravitational pull serves as the glue which provides the cluster of stars its mass. But beyond the human eye, beyond the third dimension, the black hole provides an even more magnificent service. Computer, invert.’
Instantly the stars blink out, their luster fading to a deep purple hue, as if illuminated by a black light.
Manny stares at the black hole, which now glows emerald green. From within its slowly swirling whirlpool of gravity sprout tiny conduits—veins of energy that span outward throughout the darkened heavens of the Milky Way like cosmic subway tunnels.
Splintering away from these gravitational veins are capillaries, which glow a luminescent crimson. Unlike the larger, thicker veins, these thinner spaghetti-like strands seem to be floating through the dark matter of space on their own, their free ends twisting and rotating around the cosmic pinwheel like twigs caught in a drain.
‘You are now looking at the galaxy the way it appears in the nexus. Black holes that originate at the center of galaxies were created in the early days of the universe. If you could survive passage through their vortex, you would enter a parallel universe—a higher dimension of spiritual energy where time no longer exists. When we physically die, our souls pass through these higher dimensions and enter—’
‘Heaven?’
‘Something like that.’ He points to the twisting branches shooting out from the black hole’s steep gravitational well. ‘So powerful is the black hole’s mass that its throat, or event horizon, cannot sustain all of its energy. The pressure-relief conduits branching out across the galaxy are called white holes. White holes violently eject matter into space. Those red squiggly lines that move in proximity to the ejected matter are wormholes. Notice that each wormhole has two mouths located in different parts of the galaxy. The Balam possesses an antigravity field powerful enough to counteract the effects of a wormhole, allowing the starship to use it as a cosmic shortcut across the Milky Way.’
‘And that’s how you plan to get to Xibalba? Through a wormhole?’
‘Now you’re catching on.’
‘But everything’s constantly moving. It’s like … it’s like jumping on a cosmic merry-go-round. How do you even know when and where its entrance and exits are going to show up?’
‘The positions of the wormholes change in relation to the rotation of the galaxy. Each passage has been precisely charted. The Balam knows when it’s time to leave.’
Manny pinches his brow, struggling to deal with this information. ‘Where are we? Where’s Earth? Where’s this Xibalba?’
Jacob closes his eyes. The astrotopography reverts to the original volumetric image. ‘Computer, magnify the Orion spur ten to the power of nine.’
A section of one of the Milky Way’s long outer arms leaps outward, the magnified projection again swimming around them. Below and to Jacob’s right appears a yellow speck. As Manny watches, the area magnifies, revealing Earth’s sun and its planets.
Jacob points high above their heads to three bright pinpoints set in a familiar alignment, the pattern identical to the formation of the three pyramids of Giza.
‘Al Nitak, Al Nilam, and Mintaka, the three belt stars of the constellation Orion. Look just below the stars. Can you see that tiny crimson-and-silver world? According to the Guardian, that planet is Xibalba. Now watch.’
Jacob points to their right. Moving slowly through the three-dimensional cosmos is a paper-thin looping slash of scarlet laser light, running north–south through the Orion arm. ‘Here comes our wormhole. Its proximal orifice will pass between Earth and Mars in seven days, its distal mouth whipping around in time to deposit us in the vicinity of Xibalba. The last time a wormhole intercepted our solar system in this manner was on 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin, the winter solstice of 2012—the last day of the Mayan calendar. The time before that was almost 65 million years ago.’
‘Wait … this thing will arrive in seven days?’
‘No, I said the wormhole’s closest mouth will pass near Mars in seven days. To rendezvous in time means we’ll have to leave Earth in ninety-eight hours.’
Immanuel swallows back the bile rising from his throat. ‘No way … no fubitshitting goddam way, Jacob Gabriel!’
‘Manny—’
‘No!’ The dark-haired twin bolts out of the control room, then races down the passageway, searching for the camouflaged exit. ‘Open up, goddam it! Jacob, let me out! I can’t breathe!’
A panel retracts, revealing the gantry and the inside of the warehouse. He looks down to see the lift rising slowly to meet him.
Desperate to escape, he leaps forward and grabs hold of one of the aluminum tower’s horizontal support beams, using it like a fireman’s pole to descend quickly to the concrete floor—
—the armed guards already in position as he reaches the bottom.
Meteorology Lab, University of Miami
Tuesday Evening
The Meteorology Center on the University of Miami’s main campus is the latest in a new line of ESD (Environmental Shield Designs) sprouting up along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The building has a second exterior consisting of a domed outer shell, composed of reinforced concrete and steel, designed to withstand hurricane winds up to 220 miles an hour. Inside this barrier is the mainframe, each door and window housing retractable steel shutters that seal automatically at the touch of a switch. Backup generators situated on the first floor can power the entire thousand-room building for two weeks, while satellite relays, wired directly into the curved roof, provide ample reception for the Center’s lines of communication.
Besides its role as a teaching facility, the Meteorology Center also serves as the United States southeast regional headquarters for the Earth Systems Management Agency, an organization that assesses, predicts, and monitors all environmental catastrophes across the globe.
Bruce Doyle rubs his sleep-deprived eyes, then drains the remains of his now-cold coffee. Although the effects of global warming had become increasingly apparent as early as the late 1980s, the U.S. government’s response to the problem was too little, coming too late. Doyle, the regional director of the ESMA, often equates the public’s delay with sticking one’s hand in a pot of cold water on a simmering stove. Because the changes in temperature happen so gradually, the victim never realizes the danger until flesh starts peeling away from the bone.
Doyle shakes his head in disbelief as he glances at the Winter 2033 ESMA QUARTERLY REPORT. Colder winters and hotter summers—that has been the pattern over the last thirty years, and the effects around the globe seem to be magnifying. More than 100 billion tons of water are being released from the Greenland Ice Sheet each year, doubling the melting rate from only two decades earlier, while raising sea levels another four inches. Millions of people living in low-lying lands have been displaced, from Bangladesh to Egypt. Outbreaks of malaria, dengue, and yellow fever continue moving farther north with each passing season. Storms and floods have washed away crops. Droughts and fires destroy more than 10 million hectares of forests a year. Summer heat waves have led to the deaths of thousands, while vanquishing countless plant and animal species into extinction.
And according to the QUARTERLY REPORT, things are getting worse.
The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is continuing to melt at an alarming rate. The ice sheet, which rests on a bed far below sea level, contains nearly 2 million cubic miles of ice. Scientists now know that all marine-based ice sheets have melted within the last twenty thousand years. If the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet were to go, world ocean levels would rise, and not just by inches, but by more than twenty feet.
More severe weather patterns are also taking their toll. Typhoons and hurricanes are not only appearing later in their seasons, but elevated ocean temperatures have increased their intensity, especially in the North Atlantic.
The power train behind our planet’s storm systems is the oceans, which provide energy both by direct hea
t transfer from their warm surface and by the evaporation of water. Tropical cyclogenesis takes place when the atmosphere takes on heat and moisture from warm surface waters (at least eighty degrees Fahrenheit to depths of about 150 feet). As latent heat in the form of water vapor is drawn up from the ocean, the thunderstorm’s cyclonic surface winds cause it to spiral counterclockwise (clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere). As the storm system strengthens and hurricane-force winds are achieved, inward-moving air turns upward and outward, creating an eye, a center of calm usually twenty to forty miles in diameter. The heat energy generated by the evaporation process is stored in the form of water vapor, which rises in a ring of towering cumulonimbus clouds surrounding the calm eye of the cyclone. The eye itself is composed of slowly sinking warm air while the eye wall is a strong upward flow of air created by a moderate to strong low-level convergence of air.
A medium-sized hurricane releases enough energy in a single day as the simultaneous explosion of four hundred twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs—or more than half the electric energy used by the United States population in an entire year. Hurricanes (cyclones forming in the Atlantic) are rated using the Saffir-Simpson Scale, which categorizes storms based upon their maximum sustained winds. A tropical storm officially graduates to a Category-1 hurricane when its winds are clocked at 74–95 mph. A Category-5 storms packs winds of 156-plus miles per hour.
By the late 1990s, the effects of global warming made themselves known through hotter summers and colder winters, intensifying weather systems across the globe. The initial effects on hurricanes were tempered with the arrival of an El Niño cycle, a circulation pattern where pools of warm surface water and air pressure in the tropical western Pacific roll back and forth across ten thousand miles of ocean. While El Niño brought increased rainfall across the southern United States, its high winds sheared off the northern edges of hurricanes, sparing the East Coast.
From the mid-1970s to 1998, El Niño dominated weather patterns across North America. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the first real effects of global warming suddenly became alarming.
La Niña—the little girl—is the flip side of the El Niño southern oscillation cycle. Many meteorologists classify the shift as a ‘cold event’ as La Niña cools ocean temperatures along the West Coast of the U.S. The effect of this phenomenon on the long-wave circulation pattern is to produce an upper air trough over the central United States, with a southerly flow over the East Coast—feeding virtually every low-pressure system coming across the Atlantic.
In late August of 2007, Hurricane Susan jumped from a Category-4 to a Category-5 storm as it approached the U.S. mainland. As an awestruck nation watched helplessly, the storm’s sustained winds reached 189 miles an hour just before its eye snaked across Savannah, Georgia, The ESMA’s early warnings helped keep Susan’s death toll below a dozen, but the killer storm’s winds (which spawned seven tornadoes) caused more than 4 billion dollars in damages.
So powerful was Susan that it forced the ESMA to add an additional classification to the Saffir-Simpson Scale. A Category-6 storm (or super-cane) was now regarded as a La Niña-induced hurricane packing winds in excess of 175 mph.
Less than a year later, Super-Cane Abigail, the first official Category-6 storm, made landfall in Vero Beach, Florida. The system’s storm surge would rise thirty-four feet above sea level, flooding coastal areas from West Palm Beach up to Daytona, then clear across the Florida panhandle.
By 2015, the eastern seaboard of the United States was becoming a very dangerous place to live. Seven super-canes had formed in the Atlantic, two making landfall. The worst of the lot was Super-Cane Pamela, whose double eye finally collapsed over Wilmington, North Carolina, pummeling the evacuated city with her near 200-mph winds and two dozen tornadoes.
Nature was taking its vengeance upon modern man, and something had to be done to placate her.
The first attempt to modify a hurricane’s winds dates back to 1947 and Project CIRRUS. Warm ocean water and high humidity in the air produce a drop in pressure along the surface. Horizontal winds near the surface respond to this drop in pressure by accelerating inward. The more the surface pressure falls, the higher the winds become. As low-level air moves inward from greater distances, the process intensifies, building around the eye of the storm. Project CIRRUS scientists attempted to cool the cyclone’s ‘chimney’ by dumping dry ice along a storm’s inward wall, disrupting its pressure differential.
Unfortunately, CIRRUS aircraft were not equipped to monitor a cyclone’s dynamic and structural changes. Worse, the first hurricane they attempted to cool abruptly changed direction and struck Georgia, causing a political ruckus. CIRRUS was canceled, and crippling new limitations were placed on all future cloud-seeding experiments.
These limitations would drastically affect Project STORMFURY, an ambitious hurricane modification program conducted from 1962 through 1983 by the Weather Bureau (eventually the NOAA), the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation. The basic idea behind STORMFURY was to heat the atmosphere over a greater distance from the hurricane’s eye, reducing the pressure gradient near the center of the storm, thereby reducing its wind speed. To achieve that end, scientists seeded the clouds away from the storm’s core with silver iodide (AgI), whose crystals are an especially efficient freezing nuclei, causing supercooled water droplets to change to ice crystals. By inducing freezing of the supercooled water held in the upper clouds away from the storm’s eye, a sufficient quantity of latent heat might be released to reduce noticeably the surface pressure gradient.
On August 19, 1963, Hurricane Beulah formed east of the Lesser Antilles. By August 24, the storm had been seeded twice, its maximum winds dropping by more than thirty knots. The cyclone’s eye wall dissipated, then re-formed ten miles farther away from the center of the storm. Unfortunately, a causal relationship could not be established, and STORMFURY, strangled by the new seeding restrictions, eventually lost all funding.
It wasn’t until 2016 that President Ennis Chaney reestablished funding for these vital experiments. Years later, three scientists would unite to take STORMFURY’s experiments one step further.
Essentially, a hurricane is fueled by the latent heat released by the condensation of water vapor to liquid cloud droplets. STORMFURY’s scientists chose to draw the hurricane’s latent heat away from the eye, hoping to disrupt its vortex by spreading its energy out over a greater distance. Dr. Lowell Krawitz, a meteorologist at MIT, wanted to attack the power train of the cyclone at its source by cooling the interior eye wall, thereby inhibiting condensation and convection. His delivery system—the Navy’s antiquated fleet of Trident nuclear submarines. Under Krawitz’s plan, vertical missile silos that once held Trident D-5 nuclear missiles would be refitted and converted into pressurized ejection systems, powered by the subs’ nuclear reactors. By ascending within a super-cane’s eye while still at sea, a cooling agent could be injected directly into the eye wall. While stopping a hurricane was not feasible, reducing its wind speed from 200 to 130 miles an hour would reduce its energy by more than 50 percent—something that could save countless lives and billions of dollars should the cyclone ever reach land.
What Dr. Krawitz needed was a compound that would both cool and expand.
Enter Dr. David Mohr and his colleague, Barry Perlman, two scientists who had spent the last twenty years working on liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engines. Together, they had developed several variants of cryogenic nitrogen gas used to cool fuels. A chance meeting with Dr. Krawitz led them to experiment with a nitrogen-hybrid gas, which, when introduced to a lower pressure region, would expand exponentially as it cooled.
On August 10, 2023, eight refitted Trident SSBN submarines moved to intercept Super-Cane Carol, whose 193-mile-per-hour winds were trekking west across the Atlantic toward Haiti and the southeastern seaboard of the United States. The submarine fleet rose within the eye and, maintaining course and speed, proceeded to pump MPK gas (named after the thre
e scientists) directly at the approaching southeastern wall of the storm.
As the hurricane continued on its northwesterly track, the passing eye wall inhaled the MPK gas, which expanded a hundredfold as it crystallized. Within minutes, the cryogenic gas disrupted the vertical convection within the cyclone’s wall clouds, thus reducing the amount of water vapor being condensed and sharply reducing the release of latent heat. Within an hour, sustained winds had dropped from 193 to 157 miles per hour at the center of the storm—a substantial reduction.
The success of the experiment earned the three scientists Nobel prizes and rejuvenated the Navy’s antiquated fleet of nuclear submarines. A new sub force, known as ‘the weather net’ was commissioned, with refueling outposts established in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and western North Pacific. Having been relegated to reduced duties thanks to the advent of space defense systems, the Navy was suddenly back in business as ‘Cyclone Killers.’
Bruce Doyle stifles another yawn as he watches Super-Cane Kenneth’s powerful vortex near the Virgin Islands. Doyle is exhausted, having kept vigil on the super-cane since the tropical cyclone’s birth ninety-seven hours earlier.
And Kenneth is becoming an absolute monster, more enormous than even Super-Cane Pamela. To make matters worse, a fire at the weather-net depot in Haiti has forced the Navy to arrange emergency shipments of MPK cryogenic nitrogen gas mix from the Port of Miami. A three-day delay in acquiring an antiquated oil tanker for transport has allowed the already dangerous Category-6 storm to intensify.
