The Krone Experiment k-1

by J. Craig Wheeler

  “Actually,” interjected Gantt, “if we are going to discuss this matter, and I surely want to, we should move over to my tent. It’s a little less public there.”

  They picked up their drinks and moved off to Gantt’s tent, which was set off somewhat from the main compound. Gantt went off to gather up two more folding chairs and returned to arrange them in the small patch of shade available.

  “Have you learned anything new?” he inquired of Danielson.

  “I’ve collated some more data from the Large Seismic Array and various other monitoring stations. There have been some refinements in our estimations, but nothing qualitatively new.” She took a sip of her tea. “In fact, there’s been one major frustration. We had hoped to get the Navy to make systematic measurements of the sonar signal. That would have given us much better positions. Unfortunately, their old data isn’t much good now, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t respond fast enough to get any new data this last week. As a result, the measurements of positions you got yesterday are probably the best we have.”

  “Did you explain Alex’s hypothesis to the Navy?” Gantt wanted to know.

  “No,” replied Danielson, “the decision was made not to spread that notion any further than necessary until the results of this expedition are in.” She leaned toward Gantt. “What about this cessation of the signal below the surface that you reported yesterday? My data have never shown a signal from the upper mantle, but you reported a definite time delay. That would be a small effect in my data that have poor time resolution, but it might be present. I didn’t have time to look carefully before hopping the plane. Don’t you think it’s reminiscent of the sonar signal stopping at the surface of the ocean, just that it starts earlier and lasts a bit longer?”

  “Yes, that’s my impression,” said Gantt. “It’s strange behavior for a normal seismic wave, but it might be consistent with Alex’s beast as we discussed in La Jolla.” He paused to scratch his head and shuffle his toe in the dirt. “Still, I can’t help wondering whether we could be dealing with some special fissuring that focused normal seismic waves, and those fissures could terminate below the surface.”

  “But that wouldn’t explain the delay in the return of the waves,” Runyan pointed out, “nor the holes drilled in Nagasaki and Dallas.”

  “Well, maybe the energy is temporarily stored as a mechanical stress in the rock and then released. I admit I don’t have a real physical picture of such a process, but neither do I see how to rule out the possibility. The holes? Well, you’re right; I can’t account for them easily either. Coincidental imperfections in the concrete?”

  This rhetorical question went unanswered. There was silence for a moment, broken by Runyan. “As I understand from Isaacs, you had a marginal detection of an abnormal acceleration?”

  “Yes,” replied Gantt, “there was some indication in the first event. It could be real, or just an accidental accumulation of noise.”

  “From the distances you got yesterday,” Runyan continued, “what do you estimate for the location of this event coming up today?”

  “My best guess is that the epicenter, if you can call it that, will be about a quarter of a mile to the northeast of here, but there’s an uncertainty of a few hundred meters.”

  “Hmmm, too bad we don’t have that Navy sonar data,” Runyan muttered. “I’d hate to have this thing fly up my ass.” He caught himself and turned to Danielson, patting her on the arm. “Pardon me, hon, excuse my language.” She suppressed a smile. He turned back to Gantt.

  “And you expect it at about 2:03 this afternoon?”

  “Give or take a few seconds.”

  “So it surfaced almost half an hour ago in northwest Louisiana,” mused Runyan. “It’s passed through the core and is now headed up to a point in the East Crozet Basin in the southern Indian Ocean. And, after another quick pass through the core, it will soon be here.” He stared down at the brown dirt and scrubby grass beneath his feet, as if by concentrating he could peer into the depths of the Earth in reality as he could by imagination and thereby witness this rogue particle at work.

  “You think you’re right, don’t you?” Gantt inquired.

  “I’m afraid I am,” Runyan answered.

  Gantt stared at Runyan and then removed his glasses and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Let me give you a tour,” he said and led his guests to the main tent where he explained the function of the arrayed instrumentation.

  At fifteen minutes before two, Gantt had Runyan and Danielson stand aside while he made final preparations. Danielson glanced at her watch at two minutes after the hour just as Gantt turned to announce:

  “Come and look—I’m getting a signal on the seismometers.” Runyan and Danielson approached and peered over his shoulder. All three seismometers were showing a definite increase in activity. Gantt turned to the computer, fingered the keyboard, and examined the screen.

  “I’m getting a good reading on the distance, but I’m having some trouble determining exactly where it’s heading since, as predicted, it seems to be right beneath us.”

  They turned their attention back to the seismometers, which were by now showing great activity.

  “Look at this!” exclaimed Gantt. He pointed to the readings on the gravimeters. All were showing a definite and growing anomalous acceleration. Once more, Gantt swiveled in his seat toward the computer, but before he could key in his instructions, confusion erupted.

  Runyan first saw the needle of the seismometer in the camp go off scale, slamming against its restraining pin. Before his mind could quite absorb the implication of that occurrence, his body recorded a rapid, bizarre set of feelings.

  First, he had the definite sensation that the floor of the tent had accelerated upward suddenly like an express elevator. This feeling was terminated by a sideways impulse as if he had been hit with a sudden, strong gust of wind. Just as quickly, that sensation was replaced by a familiar fearsome tickle in stomach and gonads. Runyan was reminded of a roller coaster as it begins its first terrifying descent, leaving tender organs in the grasp of inertia. His ears registered a sucking whistle, rapidly diminishing in amplitude as if someone had turned on a vacuum cleaner just outside the tent and then whisked it rapidly away.

  As these sensations passed, Runyan became aware of chaotic shouts beginning to echo around the camp and of Danielson half sprawled, grasping the back of Gantt’s chair. Danielson had taken a step toward Gantt and had been caught with one foot in the air when she was bumped sideways and knocked off balance. Runyan helped Danielson regain her feet. She collapsed against him, weak-kneed and pale with shock. Runyan held her shoulders gently.

  The whistling noise returned, this time not quite so loud and at a higher pitch. Danielson stepped back from Runyan, her hands on his chest, her eyes searching his for explanation, confirmation. After a moment, Runyan looked toward the instrumentation. Danielson’s gaze followed his and they simultaneously swiveled to look at the seismometers. All the needles had fallen to rest, tracking a straight line down the center of the strip charts. In the same instant as the faint whistling stopped, the needles twitched and once more the one on the camp instrument slammed against its restraining pin. As they watched, the needles began to swing, first entirely across the chart and then with gradually diminishing amplitude.

  The hoarse voices outside the tent died with the swing of the needles, and Runyan spoke first.

  “Goddamn!” he said with measured stress. And then again, “Goddamn!”

  As the reaction began to sink in, he felt his legs begin to shake. He moved uncertainly to the nearest chair and collapsed in it. He looked at Gantt, whose face was ashen, and at Danielson who, by contrast, was beginning to regain some color. Her eyes now showed the intensity of contained excitement. She suddenly had an idea, turned and rushed out of the tent. The two men sat in silence until one of Gantt’s assistants burst in.

  “Dr. Gantt,” he shouted, “what’n hell was that?”

  Gantt turned and looked at
him for a long moment before replying, “I don’t know, an earthquake, I suppose.”

  “Hell, that wasn’t like any earthquake I’ve ever been in,” replied the other, his voice barely quieter. “Two fellows just outside the tent got knocked on their butts. I was a hundred yards away and didn’t feel a thing. And that noise, I’ve never heard a quake make a noise like that!”

  “It was somewhat irregular,” Gantt conceded. “Why don’t you check out the camp and the other sites to see if everything is all right. I’ll see what I can figure out from the data we collected.”

  The man knew he was being put off, but could see nothing to do about it. He paused a moment until it was clear that Gantt had nothing further to say, then departed with an aggressive stride, nearly colliding with Danielson, who rushed in as he left.

  She hurried across the tent floor and pulled up a chair to sit at right angles to Runyan. His arm was draped on the chair. Danielson grasped his hand in both of hers and gave it a strong, almost painful, squeeze.

  Barely aware of Danielson beside him, squeezing his arm, Runyan was caught up in a maelstrom of fragmentary thoughts. He couldn’t grasp the details; they moved too fast, too lightly, wafted away like floating cottonwood seeds if he tried to grab at them. Somehow, though, he caught enough glimpses through the swirl. Us? Them? He couldn’t see who, but he knew the answer.

  “You were right, Alex,” Danielson said in a tense hissing whisper. “I don’t see any sign of a tunnel outside the tent, but I know you were right. That force! It could only have been the gravity! It is a black hole!” As she said the last words she raised his hand in hers and banged it back down on the arm of the chair. Runyan winced slightly.

  Danielson had been looking at his face without seeing. As the grimace passed briefly over Runyan’s features, she suddenly became cognizant of the black desolation reflected there. She stared at his impassive face as her own tenseness and excitement abated. She turned her head to look briefly at Gantt and read the same feeling of devastation on his face. Her mind spun with conflicting emotions as she released her grip on Runyan’s slack hand and slumped back in her chair.

  My god, she thought, it’s like being torn apart, elation and terror at the same time. She recognized that she had been completely committed to this project, that she craved for her passion to be justified. The frightening encounter had been so real, so visceral, she felt—vindicated! But something in her mind cowered like a timid creature, beset by a raging beast. Her mind froze, resisting the full implications of what had transpired here. Where had it come from? What were they going to do? They had done what they had come to do. But were they better off, or worse?

  She grabbed at a straw. Take a step, a small step. We’ve got to move on.

  “Professor Gantt?” she inquired. “I’ve got to call Bob Isaacs.”

  Chapter 14

  The satellite, square-rigged with solar panels, sailed a smooth, circular, polar orbit every hour and a half. The rotation of the Earth beneath it brought every square inch of the surface within viewing range in a twelve-hour period. Its eye was a large, finely-honed mirror, bigger than most Earth- bound telescopes. This eye, like many cousins, would never witness the stark glories of the Universe. It was dedicated to peering at the human scurryings below.

  Normally, the twenty minutes spent passing from the North Pole down over Canada and the continental United States to the equator were downtime devoted to signal relaying and reprogramming. This orbit, the gyros hummed and locked the telescope on several spots in a dead east-west line running through the high mountains of southern New Mexico. If the computer knew slang, it would have called this operation a piece of cake. The signal carrying orders from the ground had not called for highest resolution, the capability to distinguish letters on a license plate, only enough detail to discern a car from a house.

  Light from the Sun scattered in the Earth’s atmosphere, bounced off the New Mexico landscape and was reflected upward. The mirror in the satellite gathered a tiny portion of this light and focused it as an image on a photocathode. A sweeping electron beam converted the lights and darks of the image into electrical impulses and the on-board computer converted the impulses to immutable numbers. A beam of radiation, modulated and encoded with those numbers, shot to a receiving station on the ground at the speed of light. This signal was relayed to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland where it received routine preliminary computer processing to decode the signal and remove the worst of the spurious electronic noise. Without pause, the signal was then relayed by special laser-driven glass fiber cable, immune to interception, to receiving equipment and a computer in CIA headquarters. This computer produced an electronic signal that reproduced a picture of the mountainous terrain on a special TV screen. A hard-copy photograph was taken of the screen, suitable for humans to scan and bicker over. Scarcely half an hour had passed from the time the special order had been sent up to the satellite to the time the camera shutter clicked.

  As the photograph moved through the automatic developing process, the satellite coasted over the equator above the eastern Pacific Ocean. It would rest over the Pacific and Antarctica except for occasional records of ships. Things would pick up as it tried to collect data on the movement of the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean. There would be several frantic minutes in the vain attempt to monitor troops and rebels in Afghanistan, then the well-established routine over mother Russia herself. As the Arctic ice cap slipped underneath, the cycle would begin again.

  Wednesday evening Isaacs sat in his study, the smells of supper beginning to romance his nostrils.

  “Dad!” Isabel’s young girl volume resounded down the corridor. “It’s for you!”

  He reached for the extension.

  Even before she came on the line, from the long-distance hollow echo, broken by occasional radiophone static, he knew.

  “Bob?” her voice was tense, excited.

  “Pat?” His flat reply.

  “Bob, he was right! It’s got to be a black hole! It almost hit us, came up right outside the tent. You could feel it, Bob! The pull, from its gravity, it knocked me over. Ellison is starting to analyze the computer records, but I just don’t see how there can be any doubt.”

  Silence.

  “Bob?”

  “Sorry. That’s good work.” He was suffused with a bone-weary fatigue. “It’s just so hard to accept. I was trying to think of what to do next.” How was he going to explain this to Drefke, to the President? Damn! Why had he brought the Russians, Korolev, into this? He certainly didn’t want to hassle with them now.

  “Have you started the site survey?”

  “Yeah,” he confirmed. “We got the satellite time on an emergency basis, shots of every site on the trajectory, north and south latitude, at the right altitude. The satellite should be working now, and we should have the first cut tomorrow morning. Then we can go back to anything that looks promising.”

  “I wonder what we’ll find?” she asked the question slowly, rhetorically.

  “Pat, right now I haven’t the faintest damn idea. Let me know if Gantt’s analysis turns up anything interesting. I’ll get hold of the Director tonight and see if I can explain all this to him.”

  “Okay, good luck. You’ll let me know what the site survey turns up?”

  “Right.”

  “Bye.”

  “G’bye.”

  He hung up the phone and stared at it, unseeing. He knew he should eat before calling Drefke, but his appetite had vanished.

  Pat Danielson slipped back into the tent and took a chair next to Runyan who leaned over Gantt’s shoulder, watching numbers do formation exercises on the terminal.

  “Did you get him?” Runyan swiveled his neck to look at her.

  “Yes. He didn’t sound too happy.”

  “Not the kind of thing you get happy about.” Runyan paused a moment, contemplating. “I guess I feel relief. The peril is real and immense. I don’t think any of us really appreciate in
our guts the danger we’re in. But I’m relieved that it’s out in the open now so we can deal with it head on.” He turned back to the terminal. “Ellison’s finding out what our friend is really like.”

  Danielson maneuvered her chair so she could see. Gantt pointed to the luminescent figures. “You see the seismometers saturated when it got too close, so they stopped giving any useful information.” He played with the keys some more. “The gravimeter here in camp also went off scale. They’re meant to measure fluctuations of a part in a billion, and this one was at one percent before it pooped out. The outer stations were fine, though; here’s the mass they detected, a bit over ten million metric tons. That’s just about what you guessed, wasn’t it, Alex?”

  “Pretty close,” admitted Runyan. He thought for a while and then asked, “How long were the seismometers inactive?”

  Gantt consulted the computer and then replied, “Twenty- eight point— well, call it an even twenty-nine seconds, why?”

  “Maybe we ought to go back to your tent where we can talk this over,” Runyan replied.

  They left the equipment tent and walked toward Gantt’s.

  Wary glances followed them. All over the camp men stood in groups of three and four, discussing the strange event in muted and not so muted tones. Runyan and Danielson occupied the chairs they had first sat in upon their arrival, only a few hours ago. Gantt disappeared inside the tent and returned with three styrofoam cups and a bottle of bourbon.

  “A bit early in the day for normal circumstances,” he said, “but I could use a little bracer. Will you join me?”

  The other two nodded their acceptance and received their cups in turn. Runyan took a fairly healthy slug and looked on with mild surprise as Danielson drained hers in one quick motion and held it out to Gantt for a refill.