The Titicaca Effect

by Richard N. Tooker

  “All right.” The general thought for a second, then said, “What about Copacabana?”

  Yancey removed the enlarged photo on the easel to reveal another, this one a high-altitude image of Copacabana. “We’ll airlift 200 troops into Copacabana at exactly the same time we capture the islands, just in case we don’t capture the radios and collect the cell phones quickly enough to keep the troops on the island from getting the word out. We’ll use choppers for that. There are only about 60 Bolivian soldiers in the village, and they’ve set up a tent village on the outskirts of the town. We should be able to capture them without any threat to the civilian population. We’ll also need to secure the Bolivian Navy headquarters at the docks, but that’s no problem. At the most, they only have three or four boats there at a time, and they’re actually water ambulances. Ten soldiers max.”

  “And La Paz?” Whittington queried.

  “General, we’ve been overruled by the White House on any plan to take troops into the city.” The speaker was Air Force General Samuel Kittredge. “The president doesn’t want to leave the impression that we’re trying to take over the whole country, just the site of the Titicaca Effect. He agreed to put troops in Copacabana if we do this only because we successfully convinced him that we had to secure the village to maintain security at the site. When you brief the ambassador, you’re supposed to get him to go to the presidential palace and tell Maldonado what we’ve done, timed so that he arrives in the middle of the night just as soon as we confirm the status of the mission. It will be his job to convince President Maldonado that there was a threat from the Chinese, and that we’ve only acted in Bolivia’s best interest. The president wants no military in La Paz.”

  “Damn!” Whittington scowled. “I thought I had all that locked up with the president yesterday. He changed his mind? That means we’re putting the most delicate part of the operation - keeping Maldonado from overreacting - in the hands of Ambassador Previn. The man is a buffoon! He only has the job because he comes from a family with money that they dole out liberally to politicians. Well, we’ll just have to make damn sure Barbara Fontaine goes with him. At least then we’ll have a fighting chance that Maldonado won’t call out the troops. No military presence at all in La Paz?”

  “He agreed to flyovers,” Kittredge answered. “As soon as we know that Maldonado has been briefed, we’ll start tactical flights over La Paz every ten or fifteen minutes, using F-15s flying low enough to be really noisy, and we’ll keep it up for at least two days. Let them know we mean business and keep them guessing what we’re up to. They have no air defenses except a few old T-33 trainers that we’ve given them to use in the drug interdiction program, so there’s no risk involved. We can bring the F-15s in from the Pacific. Chile has agreed to let us use their air space. They think we’re just doing maneuvers.”

  “OK, that’s a plan,” Whittington grunted. “I want to have everything in place and ready to go within 72 hours if the president decides to invade. I’ll expect status reports from all of you twice a day until then. Dismissed.”

  Chapter 11: The Explanation

  Thaddeus Stout scratched his goatee absent-mindedly as he waited for Tyler Freeman and Barbara Fontaine to join him. Stout was the first arrival for the meeting, showing up early enough to rearrange the room to his liking. Although he was nonchalant about his personal appearance, he was positively fastidious about his presentations. He had enough experience as both a teacher and a student to know what constituted a good presentation of a complex subject—or a bad one. He didn’t want the room arrangement to work against him.

  The location was the same American embassy conference room in which he had first been introduced to the Titicaca Effect, only this time he was the one who had information to share. Almost three weeks had passed since he had arrived in Bolivia. Now he had the answer, and it amazed even him.

  It had taken Freeman only a few minutes to set up the meeting with Barbara Fontaine at Stout’s request. She wanted to understand the effect as much as he did, and had even delayed a meeting with the head of the CIA’s Bolivian task force to attend. At Freeman’s urging, the meeting had been kept secret and included only the three of them. He had become suspicious of his own government’s motives and Stout shared his concerns. Together, they wanted to make sure that the information Stout was about to reveal would be managed in a way that benefited the people of Bolivia, but they weren’t sure that Fontaine would agree with them and they wanted the opportunity to get her alone to sell her on the idea. Fontaine might be an employee of the government of the United States, but Freeman was counting on her sense of fair play to guide her into making the right decisions. The situation still felt very uncomfortable, even conspiratorial to Freeman, and he would be violating direct orders by telling Fontaine about it, but he didn’t see any way to avoid it. They needed her.

  Freeman entered the room. “Barbara will be here in a few seconds, Thad,” he said. “Are you set up?”

  “Ready,” Stout answered. He had an LCD projector attached to his laptop computer set up in the middle of the conference table, aimed at the pull-down screen at one end of the room. The projector was already on, its fan noise adding to the ambient street noises that could be heard from the street outside.

  Barbara Fontaine swept into the room, an arm full of notebooks and a frazzled look on her face. “Will this take long?” she asked Freeman.

  Freeman answered by gesturing toward Stout, obviously throwing the question to his friend. “Just a few minutes,” Stout replied. “It depends on how much detail you want.”

  Fontaine smiled at the scientist, placing her stack of notebooks on the conference table and extending her hand in greeting. “Dr. Stout, how nice to see you again. I trust you’ve become acclimated to Bolivia by now. Are you feeling well?”

  Stout shook her hand and returned the greeting. “Much better, thank you, Ms. Fontaine. I still don’t think I’m up to doing any two-hour bike rides like I do at home, but at least I can walk more than a block or two now without having to rest.”

  “I need enough detail to inform the ambassador,” she said, “and later on today we’re supposed to brief the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff about the situation here via a secure conference phone, although I can’t imagine why. I just postponed a meeting with the CIA. I’m not sure what they want, either. It’s getting crazy around here since the media arrived. Everybody wants to know what the Titicaca Effect really is. I hope you have some answers, Dr. Stout.”

  “I know what it is and why it’s happening, and in a few minutes the two of you will, too.”

  “Good,” she responded. “The media has been all over me.” She glanced at Freeman. “Since you won’t talk to them and the FAA in Washington keeps saying ‘no comment,’ they’re hoping the embassy might be willing to share some information. There are some really bizarre theories going around. Did you see the CNN special last night?”

  “No. I came back from the island late and went straight to bed,” Freeman said.

  “They convened a sort of ‘round table’ of scientists from all over the world, and each had his own theory about the Titicaca Effect.”

  “Really!” Stout grinned. “This should be good. Tell me what they said.”

  “Well, let’s see” Fontaine looked at the ceiling as she recalled the TV news segment. “There was a French scientist who is insisting it’s a weather phenomenon, although nobody else agreed with him. A guy from Los Alamos thinks it’s somehow related to the hole in the ozone, although he couldn’t seem to articulate why. Another scientist theorizes that the Bolivians are testing some kind of new explosive or secret weapon. He claims that President Maldonado is using American money to finance an arms buildup to invade Chile and take back its coastline, something the Bolivians have been talking about doing since the 19th century. He just came off looking like a conspiracy nut. And scientists from three different countries independently came up with the theory that it’s some ki
nd of gravitational phenomenon, although they all three admitted that it was impossible for gravity to somehow be different at some specific point on the earth’s surface.”

  “Bingo!”

  “What?” Fontaine looked surprised. “You mean that’s it? Gravity?”

  “Yes,” he responded, “or more specifically, antigravity. If it were just the absence of gravity, anything inside the field would simply be weightless. The Titicaca Effect is a reversal of the earth’s gravity. That’s why it forms the waterspout. The water is falling up, just as if it were an upside down waterfall. It’s like a pipe.”

  “How is that possible?” Fontaine looked dubious.

  “Let me show you.” He grabbed the mouse and opened a PowerPoint presentation of digital photographs taken at the lake. The first photo was a shot of the orange buoys that marked the location of the Titicaca Effect taken from directly overhead. “Look at this shot of the buoys taken from a helicopter.” The buoys formed a perfect circle. “When I first got to the island, I noticed that the pattern of the buoys marking the site had not been very carefully laid out. I had the team reset the location of each buoy so that they formed an absolutely round circle.”

  He advanced to the next slide, a picture of the Titicaca Effect at full force, taken from about a half-mile away. Whoever took the photo had been standing at the crest of the Island of the Moon, out of range of the rainfall because of the prevailing winds.

  “Now look carefully at the orange buoys in the water,” Stout was pointing to the image of one of the seven buoys that were visible in the picture. “It’s hard to estimate the distance from the buoy to the edge of the effect because the edge is not well-defined. But if you compare all of them,” he continued, “it’s clear that some of these buoys are closer to the edge of the effect than others. It took me while to notice that myself, but once you see it, it’s apparent. The buoys form a perfect circle, yet they’re not equidistant from the edge of the effect.”

  Fontaine squinted at the screen. “I can see that, now that you point it out. What of it?”

  “It means that the Titicaca Effect is roughly circular, but not perfectly circular. It has an irregular shape to it,” Freeman said. “But what does that tell us?”

  “Well, I had already suspected that the effect was being caused by some kind of natural mineral deposit beneath the lake, and the fact that the effect is irregular supported that theory. There’s no such thing as a perfectly round mineral deposit, especially one more than 200 yards wide,” Stout replied.

  “That’s why you asked for the drilling equipment, to drill core samples,” Freeman said.

  “Exactly.” Stout warmed to his subject as he advanced to the next photo. It was a picture of three core samples, laid side by side against a white background. They were mostly golden in color, with barely perceptible striations of dark brown and green. “These are three of the samples, taken from different parts of the formation. They all contain pretty much the same minerals, some of which I’ve never seen before. They appear to be magnetoferrous minerals of some kind. I think they might be unique. I’ve sent samples to the geologists at Sandia Labs and they can’t identify them, either.”

  “Magnetoferrous?” Fontaine asked.

  “Yes, like the crystals that used to come with crystal radio sets. Did you ever have one of those?” Without waiting, he answered his own question. “No, I guess not. You’re not old enough. Anyway, they’re clearly crystalline structures under a microscope, and I’ve tested them for conductivity. Even though they look like rocks, they conduct electricity almost twice as efficiently as copper or even gold. And they create an incredibly strong magnetic field, but only during an eruption. I discovered that quite by accident. I have a pocket compass, and I had placed it on the table next to a core sample. I happened to look at it when an eruption was in progress, and it was going wild even though my tent is far outside the magnetic field created by the effect. By transporting some of the mineral away from the site, I also transported a piece of the magnetic effect to the same location. The magnetism is a key reason, I think, that the effect does what it does. Strong magnetic fields can essentially cancel out gravity, even if the material affected isn’t normally considered magnetic.”

  “Really?” Fontaine looked dubious.

  “Absolutely! It’s been done, and it’s a reproducible experiment. It has to do with the small but very real magnetic force that binds atoms together in every type of matter. The effect is called diamagnetic levitation, and it has been done in the lab using magnetic fields that are far stronger than those produced by superconductors. The most well-known replicatable experiment was done in the Netherlands, and it levitated a frog inside a magnetic field with no ill effects. The theory is that if you could create a strong enough – and large enough – field, you should be able to levitate anything. Say, a human being, or even an elephant,” Stout said.

  “Anyway, since the magnetic effect only occurs during an eruption, and since the eruptions occur at precisely the same time each day, then it naturally follows that the effect is triggered by the rotation of the earth.”

  “Naturally,” Fontaine grunted, looking confused.

  “I get it, Thad,” Freeman interjected. “The effect occurs at precise twenty-four hour intervals, and since the rotation of the earth is the only thing in the natural world that occurs with that exact periodicity, that’s the only possible trigger event. I’m with you so far. But what exactly is happening to trigger the effect when the earth rotates?”

  “Well, that’s the part I’m still working on. My best guess at this point is that it has to be gravity waves. This mineral deposit is huge. I’ve done some sonar tests, and it’s a roughly circular ball 211 yards in diameter. I believe that the size of the deposit, the precise mixture of the minerals and the alignment of the crystals all combine to cause the deposit to resonate with gravity waves, but only when those waves strike it at a precise angle or set of angles. In other words, when the surface of the earth, at this precise longitude and latitude, lines up a certain way with the sun.”

  “So it resonates at the same time every day,” Fontaine said with a triumphant look of understanding on her face. “You’re right, Dr. Stout. It’s the only possible explanation.”

  “Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?” Freeman asked.

  “Not that I know of. As I said, I think the minerals here are unique, and quite possibly don’t exist anywhere else on the planet. But there are similar instances of naturally occurring phenomena that seem equally unlikely. For example, did you know there are places where nuclear fission happens naturally and spontaneously?”

  “You’re kidding!” Fontaine said.

  “Not at all,” Stout said. “It’s true. I’ll show you the literature. They’re very low level reactions, but they’re nuclear reactions nevertheless.”

  “Well, if it’s a specific alignment of the earth and sun that’s causing the minerals to resonate, wouldn’t the effect be seasonal?” Freeman asked. “The angle of the sun relative to the surface of the earth changes with the seasons.”

  “I thought of that, too,” Stout answered. “But if that were true, then the duration of the eruptions would be getting either longer or shorter each day, depending on which side of the vernal equinox we’re on. That isn’t happening. I’ve been watching and timing the thing for three weeks, and the duration hasn’t changed even a millisecond. Evidently, there’s a range of angles that will make the minerals resonate with gravity, and my measurements prove that the site will be in that range 365 days a year.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Freeman asked.

  “Positive, my friend,” Stout smiled. “I’d stake my scientific reputation on it. The Titicaca Effect is here to stay. The pipe is permanent”

  “Well, then why did the pipe, as you call it, start up all of a sudden?” Fontaine asked. “If it’s permanent, where was it six weeks ago?”

  “The deposit was there, but it just wasn’t res
onating. I’m pretty sure it’s because of the overburden of rock at the site, which is mostly limestone with a higher-than-usual lead content. When the rock was too thick, it dampened the effect and shut it off. I think it was too thick until a few weeks ago, when the effect of thousands of years of wave action, currents in the lake and the solubility of the limestone finally combined to thin the overburden enough to let the minerals resonate. I verified that theory, by the way, by placing my core samples under a slab of the same kind of rock that makes up the overburden. It shut down the magnetic field during an eruption.

  “If you think about it,” Freeman mused, “it’s not too surprising that it would happen here, if was going to happen anywhere. The Andes are a treasure trove of rare minerals. That’s why there has always been so much mining activity in Bolivia.”

  “Can it be controlled?” Fontaine asked.