THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

“This lets Russia off the hook,” he explained. He looked towards Oliver with deep concern. “Unless we can do something to discredit them in some way, they’re going to be viewed as the saviours in all of this mess,” he forecast.

  September 28th.

  Down on the Clyde, activity had sprung up around two old coaches. Portable offices had been positioned around them and a temporary roof placed over the top to protect everyone from the rain. Ricky felt as though he was in charge, even though a small part of his brain told him Frankie was there to stop him making any fundamental mistakes. Nonetheless, like Frank, he waded in with both hands and helped the team reduce the coaches to their bare shells, classifying everything they took off as usable or junk, before selecting which of the two frames would form the base for their new vehicle. Once that fundamental decision had been made, they began to build the compartments they wanted, paying particular attention to the living and life support areas.

  Ricky thought he knew mechanics, but being around Frank was like being back in school, re-learning all the fundamentals he had taken for granted and finding that there were other ways to do things, invariably faster. All you had to do was forget about health and safety and dismiss a lot of structural testing as unnecessary. Ricky was pretty certain, watching Frank accept one part and discard another, that his eye was just as good as a micrometer.

  Beside them, hidden within the large dry dock, stood the ferry. Out of sight of the public, it hovered three metres above the ground enabling the underside to be sprayed with the thick layer of special rubber the twins required. Meanwhile, inside, as Allan and Leanne signed off one area after another, the crews moved in to complete the walls, floors and ceilings, quickly followed by the small group in charge of furnishings and end-user technology. Every day saw large changes to the inside as it rapidly moved towards completion.

  October 2nd.

  By drawing back the seating into the walls, the auditorium became a cavernous space with a flat floor perfect for dancing on. Gantries had been erected at the back of the hall, two for the BBC who had been invited to have exclusive video rights to the event, and one for the control of the lighting and sound.

  The auditorium was about to hold the inaugural ball for the Rolle College and, as Oliver had predicted, no budget was necessary. The BBC paid to have their equipment lifted in box-vans to the ARC in part-payment for receiving sole rights to the broadcast of the event. Top acts offered thousands of dollars to be allowed to perform, earning all of them a trip into space using the oversized SUVs, their equipment and ‘roadies’, arriving on the coaches.

  Students began to arrive two hours before the start in their eagerness to get a place at the front, up against the stage, unaware that Heather had chosen the moment when she knew all the students would be heading to the auditorium to show their guests around the ship. The BBC accompanied them, just one camera and a presenter, Oliver providing him with the background text he’d need.

  As the minutes dwindled towards the start of the event, the atmosphere became electric with anticipation, students and not a few travellers mingling together in the darkened auditorium, all eagerly awaiting their exceedingly exclusive party. Two women stood out in the melee. Both dressed in skin-tight spacesuits that they had painted with a variety of florescent paints.

  At eight precisely, the Head of the Rolle College stepped out onto the stage to rapturous applause from his student body. He nodded to the half seen-crowd, dazzled by the bright lights focused upon him, and held up his hands for quiet.

  The applause, whistles and calls continued for a while, but gradually reduced enough to allow him to speak.

  “Rolle College,” he began, and had to stop once again as the words brought another bout of cheering, screaming and whistling.

  Michael laughed as he realised any speech was going to be impossible. Revising his intent, he stepped up to the microphone once again. “Let the academic year begin!” he shouted loudly over the din, and stepped back, adding his applause to that of the students.

  The curtains drew back and Lady Gaga stepped out, her first live gig since retiring several years before. The first notes of music sounded, and the audience went wild with joy.

  Michael covered his ears and made his exit, using the service stairs to climb down to the fifth floor and the entrance to the Control Room.

  “That’s better,” he sighed, seeing the production on the monitor, the sound level reduced to low.

  Samuel smiled in understanding while he finished checking the water tanks. He would schedule another water trip for the following week, but since obtaining the even larger rubbish lorries a few days before, he anticipated the frequency of their trips would reduce.

  October 5th.

  A large blue cylindrical object dominated the floor of the shipping container, nearly three metres in diameter and close to a full metre tall. Warning signs decorated the blue surface; Danger, Laser Equipment, High voltage, Strong Magnetic Fields. Six cameras were focused upon it from the sides and corners of the container, while strong lighting left nothing in shadow.

  In the middle of the blue cylindrical object was a hole, and in that hole had been placed the test, a minute piece of HYPORT within its own container, positioned precisely below where the lasers were focused.

  Beneath the shipping container holding the experiment was a second container, this one holding the generator and supporting equipment that provided the power and life-support for the test.

  Mickey carried the containers under his SUV to 75,000 kilometres out from earth and 90 degrees off the ecliptic plane, then moved away to leave it floating on its own, turning the SUV to monitor it from afar. Robert Fowler sat at his side, his first real ‘mission’ since graduating from his spaceman training.

  Professor Don Graves was in his element, a large and powerful figure who strode purposefully from one control table to the next, crisp instructions requiring crisp and precise responses from Allan, David and Thomas as they controlled the wealth of monitors and the tools they had devised in order to bring HYPORT down to Absolute Zero, or at least close enough for Quantum mechanics to function.

  “Are we ready?” Don asked the room.

  Michael, seated with a few other interested parties in the adjoining meeting room, watched the team nod. All applications and monitors were functioning, and the main device, ready.

  Magnetic field please Thomas,” Don called.

  Thomas touched his screen, his eyes fixed to it as he waited for the magnetic field to be formed. “Alright,” he nodded. “Magnet field confirmed,” he added as the professor looked towards him.

  “Prepare the HYPORT please David,” Don told the other Howard twin.

  David attended to his own screen and monitored a single laser that was agitating the molecules of the HYPORT chemical, heating it to create a gas that rose, and was held in the magnetic field directly above it.

  “Ready,” David called.

  “Start up the main lasers, minimum power,” Don turned to Allan.

  Allan touched his screen and slid a finger along it. The main screen of the control-room showed the power feed to each of the six lasers, each pointing inwards to the small accumulation of gaseous HYPORT held still by the heavy duty magnets surrounding it, right in the heart of the device.

  “Ok, induce a Doppler frequency within the lasers,” Don requested.

  Allan did so by invoking an app that would automatically shift the light frequency of the lasers until it found a match with that of the HYPORT gas. The matching frequency of photons and HYPORT molecules would cancel out the HYPORT molecular movement and cause the substance to cool. The whole room waited, and a digital thermometer at the edge of the main screen began to reduce.

  “Alright. We have the Doppler frequency.” Don approved. “Increase power to 30%.” He took a deep breath. Such tests had been conducted on earth; he had been a part of them, and yet the Rolle College had made preparations for this test with such an exceptional ease, as if nothing was impos
sible to them. They were once again treading into new territory in months, where earth-based research groups took years of agonising decision-making and approval, pre-testing and still more testing before they even contemplated anything as daring as this.

  Michael leant forward. Nothing appeared to be happening inside the container, but there was a steady fall in the temperature reading within the suspended HYPORT gas, now 312 degrees Kelvin and continuing to steadily drop.

  “What exactly are we going to see?” Michael asked of Pavel, seated beside him.

  “Very low temperatures produce many interesting changes. Superconductivity is the most common among them, but we are also able to produce a crystalline structure of great symmetry,” he explained.

  “And that’s important?” Michael asked.

  “Don believes so. But, of course, it will only be important if the quantum performance of the chemical is what we expect of it,” he murmured. “Atomic and subatomic particles do not always function the way we anticipate they will. Their reality is quite different to ours, as can be seen by the double slot tests regularly performed at most universities as a first-year introduction to Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanic courses. Still, we do not understand how they function, or how they will be perceived to function,” The professor explained.

  “Pardon?” Michael asked, losing the professor on his very last statement.

  “Quantum Entanglement,” the professor explained quietly, so as not to disturb any of the others closely watching the experiment from the large meeting room. “Where two sub-atomic particles interact, even when separated. This interaction goes as far as anticipating the state of the partner, before it actually occurs.”

  Michael stopped and stared at the particle physicist.

  “That’s right,” Pavel nodded. “It knows, before it happens,” he confirmed.

  +++++++++++++

  The silence within the control room could be cut with a knife as the four in the control-room watched their monitors and those outside watched the values being returned from the experiment and, in particular, the temperature of their test subject.

  “Full power now, Allan,” Professor Don Graves called, his attention on the details displayed on the far wall.

  The silent lengthened as the temperature continued its slow drop towards absolute zero.

  Michael saw it reach 1.5 degrees Kelvin and looked towards the container, expectantly. Nothing had changed.

  Pavel smiled. “We are not yet cold enough to see the quantum mechanics of the chemical,” he observed.

  “Thomas,” Don called gently.

  Thomas initiated a further program from his monitor, and two more lasers sprang into being. Carefully aimed towards the minute ball of HYPORT, they succeeded in further halting the movement of atoms within the test, and the temperature dropped still further.

  One moment the cameras showed the test equipment in place with no outward sign of anything having changed. The very next, the screens were black, the signal from the cameras lost.

  Michael gasped, his head turning towards one of the other monitors where there was an image of the test from one of Mickey’s external cameras. It showed the containers from outside, the upper-most container crushed, as if some mighty hand had taken it and squeezed.

  There were shouts from everyone, not only those within the control-room, but outside too, Professor Pavel Chaichenko included. He, like Michael, had stood up as the camera’s died, and with the realisation of what had happened, had screamed aloud.

  It took Michael a moment or two to realise that the cries were not of pain, but of pleasure. Everyone was grinning, some with expressions of astonishment too. Even Professor Don Graves was grinning, and clapping the twins on the back as they complemented each other.

  When Michael turned to Pavel, it was to see him grinning from ear to ear and dabbing at eyes that had watered in delight.

  “That was good?” Michael asked, totally confused.

  “Good? Good?” Pavel laughed. “My dear Mr Bennett, you have no idea how incredible that was. You best hope that history does not record this conversation. Good? That was bloody fantastic!” the Russian physicist told him, fairly jumping up and down with excitement.

  “Mind you,” he added as a sobering afterthought. “You have just given credence to the String Theory, and that will make a lot of eminent theorists very unhappy,” and he chuckled.

  +++++++++++++

  “What do you mean, you might have to do it again!” Michael cried, looking between the two twins before glaring towards Professor Graves. At least now, a full hour after the experiment had come to a sudden stop, they had managed to lose their broad grins. Oliver sat to off to one side as he had often done in the distant past when Michael had gone heatedly into battle for some cause or other, watching and waiting for his cue.

  “Those lasers cost one million US Dollars, each,” he accused. “Just how often do you want to run these tests?” he asked indignantly.

  “Until we learn where they went,” Professor Graves replied.

  “Went? It blew up!” Michael cried. “And I still haven’t received an explanation as to why you lot are all so happy about it. If you wanted to blow something up, I could have got ROSCOSMO to do it for free!” he shouted.

  “Ah, that’s the problem then. You don’t understand what we’ve achieved,” Professor Graves said, quite reasonably.

  “Professor, the way I understand it, until you’ve all pored over the data for a few months, you lot don’t know what you’ve achieved either,” Michael told him. He was feeling aggrieved, and it may just have been his recent treatment at the hands of the US and Russians, but he was looking to unload a lot of his resentment, and the twins and professor just happened to be in the firing line.

  “You’re right, of course. As physicists, we need to know all the gory details before we will put our name to a new discovery, or theory, but I can tell you now, what we have done is sent an object to another location, an unspecified and unknown location, outside of our space-time continuum.”

  “You’re certain of this?” Oliver asked, his relaxed and laid-back attitude discarded as he came to his feet and took a step forward.

  “Certainly. You saw the container, you saw Mickey pry it open after the test. A sealed container I remind you, but with our equipment missing. We have definitely opened a new door in science – if you’ll excuse the pun, even if the results lie outside of our space-time continuum and therefore cannot be verified.”

  Michael blinked and the twins looked towards one another as they considered how best to describe the concept without using any mathematical references.

  “Look,” they began. “If you wanted to reference everything in space, like, map it all, then you would need a three dimensional grid, yes?” they asked.

  Michael agreed. That was easy.

  “But, because things are so far away, it takes light years for us to ‘see’ them. Even the sun, inside our own solar system; the light from that takes eight minutes to reach us. And because light can be slowed down or even bent by things like Black-Holes, then we have to qualify everything we ‘see’ on our map and say, this is the ‘when’ of it. The time-lag, as it were,” they continued.

  “Yes, alright,” Michael agreed. He could see the complication that light imposed upon it all.

  “So the map is only good from your perspective, then,” the twins told him, and watched him chew on that one.

  “And everyone within say, a light year of me,” he qualified.

  Professor Graves joined his shake of the head to that of the other two. “If you were travelling quickly, to Venus say, then time will have slowed down for you. So the relationship of all ‘when’ references to anyone close to you, but not travelling at the same speed as you, would also be different,” he explained.

  “Ok. I can follow that, just,” Michael agreed. “But what has that got to do with our missing experiment?”

  “Well, quite simply, a space-time continuum i
s a map of space, just as we’ve described it. So, there are many space-time continuums, as we’ve explained, and yes, currently, we pretty much all share the same basic continuum. Well, we’ve just moved something to another part of the map, but outside of it, because that ‘when’ reference has been discarded. We didn’t use it. Our object totally ignored all aspects of time and as we’ve said in the past, it’s all related, therefore, dispense with time, you must also have dispensed with light, mass, and gravity. It just got up and left,” the twins told him, both grinning from ear to ear again.

  “So how do we find it?” Oliver asked. “How far did it go, and where?” he continued. “How do we verify this?” he wanted to know, eagerness showing in everything about the man.

  “We don’t know. We may never know. The only measure of space that we have is the time-space continuum, so until we ‘see’ an object, it doesn’t exist for us, inside our continuum,” the twins persevered.

  “And if it is now one light year away, then it will take one year for the light shinning off of it to reach us,” Professor Graves added.

  “In this continuum,” Michael appended.

  The twins grinned and nodded. “I think he’s got it.”

  Michael considered and licked his lips, afraid to pose the next question. “So, it no longer exists for us, so we don’t even know if it has retuned into having mass and all the rest of it, let alone where. Then, what are you going to test for next?” he asked.

  Professor Graves nodded as the twins also looked towards him. “Yes, now you begin to understand,” he agreed. “This experiment has probably achieved more towards understanding matter and our relationship to time, than any experiment in the past, and yet too much remains unexplained to clearly see what to do next.

  “However,” and the professor held his finger raised, his eyes scrutinising them all to make sure they were listening to his words. “We have proven that faster-than-light travel is possible, even if we don’t yet know what energy was involved. We are like early man striking a flint and creating fire for the very first time. We’ve achieved a monumental discovery, and yet know nothing of what we have discovered. Know nothing of what use this new energy can be put to, know nothing of how to store it, measure it, control or contain it.