The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3

by Christopher Cartwright

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Sam turned to the professor. “What the hell is Blackbody?”

  “It was first theorized in 1860 by a man named Kirchhoff, who predicted what he called then as perfect black bodies.” Capel took on his lecturing voice. “Basically, a blackbody is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence.”

  Sam and Billie stared at him, without speaking.

  “Does that clear it up for you?” Professor Capel asked.

  “Not really,” they both replied.

  The professor sighed. “All right. Imagine there is a single hole in the wall of a large enclosure.”

  “Okay.”

  “Any light entering that hole is reflected indefinitely or absorbed inside and is unlikely to re-emerge, making the hole a nearly perfect absorber. The radiation confined in such an enclosure may or may not be in thermal equilibrium, depending upon the nature of the walls. In this case, the dark stone holds everything. Think of a sponge. Bereft of water, it is light. Leave it next to water and it absorbs as much water until its full.”

  Sam asked, “What’s the dark stone absorbing?”

  The professor smiled. It was cheerful and entirely indifferent to any real concerns they may have for destroying the planet with such a bizarre and alien material. “Why everything of course.”

  “Everything?” Billie asked.

  Capel nodded. “Yes, yes. Everything that has any mass.”

  “It was stripping the electrons straight out of my hands, wasn’t it?” Sam asked, in awe. “And bending the light from the examination beam?”

  “Yes, and yes.”

  Billie took a deep breath and said, “It’s a little alien black hole, isn’t it?”

  “I like that,” the professor said. “It’s a little dramatic, but mostly accurate.”

  “When would it have stopped?” Sam asked.

  The professor answered without hesitation. “When the sponge was filled, I suppose.”

  “How long?” Sam persisted.

  “It’s hard to guess, but each of these stones could conceivably end up weighing a hundred thousand tons or more.”

  Sam let that concept sink in. “There are more of these stones hidden out there in space. One of them is heading toward us right now. That’s why it’s going to flip the magnetic poles.”

  “What?” Billie asked.

  “Think about it,” Sam said. “The asteroid has been following the same trajectory around the sun for the past thirteen thousand years… and yet no one has been able to see it with modern technology.”

  “What are you getting at?” The professor asked.

  “I’m saying the stones have been out there all along, plain as today, yet no one’s seen it because the damned thing absorbs all light around it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then how do we locate it?” Sam asked.

  The astronomer sighed. “We don’t.”

  “We can’t?”

  The professor nodded as though it were obvious. “No. We have to look for signs of light being taken away.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Yes, and I already have.” The professor’s blue eyes glistened with his own grandiose vision of his greater intelligence and discovery. “Using a database of astronomy charts with a new search input, specifically looking for light being distorted, I was able to track our devastating asteroid.”

  “And?” Sam asked, excited.

  “It was there, plain as daylight for us all to see.”

  “How close is it?” Sam and Billie asked.

  “It’s close. It should enter our orbit before the end of the week.”

  Sam swallowed hard. “The question is, now that we know that it exists, is it too late to do something about it?”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Secretary of Defense listened as Sam Reilly relayed all the new-found information regarding the asteroid, the strange material named blackbody, and their theory that the four dark stones could be used to somehow re-establish the correct position of the magnetic poles.

  She offered him any resources he required and then hung up.

  A moment later, she dialed a new number by heart, and relayed the information to one of her leading scientists.

  The man had listened intently, letting her speak without asking any questions.

  When she was finished, she said, “Well, what do you think?”

  “If the original meteorite is still out there, we’ll find it, ma’am.”

  “And if you do. Then what?” she persisted.

  “Assuming your man, Mr. Reilly manages to correct the magnetic poles, and there’s still a U.S. government left to protect, we’ll be able to use the material.”

  “But, will it be enough?” she asked.

  The scientist thought about it for a moment. “We won’t need much. If it’s as powerful as Reilly told you, a small collection of the material should be enough to complete it.”

  “Good.”

  “One more thing, ma’am.”

  “Yes?”

  The man paused and then said, “Given what we now know about what is rapidly approaching, should we really be focusing on the Omega Project?”

  The Secretary of Defense’s response was immediate. “Even if Sam Reilly can decipher the code to extinction in time, it will change nothing of the fact that the Master Builders are still preparing for war – and if we don’t intend to become extinct, we’re going to need a secret weapon.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Sam stared at the professor’s world globe.

  It was six feet high and constructed using accurate proportions based on recent satellite imaging. Shaped much like a sphere, but with flattened poles and bulges at the equator, it depicted a more realistic image of Earth as an oblate spheroid. Throughout the globe, the locations of known Master Builder temples had been set using orange flags.

  The current location of the two magnetic poles had been marked using a red flag, and purple flags were used to represent their daily positions for the past six months. Contrary to what people might assume, the magnetic poles were far from static. Instead, their position was dynamic – shifting upward of fifty miles daily, in fifty-plus mile oval shaped loops. The center of those loops indicated the real magnetic poles, but even that position was known to move roughly twenty-five miles a year.

  He glanced at the data from the past week, which was marked with yellow flags. They showed that the south pole had shifted nearly five hundred miles north and the north pole had drifted six hundred miles south.

  Sam looked at Billie and the Professor. “Okay, we know that the four sacred stones need to be placed inside four hidden temples, in order to reset the position of the magnetic poles. That part seems simple enough.”

  “What makes you certain that the dark stones will even have enough weight to shift the magnetic poles?” Billie paused, and then looked at the Professor. “You said that once each stone has absorbed as much as they could, their maximum weight would still only be a matter of a hundred thousand tons. That weight seems trivial compared with the mass of Earth.”

  “It is trivial,” Sam agreed.

  “Then how can it work?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. What if we’re overthinking the process? We’re thinking that we need equal weight to move equal mass, right?”

  “It’s called kinetic energy.”

  “Sure. So, how do you overcome a weight that is heavier than you?”

  Billie answered immediately. “You need to exert additional effort.”

  “And how do we do that, when the weight is so much larger than our weight?”

  She sighed, and understanding dawned on her. “You need a mechanical advantage or leverage.”

  “Exactly. I’m thinking that these magnetic poles are balancing on a fulcrum. We don’t need to shift the weight of the Earth, we just need to tip the scales so tha
t they return to their rightful places.”

  The professor looked at the globe. “Based on that, your hidden temples must be somewhere closer to the equator where their mass can exert the most effect over the movement of the poles.”

  Sam thought about that for a moment. “Wouldn’t they have more leverage toward the poles themselves?”

  “No.” The professor was defiant. “The widest point on Earth is at the equator. That’s where you want to move the most amount of energy.”

  “All right,” Sam said. “Let’s bring this back to basics, and go from there. Maybe something obvious will be staring right at us.”

  Billie smiled. “You start.”

  Sam said, “The Earth spins on its axis. The inner core spins as well, and it spins at a different rate than the outer core. This creates a dynamo effect, or convections and currents within the core. This is what creates the Earth's magnetic field – the same way a giant electromagnet works.”

  “So then why do the poles shift?” Billie asked.

  “No one really knows. It’s thought that the poles move because the internal core’s rate of spin and the currents within the molten material move, causing the convection in the core changes. Irregularities where the core and mantle meet make changes to the Earth's crust, which can also change the magnetic field.”

  The Professor said, “There’s a strong correlation between earthquakes and the movement of the magnetic field.”

  “And there has been a tenfold increase in the number and severity of earthquakes around the world in the past two weeks,” Billie said.

  Sam thought about the reports of recent earthquakes and knew she was right.

  “So, what makes up the physical structure of the Earth?” Sam asked, rhetorically. “The planet's inner core is made of solid iron. Surrounding the inner core is a molten outer core. The next layer known as the mantle is solid but malleable, like plastic. Finally, the layer we see every day is called the crust.”

  He pointed toward the poles. “The magnetic poles can naturally switch places. By examining rocks on the ocean floor, scientists have been able to determine when this has happened because those stones retain traces of the magnetic field, similar to a recording on a magnetic tape.”

  “When was the last switch?” Billie asked.

  “About 780,000 years ago, give or take about ten millennia.” Sam glanced at his notes on his computer tablet. “It’s happened roughly 400 times in 330 million years. Each reversal takes a little over a thousand years to complete, and it’s known to take much longer for the shift to take effect at the equator than at the poles.”

  Billie said, “So, based on that note, are we searching for the hidden temples at the poles or the equator?”

  “I don’t know…”

  Sam’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and talked for a few minutes. When he ended the call, Sam had a curious and wry grin. To the professor, he said, “Thank you for all of your assistance. You’ve been incredibly helpful. Can you gather any of your colleagues who you think might be helpful and keep trying to crunch the numbers to find the most likely position of the fulcrum? Also, I need you to work out a safe way to move the sacred stones. I don’t think moving the Göbekli Tepe pillar around to each of the hidden temples is really an option.”

  “Yes, of course,” the Professor replied. “Where are you going?”

  Sam said, “Billie and I are off to the Big Island, Hawaii.”

  Billie said, “The same place where one of the blue sapphires from the stone tablet indicated the location of one of the hidden temples?”

  “The very same place,” Sam confirmed.

  “I thought Elise searched Big Island using satellite and recent bathymetric images. It all came back with nothing.”

  “She did.”

  “Then what’s changed?”

  “There’s been some volcanic activity. A young man was killed bathing in a hot spring.”

  Billie shrugged. “There are five active volcanoes on the island. Kohala, Mauna Kea, Hualalai, Mauna Loa, and Kilauea – and Loihi, which is a submarine volcano located twenty-two miles south of Big Island and nearly three thousand feet below the surface. There’s nothing extraordinary about a tourist getting burned in a hot spring.”

  Sam’s voice was calm and emphatic. “This one’s connected to the four temples related to the four dark stones.”

  “What’s your interest in the case?” Billie asked.

  Sam took a deep breath “After the hot spring burned a tourist to death, it froze solid. At the center of the previously hot pool, a subterranean tunnel now stands. No one’s been willing to enter the ancient tunnel, but someone shined a flashlight inside, and it has ice lining its walls as far as the light could penetrate.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Big Island, Hawaii

  It was a stifling ninety degrees Fahrenheit on the island, with humidity approaching eighty percent. A guide informed Sam Reilly that both of these were on the extreme ends of Hawaii’s average in terms of weather. He made his way along the short journey through the dense forest, feeling every bit of the lethargy that such weather extracted. Even Billie, who was generally more accustomed to the warmer climate, looked drenched in perspiration. He followed the guide past a set of large volcanic rocks, and stopped.

  In front of him, what remained of the Phoiki Hot Pond appeared inviting.

  Sam sucked in a deep breath of air. It was icy cold and deliciously refreshing as it breezed across his hot skin. The humidity dropped alongside the new temperature, as though he’d walked into an industrial freezer.

  At a glance, his eyes raked the bizarre sight in front of him.

  The jellybean-shaped Phoiki Hot Spring was frozen. Any moisture that had previously dripped from the leaves of the rainforest that lined the spring was now frozen in ice. The ground surrounding the pool was hard, as though permafrost had penetrated deep into the once warm and fertile soil. At the center of the spring, the ice tapered inward, like a giant frozen funnel.

  He stepped to the edge of the opening and saw that the tunnel – just large enough for an adult to walk standing upright inside – seemed to descend farther than his line of sight.

  Billie swallowed. “So, this is a vision of what’s to come?”

  Sam nodded. “If we don’t find the remaining four hidden temples to deposit the sacred stones, it appears we’re all going to need to find some much warmer clothing.”

  “Let’s find those temples.” Billie crossed her shivering arms. “I hate the cold.”

  There were already more than thirty people working around the icy pond, taking samples, and trying to make sense of the unexplainable.

  Sam turned to face his guide. “Who’s in charge here?”

  The guide smiled. “That would be Demyan Yezhov – our resident Volcanologist on the island.”

  He glanced at the man the guide pointed to. He was a big guy. Tall and heavily overweight, but also full of muscle. To Sam, it looked as though the guy had once been into heavy weightlifting at some stage, but then his lifestyle had changed, and as he became more focused on his work, his once muscular physique was now filled with adipose tissue after years of gluttony.

  Sam approached the man. “Demyan Yezhov?”

  “Yes?” The man answered with the deep resonance of an American accent, and no trace of a Russian heritage. “Who are you?”

  “Sam Reilly.” He offered his hand. “And this is my associate, Billie Swan.”

  Demyan took it and met his eye with an engaging smile and recognition. “It’s good to meet you both. I was meaning to contact you earlier, and then this happened.”

  “Contact me?” Sam asked. “Have we met before?”

  “No. I read about your exploits in the Aleutian Portal. Interesting stuff. It defies most logic regarding volcanic eruptions and their subsequent lava tubes.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help explain any of the science behind how the damned thing formed. I’m just glad it did, and we got
out alive.”

  “No. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Really, what then?” Sam asked.

  “After I heard about the Aleutian Portal I read up about you. You’ve led an interesting life, and that brings with it some unique perspectives.” Demyan smiled. It was an engaging smile, and Sam guessed the man would have been considered quite attractive before gluttony and his work took over his life. “I needed to talk to you about your dissertation on climate change and the movement of the magnetic poles.”

  Sam felt the icy wind sucked out of his chest. The last person who was interested in his dissertation had tried to kill him. “What did you want to know?”

  Demyan swallowed hard. “How you predicted what was going to happen this week.”

  Chapter Forty

  Sam paused for a moment, waiting for Demyan’s statement to really sink in.

  His mind returned to the dissertation that he and Billie had written in an attempt to draw out those who really knew the truth. It focused on the correlation of any sudden shift in magnetic poles and a disruption of the thermohaline circulation that regulated the entire global temperatures. In the paper, he’d discussed that such an event would lead to widespread natural disasters, ranging from a series of progressively worsening earthquakes through to absurd weather patterns as the poles shifted.

  Sam looked at the frozen hot spring. “I didn’t predict this.”

  Demyan grinned. “No. I don’t think anyone could have predicted this. But the rest of your dissertation has come true.”

  “Really?” Sam knew that there had been a number of signs that the cataclysmic prophecy had come into effect, but wasn’t aware it had become obvious to the mainstream media or scientists. “What, exactly, has happened?”

  “Globally, there have been more earthquakes in the past seven days than last year. Volcanoes across the globe that were considered dormant or extinct have started to become active. More than a hundred wild fires rage between North and South America, Europe has indicated both the hottest days on record and the coldest.” Demyan turned to look at the frozen hot spring. “And now, a stream previously fed by a volcano has become frozen in ice.”