Jaunt (5 page)

Waters soon found a strange glint lodged inside a crack at the base. “Hold on....”

“What is it?” de Lis asked.

Waters picked up the pliers again, and working it into the crack, grasped an object in its teeth. Pulling gently but firmly, she plucked a glittering jewel from inside the wound, exposing it to the overhead light.

“Well, how’s about that?” Mason said.

“It’s not
Homo sapiens
,” de Lis announced, clamping the skull in a spectrometer.

Gilmour took a close look at the relic, noting the two large eye sockets, cheek bones and upper mandible. “Some sort of simian, a native species here?”

“It doesn’t fit any profile of the hominids, past or present,” Waters explained. “I’d bet my money against the missing link, too.”

De Lis closed the hood over the skull and tapped a button below the spectrometer’s scanning plate, activating the device’s spectrum sensor. A small monitor attached to the spectrometer read out the object’s atomic spectrum: a dozen peaks and valleys, rapidly drawn from a single red line.

A spike near the middle of the spectrum caught de Lis’ attention. “Look at that!”

Waters closed in. “That...that can’t be right.”

De Lis typed in a series of buttons on the spectrometer. “Readings are good. Everything’s online.” He pointed a finger to an unassuming spike. “Hmm...interesting.”

“What is it?” Gilmour asked.

“The signature of yttrium. An isotope, actually...one I’ve only seen in laboratories.”

Gilmour recalled the chemistry classes from his youth. “Isn’t that a rare element?

How could it be in this skull?”

“Yttrium itself isn’t that rare,” Waters explained. “In fact, it’s more common than silver. Its isotopes, particularly the Y-90 here, are different than the Y-89 found in Earth’s crust, and are found in asteroid and meteorite crater strata. As rare as those isotopes are compared to terrestrial Y-89, they’re only a fraction compared to the seven parts per million that are in this skull. The Y-90 here is a major constituent of the skull’s minerals, although I can’t see how a radioactive isotope with its short half-life got to Earth without decaying as soon as it made contact with our atmosphere.”

“Well, if it’s not a hominid,” Gilmour said, “what is it?”

De Lis looked at Waters. “Uh, we don’t know.”

All five were drawn again to the thirteen-centimeter-long skull, resting anonymously on the spectrometer. It seemed so peaceful.

“The only way to find out will be to catalogue its DNA,” Waters said after a moment's pause.

“That can wait for now,” de Lis said. “I think, in light of our dwindling time, our next course of action should be to split our resources. Agent Gilmour, Javier, we’ve got to see if we can find any other pieces of that impactor out there. Stacia, start work on those jewels...I want to know what’s so special about them, why that abbot had them, and what one is doing inside that skull.”

Waters nodded. “Good luck.”

Pausing at the hatch’s threshold, de Lis continued, “If we don’t get anything else out of that crater, this will be all we have to show for ourselves.”

Waters didn’t have to have de Lis spell it out for her; whatever they potentially left behind was fair game to not only the Chinese, but the Confederation, if they decided to start sniffing around their backyard. And whatever they had here was just strange enough to get the Confederation ample reason to dig around for more.

“Then I’ll try to exhaust every avenue at our disposal,” Waters answered.

De Lis nodded, then departed with Gilmour and Valagua, leaving Mason as her sole assistant.

“Ready for some action?” Waters asked the agent.

“What can I do, Doctor?”

“First of all,” she smiled, “stop calling me doctor. It’s Stacia, all right?”

“Gotcha.”

Mason retrieved a sterile container from across the lab and brought it over to Waters. She removed the lid, exposing the opalescent jewel and its many facets to the light again. Waters’ gloved hand enveloped the jewel, cradling it as she gently placed it inside the spectrometer’s hood, then dialed a set of commands into the keypad.

The scanning plate hummed while the pair waited patiently for several moments, more than long enough, Waters thought, to receive a good spectrum from the relic.

Scanning the spectrometer’s monitor for activity, Waters let out a deep, confused groan when the readout remained static, merely droning its usual mechanized voice, as if no object had been placed on the plate at all. She turned to Mason.

A single eyebrow popped up on his face. “Maybe it’s just shy.”

“I’ve never seen a spectrometer do this before...I don’t understand....” Waters tapped the scanning plate with her hand, causing the device to whine. Undaunted, she gave it a smack to its side for good measure.

“Can we try scanning it again?” Mason asked. “If it’s malfunctioning, maybe there’s another analysis you can perform.”

She sighed. “None as sensitive as this.” Waters tapped another button. “I’m programming it to run a simultaneous self-diagnosis while it scans the object. If it is a malfunction, we’ll be able to pinpoint it.”

With the “START” button toggled, the spectrometer began its second attempt at solving the mystery of the jewel’s identity, and perhaps origin.

Everything seemed normal, Mason thought, since the spectrometer hummed like before. He also didn’t see any black smoke streaming from the device, so they had that in their favor. His eyes drifted back to the spectrum readout. Once more, a dull red flatline was displayed, giving them no hint or clue as to the jewel’s composition.

After the scan cycle had been completed, Waters looked at the machine with disguised disgust, the same visage she had tried to hide from Doctor de Lis a day ago, Mason noted. She linked her holobook in with the spectrometer’s computer and accessed the device’s self-diagnosis.

Mason drew closer to glimpse the holobook’s results. “Well?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the spectrometer,” she said, switching her holobook off. “It’s this jewel. Somehow it’s obscuring the sensor.”

Incredulity slowly crept into Mason’s eyes.

“Don’t ask me how,” she intoned, before Mason could even find the words. “I’ve never heard of any substance ever having been theorized to possess no spectrum.”

They soon succumbed to the power of their collective awe, each wondering precisely what it was they had discovered in this remote corner of the world.

Mason soon broke his silence. “What about a good old microscope?”

“Hmm?”

“Is there a microscope on board to get a visual picture of the jewel’s quantum structure?”

“Yes...we do.” Even as Waters crossed over to an equipment cabinet, she still seemed to be lost in a daze, perhaps even lost to herself. When faced with an object that appeared to be contrary to all that she had learned and observed with her scientific background, the young doctor became a shadow of her professional self, perhaps unfairly humbling herself into self-doubt.

Waters set the half-meter-barreled gamma particle microscope on a mobile tray cart. She then removed the jewel from the spectrometer, placed it on the microscope’s probe plate, and secured it under the radiation hood. She toggled several buttons located on the ‘scope’s barrel before activating the quantum battery inside.

Above them, the monitor displayed a snowy pattern after Waters had linked them to the microscope’s data transmission. Looking into the microscope’s binocular eyepiece, Waters adjusted the outgoing image, which displayed a twofold exterior of the jewel on the assembled monitors.

Over the next several moments, Waters peeled away the layers of the bizarre object, but not the mystery itself. Midway through her tunneling, she paused; instead of the atomic folds and plains she had expected to see, all that greeted her was a barrier of impenetrable matter, so impassable that even high velocity gamma rays were turned away, an impossible feat save for the most densely packed material known to exist—the cores of pulsars.

Mason turned away from the monitor to Waters. “Why’d you stop?”

“I haven’t...the microscope won’t penetrate the object. I—I don’t know why.”

The agent crossed over to the microscope and lowered his eyes into it to examine the binocular eyepiece for himself.

Waters rubbed her forehead, trying to formulate a solution to this new quandary, but nothing quickly became apparent. However impossible, and theoretically unlikely, this object refused to subject itself to their probes.

Mason backed away from the scope and its disappointing view. “Are there any other tests, anything even remotely feasible?”

“A Casimir,” she said, then pondered the consequences. “But that may be unwise.”

“What’s a ‘kaz-ee-meer’?”

Waters rested her back against the edge of the island table. “Two sheets of metal designed to test the presence of negative energy in space.”

He cocked his head. “Pardon?”

“An experiment. We can view the negative curvature of spacetime with it, as well as the dimensional topology of this object.” She sighed. “In other words, find out what exactly this thing is, and its effect, or distortion, of the curvature of spacetime.”

“Is this a bad thing?”

“Well, nobody has exactly used it for what we’re talking about.”

“Why not?”

“Allow me to explain it this way: no one likes fooling with Mother Nature.”

Mason nodded his head; a justifiable response. Unfortunately in his line of work, he knew little about the theoretical bending of nature. Most of the cases he dealt with involved global terrorism, or genocide for political means. And if that was his version of fooling with Mother Nature, he wanted no part of theirs. “Is there any guarantee of its safe use?”

A smile formed over Stacia’s face. “There are rarely guarantees in science, Mr Mason.”

Regardless of his suspicions, he knew he had no real authority to stop her from performing this negative energy experiment. And if doing the experiment would help them get a leg up on the Russians, then he had no reason, nor room, to dissent.

“All right. What do we do?”

A cascade of brilliant white grains bombarded the monitors above, presenting Mason with a show unlike any other in nature. His brain, much as it did when he was a child, imagined a scene of tremendous forces at work. Despite a love of nature as a youngster, Gregory Mason never had the aptitude for studying it, so he pursued other areas to fuel his creativity, leaving science behind. Watching the fireworks on the screen, a part of him wished he had tried a little harder to grasp the concepts he was too fidgety all those years ago to appreciate.

He didn’t attempt to hide the grin on his face. “What is it?! It’s so beautiful!”

“The annihilation of virtual particles. Spacetime is a stew of these matter and antimatter reactions,” Waters explained. “They’re just too small for us to see with conventional instruments.”

“And we’re creating this inside the Casimir plates?”

“To a degree,” she said, marveling at the quantum explosions as well. For a scientist, she expressed quite a bit of her imagination herself. “Most of the annihilation occurs naturally. We’re just going to influence them a bit more.”

Waters manipulated the holo-cam’s position on the device formally known as the Casimir Symmetrical Virtual Particle Reaction Cavity. The machine was nothing but a pair of parallel metal plates inside a vacuum chamber, which, upon its invention, had the peculiar habit of confirming a cornerstone of quantum theory: the curvature of spacetime. The device was rarely practical until a method of “seeing” this curvature could be discerned by the same theory. Now, with the holo-cam firmly in place, the trio could witness for perhaps the first time the definitive spacetime topology of this bizarre and inconspicuous little jewel, and determine what exactly it was.

Satisfied with the holo-cam’s image of the cavity’s interior, Waters set to work on their final test. She started the Casimir’s aspirator, evacuating the atmosphere from the cavity. After confirming that the cavity was indeed cleared of gasses, Waters next switched on the gear for the twin metal plates. The two plates would then converge, creating a space devoid of ninety-seven percent of the virtual particles and antiparticles naturally found in the spacetime continuum.

Jerry-rigged to the top of the chamber housing was a clear dropchute, wide enough to fit the jewel. Acting as an airlock, the dropchute maintained the integrity of the vacuum without a “leak.”

Waters consulted the particle annihilation image on the monitor, confirming that the Casimir was in proper working order. She popped the dropchute’s top hatch open, gingerly situated the jewel inside, then closed the hatch again. The doctor pulled the bottom hatch open and watched as the vacuum cavity sucked the jewel into its hungry maw.

Mason witnessed an immediate shift in the image of the particle explosions. Instead of the random activity he had allowed his eyes to gaze upon, a pattern emerged in the timing of the various particle annihilations. Not only was this evident, but also a shape, although none Mason could place a name to. A void, he thought again, to be more precise. This amorphous darkness, devoid of explosions, dominated the center of the monitor image to the agent’s growing curiosity.

To his left flank, Waters pointed to the image, placing her fingers near the monitor and tracing an outline of the mysterious, dark pattern.

Wearing a smile so large that Mason couldn’t believe it was Stacia Waters, she said,

“Do you see it! Do you see it!”

Mason nodded his head, although hardly matching her enthusiasm. “What is it?”

“The jewel!” she answered, not believing that Mason could really be so ignorant. “I

—I can’t believe it worked!” Waters’ eyes teared. She could no longer hold back a yelp, a half-laugh, half-cry. All of her dreams, all of her career goals were breaking through. She was breaking through. If only everyone back at Ottawa could see this....

Mason’s finger traced the oscillating dark patch. He squinted, trying to fathom what bizarre object this jewel was, what history it had seen, who had first held its smooth facets. Above all else, he pondered what it all meant.