The final peek at Discovery - now that you're hooked, time to buy the book - WmH

Working in a coal mine,
Goin’ down, down, down,
Working In A Coal Mine
Written by Allen Toussaint, performed by Sam Cooke

CHAPTER 4

Deep underground somewhere between Boulder, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah, in a deep retreat United States Army bomb shelter, Martin Harris, Ph.D. shivered slightly against the cold. Infinitely recycled air blew across his back as he finished his work for the day. It seemed no matter where he sat in the Shelter Fourteen complex, cold air would blow across some part of his body, often leaving him feeling like he would never be warm again.

He’d been told more times than he could count that the ambient temperature and humidity were maintained at optimal levels for the computers and communications gear, not, strangely, for the humans for whom the shelter was built.

The Army had built the facility in the nineteen-sixties as a long-term habitat for government officials and their families in the event of a nuclear exchange with the now-defunct Soviet Union. The shelter began as a small set of natural caves that were deepened and expanded into a multilevel, twenty-acre community designed to provide a self-contained home for up to eleven hundred people almost indefinitely. Now decommissioned as a shelter, the facility was utilized as a research park for projects that could benefit from its unique living space and isolated location.

For Martin, locating his project forty-four hundred feet under ground gave him the perfect environment for the study of his chosen specialty, gravity. This far below ground the only vibrations that reached out to disturb his sensitive test equipment were those generated by good old Mother Earth herself.

Earthquakes were a constant fear when he began living the better part of a mile underground. The dread of being buried alive had never darkened the door to his own closet of neuroses until he came face to face with the insurmountable climb he faced should the elevator to the surface ever fail. Now his nightmares mostly consisted of endlessly climbing in the darkness toward a light that never seemed to get any closer. When awakened from these dreams, his heart pounding, his pajamas and sheets sweat-soaked, Martin had long since given up trying to fool his mind into ignoring its underlying fears. Instead of unsuccessfully trying to soothe himself back to sleep, he would get up and go watch a movie, or if he was really agitated, just go back to work.

Martin’s life’s work was the detection, measurement and location of gravity waves. He studied quantum disturbances that passed through the earth leaving nothing behind but a tickle in the space-time continuum. So far he had discovered that the sun oscillates like an ever-ringing bell, fl exing its gravity fi eld in detectable harmony. He could also, with enough computer processing power, detect the wells of gravity surrounding the larger planets in the solar system. The nearest passage of Jupiter to Earth caused a change in the local gravity constants as Jupiter’s huge gravity fi eld gently drew the earth toward it as it passed by.
What Martin lived for was the detection of gravity waves originating outside of the solar system, the result of the near passage, in galactic terms, of a black hole or the cataclysmic violence of a star going supernova. Although gravitons were an imaginary mathematical construct outside of the theories of general relativity, Martin had found some compelling hints to substantiate their existence. Especially since gravitons were the only particles that were supposedly able to escape the crushing gravity of a black hole and pass through any physical substance virtually unimpeded. What secrets could gravitons reveal should he be able, not only to prove their existence, but utilize them to examine events and objects that until now could only be observed through visible light or x-rays?

Martin’s main testing apparatus was a round platform, thirty-five feet in diameter, four feet thick, and made of a huge, vat-grown aluminum crystal. This crystal was the result of an underground construction project that rivaled in complexity the excavation and construction of the shelter itself. It was shock-mounted in the lowest level of the shelter and covered on its upper surface with a series of mirrors, prisms and four argon lasers. The laser array measured, to less than a single nanometer (one billionth of a meter), any change in size or shape of the huge platter on which they were mounted. The system was so isolated from vibrations in the surrounding rock and the machinery of the shelter itself that even the power supplies for the lasers were self-contained battery packs mounted on the top of the platter. The instruments were physically isolated from the rest of the laboratory’s equipment and transmitted the data they collected by infrared laser to the same kind of sensors used to send and receive fiber-optic telephone calls. The entire apparatus ended up costing almost thirty-five million dollars to construct, a cost borne unsuspectingly by the taxpayers of America.

Dr. Harris initially got his project funded by convincing the Department of Defense that the development of gravity-related science would have a revolutionary effect on weapons research and long-distance surveillance and even begin the development of a reactionless propulsion system. The possibility of graviton-based detectors of sufficient sensitivity to locate submarines hidden in the depths of the ocean greatly excited the imagination of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Graviton detectors could also be used to locate underground facilities, like the one in which the project was operating, by spotting large air-filled pockets in otherwise normal rock formations. Graviton-based detectors would render earth, water or any other substance transparent to view, a huge military advantage even during peacetime.

The process of detecting particles that didn’t exist was, to say the least, difficult. Even trying to explain the concept of detecting gravity waves or gravitons in terms of strategic importance required the endless retelling of a Dick-and-Jane version of quantum physics to those who could scarcely calculate artillery shell trajectories.

The first hurdle was preparing a proposal for the average military mind that made the study of something that couldn’t be seen or directly used as a weapon easy to understand. The entire project revolved around the detection of differing densities of objects by analysis of their effect on the gradient of the local gravity field. Just thinking about how many times he was going to have to describe the phenomenon almost made Martin give up the whole proposal and go teach physics at some midwestern, all-girls college. However, he kept at it, attending endless meetings in the first year trying to sell the idea to the Pentagon.

Unfortunately, he made little headway until he began to make the rounds of the Navy brass. The thought of being able to detect submarines anywhere in the world from a single installation, protected by the vast borders of the United States and out of harm’s way, was an idea too good to pass up. After refining the proposal to focus on undersea detection, and getting fi nal naval approval for a developmental project to be funded for fi ve years, Martin was off to the races.

Because of the classified nature of the project, the Navy wanted it housed in one of their own research facilities. However, the need for isolating the proposed testing apparatus from any and all vibration directed the search for an isolated and reasonably secure location for the project headquarters away from the Navy’s usual facilities. Housing the project in one of the Navy’s own research centers would have had the added benefit of enabling Martin to draw resources in engineering and electronics from the Navy’s own staff of high-powered braniacs. But finding an existing facility that fulfilled all of Martin’s requirements proved to be nearly impossible.

Then the Navy came up with idea of locating Martin’s project in Shelter Fourteen, even though the shelter was under the supervision of the Army. The prospect of developing a completely new remote surveillance technology confidentially greatly outweighed normal interservice rivalry.

Based on the initial timeline, the first three years of the five-year project were to be devoted to the development of the experimental hardware needed to measure the direction and force of gravitational anomalies. The preliminaries began on the east coast at the naval academy. Once the initial math had been worked out, Dr. Harris and the engineering team turned to developing the hardware design of the detection system.

The design of the detector was the result of the efforts of a developmental team of six scientists working through the initial year and a half of the project. The construction of the unique solid metal crystal which lay at the heart of the detector had taken an additional year to finally get right. Two crystals were initially grown, the first one getting as far as being outfitted with the developmental team’s detector equipment, but an internal flaw in the crystal matrix rendered it useless. The fracturing of one of the edges of the second crystal by a chance collision with the outside of the huge tank in which it was grown had almost sunk the project before it had properly begun.

The third time was the charm. This crystal had formed perfectly in the supersaturated solution in which it was grown and survived removal and transportation over seventy-five feet from the tank to the shock-mounted cradle in the lab. Once installed, it was outfitted with the optics and electronics without mishap.

While the crystals were being grown, Martin’s math crew was working on the requisite calculations governing the placement of the laser array on the upper side of the massive crystal. These lasers helped detect changes in the density of the crystal whenever the distance between optical detectors changed by the smallest degree. These same deflections of the laser beams, due to the passage of gravity waves, helped establish two measurements, the amplitude of the change and the direction from which the gravitational change originated.


Martin often recalled something he had seen at a lecture by Rear Admiral Grace Murry Hopper, one of the original designers of the first commercial computer, UNIVAC. She showed everyone in the lecture hall a piece of wire about a foot long, then went on to tell everyone the length of that piece of wire represented the distance electricity traveled in a nanosecond. The visual stuck with him as an illustration of the snail’s pace of light when compared to the speed of gravity waves.

In a vacuum, light travels just over a foot every nanosecond, and over 186,000 miles in a full second. In contrast, gravity had been theoretically calculated to travel thirty-seven million times the speed of light. Gravity also didn’t appear to be slowed by the density of the medium through which it traveled, unlike light.

Because of the incredible speed of gravity waves, Martin’s team had the unenviable task of trying to design a detector both sensitive and fast enough to register extremely tiny changes in the local gravitational field of the earth occurring in incredibly short spans of time.

Once the initial design of the detector was completed, the entire team moved into the shelter to prepare the lower level of the administrative area for the installation of the massive apparatus they had designed. The custom cradle and all of the support electronics were installed in the underground laboratory and tested while the massive crystal was growing in its special tank. The preparation of the new laboratory distracted Martin so much that the stark realization of where he was going to be spending the next few years of his life never really penetrated his innermost thoughts. Unfortunately, once the Navy’s scientists drifted off to other projects or back to their home billets, the tons of rock between Martin and the open air began to weigh heavily on his psyche. Although other researchers visited from time to time, both from his original team and others who had technical contributions to make in support of his efforts, he was the only full-time member of the team living underground.

He had around a hundred and fifty others who shared space in the underground community. Some were involved in other research projects, along with a handful of military and civilian support personnel, all of whom he got to know pretty well in his first six months stationed there. The Army stocked a small theater in the installation commons with hundreds of movies. They also had cable television piped down from the surface, and of course everyone with a computer on their desk or in their room had wide-band access to the Internet.

Every day that passed became a victory over isolation and claustrophobia in Martin’s mind and actually gave him a slight emotional lift, incrementally helping build his confidence in and acceptance of his life underground.

Martin had made it through another day without developing frostbite or pneumonia, both of which he was convinced were just waiting for his health to fail him, living as one of the community’s mole people. He stopped by the vending machine alcove near his room and got a sandwich and milk in lieu of a sit-down meal in the commissary and headed off to his room to relax, catch up on his e-mail and read himself to sleep.

He woke much earlier than normal. When he turned on the light he realized that he wasn’t even sleepy. What he really wanted to do was head up to the surface and walk around outside for the remaining hour or so until the sun came up. But though the underground facility was declassified, the Army didn’t want the location of the shelter’s entrance known to anyone without military clearance, or other government business, like Martin’s. So they discouraged wandering around topside. Besides, he didn’t really want to have to walk all the way over to the other side of the complex, take the thirty-minute ride to the top level and go through the security checkpoint to get outside.

Thinking he would get an early start on the day’s work, he took off his clothes and pulled on his favorite sweats. Martin wandered over to the commissary to grab something to eat before heading downstairs to the lab.

As he took the keycard hanging from the chain around his neck, he once again thought how silly the military was about security this far underground. Having to use the card every time he wanted to get into his own lab could be one gigantic pain in the ass, especially when he forgot to bring it with him and had to go all the way back to his room to get it. He slid the card through the reader and opened the door into what he thought of as his lab. The automatic sensors, reacting to the motion and heat of his body, turned on the overhead lights and brought the ambient temperature up a few degrees from the environmental default. Originally designed to save energy and extend the life of the equipment throughout the entire shelter, some misaligned heat and motion sensors more than once caused their own set of mishaps for those sitting still for extended periods of time, especially in a few of the bathroom stalls.

On his way to his desk, Martin stopped at the small refrigerator to drop off the extra orange juice and the yogurt. Plopping down into his chair, he flicked his mouse with a single finger to bring up the latest chart of data, noting he was going to have to change the batteries on two of the four lasers some time that day. They only ran for about six and a half days before they had to be recharged. The strict rotation schedule that he’d set up in the beginning of the project had deteriorated to the change-em-when-you-had-to schedule he currently employed.

The detector’s computer had been programmed to ignore the oscillations of the sun and the rest of the solar system’s planets, and instead concentrate on detected incidents that originated from other quadrants in earth’s neighborhood. Most of the ongoing research centered on the reduction of deviations in the data collection process that were caused by electrical anomalies — flaws in the electronic components causing detectors to give off erroneous signals due to voltage spikes and dropouts. Even the best electronic components couldn’t maintain perfect current fl ow over long stretches of time, so what Martin spent most of his time doing in the lab was redesigning the circuitry that made up the detector so that it could record finer and finer observations without error over time.

Looking over the data collected the previous afternoon, Martin saw that there had been a spike and then an uneven decay in what the computer classified as a local gravitational event. He checked with the delivery schedule for the complex to see whether there were any trucks in the compound above and found nothing listed. So he began the long process of elimination, comparing the input from all three detector circuits to see if all of them showed the same event at the same time.

One of the improvements to the detector Martin was considering was cooling the electronics of the detector down to superconducting temperatures. Dropping the temperature of the metals so low that current flowed without resistance called for re-engineering the detector array so that the sensors could operate at such a low temperature. Those design changes would require a total overhaul of the entire system and end up sidetracking data collection for several months. Even though the project was funded for nearly three more years, Martin was loath to have to reconfigure the circuitry and design a housing for each detector that could be continuously cooled by liquid nitrogen or helium. Doing so would require a team of low-temperature physics experts on top of his original electronics team just to work out the overall feasibility of the idea. Something like that was going to seriously add to the expense of the project, and probably add a year or more to the time he originally estimated before a working prototype could be produced.

Martin put the design changes out of his mind and began comparing the data collected by the sensors side-by-side. Looking closely, he saw that all three detector circuits showed disturbances over the same period of time. Martin logged on to his account at the earthquake research center on the US Geological Survey’s Menlo Park campus to check whether there were any earth tremors during the same period his detectors recorded yesterday.

Nothing had tripped the seismic sensors along California’s various fault lines; the earth had been quiet for the last few weeks. Martin’s next step was to dissect the data down to the microsecond to determine the location of the event.

So far none of the previous computer-recorded events had turned out to be anything Martin could use as proof of any perturbation of the local gravitational field. No black holes, no supernovas, nothing but the background pull of the moon, the sun and the other planets.

As he cross-checked the data, he began to get excited. As far as he could tell, some event had affected the local gravity constant. Mathematically, it seemed as if a massive object appeared spontaneously, affected the local gravitational field over a period of about ten to fifteen minutes and then disappeared.

Despite speculation in the more esoteric physics literature, there had never been any direct evidence of the spontaneous creation of a quantum black hole. A quantum black hole was a construct of almost no diameter, but with all of the other characteristics of its larger brethren existing at the center of the galaxy. This type, however, existed at the molecular level. Current hypothesis called for these quantum holes to disappear as abruptly as they appeared.

At first blush, this was what Martin hoped he had recorded. Based on the initial scan of the duration of the event, the data supported the spontaneous creation and disappearance of just such an animal, perhaps proving their existence once and for all. But before he broke out the champagne and e-mailed the data to those who sponsored his research, he wanted to make damn sure that what he got wasn’t the result of a poorly soldered connection or a software glitch in his equipment. While the computer processed the huge amount of recorded data, he began to think about the various improvements in the experimental model he had originally conceived.

One of the next things on the project’s agenda was to write or adapt some three-dimensional mapping software so he could display the positions and movement of detected objects visually. Martin’s initial thought was to adapt the graphics software used in medical scanners or one of the more popular computer games, and merge the gravitational data stream with the graphics display to show relative positions of the sun, planets and moons within the local universe. He hoped to spot gravitational anomalies in real time as they occurred. He added the idea to his mental to-do list and continued tracing the detector’s circuitry and the analysis of the raw data collected by the system’s computer.

The operational problem in developing a real-time display of the local gravity field of the solar system was the massive amount of data that had to be crunched in order to even begin to plot anomalies instantaneously.

Checking the current data run, Martin was pleased to see that he would be able to plot the locus of this event in a matter of hours. What Martin did not know, nor would he find out for weeks, was that his detector had, in fact, recorded the malfunction and subsequent destruction of a UFO shot down in Iraq.