Читать книгу Delta G - David J. Crawford - Страница 10

With his new found status as a mechanical genius, Rapp and Timken were duly impressed. They opened up a little more to their newfound friend. The drilling continued for a couple of weeks and all was going well. Ice cores were taken every five hundred feet and sent back to Denmark for analysis. Scientists in Europe were studying climate change, looking for pollutants, volcanic eruptions, and carbon dioxide content all going back almost 100,000 years.

One day Rapp and Timken entered the site bar. Vince and Dave watched as they uncovered a contraband bottle of Russian vodka and poured the contents into several glasses. Rapp announced, “Now for the piece de resistance.” He pulled out a large metal thermos and grabbed a set of tongs from inside his jacket. He opened the thermos and then grabbed a chunk of blue ice and dropped it into the glass of vodka. The ice immediately snapped, crackled, and popped. “What you see here gentlemen is an exothermic reaction from a compressed nitrogen oxygen mixture reacting with an ambient ethanol concoction.”

Timken held out a martini glass and said, “Or, in other words, please join us in a salute with some vodka and Greenlandic ice cubes that have been compressed from being buried under two miles of ice for over a hundred thousand years. We have just completed our core drilling.” Dave grabbed a glass and was amazed to watch the blue ice cubes pop like a Fizzie when he was a kid. The air bubbles trapped in the ice were under great pressure and had not seen the light of day for a hundred millennium. They all raised their fizzing glasses as Timken made a toast. “To unraveling the secrets of the universe, may we have the intelligence to understand them, the wisdom to guard them, and the humanity to use them wisely.” To this everyone replied back with a hearty Danish, “Skol!!”

“We are on schedule. The holes are drilled to the proper depth and the alignment is well within tolerance. We will lower the gravity meters in the morning and start our experiments on Wednesday.”

“What exactly will you be looking for?” Dave asked. “I’ve seen your instrumentation shack and understand the concept. But how sensitive are these meters and how do you know when you are successful in finding gravity waves?”

In a not too exaggerated Russian accent, Timken replied, “We have our ways, my good Captain. Besides we are really looking for the torsional waves. It appears that the Earth’s magnetic field pulls torsional waves into both the North and South Poles. Torsional waves align themselves perpendicular to the magnetic field. However, torsional waves are coupled to gravity waves. Unlike gravity, electrical fields and magnetic fields are coupled 90 degrees apart. Gravitational waves are coupled at a little over 68.75 degrees to torsional waves, half the golden angle. This famous angle is found all throughout nature and the universe.”

Timken took another sip of vodka and continued, “There are many other strange manifestations of spin-torsion interactions also at the subatomic level we call nuclear spin waves or nuclear wave resonance which are the basis of the fifth force of nature or unified field.”

“We now know that gyroscopes and gyroscopic forces can generate and are also affected by torsional waves. Experiments with gyroscopes have found slight but measurable variations of the gyroscope’s weight depending on the angular velocity and the direction of rotation. Even more bizarre, fall-time of freely falling spinning gyroscopes also varies depending on the angular velocity and the direction of rotation, resulting in microgravity. This effect is even more noticeable at the poles to a small degree with the rotation of the planet Earth. In effect, gravity here is polarized through the frame-dragging effect of large rotating masses coupling angular momentum, inertia, and T-waves.”

As the evening wore on, a couple more bottles of contraband vodka and a bottle of Norwegian Aquavit (Viking Firewater) made their rounds. Half the complex was in the site bar making toasts to everything from Ronald Reagan and the Space Shuttle, to boobs and babes. Dave was reassured that the regs he was sent out here to enforce, did not say anything about passing around free liquor. The regs only mentioned it was not permissible to sell anything but beer at the site bar, with the funds generated to be used to purchase recreational equipment. Since he was a SAC-trained killer, he had to go by the letter of the law and he deemed no regulations were being violated.

Rapp and Timken were feeling no pain and started opening up even more and more to Dave. He was not feeling any pain either. However, he held back some and had the feeling that the good doctors were not telling him the whole story of what they were up to. They were sending out way too much crypto radio traffic to be supporting an above board scientific experiment. Now was a good time to pump them for some answers.

In a slightly slurred Russian accent, Timken blurted, “You know, Captain, this whole thing started about eighty years ago in Siberia.”

“What ‘thing’ would that be, Dr. Timken?”

“This whole thing with torsional waves and antimatter, of course. Have you not ever heard of the Tunguska event?”

“Wasn’t that supposedly a huge meteorite or comet that struck somewhere in your home country at the turn of the century?”

“I assure you, Captain, it was certainly not a comet or meteorite, and there is nothing “supposedly” about this event. It really happened. Back in the summer of 1908, the explosion, as you call it, leveled over 800 square miles of forest and knocked down over 60 million trees. This is more than five times the size of the Mount Saint Helen’s eruption. It occurred in a vastly remote and relatively unpopulated part of western Siberia about five hundred miles northwest of Lake Baikal. There were witnesses and even a few casualties.”

“What do you think it was, if it wasn’t a meteorite or comet? From what I remember reading, whatever it was did not leave an impact crater, implying it was a massive air burst.”

“Well, Captain, being that we are comrades now, and in the spirit of glasnost, not to mention the spirits of vodka and Aquavit, I am about to let you in on a little secret. The Tunguska event was in fact an extraterrestrial event. It was a six kilogram ball of antimatter traveling at nearly 100,000 miles per second or half the speed of light. That ball hit the Earth at a relatively shallow angle of about 30 degrees at about seven in the morning of June 30, 1908. As a matter of fact, it passed a little less than five hundred miles directly under this very spot as it grazed the outer core and then exited the Earth in the North Atlantic about a thousand miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. It created a huge steam geyser on its way out as witnessed by several ships at seven in the evening, their time, a half a world apart. The torsional energy left in the wake of this antimatter bullet is still spinning in the core of the Earth. In effect, the molten core and magnetic field are still reacting to this torsional wave. That is where the gravity anomalies are coming from and what is causing the left hand twist on all of the satellites in orbit. You see, Captain, Space Command has a desire to find an explanation for the orbital shifts. All we have is a theory. These experiments will validate our mathematical models.”

“I appreciate your candor in discussing this topic with me, Dr. Timken. But I do have a question. Why wouldn’t this antimatter be annihilated instantaneously when it interacted with the Earth’s atmosphere, let alone be able to pass through thousands of mile of dense rock and magma and stay intact? Also, I assume that there is enough matter in the form of space dust and solar wind material to interact with the antimatter long before it even reached the Earth.”

“You are a very bright young man, Captain. The antimatter was protected by being wrapped within the wake of a torsional shockwave. No matter could penetrate this plasma flux. The explosive damage done by the Tunguska event was purely kinetic. That’s not meant to imply that other damage or effects were not felt. The wake left behind is still present after eighty years not to mention other strange after effects.”

“What other strange effects do you mean?”

“Sorry, Comrade, I’m not that inebriated.”

“I’m sorry, but I find it kind of strange that just off the east coast of the U.S. in 1908, you have the equivalent of a 20 megaton nuke going off with very little notice. I assume the slug had the same effect coming out as it did going in. Wouldn’t there have been tidal waves, shockwaves, blinding flashes of light? There had to be hundreds of ships out to sea.”

“Captain, I am very fond of the American saying, how do you say, you know what happens when you assume? It makes an ass out of you and me. When the antimatter slug passed out of the Earth it was traveling from higher to lower density material reducing the torsional energy, with the seawater being mostly constant density material. The torsional wave sliced through it like butter with very little kinetic energy transfer. I would assume that the surface geyser phenomena reported by several ships at the time would have been quite impressive. These ships were hundreds of miles away; however, they reported seeing a mile wide steam cloud rocket miles into the sky.”

“Now look who is assuming.”

“Very well, Captain, it is getting late. We have much work to do in the morning. Could I get someone to help me get my colleague up to his room?” Dr. Rapp was slumped over in his chair under the dart board at the end of the bar. He was oblivious to the incoming darts passing only a couple of feet over his head.

The alarm clock rang at 0630 hours. Dave thought that the alarm clock was amongst the worst inventions in the world. They fell somewhere on his list between nerve gas and disco. After all, it wasn’t natural to send an audio shock through your nervous system to wake you out of a perfectly good REM sleep. This was especially true after kicking back a few shots of vodka. It would be much better to wake up naturally by a stream of warm sunshine on your face. Oh yeah, right. He was above the Arctic Circle. The sun had been up already, for a good couple of months now. Luckily, there wasn’t much to a vodka hangover. After a quick shower and shave, he suited up in his cotton fatigues and headed down for breakfast. He was going to have to request a flight suit from Colorado Springs. With this much static electricity floating around the complex the last thing you wanted to wear was all cotton. However, he wasn’t officially on flying status, even though he probably logged more flying time than half the F-16 pilots he knew. The zipper-suited sun gods were quite protective of their flight suit status and took a dim view of desk jockeys wearing their holy garb.

He was surprised to see Rapp and Timken finishing their breakfasts. They looked no worse for wear. Olga was behind the grill ready to custom make any omelet imaginable. Dave thought he’d throw her a challenge. “How about a western style omelet?” She gave him a wink and said, “Sure thing, Tex.” She was definitely in a flirty mood this morning. He was beginning to wonder what he did in the bar last night that he couldn’t remember.

After pouring himself a cup of thick black coffee, he sat down at the table with Vince, Rapp, and Timken.

Vince greeted him, “Good morning, Captain. We were just going over today’s schedule. My crew is lowering the instruments out of the supply warehouse and down to the snowcats now.” Rapp said, “We should have all five gravity meters down-hole by this evening and start calibration in the morning. Hopefully, we’ll get our first readings by tomorrow afternoon.”

Dave took a sip of coffee and commented, “You’re not wasting any time are you?”

“We plan on taking advantage of the good weather. They are forecasting some gusty winds on Friday. If you will excuse us, Captain, we are going to move out with the equipment.”

Vince spoke up, “We’ll give you a couple hours to get the equipment unpacked, wired up, and then we’ll be out there to bug you.” Dave said, “I assure you I’ll stay out from under foot. I know you are on a tight schedule.” To this Rapp replied, “You are more than welcome anytime in the Apple Orchard. You saved the day with your brilliant power transfer solution.”

“Oh, you mean the jump start I gave you guys. It pays to grow up in the Midwest. I’ve got to catch up on some paperwork this morning and tend to some of my own equipment installations. We have a K-band satellite antenna to install to support shuttle operations.”

The professors excused themselves as Olga walked over to the table with Dave’s omelet and a freshly made peach Danish pastry. In a cute Danish accent Olga mentioned, “The pastry is from my grandmother’s recipe book. The omelet I learned from watching Graham Kerr on TV. I hope you enjoy them both. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No, I am fine. Thank you, Olga. I really appreciate the hospitality.” Olga smiled and strode off into the kitchen.

Vince said, “I think she kind of likes you, Captain. I told her to take good care of you.”

Dave smiled and said, “Thanks. But being the only female within three hundred miles she can afford to flirt with any guy she wants. I assure you I intend to keep things very professional out here. I don’t need any more complications than I have.”

To this Vince said, “I’m sure her intentions are honorable. She is a great cook. I’ll talk to her if you wish.”

Dave replied, “No, don’t do that. No need to embarrass her. Now, let’s run up to the communications room. I’ve got to check on some measurements and verify rack space availability for some of the K-band equipment to be fitted. I need to meet with your Com technicians, too. They will be instrumental in installing the equipment. I’ve also got to figure out how to install the antenna. I noticed you have a satellite TV reception antenna installed outside. That’s not on any of the as-built drawings.”

Vince responded, “Yeah. We bought that with our bar proceeds. Got it pointed pretty low to the horizon to pick up on a European satellite TV station.”

Dave answered, “Well, if your guys can rig that system up to watch the European boob tube, I’m sure a simple K-band set up will be no problem. We just have to tie it in with the tropo-feed back to the States.”

Vince asked, “Why in the world do you need to use this site as a shuttle telemetry and downlink station? Why not use Thule or Sonde?”

Dave replied, “Oh, to be sure that they are being fitted up, too. All the DEW (distant early warning) line sites are being equipped with the K-band capability. The military logic is this. When the shuttles come arching up over the poles in the lowest part of their orbit, they can flash down link their communications, data, telemetry, or any intel to the DEW line sites. This data stream can then be sent directly on to Colorado Springs via the DEW lines existing troposcatter radio, saving a precious ten or fifteen minutes before they are in range of any other communications sites further south. Also, the aurora borealis plays havoc with polar orbit communications. This is also a vital backup to our satellite to satellite communications relay system, which is also not very dependable. It is important to note that the Russians and Chinese are not thrilled with us over flying every square inch of their territories, too. We are sure that they have some ‘passive’ jamming capability. I prefer to discuss the classified portion of this topic out in the snowcat.”

After taking his measurements and confirming the dimensions on the communications rack, Dave next verified the power supply leads and terminal strip configuration. Space on the rack had already been identified for the K-band receiver and transmitter. A troposcatter interface was being designed and built at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. His job was to confirm that the rack positions and power leads were available to support the new communications gear. He would also be responsible for its installation north of the Arctic Circle. Plus, a totally brand new system was going to be built and installed. It would have a rack of its own and needed to be located in a secure location onsite. The most secure location was the console room and Radome. This new system was known as the Shuttle Lunar Laser Reflectometer Data Relay. In the event of magnetic storms, electromagnetic pulse detonation, or enemy jamming, the shuttle had another innovative communications capability. They had the capability to use a laser beam reflected off a quartz reflector left on the Moon’s surface to communicate.

The icecap is a perfect place for a lunar observatory. A study using ten years of imagery measured very good sky conditions on the icecap; 60 to 68 percent of the observations had clear skies or scattered clouds and only 12 to 18 percent were overcast. The clouds over the icecap are also likely to be thinner than those on the coast as the cold air inland is not capable of holding as much moisture as that at lower altitudes.

Even though a whiteout condition occurred on the icecap at times it seldom reached up and over the Radome 80 feet above the surface. Thus a laser optics receiver was to be placed atop the Radome and synchronized to track the Moon’s trek across the sky.