The world outcry over the accident and the shabby construction of the reactor was intense. Only a handful of people in the highest levels of the Russian government had a copy of the transmission sent out by the monitoring equipment just before the explosion and knew what had really happened.
Even while more cleanup operations were being run, a special unit was formed to monitor Reactor Four and the alien object within.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Ring of Fire encircles the Pacific Ocean, stretching over nineteen thousand miles. It is delineated by the volcanoes and fault lines that are the surface evidence of the split in the crust of the planet deep below. From New Zealand to New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan, arching around to the Aleutians, down the west coast of North America to South America.
The Ring is formed by tectonic plates, a theory that was relatively new in scientific circles, first postulated in the mid-1960s. The surface of the Earth, the lithosphere, is divided into nine major plates and a dozen smaller ones. The lithosphere floats on top of the mantle below. Generally, each plate delineated a continent; all, that is, except for the Pacific, which encompasses several plates. The boundaries between plates produce one of three types of effects. Where two plates were going away from each other, they produced ridges where material came up through the split. When one plate slid under another, a subduction zone occurred. Where two plates moved in opposite parallel directions was a transform fault, a prime example being the San Andreas Fault along the west coast of the United States.
Along the Ring of Fire, all these things had been happening for millennia. It was called the Ring of Fire because volcanoes circled almost the entire Pacific Rim, where plates met and magma boiled up between them. The forces involved in the Ring were staggering in concept, but they played out over eons, rarely noted by man except when an earthquake such as the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906 occurred or a volcano such as Mount St. Helens in Oregon erupted. And those were isolated events, just a fraction of the length of the ring and its potential power.
The Shadow had shown a mastery of manipulating these forces by firing a salvo of nuclear weapons from a captured American submarine at Iceland, hitting along the tectonic line down the middle of the island and literally splitting it in half. It had barely been stopped from continuing the destruction along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which would have devastated the east coast of North America and Europe.
Now, out of the Devil’s Sea gate, off the coast of Japan new lines of imagining probing were reaching, noting the composition of the Ring of Fire, the position of volcanoes and their status, fault lines, and critical junctures.
The Shadow was readying a second assault on the planet.
The probing by the Shadow was not occurring unnoticed. Three miles below the planet’s surface, in northern Japan, a group of scientists led by Professor Nagoya was gathered around monitors, coordinating the data they were getting from the superkamiokande underneath their feet. They were near the top of the natural cavern, their computers, desks, and chairs set on a steel grate that covered a highly polished stainless steel tank sixty meters wide by sixty deep and filled with water. The walls of the tank were lined with twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes — PMTs. The tubes were very sensitive light sensors that could pick up a single photon as it traveled through the tank’s water.
The superkamiokande was a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light was produced when an electrically charged particle traveled through water. The reason the superkamiokande was so far underground was in order to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet.
While Professor Nagoya and his coworkers knew little about the gates and the Shadow, they did know that activity by the Shadow produced muon emissions, which the superkamiokande could trace. Nagoya didn’t know yet why the gates produced muons or why the muons emitted did not decay as rapidly as physics said they should.
“The Shadow is checking the fault lines,” Ahana, Nagoya’s senior assistant, noted. She was a young woman with the sharpest mind Nagoya had ever interacted with. “Also volcanoes. Just like it did with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” she added, referring to what had happened just before the destruction of Iceland.
Nagoya had been studying the gates for years. Only recently, with the assistance of the superkamiokande, was he beginning to understand them. He tapped the screen displaying the lines of probes. “We have assumed that the Shadow is doing this imagining through the Earth,” he said, “but what if it isn’t going through the Earth by traveling on a different dimension or using wormholes.”
Ahana frowned “What do you mean?”
Most of what we know about physics is traditionally based on the dual foundations of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But, as you know, both cannot be right as they are interpreted by their traditional followers; they cannot coexist as formulated. Some say there is a split: that general relativity is what makes things work on a large scale and quantum mechanics on a small scale but such a concept is ludicrous. Where would such a split occur? Is there a magic point in the size of objects at which the laws of physics change?”
“What about superstring theory?” Ahana asked. “The two theories can coexist in that.”
“True,” Nagoya agreed. The fact that Ahana was up to date on all the latest theories was another asset she brought to the program. “And string theory requires we rethink our concepts of time, space, and matter. It claimed that there are many more dimensions to our universe than what we see.”
Ahana held up her hand. “But so far, only at a very small level with Calabi-Yau spaces.”
“Which no one has seen and which have only been postulated with mathematical formulas,” Nagoya said, “Still, if we stop looking at the Earth as simply a three-dimensional object but accept that there might be much to it that we don’t see or understand yet, we might be able to understand there gates better.” He tapped the screen once more. “The muon emissions that come out of the gates last longer than our physics say they should. But are they really any different? Or is it our perception that is different?”
“Relativity.” Ahana saw what he was getting at. “The muons may well be behaving the same as those in a lab, it is just that we are seeing them act differently. That means that time is variable inside the gates and on the other side, as you noted.”
“That would explain the submarine Scorpion reappearing after thirty years and the crew not appearing a day older,” Nagoya said. “I think they were caught in a wormhole between gates. I think the gates are connected in an inner space where time is very much a variable.”
“I remember when Foreman tried high-frequency radio communications through the Angkor gate to the Bermuda Triangle gate back in the early seventies. He was able to make contact when the laws of physics said he shouldn’t have been able to. The HF had to travel through the gates as the waves could not have traveled around the planet. If we could get an idea of the constitution of the world beyond the gates, probe from one gate to another, it would give us valuable data.”
“We could send a muon emitter into a gate and see what happens,” Ahana suggested.
“An emitter and a receiver,” Nagoya said. “We have to see how the patterns intersect. Could you rig something like that?”
Ahana nodded. “Yes.”
“We would have to use the Devil’s Sea gate and the Chernobyl one.”
“But-” Ahana began.
“Yes?”
“The Chernobyl gate is hot. Anyone trying to go in there would receive a fatal dose.”