Deep Fathom

Karen balked at helping her captors, but the thought of the ancient artifact’s destruction disturbed her even more. She stepped away from the porthole. “What if I can point you in the right direction about the inscription?”

His eyebrows rose with interest.

She lowered her voice. “But we’ll need to trust each other.”

He slowly nodded.

Karen said, “I’ll need a computer and your current research into the language.”

He waved for her to follow him and kept his voice low. “Rick is our team’s archaeologist. He’s still topside, but I can have him transmit the data to an empty workstation.”

“Good. Let’s get to work.”

As Cortez led her to an unoccupied cubicle, Karen calculated, planned. As much as it bothered her to deceive the man, she had no choice. “If you can get me an open Internet line,” she said, “I’ll show you what I’ve learned.”

6:45 P.M., Deep Fathom, Central Pacific

Jack knocked on Charlie’s door. No one had heard from the geologist all day except George Klein, and afterward the historian locked himself into the ship’s small library. The two were clearly working on something, but Jack was losing his patience.

“Who is it?” Charlie called out, his voice hoarse.

“It’s Jack. Open up.”

A shuffle of noises, then the door cracked open. “What?”

Without invitation, Jack pushed inside. What he found startled him. Charlie’s usually tidy lab was in a shambles. The worktable along one wall was covered in equipment and gadgets. In the center of the mess, the crystal star was clamped in a stainless steel vise. Charlie’s computer displayed inexplicable graphs and tables. Jack had to step over piles of journals and scientific magazines. Specific articles were ripped and hung on the bare wall.

It was as if a hurricane had struck there. And Charlie looked no better. His eyes were red-rimmed, his lips chapped. His clothes—baggy shorts and a shirt—were stained with ink, oil, and grease. It was hot and humid in the room, and sweat soaked his armpits and lower back.

Jack noticed that the room’s single fan had been unplugged to make outlet room for Charlie’s equipment. Jack yanked a cord, shoved in the fan’s plug and switched it to high.

“Christ, Charlie, what are you doing in here?”

The geologist ran a hand through his hair. “Research. What do you think?” He kicked aside some of the scattered magazines and pulled up a chair, sitting on its edge.

“Have you even slept since I gave you that thing?”

“How could I? It’s amazing. Nothing like this substance has ever been discovered. I’m sure of it. I’ve hit it with every test I can manage here: the mass spectrometer, the proton magnetometer, X-ray diffraction. But it defies everything. At this point I couldn’t tell you its atomic weight, its valence, its specific gravity—nothing! I can’t even get the friggin’ thing to melt.” He tapped his mini-oven. “And this thing heats to a temperature of seven hundred degrees.”

“So you don’t know what it is?” Jack leaned against the worktable.

“I…I have my theories.” Charlie bit his lip. “But you have to understand. My research is still preliminary. A lot is still speculative.”

Jack nodded. “I trust your hunches.”

Charlie scanned the lab. “Where to begin…?”

“How about at the beginning?”

“Well, first there was the Big Bang—”

Jack held up a hand. “Not that far back.”

“The story goes that far back.”

Jack’s eyebrows rose.

“I’d better take you through it a step at a time. After I heard your description of the crystal’s effect on basalt, it got me thinking. I tried to repeat the effect on other rocks. Granite, obsidian, sandstone. No luck. Only basalt.”

“Why basalt?”

“That’s just what I wondered. Basalt is actually hardened magma. Not only is it abundant in prismatic crystals, but it’s rich in iron, too. So rich, in fact, it’s capable of being magnetic.”

“Really?”

“You remember the strange magnetization of Air Force One’s metal parts. The same thing happens to basalt when it comes in close contact with the energized crystal. When powered, the crystal is able to emit a strange magnetizing energy.”

“So how does this magnetization make the mass of the rock change?”

“The mass doesn’t change. Only its weight.”

“You lost me.”

Charlie frowned. “You’ve been in space.”

“So?”

“In space you’re weightless, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you still had mass, didn’t you? It is gravity that gives mass its weight. The more gravity, the more something weighs.”

“Okay, I get that.”

“Well, the converse is true. The less gravity, the less something weighs.”

Jack began to catch on. “So the crystal is not changing the mass of an object, it’s changing gravity’s effect on it.”

“Exactly. Making the magnetic basalt weigh less.”

“But how?”

Charlie rolled a chunk of basalt toward Jack. He caught it. “Do you even know what gravity is?”

“Sure, it’s…well, it’s…okay, you smartass, what is it?”

“According to Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, gravity is merely a frequency.”

“Like a radio station?”

“Pretty much. The frequency of Earth’s gravity has been determined to be 1012 hertz, somewhere between shortwave radio and infrared radiation. If you could get an object to resonate at this frequency, it would lose its weight.”

“And the crystal can do this?”

“Yes. The crystal emits this energy. It magnetizes the basalt’s iron content, which triggers the crystalline structure to resonate. Vibrating at a frequency equal to gravity, the rock loses its weight.”

“And you learned all this overnight?”

“Actually, I learned it within the first hour of experimenting with the crystal. That was the easy part. But understanding the energy radiating from the crystal—that was the hard part.” Charlie grinned tiredly at him.

“You’ve figured it out?”

“I have my theory.”

“Oh, out with it already. Tell me.”

“It’s dark energy.”