Time Frame (Split Second Book 2)

by Douglas E. Richards

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued, “Janney did take my concerns about Hank Vargas seriously. He trusted my instincts about the man, but only to a certain extent. He thought some of my accusations were overblown. In the end, he did agree to do what we asked, but he didn’t fire Vargas as I had strongly recommended.”

  Cargill blew out a long breath. “The reason I bring this up is that three hours ago I was informed by a written order from the president that I will no longer be the sole head of Q5. Vargas and I will be co-equals. The president himself briefed the colonel on the history of time travel and our activities.”

  Allen and Blake were already aware of this bombshell, but the three members who weren’t all expressed shock and outrage at the same time, and all shouted questions that overlapped each other.

  Cargill waited for the buzz to die down and then continued. “The president called me a few days ago with some strange questions, which had me worried. He must have already been contemplating this change at the time. Q5 won’t be folded back under black weapons command, so no one other than Vargas will need to be read in. We’ll continue to be autonomous, and the colonel will continue to spend most of his time in his prior position. But he will also be co-commander of this group.”

  “I’m not military,” said Wexler, “but even I know that this is untenable. No organization can operate effectively with two heads.”

  “I agree,” said Cargill. “The president wrote the order, and seemed to go out of his way to add extra language to rationalize this move. He tried his best to spin it in a positive light, and make it clear that I still have his full support.” He shook his head and frowned. “But I don’t believe that for a second. And I see this as an initial move only. The end-game is to remove me entirely, with Vargas as my replacement.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” said Tini.

  “I’ve lost Janney’s confidence,” replied Cargill, “but he doesn’t want to spook me. He wants this to be a staged coup.”

  Cargill shook his head, more annoyed with himself than the president. “I can’t blame him for losing trust. I haven’t been straight with him, and I did a poor job of lying to cover up what happened at Lake Las Vegas. He turned out to be more astute than I gave him credit for. I brought this on myself.”

  Jenna was visibly distraught. “He can’t do that,” she insisted. “If he gets rid of you, he gets rid of all of us. You’ve built a great team here. We aren’t about to work for anyone else, especially not someone with Vargas’s reputation. He’ll see time travel only as a weapon, while we’re trying to see this as everything but a weapon.”

  “Thanks, Jenna,” replied Cargill. “I appreciate your loyalty. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I agree, we can’t let Vargas take over. We can’t even let him know our innermost secrets—which not even the president knows. But we aren’t out of options yet. There’s still time to get a read on the situation and convince Janney to reverse course.”

  “So when does this change go into effect?” asked Wexler.

  “Vargas is scheduled to arrive here in a little over two hours,” replied Allen.

  Wexler was taken aback. “That soon?” he said. “Then why are we having this meeting?”

  Cargill smiled tiredly. “We might as well,” he replied. “There’s nothing more we can do right now other than wait and see how this begins to play out. Besides, I have no doubt your presentation will be fascinating. It’ll get our minds off our troubles for a while.”

  “Not to mention,” added Blake, “that if you were to cancel now, I’d just have to keep badgering you about it until you went mad.”

  Cargill arched an eyebrow. “You also hinted to me this morning that you had some surprise revelations to make at the end of your lecture. We should learn what these are before Colonel Vargas arrives.”

  “Just so all of you know,” said Blake, “we aren’t sitting on our hands. I’ve asked Joe O’Bannon and Tom TenBrink to prepare for Vargas’s visit.”

  Wexler nodded thoughtfully. These were two of the four Inner Circle no-shows. It was all beginning to make sense. “I notice that Chris Entwistle and Eric Beal aren’t here either,” he said. “Are they involved?”

  Blake shook his head. “No. They had to rush off for an important mission. Sorry about that. I guess I’ve managed to order a good chunk of your audience somewhere else.”

  “Not at all,” said the physicist. “As I said, I’m just surprised Lee didn’t cancel this meeting entirely.”

  Jenna eyed Blake. “You say that Joe and Tom are preparing for Vargas’s visit,” she said. “How?”

  “They’re shoring up our personal and electronic security,” he replied. “Making sure none of us are surprised. Making sure the colonel can’t learn anything we don’t want him to learn.”

  “He already has,” noted Tini, “in spades.”

  Blake frowned. “Unfortunately, this is true. I should say, making sure he can’t learn anything else we don’t want him to know. It’s the best we can do at this point. O’Bannon and TenBrink are also preparing the colonel’s quarters. And arranging for a tour and demonstration that Lee will be giving him.”

  “After he meets all of you, of course,” said Cargill. “When he does, be cordial and outwardly welcoming. I’ll get him out of your hair as soon as I can.”

  Wexler exchanged a worried glance with Jenna. She had marshaled the team toward a laudable goal, and the group’s productivity and morale were extraordinary.

  Until now.

  This shake-up threatened to ruin everything they were building, everything they were striving toward. Wexler couldn’t see how this could possibly have a good outcome.

  Yet he wasn’t about to underestimate the members of Q5. Cargill had managed to survive Knight’s bloody coup. He had withstood Knight’s betrayal, and the betrayals of the men Knight had taken with him, as well as those he had left behind as moles. Cargill had prevailed in the struggle to get to Wexler’s discovery first. And finally, the head of Q5 and this team had found a way to rescue Wexler from Lake Las Vegas in the face of impossible odds.

  Cargill had shown himself to be clever and resourceful, and that was before Aaron Blake was in the picture. Wexler had seen Blake in action at Lake Las Vegas, and he was now the last man on Earth Wexler would ever bet against.

  So it wasn’t time to panic yet. Wexler would put his faith in this team. And he would begin taking precautions of his own. He would make sure that all traces of his work, the few electronic versions that existed, could be erased remotely, on his command.

  Q5 employed a number of brilliant physicists, but only he and Tini were well versed enough in the exotic physics and mathematics involved in his theory to fully understand it, and to recreate sixty-eight pages of dense mathematics. And as long as they kept his work bottled up, it would remain that way.

  So Wexler would rely on those with a better knowledge of how to repel the soft invasion that Colonel Hank Vargas represented. But if they failed, he would do everything in his power to limit the scope and scale of the technology, hampering those who might seek to use it as the ultimate weapon.

  48

  “The fifth dimension,” began Nathan Wexler, now standing at the head of the table to address his seated colleagues, “sounds pretty exotic. Magical. And in many ways, it is. But most laypeople have no idea how to describe what it really is, what it really means.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Blake.

  The corners of Wexler’s mouth turned up into the hint of a smile. “The first clue, that many people overlook, is the word dimension. This really says it all. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. There are three spatial dimensions with which we are all familiar. We live in a world of length, width, and height. And time is considered the fourth dimension. Why? Because, while I can communicate the position of any object in our universe by giving you three spatial coordinates, positions change with time, so I need to give you a time coordinate as well. It isn’t enough for
me to tell you to meet me at the coffee shop at the intersection of Oak and Maple streets, on the second floor. I need to tell you when to be there also.”

  Wexler was pleased to note that grim and anxious expressions had already disappeared, replaced by expressions of thoughtfulness and curiosity. Perhaps his presentation would take minds off the coming storm, after all.

  “So when I say the fifth dimension,” continued Wexler, “I really mean the fourth spatial dimension. It’s only the fifth if you count the non-spatial dimension of time.”

  “I’m with you so far,” said Blake. “But you just said there were only three spatial dimensions. So how does a fourth have any meaning?”

  Jenna and Joe Allen nodded, agreeing with Blake’s logic.

  “That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it?” said Wexler. “Let’s examine this from another angle. A dimension is something you can measure, but it’s also useful to think of it as a direction you can move in. The first dimension is a line. It has length, but not width or height. If you’re a train on a north/south track, your options for movement are severely limited. Forwards or backwards. That’s it. North or south, on a very narrow strip.”

  Wexler paused to let this sink in.

  “The second dimension is a square—a flat surface,” he continued. “Length and width, but no height. But going from the first dimension to the second gives you a universe of options for movement that you didn’t have before. Now you can travel north, south, east, west, or any angle in between. Instead of only being able to explore a narrow train track running across America, you can explore any point on the entire continent.”

  “Assuming the continent is entirely flat,” said Jenna.

  “Correct,” replied Wexler. “So let’s move on to the third dimension. Moving from the second to the third gives you another universe of possibilities. Now you’re in a cube. You can go side to side, back and forth, and up and down. And anywhere in between. Driving in your futuristic car that can transform into both a helicopter and a magic drill, you aren’t just limited to exploring every point on the continent. You can explore every point above it, and every point below it.”

  He paused. “Any questions?”

  When none were forthcoming, Wexler continued. “So to go from the first spatial dimension to the second, you have to go side to side. And from the second to the third, up and down. So what direction would you have to travel in to go from the third dimension to the fourth?”

  He waited a few seconds. “Jenna?” he said, putting the spotlight on the woman he loved.

  She was so deep in concentration he wasn’t sure she heard the question, but she came out of her trance and shook her head in amusement. “Very cute, Nathan. There isn’t any such direction. You’ve covered them all. It doesn’t exist.”

  Wexler smiled. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Just because we can’t perceive it, or even imagine it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We’re very limited beings. Imagine an intelligent sea creature living near a thermal vent way down in the black, murky depths of the ocean. It would perceive the ocean to be its entire universe. It couldn’t possibly know that there was another universe above the surface, one with physics more bizarre than it could ever envision. Do you think such a sea creature could ever comprehend or imagine fire, even if fire was described to it in great detail?”

  Wexler didn’t wait for a response. “But the situation we may find ourselves in is worse than that. There are radio waves traveling through us right now, transmitting music, talk shows, and phone conversations, but we have no way to perceive them. Not without a phone or a radio. If you were from a primitive culture and I told you the voices coming from the box in your hand didn’t originate there, and asked you to point to where you thought they came from, where would you point?”

  There were thoughtful nods around the table as his point struck home.

  “Microwaves heat up your food,” he continued, “but you can’t see them. Show a primitive a glass of cold water coming to a boil inside a microwave, and then ask him what’s doing the heating. You can’t blame him if he answers, magic, especially when he discovers that the walls of the magic box and everything inside of it—except the water—are cool to the touch.

  “And there are mysteries that confound even modern civilization. Take the discovery of dark matter. Something we know is there based on its effect on other matter, but which we can’t see or detect in any way. And the list goes on. We’re incapable of perceiving things that are extremely small, or of comprehending things that are extremely large.”

  Wexler paused for almost fifteen seconds to allow his audience to ponder these limitations of human perception.

  “One last example,” he said finally. “We know that an atom is more than 99.999 percent dead space. An atom’s nucleus is like a marble in the center of an empty football stadium. Yet we aren’t equipped to see any gaps in atoms or in matter. We see and feel objects as being solid, even though they aren’t. If I asked you to point to the ninety-nine percent empty space left by the many atoms that comprise my face, where would you point?”

  Blake nodded, and a smile crept over his face. “Jenna told me you had a way of making complex subjects fascinating and understandable,” he said. “Now I can see what she means.”

  “Thanks,” said Wexler, obviously pleased. “I just hope that this was sufficient to make my point.”

  “More than sufficient,” said Allen. “You’re saying that just because we can’t point to, or even imagine, a direction that isn’t north/south, east/west, or up/down—or anything in between—doesn’t mean it can’t exist.”

  “That’s right,” said Wexler. “But even if we can’t visualize the fourth spatial dimension, there are still ways we can understand some of its properties. Understand how beings living there would interact with poor humans who can only sense three dimensions. One of the most useful thought experiments comes to us from a book written by an English schoolmaster, Edwin Abbott, in 1884. A book called Flatland.

  “Abbott figured the best way to understand how bizarre, how incomprehensible, fifth-dimensional beings would appear to us,” continued Wexler, “is to think about how bizarre and incomprehensible we would appear to beings living in lower dimensions. So he imagined a kingdom that existed in a universe with only one dimension, which he called Lineland. And one that existed in a universe with only two dimensions, which he called Flatland. In Lineland, of course, there would be no degrees of freedom at all. Inhabitants would be line segments, and they could never get past each other, never change their order.”

  He touched his computer, and an image appeared on the conference room monitor above his head.

  “This is a partial recreation of Abbott’s depiction of Lineland. Notice that if you’re the king, you’re stuck between the queen and a guard for your entire life.”

  He paused. “Now imagine that this line stretches on forever. Imagine further that there’s a line parallel to it, separated from Lineland by a trillionth of an inch. As tantalizingly close as this line is, the beings on Lineland would be unable to perceive it. They would never know it was there, despite it being as large as their own universe. And they would never be able to bridge this gap and go for a visit.”

  The physicist raised his eyebrows. “A two-dimensional being, on the other hand, would not only see the other line, but could easily travel to it.”

  “So it’s a parallel universe,” mumbled Blake to himself, deep in thought. “Literally.”

  Wexler nodded. “So let’s move on to Flatland,” he said. “This is the more important land to get us thinking about how we would interact with the fourth spatial dimension. Imagine the universe as a table-top, a slice of our three-dimensional universe cut infinitesimally thin. The inhabitants of this world, Flatland, can’t perceive up and down, no matter how hard they try. They just aren’t wired for it. Something a millimeter over their head is forever imperceptible to them. Ask them to point to where the mystical “up” from a higher di
mension might be, and they can’t do it. Just like we can’t do it. The up and down is there, they just can’t perceive or imagine it.”

  He paused. “So what would life be like for beings in this universe?”

  Wexler brought up another simplified image on the monitor.

  “Here are two Flatlanders,” he said. “Notice that they have much more room to maneuver than Linelanders. But what do they see when they look at each other?”

  Jenna’s eyes widened as she considered this question. “Lines,” she answered in surprise.

  “Very good,” said Wexler. “From above, we can see that they’re circular. But they can’t. If you place a quarter on a table and lower your eyes to the table’s edge, so you’re on the same plane as the quarter, you can demonstrate this to yourself. All you’ll be able to see is a line made by the edge of the quarter.”

  He paused. “Now imagine the Linelanders have sensors capable of perceiving 2-D shapes the way we can. If I shoved a pointy ice-cream cone from the third dimension through their world, what would their eyes see? And what would their sensors see?”

  He gestured to Blake. “Aaron.”

  “Their eyes would see a point appear,” he replied slowly, thinking it through, “as the bottom tip of the cone first touched their world. This would then become a line as the wider part of the cone passed through. A line that would keep growing until it finally disappeared.”

  “And their sensors?” asked Wexler.

  “Their sensors would first detect a single point, as before,” replied Blake. “And then circles of increasing size. Finally, the large circle would disappear as the cone finished passing through.”

  “Sounds like a mess,” said Wexler in amusement. “Sensors say one thing, eyes say another. Things morphing into different shapes, appearing and disappearing in a way that to Flatlanders would surely seem random. But as miraculous, as inexplicable, as these bizarre results would be to them, they couldn’t be more straightforward to us.”