THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  “And like all great discoveries; it is not about the discovery itself, but what is done following the discovery that is important. We can’t let go now, Michael. To be this close, we have to continue. We can’t let go, Michael. Whatever we do, we must not let go.”

  “Ok. Let’s talk about what we can tell the press,” Oliver begged. “That test was conducted in full view of half the observatories on earth, so we’ve got to give them something, even if we don’t want to show our complete hand.”

  October 8th.

  Ricky woke and straight away knew he was on earth. It was too cold to be on the ARC. With that thought came the jumble of memories from the last few days and he jumped out of his cot to pull aside the thin curtain from the narrow window so that he could look down at the coach he had helped build.

  It was finished. They had tightened the last screw sometime late last night under the glare of arc-lights, and the final tests had been concluded. All but the important test, of course; taking it into space and opening its throttles to find how fast it would go. That, they would do today.

  Ricky grinned as he thought of the hundreds of astronomers who would take its measure, and gasp. And it was his!

  It gleamed with black paint, a steep-sided vehicle that still resembled a coach if you didn’t get too close. Once you got closer you’d notice that the windows weren’t the heavily tinted glass they appeared to be, but metal carefully worked to look like glass seated in rubber seals. Just like the door wouldn’t actually slide to one side, but was an airlock that would allow tested access to Mars.

  From the outside, it looked as though it could still seat forty people, and the engine compartment still looked like an engine compartment, and the luggage hold, a luggage hold. Frank enjoyed having space vehicles look like road vehicles, and Ricky had begun to appreciate the statement that was being made in continuing with that concept. And it had certainly been fun.

  “Come on, sleepy head,” Frankie called from outside, rapping on his door to make sure he was awake as he passed by on his way to the small room they called an office.

  Ricky grinned and scrambled into his brand new spacesuit. Today they would finish the testing. A brief stop at the ARC to finish loading the coach with test equipment, and then off for a quick run around the moon and back, the complete test circuit taking just minutes instead of hours. Depending on the results of their tests, they would decide on the schedule for going to Mars.

  Jerry Mathers was already in the room that had been project room, office, dining room, and meeting room when Ricky arrived. Frankie was leaning over his tablet with a gloomy expression.

  “Anything wrong?” Ricky asked as he helped himself to a cup of tea.

  “Weather doesn’t look too good. A cold front moving in, low cloud, thunder storms and showers,” he explained, shaking his head.

  “What? You have to be joking. It’s a spaceship, for fuck’s sake!” Ricky began, and stopped as Jerry burst out laughing.

  “Bastards!” Ricky mumbled, his cheeks burning.

  Frankie grinned and sipped his tea. “We’ll stop at the ARC so they can fit monitoring equipment and test the RFID.”

  “And pick up Joyce Davers,” Ricky reminded him.

  “If she’s there. I’m not waiting around,” he warned.

  “You haven’t said who the fifth person is,” Jerry told him while Ricky pulled his tablet out to send off a quick text message.

  “Didn’t think I needed to,” Frankie smiled. Of course it was going to be Matt.

  “So, if we’ve finished breakfast,” Frankie asked, looking pointedly towards the cups the other two still held.

  They stepped outside to find the rest of the earth-based ARC crew waiting for them, lining up to shake hands, wish them well, Cheryl reaching up to peck Frankie on the cheek.

  Ricky pressed his palm to the door, and selected ‘Open’ from the available options. Recognising a breathable atmosphere on the outside, both the outer and inner arcs of the circular doors opened, allowing them access to the large crew area, lights and monitors coming to life as they entered.

  Frank, the last to enter, closed the door and slid into his seat. “Come on then Ricky,” he sighed, winking at Jerry as Ricky ran awkwardly though his board, checking everything was in the green as he turned the craft into a space-going vehicle, sealing their crew area from the outside and establishing their own gravity.

  “I’m green,” Jerry confirmed, checking that the larger than usual life support systems were available to them. He felt the slight rise of air pressure against his ears as Ricky closed the coach in preparation for departure.

  “ARC?” Frankie asked without preamble.

  “Good morning Frank,” Samuel answered. “You have a five minute window of clear air-space,” he confirmed.

  Ricky grinned and put his foot to the accelerator, whooping in joy as his screens showed the ground falling rapidly away beneath them.

  Frank monitored their flight, not too worried. He had converted a number of vehicles and knew the tests that needed performing, and those were completed well before the craft reached the borders of space. Nonetheless, the first time such a large vehicle entered into a vacuum was still a moment to remember, and the coach made a few strange noises as air, trapped in the reducing pressure, suddenly released and departed. The coach was literally suffering from a bout of wind, and just as with humans, it offered a few moments of humour before it passed.

  +++++++++++++

  Michael looked towards the beeping monitor and accepted the video call from Dr Cannon on earth to see a distraught woman gazing about her a moment before she realised he was on line.

  “Michael!” she all but cried.

  “What’s happened?” he asked in an almost reflex response to her image and voice. She looked seriously worried, and that had him worried too.

  She sighed. “The ARC has released details of its latest test on space travel,” she told him.

  “Well, yes, although it was actually a test conducted on the Howard chemical, but we didn’t want that to be generally known,” he explained.

  She was shaking her head and waving that detail aside as irrelevant. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” she asked him, clearly exacerbated by his tone.

  “Obviously not,” he admitted, sitting down to listen more carefully to what she had to tell him.

  “Every single professor of particle physics who can claim any development of the science in the last two decades is clamouring to join your team on the ARC. Some of the more prominent ones are screaming at me for not having included them already, and some are telling me we’re being far too cavalier in our approach and they need to be present to oversee our program!”

  “Oh, is that all,” Michael sighed with relief, and then wished he’d bitten his tongue.

  +++++++++++++

  Michael hurried forward for his meeting with the three professors and, opening the door to the laboratory, smiled at the twins who were already seated at the work counter, cups of tea in front of them.

  “If we could begin?” Professor Graves asked with impatience.

  Michael mouthed an apology and took a stool at the table and looked towards the standing professor.

  “We’ve been poring over the data generated by our two tests and would like to bring you all up-to-date, before telling you what we’ve agreed should be our next test,” he told them.

  Professor Charles Brewer took Don’s place to begin explaining what had been determined by the high pressure test. He had various graphs that showed variations in known chemicals, and, other than confirming electrical conductivity, could draw no firm conclusions.

  “In short,” he told the group. “We have a robust chemical that did not split into its constituent chemicals under pressure, and that has a unique signature, as one might have concluded anyway.” Chas summarised. “This test concludes with the need to run more tests, and we have a suggested list,” he told the room, finishing with the list of proposed experiment
s, many of which Michael didn’t understand.

  Professor Pavel Chaichenko took his place and began a review of the second test. Like the professor before him, there were a number of graphs and drawings prepared by physics students highlighting key points from the test. Michael had to admit to understanding almost nothing of it.

  “So, what exactly happened?” he dared to ask.

  “We believe,” Professor Pavel Chaichenko cautiously told him, “That we succeeded in dismantling or turning off the links between time, gravity, mass and light. Some experiments in Quantum Physics have suggested that such might be happening naturally at subatomic levels, that subatomic particles can move between our dimension and another, and return many kilometres distance, but instantaneously. What we did was obviously at a much higher level, but the very fact that the experiment is no longer within the container, would indicate that it departed, and in a manner never seen before.”

  Professor Don Graves returned to the front and allowed Pavel to regain his seat. “In summary,” he concluded, “we’ve identified two key areas for further study,” he told the room. “We’ve ruled out a repeat of our previous test. With no means of tracking it, or of reporting back in a timely manner, we believe such a test to have no real value other than corroboration.

  “Isn’t that a worthy goal?” Oliver asked. “You must be aware of some of the voices coming out of CERN,” he pressed.

  Oliver’s suggestion made the three professors frown, Don angrily. “Well I’m sorry that certain professors chose to align themselves with one research group and not another, and am equally sorry that that group were not the ones to find a great discovery in the nature of matter and time. However, I am not going to waste my time pandering to their list of questions in order to obtain their approval. I do not need it,” he avowed, vigorously shaking his head.

  “Now then,” he said, straightening his jacket before he continued. “As I’ve said; we could continue to conduct tests that cause the same result, and hope our measurement devices provide us with some kernel of data that might help explain what is actually occurring. However, as we all agree that the occurrence commences at subatomic level, recording such activity would be extremely difficult given the environment in which it presents itself.

  “Hence we believe we should concentrate our efforts on changing the chemical structure of HYPORT and thus enable us to view its unique properties with more ease.

  “The tests have implied alternatives that should be explored. Firstly, can we induce a crystalline structure within the chemical without the need to reduce the temperature of the chemical to near zero Kelvin? We know HYPORT became crystalline at one degree Kelvin, only 0.85 seconds before it ‘activated’.

  “We believe activation occurred as the crystals vibrated. This is only a hypothesis; there was nothing to monitor the test sample at such a level, but ‘something’ must have occurred, and given the environment it was in at the time, vibration stands out as highly probable within a small list of items.

  Therefore, if we are able to introduce a crystalline structure, then our immediate test would be to introduce vibration to the chemical to detect any energy output.”

  There was a silence in the room, tempting Michael into making a comment. “How do you make a chemical crystalline?”

  “You alter the chemical structure,” the twins told him with a shrug.

  “Wouldn’t that negate its other properties, like how it works in the first place?” he asked.

  The twins were looking elsewhere, already deep in thought. “The crystalline structure may not need to be inherent in the chemical itself, in fact, cannot be. But we can manufacture a carrier for it, a crystalline structure in which HYPORT is carried or contained.

  “Like a Lyotropic liquid crystal,” the other twin confirmed, and the pair appeared to get excited by the direction of their thoughts.

  “With multiple phases, the chemical might exhibit different qualities.”

  “Testing would be that much more complex. Every change ...”

  “But the opportunities!”

  “Boys,” Michael interrupted them. He waited for them to look at him, their eyes once more in focus. “So it would look like a piece of quartz,” he surmised.

  The professors shook their head and smiled. “It will be a liquid crystal,” the twins explained.

  “And how does that help us?” Michael asked.

  “We assume you want a means to align the crystals without using electricity or expensive lasers,” the twins asked of Professor Graves.

  “Precisely!” Professor Graves beamed.

  “Then a crystalline structure produced without submitting the chemical to extremely low temperatures would allow us to use tone to align those crystals. We effectively bring the chemical to the status it was in when it ‘activated’, but without the need for all the lasers or electricity.”

  “Tone?”

  “Yes, musical tone. HYPORT may well require vibration at a particular frequency in order to perform. The simplest way of providing and controlling vibration is with sound waves.”

  Michael swayed as he tried imagining the implications. “Who can do the chemistry side, aside from yourselves?” he asked as he made notes on his tablet.

  “No one,” the twins told him. “We wouldn’t trust anyone to do it anyway,” they told him. “The variant will be able to stand on its own from a Patent perspective, so we have to do it,” they explained.

  “And the ferry?” Michael asked softly, sensing what was to come. “The trip to the Asteroid Belt?”

  The twins looked towards one another, one of those moments when eye contact alone was enough for them to confirm what the other was thinking.

  “Will continue, but without us we’re afraid. This has far greater potential and can’t wait,” they agreed.

  +++++++++++++

  “You’re doing fine,” Frank told Ricky, seated just behind and to one side of him as the student brought the large vehicle into the ARC’s docking bay. “See, easy, eh?” he smiled, once the wheels had touched the floor and the lad had steered them into one of the larger garages.

  Ricky felt the trembling that comes after physical stress and grinned with relief. He hadn’t needed help and that had boosted his self confidence.

  Air rushed in and there were thuds on the door as someone outside waited impatiently to get in.

  It was Joyce, already in her suit and carrying two large bags of foodstuffs protectively in front of her.

  “You’ve been busy,” Frank observed as he passed her on the way to the door. Students were swarming over the coach, adding items like cameras and sensors then testing the feeds to make sure they all worked. Another group were using ladders to attack the roof, loading a dozen telescope satellites that would be thrown out at regular intervals to provide the astronomy students with further information on passing asteroids. Others were checking that the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space hadn’t damaged any of the hydraulics. It would have been very embarrassing had they got to Mars only to find that the lift mechanism wouldn’t work. A final team were loading a very special clock with the aim of proving the Lorentz Factor with items larger than atoms. The coach was about to become the first vehicle to travel fast enough for adequate testing of velocity time dilation. Whatever the results of the test, Rolle College would once again make the headlines by having conducted the experiment.

  “Where do I sit?” Joyce was saying inside the dimly lit cabin, trying her best to ignore the wide-eyed stare Ricky was giving her. It was her first time in a spacesuit and she would rather people didn’t look at her. Nonetheless, she was pleased that he was.

  “There,” Jerry told her, pointing to a seat against the side of the bus. There were six monitors arranged in front of the strange chair, its structure allowing the backpack to nestle into it.

  Joyce sat and touched each of the monitors to light up the displays. She’d been practising in her suite, but it was easier here, the screens all positioned
within the reach of her arm. She ran through some easy queries and confirmed the right maps, charts and photographs were to hand, just to keep her mind from how little she wore. Ricky stood and went outside allowing her to take a deep and calming breath.

  “Bit much isn’t it, just for a trip to the moon and back,” Ricky suggested as a second dish was added to the first on the edge of the rear roof panel, its surface brightly mirrored.

  “Did I forget to mention?” Frankie asked. “We’re going past the moon a couple of million kilometres to do a Velocity Time Dilation test, as well as help test out some of Leanne’s communication equipment,” he explained. He looked across towards the door to the ARC and saw Matt at the entrance, his expression one of pain. Matt saw his watching and cleared his expression before walking forward.

  “We ready now?” Matt asked, coming up to them carrying two large thermoses.

  “You alright?” Frankie asked.

  “Sure,” Matt smiled in his usual confident way.

  “Come on then. Our driver has just learnt that we’re going to be away from home for more than the ten minutes I originally promised him.”

  “Oh. Tough, eh?” Matt asked of Ricky, breaking into an infectious grin.

  “Clear the dock,” Samuel’s voice called over the tannoy. “Vehicle departing, clear the dock.”

  +++++++++++++

  All five crew members had their monitors on, each of them checking and re-checking the information being fed to the screens, the colour of the text helping them rapidly identify where there was a problem.

  They had taken the coach out to 40,000 kilometres from earth where they no longer had to worry about the bulk of satellites and other junk orbiting the planet. There, pointed towards the moon, they checked and rechecked their craft and equipment, Matt taking on the additional role of ensuring their atomic clock was properly synchronised with its twin, sitting on the ARC.