The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(58)
As Jennifer and Mark reviewed the recording, mumbling in disgust at the lack of any useful data, Heather sat in one of the command couches exploring her headset connection with the central computer. She began working on something that fascinated her: physics.
Heather decided to start with the basic assumptions that girded all of modern physics, to see if she could communicate ideas that would generate understandable responses. Everything in humans’ modern understanding of the functioning of the universe eventually came back to the notion that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only changed from one form to another. Almost immediately the imagery she was seeing changed to one of a set of distant stars, accompanied by a very deep sense of wrongness.
The scene focused on a single star and then swept away from it, the color of the starlight shifting to red as she got farther away. This repeated itself with star after star, from multiple directions, over and over, faster and faster.
Every star shifted red the farther the observer was from the star. Okay. Nothing new there. The redshift was a well-known phenomenon and was explained by the theory that all stars were moving away from a central big bang, the first stars flung out the hardest and fastest. Of course, this caused the light coming from them to have a bigger Doppler effect, like the changing sound of a train’s horn as it approaches and then passes a stationary listener.
Again she felt the wrongness. A new sequence began, showing a single star, her perspective stepping away from it in all directions, and always yielding about the same redshift. Now that made no sense.
Another rapid shift in data, then another, then another. Heather gasped in shock, stunned to her very core. Energy was not conserved.
The bulk of the redshift was not caused by the Doppler effect. It was caused by a tiny fraction of the energy of the light waves leaking between the quantum grains of space-time into subspace. The farther light waves traveled outward from the source, the more energy leaked off into subspace, causing the wavelengths to shift toward the red end of the spectrum.
Ideas were spinning so fast in Heather’s head that she barely noticed Mark prodding her with his finger.
“Heather. We have to go. We’ll barely get home by dark, even if we pedal like hell.”
Reluctantly, Heather followed the Smythe twins back to the lower level and out of the cave. Her mind was still reeling with the incredible implications of her discovery as they spun their tires onto the dirt trail leading back toward home.
A sudden rush of cold air swept down from the high peaks above, stirring the branches of the thick brush lining the top of the canyon. From deep in that brush, the Rag Man watched them go.
Chapter 39
Vice President George Gordon crawled out of bed quietly, pausing to stare down at his wife's naked body sprawled across the bed. The slight smile that lifted the corners of Harriet's sleeping lips showed a deep satisfaction that, until just a few weeks ago, he had never expected to see again.
He glanced at the clock. 3:02 a.m. He felt new, strong, young. He felt more alive now than he had since his early twenties.
Passing out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, he stared across the sink at his reflection in the mirror. How good it felt to see that old vigor back in his eyes, to feel the muscles beneath his skin. It was like being back at the Naval Academy once more, getting psyched up for the Army-Navy game that weekend. He could almost hear his fellow midshipmen raising their voices, cheering their team on toward the coming victory.
Looking back now on the last several weeks, George Gordon thanked his lucky stars. Better yet, his intuition. Something had pulled him to Los Alamos to check on Dr. Stephenson’s progress. Something had made him pressure the deputy director into showing him more. And Dr. Stephenson had responded.
Once he had learned about the second alien technology, the old Gordon recklessness had taken over, leading him to insist that Stephenson inject him with the gray fluid. In hindsight, it had been madness, a madness borne of desperation at his deteriorating heart, at the loss of the vitality that made him who he was. Thank God for that madness.
Reaching into the medicine cabinet, Vice President Gordon retrieved a pair of tweezers. Setting them on the vanity, he moved across to the cabinet atop which a small picture frame stood, a recent image of he and his wife at the inaugural ball. Moving the picture onto the vanity and retrieving the tweezers, he began carefully plucking hairs from his high forehead, removing the new growth to match his preexisting receding hairline. It would never do to let the press discover such an obvious difference in his body, at least not yet.
Throwing on his robe, George grabbed his cell phone and moved out into the hallway, heading for his office. As he dialed, a thin smile twitched his lips. One of the pleasures of power was the ability to wake your chief of staff in the middle of the night, just because you felt like it.
The phone rang three times before Gordon’s chief of staff picked up, his voice still thick with sleep when he answered. “Hello? Carl Palmer.”
“Carl, this is George.”
On the other end of the line, the vice president’s chief of staff cleared his throat. “Yes? What can I do for you, Mr. Vice President?”
George Gordon’s grin widened. Now he knew that the man was struggling to wakefulness, having used the formal salutation that he normally dispensed with in dealings with his boss.
“Carl, I need you to look up something for me real quick. When am I scheduled for my next physical examination over at Walter Reed?”