for the piece de resistance.” He pulled out a large metal thermos and grabbed a set of tongs from inside his jacket. He opened the thermos and then grabbed a chunk of blue ice and dropped it into the glass of vodka. The ice immediately snapped, crackled, and popped. “What you see here gentlemen is an exothermic reaction from a compressed nitrogen oxygen mixture reacting with an ambient ethanol concoction.”
Timken held out a martini glass and said, “Or, in other words, please join us in a salute with some vodka and Greenlandic ice cubes that have been compressed from being buried under two miles of ice for over a hundred thousand years. We have just completed our core drilling.” Dave grabbed a glass and was amazed to watch the blue ice cubes pop like a Fizzie when he was a kid. The air bubbles trapped in the ice were under great pressure and had not seen the light of day for a hundred millennium. They all raised their fizzing glasses as Timken made a toast. “To unraveling the secrets of the universe, may we have the intelligence to understand them, the wisdom to guard them, and the humanity to use them wisely.” To this everyone replied back with a hearty Danish, “Skol!!”
“We are on schedule. The holes are drilled to the proper depth and the alignment is well within tolerance. We will lower the gravity meters in the morning and start our experiments on Wednesday.”
“What exactly will you be looking for?” Dave asked. “I’ve seen your instrumentation shack and understand the concept. But how sensitive are these meters and how do you know when you are successful in finding gravity waves?”
In a not too exaggerated Russian accent, Timken replied, “We have our ways, my good Captain. Besides we are really looking for the torsional waves. It appears that the Earth’s magnetic field pulls torsional waves into both the North and South Poles. Torsional waves align themselves perpendicular to the magnetic field. However, torsional waves are coupled to gravity waves. Unlike gravity, electrical fields and magnetic fields are coupled 90 degrees apart. Gravitational waves are coupled at a little over 68.75 degrees to torsional waves, half the golden angle. This famous angle is found all throughout nature and the universe.”
Timken took another sip of vodka and continued, “There are many other strange manifestations of spin-torsion interactions also at the subatomic level we call nuclear spin waves or nuclear wave resonance which are the basis of the fifth force of nature or unified field.”
“We now know that gyroscopes and gyroscopic forces can generate and are also affected by torsional waves. Experiments with gyroscopes have found slight but measurable variations of the gyroscope’s weight depending on the angular velocity and the direction of rotation. Even more bizarre, fall-time of freely falling spinning gyroscopes also varies depending on the angular velocity and the direction of rotation, resulting in microgravity. This effect is even more noticeable at the poles to a small degree with the rotation of the planet Earth. In effect, gravity here is polarized through the frame-dragging effect of large rotating masses coupling angular momentum, inertia, and T-waves.”
As the evening wore on, a couple more bottles of contraband vodka and a bottle of Norwegian Aquavit (Viking Firewater) made their rounds. Half the complex was in the site bar making toasts to everything from Ronald Reagan and the Space Shuttle, to boobs and babes. Dave was reassured that the regs he was sent out here to enforce, did not say anything about passing around free liquor. The regs only mentioned it was not permissible to sell anything but beer at the site bar, with the funds generated to be used to purchase recreational equipment. Since he was a SAC-trained killer, he had to go by the letter of the law and he deemed no regulations were being violated.
Rapp and Timken were feeling no pain and started opening up even more and more to Dave. He was not feeling any pain either. However, he held back some and had the feeling that the good doctors were not telling him the whole story of what they were up to. They were sending out way too much crypto radio traffic to be supporting an above board scientific experiment. Now was a good time to pump them for some answers.
In a slightly slurred Russian accent, Timken blurted, “You know, Captain, this whole thing started about eighty years ago in Siberia.”
“What ‘thing’ would that be, Dr. Timken?”
“This whole thing with torsional waves and antimatter, of course. Have you not ever heard of the Tunguska event?”
“Wasn’t that supposedly a huge meteorite or comet that struck somewhere in your home country at the turn of the century?”
“I assure you, Captain, it was certainly not a comet or meteorite, and there is nothing “supposedly” about this event. It really happened. Back in the summer of 1908, the explosion, as you call it, leveled over 800 square miles of forest and knocked down over 60 million trees. This is more than five times the size of the Mount Saint Helen’s eruption. It occurred in a vastly remote and relatively unpopulated part of western Siberia about five hundred miles northwest of Lake Baikal. There were witnesses and even a few casualties.”
“What do you think it was, if it wasn’t a meteorite or comet? From what I remember reading, whatever it was did not leave an impact crater, implying it was a massive air burst.”
“Well, Captain, being that we are comrades now, and in the spirit of glasnost, not to mention the spirits of vodka and Aquavit, I am about to let you in on a little secret. The Tunguska event was in fact an extraterrestrial event. It was a six kilogram ball of antimatter traveling at nearly 100,000 miles per second or half the speed of light. That ball hit the Earth at a relatively shallow angle of about 30 degrees at about seven in the morning of June 30, 1908. As a matter of fact, it passed a little less than five hundred miles directly under this very spot as it grazed the outer core and then exited the Earth in the North Atlantic about a thousand miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. It created a huge steam geyser on its way out as witnessed by several ships at seven in the evening, their time, a half a world apart. The torsional energy left in the wake of this antimatter bullet is still spinning in the core of the Earth. In effect, the molten core and magnetic field are still reacting to this torsional wave. That is where the gravity anomalies are coming from and what is causing the left hand twist on all of the satellites in orbit. You see, Captain, Space Command has a desire to find an explanation for the orbital shifts. All we have is a theory. These experiments will validate our mathematical models.”
“I appreciate your candor in discussing this topic with me, Dr. Timken. But I do have a question. Why wouldn’t this antimatter be annihilated instantaneously when it interacted with the Earth’s atmosphere, let alone be able to pass through thousands of mile of dense rock and magma and stay intact? Also, I assume that there is enough matter in the form of space dust and solar wind material to interact with the antimatter long before it even reached the Earth.”
“You are a very bright young man, Captain. The antimatter was protected by being wrapped within the wake of a torsional shockwave. No matter could penetrate this plasma flux. The explosive damage done by the Tunguska event was purely kinetic. That’s not meant to imply that other damage or effects were not felt. The wake left behind is still present after eighty years not to mention other strange after effects.”
“What other strange effects do you mean?”
“Sorry, Comrade, I’m not that inebriated.”
“I’m sorry, but I find it kind of strange that just off the east coast of the U.S. in 1908, you have the equivalent of a 20 megaton nuke going off with very little notice. I assume the slug had the same effect coming out as it did going in. Wouldn’t there have been tidal waves, shockwaves, blinding flashes of light? There had to be hundreds of ships out to sea.”
“Captain, I am very fond of the American saying, how do you say, you know what happens when you assume? It makes an ass out of you and me. When the antimatter slug passed out of the
