“How?”
“I don’t know. But I think it has something to do with the Bell. It could have two functions. It’s a sentry device, to keep non-Atlanteans out, but that’s just the half of it. When we first began studying the device, we thought it was a time machine. It created a field around it, a sort of time dilation bubble. Time moved slower near the Bell. We knew it had something to do with gravitational displacement — folding and warping the spacetime around it. We thought it might even be a wormhole generator”
“A what?”
“Forget the jargon. The theories were based on Einstein’s General Relativity. I’m sure that’s been updated or even thrown out by now. Suffice it to say that in the years after we extracted the Bell in Gibraltar, we noticed that it seemed to slow down time in the space around it. We believed it generated power this way. We were able to essentially reverse the device, by supplying power to it and minimizing its gravitational effects.”
“That’s interesting, but there’s just one problem. The Bell in Gibraltar was removed almost 100 years ago.”
“I know. I removed it. I have another theory. I think when the ship in Gibraltar exploded, the Atlanteans were trapped in the section that broke off. I think the door they went through wasn’t a passage to another room in that ship. I think it was a portal to another ship. I don’t think we’re in Gibraltar.”
CHAPTER 128
Around the next corner, Kate finally got the boys to stop.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she pleaded.
“We have to hide, Kate,” Adi said.
“From whom?”
“There’s no time,” Surya said.
Time — the word echoed through Kate’s mind and another fear gripped her. She spun the boys around and searched for the digital readout.
03:23:51. Almost three and a half hours left. Martin had said there was less than 30 minutes before detonation. How? It didn’t matter — the clock was still ticking. She had to think.
The boys were pulling at her again, and behind them, a set of double doors opened.
CHAPTER 129
Dorian slipped the last of the space suit off and surveyed the room — some kind of decontamination chamber. He walked toward the smaller door. His steps echoed loudly in the high-ceilinged iron chamber. The door opened as he approached, and he stepped out into a corridor. Just like Gibraltar. It was all true. This was another Atlantean city.
Lights flashed to life at the top and bottom of the corridor. The place looked pristine, untouched. It certainly hadn’t endured a nuclear blast — two of them. Why not? Had the children made it farther into the Tombs? Had the Atlanteans caught them? Disabled the bombs?
Up ahead, Dorian heard footfalls — boots marching, striking the iron floor in unison. He drew his side arm and moved to the side of the corridor, in the shadow of an iron beam.
CHAPTER 130
Kate stood and peered into the room.
The were a dozen glass tubes, standing on end like the ones Patrick Pierce — her father — had described in the journal. And like those tubes, each of these tubes contained an ape, or a human, or something in between. Kate ventured into the room, marveling at the tubes. It was incredible — a hall of forgotten ancestors. All the missing links in humanity’s evolution, neatly collected and cataloged in this oval room, two miles below the ice in Antarctica, like a child might collect butterflies in a mason jar. A few of the specimens were shorter than Kate, no more than four feet tall; most were about her height, and a few were a good bit taller. They were all colors, some black, some brown, others pale white. Scientists could spend lifetimes in this room; many had already spent lifetimes digging up bones, desperately trying to find pieces of the intact humans floating there, suspended in the twelve or so glass tubes.
The boys followed her into the room, and the double doors shut behind them.
Kate scanned the room. Besides the tubes, there wasn’t much else except a chest-high bar with a glass top. Kate walked toward it, but stopped short as the doors to the room began to open again.
CHAPTER 131
Patrick Pierce kept his hand on the pistol as he watched the man who called himself David Vale. He had let the younger man lead. His story was believable, but Patrick still didn’t trust him.