70
With only the dim glow from the twin flat-panel computer monitors to combat it, the darkness crept through the room, a physical presence reminiscent of fog swallowing the Golden Gate Bridge. At the inner edge of the battleground where light and darkness struggled, the mahogany furniture was barely visible, the outlines blurry and indistinct. The smell of furniture polish hung in the air, adding a thickness that enhanced the room’s claustrophobic contraction.
Dr. Donald Stephenson, deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, leaned back in his chair, studying the recorded video stream from the starship’s inner sanctum. Raul was performing as well as he had hoped, possibly even better.
Initially, Dr. Stephenson had been disappointed by the amount of time it took Raul to access and begin repairing sections of the starship’s neural network. By the time he had gotten around to performing a self-modification to his own umbilical connection, Stephenson was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake in selecting Raul as his subject. The lad was certainly bright enough to come to terms with his newly enhanced mental powers. The only question was the depth of the boy’s psychosis, something that could either drive him to incredible achievement or could leave him paralyzed with phobias from which there would be no recovery.
The operation that removed Raul’s legs had been entirely unnecessary. That and the crude manner in which the umbilical connections had been established were done to provide motivation for change. Dr. Stephenson had been hoping to see Raul drive himself to redo the operation much sooner than he had. But now that the self-upgrade had been completed, the pace of Raul’s advancement had quickened in a most gratifying manner.
The deputy director entered a command and the computer screens shifted, the one on the right showing a new view of Raul hanging in the air, supported by the stasis field, which he now controlled. At the bottom of the screen, a timeline displayed exactly when each frame of the recording was produced, the times calibrated through an atomic clock for accuracy before being closed-caption encoded into the video stream.
The other computer monitor was filled with instrument readings, each matched to its own timeline. The upper right corner of this monitor displayed a special set of readings. These had been received from the Ulysses spacecraft, now approaching the August 18 perihelion of its orbit around the sun.
The synchronization of all the data was tricky. It wasn’t just a matter of matching the timelines. The times had to be adjusted based upon the location of the instrument and the velocity of the waves reaching them.
More of a problem was the sensitivity required of the instruments. He was looking for gravity waves, and those waves were weak. To measure a gravity wave required instruments to be calibrated to measure movements smaller than the nucleus of an atom. Getting rid of background noise generally required incredible efforts in vibrational shielding and damping. In addition, the devices had to be super-cooled close to absolute zero.
Only a few gravitational wave experiments were being conducted around the world and those were looking at relativistic objects such as supernovas or black holes. Fortunately, Dr. Stephenson’s position allowed him to access all available data for the time period in question.
Raul had managed something truly remarkable. Two bursts of gravitational wave activity had been measured during the day of this recording. The first of these was quite small and might have passed unnoticed if not for the Doppler anomaly with the Ulysses spacecraft.
The second wave was extraordinary, several orders of magnitude larger than any gravitational wave ever measured, a clear indication of a relativistic event in the near-earth vicinity. Although scientists around the world struggled to decide if the unexpected data was real or the result of faulty equipment, Dr. Stephenson knew precisely where it had occurred and the mechanism that had produced it. He had watched it happen.
Combined with the power surge his instruments had detected from the starship, Dr. Stephenson had been able to establish an exact timeline for the process. And that timeline confirmed his equations describing the third alien technology. If Raul could solve the power limitations under which he was currently operating, the starship would soon be supplying data that would provide the final answers Stephenson needed.
At that point, given the worldwide success of the first two alien technologies, the world governments would have no hesitation in providing him the resources required for the next step. If they refused…well, he had another way to deal with that eventuality, although it would take every penny now flowing into his offshore bank accounts.
The image of the second alien starship popped into his thoughts. It was a lucky thing for the scientific team heading that investigation that Dr. Stephenson had been so busy with his work in Rho Laboratory. Otherwise, he would have had their collective asses in a sling long before now. He hadn’t expected much, but those morons hadn’t accomplished a damn thing.
Only the knowledge that the Second Ship’s technology was far inferior to that of the starship here at Rho Laboratory kept him from taking direct control of that operation. That and because the Second Ship was dead as a doornail while his was alive and under repair.
Dr. Stephenson stared at the image of Raul floating in the air, his gaze turned inward in concentration. It had been three weeks since the deputy director had set foot inside the inner section of the starship. Since Raul had gained control of the stasis field, it was prudent to wait.
So the deputy director would content himself with his observations and measurements, while he let Raul keep working.
Dr. Stephenson smiled to himself. As long as the kid remained useful, he would keep on living.