Nagoya was studying the data they’d accumulated in just the past few days, comparing it to the little they knew about muons. He’d been one of the members of a team that in 1976 at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva that had tried to determine why even muons that were caused by the sun’s rays hitting the atmosphere traveled further than their life span indicated they should. Muons were injected into a large ring, reaching speeds of.999 the speed of light. At the time the muons themselves could not be detected, but the electrons produced when the muons decayed could be and thus the distance and rate of travel of the muons prior to the decay could be deduced.
The first thing they discovered was that moving muons had a lifespan almost thirty times longer than stationery muons. The reason for that lay in time dilation according to the theory of relativity. Simply stated, time dilation meant that from a stationery observation point, a moving clock ran more slowly than an identical stationary clock.
That old data, combined with the new data Nagoya was now looking at, suggested several things to him. First he assumed that the gate-emitted muons were not a cause, but a by-product of some other action at the sub-atomic level. Second, whatever that action was, it was continuous as all the gates they were now checking showed muon emission.
The problem Nagoya faced was analyzing real data as opposed to data generated under the controlled condition of a laboratory- on top of the rather large problem of possibly dealing with a totally new world of physics from the other side’. He had to work his data while taking into account the Earth’s rotation, mass of the Earth between the Can and the target site, distances; the list went on and on to the point where Nagoya almost despaired of coming up with anything coherent.
Because of his strong background in research, Nagoya had slanted the use of the Can to gathering data than surveillance of the gates. Because of that, despite the fact that Foreman was launching a mission near the site, the Can oriented on the Bermuda Triangle gate only once every six tasks, meaning there could be over two hours between ‘peeks’.
The Can had just finished a peek at the Bermuda gate, noting nothing out of the ordinary. It moved on to a peek at the Russian gate under Lake Baikal to gather data. It would not reorient on the Bermuda Triangle area for two hours, six minutes and thirty-four seconds.
The rays of the sun are no longer visible to the unaided human eye deeper than 1,600 feet below the surface of any ocean. Even in the clean, blue water north of Puerto Rico, this law of the sea and evolution held true. Just over one quarter of a mile below the surface of the ocean, darkness ruled.
Humans, of course, have always found ways around the laws nature tries to impose on them.
During World War II, submarines went no deeper than 400 feet, well within the range of the sun’s rays, in what oceanographers called the sunlit zone, extending to 600 feet. Next was the twilight zone which went from 600 to 3000 feet. Then came the midnight zone, where darkness ruled.
Technology had come a long way since the diesel fueled submarines of the Second World War in allowing man to penetrate the ocean depths. Modern military submarines now could go down to 3,000 feet and remain submerged for months at a time. Exploration submersibles had been used to photograph the wreckage of the Titanic in over 12,500 feet of water. The Japanese had sent a remotely piloted vehicle to the very bottom of the Earth’s surface, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of 10,911 meters or over 33,000 feet down. Deepflight was the cutting edge of the next generation of vehicles designed to explore the depths of the world’s oceans.
Dane was in the front sphere with DeAngelo while Sin Fen and Ariana had crawled into the rear one. There were no seats, but rather an inclined, padded frame on which Dane and the pilot lay stomach-down. Tethers went around their bodies, giving them some freedom but preventing them from hitting the walls around the couches.
The curved wall directly in front of their faces was a series of flat TV screens that showed the view outside. Other flat monitors gave instrument readings so DeAngelo could pilot the craft. Right now they were still on the surface of the ocean next to the Glomar.
Besides numerous gauges and displays surrounding his position, DeAngelo had two levers in front of him with a short bar between them. He turned to Dane.
“It’s really very easy. Each lever controls the propeller on that side. Pull back and that blade goes faster, pull back and slower. There’s a point right about here-” he pulled back both levers- “where the blade stops, then as you go further back it reverses direction, so if you want to pull a hard right turn, you max forward speed on your left, and max reverse on your right.
“You have to be careful though,” DeAngelo added. “Deepflight’s center of mass is determined by the computer. It’s checking right now and we’ll make trim as soon as we’re released. This thing turns on a dime. It doesn’t take much to flip her. Which is why you really need to make sure you tether in or drive very carefully.
“Then this center bar is ascent or descent. It controls the horizontal plane between the two propellers. Push forward and you go down. Pull back and you go up.”
“And what if we lose all power?” Dane asked.
DeAngelo pointed to his right to a red cover, about two inches square. He lifted it up. A keyhole was underneath. “Put the key in, turn it, and we drop enough weight that we will go up.”
“Who has the key?” Dane asked.
“It’s around my neck on a chain.”
“Can we talk to Ariana and Sin Fen in the rear sphere?”
DeAngelo flipped a switch. A view of the inside of the second sphere, Ariana and Sin Fen on their stomachs, looking up, appeared. Dane noted that there was a small camera above the screen that showed them, so he imagined they had the same view in reverse. DeAngelo handed Dane a headset and put one on himself.
“How are you ladies doing?” DeAngelo asked.
Ariana looked at them. “We’re fine.”
DeAngelo checked one of his displays. “We’re in the water, but still slaved to the ship. The divers will release us in a minute or so. I’ll get us trimmed, and then we’ll start heading down.
“Deepflight is the most advanced submersible in the word,” DeAngelo said as he checked instruments and threw switches. “It’s more like flying an underwater plane than the traditional concept of a submersible. We also have redundancy on every major system, so it’s extremely safe.”
Dane felt the absence of Chelsea very keenly. DeAngelo’s confidence did little to allay Dane’s concerns about the upcoming mission. The thought of being cooped up in a confined space- whether in the submersible or the habitat- he found less than appealing. After returning from Vietnam and before being found once more by Foreman, Dane had spent over twenty years working in search and rescue. He had an uncanny ability to sense out people who were trapped, whether it be inside of destroyed buildings or someone lost in the woods. The former had always been his least favorite missions while the latter what he lived for.
He’d been in many confined areas while crawling through the ruins of buildings, but always with Chelsea. She was supposed to be the search & rescue dog and find the bodies, but in reality it had been Dane’s uncanny mental sense that allowed him to find those still alive. He’d relied on Chelsea for emotional support to get him through those difficult rescues.