Visions flashed into Dane’s mind as he touched different strands. An image of a desolate Washington, DC, the buildings smashed and deserted. The Eiffel Tower with two flags flying from it — a Nazi swastika and the rising sun of Japan, but with several modem skyscrapers in the background. The ill feeling from that vision caused him to let go of that particular strand immediately. He saw a planet, he had to assume it was Earth, that was endless ocean, with no sign of land.
Dane knew he was seeing parallel Earths, where history had taken different forms. Ahana had speculated that there might be an infinite number of such timelines, but Dane didn’t agree with her. After all, there were a finite number of strands in the sphere. Perhaps there were an infinite number of parallel worlds but only a certain number were connected by portals.
There were gates on either end of each portal line. Most gates went from a world and time to the Space Between, which seemed to be a transit area. Some went from one time and world directly to another, but there were not many of these.
Dane frowned, never having really thought about what exactly the portals where — did all the parallel timelines exist in the same space, with only some slight variable that current physics didn’t yet understand separating them?
He tried to focus on the Ones Before, on the messages they had sent him. His fingers flitted over strands as he searched. Energy was still coming in from Earhart, standing close by his side. His left hand brushed a strand and he heard a faint clicking noise, something that was familiar in some way, but be couldn’t place it. He wrapped his fingers around the strand.
The clicking noise grew louder. One end of the strand Was a portal, here on this planet and now in this time, Dane realized. He tried to pinpoint the location. There was something very strange about the portal for the Ones Before, though. Its space on one end was somehow different from all the other portals in some manner that Dane could not understand. The clicking increased, then abruptly surged, sending a spike of pain through Dane’s brain and causing him to release the strand. He staggered back, the connections with both the map and Earhart broken.
“What’s wrong?” Earhart asked as she placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
“It’s been there right in front of us the whole time,” Dane said.
“What has?”
“The way the Ones Before send messages. The relay on our planet.” He headed for the exit. He said nothing to her about the strangeness of the other end of the portal, the one whose space felt different, because he wanted to have time to think about it. “Let’s get back to the FLIP.”
Thirty minutes later they were on board the research vessel. Dane had Foreman call Dr. Martsen, Rachel’s handler, from her cabin. She came into the control room with her laptop computer, as Dane had requested.
“What’s going on?” Martsen asked.
Dane indicated the computer. “Can you play the clicking, the echo noise that Rachel makes?”
Martsen accessed her database, then pushed enter. Dane had to listen for only a few seconds to realize this was the same noise he’d heard when he grabbed the last strand.
“They’re using the dolphins to send the visions and the voices.”
“Who?”
“The Ones Before,” Dane said as he pointed to the laptop. “I touched the portal they channel through and that’s what I heard.”
Martsen frowned. “That noise is Rachel’s sonar. She · uses that ability to echo-locate, to navigate, and to find prey, not to communicate. The language I’ve been working on is her squeals and whistles, which are different. She makes the clicks with her blow hole and emits them through her forehead. She then gets the bounce-back in her jaw bone. Her brain analyzes the information and forms a picture of her surroundings, much like a submarine uses sonar to get an idea of what’s around it in the water. We’ve even run studies where dolphins have used the emitter to send high-frequency bursts to stun prey.”
Dane turned to Foreman. “When you sent my team into Cambodia so many years ago to recover that black box, you were running an experiment using high-frequency transmissions through the gates, weren’t you?”
Foreman nodded. “I had a U-2 spy plane fly into the Angkor Kol Ker Gate at the same time the submarine Scorpion went into the Bermuda Triangle Gate on the other side of the world. Then I had them transmit on HF. They were able to communicate with each other, even though there was no way the signal could travel around the planet, so I had to assume the signal was being relayed through the gates.”
Ahana had been listening from her workstation. “High frequency bursts would be an efficient way to send a piggy-backed message through a portal. I can scan the gates to see if any of them are emitting high frequency.”
“Do it,” Foreman ordered.
“You need to scan high up,” Martsen said. “Rachel can emit and hear up to one hundred and fifty kilohertz, beyond even what a bat can pick up.”
Earhart was by the hatchway, looking out at the dark · wall of the Devil’s Sea Gate, which lay two miles away. She caught a glimpse of Rachel about fifty yards off the bow, swimming smoothly through the water. “How smart is Rachel?”
Martsen ran a hand across her chin. “That’s a hard question to answer because Rachel’s environment is so different from ours. First, she lives in water, while we live on land. Second, she doesn’t have hands so she really can’t manipulate her environment. Dolphins live in harmony with their world, unlike humans.”
Something about what Martsen had just said struck · Dane as significant but before he could analyze it, Martsen continued.
“The strange thing I’ve always wondered about dolphins is that they went in the opposite direction evolution-wise than we did. We came out of the water and stayed on land. Dolphins are mammals also, but sometime during their evolution they went back into the water.”
Martsen had mentioned that before, Dane remembered. “Maybe, as you said, they did it to get away from us.”
“It’s possible,” Martsen said.
“Who is ‘we’?” Dane asked Martsen.
“Excuse me?”
“You said ‘we’ earlier,” Dane said. “I assume you don’t work alone.”
“1 work at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center outside San Diego,” Martsen said.
Dane sat down in one of the hard plastic chairs. “Why is it called that?”
Martsen shrugged. “It’s had a lot of names over the years. The program with dolphins actually started in 1960 and was called the Marine Mammal Program. They started with one Pacific white-sided dolphin. At first. The primary goal was to test the animal under the auspices of hydrodynamic studies. Scientists at the time had heard accounts of incredible efficiency exhibited by dolphins; and since the navy had the task of developing better and faster torpedoes, it made sense to check out whatever special characteristics dolphins had that they might apply to their underwater missiles.”
Dane could sense that Foreman considered this a waste of time, but Earhart and Ahana were focused on what Martsen was saying. He knew there was a thread here that needed to be pulled and followed-and at the end. He had a strong suspicion, there would be the Ones Before.
‘Unfortunately,” Martsen continued, “the first dolphin, named Notty, exhibited no unusual physiological or hydrodynamic capabilities. One of the scientists believed that was because of the restrictions of the long testing tank in which she was being held and tested in. The decision was made to move the testing to the ocean, the dolphin’s natural habitat. The facility moved to Point Mugu, California, where the Pacific Missile Range and Naval Missile Center was located.”
“That’s odd,” Dane said. “Why move it to a missile test facility?”