King felt his breath catch in his throat when he noticed what was in one of them.
“The Bouda mask.”
Stripped of the façade which had been crafted around the meteoritic metal fashioned long ages ago by his ancestors, the single lump of metal was held by two clamps in the centre of the frame. The frame, he now noticed, was likewise attached to the walls of the tube.
“The mask is the cog in the machine around which the entire time machine works,” Langley announced.
“Oh, come on,” Raine shook his head. “You know I’m happy to think a little out of the box. I’m happy to concede that the tachyon radiation did… something to Benny’s head to help him find the mask. ESP, Remote Viewing, whatever… But time travel?”
“Einstein’s general theory of relativity is considered the best and most accurate theory for space and time ever developed,” Langley replied. “And Einstein himself admitted that there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent time travel. Time is a fourth dimension and, while it may be extremely difficult to put time travel into practice, it is not impossible. In the seventies, a New Zealand scientist named Roy Kerr developed a theoretical time-travel model utilising a black hole. In the eighties, a team from CalTech set out to prove that time travel was impossible. All they ended up doing was admitting that with the right technology — most importantly, a power source far beyond anything yet developed — there was nothing preventing it. Well established, respectable scientists have published their findings in leading scientific journals. The highest profile experts have gone on record as supporting the theory. In this new age of quantum physics, Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds of the modern world, ate humble pie and admitted that a statement he made long ago denouncing the theory was wrong. His exact quote was ‘time travel maybe possible, but it is not practical.’”
Langley sighed and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. “Trust me, Nathan. Until a few days ago, I consigned the idea to Star Trek and Doctor Who as well. But since then, I’ve read this file,” he tapped the computer, “inside and out. I’ve read the theories and the science and the research which the CIA has been amassing from unsuspecting academics for seventy years. I scoured the internet, reading everything I could about time travel. And all I’ve managed to find is support for the idea.”
“For the idea, maybe,” Raine allowed. “But you yourself said we don’t have the technology to—”
Langley tapped the computer screen and it flicked on to show a different image of the same ship. Only this wasn’t some scanned-in copy of seventy-year-old blueprints. This was an animated three-dimensional wire-framed graphic of the same ship, only far more modern looking.
“In the forties,” Langley said. “The theory was sound. The technology was… chunky and archaic by our standards. But the Philadelphia Experiment wasn’t a complete failure. The Eldridge did indeed travel through time by 0.002 seconds. Unfortunately, it also travelled through space, altering the molecular state of both the ship and her crew and depositing her hundreds of miles away.” He looked intently at Raine and King. “But that was well over half a century ago. Computers the size of a small house couldn’t perform half the functions that most of our P.C.s can do. We’ve broken the sound barrier. We’ve put a man on the moon. We’ve cloned animals. We’ve created quantum computers that can calculate trillions of processes in a fraction of a second.”
Langley tapped the computer screen again. The image stopped spinning and zoomed in on a close up cut-away image of a vastly updated Eldridge. This vessel was no World War Two-era relic. While the basic shape and style remained the same, all the trailing cables and conduits had gone, giving her a sleek and menacing persona. Except for the engine room, King also realised that almost the entire inner section of the ship had been torn away, leaving her an almost hollow hulk except for a few work stations and laboratories to the aft of the ship.
“She’s been refitted with the most cutting edge technology available. Quantum computers control what is essentially a web of microscopic nano-fibres which have been fused to every last millimetre of the hull and tied into this.” He tapped the screen and the hollowed out tunnel that took up almost the entire space of the three hundred and six foot long destroyer enlarged and a graphic ‘skin’ was transplanted over it, displaying its features.
“This is a particle accelerator,” Langley explained. Both Raine and King leaned forward and peered at the image. “It is based on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.”
King couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He knew very little about the sixteen mile long LHC at Geneva but he did know that it was the largest such device in the world and had turned understanding of quantum mechanics on its head. Scientists there had even managed to capture anti-matter for an extended period of time. Yet, here he was, staring at a miniaturised version built into a United States destroyer.
“They had the technology,” Langley concluded. “But they didn’t have the energy source they needed to open a wormhole.”
“A wormhole?” King asked. He’d heard the phrase thrown around in science fiction movies but knew little else.
“Stephen Hawking, among others, suggests that time is a fourth dimension and that it, like everything in the other three, is ‘puckered’ with holes and crevices. These crevices appear everywhere. Even on the smoothest surface imaginable, when you get down to the sub-atomic level it is wrinkled and broken. The fourth dimension, time, is just like this. Full of holes. Tiny holes that even the world’s most powerful microscope cannot see. But they are there.” He checked that his audience was still following. King knew the man was no scientist and was merely detailing what he himself had recently learned.
“We’re talking about the quantum level here. Smaller than molecules or atoms, billionths of trillionths of centimetres wide. But they’re not just holes. They’re tunnels, constantly forming, collapsing and reforming again. Tunnels through space… and through time. They’ve been scientifically proven to exist, at least in the realms of quantum theory, and it has been suggested that if captured and enlarged, that tunnel through time would be large enough for a person… or even a ship, to travel through.”
“Oookaaay,” Raine said, his voice still full of scepticism. “So how do you capture a wormhole?”
“By bombarding it with exotic matter with either negative or imaginary energy density.”
Raine rolled his eyes. “Wish I hadn’t asked.”
“Think of it… think of the ‘empty’ space in front of you as a solid piece of sandstone,” Langley suggested. “Now, you find a tiny crack in the otherwise perfect stone. You turn on a power-washer to its most intense jet and pound away at that crack. Bit by bit, that crack enlarges until — boom!” he smacked his hands together, shocking everyone. “It wrenches apart completely! What are you left with? A hole. And, if that crack ran all the way through the piece of sandstone, a tunnel.”
Langley turned back to the computer screen and brought up another image. This was a theoretical image of a tunnel, two wide throats on either side connected via a thin tube. While the numbers and letters that made up the equations written all around the image made no sense to King, there was no doubting the representation of small arrows aimed at one of the mouths.
“In 1943 in Philadelphia,” Langley said, “they hooked the single piece of the Moon Mask up to a very crude particle accelerator which collected the tachyons — exotic matter — and fired them into one of these wormholes. It opened and swallowed the entire ship, but there weren’t enough tachyons to keep it open. It collapsed around them, ending in disaster.”