“Faraday shield,” Honi said.
“Most people wouldn’t know what that was,” Dr. Franklin replied. “How did you…?”
“I work inside three of them. But ours are built into the walls and floors.”
“Of course they are.”
Honi turned to Jake. “Faraday shields stop all electronic signals from entering or leaving the enclosed area. That’s why your cell phone wouldn’t work inside the NSA building day before yesterday.”
“Okay,” Jake replied. He turned to Dr. Franklin. “What’s this new development?”
“It’s called Project HAICS. The actual device is in Arizona, being loaded onto a rocket. By next week it will be in orbit. This is a scale model of the antenna.”
Jake frowned as he looked at it. “I’m thinking this part is the antenna?” He pointed to a central straight rod.
“Partially,” Dr. Franklin replied. “This entire assembly is the transmitting antenna. The receiving antenna is a three mile long wire that will point down toward the earth.”
The antenna was exotic and strange. It had a single rod pointing out from the center. Around that were 24 curved rods that extended from a ring near the base of the main box in a tulip shape. Outside of that was a gold mesh spaced evenly from the tulip-shaped rods.
“I’ve seen parabolic antennas before,” Jake said. “But this can’t be anything like that.”
“It isn’t. In a regular antenna, you have one active element and sometimes a reflector. The HAICS unit has 25 active elements, or antennas, plus the mesh you see is the reflector.”
“But that will reflect the radio signal back on itself,” Jake said. “Why?”
Dr. Franklin smiled. “That is what I call the ‘watermelon seed effect.’”
“So, what does it do?” Honi asked. “What is HAICS?”
“I developed this system for Project SETI.”
“The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence?”
“Yes. Advanced civilizations have to be able to communicate over vast distances. Ordinary radio waves are way too slow to be of any practical value in deep space. So I started with the premise that such an interstellar communication system must already exist. I just needed to figure out how the existing system actually worked.”
“And this is…” Honi said.
“Project HAICS, the Hyper-Accelerated Interstellar Communications System.”
“But that would mean the radio waves would have to travel faster than the speed of light,” Jake said. “And we know they don’t.”
“Until now,” Dr. Franklin said. He touched the center rod. “The increasing radio wave leaves the central rod, propagated out at right angles to the antenna. Sideways, if you will. The same thing happens from each of the 24 curved antennas, but with the opposite electrical polarity. The mesh is more than one tenth of a wavelength away from the curved antenna, so the signal is reflected and focused inward, rather than outward. The result is that the electromagnetic wave from the center antenna is the same polarity as the field from the curved antennas. So, as you noted, the signal is reflected back onto itself. You can’t destroy the electromagnetic field, but you can compress and concentrate it. As we do that, the signal is concentrated into a torus. But it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?”
“A torus?”
Dr. Franklin gave Jake a frustrated look. “A three dimensional shape, similar to an inflated inner tube. Essentially donut-shaped.”
“Ah. Because of the curved antennas, the force isn’t applied evenly, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. Instead of moving perpendicular to the central, main rod, like it normally would, the electromagnetic wave is forced to move parallel to it, and is accelerated beyond the speed of light in the process. It’s like squeezing a watermelon seed between your fingers, at some point the sideward force of your fingers results in a linear acceleration and forward movement of the seed. Same thing happens here.”
“So the signal is ejected at a speed faster than the speed of light?” Jake asked.
“By a factor of a thousand. This is the radio version of a laser beam.”
“Doesn’t that make the signal really stretched out?”
“Yes, it does. What you end up with is a signal with a very high frequency, but an extremely long wavelength.”
“And everything we have known about radio waves…”
“The higher the frequency is, the shorter the wavelength will be. Every radio we have ever made has matched the antenna to the wavelength, and the radio transmitter and receiver to the frequency.”
“So if this Interstellar Communications System really is in use, we would have to match a very long receiving antenna to a high frequency receiver. Otherwise we wouldn’t hear anything?”
“Which is what I did three years ago,” Dr. Franklin said. “Extreme Low Frequency antenna matched to a High Frequency receiver.”
“And?” Honi asked.
Dr. Franklin grinned. “There’s a lot of interstellar radio traffic out there. We’re still working on deciphering it, but sometime next week, we’ll be able to say ‘HI’ to our galactic neighbors.”
“If you don’t know what the others are saying, how are you going to say ‘HI’?” Honi asked.
“PI. The ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. The one universal constant everyone has got to know.”
“Three point one-four-one five nine, etcetera?” Honi asked.
“Sent in pulses, yes.”
“So there’s really life out there?”
“The galaxy is teeming with intelligent life. It’s time we joined our neighbors in the interstellar community.”
“Well,” Honi said on their way out of the Engineering Building. “That was at least entertaining. I just don’t see how it’s relevant to our investigation.”
“It probably isn’t. After both of us being in the hospital, I just thought we could use a small break. In most crimes we have a limited set of people involved — family, friends, neighbors and business associates. That small set of players limits the possibilities and defines what’s relevant and what isn’t. In a criminal investigation with international connections, like this one has, it’s like solving a large jig-saw puzzle, but with several non-related puzzles thrown into one large pile of pieces. We can’t tell what’s actually relevant and what isn’t, until we get closer to the end of the investigation.”
“So in this investigation we have a vehicular homicide, international money laundering, and a connection to illegal gun-running, terrorists, the murder of a federal customs agent and the attempted murder of both of us,” Honi said.
“Plus the sudden and unexplained cooperation of competing criminal cartels, a connection to Asian gold and fraudulent gold bearer bonds that runs back to early World War Two, not to mention the strange watch. Add to that the apparent large-scale involvement of several of the world’s central banks in criminal activity and financing terrorism, and we have more information than we can wrap our arms around.”
“So how do we sort it all out?”
“My basic premise is that a piece of information is relevant until I can prove it isn’t.”
“But doesn’t that make the investigation overly complex?”
“Sometimes, but if I disregard a critical piece of evidence early on in the process just because I may think it’s not relevant, I may never solve the case.”
“And you always solve your cases?”
“Pretty much, yeah, I do.”
“Okay, so what’s next?”
“We’re back to rule number one — follow the money.”