Both simply glanced up when he crashed through the door. Dr. Marie closed the file and leaned back in her chair. Ira ran a hand across his bald head. The only sound was a steady whir from an air conditioner and the drip of seawater off Mercer’s body. He threw his flippers into a corner.
“Nuclear physicist?” he taunted Briana. “How about Harry fucking Houdini?”
“You were told not to enter the cavern,” she snapped back.
“Easy, Doctor,” Ira said.
“He isn’t cleared for this project, Admiral. You assured me he could complete the tunnel to the cavern and not ask questions.”
Ira shot her a hard look. “I don’t like lying to my friends and I’ve done it long enough. It’s over.” He turned to Mercer. “I didn’t have a choice. The orders came straight from the secretary of defense and the president’s office.”
Mercer heard the sincerity in Ira’s voice, saw the shame in his eyes. This was the Ira he’d known and agreed to work for. The tension lines that had etched his face seemed to be relaxing with each passing second. Mercer unzipped his wet suit and used a handful of paper napkins stored in a sideboard to wipe water from his eyes and dry the hair on his chest. Whatever he was about to hear, he knew he’d need to sit for it. He’d probably need a drink too, but the camp was dry.
“That cavern,” he said, “it’s not natural, is it?”
“No,” Ira replied, “it’s not. It was formed when the submarine refocused.”
“Refocused? What does that mean?”
Ira hesitated. “I think it’s best if Dr. Marie explains it.”
For a moment she seemed to struggle between the need to keep her project secret and the desire to brag about her work. And then it came in a rush of pride.
“How much do you know about quantum physics, Dr. Mercer?”
“It’s the realm of the subatomic, where the rules we live by, like gravity and magnetism, no longer apply. Most everything I’ve read about it is so counterintuitive that I tend to ignore it.”
She nodded. “A reasonable and honest answer. There are only a handful of scientists in the world who wouldn’t give that exact same response. And yet what you don’t know is that it is the branch of physics that will one day revolutionize the way we live our lives.”
“I don’t think the ability to move a submarine into a mountain is going to better my life any time soon,” Mercer said sarcastically, still riled by all the lies he’d been told.
She didn’t like his flippant comment and her tone became brusque. “Well, then how is this for counterintuitive, Doctor — we didn’t move the submarine into the mountain. In fact, the sub never moved at all.”
Mercer held up a supplicating hand. Antagonizing her wasn’t going to get the answers he wanted. “Could you start from the beginning, please? In laymen’s terms.”
“All right. What is the fastest possible speed in the universe?”
“The speed of light. One hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second.”
“Newton’s second law of thermodynamics basically states that all systems decay into chaos, right?”
“I believe so.”
“Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound?”
“What does this have to do with that submarine?”
“Please answer the question.”
“Sure, why wouldn’t it?”
“In the quantum world, you just gave three wrong answers. The study of the subatomic came about from the work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. One of the principles all subsequent research has been based on is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the simplest terms it means that observing an event alters its outcome. Therefore nothing in the universe happens without direct observation. It sounds arrogant, I know, that we, the observers, make things happen by our very presence, but it has been proven in the lab dozens of times. That means the tree in the forest can’t make a sound because it never fell.
“And in the world of the subatomic, both in time and in space, order can spontaneously arise from chaos. Albeit for fractions of a second, but even that short time span refutes Newton’s second law.”
“And the galactic speed limit?” Mercer pressed. “The speed of light?”
“What if I told you I’ve seen an experiment where a beam of laser light that was shot through a gas medium at extremely low temperatures actually came out the other side of the chamber
Mercer didn’t doubt her claims. He was more aware than most that the immutable laws of the past were falling to scientific breakthroughs at an ever-accelerating pace. Yet he couldn’t fully grasp the implications, or how this got a submarine weighing a thousand tons or more into a mountain hundreds of miles from the sea.
“Now, what if we take that experiment one step further? What if we could do it with particles? In one sense, that is what light is, a particle we call a photon.”
“You’d have a particle existing at two places at once.”
“And what if in the process of shooting the particle, the original you started with gets destroyed?”
“You’d end up with a duplicate particle on the other side of your super-cold gas chamber.” The realization hit like a body blow. “You’re talking about some kind of science fiction transporter system.”
She gave him a pained grimace. “That isn’t how it is. There’s no ‘Beam me up, Scotty’. The media keeps hyping the possibility, but in truth transporting a human being, while possible in the abstract, will never be practical.”
“But is that what you wanted to do with the submarine? Transport it to Area 51?”
Her expression turned even more sour. “No, but we were afraid it might happen. You see, our aim was to make it invisible. We call it optoelectric camouflage. It’s designed for surface ships and perhaps aircraft if we can scale down the necessary equipment and reduce the power consumption. We used a sub because there was a theoretical chance something like this could happen.”
Ira interrupted. “It got away from them.”
“It didn’t get away from us,” she said curtly. “The navy was told about this possibility. We built in the fail- safes.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“The system my team and I developed uses a bubble of intense magnetism to bend visible light into a toroid, a kind of doughnut shape. We observe an object because light is reflected off its surface. Some wavelengths get absorbed and the ones that bounce back give the object its color. Now, something that is black will absorb all the wavelengths, so we can’t see it, yet we perceive its presence against a colored background. My theory was that if we could trap the light in a toroid so it couldn’t escape, and then bend it around the object, the observer wouldn’t see anything. It would be like how water bends light so a pencil looks disjointed if half of it sticks above the surface.
“And?” Mercer prompted, because while what she was saying sounded far-fetched, it wasn’t an explanation for what he’d seen in the mine.
“We ran into the quantum world,” she said as if that clarified everything.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning there was a consequence we had considered, took precautions against, but rejected as a real concern. The magnetic field bent visible light until it became a self-sustaining loop, a point in space in which light itself couldn’t escape.”
“Hold it, that sounds like a black hole.”
“No. Black holes are the collapse of matter due to gravity. We were using magnetism.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that gravity hasn’t been reconciled with the quantum world. It was what Einstein was working on when he died, a grand theory of everything — nuclear forces, magnetism and gravity.”
“So you stumbled onto something new.”
“Yet the consequences are the same.”
“What consequences?”
