David Golemon - Ancients

Three men turned and ran back the way they had come, but the rest would never return to the man who had ordered them to Rothman's house.

When it was over, Jack stood and hurriedly replaced his spent clip. He scanned the area around him and then looked at Everett.

"When in the hell are you going to follow orders, Captain?"

"Maybe when you start giving me orders that make sense by allowing me to assume some of the risk, Jack."

"Okay, Captain," he said, letting a smile finally crease his tanned face. "That wasn't a bad makeshift plan, by the way. Especially since we didn't know if they had night-vision gear. Also the part of the plan where you assumed Ryan would find the right switch for the lights."

"Nah, I knew he would just hit them all; the odds were with us."

Collins stared at the empty cart and the open door. Mendenhall and Ryan stood next to it and they did not look happy.

"The helicopter?" Jack asked.

"Gone," answered Ryan.

"Maybe that bad guy on the phone had a point about those two, Jack," Everett said. "I mean, leaving us to fend off the wolves while they run is not the makings of people with a whole lot of character."

Jack grimaced and then looked at the others.

"Well, we learned a few things. Let's go home and see what comes of it. We'll call the locals and use Europa to see if we can pin some names to the Virginia hospitality down in the tunnel."

"Yeah, we learned a few things all right, like not to trust anyone over fifty," Ryan mumbled as he turned and left.

Sarah had been on a conference call with Bell Labs for four hours and had even awakened the chief design engineer for Bose. She had to run some questions by the chief engineers of both facilities after Niles Compton, in Washington, had pulled some powerful strings and cleared the way for her to speak directly to the labs. When she was done with her questions, the Group's Engineering Department ran her theory in model form on Europa.

With some success in the theory end of things, they needed an actual working model to prove it sound. They set up a mechanical model inside one of the many workshops of the complex. They had engineered two sandstone slabs, each eight inches thick, and it was these strange items that the Earth-Sciences team was currently examining as the communications division hurriedly set up their equipment to be used in the experiment.

"I don't get what you're suggesting, Sarah," said the young doctor from Virginia Tech. He looked over at a room monitor and into the face of Niles Compton, who was on the line from the White House subbasement, where he had set up shop with the new science adviser to the president.

"I think I do, and if she can pull this off, we have at least a theory to advance to the Russians and Chinese, and maybe, just maybe, they can convince the Koreans," Niles said from Washington.

"The key here is our naval-communications gear." Sarah nodded at the com techs and they gave her a thumbs-up.

The summoned scientists and engineering personnel assigned to the earthquake investigation stood around the lab, and all were wearing goggles. Most shook their heads in doubt at what Sarah was trying to do. Most of them had heard of sound as an impact carrier, but few believed that it could actually be used in real-world situations. As they watched the final connections being made, each was handed a pair of earphones and earplugs. They were instructed by the communications men--an army sergeant and a navy signals man--to insert the ear-canal plugs first and then place the headphones over them.

Sarah was nervous but she knew that this experiment should work. She was standing next to Jerry Gallup, who held a PhD from Harvard in telecommunications. He had informed her, after seeing Europa's results, that she had a very viable theory.

Sarah thought briefly of Lisa Willing, her roommate who had been killed in a field operation close to three years before. She was in communications and had once that sound decibels could penetrate aggregate formations in just the same manner as an opera singer could break glass when a certain pitch was reached. It was very rare in that scenario, but she and Gallup had received startling information from Bell Labs and the corporations of Audiovox and Bose that such theory was in practical use inside their own labs.

Sarah watched on closed-circuit television as Professor Harlan Walters of the University of Hawaii and director of the Trans-Pacifica Institute of Seismic Studies on Oahu started the experiment.

"Okay, I think we're set to begin," he said from Hawaii. "The hydraulic rams you see on the bench are set at scale level to two hundred billion metric tons, an estimate to be sure, of the pressures some of our continental plates induce on their leading ledges. The two sandstone slabs that you see represent the plates. The hydraulic rams are exerting this pressure on them at this moment, just as our real plates are doing below our feet. Now on top of these sandstone slabs we are placing a piece of granite with a hairline surface fracture that will act as our fault line."

Sarah looked at the sound technicians and nodded on her cue from Hawaii.

As the gathered witnesses watched, the communications men placed small domes in a long line two feet from the surface crack of the granite and then attached electrical leads to them.

"Now, what you see being done is the small domes placed on the granite have what the audio scientists call 'sound-inducing tone forks.' A small electrical current is sent through to the forks, which will act just as a real tuning fork will when struck; only we will control the amount of vibration by electrical current, thus controlling the power of the decibel output. While no sound-wave energy will be strong enough to damage strata that are as hard as granite, our intention is not to attempt that. Instead, we will strike at what supports the granite, or the upper crust of the earth, the actual tectonic plates that support the upper crust and are responsible for continental movements throughout earth's history. Since these plates all have leading edges that are uneven and the thickness varies to some degree, we presuppose that they can be attacked, for use of a better word, by audio waves."

There was loud mumbling as people in the engineering lab disagreed with one point or another about the theory.

"Lieutenant McIntire, you may begin," the professor said from Hawaii.

"Sergeant, if you will start the decibel assault on the plates, please."

A large console hurriedly pieced together by the Communications Department came to life. The sergeant and naval signals man started manipulating the knobs and switches that would activate the current, which would in turn start the minute motion of the forks inside the small domes.

One woman--a young first-year PhD from Stanford--shook her head and became unsteady on her feet. When she became nauseated, she was assisted out of the lab by another lab technician who was not feeling well.

"Some of the wave will escape. It will affect people differently, as our inner ears are not identical. Some will feel queasy and light-headed, while others may feel nothing at all. Once we interview survivors of the quakes and determine if any of them felt these same symptoms just before the earthquakes hit, that will add punch to the theory," Walters explained over the closed-circuit television link.

Sarah winced, as she too had felt uncomfortable as the wave started its assault. Then she felt better after a moment.

"They will start adjusting the pitch of the wave at this time," she said. "The pitch refers to whether the sound is a high or low note. High frequencies create high pitches and low frequencies produce low pitches. The human ear can process frequencies between twenty Hz and twenty thousand Hz. These are audible sounds. Sound waves with frequencies above twenty thousand Hz are called ultrasonic. Dogs can hear sounds up to about fifty thousand Hz. So a whistle that only dogs can hear has a frequency higher than twenty thousand but lower than fifty thousand Hz. Sound waves with frequencies below twenty Hz are called infrasonic. We will begin at the lower end of the ultrasonic scale and work our way up."