The Prometheus Project: Stranded Part 10

Ryan didn't answer so Regan forged ahead.

"Before, we were just like everyone else. But things have changed. The Teacher lifted us off the page. We know what 3D objects look like when viewed from the fourth dimension. We know how our bodies feel when we're moving in that impossible direction. So all you have to do is find a tiny fourth-dimensional seam in the s.h.i.+eld and go through. You can do it, Ryan. I'm sure of it."

"That's great, Regan," replied her brother sarcastically, finally responding. "Can you come up with a theory of how I can flap my arms and fly out of here? That's just as likely. Or maybe I can click my heels together and say, 'there's no place like home.' "

"Come on, Ryan. Why are we now suddenly able to see inside solid objects when we go through a barrier? Because our minds have been changed again. We've been shown the fourth dimension. So now we can recognize it when we're there. So press against the s.h.i.+eld and find a way to move a billionth of an inch into the fourth dimension. And then go through it as easily as a Flatlander walking over a line."

"That's impossible!" barked Ryan. "Dad said no human has ever been able to move into the fourth dimension. What part of that didn't you understand!"

"No human has ever been telepathic either. And yet we're using telepathy right now. Give it a shot," she broadcast as forcefully as she could. "You have nothing to lose."

"All right already! I'll give it a try. Just to shut you up! Just promise you'll leave when it doesn't work."

"I promise."

Ryan rose and walked closer to the surrounding gray beasts, still inside the roaring semicircle of fire. He picked up his last three stones and flung them as hard as he could at the nearest three carnivores. "I hate this planet and I hate you!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. Then he stopped using words and just screamed at them as threateningly as he could until his throat hurt. None of the animals were the least bit intimidated.

Finally, he decided he was ready to make his ridiculous attempt. He pressed against the wall of force so he was touching it with as much of his body as possible.

If Regan was right, the barrier touched the fourth dimension. There was a crack he could pa.s.s through. Or step over. If only he could find an impossible direction in which to move.

He closed his eyes. He curled his hands into fists and fought to concentrate. He needed to move his body so he would feel the same stretching sensation he had felt twice before. He tried to recapture what this felt like in his mind. He visualized what he had seen before. The driver's insides. And inside the insides. And inside of that. For just a moment he fooled himself into thinking the sensation of being pulled apart had returned, but then he totally lost his concentration and knew he would never get it back.

It was over. He never had a chance of finding the fourth dimension and he knew it.

"I'm done," he broadcast to his sister. "I tried your idiotic idea and I failed! Now go away!"

CHAPTER 18.

Through the Looking Gla.s.s

Ryan turned back around. To face the fire. And the vicious pack eagerly awaiting their chance at him. He opened his eyes.

The barrier was an inch in front of him!

He gasped. He blinked rapidly, not sure if he should believe his eyes. But the blinking didn't change anything.

He had made it through, after all. He had found the seam.

"Regan, I'm in! You were right!"

Three miles away, sitting by herself near the edge of a portable, green-tinted force-field, Regan beamed. "Yessss!" she replied happily. "I knew it!"

Ryan wasted no further time on celebration. He had to find a way to help the rest of the expedition. "I'm looking for the other tram."

He searched for several minutes within the s.h.i.+eld perimeter and found the tram Nathaniel had stolen. He quickly inspected it. "Nathaniel removed both the red and white crystals from this one too. And there aren't any more trams on Isis."

"Why would he bother to do that? He thought there was no way we could get back through the s.h.i.+eld to even reach the second tram."

"He's like Tezoc," replied Ryan. "Very, very careful. If someone from Prometheus did try to rescue us, he wanted them to fail." He paused. "I'll be right back."

As Ryan bolted through the portal the connection with his sister ended abruptly. Earth was just slightly beyond their telepathic range of fifteen miles.

Ryan looked around cautiously but no one was inside the zoo building. He shot through the nearest portal and used his knife to pry both a red and then a white crystal from the first tram he spotted. Returning to Isis he slid the white crystal into the small, hidden slot in the front of the tram and worked the controls.

Nothing happened.

"Regan," he broadcast. "I can't get the tram to work. There must be some trick to inserting the white crystal, or maybe a white crystal from one tram won't work in another. I don't know."

"That's okay. It doesn't matter anyway. You can't reach us until the lava river stops flowing and cools down. Or until we find a way around it."

"I'll go and get help," he a.s.sured her. "But I need to do something first. I'll be back in five minutes."

"Where are you going?" asked Regan.

But Ryan was just stepping through the portal as the thought reached him, and an instant later he was once again 25,000 light years away, back in the zoo building.

Ryan returned, right on schedule. "I had to get another red crystal," he told her upon his return.

"Why do you need two?"

"You may be able to get through the s.h.i.+eld the way I did, but who knows. I have no idea how I did it. And I'm not sure I could do it again. In case something happens to me and help never comes, I'm leaving a red crystal outside the s.h.i.+eld for you and the expedition."

Regan considered this. "Good thinking. And I get why you have two. So you can leave one outside and use one to get back across the barrier."

"Exactly," replied Ryan. "I'll bury the crystal right next to the s.h.i.+eld. Look for a ring of ash by the s.h.i.+eld where my fire was. I'll also mark its location with a few sticks."

"How will you explain how you got through the barrier?"

Ryan thought for a few seconds. Having set foot back on Earth had done wonders for his mood and his powers of concentration. "I'll say I was getting attacked and the barrier just opened for me somehow. Like this was another safety feature the Qwervy built in to protect zoo visitors that we didn't know about."

Regan nodded. "That should work."

"Regan," he broadcast. "Thanks. And sorry for being such a jerk. I owe you one. And I'm going to make it up to you." Ryan paused. "But before I go, I could use your help one last time. Remember in Nathaniel's letter he said something about gravity being an insanely weak force. A force that isn't a force."

"I remember."

"I might be facing a weapon that controls gravity. So the more I understand it, the better."

"So you want me to ask Dad about that part of Nathaniel's letter?"

"Yeah. And any other thoughts he might have about this weapon."

"It isn't really a weapon, Ryan. It's a device that could change the world in some really great ways. Nathaniel is just misusing it."

Regan told him she'd be back in ten minutes and ended their connection.

She returned just five minutes later. Ryan was surprised. Once their father began talking about science it was usually hard to get him to stop.

"Okay," began Regan. "Nathaniel called gravity ridiculously weak. That's because it is. There are only four known forces in the universe. Two of them are called the strong and weak nuclear forces. These do things like keep atoms from flying apart and ... I don't know, something else. I only took notes when Dad got to gravity. The third is the electromagnetic force. And the fourth is gravity."

"So why did Nathaniel say it wasn't a force?"

"I'll get to that," replied Regan. "Anyway, gravity is by far the weakest of the four forces. Dad says magnetism is ... " She looked down at her notes. "Well, he doesn't remember exactly. But it's something like a thousand trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity. Which he says would be a 1 followed by 39 zeros if you were gonna write it."

"Are you sure you heard that right?" asked Ryan. "That doesn't seem possible."

"That's what I thought. But it's true. Dad reminded me that the gravity produced by an object depends upon its ma.s.s. So the gravity we feel on Earth is produced by the ma.s.s of the entire planet." Regan glanced at her notes once again. "Dad says the Earth weighs about twelve million billion billion pounds."

"Really," commented Ryan, amused. "I'll bet it was hard finding a scale big enough for that weigh-in."

Regan smiled. "The point is, even when the weight of the entire Earth is trying to hold a paperclip down, a tiny little magnet can lift it off the ground."

Ryan thought about this and nodded. His dad made a good point. He had never thought about it that way. "Okay. Magnetism one, gravity zero," he broadcast. "Which means that if you did have the technology to affect gravity, there's a lot of room to strengthen it."

"I guess."

"So why is it not a force?" asked Ryan.

"Well, some scientists cla.s.sify it this way, some don't. According to Einstein, gravity isn't so much a force as it is a change in the shape of s.p.a.ce-time."

"What's s.p.a.ce-time?" asked Ryan.

"Dad says it's like s.p.a.ce and time rolled into one. But Dad told me when he was explaining not to worry about that. To think of it as the same thing as just s.p.a.ce. Anyway, he told me to think of s.p.a.ce as a gigantic sheet of rubber. Or a gigantic trampoline. And objects dent this trampoline, causing other objects to roll toward them. That's what gravity is."

"What?" broadcast Ryan uncertainly.

"Let me give you an example." She consulted her notes once again. "Suppose you spread marbles out on a large, circular trampoline. Then you set a hundred pound bowling ball in the very center of the tramp. If you did, the bowling ball would stretch the tramp down, creating a crater-shaped pocket, and the marbles would roll toward it. But even the marbles dent the tramp some, creating their own little indentation to sit in."

Ryan thought about this. "Okay. I sort of get it. So s.p.a.ce is like a trampoline. And everything pushes into it. Light things dent it just a little. Heavy things, like the Sun, dent it a lot. And the heavier an object is, the bigger the crater it creates, so the more other things are forced to roll toward the bottom of this crater."

"Right. So gravity isn't really a force. It's what happens when objects stretch s.p.a.ce."

"Interesting," noted Ryan. "But I can't see how any of this is going to help me stop Nathaniel." He paused. "Did Dad say anything else about the Enigma Cube?"

"I tried, Ryan. But we got interrupted. There's a lot going on right now. He said he would tell me more at another time."

After another few minutes of telepathic conversation the siblings ended their connection.

Ryan took a deep breath and crossed the barrier again to leave a red crystal for the expedition. As had happened earlier that same day the first time he had crossed the Isis s.h.i.+eld-could it really be true that only four or five hours had pa.s.sed since then?-he felt the stretching sensation that meant he was brus.h.i.+ng against the forth dimension. Now that he understood it-a little-he fought to open his mind as wide as he could to the experience.

Ryan buried the crystal and stabbed the two spears he had been making deep into the soft soil beside it to mark its location as he had promised. He shoved the other red crystal into his pocket. "Better luck next time, wolf-things," he said with a sneer.

With that, he crossed through the s.h.i.+eld and headed to the portal back to Earth.

CHAPTER 19.

Pinned

Ryan peered around the zoo exit cautiously. Not seeing anyone he emerged from the building, keeping an eye out for surprises.

A body was stretched out like a human speed b.u.mp on the ground twenty yards away. No one else was in sight.

He rushed over to the body and knelt beside it. It was Lieutenant Lebron Williams, and he was sprawled out like a snow angel on his stomach. He had been a.s.signed to guard the entrance to the zoo. His automatic weapon was lying next to him, and every square inch of his body that could possibly be touching the ground was pinned there.

The guard's eyes were closed but he was still breathing.

"Lebron, it's Ryan Resnick. What happened?"

The guard managed a shallow grunt but that was all.

Ryan grabbed one of Lebron's hands that was palm-down against the floor and pulled. He was able to move it, but it was far heavier than a hand should have been. Nathaniel must have used the Enigma Cube. The gravity of the ground on which the guard was glued hadn't changed at all. The gravity of his body had changed. It was as if Lebron was wearing a bodysuit made of powerful magnets and the Earth was made of solid steel. To Ryan, the gravity around Lebron was the same as it had always been.

Nathaniel had chosen the setting on his weapon carefully. He didn't change the guard's gravity so much that his heart stopped or he could no longer breathe. Just enough so that every movement was a battle. Ryan suspected Lebron had been strong enough to drag himself this distance away from his post before he became too exhausted and was forced to give up.

There was nothing Ryan could do for him. "I have to go, Lebron," he said apologetically. "But I promise I'll try to find a way to help you."

Ryan checked several more buildings and the security headquarters but it was all the same. Everyone inside of Prometheus was now pinned to the floor. Nathaniel must have set the Enigma Cube to a broad enough radius that the gravity effect had hit all life within the city at the same time.

He calculated that he was only two or three hours behind the deranged physicist and his hostage. And if Nathaniel had further business within Prometheus after using the gravity device, or had been delayed for any reason, Ryan might be almost on his heels.