Atlantis: Devil's Sea Read Online Free Page B

in opposite parallel directions was a transform fault, a prime example being the San Andreas Fault along the west coast of the United States.
    Along the Ring of Fire, all these things had been happening for millennia. It was called the Ring of Fire because volcanoes circled almost the entire Pacific Rim, where plates met and magma boiled up between them. The forces involved in the Ring were staggering in concept, but they played out over eons, rarely noted by man except when an earthquake such as the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906 occurred or a volcano such as Mount St. Helens in Oregon erupted. And those were isolated events, just a fraction of the length of the ring and its potential power.
    The Shadow had shown a mastery of manipulating these forces by firing a salvo of nuclear weapons from a captured American submarine at Iceland, hitting along the tectonic line down the middle of the island and literally splitting it in half. It had barely been stopped from continuing the destruction along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which would have devastated the east coast of North America and Europe.
    Now, out of the Devil’s Sea gate, off the coast of Japan new lines of imagining probing were reaching, noting the composition of the Ring of Fire, the position of volcanoes and their status, fault lines, and critical junctures.
    The Shadow was readying a second assault on the planet.
    *****
    The probing by the Shadow was not occurring unnoticed. Three miles below the planet’s surface, in northern Japan, a group of scientists led by Professor Nagoya was gathered around monitors, coordinating the data they were getting from the superkamiokande underneath their feet. They were near the top of the natural cavern, their computers, desks, and chairs set on a steel grate that covered a highly polished stainless steel tank sixty meters wide by sixty deep and filled with water. The walls of the tank were lined with twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes—PMTs. The tubes were very sensitive light sensors that could pick up a single photon as it traveled through the tank’s water.
    The superkamiokande was a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light was produced when an electrically charged particle traveled through water. The reason the superkamiokande was so far underground was in order to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet.
    While Professor Nagoya and his coworkers knew little about the gates and the Shadow, they did know that activity by the Shadow produced muon emissions, which the superkamiokande could trace. Nagoya didn’t know yet why the gates produced muons or why the muons emitted did not decay as rapidly as physics said they should.
    “The Shadow is checking the fault lines,” Ahana, Nagoya’s senior assistant, noted. She was a young woman with the sharpest mind Nagoya had ever interacted with. “Also volcanoes. Just like it did with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” she added, referring to what had happened just before the destruction of Iceland.
    Nagoya had been studying the gates for years. Only recently, with the assistance of the superkamiokande, was he beginning to understand them. He tapped the screen displaying the lines of probes. “We have assumed that the Shadow is doing this imagining through the Earth,” he said, “but what if it isn’t going through the Earth by traveling on a different dimension or using wormholes.”
    Ahana frowned “What do you mean?”
    Most of what we know about physics is traditionally based on the dual foundations of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But, as you know, both cannot be right as they are interpreted by their traditional followers; they cannot coexist as formulated. Some say there is a split: that general relativity is what makes things work on a large scale and quantum mechanics on a small scale but such a concept is ludicrous. Where would such a split occur? Is there a