Chapter 5

The Eddington Facility, Near Drinkwater, Saskatchewan, Canada

David Eddington’s family had owned a farm near Drinkwater for nearly 200 years, since the late 19^th Century in fact. Well, leased it anyway. Over time, the farm had subsumed nearly all the surrounding farms and now stretched nearly all the way to Moose Jaw to the northwest and Pense to the northeast. The farm was roughly an oval that was 15 miles on its long axis by 10 miles on its short axis – or 24 km by 16 km, give or take. One day, when he was a young man who had just inherited the land from his parents – about 35 years ago – he got a phone call.

A voice identified himself as Albert Carradine, and asked if he would like to approximately double the size of the farm. He (Carradine) would supply the cash; all he wanted in return was the right to build a large, roughly circular, underground facility with some mostly-underground support buildings on it. It would be for scientific studies and the land would be returned to its normal use when construction was complete. The only stipulation was that Eddington and his family would secure the property and not discuss it with anyone. ‘Anyone’ would include the Canadian government. Of course, the Cree would know, too.

Carradine wanted to build a particle accelerator about double the size of the old accelerator at CERN. It was to be about 20 km in diameter, and of course, 3.1415 times that in circumference. The money would come from Carradine for construction and security; he just wanted to have it titled in the farm’s name. Eddington and his heirs would be paid handsomely just to grow wheat on the land – in addition to whatever the farm’s proceeds from the wheat would be, of course. The land was actually owned by the Cree Nation, but Eddington had a lease that went on forever ... or nearly forever.

Eddington wanted details, of course, and they were provided. A deal was struck. Soon, the property was acquired, and construction was begun. Ten years later, an operational accelerator was in place – the largest in the world by far – and a small crew of physicists began arriving. The support team of engineers and security men were there in fairly large numbers, and Moose Jaw’s night life picked up. Anybody who talked about the Eddington Facility – as it was known – just disappeared. They weren’t killed, they just went away. Patagonia was nice this time of year – if you liked rocks and ice. The pay was good, and most of the crew became permanent residents – complete with family and children. Only one visit from the Saskatchewan provincial government occurred. That was in the early phases of construction, and the man was directed to talk to Carradine. Nothing further was ever heard from the authorities.

In 2058 a new generation of ultra-super-cooled magnets were installed in the Eddington Facility – they operated at just a skosh above absolute zero degrees and were bathed in an unstable liquid called DiBiN. DiBiN was short for DiBismuth-Nitrogen and is theoretically impossible to make. Any chemist will report that Bismuth won’t combine with Nitrogen to make a cold liquid. That’s in theory. It is very, very cold, when it was actually made - when bombarded with radioactive particles – and theory be damned.

Shortly thereafter Frau Doktor Bruska Meinshmidt – a woman ‘on loan’ from the Köln University’s physics department – began her experiments with the speed of light. In August of 2061 she contacted Carradine.

Meinshmidt: “Carradine?”

Carradine: “Yes, Doktor? You sound excited.”

M: “We have done it! We have accelerated a particle to the speed of light and, I think, above it. Of course, we cannot see anything beyond that threshold. It disappeared for a few nano-seconds and when it reappeared on our instruments it was annihilated. There was a tremendous burst of energy. Thank the gods for the magnetic bottle it was encased in. We had to bleed the energy out of the bottle slowly and there was simply an enormous amount.

“I don’t know how to explain it to a lay person. That single particle’s annihilation would light up a city like Chicago for a week.”

C: “That is wonderful, Doktor. How much energy did it take to produce the event?”

M: “Okay. Let’s say a typical medium to large power generating station generates 5 MW of electrical power in a day. That’s MegaWatts. We used about 7 MW to accelerate the particle. It came out of supra-light speed and was annihilated, producing nearly 100 MW.”

C: “Fantastic!”

M: “But that’s not all of it. It took a long time to bleed off the energy in the mag-bottle. The bottle was simply blindingly white with photons and other energy-bearing particles. During that time we studied the pico-seconds between the particle’s reappearance and its annihilation. Note that I do not say ‘explosion.’ No ... It imploded. Here’s what happened as nearly as we can identify the process.

“When the hyper-particle – we have no name yet for something returning from supra-light speed, and are calling it the ‘Albert Particle’ in honor of Einstein, of course – Well ... when it first broke through the light barrier on the way back, slowing down, it dragged back some dark matter in the form of raw energy. At least, that’s what we thought happened. That’s not the actual process, of course, but the analogy will suffice. When the dark matter touched the Albert Particle, it imploded. We hypothesize that dark matter is somehow some sort of anti-matter, traveling at supra-light speeds. Maybe it only exists at supra-light speeds, we don’t know. We think we actually saw traces of dark matter, Mr. Carradine!

“It’s all conjecture at this point, of course, but...”

C: “That’s a game changing discovery, Doktor. Who else was on the team that knows about all this?”

M: “Well, me, of course. The engineering staff that bled off the power. There were three of them. My assistant, Marcel Rineau. That’s about it ... oh ... and Io of course. She did the real grunt work on the analysis.”

C: “Yes, of course. Io. Listen ... Is there anywhere else on the planet that can accelerate something to this speed? Can your work be duplicated?”

M: “Well ... I don’t really know what the Russians have buried somewhere. For the Chinese, I’d say no. You ... want to keep this quiet? I hope not, because it will change everything. Einsteinian physics needs an addendum. The world needs to know about this.”

C: “As long as you don’t mention how you did it ... Just what the results are. And you can mention that you’ll be glad to meet with anyone who can produce near-light particle acceleration. I’d like to listen in on those meetings, if any take place. But the theoretical guys? No problem. I don’t have to tell you to make sure it’s repeatable ... Um ... then I’m going to want to scale it up to continent-wide production levels.”

M: “You want to...” [her voice trailed off] “ ... Can I and my team make some stock transactions before it’s announced.”

C: [laughs] “I’m pretty sure that would be illegal – at least in the United States. But you’re in Canada, on land that belongs to the Cree Nation. You can tell me and I’ll mix your orders in with some of my offshore transactions, and we’ll work out the money afterwards.”

M: “Okay. I want to short every goddam oil and coal and natural gas company in the universe. [laughs] God ... this will turn the world on its ear ... Wait ... Okay. I have to go. Thanks Mr. C.”

Io, nestled in her ‘home’ network node in the Utah / New Mexico / Colorado salt caves, of course, already knew what ‘Carradine’ had just heard. It was she, after all, who had done all the tedious math that supported the Eddington Facility. She closed down the Carradine persona, made further notes in the TW01 file and continued her search for the perfect candidate to implement TW01.

She placed a series of shorts and bought some puts on the oil, gas and coal stock markets. ‘SOME’ ... hahaha ... she was so short in the markets that the SEC started to wonder who was doing all that selling. Let’s see ... what else? The railroads would no longer need to send hundreds of bomb trains around the U.S. and Canada. They called them bomb trains because the hundreds of crude oil tank cars tended to explode into dramatic fireballs. Pipelines too would become relics. She wanted to take over control of the electric companies; their stock should go down at the thought of all the additional expense they’d have to deal with, but the demand for electricity would be stable. Auto companies? She decided not to meddle with them.

Then Herrin Doktor Meinshmidt’s article appeared in the Journal of Theoretical Physics.

The furor was world-wide. This was a perpetual-motion machine. It generated more power than it consumed – a lot more power. The only problem was that it required the world’s largest particle accelerator to run it. The world beat a path to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

The U.S. government was outraged; President Ellis was apoplectic. How could a world-changing scientific event take place just a few miles outside its borders and they not know? Or even worse ... they didn’t control it? The U.S. offered to ‘protect’ the installation and was in the process of sending three ‘friendly’ divisions of Marines and Special Forces into Saskatchewan. The Canadian government thanked the U.S., but declined to be thus ‘protected.’ The U.S. insisted.