Chapter 46
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Ray Ortiz half-jogged to the dock, cursing himself for not being better equipped for the weather. The rain was sporadic, but the bottom would fall out any minute now and Ortiz would be drenched in a suit and tie. He saw Aaron West and Carl Jacobs putting some miscellaneous gear onto a Zodiac. “Hey guys,” Ortiz called to them.
Both men looked up from their work. “Mr. Ortiz,” Carl responded. “What's going on?”
“Are you going out to shut down the clocks on the buoys?”
“Yeah. We were just about to shove off. Why?”
“Mind if I tag along?”
Carl looked at Aaron and Aaron shrugged in response. “Why not? You're going to get soaked.”
“I'm already soaked.”
“Here,” Aaron said as he retrieved a folded rain poncho and handed it to Ortiz.
“Got any more of those?” the voice of James Grady said from up the dock. James was followed by his two sons. Ortiz was about to rebuke the three men and turn them back when James started again. “If you're going out to El Pliegue, we are going with you.”
“I don't think that's a—” said Ortiz.
“Look. It's my son who is lost out there. Their brother. What else are we supposed to do? Mark and Eli were the last ones to see Joey there. They may notice something you don't. And you know, we're going to go nuts if we are stuck in that dorm. If the boat's going to El Pliegue, we want to be on it.”
“What about your wife?” Ortiz suggested.
“She's back at the dorm, talking to her mother on the phone. This won't take long, right?”
“Shouldn't,” Aaron said. “We just have to power down four atomic clocks. Nothing to it.” What Aaron didn't say is that they were planning to note the time on those atomic clocks to see if they are experiencing the same time distortion as the phones that they replaced.
“Well then let's do it,” Eli said, grabbing a poncho from Aaron's hand and boarding the boat uninvited. The other men followed suit.
“Okay, saddle up.” Carl said, and then started the Zodiac's engine. It was a short trip to the buoys and with the rain and wind there was no room to talk. When they pulled up to the first buoy, the stopped the boat and began to open the Pelican case holding the atomic clock.
“Is that the time on the clock?” Ortiz said, looking over Aaron's shoulder as he opened the case.
“Yeah. It just keeps time and displays it right on the front panel. It's much more accurate than ordinary clocks.”
“Well, I don't know about that,” Ortiz said. The Grady men and Carl all joined Ortiz, crowded around Aaron, looking at the clock. Ray Ortiz looked at his wrist watch to compare, although there was no point. The time showing on the atomic clock's front panel read 04:27:14 and was ticking away, while Ray's watch indicated it was about ten minutes until eight pm central time. The atomic clock was over three and a half hours fast.
“Is that supposed to be the right time?” Mark asked.
“Well, we set them using GPS when we put them out here yesterday afternoon. The time showing here is what time the clock thinks it is.” Aaron explained.
“How is that possible?” James asked.
“Well, I'm not sure I can explain that,” Aaron replied.
“Can't, or won't?” Ortiz asked with an edge of suspicion.
“Can't,” Aaron said, suddenly deciding to come clean. The sooner they learned what was really going on was the sooner they would stop chasing ghosts and be able to focus on finding the boy. “Look. This is not really unexpected,” he said as Carl shot him a cautionary look. “Come on, Carl. These guys are not here to steal Thermion's secrets or shut down Daedalus. They are looking for a lost boy. Anything we can tell them that might help them find him, I'm going to tell them.”
Carl nodded gently and breathed, “Alright.”
Aaron continued. “We told you we were monitoring GPS timing errors, which is mostly true, but not the whole story. We were searching for any small timing anomalies and we decided that we could use GPS receivers to locate these anomalies, if they existed. What we found were some pretty serious timing anomalies, but only on these four stations. On the buoys.”
“Anomalies,” James repeated. “What sort of anomalies are you looking for?”
Carl responded for Aaron. “The Daedalus project, the work we are doing here on Isla Roca, is basically trying to manipulate intense gravitational fields in order to make it possible to move objects from one place to another very quickly. We have a test system in the lab and we have been testing this device, trying to move these little black cubes from one place to another in the lab. But the cubes were just disappearing and we didn't know where they were going. We set up this matrix of GPS receivers to try and find out where all of the cubes were ending up. The idea was that the effect of the Daedalus device may cause a slight timing error at the destination of the cubes.”
Aaron picked up the narrative. “So we put out this matrix of GPS devices, ran another test and looked for an anomaly. We used cell phones at first, since they are portable and we had a ton of them available. Our computer scientist wrote a special program to monitor their time and this was supposed to help us detect any minute timing anomaly.”
“So, you detected this anomaly out here, on the buoys.” Ortiz suggested.
Aaron responded, “Well, not exactly. We expected the clocks to run very slightly slow. Like, maybe lose a few hundredths of a second between the synchronization intervals.”
“What do you mean?” Eli asked.
Aaron answered, “GPS receivers get a time update every second from the GPS satellites, so they can synchronize their local clocks once per second. We figured we'd see a few hundredths of a second of error within one of these seconds, which sounds tiny but for GPS would be a huge error.”
“But this clock is not a couple of hundredths of a second off.” Mark said. “It's way off.”
Carl then continued, “Well, the phones we put out here were probably much worse. We went through two different sets of phones before switching to the atomic clocks. We thought maybe some radiation or magnetic fields were screwing with the phone's electronics. So we put these atomic clocks out here, which use much more stable oscillators, and shielded the enclosures. We also measured for radiation and magnetic fields. That's what we were doing when you ran into us out here yesterday.”
“And now,” Aaron said, “We have these atomic clocks that are, as you put it, way off. Well at least this one. I guess it could be defective. Could still be radiation, but maybe it's transient, only happens occasionally and it wasn't happening when we were measuring.”
Mark was looking at his digital watch and noticed that the time was ticking off at the same rate as the atomic clock. “Well, it's not running fast. It seems to be counting seconds at the same time as my watch,” he said.
“Could be because some transient condition is causing the clock error, could be that if there's a constant condition, it's affecting your watch just the same as the clock. Who knows,” Aaron said.
“Okay, I think I get what's going on. But did you find any of your lost cubes?” Ortiz asked.
“No. But we were so focused on the really screwy behavior of the phones, and now this clock, that we didn't really look. Plus, if the cubes wound up out here, they'd sink in El Pliegue. They are only one centimeter by one centimeter. We'd never find them.”
“Guys, let's just get these clocks turned off and get out of here. We're not getting anywhere with this, and I'm tired of standing here in the rain and the dark,” Carl said. Aaron turned off the atomic clock they had been looking at and sealed it back up in the Pelican case. Carl powered the boat to the next buoy, where Aaron commenced opening the case to reveal the next clock.
The time on the second atomic clock was also fast. This clock's panel read 09:41:23 and was counting seconds. Mark saw this time and compared with his watch which now showed it to be eleven minutes after eight pm central tim
e. “This one is four hours faster than the other one was,” he said to the group.
“So it is,” Aaron replied. He really didn't have an explanation and now that he'd gotten what he knew about this testing off of his chest, he wasn't interested in continued effort to solve this problem. He would report the error of these clocks back to Kyle and the others and let them sort it out.
“So,” Eli said to Mark, “You and mom were out here earlier today and your sonar unit was pulled under, right?”
“Yeah, we were just over there, a few feet,” Mark said and pointed. Aaron knew exactly where they had been. He hadn't been able to shake his unsettled feeling after that crazy event all day.
“What if this time anomaly is worse under the water? Maybe whatever it is that pulled the sonar overboard is the same thing causing it.” Eli suggested.
“Yeah, I guess if we continue doing this test, tomorrow maybe, or after you guys find your brother, we might drop these clocks under the water,” Carl responded.
“We're right here. Let's just drop one under right now. It'll just take a minute. I'm pretty curious about this now,” Eli said. Mark nodded in agreement.
“No, no way. We're just here to turn them off, that's it. We've already wasted too much time talking about this. It's raining. It's dark. The rain is going to get worse and we do not want to be out here on this little boat if the thunderstorm moves in behind this rain. The Coast Guard will have to start looking for us,” Carl said firmly.
James's curiosity was also piqued, and he also wanted to see for himself this violently-pulled-under event that his wife and Mark had described. He didn't really know why, but he had a hunch that this was related to Joseph's disappearance. He said, “Come on guys, it'll only take like five minutes. Aren't you curious?”
Ray Ortiz stepped in, “No, I think Carl's right. We have to think about your safety too. This is a dead end.” The truth is, Ray's whole objective was to get Aaron and Carl to talk about what was really happening at Isla Roca, and they had already done so. He was ready to get back to the island and start poking around in the facility.
“Look,” James said. “We have this rope here. We could just tie it off on that D-ring and tie the other end to that Pelican case handle. The case is waterproof. Just drop it under, then pull it back up. My five minute estimate was too big. One minute.”
“It's not—” Carl started before James interrupted.
“One minute. We can afford one minute.” James said.
Carl rolled his eyes and repeated, “One minute. Aaron, reset it to the correct time first. I'll pull the Pelican case.”
Aaron connected the atomic clock to the Zodiac's GPS antenna and allowed it to sync the time while Carl removed the Pelican case from the buoy and rigged it with the rope as James had suggested. Then Aaron mounted the atomic clock back in the Pelican case. “It's going to float. We need some ballast,” Aaron said. Carl produced a length of chain from under one of the Zodiac's seats and stuffed it into the case along with the atomic clock.
Aaron sealed up the Pelican case and then said, “Here goes nothin'” as he tossed it overboard. The 150-foot rope was quickly drawn out as the case with the clock in it sank into El Pliegue.
“Alright, it's down there. Now let's get it up and get out of here,” Carl said. James and Eli began pulling the rope to retrieve the Pelican case. It was heavier than they expected due to the bulky chain that Carl had put in the case.
Suddenly the rope jerked as if something was pulling on the case hard from beneath the water. James thought it felt like the case had gotten ten times as heavy. As he was straining to pull up what was now a very heavy case, the other men on the boat could see something was wrong and began to come to his aid.
“What is it, dad?” Mark asked.
“It just got real—” James said just before it pulled again even harder, and this time James lost his footing on the deck of the Zodiac and went over the edge. James was glad Carl had insisted they all wear life jackets as he watched his sons and the other men scramble to rescue him.
“Swim!” Carl shouted, but James was way ahead of him. As he was pulling through the waves the few feet back towards the boat, he watched the boat itself tilt in the water and the rope holding the atomic clock then snapped somewhere beneath the water's surface. James grabbed the rope to pull himself back to the boat and then felt the rope slip through his fingers as he, too, was pulled under.