The Black Hole Read online

  THE BLACK HOLE

  RAY HAMMOND

  © Ray Hammond copyright 2017

  Ray Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  May, 2025

  The old Boeing 747 crossed the Arizona border and, responding to software commands, throttled back its engines, extended its wing geometry and began a gentle descent towards 2,000 feet. There were no human pilots on board, no crew members and no passengers. The jet was a ghost ship, sailing into the unknown.

  Three hundred yards behind the unmanned Boeing, two piloted and fully-armed F-35 jet fighters maintained watchful port and starboard stations, on the look-out for any threat that might cause problems for the elderly, computer-controlled jumbo jet and its ultra-secret cargo.

  Built thirty years earlier, the 747-400 had been completely refitted for this single, one-way mission. In what had once been the long passenger cabin, only the main floor remained. All of the vertical bulkheads had been removed and the plane’s hull had been strengthened with specially developed titanium and carbon-fibre ribs.

  In the lower cargo hold, eight huge electricity generators, bolted to the specially-strengthened deck, were running at full power, delivering the vast quantities of energy demanded by the sophisticated, experimental technology that had been crammed into the aircraft’s main cabin.

  To provide the enormous thrust needed to haul this super-heavy cargo aloft, four of GE’s latest and most powerful jet engines were slung beneath the aircraft’s straining wings.

  The vast central space of the Boeing’s main cabin was completely filled with fourteen miles of double-skinned, zinc-zirconium tubing. The eight-inch diameter pipe was racked in an endless, elongated coil which ran in banked horizontal loops all the way from the cockpit door to the aircraft’s tail.

  At each end of the fuselage, the loops turned back on themselves in elegant parabolic curves. Between the tube’s twin skins, 18,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen were being pumped at high-pressure to keep the pipe’s interior temperature close to absolute zero.

  At 2,000 feet the F-35s levelled off behind the 747 and Captain Zack ‘Blackjack’ Harding checked the co-ordinates on his aircraft’s heads-up display. Then he radioed to his distant controllers.

  ‘Roger that, control,’ he responded once he had received his orders.

  He glanced across to where his wingman sat floating in precise parallel formation a hundred yards away to the right.

  ‘Time to go, Dangerman,’ he radioed. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘Roger, Blackjack,’ came back the immediate response. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  The two F-35s peeled up and away, one breaking to port, the other to starboard, and both pilots lit their afterburners as they accelerated to full-power in eighty degree climbs. Although neither man knew the precise nature of the cargo the 747 was transporting to the remote test area, they were sure that they wanted to be long gone before the delivery was made.

  Flying on alone, the silver jumbo jet entered the 200 square miles of desert that the Pentagon had acquired, cleared and prepared solely for this live test. Without knowing why they had been ordered to do so, local army units had swept the designated area to ensure no civilians remained and had then enclosed the entire zone within 800 miles of twelve-foot high security fencing.

  In the centre of the test area two battalions of Navy SeaBees had, in less than three months, constructed a small town – the sort of conurbation that might normally provide homes for around 5,000 people. But although the urban area looked complete, all of the buildings were empty shells, and there were no paved roads and no utilities; the town was merely a mock up.

  In the empty cockpit of the 747, the virtual pilot received and reconfirmed instructions to begin a further slow descent which would bring the plane down to an altitude of precisely 1,500 feet as it arrived over the central target zone.

  *

  Thirty minutes earlier ‘Marine One’, the lead helicopter of the Presidential Flight, had delivered U.S. President Gerald T. Weeks and a small entourage to the Pentagon’s Strategic Weapons Test Control Center in the Chuksa Mountains, Arizona. He had arrived to witness personally the first live test of the ultra-secret weapon.

  Now, the four-star general in charge of the project was summarising the short presentation he had made to explain the technology that was about to provide the United States with a new, non-nuclear, super-deterrent.

  ‘The development of today’s test weapon has taken eleven years and the dedication of over one thousand people,’ the general told his commander-in-chief. ‘Although few of them understood fully what they were working on.’

  ‘I can’t believe how you guys managed to finance all this without specific Congressional approval,’ broke in the President, sweeping his arm in the direction of the complex images and impenetrable Pentagon jargon that filled the 3D projection screen. ‘Hell, even I didn’t know this project existed until last month!’

  General Rodney Stone, the flag-rank officer in charge of all of the Pentagon’s many ‘black’ ultra-secret weapons development projects, examined his guest of honour’s eyes in an attempt to interpret his meaning. The recently elected President was only in his early forties, the second youngest candidate ever to be voted into the White house, and he was already proving to be an energetic and liberal reformer. In particular, he had recently infuriated the American military establishment by insisting on ratifying an international treaty that extended the ban on all further development and testing of nuclear weapons.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Stone said at last, deciding that the younger man was paying him a compliment. ‘We’ve taken great pains to keep the Indiana Project secret.’

  President Weeks glanced at his watch. ‘O.K, it’s almost ten of,’ he announced impatiently, rising from behind the table. ‘Where do you guys want me?’

  *

  Eighty miles to the south-east, the wholly unmarked Boeing leveled out at 1,500 feet and flew steadily towards its target at a ground speed of 220 knots.

  It was cryogenically cold inside the aircraft’s main cabin and the freezing air was thick with ozone – a blue, toxic gas which smells of geraniums, cabernet sauvignon and chocolate – generated as immense energy fields forced oxygen atoms to cluster together; O3 rather than O2. Inside the endless loop of super-cooled tubing, minuscule but extremely massive nuclei of Zilerium 336 – a stable isotope of a new ultra-heavy metal developed specifically for this project – were being accelerated to enormous velocity.

  Pulled forward relentlessly by a cladding of super-conducting, niobium-titanium magnetic particle guides clamped at frequent intervals to the outside of the tubing, the massive nuclei were traveling at close to the speed of light.

  From the
generators in the 747’s hold, vast quantities of electrical power supplied faster and faster pulses to the magnets, accelerating and steering the millions of particles as they raced in magnetic suspension through the near-perfect vacuum inside the endless loop of tubing. Now each particle was completing 40,000 laps of the fuselage per second.

  In the centre of this looping particle collider sat a large, square black box from which a pipe protruded, joining the main accelerator tube at a forty-five degree angle. Inside the box, xenon gas was held under high pressure, ready to inject a beam of electrically suspended Zilerium anti-matter nuclei straight into the path of their speeding real-matter counterparts.

  *

  The main control room in the Chuksa Mountains had been converted and upgraded from what had once been one of the Pentagon’s Cold War nuclear warfare command posts. Two dozen scientists sat at computer displays intent on data streaming back from instruments on board the approaching delivery aircraft. At the far end of the room three large reinforced windows provided views of the vast Arizona desert that stretched out before them over 1,000 feet below. In the distance and to one side they could see the low mountains of the Kinska range.

  ‘The test zone itself isn’t actually visible from here,’ explained General Stone as he ushered the President into the central viewing chair. ‘But these screens will show us pictures of what happens at Ground Zero – and give us views from space. We’ve got cameras all over the site – and, of course, we’ll be able to see the moment of detonation in the sky.’

  President Weeks glanced up at the images on the screens. What he could see resembled a peaceful small community baking in the afternoon sunshine. But there was no movement; no cars on the streets and no people on the sidewalks. The town looked like a deserted film set.

  ‘This is Professor Tom Baxter, sir,’ said the general as a tall, stooped man with a grey, ponderous face arrived in the centre of the room. ‘He’s the chief scientist on the project, the man who’s really the father of this whole wonderful thing.’

  As the President shook hands with the Pentagon scientist, he stared up into the man’s dark, lugubrious eyes.

  ‘So Professor, you’ve managed to develop a WMD that is not only non-nuclear, but one that’s also more humane?’ he said, motioning for the scientist to sit beside him in one of the viewing chairs. ‘Seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it?’

  The particle physicist took a seat and turned to face his president.

  ‘Not really, sir,’ began Baxter. ‘Radioactive fall-out after a nuclear explosion doesn’t help anyone, neither the vanquished nor the victors, and it persists for many years. With a controlled black hole evaporation, you only get a pulse of X-Rays and some gamma radiation, which quickly dissipates. It’s a very clean weapon.’

  ‘Black hole?’ asked the President mystified, glancing from the scientist to the Pentagon general and back again. ‘General Stone didn’t mention anything about a black hole. You mean this weapon creates a black hole – like a black hole in space?’

  Now it was the professor’s turn to look puzzled. Expecting that the President had been fully briefed, he shot a questioning look towards Stone.

  ‘We prefer to avoid such emotive descriptors, sir,’ explained the general quickly. ‘We describe this as a PWS – a particle weapon system. The energy released comes directly from the collision of high-speed particles.’

  ‘But you’re actually creating a black hole?’ insisted the President. ‘I thought black holes had to be monstrously big – and that they swallowed up everything that came near them?’

  Neither man answered immediately and the President shifted his stern gaze of enquiry to the physicist.

  Baxter gave a small nod of his head. ‘That’s true in nature, sir,’ he agreed. ‘But we’re creating an artificial, controllable black hole – on a miniature scale. It grows for only a few seconds, then it evaporates and dies. We’ve calculated precisely how to stop its accretion.’

  ‘Our test is entirely automated, sir,’ cut in General Stone. ‘Highly advanced software personalities are controlling this entire operation. The delivery airplane is being flown independently by a software personality and each of these monitoring screens and commands points is also under the control of a virtual assistant. The humans here are merely supervising.’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ called the voice of a virtual assistant over the room’s PA system. Countdown digits appeared as an overlay on all the screens.

  ‘We’re go for the test,’ announced one of the human scientists seated at a computer display.

  *

  With a high-pitched whine, the compressor on board the Boeing 747 increased the atmospheres within the stainless steel container of xenon gas. It was ready to inject the vapour and suspended anti-matter nuclei directly into the nuclear beam.

  Had there been any human crew in the plane’s cockpit they would have seen what appeared to be a small town come into view in the middle of the desert. As it was, the virtual pilot in charge of the flight deck captured these images and fed them back to the virtual assistants who were running the experiment twelve miles away in the Chuksa Mountains. Other cameras inside the main cabin sent back views to accompany the streams of data being produced by the 231 separate instruments placed within the flying particle collider and its power sources.

  The massively-dense nuclei hurtling around the endless tube had now reached a speed of 180,000 miles per second – almost the speed of light itself. The Zilerium nuclei, of exceptional stability for their enormous atomic weight, clustered and re-clustered, mutually repelling, on their fantastic journey towards their destruction.

  As the countdown arrived at zero, the jet of xenon gas and electrically suspended anti-nuclei was fired directly into the path of the speeding nuclei, causing countless millions of head-on collisions – collisions at the enormous centre-of-mass energies required to generate a miniature black hole.

  In the 100,000 billion billionths of a second as the first collisions took place – a period of time similar to that in which the first ever particles were created in the original cosmic ‘Big Bang’ – the protons and neutrons and their anti-particles in the respective nuclei and anti-nuclei were broken down into their constituent components. Quarks of all varieties emerged – up and down, strange and charmed – as did bosons in all their peculiar manifestations; photons, gluons and the Ws and Zs. All grew together to form the ultra-dense quark soup not seen since the start of time.

  In this primal fireball of extreme energy-density space-time itself become plastic, just as the complex computer simulations had predicted. Then it fractured, opening the long-suspected portal to new dimensions. Immense gravity rushed in.

  In an instant, as matter and anti-matter imploded, an extreme gravitational force was generated – a force beyond the descriptive ability of

  conventional physics – to form a ten-dimensional energy-object.

  Then, under this intense, sustained and irresistible gravitational attraction, the atoms and molecules of the collider itself, and the surrounding machinery, and the plane which had contained it, broke down and collapsed into the event horizon of the minute man-made black hole – releasing vast amounts of thermonuclear energy as the atoms collided and crushed each other on their headlong rush into the singularity; molecules to atoms, atoms to ions, ions to nuclei, nuclei to nucleons, nucleons to quarks, all in a simultaneous instant. Then the sand and rocks of the desert itself began to be sucked into the gravitational maw.

  Within a few billionths of a second the vicious, voracious, insatiable black hole had grown to the size of a golf ball – a mass which already weighed a trillion tons.

  *

  Inside the control room, the President emitted a gasp as the vast sky above the Arizona desert seemed to explode with light. The burning core of brilliance was sustained, filling the room with luminous white radiation. Then, although the concrete command centre was built directly into the rock, the whole room vibrated as the f
irst energy waves shook the Chuksa mountains.

  The 3D screens around the room revealed that the mocked-up township had vanished and, as the ground-level cameras had themselves been sucked into the miniature black hole, the displays had automatically switched to satellite images. From eleven miles up, it looked as if a sibling sun was burning on the surface of the Arizona desert.

  ‘Evaporation and shut down in five seconds,’ announced a virtual assistant over the room’s PA system.

  Digital counters on the displays flicked down as the voice of the software personality counted away the seconds, ‘…three, two, one, zero. Shut down.’

  Everyone present in the room stared out at the enormous white fireball that still filled the sky. Then everything outside abruptly turned red and the sky seemed to twist into a magenta funnel as light itself was sucked into the newly created gravitational singularity. Everything in the command centre was bathed in an eerie red glow as light sped away from the observers, spinning and warping into red-shift.