Delta G. David J. Crawford

he let the fuel run out in the generator while he was off loading the C-130. They can’t get it restarted. The battery is nearly drained.” Dave looked over at the generator. He wasn’t a mechanical engineer, but he grew up in northwest Ohio and knew how to jump start a clunker to get her started on a winter morning. He asked if the snowcat had a set of jumper cables. He was surprised to hear from all the men standing around him, “What are they?” He thought to himself, “You’ve got to be kidding. All these PhDs oozing with brain power and they didn’t know how to jump start an engine.” They were actually contemplating having a new battery flown in from Sonde.

      “Okay, gentlemen, this is what we’re going to do. This is a standard twelve volt marine battery. Have Jorgen open up the hood or whatever you call it on the snowcat.” He found an extension cord plugged into one of the flood lights. Just like his dad had taught him, he always carried a pocket knife on him. This time he had to dig through three layers as he had left it in his fatigue pants pocket under his iron pants. He cut off the ends and then peeled back the insulation a couple of inches, exposing the copper wire. Jorgen had lifted the cab over the diesel engine. Luckily Dave spotted a couple of C-clamps in the top tray of a tool box. He grabbed them and walked out to the snowcat. He clamped a wire to the positive terminal and then walked back into the derrick shelter. He clamped the other end of the cable to the positive terminal of the generator battery. He walked back outside and clamped the other wire to the negative terminal on the snowcat. He then walked back in and looped the leftover cable around the generator frame for a ground. Just then Timken re-entered the tent. “Are you sure you know what you are doing, Captain? This is some delicate machinery.” Dave was a little annoyed at this point, “Delicate my ass, this is a standard 60 kilowatt, 240 volt, three phase Cummins generator set. This ain’t rocket science. I should know. Okay, crank her over. She should start up.” Boris turned the lever and sure enough the generator cranked over and sputtered to life. He let it idle a minute or so and then threw another switch. Presto!! The lights came on. He figured he’d earned his pay with this little piece of technical knowhow. Obviously, this crowd had never had to jump start a ‘65 Mercury in a dark parking lot at ten below before. Piece of cake.

      CHAPTER 5

      Ancient Blue Ice Cubes

      With his new found status as a mechanical genius, Rapp and Timken were duly impressed. They opened up a little more to their newfound friend. The drilling continued for a couple of weeks and all was going well. Ice cores were taken every five hundred feet and sent back to Denmark for analysis. Scientists in Europe were studying climate change, looking for pollutants, volcanic eruptions, and carbon dioxide content all going back almost 100,000 years.

      One day Rapp and Timken entered the site bar. Vince and Dave watched as they uncovered a contraband bottle of Russian vodka and poured the contents into several glasses. Rapp announced, “Now for the piece de resistance.” He pulled out a large metal thermos and grabbed a set of tongs from inside his jacket. He opened the thermos and then grabbed a chunk of blue ice and dropped it into the glass of vodka. The ice immediately snapped, crackled, and popped. “What you see here gentlemen is an exothermic reaction from a compressed nitrogen oxygen mixture reacting with an ambient ethanol concoction.”

      Timken held out a martini glass and said, “Or, in other words, please join us in a salute with some vodka and Greenlandic ice cubes that have been compressed from being buried under two miles of ice for over a hundred thousand years. We have just completed our core drilling.” Dave grabbed a glass and was amazed to watch the blue ice cubes pop like a Fizzie when he was a kid. The air bubbles trapped in the ice were under great pressure and had not seen the light of day for a hundred millennium. They all raised their fizzing glasses as Timken made a toast. “To unraveling the secrets of the universe, may we have the intelligence to understand them, the wisdom to guard them, and the humanity to use them wisely.” To this everyone replied back with a hearty Danish, “Skol!!”

      “We are on schedule. The holes are drilled to the proper depth and the alignment is well within tolerance. We will lower the gravity meters in the morning and start our experiments on Wednesday.”

      “What exactly will you be looking for?” Dave asked. “I’ve seen your instrumentation shack and understand the concept. But how sensitive are these meters and how do you know when you are successful in finding gravity waves?”

      In a not too exaggerated Russian accent, Timken replied, “We have our ways, my good Captain. Besides we are really looking for the torsional waves. It appears that the Earth’s magnetic field pulls torsional waves into both the North and South Poles. Torsional waves align themselves perpendicular to the magnetic field. However, torsional waves are coupled to gravity waves. Unlike gravity, electrical fields and magnetic fields are coupled 90 degrees apart. Gravitational waves are coupled at a little over 68.75 degrees to torsional waves, half the golden angle. This famous angle is found all throughout nature and the universe.”

      Timken took another sip of vodka and continued, “There are many other strange manifestations of spin-torsion interactions also at the subatomic level we call nuclear spin waves or nuclear wave resonance which are the basis of the fifth force of nature or unified field.”

      “We now know that gyroscopes and gyroscopic forces can generate and are also affected by torsional waves. Experiments with gyroscopes have found slight but measurable variations of the gyroscope’s weight depending on the angular velocity and the direction of rotation. Even more bizarre, fall-time of freely falling spinning gyroscopes also varies depending on the angular velocity and the direction of rotation, resulting in microgravity. This effect is even more noticeable at the poles to a small degree with the rotation of the planet Earth. In effect, gravity here is polarized through the frame-dragging effect of large rotating masses coupling angular momentum, inertia, and T-waves.”

      As the evening wore on, a couple more bottles of contraband vodka and a bottle of Norwegian Aquavit (Viking Firewater) made their rounds. Half the complex was in the site bar making toasts to everything from Ronald Reagan and the Space Shuttle, to boobs and babes. Dave was reassured that the regs he was sent out here to enforce, did not say anything about passing around free liquor. The regs only mentioned it was not permissible to sell anything but beer at the site bar, with the funds generated to be used to purchase recreational equipment. Since he was a SAC-trained killer, he had to go by the letter of the law and he deemed no regulations were being violated.

      Rapp and Timken were feeling no pain and started opening up even more and more to Dave. He was not feeling any pain either. However, he held back some and had the feeling that the good doctors were not telling him the whole story of what they were up to. They were sending out way too much crypto radio traffic to be supporting an above board scientific experiment. Now was a good time to pump them for some answers.

      In a slightly slurred Russian accent, Timken blurted, “You know, Captain, this whole thing started about eighty years ago in Siberia.”

      “What ‘thing’ would that be, Dr. Timken?”

      “This whole thing with torsional waves and antimatter, of course. Have you not ever heard of the Tunguska event?”

      “Wasn’t that supposedly a huge meteorite or comet that struck somewhere in your home country at the turn of the century?”

      “I assure you, Captain, it was certainly not a comet or meteorite, and there is nothing “supposedly” about this event. It really happened. Back in the summer of 1908, the explosion, as you call it, leveled over 800 square miles of forest and knocked down over 60 million trees. This is more than five times the size of the Mount Saint Helen’s eruption. It occurred in a vastly remote and relatively unpopulated part of western Siberia about five hundred miles northwest of Lake Baikal. There were witnesses and even a few casualties.”

      “What do you think it was, if it wasn’t a meteorite or comet? From what I remember reading, whatever it was did not leave an impact crater, implying it was a massive air burst.”

      “Well, Captain, being that we are comrades now, and in the spirit of glasnost, not to mention the spirits of vodka and Aquavit, I am about to let you in on a little secret. The Tunguska event was in fact an extraterrestrial