Black Sun

President Henderson seemed to grasp this. “What you’re saying is that these stones are the same as those intersecting points on the floor, only in four dimensions.”

Moore felt he was getting somewhere. “Exactly. We can see and sense only the parts co

“Okay,” the president said. “For the first time some of this is starting to make sense.”

Across from Moore, Stecker rose to his feet.

“Mr. President, there’s another possibility to consider here,” he said. “One that relies on more than a wild theory, and in fact actually comes with direct evidence linking it to these stones.”

“Which is?” Moore asked, aggravated by Stecker’s untimely interruption.

Stecker didn’t respond directly to Moore. Instead he spoke into the camera lens, focusing on Henderson. “Mr. President, have you ever heard of the term geomagnetic reversal?”

“North Pole shifting?”

Stecker nodded and motioned for his scientist to make their case. “Talk to the president, Ernest.”

The man in the lab coat got up and cleared his throat. He seemed a little nervous in such company, clearing his throat twice before speaking.

“Over the last hundred million years the north and south magnetic poles have switched places dozens of times. The most recent shift occurred seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago, in an event we call Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. But in the billion years before that, the poles reversed on an almost random time frame, sometimes as quickly as forty or fifty thousand years, in other cases remaining stable for fifty million years or longer. Periods we call superchrons. The truth is that no one understands the timing or mechanism of these reversals.”

Moore studied the man, considering what he was saying and wondering where this was going.

“Now,” the man continued, adjusting his glasses and begi

The president interrupted. “All very interesting,” he said with undisguised frustration. “What the hell does it have to do with the stones?”

The CIA’s scientist gulped at a lump in his throat. “I’ll show you,” he said meekly and then went back to the computer and began tapping at the keys. A graph appeared on one of the flat screens in the lab; a remote screen in the White House displayed it as well. Across the bottom axis was a timeline, begi

Even before the CIA’s man explained the graph, Moore began to feel sick. What the hell were they getting at?

“There are fairly accurate measurements for both the field strength and the position of the north magnetic pole since the late eighteen hundreds,” the scientist explained. “This graph displays the magnitude of the pole’s movement by year.”

He pointed to the thick red line, cutting across the chart. “What we see here is the begi

He traced the line with a pointer. “And from there we see a continuing slow deterioration, with the north magnetic pole moving southward, approximately seven or eight miles per year over most years of the past century. A pace that quickened to over twenty miles per year in the last few years.”

A few more clicks on the computer and a second graph appeared, this one representing field strength, with the timeline now stretching back some three thousand years.

“As you can see, the field strength has decreased almost continuously from a high point achieved roughly two thousand years ago. As of last year, the earth’s magnetic field had weakened thirty-five percent from its peak, with almost half of that drop coming since the falloff in 1908.”

The year 1908 was reverberating through Moore’s mind, but he couldn’t say why.

A third chart with a more volatile line popped up on the screen. The time frame on this chart extended back only through 2009.

“This is the field strength over the last three years.”

Moore stared. There were two more dramatic drops and two minor spikes, but if the time index was right, he now knew what the CIA was getting at.

The field strength had dropped an additional 5 percent in the winter of 2010, the exact time when Danielle and what was left of her team had recovered the Brazil stone and brought it to Washington.

A small spike could be discerned, near the end of November of the current year, perfectly coinciding with the burst over the Arctic. And an additional large drop occurred at the far right edge of the chart. Moore guessed that would be tied into the event that had occurred a few days earlier, the same moment that Danielle had pulled the second stone from beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

After that latest drop, the earth’s magnetic field was down almost 50 percent in relative terms, and sitting at an all-time low for the last fifty thousand years.

Unless the data had been faked, even Moore could see that the stones were intimately co

Just in case the president hadn’t seen it yet, the scientist lowered the boom.

“As you can see, Mr. President, these dramatic reductions in field strength coincide exactly with two events: the NRI recovery of the stone from the Amazon and the event that took place here forty-eight hours ago. And just as incredibly, the survey data tells us that magnetic north has traveled south by over a hundred and forty miles in the past five months, ninety miles of that since November twenty-first.”

With Moore struck silent, Stecker took the spotlight.

“In one sense,” he said smoothly, “we think the NRI is actually right. The stones are drawing energy through some conduit beyond our understanding, beyond our ability to see, but I assure you, Mr. President, it ain’t coming from the future. It’s coming from right here, right now, in our current time frame. These stones are draining our magnetic field. It’s virtually collapsing before our eyes. Every time Moore’s people recover one of these stones and bring it out into the open, the situation grows a hell of a lot worse.”

“Damn,” the president said, clearly disturbed.

Stecker wasn’t done. “What really scares me is this, Mr. President. These stones are drawing all that energy to themselves, storing it perhaps, and when they release it … I don’t know about the end of the world, but it could be the end of the modern, electronic world as we know it.”

Moore felt like a lawyer who’d just been blindsided, wanting to know why this information hadn’t been disclosed. But this was no courtroom and no one cared if he was surprised. In some ways it made things worse. For the CIA to come up with something he and his team had not found made him look incompetent.

“Fine,” the president said. “Now, in practical terms what does a failing magnetic field do to us? It’s obviously happened before. Do we see any die-offs, any great extinctions like the dinosaurs?” He paused. “Arnold?”

Moore looked up, still reeling. “No, Mr. President,” he mumbled. “But our world is different than theirs. Our world depends on electrical power for absolutely everything that matters. And with no magnetic field, we are exposed to the solar wind.”

“Meaning?”

“An unending torrent of charged particles that will, over time, affect human tissue. But at a far quicker pace it will destroy the electrical grids, computers, processors, and any other device with modern circuitry. While it will not melt the earth, as some in Hollywood have suggested, a large solar flare or an event known as a coronal mass ejection could set us back to the stone ages. Or at least the late eighteen hundreds.”