Time Sniffers (A Sample)

"What?" my eyes question him. His eyes answer back.

He drops his gaze down to the bottom corner of the right-hand page. My heart skips a beat. There-the same strange shape I had seen in the milk, and on the dry erase board. Dylan tugs on my shirtsleeve and I follow him out the front door. When I went out to drag the empty recycling bins up the driveway at lunchtime, I hadn't noticed it, but now it glares at me like a neon sign.

Pine needles lie strewn all over the driveway, but right in front of the concrete steps leading to the front door the wind has blown them together, grouping them in a thick wad. There is no mistaking this for some random pattern. I know science and can tell when something defies randomness.

I look at Dylan's face. A smile inches up-the first I've seen in weeks. He points to the binder and I again look at that page-where my mom had drawn a symbol alongside a notation on an experiment. It looks like a mountain, an upside-down V, but with the legs curving slightly outward. I flip through more pages and see that symbol over and over. And then I notice it drawn beside another sign and I recognize the Greek.

Lambda. The symbol for dark matter.

The other is Omega. Next to those two symbols my mother had written, ΩΛ= cosmological constant. A volume of space has the same intrinsic fundamental energy as matter . . . I stop as a shiver runs down my spine.

My mom had talked to me often about her experiments, about energy just out of reach in subspace or some other dimension and how to tap into it. I remember her telling me not long ago, with a flush of excitement, that she had found a curious link between dark energy and what Einstein referred to as the cosmological constant-or vacuum energy. Einstein couldn't accept the possibility that the universe could collapse in on itself, so he proposed a density and pressure associated with "empty" space, to counteract the gravitational force of matter and energy. That's why it's called "vacuum pressure." All that empty space really not empty, but made of dark energy and matter exerting influence on us.

My mom had found a way to tap into that energy making up 74 percent of our universe-energy that could possibly be harnessed in ways that would stagger the imagination and save the world from ruin.

Think about it. Those laser beams in the lab-the ones now disintegrated in a pile of dust-created temperatures of more than a million degrees! The pressure of those colliding atoms equaled more than a million times the earth's atmosphere, similar to that found in stars and the cores of giant planets. That's why the DOE amped up funding for the laser facility.