Page 164 of The Secret of Secrets

To mitigate risk, all facilities using liquid helium, including hospitals with MRI machines, were required to install a “quench vent”—a ventilation pipe that ascended up through the roof of the building—to ensure that, in the event of an inadvertent helium leak, the rapidly expanding gas would have a safe alternate route to escape…rather than blowing up the building. Threshold’s quench vent was massive, but then again, so was the quantity of liquid helium stored down here.

The Golěm gazed again past the SMES to the twelve Cryofab flasks. More than twenty thousand liters of helium, he had calculated. The expansion potential was almost incalculable.

Catastrophic explosions with liquid helium, he had learned online, were fairly common—including SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and even a veterinary clinic in New Jersey whose MRI had a small leak and exploded.

The Golěm knew that if this SMES quenched unexpectedly, the liquid helium loaded into the system would instantly boil off in a torrent of expanding gas racing up the conduit and shooting skyward over Prague in a geyser of freezing-cold helium.

Most likely blasting off R2-D2’s head in the process.

The liquid helium loaded into the SMES machine at any time represented a very small portion of the total volume contained in the tanks. The Golěm could not begin to imagine what would happen if all the helium in this facility were released at once…converting from liquid to gas in an instant.

Such an event had never occurred. Ever. Anywhere.

There were too many fail-safes.

Helium flasks were extremely robust with multiple safety features. Built like giant Thermoses, their double-hulled “Dewar” design employed nature’s most efficient insulator—a pure vacuum—to ensure the liquid inside stayed cold enough never to convert to gas. For additional safety, each flask stored its liquid under extremely high pressure. This raised the helium’s boiling point, offering a wider margin of error before it hit critical temperature.

The flask’s final safety measure was a “rupture disk”—a tiny copper disk built into the shell of the tank. An intentional weak spot, the disk was calibrated to rupture if the internal pressure climbed too high…thus averting a cataclysmic tank explosion.

Although rupture disks were designed to explode outward, they would also rupture inward if the pressure outside a canister became too great. Of course, that never happened because nobody was ever careless enough to store liquid helium in an airtight space.

Considering these three fail-safes, the probability of multiple tank failures at the same moment carried a statistical probability of zero.

It simply could not happen.

Not without help.

Reflecting on the horrors inflicted on Sasha by Threshold, The Golěm took a final look at the quietly humming SMES device, savoring the irony. This machine was the secret source of Threshold’s power…and was about to become the agent of its destruction.

Chapter 104

Having entered the bio lab with Langdon, Katherine was carefully examining the sophisticated machine before her.

Artificial neurons don’t exist. Not yet.

This had always been Katherine’s belief…but now she was not so sure. While the machine did indeed look like an elaborate hydroponic incubator, she had no way to know, with her naked eye, what was in the vials of liquid.

It’s impossible…isn’t it?

Much of Katherine’s postgraduate work in brain science had centered on neurochemistry, studying the specific chemical mechanisms by which the brain’s neural network functioned. Artificial neurons, in concept, had first been proposed in 1943 by American scientists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts—but the realization of that concept had always seemed a distant dream. There was a common quip among biologists: Humans will inhabit Mars long before we build an artificial neuron.

“Check those manuals?” she said, motioning to a bookcase across the room. “See if you see anything about this incubator or what they’re growing in here. I’ll check the drawers.”

As Langdon headed to the bookcase, Katherine began rifling through a set of file drawers built into the room’s glistening worktable. Most meticulous laboratories, including the Institute of Noetic Sciences, created a “protocol book” for every project—a hard copy set of procedural guidelines to ensure consistency and reproducibility of results. This is what Katherine hoped to find, but she found nothing of much interest within the drawers.

It was not until she discovered a recessed “flat tray” drawer in the table that she found anything promising…including a heavy black three-ring binder. Although it was far too thick to be the protocol book she was looking for, she felt a chill when she saw the words emblazoned on the cover.

Top Secret

Property of Central Intelligence Agency

Katherine immediately hoisted the binder onto the table and opened it.

Please tell us something…

As she skimmed the first few pages, she was startled to learn that the authors of this binder came from the prestigious Laboratory of Organic Electronics (LOE) in Sweden. The CIA recruited from LOE?! In the quest to produce artificial neurons, LOE was one of the world’s leading think tanks. Katherine had mentioned their Venus flytrap breakthrough only minutes ago!

Spellbound, she flipped through the various sections of the binder, reading the headers. She saw a number of familiar topics, but then her eye hit on one that stopped her cold.