Thompson shrugged and sipped his gin. "I don't know much about Commerce, I suppose. Mostly about hunting and fishing licenses, wildfires, and what to do if you stumble across a bear."
"What do you do?" Mackey asked, suddenly interested in all kinds of life-saving knowledge.
"Yell at it, and don't back down."
Parsons laughed. "Good advice for bureaucrats, too! How about you, Fred? Tell us more about the new engineer!"
"I'm in the Electromagnetic Bureau, Domestic Interference Engineering Section. Currently working on doing Part Six compliance for shielding components. Current batch is meant for P-car sensor arrays. A good crop—composite material. That combined with some phase cancellation circuits, and the new sensors should be nearly impervious to interference from track-side sources. The real genius is, you see—"
Hopper took the liberty of interrupting him. "Mr. Mackey is Level G certified, and it seems that recognizing otherwise faceless bureaucrats is a real specialty of his."
Parsons sipped his cocktail. "I thought you preferred a more direct approach than bureaucratic channels, Grace." He gave her a knowing glance. Mackey suddenly thought of the strange plastic pistol that he assumed was still in the Assistant Secretary's briefcase, currently on the floor between her leg and the cabin wall. Hopper said nothing and took a swig of her drink.
Parsons turned back to Mackey, cocking his head to one side. Mackey was again struck by the notion of how even in his mid-fifties, the man simply beamed an elusive charm. "So, Fred—only Level G? Nothing higher than that?"
Mackey wrinkled his brow a bit. "Level G is the highest rating for Bureaucratic Literacy. Not to say—I certainly could stand some refreshing, I am somewhat rusty on intra-cabinet procedures, and more mnemonic conditioning is always useful—but that is the highest qualification."
Parsons laughed again, throwing his head back against the pilot's seat and taking a sip of martini. As they passed the end of the point, he disengaged the autopilot to throw them into a banking turn to the east between the Santa Barbara coast and the Channel Islands, all while still managing to hold onto his glass by the very end of the stem. Once settled on the new course, he re-engaged the automatic controls, and took another sip.
"That's the highest non-classified certification, you mean. My goodness, Grace—operational security aside, you have to let poor Fred here in on some of our secrets if you want him to help out!"
Hopper waved her hand dismissively towards the pilot's seat, although Mackey couldn't tell if it was because Parsons was pulling his leg or because she was dodging the question.
Parsons continued. "You look like a bright young man, Fred. You no doubt know your history, all about the Administrations, and Commerce and Transportation, and how we got to be in the mess we're all in today. But there is more to it than just Technocratic Administrationism ideology, more to it than inter-Departmental feuding. There are secret orders to the world, which although invisible to us, affect our every motion."
The rocket man balanced his elbow on the seat rest, raising his glass and placing his opposite hand casually upon the inside of his balanced elbow. Mackey looked over Parsons' shoulder to make sure Ross was still keeping an eye on things.
"We've known for some time about a secret society out there, pulling strings. Mostly in Commerce. But their agents have infiltrated Transportation as well. Whoever it is, they aren't entirely government. The feud, the ideological debate, the history of the Departments, the Administrations: all that is a ruse. It's a distraction, get it? This secret society has their own motivations for directing the course of events, for setting us down this narrative course of ‘the Federal Government as a battle between two divided houses.' We don't know what their motivations are, but we know it is far bigger than that. It isn't about ideology at all, you see. It is about the occult knowledges. Ideology is just the surface! It's only two dimensions! Beneath it, invisible to most people, are the larger experiments, where the real urges that move the world exist.
"There's a purpose behind all of it. Like I said, the Census Service researches astrology. The Weather Service, Fortean phenomena and other odd atmospheric occurrences. The Park Service, vortexes. The Forest Service is working on communication with animals," he pointed his drink at Thompson, "in ways other than yelling at them. On our side, the Infrastructure Bureau researches sacred geometry. The ASTB, alchemy and the harmonies of the spheres and angelic hierarchies. Over in the Electromagnetic Bureau, you work on psychic phenomena. And the Postal Bureau has always had a certain fascination with trying to predict the future, whether or not that is actually possible—"
Hopper was rolling her eyes. Catching her expression, Parsons threw up his hands, though not spilling his drink. "Oh come on, Grace!" he implored. "This isn't classified! Just no one ever talks about it."
Mackey responded cautiously, even as his mind was carefully filing this information away. "I'm fairly certain I've never seen any research on psychic phenomena at the Electromagnetic Bureau."
"Of course not! No one can come out and say that is what they are really working on, because then people would want to see results. They'd want proof, and most of the time, that proof doesn't exist. The whole point of the occult structure is that it is hidden, beneath the surface. You say, ‘I use alchemy,' and then everyone wants to see you turn lead into gold. But it doesn't work that way. The results aren't so tangible. The results are in the entirety, not in the specific. You yourself are not researching psychic phenomena. Your scientific work at the Bureau, with interference testing and so forth, are the results of the larger experiment in psychic phenomena. You follow?"
Mackey looked at Thompson, trying to see how he was taking this in. It was hard to keep up, and Parsons kept going around in circles. Maybe Parsons was just nutty. Some scientists could be like that, he supposed. But then, why wasn't Hopper at all concerned?
"Okay, I'll start with a better example. Take the P-car, for instance. It changed the world, they say, everything in our society is because of the P-car. But what does the P-car run on? The track, of course. But not just that. What about the electricity? What about your radar components, and the apportionment of the electromagnetic spectrum? Where do the motors come from? The computers? What about all the bureaucracy that greases those gears, that keeps the infrastructure functioning from one day to the next? And then if you admit that behind the ‘revolutionary invention' of the P-car there are all these other connected systems, what lies behind them?"
Parsons was gazing out of the cockpit windscreen, still speaking back to the cabin, but also speaking to somewhere else, out beyond the aircraft, in the atmosphere. "The conflicts we see in the world are representative of conflicts on the immaterial plane. Amateurish sacrifices, secret spy satellites, maybe even the explosion in the test trench. It's all part of a bigger narrative. As above, so below. Someone, somewhere, wanted us to be at this point, on this route, at this time. We don't know why, and maybe we never will."
"That's a nice speech, Jack," Ross kidded. "Have you been rehearsing it long?"
"All fifty-six years I've been on this earth," he answered, soberly. "Maybe even longer than that."
Hopper finished her vodka soda and placed the glass in a form-fitting holder in the cabin wall. "Don't let Jack's metaphysical tendencies overwhelm you, Mackey. We may not yet know what to make of all of these events, but that's how this business works. It is not a conspiracy—not necessarily. At least not outside of the scope of the everyday conspiracies of government. There are unknowns, and we seek to uncover those unknowns. Whether it is human malice, undiscovered principles of nature, or merely Commerce trying to cover its own ass, we come up with a theory and engineer a solution. Our theory only needs to be the size of the problem at hand, not a full cosmology."
Parsons finished his drink as well and, stowing the glass, prepared to take over the controls as the Vail-22 overflew the oil platforms of the S
anta Barbara Channel. "That may be so, but no individual problem is ever separate from the wider view. Back in 1952, I was almost killed by an explosion. Unsolved mystery, according to the Postal Inspectors. The bomb killed another rocketry specialist. A German man, by the name of Von Braun. Recruited by Roosevelt in 1937, he was one of the finest rocketry minds in the world. Better than me, maybe even better than Mary. If it had been me in the Postal Administration lab rather than him, I wouldn't be sitting here today. A freak matter of chance, you might say. You can't second guess the forking paths of fate. But at the same time, who planted the bomb? Who was its target? Did things go according to plan, or did the plan fail? Unsolved, they said. Without any larger theory, it was only an isolated crime, they said. But you can't put the energy back into the bomb. Someone knows what happened. Someone's will had a deadly effect that day. Right or wrong, lucky or unlucky, the microcosm and the macrocosm are always connected."
Mackey couldn't help but wonder what his father would make of all this. The man had flown electronic warfare planes for the Postal Administration during World War Two, and a die-hard Technocrat like his father would blame the Commerce Department for any wrongdoing. There was an enemy in the government all right, according to the senior Mackey. And the Commercialists were it. The notion of the Commerce Department assaulting and murdering members of the Transportation Department fit right in with the old man's worldview.
Orthogonal Procedures was one thing, but what about these occult procedures? Metaphysics, alchemy, and astrology? Fred had never heard his father mention anything like that. And ten years under his belt at the Electromagnetic Bureau, he had never seen anything like that. Until yesterday. Mackey had seen what had happened on the hilltop in the Sierras, and his father had not. How would his father have reacted to such a situation? What was more important to his father—that everything that the Administrations had done made sense according to science, or that the worldview was diametrically opposed to Commercialism? If metaphysical beliefs were ever a public tenet of the Administrations, would his father have accepted them on principle, or would his faith in Technocratic Administrationism have been diminished?
It was interesting to pose these questions, perhaps. Especially after a couple gins, while strapped to an aircraft made from four ceiling fans and piloted by a charming lunatic. But Mackey knew from experience that he could ask himself rhetorical questions all day, but without a lab bench to sit at and begin working out problems, he wouldn't get any further than watching the clouds.
The fact remained that all of Mackey's lab work involved electromagnetic energies, not psychic energies. The equations, the models, the testing procedures, the technology in the field: it all operated according to physical laws, and never had anyone on any level in the department suggested that their work was anything else. Even if it was just a metaphor, as Hopper had said, Mackey had never heard one whisper of it. He tried to imagine the other engineers in his department, like the brilliant Lynn Thacker, talking the way Parsons did. It was antithetical to the entire way the Section and the Bureau functioned. It was completely outside of the mechanism of their bureaucracy to consider such notions.
But maybe that was what Parsons was talking about, when he said that the microcosm and the macrocosm were linked. The mind has to know what the hands are doing, but not the other way around. Parsons was one of the ASTB's top scientists. Hopper, despite her eye-rolling, was one of the top officials of the Department, and certainly had her own secrets. Ross was a ballistics engineer who not only was a pilot but designed her own machine gun. These were important people, the heaviest bureaucrats that Mackey had ever spent time with. And if they spoke this way . . .
The sacrifice in the Sierras was certainly an indicator of something—though Mackey couldn't say exactly what. Maybe there were classified Bureaucratic Literacy levels, or maybe there weren't. Perhaps someone had wanted to sacrifice them to a Babylonian god and goddess, or maybe it was just a plain old murder. Maybe the Commerce Department was planning some sort of scheme against Transportation, or maybe it was all a misunderstanding. But to Mackey, Orthogonal Procedures seemed like it might be its own form of occult belief. It didn't so much matter, he decided, whether one believed in the conspiracy or not. There were still secrets. And there were still murders. Two days ago, at his desk in the Electromagnetic Bureau, he hadn't seen any research into psychic phenomena, but he also wouldn't have believed in anything he'd seen since.
These thoughts bouncing around his head with no resolution, Mackey dropped the inquiry and looked out the window. Coming around the edge of Point Dume, Parsons flew the craft along the coastline, below the peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains. Coming clearer through the marine layer haze, Los Angeles loomed into view. The sprawling city had the most tangled web of P-car interchanges Mackey had ever seen, like the roots of a forest seen from under the ground. Skirting the Los Angeles Airport, Parsons turned north before the cluster of skyscrapers around Century City and joined the aerial traffic lanes following the thick belt of tracks over the mountains. Over the twisted loops of residential tracks and houses ensconced in the narrow canyons, the San Fernando Valley became visible.
A dense net of arterials, laid over the larger freight lines cutting back and forth across the valley, wove the city together like a thick carpet. Along the entrenched tracks below, able to handle formations of freight cars three times the track gauge of a P-car, Mackey saw the immense Postal Bureau factory complexes, stretching in a thick band from Canoga Park to Burbank.
These plants turned out new P-cars, aircraft, spacecraft, and all of the requisite technological pieces by the thousands and millions. Supply trains hauled these wares back and forth between the mammoth plants, and then outward to the rest of the world, returning to drag new raw materials inward and complete the supply chain. Then, once the produced technology was powered up and connected to the system, it all came hurtling back.
Aircraft crisscrossing the sky, carrying express mail and executives of the vast bureaucracy that accounted for every piece. Spacecraft ascending and then returning from orbit like flame-propelled elevators. P-cars whirring, stretching over the surface of the planet on their hairline tracks, transporting the hundreds of thousands of workers in those plants and the offices to their homes, to the grocery stores, to the pedestrian malls, to the cinemas, and to the sports complexes, scattered over the surface of the valley. And the rest, the minor bits, the smaller, less notable technology that filled in gaps to build the interconnected masonry of the modern world: radio earphones, coffee machines, synth organs, parking consoles, electro-books, and bedside clocks.
The city below really was like nothing quite so much as a circuit board. A single plane connecting many specially designed components into a complex circuit, each feature across its compact surface playing a particular role in the function the unit was created to fulfill. Passive components, like housing developments, shopping malls, and factories, each becoming a valve in the system once the current was applied to them. And between this dense tiling of components, Mackey watched the current flow—millions of P-cars, shuttling in every direction along the tracks that completed the system into a functional circuit. And below that, running through the coils of wire that made up the P-car motors, was the actual electricity, not just the metaphorical current. As Parsons had described, Mackey conceded.
It was, he realized, a fairly incredible cosmology that technology had created, over the course of only fifty years. From the first rudimentary Pierstorff systems in 1920, to daily rockets to the moon in 1970. It was almost unnerving to try and imagine where they might be in another fifty years. That some sort of occult metaphysics might be behind it was almost too simple of an answer.
Mackey, occupied with his thoughts, did not see a small white dot slide in between the aircraft, tailing them only a few hundred yards back. The trailing craft was small, too small to contain a cockpit, and fit in with the flurry of other aerial traffi
c transiting the busy paths above the sunny San Fernando Valley such that none of them even saw it amongst the confusing brightness of the Southern California sky.
After Action Report PA-954
Date: February 6, 1941
Action Date: January 30, 1941
Location: Karlsruhe Sector
Map Grid: [REDACTED]
Mission: Acquisition of Technological Prototypes and Personnel
Officer in Command: Postmaster Hansen
Narrative: Reports of in-bound train carrying prototypes and personnel from [REDACTED] containing potentially cutting edge [REDACTED]. Upon reviewing intel, P-Col. Grace Hopper argued for permission to lead the mission herself, taking a hand-selected platoon of engineers and other unlisted operatives.
While the circumstances of the mission becoming compromised are still under investigation by Postal Inspectors and are therefore classified, Hopper's platoon came under heavy fire from fighter aircraft and perhaps as much as a company of regular Wehrmacht troops upon crossing the Rhine, still some miles from their rally point with Echo Company of the 501st Combat Transportation Division. With many of her troops killed or wounded, P-Col. Hopper fought her way through enemy lines single-handedly to capture an armed off-rail transporter.
After commanding her engineers to reprogram several railed transporters to create a distraction, P-Col. Hopper and her unit not only managed to escape the ambush, but also used the off-rail transporter to drag the target rail car with [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] three miles down an unmapped siding, where they managed to meet up with Echo Company, using either sheer luck or communication means unknown to arrange the rendezvous.
For quick thinking and bravery under fire that not only saved the lives of many of her personnel but still managed to accomplish the mission objectives, I submit P-Col. Hopper's name for consideration for the award of Master's Stamp, and Silver Stamps to each of her engineers. Hopper is a credit to the entire Postal Administration, and is an example of exactly the sort of bravery and leadership that we need among all Allied Forces in Europe.
Orthogonal Procedures Page 10
