Chapter Forty-Eight
They left the ruined church and started making their way back along the leafy path through the woods. There was a closeness between them now that hadn’t been there before, and it warmed him more than the June sun streaming through the trees.
‘How much do you know about science?’ she asked him as they walked slowly side by side.
‘Just what I’ve picked up here and there,’ he answered.
‘You never studied it, then?’
‘I studied theology, then war. Why?’
‘I studied science,’ she told him. ‘Physics. University of Geneva was where I took my first degree. When I graduated I went to Bonn for my PhD.’
He stared at her in surprise. ‘How does someone with a science doctorate end up selling pottery?’
‘Because I happen to give a shit about scientific integrity. Science is meant to be the pure pursuit of knowledge for the good of the planet and its occupants, you know? But of course that’s not the way it works. Like when a big telecommunications corporation uses bribes and threats to suppress studies that prove carcinogenic effects from mobile phone radiation. Or when astrophysics research projects get mysteriously shut down because someone inconveniently showed up major flaws in the Big Bang Theory. Little things like corruption and hypocrisy, I kind of have a problem with. I’d rather be helping Franz to sell his art than be part of that fucking machine. All it does is serve the establishment.’
‘You’re an idealist,’ he said.
‘Something wrong with that?’
‘Not at all. I’ve had the same problem all my life.’
‘Then you understand why I quit my career. But before that, it was my whole life. I was eighteen when I went away to Geneva. Maximilian hated me being away from home, but he was pleased I was following in his footsteps.’
‘How so?’
‘You didn’t know? Before he made all his money, way back, he trained in chemistry and physics. Was pretty talented at it, too. That’s what got him started in business – when he was a student he patented a heart drug that got taken up by a big pharmaceutical company and made him rich. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘off I went. I had everything money could buy. Maximilian bought me a luxury apartment in Geneva. I had a sports car, a fat allowance. Everything except freedom. He wouldn’t let me have friends or go to parties with the other students. He always seemed to know what I was doing, like he was having me followed. Insisted I always came straight home for vacations and couldn’t leave until term began again. That’s why I was there, the summer after the end of my first year, when I overheard the phone call.’
‘What phone call?’
‘Between him and his brother Karl. Not long before poor old Karl died. Shame, I liked him. Maximilian had been collecting antiquities for years by then, and he was telling his brother about these documents he’d found by chance at some auction.’
‘You mean the Kammler papers?’
She nodded. ‘Of course, back then I’d never heard of Kammler. But he was telling Karl what an amazing discovery it was. Amazing and worrying, and how he’d been sitting up nights reading the stuff, becoming obsessed with it. I could hear Karl’s voice on the speakerphone. He told Maximilian that if this stuff was even half true, he’d be out of business and that it was best to lock it away and not let anyone else see it. He was kind of joking, but I could tell that Maximilian was taking it really seriously. He was scared.’
‘I don’t understand. What was it about the Kammler documents that was spooking him so badly?’
They’d reached the office. Storm left them to go sniffing round the buildings, and Ben led Ruth inside.
‘That’s what I’m going to show you,’ she replied. ‘And it’s going to blow your mind.’
‘I’ve heard that before,’ he said, thinking of Lenny Salt.
‘Just wait and see.’
Ben fired up the laptop on his desk. As it whirred into action, he ran his eye over the pile of mail that was stacked up beside it. He was about to sweep the whole lot aside when he noticed the official Steiner logo on the envelope.
‘That looks familiar,’ Ruth said.
Ben tore it open, remembering the letter that Dorenkamp had mentioned. It was from Steiner’s lawyer. An invoice for forty thousand euros in respect of damages incurred to property during Ben’s brief period of employment. The letter finished tartly by warning that ‘If the outstanding sum is not paid promptly within fourteen days, there will be further legal action and possible criminal charges.’
He tossed it down on the desk. Ruth read it and whistled. ‘Even at my worst, I only managed to smash a few of his windows. What the hell did you do?’
‘I had an argument with a smoke alarm. Now let’s see what you have to show me.’
‘Get ready,’ she said. ‘When you see this, everything you thought you knew about the modern world is going to change.’ She sat in the swivel chair and he watched over her shoulder as her fingers rattled over the keys. She quickly entered a website URL and a box flashed up on the screen asking for a password. She rattled the keys again and hit ENTER, and the site opened up. Its design was basic, homemade, and Ben realised right away that its only function was as a repository for data files, secure storage for large amounts of information that could be accessed only by a chosen few.
‘This is access only,’ she said. ‘Not open to the public. Rudi created it, and we uploaded all our research stuff onto it. I’ve never shown it to anyone on the outside.’ She scrolled down an index of files, all with coded names that made no sense to Ben. ‘You’re a big boy,’ she said, selecting one and clicking on it. ‘I think you can handle it if I throw you right in at the deep end.’
As Ben watched, a video file loaded up onscreen and then began to play. The video seemed to have been filmed in some kind of warehouse. Bare brick walls, concrete floor.
‘You’re looking at a storage facility on the edge of Frankfurt,’ Ruth explained. ‘We hired it cheap, no questions.’
‘Who’s filming this?’
‘I’m holding the camera. Franz was there too, operating the gear. A few other guys, too. All witnesses to what happened there.’
‘Franz, the potter?’
‘He wasn’t always a potter. He was my colleague at Frankfurt University, where we were both teaching applied physics at the time this was filmed.’
As Ben watched, the camera panned slowly across a massive bank of equipment that looked as if someone had salvaged it from a 1950s military base or the set of some antiquated science-fiction movie. Lights flashed, the display of an oscilloscope glowed green, the needles on gauges pulsed up and down. Banks of diodes and buttons and dials, wires trailing everywhere. The equipment was emitting an electrical hum. The camera panned across to reveal more of the warehouse, and more equipment wired together across twenty yards of the concrete floor.
‘This was all stuff we bought as junk, borrowed or stole wherever we could and rigged up ourselves,’ Ruth explained. ‘There’s a Van de Graaff generator, a bunch of tuning capacitors, and that thing there that looks like a giant dumbbell is a Tesla coil. Nothing fancy or expensive. That’s the beauty of it.’
Ben didn’t reply, watching without comprehension of what he was seeing. In an empty space a few metres from the machinery were two large items that could only be described as scrap metal. One was a huge rusting cast-iron hulk of an old mangle that looked as though it had been dragged out of a river and probably weighed over seventy kilos. Next to it was a truck axle and differential, complete with double wheels. Beside the axle lay a small dark object that Ben couldn’t make out at first, then realised was a plain black baseball cap.
‘What is this all about?’ he asked.
‘Just watch.’
Some voices could be heard offscreen from behind the camera. Then someone went ‘Shh’ and the room fell into a hush. The hum from the equipment grew louder. Lights began to flash faster. The readouts on the dials went wild.
‘It’s starting,’
Ruth said. ‘You’re going to be amazed.’
Ben watched closely.
Nothing was happening.
‘I don’t see anything so spe—’ he began.
And his voice trailed off in mid-word and his eyes opened wide as the baseball cap, the truck axle and the enormous mangle all suddenly sailed weightlessly up into the air.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The items hovered there, levitating without support. Ben stared hard at the screen, searching for tell-tale wires that might explain how this trickery was being done. But there were no wires, and what happened next made his jaw drop. While the baseball cap and the mangle floated in mid-air, the massive truck axle started to rotate slowly around on an invisible pivot. Then it suddenly took off, flashing across the warehouse faster than the eye could follow and smashing itself into the far wall with a loud crash and a cloud of masonry dust. A solid lump of metal, half a ton or more, zipping through the air like a lightweight arrow.
Propelled, apparently, by nothing.
At that point, the video clip came to an end, the image of the axle’s impact freezing on the screen. ‘We turned everything off then,’ she said. ‘Aborted the experiment. We couldn’t control the movement or direction of the objects, and it was just too dangerous to continue. Then we packed up the gear and got the hell out of there before the warehouse owners discovered the damage to the wall.’
Ben tore his gaze away from the screen and turned to her. ‘This isn’t for real,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be faked.’
‘Come on. Open your eyes. To fake that on camera would cost millions. It would take the kind of CGI special effects technology they use in the movies. Did that experiment look that well funded to you? No, Ben, this is real. And there’s more.’
He looked at her, studied her face for traces of a lie and could see she was absolutely serious. ‘OK. That was impressive. But what the hell was it?’
‘It’s not a magic trick,’ she replied, allowing a smile. ‘It’s scientific reality. What I’ve just shown you was the most successful AG experiment Franz and I ever achieved.’
‘AG?’
‘Anti-gravity. The next one we did was a disaster. Nothing worked properly. Soon after that, the university cottoned on to what we were doing and found out that we’d borrowed some equipment from their labs without permission. We got sacked for conducting dangerous, unorthodox experiments – for which read experiments that the academic establishment and its corporate paymasters don’t want the world to know about.’
Ben shook his head in confusion. ‘Hold on. I thought that what you were going to show me had to do with the Kammler papers – stuff dating back to the 1940s.’
Ruth tapped the screen with her finger. ‘That’s exactly what this is, Ben. Harnessing hidden energies, tapping into the power of the ether. That’s what Kammler’s work is all about.’
‘It sounds more like science fiction. Something from the future.’
‘Wrong. Scientists have been talking about it for centuries. Benjamin Franklin said in 1780 that “We may learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transportation.”’
‘How did you get into this stuff?’ he asked, still reeling from what he’d just seen and fighting to make sense of it.
‘Remember I told you how I’d overheard Maximilian’s phone call that time, when I was a student? Well, this is the stuff he was telling his brother about. As soon as my vacation was over and I went back to university, I started digging through every science text I could find that could explain what it was all about. Of course, the tutors did all they could to discourage me. It was years before I started seeing the deeper implications, and understanding that this radical, incredible thing was based on a complex phenomenon called Zero Point Energy.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Not many people have. That’s for two reasons. One, because the physics of it makes Einstein’s relativity look like first-year maths. Secondly, because there are a lot of rich folks out there who stand to gain if this thing stays a secret. Zero Point Energy is, basically, free energy.’
He pointed at the screen. ‘So you’re saying Kammler’s research was to make stuff float about?’
‘There’s much more to it than that,’ she said. ‘OK, I’ll try to make it simple. As Einstein showed, we need to think of the universe and everything in it as an infinite soup of energy. Including you and me. We might think we’re real and solid, but in reality we’re just floating clouds of electrons. All that’s stopping us from falling apart, or disappearing through the floor, is the interaction of electromagnetic forces. We’re literally made up of and surrounded by gigantic, limitless amounts of energy.’
Ben frowned, absorbing the ideas.
‘Now, when it comes to trying to exploit natural resources for human civilisation, our technology is limited to using the crudest methods imaginable. Fossil fuels are inefficient, wasteful and harmful to the planet. And they’re running out fast. But imagine if we could tap into the natural energies that surround us, literally pulling power out of the ether. We’d be rewriting the future of the planet. Each home with its own little Zero Point Energy reactor, providing unlimited power for heat and light. Free. Safe. Clean. No more toxic by-products to dispose of. No more gases pumping into the atmosphere, no more radioactive waste sitting at the bottom of the ocean. For the first time since the industrial revolution, humans would actually be living in harmony with the Earth instead of destroying it.’
‘I get you, but I still don’t see what this has to do with Kammler.’
‘Kammler was the inventor of something called the Bell,’ Ruth explained. ‘A very special and completely unique device, commissioned by Hitler in 1943 or 1944 and built by Kammler’s team of SS engineers and scientists. Not much is known about it, except that it was in development in a secret facility somewhere in Eastern Europe during the final years of World War Two. Whatever it was, it was so potent that it had to be kept locked inside a vault. Witness reports from the time claimed that it had strange powers, interfered with electrical equipment and emitted a weird blue light when it was turned on. Based on what we know about Kammler’s research from leaked information at the time and vague references in some of his correspondence to fellow SS engineers, there’s a very good chance that he was building some kind of Zero Point Energy reactor.’
‘Reactor?’
‘An instrument capable of extracting raw energy from the ether and converting it into usable power. Like electricity, but not artificially generated. Straight from nature. What we can create ourselves is a pale imitation.’ She paused. ‘But when Kammler disappeared in 1945, in the very last days of the war, so did all trace of his invention. Nobody knew where it was, whether it had even survived. US Intelligence spent years searching for it, but never found it. The same goes for his research papers, containing the secrets of his invention.’
‘But you think Steiner found them?’
‘That’s right, Ben. I believe that’s what he found by accident and has locked away – you can easily see why this stuff would be a threat to him. And from what he said that day on the phone to Karl, I think he knows not only the secrets of the Bell, but where it might be – its hidden resting place since 1945.’
‘Let me get this right,’ Ben said. ‘You’re saying that this Bell was a machine capable of drawing the energy out of thin air and converting it into usable power? Like a nuclear reactor, but without the need for fuel, and with no waste products?’
Ruth nodded. ‘The future of our planet.’
‘It’s a little hard to imagine the Nazis as the inventors of a wonderful green technology that could save the Earth,’ Ben said. ‘Especially as they were in the middle of losing a war at the time. I’d have thought they had other things on their mind than green ideology.’
‘There are other theoretical applications. Like the potential to create a super high-speed anti-gravity aircraft. There’s some evidence th
at the Nazis might have been doing just that. And then there are other things, too.’
‘Such as?’
‘We’re talking about energy, Ben. A limitless force of nature. If you control its release, harness it, you have a safe, clean reactor that can go on churning out endless amounts of power for all eternity. But if you speed up the process and let the energy come pulsing out much more strongly, you have something else altogether.’
Ben’s stomach gave a lurch. ‘A bomb.’
‘Infinitely more powerful than the effect of merely splitting the atom. While the Americans were developing the first nuclear weapons, they had no idea that their enemies were working on something that could potentially have made Oppenheimer’s atom bombs look like kids’ fireworks by comparison. It’s safe to say that when Hitler gave Kammler’s SS Special Projects Division carte blanche to develop this technology, it wasn’t because he cared about the future of the environment. It would have given him the power to obliterate half of Europe. He could have won the war in a day.’
‘So isn’t it just as well that the Kammler research stays safe and secret?’
Ruth shook her head, resolute. ‘No, Ben. The planet deserves it. Whatever dark side there may be to Zero Point Energy, it’s no different from any other natural resource. Take electricity. You can use it to provide light and warmth and make people’s lives better; or you can use it to fry a man in a chair. If we can just control that energy responsibly, we really do have the key to saving the planet.’ Her eyes were bright with excitement as she talked. ‘Think of it. The end of our dependence on fossil fuels. The total breakdown of the evil business empires based on raping the environment.’ She smiled darkly. ‘Including Steiner’s. He has billions tied up in the aerospace and oil industries. Imagine the catastrophic losses he’d suffer if this technology broke through into the mainstream. Greedy capitalist bastards like him, plundering the planet’s natural resources and holding them for ransom, would become as extinct as the dinosaurs.’
Ben now understood why Steiner had lied about the real nature of the documents in his safe, inventing the Holocaust denial angle to put any enquiring minds off the track.
The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Page 159
