Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  Though he hoped they could eventually use it to pinpoint the Allen field’s destination or destinations, he couldn’t place all of his proverbial eggs in that one basket. He wasn’t aware of any public or even interagency announcements regarding a location tracking system. Consequently, for the time being, they’d have to rely on short-wave radio signals and telemetry to determine where the Allen field led to. Along those lines, it was ironically a non-technical staff member, Guy Pool, who suggested the most useful additional bit of telemetry to that point: audio. Gizmo was soon equipped with a tape recorder that would activate along with its other sensors shortly after reaching the other side of the field.

  As for US-395’s first passenger, they spent about a month getting Gitano accustomed to the sending room, the probe that would accompany him and what he might experience after being sent. With two weeks remaining until launch, all that was really left to cover was the retrieval process. Dr. Rys, and the Project Firewall team before him, had implemented rigorous protocols to neutralize biological hazards before they could escape the chamber. However, no one in US-395 had applied those protocols to a living passenger yet. The closest they’d come was Gizmo, a nearly indestructible probe. And so, the retrieval team began running drills every other day with Gitano. After just a few repetitions, US-395’s first passenger was coming through like a champ every time, trotting from room to room, getting cleaned up, observed by the medical team and then released, all without incident. Though he hated to do it, Dr. Rys ultimately instructed Gitano’s retrieval team to carry firearms. Human nature being what it was, it would’ve been too easy to get lulled into believing that they completely understood what the Allen field was and how it functioned. It required conscious effort to remember that the truth remained otherwise.

  By the March 16th launch date, everything was set; and although it seemed like US-395’s first passenger could’ve trotted to the sending room on his own after all of their preparation, Dr. Rys himself walked Gitano through the chamber, leash in one hand and probe in the other. As they’d done in innumerable drills, Gitano was left inside the sending room alongside the probe. When Dr. Rys returned to the Maytag desk, he saw the team had gathered their seats behind it, looking intently into the sending room through the closed-circuit television monitor.

  Intellectually, there was no difference between this launch and the countless others they’d witnessed and participated in. Nonetheless, it was hard to deny that it felt different. They were about to send a living, breathing creature through the Allen field for the first time. Not only that, Gitano had grown on them. To the casual observer, therefore, it would’ve seemed as though they were watching a riveting action film through the monitor rather than a dog obediently staying put beside a shiny metal shoebox. Once he was seated, Dr. Rys inserted his key to unlock the Maytag’s sending controls. He then lifted the protective cover off the left switch and flicked it. With his eyes on the monitor’s clock, he then uncovered the right one. He flicked that switch at 9:30am sharp, sending US-395’s first passenger away.

  On the monitor the team now saw a thermal image displaying a three-dimensional void perfectly mimicking Gitano’s and the probe’s dimensions. Unlike the probe launch almost a year earlier, there wasn’t any clapping or cheering. Instead, most who observed the launch simply got out of their seats and did some work or talked with one another to pass the time. Guy Pool was listening for the beacon at the short-wave radio receiver. As usual, an interagency memo had been circulated to domestic and overseas government offices asking them to listen for the signal also. The retrieval team was suited up and on its way to the sending room door.

  Once 9:56am arrived, everyone was back at their seats, eyes glued once again to the closed-circuit monitor. Dr. Rys had remained at the Maytag desk the entire time. After un-flicking the right switch, he uncovered the left toggle, placing his thumb over it. At 10am sharp, both Gitano and the probe blinked back into existence on the screen, switching on the lights in the sending room and changing the image on the monitor back to its regular black-and-white picture. With a bark, Gitano signaled that he’d returned unscathed. A few spontaneous hoots then erupted from behind the control desk and the retrieval team went to work. The probe came back first, and was placed in its tub of chlorine bleach to kill any pathogens that might have possibly survived the high-temperature sterilization process. Dr. Rys then hurriedly took it to a lab station next to the chamber’s entrance and began jotting down readings:

  Temp: Low=68ºF, High=72ºF

  Bar: Low=1010 mb, High=1015 mb

  Light: Low=30 lux , High=40 lux

  Duration: 30 minutes

  The data were wonderfully unexciting. By then a crowd had gathered around him; and Dr. Rys could feel their collective sense of relief once they saw the environmental telemetry. He then rewound the audio tape from Gizmo’s recorder and played it. To everyone’s delight, they heard Gitano barking and what sounded like a stream in the distance. The tape went on like that for about a half hour.

  As for Gitano, he stayed in the chamber for six days. They kept him in the shower room mostly, feeding him from time to time, and walking him through the bachelor pad as it became increasingly clear that there was nothing wrong with him. The team physicians had veterinary experience and ran tests to make certain he was okay. Based on the results, he’d suffered no ill effects. As for the beacon, neither Guy Pool nor anyone else ever detected it.

  They sent Gitano seventeen times afterwards, usually altering the original mission’s parameters. Time spent on the other side varied from a half hour up to six hours and launch times ranged from six in the morning to as late as nine in the evening. Often, instead of staying put, they’d have Gitano run once they’d sent him to confirm that the Allen field did in fact lock onto passengers sent through it. The Maytag brought him back every time. Furthermore, over his eighteen missions, the temperature on the other side never went below 63ºF or above 77ºF. It was almost as though the Allen field had made special arrangements for Gitano’s visits to be as pleasant as possible. Physiologically, he was as fit after those missions as the day Dr. Rys adopted him. Quite possibly, he was actually healthier, considering the exercise he was getting and the premium dog food they regularly fed him.

  Despite the mostly positive news, however, gaps in their understanding did persist. The audio recordings, for example, seemed to vary considerably in terms of background noise. Sometimes they heard a running stream as in the first launch and other times they heard nothing in the background aside from Gitano barking. A few times they heard a breeze or a sound not unlike waves hitting shore. They never heard people. Furthermore, the probe’s beacon was never detected. Though he conceded it wasn’t airtight, Dr. Rys nevertheless felt that most of the telemetry indicated that the field’s counterpart location was indeed terrestrial.

  By the time Gitano’s missions were drawing to a close, Dr. Rys’s son, Pedro, had begun working on US-395. Though it took almost three months, his internship was ultimately vetted and approved. They’d run a background check and as expected, he’d sailed through with flying colors. As his summer internship progressed, it became clear that Dr. Rys’s faith in his son had been warranted. Pedro demonstrated a maturity and work ethic far beyond his years. Perhaps just as importantly, he got along with the team, and had even begun joining the weekend surf sessions in Santa Barbara County. Consequently, when Pedro asked if he could spend the following summer before graduate school working on the project, Dr. Rys agreed, thinking to himself that the timing should work out well. His son would probably be there when US-395 finally sent its first human passenger.

  Number Tree

  The pace US-395 had sustained in its two years of operation was extraordinary. Dr. Rys had seen a technology that didn’t even exist just a decade earlier, his technology, progress from trial runs involving tiny sprigs of lettuce to the commonplace sending of a bounding sixty-five pound Labrador retriever. In many ways, it was intoxicating. He often had to remind h
imself not to lose sight of the bigger picture, a priority even more important than US-395’s official mandate to develop the Allen field generator technology. That priority was to develop and introduce the technology wisely. Given their rapid progress, he realized that he needed to spend more time thinking about how to peacefully transition field generator technology out of the auditorium. To do that, he began familiarizing himself with the US-395 decision tree diagram.

  To a large extent, the diagram reflected the man who’d created it. One of the qualities that Dr. Rys had sought when he’d recruited for the team historian position was integrity. Specifically, he’d hoped to hire someone with a ruthless sense of intellectual honesty, someone who could essentially be US-395’s designated truth-teller. In Dr. Gidsen, he’d found that historian. As Dr. Rys had hoped, although he had superb interpersonal skills, Dr. Gidsen wasn’t one to adjust his conclusions to avoid hurt feelings. This quality was particularly important when it came to his work on the decision tree. Within it, he’d painstakingly charted the most likely decisions that they’d face as they continued developing the field generator technology, including the external events associated with those decisions. For example, the choice Dr. Rys made years earlier to focus solely on non-military applications of the technology placed them squarely on one branch of the decision tree. Following that branch led to a fork in the tree representing the uncertainty associated with eventually sending a human passenger. Unlike a decision, this wasn’t completely in their control and probabilities were therefore assigned to each possible outcome of that event. Based on their recent successes, Dr. Gidsen had assigned a 75% probability to them eventually succeeding. Reaching that branch led to other decisions they’d need to make and other external events they’d likely face, such as whether they’d find a way to control the field’s destination. All of the outcomes on the tree, whether driven by decisions or outside events, were based on recommendations he’d received from US-395 team members and his own research into the histories of various technologies.

  It was an impressive piece of work. In just over one year, the decision tree had outgrown the single sheet of paper that it’d initially occupied just beside Dr. Gidsen’s desk in the admin room. It now took up about sixty-four square feet in an area just behind the lab room, where team members could look at it, as well as pencil in questions and comments.

  As they approached the middle of July, Dr. Gidsen was busy quantifying outcomes to different branches of the decision tree. He’d created a metric that incorporated per-capita income, life-expectancy and literacy rate to approximately gauge things that most people would probably consider beneficial, namely wealth, health and education. Dr. Gidsen referred to the change in this metric attributable to the introduction of Allen field technology as the Pueblo Index. For example, an index value of +1 at the end of one series of decisions and external events meant that the United States was approximately twice as well off relative to where it was before US-395 began; and a value of 0 at the end of a path meant that in following that particular series of choices, there’d been no change in the country’s welfare. He’d begun assigning index values at the end of January just after the team’s vacation; and within five-and-a-half months, he’d completed most of the chart’s branches.

  Looking closely at the quantified outcomes for the first time, one thing struck Dr. Rys immediately: Almost all of the diagram’s endpoints had negative index values. Based on the tree, there were only five paths to outcomes where the country was better off because US-395 existed. Unfortunately, reaching even those endpoints wasn’t purely a question of skill, intelligence or determination; a lot depended on sheer luck. Dr. Rys found this troubling to say the least. When he first asked about the index values, Dr. Gidsen simply noted that there was no definitive way to predict the future states of the world that arose from each decision. However, using history as a guide, one could estimate probable outcomes. That was what the decision tree represented.

  As if wanting to explicitly hear the chart’s daunting conclusions out loud in order to eliminate any doubt, Dr. Rys then asked for his honest appraisal of where the technology would probably lead. Dr. Gidsen responded by launching into an extremely lucid and cogent summary of his findings. In a nutshell, he’d concluded that the world wasn’t ready. Specifically, he felt that the pull towards military uses of field generator technology would ultimately prove to be inexorable. Based on his analysis, inspired decision-making could stave off bad outcomes for perhaps a dozen years, but the final result was almost always the same: A destabilizing conflict fueled by a militarized version of the field generator that pushed the United States back decades. Even the outcomes with positive index values rested either on an extremely unstable balance of power, or the swift and utter defeat of the Soviet Union. Given recent revelations of the success of Soviet espionage efforts, Dr. Gidsen didn’t put much credence in the latter happening anytime soon.

  Nevertheless, he did identify two conditions that could pull all of the outcomes into the positive:

  1. Extensive global economic interdependence, which would ensure that the costs of attacking an adversary using an Allen field weapon outweighed any possible benefit.

  2. Robust information systems to monitor and regulate field generator use worldwide.

  The world in 1959 simply wasn’t far enough along in either respect. The United States and Soviet Union were largely self-sufficient, minimizing the chances of them developing any meaningful interdependence; and computer technology wasn’t advanced enough to power a system to monitor field generator use globally.

  Listening to his voice, Dr. Rys could tell that it pained Dr. Gidsen to say those things. It was an extremely persuasive analysis that unfortunately argued against the very technology he’d founded, the technology they were all working hard to develop. He had no response. That night, lying in bed beside Abigail, he spent most of the interval just before sleep trying to find some way past the decision tree.

  Revelations

  Wednesday, July 15th found Dr. Rys at his usual booth in Art’s Diner reading the morning newspaper just before heading into work. Two days earlier, Gitano had concluded his four-month stint at US-395 with eighteen successful missions notched into his collar. With the sending of a human passenger finally within sight, Dr. Rys wanted to enjoy the respite before the next push. Reading through the paper, he saw that the Dodgers were still doing well, which was good news. In fact, there was already talk of a World Series. Dr. Rys was a fan, but it was too early to tell for his tastes. Still, at the very least it looked like the Dodgers were mounting quite a comeback. It was about 7am when he finished his coffee, left a tip under his glass of water, took his paper and walked out towards work.

  As he neared the post office building, he noticed that there still wasn’t anyone else parked in the lot. Usually he’d pull in at around 6:30 in the morning to see either Dr. Bishop’s Crestliner or Dr. Sharp’s DeSoto just beside the post office building. Seeing neither car in the lot was slightly unusual, but probably nothing more than that. Shrugging it off, he opened the side door into the post office then went downstairs and into the auditorium. He walked to the Maytag’s controls, punched in a seven-digit code and toggled the central switch, activating the generator’s electrical and mechanical systems for the day’s launches. Then he went into the admin room as he did every morning to check for messages on the answering machine, a handy piece of technology carried over from Project Firewall. In over six years of checking, he’d never gotten a message. Never, that is, until that morning. It was a message from the new undersecretary for transportation, John Allen, laconically asking Dr. Rys to return his call as soon as possible. It was a very neutral-sounding voice message, so he didn’t know what to make of it. He closed the administrative room door, dialed the undersecretary’s phone number and was patched directly through to him.

  After exchanging a few pleasantries, Undersecretary Allen cut to the chase and began explaining something called Operation Plowshare.
It was a classified investigation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigations and a newly formed intelligence unit called the National Security Agency into arms trafficking. Specifically, it was charged with identifying potential channels for the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to foreign powers and high-net-worth entities. Although it sounded absurd at first, some top analysts in the State Department and the Pentagon had warned that non-governmental entities could develop nuclear weapons. Operation Plowshare was a pre-emptive strike at that capability. What the task force found was troubling. The capability did in fact exist for third-parties to build nuclear weapons. Moreover, they’d uncovered a web of over two dozen companies operating in the United States to realize that capability while obscuring their weapons programs from government scrutiny. The FBI raided those companies yesterday and found lists of names. The task force cross-referenced those names with government rosters; and two people listed were in US-395, Dr. Sharp and Dr. Bishop. Agents searched their homes in Pueblo last night, and found that their houses had been bugged and their phones tapped. They then took them and their families to Edwards Air Force Base under protective custody. Along with those lists of names, the task force also found addresses for what appeared to be subsidiaries. One address was in Pueblo. FBI agents raided that location a couple of hours earlier and found some machinery they couldn’t identify. On a hunch, after hearing about what had happened to Dr. Bishop and Dr. Sharp, Undersecretary Allen told the FBI that he’d send his lead scientist in charge of US-395 to take a look. The undersecretary then gave him an address where the agents were.