Silence.
“Er, no.”
“Good,” she replied. “Then let’s start with the lab downstairs. What exactly is it?”
Friedricks was shaking now and it showed. “It’s… well, it’s kind of odd. I mean, I can only go on Klein’s notes and the data, but it seems…” He fought to get the words out; words no scientist should ever have to deliver. “It kind of looks like a… time machine?” He squeezed them out. They felt painful.
Scalise, however, seemed completely unfazed. She leaned back. “Explain.”
“Er. okay,” Friedricks continued. He turned to the screen behind him, flicked some folders with his stubby fingers and enlarged an image. It showed a clear image of the laboratory set up to perform the initial experiment, one of the same images that Klein himself had shown to Sherman, Haga, Bond and Strauss on 20 April, 2040. “It seems that on…” he checked the notes again, “April 2, 2040, a scientist by the name of Peter Strauss decided to run an experiment on KRT’s primary Siberium sphere. Strauss seemingly had the idea of bombarding it with massive amounts of electricity whilst it was sealed in a vacuum. Basically, he was looking at electrical conductivity mass more than anything. A number of devices were placed in the room to monitor everything from heat, light, magnetic and electrical fields, along with gravitational forces etc. Also placed in the lab, in a sealed case, was a mouse - DBX2105 - which Klein refers to as ‘Charlie’. I believe it was just a standard white-footed mouse: Peromyscus leucopus…”
Scalise through him a dark look that instantly told him she hadn’t actually meant everything.
“Anyway, something went wrong,” he continued, nervously, “or right - I’m not entirely sure - and, after the experiment, Charlie had… well, disappeared.”
“Where to…?”
Friedricks took a deep breath. “Well, according to Klein’s notes… 1776…?” Even he could not actually believe he had just said that. “It seems that, again according to the notes, the gravitational pull on the Siberium sphere had been so great, just for an instant, that it had actually bent light.”
“And by bending light it also bent time,” Scalise said confidently.
Friedricks paused. He didn’t like to disagree with her - she did not look the sort who would really appreciate it - but well… she was actually quite wrong.
“Actually, er… no,” he said, cautiously. “You simply cannot bend time. But you can, however, bend one’s perception of it. After all, time is really only measured by perception, even in scientific terms. That’s why only DBX2… sorry, Charlie… was affected. Only something which can comprehend time can, in reality, actually be affected by it. What happens is that light rushed past you. If it does that faster then, well, the speed of light then you should start to see things that happened a second ago, a day ago, a week ago and so on. It would seem that, when the charge was removed and light returned to normal, Charlie was… well, left looking at what he’d been looking at whilst the charge was on. He stayed there.”
Scalise turned her chair away and looked out over Klein’s expansive vista, leaning back in the deep leather as she pondered almost to herself. This was actually starting to make some sense.
“So, Klein’s people have this little ‘accident’” she said, still thinking it through, “and Klein, rather than coming to his sponsors, starts to see a window of opportunity. An opportunity to not even need his sponsors. He was raised in a religious household so he is aware of a very valuable trinket that he might just want to get his hands on, and he knows where in history it was last accounted for. Now, suddenly he sees a way to get it; to be the reason it is unaccounted for since. So, according to what I’ve seen, he engineers some deal with Huntsville to get some Death Rowers to go and do his looking. They find the… ‘Tables’… hide them, and then supposedly all he has to do is… dig them up.”
She span her chair back to face him. “So… the ‘Tables’ themselves. Talk me through them. What are they exactly and what do they do?”
Friedricks looked a little confused. “They don’t actually ‘do’ anything,” he said. “They’re just codes.”
Scalise’s eyes narrowed, inquisitively. “What kind of codes?”
“Well,” Friedricks began. He turned back to the screen. With a few more flicks it showed a page from the Bible and he could see Scalise sighing yet again. She was not one for religion. Her demeanour made him progressively more nervous, if that were possible. “I’ve obviously had to look this up but apparently in the Bible, the Old Testament, it states very clearly that Moses received some tablets of stone on Mount Sinai.”
“The Ten Commandments?” Scalise offered, as though she already knew she was right.
“Well, no,” Friedricks disagreed again. “That’s what I thought. But it seems that Moses carved the Ten Commandments when God dictated them. He didn’t actually receive them. But God did give him tables. Some that had already been carved. By God, apparently.”
He pulled Exodus 24:12 up on to the screen, the text clearly legible: ‘And the LORD said unto Moses, come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.’
“And here,” Friedricks continued. The image changed:
And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.
Scalise closed her eyes in disgust. “And so these ‘Tables of Testimony’…? They are, what exactly..?”
Friedricks thought for a moment. “Research is lacking,” he said, “but the general consensus is that they may be ‘The Divine Laws of God and Man.’ The laws of creation, the laws of the universe, the laws of physics. If that were true then it would be something bordering on, say, the Unified Field Theory.”
The Unified Field Theory, Scalise mused: Einstein’s ultimate goal. Now that was something she did understand. The defining law that would one day prove that all physical phenomena was ultimately explainable by one underlying unity. To have such knowledge, in terms of scientific advancement, would offer an understanding of the physical properties of the world around us that would be unsurpassable in every sense. The hurdles that plagued the advancement of an innumerate number of technologies would be toppled almost overnight.
No wonder Klein was so keen to get his hands on them, she thought.
“But he never found them?”
Friedricks flicked through some screens on a tablet which was sitting on a small desk to his left. “Actually, he kind of did,” he explained, “but they weren’t real.”
Scalise looked suspicious. “What do you mean by ‘not real’?” she asked.
“Well, they were fakes.” Friedricks explained. “From what I can glean, way back when, Klein was using some land that KRT owned in France to simply dig for the tables…”
“Cardou..?”
“Cardou. It’s close to places like Rennes-le-Château and Alet-les-Bains, places where these tables seemed to have disappeared from history. This was long before any of… this.” He gestured to the screen. “This was around 2010 or 2011. Around that time he was made aware that the Tables he was searching for had actually been found. They had been intercepted, from DHL of all people, having been shipped to the USA from Salvaza Airport in Carcassonne, about forty kilometres north.”
“Who shipped them?”
“A woman called Sarah Fiddes.” He smiled slightly, and changed the screen to an image of one KRT employee whose name seemed to have cropped up a lot in her own brief scan of the files. “It turns out, however, that Sarah Fiddes was actually Alison Bond. Klein just didn’t know that back then, that was all. How could he? He didn’t even know Alison yet. She hadn’t been born. He sure as hell hadn’t sent her back to look for them.”
“So what happened to the Tables?”
“A deal was reached in which Sarah… sorry, Alison’s… mother would decode them. Apparently she had a g
ift for pattern and sequence. She was at Thousand Oaks.”
“The mental asylum?”
“The psychiatric facility, yes. She was autistic.”
“And did she decode them?”
Uncharacteristically, Friedricks smiled. “Yes, yes she did. Kind of.”
“And..?”
“There were two disks, apparently, each engraved with thousands and thousands of symbols. Very complex with approximately 2500 text routes that could be taken through the text, the vast majority of which threw up gibberish. Thirty-three of those routes, however, didn’t. Instead they threw up further sequences of letters containing yet more embedded texts. The letters from the embedded texts then needed to be highlighted in the disks as a whole to form a series of patterns. Once these patterns were uncovered, they could then be laid over the three remaining sides of the disks in turn, uncovering the final texts. Ultimately that led to the answer.”
Scalise leaned forward, interested. “The answer being..?”
Friedricks took a deep breath, then turned and called another image on to the screen. It appeared to be just a basic list of well-known chemical and ionic compounds followed by a date: Fluorine, uranium, carbon, potassium, yttrium, oxygen, ununumium, potassium iodide, einsteinium, indium, 1955. It was hand-written on Thousand Oaks notepaper and, if Scalise were to hazard a guess, it was either Tina Fiddes’ handwriting or, at the very least, someone she had dictated the answer to.
“What is this?” Scalise asked.
“Well… it’s a joke,” Friedricks said, laughing gently. His tone indicated that Scalise should perhaps know this already.
“I’m a mathematician, not a physicist, Mr. Friedricks, please get to the point.”
“Well, the point is you’d actually need to be a chemist, not a physicist. Here, I’ll show you.”
He swiftly picked up a DigiPen from the small desk and started writing chemical symbols at the side of each compound, the pen acting as a stylus which added his text to the digital image.
“See, we have Fluorine: chemical symbol ‘F’,” he said, adding it. “Then uranium: ‘U’, carbon: ‘C’. Potassium is an odd one, that’s ‘K’. Then yttrium…”
It wasn’t long before Scalise could see the pattern forming. It didn’t take a mathematician to see it, just someone with even the most basic grasp of coarse English.
When Friedricks reached Einsteinium, he said: “This is where I believe the date comes in. In 1955, when it was first discovered, the chemical symbol for Einsteinium was ‘E’. IUPAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, later changed it to ‘Es’. But in 1955 it was still ‘E’. Indium, at the end, is ‘In’.”
“A few years after this was done,” he explained, “the disks were decoded for a second time, just to be sure, but this time it was done through one of the advanced I.Q. systems that KRT had acquired from IntelliSoft. Mr. Aldez himself oversaw the procedure and it came back with exactly the same result. It was definitely the creator of the disks that were playing a trick on Klein, not Tina Fiddes.”
Scalise scoured the letters running down and could not help but smile. Friedricks had even drawn horizontal lines as he had gone down to separate the groups: FUCK/YOU/KLEIN
“Clever girl,” Scalise said gently. “So Alison screwed him over?”
“Oh, and then some,” Friedricks added, as though this wash not even the half of it. “Because from the notes, I also think that whoever intercepted the package, and it certainly wasn’t Josef Klein, then replaced the Tables that transpired to be fakes with some kind of explosive device…”
“A bomb?”
Friedricks nodded; clearly uncomfortable. “And my best assumption there, looking at the data, is that this bomb was meant for whoever collected the package; probably Alison. She, for her part, seems to have not opened it but instead she drove north of Tejon State Park and…”
“Buried the bomb,” Scalise said, nodding. Very, very clever girl, she thought. “So Josef is due to collect the Tables she is supposed to have secured for him, but instead he opens up a bomb…”
“That he himself may have been responsible for planting,” Friedricks interjected, slightly more confident now. “There was fragments of packaging found at the scene and a label bearing a partial code. It matches the DHL package from 2011.”
“I presume you’ve not discussed this with anyone,” Scalise said coldly.
“With who?” Friedricks replied. “I work alone, I live alone.”
Scalise glanced at the desk-screen once more, his personnel file still in full view. “Indeed you do,” she said without emotion. That’s why she had chosen him.
“OK,” she said, standing. “You’ve been a great help. Wait here and I will get two of my men to escort you out.”
“But I’m still on-shift,” he offered.
She glanced upward and smiled as she gathered her things, though it never reached her eyes. “Take some time off,” she said.
As she continued to gather her tablet and papers, Friedricks looked uncomfortable. “Is any of this for real?” he said eventually.
Without looking she replied: “Think of it like relativity,” she said.
There was no reply.
“It’s a just a theory,” she said, walking both toward him and toward the door. “And for now it’s the best one we have.”
Friedricks looked even more uncomfortable now. As she passed him, the harsh-clicking shoes stopped for a moment, just a couple of feet from him. She could see the worry etched on his face.
“Tell me, Mr. Friedricks,” she said, looking right at him. “If you were aware that these Tables, possibly containing the answers to Unified Fields, were out there… somewhere… you’d do all you could to find them, right?”
Friedricks nodded. “Of course.” He said, it was a given. “You’d probably become the richest man on the planet.”
Scalise looked disappointed. “That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice oddly full of regret. As she spoke, however, Friedricks noticed a very slight twitch in her left eye. It looked more like disdain.
She opened the door and, in another burst of clicked-heels, she was gone.
* * * * *
In the corridor outside, Scalise looked to the black-helmeted guards who had been watching the door and nodded. She never said a word. Lowering his assault weapon, one of them reached into a side-holster and removed a jet black magnetoPistol. A fairly recent development, this compact weapon utilised a large burst of electricity from a butt-housed TiGa battery to create a powerful electro-magnet within a coil wrapped around the inner perimeter of the chamber, just for a few milliseconds. TiGa batteries, another KRT development, were comprised of a Gallium (Ga) core wrapped in Titanium (Ti). They were the aptly-titled successors to the Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) batteries popular in the early part of the 21st century. Each titanium module produced more than enough positive charge to instantly repel the counter-charged projectile and fire it just as effectively as any of the more ‘old school’ weapons. Where the mP won out, however, was twofold: firstly, that the power could could be adjusted via a small dial, keeping the projectile from hitting the sound barrier and creating the associated ‘crack’ sound if one was working close-quarters. Secondly, and closely linked to the first reason, at subsonic speeds the weapon was almost completely silent.
The mP still fired ‘regular’ bullets and, save for them having around seven percent zinc and three percent magnesium added to their copper/nickel mix, those bullets still killed. Instantaneously, especially if it was a well-targeted head shot.
Whilst the second guard turned and took hold of an empty KRT mini-dumpster; a large, wheeled container used by janitors for periodically collecting trash and brought along specifically for this occasion, the first guard raised his mP, turned and entered the room. When both were in, the door swished closed again.
Scalise heard only the slightest ‘phut’ sound, twice, before the crumple of what sounded like a human body collapsing on to a h
ard, polished floor. A body that weighed, at Scalise’s estimation, around 200lbs.
One problem removed, she mused.
One more to deal with.
Though she had been loathed to give too much away in front of Friedricks, in spite of his quite frighteningly shortened shelf-life, she was now beginning to form a very clear picture of exactly what had been going on here. Alison had gone back because, apparently, she had some mummy issues. In doing so, she had assured the late, apostate Josef Klein that she would locate him his scientific grail. Instead, she had flipped the tables out for some fakes and almost engineered that they would then be intercepted. In this way she had not only thrown the earlier Klein off her scent long enough to buy back some time, but had also then managed to remove the later Klein from the face of the earth.
What that meant, however, was that the real tables - the real answers - were still out there somewhere. And, as Alison had needed to remove herself from the face of the earth shortly after her little sleight of hand, it begged the question: ‘where are they now’?
So Scalise got to thinking about just whom Alison had associated with. Whom she had ever associated with. And one name kept coming back to the fore: the man who had sent her back there in the first place: Peter Strauss. If Alison had not hidden the Tables for Klein to find, then you could bet your slimy little ass that she had hidden them for someone to find.
And that someone might just turn out to be Peter Strauss.
Strauss was a problem that really did need removing. Of course now, that should really only happen after he had given her the things that, as all jaunts were funded by KRT (and KRT was itself funded by The Scalise Family Trust), were rightfully hers.
for now, she was actually quite pleased that Strauss had evaded death.
Neither the pleasure, nor the evasion, would be lasting very long.
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