“We may be able to get your cat and your belongings for you,” the sheriff offered. He looked at me. “When the time comes, suggest to Sarah she should reach out to the professor’s mother, they make arrangements to pack and ship her things home. We make a switch and bring them up here.”
“I want to hear more about this deal Peter made with the tong,” Rob changed the subject. “How are they going to help you get this Professor Gomulka?”
I explained what I had in mind.
“That might work….” Rob nodded his head thoughtfully. “It’s a start. We need to refine it some. Not tonight, though.” He turned to face Marlena. “Tonight, we’re going celebrate the newest member of The Resistance.”
The Resistance? That rubbed me the wrong way. “I don’t like that term – resistance. It suggests all were going to do is slow them down, not stop them.”
“Kids got a point,” the sheriff agreed. “It’s like conservatives only slowing down the inevitable progression to tyranny, never stopping and reversing it.”
“What would you call it then?” Rob put me on the spot.
I thought about it a minute and realized why the term bothered me. Resistance made me think in terms of direct current, DC, slowing down a one-way flow. We needed something more dynamic, something alternating current, AC, pushing back the flow and making it going in the other direction. Impedance? No. Then I had it.
“Reactance,” I proposed. “They call us reactionaries already. Let’s own the term. We’re ‘The Reactance.’”
“The imaginary resistance?” Marlena asked skeptically.
“Or the resistance with imagination,” I offered, “or the complex component of the resistance, if you prefer.”
“I like it,” Marlena smiled. “I think Oliver Heaviside would approve. I’m delighted to be the newest member of ‘The Reactance.’”
Rob grilled some steaks for dinner. We roasted marshmallows over the fire. Finally, as the sun began to set, we pulled up our chairs around the fire. How long had it been? I remembered a July 4 bonfire – one of the last happy times I’d had with my folks before we’d found ourselves in a fight for our lives. Now, we could relax, celebrate our victories and plan our next steps. Rob offered me and Amit some beer. I took it to be polite, but I didn’t much care for the taste.
“It’s been a good year,” Rob stoked the fire and a burst of sparks rose to the heavens. “We’ve made some progress, learned more about them, acquired some new allies, even bloodied the Circle’s noses a bit, and gotten away with it, with them none the wiser.”
“True,” I agreed, “but we’re no nearer understanding who’s really behind the Circle. Was there an unknown ancient civilization discovering electricity, wrangling with electromagnetic theory, and developing advanced technology? Atlanteans? Lemurians? How could they have discovered so much without leaving a trace?”
“Ancient batteries have been discovered,” Marlena noted. “They’re thought to have been used in electroplating.”
“But, that much technology would leave some trace,” I pointed out.
“Extraterrestrials?” the sheriff suggested.
“I don’t see how,” Marlena was skeptical.
“The Brotherhood thinks it’s a Chinese deity,” Amit noted.
“Maybe the Albertians are right,” speculated Rob. “Fallen angels seeking to tempt us with the forbidden fruit of dangerous knowledge? Or Satan himself, seeking dominion over the Earth?”
The flames danced in front of us as we continued to ponder what we learned. “We have some intriguing clues, but we simply don’t know enough yet to figure out who they are and what they really want,” I concluded.
“They seek power?” the sheriff speculated. “Control?”
“But to what end?” I asked. “We don’t really know.” No one care to dispute me. Who are they? I stared into the fire. What do they want? No deeper answers were forthcoming.
Finally, the sheriff lifted his bottle in a toast, “To Amanda,” he took a swig. “Gone, but never forgotten.” I drank to my mother’s memory.
“To my brother, Roy,” Rob offered a toast. “You’re…” He started to say something, more, but couldn’t. He took a deep breath, and simply added, “Roy.” Took another sip of the bitter brew in my father’s memory.
“To James Clerk Maxwell,” offered Marlena in toast, “To Heinrich Hertz, and the other pioneers struck down by arrows in their backs before their days were finished. You will be avenged.” I drank to that with a smile. She had a bloodthirsty twist to her. Good. She’d be needing it.
“To Mr. Rodriguez, Nicole, Jim Burleson, Robb LeChevalier, and the other forgotten victims of the Circle,” Amit proposed. “May they rest easier when our work is done.”
Here, here. I gazed into the flickering flames as the silence grew. I realized we’d forgotten a critical someone who’d been with us at the beginning and at the end of our first year at Tech, but was no more.
“Angus MacGuffin.” I held my bottle up and observed the dancing flames refract through the bottle. “They struck you down, but not before you accomplished what you set out to do. Now we know. We will share your story, we will recover your legacy, and we will avenge your murder.”
Everyone drank to that. The sky darkened to black. The gathering was winding down. The pause stretched ever longer. Finally, Marlena broke the silence. “You realize that ‘MacGuffin’ is a term used in drama to denote the goal for which the hero seeks,” she pointed out.
I smiled. “Yes, that was one of the first things we uncovered in our research. Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term in the 1930s. How he came across it, I’m not sure. Maybe he was a member of the Circle, or maybe he just associated with them and overheard some stray mention of the name. In the 1930s, ‘MacGuffin’ was the ultimate goal, the man of mystery being sought by half the world’s elite.”
“Heh,” Marlena snorted in amusement at the irony of it. “The man the Civic Circle tried so hard to get everyone to forget,” she was shaking her head with a sad smile.
“Will be remembered forever as the goal of every hero’s quest.” I completed her thought.
It was late. We’d continue building on MacGuffin’s legacy, in the morning.
Afterword: About A Rambling Wreck
This is a work of fiction, but A Rambling Wreck draws heavily on real-world history, science, philosophy, and events within our own timeline. Here are a few of the more interesting examples.
The writings of the quantum physicists are quoted accurately, and Paul Forman makes a compelling case that the intellectual revolt against causality, determinism, and materialism, in Weimar German culture contributed to the philosophic foundation of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
John A. Wheeler, a contemporary of Niels Bohr, told me the story of how Bohr harassed Schrödinger to adopt the Copenhagen Interpretation while the later lay in a sickbed. Wheeler further described details of Slater’s “dubious adventure” with Bohr and Kramer. I have verified these stories against other historical sources as well.
The brilliant Italian physicist, Ettore Majorana, really did disappear in 1938, and there is considerable evidence that he lived out his life in South America. The quotations from Atoms in the Family are correct – Majorana’s nephew really did die in a mysterious fire, his uncle was charged with the crime, and Majorana successfully worked for his uncle’s acquittal.
Widespread government surveillance of domestic communications became known in the fall of 2005 in our own timeline as well, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) reacted as described. Erin McCracken really did write an amazingly prescient article in the fall of 2005 about the dangers of Facebook and the threat to civil liberties posed by the NSA’s Echelon program. I found this and other incidents of Georgia Tech campus news in back issues of the Technique.
The Ivy League Nude Scandal is real. A wide variety of Ivy League and other “elite” schools really did mandate that all incoming students be photogr
aphed in the nude. Boxes of abandoned photos have been found, so it is not impossible that some photos may have found their way into the hands of those who may have used them for nefarious purposes. Anything beyond that is completely fictional. I hope.
I offered a fictional reinterpretation of the controversy surrounding Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor’s rather casual attire. Professor Graf’s “Shirt Storm” advocacy borrows heavily from the “Amazonian feminism” of Camille Paglia. Like Cassandra, her decades-old essay, “No Law in the Arena” (collected in Vamp and Tramps), was as prescient as it was ignored.
The fictionally suppressed electromagnetic discoveries attributed to Heaviside are my own. The curious behavior of the exponentially decaying dipole was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. The electromagnetic impedance of the fields around an elemental dipole source really do form a yin-yang diagram when plotted on a Smith Chart. A more technically rigorous discussion and the application of these ideas in antenna theory may be found in my text, The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas, 2nd edition, 2015.
One of my Alpha Readers cautioned that the social justice rhetoric of A Rambling Wreck sometimes sounded like parody. He had a point. I helped myself to the catch phrases and jargon of a wide variety of social justice warriors from Saul Alinsky to his more modern successors. The typical social justice diatribe is devoid of dialectic meaning. Instead, SJWs typically employ rhetoric, to signal their own perceived moral virtue, to emotionally assault a perceived enemy with trigger words (Nazi! Racist! Fascist! etc.), or to camouflage and obscure some deeper true meaning – not only from the audience, but often from the author xyrself. That makes for long, meandery, and frankly, boring rants. By placing social justice rhetoric in the concise dialectic form required by the narrative structure of my story, the inherent illogic and vacuousness of it become far more apparent. To that extent, I acknowledge I do an injustice to social justice advocates.
While I was writing my fictional account of an attempted social justice coup at Georgia Tech, it all actually happened in real-life. My alma mater, Purdue University, hired a new head of the School of Engineering Education, Professor Donna Riley. Her “scholarship” and philosophy are similar in many respects to that of the fictional Professor Cindy Ames. See Rod Dreher’s account “Queering Engineering at Purdue,” from The American Conservative, March 30, 2017 for details.
If you’d like to learn more about social justice and understand SJWs, Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is a great starting point. I also recommend Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie, and The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, by Anonymous Conservative. The Chinese opinion of ‘baizuo’ is as described by Professor Chen.
Finally, the legend of George P. Burdell continues to be told where ever George Tech alumni and students congregate. I enjoyed the opportunity to offer my own contributions to the existing mythos.
Acknowledgements
Robert E. (Robb) LeChevalier really did die of brain cancer in 2014 in our real-world timeline. His life was prolonged by the remarkable efficacy of Coley’s Fluid (see http://coleyfluid.org/), an overlooked and nearly forgotten nineteenth-century immuno-therapeutic treatment that – for a time – regressed his aggressive glioblastoma. At the time of his death, Robb was seeking funding to commercialize his revolutionary particle-accelerator-on-a-chip technology that has the potential to make interplanetary ion propulsion and fusion power feasible. For details and contact information, see http://www.robertlechevalier.com/donation). Robb’s remarkable wit and wisdom will be made available in a forthcoming book, Robbservations, edited by Monica Hughes, Ph.D. I'm indebted to Dr. Hughes for permission to use her husband's real-life story in this fictional context.
Sheridan Brinley, son of the late Bertrand R. Brinley, generously granted permission for Harmon Muldoon to appear in A Rambling Wreck. I grew up on the tales of The Mad Scientists’ Club and I’m thrilled to be granted free reign to incorporate a small part of Brinley’s fictional universe in my story. Harmon was originally the club’s radio expert, but was kicked out for “conduct unbecoming a scientist.” He became the worthy nemesis of the Mad Scientists’ Club. It seemed deeply appropriate that he should prove to be a nemesis – of sorts – to my characters as well.
If you haven't read these young adult stories – you should! Originally a series of short stories that appeared in Boy's Life in the 1960s, The Mad Scientists’ Club features clever, independent-minded young men who overcome an amazing variety of challenges through cleverness, teamwork, and, of course, a healthy dose of mad science! If you're a fan of my writing, you'll really like Brinley's.
Peter’s undergraduate research experience drew on my own experience at Purdue University. I’m indebted to my Purdue classmate, Professor Dale Litzenberg, now of The University of Michigan, who explained for me the work he and John Ayres did in Purdue’s mirror lab.
Thomas Eiden provided me with some nuclear physics consultation, including the critical observation that some of the low-energy gamma rays Professor Chen’s team detected from orbit, would have been completely attenuated by the time they reached even a low-Earth-orbit gamma ray observatory. Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes were in fact discovered in 1994 by BATSE, the “Burst and Transient Source Experiment,” on board the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. I took the liberty of appropriating the discovery for Professor Chen’s team. We live in a world in which antimatter (in minute quantities) occurs naturally, a result that would have seemed like science fiction when I was starting my graduate training in physics.
Paul Blair provided suggestions on topics ranging from Latin grammar to the events surrounding Ettore Majorana’s fictional stay in Buenos Aires.
My Alpha Readers gave generously of their time to review my early drafts and provide their suggestions and corrections. Alpha Readers included Brandy Harvey, Francis Porretto, Jay Garing, Jack Gardner, Jeff Koistra, June Coker McNew, Daniel Stratton, and Robert Tracy. Foremost among my Alpha Readers is the amazing Barbara McNew Schantz, whose talents, not only in managing our busy household, but also in editing and proofing my novels are much appreciated by her husband.
The vector diagram of Chapter 2 and the “yin-yang” Smith charts originally appeared in my The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas, 2nd edition, 2015. If you are interested in the electromagnetic physics of my Hidden Truth stories and how it can be applied in practice, you may want to check out my ultra-wideband antenna book. The Smith Chart of Chapter 7 is by “Wdwd” (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In conclusion, I am deeply grateful to all the readers of The Hidden Truth who took a chance on an unknown author. You joined Peter Burdell and Amit Patel on their fictional journey to discover the hidden truth and unmask the Civic Circle, and now you have joined my heroes in their first steps to outwit and defeat their formidable enemies.
Your support through your reviews and word-of-mouth have been critical to the success of The Hidden Truth. You are wonderfully engaged, and a remarkably high fraction of you volunteered your time to review my work and help bring it to the attention of more readers. If you enjoy my latest story, if you think it deserves a wider audience, I hope you’ll let your friends know, and post reviews on Amazon and elsewhere to help spread the word.
Thank you.
About the Author
I’m a radio frequency (RF) scientist with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. My research aims at understanding how bound or reactive electromagnetic energy decouples from a source or an antenna and radiates away. This theory has been helpful in understanding and designing not only antennas, but also near-field wireless systems. I “wrote the book” on The Art and Science of Ultra-wideband Antennas. In addition, I’m an inventor with about forty patents to my credit, mostly antennas or wireless systems, but I was also a co-inventor (with my wife, Barbara) on a remarkably effective baby bowl. Barbara’s Baby Dipper® bowl and feeding set (see http://babydipper.com) helps parents feed infants and helps
toddlers learn to feed themselves through a clever, ergonomic design. With Bob DePierre, I co-invented Near-Field Electromagnetic Ranging. I conceived the idea and Bob reduced it to practice and made it work.
I’m an entrepreneur, as well. I co-founded The Q‑Track Corporation. Our company is the pioneer in Near-Field Electromagnetic Ranging (NFER®) Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS). Q-Track released the first NFER® RTLS a few years ago. Q-Track products provide precise (40cm rms accurate) location awareness that enhances the safety of nuclear workers. In other installations, Q-Track products let robotic overhead cranes know the location of workers to avoid collisions. Q-Track’s new SafeSpot™ systems help keep people safe from collisions with forklifts. NFER® RTLS provides “indoor GPS” by providing location awareness to the most difficult industrial settings. See http://q-track.com.
Furthermore, I’m an amateur radio operator (KC5VLD), and a Webelos den leader in Huntsville, Alabama, where I live with my wife, Barbara, and our four children: twin boys, and twin girls.
I was deeply honored by the reviewer who suggested that The Hidden Truth was a great book to tide a reader over until the next Larry Correia or Jim Butcher release. May I suggest some other authors you might want to investigate to tide you over until the release of The Brave and the Bold: Book 3 of The Hidden Truth? I listed a number of recommendations in The Hidden Truth, but more appear all the time. There’s a growing fraternity of independent, self-published authors busy changing the culture one story at a time with their tales of adventure and heroism. Here are a few of my more recent discoveries.
C. J. Carella’s Warp Marine Corps series blends small unit action with interstellar warfare and politics in a particularly satisfying manner. Russell Newquist’s story, Who’s Afraid of the Dark? is a fast-paced, clever, horror short, and he promises more tales of Peter Bishop are to come. JP Mac revisits the Lovecraft universe and throws in a healthy dose of campus political correctness for comic effect in Hallow Mass. Chasing Freedom by Marina Fontaine is a rare upbeat and hopeful dystopian novel, full of exciting action. Peter Grant gives Louis L’Amour a run for his money with his Ames Archives series. The latest installment, Rocky Mountain Retribution, is superb.
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