The little girl tugged away from her Mom’s hand and looked away and then back at Planck and mumbled hello.
The young woman then said, “Well Heather is sick. She has a bad heart. But the Doctors say she isn’t a good candidate for a heart transplant. They are wonderful doctors but they say there isn’t much they can do. We were wondering if you…if you could do something?”
Planck looked back at the little girl and her parents. He didn’t know how to answer. He was most comfortable in an impersonal, theoretical world. Megan Baxter came to his rescue – sort of. “How is it you think Dr. Planck can help?”
The young father spoke then, “We hoped he would pray for Heather. Help make her well. Help her get a healthy heart.”
Planck realized he had to try. It was time for him to leave his island. “I will pray for Heather. But Heather needs your help more than mine. I’m sure you pray for her already, but I’d like you to try a different approach. Gather your friends and family all together. Have as many people there as possible. Have them sit and be still. Then ask each of them simultaneously to have but a single thought in their head. Have them all see in their minds a healthy heart beating in Heather’s chest. Just that thought, nothing else. Have them hold that thought in their minds for at least fifteen minutes. All together…all with that same thought. A healthy heart beating in Heather’s chest. Do you understand? Can you do that?”
The young couple looked back at Planck with hope and gratitude and fear shining in their faces. They nodded their heads as they looked at their little girl and said they would do that. Then Megan Baxter took out a paper and pen from her purse and wrote down their names and phone number then gave them her business card and asked them to stay in touch with her and to tell her if they needed help from the church.
When the couple and their child had walked away, Megan turned back to Planck. “Do you think she’ll get better?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think they’ll do what you told them. And I think that little child will get better. And then I am going to post that in the social media channels and I can’t even imagine what will happen after that!”
Megan gave him a smile that weakened his knees as she took his hand. “Come on, my car’s over here….By the way, I noticed you’re not on LinkedIn or Twitter – not even Facebook.”
Planck just shook his head, “Until all this started I was hiding out on a remote island – pretty much off the grid as people say now.”
“Yea, I get that – well that is all going to change.”
Holding her hand, Planck just let her lead on.
David glanced out the window of his flat in New York City with a thousand yard stare. The sentence he wanted to write wouldn’t quite formulate itself into the paragraph he was writing. The article was to be about how Plato’s sessions with the influence leaders in the country was taking root in the current presidential election cycle. The political debates seemed more substantive and less gladiatorial. The candidates were pushed by their peers and by the media to address the serious issues of the world with clarity and understanding. And the public was paying attention. The blogging universe seemed to be making sure of that. Already a formerly front-running candidate from each of the Republicans and the Democrats had washed out in the polls because their total lack of intellectual depth was exposed to all.
In the two months since the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, David had been busier than he had ever been in his life – and happier too. During the two months he had written countless articles on how new technological advances shared by the crew of the Bucephalus plus the benefits of Participatory Physics could help raise the standard of living for everyone on Earth. The potential was so extraordinary that people found it hard to believe. But they wanted to believe and of course they were impatient to have it immediately. That was David’s biggest problem as a writer. How does one make what is coming in the future make a difference in the present?
And Plato kept warning them that the current peacefulness was not to last; though using the word ’peacefulness’ was somewhat a misnomer. There were still bombs going off every day in Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut. Civil war was still killing effortlessly in Syria. Iran was fomenting violence everywhere. Still that passed for quiet and peaceful.
Every day that could be used to bring the future benefits closer to fruition was valuable. David already missed the early days on Pirates Cay when he and Gabriela and Dr. Wheeling were talking physics with Planck and Ozawa and then he and Gabriela would go walking down the beach hand in hand, and sometimes spotting Plato and Catherine Ozawa walking together as well.
Now he rarely saw Dr. Wheeling or even Gabriela. Both were consumed by their work in showing how Plato’s tech advances and Participatory Physics could be put to work. Dr. Wheeling had been enormously effective already in focusing the physics community on finding solutions. His talks had taken him to the major universities of the world where his lectures had packed the auditoriums.
Plank’s island had become the locus point for discussions about Participatory Physics. Also all meetings with Plato were held there. The Bahamian government had been very helpful in isolating Pirate’s Cay from unwanted visitors – which meant almost everyone except the invited few. The US Coast Guard and Air Force were also policing the area with the permission of the Bahamian Government.
In Washington D.C. Hank Scarpetti and General Greene were leading a different type of team. They were preparing for a more active terrorist environment. The Embassy explosion had both horrified and excited the Potomac community. It wasn’t as big an event as 9/11 but it was big. And the film coverage was exhaustive. The accumulation of body bags and ambulances held the media’s attention for hours. Construction and demolition experts gave clinical dissections of how the missile had caused the building to implode.
The intelligence community was exhorted to greater effort and determination. Homeland Security raised the Alert status at government facilities and airports. The country’s political leaders were in constant sessions talking about what needed to be done and more importantly, who was to blame and to show it wasn’t their fault. As General Greene said to Scarpetti disgustedly, they were practicing on their fiddles while waiting for Rome to start burning.
David thought about these things and stared at the blank Word Document he had opened on his laptop. He had started with the idea of writing an optimistic piece about how the new technology could work to the benefit of everyone. Yet he really wasn’t feeling very optimistic just then. Rather the opposite. He thought events were going to get worse before they could possibly get better.
When is Progress not Progress
By David Randall
I’ve always had an optimistic view of the future. Looking back over the last 12,000 years of “civilized” mankind it seemed to me that things kept getting better and better. We stopped our ceaseless wanderings and settled down and created villages.We learned how to grow more food, build stronger shelters, live longer lives and understand more about how things worked. Life seemed to get better. The trend lines for those 12,000 years all pointed toward better living conditions and better lives. The future is a wonderful place to get to.
When we look back at those years – that great expanse of time – we sacrifice the details in order to see the overarching direction. What blurs is the very uneven and circuitous path the real storyline of those 12,000 years took to get us to where we are. Depending on where you were, in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, or in Africa, your actual experience of all those “future” years would have varied greatly. What would come in the future would be better in the long term, but sometimes it would be worse for a while. Sometimes much worse.
There were decades and even centuries when living conditions for the average person did not change at all – or life even worsened. The future is not by its nature benevolent; rather it is amoral. It gives you what you earn. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
I think we should keep
that in mind.
The week that forever after would be called “Hell Week” began on a busy Tuesday morning at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport just as the transatlantic flights were landing with their load of tourists and business travelers. Four men wearing full body armor and armed with machineguns and hand grenades jumped out of a car that pulled up near the waiting taxi line outside of the arrivals area and ran into the baggage claim area through its unguarded exit. There were over a thousand people crowded around the huge room waiting for their bags to be unloaded and placed on the conveyer belts. Shouting unintelligibly about Allah the four men started firing randomly at the travelers all bunched together and threw their hand grenades.
In seconds the baggage claim area was total bedlam. Running and screaming people trampled over each other in a dash for safety that did not exist in the confines of the area. Bodies accumulated in heaps on a floor slippery with blood. The weapons fire was continuous and mind-numbing.
When security forces began arriving, the terrorists staged the second part of their plan -- a running firefight into the immigration area that bordered Baggage Claim where hundreds of international airline passengers who had been queued up waiting at Passport Control would be caught in the crossfire. The terrorists with their plan clearly in mind, then reversed back toward the baggage claim area where all was chaotic and tried to flee through the baggage claim exit. So far no more than five minutes had gone by.
One of the terrorists had died in the immigration area but the other three were still running and shooting at the policemen. They made it back outside to the taxi line where their car was waiting. Their plan failed there as the driving lanes were all backed up and their car had nowhere to go. The airport security killed them with a barrage of bullets as they were stalled in their vehicle, stuck in the traffic jam their actions had created but they had not anticipated.
That same Tuesday at 5:15PM EDT Jack was stalled in rush hour traffic on Broadway just a few yards away from the Tickets facility in the middle of Times Square. The air conditioner in the ten year old Ford Taurus didn’t work and he was sweating in the afternoon heat. He knew he was sweating because he was nervous but he blamed the air conditioner. He should have stolen a newer car. There was that new Mercedes he could have taken but he knew he wouldn’t have felt right in it. Besides it wouldn’t matter for much longer. For once he didn’t mind being stuck in traffic. And he didn’t mind that the crowds of pedestrians on the sidewalks were cutting between the cars in their hurry to get to wherever they were going.
He saw a street peddler on a side street with his pile of knock-off purses and wallets trying to get passers-by to stop and buy something. A couple of years ago he had been just like that guy. Only he liked the corner of 5th Avenue and 37th Street; people there were more eager for a deal, they didn’t care if it was a knock-off as long as the Gucci or Louis Vuitton logo was visible and the quality wasn’t total shit. At first he rather liked selling on the street, but over time he came to hate how everybody treated him like he was nothing. They just saw him as some Middle Eastern immigrant that somehow had got into their country. He would tell people he was Pakistani and their countries were allies but they didn’t care.
A friend had told him that he should pick an American name because people would treat you better. So he picked ‘Jack’, what could be more American than that? He even worked on his accent. His English wasn’t so bad, he was good with languages, but his pronunciation was a problem. Even after being in the U.S. for eight years, people had trouble understanding him. So he stuck pretty close to other Pakistanis, guys who were even more recent into the country than he was.
But they liked him. And like him they were passionate in their beliefs. Like him they thought people from India were horrible people and that Pakistan should be treated with more respect because Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons. And they worshipped Islam like he did. And more and more they talked about how that was the center of a man’s life. At first, they were more fervid than he was, but being around them really made things clear for him. He was meant to be a servant of Allah and he would be rewarded for his service. He was not meant to sell fake purses on dirty New York Streets to people who treated him like he didn’t belong there.
Then just six weeks ago the man who said he should be called Hasan had come into their group. Jack didn’t know exactly how that had happened but Hasan was a man who knew how to do things. And Hasan knew what needed to be done and he made them all realize that it was no longer acceptable to just talk about things they should do. Soon his friends were arguing about who would be the first to really strike a blow. Then somehow he was the one to say he would do it and they all looked at him with more respect. And Hasan explained how to do what was needed and the last few weeks were the most exciting weeks of his life.
Jack started to feel too nervous sitting in the traffic jam in the middle of Times Square. He thought he saw a policeman looking at him. Then that policeman turned to another policeman standing near him and said something. Then the two policemen looked over in his direction. The plan was to position the car as close to the big Marriott Hotel as possible and then to set the timer on the bomb for one minute and leave the car and walk away quickly but not too fast to draw attention. But everyone had told him that he had to explode the bomb no matter what. He could not fail – not like the fool a couple of years earlier who failed to explode the bomb right about a block away from where he was sitting there in traffic.
Then he saw the two policemen start to walk in his direction. Jack reached for the device that would trigger the bomb. His hands shook a little bit. The two policemen kept coming closer to his car. And Jack pressed the button. Jack never saw the beautiful blonde girl walking across the street behind him who the policemen were coming closer to get a better look at.
The blast was huge. Nearby cars hurtled into the air, storefronts were demolished, shattered glass from windows of the overlooking skyscrapers cascaded down like a waterfall onto the streets, and bodies and parts of bodies were shot away from the blast center like grisly missiles. Death and destruction littered the streets. Soon the wailing sirens of police cars and fire trucks and emergency vehicles descended on that iconic center of New York City and there would be no Broadway shows that night.
Two days later at the Munich Germany train station, Hans Mueller, a tall, thin 23 year-old with blond hair cut short and with a Nazi swastika tattooed on his right forearm took off his knapsack and dropped it into a trashcan at the front of the platform that hundreds of passengers de-boarding the 6 PM express train from Frankfurt had to pass by in just a few moments. He started to walk away when two plain clothed security guards who had spotted him earlier seized him from behind and pinned his arms behind him and snapped on handcuffs. They searched him quickly and found the cell phone they thought would detonate the bomb they suspected to be in the knapsack.
Recklessly one of the guards pulled the top off the trash can and checked the knapsack. The bomb was there. Other security personnel cordoned off the area around the trashcan and maneuvered the people coming off the Frankfurt train to enter the station through a different entryway that entwined them in the crowd of passengers coming off the express train from Berlin. Dieter Strauss, a pimply mousy haired teenager wearing jeans and a black tee shirt with a fake Iron Cross medal hanging around his neck inside his tee shirt watched Hans being detained. He looked around and observed that no one seemed to have noticed him. He wondered if he could do anything to help Hans and then put that thought aside. He didn’t really like Hans anyway. Hans talked too much and picked on him because of his skin blotches. And Hans was not very smart either.
Dieter made up his mind quickly. He would explode both bombs. Han’s bomb would now not be very effective but the bomb that Dieter had positioned to target the passengers from Berlin was now perfect to get the Frankfurt passengers too. He watched the police ushering Hans in the direction of the station building, close to where Dieter’s bomb was. He saw
Hans look desperately at Dieter as he realized how close he was coming to the trashcan where Dieter’s bomb had been placed. Hans started violently shaking his head and shouting “No!”
Dieter pressed the key on his cell phone and the trashcan in the middle of the crowd of people coming off the Frankfurt and Berlin trains exploded. Dieter turned away and ran off in the middle of a crowd of people who were fleeing.
The sun was setting over The Great Hall of the People on the western edge of Tiananmen Square. The meeting place of the National People’s Congress was crowded that evening with high-level Communist Party participants celebrating the 80th birthday of one of their most respected ministers. Security was as always very tight, but that evening particularly so because the General Secretary himself was supposed to arrive within the hour. He was running a little late but had promised to come for a few minutes.
When the General Secretary was just a block away from The Great Hall, the blast of an explosion rocked his car. The bomb blast centered on the East Gate at the center of the huge building and toppled the columns there and engulfed that part of the building in flames. Most of the people in the area where the bomb was set off escaped through the rubble and fire. But not all escaped; the minister whose birthday it was did not survive and several other senior ministers perished with him. In all, over fifty people died there that evening.
Later there was discovered on an undamaged outside wall of The Great Hall a spray painted statement, ‘A typhoon’s wind blows in both directions.’
Joan Smithson and her ten year-old daughter Meagan stood in a line; a queue she thought to herself was what the English called it, at Trafalgar Square in London waiting for a double decker bus. They had just seen the towering statue of Lord Nelson at the center of the square and now were headed back to their hotel to meet up with her husband Don. He had just called them and said his meeting was over. Now he was free to join them and play tourist.
Quantum Times Page 24
