by Randy Moffat
Target zero had become Holy Shit in no time at all.
CHAPTER 7—CONFESSION AND THE SOLE
Admiral Dyer sat in his chair with his feet up and crossed at the ankles . . . barely suppressing a yawn while Bear stood with his hands tucked neatly behind him admiring the soles of the admiral’s shoes. He looked calmly at MacMoran through the tops of his eyes and Bear met his stare equally calmly. The flag officer was a real gentleman. He had offered Bear a seat even though he was pissed off—it was 1:30 AM in Alabama. For this report Bear felt he should stand.
“Admiral . . . I have a confession to make.”
Dyer nodded—as clear a signal to continue as the two of them needed. Bear had flown there overnight. He had demanded and gotten the interview on short notice. Dyer knew something was up. He figured it had to be bad—it always was when they drag you out of bed at zero dark thirty.
Bear pursed his lips momentarily and cupped a fist in a palm behind his back, trying for his best contrite errant school boy look. His neck was one big ache from trying to sleep on the airplane.
“I have exceeded your orders . . . rather a lot actually.”
Dyer looked puzzled.
“What? How? Your reports don’t show anything.” He asked.
Bear wrinkled his brow and tugged an ear.
“I may be just a smidgen behind in my reporting. You asked me to build you an advanced communications system . . .” He looked at the ceiling introspectively. “In the course of researching and building that communications system we came upon a quantum . . . uh . . . effect. The effect instead of being simply applicable to communications can be used as a . . . well . . . as a weapon.”
Dyer was silent for a moment, leaving Bear room to continue. When he did not, Dyer spoke.
“What kind of weapon?”He nudged.
Bear smiled.
“A big weapon . . . a seriously powerful weapon . . . one of those weapons that beat the band . . . the boys have taken to calling it . . . a death ray.”
Dyer looked confused.
“But we’ve already plenty of research into particle beam weapons . . .”
“Not like this you haven’t!” Bear interrupted before they wandered down side roads of conjecture. “This particular particle beam is based on theoretical particles that have never been physically observed. It’s like nothing the Earth has ever seen. May I use your computer?”
Dyer looked confused by the change up.
“All right . . .” He motioned his head at the machine on his desk suspiciously.
Bear pulled out a secure jump drive, inserted it into the machine and activated it.
The film footage of their experiment on the stone wall at their hideout appeared and Bear froze the image and prepped him.
“This is a short bit of tunnel and native rock at the end . . . The rock wall you see is easily a half mile of native stone. Nothing special and especially nothing up our sleeves.” He pointed. “Here you can also see the apparatus we set up at one end and pointed at that wall . . . the expected impact point is the small X shaped smear centered on the white wall.”
“What does the apparatus do?” Dyer asked.
Bear grinned.
“Funny thing about that—fairly straight forward idea actually—Petrovski thought of the scheme initially so we have been calling it the ‘Petrovski Effect.’ To keep it simple it involves the excitation of certain particles in a way that had never been thought of so that they are first brought into existence and then their spin is changed until they act on matter or just after . . . never mind . . . anyway . . . the virtual particles drop back into . . . into their own reality. “Bear finished weakly. “In fact, the experiment you see involves changing the spin so that it produces a continuous source of particles whose . . . unique property is that they have a spin of positive two.”
Dyer looked curious, but unenlightened.
“Spin two particles are called gravitons!” Bear added helpfully.
Dyer shifted in his seat in a precursor of annoyance. Everything about his body language said he did not know or couldn’t remember what a graviton was and that Bear better get on with enlightening him.
“So those are the particles that have never been detected?” The name had clearly not meant anything.
Bear laid his finger alongside his nose and grinned like the artful dodger.
“Until now—though we are not detecting them so much as generating them. Seems to work though . . .”
Dyer smiled as if amazing scientific breakthroughs were routine in his world and annoying shits like Bear appeared in front of his desk all the time just before they were fired or beaten to a pulp for disturbing his sacrosanct sleepy time.
Bear got the message and continued as hastily as he could.
“The graviton is the messenger particle for gravity so our best guess at this point is that what the gadget actually does is sends out a stream of particles that communicates directly with the space time matrix substructure. Down below Plank length at . . . .” Bear noted the storm clouds gathering on Dyer’s brow and sped up his delivery. “Suffice to say, the message gets sent to whatever we are aiming at that there is a something with a lot of gravity very nearby which of course causes space time to bend in accordance with Einstein’s physics to accommodate it.”
Dyer nodded, sat back and let the child chatter.
“We started small.” Bear unfroze the image and the edited digital film ran through the short form of the sequence to the end of the first experiment. The image zoomed in and showed the bubble on the surface of the limestone. Bear froze it. Dyer peered at the screen.
“That was the end of our first attempt.”
Bear glanced at Dyer.
Dyer shrugged, still squinting and peering nearsightedly.
Bear leant forward and pointed at the anomaly.
“See . . . there is a bubble there . . . it’s not in the paint . . . it’s in the rock itself.”
“That’s it?” Dyer asked with a hint of deflation. “That’s it! You woke me up from a perfectly good wet dream to show me you have invented a rock bubble maker?
Bear smiled almost shyly.
“I thought that would be your reaction actually . . . . so even though the team thought it was pretty dramatic already I ordered them to crank up the gain a notch. I may have been . . . hmm . . . overzealous . . .” He hit play on the button and even through the medium of video that effect was remarkable as the wall visibly slid out of sight in the millisecond before the image suddenly faded to black as the lights went out and everything went dark. Bear stopped it.
Dyer looked startled and finally emoted as expected.
“Holy Moley! Did I just see what I think I saw?”
Bear met his eyes.
“That’s funny . . . everyone else said “Holy Shit!” But, yes . . .” He stated frankly. “To be clear, the beam removed about 14 point six seven meters of native limestone in less than a nanosecond. Essentially the change was instantaneous.”
Dyer looked nonplused.
“Technically though, it did not remove the stone . . . it simply moved it—out of the way of . . . well of something the universe thought was there. We think . . . at least the Eggheads think that the basic matter was actually bent along gravity force lines in a hurry to . . . I don’t know . . . flee is a good word . . . to flee from these heaps of non-existent matter the gravitons told it was there. The particles of the stone were shoved into the empty quantum spaces in the surrounding rock . . . not actually destroyed you see? The atoms and quarks were just shoved into the spaces between existing atoms. The smoothness you see in the video on the rock surface is the line that the edge of the graviton field signaled them to move to and the glassy appearance is where the extra matter was placed in such a way as to create very finely textured stone w
ith twice the density of ordinary rock. Twice the density because it had all the rock in front of it shoved rudely into the spaces in its structure. We are still checking that conclusion but my guys think it’s probably right . . . . oh . . . and the effect was ragged around the edges where the particle beam got less coherent . . . kind of like a spray from a fire hose . . . solid in the middle and less concentrated around the edges.”
He played the video back in slow motion again and let Dyer watch it at a frame every second or two.
Dyer shook his head in amazement, as taken aback as the next man to see a wall of stone literally just move away and disappear until the moment the lights went out.
Bear then turned on the video, ran past the darkness and reached the team’s flashlight show and later still when some temporary lights and a trickle of electricity came back on the scene and showed it again in bright light. The video showed the steep slope that had been created; the truly dramatic effect of instantaneously smashing the solid matter of native rock into a glassy deep slope.
Dyer responded finally by standing.
He paced back and forth for a couple minutes . . . as long as his decisive nature could handle. He stopped and stood still.
“Show me that again!” He commanded. “From the beginning . . .”
Bear showed it to him again.
Dyer sat down and closed his eyes for a minute.
He opened his eyes and met Bear’s even stare.
“You are not shucking me, right?” Not really meaning it—the evidence was too compelling. It was hard to fake world class physicists in pin stripe suits shouting “Holy Shit” in utter astonishment.
“Nary a shuck.” Bear shrugged and answered quietly.
“What do you want?” Dyer finally asked.
Bear sat down then. He leaned back to think and they both remained silent for almost two minutes. Bear knew he needed to get this right. It was his responsibility to his team and to some larger thing he could only sense dimly. Bear leaned forward and spoke tersely; afraid momentarily that he might fail at what he knew must be done. Dyer was the man who could make it happen and Dyer could also fail to make it happen if Bear did not do his job now.
“I want a free hand to research further. I need more money and more time.”
Dyer held up his hand.
“Why should I use the Q-Kink team? Why not assign the weapons research aspects to another team and let you drive on with your original project?”
Bear shook his head instantly, knowing that was the wrong.
“It would be a mistake. The makeup of team Q-Kink is totally unique and they work because of the synergy that results from all its parts. Change the makeup of my team and you lose the synergy that led to it and frankly if you change the focus of that group in mid-stream, change who’s looking at it and you interrupt everything . . . the established interconnections between minds, the lines we are thinking along and the team’s . . . flow . . . you may lose a lot of its potential. You will also lose time, money and worse . . . you will lose momentum . . .” He spoke with intensity and passion. “We built this Admiral . . . my team! It needs to do the rest . . . whatever that is. I don’t just think this, Admiral . . . I know this!”
Dyer regarded him levelly for a full minute. The sound of a cat’s paw hitting carpet would have been as loud as a rifle shot in the room at that moment.
Dyer blinked first and rubbed his chin.
“You are asking me to have a lot of faith in you.” He said quietly.
Bear grinned crookedly and gave a good humored shrug.
“All I can say is that I will do my best to reward the faith. Look at it this way . . . maybe I can give you a working quantum communications link and a death ray for roughly the same price. Try and get that kind of deal on e-bay!”
Dyer didn’t laugh. He was busy doing mental calculations, thinking through the things Bear did not have to deal with. Bear presumed it was primarily politics. Politics was always trouble and he let the older man think in peace.
“What else precisely do you need?” He asked cautiously his feet firmly planted on the ground.
It was not a time to hesitate. Bear didn’t . . .
“I am guessing, but fifty million more to start with and maybe a few more personnel to add to the team . . . I will let you know about that. Also, I need six more months for phase one and probably some more for the later phases depending what we do with the weapon.”
Dyer grinned a little crookedly himself.
“That’s a lot of money and a lot of time, son.”
“For a death ray and a Dick Tracey communicator watch that gets free cable, dances a jig and does your laundry too?” Bear smiled back incredulously.
Dyer laughed from the gut this time.
“Tentative OK then . . . and MacMoran . . . you are the commander in the field on this—dammed if I am going to try and outguess you . . . especially when you do that disappearing wall trick . . . I always back my guys and look after them; but I hope you know what the hell you are doing!”
Bear grinned.
“Admiral, I haven’t made myself clear . . . we are tinkering around out at the edge of human knowledge . . . not only do I not know what I am doing, I don’t know what will happen ten minutes down the road. But I do know this . . . something will happen with this team, and whatever it is . . . it is likely to be . . .” he pursed his lips, “. . . interesting.”
They both laughed and rubbed their mental palms together at the prospect. It was a measure of rare human accord that they were rubbing them for much the same reason.
“I am sure I do not have to warn you not to make half of Missouri disappear . . . Now get out of here you crazy bastard, before I give you the sole of my boot.” Dyer finished in a friendly tone.
Bear had seen those soles . . . there was gum on one of them and they were far too big to fit up his backside . . . He got . . .
CHAPTER 8—A NICK ON THE CUTTING EDGE
A giddy feeling somehow lasted in Bear until he was back at Anglewood feeling lightheaded at his success and like typhoid-Mary he aimed to infect other people with that dizziness. He chose Wong first.
As he had run out the door he had ordered Wong to dissect their power failure while he was away in Alabama.
“Tell me about what went wrong with our power.” He demanded as soon as he walked in the door.
Wong’s shoulders rose up.
“Nice to see you too, boss. We drew too much juice.”
Bear shrugged his own shoulders in a ‘Duh . . . now tell me something I don’t know’ roll. Wong took his cue.
“When the Eggheads turned up the gain on their laser rig and the accelerator it yanked down tons of amps. Petrovski says it ain’t actually the Casimir piece that did it . . . . There was an unexplained power spike that we have not precisely resolved yet—something to do with the particles themselves the Eggheads say. Possibly related to inertia, but frankly they are quasi-clueless. Maxmillian told me it simply poured volts through that big switch he was using in the lab. It tripped two heavy circuit breakers in the panel and went by so fast that some got by the panel and fed into that jury rigged 1948 electrical resonator he was nursing. The whole pile, breakers and resonator simply fused. That was the sparks we got. We’ll do better next time now that we have tried it and know what to expect but . . . .”
“But . . . ?” Bear started but Wong held up his hand.
“But the breakers and resonator were very good stuff actually. When you finish the electrical math that antiquated resonator was much higher capacity than most modern setups would have been. It was a sweet monster that Maxmillian dug up back in the catacombs here and it was built like a brick shithouse before the Japanese invented tin foil crap and sold it to us by the ship load. He absolutely loved that thing and would be really pissed at you fo
r letting it burn up; except he found about a half dozen identical ones stashed beside it back in the catacombs.”
“Save the colorful anecdotes and gimmie the short version, Wonganator.” Bear used a pet name since his mind was elsewhere.
“We checked with the power company—they tell us that we pulled everything the local delivery grid had through the small wire pipes from the telephone poles into this place. In other words, the limit was not so much how much the power grid could deliver as the capacity of the wires into the cave. Our wires here in the ground got HOT, chief. They got real hot. Maxmillian tells me that it was a race as to whether his boxes went first or the wires simply melted. Bottom line? This rig eats juice when it pushes the Petrovski filed out.”
“Can we increase the pipe size here between the grid and the complex?”
“Yes, but there will still be a problem.”
“What?”
“Maxmillian and I are in agreement. Even if we grow the pipe into the cave, any further experiments bigger than what we just did could quickly exceed the ability of the local power grid itself to deliver enough juice at this single point through the wires between here and the county transformers. This is the edge of rural Kansas after all—the only thing beyond us is small farms and about a thousand mile of wheat fields. We cannot fix the grid ourselves and if you end up blacking out a town or two and there goes our secrecy. As it is the power company has already called us and requested that we warn them if we plan to make further pulls of that magnitude. They think we are manufacturing taffy in here for crying out loud . . . We start sucking in the juice for every air conditioner in Northern Missouri and questions are going to be asked about why our lollipops use so much mojo.”
Bear looked momentarily grim to placate Wong’s expectations, but his heart was not in it. He was still riding the personal high from the night before.
“Man! I was feeling good too. You are such a downer, man.”
