The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

Simultaneously, in a location that hadn’t even existed picoseconds before, a fireball erupted and matter and energy exploded out into a newborn universe — our universe.

  That was 13.7 billion years ago as we reckon time.

  What those of us who inhabit this universe tend not to realize is that one universe is separated from the next by only the thinnest of veils. Ours is merely one of the unnumbered universes that make up the experience which is our reality. While there are some universes where things are so radically different — the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, and such — as to be practically unrecognizable, there are others where things are only marginally different. There might be one where the Nazis won World War II, for example, or Nixon was a hero, or where it was true that not only do vampires exist, but yes, they sparkle.

  But thin veils can be torn asunder.

  CHAPTER 4

  2020

  Sanford Williams, lame duck president, sat in the driver’s seat of the rusted red 1974 Ford F250 pickup truck which he had owned for nearly twenty years. In the passenger seat was Leonard Calhoun, his Secretary of the Treasury. Calhoun’s long, spindly legs were folded up much like the legs of one of those collapsing stepladders. In the bed of the truck were two armed Secret Service agents keeping watch over the surroundings.

  Lying on the bench seat between the President and Calhoun was a dogeared paperback copy of Steven Denver’s Greasy Grass, which Williams had read eight or ten times and was currently browsing yet again. Reading about how Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer had ineptly led the Seventh Cavalry to death and defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn somehow curiously comforted the President; it helped to make him not to feel as if he were the only man who had ever been put in charge of something that he didn’t have the wherewithal nor the means to control.

  It was July 3rd, 2020; four months to the day until the 2020 Presidential election. Williams’ name would not be on the ballot this time around. Like LBJ in 1968, he had declined to run for reelection, borrowing the words of his announcement from Johnson’s: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Whatever poor bastard inherits this clusterfuck, he thought, at least it won’t be me.

  The old Ford truck was parked near the edge of a bluff overlooking a canyon in Wyoming, Williams’ home state. The site was part of 22,000 acres of rugged wilderness land which he had owned for more than a decade, and which included the large home which served as his “Western White House.”

  Williams fancied himself an outdoorsman along the lines of Theodore Roosevelt, though in reality he was less rugged and resourceful than many lifelong urban dwellers. Williams did, however, enjoy the “peaceful easy feeling,” as the Eagles put it, that he experienced while sitting under the huge blue dome of the Wyoming sky. He stared out over the multilayered colors of the sedimentary rock formations that stretched into the distant miles, drinking in what serenity he could muster.

  “Leo,” he mused, “what the hell should we do? Half the money people say we need to come up with more cash to bail out the banks yet again, and the other half say it’s finally sink or swim time, that they need to either fish or cut bait, shit or get off the pot — or one of a hundred other tired clichés. I’m not cut out to make these kinds of money decisions. That’s why I have you.” He grinned a lopsided half-grin at Calhoun, a fastidious little man who wore a pinstriped suit despite the ninety degree heat. His small, gold-rimmed glasses were perched atop his nose, and he looked about at home in these surroundings as a Jesuit priest in a whorehouse.

  “Mr. President —” Calhoun began. Williams gave him the blue-eyed glare known in the halls of Congress as “The Look.”

  “Leo, we’ve known each other for thirty-two years. Forget the ‘Mr. President’ bullshit and give it to me straight.”

  Calhoun suddenly looked even more uncomfortable, like a pimply-faced fifteen-year-old about to break the news that he’d impregnated Williams’ teenage daughter. “Sanford, this is bad. It’s worse than anyone is letting on.”

  Williams’ face clouded. “How bad?”

  “It could spread. It could go worldwide. The London and Nikkei markets are shaky. Everybody’s watching what we do. If our economy crashes, they’re liable to panic and spark a global selloff. Stock prices would

  go through the floor. It’d be worse than 2008. It’d be 1929 all over again. Worse. It could very well affect the entire global economy.” Now he looked grim, like a doctor delivering news of terminal cancer. “If we do nothing, we’re in for total economic collapse. If we try to help the financial sector out with government money like we did in 2009, a lot of people will be in an uproar. Either way, it’s not good. But…”

  “A no-win situation.”

  “Exactly.”

  Williams sat in stony silence, watching the shadows lengthen as the sun approached the horizon. “I wish I could be like Jim Kirk,” he said, referring to the legendary Star Trek captain, “and say I don’t believe in the no-win situation, but in this scenario, I’m afraid I’d be feeding you a line of utter hogwash. So if we do this, Leo… how much are we talking about?”

  “Hard to say. Seven point nine trillion, maybe even eight trillion dollars.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s not that much, on a government scale. The previous two presidents and you have spent that much and more just paying for the wars we’re in,” Calhoun said pointedly. Williams knew that Calhoun had never been in favor of going into either Afghanistan or Iraq, and had been adamantly and publicly opposed to the invasion of Syria, in which the Obama administration had found itself entangled in 2015. “But that’s not how the general population will see it. They’ll only see that you’re taking money, which came from their tax money, and using it to bail out companies that they already pay money to every month, some of which were already bailed out once, a decade ago…”

  Calhoun’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “But there’s more.”

  Williams looked him square in the eye. “What is it?” he growled.

  “Mr. President… you recall the Edwards-Gammon bill that you signed into law last year.” Williams acknowledged him with a nod. “It requires a periodic audit of the Federal Reserve to be conducted by the Government Accountability Office,” Calhoun continued.

  “I know what it was for. And?” Williams said, his voice a low monotone.

  “It’s the first time the Federal Reserve’s been comprehensively audited, ever,” Calhoun said. “The very first time, since the damned thing was founded in 1913. Oh, there are other types of audits performed,” he said in response to Williams’ frown. “The GAO conducts reviews of Federal Reserve activities, the Board's financial statements are audited every year by an outside firm, and the financial statements of the Reserve Banks are audited each year by an independent outside auditor. But there’s never been a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve itself, not like this. The results were published to the Web this morning.”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Williams said.

  “I would have vastly preferred to have had a ghost come into my bedroom and make my wife’s head spin around as I lay next to her rather than accept what the report showed,” Calhoun replied.

  What the audit revealed was shocking indeed. Thirty-four trillion dollars had been secretly given out to banks and corporations everywhere, from the United States to France to Scotland to a dozen Pacific Island nations and more. Between December 2010 and June 2017, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. Their internal documents referred to the bailouts as an “all-inclusive loan program,” but virtually none of the money had ever been paid

  back, and the loan terms provided the cash at zero percent interest.

  “Why didn’t the Fed inform Congress about this?” Williams roared.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Calhoun replied. “The American public would have been livid if they’d foun
d out that the Fed bailed out banks all over the planet while Americans were struggling to find jobs. If they’d informed Congress, it’d have been bound to get out… and you know that C-SPAN is always listening.”

  Williams sat in stony silence. Congress had just approved, after months of partisan squabbling, an agreement to increase the debt ceiling yet again, for the twelfth time in as many years, this time allowing the country’s indebtedness to top $25 trillion. The money the Fed had essentially thrown away would have erased the entire debt of the Federal government.

  “How urgent is this? Can I leave it to fall in Ferguson’s lap? Or Winter’s, if it comes to that?” Senator Christopher Ferguson was the Republican presidential candidate, having defeated Williams’ own veep, the introverted Charles Scofield Mann, for the nomination. A third-term senator from Colorado, Ferguson was the elder statesman of that state’s delegation, white-haired and gregarious, and one of Williams’ oldest friends. His opponent, Roger Winter, was the popular Democratic governor of California, just 48 years of age and athletic.

  “If you leave this simmering until January 20, it’ll be far too late. This requires immediate action.”

  “Goddamn you to hell, Leo, you never could lie to me,” Williams said, smiling a grim smile. “Couldn’t I have been kept in the dark? At the very least, allowed to enjoy the fireworks show tomorrow without this thing being on my mind?”

  “That’s why you hired me, Mr. President… to shine a light.”

  As it turned out, however, the economy was the least of their worries.

  CHAPTER 5

  2009

  In 2009, Brad Lawrence was an 11-year old boy living in Three Forks, Montana, a small town of about 1,900 located near the Bridger Mountains between Bozeman and Helena. He was in what he thought of as the most miserable year of his life, otherwise known as Sixth Grade.

  His grades that semester had been dismal — Ds and Fs, prompting his parents to ground him from pretty much every outside activity, including contact with his best friend, Samuel Denver. Sam was known to stay up late playing his father’s Fender Telecaster guitar, a pastime for which Brad had developed an affinity and which his parents both thought was an utter and colossal waste of time.

  Brad had begged his father to take him to one of the three pawn shops in nearby Belgrade to see if they had an affordable instrument on which he could learn to play.

  The perpetual answer, of course, was no. Brad persisted in asking again and again; his father figured that he had heard the plea at least twenty times in the last four months. Finally, he made Bradley a deal: if he could bring his grades up from the current D-minus average to straight A’s, they would go shopping.

  Motivation is a powerful thing.

  By the end of the spring semester of 2010, Brad’s report card showed six As and one B+. Despite the technical shortfall, his father was so impressed at the improvement that he agreed that the two of them would go the following Saturday and see what was available.

  CHAPTER 6

  2020

  It was two days after his pickup truck heart-to-heart with Leonard Calhoun. As one of his final acts as President of the United States, Sanford Williams called a financial summit, a nearly unprecedented conclave of government officials and leaders from around the globe. It was to include representatives from the member nations of the former G-20, now simply referred to as “the Twelve”: the United States, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, the European Union, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and the newly formed Pan Asian Alliance, or PAA.

  He requested that each nation send an elite delegation consisting of that nation’s senior finance minister and central bank governor plus its head of state or a duly appointed representative of such.

  The delegations met in Paris, France, and discussions were held beginning October 5, 2020, three months after the announcement; the plan was to meet for five days, adjourn for discussion by the governments of each represented nation, and return on October 26 to discuss further plans.

  The Pan-Asian Alliance had announced its formation earlier in the year and numbered among its member states China, Japan, and Korea (which had been reunified in 2018 under a Chinese-controlled government), along with more than a dozen others. It was, in effect, a United States of Asia. There had been overtures beginning in 2016 from China, entreating the United States to entertain the idea of the two nations, in essence, becoming one. The Williams administration had rejected that idea like a kiss from a leper.

  On October 22, the PAA announced that its representative nations would not be returning to the conference, citing a lack of confidence in the Western nations’ ability to affect any significant change in the world economic climate. India and Indonesia both declined comment, but rumors were rampant that they were both in secret talks to join the PAA. When October 26 arrived, the chairs earmarked for the representatives of the Asian nations sat empty.

  The Western powers were furious. The Prime Minister of Great Britain went so far as to say that the Asians should be ashamed to breathe the same air as the rest of the planet.

  The conference began as planned, but without the sizeable economic clout of the Asian bloc being present, the representatives of the remaining member states privately agreed that there was little point and even less promise to anything that they might accomplish. The meeting went on for the originally planned three and a half hour opening session on October 26, gathered again on the morning of October 27, and mutually agreed to adjourn after a discussion of only two hours, issuing a statement to the press which indicated that no progress had been made whatsoever and that the summit had been “essentially hobbled” by the Asian nations’ actions. It called for the peoples of Asia to demand that their leaders “act in good faith” by agreeing to participate in a new series of talks that were planned for the early spring of 2021.

  Good faith was not how anyone would have described the reaction of the Pan-Asian Alliance.

  CHAPTER 7

  2010

  On a hazy Saturday morning in May of 2010, Charles Lawrence pulled his silver BMW into a parking space at Chess Pawn in Belgrade, Montana, a place where he had never been and, in fact, had never imagined that he would go.

  He’d been taught as a child that pawnbrokers were places that desperate people went to surrender things of value that they owned in order to get money to pay overdue bills, purchase food for their hungry children, or satisfy their craving for alcohol or drugs.

  What he’d never learned was that for certain types of goods, firearms and musical instruments being two of the primary examples, pawn shops were a fantastic resource.

  Charles and his son walked into the dimly lit building, and Brad’s eyes flickered over the various items on display. Tools, stereo equipment, and other items… then he saw, on the far wall, a small assortment of guitars. They walked over and examined what was available, but Bradley was not impressed. None of them compared to the Fender Telecaster that belonged to his best friend’s father, Mr. Denver.

  They moved on to the next pawnbroker, Fistful of Dollars Pawn and Gold. They went inside and Brad was immediately struck by the large number of guitars that were displayed on hangers across two walls of the shop.

  He began examining some of them, looking at the price tags that hung from the tuning pegs of the instruments.

  He admired a Gibson Les Paul Custom; it was black with a pair of white DiMarzio pickups. He glanced at the price and gasped. It was $1,700. He knew his father would never go for that.

  “How much can we spend?” he asked his dad.

  “I don’t know… how much is a good guitar?”

  The pawnshop owner overheard them and spoke to Brad. “Are you wantin’ an electric guitar, son, or an acoustic?”

  “Electric,” Brad answered.

  “Well, we’ve got ‘em ranging anywhere from about $75 on up to a couple thousand or so,” the man said. “You’ll also need an amplifier. Those we have from $49, although, trust me, you don’
t want one of those, up to a thousand or so. Are you just starting out?”

  “Yeah,” Brad admitted.

  “Well, let me tell ya,” the man said to Mr. Lawrence. “I know you probably don’t want to spend a bunch of money for his first guitar, but one thing to consider is that a cheap guitar is gonna be harder to play, and when it’s hard to play, young players get frustrated and quit playing altogether. You get something decent — doesn’t have to be high dollar — it makes it a whole lot easier and a lot more fulfilling.”

  Brad and his father exchanged a glance.

  “What would you recommend?” asked Mr. Lawrence.

  The man proceeded to show them a few different instruments in the $200 range, including a Squier Stratocaster made by Fender, and copies made by Epiphone of the Gibson Les Paul and Gibson SG. “Any of these would work well for him,” the man told Mr. Lawrence. Then he asked Bradley, “What kind of music do you want to play, son? Who do you like?”

  He could see a light in Brad’s eyes as he began to reel off the names. “Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Guns n’ Roses…”

  The pawnshop owner grinned. “That’s some old classic stuff for a li’l kid like you.”

  “My best friend and I like to sit and listen to his dad’s record collection. He’s got hundreds of records… the big black ones, like from before CDs?”

  “Cool,” the man grinned. “Well, any of these would work for you. The Strat is $125, the SG is $175 and the Les Paul is $250,” he said, indicating each one in turn. “Like I said, though, you’re gonna need an amp, too, and for the kind of music you’re talking about, you really should get a tube amp. They have that crunchy, thick sound like you’re gonna want.” He led them over to a different part of the store where the amplifiers were arranged. “Like I said, we have these puny $49 transistor amps, but you’re not gonna be happy with one of them for long. Now, I’ve got more expensive ones, but what I think would be great for you is this old Fender Princeton amp. Yeah, it’s old, but not so much that it’s considered vintage and collectible, which would make it a lot more expensive. It’s listed at $329, but I could let you have that for $200 when you’re buying one of these guitars.”