Here & There (51 page)

*
Umberto Eco would be so proud.

I gave up. I went to the liquor store, where I purchased bottles of Pinot Noir and a Chianti. On the ride home, I did not think. Or rather, I chased thoughts from my mind with Holst. His Enigma Variations were in the car’s CD player. I kept #IV (Allegro di Molto) on repeat, loud.

Upon returning home, I brought my meditative music with me inside. The stereo swallowed the CD and filled my living room with Variation IX Nimrod (Adagio). I left my cell phone and keys on top of one of the speakers, and retrieved a corkscrew and glass chalice.

The epiphany was almost comical. As I finally relaxed into the back of the sofa, Nimrod reached its loudest crescendo, and the moment the wine hit my lips, a quiet, static feedback, like a warped Morse code, scratched across the speakers, briefly distorting Nimrod’s notes,

then disappeared, and my phone, sitting atop the speaker, buzzed to life with a text from my son.

In vino veritas indeed.

I was out of my seat before I even realized my realization. I flicked the stereo off on my rush to the study.

The computer took an eternity to stir from its slumber. My fingernails tapped their own impatient Morse code on the glass desk.

Finally, the audio recording was playing in tandem with the NB footage.

Reidier was circling the table:
I don’t care what Q Net did. They’re
in the Stone Age as far as I’m concerned. And Bell’s paper disproves practically all of your . . .

And there it was on the cell tap, that same quiet burst of warped Morse code that results from the radio signal of a cellular phone interfering with the magnetic field of speakers—even mobile phone speakers. Except cell phones don’t interfere with themselves. But it’s there with every lap Reidier completes. Every time he passes the credenza, there’s feedback, perfectly prompting Reidier’s hiccups in pace, his subtle head tilts of confusion.

It’s the static.

It’s the interference.

It’s the nanobots.

And Reidier knows it. Knows it with a glance, while leaning against the archway, not lost in thought at all, rather instead strategically trying to avoid detection while risking one last evaluative glance at the nanobot-coated credenza.

Adapted from the surveillance footage taken in Rear Admiral Wisecup’s “Secure Room” at NAVSTA, from the file of the Office of the Director of the Strategic Technology, Donald Pierce; February 14, 2007.
¹¹¹

“Have you ever heard of a railgun, Professor Reidier?” Pierce asks, the excitement in his tone quite clear.

“It’s an artillery gun powered by electricity in order to harness immense electromagnetic fields. Basically it’s a monorail on steroids, only instead of moving a train, it’s hurling ballistic projectiles.”

“So much for State secrets,” Pierce elbows Wisecup knowingly. Wisecup nods and half laughs, half grunts in response.

“Railguns are hardly secrets, Pierce,” Reidier notes. “Louis FauchonVilleplee invented his electrical cannon almost a century ago. Scientists have been developing ways to use the tech to launch aircraft or supplies into space. And the British successfully weaponized it the late ’90s.”

Pierce nods. “That’s all public knowledge. What isn’t is that DARPA and the ONR—”

“ONR?” Reidier asks.

“Office of Naval Research,” Wisecup offers.

“The Department and the Navy have been hard at work down at NSW, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, building next-generation prototypes.” Pierce leans back in his chair and lets his reveal sink in.

Reidier seems nonplussed.

“We’ve been able to procure one of them and have already set about adapting it into what we think will be a viable energy source for your work,” Pierce completed his thought.

Reidier scratches at his cheek, sucking in his lips a little. Finally, he sighs and says, “It won’t work. Not enough energy.”

Wisecup guffaws, “The last prototype test hurled a projectile at
██
miles per hour over a distance of
██
miles in under six minutes.
█████
megajoules of energy packs a hell of a wallop as far as I’m concerned. How much more goddamn energy do you need?”

Reidier leans back in his chair and says, “More.”

Wisecup lets out a deep belly laugh and slaps his palm on his armrest. “Now that’s the kind of bravado I can get behind. More!”

Unlike his colleague, Pierce is far from amused. His forehead wrinkled with worry. “What’s your concern, Kerek?”

Reidier proceeds, assuming the same voice and mannerisms he exhibits while lecturing. “Developing
████
megajoules of electromotive force would require
█████
X 10
██
electron volts. Converting
█████
megajoules to teslas is
██
X 10
█
. The Russians produced 2.8 X 10
⁴
teslas in a laboratory in Sarov in 1998. Unless I’m wrong, that kind of capability doesn’t come anywhere close. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be enough.”

Pierce visibly relaxes, a smile even makes its way to his lips. “Your calculations are spot on. I agree with you that current railguns, what the British developed, are completely inadequate for our purposes. At best, it gets us halfway there. And the last thing we want would be to only achieve half of a teleport.”

Both Reidier and Wisecup listen to Pierce with a bemused curiosity. “I’m afraid that Rear Admiral Wisecup has inadvertently misled you.”

Wisecup shifts, uncomfortably. He does not know where Pierce is going with this and clearly does not like the implication of being mistaken or deceitful.

Pierce continues, “The
██████
megajoules of wallop was what made headlines last December, but that was, well, what made headlines, and completely consistent with current railgun technology. At the Department, we’re not very interested in current tech. It’s why we’re so interested in you. What we’ve been tinkering with, well, our nonpublic prototypes involve linking several very large
████ ███
together. As a result, we generate about
████
X 10
██
electron volts, plus or minus a few. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’ll probably do the trick, no?”

Reidier rests his elbows on the table, presses his palms together as if in prayer, and rests his head against his hands, his fingers pressing against either side of his nose against his brow, his thumbs hooking under his chin. Reidier nods and exhales audibly. “Yes, that
would be enough. But where would we get that kind of power? Do we need to relocate again?”

Pierce shakes his head. “Not at all. That’s where the Rear Admiral and his Navy come in so handy. Your adapted railgun and power source are already en route.”

Reidier follows Pierce’s gaze out the window. “A battleship?”

“How’s a goddamn aircraft carrier sound to you?” Wisecup grins at Reidier. “The USS
████████
should give you a good goddamn wallop, eh?”

Reidier nods, almost in a daze. Wisecup claps Pierce on the back. The two government men are pleased with the success and grandiosity of their solution. In their self-adulation, however, what they fail to see is the slightest drop in Reidier’s shoulders. Perhaps it’s just an unconscious release after the minor confrontation, or perhaps it’s indicative of a psychological capitulation. Regardless of the motive, the sentiment is clear: resignation.

“So where are we going to put this floating battery?” Reidier asks.

Wisecup gestures out the window that looks out on NAVSTA’s bay and piers.

Reidier turns and takes it in. “Your base?”

“Look out a little further, just across the water,” Pierce offers.

Reidier leans toward the window.

“We got you your own personal little mad-scientist island outpost,” Wisecup boasts and points.

The three men stand up and approach the window to take it in.

Upon magnification of the footage, while pixilated, the location is undeniably recognizable. Across the water from the conference room sits Gould Island.
*

*
Beyond negotiating a price with the lobsterman, I still wasn’t talking to Lorelei. I sat on an old, dirty cooler at the stern of the boat, while she made small talk with the captain.

He was going on about how he remembered it, in his heavy Rhode Island accent, a tongue allergic to Rs.
Rememb’d the buhds maw than the fish. Yes suh. Looked like a swa’aw’m . . . A fawhg of feathuhs and feedin’. You could hee-yah theah squawks all the way back on the docks.

The fish, though, well they wuh ev’y’wheah. Well, at least ev’y’wheah within this, ya no, radius of death ‘round the gnaw-thin tip of thuh island. Damndest thing I ev-uh so’ah. Yes suh. The wheah’dest pot though, was that some of ‘em, was actually cooked. Nevah seen anythin’ like it. No suh. Cooked fish floating up from the depths.

I listened, a little, out of the corner of my ear. But mostly, I just kept going over this Tracy Kidder bit I remembered: “In fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility. In nonfiction, it has everything to do with those things. I think that the nonfiction writer’s fundamental job is to make what is true believable.”

As we bounced from crest to crest, Gould Island winked larger and larger with every dip of the bow. The truth of it became less and less plausible with every league. I zippered my coat all the way up. The weather might’ve warmed up a bit, but the ocean air still had a bite.

Finally, we were idling less than a hundred yards from the beach. Lorelei and I stood on the port side, staring at ground zero of
The Reidier Test
.

It looked like . . . an island. I don’t know, I think I half expected it to still be smoking. Instead the site was covered with a swath of primary-growth plants and even some overzealous secondary-growth shrubs.

Ov-uh theah’s some rubble ya can see through thuh bushes
, our lobsterman pointed out.

Part of what used to be a brick wall flashed between the overgrowth. It was the bottom half of a window frame.

We slowly motored north, up the east side of the island, following a three-foot-high cement wall that demarcated the beach from the woods. It sunk into the earth about a third of the way up the island. We saw several more partial brick or cement structures that were slowly being swallowed up by the green.

Our captain kept pointing out secret sites that were camouflaged to the untrained eye. What looked like a teepee of kindling surrounded by trees was actually a wooden structure that had imploded. Those “kindling sticks” were actually old beams.

The northern end of the island was flat—a field of concrete striated with weeds, saplings, and ferns.

“Jesus, get a load of that.” Lorelei leaned against the side of the boat to try to get close, try to make sense of what wasn’t there anymore.

Traces of another concrete wall circumvented the former compound and opened up at the tip of the island where the ocean was dotted with the odd pylon.

“What’s that?” I asked our captain.

“Was a pe’ah.”

A pier. Didn’t look like much. I said so.

“Nah, a big one too. Yes suh. U’sta have an entiya eah’craft carrie-ya docked heah.”

I tried to imagine an aircraft carrier tied to the pier. Mammoth wires running off it into Reidier’s lab. I played dumb. “What happened to it? Sink?”

“Nah, theah would’uh been a whole heap of flotsam on the sh’oah. I huh’d it’d shipped out a cuppa days pry-ya.” The lobsterman shrugged.

On the way back, the captain pointed out two aircraft carriers that were docked at the NAVSTA, the naval base, just across the bay on Newport’s western shore, the former fiefdom of the late Rear Admiral Wisecup.

Believability, plausibility, reality. I just didn’t know anymore.

Neither did Lorelei. Instead she gave me a crooked smile while the wind whipped wisps of her hair in front of her face.

She’d be stunning even in the middle of a goddamn hurricane. Hell if I didn’t swoon a little inside. It was either that or another swell of the Atlantic.

“I guess we just keep digging. Tomorrow we go to Providence.”

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. What I hope to accomplish. I can’t keep it all straight, it’s a Chinese somersault between my memory and my imagination rolling down the banks of the Providence River, tumbling toward perdition.

Adapted from the video surveillance of Gould Island Lab; June 15, 2007

Reidier rests his hands on the pen tray of the whiteboard behind him, his left elbow patch inadvertently erasing some of his calculations.

Rear Admiral Wisecup, in an almost comically cliché gesture, pulls out a cigar and butane torch lighter. He has the cigar in his mouth and the bright-blue flame ignited before he pauses to ask, as if it’s a foregone conclusion, “You mind?”

Reidier, without any aggression, matter-of-factly lets him know he can’t smoke there.

“You allergic or something?” Wisecup challenges Reidier.

Reidier adjusts some machine on the nearby table while he proceeds to explain, first with several lines of technical jargon and then again in a more vernacular analogy, that while smoke might seem a rather insubstantial intrusion of particles, it’s a tsunami of interference on molecularly calibrated machines.

Wisecup takes this in stride. He repockets his cigar and lighter, and even seems a bit amused. Finally after watching Reidier tinker with his machine, he asks, “You ever hear about Pizarro and Atahualpa?”

“Were they scientists or generals?” Reidier retorts. The bite of his comment is wielded like a velvet-covered mace.