Quantum Times (9 page)

     Then his cell phone started vibrating and he checked it and learned that David was calling him. He just shook his head resignedly. He knew he had to take the call and he knew he first had to interrupt the general who was then speaking and then tell everyone who was on his line.

     Then he answered David’s call with everyone in the meeting watching him.

     Without preamble Mark Randall asked, “Is the story in The Washington Post true?”

     “Yes,’” David replied.

     “David, right this minute I’m in a meeting at the Pentagon with some of the highest ranking officers in our military. Now is not the time to play games. Before you called we were speculating that there is more to your story than appeared in The Post. Do you know more than you wrote in your article?”

     With the abduction of Planck David knew that their previous limited disclosure plan was out the window. After a moment’s pause, he said, “Yes – actually there is a lot more. But before I say anything more, I have to ask you a question. Because I think we have an emergency to deal with.”

     “Hold on David, I’m going to put my phone on speaker. Is there any reason I shouldn’t do that?”

     After another pause, David said, “No I guess not.”

     “Alright. You’re on the speaker now. What’s your question and what is the possible emergency?”

      “My question is, did anyone in the U.S. government just send a team of men to kidnap Benjamin Planck off the beach here in Pirate’s Cay in The Bahamas? ….Because if you didn’t, someone else sure did!”

     Looking around the room of men, all Mark Randall saw were faces bearing the same shocked expression that he felt his own face probably showed.

     “David, give me a minute. I need to put you on hold.” Mark pressed the mute button. Looking once more around the room, he asked, “Does anyone know anything about this?”

     Everyone there looked at each other. Each of them knew it was possible that someone else was doing something. In the room were senior leaders not just of the branches of the military but also of DoD, CIA, DIA, Homeland Security and The White House. All shook their heads. Mark Randall knew that mere denial by them did not mean for certain that no one was doing anything but from the way their conversations had been going he believed they all were equally in the dark about who Benjamin Planck was and why The Object was interested in him.

     Before switching off the mute button Mark said to the men and women in the room, “If it wasn’t us, then there are a whole lot of things we have to do immediately. Everyone nodded their assent. Mark hit the mute button.

     “David, it wasn’t us. Please tell us what you know.”

     Feeling more awed and intimidated than he would have thought by people he figured were now listening to him on the other end of the call, David recounted how Planck had just been kidnapped off the beach and then taken away by the men in the fishing boat. Then he described how the fishing boat seemed to have stalled just at the visible edge of the horizon.

     General Mark Randall told David to hold on again and switched him back to mute. To the people in the meeting room he said, “Obviously we have to get a team out there immediately.” A Navy Admiral and a man in civilian dress rose out of their chairs, nodded their heads to the people in the room and left the meeting.

     At that point the Army General who had been leading the meeting came over to the table in front of Mark Randall where his cell phone was resting and motioned to Mark that he wanted to speak to David as well.

     “David, this is General Carl Greene. I’m the one in charge on this –at least for the moment. You mentioned that you knew more about this Benjamin Planck thing than was in the paper. Could you tell us what you know please? We are all very eager to hear but take your time and please be complete.”

     On the other end, still standing on the beach in front of the resort buildings, with the view of the fishing boat still barely in sight, with a somewhat stunned sense of weird reality settling in on him, David locked his mind in on just telling what he knew. All of it. Once he had met Planck on the island he had known that events could get very big very fast, but it had all seemed so theoretical, just discussions on advanced Physics, Planck playing the role of the brilliant young Einstein and Dr. Wheeling playing the role of the dubious but equally brilliant older scientist. David and Gabriela were the privileged audience. The role playing was over.

     “Sir, I’m not really sure where to begin…Perhaps I should start with how I found Planck – and by the way, he did not want to be found, and that was before The Object said it wanted to meet him! After that started, he really did not want to be found! He is somewhat reclusive ... which is why it has taken this long.” David went on with how he had remembered Ben Planck from his days at Columbia and thought that he might be the right Benjamin Planck. Then David told them he had spent many hours hunting Planck through the internet and how he had come up with the story about the two hurricanes that against all weather tracking odds seemed to go around Pirate’s Cay where David had set up a religious retreat.

     Then David described how he had enlisted Dr. Janus Wheeling to go with him to meet with Planck and that once there they learned that Planck had moved theoretical physics to a new frontier.

     General Greene interrupted, “Wait a minute…let me digest what you just said. You said that this Benjamin Planck had the power to move not one but two hurricanes so that they wouldn’t hit his island. And then you said that you and Dr. Janus Wheeling –the Nobel Prize winning Dr. Wheeling no less, went down to this tiny Bahamian island where Planck had a sort of meditation slash theoretical physics group. And that then you and Dr. Wheeling and Planck discussed theoretical physics. Do I have that more or less right?”

     “Yes sir…I know it sounds pretty bizarre.”

     General Greene cut in again, “Son, everything about The Object is pretty bizarre. It’s because your story is bizarre that I tend to believe you. I also have read your science writings in the past. I loved your series about finding the Higgs Boson. So I have a simple question for you. Do you believe ….and does Dr. Wheeling believe that Planck moved those hurricanes away from his island?”

     “Yes sir, I do. And so does Dr. Wheeling.”

     Greene continued, “I have a feeling I’m not going to like the answer to my next question. How did he move those hurricanes?”

     David’s response came quickly, “With his mind, Sir.”

     “With his mind?”

     “Yes sir. Actually with his mind and with the minds of other people here on the island. About thirty other people.”

     Then David heard the General say, “This is going to be a nightmare.”

     There was total quiet in the meeting room. Then General Greene finished shaking his head and asserted control. “David, is Dr. Wheeling there with you on the island?”

     “Yes sir.”

     “Well I think it is too dangerous for you to stay there. I don’t want anything more said on your cell phone.  I’m going to send a plane to go pick you up …you and Dr. Wheeling. I want to bring you here to the Pentagon. And then I’m going to want to hear everything. We happen to have an Air Force base at Homestead in Florida. My guess is a plane will be there in not much more than an hour. Is this all right with you?”

     “Do Dr. Wheeling and I actually have a say in this?”

     “It is better if you say yes. But yes you will be picked up there.”

     “Then I better go find Dr. Wheeling.”

     David found Dr. Wheeling in the lobby area. He had heard the bare details of the kidnapping of Planck. David filled him in on what he had seen and on the conversation he just had. He agreed that Planck’s kidnapping changed everything. He went back to his room to gather his things. David went back to his room and found Gabriela and caught her up too. She wanted to go to the Pentagon with him but since they didn’t know how that would work out and no one knew anything about her yet she ultimately agreed to find her way back to New York. Both Dr. Wheeling and David thought it would be best if she could share what they now knew with a couple of Wheeling’s peers and she was the best one to do that.

     Neither Dr. Wheeling nor David were really comfortable with submitting themselves to the     care and control of the generals in the Pentagon, so they thought the more people that knew they were there the better. David then called the Editor at the Washington Post and just told him that there were new developments that he could not yet talk about but that if he didn’t hear anything from him in two days to start asking questions at the Pentagon. David wasn’t sure if he was being paranoid or smart… or dangerously naïve.

     But before the military came to get him there was one other person David wanted to talk to there on the island. He went in search of Catherine Ozawa; the Zen Master Planck had brought to the island. Planck had introduced them the first afternoon.

     With his usual almost total recall, David remembered the brief bio Planck had told him about Ozawa. She had been born in San Francisco to parents who had emigrated from Japan prior to World War Two. As an adult she had returned to Japan and studied at a Zen Buddhist monastery there for ten years. As a woman that had been difficult but she had adjusted to what could be done. In her bio she had written, “On the path to Enlightenment there aren’t separate restrooms for men and women.” David had liked that when he read it.

     Then she had returned to the Bay area where she founded her own retreat. Along the way she had also studied advanced physics and had a Doctorate from Stanford to show for it. She found no incongruity between Zen Buddhism and theoretical physics. She thought the doctrine of Karma was just another way that the Observer functioned in the universe. She also had worked at some early Silicon Valley start-ups that were now worth billions of dollars. Planck sought her out and convinced her to come join him on Pirate’s Cay.

     David found her in conversation with two of her students in the lobby. When she saw David wanted to speak to her she left the two monks and came over to where David was standing under a palm tree.

     Catherine Ozawa was in her late sixties. Somehow she looked like age was not relevant to her. Her face was lined with a few wrinkles that seemed to be in the right places, laugh lines stood out around her eyes. Her body was lean and her posture straight. Her hair was mostly white and short. Her eyes were somehow old and her expression calm but careworn.

     David stared awkwardly for a moment; he had never talked to a Zen Master before. “I’m sorry; I don’t really know what to call you. Should I call you Master?”

     “Just call me Catherine.”

     “OK Catherine… I guess you pretty much know about everything that goes on here…” Ozawa nodded and David continued, “Well, whoever it was that just abducted Planck, it seems it was not the US government. I just was talking to a bunch of generals and they claim ignorance. But within the next two hours I’m betting this island will be swarming with soldiers. And Dr. Wheeling and I are going to be picked up and taken to the Pentagon.”

     Ozawa considered the implications, “I had better go and tell everyone.”

     “Before you do there are some questions I’d like to ask you.”

     “I’m sure you have many.”

     David smiled, “Yea. Too many for the time we probably have. But my first one is, how powerful is this mind over matter capability that you and Planck and the others here are working on?”

     Ozawa held out her hands with the palms open to the sky. “How powerful is the universe?”

     “Is that a koan? Like what is the sound of one hand clapping? I think I need to talk to the person with the Doctorate in Physics not the Zen Master.”

     Ozawa laughed, “No that was not a koan. That was my physics answer. What we are learning here is that consciousness gives form to everything. So the power is almost infinite. However, if the question you really are asking is how much can Planck and those of us here actually manipulate so far, well the answer to that is not all that much. We are just beginning to learn.”

     “Moving hurricanes is not such a little thing.”

     “That depends on the point of comparison. Let me answer your question this way – with what we know how to do already we can change weather patterns all over the world. We can solve the global energy problem. We can do things that would seem like miracles. But…and this is a big but, we have no solution yet for the law of unintended consequences. We are not wise enough to use the power – and mankind is definitely not wise enough.”

     David paused then and looked at the little wizard of a woman who was telling him that the world was about to change. “You know that there is now no way to hold this back – your secret will not be a secret much longer.”

     Catherine nodded. “I told Planck that. The coming of The Object hastened everything… but the future can never be held back. The ocean’s tides cannot be resisted.”

     “Was that the physicist or the Zen Master?”

     Ozawa laughed again, “That was the Zen Master.”

     David nodded, “Then let me ask the Zen Master a question. I’ve been beating my head against the wall on this. What does this new understanding of physical reality actually mean for us as people? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?”