The General's President (21 page)

"I wouldn't be surprised. So if we're collaborating with the Soviets, why the secrecy? I presume they know what we're doing."

"Not all of it," Gupta answered. "Usually both sides hide what they're doing. Then, after a couple of years—three or four—there's an exchange of information. Usually when both sides have run into problems that seem to require it, or get worried about what the other may have come up with that they haven't. Each side's afraid of falling behind. Actually, some of the scientists, on both sides apparently, would like the work to be totally open—two countries, one project—but policy doesn't allow it. So we settle for trading periodically, neither side giving up anything without getting something of similar magnitude. You should be at one of those sessions; they reek with distrust!

"Finally one side tightens up and everyone goes home suspicious, to play with what they learned."

Again Gupta's grin flashed, lopsidedly this time, as if the whole affair held a certain ironic humor.
And if you really look at it, it does
, Haugen thought.

"So the secrecy grows out of two things," Gupta went on. "First, if Side A can know what Side B is doing without exchanging what it's doing itself, then Side A will certainly withhold, and thereby gain an advantage.

"But at least equal in importance, neither side wants the public to hear about it. The rationale is that, if they knew, a lot of people would be scared and panic. Supposedly. And a lot of others would more or less give up on solving human problems, waiting for imagined saviors from space to solve them for us."

As he'd talked, Gupta had watched Haugen alertly, for indicators of the president's attitude. He decided now to take a chance. "Actually there's a bigger reason than either of those." He paused. "It's the importance of the work. Security freeze-up tends to increase as the square of project importance, regardless of actual security need."

The president's only response was a nod. "So what's the nature of this work?" he asked.

"It has to do with extremely large-scale energy transfers, and some pretty remarkable things that can be done with them."

"Large-scale energy transfers," the president echoed, and looked thoughtfully at him. "Okay, let's see how far I can take it from there, speculating. Correct me when I go astray. The Soviets got hold of Nikola Tesla's notes, or copies of them, from the Tesla Museum in Yugoslavia, and eventually got to playing with scalar resonance on a large scale."

Cromwell stared, thunderstruck. Haugen continued.

"And for some of the same reasons that had stopped Tesla, the Soviets had gotten stalled on it. But they'd gotten far enough that we'd begun to realize what they were doing. Right?"

Cromwell continued to stare. Gupta's face had slipped a couple of inches; he nodded.

"Meanwhile," Haugen continued, "the ETs were letting themselves be seen, or letting their ships be seen, or whatever it was that some people were seeing, and the evidence was becoming pretty indisputable. So the government began to suppress information and spread disinformation. And finally the Kremlin and the White House got together on what was perceived as the ET danger."

"Mr. President!" Cromwell broke in. "Is it that damned obvious? Or has someone leaked? You couldn't have known about the scalar resonance work without a leak!"

Haugen shifted his gaze to the general. "No leak; not that I know of anyway. But there's a lot of evidence, if you look around enough. I've been wondering about it for years.

"Let me run it down for you, from my personal viewpoint. First of all, electrical engineers learn a lot about Tesla's work; or my class did anyway. I mean, this was the man who invented the transformer, right? The man who made large-scale commercial electrical development practical, and long distance, high-voltage power transmission possible, who invented the radio... Inventively inclined people like me can get pretty interested in Tesla."

"The radio?" Cromwell said. "I thought Marconi invented the radio."

"Marconi got the credit; still does, I guess, despite the court decision. But decades later, in the 1930s I think it was, the courts reviewed the evidence and declared that Tesla had beaten Marconi to it; there were more than enough witnesses and written reports of his early demonstrations. So legally at least, Tesla's the inventor of the radio. Whatever; the man was an intuitive electrical genius.

"With strong emphasis on intuitive.

"The thing is that when you look over his record, his big successes came early, in the late 1800s. Later he kept on claiming big new developments soon to be released, but never delivered on them. It's as if he kept having these big—cognitions let's call them, strokes of intuitive genius, but couldn't explain them successfully. Nor develop working models. He'd talk about plans, and give apparent explanations, but generally his explanations seemed to have basic scientific flaws.

"So people started thinking of him as a crackpot. And of course, we can't examine his notes to see his experimental evidence, if any, because after he died—at the end of the war, actually—the Yugoslav government got custody of them. And I suppose the Soviets got copies before Tito broke with them.

"Over here, different people tried to follow up on his claims and invent things Tesla talked about, but these didn't pay off. Which tended to discredit them."

He looked the other two over. Cromwell looked impressed. Gupta's grin was back; he looked like a man enjoying himself.

"But the suspicion persisted among a few of us that his
intuitions
were correct—that he just didn't have the theory to explain them convincingly, nor the technical support structure or financing to work them through.

"Anyway, I suppose the Soviets made some progress on scalar resonance but lacked some of the support technology to get any further. So we traded them some of the technology they needed for reports on what they'd done. On the common ground of advancing human science and technology in case the ETs got acquisitive."

Neither of his visitors seemed inclined to correct him. Haugen's face went thoughtful. "Which means," he added slowly, "that we've got scalar resonance transmitters too. Otherwise we'd be in deeper trouble than we are."

"Right, Mr. President," said Gupta. "We've got three of them. One each on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the Nevada Test Area, and in Australia."

"In Australia! Hmh! That makes sense."

"Wait a minute, Mr. President," Cromwell said. "Did you figure all that out here today, just on the basis of your interest in Tesla and what Jim said?"

Haugen shook his head, grinning. "Nope. I like to think I'm smart, but I'm not that smart. But large-scale work on scalar resonance, with the scale of physical effects produced, and with all the meteorological, geophysical, and radio research and monitoring going on on this planet... There've been observations and speculation about those effects for twenty years. Enough that some people have gotten interested and asked questions, and a few very bright people have done a damned good job of figuring out what had to be causing them. You must know about Paul Fairbairn's book, at least."

Cromwell nodded. It was coming together for him now.

"I read it a dozen years ago," Haugen went on. "And I read some of the pamphlets that were published before and after that. In some ways they made a lot of sense, but in other ways they didn't. Like, if the Soviets were able to do some of the things they were supposed to be doing, why hadn't they extorted us into rolling over and playing dead for them? That kind of constraint from them just didn't make sense. So not many people took the claims seriously.

"Some of the pamphlets even claimed we were working with the Soviets, but they never made a convincing case for that either. The whole thing sounded paranoid; even Fairbairn's book did, good as it was. What was missing, what was necessary to make it make sense, was the ET angle."

The president turned to Gupta then. "Show me this compelling circumstantial evidence for ETs."

"It's in there," said Gupta, indicating his briefcase. "In a report. I'll leave it with you. And I should point out—I'm
required
to point out—that it's classified Top Secret."

"Right. What can you tell me about the actual technology?"

"That's in there too, sir. If you have any questions and need to get in touch with me, the general can tell you how to handle that."

Haugen turned to Cromwell.

"No problem," Cromwell said. "The connection is programmed into your phone. I'll show you how to access it before we leave."

The president nodded. "Another question: Why have the rumors on this dried up? I haven't read any for, hmm, half a dozen years or longer."

This time Cromwell answered. "Because large-scale testing stopped. Partly due to apparent environmental side-effects, and partly to a political agreement. There was an unpredicted minute slowing of the Earth's rotation, enough to cause detectable aberrations in atmospheric circulation, for one thing. And the only halfway convincing explanation our computer models came up with was that large scalar resonance tests were having effects on the molten outer core." He turned to Gupta. "Is that about it, Jim?"

"Close enough," Gupta said.

"And shutting down the Soviet use of scalar resonance to manipulate global atmospheric circulation was part of Wheeler's trade-off with Gorbachev at Brussels," the general continued. "Along with stopping the electronic and laser sniping at each others' rocket launches and satellites that went on for a while there.

"Wheeler's line on that was, they'd either stop kicking up seismic activity and messing around with our weather, or we'd go beyond token reprisals. Of course, except for the one at Hanford, our installations weren't as powerful then as theirs—they take a hell of a lot of electric power, and at that time we didn't have practical high temperature superconductors. But we had the advantage that we could focus ours more precisely, and with no need for preliminary registration to get on target."

For a moment, Cromwell's mouth was a tight line. "And Wheeler stated flat out to Gorbachev that if a major attack took place with resonance weapons while he was president, he'd use nuclear retaliation. Wheeler was a damned good man, Mr. President. Too bad he had that lousy coronary."

Haugen nodded idly, gazing blankly at the carpet, and when he spoke again, it was as if he hadn't heard. "So," he said slowly, "the transmitters take a lot of power. That figures." He looked up at Gupta then. "Why wasn't that as big a factor for the Soviets as it is for us?"

Gupta frowned. "I suppose they have nuclear generators at theirs," he said. "Only one of ours has, at Hanford."

"Interesting," said Haugen, again after a pause. "Jim, I want you to find out definitely for me whether the Soviets have nuclear generators at their scalar resonance installations or not."

Gupta nodded. "Yes sir, Mr. President."

"Are we done with the briefing now?" Haugen asked.

"Unless you have more," said Cromwell to Gupta.

"I'm done," Gupta answered, and looked quizzically at Haugen. "This was a lot easier than briefing President Donnelly. You did most of the work." He took two thick reports from his briefcase and handed them to the president. "There's an abstract in the front of them and a summary at the end, along with a video tape in a rear pocket. And they're thoroughly indexed, tabbed, and highlighted; not as hard to get through as they look at a glance. You won't have any trouble with them."

There wasn't really anything more to say then, and in two or three minutes, the president's two guests left; he didn't offer them coffee. He intended to read the reports right away. It promised to be one of the more interesting things he'd done in quite awhile.

And a plan was beginning to stir in his creative mind.

***

Haugen took only one real break in his reading: He buzzed John Zale.

"Hello, John," he said. "How'd you like to start drilling me in Polish? I sort of remember what you taught me before, but I never really mastered it. When I try to speak Polish, it tends to come out half Russian."

Zale laughed. "I've noticed. Sure, Mr. President, I'd be glad to. I'll soon have you speaking Polish well enough to run for Pope."

NINETEEN

The president could have had someone find Father Flynn for him, but he went himself. It wasn't really a hunt; the priest was right where the president expected: in the White House library.

As Haugen went over to him, the Jesuit looked up.

"Good book?" Haugen asked as he lowered himself into a chair.

The Jesuit closed the book on a bookmark and showed it to the president. Gilt letters on the cover read
The Story of the Constitution
. "Excellent book. Were you looking for me?"

"To invite you to supper with Lois and me. Will you?"

Flynn nodded. "I'd be delighted." He smiled. "Lois just walked out of here. That's an interesting project she's got, you know. Until I came here, I'd never even thought about the White House having a domestic staff, although obviously it would. As for what it would have been like under Jefferson, or Jackson... Has she ever written a book before?"

"No, but she carries on great correspondence: writes ten and fifteen-page letters, the best I've ever read." He looked out the window. "The sun's out a bit. I'd been thinking about inviting you for a walk, but somehow it feels like too much trouble. I'm not feeling up to snuff today."

"How
do
you feel?"

"Listless. Not much energy. Nothing physical; it's what Lois calls the glums."

"I know the symptoms. Why don't we take that walk?"

Haugen smiled. "That's what I needed: a push. Shall we go out in our shirt sleeves? I don't feel like rounding up a jacket." He got up, gesturing at Gil and Wayne who'd come in with him. "And the Service has decided the marines keep the area safe enough that I don't need a flakjacket in the yard after all."

Flynn nodded, answering with a smile of his own. "Shirt sleeves? Why not! After all, we are transplanted Minnesotans."

The breeze had faded, and it wasn't that chilly if you walked briskly. Wayne and Gil kept pace in their suit jackets, at Haugen's request staying far enough away to leave the president and priest their privacy.