Damage Control

by Gordon Savage

  “The president? Me?” To say this caught me by surprise would be an understatement. I paused half way to sitting, my heart already racing. Wow! This wasn’t exactly in my job description.

  Frost sat down and picked up his phone. “You’ll do fine. It won’t be a formal briefing, and he’s easy to talk to if he lets you get a word in edgewise.”

  He spoke into the phone for only a few seconds, listened for a few more, and hung up. “We’ve got about forty five minutes and it takes a half hour to get there. Let’s move.” He practically jumped out of his chair.

  Dazed, I stood. He took me by my arm, and we headed out of his office. Frost nodded to Sylvia and let go of my arm. For once I was grateful for being tall. If I had been shorter, I would have had to run to keep up. As we left the SCIF, he said, “We’ll take my car. If we can get there on time, they can squeeze us in.”

  By the time we got to the White House my pulse was back to normal, but I was still so keyed up that I really can’t remember the maze we went through to get to a parking place. We both had to show our IDs—I think more than once—and eventually we were parked within walking distance of the side entrance to the West Wing. We had to show our IDs again to get into the building. The president’s chief of staff was there to meet us.

  The president actually shook my hand. He thanked me for the work I was doing, and he knew about my involvement with rescuing the Masterson family. “I imagine it was hard to shoot those men,” he commented. I could only nod my head in agreement.

  He took a seat, and the chief of staff pointed us to chairs in front of the president’s desk. When we were seated, the president got right to the point. “It’s been two weeks since I was briefed on the situation at the safe house. I understand you were able to help with some of the security issues.”

  I gave him about a ten minutes summary of the work the trio was doing to make teleportals safe. Then I mentioned our contact with the Alternates.

  The president sat up straighter. “I was briefed on – what did you call them, the Alternates? But I didn’t get much detail. As I understand it, these people are humans with a similar history to ours, and they speak English. Do I understand correctly that in this other dimension they have been using teleportals for over twenty years?”

  I was tempted to explain the difference between a dimension and a universe, but it was common usage, and I didn’t want to insult his intelligence. “Yes, sir.”

  “I assume they had a tumultuous transition from what we think of as normal transportation to instantaneous travel.”

  “I don’t know how turbulent it was, but they got through it and are thriving now. I might point out that even though there are so many striking similarities with our world, they never had a World War II, and international relations there have been peaceful for nearly a hundred years. That probably helped them work together to overcome the problems that developed.”

  “I see.” Apparently something was on the president’s mind, and he finally asked, “But tell me, what do you think of teleportal development?”

  That question caught me off guard. I hedged my answer. “Sir, my opinion isn’t important. Teleportals are a fait accompli. We either accept them or get behind the rest of the world.”

  He chuckled. “I agree with you there. Still, what are your thoughts about the economic chaos?”

  “Well, sir, I’m no economist, but I don’t see any way we can avoid it. As I said, teleportals are inevitable now. The best thing we can do now is start trying to find ways to reduce the impact. The Alternates worked together and got past it. We should probably do the same, and I imagine the Alternates would be happy to help us.”

  He nodded. “Getting this fragmented planet to work together will be quite a task, but I agree. We’ll have to do it. I like your idea about getting your Alternates to help.”

  He looked directly at me. “Thank you for coming in, Ms. Pederson. I have to do some thinking about this, but right now I can see I’ll need a special envoy to establish relations with these Alternates, someone who understands them – like you do. I’ll be looking for someone to fill the job. Say the word, and it’s yours.”

  He saw the dumbfounded look on my face and smiled broadly. “Please give it some serious thought.”

  My mind was racing. What would an envoy do? I wasn’t a diplomat. I wasn’t a politician. I’d have to get training from someone who knew how to negotiate. I’d … I was getting ahead of myself. With that I came back to earth. My job for now was to get the investigation of Reid’s explosion back on track.

  When we stood up to leave, the president asked me what I was currently working on. I told him I was technically on vacation, and I was using that time to investigate the explosion. He nodded to his chief of staff and had us sit back down. He asked me for a two minute summary of what I had found. After which he stood up and told his chief of staff to send us a charge number for me to continue my investigation. Then he thanked us, and left with his chief of staff trailing him. His administrative assistant escorted us out of the building.

  On our way back to Reston Frost asked, “What did you think?”

  I noted he had refrained from mentioned the offer to serve as an envoy. Now that my stomach was getting unknotted, I realized how tense I had been. “He seemed nice, but I’ve been under a mortar attack that didn’t scare me as much. I don’t know why.”

  “You get used to it in a hurry. Did you never have to brief a general officer?”

  “Only once, but that was different. It was my job.”

  Frost chuckled. “I think he just signed you up to keep him up to date, so now this is your job.”

  Chapter 22

  “Senator Blake, chairman of the senate committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today announced that his committee has scheduled hearings on the teleportal explosion. He said that the hearings would be closed at the request of Homeland Security, but the committee would release all the unclassified information as soon as possible.”

  – Beverly Ha, Channel 15 News

  Day 9, 6:30PM

  When I got to my condo, I remembered to check my mail before I went upstairs. My mail box held a small package roughly twice the size of a deck of cards. The postmark was from DC, but the return address was for Troy’s condo in Phoenix. That seemed strange, and I briefly wondered if I made someone uncomfortable enough that they had sent me a bomb. Get over it, girl. The only person you’ve made uncomfortable so far is Dennis Wells, and even he wouldn’t resort to murder to shut you up.

  I had a silent laugh at my paranoia and headed up the stairs to my apartment with the package in hand. Despite my burning curiosity I laid the package on the kitchen counter and checked my landline voicemail first. The last message was from Troy. I listened to it eagerly.

  “Hi, beautiful. I got one of the FBI guys to mail a package for me. You should be getting it today. When you do, plug the flash drive into your computer. It has instructions on what to do with what’s in the package. I think you’ll like it. Miss you. Bye.”

  Fascinated, I picked up the box and carried it over to my lap top. While it was booting up, I opened the package and removed the flash drive and two small circuit boards with USB cables attached.

  When I booted up my laptop with the flash drive plugged in, a window popped up that said, “Loading control software. Please wait.” It didn’t give me a choice. That fit with the Troy I knew, code that would bypass computer safeguards. And it was why he was doing so well developing solutions to teleportal security problems. He knew what to expect from serious hackers. When the screen cleared, a pop up window displayed a message: “Please plug in a circuit board.”

  As soon as I did, a splash screen appeared saying, “Initializing microportal communicator.” I barely had time to wonder what a microportal was before the screen switched to a Skype-like display. On the left side there was a list of names. The list started with Troy, Melissa, Greg, Heather, Alexandra, and Kevin. The first three were the partners in t
he teleportal project, and the next three were Greg’s wife and kids. Tacked on the end were the names of the Alternates we had contacted. I stared at the screen wondering if this was for real. There was one way to find out. I clicked on Troy’s name.

  The view from my laptop camera popped up in a small window in the lower right corner of the screen. The laptop produced a sound like a dial tone followed by an old telephone ringing. I didn’t have time to wonder why Troy had picked an archaic ringtone. It only rang once. The screen switched to a view of Troy sitting in the portal workshop. The image took my breath away. He grinned broadly and said, “Hi there, stranger. Wow, it’s good to see you.”

  I felt like I could reach out and touch him. I smiled and the day’s stress seemed to ease out of my body. “It’s good to see you too. I’ve really missed you. They’ve let you on the internet?” Then I noticed that the whole team was gathering behind him. “Hi, everybody.”

  Everyone had to say hello and ask how I was feeling. I suspect they wanted me to tell them all about what had happened, but that could wait until later. Of course Alex was taken by my still visible rash. Did it hurt? Did it itch? Melissa commented about the TV news and not so subtly wondered if it meant they could resume work any time soon.

  “As far as I can see,” I responded, “there’s really no reason to keep you guys incommunicado any more. By now the whole world knows about teleportals. … Of course, Wells is still adamant that teleportals are a danger to our national security. To keep up the pretense he’s ignoring clear evidence that the explosion wasn’t matter/antimatter. But he’s losing ground. I found out today he’s even taken his push to have congress outlaw teleportals off the table. I suspect it won’t be long before you guys can go home. Then we can start in earnest looking for a way to safely open the interface to the other universe.”

  “And maybe we can get back to preparing the teleportals for production,” Greg grumbled.

  Melissa nodded. “What he said. … I hope you’re right, Samantha. We did convince our guards to let us continue communicating with the Alternates … as long as we don’t try anything new with the portals.”

  Melissa looked at the whole group and then back at the camera. “We’re keeping you two love birds from each other.” She turned and shooed everyone toward the door. “It was good talking to you, Sam. Get healed up.” She headed for the door too.

  I looked at Troy, who was smirking. “So what do you think of this?”

  “You mean this online video? I love it. How did you pull it off?”

  “To start with it isn’t online. It’s subspace, or wormhole if you prefer.”

  “Okaaaay. …” I said. "Explain.”

  “What you have is essentially the call-in circuit for a teleportal. It works the same way as the circuit we use to transfer sound when we contact the Alternates, but it also carries video. It seemed logical to call it a microportal.”

  He gave me an impish look that suggested he had another surprise for me and was enjoying the anticipation. “By the way, you probably noticed the contact list has the Alternates on it. They’ve agreed to talk to our media and give them a tour of their Earth. That ought to drive Wells berserk.”

  An alarm went off in my head. “Wait a minute. Who’s making arrangements on this end to get the Alternates on TV?”

  Troy grinned. “Who do you think? You got that video of the explosion on the tube, didn’t you?”

  He was right. I knew just the person to handle it. “Now that you mentioned it, I’m sure Rebecca would love to interview Dr. Friedlund and company.”

  Troy laughed. “See? It should be a piece of cake to set up.”

  He added, “One other thing, with a little effort these things can be turned into smart phones that don’t require cell towers and can reach anywhere on earth … or anywhere near it for that matter. How about direct dial to the ISS?” He turned his head and gave me sidelong, conspiratorial glance. “Wouldn’t that be something? And I have a friend in Phoenix – Dan Kaplan – who can setup mass production of them. I’d appreciate it if you’d get in touch with him and send him the jump drive and the other board.” He gave me Dan’s phone number. “Tell him to use it to contact me. I figure he can have them on the market as personal communicators in less than six months.”

  We spent the next hour catching up. Troy was fascinated by the possibility the explosion was murder and gave me some ideas to think about. The rest of our conversation was personal.

  Chapter 23

  Beverly Ha: “Tonight we are broadcasting jointly with the other DC news channels and the broadcast networks to bring you a special news report. Guest reporting for us will be Rebecca Williams of WCPR in Cincinnati. She is the daughter of our late videographer, Ben Williams. … Rebecca, over to you.”

  Rebecca Williams: “Tonight we are about to engage in an historic interview. Representatives of the alternate universe have consented to talk to us about their world and the routine use of teleportals there for transportation. When the interview and tour are over, we will be asking the Alternates, as they are called, to respond to selected questions tweeted to us here at Channel 15.

  “Our Twitter name is on your screens.

  “Now let’s meet our guests. …”

  – Channel 15 News

  Day 9, 9:30PM

  As soon as Troy had said the Alternates were willing to be interviewed, I knew Rebeca should do it. She had lost her father in Reid’s misguided attempt to get publicity by contacting the other universe. That gave her a personal interest in teleportals. I called her as soon as I got through talking to Troy.

  “You what?” I had just told her about the microportal communicator.

  “I have a device that allows me to talk with and see the people in the other universe.”

  Her voice slowed down as if she suspected something. “And why are you telling me this?”

  “Because their research team, the one we’ve been communicating with, has agreed to be interviewed about their world.”

  Her voice went up in pitch and volume and sped up noticeably. “Be interviewed? You mean…?”

  I grinned, not that she could see it. “Yes, and I thought you should be the person to do it.”

  “Oh my God. You’re serious?” She was almost breathless.

  “I am. I’d like to show you the device and how it works tomorrow morning if that will work for you. What time should I be at your place?”

  “I’d say why wait, but I understand you have other things to take care of. How about 9:00 AM?”

  ◆◆◆

  Day 9, 10:00PM

  As soon as I hung up with Rebecca, I called Troy’s friend, Dan Kaplan.

  After I introduced myself and mentioned that I had seen him at the hospital when he picked up Troy, he asked, “Oh, you’re the redhead Troy was talking to. You don’t happen to know where he is and how he’s doing, do you?”

  “Yes to both questions. Troy’s doing well, but right now I’m not allowed to tell you where he is. I presume you heard about him being one of the hostages in the hostage rescue last month.”

  “Yeah. Since I hadn’t heard from him in all this time, and I knew someone was following him when we left the hospital, that had me concerned. I was worried he’d been hurt in the hostage situation. It’s a relief to hear he’s alright. Can I talk to him?”

  “You should be able to talk to him in person in a day or two. He gave me a prototype device to send to send you. It’s a… let’s call it a subspace transceiver. You can call him on it as soon as you get it.”

  He seemed to understand immediately. “Sounds good,” he said. “Do you need my mailing address?”

  “Troy gave it to me.” I responded. “Getting back to the device, Troy believes this will be the next big thing in communication. He says it’s a cell phone that doesn’t need towers. He gave me a design spec to send you. He wants you to start producing it commercially.”

  “I see. If it’s what I think it is, I can’t wait to get my hands on
this thing.”

  “I have the specs in a zipped file called MicroPortal.” I gave him my email address. “You can verify that by sending me an email, and I’ll respond with the file….” I had another thought. “Do you have caller ID?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, then you already have my number. You can call me if you have a problem.”

  After we hung up, I realized how late it was. I was tired and it was time to get some sleep. Decisions on what to do next could wait until morning.

  Chapter 24

  Rebecca Williams guesting on Channel 15: “Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Eric Friedlund, head of subspace research at Princeton Teleportals on the alternate Earth. Dr. Friedlund, welcome to our Earth, even if it is by remote transmission, and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.”

  Friedlund: “My pleasure, Miss Williams. Perhaps we could arrange for our television networks to interview your Dr. Kim and her associates someday, although I understand they are temporarily isolated for their own protection so they wouldn’t be able to show us around.”

  Williams: “That would be an interesting exchange, but for now we are highly interested in your experience with teleportals. We’ve been told that you have been safely using them for over twenty years.”

  Friedlund: “That’s true, but if I understand correctly, our situation is significantly less hazardous than yours…”

  Channel 15 News

  Day 10, 7:00AM

  I sat drumming my fingers on my desktop in frustration. I thought about the day ahead. I would be meeting with Rebecca this morning to introduce her to the microportal. I hoped the interview she would do with the Alternates would put pressure on Wells to back off, but he seemed to be able to rationalize his way around any obstacle I threw in his way.