Vostok

by Steve Alten

  As my consciousness hovered in the centrifuge’s positively charged core, an image appeared on the wall of spinning rollers like a 360-degree movie screen. The projection showed a man who looked to be in his mid-forties, his hair silver-gray and long, pulled back into a tight ponytail. He was dressed in an expensive, charcoal-black Italian suit with a matching shirt and tie. He was seated in the back of a limousine next to an attractive brown-eyed blonde in her mid-thirties. The two of them were holding hands.

  As I watched, the silver-haired man’s eyes rolled up and he slumped over. The woman grabbed him and shook him and called out his name, but her words were distorted, rippling with echoes. Before I could comprehend what she was shouting, a tsunami of negatively charged electrons swept through my being and carried my consciousness outward through the portal’s spinning inner ring. That’s when I realized the man in the limousine was me.

  Part Two

  Endings…

  25

  “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

  —Albert Einstein

  “Zachary! Zach, honey, wake up. Driver, pull over!”

  I opened my eyes, my brain buzzing with electricity, my body weighed down by a sudden sensation of gravity.

  “Zach, are you all right?”

  I turned and stared at my research assistant and lover, and the buzzing stopped.

  “Susan?”

  “Thank God. I thought you were having a stroke.” Susan McWhite, Ming Liao’s former assistant, turned to the dangerous-looking fellow in a buzz-cut and dark suit leaning inside my open window. “Jim, tell the driver we need to skip the hearing and get Dr. Wallace to a hospital.”

  I turned to my head of security. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just tired from the flight. How soon until we arrive?”

  Jim Clancy checked the GPS on his watch. “Twenty-eight minutes. You sure you’re okay, boss? You look kinda pale.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The armed bodyguard waited until I closed the window before signaling to our motorcade over his radio. Then he climbed back into the front passenger seat, and we continued our journey through the District of Columbia.

  The Subcommittee on Energy and Power falls under the auspices of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, its congressional members exercising control over the broadest jurisdiction of any congressional committee on Capitol Hill. These powers include overseeing national energy policy, energy conservation and information, energy regulation and utilization, regulation of nuclear facilities and waste, the Clean Air Act, and all related Homeland Security issues.

  Democrats sat behind a stretch of elevated wood-paneled tables at the front of the assembly room. Chairing this morning’s event was Congresswoman Cassandra Boyd of Texas’s twelfth district.

  I found myself seated at a small table on the assembly room floor next to my attorney, Scott Schwartzberg, whose team of litigators occupied the first row of seats behind us. Behind them were my fellow defendants—inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. The rest of the galley overflowed with private citizens, all of whom had to pass through security.

  I wondered if the members of the media who were seated on the floor by my table had been subjected to similar scrutiny.

  Scott pointed out the woman seated behind my research assistant. “Jaqui Billups; she’s from the New York Times. She’s been hounding me all week to set up an interview. Next to her is Dawn Warfield, a video columnist from The Huffington Post. She wants to do a podcast before we leave the building.”

  “I’ll do the Post. Forget Billups. The CIA will redact anything positive in her article. What about 60 Minutes?”

  “I’m still waiting for a confirmation.”

  Congressman Boyd took her place behind the dais, adjusting her microphone. “The subcommittee will come to order. This morning we’re going to hear statements from members of the science community who oppose H.R. 1691, the Alternative Energy Fraud Act, sponsored by Congressman Jaime Watkins of Kentucky, and our esteemed co-chair, Lorey Schmidt. This much-needed piece of legislation will protect investors who have lost vast sums of money to charlatans who claim to have designed clean, abundant, and non-polluting energy sources, only to learn later that they were duped.

  “Our first witness is Dr. Zachary Wallace. It should be noted for the record that Dr. Wallace is not a physicist. He is, in fact, a marine biologist who earned his fifteen minutes of fame resolving the monster mystery at Loch Ness. Seven years ago, Dr. Wallace survived a manned descent into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. When the mission lost its funding, Dr. Wallace returned to his teaching position at Cambridge. At some point he left the university to work with John Searl, the British inventor who is best known for the Searl Effect Generator, a device Searl claimed could levitate like a flying saucer, though conveniently it was never filmed doing so. Dr. Wallace refined the design so that it functions as an electrical generator. He then used investor capital, most of it coming from the Tanaka Institute, to fund his own company, Wallace Energy, a privately held corporation with headquarters in Edinburgh and San Francisco.

  “Dr. Wallace, you have been granted five minutes to explain to the subcommittee how this device works. Then we’ll open it up to questions.”

  I waited while a large flatscreen television was rolled into position before the assembly and powered on. Using a DVD remote, I pushed PLAY.

  Appearing on screen was a doughnut-shaped metal disk the size of a dinner plate. Spaced out along its surface were three one-inch-wide rotating rings.

  “Energy surrounds us. The challenge is to convert it to power, defined as voltage multiplied by current to equal wattage. This is the Vostok, a closed-circuit perpetual generator. It produces a quantum vacuum flux field using zero point energy. It is powered by the electrons that perpetually surround us, producing clean and unlimited electricity. As you can see, its doughnut-shape design contains three circular ring plates. Held within these ring plates are rollers, each the size of a D battery. These rollers, along with their ring plates, possess a magnetic north and south pole. As a result, the rollers float on the magnetic field without actually touching the ring plate.

  “The process of rapidly circulating these rollers around the ring plates in order to generate electricity begins when one powers up the positively charged neodymium core. Negatively charged electrons immediately rush into the device, where they join together to form boson pairs. The pairs compress and then exit through the central core to the first outer ring, where they cause the twelve rollers to accelerate to speeds averaging 250 miles an hour. From there they pass through a magnetic layer that both excites and pulls them through the second ring, where they cause these rollers to revolve at a velocity exceeding 600 miles an hour. Finally, the electrons exit to the copper emitter layer, where they join trillions of other boson pairs in ring three, spinning these rollers at over 1,500 miles an hour.

  “A switch directs the generated electricity through standard coils, completing the electrical circuit. Unlike conventional generators that heat up after prolonged use, the Vostok remains cool no matter how long it runs. There’s no fuel needed and no toxins released. The unit is powered solely by electrons entering it and the unit and the internal tensions of the atoms. It is, literally, a source of endless clean energy.”

  Several subcommittee members stood and applauded, irking their chairman who looked down her nose to address me. “Theories are different than working models, Dr. Wallace. Where’s your prototype?”

  My blood pressure ticked upward. “In fact, Chairman Boyd, we had thirteen working models of varying sizes and outputs that were all beta-tested. Three were designed to power cars and trucks, two for trains, and two larger models for commercial jets. The rest were designed to power single-family homes and high-rise commercial structures. Our entire manufacturing plant in Edinburgh ran on a single unit no larger than this table.”

  “And where are these prototypes now?”

  �
��Perhaps you should ask the two CIA agents, posing as technicians, who stole the prototypes from our R and D safe shortly before my Edinburgh factory burned to the ground.”

  “Sir, you dare to accuse the CIA? Where is your proof?”

  “You mean that I was robbed, or that the thieves were CIA agents? Maybe they were MAJESTIC-12. Does it matter? Whoever they are, they’re being funded by Congress with zero oversight. These guys make their own rules and don’t care who they hurt.”

  The chair held up a CD file. “The official report indicates the fire was a direct result of your invention overheating.”

  “The official report, congresswoman, was prepared by the same investigative firm who cleared British Petroleum in last year’s oil rig explosion in the North Sea.”

  “Why is it, Dr. Wallace, that every inventor who fails to produce a working model of their so-called ‘new energy technology’ always has a conspiracy story to tell?”

  “My story’s real. So is the security tape of my safe being robbed, which we posted on YouTube—until the network was ordered to remove it. I guess triple-X videos are fine, but energy systems corrupt the minds of our youth.”

  The audience in the galley stood up and applauded.

  The chair banged her gavel for quiet. “Does anyone have a question for the witness? The chair recognizes the junior congressman from Montana.”

  Justin Willems nodded to his colleague. “Thank you, Ms. Chairman. Dr. Wallace, I’m impressed by the Vostok, and I’ve always supported alternative energy. The problem you seem to have is credibility. Sex scandals, accusations of financial abuses. Even your partners, the Tanaka Institute, have been named as defendants in a series of lawsuits—”

  “The Tanaka Institute is an investor, Congressman Willems. The Taylor family runs an aquarium that features the most dangerous predators that ever lived. Sometimes accidents happen. But Jonas Taylor and his wife, Terry, are good, moral people who I’m proud to be associated with. As for my own credibility, none of the accusations made about me are true. This is all part of a disinformation campaign that began two years ago, shortly after we made a technological breakthrough that allowed us to adapt the Vostok power generator to motorized vehicles, directly threatening Big Oil’s stranglehold on the transportation industry.

  “A short time later, unsubstantiated rumors were circulated on the Internet and various news organizations that I had used investors’ monies on lavish trips to Beijing, which wasn’t true. Then a former associate went on a news show and accused me of rape, which led to her giving birth to her daughter. She sued me for $20 million. The woman’s attorneys were paid from a private offshore fund. The DNA evidence acquitted me, but my reputation was soiled. Weeks after the trial, I began receiving death threats and had to hire a private security team. The paranoia helped to end my first marriage.

  “For the record, these same strong-arm tactics were used on Professor Searl, who was poisoned while eating in a diner with Intel agents posing as investors. Dr. Searl was wrongfully imprisoned, and all of his equipment and papers were destroyed. Similar things have happened to other courageous citizens and inventors like T. Townsend Brown, John Keely, Victor Schauberger, Otis Carr, and Dr. Steven Greer. It seems like every time a scientist or private company attempts to market a device that threatens the fossil fuel industry, the powers that be strike back without mercy.”

  While I was speaking, Chairman Boyd handed a note to an assistant, who took a roundabout route before slipping it to the court stenographer.

  My attorney immediately grabbed my microphone. “Excuse me, Chairman Boyd. May I inquire what was in the note your assistant just handed to the stenographer?”

  The congresswoman’s cheeks flushed. “The official transcript of these hearings is not the appropriate venue to cite innuendo. As such, I asked that the witness’s last statement be stricken from the record.”

  The members of the galley lost it. Shouts and threats and catcalls rained upon the members of the committee—along with several shoes.

  It was exactly the response the chair had hoped to elicit. Within minutes, security had cleared the hall of all visitors.

  With order established, the hearing resumed. “The chair recognizes Congressman James Hinks from New Mexico.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Chairman. Dr. Wallace, I’ve been reading stories about lawsuits filed against your company by the Chinese and Australians, something about fiduciary claims on behalf of investors who funded your Vostok mission years ago. Could you expand on that?”

  “Congressman, the lawsuits are ridiculous and unfounded, and that’s all I’m at liberty to say.”

  “Then you’re denying this technology originated from an extraterrestrial spacecraft abandoned in Lake Vostok?”

  Scott Schwartzberg took the microphone. “Congressman, my client is not at liberty to discuss proprietary claims from the lawsuit you mentioned, or any of these other ridiculous claims. The underlying issue here is whether the Vostok works. It does. Whether its designs were inspired by collaborations with Dr. Searl, Dr. Wallace’s pet goldfish, or little green men has no bearing on this hearing.”

  The scientists in the galley laughed. A few members of the subcommittee smiled.

  Not Congressman Hicks. “You may well find my line of questioning amusing, but in New Mexico we take these matters quite seriously. There have been fourteen incidents of UFO sightings in the last four months, and some have suggested these sightings have coincided with the testing of your devices—something to do with accessing a trans-dimensional conduit, I don’t know exactly. So I ask you again, on the record, have you ever seen or had access to an extraterrestrial spacecraft?”

  Scott Schwartzberg leaned over again to instruct me.

  “Dr. Wallace, why do you need your attorney’s help to answer a simple question?”

  “Because it’s not a simple answer, congressman. The very nature of asking me about extraterrestrials characterizes my work as fringe science. It’s not. Have I personally witnessed an unidentified flying object? The answer is no. Do I believe they exist? Having listened to the sworn testimonies of several hundred high-ranking military officers, jet fighter pilots, and commercial airline pilots—all of whom claim to have seen these E.T. vehicles—I’d have to say yes.

  “The military must think they exist, otherwise why spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars building top-secret underground facilities in the southern desert of Nevada. Again, none of this has anything to do with the Vostok power generator, which absolutely works. If it didn’t, why would Peter McLaughlin, the former CEO of General Motors, have offered us a three-billion-dollar contract two years ago to produce Vostoks for a new line of passenger vehicles?”

  Congressman Brian Ullom motioned to the chair to respond. “If that’s true, Dr. Wallace, then why did General Motors cancel the deal?”

  “They cancelled because the United States Patent Office refused to issue patents for our design. In fact, the patent office has turned down patent requests for over five hundred alternative energy devices, many of which, like the Vostok, would render fossil fuels obsolete. It also doesn’t help our quest to take our company public when members of this very committee threaten to issue a Section 181 order, as per title thirty-five of patent law that allows for military seizure in the event that we ever do receive a patent. You see, Congressman Ullom, the real reason we’re still polluting our air and biosphere with carbon dioxide and why wars continue to rage in the Middle East is not because we lack energy solutions. It’s because the concept of free, clean energy threatens Wall Street and its six-hundred-trillion-dollar derivatives and commodities market. That’s who your subcommittee should be protecting the American public from, not us.”

  Three hours later, Susan and I walked out to a late October afternoon and were greeted by a brisk wind and a wild crescendo of cheers. A sea of humanity spread out before the entrance of the Rayburn House Office Building, covering Independence Avenue all the way to Union Station and beyond. A mill
ion strong, maybe twice that, based on a quick glimpse down the mall. Thousands bore handheld signs expressing Thank You, Dr. Wallace and Free Us from Big Oil and Save the Planet a hundred different ways.

  It was as gratifying as it was frightening. I was completely at the mercy of the crowd and every wacko with a gun.

  At the Capitol building a stage had been set up facing the mall. Jim Clancy grabbed one arm and Susan the other as our security team surrounded me and pushed their way through the parting masses toward the podium. It was as loud as a college football bowl game, and I heard Jim shouting instructions about a bulletproof shield.

  The shield was an eight-foot-high, three-sided Lexan enclosure that surrounded the podium. Jim opened the back panel and I ducked inside. There were no air vents other than a few slits atop the slanted ceiling, and the effect created a stifling silence.

  “Good afternoon.” My greeting repeated across dozens of speakers in a staggered delay throughout the mall.

  Muffled by the bulletproof plastic, the crowd’s response returned to me in waves, concluding with the distant din from the masses gathered around the Washington Monument almost a mile away.

  “Imagine your home powered by an infinite supply of free, clean electricity. Imagine never having to fuel your car again. Imagine free public transportation, reduced manufacturing costs, urban areas with clean air, and oceans with reduced levels of carbon dioxide. The threat of global warming addressed, the threat of a war in the Middle East defused. Energy is the life-blood of civilization, the key to our survival as a species. For most of the last century, our fossil-fuel masters have used energy to maintain control of the masses. I say, enough is enough.”

  Staggered cheers moved across the multitudes, the sound reverberating off the surrounding buildings.