by Norman Oro
After familiarizing himself with the theoretical model, studying the field generator prototype and reviewing experimental data, Dr. Kerberos concluded that reconfiguring the cradle could significantly increase the Maytag’s field-strength. This was an imposing proposition. Unlike the generator prototypes that had cradles just under two feet tall, the Maytag’s cradle loomed over forty feet in the air, forming an arc encircling the sending room, which was itself about the size of a large university lecture hall.
To gauge whether it was worth the effort, Dr. Rys asked him what he considered to be a significant increase in capacity. His nuclear engineer promptly noted the existing pound-minutes limit on his clipboard then penciled in nine zeroes after it. At that, Dr. Rys paused, nodded then requested that he proceed.
In addition to the work around the cradle and the sending room, a very sturdy metal desk had been placed about thirty feet behind the chamber’s entrance. On the desk sat the Maytag’s new controls, which vaguely resembled a futuristic cash register. It was essentially a large aluminum box with a toggle switch and a glowing six-digit Nixie display set on top of it. Just above the toggle switch was a strip of duct tape with the word “AWAY” written on it and just below the toggle switch was another piece of duct tape labeled “HOME”. The Nixie display showed the duration of any sending experiment in hours, minutes and seconds. Flipping the toggle switch to AWAY would send an object. Flipping it back to HOME would return it. Work on the field generator’s controls was still in progress and so there was exposed wiring on the floor all around the control desk.
Aside from the technical staff, the medical team was busy inside the chamber’s emergency operating room restocking medical supplies. Fortunately Dr. Young and Dr. Moreno hadn’t found any major gaps in Project Firewall’s contingency planning. The only improvements they’d recommended were a few upgrades to the surgical equipment, which would allow Dr. Moreno, the team surgeon, to better treat serious injuries. They’d already finished carrying the latest shipment of medical supplies into the adjacent shower room. To facilitate moving the surgical equipment that they expected to arrive later that afternoon, they’d kept the chamber doors leading to the operating room open.
Given the time of day, there was the usual bustle of activity around the auditorium entrance as people left for and returned from lunch. Dr. Sharp and Dr. Bishop had just arrived from Art’s Diner and were animatedly discussing their project. They were looking for Dr. Rys to answer a question; and when they spotted him entering the admin room, they began quickly walking his way. As Dr. Sharp was passing the Maytag control box, though, his right foot caught on some wires. However, rather than giving way, the wiring held and to help break his fall, he instinctively reached his hands out towards the control box, inadvertently flipping the Maytag switch in the process. A soft breeze then went through the auditorium.
It was only after Dr. Sharp got up that he saw what had happened. There was now an expanse of nothingness beneath the arc of the Maytag’s cradle. There wasn’t even light. And though he couldn’t see it from his vantage point, the entire sending room and everything else the cradle encircled were now gone, replaced by the void. In a near panic, he then shot his hand at the control once again and toggled it back to HOME. This was immediately accompanied by a soft thud of air, a muted flash of light and the sending room’s reappearance.
Dr. Sharp then heard footsteps and suddenly saw Guy Pool running full tilt past him and into the chamber entrance. Slung over his right shoulder were hazardous materials suits. He was also screaming something; however, Dr. Sharp was in too great a shock over what had just happened to make it out. He then noticed that the chamber’s doors inexplicably were all closing at once, seemingly of their own accord. Guy Pool had just reached the heavy door right before the shower room when he appeared to realize that he wouldn’t be able to make it through. He hurled two of the suits through the door yelling the same word over and over. Just before the doors all sealed shut, Dr. Sharp finally made out what he was screaming: “Firefall”.
It seemed to mean something because Dr. Moreno and Dr. Young dropped what they were doing, grabbed their hazmat suits from the floor and began hurriedly putting them on. Guy Pool, stuck in the section just before the shower room, did the same. The doors by then had all closed.
Walking towards the chamber, Dr. Sharp noticed at once that something was wrong with the remote thermometers they’d placed next to its entrance. All of the room temperatures within the chamber seemed to be climbing precipitously and had already reached 300ºF. He then went into the admin room to tell Dr. Rys what had just happened. As soon as he told him what Guy Pool had been yelling, Dr. Rys left the room and headed towards the fuse box beside the chamber entrance. Once he got there, he unlocked it and shut off all power within US-395. Unfortunately, this seemed to accomplish nothing as the backup generators then immediately kicked in and the room temperatures resumed their ascent, quickly climbing past 500ºF. No one could hear or see them, but Dr. Young, Dr. Moreno and Guy Pool were now frantically screaming and pounding their fists against the chamber doors trying to open them. Dr. Rys then ran back to the control box and flipped the switch to AWAY.
The sending room disappeared again. To generate a field of that magnitude without the reactor, the emergency power used to heat the chamber’s rooms and seal its doors was instantly diverted to the Maytag. Struggling with the overwhelming task of maintaining the Allen field around the entire sending room, all of the backup generators quickly exhausted their stores of energy. By then, Dr. Rys had begun donning his hazmat suit and grabbed a flashlight. The auditorium lights which the backup generators were powering soon went out and with that came the soft thud of air and flash of light signaling the sending room’s return. Dr. Rys then made his way through each of the unsealed rooms, entering combinations and feeling the warmth of the doors even through the gloves of his heavily insulated hazmat suit. When he got to the heavy door just before the shower room, he found Guy Pool on the floor unconscious. By this point, Dr. Sharp had donned his hazmat suit also and followed Dr. Rys. He pulled Guy Pool out of the chamber as Dr. Rys found Dr. Moreno and Dr. Young unconscious on the shower room floor. Everything seemed to be drenched with water. Dr. Sharp had returned by then and together they started pulling Dr. Moreno and Dr. Young outside. As they made their way through the doors, Dr. Rys glanced at a thermometer and saw the mercury in it had burst through. Temperatures in the chamber had hit over 670ºF.
The protocol that Dr. Sharp inadvertently triggered was called “Firefall”. Being the only ones who’d read through the Project Firewall archives, only Dr. Rys, the medical team and Guy Pool were aware of it. The chamber was built with a series of electrical circuits running through its periphery. If any of those circuits broke, the facility’s security system interpreted that as meaning that the chamber’s structural integrity had been compromised. To head off the release of pathogens and toxic materials, as well as to keep a possibly hostile force from taking possession of the project’s vast library of chemical and biological weapons, Firefall would trigger the chamber doors to seal magnetically. Each room would then be heated to 1,500ºF, and drenched in napalm, which would be ignited using explosives built into the facility’s floors and walls. Personnel were given a minute and a half to leave before this happened. They’d also memorized a ten-number combination for the doors’ locks to unseal them and push back the initiation of the protocol in increments of ninety seconds until the chamber was fully evacuated.
Unfortunately for US-395, no one from Firewall had ever recorded the over-ride sequence in the project files. Though unfortunate, this was understandable. The chamber had been built to the tolerances of a Mosler vault. Put into perspective, shortly after World War II, when the Allies surveyed the damage done to Hiroshima, amid the rubble of shattered buildings less than a mile away from the explosion’s epicenter, they found perfectly intact bank vaults. Mosler bank vaults. Breaching the chamber’s structural integrity was therefore uni
maginable when the facility was originally decommissioned after the war. As a result, everyone assumed Firefall would never be invoked. Never, that is, until Dr. Kerberos almost immeasurably boosted the Maytag’s field-strength, enabling Dr. Sharp to accidentally teleport an entire section of the chamber away in the blink of an eye.
However, rather than piecing together the events that led to the accident, Dr. Rys’s thoughts were elsewhere. Specifically, he was thinking that a pre-meditated attack on his team couldn’t have been more debilitating. The only two people who could’ve treated injuries arising from the accident were themselves hurt; and aside from flashlights, US-395 was dead in the water with the auditorium and chamber pitch-dark. He called the outpatient clinic in Pueblo and told them there’d been an accident and that members of his team had been rendered unconscious. An ambulance was rushed over immediately. Fortunately, aside from some broken bones in their hands, no one was seriously injured. There could just as easily have been four people taken out on stretchers that afternoon; however, as luck would have it, Dr. Kerberos had decided to finally take his lunch-break just minutes before the accident and was in Art’s Diner contentedly working his way through a cheeseburger and some onion rings.
Despite the turmoil, Dr. Rys was impressed by how his team responded. He was especially proud of Guy Pool, whose quick thinking saved the lives of US-395’s medical staff. Of course, Dr. Sharp felt terrible about what had happened. The rest of the team did what it could to let him know that they knew it was an accident and that nobody blamed him for it. Nevertheless, everyone knew changes were in store.
To ensure the Maytag would never inadvertently send a misplaced set of keys, much less the sending room and everything around it, Dr. Rys started overhauling the field generator’s controls the next day. As an added precaution, a massive tarp embedded with a layer of sensors was set over the chamber, making it look more like a shiny lob-sided tent than a giant bank vault with a halo. If anything happened within it, like a spike in temperature or electromagnetic activity, the sensors would immediately register it. To provide some redundancy and enhance US-395’s scientific capabilities, work also began on an additional network of sensors that would eventually surround the tent. Finally, a closed-circuit television system was installed in the chamber with cameras in each of the rooms, and walkie-talkies were integrated into each hazmat suit. Upgrading the chamber, repairing the damage to its rooms, and rejoining the sending room to the rest of the facility took over three months to complete.
After the accident, Dr. Rys spoke with Undersecretary Rothschild and requested the immediate removal of all vestiges of Firefall from the chamber. After hearing about what had happened and what could’ve happened to members of the project team, he quickly agreed. However, the undersecretary insisted on maintaining some minimum level of defensive capability. Consequently, the following day, a shipment of two dozen rifles and two dozen thirty-eight caliber revolvers, as well as lethal and non-lethal ammunition arrived in the auditorium from Edwards Air Force Base. Gun racks were also set up. A dozen pistols and a dozen rifles loaded with non-lethal ammunition were placed in the front gun rack. An equal number of weapons armed with lethal rounds were placed in the rack behind it with stocks that were covered in white tape for quick identification. All of the guns were locked into place and each team member was given a key. As part of his agreement with the undersecretary, Dr. Rys required that all team members attend a full day of firearms training at Edwards Air Force Base at least once a month. Everyone was then issued a weapons permit. An always-live direct phone line to the air base was also installed, which could send a contingent of heavily-armed security personnel or even a fighter squadron to US-395 within minutes.
Delegate
By late January, 1958, Firefall had almost completely faded from awareness. After learning what they could from the accident and making some necessary changes, US-395 promptly resumed its galloping pace. Ironically, it was the team historian who proved to be pivotal in shifting focus away from the past. Dr. Gidsen spoke extensively with team members after the accident, documenting the most salient aspects of what had happened and why. Doing that and then sharing his findings seemed to put a definitive end to it in everyone’s minds. Intentionally or not, he served as a sort of example when he then turned his attention once again to his other projects. The rest of the team followed suit. As for the medical team, Dr. Young and Dr. Moreno finished upgrading the emergency room within the chamber; and subsequently found themselves on call most of the time. As part of their employment agreement, they spent their time away from the project volunteering their services at the Pueblo outpatient clinic. With Firefall receding further and further into the past, its impact on Guy Pool was perhaps the most lasting. Through his actions, the team administrator had earned an inordinate level of respect relative to his age. This change in how the team perceived him coincided fortuitously with his growing responsibilities managing US-395’s operations.
On the technical side, they were on track to send a probe some time in the middle of the year, which was still six months ahead of the original schedule. Although there was no propellant involved and it was practically noiseless with no movement to speak of, people on the team took to using the term “launch” to describe the sending process. It proved to be so catchy that even Dr. Rys found himself using it from time to time. In terms of the first major launch, work on the probe had progressed quickly despite the absence of the team’s second quantum physicist. The position was still open and with everyone immersed in their respective projects, a hire didn’t seem likely in the near future. In Dr. Rys’s estimation, however, that was unsustainable, especially as work ramped up even further. Eventually a portion of his technical responsibilities would need to be delegated.
With an eye towards possibly finding a successor, he’d begun teaching at Caltech part-time in the fall term of 1957 as the chamber underwent repairs and upgrades. It was a three hour graduate seminar on the quantum mechanical implications of non-locality. The students in the class were very bright with some falling well into the brilliant category. The field had progressed a great deal since Dr. Rys left teaching five years earlier. In addition to forcing him to get up to speed on the latest advances, it was also a chance to potentially identify a replacement for his technical work on US-395. Given the seminar’s topic, he felt that any one of his students could’ve competently taken over his technical responsibilities with time. Though important, that alone wasn’t enough. It was also a question of drive.
At the start of the fall term, there were at least two students who seemed up to the job. One was Gil Monet, who fell into the brilliant category and was finishing his dissertation the following spring. The other was Jeremy Marshall, who was equally brilliant and also entering the job market in June 1958. Despite their comparable aptitudes for quantum mechanics, their personalities couldn’t have been more different. Gil was extroverted and enjoyed the attention that often came with being the brightest person in the room. In fact, he mentioned once that he got into quantum mechanics because of its high level of difficulty, the field’s relative novelty and the prestige conferred upon its practitioners. Jeremy, on the other hand, kept more to himself. He entered the field because he loved quantum physics. It was that simple. Though he admitted it was a secondary reason, he also sought to eventually make some lasting contribution to the world as a college professor or perhaps as a researcher.
Interestingly, money didn’t particularly motivate either of them. Over the course of the term, Dr. Rys learned that they were both independently wealthy. Jeremy’s grandfather had made a fortune during the Roaring 20s cashing in on early-stage investments in RCA and General Electric. Gil’s great-grandfather had accrued vast tracts of land in Northern California before the Gold Rush, and sold his holdings around the turn of the century at a considerable profit. After that, many of his heirs moved to Los Angeles with the Monets eventually settling down in the Hollywood Hills near Los Feliz.
Du
ring his seminar Dr. Rys was very careful to avoid exercising anything that could have been even construed as pressure on any of his students regarding their careers. This was primarily out of simple ethics. His job at Caltech was to teach, not to recruit. He loved the institute and lived by its honor code. Furthermore, given the nature of his work, there was very little he could really say about US-395. Nevertheless, the fact that he’d once been one of the world’s premier academics in quantum physics generated intense curiosity among his students. And his tight-lipped attitude paradoxically only heightened the project’s mystique and appeal. As a result, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he got more than his fair share of applicants for the job posting he planned to submit for spring. Although he’d keep an open mind and hire the best candidate when the time came, he expected the hiring decision would probably come down to Gil Monet or Jeremy Marshall. Both had expressed a strong interest in working on the project, and were exceptionally intelligent and likeable. If forced to choose, however, he thought that just by the slightest of margins, Jeremy Marshall would suit US-395 better and vice versa.