Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  As for the Maytag, he made certain that it would be left alone despite the energy it consumed. Aside from the very practical need to avoid bringing back a one hundred kiloton atomic bomb that US-395’s scientists warned could rematerialize on the brink of detonating, President Eisenhower believed in the technology. He’d followed it closely and was convinced that the problems associated with its potential abuse could eventually be overcome. The instantaneous transport of people, food, medicines and even energy had almost been in their grasp. The Maytag symbolized the technology’s promise; and keeping the field generator running was in a sense like leaving the light on for someone until they came home.

  3

  Strive

  Professor Marshall

  Looking at the calendar, Dr. Marshall saw that it was already December 21st, 1959. It’d soon be a new decade and he’d probably greet it hunched over a short-wave radio in an underground auditorium in the middle of the desert. Though it wasn’t how he’d originally envisioned himself ringing in the 1960s, there was nowhere else he’d rather be. Dr. Rys and his son were out there. They’d disarmed the device. Somehow he knew it. It was just a matter of time before they found them. Those final moments before they were sent passed so quickly that Dr. Marshall didn’t immediately appreciate their true import. Practically everything changed, though, once he did. It was quite a thing to owe your life to someone.

  Learning about the task force’s findings during the days immediately afterwards had been hard on everyone. The stomach-churning realization that their privacy had been violated was unlike anything anyone on the team had ever experienced. However, adding the possibility that US-395 itself might soon end, its promise unfulfilled and all of their work rendered almost meaningless, made those days almost unbearable. Like everyone else on the team, Dr. Marshall was offered a new identity and federal protection; unlike most, however, he declined. Instead he’d moved out of his apartment in Pueblo, which it turned out had been riddled with microphones and phone taps, to one in Carpinteria, a small town just south of Santa Barbara. As a precaution, he had his new apartment swept for electronic surveillance devices and, as expected, it was clean. He did it mostly to ensure some sense of a normal life, which went hand-in-hand in his thinking with a sense of privacy. As far as protecting the project’s confidential information, his mind was at ease. He wasn’t married, so he hadn’t really spoken about his work on a regular basis with anyone outside of the team. Thinking that, he realized that with each passing day, it grew harder to use that word to describe US-395.

  Without Dr. Rys, it felt as though the project had been hollowed out. In many ways, he was US-395. At first, most expected a replacement. Dr. Marshall himself had learned enough during his time on the project to oversee construction of another Maytag. However, the White House seemed to be leaning the other way as they learned more about what went on at Applied Sciences; and he was eventually forbidden from building a new field generator. Little by little, their group began disbanding. Most had taken the government’s offer of a new identity and relocation. In light of what’d happened, what the task force had found and the uncertainty regarding the project’s status, Dr. Marshall couldn’t blame them. People were moving on and looking after their own interests as they had to.

  In addition to Dr. Marshall, Dr. Gidsen was one of the few who’d declined a new identity. He stayed on the project for as long as he could, taking a shift at the short-wave radio. However, like most on the team, once word got out that he might soon be on the job market, he had no shortage of recruiters contacting him. Ultimately he left US-395 in early November to join the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto as a research fellow. Before departing, he agreed to attend the annual team get-togethers at Art’s Diner that Guy Pool was organizing. Also, as a sort of parting gift, he left behind the decision tree chart that he’d devoted so much time to. With Dr. Gidsen gone, only Guy Pool and Dr. Marshall remained.

  On any given twelve hour shift while listening for the beacon, they read through and continued work on the decision tree diagram. As a result, over the months that followed, Dr. Marshall and Guy Pool became exceedingly familiar with it. Having reviewed it dozens of times, it was difficult to fault Dr. Gidsen’s analysis and its conclusions, pessimistic though they were. It all seemed to boil down to the two conditions that he believed needed to be met to safely introduce Allen field technology: extensive economic interdependence among nations and a worldwide field monitoring system. As a kind of shorthand, they began referring to them as the field criteria. Simply put, fulfilling those two conditions was the key to bringing Dr. Rys and his son home. With the field criteria met, they could make a very persuasive case for reopening US-395 and authorizing the construction of another Maytag. With that second field generator, they wouldn’t have to listen for the beacon. They could contact Dr. Rys and Pedro directly. Once they’d confirmed that the physics package had been disarmed, they could deactivate the first Maytag’s field, returning them to the sending room. Driven by that realization, it was during those closing weeks of the decade when Dr. Marshall and Guy Pool began thinking about ways to help make the field criteria a reality.

  In addition to listening for the beacon and going over the US-395 decision chart, Dr. Marshall spent a considerable amount of time in November and December shuttling back and forth between Edwards Air Force Base near Pueblo and Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, DC. Being one of the few remaining people who knew how to build an Allen field generator, he discussed the technology at length with Undersecretary Allen and the White House’s science advisors, sometimes even answering questions from President Eisenhower himself. The president and undersecretary had spoken with everyone else on the team and had familiarized themselves especially with Dr. Gidsen’s work. Like most, they found his analysis cogent and asked Dr. Marshall for advice regarding how to contain the development of field generator technology. Although he knew better, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disloyalty as he laid out a plan for Undersecretary Allen that would stifle the technology for decades. The research physicist in him was squirming the entire time like a five-year-old being forced to eat his vegetables. It had to be done, though. After he found out how Applied Sciences had used their technology, he was convinced more than ever that they needed to heed the warning within Dr. Gidsen’s chart. He comforted himself with the knowledge that the Maytag was still running day in and day out in Pueblo, a silent and very real testament to the groundbreaking work he was once a part of. Also, his contributions to US-395 merited Dr. Marshall a special exemption from the government’s impending assault on the technology: He alone would be allowed to continue researching the Allen field as long as he never built a field generator. In return, he’d have to allow FBI agents to run intermittent security checks at home and wherever he worked to make certain his research wasn’t compromised. Dr. Marshall agreed.

  It was towards the end of January 1960 when President Eisenhower finally called off the search for Dr. Rys and his son then ordered that US-395 be shut down. Over six months’ worth of reviewing reconnaissance photos and listening nonstop for the beacon had turned up nothing. Undersecretary Allen contacted Dr. Rys’s family to relay the message and offered his condolences. The Maytag would be kept on, using energy from the nuclear reactor built to power it. Despite what they were told, however, Guy Pool and Dr. Marshall believed that President Eisenhower and Undersecretary Allen hadn’t given up, at least not completely. Something told them there was some out-of-the-way corner of the government still searching. Whether that was true or not, the work Dr. Marshall and Guy Pool had committed themselves to was effectively over. And as if to drive that point home, when Dr. Marshall returned to Pueblo in late February to get a slide-rule he’d left at his desk in the admin room, he saw that the door to the auditorium was walled off. The stairs just dead-ended. It was as though the auditorium and the project it housed had never been.

  With US-395 shut down, Dr. Marshall knew it was time to get on with his life. After
considering a career as purely a research physicist, he decided instead to enter academia, and began speaking in earnest with the recruiters who’d been wooing him since he graduated from Caltech. Once word spread, he was contacted by some of the most renowned physics programs in the country. He even heard from such venerable institutions as Oxford and Cambridge. Though he felt honored to have received so much attention, he was at heart a Californian. And though there were numerous world-renowned programs in his home state, it ultimately came down to choosing between his beloved alma mater, UCLA, and a new university with tremendous potential, the recently established University of California at Santa Barbara. He agonized over the decision for weeks; however, the allure of taking part in building a premier physics department at a new university won out. He accepted UC Santa Barbara’s offer and would begin teaching as an associate professor there in fall. Once he decided on UCSB, he began looking for a place to settle down; and bought a nice, wood-paneled house in a small, quiet neighborhood in the hills of Carpinteria.

  Dr. Marshall spent most of his time from March through August with his girlfriend, Victoria, before she left for Berkeley to start her PhD. He also surfed a fair amount to get accustomed to the local breaks. Sitting on his surfboard in the waters of Rincon in late May, the thought ran through his mind that perhaps it really was all for the best. True, one of the finest people he’d ever known and his son were still missing. And it was true that he didn’t make history as a member of that man’s team. Like everyone else on US-395, he wanted to take part in developing the Allen field technology to its full potential. The notion alone was staggering: He was on a team that worked on teleportation. They were on the brink of realizing what existed only in science fiction. It would’ve changed the world. His ambition was probably getting the better of him, but if asked, Dr. Marshall would’ve admitted that US-395 ending the way it did hurt.

  Despite all of that, he still had most of his career ahead of him. He’d take part in building a preeminent physics department within one of the world’s great educational systems, the University of California. The natural splendor of the area surrounding his home and the university he’d work for was nearly indescribable. He was dating the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. World-class surf was almost literally just a stone’s throw away during fall and winter. Finally, he was still independently wealthy. Neither he nor the family he might one day have with Victoria would ever be for want of money. His charmed life would continue. And for the first time ever perhaps, Dr. Marshall felt truly grateful for that.

  Guy Pool

  Though he didn’t care to admit it, Guy Pool was a child of privilege. He was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Bel-Air. His great-grandfather had been in the real estate business; and as a young man had begun acquiring large tracts of land in Northern California shortly after the Mexican-American War because of the area’s natural beauty and rumors of a transcontinental railroad. By the start of the Gold Rush and the resulting boom in property prices, he owned large swaths of what later became the city of San Francisco. Having grown immensely wealthy as the 20th century dawned and thankful for what he privately felt was nothing less than providence smiling down on him, he sold all of his property holdings despite protests from friends and business associates urging him to hold onto them to realize an even greater profit. A few months later came the earthquake of 1906, which almost destroyed San Francisco. It was a story he often told and one that was soaked into the bones of each of his descendants. At its best, it kept his heirs optimistic under the most trying of circumstances and kept them humble under the most propitious. It ran through Guy Pool’s veins especially; and helped him endure the events surrounding Dr. Rys’s disappearance and the sudden reversal in US-395’s fortunes.

  They began shutting down the project in earnest in February 1960. Based on what Guy Pool observed, almost every facet of US-395 was being purged, not only from government records, but seemingly also from existence. He’d heard what Dr. Marshall had found when he’d tried to retrieve his slide-rule from the auditorium; and drove to the US-395 facility that day to see for himself. After descending the stairs, he saw it. Instead of the door that he’d walked into and out of for over two years, he found a concrete wall, seeming to almost assert that their project had never been.

  Unlike Dr. Marshall, Guy Pool opted to stay in Pueblo, living in an apartment infested with electronic surveillance devices. The people who’d been on the other end of those microphones embedded all around his bedroom, kitchen and living room, however, were already in custody. The microphones were there, but no one was listening. As if they picked up anything of value to begin with. Guy Pool was unmarried and rarely ever talked about work with the women he dated or with his parents. The only thing they were likely to pick up was hours of him listening to music on his record player, and perhaps an occasional moment of intimacy that he just as soon would’ve kept between him and the lovely women of Pueblo. Nevertheless, he did at first find it very unsettling. Intrinsically he believed that things like that simply weren’t supposed to happen to him. And so, as if to somehow disabuse himself of what he judged to be an inflated sense of entitlement, he stayed in his apartment longer than he needed to.

  The truth was, even if he had decided to move out right away, he simply would’ve looked for another apartment in town. Guy Pool wanted to keep working. They were almost there. Like everyone else, he wanted to be there when they sent their first human passenger. He wanted to be there to hear about what was on the other side of the Allen field. Consequently, like everyone else, the circumstances under which those first human passengers were actually sent sickened him. It felt like someone had taken their collective dream and twisted it into something terrible. Dr. Rys and his son deserved better. The entire team deserved better. Knowing that, feeling that it was all just an awful mistake that would soon be righted, he was certain news was just around the corner that they’d been found and US-395 could resume. However, seeing the auditorium door walled off finally convinced him otherwise. He wondered whether that was why it was done that way: To end hope.

  Hope is a good thing, but it could consume a life in a heartbeat. In his case, without hesitation, he would’ve faithfully hoped and waited, listening at the short-wave radio in the auditorium every day without fail for as many days, months or years as it took because Dr. Rys and his son essentially entered into that same bargain for him and everyone else in Pueblo. Instead, Guy Pool would simply carry the distinction of being one of the final hold-outs, one of the last people to move on by only a few months. Like the rest of the team, he’d get on with his life.

  In early May he met with Dr. Marshall to surf Rincon, congratulating him on his new job as an associate professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. When Dr. Marshall thanked him and asked him what his own plans were, Guy Pool responded that of course he’d think about what he could do to bring Dr. Rys and his son back. Judging from Dr. Marshall’s silence, he intended to do the same. They soon decided to use some of their money to create an automated system to listen for the beacon. They commissioned a group of electrical engineering graduate students at Caltech to build a network of radio receivers with amplifiers and filters specifically designed to identify the US-395 signal. The receivers were placed around the world to eliminate coverage gaps. Once the network was done, Dr. Marshall and Guy Pool were each given what appeared to be a simple alarm clock with hands that didn’t seem to move. They also each received a sheet of paper with a world map that had some numbers written on it. Each clock it turned out was itself a radio receiver. Upon detecting the beacon, the network would signal them to begin ringing. As for location, the hour hand on each alarm clock would then move to indicate where the signal was first picked up. The engineering team had arbitrarily divided the world into twelve regions corresponding to the hours on a clock. Looking at the map, for example, they saw that the one o’ clock region comprised most of the western part of North America and a stretch of the Pacific Ocean.
According to the lead engineer, the system was foolproof, maintenance-free and would last practically forever. Guy Pool and Dr. Marshall called it the 395 Array.

  Having secured some peace of mind, Guy Pool resumed his world travels that September. Rather than seeking spiritual insight, however, a quest for a different kind of understanding now guided him. Like Dr. Marshall, he was fortunate enough to have been a man of some means. If he wanted to, he could’ve started an organization, perhaps a company, to work towards realizing the field criteria. Having friends who were active in politics, he briefly considered focusing his energies and resources on the first criterion, advancing stronger commercial ties among nations. However, upon reflection, he simply wasn’t passionate enough about world affairs and statecraft to devote himself to helping realize that goal. And so he began looking at the second field condition instead: Developing information technologies robust enough to power a system for monitoring worldwide field generator use. He had friends at MIT, and Dr. Marshall had colleagues at UCLA and Caltech who could at least point him in the right direction regarding that. After doing some research, he saw for himself why Dr. Gidsen held such a dim view of creating a field monitoring system in their time. Fulfilling the condition would require an incredibly powerful and nearly omnipresent computer that wasn’t even close to existing in 1960. And Guy Pool surmised that even his considerable wealth combined with Dr. Marshall’s wouldn’t be enough to make it otherwise. Still, he wondered whether there was perhaps something else he could do to eventually make that warning system a reality.