Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  It was a half hour drive from her apartment in Goleta to Professor Marshall’s company. She calmed herself in the knowledge that her little green Mini Cooper convertible would get her there in practically no time. In her three years at UCSB, she’d driven that stretch of Highway 1 to Carpinteria countless times and had never encountered a problem. Thankfully, her drive that afternoon was no exception. As she took the Casitas exit, it even seemed like she might be on time. She pulled into the parking lot at 3:27pm, got out of her car, and walked briskly up a flight of stairs to a door with the room number Dr. Marshall had given her. She was just in time. Holding the folder containing the reading assignments in her left hand, she knocked then waited. There was no reply. She knocked again, this time for a bit longer and waited. Perhaps Dr. Marshall couldn’t hear her. After about ten minutes, she called his number on her cell-phone and got only voice-mail. Looking at her phone, she saw it was already close to four. She still had over three hours until her flight, but the drive would take at least half of that and then there was check-in. Wincing, she remembered the razzing she took when she showed up a day late the year before. It was mostly good-natured, but the message was unmistakable: Don’t be late again.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached out to the door-knob and gave it a twist. It turned. She pushed at the door. It gave. They kept the door unlocked. Calling Professor Marshall’s name, she tentatively stepped inside to find there was no reception to speak of. Instead she saw electronic components, tools and assorted pieces of lab equipment scattered on the floor along the walls. If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve said it was a startup, just a few months removed from someone’s garage. She smiled a bit, thinking to herself that this was the kind of office she could picture Dr. Marshall working in. She called out again for him, but still there was no response. Straight ahead of her was a long hallway that ended at a metal door. Just before that and to the right was the entrance to what looked like an office. She started walking towards it. As she got closer, she noticed the lights seemed to turn on inside. She called out to Professor Marshall again, but still there was no reply. Did he have headphones on perhaps? The light from the office grew brighter as she approached. Once she reached its threshold, she turned to see that there wasn’t anyone inside. Instead she happened upon one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen, as well as one of the least expected.

  It appeared to be a glass jar filled with fireflies. Not just any fireflies, though. The year before she left for the United States, she saw an identical throng of them at the start of her final year at boarding school. The way they moved around in the jar, the color of light they gave off, its intensity; it was all exactly the same. She’d never forget that night. She was on an evening jog when she noticed them floating around a tree near Amersham Road. She’d never seen so many before and must’ve stood there for about a half hour just staring at them. It was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. Standing at the threshold, it was like someone had scooped up all of those fireflies from that memory and put them into that jar just for her. A thought began forming in her mind to step closer to get a better look. It was just then when she heard someone’s voice in mid-sentence, like her father gently waking her in the middle of a dream. She turned to see Dr. Marshall’s reassuring face. She’d never felt more at peace. It was an effort, but she managed to pull her focus back to the day’s errands and laconically apologized for letting herself into the office. Professor Marshall then said something about the jar to which she smiled, nodding her assent. She then handed him the folder with the proposed assignments, explained that she didn’t want to be late for her flight, exchanged farewells and left the office. On her way out, reaching into her purse for her car keys, she was surprised to find stashed in one of its side-pockets her boyfriend’s plane tickets.

  Everything happened so quickly that Professor Marshall was left just standing there with the folder in his hand well after the office door had closed. He of all people knew that Kate Minon could arouse a whirl of activity. Judging from what he’d just witnessed, she could do that in more ways than one. The activity within the field detector was unlike anything he’d ever seen. On a hunch, he went to the office’s desktop computer to replay archived telemetry for the previous hour from Vela. He turned off the filter he’d developed to screen out low-level ambient field activity and zoomed into Carpinteria until he hit the system’s maximum resolution, six square miles. He saw nothing except the usual ghostly flickers representing Allen fields blinking into and out of existence. Around a half hour into the replay, however, there was an unusually strong pulse of activity that lasted for just an instant. Nearly a half hour after that, there was another equally strong pulse. Instead of immediately disappearing, though, this one grew in fits and starts to an intensity just shy of the Maytag’s until it too blinked out of existence. He’d never seen naturally occurring Allen fields do that before. As a matter of fact, he never thought they could. Instinctively, his mind began racing, seeking patterns and formulating hypotheses. Just as instinctively, he forced himself to slow down. More mundane yet urgent tasks called. Vela 5A was due to go into orbit within a few days and that took priority. Nonetheless, he made a note to look into ambient Allen field activity as soon as possible.

  Leaving Professor Marshall’s office, Kate Minon felt more than a little bewildered finding the missing plane tickets in her purse. However, her sense of relief overwhelmed any impulse to reconstruct the events that could’ve led to that improbable outcome. Making her way back to her car, she called her equally relieved boyfriend, who’d been anxiously searching all over his apartment; and made arrangements to meet at LAX. As she pulled out of the parking lot to resume her drive to Los Angeles, she felt as though a load had been lifted off her shoulders. Part of her, though, was still standing at the threshold of that office admiring that jar filled with fireflies. Beautiful. One day she’d have to ask Dr. Marshall where he found them.

  The timing was closer than Professor Marshall would’ve liked, but Vela 5A lifted off on Wednesday, January 7th as scheduled. Like the launches before it, he attended the afternoon liftoff personally. Once the satellite reached its final orbit and went live, a region about the size of the Americas stretching from the Russian Federation in Northern Asia down to New Zealand in the South Pacific began glimmering with activity on the Field Technologies flat-screen monitor. As with the telemetry from the other detectors, the naturally occurring Allen fields closely mirrored population with most of Japan and Indonesia along with the coastal regions of China and Australia shimmering. And as usual, coastal waters didn’t seem to present much of a barrier. Though less intense than on land, the Pacific Ocean from Japan down through New Zealand was also aglow. Allen fields in the Earth’s oceans. It was still baffling. Dr. Marshall had run diagnostics that ruled out equipment glitches; and his calculations regarding the particle energy that the satellites were picking up verified that the field sources were in fact underwater.

  After returning from the launch, Professor Marshall began reviewing archived and real-time satellite telemetry to better understand ambient field activity. He’d created a metric to quickly give him an idea of the intensity of a given field event. It ran from 0.0 to 1.0 with a 1.0 reading translating into a field-strength equal to the one in Pueblo. He called it the Maytag Index. Finally buckling down and methodically poring through six months of data, he identified about three hundred instances of activity with an index value of 0.7 or higher. Based on his estimates, these were comparable to the event he saw when Kate Minon was at the office a few days earlier, which measured an astonishing 0.9. Despite the number of cases, 0.7+ events didn’t happen as frequently as it might have seemed. Those three hundred instances were for a region encompassing the Americas, Europe, Africa, and large parts of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, which all together contained well over half of the world’s population. Once he built a filter to automate the task, it turned out there were in total only
about a thousand such events in the telemetry since Vela 1A went live two years earlier.

  One interesting wrinkle in the observations was that they weren’t randomly spread across the Earth’s population centers. Although there was undeniably some geographic scattering of high-intensity events, there were certain regions where they seemed to be tightly grouped and more likely to occur. Every continent had at least one such area. As he’d suspected, the central coast of California, specifically around Santa Barbara and Carpinteria, was one of those places. The events also tended to happen in the evening when most people were in bed asleep. Finally, there were a few cases where two 0.7+ observations occurred simultaneously right down to the tenth of a second, but many miles apart. What that seemed to suggest was staggering: Teleportation via naturally occurring fields.

  As for the underwater Allen field activity, there’d been no high-intensity events in the Earth’s oceans detected since Vela 1A went online. This wasn’t too surprising considering aquatic ambient field activity was considerably less intense than its land-based counterpart. At about 0.1 on the Maytag Index, its average came in well below the 0.2 index values usually observed on land. However, there was no denying it was there, with the greatest concentrations occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, around the shores of Japan and off the coast of the American Northeast. Furthermore, there appeared to be some seasonality, though it was nothing he could pin down or quantify. It was almost as though Allen fields were living things. In fact, if Professor Marshall were of a different age, he perhaps might even have called them spirits.

  Despite the weather, the family reunion in Marseille was the best in Kate Minon’s memory. To her relief, she and her boyfriend arrived on time. As always, the well-known warmth and hospitality of the French Minons brightened the gathering. On top of that, she and her boyfriend got to use the French they’d learned, which was a rare treat. Perhaps most surprising of all, there was snow while she was there. It was almost surreal seeing the Mediterranean port city of Marseille covered in snow. There was some good-natured kidding that year that the English Minons had inadvertently brought London with them to southern France. As a matter of fact, it was the heaviest snowfall in years and unfortunately almost brought the city to a standstill during her stay there. Though she couldn’t help it, Kate Minon almost felt guilty enjoying the weather. Having spent several years in California, the sight of snow had regained the novelty and beauty it had when she was a child growing up in England. Fortunately, the disruptions caused by the inclement weather weren’t too severe. After a restful week-long break, Kate Minon was looking forward to returning to Santa Barbara and continuing work on her dissertation.

  Professor Marshall was looking forward to Kate Minon returning to Santa Barbara. It’d been decades since he’d run a seminar alone; and he was feeling a little overwhelmed. Attending the satellite launch then poring through Vela system telemetry the day before didn’t help matters. Still, he knew it was good for him to close the circle, so to speak. The crop of graduate students in his seminar that Thursday was as sharp and energetic as ever. In the back of his mind, he felt that was the true key to his longevity, to his decades-long career as a professor. His students kept him young; their ability, vitality and intelligence kept his own mind sharp, alert, flexible and open to new ideas. As for the Vela satellite network, it was progressing smoothly. Instead of the six months he originally needed to prepare a detector satellite for launch, it now took half that time. He’d also built a filter into the system that would report high-intensity events as they occurred.

  Dr. Marshall saw the system’s very first alerts early Friday morning at his home computer. The first e-mail reported a 0.8 event northwest of London in a town called High Wycombe, and just after that was another alert for a 0.8 event located around Carpinteria. The timestamps were identical, Thursday 1/8/2009 9:00:52.8 PM PST. Pasting the event coordinates into an online mapping service, he saw the points were over five thousand miles apart. At that, a single word came to mind: Teleportation. Abandoning his usual restraint, he bolted out of his chair, got dressed, kissed his wife in bed and headed to Field Technologies. Reaching into his backpack to grab a notebook on his way out, he was delighted to find wedged in one of its corners his mobile phone, which had been missing for several days.

  It was a five minute drive to Field Technologies, but it took him over twenty minutes to work the office door open once he got there. He made a mental note to get it fixed that day. Dr. Marshall sometimes thought about setting up a secure link with his home computer that’d allow him to access telemetry remotely; however, he never did it. Almost a half-century later and that summer day in 1959 was admittedly still fresh in his mind. He pulled the archived telemetry for the evening before and observed that the event mirrored what he saw the day Kate Minon stopped by Field Technologies. Like then, the usual low level field activity gave way to a much stronger pulse that fitfully grew in intensity only to disappear seconds later. However, this time, he saw the telemetry displayed on a world map. And this time, he saw two identical fields appearing, intensifying then disappearing at the same time, an entire ocean and continent apart.

  Once he got over the initial shock at what the telemetry had just shown him, questions came rushing in. First and foremost: Was anything sent? If so, it was fundamentally different from the sort of teleportation they’d achieved in Pueblo. With the Maytag, there was only one Allen field and once it disappeared, the object returned to the sending room. Despite the differences, his every instinct told him the answer was, ”Yes.” It was just that with the organic fields, somehow what got sent stayed sent. Assuming something was sent, where was it? Answering that would’ve literally been like trying to find a needle in a six square mile haystack. However, he didn’t know whether that needle ended up around Carpinteria or was sitting somewhere north of London. Also he didn’t know whether what he was looking for was a needle, a Labrador retriever, someone’s bicycle, a bar of surf wax, a pack of bubblegum or a piece of driftwood. If only the Series B Vela satellites were live. Once in orbit, he estimated that they’d provide event locations accurate to within one hundred yards. Still, the truth was that none of those satellites were up yet. He’d simply have to work with what he had.

  Though he felt his reasoning jeopardized getting his PhD in physics immediately revoked, he believed he knew the element connecting the seeming instances of teleportation that Vela had detected. He would’ve preferred that his theory be rooted in facts, in data, as it nearly always was instead of the murkier stuff of instinct and intuition. Still, intuition certainly had its place in science. And the truth was that the scanty information he did possess indicated a nexus: Kate Minon. He made a point never to pry into his students’ private lives, but in addition to her distinctive accent, she mentioned once that she grew up in England. Also, she lived just up the coast in Goleta. Finally, she was in Carpinteria during the high-intensity event that set the detector off in a way he’d never seen before or since. If anything, Kate Minon was at least a starting point. The issue, of course, was figuring out how to proceed without compromising the project or, more importantly, the trust she placed in him as her mentor. As it had been with all of his students through the decades, that trust was inviolable. Although what the telemetry intimated was amazing, an organic equivalent to the technology they’d worked to develop fifty years earlier in Pueblo, involving Kate Minon was a last resort. He’d first exhaust every alternative before doing that.

  He began by identifying as many cases of simultaneous high-intensity activity as possible between Carpinteria and High Wycombe. It turned out there were a half-dozen such instances. He’d never thought to look, but in fact, the 0.9 event coinciding with Kate Minon’s visit to the office about a week earlier also had a counterpart in High Wycombe. What was in High Wycombe? Looking at an aerial map online, it was certainly a very pretty area, full of trees and nice English homes, but there was nothing to suggest why it would be a focus of so much field activity. Professor
Marshall then identified all instances of simultaneous field events at or above 0.7 on the Maytag Index; and found fifty-one such occurrences for the swaths of the world that Vela covered. About a tenth of all high-intensity activity had an identifiable counterpart. Six of those fifty-one instances were of course between Carpinteria and High Wycombe. Interestingly, seven occurrences altogether involved High Wycombe. Instead of Carpinteria, one event had its counterpart in London. It measured a solid 0.9 on the Maytag Index and happened almost precisely a year earlier, January 1st, 2008 at about 9pm PST. Though he unfortunately knew next to nothing about England, the maps indicated that it was around an area of London called Kensington and Chelsea. After puzzling over the data for a while longer, he looked at the clock and saw that it was almost eight in the evening. He’d spent the entire day in the office and had forgotten to eat. He needed to go home, have a late dinner and sleep on what he’d learned. Also, it was time to bring Guy Pool and Dr. Gidsen into the loop.

  Professor Marshall called them early the next morning from the Field Technologies office and got lucky, reaching them both on the first try. After exchanging a few pleasantries, they got down to brass tacks as they might’ve said in their younger days. He started by going over his hypothesis regarding what the satellite telemetry from Thursday evening represented, explaining that Mother Nature seemed to have beaten US-395 to the punch. Not only was teleportation possible, it was already happening. To bring the point home, he asked them both to view the event using the link he’d e-mailed to them earlier that morning. It was one thing to say teleportation between Carpinteria, California and High Wycombe in England. It was something else to see those two points separated by over five thousand miles light up simultaneously with field activity on a world map. After a few moments of silence, Guy Pool requested Dr. Marshall’s risk assessment. Of course. Nearly fifty years later and that summer day in 1959 was still fresh in their minds. Dr. Marshall replied that he’d researched all of the high-intensity event locations and time periods, and thankfully found nothing to suggest that the field activity was malicious. He saw no news reports, for example, of missing persons or theft. In fact, there were no news reports at all, good or bad. No scientist, engineer, university, government or business took credit for what would arguably have been humankind’s greatest technological advance since the invention of the wheel. All of which led Professor Marshall to believe that it was possibly uncontrolled. This was greeted with more silence. He went on to explain that like the weather and other natural phenomena, instances of teleportation somewhat resembled unpredictable acts of nature. He then tempered that by saying that he didn’t feel it was completely random. Potentially there was a human element involved; however, he didn’t know enough yet to elaborate.