Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  Opening the High Wycombe office was a sort of homecoming for Dr. Minon. They were only there for the weekend, but she took Professor Marshall on a tour of the area on Saturday and showed him the tree where she’d originally seen the fireflies in her story. Despite the fact that neither of them was at all superstitious, they each felt a tingle run down their spine when they read the street’s name-plate buried in some hedges: Allyn Close. Though there were no lightning-bugs there that afternoon, Dr. Marshall had to say it was a beautiful tree. Seeing his reaction, Professor Minon told him that it was called a London planetree. After commenting on the name and not hearing a response, it was then when Dr. Marshall noticed that Kate Minon had gone very still. Looking at her, all he could see was her staring at something. Turning his head slowly to try to see what could cause such a state, he finally understood. Parked in a driveway just down the street was a white, nearly mint condition Karmann Ghia convertible with California plates.

  Fortunately, the car hadn’t been towed. Just as remarkably, it was clean, as though someone had washed it regularly. Dr. Marshall surmised the snow and rain probably had a hand in that. He subsequently learned that the house’s owners spent half of the year living in a vacation home in New Zealand. Though it was a stroke of luck that it was still there, discovering her boyfriend’s car that way was tough on Professor Minon. It was one thing to see numbers and telemetry suggesting one’s connection to certain phenomena, it was another thing entirely to witness the consequences of that possible connection firsthand. After learning that her boyfriend also lived in Carpinteria, Professor Marshall did his best to cheer her up and pointed out that it was still far from clear what her relationship was to the events that the Vela system had detected. Fortunately, he succeeded to some degree. More importantly, Kate Minon was inherently resilient and seemed to be alright by the next morning. Dr. Marshall didn’t know, but apparently she and her family were fairly well off. As a result, when he offered to help pay for the car’s transport back to California, she politely declined. After the shock of finding her boyfriend’s car shifted over five thousand miles away from where it’d been, the rest of the weekend was thankfully uneventful. With Dr. Minon there to help, and having worked on the devices for over four years by that point, Professor Marshall had the newest field detector ready well before Sunday evening. Because of its new design and the area’s relatively flat geography, he estimated that it could detect all Allen field activity within a twenty mile radius.

  After returning from England, Dr. Marshall spent most of the subsequent few weeks winding down his work at UC Santa Barbara. His seminars had gone well and he used the bulk of that time to handle the administrative tasks associated with his retirement. Fifty years. Perhaps it was cliché, but it did go quickly. He loved the university and was proud of what he along with his colleagues in the physics department had built there. Of course, he was also proud of his research and the countless students he’d taught. The changes in his life would take some getting used to. He’d no longer be a professor. The next crop of students would take instruction from someone else, would seek someone else out for guidance. Someone else would sit in his office. Someone else would propose new frameworks for understanding quantum events. Not being particularly sentimental, he shrugged those thoughts off and noted to himself that he could still visit the university as often as he liked. The professors that those students sought out had a more than fair chance of being ones he himself had taught. Most importantly, UC Santa Barbara would still be there long after he retired. The institution would go on. Students would still learn there. Society’s understanding of the physical world it inhabited would continue to progress. Knowledge would continue to be generated and distributed. It wasn’t really that big a deal. Despite that, Professor Marshall had to admit there was an almost tangible finality to it. It was slightly more difficult than he’d anticipated, but he managed to give the commencement address to the Class of 2010 without a hitch. It was a cloudy spring day in Goleta.

  Although preparing for his retirement consumed most of his time, Dr. Marshall also continued his work on the satellite detection system and Highway 1. A few days after the successful launch of Vela 2B in late June, he installed a ground-based field detector in his lab. With it, he finally had high-resolution field telemetry for the most crucial transit points in his research, Carpinteria and High Wycombe. When the second land-based detector went live, he could pinpoint event locations in both regions to within a foot. It was just then, however, when he received some unexpected, terrible news: Dr. Gidsen had passed away in his home in Arlington.

  Reflecting the man himself, the funeral a few weeks later was simple yet heartfelt. When they invited Dr. Marshall to speak a few words, he recited some lines from a poem that his friend had been fond of:

  Though much is taken, much abides; and though

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

  Shortly after the ceremony, Guy Pool and Dr. Marshall talked about the project. It was somewhat difficult to concentrate under the circumstances, but they agreed to seek Professor Minon’s consent to develop Highway 1 technology based on her connection to organic field activity. Although his passing significantly weakened the chances of reopening US-395, Representative Gidsen had been busy laying the groundwork for bringing Allen field technology to the government’s attention through Highway 1. Before leaving for their cars, they then went over a contingency plan of theirs from the 1980s for resolving US-395.

  The plan’s broadest outlines had been laid out as a fallback in case their efforts to get approval for a second field generator failed. The problem, as distilled by Dr. Gidsen in 1985, was that potentially they’d never know whether it was ever safe to bring Dr. Rys and his son back. If they’d failed in disarming the bomb, there was a possibility it could rematerialize unexploded only to detonate a few minutes later in Pueblo. Even if they did disarm it, there was a very small though not insignificant chance that it could be brought back exactly as it’d been sent with the countdown to detonation resumed in a reconstituted weapon. Given that, the signal didn’t matter. Essentially the only thing really keeping them from un-sending Dr. Rys and his son was the threat of a reconstituted weapon. If there was a way to get the town, Dr. Rys and Pedro clear of the blast radius in time, receiving the signal wouldn’t matter. If they could do that, they could’ve all driven to Pueblo, taken a sledgehammer to the walled-off auditorium door and un-sent them that day.

  Ultimately, the contingency plan they came up with involved evacuating Pueblo. Though it wasn’t ideal, they could’ve funded an evacuation with little to no aid from the government if they had to. As for the weapon, there were perhaps a couple of minutes left on its timer when it was sent. Guy Pool had the most experience with the chamber, and he estimated that would be just enough time to open the sending room door and get Dr. Rys out of there with his son. Then they’d need to somehow immediately get clear of the blast radius. And that’s where the discussion ended twenty-five years earlier. For all the brainpower seated around that kitchen table, there was no conceivable way of getting them out of there in time. In 1985 there was no way to execute their hypothetical contingency plan and it stayed that way ever since, a hypothetical.

  By 2010, however, things had changed. As Dr. Marshall pointed out, it was clear teleportation could be effected using naturally occurring Allen fields. The instantaneous sending of an eighteen-hundred-pound Karmann Ghia five thousand miles from Carpinteria to an English suburb just northwest of London was proof of that. If they could somehow harness those naturally occurring events, their fallback plan became viable. Guy Pool agreed, noting that it didn’t have to be perfect. If they could develop a device, a technique, anything, to effect sending from the chamber to someplace on Earth
, the contingency plan could work. All that mattered was getting Dr. Rys, his son and whoever else out of the chamber to some location where they could later be recovered. Despite the solemnity of the day’s events, their discussion ended at that, on a fairly optimistic note.

  After Dr. Gidsen’s passing, Professor Minon became even more critical to Dr. Marshall’s efforts, and integrating her more closely into Highway 1 became almost a given. However, unlike an inanimate object or physical phenomenon that could be measured and tested at will, furthering their knowledge of Allen field activity through her brought up obvious ethical considerations. Though no longer a professor, Dr. Marshall’s personal code regarding how he conducted his research remained a series of bright lines he’d never cross, even if that meant not being able to retrieve Dr. Rys and his son. As a result, the decision concerning Dr. Minon’s involvement in Highway 1 would be left entirely to her.

  He broached the topic during one of their weekend lunches. It was an overcast summer afternoon in Carpinteria and they were eating in the office. While talking about the latest results from Vela, Dr. Marshall mentioned possibly shifting Highway 1’s focus from detecting and analyzing organic field events to creating them. Almost instantly grasping what that meant, Professor Minon responded by saying that no one wanted to see practical applications of their research more than she did. The application on both of their minds was, of course, controlled teleportation. They both agreed that if there was a link among some of the more notable field events Vela had detected, it was probably her. And they further concluded that they’d need more data to better define that relationship. With that in mind, they started talking about measuring things like heart rate, body temperature and respiration, theorizing that the connection was mostly driven by physiology. However, they eventually decided to look at the physics instead; and spent the next few months designing and building miniature field detectors, ones that could record Allen field telemetry out to a radius of about forty feet.

  Once finished, the mobile detectors resembled small marbles just over an inch in diameter and were set into wristbands that could be worn comfortably at all times. As with all the detectors, they were usually alight with activity. To keep them from drawing too much attention, a coat of silver paint was applied, so they ended up looking more like ball-bearings than anything else. They built two mobile detectors. In addition to Professor Minon’s wristband, Dr. Marshall wore the second one as a control. They’d briefly discussed possibly using residents living around the land-based detectors in Carpinteria and High Wycombe as control groups. However, being people who intensely valued their own privacy immediately precluded that. Between the mobile devices, the terrestrial detectors and the Vela network, Dr. Marshall liked his odds of eventually learning how teleportation using ambient field activity might be effected.

  After the personal field detectors were ready, it was only a matter of waiting for high-intensity field events between Carpinteria and High Wycombe. By early November 2010, however, it was clear they’d hit a dry spell. In fact, there hadn’t been any activity between those two points since the 1.1 level field events in January. Dr. Minon visited the small office with the field detector prototype numerous times since then to no effect. With no events to work with, they busied themselves instead with completing the detector satellite network. By the time Vela 3B lifted off in early January 2011, there hadn’t been any high-intensity events in Carpinteria or High Wycombe in almost a year. Nevertheless, there was progress in other areas.

  In mid-January Dr. Marshall and Professor Minon started using data-mining programs to analyze hundreds of millions of observations from the orbital and terrestrial field detectors. Within a few months they’d uncovered several notable trends in the telemetry. For example, since Vela 1A went online in January 2007, the number of teleportation events per year seemed to be growing. It was too soon to be certain, but they couldn’t rule out the very faint beginnings of an exponential growth curve. They also gained valuable insights into Dr. Minon’s connection to ambient field activity. Specifically, Dr. Marshall discovered that every night while she slept, certain regions of the world were more likely to experience an up-tick in Allen field activity with some events reaching field-strengths just shy of the 0.7 threshold for teleportation. He outputted the names of those places to a file and showed them to Professor Minon. As she read through the list, he saw a range of expressions flit across her face ranging from slight embarrassment to amusement to near exhilaration. Once she was done, she explained that each of those places held a meaning for her. Like the tree on Allyn Close, each was home to some of her most intense and vivid memories.

  The times and locations of teleportation events, combined with what Dr. Marshall had learned from speaking with Professor Minon, pointed to an important new element that possibly influenced field activity: Dreams. Staring at screens full of telemetry, Dr. Marshall remembered something along those lines in Dr. Rys’s journals. Once he was done at the lab that day, he went home and started looking for it. In addition to the usual notes, data, hypotheses and diagrams, the entries leading up to the July 11th, 1958 launch of US-395’s first probe also briefly mentioned recurring dreams that Dr. Rys had been having. Even over fifty years later, Dr. Marshall still clearly remembered the unusual telemetry the probe recorded. The temperature readings, the atmospheric pressure measurements, everything indicated that they’d sent it into a snowstorm. Once he found the section he was looking for, he recognized it because there were only handwritten notes. There were no numbers, diagrams or charts. He’d skipped through it originally because it was in Dr. Rys’s native Spanish. In all of his journals, everything else was in English. Only those couple of pages were in Spanish. Also, though Dr. Marshall was very fond of the language and had a strong command of it, he skipped the section because of its very first sentence: Sigo teniendo el mismo sueño. I keep having the same dream. Along with everything else, that opening sentence had cordoned those pages off in Dr. Marshall’s mind as something very personal and not intended for him. However, given his recent findings he began wondering whether it was actually the very thing he should’ve read.

  Finally going past the first sentence, Dr. Marshall read about how vivid Dr. Rys’s dreams had suddenly become, how real it all seemed. As he read on, he learned that they were recurring dreams of a walk home when Dr. Rys was a little boy. It was always the same dream, him with his brother walking home from school in Bogotá on a gray and cloudy afternoon. He was barely nine years old at the time and his brother was just a bit older than that. They were out near an open field when it quickly got much colder and darker. They felt the wind kick up and then heard a din all around them, as though thousands of the marbles they played with at school were falling from the sky all at once, hitting the sidewalk. He didn’t understand what was happening. After the initial confusion passed, he realized it wasn’t just hitting the sidewalk, it was hitting him, as well. Jerking his head down for cover, he could see what it was all around him on the ground. Compounding his confusion, he saw that they actually looked like marbles. They were beautiful. Scattered all over the sidewalk were round, shiny, white marbles. It was bizarre realizing that it was those pretty things that were pelting him and his brother relentlessly, stinging them in the back of the head, in the neck, around their arms and shoulders. And it wouldn’t stop. If anything, it seemed to strengthen. In their panic, they just started running around looking for cover, but there wasn’t any. There wasn’t a tree in sight, only fields of grass stretching out seemingly indefinitely in all directions from the sidewalk. There was nowhere to go.

  It was then, just as inexplicably, that he felt an arm wrap around him, abruptly lifting him into the air. Before he knew it, he and his brother were sitting side-by-side in a car, the falling marbles now beating furiously on the roof instead of on them. It was their family’s Model T. He heard his father’s voice booming from the driver’s seat just over the din. He was telling them that it was a granizada, a hail-storm. Dr. Rys
wrote that he’d never forget the sound of it mercilessly pelting the car all the way home, as if it were looking for some way in, angrily trying to claim what it’d been cheated out of. The hail-stones put several cracks into the windshield as their father drove along. Somehow, though, it never shattered. Pulling into their covered driveway, his anxiety at what had just been visited upon them finally began receding. The sense of foreboding that came from being trapped in the granizada had been so intense that its mere absence felt close to elation. As his father switched off the car’s engine, he was grateful just to be home and alive.

  Once he was done reading, Dr. Marshall looked at the telemetry Dr. Rys jotted down later that same week from the probe. After consulting with a meteorologist he knew at UCSB, he confirmed that the readings were consistent with a hail-storm. He also remembered Professor Minon telling him months earlier that just before her family reunions, she often dreamt about her times in boarding school and her evening at the London planetree in particular. Being drawn once again into the murky world of instinct and intuition, Dr. Marshall felt well out of his element. Nevertheless, there was a pattern. There were so few observations, though. Even calling them observations was a stretch. In truth, they were anecdotes. Building a predictive model of a physical phenomenon on anecdotes wasn’t ideal. He personally would’ve preferred having millions of data points. Still, he worked with what he had. If forced to guess, he’d hypothesize that there was some link between Allen fields and human emotion, specifically as expressed while asleep and dreaming. It was as though Allen fields, artificially generated or otherwise, responded to intense emotional states. Unfortunately, Dr. Rys wasn’t around to speak with regarding dreams and emotional states; however, Professor Minon was.