The Black Hole

by Hammond, Ray

  But, even as he read reports that conjectured about Alexander Makowski’s mental health, Floyd had a strong feeling that he knew more about the psychology of the man than an entire team of hot shot psychologist profilers. He had been in Makowski’s presence only once, seven years before, but the sustained and crazed ranting he had observed in those few hours had convinced him that the Humans First leader, although undoubtedly sincere in his beliefs, was dangerously unstable.

  There was a knock on the door and Ray Fox entered the spacious private bedroom.

  Floyd turned to look at him squarely.

  ‘Bloody marvellous!’ exclaimed Fox, and he gave a low whistle of appreciation.

  The CTU director reached out and clasped the reconstructive surgeon by his shoulder. ‘He looks precisely like our target.’

  ‘Just how long do you intend keeping me here?’ demanded Floyd, assuming his new character’s flat Essex accent and speaking the words he had heard Tipton ask over and over again.

  ‘That’s him. Perfect,’ said Fox with a smile.

  The doctor almost simpered with pleasure. ‘Before we reprofiled Mr Floyd’s larynx we had our computer create a simulation of Tipton’s vocal chords – interpolated from his voice prints. After surgery we ran comparisons between the two vocal signatures – the original and Mr Floyd’s new voice – and we’re within an error margin of four to five per cent. As you know, that’s enough to create a positive identification in all the world’s matching systems.’

  ‘Good work,’ nodded Fox, still sizing up his remodelled field agent. ‘Fingerprints O.K.?’.

  ‘Oh yes,’ confirmed the surgeon, turning Floyd’s hand over so that it lay palm upwards in his. All of the fingerprints have been regrafted with precise replicas of the target. They would pass any test.’

  The CTU boss again nodded his approval.

  Now the doctor dropped Floyd’s hand and pointed to the patient’s left eye.

  ‘We’ve copied the iris scans you provided and created permanent-wear, total-cover contact lenses which replicate them exactly. If we’d had more time, we would have considered growing new irises for a transplant. But I gather speed is of the essence.’

  ‘It is, doctor,’ said Fox with a beam. ‘Thank you very much, you’ve done an excellent job.’

  Recognising his dismissal, the surgeon glanced again at his patient with satisfaction and then excused himself. When the door had closed Floyd turned to his boss. ‘What do we know about this Indiana Project?’ he asked in Tipton’s voice, but without his flat accent.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Fox, still gazing at his transformed agent. ‘If the Americans know what it is, they’re not telling us. They say Makowski may be bluffing.’

  ‘Not his style,’ said Floyd with a shake of his head. ‘However mad hew is, he’s still a scientist. Always very precise.’

  Fox pursed his lips, then changed the subject. ‘How do you feel now, Harry?’

  ‘Almost ready to go,’ said Floyd ‘I just need to feel myself into this character a bit more.’

  ‘You can do that in your long drive down from Mexico,’ said Fox. ‘The RAF are flying you out this evening.’

  Seven

  ‘Dr Phelps, a pleasure to meet you,’ enthused Robert Brabazon as he walked around the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office to greet his visitor.

  Behind the retired, wheelchair-bound physicist, ATA Director Mike Ryan and Senior Field Agent Nicole Sanderson stood stiffly to attention, both VAs muted. Although her boss had met the President several times before, Nicole herself had never previously been in the Chief’s immediate presence. She pulled at the hem of her black trouser-suit jacket to ensure it was straight.

  Brabazon shook the elderly man’s hand warmly and perched on the edge of the large pedestal desk – an elegant piece of mahogany craftsmanship that had been given to the White House by Britain’s Queen Victoria.

  ‘Now what is all this about the Indiana Project?’ he asked, remembering to keep his speech slow when speaking to someone without the benefit of an implanted VA. ‘And why can’t you talk to anybody about it except me?’

  Nicole and her boss had debated the best way to extract information from Phelps. Both agreed that it was highly likely the man had bragged about the Indiana Project to Makowski, probably while drunk, just as he had mentioned it to his students. But both had doubted that any sort of prosecution would be useful, even if it were viable. Then two pieces of evidence had been uncovered that had persuaded Ryan to arrange an urgent meeting between the President and the retired physicist.

  The first discovery that prompted his decision was very physical, very tangible; the mountain range in Arizona that Phelps mentioned no longer existed. A vast crater had taken its place. The media of the time had reported that an underground nuclear weapons test had taken place – much to the fury of the international community and environmental groups.

  Second was the discovery of a less physical but equally vast hole in the Pentagon’s ‘skunk works’ budgets that had been incurred between the years 2013 and 2025. Over $24 billion had been spent on unspecified ‘experimental military development,’ but there was nothing to show for it and no mention of the technology involved.

  ‘I need to talk to you alone, sir,’ Craig Phelps told the President, glancing over his shoulder to where Nicole and her boss stood. ‘What I have to say is for your ears only.’

  ‘Is it O.K. if I ask them to stay?’ said Brabazon genially. ‘I’ll take full responsibility.’

  The elderly man tapped his hands on the top of his thighs, as though he were patting his pockets. Then he gave a short nod.

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘Sit, people,’ the President told the representatives of the Anti-Terrorism Agency. ‘Now, Dr Phelps, tell me all about it.’

  Thirty minutes later they were still listening to the old man’s story. Twice the president’s external virtual assistant had alerted him to urgent phone calls and twice he had repeated his instructions that he was not to be disturbed. A presidential aide had even popped his head in the door to say that the Chief of Staff needed to see his boss urgently, but he too had been sent away.

  ‘Over an eleven year period, we built a terrible, terrible weapon,’ Phelps had begun with a sad shake of his head. ‘Back then there was a global ban on all nuclear weapons development and the Pentagon wanted an alternative WMD technology that didn’t violate any of the treaties.

  ‘But it all went terribly wrong. On the first live test, the darn thing ran out of control, nearly killed us all. President Weeks was there – he saw the test for himself. He ordered the project cancelled, and the team disbanded. He said the technology was so dangerous it should never have been developed. He even issued a Presidential Decree that everything to do with Indiana should remain classified – for ever!’

  ‘This one?’ asked Brabazon, leaning across his desk and plucking a folded document from his blotting pad. The President held out the personally signed decree, displaying the great seal of the United States of America. ‘It’s dated June 2025. But it makes no reference to the Indiana Project. It merely orders that a development team led by Professor Thomas Michael Baxter and General Rodney Stone be disbanded and all work, documents, materials related to their experimental work on multi-dimensional gravity armament systems be destroyed. As you say, President Weeks specifically ordered that all information and knowledge emanating from and relating to the experiments should remain permanently classified.’

  ‘That why I couldn’t speak about this to anyone but you, sir,’ said Phelps, glancing round at Nicole and her boss, almost triumphant that his stubbornness had been vindicated.

  ‘Well, I appreciate that now, Dr Phelps,’ said Brabazon in a mollifying tone.

  ‘One thing I want to get straight is that I never mentioned anything about Indiana to Makowski while he was at Stanford,’ said Phelps firmly. ‘I’ve never mentioned it to anybody, not from then until now!’

  ‘I understand,’ said Braba
zon tactfully. Then he glanced up at Ryan and Nicole. ‘And do we think the Humans First people actually have this technology?’

  ‘Agent Sanderson visited and showed me a physics equation that I recognised immediately,’ said Phelps, taking back centre stage. ‘It was the first part of the core equation that lies at the heart of the Indiana Project. If HFDA guys are sending that to each other, as she says, Makowski has definitely got hold of the physics on which the Indiana technology was based.’

  ‘I see,’ said Brabazon grimly. ‘You’d better tell us everything you know about this weapon.’

  Phelps pulled himself more upright in his chair. ‘We built a black hole bomb, sir,’ he said. ‘All based on Tom Baxter’s theory of multi-dimensional gravitational spillage and evaporation within singularities.’

  ‘Whoa!’ said Brabazon, holding up a hand. ‘Can you give me that in layman’s terms?’

  ‘A black hole is the universe’s ultimate form of energy, sir,’ explained Phelps, sitting back in his chair. ‘In nature, it occurs when a giant star collapses and creates a small object so dense that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light.’

  The physicist glanced up at the President to see if he was being understood.

  ‘It swallows everything nearby and crushes it down to nothing,’ he continued. ‘Professor Tom Baxter of Cal-Tech discovered how to create miniature black holes that grew for a given period and then evaporated under controlled conditions. But something went wrong and on the first live test his weapon wiped out the Kinska mountain range in Arizona and dug a crater twenty miles wide.’

  There was a silence as Phelps completed his summation. It seemed as if a sudden chill had settled on the room.

  ‘And where is this Professor Baxter now?’ asked the President.

  ‘He’s dead. I read he died in a boating accident a few years ago.’

  The President lifted his weight from the desk and walked round to his high-backed swivel chair.

  ‘O.K., warn Homeland what we’re dealing with,’ he ordered Ryan. ‘And Dr Phelps, you have my permission to tell the ATA everything you can remember about this darn project and about all the other scientists who worked on it.’

  *

  ‘Buen viaje!’ said the owner of the little motor repair shop.

  ‘Muchas gracias,’ responded Harry Floyd as he took back Gary Tipton’s credit card. ‘Adios.’

  ‘Almost a native,’ said Maria in his tiny earpiece. ‘Shall I plot the route?’

  ‘Yep, you know where we’re going,’ Floyd said, apparently to himself as he opened the door of the red Corvette and touched Tipton’s ID to the dash to start the motor. ‘Due south to Venezuela – Caracas.’ It still felt strange to have to speak out loud in order to communicate with his VA.

  Maria transferred herself from Floyd’s communicator to the car’s old-fashioned internal system. While she mapped out the long and winding route down through Central America and on into Venezuela, Floyd swung Tipton’s back-pack into the rear seat and lowered the soft top. He estimated the journey would take three days if he drove for sixteen hours a day; there was no satellite vehicle control on Mexico’s highways. HFDA knew Tipton was driving down, so a manual drive it had to be.

  On his arrival in Phoenix, Gary Tipton had caught a bus out to the suburbs and bought himself this second-hand Corvette from a run-down second-hand car lot. Sensibly he had guessed that driving across the border in a new rental car would be more conspicuous than doing so in an old car with Arizona plates.

  CTU surveillance had tracked him from Phoenix airport and the satellite had picked him up as he crossed the border into Mexico at the small town of Naco, to the west of El Paso. Then, while he stopped overnight at a motel in Moctezuma, a CTU engineer from the British embassy in Mexico city had arrived and, under cover of darkness, had attached a small, remotely-controlled explosive device to the car’s right front half-axle. It was a sabotage technique the British security services had perfected over many decades.

  ‘O.K., take the next right turning for El Sueco and then head south for Chihuahu,’ said Maria stressing the throaty sound of the Spanish consonants in the place names.

  Floyd slipped his sunglasses on, gunned the old petrol-hybrid engine and swung out onto the empty highway.

  ‘Now, repeat after me,’ said Maria. ‘ “No comprendo. Hablad más lentamente, por favor”.’

  *

  Professor Nagourney’s linking you, Carl said into his owner’s inner ear. He wants to talk about the equation you left with him.

  Nicole was so besieged with work that she briefly considered telling her VA to take at message. Put it external, she ordered with a thought. She didn’t know the physicist well enough for the intimacy of a mind link. The communicator on her desk trilled.

  ‘Hey, Nicole, how’re you doing?’

  Alain Nagourney was calling from his home, the agent saw. She decided not to enable a visual link.

  ‘Great – but we’re really busy.’

  ‘I see the national security level has gone up again. I heard what the President said, but are you guys at the ATA really taking Makowski’s threats seriously?’

  ‘We have to,’ Nicole told him. ‘Things are more tense in DC than I’ve ever known them.’

  There was a clipped shortness to her replies that the physicist, or his VA, picked up on immediately.

  ‘I’m still working on that equation you left me,’ he said, getting down to business. ‘If I make some assumptions – some pretty wild assumptions – that the D representors do signify additional dimensions, I’d say it is indeed possible that this formula could be connected with a basis for calculating the evaporation points of an artificially-produced black hole.’

  Nicole nodded, then added, ‘O.K.. Thanks.’

  Although Alain Nagourney could have no way of knowing it, ATA agents and advisors had now been debriefing Dr Craig Phelps for two days. Having been given permission by the President to talk about the Indiana Project, the retired team member had rapidly named the other scientists on the project and told them all he could recall of the technology involved. But, as the agency’s in-house science advisors had quickly realised, neither they nor Phelps fully understood the highly-advanced and very abstract multi-dimensional physics that lay at the core of artificially produced black holes.

  ‘My job was just to scale down the super-conducting proton magnets,’ Phelps had explained. ‘I had to calculate the power decay as we reduced the mass. But Baxter’s theoretical multi-dimensional quantum work was way beyond me, beyond most of us.’

  ‘Nicole?’ queried Nagourney after a few moments of silence had passed. ‘Hey, is any of this of help?’

  ‘Sorry, Alain,’ apologised Nicole. ‘I was thinking. Have you ever gone through a U.S. security clearance procedure – or have you ever signed a National Secrecy Agreement?’

  ‘Hell, no. I’ve always stayed out of trouble,’ laughed the physicist.

  ‘I’d really appreciate your help down here in Langley,’ said Nicole. ‘You were right about your old Stanford lecturer, Craig Phelps, but I can’t involve you further unless you’d be prepared for us to check you out and have you sign a goddamn NSA.’

  ‘Well, the university is still on summer vacation,’ responded Nagourney.

  ‘O.K.. I’ll get the security clearance people onto it,’ Nicole told him. ‘Then, unless you’ve got some terrible secret lurking in your past, I’ll be in touch.’

  *

  Alexander Makowski lit the videoscreen in his secluded rural retreat and, right on cue, he saw the image of his chief scientific officer, Dr Sergy Larov, and Colonel Andreas Poliza, HFDA’s director of military operations. Both men were standing in brilliant sunshine, a semi-tropical rural backdrop behind them.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said Makowski as he began the encrypted video conference.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Larov. The HFDA colonel merely nodded.

  There was a flicker and then a third figur
e appeared on Makowski’s wall display.

  ‘Welcome, Benny,’ said the leader of Humans First.

  Benjamin Pace, the leader of the outlawed Humans First Party of America, nodded and greeted the others. He was seated in a small office.

  ‘How is the airborne training going, Colonel?’ asked Makowski.

  ‘We haven’t started yet,’ replied German-born Poliza. ‘We are selecting the best of our active service volunteers and training up some of the new recruits. But we’ll be ready on time.’