A Glint In Time (History and Time)

by Frank J. Derfler

  "Hello, Major Valenzuela, I'm Sally Arthurs. It's a pleasure to meet you."

  "How do you do, Ma'am."he replied.

  "I'm sorry for the delay, but we had to make sure you are who you say you are. I'd like to spend a few minutes with you to find out a little more than what's in your personnel file. I'm the Deputy Director Administration for the TDA. Since you're a fighter pilot, I'll put it this way. This is the verbal part of a pass or fail check ride. If you pass, you go inside the building and get to work. If you fail, you go back out to the parking lot and we give your name back to the military personnel center."

  "That's pretty straightforward, Ma'am. "Jose replied after a moment. "I'll admit that I know nothing about what you do or what you're looking for. So, I don't really know how to respond."

  "Let me ask some questions," she said.You majored in computer science at the Air Force Academy. What's your experience with database integration?"

  For the next forty five minutes Jose found himself answeringtheoretical questions aboutdatabase programming, probing questions about his career plans, intrusive questions

  about his social life, and interesting questions about his knowledge of history, literature, and social science.

  At one point she repeated an answer back to him. "You read science fiction for relaxation?"

  "Well yes," he admitted."! also like historical fiction and military fiction. I like WEB Griffin, H.Jay Riker, and lately I've been reading some stuff by Ian Douglas."He saw her eyes move to the TV camera as if telegraphing something to an audience, but he wasn't sure what. She smiled slightly. "It's possible that someday you'll meet them." She left it at that.

  It was only a few moments later when the door was opened by a tall man wearing the informal open collar version of the Air Force uniform with a light blue shirt and darker blue pants. Each epaulet of the shirt had the two stars of a major general. Jose wasn't sure of the protocol, but he pushed back his chair and popped to attention.

  "Stand easy, Major," the general said with a wave of his hand. I'm Ted Arthurs. Sally, what do you think?"

  "I think that once we tell him what we do, he'll be a keeper."she replied firmly.

  " Okay, Jose, come with us."Almost subconsciously Jose noticed that the general had pronounced his name almost like a native Cuban. He also noticed command pilot wings on the general's shirt. At least they had something in common. He followed the two of them out of the interview room, through the bare reception area, and when it buzzed open, through the other door.The final door was like a bank

  vault. It was heavy with locking bars and swung silently and effortlessly on its hinges. As they entered the hallway, a soft chime sounded musically three times. The few open doors along the hallway were quickly closed by the occupants of the offices.

  As he led them down the hallway, Jose sensed that they were in a building that was compartmentalized. It was like a building inside a building and they were walking around a center core. "Jose, I'm going to sit you in an office and let you work your own way through a briefing package. I've got to start out by saying that anything and everything within these walls is Top Secret code word TD. At this point we hope that there are only about a dozen people in the world who will know what you will know in a couple of hours. Our first job is to keep it that way.This is the biggest and baddest secret you'll ever know. And, there are people still sitting in dark cages in foreign countries who didn't quite understand that. If you screw up this secret in any way you'll disappear into one of those cages forever. You still ready?"

  Jose stopped walking and paused. "Let me ask you one question, Sir. "he said. "You both seem intelligent and pretty well balanced. Is this secret really worth it? Is it important work?"

  Ted Arthurs smiled slightly, rubbed his chin and said, "It has changed the world, Jose. It has changed the world more than once."

  "Yes," Sally said. "We think it's important enough to put it right next to our children as the center points of our lives."

  Jose paused again. "You two are married?"

  "Yeah," Ted Arthurs replied, "I told you. We need to keep the secrets in the family."

  The general dug in his pants pocket and handed Jose a small glass bead. "While you're reading the briefing material, keep this on the table. You'll read about them. We use these to convince people to join us."

  Sally laughed out loud.

  WEIRDER AND WEIRDER

  Monday, June 6, 201 1

  1700 Eastern

  Homestead, Florida

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Major General Ted Arthurs (USAF Ret)

  Recorded July 2015UNCLASSIFIED

  ". . . . . we knew we had a winner the minute we saw him."

  Jose read for three hours without stopping. He was in a small comfortable office with both a good desk chair and an easy chair. Sally Arthurs had stopped by once to see if he needed anything. He said he was fine and, as she left, the office door had closed behind her with a pronounced double click. He'd rotated between the chairs a couple of times and stopped and stared at the wall more than once.

  The briefing books were three-ring binders. They were numbered and divided by tabs. The content read like part science fiction, part military adventure, part physics textbook, and part fantasy. The most interesting parts were the personal narratives of Theodore Arthurs, Sally Langley Arthurs, Dr. Bill Wirtz, and Dr. Fred Landry. The narratives of Wirtz and Landry, while concise, covered nearly two decades. He had to keep reminding himself that it was true.

  These people at least had the power to change history and they had probably done so in some very big ways.

  At 1700 General Arthurs opened the door and Jose bounced up from the armchair holding an open briefing book to his chest. "Have you got a place to stay for tonight?" the general asked.

  "No Sir, I drove right here. I thought I'd check into the BOQ."

  "You can do that tomorrow. Sally and I would like you to stay with us tonight. We can have dinner and then, once the kids are in bed, we can talk. I imagine you want to talk, right?"

  "I think I have a thousand questions, but I'm not sure what they are." Jose admitted.

  "Well, we only have about 500 answers. Or less. There's a lot we don't know." Arthurs replied.

  Following the Arthurs' new Cadillac Escalade hybrid SUV, Jose did the math. If Sally was a GM-15 or 16 grade civilian, the equivalent of a full Colonel, then the two of them brought in at least three times what he made. They could afford the Escalade.

  They left the base, turned south and drove right next to the Homestead NASCAR track. Jose saw the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in the distance. He knew now that the TDC, or the Project as it had been known, was placed here because it was close to that power plant. He was amazed

  at how his perspective had changed in one afternoon. They entered the gate of a golf course community and took a street that wandered through a richly landscaped neighborhood.

  He drove up a steep driveway, parked, and had to climb eight stairs to enter the front door of the sprawling house. Inside, the house was comfortable, but not elegant. Sally showed him to a guest bedroom and said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to order in dinner. Ted and I take turns cooking, but tonight isn't the night for experiments. I can recommend the Picadillo or the Masas de Puerco Fritas."

  "Ma'am, I've spent almost a year in Montgomery Alabama. I've got nothing against okra and sweet tea, but if I could get some Picadillo I'd think I'd gone to heaven."

  "Picadillo and all the trimmings. It will be about forty five minutes. There are towels in the bathroom over there. Ted and I will be doing homework for a while."

  When he entered the kitchen half an hour later, Jose understood the comment about homework. The general was sitting at the kitchen table, still in uniform, apparently trying to remember how to deal with the multiplication of exponents. He was sharing an algebra book with a young man who looked remarkably like him. Sally was sitting next to a girl, about th
ree years younger than the boy, who was trying to diagram a sentence. Jose smiled at the scene and quietly went out on the back deck.

  The deck was elevated above a grassy backyard and it merged into a screened pool. As Jose looked around, he spotted surveillance cameras in the eaves of the

  house. He turned toward the golf course and saw a line of black posts sticking up from the mulch defining the back of the property. They looked just like the motion sensor posts that the Air Force security teams placed around loaded combat aircraft to warn of anyone approaching.

  Indeed, just then Jose heard a double chirp that was too harsh to be a doorbell. Through the windows he saw the general check a television monitor before he went to the front door.

  A few moments later Sally called, "Jose, let's eat."

  Jose was introduced to the two Arthurs offspring, Patrick and Michelle, and they sat down to eat. The general and his wife steered the conversation toward Jose's family and his life in both Cuba and Miami. It was clear that talk about what went on at work didn't take place with the children present. The Picadillo wasn't exactly like his Abuela used to make, but darn close.

  Later, after the kitchen was cleared and the kids were in their rooms, Sally handed Jose a glass of red wine and said, "Okay, Let's go into the den. Now it's your turn to ask questions."

  "I don't know where to start. How about the physics first, then we'll do the politics."

  "A wise approach."the general observed. "Tell us what you remember from what you read."

  "Okay, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle I kind of understand. It describes the relationship between the position of an atom and its momentum. As atoms stop moving at absolute zero, their momentum falls to zero, then Heisenberg's principle says that their position becomes unknown. The Bose-Einstein thing. . ."

  "Condensate" the general supplied.

  "The Bose-Einstein condensate is kind of a real world example of Heisenberg's principle. In laboratories across the country, around the world I guess, they have even been able to trap light, to stop it in the deeply cold condensate."

  The general nodded. "Fortunately or unfortunately, that's very true. That part of the technology is relatively common in academia."

  "Your added twist is the ability to freeze something, this glass bead, into the condensate's rubidium ice and then, since it doesn't know where it is anyway, kick it back in time and send it someplace else. Of course, it takes a lot of power. The power induces heating, pressure, and dynamic forces. . . I would think all the way down to the level of the elements of the atoms."

  "As crazy as it sounds to hear you say it, that's absolutely correct."Sally said.

  "Oh no. The crazy part comes next. You have used this ability to change the past. And actually, I guess, to change the present and the future."

  "You understand that we can't go forward into the future?" the general clarified. "Well, never say never, but at least the people who think they understand what is going on don't think we have a way to go forward. The only way we change the future is by changing what happened, or what might have happened, in the past."

  "And you do that by sending something, maybe a 'hot BB' into the past hoping to affect some change."

  "Yeah. And hoping we have some guess at what that change might be. That's where it gets sticky."

  "But," Jose continued, "right after 9/11, practically ten years ago, you were ordered to stop shooting through time and to start looking into a defense against other people shooting. You expanded the facility at Homestead, you have plans for an alternate site to increase survivability of the project, and you tried to create a vacuum around the information and pull it in after you."

  Arthurs nodded. "Those of us inside the Project, as we still call it, have seen that people inside and outside our government would love to control this capability. We often think we have more to fear from inside the government than outside. This fear, by the way, has been shared by two Presidents and four Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs. That's why the President and the Chairman are the only people in our chain of command."

  "What about the NASA thing?"Jose asked.

  "That's always the fly in the soup."the general replied. "In 2000, as a way to try to generate funding, Colonel, now General Landry pulled off a stunt where the Project shot some beads into the cargo bay of the Shuttle Endeavor while it was in orbit. It worked perfectly. Since then, there has been a faction within NASA that has demanded access to this capability in case an asteroid threatens the Earth. In theory, even as the space rock is entering the atmosphere we could be sending titanium beads back in time and back up its trajectory to at least erode it and maybe deflect it."

  "The problem," he continued, "is that a few of the old heads in NASA threaten to blow the lid on the technology in order to get their own capability if we don't agree to share. So, we bow to blackmail and share. In fact, some of the logic behind establishing the new backup site comes from NASA. They warn about Tsunami waves from space rocks knocking out our power source down here and they want a high and dry backup operation. And, that's where you come in."

  "Huh?" Jose replied. It wasn't the most impressive thing he'd ever said, but it caused Sally to smile.

  Arthurs continued, "I need a commander for the backup site. I need somebody technical, non-political, and self confident. That's you. It's not a fighter squadron, but it is a command-coded billet in a joint agency.Your next promotion board will love it. Unless, of course, the promotion board can't find you because you are in a cage guarded by mercenaries in some country that ends in stan."

  "You're kidding about that, right?"Jose asked.

  "Oh no, Jose."Sally replied. "He is deadly serious. We don't know for certain, but we believe there are senate staffers, NASA bureaucrats, and at least one person who worked at the Project in those cages. This is one time when the advice, 'Don't go there. ' is a very good idea."

  Jose had drained his wine in two gulps. They paused for a moment while Sally retrieved the bottle from the kitchen.

  While Sally was out of the room, the general said quietly, "You've spotted some of the security around this house?"

  Jose just nodded.

  "Sally and I faced down two wanna-be Jihadist wackos in a house just down the street. You're going to get a personal security briefing and firearms refresher training. Live it."

  Sally returned and refilled their glasses."Did he mention that we had the help of two Navy Seals in capturing those bad guys?" she asked.

  Her husband gave her a warm smile in reply. "She reads minds. It's handy."

  After a moment, Jose said, "So you believe that the US involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s would have dragged out for a long time if the Project hadn't taken action?"

  "I can show you evidence. I can't prove any of it, but we can pile up evidence."As he replied, the general's eyes moved

  to a picture of Sally's father on a bookshelf. One of the first Air Force advisors in Vietnam, he had come back and gotten to know his two grand children very well.

  "It seems certain that the executive order Kennedy signed in October 1963 ordering the advisors out of Vietnam wouldn't have held up if the Castro brothers had kept Cuba communist. Kennedy would have been pushed to make a strong anti-Communist stand in Southeast Asia if there was a Communist Cuba staring him in the face. People tend to forget that communism was the monster in the closet in those days."

  "Kennedy had to keep the eyes of the Nation off Cuba and make his bones as an anti-communist. As it was, he spent most of '63 locked in the White House settling down Cuba after the Castro's died. In the turmoil, the CIA reconstituted Brigade 2506 very quickly and took over the government. The rumor is that many of those middle grade officers and senior NCOs in the Brigade spoke Spanish with a Texas accent. Kennedy made that famous trip down there in November of '63 where he attended the inauguration of the new president. You've seen the magazine cover pictures, I'm sure."

  "And the Communists would have stayed in Cuba if the Castros hadn't gone off
the road?"

  "Dr. Bill Wirtz, you'll meet him tomorrow, thinks that if Kennedy hadn't used the Mob, or so the story goes, to get Castro, then Castro would have lasted a long time and Cuba, just over there," he pointed south, "would be some kind of Communist enclave."

  Jose unconsciously wrinkled his dark eyebrows and gave a Communist Cuba some consideration for a heartbeat.

  "And you believe that there were more terrorists teams on 9/1 1 than the four we know of?" he continued. "And that the Project prevented more serious harm?"

  "That evidence is strong and physical. As you read, I personally saw the beads recovered from the aircraft tires. They were from the Project. There is no doubt."

  Jose shook his head. "Amazing. The briefing materials you gave me got thinner after 2001. How are you coming on the mission to at least detect and possibly deter the use of time transfer?"

  "Ah," the general replied. "That's the billion dollar question.And we can't discuss it outside of our building. I'm going to do a little email, check the news online, and get to bed. The house has wireless Internet connectivity, thanks to my wife the electrical engineer, so feel free to get connected. We have a lot more to talk about tomorrow. We get the kids off at about 0730 and then go in to work after that. We have a little staff meeting at 0830. Breakfast is light. See you in the morning, Jose. Oh, please don't go off the deck or out a door. You'll set off alarms and Sally still sleeps with a gun under her pillow."

  Jose said good night, but he stayed in the den for a while with his glass of wine and set aside the urge to go outside to think. He didn't doubt the general's parting words for one moment.

  COMPARTMENTS AND CODE WORDS

  Tuesday, June 7, 201 1

  1000 Eastern

  TCA Headquarters

  Homestead ARB, Florida

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Brig Gen Fred Landry, PhD, (USAF Ret)