The General's President

by John Dalmas

  "Yes sir. I'll keep that in mind, Mr. President. And I'll keep you informed."

  "Thanks, Ernie." Haugen broke the connection, then resumed the call for Lois. "And I've got a premonition," he finished. "For what it's worth. The Soviets are going to move down into Iraq."

  ***

  A phone call from Cromwell had driven the new Soviet move to the back of the president's mind. The general wanted to bring someone over. To give another briefing, this one on an NSA project. Haugen had told him okay, come on over. Cromwell said it would be forty or fifty minutes; he had to fly the guy in from Fort Meade.

  The president finished scanning another report, initialed it, then another, and six more, putting them in his OUT basket. He looked at his watch; forty-five minutes had passed. Getting up, he walked to the big window and parted the curtains. The day was cloudy. Breezes vagrant and unruly chased occasional leaves; the last to fall. The grounds staff had harvested the main crop. In Duluth the earth would be snow-covered by now.

  The National Security Agency. The name itself had a certain built-in camouflage, Haugen thought. A lot of people thought it meant the National Security Council, the NSC, the group everyone knew about that set defense policy. He'd thought so himself till he'd been briefed, early on.

  The NSC consisted of himself, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and Cromwell in his unwanted role as vice president. There was also a slot on the NSC for a national security advisor, but Haugen hadn't appointed one, felt no need for one.

  But the National Security Agency, the NSA, presumably was functioning with the same people as before. After having been briefed on it, his first week in office, the president had assumed he knew what he needed to about the NSA: It was the most secret of secret agencies, non-political, totally technical, in charge of cryptography, of intelligence gathering by satellites, and the safeguarding of armed forces communication. And like several other agencies, it monitored foreign communications for intelligence purposes. Now Cromwell, on a security line from his Pentagon office, had told him there was more, had admitted it was something he hadn't wanted to talk about until the president had gotten well grooved in on the job.

  Haugen's gaze out the window had gone unfocused, opaqued by thought. Flynn, he decided, shouldn't attend this one. He'd had Stephen sit in with him on quite a few meetings and interviews, which had made some people nervous, even though the priest sat quietly out of the way. Or was it because he sat quietly out of the way? Haugen mused. Or did they think of the priest as a shaman of some sort, sorting out their inner thoughts, their motives? It wasn't that he was a Jesuit—a lot of people had a weird idea of Jesuits—because almost none of them knew the order Flynn belonged to.

  Maybe they simply felt ill at ease that a president, a non-Catholic president at that, chose to have a priest close at hand, Haugen thought. Today, parts of intellectual society had become so utterly secular that the very existence of religion seemed to make them uncomfortable. Apparently it wasn't churches that troubled them—churches were organizations, something they could understand—but religion for chrissake!

  Not that he himself was religious, even privately. Haugen hadn't felt any urge in that direction as far back as he could remember, which was as far back as had any meaning to the subject. But he did have a notion, however nonrational and ill-defined, that Flynn was a valuable adjunct conscience. That just the priest's being there had an effect, without anything being said between them. And Haugen was not a man to argue with impulses that felt right to him. He'd gotten rich off impulses like that.

  Still, Flynn's presence at this NSA briefing didn't quite seem appropriate. Partly because when he'd asked Cromwell if Campbell, the Secretary of Defense, would be sitting in, Cromwell had said no, and asked him not to mention it to Campbell or anyone else. As if something about it was too secret for even the Secretary of Defense to know about.

  Yet the NSA was under Campbell, and supposedly reported to him. Weird!

  His intercom buzzed, and he went to it. "Yes Jeanne?"

  "General Cromwell is here, Mr. President, with another gentleman."

  "Send 'em in."

  The man who entered with Cromwell appeared to be Hindu—tallish, slim, still young. "Mr. President," Cromwell said, "this is Dr. Mahendra J. Gupta of NSA."

  They shook hands—Gupta's, fine-boned, engulfed in the beefy Haugen fist that seemed altogether too large for a man his height. The Hindu grinned nonetheless, seeming entirely at ease, and when he spoke, there was no trace of accent. "You might prefer to call me James, Mr. President," he said. "Or Jim. Mahendra's a little awkward if you're not used to it."

  The president's brows arched. "All right. Jim it is. American born and named?"

  "Southern California."

  "Well, I guess that qualifies. Sit." Haugen gestured. They took seats, each visitor setting a briefcase by his feet. "What's this about?"

  "Probably the most confidential piece of business in the government," Cromwell said. Then he pointed at his briefcase. "What I've got in there is a sort of ECM. To scramble certain electronics, in case someone's managed to bug the place."

  Haugen fixed him with his eyes. "D'you think they have?"

  "No sir. I doubt hell out of it. I just don't want to take chances on this."

  "Hmh! In that case—" Haugen went to his office door, opened it and looked out. "Jeanne," he told her quietly, "no interruptions please." Then he closed the door and locked it.

  "All right," he said when he was seated again. "Let's have it. What is it that's so confidential that apparently even the Secretary of Defense can't know about it?"

  Cromwell looked at Gupta. "You might as well do the talking, Jim," he said.

  "Right." The black eyes found Haugen's. "It's about little green men, Mr. President." Cromwell winced. "Not literally," Gupta continued, "but we do have compelling, if circumstantial evidence of extraterrestrial visitations."

  "Visitations? That's plural. When?"

  "On a number of occasions, especially during the decades of the fifties and sixties and into the early seventies."

  "Circumstantial? Then what's so confidential about it? Probably half the people in the United States believe in flying saucers."

  "There are some puzzling aspects to the observations, sir. That's part of it. But mainly it's the work that's resulted that's gotten the heavy security lock."

  "What work?"

  "Research and development."

  Haugen gazed without speaking, eyes intent.

  "Let me start from the beginning," Gupta said. "The Soviets have similar evidence for ETs, but tending to be more xenophobic than we are, it worried them a lot more. The subject came up at a summit conference back in the seventies, and it was decided that the two governments should collaborate in the development of high-tech weaponry. The United States' role in this is under the aegis of the NSA. Perhaps not the logical place for it, except for the secrecy aspect, but that helps in the cover. Currently I'm in charge of our work on the project."

  "Interesting," Haugen said. "How old are you?"

  The grin flashed again. "Thirty-four, Mr. President. They decided, on the basis of my doctoral dissertation, that I was coming so close to confidential work from outside the security wall that they'd better get me inside, so they hired me. Since then I seem to have risen through the system."

  "I wouldn't be surprised. So if we're collaborating with the Soviets, why the secrecy? I presume they know what we're doing."

  "Not all of it," Gupta answered. "Usually both sides hide what they're doing. Then, after a couple of years—three or four—there's an exchange of information. Usually when both sides have run into problems that seem to require it, or get worried about what the other may have come up with that they haven't. Each side's afraid of falling behind. Actually, some of the scientists, on both sides apparently, would like the work to be totally open—two countries, one project—but policy doesn't allow it. So we settle for trading periodically, neither side giving up anything wi
thout getting something of similar magnitude. You should be at one of those sessions; they reek with distrust!

  "Finally one side tightens up and everyone goes home suspicious, to play with what they learned."

  Again Gupta's grin flashed, lopsidedly this time, as if the whole affair held a certain ironic humor. And if you really look at it, it does, Haugen thought.

  "So the secrecy grows out of two things," Gupta went on. "First, if Side A can know what Side B is doing without exchanging what it's doing itself, then Side A will certainly withhold, and thereby gain an advantage.

  "But at least equal in importance, neither side wants the public to hear about it. The rationale is that, if they knew, a lot of people would be scared and panic. Supposedly. And a lot of others would more or less give up on solving human problems, waiting for imagined saviors from space to solve them for us."

  As he'd talked, Gupta had watched Haugen alertly, for indicators of the president's attitude. He decided now to take a chance. "Actually there's a bigger reason than either of those." He paused. "It's the importance of the work. Security freeze-up tends to increase as the square of project importance, regardless of actual security need."

  The president's only response was a nod. "So what's the nature of this work?" he asked.

  "It has to do with extremely large-scale energy transfers, and some pretty remarkable things that can be done with them."

  "Large-scale energy transfers," the president echoed, and looked thoughtfully at him. "Okay, let's see how far I can take it from there, speculating. Correct me when I go astray. The Soviets got hold of Nikola Tesla's notes, or copies of them, from the Tesla Museum in Yugoslavia, and eventually got to playing with scalar resonance on a large scale."

  Cromwell stared, thunderstruck. Haugen continued.

  "And for some of the same reasons that had stopped Tesla, the Soviets had gotten stalled on it. But they'd gotten far enough that we'd begun to realize what they were doing. Right?"

  Cromwell continued to stare. Gupta's face had slipped a couple of inches; he nodded.

  "Meanwhile," Haugen continued, "the ETs were letting themselves be seen, or letting their ships be seen, or whatever it was that some people were seeing, and the evidence was becoming pretty indisputable. So the government began to suppress information and spread disinformation. And finally the Kremlin and the White House got together on what was perceived as the ET danger."

  "Mr. President!" Cromwell broke in. "Is it that damned obvious? Or has someone leaked? You couldn't have known about the scalar resonance work without a leak!"

  Haugen shifted his gaze to the general. "No leak; not that I know of anyway. But there's a lot of evidence, if you look around enough. I've been wondering about it for years.

  "Let me run it down for you, from my personal viewpoint. First of all, electrical engineers learn a lot about Tesla's work; or my class did anyway. I mean, this was the man who invented the transformer, right? The man who made large-scale commercial electrical development practical, and long distance, high-voltage power transmission possible, who invented the radio... Inventively inclined people like me can get pretty interested in Tesla."

  "The radio?" Cromwell said. "I thought Marconi invented the radio."

  "Marconi got the credit; still does, I guess, despite the court decision. But decades later, in the 1930s I think it was, the courts reviewed the evidence and declared that Tesla had beaten Marconi to it; there were more than enough witnesses and written reports of his early demonstrations. So legally at least, Tesla's the inventor of the radio. Whatever; the man was an intuitive electrical genius.

  "With strong emphasis on intuitive.

  "The thing is that when you look over his record, his big successes came early, in the late 1800s. Later he kept on claiming big new developments soon to be released, but never delivered on them. It's as if he kept having these big—cognitions let's call them, strokes of intuitive genius, but couldn't explain them successfully. Nor develop working models. He'd talk about plans, and give apparent explanations, but generally his explanations seemed to have basic scientific flaws.

  "So people started thinking of him as a crackpot. And of course, we can't examine his notes to see his experimental evidence, if any, because after he died—at the end of the war, actually—the Yugoslav government got custody of them. And I suppose the Soviets got copies before Tito broke with them.

  "Over here, different people tried to follow up on his claims and invent things Tesla talked about, but these didn't pay off. Which tended to discredit them."

  He looked the other two over. Cromwell looked impressed. Gupta's grin was back; he looked like a man enjoying himself.

  "But the suspicion persisted among a few of us that his intuitions were correct—that he just didn't have the theory to explain them convincingly, nor the technical support structure or financing to work them through.

  "Anyway, I suppose the Soviets made some progress on scalar resonance but lacked some of the support technology to get any further. So we traded them some of the technology they needed for reports on what they'd done. On the common ground of advancing human science and technology in case the ETs got acquisitive."

  Neither of his visitors seemed inclined to correct him. Haugen's face went thoughtful. "Which means," he added slowly, "that we've got scalar resonance transmitters too. Otherwise we'd be in deeper trouble than we are."

  "Right, Mr. President," said Gupta. "We've got three of them. One each on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the Nevada Test Area, and in Australia."

  "In Australia! Hmh! That makes sense."

  "Wait a minute, Mr. President," Cromwell said. "Did you figure all that out here today, just on the basis of your interest in Tesla and what Jim said?"

  Haugen shook his head, grinning. "Nope. I like to think I'm smart, but I'm not that smart. But large-scale work on scalar resonance, with the scale of physical effects produced, and with all the meteorological, geophysical, and radio research and monitoring going on on this planet... There've been observations and speculation about those effects for twenty years. Enough that some people have gotten interested and asked questions, and a few very bright people have done a damned good job of figuring out what had to be causing them. You must know about Paul Fairbairn's book, at least."

  Cromwell nodded. It was coming together for him now.

  "I read it a dozen years ago," Haugen went on. "And I read some of the pamphlets that were published before and after that. In some ways they made a lot of sense, but in other ways they didn't. Like, if the Soviets were able to do some of the things they were supposed to be doing, why hadn't they extorted us into rolling over and playing dead for them? That kind of constraint from them just didn't make sense. So not many people took the claims seriously.

  "Some of the pamphlets even claimed we were working with the Soviets, but they never made a convincing case for that either. The whole thing sounded paranoid; even Fairbairn's book did, good as it was. What was missing, what was necessary to make it make sense, was the ET angle."

  The president turned to Gupta then. "Show me this compelling circumstantial evidence for ETs."

  "It's in there," said Gupta, indicating his briefcase. "In a report. I'll leave it with you. And I should point out—I'm required to point out—that it's classified Top Secret."

  "Right. What can you tell me about the actual technology?"

  "That's in there too, sir. If you have any questions and need to get in touch with me, the general can tell you how to handle that."

  Haugen turned to Cromwell.

  "No problem," Cromwell said. "The connection is programmed into your phone. I'll show you how to access it before we leave."

  The president nodded. "Another question: Why have the rumors on this dried up? I haven't read any for, hmm, half a dozen years or longer."

  This time Cromwell answered. "Because large-scale testing stopped. Partly due to apparent environmental side-effects, and partly to a political agreement. There was
an unpredicted minute slowing of the Earth's rotation, enough to cause detectable aberrations in atmospheric circulation, for one thing. And the only halfway convincing explanation our computer models came up with was that large scalar resonance tests were having effects on the molten outer core." He turned to Gupta. "Is that about it, Jim?"

  "Close enough," Gupta said.

  "And shutting down the Soviet use of scalar resonance to manipulate global atmospheric circulation was part of Wheeler's trade-off with Gorbachev at Brussels," the general continued. "Along with stopping the electronic and laser sniping at each others' rocket launches and satellites that went on for a while there.

  "Wheeler's line on that was, they'd either stop kicking up seismic activity and messing around with our weather, or we'd go beyond token reprisals. Of course, except for the one at Hanford, our installations weren't as powerful then as theirs—they take a hell of a lot of electric power, and at that time we didn't have practical high temperature superconductors. But we had the advantage that we could focus ours more precisely, and with no need for preliminary registration to get on target."

  For a moment, Cromwell's mouth was a tight line. "And Wheeler stated flat out to Gorbachev that if a major attack took place with resonance weapons while he was president, he'd use nuclear retaliation. Wheeler was a damned good man, Mr. President. Too bad he had that lousy coronary."

  Haugen nodded idly, gazing blankly at the carpet, and when he spoke again, it was as if he hadn't heard. "So," he said slowly, "the transmitters take a lot of power. That figures." He looked up at Gupta then. "Why wasn't that as big a factor for the Soviets as it is for us?"

  Gupta frowned. "I suppose they have nuclear generators at theirs," he said. "Only one of ours has, at Hanford."

  "Interesting," said Haugen, again after a pause. "Jim, I want you to find out definitely for me whether the Soviets have nuclear generators at their scalar resonance installations or not."