Quantum Times

by Bill Diffenderffer

  General Greene replied, “I survived the blasts. Maybe the lucky ones didn’t. Life there is going to be very hard for a while. All the radioactivity – it’s got to be a nightmare.”

  After General Greene had left, the President looked over at Scarpetti who had remained behind. “What do you think, Hank? How do we manage the fallout of 309? Don’t I need to get in front of the people and tell them something? Something reassuring?”

  “What would you want to tell them? It raises way too many questions and doesn’t give any answers. My advice is don’t say anything right away. Give everyone a chance to just breathe. Create a gold plated, non-partisan commission to study 309. Get recommendations from this commission to ensure events there don’t replicate here. Then create a second commission with lots of brilliant academics to consider the scientific and religious implications of 309. We probably should have done that before anyway. Let the media get all excited about who gets appointed and what their missions are. What we don’t want right now is you answering questions about what went wrong there.”

  The President thought about that advice, then he nodded – it matched his political instincts. “Hank, that’s a great idea. Two special commissions: one to address the geopolitical issues and the other to address the scientific and cultural ramifications. The media will love it! But let’s make sure we have people we can trust on it. We want those commissions to come up with the right answers.”

  “Absolutely. We’ll get the right people selected. But let’s not be too obvious about that. Let’s make it look non-partisan.”

  “Sure – we’ll do it that way.” The President liked this approach. He felt relieved. “Hank, it wasn’t our fault, was it? … You know, I’ve felt sick ever since I saw Plato’s documentary…. You don’t suppose it might be something he created – you know like it didn’t really happen.”

  “How could it have been our fault? It’s not even our world!” Hank said what he knew his President needed to hear. But it had been years since he had last wanted so much to just go out to a bar and not stop drinking until the world went blank.

  After General Greene had called him and shared the information that the President was reaching out to other world leaders to determine what to do about The Freya, Plato asked David to come meet with him. They were both on Plank’s island where David had set up shop to do all the writing. His articles on Earth #309 had been on the front pages of newspapers around the world and his on-line posts had tens of millions of viewers. Plato had fed him facts and details that no other journalists, reporters or pundits had access to. To the world, David was the doorway to all things Other Earth, he was the reporter, the teacher, the philosopher and the guru, all rolled into one. He was also exhausted.

  When David took a seat across from him, Plato asked, “How’s Gabriela?”

  David tried for a smile that came off a little weak. “She’s ok. She always had a tendency to see the world through a darkened window. This doesn’t help. She says she now knows what death feels like. I don’t really know what that means but….anyway, I think she’s dealing with something we all have to deal with now. As soon as I have a chance, I’m looking forward to going into a deep philosophical funk for at least a week or two.”

  Plato looked out the sliding glass doors to the patio outside his room. He understood David’s comment even more than David would know. Once he had been in that mental malaise that bled the joy out of everything. He had been like that for almost a year. From that dark time he had learned to just be the best he could be, moment to moment, and accept what follows.

  “David, you’ll have to wait on going into that funk. There is more we have to do. We have to find a way to stop The Freya from creating more havoc and chaos.” Plato then went on to share with David the attempt to destroy the Capitol and the President’s determination to gather international support before he would take any action against The Freya. He finished by saying that the President’s course of action, though reasonable on its face, would take too much time – time that The Freya would use to create more destruction – since Captain Ragnar would quickly learn of the attempt to build an international coalition against him.

  Tired as he was, David’s mind was clear. “He has to be stopped. If he isn’t stopped, everything continues to escalate. That’s what happened on #309, isn’t it? Things kept escalating. Then mankind’s self-destructive tendencies come to the fore. The most ruthless leaders’ paranoia sets in and they strike against perceived enemies before they are struck at themselves. A chain reaction of devastation.”

  Plato just nodded.

  “So what do we do?” David asked.

  Plato knew the answer but couldn’t be the one to give it, at least not all of it. “The Freya has to be destroyed as soon as possible.”

  “And our military isn’t going to do it, is it?”

  “Much as General Greene would like to – and he said that he argued with the President – the military will not be given the green light. We cannot look there for an answer.”

  David saw what needed to be done but wasn’t ready to say it. Instead he said, “But how do you destroy The Freya when it never comes down to land? It’s always fifty thousand feet in the air.”

  “Yes, it is,” replied Plato patiently.

  “So theoretically, if it won’t come down here, whoever is going to destroy it has to go up there.”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  David sat there silently for a moment, just staring back into Plato’s ancient eyes. “Still thinking theoretically, if someone went there to destroy it, wouldn’t they be destroyed with it? That sort of would be a negative.”

  “It would be if there was no alternative. But I believe there is a quite safe way to accomplish the goal – if someone was invited up onto The Freya for a seemingly legitimate reason.”

  At that point David was too tired to play the theoretical game any further. “Plato, we both know that I am the only one who we know can get invited up there. Are you saying that there is a way that I could blow up The Freya and live to tell the tale to my grandkids? By the way, did I mention that Gabriela is pregnant?” David was sort of sorry he blurted the last comment out. He hadn’t intended to but he didn’t like any of this.

  Plato just regarded David and said nothing. Then after a moment, with a wise and benign look on his face, he said “First, congratulations to you and Gabriela. And yes, you will live to tell the tale.”

  Telling Gabriela was the hard part. Before he said a word, he knew his sanity would be questioned. Sitting on the bed in their room at the retreat, Gabriela’s comment when she first heard what he intended to do was simply, “Are you nuts? No! No! No! You are going to be a father, you idiot!”

  In various combinations of words, David kept repeating that The Freya needed to be stopped and he was the only one who could get himself invited up to The Freya. Then he would add that Plato had a plan to do it safely.

  Then Gabriela would repeat, hell no and tell Plato to do it himself.

  Halfway into the conversation, they both knew he was going to do it. The best argument he had was that their child needed to grow up in a better world than this one.

  ________________________________________________________________

  Setting up the interview with Captain Ragnar aboard The Freya had been easy. Through his usual contact with Lieutenant Benson David had said he needed to get his Captain’s views on what had happened at Earth #309. Captain Ragnar had agreed and moreover wanted to do it soon.

  David had been confident he would get the interview. What concerned him was how he was to smuggle a bomb onboard The Freya and blow it up when he wasn’t there. That was the part Plato was confident about. When Plato showed him the bomb, David had to admit that getting it onboard was probably going to be easy, though not without its stressful moments. When Plato told him how he was to detonate the bomb, David became much more doubtful. He wasn’t at all sure he could do it. He had never done anything like it before.<
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  The interview on The Freya was set up for the next day. The shuttle pickup was to be at their usual spot in a deserted field in New Jersey not far from the George Washington Bridge. David and Gabriela had returned the night before to their apartment in New York City. To his surprise, Gabriela no longer tried to talk him out of going forward with their plan. She said that Plato had assured her that David would be all right. Plato said that he would be right there with David monitoring everything – not physically of course. David thought that whatever Plato’s powers of monitoring might be, it wasn’t the same as being there and holding his hand.

  Before David had left Pirate’s Cay, David had practiced detonating the bomb. The first few attempts failed. He couldn’t seem to set his mind to it. Then just as they were running out of time, David got it right. The bomb exploded. Well, a version of the bomb, a much less powerful one, but Plato said the principle was the same.

  As David drove up to the designated spot where The Freya shuttle was to pick him up, he wanted to turn the car around and leave. What had been hypothetical until now had just turned real and imminent. He asked himself again why it had to be him but the same answers came up. He tried to just concentrate on the interview questions he had for the Captain. The interview had to be for real. He had to handle himself just as he had the previous two times he had interviewed Captain Ragnar on The Freya.

  As David stepped out of his car, he checked his watch and saw he was still a few minutes early. The sky was clouding over and he felt a stiff wind blowing his hair. Using his fingers as a comb he tried to straighten it but the wind was insistent. He stared at the spot in the field where he expected the shuttle to land and then looked up into the sky to search for it. As he waited he felt his hands tensing and balling up into fists. He told himself to relax, which didn’t work. He continued to stare at the field and then up into the cloudy sky. He wished the wind would stop blowing.

  Then as it was just a few hundred feet above the ground, David saw the shuttle. As before, it could only be seen when it was quite close. Its coloring always seemed blended to the background sky. David watched it touch down as smoothly and softly as a hawk touching down onto a tree branch.

  David walked over to it and the same soldier as before ushered him onboard, patted him down for weapons and went through his backpack. David tried to act normally as the soldier searched the backpack and took his laptop, Kindle, water bottles and pad of paper out and then put them back in. Though the routine was no different than before, David thought the soldier was more serious, more diligent. By then, David had no idea what acting normal was, he felt sure his face must have looked like a deer’s caught in headlights.

  He knew that as the soldier put the two bottles of water back in his backpack he had been holding his breath. For now one of the two seemingly identical bottles of water was something very different. The two plastic bottles with the liquid that looked like water had been given to him by Plato. One was just distilled water but the other, though it looked just like the water bottle David had sipped from during the interviews with Captain Ragnar in the past was chemically something else entirely. In fact, Plato had told him that if necessary he could even drink the liquid in the second bottle, though it would taste somewhat salty and metallic. In its current state it was harmless.

  Plato said that with just a slight rearrangement of its molecular structure, the liquid in that little 16.9 oz. plastic bottle became an explosive that could level a ten story apartment building. Carefully, David kept that thought out of his mind.

  When the soldier-flight attendant was through with his search he returned to his seat up front next to the pilot. David took out his iPhone and pretended to look for messages but his mind saw little of what his eyes were looking at. Several times David ran his fingers through his wind tossed hair trying to restore his longish hair to normalcy. The rest of the five minute trip David spent thinking about how he would leave the bottle-bomb behind on The Freya – where could he place it?

  Once the shuttle entered The Freya’s cargo doors, David exited and was escorted to the lounge area where they had conducted the interviews previously. Captain Ragnar was already seated there waiting for him. Even seated, his back was straight and his uniform was tucked in and unwrinkled and his dark hair was cut short and combed. As he walked to the table David glanced around the deck area hoping to see where he could put the water bottle. Now that he was looking closely he noticed how bare the crew area was. There was no place to dispose of trash and leftovers, just a seemingly voracious garbage disposal unit that looked like it doubled as a paper shredder. For all David knew it could reduce all waste to recyclable molecules. His idea of leaving the bottle in a trash can was not possible.

  The Captain stood up to shake David’s hand. His grip was strong and David found himself squeezing his grip more firmly than he would normally. The Captain’s smile was brief. David took the seat left for him and took out of his bag his pad of paper and a bottle of water – twice making sure he was taking the right bottle. His mouth was so dry he wasn’t sure he could speak without drinking something.

  “Thank you Captain for agreeing to this interview. I suspect you know that the whole world has now watched the ‘documentary’ for lack of a better word that The Bucephalus has shown online which presents the destruction at Earth #309?”

  Captain Ragnar presented his usual unsmiling and resolute expression. “Yes, David, I know of it. I thought it a little melodramatic but I suspect Plato was pleased with its effect.”

  David now found that he could just follow through with his questions as he had countless times before. Each breath was now coming naturally, not the product of a reminder to ‘just breathe’.

  “Well, Captain, from the video it was clear that The Freya was there just before the nuclear weapons started going off. My readers will want to know what you believe set everything off. And what advice do you have for us to ensure that what happened there does not repeat itself here?”

  Captain Ragnar could not help himself from showing a small ironic smile. This was exactly the question he had been asking himself ever since the destruction of #309. Things there had advanced too quickly and too far to meet his purposes. Too many nuclear devices had gone off and that Earth was too far destroyed to be useful to him. He had not anticipated the chain reaction of attacks that had followed the bomb blast in Washington, D.C. That was why he was taking things slower here. Chaos could outrun opportunity if the chaos left radioactive particles all over the planet.

  Of course that wasn’t the answer he gave David.

  So David asked his questions about #309 and Ragnar gave his answers: answers which showed he had tried to help the planet but had not succeeded, answers that pointed at Plato as a potential instigator, answers that showed how sorry he was at the great loss of life and how this Earth #310 – an Earth so like #309 – needed to learn from #309’s mistakes, answers that showed what a powerful assistance The Freya could provide in the interests of world peace.

  David recorded everything and dutifully asked the logical follow-ups and made the appropriate commentary. All the while, in the back part of his brain he marveled at the power of ‘the big lie.’ He found himself wanting to believe Captain Ragnar; if he believed him, he wouldn’t have to try and kill him – and kill all of his crew there onboard. Only he knew better. He didn’t believe Ragnar. He found deep inside himself, he blamed Ragnar for killing Gabriela on #309 and taking her away from him there. His mind had opened up a new portal which he could pass through and find the feelings of loss that the death of Gabriela on #309 produced.

  After what seemed like just moments, David checked the time and found the hour set for the interview had passed and he checked his notes and found he had asked all his questions. The interview was apparently over and David still had no idea where to place the bottle. The Captain stood up and shook David’s hand and said he looked forward to reading David’s article. He said he appreciated that David’s past articles had
seemed fair and balanced. David gathered up his things and slung his backpack over his right shoulder.

  Then the Captain turned back to him. “You know David, I’ve never asked you. What do you really think? Do you fear for your world? Do you trust those of us from other Earths?” Perhaps the Captain’s demeanor was no more intimidating than usual; but to David’s heightened sensitivities it seemed more aggressive and suspicious. The Captain’s dark eyes were focused on David as if he sensed a new danger.

  Standing there, David felt trapped. He knew he should not answer with what he believed to be true. And his mind was still desperately thinking about what to do about the bomb. But he found the truth was welling out of him. “Captain, my world changed the day we learned there were other Earths. The history of my Earth has taught me that no one from other Earths should be trusted. I believe to you we are the natives of a backward land and you are colonialists. You are here to take things from us and give to us trinkets and beads.”

  Captain Ragnar’s expression hardened. He stared back at David and seemed about to say something, then turned and walked away. David stared at his back and then once more looked around for a place to stash the bottle. But there was nowhere. And then as he went to pick up his backpack which still contained the bottle bomb, one of the crew members came over to him to usher him back to the cargo area where the shuttle was awaiting him. The crew member picked up David’s backpack to carry it for him. Half-heartedly David tried to wrest it back but the soldier just smiled and started walking with it to the shuttle. Both relieved and frustrated, David followed him.