The Hidden Truth: A Science Fiction Techno-Thriller

by Hans G. Schantz

  “But Hofmann lived lavishly and spent even more than he earned. In desperation, he planted some bombs to distract his creditors, killing a couple of people. He almost blew himself up, too. An amazingly persistent forensics examiner went back and found subtle clues. Hofmann’s ink cracked differently than real period ink, supposedly different letter writers shared common quirks, stuff like that.

  “So, yes, old documents can potentially be forged and will pass all but the most scrupulous and careful authentication. If you don’t leave pipe bombs with your associates and draw attention to yourself, you may very well avoid detection. Still, it would still be much easier to do the forgery digitally.”

  “It would be easier if the change were made right at the time of the printing,” I pointed out. “Maybe someone persuaded the printer to modify the book? Change the original type – just a line or two on a couple of pages – and print new copies. Perhaps they tried to recall the original printing and remove copies of the books from circulation, but they missed some. A few copies from the initial printing were missed and one ended up at the library here. But most of the copies in circulation have the change.”

  “That’s an easier to imagine scenario than a later forgery,” Dad acknowledged. “But the Franklin book was printed in New York. The Fleming book – he was British, right? Unless it was an American printing?”

  I checked my scans. Both the Tolliver copy and the Omnitia scan said the book was printed by Longmans, Green, and Co., 39 Paternoster Row, London. The title plate also listed offices in New York and Bombay. “Probably printed in London.”

  “That complicates matters,” Dad said thoughtfully. “If it were government coercion, it was two different governments in cahoots. Whoever it was would need a presence in New York and in London.”

  “So,” I summarized, “we have three scenarios: first a modern digital cover-up likely with collusion from Omnitia, second a more recent elaborate forgery, or third, someone coerced the printer to make the changes and missed some of the copies already in circulation.”

  “I still think the first is more likely,” Dad opined. “a modern digital change. Next most likely is a change right at the time of printing like you suggest. A modern forgery is extremely unlikely. It wouldn’t stand up to any scrutiny without enormous effort. And there must be hundreds of those books around in various university library collections. The best way to test the modern digital change hypothesis is to find other old copies of Electric Waves and Principles of Wireless Telegraphy. If the old books all match the Tolliver copies, then you are probably looking at a modern digital alteration. If you find altered books, then you’ll have to do some detailed testing to try to identify whether they are alterations from the original printer or more recent forgeries.”

  “I can visit libraries, and check for copies,” I pointed out. “I don’t even have to use an online catalog since I know right where they ought to be shelved.”

  “Avoiding any sort of electronic trail is a good idea,” Dad agreed. “let’s continue this conversation with your mother over dinner.”

  I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. “Should we be adding Mom to the discussion?”

  “Son, you have to assume when you tell a man something he’s going to tell his wife. Your mother is one of the most trustworthy and level-headed women I’ve ever known, which is a big part of why I married her in the first place. You would be wise to take her into your confidence as well, and you should seek out her opinions.”

  I agreed that Dad should tell Mom, but I had a good notion she wasn’t going to like it.

  At the dinner table, Dad brought Mom up to speed on what we’d found. It took most of the meal. Mom’s counsel was for caution. “You and your father are running around playing secret agent investigating this mystery of yours. If you’re right, the folks with whom you’re tangling are ruthless experts willing to kill to keep a secret.”

  “I don’t think his suspicion of a conspiracy to kill electromagnetic scientists is at all credible,” Dad pointed out to Mom. “He found a coincidence. Many people, even prominent people in the nineteenth century died at what we’d consider to be young ages due to diseases or cancers we could cure today.”

  “The only suggestion we have of foul play is over a hundred years old, Mom,” I pointed out. “We’re taking the risks very seriously which is exactly why we’re being so careful and ‘running around playing secret agent.’”

  She was not convinced. “‘The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine,’” she chided us as Dad and I cleared the table. “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll take care of the dishes and leave you boys to playing with your fire – mind you don’t get burnt.” Mothers.

  “I wish we could just order used books,” I noted to Dad as we settled back into the living room. “But even if we placed the order anonymously online, the books have to be delivered to a real world physical address.”

  “That’s a problem,” Dad acknowledged. “Why don’t you and Amit search online anonymously and see what you can find? Try eBay, Alibiris, and ABEBooks. Be a bit vague in your search terms so it’s harder for a third party to figure out exactly what you’re looking for. You could search on “electric waves” and “wireless telegraphy” then manually sort through the results. Add a bunch of other searches to hide the significance of the ones that really count. Something might pop up at McKay’s here locally. Unfortunately, most of the top used-book dealers are too far away for us to just stop by and purchase a book – like Powell’s in Portland, Oregon; Cat’s Curiosities in Las Vegas, Zubal Books, in Cleveland, Ohio; or Books-on-Benefit in Providence, Rhode Island. Depending on the location, Rob or I might have an acquaintance we could trust to swing by, purchase a book in cash, and then ship it to us. If you find any leads from book sellers or dealers in Memphis, Houston, Birmingham, or anywhere along the route of our road trip in August, we could swing by and pay cash for what they have. But that’s the only safe way to make an anonymous purchase.”

  * * *

  At Kudzu Joe’s the next morning, I shared the previous night’s brainstorming with Amit. He liked the idea of searching for other copies of the books to try to figure out whether we were looking at an old or a recent conspiracy. He and I worked out a used book search strategy, and he agreed to spend some time searching during his next wardrive. Amit also pointed out that many libraries had online listings of books, and he proposed to look into it. Once we had our plans laid out, we worked on debate research until lunchtime.

  Amit joined me after class at the library for more book scanning. There weren’t all that many physics books older than 1923, so we decided on a strategy of scanning them without reference to availability of an online scan. We began working our way through the 537-538 section, but it was slow going with Amit having to serve as lookout in case one of the librarians came by. I think the librarian was getting suspicious because the visits seemed to be getting more frequent. It was a frustrating and not terribly productive experience. There had to be a better solution. We gave up for the day.

  Amit’s father had him running errands for the hotel. He could wardrive on his trips, find an open Wi-Fi connection, download a book or two and continue driving on. When he had a break, he’d stop and do some serious searching while downloading a book or two in the background. He found some promising results in the online library catalog at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

  * * *

  That Friday, I drove into Knoxville – solo, since Amit was busy at the hotel, and Dad was off with Uncle Rob. My first stop was the John C. Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus. As I was walking through the first floor, an archeological exhibition caught my attention: “Centaur Excavation at Volos.” There on display was a half-excavated skeleton of a “centaur,” half-man and half-horse. I was amazed at the time and energy it must have taken to create such a convincing looking, yet obviously phony display. How many other less obvious scientific deceptions might be lurking in
the library?

  Unfortunately, the library didn’t have a copy of Franklin’s Electric Waves. They did have a copy of Fleming’s Principles of Wireless Telegraphy, however, up on the 6th floor. The library used a more complicated classification scheme from the Library of Congress, rather than the Dewey Decimal system with which I was more familiar. I got off the elevator, hung a right and found Fleming’s book at the arcane location TK5741.F6 1910. Wait, 1910? Not quite the same edition. The Tolliver Library had a first printing from 1906. The Hodges Library copy was a “second edition, revised and extended” from September 1910. I looked for the bibliography, but this edition only had books, not papers. I pulled out my digital camera and snapped a few shots of the bibliography just in case, but it looked like a dead end.

  My trip wasn’t a complete waste, however, because I had a list of books to investigate on electromagnetic history. Just a few shelves away, I found a marvelous book about Heaviside by Paul J. Nahin, Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude. I was tempted to scan the whole book, but since it wasn’t old enough to be in the public domain, I refrained. I continued my search down on the fifth floor where I tracked down a copy of Bruce J. Hunt’s The Maxwellians QC670.H84 1991. I didn’t have borrowing privileges, nor would I have wanted to leave a trail if I could avoid it. I resolved to figure out a safe way to acquire copies, soon!

  On my way home, I found a copy of The Maxwellians at McKay’s Used Bookstore. I also stopped by Harbor Freight where I found a wonderful wireless motion detector. That would come in handy the next time we scanned some books.

  * * *

  By the end of June, Amit and I were on a roll. We’d start the day at Kudzu Joe’s reviewing the previous day’s results. Amit’s OCR routine threw so many false positives we still had to manually review each page. At least he had it set to highlight the text, so we could focus on potential discrepancies. We didn’t find any actual hits, however. In well over a hundred books, we had a grand total of two suspicious changes, one each in the Franklin and Fleming books. At least it made sense why this rewriting of history had apparently escaped detection. We knew it was there and despite our best efforts it was next to impossible to find the evidence!

  After reviewing the previous day’s haul, Amit worked on another fascinating project that had just started up. His father had described Amit’s network traffic monitoring application to the Berkshire Inn’s regional management team, and now Amit was on the hook to make a presentation on it to the company’s management at their operations center in Charlotte, NC in August. If it went well, Berkshire Inn might want to roll out Amit’s application at other Berkshire Inn locations for a trial. He was coding furiously, trying to clean up the user interface and make the application easy for non-experts to use. Amit was positively gleeful at the possibility of having his code distributed across multiple Berkshire Inns. He assured me he could exploit the company’s intranet to disguise our Internet traffic and eliminate the need for wardriving. Even with all this to keep him busy, he still continued flirting shamelessly with Emma.

  On my side of the table, I’d either do debate research, work on my physics homework, or study more about the electromagnetic pioneers and the geopolitics of the early 1900s. We hadn’t been able to confirm whether the electromagnetic villain whose fingerprints we’d found was working on modern digital copies or had been active only around the time the books were published. I was confident, though, that we’d find the edits in old books and prove it was a century-old conspiracy. That the pioneers of electromagnetics and wireless engineering could be talking seriously about bouncing electric waves sounded crazy. I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t get a mention in the history books. Unless it had been suppressed almost immediately, word would have spread.

  In the back of my mind, I was still amazed at how dangerous it had been to be an electromagnetic pioneer. The originator of modern electromagnetic theory, James Clerk Maxwell died prematurely. Heinrich Hertz proved the validity of Maxwell’s theory by discovering radio waves and was dead within a year of publishing his book, Electric Waves. Maxwell’s ideas were formalized by Hertz and a group of other physicists that historian Bruce J. Hunt had dubbed “the Maxwellians.” The Maxwellians worked out the implications of Maxwell’s thinking and streamlined it into modern form. These men included George FitzGerald, Oliver Lodge, and Oliver Heaviside. FitzGerald died not long after he’d worked out what would become some of the basic principles of relativity theory, deriving them from a study of electromagnetics. Oliver Lodge became convinced of the reality of psychic phenomena and it looked as though the last half of his life was spent largely writing about spiritualism. The only one of these pioneers who kept working on electromagnetics to the end of his life was Heaviside. But even Heaviside was clearly slowing down by the time his book came out in 1912, and he never finished the fourth volume on which he was working until his death in 1925. Heaviside complained of continual harassment distracting him from his work, of rocks through his windows, and vandalism from the neighborhood boys. His friends thought he was paranoid. But what if someone actually was out to get him, to keep him from productive work?

  So three of the five pioneers of electromagnetics died prematurely at the peak of their careers. A 60% mortality rate was scary high. Dad was convinced it had to be natural causes since an assassin would have used poison. Death by cancer was inherently a death by natural causes. But three out of five dead in their prime? I wasn’t so sure. The odds against that had to be astronomical. And the remaining two were harassed or distracted away from making significant further progress. It was as if someone realized that killing them all would start to look suspicious and merely sidetracked the remaining two. Between the editing of electromagnetics books and the high mortality rate, I became increasingly convinced Dad was wrong, and there had to be a connection. I had frustrating hints of a much larger picture, but without more pieces of the puzzle, I could do little more than speculate.

  After a morning at Kudzu Joe’s, I still went home for lunch. Dad was off with Uncle Rob or in Knoxville working on Dr. Kreuger’s place. I regretted telling Mom about the 60% mortality rate business, because it just made her more nervous. I avoided discussing my research with her over lunch for fear of sparking more lengthy maternal admonishment to be safe and careful. That didn’t work, of course.

  “I’m so proud of you, son,” Mom told me over one lunch. “You’re growing up into a fine young man. You have that same energy, determination, and drive that I dearly love in your father,” she added with a maternal smile. Then the smile faded. “But you have your father’s faults as well,” she added sternly. “You may understand intellectually that there are bad people in the world, but you’re so confident in your abilities, that you think you can overcome any obstacle and defeat any adversary. Usually, that’s a good thing. But there are powerful forces at work in the world: ruthless people with power and influence who will trample over anyone who gets in their way.

  “My grandfather…,” she began, “well that’s not my story to tell. My family, the Tollivers, have been working for generations to acquire power and influence, to make the right sort of connections to break into the elite. Men like your Uncle Larry, or Uncle Mike, or like Sheriff Gunn only care about preserving and enhancing their power, and they won’t hesitate to do whatever it takes to get what they want.

  “There are some lions whose tails are best left unpulled,” she admonished me.

  I promised Mom I’d be really careful. And, I kept right on doing what I was doing. Really carefully, of course.

  I remember clearly another Friday from that June. I went to Knoxville with Dad and helped him run the electrical power in Dr. Kreuger’s underground refuge. The place had gone from a hole in the ground to a structure in under a month. But then, most of Dad’s construction projects were like that. The structure went up quick, the detail work of plumbing, HVAC, and electrical took longer, and the finish work – the dry wall, trim, painting and cabinetry in residential jobs seemed to tak
e forever. Instead of the giant hole that had greeted us a month earlier, there was a raised gravel field maybe five or six feet above grade and topped with low foundation walls. The walls were a giant nine-foot spaced periodic honeycomb with raw rebar stretching up like a Venus flytrap to catch a passing house and anchor it to Earth.

  The place was a network of cargo containers sandwiching concrete walls between each one. The bottom level of cargo containers was all supported on concrete piers making about a three-foot-high crawl space. I figured out quickly why Dad brought me along. My job was to run, or more correctly, crawl, the Romex power cable from the power panel where Dad poked it through a hole in the floor over to where he was drilling through the floor to install power outlets. Then, he’d drill another hole and I’d drag the wire from the earlier hole to the newest hole. A half dozen holes later, and it was back to the power panel to start on the next circuit. I couldn’t complain though. Last summer I worked on a renovation project in a rental house where the plumbing had leaked sewage all over the crawl space. As the junior apprentice, I got stuck with that job. Fortunately, I had a full body suit. It only took a few hours, and we completed the crawl space part of the work before the day got hot and unpleasant. But that odor was stuck in my hair for days and no amount of scrubbing or washing could completely remove it. Dr. Kreuger’s refuge was actually one of the nicest crawl spaces I’ve ever worked in, because it was so new and clean and cool.

  Most of those June afternoons were not nearly so memorable. I went to physics class after lunch. It was fairly easy after all the private tutoring I’d had from James Clerk Maxwell via Matter and Motion, supplemented by my father. I had to keep at it to avoid getting complacent, but I was cruising toward an easy A and one more core class for which I was not going to have to pay university tuition, once I’d transferred in the credits.