by Randy Moffat
Dyer looked really thoughtful then.
“I see.” He said neutrally, which was not the enthusiasm Bear wanted.
Bear realized her had shown his hand slightly early and clammed up.
“I need you to come with me to Washington, tomorrow—there is a secret defense oversight committee meeting I need to address.” Dyer said absently.
Bear nodded.
“Get some sleep.”
Such was their relationship that neither said anything further
The cable was still out in the damn motel.
Christianson had wandered into the woods that reached for miles in every direction from the trailer. He had felt a need to return the contents of his alimentary canal back in nature and Nyon and Po were alone on the trailer’s porch for once.
“I spoke to my cousin Sho Fu again . . . at the place of the red stones.” He reminded Po.
“Yes.” Po said.
“He says there was even more excitement there. The man MacMoran went into the Admiral’s office and there was a lot of noise and they stayed together for a time in the Admiral’s officer. Cousin Sho said the admiral stayed and made phone calls until very late. Several hours after the man MacMoran left—while the Admiral stayed on the phone. Cousin Sho waited and waited, but had long since cleaned the building and was out of reasons to stay. He had two other buildings to clean and when finally he was about to leave and saw the admiral go to the bathroom and slipped into his office for a moment. There was a disc in his computer and a video on it that Shu played for a minute as he emptied the wastebasket. It showed a ship that had gone to space. It was the man MacMoran in the picture of the spaceship. The kink people have been up in space. They went very fast.”
Po breathed and smelled the booze on Fuk Bao’s breath.
“You are drunk?” There was no censure in his voice—it was a straight forward question without rancor. No pot can call a kettle black.
Fuk Bao shook his head.
If there was one thing that Po could recognize it was drunkenness. Fuk Bao was sober enough.
Po nodded.
“Instead of a radio through the earth they are flying above it then!”
Fuk Bao looked at him curiously.
Po turned abruptly and left. Even he could see it was important information.
CHAPTER 12—SALES PITCH
Washington—The place where dreams are bred, over-bred, in-bred and at their core often become the discarded toys of favored sons making lots and lots of bread. Washington had a reputation for abandoning the after birth of great ideas in a basket on the doorstep of the foundling’s home on the edge of a nearby slum. Bear knew that if you want to win in Washington you have to strike hard and strike fast before the forces of inertia can set in. Personal experience had taught Bear that if a man breathed in very hard in Washington he could literally hear his arteries hardening, but during all previous visits Bear had remained untroubled by anything actually happening. Now he desperately wanted something to happen and needed it to happen so quickly that it could not get intercepted. This was clearly contrary to Washington’s inclination. Bear was instantly filled with trepidation at the sight of the Washington monument on the horizon. He understood empirically what Winston Churchill head meant when he said under his breath that Democracy is the slowest form of government. On a good day legislation travels at the speed of smell. Anything faster risks the lurking armies of wheelchair generals and armchair quarterbacks squatting on the sidelines acting primarily as self appointed agents of inertia who are attracted only by movement. If they got their sticky hands on his idea it would go from 100 MPH to dead stop in a matter of minutes. Bear sweated. He had cut so many corners to even get to this meeting that his route to the city was practically a circle. He had been too hard working too fast and too busy actually accomplishing things to anticipate a pleasant reception in corridors of power constructed of molasses. Worse, for the first time since the projects inception he wasn’t sure that he and Dyer were completely simpatico. Bear mentally braced for censure instead of results and began wondering idly what size blindfold would fit him.
The place Dyer took him for the meeting was predictably deep in the lower intestines of the Pentagon. The conference room was even more faceless than he had expected from a room where meetings of the defense oversight committee for secret projects met if their stools at the bar were full. A glance showed a tight bipartisan gaggle of senators and representatives, guardians of the public checkbook and morals who sat along one side of the table in tiers like red nosed judges in a Dickensian novel, while Dyer and Bear alone occupied the opposite side like school boy supplicants asking for more gruel.
It felt like a tribunal. It talked like one too for the first few minutes until Dyer stood up and took the offensive in stentorian tones that pointedly ignored what had gone before. Luckily he had audiovisual aides to distract the magisterial magpies and successfully referred the committee’s attention to the view screen on the wall. He waved his hand and the lights faded obediently. Bear was thankful. As the lights dimmed he easily imagined that the light-switch was the committee’s normal technological apogee.
“OK. I think we have beaten around the bush long enough, gentlemen and ladies.” Dyer rumbled—he could speak as well in public as he did in private when he chose. “Let’s get down to brass tacks. I called this special meeting because one of my projects had developed something . . . remarkable. Something that was quite unexpected. They have been pursuing a line of research that started out pointing one way and then ended up pointing in quite another. The results are . . . well . . . see for yourself.” He waved at the screen.
He ran the video that Bear had shown him the night before on a screen six inches smaller than a Cineplex’s so that its drama was suitably enhanced.
There were some sniggers in the dark during the showing of the antiquated lines of the B-52 being fitted out and all the gear being stuffed willy-nilly into its guts though it was edited in such a way so as to never showed the accelerators themselves. The laughs faded away when she took off and stopped altogether when then broke out into space while Dyer narrated. There was a suitably shocked gasp when the stars came out and filled the big screen.
Dyer froze the shot and added a dry sidebar for dramatic effect.
“I am informed that the ship exited the atmosphere and entered outer space within the period of approximately one second.”
That shut them up entirely. Dyer restarted the video which he had paused to deliver this minor bombshell. Now he lobbed his atomic device into their unsuspecting midst.
Suddenly Mars filled the screen and Dyer froze the image again just where O’Hara and panned the camera across a bit and caught Bear’s face in partial profile highlighted against the red planet.
“Total flight time to Mars orbit was probably less than a minute.”
“My god!’ Someone stage whispered in the dark, but that one appeal to their super-intelligent alien watchmaker was the height of the group’s oratory genius at that moment. No deities there, they were all too human.
“Lights!” Dyer commanded, but he was not obeyed and had to ask twice more in rapid succession—the senatorial aide working the switch was apparently distracted by the images still on screen as much as the rest of the room..
The light ruined the sweet noiselessness. As the lights came up with it came a tidal roar of questions. The crowd being composed mainly of politicians they included a fair share of rhetorical posturing phrased more or less as questions too.
Dyer took it all for ten minutes with stony faced calm gained though years of experience, answering questions with neutral authority and apparent disinterest.
After the five minute mark he began to end more and more of his sentences with a waved hand at Bear and an assurance to the questioner that technical questions would be answered ‘When Mr. MacMora
n speaks . . .” which gave Bear at least some time to think of some clever one liners, but he still felt unprepared when Admiral Dyer said simply, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the leader of the Q-Kink team and discoverer of the new space drive, Mr. Bear MacMoran.” He waved an arm expansively at Bear.
Bear rose grimacing at Dyer mainly to show his displeasure at being made a display in his political theater. Dyer grinned, winked and deliberately swallowed a noisy sip of coffee. Message received. His mouth was now full; Bear would have to do the talking.
“Ask away.” Bear said mildly, assuming a modest stance with his hands cupped in front of his privates unconsciously afraid that the next Senatorial words slung at him would strike his reproductive organs painfully.
He was not far off.
An officious senator from Alabama who had been leading the ranks of what Bear had mentally dubbed ‘disbelievers’ while Dyer talked overpowered those around him with a roar—his chins wobbled in a distracting way as he spoke and Bear had to repeat the senator’s words over inside his own head to remind himself of their content—so engaging was the performance of the theater of porcine jowls.
“Do you mean to tell us that we are supposed to believe you have created a ship that will travel around the solar system in minutes and the only proof you give us is some video that could easily be from some . . . some juvenile’s computer?” The chins asked accusatorily. Bear was taken aback a moment and peered at the man like an exhibit in a museum. He was fascinated that anyone would think that Bear had nothing better to do with his time than enact some great scam on the American people let alond tease a group of congress people. Clearly the senator hailed from a Luddite land of weeds where the inhabitants were disturbed only by the sound of peanuts growing and the shoe was a passing vogue belonging to effete intellectuals. In some way he was revisionism incarnate as if all the reaction in the human animal had been distilled into a single human. It made him easy to hate so Bear smiled sweetly at him.
Bear held the smile for several seconds and since the expression was unexpected in the face of his truculence it threw the heckler off guard long enough for Bear to get a word in.
“Actually I do not mean to tell you anything of the sort, sir. I was asked here by the good Admiral, I presume as a witness to the success to my team’s modest line of investigation. The video is simply a record of events and if you look carefully I think you can make out my own rather ugly visage in it. Now I am sure you are not calling me a liar . . .” He looked significantly at the fat man who swallowed unconsciously at the sudden cold steel in his eyes, “. . . since you do not even know me; so I will simply say that Charlatans always have one great weakness, which is that they cannot repeat their demonstrations under scientific conditions or the scrutiny of the public. I assure you and anyone else whose credulity is stretched . . .” He looked about casually in a brazen double dare, “. . . who doubt the veracity of the experimental success of the Petrovski effect or our application of it in a space drive needn’t suffer from that opinion for long. They are immediately invited to accompany us and we will repeat the experiment with them inside the craft. Taking you along will not change the results one iota I assure you. There is absolutely nothing up my sleeve. It works.” He said with absolute and clear conviction. “That’s all. It simply works.”
Senator wattles must have envisioned his wide bottom gadding about in an experimental space ship and substituted bluster for logic.
“My constituents will not agree no matter how many times you repeat your flummery . . .”
Bear looked at him curiously.
“Your constituents, Senator . . . Or you?” Bear tried not to sneer.
The Senator’s mouth tightened. He was pissed now. He responded like a bully and attacked.
“There is no mention of such travel in the pages of the good book.” Bear detected a faint groan from several others in the room. ‘The ear tests words as the tongue tastes food.’ Job 34:3. My ear has tested what it hears and my ears question all it hears here. It is the gabble of geese.” The Senator leered knowingly, as if what he had just said made the slightest sense.
Bear countered instantly.
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject—Ludicrous 5:17” Bear replied levelly.
The Senator looked disoriented at this biblical one-ups-manship. Several brighter people snickered behind their hands to discover that Bear had just taken a Mickey. Shocked to find that the book of Ludicrous was nowhere in his painfully memorized mental list of the Pentateuch the bulbous man eventually opened his mouth to rebut but the delay had made him just too late; instead another eager Congressman shoved a question in . . . luckily his was a voice of reason rather than from the overly vocal fringes of opinion.
“Mr. MacMoran . . . Congressman Jacobs . . . Let me just say this is an amazing achievement! Fantastic! Beyond belief! To go to Mars . . . Was it very exciting?”
Bear laughed.
“Exciting is a good word for it. We had less than 4% power left after the trip to Mars and back. Worse . . . Our air-frame had an expert pilot in it and I thank goodness for it! We lost two plane engines on reentry. The landing got so exciting I about wet my pants since some of the brakes were still frozen up from orbit in outer space and we skidded all over the runway before he managed to stop the bird with our nose wheel in the dirt at the far end. I was almost too busy kissing the tarmac to overhear my Chief Engineer’s question to him once we scrambled out of the cockpit. She said, ‘Did we just land or were we shot down?’
That cracked them up so Bear kept up his patter of ancient jibs.
“We actually felt our way to Mars. I once knew an Air Force General who said ‘You’ve never been so lost, as when you are lost at Mach 3 . . . ‘“ That kept them going. “All I can say is he never tried being lost at light speed . . . .”
That got them yucking it up in the isles, the insult to the bible ridden Senator forgotten by all but the man himself. His flash frozen mind was chewing busily on Bear’s perceived disrespect to his 2500 year old Hebraic God while Bear kept talking in the here and now. He wanted the rest of the politicos to find no chance of closing ranks on one of their own. By telling jokes Bear showed he was obviously the good guy here—in contrast to the windbag. Bear might learn to regret having made an enemy today and begetting a personal hater in the group, but in life you had to draw the line somewhere.
Congressman Jacob’s went on after the larger group quit laughing and buzzing companionably away.
“The Admiral was vague about the power supply for the uhh . . . drive. It seems important. Can you tell us about it?”Congressmen Jacobs asked.
Bear glanced at Dyer whose face was impassive. Bear followed his instincts and pulled his head firmly inside his turtle shell.
“Gentlemen, I do not believe I can. The space drive lies at the core of the thing and the details of the drive are currently highly classified, but in general I can say that the drive is radically new and in no way resembles anything that exists on earth at this time. The power supply for the drive is equally radical though both are based on existing theoretical science, they are utterly, totally and completely unique since they engineer that science into an unexpectedly usable form. In short, the ship is a seminal breakthrough and I am reluctant to state the details of its operation without proper safety controls on dispersal of content from this meeting. In short, gentlemen . . . the walls have ears and I have to be sure you are fully cleared for the answer. Admiral Dyer will advise me later on who can know. I am sure you understand.”
They clearly didn’t want to understand. Many had sour looks, offended that they were not in the ultra—secret clique, but in their hearts they knew he was correct based on their own sense of each other and history. They were all scarred fighters inside the ring ropes marked by the ring-roads of Washington. Despite their membership in this secret oversi
ght committee any one of them up for reelection would leak the story to the media quicker than Lot pawned his daughters to the Sodomites. They rumbled in annoyance but not true concern. There would be time later to find out and use it to advantage.
Bear caught the vaguest of nods from Dyer and presumed it was in agreement about the reliability of a secret being kept by the group, reviled politicians all.
“Mr. MacMoran! Mr. MacMoran!” More shouted now, several waving their hands like school children.
The committee meeting droned on, excited people asking excited questions and demanding exciting explanations according to their natures, which ranged from relatively benign and supportive to positively malignant. Like most groups of humans they also covered the spectrum from the moderately intelligent to the deeply stupid.
Dyer orchestrated the Q and A for about an hour and then extracted them from the committee’s clutches artfully using the time honored ‘urgent demands of state’. As it turned out it was no subterfuge and as they stepped out they were handed a note which demanded that they present themselves to the chief executive ASAP. The President and his star chamber cabinet had gotten wind of the announcement of a trip to Mars somehow and there were six people in the oval office waiting for them. The White House asked that they make a classified explanation of their activities which they did though Bear’s tummy was growling like his Kodiak namesake. The give and take at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue was similar in every way to the cluster fuck with congress and in the end Bear was left with much the same impression as that given by the oversight committee. At the end he was pleased he had not voted for the President since Bear found him benignly softheaded and given to rash decision-making at the advice of his Vice President and his Chief of Staff. The Vice President possessed no actual intellectual ability but had a certain animal cunning around her self-interest in place of it. The Chief of Staff on the other hand was as sharp as a tack, but so excruciatingly oily that all Bear wanted to do after hearing him talk candidly in the privacy of the President’s officer, was to bathe and rinse long and hard to clean off the soap scum and lime scale that poured out of the wellhead of his mouth. The chief of staff looked thoughtful as they left. It was that look which ultimately scared the hell out of Bear.