The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  He gave a hard look to Dyer in the car as they were being driven back to the hotel.

  “Well . . .” He said. “That certainly left an aftertaste on my tongue. I have a deep understanding now of the Japanese concept of bukakki . . .”

  Dyer nodded abruptly to stop him getting too gross.

  “Welcome to Washington, kid. Morning mouth is the usual flavor after wrapping your lips around the dignitas of the senate—not to mention the executive branch. You did OK for a first timer. I was actually impressed. You talked a great deal and said very little—all you need is a constituency and you can work this town like Stradivarius played the fiddle—Or at least Nero playing his fiddle. My heart was really in my mouth when Congressman Jacobs asked about the guts of the drive, for a moment I thought you were going to spill the beans, but you kept your head and glued your mouth shut.”

  Bear nodded.

  “You can’t give it to them of course.” Bear said. “Not to them or the White House either. After ten minutes with the Chief of Staff . . . well I am going home and lock up my family silver after hearing that guy talk!”

  Dyer looked troubled.

  “What do you mean ‘can’t give it to them? Son . . . in case you hadn’t noticed . . . We work for them! Eventually we will need to reveal your parlor trick to a select group of these guys. Those with the need to know of course.”

  “Maybe! Maybe not!” Bear said firmly. “I figure that for the time being I work for the constitution and through it I work for the people. These guys are only the people’s designated representatives, not the people themselves. The motto of these guys has largely been that what the people do not know will not hurt them. Pull over . . . !” His voice was agitated enough to get quick results from the driver.

  Their front tire was next to a curb that fronted a park.

  “Let’s go for a walk.” Bear said rolling his eyes in the universal gesture for ‘I don’t want to talk in the car after an extended top secret meeting full of top secret guys heavily invested in the top secret business. For all I know every peckerwood in the meeting has bugged us by now.’ It was a lot of talk for a roll of the orbs, but Dyer got the entire message. A random park in the dark would do nicely for a secure conversation.

  It wasn’t much of a park and they both ignored that it was in a really bad neighborhood. A half block away a hooker was arguing vociferously but quietly at the top of her voice with a competitor, the noise was being ignored and pretty well drowned out by two cats who were mating with loud yowls on top of an overflowing dumpster next to a snoring drunk who had stuffed his lower half into an improvised sleeping bag made out of some trash bags lined with a USA Today.

  He and Bear walked off randomly along a badly lit path a couple hundred meters before Bear spoke.

  “You must see . . .” He said suddenly as if the conversation had never been interrupted. “. . . that the Petrovski effect drive is bigger than those two groups of jackasses we met tonight!”

  Dyer strolled beside him poking disapproving lips out in the trickle of light. His dark face would have been inscrutable black against black, but the distant streetlight, not yet shot out by the locals during weekly target practice cast enough light that it caught the intelligent glitter of Dyer’s eyes as Bear sought them out to deliver his total conviction.

  “We should not be having this conversation, son. Treason’s like makeup . . . it rubs off.” Dyer began looking around automatically, still a political animal by training despite the finer instincts that Bear knew he had. Bear stopped abruptly.

  “Don’t give the ‘son’ bit Admiral. I respect you too much for you to condescend. And definitely do not give me the party line about treason. Reason yes! Treason no! Let’s face it . . . there is no party line possible for the Petrovski effect. I am making a point now before we suddenly get watched more and more closely by the clowns from one of those meetings who want to seize control of the technology. Admiral . . . Let’s talk like men and not a couple pompous characters in ‘Pirates of Penzanze!”

  Dyer grinned at the tongue lashing—Bear could make out the teeth in the dark easily enough and eased off a bit himself.

  “OK! OK. So talk!” Dyer’s voice came eerily from behind the white of the enamel. He sounded more receptive.

  Bear smiled marginally back and then dropped into his best serious subordinate face, turning it to the light so Dyer could see it, and putting all his righteous intensity into what he said next.

  “Admiral . . . with all due civility I need to point out that we are aiming way too low here . . . This space drive is bigger than a committee . . . this drive is bigger than a president . . . this drive is bigger even than any single government . . . this drive is bigger than the American people. This thing is one of those . . .” He hesitated but drove on. “This is one of those moments where something remarkable . . . a piece of the puzzle of human advancement had slipped into place and our understanding of the . . . well . . . the universe. We have just discovered that we might just have caught a major glimpse of what the picture on the box lid of the cosmic puzzle looks like. It’s that big! I need to convince you of just how big it is and get you to understand that it is bigger by orders of magnitude than the way you usually think about the political, economic, or military equation! My guts say that in the fullness of time this will be a piece of the future of humanity that writes our destiny in ways we cannot envision today standing here in this seedy park in the dark. You are important as the pivot point around which invention occurred especially because that universe shaking idea’s origin came from a nutty cave full of weirdoes and whakoes who you’ve got working for you. Neither of us set off to shake things up to this level I grant you, but we have done it never-the-less and I need you to see that ‘we work for them’ is not even close to what I am talking about here. I get it. It was American dollars that paid the bill, but it turns out the meal from that investment will feed the race itself; the race of man, Admiral. The future of everybody . . . every stinking human on this mud ball is at stake. This is not some idealistic chuckle headed nonsense though . . . this is the real deal that calls for global thinking. Actually . . . for the first time in history it calls for extra global thinking. Admiral this thing has to be handled very carefully and very fast before those bottom feeders in those two meetings get their suckers on it. When I mentioned a strategy to you yesterday, I agreed to your plan and bowed to your political wisdom in taking it to the oversight committee thinking it was the proper routine way to get things elevated to the proper level. I realize now I was on autopilot and dead wrong. Look . . . ! Someone in that first room is going to give in to temptation and talk in the next few days because they simply cannot keep a secret this big. The guys in the second room probably won’t spill a thing because they want to try and hide it and control it. I watched them and their beady little eyes lit up the whole time we were talking. It’s the same look that a hungry lion gives a wounded wildebeest. The greed of the white house folks will not be able to contain the greed of the first group. At least two of the senate folks are deadly enemies of the White House and will want to leverage what they know before the President uses it himself. When they do the cat will claw its way out of our bag in the press and when that happens, we need to be ready! Admiral we need a big vision and we need it right now because if we don’t have a plan you can by heavens expect someone else will come up with one for us and it will be a very . . . very . . . very bad one.”

  Dyer peered at him closely in the poor light. Instinct told him he at least had got the Admiral thinking about past bitter experiences of a similar kind.

  “You sure talk pretty. What are you really talking about? Giving this to the UN instead of congress and the President or something?”

  Bear shook his head violently.

  “No! No! No! The UN is extraterritorial, but not nearly extraterrestrial! Besides . . . they certainly can’t k
eep a secret. A hundred seventy nations plus are 170 times worse than one single country. The important bit is that we need to let this secret get out, but NOT its details. The press needs to know the drive exists, but not how it works. If we let the politicians let it out it will get spread around legally and then leaked. Then things will really go to hell. The point is that the drive itself is more dangerous than the atom bomb ever was. If its technology is not controlled by an extraterritorial, indeed extra-planetary body, then every nut in this world will want to play with it. We already know a little about its weapons potential. No, sir! The information must be kept from the mainstream as much as from the national bodies. I want to give it to mankind . . . but only in a carefully structured way. Frankly, we need something entirely new to contain it . . .” He was half making this up as he went along and hesitated a moment, but some instinct told him he needed momentum and pulled his words out of the dark black back of his brain. “A . . . a . . . new body that can hold the knowledge and use it without letting it get out to the world in detail. Something people can get behind based on . . . I don’t know . . . altruism perhaps . . . instead of merely lining their pockets. It must be manned with people with a sense of the greater good rather than mere self interest. The new body must contain the knowledge and channel it in directions of growth rather than destruction. They need to keep it secure, develop it and use it for all . . . mankind . . .” He petered out realizing what he was saying for the first time.

  Dyer pulled on his lip a moment and it was he that watered the seed to germination.

  “So what you are talking about is . . . a Buck Rogers Space Cadet Corps or something?” He was wandering through many thoughts when he said it and had with difficulty kept the incredulity out of his voice; a real trooper.

  Bear showed his teeth and laughed like a madman, seizing on it.

  “Yes, Sir! That isn’t too bad. Like a boy scout Space Cadet Corps—an organization that is beholden to no one except the planet itself and humanity in general. Something with high faluten notions of honor, charity and little puppies whose mission is . . . I don’t know . . . to expand . . . . humanity . . . to expand man’s horizons and to take him beyond this world and towards the . . . stars . . . or some such crap. You know . . . a mission statement they can roll up the screen from bottom to top really slowly at the beginning of the IMAX movie so the barely literate mopes in the audience can read it while their chairs vibrate like a cheap washing machine from the surround sound movie theme being cranked up to maximum. The words need to be something to get their pulses revved up while they dream about being a part of the outfit without . . . of course . . . actually taking any of the risks of joining up.”

  Bear put a foot up on a park bench. It had graffiti scrawled all over little advertisements for cut rate lawyers who promised to get their clients all they deserved for work-related injuries. A frustrated children’s author of a vandal had used more motivation than skill to raggedly carve ‘Jane eats Dick’ into the poorly painted wooden slats. Bear leaned his arms across each other on the high knee and looked at Dyer wearily.

  Dyer shook his head repeatedly like a palsy victim trying to clear an inner ear after a swim.

  “That weed you are smoking is frying your circuits, son. Living on Fantasy Island in your head will get you killed in this town.” Dyer said pragmatically. “This kind of talk is outta some ‘Boy’s Life’ or “Amazing Stories” sidebar . . . nice for the kiddies, but pure trouble among the street fighters and sharks of this town who will fall on it like bloody bait and tear it to pieces. Nobody wants to hear it . . . least of all a GOP congress who wear the flag like a toga and waves the national checkbook like a magic talisman while they spend every dime they can get their hands on for whores and dope.”

  Bear regarded him evenly and surprised Dyer by smiling.

  “OK..So we stick it to them before they can stick it to us. A sucker punch . . . .” Bear said. “We circle around and come in their back door while they are watching the front.”

  Dyer stood, unconvinced.

  “You know I’m right in principle don’t you?” Bear said gently.

  Dyer snorted derisively, spun on his heel and walked several paces away, then spun again to return and look at Bear who simply leaned on his knee and remained silent watching him reliving images of their first meeting.

  Dyer repeated the steps several times over several minutes before he came to an abrupt halt. Bear had seen him pacing before this way, the day he was hired.

  “OK. If . . . And it is a huge monstrous flashing neon ‘IF,’ I agree, how do you see this going? To leave town with it and not get our asses arrested we still have to get by the oversight committee first which means we need a lever made from a whole Sequoia. Hell after today the President will be a wicket we will have to roll through too. We need something we can clunk them over the head with and then use to move them aside. That ain’t gonna be easy!”

  Bear smiled, stood and stuck out his hand.

  Dyer shook it suspiciously and Bear laughed.

  “I like the sound of that ‘we,’ Admiral. You are a good man and . . . thank the stars for all of us that you are. I have an idea. Let me tell you how I can keep you out of jail and quickly move the rock candy mountain of entrenched self interest called American Bureaucracy faster than the Petrovski effect . . .

  The next day the Admiral and Bear sat opposite a now slightly expanded panel of Senators and Congressmen who generally glowered at them in return. Dyer had spent the night calling in folks who he wanted there but who had missed the last meeting. It was a different room than last time too; smaller, with short tiers of chairs facing them instead of the two long ones like the last time. It seemed crowded. Most of the oversight committee looked frowsy—called out of a bed, a bottle, or general boinkery and none too happy about it. Serious golf games were not going to occur and its impact in raised disgruntlement radiated in ripples.

  “Why have you asked for this meeting, Admiral?” demanded the pugnacious bibliophile from Alabama. Naturally he had shown up. “This second meeting in as many days?” He dripped sarcasm from every pore along with sweat—his weight was working hard to lose the excess heat of processing all the calories of the five eggs and pancakes with assorted meats he ate for breakfast and he wanted out of this room. The way out for him was to poison his college’s already stretched patience early and get them to vote for quick adjournment which he knew would tick off Dyer and his upstart minion.

  Dyer smiled, stood and spoke with the same suave cool detachment that Bear had come to respect so much. Personally he just wanted to run over and punch the fat bastard silly. Instead he sat contritely; hands folded on the table top and tried to look innocent while the admiral talked.

  “We are here to recommend a course of action for you regarding the MacMoran Space Drive which we introduced to you yesterday.” He let his voice go up, making a point. “The drive which has allowed a manned space craft of the United States of America to become the first to visit another world that is not Earth’s satellite.”

  Everyone in the room jolted at that. Some of the congressmen because it was the first time they had heard about a space flight while others because it was the first time the United States had been juxtaposed with the words “interplanetary space flight.” Bear jolted because he was startled to hear his name in relation to the drive anywhere outside the boundaries of his team. He was unaware that Dyer even knew of it. He certainly knew that he had included it nowhere in his written notes to the Admiral. The old man had apparently made some phone calls.

  The committee’s tangential whispered conversations quieted suddenly verifying that most of their talk had to do with schemes of their own for the drive in question. In that moment Bear saw enough shifty looks to know that it was a good thing that he and Dyer had acted when they did. Had they waited even a day longer half the people in the room had been planning some s
cheme to exploit the invention—it would not astonish him if it was for monetary gain in one arena or another. It was a record worthy of the Guiness book of Malfeasance, even for Washington insiders sworn to secrecy.

  Dyer pretended to take their silence as his due, looked at the chairman of the committee and began to define key points in a plan that despite its beautiful round rhetoric moved control of the drive unit from any oversight by the committee here and into the control of a specially formed group of personnel who would become the core of a new organization. It was to be an organization responsible for further development and exploitation of the drive’s potential. It also announced that this group would support that new organization and provide partial funding. Bear found himself handing out copies of the principle points of the plan that he and Dyer had discussed the night before, which were still literally warm from a copier.