by Peter Damon
The tall student finished writing with a flamboyant period and stepped back to view his latest work. “There is a correlation!” a stated.
“I take it you made sense of that?” Robert asked.
“Who gave you that?” James asked briskly.
“Professor Don Graves,” Robert told him.
“And how do you know Professor Graves, let alone are able to talk to him?” he asked.
“Don’s working on Freedom One,” Robert shrugged. “It’s not like he’s in Timbuktu or somewhere without modern communication,” he pointed out.
“You talk to them?” James asked, astonished.
“Not often, only when needed. But they get CNN, Bloomberg and BBC World Service. They know what’s happening down here.”
“They need to tell us what their plans for those asteroids are,” James stated.
Robert shook his head. “They’re not going to do that,” he told him. “Answer one question and they’ll get a dozen more. Before they know it, they’ll be spending half their time in front of a conferencing unit, having to explain everything, time and time again, repeating it to those who disbelieve,” he pointed out.
James appeared to have lost interest, staring again at his whiteboards, his eyes following the new lines of mathematics, his cheeks flushed with excitement.
“James, they need a local man, someone prominent, to fight their cause,” he told him.
James pulled his face back, blinking rapidly. “Me? I’m hardly prominent,” he admitted.
“You have the ear of the President’s Chief of Staff. That makes you very prominent,” Robert pressed.
“This,” James said, pointing to the code Robert had given him. “This is phenomenal.”
“It’s old news,” Robert told him, smiling thinly as his words gave him James’s full attention. “They came to that conclusion a good six weeks ago,” he pressed, and watched James lick his lips.
“They’re not all-out mavericks, James. They’re scientists who want to learn, discover and share. But in discovering, just like great discoveries in the past, they want to retain ownership of their discovery, and profit from it.”
James appeared to consider, his eyes drawn back to the boards again.
“They wouldn’t have shared this unless they thought you worthy,” Robert stressed.
“Do you think so?” James asked, clearly moved by the statement.
“Sure.”
“Do you think I could work with them?”
“I think you’re bright enough,” Robert judged.
“Here, give them this,” James told him, scrambling for a piece of paper so he could quickly scrawl another equation.
Robert took it. “And you’ll talk to the Chief of Staff?” he asked. “Those asteroids will give earth so much metal, it’s phenomenal!” he stressed.
James agreed with a sharp nod of his head and held out his hand. “I’ll do what I can,” he told Robert.
July 18th.
Robert took the light railway into the heart of London, and there transferred to the older underground system to make his way to the Bank station, under the old City of London.
The underground station was a maze of passages, some nearly half a mile long, and Robert had to carefully count the junctions before taking the correct turning, and open the service door that should have been locked. He was more able to find his way once on the other side of the door, among the older, unused passages, although the sound and feel of an underground train passing just the other side of one of the walls unnerved him for a while.
He arrived at a tiled passage where two camp-chairs had been erected, one already holding the bowed figure of Stanley Charway.
“What’s up? he asked, taking the vacant chair to nod a greeting.
“Do you know anything about an aircraft called the XB40-B?” Stan asked.
“Sounds American. They used to have an XB35, didn’t they, sometime in 2000? Wasn’t it something to do with speed or height, or both, some sort of spy plane?”
“All of those,” Stanley agreed. “Well, this one takes off like any jet plane would, and at a height of 40 kilometres, fires up another set of engines to take it into outer-space,” he explained, and passed Robert a USB chip. “Details are in there,” he told him.
“You want me to publish,” Robert assumed.
Stan nodded, his eyes dark. “They’re using it to ferry astronauts to and from their new space-station,” he explained. “I think you’ll find, they’re doing it without notifying the United Nations Space Authority.”
“Ooh, naughty, naughty,” Robert chuckled, and proceeded to bring Stanley up to date with his trip to the USA. “Anything on Russia?” he asked in closing.
“They’re continuing to throw all their resources into reproducing HYPORT. We occasionally hear glimmers, especially when their tests cause their research establishments to blow up or catch fire,” he chuckled.
“And China?”
“Nothing,” Stan admitted with a sour face and a shake of his head. “The good news is that satellite imagery is not showing any great change. They’re not mobilising huge armies or manufacturing dozens of missiles and tanks. But what they’re doing, and why, is still a mystery. Have you any ideas?”
Robert shook his head. All his thoughts had already been picked up by the rest of the media. He strode away the way he had come, the USB safely in his pocket.
Stanley waited until the distant clang of the door told him Robert had gone, then used the auto-dial on his cell-phone to let Sir Arthur know that the XB40-B information had been passed on. There was nothing like stirring the pot occasionally, he thought. Michael would be proud of him, and he smiled.
+++++++++++++
“I’m not defending them,” Frankie said, shaking his head.
“Yes, you are,” Allan told him. “Had they used the app, then that crash would never have happened,” he stressed.
“And all they’re saying, is that the app is too slow. It’s quicker to land it themselves.”
“With these results,” Allan said, waving an arm towards the wall mounted monitor where the image of the mangled SUV was displayed, a reminder of what they wanted to avoid.
“All we’re asking is; can the app be speeded up?” Frankie asked.
“No,” Allan answered. “To speed it up would mean forgoing some of the tests and calculations that it does, and that would mean increasing the risk of this recurring beyond acceptable limits.”
“Acceptable? By whose standard?” Frankie asked.
“By mine,” Allan answered. “Do you want to set a lower standard?” he asked, his eyes holding Frankie to his chair.
“Then we have to slow down,” Frankie told him grudgingly.
“Fine. We take the list back to the Howards to prioritize the asteroids. If they can categorize them in relation to their importance, then we can always extend to a lower tier, as and when we have the resources. But that app must be used,” he stressed.
+++++++++++++
Michael chose the carrot and coriander soup served with the small wholegrain loaf and meandered past some of the other tables in the restaurant to sit with Professor Lovell and Oliver.
“How’s things?” he asked them, taking his seat and wiping his spoon, something he did purely to irritate any of the kitchen workers who happened to be watching. He smiled in their direction, then began eating.
“Was that a pleasantry, or a desire for details as to our progress?” Oliver asked, Professor Lovell also hesitating in his eating to wait for an answer.
“Well, both,” Michael admitted.
“Earth is still reeling from China’s move to close its borders and doesn’t care about us much,” Oliver pointed out. “With each passing day, earth populations learn something new about their reliance on China’s manufacturing facilities, and the details just become more and more disturbing.”
“Did you know that 30% of the earth’s wood pulp was coming from within China?” Professor Lovell asked
him.
“I didn’t,” Michael admitted. “I guess that must be worrying a lot of people who still like to read from the printed page.”
“Oh, far more dangerous than that!” the professor laughed. “Bog roll, my dear man; bog roll!”
“And disposable nappies,” Oliver added.
“Oh! This is serious!” Michael stopped eating to laugh.
Glen joined them and the story was repeated for his benefit before Michael moved them on to his real interest; kingmakers.
“It’s difficult to say with certainty,” the professor explained. “Certainly, the richest men and women in the world do not appear to be working together in any way or form; quite the opposite, in fact, with histories of quite aggressive take-overs. However, looking beneath that echelon of richness and power, we can infer some collaboration between nationalistic billionaires that might be considered the seeds of a unified approach that either creates, or solves, overall and global commodity positions.
“That means?” Michael asked.
“There is evidence to suggest that seemingly independent multi-billionaires are working under some form of umbrella organisation to, in some cases, create shortages, and in others, relieve them.
“As yet, we can’t see a motive for this. Certainly the motive is not uniformly financial because in some cases they’ve lost considerable sums of money. But their actions clearly support one another, which is not what you’d expect to find from truly competitive markets,” Professor Lovell explained.
“Could it be nationalistic in nature?” Michael asked. “Promoting particular candidates for political roles?”
“It could be several things,” Glen told him. “Nationalistic is one of them. A number of the people who fit into this ethereal body are Russian for example, but not all. Nor have their decisions favoured Russian, at least, not exclusively. It could be that they’re being extremely cautious and are as aware of the statistics they leave behind them as we are, and thus act accordingly. As to party politics, or trying to promote particular people into positions of political power, that’s harder to prove. We’ll just have to continue digging,” he shrugged.
“Ok. And our investments?” Michael asked.
“We’re continuing to spend,” Professor Lovell agreed, smiling.
“We’ve picked up most of the mining sector for just cents on the dollar,” he told Michael. “Our holdings of research laboratories have grown and we’ve grown our patent offices to improve cross pollination of ideas from one field of research to another, improving the marketability of many of our stranger discoveries.”
“That means that there are now new chemical treatments for fabrics, a new range of sugars for the food market, some improvements to the petroleum refinery process that will not only reduce the cost of petrol, but also to a number of petroleum derivatives,” Glen told him.
“This soup is good,” Oliver remarked.
“Fresh produce,” Frankie told him, coming over to join them.
“I guess it’s still going to be a while before we get tomato soup then?” Glen asked, like the others, aware of Frankie’s penchant for stealing tomatoes off the plant.
August 9th.
James stood in the dressing room of the Hilton Conference Centre, in front of the mirror, and cast a critical, non-approving look at the formal suit and bow-tie he wore. He felt awkward, as he always did when forced into formal attire, and dearly wished he was back in his study-room where he could immerse himself in the latest calculations on the very essence of gravity and mass.
“I should be working,” he muttered to the man beside him, “not attending some lavish conference where people just want to see us and talk to us,” he said.
Dean Hardy chuckled, his own collar supporting his chins while a hand carefully smoothed his oiled hair back. “Nonsense boy. Your work is being put up against Einstein and Hawking. So why shouldn’t you receive the accolade you deserve?” he stated.
“It was Don Graves work that gave me the clue,” James repeated, a little embarrassed by all the attention he’d been receiving of late.
“No breakthrough is ever accomplished in complete isolation,” the dean of the Honour college pointed out, moving from James’s side to answer the soft knock on the door. It was a young hotel messenger-boy carrying a long box, a cellophane window revealing a full thirty six red roses within.
“My word, would you look at that,” the dean marvelled, closing the door before pulling off the tape so he could remove the close fitting lid and look at the flowers in full.
James wandered over and, with the dean, leant forward to look more closely at the small card fixed to the stem of one rose.
It was doubtful he or the dean was aware of the toxic gas released when the cover had been taken off the roses. The messenger-boy who opened the door five minutes later also died, while those in the corridor, waiting to applaud the young scientist as he made his way to the stage, suffered breathing problems, headaches and nausea.
August 10th.
“Oh shit,” Robert murmured, reading the headline as it came across the media feed. He swallowed bile and took a deep breath, continuing to read the sketchy details coming from Arizona as the collapse of James McMillan and Dean Hardy were confirmed as murder, with speculation growing that it had been China who had perpetrated the deed, to ensure the brilliant young physicist didn’t find the secret to HYPORT before they did.
“You’re reading it; good,” Sam said, coming to a stop at his side. “We need something, and fast. Can you do it?” he asked.
Robert nodded, his eyes searching the room as he tried to marshal his thoughts and formulate a view on the death of two scientists half way around the earth. He nodded again, this time to himself as a story-line grew from his shock and horror. He wanted everyone to feel that; to experience the horror of such clinical murder, and having felt it, rebel against the culture that spawned it.
He doubted that it was the Chinese, but to say as much was to raise questions about his past associates and whether they were truly in the past. Therefore he didn’t dispel the notion, but broadened it to include any of the nations eagerly working to find the constituents of HYPORT. If China were a contender, then so too were Russia and the European Union. They had equal cause to view James’s work as the death knell to their expensive surge in chemistry. Those were the nations that publicly admitted to funding large research groups, but there wasn’t a country in the world that hadn’t taken some steps towards carrying out similar research. As Michael had often contended; the prize was just too big for anything to stand in its way.
+++++++++++++
“What do we know?” the president asked, waving those around the table to sit once more.
“A toxic gas released when the packaging to the roses was removed. Three dead, seven hospitalised with breathing difficulty, headaches and nausea. The agent is unknown but we’re analysing it. Roadblocks have been implemented, ditto airports and sea ports. Police and FBI are chasing down the delivery of the roses, but so far no news,” she was told.
The President looked towards her Chief of Staff. “I’m sorry, Joanna. You liked him?” she asked.
Joanna nodded. The boy was, had been, awkward and fumbling, and yet impassioned. “I have to ask whether he was killed for his knowledge of gravity, or because of his conviction that these asteroids are being sent here as a harvest, not as missiles.”
“You think it the former,” the president pressed.
“He made no secret of the fact that it was a comment of Don Graves that tipped him into his new line of thinking, so really, nothing he was doing was new, just new to earth. Did it or could it change that much?” Joanna asked.
The president took up the thought, nodding her head in agreement. “Whereas, if he’d been successful in his argument that the asteroids are no harm to us, then we would divert billions of additional dollars into our space program.”
“Our strength in space could be the real threat,” Joanna pointed o
ut with a nod.
The rest of the room waited in silence, watching the two women consider the argument, the lives of millions of Americans, and possibly many others around the whole planet, resting on what the president decided.
A light begin to flash on one of the phones down the table, and all eyes, including those of the President and Chief of Staff turned to look towards it.
The aide, blushing, quickly picked up the phone and listened. “Right. Send the details to my email, soon as you get anything more,” he told the caller before replacing the handset.
Everyone waited, knowing that the call would have to be something related to their meeting, otherwise it wouldn’t have been put through. “Madam President, GAIS has detected the ‘push’ of another asteroid,” he told her.
“GAIS?” she asked of someone closer to her side.
“Gravitational Anomaly Identification Study, Ma’am,” Joanna told her. “The only one was part of the ALMA Array in Chile, but after James McMillan found the spaceship with it, we built our own,” she explained.
“So we know it was pushed,” the president confirmed.
“What size?” Joanna asked of the aide.
He licked his lips. “Early detectors have measured it at approximately 1.2 kilometres in diameter, Ma’am. We actually believe it is the 1950 DA asteroid.”
“Is that important?” the president asked, looking about her, hating it when she was surrounded by know-it-all technical people.
“Well Ma’am, that asteroid last passed close by in 2001. We were able to calculate its orbit quite precisely, and established that it will return on 2880. It was currently the asteroid with the highest probability of hitting us, Ma’am,” he explained.
“And they’ve caught it, and decided to lob it our way early,” she concluded.
“How much does it weigh?” she asked in the silence. “Do we know?”
“The slow rotation and Radar Albedo suggest it to be fairly dense; Nickel and Iron most probably. We estimated approximately 20 billion tonnes.”