by M.A. Harris
Primus Junction, Utah
Paul slept till the landing at Primus Junction, Utah; it was a smooth landing but the sudden deceleration woke him up. The aircraft swung off the runway and braked to a stop very quickly. It was late evening now and he couldn’t see much as he climbed down the airstair. There were some widely spaced lights, a couple of hangars, several single engine planes, one high wing twin and a cinder block building, that seemed to be about it.
“Have a good night Mr. Richards; someone will pick you up at the operations building.”
“Thanks Sarah, nice smooth flight, I caught up on some sleep.” He waved as she pulled up the door plus steps. The plane was going to hop over to Salt Lake City for a morning flight.
The man in a reflective vest waved him towards the operations building still focused on the jet. The turbines started to wind up as Paul crossed a yellow line near the building and to his right he saw the sweep of headlights in the parking lot.
Paul strolled towards the lights, when he got there he found a smallish man with a beard standing next to the open door of the SUV. There was a flash of teeth, “Paul Richards?” Without waiting for a reply, he went on, “I’m Cliff Samson, and I’ve arranged overnight accommodations.” The voice was light with a hint of what one might call a western accent but it was also irritated.
“Uh, thanks!” Paul smiled back, though he wasn’t completely sure that had been a smile.
“Do you have any more baggage? It’s late and my wife will wait up for me and I have to be up early, doing the Lord’s work.”
Paul kept his shrug inside, it took all sorts, he climbed into the front passenger seat of the big hybrid. Cliff Samson was already in the driver’s seat, the picture of impatience.
The dome lights showed that he was broad, fair skinned and red haired, the flash of teeth again, a cross between a smile and a grimace, “Sorry if I’m a bit abrupt, I’m the Project Manager of the Paaly project.” A sigh, “Dr. Paaly pulled you out of his hat rather at the last minute I’m afraid, so I’m a bit frazzled. God forgive me, I got a little angry with Cooper.” He was shaking his head as the big Ford accelerated forward.
Paul snorted, “Join the club, I’ve never liked anyone as much or been as angry with anyone as much as I have with that old reprobate.”
The flash of teeth, “I’m glad to know it’s not just me, Mr. Richards.”
“Call me Paul if you would.”
“I’m Cliff, Paul.” The words and intonation were a lot less stilted.
“You said you’re the project manager on the Paaly project, could you tell me what that is Cliff?” Paul asked quietly as they turned out onto a gravel road that disappeared into a distant infinity.
“Sorry Paul, no; Cooper said you’d ask and he told me he wanted to intro you himself. He’s a demon on security is our Dr. Paaly.” Samson sighed.
Paul gritted his teeth for a moment then began to laugh, “Oh yes, yes he is Cliff, he is the devil himself at times.” This got him a slightly outraged look from the other man but no further comment. Paul leaned back and watched the road unwind.
-o-
Paul rolled out of bed early, feeling good, it was eight o’clock as far as his internal clock was concerned and he’d slept most of the way here so he was fairly well rested. The room was standard, they seemed to build all low cost hotels the same these days and there were few options. This hotel had been built and was run by one of the big chains, but it had been built to service the workers on the canal project, the headquarters of which were in Primus Junction. Paul wondered what connection, if any, there was between the canal project and Cooper’s work. The only one he could image was power generation, though from what he had heard the canal was for irrigation.
Cliff was going to pick him up in a little over an hour and take him up to the ‘Project’, but Paul had time for a run. He got dressed quickly and headed out, the air was startlingly cold, reminding him that this was desert. He hesitated as he walked out; maybe he should put on leggings and a jacket. In the end he simply couldn’t be bothered so he started out heading for the center of town. He passed through it and came out the other side without really realizing he had passed the center of town.
It was obvious that Primus Junction was actually pretty old, some of the houses looked like late Victorian period. There must have been something here because a few of the homes were actually fairly large. He went over two streets when he had the option and ran back and it was obvious how small a town it was because this was a gravel road and some of the lots on the west side of the street stretched off to the horizon with no sign of habitation.
As he neared what he now realized was the center of town he approached what he at first took to be a small forest on the west side. Getting closer he realized that it was actually a small cluster of fairly modern buildings surrounded by trees, on the ‘town’ side were some fairly large buildings, with a sign: PRIMUS TECHNICAL INSTITUTE
The sign was on one of the newer buildings but Paul saw PTI cut into the brick of an older one; obviously the Institute was doing OK. As Paul passed the older building he saw another jogger, a young woman who flashed him a sweet smile as they passed. Paul felt the old confused embarrassment and the flicker of anger at his inability to do more than duck his head in response.
He saw the tarmac end in gravel again up ahead, just past the next street. A big black and white SUV slid around a corner ahead, Paul saw the officer inside give him the eye but nodded in friendly recognition. He had no acquaintance with the police other than the ones he’d talked to when his pretty toy of a sports car had been stolen during the spin down of his company. They - and the insurance company - had thought he’d been pulling a scam on them. He hadn’t and the insurance had paid in the end, but they probably still thought he had gotten away with something. Though he’d been hurt and furious at the time he couldn’t really blame them, in retrospect he could see that it looked suspicious, even though he’d done nothing. The four-wheel drive drifted down the road and out of sight.
Paul ran until he came to what looked like the last cross street, then turned and crossed the ‘main’ road finding this side of town was a little more built out. There were more streets out this way and there was a mixture of small businesses as well as houses.
At the edge of town Paul came to a fenced and graveled enclosure with neat rows of the prefab office huts set up around an older brick office block and couple of big corrugated metal structures that had to be warehouses. Even this early there was some movement. Passing the guarded front gate Paul saw the big sign that confirmed his suspicion; Aristide Industries was printed in large red letters on a pale gold background.
He jogged back to the main road at the end of town and slowed to a fast walk. He’d seen a restaurant in the center of town, in a small row of shops on a plank walk that looked somehow out of place. The faux Wild West fascia only stretched a couple of hundred feet and looked like something the locals had done to attract some business off of the secondary highway that ran through the center of town.
There was a line of battered pickups and SUVs parked in front of the diner as well as the police cruiser he’d seen earlier, at least he assumed it was the same one. This didn’t seem like a town that would have more than the one.
The hotel didn’t even have a so-called continental breakfast on offer, or much more than a coffee machine in the vending area, so he stopped at the diner and walked in.
The five men and two women at the counter and the tall brunette behind the counter all looked up as he walked in and Paul almost stopped under the impact of their combined gazes. There was no overt hostility, at least not after the first instant that might have been a figment of his imagination. He walked towards an empty stool at the end of the bar and the waitress drifted towards him, her face professionally friendly.
He smiled, “Good morning, I’d like a cup of coffee and a couple of slices of white toast with butter, no preserves?”
/> “Sure thing,” she smiled politely in response, “Passing through?”
“Kind of, I’m here for a couple of weeks to help a friend of mine on a project he’s doing.”
She glided away to get his coffee and start the toast, dropping the slices in the toaster herself.
The other patrons had gone back to talking quietly or drinking or eating, the policeman at the end of the bar climbed to his feet with a big thermos cup that the waitress had just filled. He leaned over the bar and she delivered a sharp peck on the lips and a smile, “Drive safe hon.”
“Always do sweets, see you later.” He was a tall man, the very picture of the western Sheriff.
He stopped at the end of the bar looking down on Paul, “Saw you earlier, enjoying the morning?”
“Yes officer, it’s kind of crisp, not like DC in the morning.”
A faint raising of the eyebrows, “You from Washington?”
“Yeah, I work part time for the Navy, riding herd on contractors, a friend of mine called me to come out and give him a hand on something.”
The big head nodded, “Good, well hope things go well.” He smiled faintly and went out.
Paul’s coffee had appeared, he put in the half and half and sweetener he preferred and drank it. It was nothing special but not dishwater or hyper-strong. The toast was the same, reasonable quality basics made up competently. He enjoyed it, the refill was as good as the first, then he was out of time, he paid his check and headed out, at a fast walk after eating.
When Cliff pulled up in the big Ford hybrid Paul was waiting with his work case, Cliff looked at that, “Sorry, I forgot to tell you that we’ve got a room for you up at the base, I just hadn’t the time to arrange it with housekeeping last night.”
Paul shrugged and got his things while Cliff paid the tariff.
They headed out of town the way they had come the night before. About two miles out of town they came to a big turnoff that led onto another road, Cliff nodded ahead, “We’re actually driving almost on top of the canal now Mr. Richards, this is the construction road, though when we’re done it’ll be called a state highway.”
They barreled down the very straight road at something like eighty, Paul looked out, at times he could see the line of the canal off to the left as the ground undulated, a long berm following the road, in this kind of climate no one built uncovered canals any longer. In fact the government was now spending billions covering several that had been built in the middle of the previous century. Beyond, the ground rose to steep, high bluffs they had crossed last night soon after leaving the airport. Primus Junction lay in a dry valley between that line of bluffs and the rising foothills of the Primus Range that bulked to the west. There was grass and scrub and small low lying woods, startlingly green, and there were fields of colorful flowers in folds in the ground, the result of spring showers. Ahead on the right, another bluff rose like the prow of a ship, splitting the valley in two.
After ten minutes the road suddenly ended, or the paving did, the paving equipment was parked on the side waiting for the orders to go, in front stretched a broad gravel road. Cliff slowed to about sixty. Ahead on the right Paul saw a big industrial facility rising out of the floor of the dramatically narrower canyon they were now in. As they drove past, Paul saw a concrete plant and some other types of nondescript industrial facilities. On the far side was a huge staging yard containing immense concrete shapes, big round cornered concrete sections that had to be twenty feet tall and thirty wide on the inside. The complex looking joints and some pre-installed piping in the sidewalls were impressive.
Cliff pointed, “Sections of the canal pipe, the fabrication plant was set up here, about midway, because there’s a source of water and good quality sand nearby. The railway runs through here as well.” The SUV took a little air as they went over the physical reality of that comment a lot faster than Paul would have.
A mile further on there was a turnoff that they took to the right, heading straight for the bluff on that side. The ground rose in a long deceptively shallow slope for a half a mile and then the ground dropped away, hidden behind this glacis was a little town.
Paul had seen the steeple of the town’s central church as soon as they turned off and had been debating as to what it was. The road they were on passed to the right of the town along the lip of the rise that hid it from the outside. Paul could look down; it was like something out of a nineteen fifties propaganda piece. The town was laid out on a perfectly regular grid around a central park, on one side of which was what looked like a school and on the other the big church. The other two sides had what looked like stores. All of the houses were single story ranches, looking like they had come off a production line - which they might have - Paul realized they looked like they could be prefabs.
“What’s this Cliff?”
“It’s where I live Mr. Richards, a village some of us have established for ourselves, most of us work in the research facility that Aristide Industries has established here, instead of driving back and forth to Primus Junction proper we started a little town of our own. Figure that with the New Valley project and the new city this will be a nice location for the long run.” There was something vaguely stilted about that comment, and something oddly impermanent about the stolid little village below.
“Oh.” Was about the only response that Paul could come up with, he could think of a lot of questions but decided that he didn’t want to ask them here and now, instead, he asked a question that perhaps he should have asked before, “Where are we going?”
“Aristide Industries owns most of this area other than what the canal authority will own and our little town, the research center’s up in a hollow in the bluff ahead.”
The road turned sharply, passed a serious looking guard shack whose armed occupant waved them past, then headed up a steep cut in the side of the plateau. There was a concrete sided ditch for runoff, but the other side of the ditch was also concreted, almost as if it was designed for some large vehicle to climb up here.
The road came out on the top after a steep climb. There was a spectacular long view of desert and distant mountains for a few moments and then they dipped into a steep sided hollow. Suddenly and rather startlingly a neat and modern corporate campus surrounded them. On one side was a glass and native stone two-story office block, further along were more of the same then machine shops and a high bay fabrication shed. To the right was what looked like a two story hotel-cum-lodge, apparently the living quarters Cliff had mentioned earlier. There were a lot of small trees and bushes and some grass; surrounded by the reddish rock walls it was picturesque and a bit otherworldly.
The road continued wide and concreted up to the fabrication shed. There wasn’t a lot of movement around it right now but neither did it look abandoned, it had an expectant air. Cliff pulled up into a parking space in front of the office building. Sprinkled along the row of slots were five ZEVs, battery powered sons of golf carts, all plugged in.
The glass door on the front of the building opened and Cooper Paaly strode out with his arms outstretched. Paul couldn’t help himself from hopping out and striding over to meet his aging friend with a big hug. After that first silent greeting he stood back and looked Cooper over, the tall spare frame was skinnier than ever and the face was definitely old now, though the glow of the unquenchable fire burnt in his eyes. Paul tried to think of something to say.
Cooper smiled warmly, “It’s good to see you again Paul, it hurt me a great deal to have to cut myself off from you and I missed your insight and your constant prodding.”
Paul shook his head, “Let’s drop that Coop, we’ll never agree about the necessity of it. Still, I agree that it’s good to see you, you old reprobate, damn it, I realize now why I’ve been getting stale lately, I’ve not had you to yell at.” Paul found he was grinning up at the taller man.
The big physicist smiled down and then glanced over Paul, his face shifted a lit
tle, it wasn’t exactly unfriendly but it was cool, “Morning Cliff, thanks for picking Paul up for me.”
“You’re welcome Dr. Paaly, I’ll see you later, after you’ve introduced Paul to the problem,” there was a coolness in the other man’s voice as well and Cliff walked around them and into the building.
With a sigh Cooper watched Cliff’s stiff back vanish. “He’s a good man, but he’s angry with me for getting Richard to call on you. He wants a team of top people called in but Richard agrees with me that the problem requires insight, not a committee, and the longer we keep this under wraps the more chance we have of keeping some control over the technology.”
“I don’t know Coop, Cliff sounds like he might have the right idea. You know that most of the time you’re better off letting a breakthrough technology out and then building on what others do with it. Maybe if this were a new Coca Cola I’d understand, but this is a complex and very broad impact technology that will break and make industries Cooper. Trying to keep it locked up is pointless and even counterproductive.” He and Cooper stared at each other, one of their old conflicts alive almost in the instant of their reunion.
Cooper shook his head, “Maybe Paul, maybe, but it’s my technology, and now Richard Aristide’s.”
That shut Paul up as Cooper turned towards the building, waving Paul to follow. That last comment had been very atypical of Cooper, who had never been willing to share before, what had made that change he wondered?
-o-
Paul stared around him in some surprise. They’d walked through the office building and out the back, into the cliff behind. Apparently the office building was almost a window dressing for the main part of the operation, which was buried in a network of tunnels driven into the sandstone body of the bluff. The walls, floor and ceiling were all smoothly finished and the network of ducts and pipes running along the ceiling on one side of the tunnel was very neatly done. It was a very impressive facility, almost too impressive.
“Nice digs hey?” joked Cooper as he led Paul forward. At last they stopped and Paul stared again. The room was quite broad and tall with reinforced concrete walls, not the raw red sandstone of the bluff. Its layout was very much like the work area at Coopertek’s condo office, even down to the location of the Stack. The major difference was the way the Stack was connected, now there were two very large bore pipes connected to it with stainless steel bellows and it was connected to the floor with what looked like heavy shock mounts. There was also heavy power cable running into the chamber.
“What the hell, Cooper?” Paul waved at the chamber.
“I told you I found an anomaly Paul. Serendipity Paul, at its apex God laughing at us all.” Cooper’s voice was hoarse all of a sudden as he stared at the chamber with an avid expression.
Paul made to speak, Cooper Paaly held up his hand, “No, watch Paul, watch.” The tall gangling figure moved to a computer workstation at one side with a very new and big tablet display. He tapped the screen a couple of times and then scribbled his name on it when it flashed crimson. The display changed to show an instrument interface and Cooper tapped on several virtual buttons. He turned back to Paul and pointed at the chamber, “Watch.”
Looking closely Paul realized the chamber was literally chained to the floor with four stout sections of stainless steel links. As he watched in growing disbelief the chains shifted, the shock mounts relaxed then separated from the floor until there was a ‘thunk’ and a bobble as the chains reached the end of their slack. The bellows were now extended a good foot from where they had been and the windows in the chamber emitted a faint blue light.
There was a faint sound, the rushing noise of the gas handling system feeding the chamber and a growling snarl that was unfamiliar and a little chilling. Paul realized that the world was narrowing down as his mind fought to comprehend the incomprehensible. The chamber weighed at least half a ton, probably more, but there it sat, a good foot off the ground, quite obviously unconnected to anything that could have lifted it.
Cooper was there holding his arm, Paul realized he was swaying, his hands were ice cold and there was a faint internal whine overlying what he could hear, “The stars Paul, we have the stars. This is what I saw three years ago, in the middle of the night! I was at my wits end with that Stack we had decided was never going to work and I fed it power and more power, just trying to get it to do something!” A pause as he relived that moment, a chuckle, “And it did! The whole damned chamber started to slide sideways and rotate, and I realized it was no longer resting on the floor Paul! The damn thing nearly flipped over but I killed the power and it settled back down, three feet and almost ninety degrees away from where it started!”
“Jesus Christ Paaly! Why the hell didn’t you tell me, you damned maniac? We’d have been in Stockholm last year, you’ve gotta have broken every goddamned law in physics, it’s all out the blasted window! Don’t you know that? And you gave us the stars! What the hell have you been playing at?” Paul wanted to choke the life out of the tall idiot.
“Stockholm, Stockholm, always goddamned Stockholm with you? What is this fixation with the Nobel Prize, Paul? Somebody gore your ox or something?” Paaly sounded angry, which was unusual for him. The big physicist usually rode out the rages his behavior caused in others with placid unconcern.
Paul almost let his rage carry him on but Cooper’s comment had a lot of truth in it. To a large degree he was simply letting habit put words in his mouth, he had no real interest in the Nobel Prize, though the Navy’s Research office pinged him about it once a year, they’d funded Nobel Prize winning research in the past and it always looked good when reporting back to Congress.
He took a long deep cleansing breath and gazed blankly at the ceiling for a long moment before looking back at the chamber to make sure he wasn’t imagining things, then “Cooper this is really amazing but what do you want me for? You have everything you ever dreamed of here, what good is a second rank systems engineer going to do you?”
Cooper sighed, “Always the pragmatist at bottom and you never recognize your own genius. Paul, the problem is that I cannot make it scale, I thought I could, I thought I had it done, two times - but each time when we build the bigger Stacks I get a lot of heat and a burnt out Stack. And I cannot get the fusion Stack to work - and I need both of them Paul - the lift Stack and the power Stack - or I don’t have a system.”
-o-
Late that night Paul sat with his head on his hands thinking about a lot of things. An issue niggling at his mind was quite what was going on here in this hidden research facility. It seemed very focused on Cooper’s work and yet that made no sense. This facility, or at least a lot of it, had been here for some years. And who would have sunk the millions into building this place on the off chance that Cooper’s incredible discovery could be turned from startling parlor trick to practical propulsion system in a very short time? Having thought about that issue from all sorts of directions before, he very consciously set it aside and looked at the technical problem.
Some of what was being worked on was still a confused jumble to Paul. With much more money to work with Cooper had split his effort in two. One line was looking at the Paaly effect and trying to refine it, the other trying to get the fusion Stack to work. The two designs had diverged rather radically and the interior of the thrust Stack design no longer looked a lot like the designs Paul had worked with before.
What Cooper had discovered, again purely by accident, was that the molecule sized spin rings in the reactor, when they collapsed, formed a temporary artificial Monopole. The Monopole was a super massive fundamental particle, much more massive than a neutron, with a magnetic ‘charge’ of either North or South. It had been a holy grail of some physicists for the better part of half a century but had never been spotted until now. Maybe not even now, Coop thought that what was being created was an ephemeral doppelganger, but it certainly acted like the real thing.
Co
oper had quickly decided that the thrust Stack could look very different from one optimized for fusion power generation since the ring collapse that got the best Monopole generation was far from what their models said would be good for fusion. Paaly had given up on fusion in the thrust Stacks and converted to Argon, a much easier gas to work with. He had also radically modified the Stack design; there were no MHD generators. Now there was a much-simplified array of spin ring chambers on the various curving plasma feed manifolds, tens of thousands of little chambers in each sandwich section.
The thrust Stack, as Cooper had demonstrated, was quite predictable. From what he and his team had told Paul the system was remarkably reliable, and up to a certain power level it was quite efficient, converting something like eighty percent of the input energy into an equivalent amount of thrust. At the upper end of the power range the Stack was hard to keep cool and the efficiency rapidly fell away. Since they had no good theoretical model as to what was going on in the first place it was impossible to ‘design’ a solution. Instead they were varying parameters on several chambers and doing runs to see what effects the changes had, expensive and so far fruitless. They’d tried to increase gas flow rate and pressure but that had little effect. There was a team working on water-cooling the system but Cooper had his doubts and Paul thought it a fool’s quest, at least for now.
Looking at the design of the thrust Stack and looking back on the work it was rather amazing that their small team had been able to design the complex pattern that was etched into the silicon plates. But then that was like the job of a RAM memory designer, you did the complex stuff once and then just replicated it a million times across the plate. And the Paaly Stack, as remarkable as it was, was really quite simple in comparison to a modern computer chip.
They had spent a lot of time trying to get the coherent spin rings to fuse. With the new, expensive instruments available, Paul and Cooper’s conviction that they had succeeded had been confirmed, though the output was miserably low in any practical sense. What he had never known until today was that this other oddball effect was at work. The effect had remained hidden because the Gen I design had produced equal numbers of north and south poles, which had canceled themselves out. By chance they had designed the Gen II slices to produce all North poles. But also by chance all the early Gen II Stacks had been assembled in the same orientation, so that any reaction force generated had been pushing down into the floor, hiding the effect as well as the first design had.
Back at Coopertek, by accident, Coop had started to build the last one ‘upside down.’ When he realized he’d simply decided to continue rather than tear down five days of work and start again.
Without that simple ‘mistake’ it was quite likely that the Paaly effect as Cooper called it with typical assured arrogance, would have remained hidden, probably for a very long time since theoretical physics was probably decades, if not centuries, from developing a theory that would have predicted the effect, and the experimental physicists were off exploring along other avenues these days.
Shaking his head over the thrust Stack and its problems he turned his thoughts back to the fusion Stack. These results were even more puzzling. Cooper had fabbed the Gen III design that they had come up with after the ‘failure’ of the Gen II. He had apparently been pretty convinced it was going to work, which didn’t surprise Paul. Cooper was always convinced the next design would finally work. It was the only way the big man could possibly have kept going all these years; he simply discarded past failures and charged forward.
But the Gen III Stacks had failed to do much more than generate more excess helium and get hot. With the expensive detectors now available they could detect other fusion byproducts from the relatively ‘soft’ thermonuclear reactions inside the chamber so they knew that fusion was taking place, but the output power had never blipped more than a hair above the ‘recuperative’ level the MHD generators always produced. Looking at the data Paul could see that it was possible to read it as being above that level, but it could be interpreted other ways as well.
Paul shifted to look over at the old physicist. Cooper was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, mouth open, snoring softly. Paul dropped his chin back onto his fists which were sitting, one on top of the other, to provide him a little bit of altitude. He looked at the unit cells of the two designs, his thoughts spiraled into a confused half dream, his eyes crossed and his hands slipped, he cursed softly as he almost landed chin first on the table. He pulled himself erect and looked at the paperwork again. All these years of development in displays and it still came down to doodling on paper printouts sometimes!
He leaned back and closed his eyes and tried to think, perhaps to nap, sleep might be welcome at this point. His mind floated, pieces of data from the past and from briefings earlier in the day flowed back and he pictured what was going on. He was half asleep again when an image and an answer came to him, almost literally in a flash. His eyes popped open and he stared down, wanting to giggle. It all made sense; he could see why the new design appeared better up to a certain point, and then failed. The data was there but Cooper had charged past his data, as was his tendency when in the grips of a major effort, and none of the people in his team were working on the theory, or if they were they were way down in the details.
Paul could imagine the collapsing coherent ring suddenly leaping upwards under the impulse of the slice magnets and shattering against the top of the spin chamber. The holes in the original slices had provided vastly more time for reaction. Conversion efficiency might be higher than ninety percent up to a much higher power level.
Paul found he was wide awake and staring intensely at the rock wall, he reached for one of the tablets Cooper had brought out and tapped in some commands. He looked over some results and some charts and tables. He pulled up MathCAD and looked at the design and assembly numbers for the various Stacks that had been put together and the screwball results they had gotten in a couple of instances.
The image came back; he saw the coherent ring again, this time in the fusion reactor. As energy was input from the magnetic field the ring collapsed tighter and tighter, spinning faster and faster. The nuclei were moving at a large fraction of light speed just before fusion. But in his mind he saw the rings stuttering and almost going chaotic as the energy was input into them. This latest generation was more powerful and the excitation much quicker. They had long ago decided that the rings probably collapsed in a series of ‘quantized’ steps. If some of the original, long discarded thoughts were in fact right, the new system was pumping too much energy in too fast.
Paul looked fondly at the tall man shaking his head with a faint smile he whispered, “Cooper you idiot, you never learn from your little mistakes.”
Looking at his friend Paul grimaced, Cooper was aging almost visibly with his tragic illness, and he needed his rest. Paaly had wrapped a big throw rug around himself earlier, but it had slipped off in his sleep. Paul pulled it back up around the thin shoulders and tried to make sure it would not slip off again. The chair Cooper was in was a big overstuffed recliner where he had obviously slept before. Paul tried to make sure the old man was as comfortable as possible then walked down the tunnel for the exit. Cliff had shown him his comfortable little room during lunchtime; it was in the building across the narrow hollow.
There was a very wide man standing in the entrance vestibule as Paul came out of the tunnel. He was dressed in the black fatigues and jacket typical of modern police special operations or high-end security services and had a handgun in a quick draw holster. The man’s earboom was attached with one of the ‘tactical’ bands and had a wire down to what looked like a military radio rather than a phone. The security officer and Paul exchanged looks. The big man nodded politely, “Mr. Richards.”
Paul looked for a nametag but there was none, “Officer?”
The other nodded, “Mr. Sampson told us you’d be around, are you likely to b
e pulling all nighters frequently Mr. Richards?”
“It’s par for the course in this line of work I’m afraid, is there a problem?”
The big man shrugged, “Security is pretty tight here Mr. Richards, it’s not a good idea to go wandering around at night. Mr. Aristide has some really important stuff going on and we’re tasked with protecting it, we take that very seriously.” The threat was gentle but pointed enough.
Paul was a little angry, a little upset, but he’d done some stints around the nuke’s and the black program offices a few times. This guy was actually pretty civilized, “OK, message received, I’d like to get some sleep, do I need an escort?” He tried to keep his voice from getting snide.
He almost succeeded, the big guard didn’t take the faint hint amiss, there was even a glint of amusement, “No Mr. Richards go on ahead, just make sure you stay in the open.”
Paul nodded and headed for his bed, wondering what it was that Mr. Aristide was so protective of.