Class Fives: Origins (8 page)

“I believe that what we would find there is nothing less than the thing that caused all that we know, see, and experience in our entire universe in the first place. I believe we would at last observe God. Not merely observe, but interact with it, directly.

“If I am correct, one day I hope to stand here and at long last give the world the one thing it has been reaching for since the beginnings of human civilization. Metaphorically speaking, I hope to give you God’s phone number.”

The silence in the great room was absolute.

Joe Franklin stood looking down at the long, wide table, his eyes casting slowly over the large top page of the schematics. They were yellow with age and bore small smudges of dirt or perhaps ink, indicating extensive previous display in a working environment.

Currently his gaze was fixed on one particular section, an exploded view of a fist-sized sub-circuit that would eventually jut from the side of the completed device, and would contain most of the controls.

“Go on,” the voice issuing from the speaker phone prompted calmly.

“Well,” Joe responded, with a faint sigh of resignation, “Like I told you, I can’t do the main control circuitry unless I know what the impedance rating of the central power coupling is supposed to be. Otherwise, if it’s not right, if we use the wrong materials, it could burn out as soon as the current is applied.”

“And that information,” the voice replied, “Is not shown on the schematics?”

“No, it’s not,” Joe responded. “There’s a reference here to another document which, I assume, is detail on the required metallurgy of all the power-bearing components. I don’t suppose you have a copy of that?”

“Alas, no,” the voice said thoughtfully.

Joe nodded slowly, despite the fact that the man with whom he was talking was at the other end of a phone.

“Yeah, I kind of thought so,” Joe said resignedly.

“So how do we correct this?” the voice said.

Joe took a further moment to let his gaze sweep over the aging paper containing its myriad sharply etched lines, text and symbols.

The entire project was quickly approaching the point at which he would prefer to abandon it rather than put up with any additional frustration and his growing sense of discomfort.

This set of plans, fifty four pages in all, had arrived rolled up tightly in a shipping tube a little over three weeks ago, the day after he’d received that first mysterious phone call. The client, who had only identified himself as Dr. Walter Montgomery, had said Joe had been recommended to him as a capable independent electrical engineer who made much of his living by fabricating prototype electronic devices for various clients. He had worked for major corporations, constructing experimental equipment for testing, and had a growing reputation with a few development companies who would receive bright ideas for new devices of various kinds from eager, hopeful, would-be amateur inventors, who had no clue how to transform their brainstorms into working models. The companies would pass them along to Joe and, for a fee, he would see if these products of imagination could be made, and if they would actually function as intended.

One of his key attractions for doing such work was his discretion. He made it a flat, unbending rule that what he did, how he did it and any other information about anything he did, was strictly between himself and his client. If the client paid his fee, then what happened to his work was none of his business once he turned it over to them.

As a result, over the years, he had found himself constructing a few devices that could easily be used as components of weapons, and one time he had actually taken a stab at building a crude electromagnetic rail gun, intended to propel a one-inch diameter metal bolt at tremendous speed using only the power of a magnetic field. That project had been abandoned by the client when he was informed of just how much power would be needed to make the thing function properly.

But this project was beginning to make him feel a growing sense of discomfort. For one thing, the plans were old, having originally been drawn decades ago, and clearly having spent at least some time spread out on a long table, just like the one before which he now stood, and poured over by who knows how many people. For another, the notations and text were in Russian Cyrillic.

“Dr. Montgomery,” he said at last, his tone cautious, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” the voice responded.

Joe hesitated, searching for a delicate way to pose the question.

“Can you tell me the specific purpose of this device? What its function is supposed to be?”

“Is it important that you know that?” the voice replied, and now the tone was quiet, cautious.

“It would certainly help,” Joe countered. “I mean, if it’s meant for sustained, continuous operation, then that would be one thing. But if its function is, say, as some sort of… initiator, that would be something else entirely.”

The voice did not respond immediately, and when it did, it was flat, slow and thoughtful.

“Is it necessary for you to understand all that in order to complete it?”

Joe paused, thought a long moment.

“I’m going to have to say yes,” he finally stated. Then quickly added, “I know I agreed to do it just based on the schematics, but the… unusual nature of them, and the fact that there is some crucial information missing means I’ll need to understand what its ultimate purpose is supposed to be. If I know that, I can maybe create some kind of work-around when I hit a snag. Like now.”

This time the voice did not respond for several long seconds, and when it did it was somewhat crisp and flat in tone.

“And if you have this information you will be able to create a functioning model?”

“I should be able to, yes.”

This pause was long enough to cause Joe’s discomfort to climb to an itch at the back of his neck.

“Very well. It is a lens for a modified particle accelerator.”

Instantly several perplexing questions dropped into place in Joe’s mind.

“Ah,” he said, quietly, “That would explain a few things. Particles. Not a laser.”

“No,” the voice countered firmly, “The stream will not be photons.”

Again Joe nodded absently.

“Can you tell me what kind of stream it will be?”

The voice seemed to hesitate.

“Something… archaic.”

Thanks, Joe thought sourly, that helps loads.

“So,” the voice continued, “Is that enough information to progress with actual construction?”

“Well, it certainly answers some questions that were bugging me, yes. Okay, then. I can finish up the rest of the components and start construction of this part later in the week.”

“Excellent.”

“There is one additional stumbling block,” Joe added.

“Which is?”

“If my Russian isn’t too rusty, I’m going to need quite a large amount of titanium, and I don’t know if you were aware of it but that is a federally controlled substance. After all, it’s what they build things like fighter jets out of.”

“How much will you need?” the voice responded immediately.

“At least six hundred pounds in sixteenth-inch sheets.”

“I will have it to you by the end of the week,” the voice responded simply.

And it was that statement, more than anything else, that had popped up on this project since he’d first received the plans, that caused a chill to trickle down Joe’s spine.

If this guy, whoever he was, could get his hands on that much titanium, then he must be some sort of major player. Government, maybe?

“Okay,” he responded simply. “In that case I’ll start fabricating the circuitry tomorrow.”

“How long will it take before the prototype is completed?”

Joe considered.

“Give me…. A few weeks. By then you should have a working unit for testing. Another couple of weeks to tune and you’ll be good to go.”

He could hear the long, deep breath being drawn on the other end of the phone line, then the expelling of the air as a decision was made.

“Very well,” the voice said. “Please keep me informed of your progress.”

“And the second payment?” Joe said, trying to sound casual.

“I will wire it tomorrow,” the voice responded, an edge of annoyance in the sound. “Same bank account, I assume?”

“Yes, that should do nicely.”

“Then I shall speak to you again next week, Mr. Franklin.”

“I will expect your call. And I hope you have a good evening.”

“Oh, you can count on it, Mr. Franklin. Goodbye.”

The line clicked off before Joe could toss back his own farewell.

He punched the button to kill the speakerphone.

“Particle accelerator, my ass,” he muttered to himself.

He knew what a particle accelerator was like. He had studied the mechanics of those and a number of other complex scientific devices in graduate school. And this was no particle accelerator. Yes, its function was the collection and channeling of something, but it didn’t use magnetic fields and it was configured all wrong.

A particle accelerator was used to channel subatomic particles along a circular track, moving them at speeds approaching that of light itself. Then those tiny blobs of matter would be deliberately slammed head-on into other particles and blow apart, revealing even smaller bits and pieces of the stuff of nature that could be photographed and studied and catalogued. He’d always thought of the particle accelerator as the biggest possible tool in the world designed to take apart the universe’s smallest possible objects.

But this thing, whatever it was, would be, essentially, inert. Sure, it used a considerable amount of electricity, but to do what? It didn’t convert it to heat, or light or even a magnetic field. It didn’t store it up and release it in one massive electromagnetic pulse. It just routed it around in seemingly meaningless ways. The power went in and simply never came out, in any form.

So what did that mean, he wondered? Would it just heat up and melt? You couldn’t push that many electrons into such a confined space without it attempting to escape in some way.  It would have to go somewhere, into something.

Unless, he reasoned, it actually would be expelled, but in a form he wasn’t familiar with. Not light, not heat, not magnetic fields or electromagnetic pulses. Something new? A new force? And if so, what?

It’s a converter, he realized. Power and something else entered at one end, where there would be a lot of stored electrical energy, and something entirely new emerged at the other end. But what?

A weapon, he thought. It’s some kind of weapon. Something new. Something powerful.

He sighed and let his gaze sweep over the sheet of schematics.

I’m going to have to ask for more money, he told himself.

Roger sighed, glanced in his rearview mirror and gently flicked the turn signal, indicating he would like to ease over into the left lane. The traffic on the Interstate was heavy but moving along at a remarkably fast clip, and naturally there was the usual scattered collection of idiots, darting from lane to lane, slipping in just inches in front of other vehicles.

Why, he wondered, do they do that? It wasn’t as if they’d actually save any time in getting to their destinations. He personally wasn’t all that worried about getting to his own appointment. It was just another seemingly meaningless sit-down with officers of the small marketing firm he was designing the web site for. They would sit around a big table and bombard him with their latest brilliant ideas for new bells and whistles to add to the web pages, that would allow them to do all kinds of amazing things, and he would patiently explain to them once more that all they would accomplish would be to slow down the time it took that page to load, particularly if the visitor’s system didn’t already have installed the various small chunks of script programming to run the applications. The likely result would be that after a dozen or so seconds of staring at a blank browser, the potential customer would move on to some other site, some other company, and do business there instead.

He’d already explained this to them several times, and he would most likely have to do so again this morning. In a way they were acting like moderately spoiled children. Having been told “no,” they had gone off to try and figure out yet another way to obtain what they wanted, ignoring his continuing admonishments that the technology required to run their elaborate visions of what they wanted simply didn’t normally exist on most personal computers. But they were paying for his services and he had an obligation to hold their hands through the process, make them understand that there was often a wide gap between what one wanted and what was possible.

With any luck he would be able to get the point across to them quickly, perhaps endure a lunch with a few of them, then head back home and actually get something useful done today. He leaned forward, reaching for the dial of the radio, intending to find something to listen to other than the blaring, screeching wail of guitars and drums that was attempting to pass for music. Just as his fingers closed delicately around the knob, it happened. A sharp blare of a horn from somewhere ahead of him cut through the morning air, followed almost instantly by the loud shout of a truck horn. Screaming brakes cut through the shrill noise, and then the bang of crumpling metal and exploding glass. The taillights of every vehicle packed into the lanes before him flared bright red and Roger carefully pressed his own brakes, feeling the sudden deceleration of his car. Behind him he heard tires squealing, and a hope flitted across his mind that whoever that was they didn’t slam into his rear.

But his attention was yanked off to the side of the road ahead where a massive eruption of smoke was boiling up from the side of the highway. And at the bottom of the ugly, roiling, dark column he could make out flames licking upward, snatching at the escaping vaporous cloud. Holy crap, he managed to think as his car finally jerked to a stop and he fixed on the site of the obvious accident, no more than a few hundred yards ahead and off to the right side of the concrete ribbon on which he now sat.

What the Hell happened, he wondered?