Origins (14 page)

Chapter 19:  Rain Man

A wave of
nostalgia washed over Mark as he pulled into the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center.  He’d spent the majority of his career working against the goals NASA strived to achieve, but oddly enough Mark had a strong affinity for the place. 

He held great respect for the contributions the program made to the country.  In his mind NASA was almost single handedly responsible for bringing the country into economic, technological, and military dominance.

The United States was not always on top.  In fact prior to World War II, the country barely cracked the top thirty list of most influential nations on the globe.  Most people attributed the nation’s rise to developing the atomic bomb first.  That technological advantage lasted a grand total of four short years; a relative flash in the pan.  Ascension from obscurity to superpower took a sustained technological edge for decades that the rest of the world was powerless to match.  NASA provided that edge.

Computers, integrated circuit boards, metallic alloys, heat shielding, fiber optics, Kevlar, nylon, and the ability to place satellites in orbit all came into commercial use after first being perfected by NASA to serve their needs.  Even the program’s failures and useless passion projects, like studying the dust particles trailing behind a comet, lead to new materials, new software, better propulsion systems, and the list went on and on. 

The only aspect of NASA Mark disliked was the people.  Some of the smartest individuals on the planet worked there.  They knew it and they usually felt a need to prove it to you every chance they got.  The mentality was if a person couldn’t solve differential equations without a calculator, that individual may as well sit in the corner quietly with a dunce cap on his head. 

Mark could put up with the arrogance though.  He took comfort that the rocket scientists may be geniuses in their particular subject matters, but most were borderline retarded in all other areas of life.  Every time he came to NASA it was almost like watching Dustin Hoffman play his Raymond Babbitt character from the movie
Rain Man
.

Mark had a theory about how this happened to such intelligent people.  The human brain could only hold so much information.  When it reached capacity, new information came in and caused something very basic and fundamental to squirt out the other side; never to be found again. 

In Mark’s estimation, an astrophysics student may learn the thrust to weight ratio needed for a rocket launch, but that student would lose the knowledge that pointing a champaign bottle at his face while trying to open it was a bad idea.

Mark parked his car, along with his nostalgia, in front of the three story concrete structure that was so creatively named the Kennedy Space Center
Headquarters building.  Couldn’t they have at least named it after one of their ultra smart rocket scientists Mark thought on his way to the building’s front entrance?

Waiting for him on the other side of security stood a particularly awkward young man.  His hair looked like he just rolled out of bed, and not in the stylized way people liked to do it these days.  His white shirt and sinfully ugly brown tie had coffee smears on them, which was in addition to the green stains creeping out from under the kid’s armpits.  To round off the package was a breast pocket full of pens and the mother of all calculators nestled inside.

The kid’s eyes shifted side to side and never looked higher than Mark’s neck as he approached.  Mark came to a stop three feet away from his greeter and stood staring at the kid’s forehead, waiting patiently for eye contact to be made.  The young man visibly struggled against his natural instinct to look away and slowly lifted his head. 

“Hello, hi.” The kid squeaked rapidly.  “Dr. Kranz asked me to escort you to the conference room.”  With the words spok
en the young man let out a sigh of relief and lowered his head once more.

“Hi yourself,” Mark exclaimed sarcastically matching the high pitched tone of the salutation.  He held the tone for his question, “Who is escorting me today?”

“It’s not nice to make fun of people,” the kid said as his head came up again and his eyes once again darted from side to side only accidentally making full eye contact.  “I’m Jeremy, the payload specialist for the deep space communication probe program.”

“Wow. I’ll bet you can’t say that five times fast without pulling a muscle,” Mark teased.  “Listen, you look like a nice kid Jeremy but tell me why the hell I’m
standing here talking to a pissant payload specialist and not Alfred Kranz himself?”

Jeremy looked like he was about to run away screaming, but to his credit he stayed put.  “I’m here because Dr. Kranz called me into his office six minutes ago and said to bring that nosey, pain in the ass National Security Agent to the conference room since the two minutes he would waste doing it himself was more than you deserve.”

The words leaving Jeremy’s mouth must have reached comprehension in the young man’s mind because the kid instantly snapped his head up with panic in his eyes.

“Well you’re a chatty one aren’t you?” Mark said through a half grin. The lips may have smiled, but the rest of him was plotting the kid’s demise.  “Why don’t we forget talking anymore and you just take me to Alfred?”

True to the request, Jeremy escorted Mark, in silence, into a tiny conference room where flight director, Alfred Kranz, stood with his back to the door.  His hands were held behind his back as he looked out the exterior window.  With his escort task complete, Jeremy slinked off into the sea of cubicles to do whatever payload specialists do at NASA.

“Thank you for providing an honor guard escort for me, Alfred.  Your boy Jeremy is quite the charmer.”

The flight director turned away from the window and gestured towards a side table where an already opened and half finished bottle of water sat.  “Can I offer you something to drink?”

“No thanks.  This nosey, pain in the ass NSA agent had a drink on the way over.  Thanks for the offer though.  You really pull out all the stops to make a guest feel welcome.”

“Cut the crap.  I have better things to do than play a game of verbal masturbation with the likes of you.  Why are you here?  Why does my deep space communication probe mission warrant a visit from the NSA?”

“You’ve always been my favorite here, Alfred.  You get right to the point and I like that,” Mark praised. 

“I take it we’ve met before then,” Alfred interrupted.  “It must have been far more meaningful for you because to me you look like any other NSA stooge.  I hate when you people are around.  Your proximity and the probability of things going wrong appear to have a direct correlation.”

“Are you implying I’m some sort of bad luck charm?” Mark asked.

“I don’t think luck has anything to do with it,” Alfred shot back.

“Like I said, you get right to the point, so let me reciprocate in kind,” Mark said with a frosty edge on his words.  “You’ve spent ten billion dollars on this little passion project of yours.  That money would have been better spent in thousands of other places.  An aircraft carrier complete with a full fighter wing certainly comes to mind.  The president wants to make sure he’s getting his money’s worth.”

“The president is well aware that every dollar invested in NASA eventually adds ten dollars to the nation’s economy,” the NASA flight director stated.  “I thought you were going to get to the point.”

“I’d still prefer having an aircraft carrier at the end of the day, but what do I know.  The real concern is the safety of the reactor that powers your probe.  Its design has a rather questionable track record, wouldn’t you say?  It’s the sort of thing that keeps people like me tossing and turning all night, and it certainly falls under the umbrella of national security.”

Alfred’s face grew red as his anger level rose.  “The first fusion reactor was built on the cheap by the military according to a politician’s time table.  All the best minds this country has to offer were kept on the sidelines.  The accident that came as a result was not a question of if, but rather when it would happen.”

“An accident,” Mark repeated with surprise.  “You certainly have the knack for understating things a bit.  A quarter million people died in that
‘accident.’  With that as a frame of reference, I’m scared to ask what might pass as an earth-shattering catastrophe in your book.”

“You’re right of course,” Alfred conceded.  “I suppose I downplay the fallout in my mind as a coping mechanism, but that situation was vastly different than this project.”

“How’s that?” Mark asked.  “You’re constructing a fusion reactor with the same design.  Some define insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.  This begs the question Alfred, are you insane?”

The flight director pulled out a chair and took a seat.  He gestured for Mark to do the same.  Mark chose instead to stand and lean against the table directly over Alfred Kranz.  The subtle play to gain a dominant posture didn’t go unnoticed by either man.  The flight director politely sat in his chair with a smug look on his face that made Mark want to throw Alfred right out the window.   Doing that would certainly end the probe mission’s threat. 

“All this was detailed in the original project plan I submitted and got approved five years ago,” Alfred began.  “Your line of questioning implies you’re either too lazy to read the documents for yourself or too stupid to understand them without an interpreter.  Allow me to give you the Cliff Notes version, and I’ll use small words so I don’t lose you.”

Now Mark’s face began turning flush as he struggled to contain his anger.

“The military chose to construct their reactor on the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia for two reasons.  It was done first and foremost to maintain secrecy.  If knowledge about a functional fusion reactor got out the world would be thrown into instant chaos.”

“Well, now you’re overstating things.  Are you bipolar by any chance?” Mark asked rhetorically.  “Working in the NSA requires me to be a perpetual cynic of human nature, and even I don’t buy what you’re saying.  Why would a reactor capable of generating almost unlimited amounts of energy with virtually no environmental impact cause such trouble?”

“Trillions of dollars are dedicated around the globe to the exploration and refinement of energy,” Alfred instructed.  “How would the financial markets react if all those investments were suddenly worth nothing?  How would a middle eastern country floating atop a sea of oil react if the market price of that oil suddenly dropped to five cents a barrel versus the hundred dollars a barrel we see today?”

“When you put it that way, it would certainly make a tempting terrorist target,” Mark added.

“Look at you standing there using your brain,” Alfred mocked.  “I’ll bet someone on my team could build a machine to harness those brain waves to toast my bagel in the morning - very lightly of course.”

“Now who’s not getting to the point fast enough?” Mark asked through gritted teeth.

Mark of course knew every detail of what the director just said from the proposal documents and internal NSA papers.  Mark was willing to play the fool to gain an edge on this mission, but it didn’t make absorbing the insults and sarcasm any easier.  Alfred was skating on very thin ice.

“The second reason the military chose to construct the fusion reactor under water was to contain the impact of any catastrophic accidents,” Alfred continued with a smirk lighting the corners of his mouth.  “The fusion reactor basically creates a miniature sun generating incredible amounts of heat.  It was assumed the shear mass of the ocean’s volume would dissipate the heat and absorb any shockwave.”

“Well the heat from the explosion wasn’t an issue, though the following couple years were unusually hot around the globe, but the shockwave from the blast was another matter,” Mark said.  “It resulted in a 9.3 earthquake that lasted almost ten minutes and the tsunami enveloped the entire coastline of the Indian Ocean.  I think none of us would be here had that explosion gone off on dry land.”

“Indeed,” Alfred agreed.  “That’s why our reactor was constructed in space this time.  In addition, the reactor won’t be brought on line until it’s at least a quarter million miles away from Earth.  It’ll pose no threat at all.  It’s the ideal way to test the technology.”

“So what went wrong with the first reactor causing it to blow?” Mark asked.  He knew the answer already but he was curious to hear the director’s interpretation of events.

“The magnetic field containing the fusion reaction broke down,” Alfred replied with sorrow creeping into his voice.  “There was a defective watertight seal on one of the electro magnets.  It broke down and allowed a miniscule amount of water to seep in.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to disrupt the flow of electricity to the magnets.  The field collapsed and the fusion reaction hit the outside elements causing an unparalleled explosion.”

Mark was glad to hear there was no suspicion of foul play from the director.  The truth of the matter was the seal was not defective at all.  It performed its function flawlessly, though the extent of the explosion was light years beyond what anyone at the NSA expected.  Dirty business most definitely went on underground back in Maryland, Mark thought.

“Thank you for the education,” Mark said while reaching out to shake his hand.  “It was most enlightening.”

Alfred didn’t move a muscle.