Chapter 14: Science Fiction

It took Travis half a day to make his way to Glasgow. First was a helicopter flight to Sumburgh, with the pilots nervously searching the sky for a disk, followed by a commercial turboprop flight to Aberdeen. In Aberdeen he rented the first thing he could get, a Vauxhall Corsa, a car he had never heard of and hoped never to drive again. Two-and-a-half hours later he was in a parking lot of a local motel, following the GPS directions sent to him by his contact.

That contact turned out to be a heavyset man in his late thirties named William ‘Billy’ Turnbull. He was leaning against his own car, a Mercedes hybrid. He waved and Travis went over. They introduced themselves and Travis commented, “I like the car! Can we trade?”

Billy smiled and said, “Thanks. I drove up this morning. No trade. My wife has one of those and I can’t stand it. What’s the plan?”

“It’s too late in the day to grab these guys. Can we get rooms?”

“That’s why we’re meeting here.” He handed over a keycard. “I’ll give you what we have so far. And in the morning?”

“We find this research team and figure out if they invented time travel.”

“And if they have?”

Travis grimaced. “Then we find out what the hell happened and shut it down. I don’t know what your people have come up with, but nobody back home thinks time travel is a good idea to get involved in.”

Billy shrugged and nodded. “Wait until somebody decides to go back in time to kill Hitler early, or worse, bring him back to the future and turn him loose! No thank you!”

“You think that’s bad, wait until the Pope decides to send back a drone to take a video of the Crucifixion and they find that Jesus didn’t actually die on the Cross, but it was some other poor schmuck, and that Jesus snuck out of town, moved to Haifa, married a local girl, and got a job on a cruise ship in the Med!”

“If not that, you know something else is going to come out,” agreed Billy.

“Who are you with, Five or Six?” asked Travis, referring to MI5 and MI6. The former was the Security Service, the British counterintelligence agency, while the latter was the Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s CIA. The MI referred to the origins of the two agencies as departments of Military Intelligence during World War II.

“Five. Six isn’t allowed to operate inside the country, like you’re not allowed to in the States.”

“How authorized are you, at least in this case?”

Billy flicked his jacket open, to show a pistol in a shoulder holster. “Fully authorized.”

“Let me drop off my stuff and we can grab a late dinner, and if you order up a haggis, I am going to shoot you with your own gun!”

Turnbull just laughed and pointed Travis to the motel.

The next morning, they met for breakfast and then climbed into Billy’s Mercedes. “Definitely beats what I have at home,” commented Travis.

Billy replied, “I live a truthful and honest life full of virtue and wonder. At least that’s what I tell my mother.”

“I tell mine I drink, smoke, and do drugs. She just wants to know if my supplier is better than hers.”

Billy laughed loudly. “Let’s go find this bunch.”

“Anything more on these guys?”

“Same as we had last night. The Ministry is still denying everything, but that won’t last. By now the tabloids must have bought photos from SPOT.” SPOT was a French commercial satellite company that would sell satellite imagery to anybody with a credit card. While not as good as the current American, Russian, and Chinese satellites, the imagery was more than sufficient to photograph a Viking longship from five hundred miles up. “It’s mostly a British team, but the research team leader is one of you, an American ex-pat. He met his first wife here when he was going to school in Edinburgh, and he got into the faculty here in Glasgow. Then they got divorced and he stayed. He’s the brains in the project, but nobody understands what they are up to. We need to figure it out before we do anything else.”

They continued chatting until Turnbull pulled into a university parking lot and parked the car. Travis said, “Lead the way.”

The pair went into a nondescript building between the Kelvin Building and the Library. Turnbull stated that they were only meeting with the team leader, Paul Hammersmith. “We’re ostensibly from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, here to review their latest grant application. They did the first grant. They occasionally get funding from your side of the pond, so that’s why you’re here.”

“Works for me,” replied Travis.

Turnbull went to the office and knocked on the door. “Come in!” came from the other side.

The two men entered the office and found Hammersmith sitting at his desk, a tablet computer laying on the desk in front of him. “Doctor Hammersmith?” asked Turnbull.

Hammersmith stood up. He was an average looking man possessed of a deep voice and thinning hair. “Yes.”

“I’m Billy Turnbull and this is Travis Shockley. We’re from Rutherford Appleton and are here to discuss your latest grant application. Did you get the word we were coming?”

Hammersmith smiled and stuck out his hand. “Yes, yes, thank you for coming! I got the call late yesterday. Happy to have you. How can I help?” The academic was looking forward to securing additional funding for the locus project. He waved them to a pair of armchairs facing his desk.

Travis took over. “Doctor, I’m new on the staff at Rutherford Appleton and am still getting up to speed. Could you take a minute and explain just what quantized multidimensional translation is?”

Hammersmith smiled. “It is quite a mouthful, isn’t it? We need to take it a piece at a time. The quantized, of course, refers to quantum theory, in this case the quantum gravitational aspects of Unified Field Theory. Multidimensional refers to the calculations involved. We need a supercomputer to chew through the seventeen dimensions that control gravitation in the space-time continuum. Finally, the translation involves translation among the various axes in the specified dimensions.”

“Seventeen dimensions?” commented Travis. Whatever this guy was talking about went way over his head, but he needed to figure it out.

“Seventeen in the final calculations. There are several more theoretical dimensions, but they are so brief and fleeting they cancel each other out.”

“And the final purpose of this is energy production?” asked Billy.

“Yes, though everything we are seeing shows that there are quite a few more possibilities.”

“And this is done here?”

“Downstairs. Care to see? We might find a few of the team there.”

“That would be very nice,” said Travis. “Could we?”

“Absolutely! We always want to show where the money goes!” Hammersmith popped out of his chair and led the two representatives from the research lab down two floors to the energy lab.

Another man was sitting in the lab in front of a computer screen. He looked up as Hammersmith led the pair in. Introductions were made. “Doctor Stevens is in charge of monitoring the system, but that includes operating the system. One of his people actually does the monitoring.”

“I guess that makes you number two around here?” asked Billy.

“Maybe so, but only regarding the hardware. Paul is the theoretician,” answered Stevens.

“Understood.”

“So, what does this involve?” asked Travis.

Hammersmith went over to a whiteboard and erased it. “The basic theory starts with one of the fundamentals of relativity, the gravity well associated with a planetary body.” He quickly sketched a curved funnel on the whiteboard. “This shows better on a computer, but it’s easier to draw on the board. This is a two-dimensional version. We have here a single dimension for a locational axis, X, Y, or Z, and a secondary axis showing the gravitational potential.”

Travis had seen pictures of a gravitational well in textbooks, so he faked an understanding and said, “I’m following you. How does this relate to energy production?”

“The gravitational potential is entirely related to energy production!” Hammersmith responded excitedly. He drew a set of parallel lines between two points on the funnel and said, “At any two points on the gravity well you have a gravitational potential, just like between the top of a hill and the bottom. If we can tap that potential, we can tap an infinite amount of energy! The more energy we need, we simply need to move the two points farther apart!”