“I agree. Yet, it doesn’t seem like the rods should work at all. Remember when we started out? The thing that held us back for weeks was that we didn’t think they could possibly work.
When we finally settled down and tried making some rods, they worked. And here we are today.
I’d suggest that there is a hole in physics and the rods are pointing this out to us, operating in the cracks as it were.”
“So what now?” Tom Barrel, a tall, thin black in his twenties asked.
“I want you guys to generate all the information we’ll need to…uh…”
“Warp space,” Steve finished.
“Yeah,” I said looking perplexed. ” It still sounds impossible doesn’t it?”
They all laughed. Sometimes, that’s the job of a good team leader; make the individuals relax so that they don’t cut each other’s throats.
“Well, to heck with the impossibility. Give me the calculations I’ll need to set up…oh…let’s call them gates. Give me the calculations to set up space-warping gates to get to each of the planets in our solar system. And maybe even a few of the close stars.”
I looked at each of the young faces in front of me. It was beginning to sink in, I thought. We might be working out a way other than sub-light speed travel to quickly hop to the stars!
“What are we going to call this formula and theory?” Tom asked.
“That’s simple,” Fran said. “Hunter’s Principle.”
There was a murmur of agreement among the team.
“Let’s don’t worry about naming it right now,” I said. I liked the sound of it but wanted to at least appear to be humble. “Just get the information generated so we can test this all out when we get to the Moon.” I left them, knowing that they’d probably give me much more than I was asking for.
Hunter’s Principle. I liked the sound of that. And if the calculations proved correct, rather than being an intellectual dead end, our little Moon base was apt to change the course of human history even more than I cared to imagine. We might soon be opening up gateways that lead to the stars.
Chapter 26
The news conference was a let down. It was as good as we’d hoped for. Better. Jake’s lot was packed with news cars and vans. But I was tired of being in such a constant state of flux and was ready to return to being inconspicuously ordinary.
There were hundreds of reporters, each holding a mini-cam and asking a barrage of either intelligent or idiotic questions but never anything in between. After Nikki put the van through its paces for them, I could almost see the electricity flowing through each brain as they realized the possibilities of the rods. Nothing like an old van, pocked with bullet holes and dented from crashes, to blow minds as it does acrobatics in the air overhead.
“Here’s something else of interest,” I said after the van landed. “Monny Prell, a design engineer we’ve picked up, has rigged this little generator from the rods. Now… we’ll hook up a couple strings of electric lights and some power equipment…” A bunch of us quickly had a string of appliances and lights running off the generator. “That’s about what a small apartment uses. The cost of the generator, if they were produced on a large scale, would be about one week’s salary.
As you can see, for a small price, every home in the world can afford to make their own power for household appliances.”
The questions stopped after that for a minute while everyone mulled it over.
“I’m having Tom hand out some little sections of rods we’ve cut out of the last of the rods we’ve made. I figured that having a little bit of a rod in your hand, trying to keep it from floating away, would give you something to remember us by.”
There was a mad scramble by reporter to get one of the rod sections. Tom had trouble keeping his footing in the jostle but finally got the sections more or less distributed to the press.
I lectured a bit more then finished up my sales pitch, “The time of massive generators, pollution, and terrorist acts that leave us… in the dark… are soon to be things of the past,” I said.
“Now, I’d like—”
The reporters had recovered. Not willing to let me finish where I wanted to, they started calling out questions.
“Will you ever make flying belts for individuals?” a dark-haired woman toward the back of the group asked.
“We thought about that,” I said. “But it’s too dangerous. If you get your legs in the way, it can cause severe injury when the rods try to push your feet away from your body. Too, if you miscalculate just a little, it would be easy to drop like a rock. Some day, we might be able to make an array of pin-sized rods and have them controlled by miniature servo motors and a computer… Until then, though, a flying belt would be a terribly dangerous way of traveling.”
I fielded a few more trivial questions then Jake stepped up to the car that was serving as my stage and pointed to his fingernail watch. Time to go.
“One final thing,” I said. ” If each of you will focus your cameras on this sheet of paper…”
Everyone did. “This won’t make much sense to most viewers. It’s the formula for making the rods. The process isn’t quite as simple as the formula, but anyone with a little metallurgical know-how can pull it off with the data on this sheet. Anyone watching out there has my official authorization to use my formula to create as many rods as they wish. There will be no patent rights to this technology. It’s public domain. You can use the technique privately or sell rods for a profit. It’s up to you. This is our—the research team that helped me produce this as well as myself-
-this is our gift to the world.”
That will also take the heat off us, I added to myself; the genie was now out of the bottle as the formula was beamed at the speed of light around the global communications satellites to homes and offices around the world. The Net and 3Vs would make sure it could never be suppressed or hidden.
Jake stepped up beside me, “Sorry folks but that’s all the time we have.”
Amid some clapping and shouted questions that I did my best to ignore, Jake and I pushed our way through the crowd as each of our little band got into their assigned vehicles and our caravan of thirty-six cars and vans lifted off together.
We nearly squashed one gung-ho reporter who decided to try to get a shot from below the vehicles and instead got flattened by the gravity wash in the process. He struggled back to his feet with a broken camera and a bloody nose, making a good object lesson for the folks back home as to how dangerous the rods could be.
I knew things were going too well.
Sure enough, no sooner were we in the air than a fighter dropped down from the clouds, screeching over us with a sonic boom that visibly rocked the cars and vans floating in the hot Texas air. There was no way of knowing if the plane was really out to get us or to impress the news people; one canister of napalm then and there would have done it, so I figured he must be aiming to spare the reporters and take out our space caravan. At any rate, the plane just went overhead on the first pass.
“Get going,” I said into my radio to the other vehicles. “Get into your orbit as soon as possible. We’ll try to hold this guy off here if we can and catch up to you as soon as possible. If we don’t make it, the sealed envelopes we gave you will show how to program your computers to get to the base on the moon that we’re headed for.”
The vehicles flashed skyward in the hot Texas air. Meanwhile the fighter was just slowing down enough to make a low-altitude turn and was headed back, the hot air distorting its distant image so it waved and flickered like a ghost on the horizon.
As the fighter approached, a missile dropped off its wing and came flashing toward us.