I glanced up. The librarian, who'd been waiting to catch my eye, nodded toward the clock on the wall behind her. I looked around and realized I was the only person in the room. I'd lost track; it was a Saturday and the library closed early.
Outside, the rain had given way to the starlit sky of a passing cold front. I pulled up my collar and started down the street, dodging puddles that shimmered under the streetlights. The anomaly over gravity's measurement and the uncertainties over its causes only served to tell me how incomplete my knowledge of physics was.
I reached the edge of the common. The lights of my home street were faintly visible through the trees. I thought about my late-night call from Abelman. In the week since her approach to Trimble and his initial favorable response to the idea of an interview, it very much appeared that somebody had gotten to him. And then I thought about what I had just learned. If we had no real understanding of gravity, how could people say with such certainty that antigravity could not exist?
In 1990, the U.S. Air Force had been looking at developing a weapon capable of firing a "plasma bullet" — a doughnut-shaped ring of ionized gas — at 10,000 kilometers per second.
Shiva Star was capable of generating and holding up to 10 megajoules of electrical energy and a potential 10 trillion watts — three times as much as the entire U.S. electricity grid carried in a year. At the time that I visited Shiva, which was located within the USAF's directed energy research laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, program engineers had been readying to fire a plasma bullet sometime in 1995. The purpose of the bullet was to destroy incoming Russian nuclear warheads and, despite some fierce technological challenges, the program engineers were confident they could do it. But several years later, when I returned to Kirtland, it was like the plasma bullet project never existed. Engineers had difficulty even recalling it.
Officially, it had been terminated on cost grounds. But this made little sense. The program had been budgeted at $3.6 million per year for five years. Eighteen million bucks to produce a true quantum leap weapon system. Few people I spoke to bought the official version. Somewhere along the way, they said, Shiva must have delivered. Somewhere along the line, the program had gone black.
I coupled this knowledge with what the antigravity proponents had been saying in 1956. If you could find a way of shielding objects from the effects of gravity, the military, let alone the economic ramifications would be enormous.
Aircraft propulsion seems to have progressed little in appreciable terms since the advent of the jet engine in the 1940s. Incremental improvements for decades have been of the order of a few percentage points. The fastest aircraft in the world — officially, at least — is still the Lockheed Blackbird, designed in the late 1950s, first flown in 1962 and retired in 1990.
Amongst my peers, there had been speculation since the late 1980s about the existence of a secret replacement for the Blackbird, a mythical plane called Aurora that supposedly flew twice as fast and on the edges of space. I had no direct evidence of Aurora, but then I'd never gone looking for it either. On balance, though, I felt something had been developed. In 1992, circumstantial evidence of Aurora's existence was strengthened when Jane 's Defence Weekly carried a detailed sighting of a massive triangular-shaped aircraft spotted in formation with USAF F-lll bombers and an air-refueling tanker above an oil rig in the North Sea. The sighting was credible because it was witnessed by a highly trained aircraft recognition expert in the Royal Observer Corps who happened to be on the rig at the time.
Shiva had been my first brush with the "black" world, the Pentagon's hidden reservoir of defense programs — projects so secret that officially they did not exist. Since then, I'd felt the presence of other deep black projects, but only indirectly.
Looking for the black world was like looking for evidence of black holes. You couldn't see a black hole, no matter how powerful your telescope, because its pull sucked in everything around it, including the light of neighboring stars. But astronomers knew that black holes existed because of the intense friction they generated on their edges. It was this that gave them away.
Forty years ago, the people in charge of the Air Force's hidden budget would have been quick to see the extraordinary implication of Trimble's message; that there would be no limit — no limit at all — to the potential of an antigravity aerospace vehicle.
The black world would have thrilled to the notion of a science that did not exist.
As I crossed from the park back into the glare of the streetlights, I knew I was quite possibly staring at a secret that had been buried more than 40 years deep.
I called Lawrence Cross, an aerospace journalist from the circuit, an ex Jane's man, now a bureau chief for a rival publication in Australia.
Cross and I had spent long hours ruminating on the existence of U.S. Air Force black programs and the kind of technologies the Air Force might be pursuing in ultrasecrecy.
I liked Cross, because he had his feet squarely on the ground, was a hell of a good reporter, but wasn't your average dyed-in-the-wool-type hack. It had been a while since we had spoken.
The phone rang for ages. It was ten at night my time, eight in the morning his; and it was the weekend. I could hear the sleep in his voice when he finally picked up the handset. In the background, a baby was crying. Cross had three kids under six years old. Ninety percent of the time he looked completely exhausted.
He remained quiet as I sketched out the events of the past weeks. I told him about the article, Trimble's initial willingness to be interviewed, then the phone call from Abelman and her insistence, on Trimble's sayso, that I drop the whole business.
"This is interesting," he said, stifling a yawn, "but why the long distance call?" "I wanted to tap you on one of your case studies." "Uh-huh." He sounded wary, more alert suddenly. "Which one?" "Belgium," I said. "Wasn't there some kind of flap there a year or two back?" "You could say that. Hundreds of people reported seeing triangularshaped craft all over the country in two 24-hour waves — one in 1989, the other in 1990. The Belgian Air Force even scrambled F-16s to intercept them. Why the sudden interest?"
"You once told me that those craft might have been the result of some kind of secret U.S. development effort."
Cross laughed. "Maybe I did. But I've had time to study the officiai reports since — the ones put out by the Belgian government. Those craft were totally silent. They hovered, often very close to witnesses, and they never made a sound. You may find my take on this hard to swallow, but there is no technology — no technology on earth — that could produce that kind of performance." "Didn't the Belgian press try to tag the sightings to Aurora?" "Yes, but you and I know that that's crazy. Even if Aurora is real, don't tell me it can remain stationary one moment and fly Mach 7 the next. And without making a sound. Belgian radar tracked these things. The tapes show that they pulled turns of around 20 to 40 g — enough to kill a human pilot." He paused. "You're not seriously suggesting what I think you're suggesting, are you?"
"A 40-year U.S. development effort, in the black, to make antigravity technology a reality? Why not? They were talking about it openly in 1956, Lawrence, then it dropped off the scope. Completely and utterly, like somebody orchestrated the disappearance. It makes me want to consider the possibility, at least, that someone achieved a breakthrough and the whole thing went super-classified." "And now you've got the bit between your teeth?" "Something like that, yes." For a long moment, Cross fell silent. Then I heard him light a cigarette. In the background, I heard his wife calling him. Then he cupped the receiver, because I caught his voice, muffled, telling her he'd be there in a minute. The baby was still bawling its lungs out.