"Here's the problem I'm facing, Dan. If Schauberger and Podkletnov can crack antigravity, more or less in their garden sheds, then why can't NASA, for Christ's sake, with billions of dollars at its disposal?" He thought about it for a long moment, then lightly cleared his throat. "My best shot, and it doesn't help you much, is that what you and I have learned tells me that there are two kinds of science. The stuff they teach you in college and all the weird shit they don't. The aerospace and defense industry is inherently conservative. It doesn't like change. This … knowledge, if you can call it that, is dangerous stuff. It's change with a capital C and it's not easy to get your head around. The aerospace and defense industry says it likes people who think out of the box, because they're the guys who give us the breakthroughs … radar, the bomb, stealth and that. But think this far out and they look at you like you're crazy. They might even put you away."
I thought back to the article that had landed on my desk all those years ago and my failed attempt to interview George S. Trimble.
Only a maverick, an enlightened one at that, would have pushed for the foundation of something as bold as RIAS — the research institute spun out of the Martin Aircraft Company that Trimble had helped to set up in 1955, at exactly the time he was making his public pronouncements about the imminent conquest of gravity.
I liked to think that all those people who'd been talking up antigravity in the mid-1950s had been forced into silence by some murky intelligence outfit tasked with guarding the truth about the Germans' achievements during World War Two.
Yet, they might just as easily have been silenced by their own chief executives — people who realized they were talking up the premature death of the aerospace industry itself. A science that made their whole world redundant.
Like white goods, fast-food chains and cars, the aerospace and defense industry of the 21st century has become a global enterprise. Back in the 1950s, though, as a modern entity, one that we would recognize today, it was only just getting going.
The 1950s was the decade that spawned the intercontinental ballistic missile, the Mach 2 jet fighter, guided weapons and transatlantic jet passenger planes. It was a time when the industry needed brilliant individuals — mavericks like Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich of the Skunk Works — to bring about those revolutionary advances.
Maybe that was why one name had kept popping into my head since my return from Austria.
When I had first inquired about Trimble and RIAS at Lockheed Martin, my contacts there had recommended I interview a man who routinely talked about the kinds of things that had once been integral to the RIAS charter.
A man who tended to talk about Nature, not science; a physicist who looked at things quite differently from other people.
Boyd Bushman was a senior scientist for Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth Division, the part of the corporation that turned out F-16 and F-22 fighters for the U.S. Air Force. If you're interested in antigravity, then talk to Bushman, they'd said. Bushman, the guy who'd levitated paper clips on his desk. I hadn't, because back then Bushman's theories had sounded just a little too weird. And back then, I hadn't begun to accept the fact that antigravity and the multibillion-dollar interests of the aerospace industry went together like chalk and cheese.
But it was all a question of perspective. I saw things very differently now from the way I'd seen them then.
What, I wondered at this moment, was an antigravity man doing at the world's most prolific manufacturer of good old-fashioned, jet-powered combat aircraft?
If Bushman was talking up antigravity in the midst of an industry that didn't want to know, then maybe, just maybe, he could provide the answer to the $64,000 big one; the discrepancy between clear evidence in the real world of the existence of antigravity technology and the people at NASA who were, at this very moment, spending ten times that amount scratching around for theory to make it work.
In two weeks' time, I was due on another defense industry junket to the U.S. West Coast. From there, it would be easy to route back to England via Texas.
Journeying into Kammler's kingdom had taught me the value of analyzing data in situ. Now, as I prepared for one last trip to the States, I needed something to help me acquire a different kind of mind-set.
I considered how, in July 1986, an F-117A Stealth Fighter crashed at dead of night into a desert canyon just outside Bakersfield, California. For me, the crash had always held a special kind of significance, since it was one of those rare occasions when the black world had been flushed into the light.
In 1986, the very existence of the Stealth Fighter was still a classified secret even though the aircraft had been in full squadron service for three years.
What did Bakersfield say about the system that had been set up to protect America's most deeply classified secrets? Had it been a murder site, what would a profiler have deduced from the traces this incident had left in the environment?
Back at my desk, I started sifting through a pile of newspaper clippings that I'd kept since the time of the crash. Through the clippings, I had traced the whereabouts of a number of witnesses to the events of that night. One of them, Amelia Lopez, now a local law enforcement officer, had reluctantly promised to act as my guide should I ever find myself in that neck of the woods.
I checked to see that I still had Lopez's numbers. Then I picked up the phone and called the public affairs department of Lockheed Martin, Fort Worth.
Chapter 24
The flight was several hours out of Heathrow, when I reached into my hand luggage and extracted the book that Marckus had made me promise I'd read before I got to the States. He'd sent it to me ten days earlier, but in the hurly-burly of stories that needed to be written before I disappeared off to America, and in the course of preparations for the weeklong trip itself, I simply hadn't had the time to pick it up.
Not only that, but the book, which was called Blowback — The First Full Account of America 's Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, looked rather academic and heavygoing. Even now, as I gazed at the cover, I found myself reluctant to make a start on it, the more so as Marckus never told me what it was about the book that made it essential reading. But I'd read the newspaper, established that there were no movies on the entertainment system worth watching and had even plundered the in-flight magazine for items of interest. With nowhere left to go, I turned to Blowback and started reading.