The trouble was, it didn't end there. With the help of German-derived science, America's technological lead over the rest of the world accelerated exponentially after the Second World War. But the black world was a low-grade reflection of the system that had been employed to protect the secrets of the Kammlerstab within the confines of the Skoda Works.
The state within a state had been transported four thousand miles to the west and somehow, I just knew, Kammler had come with it.
The intuitive feeling I'd experienced all these years in obscure corners of the U.S. aerospace and defense industry had suddenly acquired a face.
Throughout the next interview, I felt the presence of the info-minders like a low-intensity headache. After the near-informality of my time with Bob Widmer, the proximity of three company caretakers in the room gnawed away at my concentration. They were here to watch over the man who could levitate paper clips on his desk.
But now that the interview was over, the minders were looking the other way. They'd done their job and I'd done mine. Boyd Bushman had spilled no secrets either on or off the record and that was what mattered. Nor had he in any way tarnished the reputation of the Lockheed Martin company.
That I had learned nothing of value must have shown on my face, for without warning, Bushman leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "It's a lonely walk, but a rewarding one," he said, so quietly that I almost missed it. I looked into his eyes, which were quite blue but for that superficial milkiness that sometimes denotes the onset of old age.
He smiled at me. "Keep traveling the road and you might just find what you're looking for." "What do you mean?" I asked cautiously. "In all my years with this company, no one has asked me the questions you came here with today." He paused a moment, then said: "Here, I want to show you something."
He produced a vidéocassette from the folds of his loose-hanging suit and gave me the same smile that had crossed his face a number of times during the interview; usually, I noticed, when he needed a moment or two to think about a particularly awkward question I'd thrown at him. He looked not unlike Walter Matthau, the Hollywood actor, with a kindly, hangdog expression and thick straight hair to match. Instinctively, I'd liked him. But more to the point, I knew that I could trust him. Unusually for someone who toiled in the heart of the U.S. defenseindustrial complex, he looked like someone who was incapable of telling a lie.
Bushman appeared beyond the retirement age of most good man-and boy company men, which in itself spoke volumes about his ability.
Before I met him, I'd been told that he was a one-off, one of those people who liked to think out of the box — defense jargon for a guy in the trade who looked at things differently. Just how differently, I was about to find out.
The picture on the TV screen steadied and I found myself staring at a scene of such ordinariness I thought for a moment that Bushman had plugged in the wrong tape.
From the graininess of the film and the way the camera trembled, it rapidly became clear that this was some kind of a home movie. It depicted the interior of a garage or workshop. In the middle of the frame was a saw on a pockmarked wooden work surface. Beside it was a pair of pliers and a handful of nails.
For a while, we both just stood there watching a picture in which nothing happened. The minders had taken a quick look and apparently decided it was an eccentric end to a quirky afternoon's work, because they went back to their own conversation.
My gaze drifted back to the TV just as one of the nails in the center of the screen began to twitch and the pliers moved — jumped, rather — a centimeter to the left. Within seconds, everything was shaking, as if rocked by a series of earth tremors. And then, quite suddenly, the nails stood up, like hairs on a cold forearm.
I looked at Bushman, who was studying the screen intently. "Watch," he urged, "this is the best bit."
One by one, the nails took off and shot off the top of the screen. A moment later, the pliers started to do a crazy nose-down dance across the work surface and the saw began flapping around like a fish out of water. Then they both went the way of the nails, shooting out of frame toward the ceiling. Then, the picture switched: same background, different still life. Ice cream was creeping up the sides of a see-through tub. A lump of it broke away and rose toward the ceiling trailing little pearls of cream. Seconds later, the whole tub jumped off the bench.
My skepticism was working overtime. But Bushman read my thoughts. "It's no fake," he said. "This is as real as you or I." He cast a look over his shoulder at our companions. "The man responsible is a civilian, nothing to do with the defense business. That he's a genius goes without saying, of course. You needed to see this, because it's confirmation of the data." He emphasized the word as if somehow it would help me understand what I had just seen. "You must get to see this man. I think, then, you will be closer than you think to the end of your journey."
"Data? What data?" I looked at him more closely, hoping for more, but he said nothing.
As I was ushered out of the room, the scientist looked down at the thick pack of material he'd handed me before the interview. I hadn't had time to look at it. Now, I wished I had.
That evening, I sat down with Bushman's file in my hotel room. He'd loaded me down with so many papers, I didn't know where to begin or what I was really looking for. There was a stack of photostats relating to the patents he'd filed during a long and illustrious career that had included stints at some of the giants of the postwar U.S. aerospace and defense industry: Hughes Aircraft, Texas Instruments, General Dynamics and Lockheed.
There was his résumé, which noted his top secret security clearance, as well as copies of scientific papers, stapled neatly at the corner, with exotic-sounding titles that meant little to me.
My eyes swam over pages of complex mathematical equations and algebra sets. I was looking for clues, but seeing nothing that made much sense. I pressed the "play" button on my tape recorder. From the tenth floor of my Fort Worth hotel room, the lights of the city shimmered in the sizzling 90-degree heat, even though it was a good half an hour after the sun had slipped below the skyline. Inside, the airconditioning was cold enough to prickle my skin.
"…1 went back to some of the first work on gravity done by Galileo…"
Bushman's voice crackled in the darkness, clashing for a moment with that of a CNN reporter on the TV. I adjusted the volume on the tape recorder, hit the fast-forward button and pressed play again.
"So, what I think is: Follow the data and log your data very well and don't throw it away because you have a theory. The theory of gravity is just a theory. Einstein improved on the original theories of Newton and he was verified by data — and data gave precedence. No one believed Einstein until the data arrived. Well, our data's arrived … "
I scrolled the tape again. As I did so, I spotted something among the collection of papers Bushman had given me. Tucked beneath the patents and company brochure material on weapons technology was a grainy photocopy of a UFO flying low over a straight stretch of desert road. A handwritten caption underneath identified the location as Santa Ana, California, and the date as 1966.
Flicking past it, I found another cluster of photostats taken from the "Ramayana of Valmiki — Translated from the Original Sanskrit." A stamp on the title page identified the book as belonging to "Lockheed/Fort Worth."
Puzzled, I toggled with the buttons on the tape recorder and finally found the part of the interview I'd been looking for.
"Nature does not speak English," Bushman had been telling me. "Not only that, but if we verbalize it, we're probably approximating, but not telling the truth. Math comes close, but it isn't there either. What Nature tells us is what must be honored. It has been talking to us on many domains." I let the words echo in my head for a moment. Bushman was a senior scientist for one of the world's biggest defense contractors; a member of the fraternity that I'd looked to for expert comment all my professional life, and he was telling me to trust in what I saw. Follow data, he'd said, not theory. He worked on programs that lay beyond the cutting edge of known science.