SDI was unveiled in March 1983 and from then until its death later in the decade was heavily staffed by experts from Los Alamos and ONR.
For the life of me, I couldn't think what Hutchison's work had to do with it.
Soon after Hutchison's lab was moved to the large warehouse on the edge of North Vancouver, the experiments began in readiness for the INSCOM visit. The Pentagon's funding was good for four months. Alexander had provided Hutchison, Hathaway and Pezarro with objects on which to test the Hutchison Effect in its new location. One of these was a six-by-quarter-inch molybdenum rod. Molybdenum is an incredibly strong but light metal used in nuclear reactors. It has a "sag" temperature of 3,700 degrees C. Alexander had deliberately marked the rod so it couldn't be switched. Give it a whirl, he told Hathaway. See what happens.
A few days later, the colonel was contacted by Hathaway and told that the test runs had been spectacular. The test specimens were dispatched to the INSCOM team for analysis forthwith.
The Effect had snaked the molybdenum rod into an S shape as if it were a soft metal — lead, tin or copper. There were other successes to report, too. A length of high-carbon steel had shredded at one end and transmuted into lead the other. A piece of PVC plastic had literally disappeared into thin air before the eyes of the evaluators. Bits of wood had become embedded in the middle of pieces of aluminum.
And, of course, things had taken off — all over the laboratory, items had been levitated; some deliberately, others in parts of the lab that were nothing to do with the experiment. The lab at one point had also become self-running, drawing its electricity from God only knew where — since the power was down at the time.
Keep everything exactly as it is, Alexander told him. We're on our way up.
When the INSCOM team got off the plane in Vancouver, everyone was gibbering with excitement about the looming set of tests — everyone, that is, except for the more senior of the two Los Alamos scientists, a dour man who'd been given the unaffectionate nickname "Big Bad Bob" by the other team members.
Bob remained convinced that somehow it was all just a bunch of jiggery-pokery. Someone, he'd told Alexander, was being had here. A shimmy through the airframe as the A320 thumped down on the tarmac at Vancouver and here I was, same place as the INSCOM group, different time.
Like them, I was thinking of the encounter to come; and for a reason I couldn't entirely put my finger on, I felt anxious.
I set out from the hotel for Hutchison's apartment 12 hours later.
It was a crisp morning, warm air from the Pacific mixing with the cold air of a blue sky to form a thick layer of cloud in the waterways of the harbor below. I followed Hutchison's directions, turning left on a wide run-down street, eventually spotting what I was looking for: a brown apartment building with an antenna farm on one of the balconies.
I could see Hutchison in silhouette at one of the windows, scanning the street for my arrival.
He met me at the entrance and we shook hands. He was dressed in jeans and a denim jacket. A strand of thick black hair fell over one lens of his glasses. The other had a crack running through it. He was tall and powerfully built, but his voice was softer than I remembered it on the phone. Through the handshake I could sense he was as restless as I was. We exchanged a few pleasantries, then I followed him inside. A minute later, there was a rattle of keys and tumbling of locks as Hutchison pushed back the door of his apartment. The door traveled about 18 inches, then stopped abruptly. "Sorry, it's kind of a squeeze," he said, forcing his way through the gap and disappearing inside. I followed suit and found myself in a dark, narrow corridor with what looked like crates lining the walls. The gap down the middle was barely wide enough for a child. Hutchison pushed the door shut and somehow managed to squeeze past me, heading for the back.
He pulled a drape off the window and light flooded the room. Outside, the aerials and dishes I'd spotted from the street pointed skyward at crazy angles. It was only when I turned back to study the apartment interior that I realized the crates I'd seen were radios — huge, metallic, gray, lifeless things, some the size of tea chests. I peered into the kitchen, the bathroom and bedroom and saw more radios.
Every available inch of floor and wall space, in fact, was filled with radios and radar screens, gear that had gone out with the Stone Age, complete with dials, valves and analogue readouts.
It was like stepping into a cross between a military surplus store and Radio Shack circa 1952.
Hutchison lowered his huge frame to the floor and assumed the lotus position on the chocolate-colored carpet. He had an almost childlike innocence about him. He'd never once asked why I'd come all this way to speak to him and he gave me the impression that only a small part of his mind was here in the room with me.
The equipment, he told me, had been requisitioned from some '50s vintage Canadian warships he was helping to dismantle in the harbor. In return for his salvage services, the Canadian military said he could have all the stuff he was able to carry away with him. Clearly, they'd underestimated his strength.
Radios, sonar systems and electronic countermeasures devices lined shelves suspended from the ceiling. Hutchison told me he'd consulted the plans of the apartment block and had drilled holes in all the right places.
"There's a ton and half of the stuff above your head, but it's safe enough," he smiled. I glanced up nervously and noticed a heavy-looking cluster of boxes suspended over me, then asked if this was the equipment that had been used in the INSCOM tests. Hutchison shook his head. Much of it had been confiscated by the Canadian police and after their intervention, he'd found it hard to carry on, though recently he'd rebuilt the lab and was readying to start operations again.
He showed me an aluminum ingot that looked as if it had blown apart from the inside and a file filled with letterheads I recognized: Boeing and McDonnell Douglas had been but two of Hutchison's backers.
But he was getting ahead of himself and so was I. First things first. "What happened after the arrival of the INSCOM team?" I asked. He scrolled back 15 years and told me about the plow. The building had been unremarkable, another storage facility in the outer suburbs. There was no security, just an eight-foot wire fence and the warehouse's relative obscurity amid the smoke and grime of Vancouver's industrial quarter. It was not optimum, but guards would only have attracted attention.
The equipment was housed behind a wall of breeze blocks in the middle of the warehouse. The breeze blocks extended halfway to the roof — around 15 feet. This was the target area. Behind the wall was the large Tesla Coil containing the uranium source, a device around four and half feet tall with a doughnut-shaped metal coil on top.
Diagonally across the room, on the other side of the target area, sat a powerful Van de Graaf generator capable of producing a 250,000-volt DC static charge.
The other prominent piece of technology was a three-and-a-half-foot double-ended Tesla Coil, known as the "dumbbell," suspended from supports running across the top of the wall.
Between these three main equipment items were an assortment of smaller devices, all connected to each other by multiple coils of wire and cabling.
There were tuning capacitors, high-voltage transmission caps, RF coils and a spark gap that would snap every 40 seconds or so sending an earsplitting shock wave throughout the building while it was up and running.