Chapter 26
I met Marckus in a country pub close to the haven on the estuary where we'd hooked up at the very beginning. It had been several years since our initial rendezvous, but when I walked in and saw him in the corner, time might as well have stood still. He looked up from his paper, gave me a wave and clicked his fingers for some attention from the bar. Other than a bored-looking girl behind the pumps, there was no one else in the room.
After she'd taken my order, she came over and set my beer down on Marckus' paper. Marckus clucked like an old hen and handed the glass to me. The circle of condensation, I noticed, had partly ringed the word "doom" on a headline about the forthcoming earth summit. It felt about right. It had been raining solidly for months.
"So you know," he said with an air of finality. "Good. I can't stand awkward explanations."
Before departing for Canada, when I'd been desperate for him to brief me on Hutchison, I'd left messages on his answering machine telling him I wanted to talk about Blowback—the book he had lent me about U.S. recruitment of high-value Nazis. Marckus must have figured out that I'd known then. "Where have you been?" I asked him. "I decided to make use of some vacation time that's been owing to me."
He held up his hands. "I'm sorry. I should have told you." "So where did you go?" He looked down at his beer. "I've been following in your footsteps, paying a few respects. Bavaria is beautiful this time of year. From the little hotel where I was staying you can see the snow on the mountains. Maybe on a clear day, if you could only see through the wire, you might have glimpsed the same view from Dachau." "How many members of your family did you lose?" I asked. "A couple that I know of. An uncle and aunt on my father's side. Most of me is as English as you are." He paused. "I'm sorry I put you through the hoops. It must all seem a little trite, I suppose. But it was important to me that you found things out for yourself. 269
"When you started out on the path that you did, sooner or later the trail was going to lead you to Germany. I was happy to help you with the science, but it was important that I held back certain kinds of information. It has taken me decades to build the knowledge that you have acquired in just a few years. But if I'd told you the full story from the outset, you'd have written me off as a crank." "Do you think the Americans have mastered the technology?" I asked. He shrugged theatrically. "We're going in circles again, aren't we? I told you when we first met. I don't know. I know — you know now — that they have access to it, but whether they've mastered it or not… it depends on what you mean by 'mastered.' '
He took a sip from his drink and continued. "When the Americans tripped over this mutant strain of nonlinear physics and took it back home with them, they were astute enough to realize that their homegrown scientific talent couldn't handle it. That it was beyond their cultural terms of reference. That's why they recruited so many Germans. The Nazis developed a unique approach to science and engineering quite separate from the rest of the world, because their ideology, unrestrained as it was, supported a wholly different way of doing things. Von Braun's V-2s are a case in point, but so was their understanding of physics. The trouble was, when the Americans took it all home with them they found out, too late, that it came infected with a virus. You take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology, as well." "And the black world?" I prompted. "Well, there are different shades of black, of course. But what interests me is that the bit that is truly unaccountable is the part of the system that's been exposed longest to the virus. So in time, it will simply destroy itself. That, at least, is my earnest hope."
Marckus stared out of the window a while, then shook himself like a dog. "Tell me about Canada."
I took a pull of my drink and set the glass down. I felt tired. "There isn't a whole lot to go by. After the Royal Canadian Mounted Police paid him a visit, Hutchison doesn't even have the equipment to do lévitations or transmutations anymore." He glanced up. "So, you believe him." "I believe that he caused objects to lose their weight. I also believe he made iron bars turn momentarily transparent and I believe that he transmuted metals." I tried to rub some of the tiredness away, but the alcohol wasn't helping. "Beyond that, I don't know."
Marckus fell silent for a few seconds, then he said: "Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to transmute a metal?"
At the back of my head, I seemed to recall Hathaway talking in terms of a gigawatt or two. I found it difficult to visualize a gigawatt and said as much to Marckus.
I didn't want another physics lesson, but I realized too late I was going to get one.
"At the low end of the scale, Hutchison was using 400 watts to achieve the effects you're talking about," Marckus said. "Four hundred watts are the heat and light you get from four light bulbs." A kilowatt — a thousand watts — represents the heat you get from a one-bar electric fire. A thousand kilowatts are a megawatt and a thousand megawatts are a terawatt. A thousand terawatts, Marckus told me, were a gigawatt.
"You know now what a gigawatt is?" he said. "A gigawatt is the equiva lent energy release of the Nagasaki bomb. And that's what Hutchison was pulling out of his 110-volt AC wall socket to turn steel into lead.
"Transmutation is real. The reason most people don't use it to turn lead into gold is that the power requirements cost more than the gold." "Why would INSCOM be interested in alchemy?" I asked. Marckus smiled again, but the look in his eyes was intense. "Transmutation has other purposes. You can use it to change the rate at which radioactive elements decay or you can turn the whole process around." Marckus was putting me through the hoops again. "Go on," I told him. "Think of it," he said, leaning forward, "transmutation, if you can do it the Hutchison way, is a cheap method of enriching uranium, for example. There's another thing, too. Remember when you were heading for Puthoff's place and you asked me for a no-brainer on the power potential of zero-point energy? I gave you the shoebox analogy and how much untapped energy there is in it?"
He swilled the dregs of his beer around, drained them, then set the glass down and looked at me. "Maybe Hutchison doesn't know it. Release that energy slowly and you've got a safe, clean reactor that can go on pumping out power forever. Speed up the process and make all the right connections and you've got a bomb; one that'll make a thermonuke look like a child's firecracker. No wonder they shredded the report at Los Alamos."
I was about to remind him that it had merely been "routinely destroyed," but stopped myself. Standing next to the coffee machine at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Austin, Puthoff had coolly relayed his belief that there was enough energy in my cup to boil the world's oceans many times over. And then I remembered the Schaubergers' fears over the Americans' hijacking of the implosion process — its potential use in the development of a giant bomb. I could feel my heart in my throat. "When he does what he does," Marckus said, "Hutchison is reaching into a place that you can't see or touch and he's pulling things out we call 'phenomena.' " He turned his index fingers into quote marks to make the point. "But things don't happen by magic. Phenomena happen because there are laws of physics we don't understand yet. The fact we haven't found the answer yet is our problem, not Nature's. But we're working on it." He stared at me and frowned. "Why on Earth are you smiling?"
"Because you just nailed something down for me. Something that's bugged the hell out of me almost from the very beginning." "What's that?" "The Philadelphia Experiment. A neat piece of disinformation, I think you'll agree, but stuffed full of real elements that make it impossible for people like you or me to conduct a meaningful investigation of anything remotely related to it. I'm thinking of T. T. Brown, electrostatics and stealth, of course, but there was always that one part of the story that didn't seem to fit — the part about the ship slipping into another dimension. Even that, it turns out, has a grain of truth in it." Marckus nodded. "The best disinformation always does." Bushman was right. Everything had been right there in Hutchison's apartment. No wonder INSCOM's weird-shit division had shown up at his door. Sooner or later, someone would succeed in developing a zero-point reactor — a machine that would be able to exploit the fluctuations in the quantum sea as they blinked in and out of existence millions of times every second. It was just a matter of time. "We are at the stage that the fathers of the atomic bomb were at when they put together their first test nuclear reactor in the early Forties — and look what happened a few years later," Puthoff had been quoted as saying recently.