I offered Marckus another drink, but he looked at his watch and said that he had to get going. The wind had started to lash against the window, bringing more rain with it. Marckus pulled up the collar of his coat and readied himself to leave. But I hadn't quite finished with Dan Marckus just yet. "So what's it to be?" I asked him. "Are you going to build a bomb or a reactor?" Marckus made an exaggerated display of busying himself with his coat. He said nothing, so I asked him again. "I'd like to know what you're going to do with this knowledge, Dan. You know as well as I do that radical technology that destroys existing technology isn't welcome."
"Let me put it another way," he said. "Years ago, a story appeared in one of those pulp American science-fiction rags, Astounding Science Fiction I think it was, in which the U.S. military authorities gathered America's best scientific brains around a table and told them to develop and build an antigravity machine, because it was known that the Russians had already developed something similar. The twist in the tale, of course, was that the business about the Russians was a total piece of fiction, but not knowing this the scientists went away, put their heads together, and came up with a crude, but workable device.
"The point of the story is that nothing is impossible, once it is known to be practicable. I have something infinitely better than that. Physicists have proven the existence of the zero-point energy field and your data shows that people have actually developed antigravity devices that flew. I want you to know that you weren't simply duplicating knowledge that I already had. Let's say I had the big picture and you provided the details. It's the details in this business that are important. What we're faced with here is a simple set of alternatives. Free, clean energy for everyone on the one hand or the biggest bloody bomb you can imagine. I want the good guys to be in the van here, because a day doesn't go by that I don't think about my family and what happened to them under the Nazis."
Marckus strolled across the parking lot, heading for a pathway through the woods on the other side. There was something nagging at the back of my head that I'd meant to ask him, but I couldn't think of it. I closed my eyes, but the inspiration wouldn't come. When I opened them again, he had vanished among the trees.
It was then, of course, that it came to me. I'd meant to ask if he had sent the article that had landed on my desk at Jane's all those years ago.
I smiled to myself. That would have been too Machiavellian; even by Marckus' impressive standards. But I would ask him all the same.
Twenty minutes later, I eased my car along the narrow road that ran beside the abandoned radar establishment and parked up close to the jetty where Marckus and I had first met. The rain had passed, leaving the unmistakable smell of spring in its wake. I got out of the car and gazed skyward. High above a checkered layer of cirrocumulus, an aircraft contrail tracked westward toward America, the silver arrowhead at the point of its creation looking tiny and vulnerable against the deep blue. For years, I had banked on the presumption that technology would pursue a set course — one that had been preordained ever since someone had had the wit to fashion a wheel out of a piece of flat stone. Now I knew that it didn't have to be that way, that there were shortcuts in the process that would allow us to leap the state of the art in moments of searing inspiration. I thought back to the day that Garry Lyles at NASA had outlined his vision of interstellar travel, the fast trip to Alpha Centauri that he earnestly hoped man would make within the next 100 years. If we looked in the right places, we might just be making it a lot sooner.
Epilogue
A few final thoughts, the first of them regarding George S. Trimble Jr., the man whose comments on the imminent "reality" of gravity control provided the trigger for the investigation behind this book. In 1967, Trimble left the Martin Company for NASA, where he became director of the Advanced Manned Missons Program. His reasons for not wanting to be interviewed about his activities at Martin Aircraft deep into his retirement remain unclear, although, of course, they may be entirely innocent. As an ironic twist on everything that followed, I recently came across a comment of his: "The biggest deterrent to scientific progress is a refusal of some people, including scientists, to believe that things that seem amazing can really happen," the New York Herald Tribune quoted him as saying on November 22,1955. "I know that if Washington decides that it is vital to our national survival to go where we want and do what we want without having to worry about gravity, we'd find the answer rapidly." Enough said. In October 2000, the U.S. magazine Popular Mechanics revealed that Ning Li, the Chinese-American scientist working in an area of endeavor similar to Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov, was close to developing an operational machine capable of exerting an attractive or repulsive force on all matter. By using 12-inch disc-shaped superconductors and around a kilowatt of electricity, Li's device would produce a force field, the magazine stated, that would "effectively neutralize gravity above a 1-foot-diameter region extending from the surface of the planet to outer space." Li left the University of Alabama at Huntsville in mid-2000 to pursue the commercial development of her invention and has kept a low profile since. While her eye is said to be on civilian spin-offs of this remarkable breakthrough — NASA scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center believe her "AC Gravity" machine could be used as a shield for protecting the International Space Station against impacts by small meteorites — it goes almost without saying that it could also be hijacked as a weapon. The same force that can deflect a meteorite or a piece of orbiting space junk can also stop a reconnaissance satellite or a ballistic missile dead in its tracks. Hit a foot-wide gravity-reflecting beam at an orbiting velocity of 17,000 miles per hour and it would be no different to hitting a brick wall, except there would be no evidence to say that you had hit anything. The results, to borrow an expression from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, would be "indistinguishable from magic," the ultimate in weapons technology.
Over recent years, a wealth of articles have appeared outlining the view of an emerging breed of physicists that we may indeed reside in a multidimensional cosmos. The August 2000 edition of Scientific American, for example, generated a mass of copy in newspapers here and in the States on this growing belief — that parallel universes may exist alongside our own and how additional, unseen dimensions would help to unify the fundamental forces of Nature that inhabit our four-dimensional spacetime. According to this thinking, much of it wrapped within so-called "string theory," our universe may simply exist as a membrane floating within a higher-dimensional space, with gravity — this impossibly weak, little-understood yet massively influential force — the only one of the four fundamental forces capable of propagating across the dimensions. Over the course of the next decade, experimentation may provide real answers to these tantalizing and complex suppositions. For me, it has simply served to show how taboo notions — taboo science—can, in time, enter the mainstream of ideas.