A Twist in Time (21 page)

As the Internet became less useful as a source of information because of server overloads, the national news services picked up the slack.  Although the heads of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice took to the TV to express their opinions that this wasn’t a terror attack, they had no credibility. 

The panic in the eyes and fear on the faces of the TV talking heads was all it took to close down voting in the United States.  At polling places around the country, municipalities and counties brought in tow trucks to move every parked vehicle to the nearest open area. Public buildings were evacuated and searched.  Sirens echoed through every city and suburb in the country as emergency units looked for suspicious cars near any polling place.  Bomb sniffing dogs and their handlers were heroes wherever they showed up. 

Local responders worked hard, but the damage to the democratic political process was done.  The TV talkers filled the air with photos of bloody bodies and fractured buildings.  There were seventeen deaths and more than two dozen serious injuries at the three bombsites and with one mind voters across the U.S. decided to stay away from the polls for the rest of the day. 

At noon Pacific Time the leaders of the Project, they still didn’t really think of it as Interspace, gathered to review what they did and didn’t know.  Ted Arthurs joined in by secure voice from Homestead.

Bill Wirtz began by saying, “The people who made these bombs were good.  According to our analysis, and experts on the NIBRS network agree, each bomb was a powerful fast explosive.  Even from the Internet photos it’s easy to see that there was a lot of blast effect and a relatively small amount of flame. This isn’t from a slow explosive like propane, fertilizer, or black powder.  It’s some military grade explosive like the tritonal used in a Mark 82 general-purpose bomb.  One Department of Defense analyst estimated that each explosion had the power of about 20 pounds of tritonal.  That’s about a third of what is in each Mark 82.“

“So, “Jose observed, the bad guys didn’t make the explosives in a bath tub.  It was either brought into the country or moved cross country.”

“Exactly,” Bill agreed.  “That also means we probably can’t disrupt the explosive or set it off prematurely by throwing hot glass beads at it.” 

“Let’s back up a minute,” Ted Arthurs said over the speaker.  We can’t go righting every wrong in the world. Some people were killed and that’s a shame, but is this a threat to the country? Is this a threat to the Constitution?”

Bill Wirtz nodded his head, invisible to Ted, and then said, “There is that potential, Ted.  We’re talking about a lot of hotly fought elections across the country.  As a minimum, every losing candidate is going to sue to invalidate the election.  Every candidate who won based on early voting and absentee voting is going to fight the idea of having a second election day. Cities and towns are going to complain that they don’t have the money to run another election.  The importance of these three bombs will depend on how the Department of Justice reacts and that will depend on how some key elections turn out.  But, if the Justice Department and the court systems don’t appear responsive to the people, we’ll breech what we project to be a major point of trust in the government.” 

Janet added, “Ted, the people in this country don’t trust the federal legislative branch and there is active and growing distrust of the federal executive branch.  The political class is alienated from the voters.  The judicial branch, the court system, is holding the whole thing together.  If this doesn’t turn out well, we project civil unrest and, in some scenarios, states trying to leave the Union.”

“But,” Bill hurriedly continued, “I’m not proposing that we do anything more than Darkspot right now.  I really don’t think we have any other actionable alternative.”

Rae had recently learned about Darkspot.  The concept and the physics fascinated her, but, as Sally had briefed her, Darkspot might better be called Long Shot because it usually didn’t work.  As Sally told the story, back in the 1990s when Ted and Sally recovered some of the glass beads that had been transported through time and emerged into empty air, they noticed  those beads were colored and even flecked.  The beads were clear before they were kicked back in time. Other recovered beads that had gone through time and emerged inside of something were dark.  Microscopic optical analysis and a year of computer analysis proved that when the bead emerged, at that instant it captured available light and that the light could, through optical expansion, filtering, and computer interpolation, be reconstructed into a 360 degree spherical image of the surroundings at the time the bead emerged from its backward kick.      

Sally’s lesson stressed that the first practical problem with Darkspot is collecting the bead.  The Project’s technology can only send things back in time and so far they have no proof that it’s possible to go forward.  There is no way to make an object return like a yo-yo on a string.  Once it appears in the past, it must age normally to be available in the present.  Recovering the bead involves going to the location and searching for a small glass sphere that emerged in the air at some time in the past.  If someone can physically access the location, which often isn’t possible, the small bead could be lost in the dust, cleaned up, blown away, crushed, or simply not found.    

As another practical problem, it takes a lot of time and processing power to recreate the image from each bead. Like an ordinary camera, lighting and distance are a big part of getting a good image. Unlike an ordinary camera, there is no lens, no pixel size, and practically no limit to how their computers can enlarge a section of the spherical image. 

“Ted,” Bill Wirtz said, “you and Sally have a lot of experience bead hunting.  You might as well leave for Atlanta right now.” 

Ted Arthurs simply replied, “Yup. We’ll fly commercial out of Miami as soon as possible.”

Rae spoke tentatively, “Can I try to logic my way through this one?” 

Bill said, “Go for it.”

“We’ll shoot some beads into a spot above that parking lot at some time before the bomb goes off in order to capture images.  We’ll find exactly when the car arrived and see who delivered it,  Right?” she asked. 

Bill and Jose nodded while Janet said, “Exactly.”

Bill added, “The polling machines and tables were installed in the senior center the evening before the election.  One county employee stayed there all night as security. He said he went for a walk around the building around ten pm and no car was there.  He says the car was definitely there when the first poll workers arrived at about five thirty in the morning.  He thought the car belonged to the arriving poll workers and they thought the car belonged to him.”

“So,” Rae continued, “We have to do an hourly survey and then, when we find the right time frame, we have to do a finer survey to try and see the driver.”

This time, everyone in the room just nodded.  On the telephone, Ted said, “Here comes the hard part.” 

“We haven’t sent the first bead yet, but Ted and Sally are ready to get on an airplane to go there and gather the beads we haven’t yet sent, right?” 

Bill closed his eyes, hugged himself, rocked a little and said, “Yes to all that.”       

“But,” Rae went on, “that’s okay because in the future we will send the beads back in time and so they will be there today when Ted and Sally arrive… even if we haven’t sent them yet.  It doesn’t matter when they were sent, the beads all appeared over the parking lot many hours before Ted and Sally will arrive.  In fact they are there now.”

Bill opened his eyes, “Congratulations, Dr. Dunnan , you are now as convoluted as the rest of us!  We intend to do it, so it is done? Maybe.  But, because I don’t ever want to find the limits on the self-healing powers of foamy space-time, let’s start shooting as soon as possible, eh?”

Janet added, “We have to make something happen so the rest can happen.  Or something like that.”

A hypothetical observer with a God’s-eye view sitting in a segment of neutral-time space, would find the next days interesting.  That observer would see an initial time line where Ted and Sally recovered four beads from under the trees at the south end of the parking lot.  They took those four beads to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport and flew to Las Vegas and drove to the site in Boulder City. After Bill Wirtz inspected the four beads, he ordered more recon shots.  The observer would now see a twist in time form where  Ted and Sally collected ten beads.  After Bill completed the inspection of the ten beads and made two more recon shots, the observer would see a loop where Bill and Sally had returned with twelve beads. 

Since the process involved sending more beads back to a specific time before Ted and Sally collected the beads, every bead must have been there when the collection took place.  Space-time healed itself and made the necessary happen.

The process of evaluation and re-sampling in order to find the precise time the car arrived in the parking lot of the Senior Center took weeks.  Unless you were the observer and then you saw that it took no time at all.

In the Project’s time line, the Nation was in trouble.  The authorities didn’t have a single lead on the bombers.  The cars were all stolen in the Atlanta area, but their plates had been swapped with those of legitimate vehicles. There were no fingerprints or other leads.

After the Election Day bombings and flight from the polls, incumbent politicians at the federal level and in many of the states were intent on keeping power and trying to invalidate the election and to reschedule it for months down the road.  The Department of Justice used the excuse of the bombings to investigate and therefore intimidate winning candidates who sued to be seated.  The court system was paralyzed.  Demonstrations, both organized and spontaneous, took place throughout the country, but they often turned violent when the opposing sides physically clashed.  In just a couple of weeks, the U.S. looked like a banana republic.

The turmoil increased calls for gun control and a new constitutional convention.  Police departments and the investigative branches of Homeland Security conducted searches without warrants or with warrants from secret courts.  There was talk in state legislatures in Texas, Florida, and Arizona of secession.  The media fanned every little flame into a forest fire just to meet their own agendas.  In just a few weeks the Republic was showing signs of stress simply because of a few well-placed car bombs.  A headline on The Drudge Report asked, “Is This the End of America?”  

__________

For this meeting, everyone was in Boulder City.  Ted and Sally arrived in town about a week after the aborted Election Day and they were expecting a shipment of household goods from Homestead to fill their new house.  In the two weeks since the election, Bill and Janet, supported by the rest of the Boulder City crew, worked almost non-stop to refine and analyze the captured images. 

“The fact that the parking lot was dark except for a few light poles saved us a lot of computer processing time,” Bill Wirtz explained.  Each bead we shoot now has a microscopic ID, so we know exactly when and where it arrived.  After we examined the first few spheres, we understood the patterns of light and then we were able to quickly move to the specific area of the parking lot we wanted to see on each of the following beads.  It looks like we have what could be some very good news.”

Since they had been following the analysis hour by hour, none of this came as a surprise to the senior management staff.  But, it was good to make sure everyone had all of the information. 

“The first car to arrive isn’t the car that exploded in Atlanta.  We are ninety percent sure that the first car left after a short pause and went on to explode in Cincinnati. The Atlanta bomb car arrived in the parking lot about a minute after the first car and was later followed by what is surely the Orlando bomb car.  The driving time from Atlanta to Orlando and from Atlanta to Cincinnati is almost exactly the same: eight hours.  It seems clear that this is the start of the mission.  Right here at eleven PM we see them park the Atlanta bomb car and take the other two cars out of the parking lot.”  

Bill turned toward the screen, “In this image, the Atlanta car is parked and the driver of the Atlanta car is getting into the car that will go to Orlando.  We have the three drivers in two cars at this moment.  They aren’t yet moving, we know where they are down to the inch, and we could saturate the interiors of both cars.”

Jose picked up the ball, “So the police find three cars filled with explosives and three dead bodies.  That’s certainly better than what did happen, but what outcome would it have?”