“I wonder if I might ask something of the team, Dr. Cavanagh?” asked General Pickler, standing and projecting his formidable voice to the podium.
“Of course, General.” prompted Madeline.
“You’ve shown that the probe can see through all kinds of murk, and to a not inconsiderable depth. But two miles deep this tank is not. How do you know that the significantly increased signal distance won’t simply refract your imagery beyond recognition?”
“Well, General,” said Madeline, turning briefly to Neal to flash a smile at him, “that is an important question, and one we have battled with. We did come up with an experiment to test it, but it is a little … unconventional. If I may suggest we take a brief lunch break while we set it up, and then I hope we will be able to set your mind at ease.”
* * *
As the group filed back in from their foray to the Institute’s cafeteria, they were directed to a second part of the vast hangar that housed the various experiments the Institute was working on at that time. Though smaller in overall size than the main hangar, this room still ran the entire length of the back of the building. It contained only one structure. Originally designed for warping or “eccentricity” tests on the driveshafts of naval ships and cruise liners, the room held a single tube, five feet wide and 450 feet long. At any point along its length the hinged top cover could be opened to allow access, and the entire tube was mounted on rollers so that it could be rotated through 100
o
to allow for the removal of the test shafts onto railings that ran the length of the hangar.
The tube was empty now, its top covers closed, and in place of the stress engines normally placed at each end there were covers fitted to block the gaps. At one end a duplicate of the probe from the tank was secured into this cover, facing down the length of the tube. At the other end, they had arranged iron pieces on the inside of the cover, similar to the ones used at the bottom of the pool.
There were no seats here, so the review committee filed in and formed a line along the side wall. General Pickler was the first to speak: “Well, I guess I’m curious how this will help us anymore than the tank. How much longer is this, exactly?”
“Well, General,” started Madeline, “the tube is actually only 150 feet longer than the tank is deep, but it is not filled with water.”
“Well, what is it filled with?” he said to a mix of consternation and curiosity from the rest of the committee.
“Well, General, it isn’t filled with anything, not yet, at least.” She smiled at him without a hint of concern or patronizing tone, “To simulate two miles of depth we needed a substance much denser than water, but with some of the same properties.
“We can thank Captain Hawkson for his recommending something he had worked with in his navy days, which refracts at a degree twenty-three times greater than water.”
As she said this, sirens could be heard approaching.
Two behemoth green and white airport fire engines pulled into the long chamber, one through the doors at the far end, and the other coming in through the big double doors right next to the group. They slowly pulled up to either end of the tube, as the committee stepped smartly out of the way.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” shouted Madeline over the engines’ low grumbles, “the dense foam these engines produce is just the substance we need, unfortunately it does not stay in its foam state for more than five or so minutes, so we were forced to wait till the last moment to have them come in and fill us up.”
As she spoke, the engine operators climbed down from their cabs and began unwrapping the hoses, connecting them to specially installed valves on either end of the long tube.
With a radio confirmation from the distant second team the engine chief shouted commands to the hose team and both engines started pumping. Foam was squirting out of small gaps in the tube’s side as it coursed from each end, and the stunned audience stepped back as it quickly filled the tube.
So that the tube would not explode when it was full, the team had removed the central top hatch and through this a thick jet of foam suddenly exploded as the two streams met in the middle.
The hose teams cut off the supply, and the probe was activated. As the compound image began to form on the screen, Madeline reiterated: “In the dossiers we gave your assistants, we included the consistency and refractive properties of jet-fuel fire retardant just in case, once again I reiterate that, for the purposes of our experiment, this amount of the foam behaves the same way as roughly two-mile-deep water does.”
Slowly the image began to resolve on the screen and the military men confirmed it matched the predetermined layout shown in the previously unexplained depth test section of their dossiers. Happy and suitably impressed, they were keen to exit the noisy and messy room, and Laurie looked at Neal as they filed out the way they had come. He was laughing, along with his colleagues, as James Hawkson walked up to him and shook his hand, shaking his head and laughing as well. Neal and Laurie’s eyes met across the room, he grinned boyishly and she chuckled, a small victory shared amongst new friends.
As Dr. West followed the committee members to their conference room to join the closed-door discussion about the project’s future, James and Neal thanked the fire teams and they, in turn, exited the long room.
There was only one way to get the foam out of the tube and into drains in the concrete floor, so as the team enjoyed the success of the tests, and the fact they had gotten to use the giant airline fire engines, Neal walked quietly over to the tube’s rotation controls.
“OK, enough celebrating, let’s get back to business,” he shouted, “time to clean this place up.”
And with that he pressed the control that rolled the tube through 100
o
, its top hatches opening as it turned over.
Fifty-five thousand gallons of fire retardant foam flooded out, washing the team off its feet and covering them from head to foot. Twelve coughing, laughing snowmen got slowly up off their butts, wiping the harmless foam from their faces and surveying the foot-deep white pool that now stretched the length of the huge space.
Neal had held on to the wall mounted control panel and was only wet to the knees. He was now slowly moving toward the door, laughing, his relatively clean clothes the only color in a sea of white. James was the first to react, turning and sloshing after him. But Madeline was nearer the door and came to cut Neal’s exit off as he laughed obscenities and tried to run.
“Come on, Mr. Smith,” they all laughed as they pounced on him, “give us a hug!”
Drill Sergeant Shih considered the files in his hands. He had been working with the officer candidates for ten weeks now, and as usual, he had been summoned by the base commander to discuss their potential. While all were equal in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, he was discreetly tasked with identifying who among each class were more equal than others.
As the drill sergeant always did, on the first day of training Shih had looked for a strong candidate to abuse in order to set a standard of excellence for the group. Pei Leong-Lam had seemed to have all the required characteristics: strength, drive, and a measure of arrogance. But it had turned out his arrogance, if that was what it was, had been well placed.
Pei Leong-Lam was one of three candidates he had selected to present to the Base Commander, but Pei was as far removed from the other two as they were, in turn, from the rest of the class. He had consistently exceeded all targets for the school, coming close, but never quite breaking every record the base had. This final failure had not seemed to faze him, in fact his drive seemed to be utterly unflappable. The drill sergeant’s shouts and abuse had also not served to allay his progress, nor make him angry. He had continued, utterly unaffected by Shih’s deliberately unreasonable abuse.
As the buzzer rang on the base commander’s secretary’s desk, Shih rose sharply to his feet, his boots clicking to anticipatory attention, three crisp manila folders clasped in front of him. The secretary stood and, head bowed, opened the base commander’s door. The door was made of thick but brittle wood, an opaque glass panel in the center framed the gold on black Chinese lettering showing the comrade’s auspicious title. At a summons from within the office, the drill sergeant stepped through, the secretary closing the door behind him and resuming her seat.
* * *
On the other side of the planet, Lana Wilson sat on her bunk in her barracks at Annapolis and folded her uniform neatly. As usual, she was not participating in the revelry at the other end of the long room, as many of her other female navy officer-wannabes laughed and talked about the mischief they intended to get up to this weekend.
“All I know,” said Marie Smulyen, leaning against her pillow on her bunk, “is that I am horny.”
The other girls laughed and a couple nodded emphatically. “No shit, sister,” said Latesha Harris from her perch on the end of Marie’s bunk, “ten weeks in a room with you bitches is not my idea of fun.”
Marie extended her leg and kicked her friend, “You love it, ya big dyke.” she laughed.
“Hey,” interjected KC Smith from the next bunk, “I’m with Latesha on this one.”
“Sure you are!” laughed Marie.
KC did not look at Marie, but gave her the bird as she continued, “I have never seen so many naked women in my life. I intend to redress the balance this Saturday.”
“You got a boyfriend?” asked another girl.
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t want to have to explain to him the kind of freak I plan to get on this weekend. No, my friends, this will be strictly NSA.”
Several of the girls shook their heads in disdain, their upbringing keeping them from sinking quite to the level of their male cohorts in the next building.
“Well,” said Marie, “we have our first leave since joining the program this weekend, and I know some of you plan to have a nice dinner with some of the boys. Well, let me tell you, those
boys
are no good to me, so I’ll be skipping that snore-fest and heading straight to the club. You fools can come on after and have what’s left.”
“I’m with you!” said Latesha.
“Hell yeah!” said KC, and the two of them reached over and high-fived.
Down the room, Lana did not look up from her bunk, but she was listening to every word of the group. In fact, she heard and logged everything they said, even the snide remarks and comments some of them made about her abilities. She had singled herself out from the class early on with her marksmanship and astonishing grasp of the navigational and engineering theory they had been forced to learn.
She was clearly going to be fast-tracked for promotion, and her colleagues were not foolish enough to doubt that she would one day be a powerful officer in the navy they planned to call home. But they were also not immune to some jealousy for her exceptional speed and intelligence. Physically, she appeared to be a match for most of the male officers; intellectually the school had no one who could challenge her.
So given her obvious focus and ambition, the other women in her barracks would have been surprised to learn that she was just as keen for the coming weekend leave as they were. But when the petty officer entered the room, she sprang to her feet just as quickly, and waited with equal anticipation for the official leave slips that the senior rating was handing out.
* * *
That Saturday morning, the roll call on the parade ground was more restless than usual. Marie and Latesha winked at each other as the master chief reeled off various information about where they could and could not go, and when they had to be back. Behind them, KC smiled a small but wicked smile to herself.
At the dismissal, Lana Wilson turned and walked directly toward the gate. In navy issue khakis she walked through the security checkpoint, flashing her pass, and down the street toward the bus station. As she was aware, the bus she planned to take was turning onto her street now and she broke into a sprint as she was informed in real-time what its speed and anticipated arrival time was. She slowed to a brisk jog as the bus pulled up to the stop just ahead of her, stepping in behind the last passenger as he climbed aboard. Though most of her colleagues did not plan to leave town that weekend, the few that had planned to take the bus to Fort Meade train station would be disappointed to find out that the next one was not for another twenty-five minutes.
* * *
Four hours later, Lana stepped off a regional train at the small, rural town of Parrsville. In a brief stop not dissimilar to the one Pei Leong-Lam had made on his approach to Weifang, Lana had also been forced to bury her conspicuous black bag as well. After a brief visit to a sporting supply store in the town center to buy a duffle bag, she began walking out of the town until she came to a spot along the road and stopped. She was exactly equidistant from the last house of the housing development on the outskirts of town and the first of the slightly dilapidated but still busy farmhouses that were the bread and butter of this area.
As she waited for the go-ahead from the ever-watchful eye above, she contacted her subspace relay waiting underground nearby, reinitiating the real-time connection with the orbiting platform. This allowed her to send instead of just receive information for the first time in ten weeks. While she uploaded her report on the Officer Training School where she had been sequestered for the last two and half months, the satellite confirmed that there were no cars in either direction for some distance and instructed the waiting black bag to extricate itself from its hiding place.
Lana watched as the object started to rise out of the loose soil at the side of the wheat field, its sides undulating, working it up out of the soil like a giant worm. Over the past two months it had been driven over twice by a tractor, and the farmer’s dog had urinated on the soil over its head on several occasions as it sniffed at the alien presence below. But despite this, it had remained unharmed and, luckily for the farmer and his dog, it had also remained undiscovered. In a vineyard in France, a vintner had discovered a mysterious black bag there when he had begun to dig up an infected vine from one of his rows of Sauvignon Blanc. His end had been quick and gory, and the bag had simply shuffled itself to the side, reburying itself. It had remained there, unseen, while first the vintner’s family, then the police had attempted in vain to discover the cause of the unfortunate man’s death.