ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 91
don't really have a taste for it here, not at a senior level. They don't have
the vision that the Americans do. Antigravity is too much mumbojumbo,
not enough ROI." He rubbed his thumb and forefinger under his
nose and pulled a face. "Return on investment—bean-counter talk."
"So, if you can prove that the Americans really are up to something,"
I said, "you raise the stakes and get something going here? You get a real
program in this country with real money behind it?"
"Right—to a point," he said. "The difference is you're going to prove
it."
I stared at him, thinking I hadn't heard him right.
"It's not such a bad arrangement," he said, reaching into the manila
folder and pulling a bunch of papers from it. "You get a short course in
physics, a few tips on who to talk to, and maybe a story out of it." He
paused. "The story of the biggest breakthrough in transportation technology
since the invention of the wheel."
"You said there were signs . . ."I said cautiously.
Marckus pushed the papers across the table. The cover sheet was a
photocopy from some kind of index. The writing was small, but my eyes
were drawn to a section of text that had been highlighted with a yellow
marker pen.
I peered closer and words like "magnetic monopoles," "gravitational
charge" and "linear equations" swam into my vision.
"This is taken from something called the 'Source Index,' " he said.
"It's a list of doctorate papers published by universities around the
world. The highlighted part shows you what is happening in one
U.S. university, that's all. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of other
facilities like these across America engaged in related research. All of
them probing the sorts of areas you'd want to probe if you were pulling a
field-dependent propulsion program together. Some of the entries go
back decades."
Field-Dependent Propulsion; yet another term for antigravity.
"This thing is a multifaceted, multilayered puzzle and you won't solve
it by picking away at the edges," Marckus said. "Begin with what you can
see, then search for what you can't. What NASA's doing is in the open,
so get over there and start looking and listening. Then go deeper. Some
people say that the B-2 Stealth Bomber uses an antigravity drive system.
It's like the bomb. The physics has been around for a long time. All it
requires is some imagination, a shitload of money and some technical
know-how and someone who wants to put the pieces together."
On the way back home, as the shadows lengthened and the traffic
bunched on the choke points into London, I thought long and hard