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

NICK COOK 265
from the inside and a file filled with letterheads I recognized: Boeing and
McDonnell Douglas had been but two of Hutchison's backers.
But he was getting ahead of himself and so was I. First things first.
"What happened after the arrival of the INSCOM team?" I asked.
He scrolled back 15 years and told me about the plow.
The building had been unremarkable, another storage facility in the
outer suburbs. There was no security, just an eight-foot wire fence and
the warehouse's relative obscurity amid the smoke and grime of Vancouver's
industrial quarter. It was not optimum, but guards would only
have attracted attention.
The equipment was housed behind a wall of breeze blocks in the
middle of the warehouse. The breeze blocks extended halfway to the
roof—around 15 feet.
This was the target area.
Behind the wall was the large Tesla Coil containing the uranium
source, a device around four and half feet tall with a doughnut-shaped
metal coil on top.
Diagonally across the room, on the other side of the target area, sat a
powerful Van de Graaf generator capable of producing a 250,000-volt
DC static charge.
The other prominent piece of technology was a three-and-a-half-foot
double-ended Tesla Coil, known as the "dumbbell," suspended from
supports running across the top of the wall.
Between these three main equipment items were an assortment of
smaller devices, all connected to each other by multiple coils of wire and
cabling.
There were tuning capacitors, high-voltage transmission caps, RF
coils and a spark gap that would snap every 40 seconds or so sending an
earsplitting shock wave throughout the building while it was up and
running.
Now, though, as the equipment warmed up prior to the test, all it
emitted was a low-intensity hum.
Outside the target area lay a pile of unclaimed scrap metal. Leaning
against the wall were three old streetlights and a spool of wire hawser. Set
in front of them was a rusting horse-drawn plow, three times the weight
of aman.
In the flickering light of the monitoring screens members of the team
would see their shadows moving on the edge of their vision. Several said
it made it feel like there were people there, watching them.
Between the scrap metal and the target area a bank of receivers and
monitoring equipment rested on a workbench.