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

NICK COOK 273
"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