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30 The Hunt for Zero Point
"No," Craig replied, apparently without irony.
"I thought I should report it," Bertrandias told him. "There was a lot
of objection to my getting in there by the party that took me and the thing
frightened me—frightened me for the fact that it is being held or
conducted by a private group. I was in there from about one-thirty until
about five in the afternoon and I saw these two models that fly and the
thing has such a terrific impact that I thought we ought to find out
something about it—who these people are and whether the thing is
legitimate. If it ever gets away I say it is in the stage in which the atomic
development was in the early days."
"I see," General Craig replied. The man's urbane delivery earmarked
him, to me at least, as someone big in Air Force intelligence.
"I was told that I was not to say anything about it," Bertrandias
burbled on, "but I'm afraid that all that I heard made me believe in it and
these were not schoolboys. It was conducted in rather an elaborate office
in Los Angeles. I thought I should report it to you."
"Yes, well I'll look into it and see what I can find out," Craig told him,
shortly before hanging up.
It seems that what Bertrandias had stumbled upon, a little before the
Townsend Brown Foundation was ready to pitch it formally to the
military, was Project Winterhaven—the distillation of all Brown's ideas
into a blueprint for a manned antigravity fighter, built in the shape of a
disc and capable of Mach 3, twice the speed of the leading jet-powered
interceptor of the day.
Years later, LaViolette had found extensive references to Winterhaven
in the sole remaining copy of the Electrogravitics Systems report the
Congressional librarian had tracked down to the technical library at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
I was rapidly coming full circle.
I needed to see the report on Project Winterhaven, but remembering
the difficulty LaViolette had had in tracking down the one remaining
copy of Electrogravitics Systems, I couldn't begin to think how or where I
would lay my hands on one. I imagined, given the Air Force's evident
excitement about Brown's work, that if there were any copies of
Winterhaven left, they were buried somewhere deep.
I rang Valone in Washington—my third call in as many weeks—and
this time got the question I'd been dreading. Was Jane's running some
kind of investigation into antigravity?
I told him it wasn't; that my interest in Brown's work was born of
personal curiosity, nothing more, and that I'd appreciate it if he'd keep
the matter to himself.