Technol Rep Tohoku Univ: GENERATION OF ANTI-GRAVITY ...

NICK COOK 249
guidance. For an aerospace engineer the black world was a regime that
ought to be endured only for a small window in a person's career—and
even that was a crime, Widmer said. It was not, he added, what he would
call a good formula over a long haul.
When I noticed his hands, I saw that they were shaking.
After a pause that was long enough for me to image the mixture of
suspicion and draconian security that had once stalked him, he added:
"I mean, the degree they went to in order to hold the secrecy was
unbelievable."
The look in his eyes was so far-off and intense that I was reluctant to
intrude further. But I needed to ask him one last question.
"Did it frighten you, ever?" I said.
"Yes," he replied, his voice scarcely a whisper.
As I left the room, heading under escort for my appointment with
Bushman in the cavernous interior of Plant 4, the minder and I said
nothing. Perhaps this way, it was easier to pretend that nothing had
happened. But as we walked across the shop floor that had consistently
churned out combat aircraft for the past 50-odd years and then stepped
back into the strip-lit corridors and past endless security-sealed doors,
the air-conditioning cold on our faces, I couldn't help but wonder at the
senselessness of it all. One look at Widmer, another at his résumé, told
you everything you needed to know. His ambition had been to design and
build aircraft that made GD Convair the best plane-maker in the
business and which protected America from its enemies. In most people's
eyes, that made him a patriot, not a security threat.
But the CIA, or whoever the hell had terrified the bejeezus out of him
and his family, had insisted on making the point. And what for?
Had Kingfish, the official loser in the CIA's high-speed spyplane
contest, gone on as a "deep black" development program, emerging years
later as Aurora?
Or was the truth more prosaic?
Had Kingfish simply been too expensive to be developed, forcing
someone, somewhere to consign its design principles into a black hole of
ignorance, the mythic warehouse that Ben Rich had told me about, where
no one would ever be able to get at them?
If so, how many other technologies were in that place? How many
more Widmers had been terrified into keeping that perpetual oath of
silence?
Hundreds. Thousands in all probability.
Whether George S. Trimble had developed antigravity in the black or