Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (53 page)

“It’s not only that… Although of course we do have a responsibility to evaluate and oversee these expenditures. Still, the fact that the costs are reaching this order of magnitude creates a kind of vulnerability. The fact is — and this is only based on what little I know of this operation — I would not want to be put in the position of having to defend these expenditures to a Congressional committee, for example.” He paused again, twisting his head uncomfortably. The thought seemed to cause him genuine distress. “I find that when these things reach a certain level of funding, no matter what security precautions are taken, we can no longer be confident that we won’t find them suddenly being used as a vehicle for a political attack.” He ran his finger along his lip again, tapping it lightly at several points. Perhaps he was checking for cold sores. “And so I particularly wanted this chance to review the situation with you directly.”

“Yes,” said Jenkins. “I understand perfectly. I’ve tried to keep Nick Ridgefield fully informed about how we were spending money and how much. I think—”

“Well, you have. You absolutely have.”

“And I’ve tried to present an honest picture of the very real possibility that we will ultimately fail in our efforts.”

“Failure is not really an important issue here. Nor, up to a point, is cost. Public scrutiny is really what we have to be concerned with.”

“Of course,” said Jenkins. “I understand your concern perfectly. The political risks are high and the costs are unquestionably high. But the value of what we are doing, if we are successful, is incalculable.”

“I’m sure it is. I’m only concerned that the political risks here may be so great that no amount of value could justify them.”

Jenkins’s eyes widened momentarily, as if something in this startled him. “Of course,” he said slowly. “I see that perfectly. That’s why I’m so glad to have the opportunity to go over this with you in person. So that you can judge for yourself what is at stake.” He paused for a moment and then resumed. “I assume you’ve talked to Ridgefield.”

“I
have
talked to Ridgefield, of course, but… Let me be frank, umm— your name is David Jenkins just now, isn’t it? Perhaps it would be best if I called you that as well. Let me be perfectly frank, Jenkins. Ridgefield doesn’t want to talk to me about this. He strongly recommended that I speak with you directly. He doesn’t want the responsibility. He doesn’t want to be on record as having stated clearly — or having known — what is going on here. He has the highest possible opinion of you. Everyone does. Brilliant record, nothing odd or erratic — otherwise this wouldn’t have gone as far as it has. But Ridgefield wants to make sure that you have the whole responsibility for this. Or that I have it. And I’ll tell you quite frankly that I almost refused to talk to you at all. But, on balance, I felt safer informing myself, so I allowed myself to be prevailed upon. But whatever you may have told Ridgefield, you should assume that I know nothing about all this. You should present — and you should understand that this will be strictly off the record, for the time being at least — you should present me with all the facts.” He glanced involuntarily at his watch.

Jenkins’s face wrinkled up. He walked over to the filing cabinet and withdrew a folder of large photographic prints. “This building housed, until last April, a small corporation called MicroMagnetics, Inc., which was engaged in research funded by various agencies of the
DOD
. I apologize for the quality of the photograph: it is the only one we have; it was taken in connection with an application for a mortgage, by the wife of the man standing in front of the building. We are still, after many thousands of man-hours of interviews and scientific review, not sure about the precise nature of the research being performed there. However, inside the building there was a laboratory in which had been constructed some sort of magnetic containment device — that would be the next photograph — similar to those used in the development of nuclear fusion devices…”

Jenkins was giving a set speech. He recited the curriculum vitae of Bernard Wachs, Ph.D., including a critical bibliography of his published work. He listed the names of the people who had worked for Micro-Magnetics, what they had done there, what they understood of Wachs’s device. Jenkins’s visitor showed a polite interest in the photographs, examining them in much the same way he would have examined photographs of distant cousins in whom he was not much interested, during an obligatory visit to a great-aunt.

Jenkins began to describe the press conference. He had a floor plan of the building and grounds. There was a picture of Carillon. I found myself getting to my feet so that I could see the photographs, and I realized that I was quite unsteady. I reminded myself that I had not eaten for thirty-six hours. But seeing those pictures and hearing those events recounted in that insinuating monotone was having an overwhelming and unexpected effect on me. I was startled by the realization that it had all taken place only five months before. Somehow I had put it all out of my mind, and it had come to seem, until this moment, quite remote. But now, looking at these photographs, I felt the blood draining from my head, and I pictured again the final pulsing incineration of Carillon and Wachs. I had to keep hold of myself. Jenkins was talking about the Students for a Fair World and what else they had done and then how everyone had filed out onto the lawn in front of the building. Why hadn’t I filed out onto the lawn like everyone else?

Jenkins was walking across the room. He pulled open a closet door, revealing a metal safe the size of a small refrigerator. I knew that I must get over there no matter what. One, two, three careful steps, lowering the heel onto the floor and then rocking onto the edge of my foot. He was turning the knob around and around, clockwise. He stopped at fifteen. Fifteen, fifteen, fifteen: remember fifteen. Back around to thirty-seven. Fifteen, thirty-seven. Fifteen, thirty-seven. Forward to eighteen. Back to five. Fifteen, thirty-seven, eighteen, five. Fifteen, thirty-seven, eighteen, five. Easy, but my mind threatened to go blank with panic at the possibility of forgetting.

Jenkins pulled open the door to the safe and carried over another little folder. He laid it on the edge of the desk in front of his visitor and lifted the cover. There was a small pile of black and white photographs. The one on top showed a lawn with what appeared to be a large hole or crater. It might have been the excavation for the foundation of a new building.

“And this is how the site appeared shortly after the explosion. If explosion is the proper word. Fortunately, there was a transient condition of high radioactivity, which resulted in immediate evacuation of the area.” The visitor was flipping through more photographs of the site. He reached a photograph of a man in a spacesuit floating over the crater.

“I don’t quite make out what’s going on in this one,” said the visitor, turning the picture at an angle and furrowing his brow. “There’s a man being lowered somehow into this pit.”

“Actually, that’s not what’s happening,” Jenkins was saying. The other man was flipping through the remaining photographs. He stopped at a picture of three men suspended in midair, one on his hands and knees, one standing, and one in the posture of a man sitting on a chair. It looked like some improbable pantomime. Throughout the space in which they floated, there was a network of lines forming squares and rectangles, as if someone had tried to draw in the outline of a building.

Jenkins was trying to explain. He had pulled out the photograph of the building before the accident and the floor plan, and he was pointing from one to the other. “This picture is taken at a slightly different angle, unfortunately, but this man is standing in the room next to this door in front, and the man crouching above him is in the room directly above.”

Jenkins’s visitor was looking at the pictures with total concentration now. “What you are asserting here is that the entire building is still there, only invisible.” The man licked his lips nervously and blinked “Ridgefield left me with a more modest impression — some extraordinarily transparent objects… Have you had these photographs authenticated?”

“Well, from our perspective there wouldn’t really be any point. One of my men took those photographs. The person standing in this first room is me.”

“I see.” He went back through the photographs, looking at them intently now and saying nothing. “Tell me… It’s of course hard really to tell from these photographs… how convincing, exactly, was the illusion… the sensation of invisibility? That is to say, did you see the outlines of things? Was it as if everything was made of glass? Did… How exactly does it work with glass? Does the light reflect off it differently? … With these photographs it’s impossible to—”

“It was not at all as if everything was made of glass. You could see nothing whatever. No outline, or shape, not the slightest opacity or visual distortion. When you touched something, you could feel it. That was all. Everything was exactly as it had been, except that it was completely invisible. I know it sounds incredible. It’s too bad that the photographs aren’t better. We took others with much better equipment.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were destroyed.”

“Destroyed how?” asked the man. He seemed to feel some outrage that such a thing had been permitted to take place. “Is that part of the… I gather from Ridgefield that there is some issue of sabotage here. How much of this remains? Can we visit this site?” He was still squinting at the photographs.

Jenkins had walked back across the room and was carefully groping inside the safe. He walked back towards the desk, holding his hands out oddly before him, palms upward, as if in supplication to some deity. He was carrying something, something invisible, and there was a little clatter as he deposited it on the surface of the desk in front of his visitor. Fifteen, thirty-seven, eighteen, five. It was several objects, and as he arranged them, his hands moved mysteriously over the surface of the desk as if he were performing some magical incantation.

Jenkins was holding an empty hand out toward his visitor and saying, “You might examine this.” The man looked at Jenkins with an expression of discomfort and perhaps annoyance. Either he was like the member of the audience who is suddenly singled out by the magician and told to take a card or else he was being forced to humor a madman, and whichever it was, it made him feel foolish. His eyes shot momentarily back toward the door as if in contemplation of escape. But there was Jenkins’s hand under his nose. He moved his own forefinger self-consciously toward it. Just before it reached Jenkins’s forefinger, he started, jerking back as if he had been stung. He reached out again and took whatever it was and began to manipulate it, as a look of astonishment spread over his face.

“It’s… it’s a cigarette lighter… It’s quite unbelievable… And is the whole thing like this? The whole building?”

“It was. It’s been burned down.”

“Burned down?
How in God’s name could that have been permitted to happen?” He was staring intently at his own hand. The thumb was jerking up and down comically and you could hear the scratch of the flint. He moved the fingers of his left hand in a little circle over the right hand. Suddenly he emitted a half-stifled little shriek, and his hands flew violently apart.

“I see it still works perfectly.”

He sucked momentarily at the fingers of his left hand and then leaned forward from the edge of his chair to search for the dropped lighter.

Soon both men were on all fours feeling about for the lighter. “Tricky keeping track of a thing like that, isn’t it?”

“Very tricky. That, in a way, is our main problem.”

“How much survived this fire? What do you still have?”

“I’m afraid that this—” Jenkins located the lighter somewhere under his desk. “Here it is.” The two men stood up and Jenkins carefully deposited the lighter on the desk. “I’m afraid that what’s here on this desk is all that we have. There was probably some sort of explosion during the course of the fire. It may have been a fuel tank, or it may even have been something in the laboratory, but there was essentially nothing left of the site. We spent several weeks sifting the ashes and raking the surrounding area.” The other man was groping over the surface of the desk in front of him. “You’ll find, in addition to the lighter, a portion of a glass ashtray, a screwdriver, and a bullet.”

The visitor picked something up and held it in his hand, which was shaking.

“That’s all that survived the fire? This bullet has been fired,” he said, turning it over in his fingers. “Have you had anyone look at this… I mean, from a scientific point of view?”

“We’ve sent pieces of the ashtray to Riverhaven and to the Radiation Labs. They refer to it as ‘superglass.’ For security reasons, we haven’t for the time being told them that we have any substance other than glass with these properties. At some point a decision will have to be made about how we want to proceed on all this.” Jenkins frowned, his face contorting in folds. He seemed to be thinking about something.

“And have they come back with anything? I mean, do they know how it’s done?” The man’s voice had a little quaver of nervous excitement to it. So would mine have, if I had tried to speak then. I was trembling as I waited for the reply.

“If you mean could they re-create the phenomenon, make other objects like these, no. They have come back with a great deal about the properties of ‘superglass.’ But when you come down to it, they are mainly just describing the lack of properties you might otherwise expect to find. I’ll give you the reports, and you—”

“Well, if they can’t do it themselves yet, do they know… do they have some general idea more or less how it must have been done?”

Jenkins wrinkled up his face. “You should look at the reports. I would say the answer to your question comes down to no. But they would give a much lengthier, more complicated formulation. The fact is, they have many different ideas how it must have been done. Too many.” He stopped as if considering whether to pursue the question. “The theory seems to be that these objects are not built up out of the same subatomic particles as other physical things. Instead, they are composed of different particles, or perhaps units of energy, but arranged in the same structure as before. Or perhaps they are largely the same particles, only interchanged somehow. There are differing schools of thought. In any case, you have an object with roughly the same properties as the original, except that light passes through it without any refraction. Specific gravity is slightly lower. Mechanical bonding seems to be poorer. But basically you have an invisible version of a given object.”