The Hidden Truth: A Science Fiction Techno-Thriller Read online

I handed the book back to her. I think I had Xueshu Quan’s contact information memorized, but I’d need to write it all down soon before I forgot any of it.

  “Well surely there are other treasures like this one waiting to be found here,” I offered.

  “Well, that’s true,” the clerk said. “There’s a whole list of books with printing defects our customer wants.” Yee hah! I hadn’t felt this giddy since I was a kid on Christmas morning! Calm. Control. Focus.

  “You know,” I heard myself saying as if from a distance, “I visit lots of other used book stores. I could keep my eyes open for you. If you can give me a copy of that list, and your phone number…”

  “You just want my number!” she said with a smile.

  “Well,” I condensed all the confidence I could muster into a smug grin, “you can’t blame me, even if it weren’t for the money I could make for us. You know, if I contact you directly, couldn’t you just go straight to your customer and pocket the money?” She probably did have a responsibility to take deals like that to her boss here at the store. She looked uncertain – good, she was cute and honest. “You should probably think it over and figure out the right thing to do.” I added quickly.

  “I suppose so. Hold on a sec.” She stepped away from the counter and vanished in the back. She reappeared with the list. The top part was truncated as if she’d folded over the original with the customer’s contact information. On the top, she had written her number and “Call me! Nicole.” She handed it to me with a grin that just melted me inside. Then, she looked around and said softly, “Don’t let anyone see this list, OK? I’m not even supposed to have it myself.”

  “Glad to meet you Nicole. I’ll take good care of it.” I felt like a heel. The first time I’d actually “number closed” a girl, to use Amit’s phrase, and there was no way I could call her. “My name’s Dan,” I compounded my sins further with a lie. “Oh, by the way, did any other books come in with the Franklin book? Maybe there’s something else I’d like to get.”

  “I think so, she said. I’ll check,” she stepped into the back.

  While she was away, I casually walked past Dad as if checking out the shelf next to him and said, “Jackpot! Make sure no one buys anything here with credit cards. Leave no trace.” He nodded in affirmation. He slowly moved off. By the time Nicole was back, I saw him whispering to Mom and Kira.

  “Come with me,” Nicole said. I followed her to the science section. I saw Mom and Kira leave the store. Dad continued browsing, but he’d worked his way over to where he had a line of sight to me. Nicole pulled out Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science by Weyl. Princeton was apparently the publisher, and there was a label that said “Bk-82” on the spine. I opened the cover. Bingo! There was what I presumed to be a former owner’s name on what looked like an address label – Kenneth A. Norton, 4623 Kenmore Drive, N.W. WASHINGTON, D.C. Just below it in pencil was scribbled $8 and some illegible text. “That’s the only other book,” she said.

  “Great! You sold me.” I handed her a ten-dollar bill. “You can keep the change.”

  “You want your receipt or a bag for that?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Well, you at least need a bag or they’re going to think you’re shoplifting. Back in a sec.”

  She brought me back the book in a bag. “Your receipt is in the bag.”

  “I gotta run.” She looked disappointed. “When are you off?” I added.

  “My shift ends at eight,” she said.

  “I’ll see if I can make it.” That wasn’t exactly a lie, but it sure felt like one. I already knew there was no way I’d be back to see her. I’d be checked into my hotel for the night with my family before she got off work. Alas.

  I met Mom and Kira at the car.

  “What’s with all the cloak and dagger, Little Buddy?” Kira asked. She knew I didn’t like her calling me Little Buddy, particularly now that I was taller than she was.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said. “Let’s wait for Dad.” I pulled it out. There was the list. I had it. It was in my hands. Next to Nicole’s name, I began to scribble: “Xueshu Quan.” I wrote his address in Arlington, Virginia. I’d ignored the zip since I figured I could work it out later. I added the cell phone and email. Gotcha, Xueshu Quan!

  Dad hopped in and we drove off. “Okay, son. Spill it. What did you get?”

  For Kira’s benefit, I started from the beginning. For months, I had been scratching away with Amit, closely examining straw after straw in search of a few needles. Now instead of a painstaking search for the puzzle pieces, I had them all, or at least a list of them. I reviewed the list aloud.

  “This is incredible! Look, here’s the Franklin book listed for $1000, ‘send p. 115 to confirm.’ That’s the first reference I found. The list has the Fleming reference for $500, ‘send p. 640 to confirm.’ It has the Whittaker reference we found a couple of weeks ago also listed at $500. There are several other references at the $500 level. Another $1000 reference. And here’s Oliver Lodge, Modern Views of Electricity, third edition revised, 1907, ‘send pages 302-303 to confirm,’ $5000! This really is like a treasure map!”

  “So, if you can find this book,” Kira asked, “you’ll be able to sell it for $5000?”

  “Not exactly,” I replied. At that point, I decided to explain it all to her. By the time we got to the San Jacinto Monument, Kira was up to speed. “So, we don’t know exactly who was responsible,” I summarized, “but someone apparently suppressed a discovery by Heaviside – something about wave interaction that got described as electric waves bouncing off each other.”

  “It can’t be the same person as this Xueshu Quan,” Kira observed. “He’d… maybe she? …would have to be a hundred fifty years old.”

  “This Quan is probably just someone, like us, interested in understanding what happened,” Dad offered. “The lesson we learned here today is even if you are discrete, when you go out in the world seeking information, you leave traces.”

  “I can’t believe how lucky I was to stumble across this list,” I said.

  “‘Luck comes to the well-prepared,’” Dad opined. That always was one of his favorite sayings. “You were looking in the same sort of places for the same sort of things as this Quan. Quan had to expose a bit of his secret, putting it at risk in the hope of the greater reward of being the first to identify and secure these old books. Most anyone who came across the list would think nothing of it. Only because you had already identified the significance of some of the items on the list, were you able to work out Quan’s secret.”

  “I think you’re missing the implication of your father’s point,” Mom said to me. “As you’ve gone out searching for these secrets, you’ve left traces. Someone who knows the secrets would also realize that you know a part of the same secret, and you’re actively looking for more. You and your father are both amateurs at this, yet you’re playing a very dangerous game. I think you should stop.”

  “Even now, I don’t see much risk,” Dad assured Mom. “Suppose this Quan came asking, wondering why you were so interested in the list. Quan is offering a lot of money for these books, and all you’re trying to do is keep your eyes open, find the books, and offer them to Quan. Of course your interest is in the suppressed discovery, but you could explain it away by saying you were only interested in finding and selling potentially valuable books, not in any secrets.”

  “Still,” Mom insisted, “I’d feel much better if we didn’t stay the night in Houston. Hotels mean IDs and credit cards and a huge red flag announcing we were there. I’d like to put more distance between us and the bookstore to make it all the less likely anyone could connect us to it if they started looking seriously. We were planning on staying here and driving to Huntsville in the morning. Why don’t we just head on up there?”

  Dad countered, “I was planning on stopping by the big contractors’ tradeshow in the morning, and meeting up with Jim Burleson and some of my other professional colleagues. Tha
t lets me treat a big part of the trip as a professional expense.”

  “You’ll be seeing most of them back up around Knoxville, anyway,” Mom noted. “It’s not as though this trip was so expensive we can’t afford to pay for it as a personal expense. I know you don’t like having your plans disrupted, but I’d appreciate it if you’d take my concerns seriously and just get us as far away from here as possible.”

  “I think that’s an over-reaction on your part,” Dad countered levelly. “Also, I’m tired from driving all day. You’re talking about another ten-hour drive. I’m not comfortable trying to pull an all-nighter.”

  It was rare for Mom and Dad to argue like this in front of Kira and me. I felt bad about it, because I’d been more or less ignoring Mom’s concerns from the beginning. “I could drive,” I offered.

  “I’ll drive,” Mom said. She turned and looked at me. “You can sit in the front seat, talk to me, and help keep me awake.”

  Dad clearly didn’t want to dispute the issue further. “OK,” he acquiesced, “but, at some point, you will need to pull over and check us into a hotel, so we can at least get some sleep in a real bed. Maybe around Tuscaloosa or Birmingham?”

  Mom agreed.

  We cut short our visit to San Jacinto and skipped our tour of the Battleship Texas. Dad got us to Beaumont, where we topped off our gas and bought dinner at a McDonald’s. Dad paid cash. Mom and I got some coffee. Mom took the wheel, and I sat in the passenger seat.

  Well after midnight, we pulled in to a truck stop somewhere on I-59 near Hattiesburg. Dad had a wad of cash that he’d been planning to spend at the Huntsville Hamfest – sort of a combination amateur radio convention and flea market. He’d handed it over to Mom for gas and the hotel, saying he’d just visit an ATM in Huntsville. She peeled off a few bills for me. I paid cash inside and pumped the gas for Mom, while she visited the restroom and got us coffee. Then, it was my turn. When I got out, Mom was waiting with the car. I hopped in and we continued.

  Before long, Dad and Kira were sound asleep in the back seat. I’d been meaning to ask Mom about the “unpleasantness” she’d mentioned at Robber Dell on Independence Day: the reason why she’d practiced and become such a good shot. I took the opportunity to do so now.

  “Why ever do you want to know about all that?” she asked.

  “Because you’ve never told me much about the time when you and Dad got married. I pick up hints and teases about there being big trouble about it here and there around town. How scandalous it all was. Half the town must know the details. I’d rather hear the truth from you, so I don’t have to wonder how much of what I hear is exaggerations or lies.”

  “What have you heard?” Mom asked.

  “Frustratingly few actual details,” I explained. “I mean I know you and Dad got married in Atlanta, and I know Kira was born six months later. And I understand your family was not happy.”

  Mom was quiet, thoughtful. “This is very personal.”

  “I understand,” I said. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. It’s just awkward for me when folks talk about you or Dad and I’m clearly missing the context.”

  She weighed my words. “The town only has the vaguest idea of what actually happened. What I am about to tell you needs to be a secret. The reason you need to keep this secret is it would be profoundly embarrassing to my family, particularly to my brothers, your Uncle Lawrence and Uncle Michael. Not that they don’t deserve whatever measure of embarrassment that might come to them, but we’ve had a truce for two decades now, and I don’t want to give them cause to throw their weight around at the expense of you or your sister. Also, I know your father still feels bad about it. He shouldn’t, but he does, and I won’t have you bringing this up with him. I suppose, though, if you’re old enough to ask, you’re probably old enough to know. With this frolic you and your father have undertaken, you’re clearly good at keeping secrets. You understand and give me your word that all this is in confidence between you and me?”

  I did and I did.

  “Very well,” Mom began. “I went to Princeton as an undergraduate. I was supposed to be getting my MRS degree while studying art or music or some other major appropriate for my gender and class.”

  “MRS degree?” I interposed. “Master of what, Rocket Science?”

  Her face broke into a bright smile. “No, dear. MRS as in ‘missus.’ My job was to look pretty, socialize with the most elite scions of the country’s aristocracy, and land a suitable husband. My parents expected me to make an appropriate match, to marry up into another elite family. To form a strategic alliance between the Tollivers and another great family, maybe even break the Tollivers into the power elite who run the country, the offspring of someone on the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve, or maybe even someone in the Civic Circle.”

  “I haven’t even heard of most of those?”

  “Yes, and that’s the way they like it. They are associations of the most powerful and influential people in the country. The people who are in charge behind the scenes. Some, like the board members on the Federal Reserve, the Stock Exchange, or major corporations have actual power. The other groups’ power lies in the ability of members to network and coordinate among and between the captains of industry and government. It’s all about the connections, trading favors among the power brokers, setting and enforcing what will become the accepted wisdom.

  “In any event,” Mom continued. “I might well have taken the path of least resistance, except that Father, Grandpa Jack, was too pushy. I became resentful. And, art appreciation was boring. I loved chemistry. It was just like cooking – putting together precise recipes, keeping all the glassware spotless to avoid contamination – and the results were endlessly fascinating. It was all directly relevant to the Tolliver Corporation’s business, too, of course.

  “And then, my senior year when I should have been planning June nuptials with my Prince Charming, instead I was planning my admission to graduate school. Father was furious. He had just come to accept the fact that I was going to come home and work in the family business as a junior chemist, and he was going to have to settle for pairing me with some rising young Tolliver star deserving of marrying the boss’s daughter. Instead, I was off for a Ph.D. in chemistry that might take six years or more.

  “But, you never finished,” I pointed out. “You got married instead. What happened?”

  “I started graduate work in chemistry and began working as a research assistant for a professor at Georgia Tech on chemical fertilizers. It’s a big part of the Tolliver business, and I liked the idea of putting my chemical knowledge to work figuring out how to feed people.

  “You have to understand a bit of what was happening at the time,” Mom explained. “A famous biologist, Paul Ehrlich, convinced many people that mass famine was just around the corner and hundreds of millions of people were going to starve. The press had stories every week about hunger in America and how the heartless Reagan administration wasn’t feeding the poor. I was idealistic, and I wanted to do what I could to help fend off the pending starvation.

  “As I started studying and researching, however, I began to realize that the apocalyptic scenarios were grossly exaggerated, and that we weren't truly on the brink of famine, starvation, and disaster. An economist named Julian Simon wrote a book called The Ultimate Resource that explained how shortages in physical resources were overcome historically by human imagination and creativity. When a resource becomes scarce, people go out and find more of it, they recycle and use it more wisely, or they find substitutes.

  “Simon and Ehrlich made a bet back in 1980. Ehrlich selected a group of metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. He bet Simon that they would become scarcer over the next decade. They bet $1000 with Simon to pay Ehrlich the difference if the metals became less available and more expensive, and Ehrlich to pay Simon the
difference if the metals became more available and less expensive.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “The $1000 selection of metals from 1980 became something like $400 in 1990. Instead of the metals becoming more rare and expensive due to the shortages Ehrlich predicted, they become more plentiful, like Simon had expected. Ehrlich paid Simon the difference. That was after I already left graduate school, though,” Mom explained.

  “So, why did you leave then?” I asked her.

  “I learned about a man named Norman Borlaug. He did some pioneering work in plant breeding that created amazingly hardy and productive variants of common food crops. At the same time Ehrlich was pontificating about how India would never be able to feed itself, Borlaug was introducing better, more productive varieties of wheat that solved the problem. While Ehrlich was whining about how we were all doomed, Borlaug was already solving the problem.

  “Here I'd been thinking the world was in crisis and I had to do my part to fight as hard as I could to keep humanity from starving, and it turned out to simply not be the case. There was no great danger, just a bunch of academics who should have known better who were puffing themselves up to gain notoriety and power through their dire predictions.

  “And then I met your father.”

  “So it was love at first sight?” I asked.

  “No,” Mom laughed. “I thought he was an arrogant... well, I thought he was arrogant and full of himself.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Mom assured me. “He came up to me at a club where my friends had dragged me for drinks and dancing, and he asked me what I was drinking. “I told him I wasn't interested in him, and I started to turn my back on him, but he stopped me, saying 'That's not what I asked you. I asked what you were drinking.' I told him I was drinking a fuzzy navel – that's orange juice and peach schnapps. He asked me if it was any good. I told him it was. Then, before I could do anything, he took my drink, took a sip of it, set it back down, and said, 'Your judgment in drinks is every bit as poor as your judgment in men.' Then, he turned his back on me and just walked away!”