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

  “Soon the rest of the country learned for themselves what it meant to trust the word of the elite. Most of the folks in the Cove banked in Maryville, so when the banks there failed, they lost what little they got for their land. To add insult to injury the federal government forbade “hoarding” of gold. What little real gold money people had stashed away, they were made to turn in under penalty of prison and given $20 in paper money for every ounce. Then, overnight that gold was revalued at $35 an ounce, so effectively, the government stole nearly half of whatever was left.

  “Poor folks everywhere suffered, but they could lean on their neighbors, their church, and their community for help. Cove folks had none of that. Many of the older folks who thought they could live out their remaining decades on the rent from their fields simply died under the stress of the eviction. Our family was devastated. Farming was all my grandfather knew and he couldn’t so much as find work as a sharecropper. Finally, he got enough together to put a down payment on a small spread west of Knoxville.

  “My pa was in school there one day a few years later when the principal called all the students together. ‘I just got a call from Senator McKellar,’ the principal told my pa and the rest of the students. ‘He wants me to tell you to go home and tell your parents: you’re all going to need to find a new place to live. The government’s going to take your property for the war effort.’ The Tollivers and their cronies saw the economic advantage of a huge federal facility in their backyard, so they offered up other people’s land to make it happen.

  “Sure enough, a few days later pa and his folks came home to find an eviction notice pinned to their door and flapping in the wind. They had three weeks to get off the property – not even enough time to finish harvesting the crops. That was in 1942 when the government seized all the land for the Oak Ridge lab. Grandpa was wiped out a second time. It was months before he saw any money, and when the check arrived, it was just barely enough to pay off the mortgage. It broke the man. Grandpa took to drink.

  “My pa was born in the Cove but didn’t remember much of it. He had vague memories of playing in the fields in the beautiful mountains. But his childhood was a hardscrabble existence – homeless, never enough food, never a toy or present.

  “Pa took me into the Great Smoky Mountain Park once, and up into the Cove. It was springtime. He brought me to the pasture where the family farm once stood. It wasn’t one of those historic log cabins, so the park service people had razed his family’s home to the ground. There in the open field, where the house once stood was a sprinkling of beautiful jonquils – the last remnants of his mother’s flower garden, still hanging on tenaciously, years later. My father was a strong man. But somehow, those flowers broke something inside him. He cried. I think that was the only time I ever saw him cry.

  “My father suffered tremendous hardships growing up. He did his best to insulate me and Rob and your Grandnana from it all. He succeeded, mostly. But it came at a cost. He was short in stature because he never got enough food while he was growing. And all the hard work and stress took a huge toll on his health – he never made it to retirement.

  “And all that happened because the Tollivers and their Civic Circle buddies bulldozed our family farm to make a playground for hikers and picnickers. And then they wiped out the family a second time to profit from a bomb factory. They are brutal, vicious thugs willing to trample the weak and powerless to achieve their ends. That is why I despise the Tollivers, your mother excepted of course, with a burning passion.”

  Wow. “How did you and Mom ever get together with all that between you?”

  Dad looked a bit guilty. “When I figured out who she was, I decided to get back at her family through her. But, the more I came to know her, the more I came to realize an important truth – just because you are in a family, or any other group for that matter, doesn’t mean you agree or endorse everything they do. When I finally confronted her and explained how our family histories were related, she was appalled at what her family had done. She had her own issues with them as well, but my story was what convinced her to break with them entirely. So, ultimately, I did achieve a measure of the revenge I had been seeking, but only because your mother became my ally instead of my enemy.”

  This was all a bit much for me. I changed the subject. “I’m still having trouble imagining you and Mom out dating and dancing,” I explained. “I didn’t know you liked to dance so much.”

  “Dancing’s not much of a sport,” he said. “Mediocre exercise compared to running or swimming. I only danced because it was such a great way to meet girls. You get into their personal space. You break down inhibitions. I met many attractive women dancing. You should consider getting into it.”

  “I may at that.” My parents’ different perspectives were fascinating. “Have you taken Mom dancing any time lately?”

  “We haven’t been dancing in years,” he said. “Too busy with work and family.”

  “Now that I’m about to leave home and go to college and your business is winding down,” I suggested, “you might want to take Mom out dancing somewhere. I bet she’d enjoy it.”

  He looked at me with one of those strange looks. “That’s a good idea,” he acknowledged. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

  My suggestion helped ease my conscience for getting Dad to corroborate Mom’s story without either knowing I’d been speaking to the other. Since I’d given my word to Mom, I couldn’t go any further with Dad about goings-on in Sherman.

  Looking back, I still have trouble thinking of my parents as real human beings with passions and interests, struggles and adventures of their own. Even today, my parents feel like a primal force lurking in the background, still guiding my actions through the force of their teaching and example. They just are. The nature of the relationship dominates my mental picture of them. It’s tough to keep in mind the fact that they too were real people with real problems, who did as best they could to do right for themselves and their family. I’m sad now to recall, but that weekend was the first time I began to understand my parents as real people. I saw my mother as a girl rebelling against her over-controlling father, a young woman setting out to save the world, a disillusioned chemist turning her back on fraud and deceit, choosing to break away from her profession and her family and make a new life for herself with my father. I saw my father as a young man dancing his way into girls’ hearts, burning to right the wrong committed against his family, allying with my mother to put the Tollivers behind them and make a new life and a new family together. They both worked so hard and overcame so much to give me a good start in life. Soon I would be facing even greater challenges, and I would have to do my best to live up to their example.

  Chapter 7: Summers’ End

  The Monday morning after we got home, I caught up with Amit at Kudzu Joe’s. “You know, it would have been much easier to just talk by cell phone,” I told Amit.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Amit insisted. “They’re listening, you know.” I’d only been away for a week and already I was actually missing Amit’s paranoia. He’d been busy, too.

  Amit’s demonstration to Berkshire management had gone well. Their IT people were pleased with what his network monitoring software did, and the operations team was impressed with how easy it was to use. Amit may not have had much experience with professional software projects, but he had years of experience helping his folks run their business. He knew hotel business processes and procedures cold. He understood exactly how to make a tool that a typical hotel manager would be able to understand and use. The Berkshire executives were happy to throw enough money Amit’s way to pay for his first year at college. In return, they were going to get a business tool that would have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop otherwise.

  “I might have been able to charge them more for it,” Amit acknowledged, “but the recurring revenue for maintenance and upgrades will be huge if it gets adopted across the company. They’ve already agreed to roll out my s
oftware to an even larger scale pilot – a couple dozen hotels around eastern Tennessee, north Georgia and northern Alabama.”

  In truth, I had mixed feelings. I was genuinely happy for his success but also a bit jealous that his accomplishments were so far beyond my own. “That’s great news,” I told him. I did mean it. “Is this going to make it easier to get online anonymously?”

  “Absolutely,” Amit exclaimed gleefully. “No more wardriving for Internet access. I have to debug and test the software by capturing and sifting through an entire hotel’s worth of Internet access at a time. It should be easy to hide a search here or a download there in the data stream. But it’s going to take time for me to get everything set up so I can do it smoothly and without leaving a trace. Do you think we need to do more searching?”

  “I think once we download scans of everything on this list, we’re done with book downloading for the time being.” I handed Amit the Xueshu Quan list I got from Nicole, and I brought him up to speed on my encounter at the bookstore in Houston.

  “That was smooth, dude,” he said, admiringly. “I knew you had it in you. Next time you pump and dump a girl, though, try to do better than just pumping for information and a number.” It was hard for me to tell if he was being sincere and serious or if he was just trying to provoke a response out of me, so I ignored him.

  “Our top priority should be getting this one – a copy of Lodge’s Modern Views of Electricity.” I suggested. “It’s the most expensive book on the Xueshu Quan list, so it’s probably the most revealing. We should be looking for more scans as well as physical copies. It’s on the list of books we already checked out from the Tolliver Library.”

  “I thought that title looked familiar,” Amit said. “So, did you notice anything on page,” he glanced down at the Xueshu Quan list, “302 and 303?”

  “Look at this!” I turned the laptop over to him and showed him pages 302-303 from the scan we made of the Tolliver Library’s copy. “See this figure?” In the middle of page 302, there was a collection of graphs labeled “Diagram of the electric and magnetic forces concerned in radiation” drawn by a Mr. Trouton. “This figure is labelled ‘Fig. 65,’ see? Only, there’s no mention at all in the text of Figure 65.”

  “Interesting,” Amit said, thoughtfully. “You compared the Tolliver Library scan to the ones we downloaded off Omnitia?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “The pages look the same. I think this is a case where the Tolliver Library copy was already altered.” I explained the discovery from Vanderbilt University where I found a physical copy of Fleming’s Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy that differed from the copy in the Tolliver Library but exactly matched the Omnitia scan we downloaded.

  I saw the light bulb turn on immediately for Amit. “So, it’s not just a modern digital forgery, after all,” he said. “Your electromagnetic villains censored some copies of these books, and they missed others. It probably happened right at publication. The book was published, someone noticed, recalled what copies they could, and reissued a ‘corrected’ or censored version. The Tolliver Library happened to get uncensored versions of the Franklin, Fleming, and Whittaker books. With the Lodge book, though, the one book that’s most important to figuring this out, we got stuck with a censored version.”

  “Exactly,” I confirmed. “That’s the fundamental problem with our method. We’ve been comparing scans of Tolliver Library books to Omnitia scans. But, if the Tolliver Library book has already been censored, there’s nothing left to find except, perhaps, for some evidence of the censoring.”

  “Like a mystery figure that conveniently eats up almost a whole page of text but is never mentioned in the text itself,” Amit noted.

  “Oh, and speaking of evidence of alteration,” I scrolled down the scan to the index of the book. “Check out the index entry for Heaviside.” The index listed “Heaviside, 153, 233, 325, 391,” and then on the following line, “399n., 417.” There were broad gaps between the numbers, as if a page number had been deleted. “Our electromagnetic villain got the index right this time, but was too lazy to roll the “399n” up to the earlier line,” I hypothesized. “Take a look at the Hertz index entry.” Hertz was followed by six numbers. “I measured the text,” I explained to Amit. “There’s no reason why the ‘399n’ should have been dropped to the bottom line. I’ll bet a mention of Heaviside on page 302 or 303 was deleted and the remaining numbers were spaced out.”

  Amit scrolled back up to pages 302-303. The remaining text on the page ended with a paragraph talking about a quarter-wave acceleration of phase. It seemed fascinating, but neither of us understood it.

  “I suspect any library copies are going to be missing the ‘printing defects’ we’re looking for,” Amit speculated. “Just like the copy of Fleming’s Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy at Vanderbilt.”

  “If someone’s trying to hide what’s in these books, you’d think they’d have removed anything easily accessible from a library by now,” I agreed.

  “It’s hard to believe the Tolliver Library was overlooked,” Amit said.

  “Tolliver Tech was never that significant a university,” I pointed out. “In its day, it had a good reputation for engineering, but the place was never more than a regional standout. Tolliver money gave the library here an acquisitions reach on par with the top schools of the day, but even then, I doubt many people outside the region would have heard of it. Now that it’s a community college, who would anticipate that the library of some backwoods community college would have a world-class collection of century-old technical books?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to check nearby libraries just to be sure,” Amit observed. “It’s going to be tricky if this Xueshu Quan is looking, too. If he’s prepared to pay $5000, you can forget trying to outbid him on eBay.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I explained. “If we find a copy online from eBay or some other place, we could just contact the seller and get him to send a picture or scan of the appropriate page to an anonymous e-mail. That’s all we actually need.”

  “That’s doable,” Amit concluded. “I can use an anonymous email account to make the request. The fundamental problem is that the information is time-sensitive. Up until now, I could head out every few days to make an anonymous search and download a few scans. No real time pressure. Now, we have to be able to move quickly on the information and try to act before Xueshu Quan or anyone else can snap the books up before us. I’ll have to search every day or set up an automated search. At least it’s not a lot of data – not like trying to download an entire book at a time.

  “What about that other book you got,” Amit asked, “the one that came in to the Houston bookstore?”

  “It was Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science by Hermann Weyl,” I explained. “I skimmed through it, but it doesn’t seem relevant. We ought to look into the owner, though, someone named Kenneth A. Norton.”

  “So you think this Norton owned the Franklin waves book that you looked at, too?” Amit asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Nicole said the books had come in together. I’m not positive. Norton stamped his address in the front cover. It didn’t have a zip code, which probably means he owned it a long time ago. The book was published in 1949, so this Norton may have been just one of several owners.”

  “We can try to find out about Norton, but I want to try researching this Xueshu Quan, too,” Amit added. “He doesn’t seem like someone just investigating this bouncing waves stuff. From that list, it’s as if he already knows what’s out there, and he’s trying to gather up all the copies before anyone else finds them. At least we can download scans of the books on the list.”

  “I want to call Nicole and apologize for standing her up.” I’d felt guilty about lying to the girl and felt I owed her at least that. “Can we do that while we’re wardriving?”

  Amit looked at me, gently shaking his head. “Girls stand up guys all the time. Turnabout is fair play.”

  “That�
��s not how I care to play ‘the game,’” I insisted.

  “If you insist,” he acquiesced. “I can set up a VOIP call.”

  “What?”

  “Voice Over IP,” Amit explained. “You can make a phone call over the Internet connection. We need a pre-paid credit card number, though. Can you ask your Dad to get a prepaid card on one of his trips to Knoxville? That’d be safer than buying it around here. I’ll need the card number to set it up.”

  Amit agreed we’d complete a wardrive looking into Xueshu Quan and Kenneth Norton. Amit was going to look for more scans of the Lodge book just in case a different source might have scanned the uncensored version. The Tolliver Library had four of the books on the Xueshu Quan list, and we had scans for them all. Amit was going to hunt down scans of the remaining half dozen or so. We’d review the results, and then make one last wardriving expedition to let me make my call, to try to gather data on any open questions.

  Our more immediate deadline was the pre-season debate tournament. We had less than a week to go, so Amit and I spent the rest of our morning at Kudzu Joe’s running through our debate plans. Amit wasn’t happy with the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator case I’d come up with. He was concerned that it wouldn’t be significant enough – that legalizing RTGs wouldn’t have much impact. I needed to work on that. We also agreed we should both be working on some alternate affirmative cases. We spent the rest of the morning brainstorming and researching.

  * * *

  Finding an open Wi-Fi connection while wardriving was only half the battle. The other half was finding one with enough bandwidth to download book scans. Many of the free public Wi-Fi hot spots were throttled. You could check your email or browse the web, but they put a limit on how much and how fast you could download. Amit had found a number of good locations. And Tor itself tended to be slow, requiring a long time to download large files.