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

  I think I actually followed a bit of that, but it wasn’t nearly as clear to me as it apparently was to Dad. Even Dad was still confused. Amit interrupted our contemplation.

  “I asked the eBay seller to send a scan of the index also. Check this out,” he said. Amit showed us scans of page 510. “In the Tolliver copy and the Omnitia scan, the Heaviside index entries are spaced out. In the eBay copy, there’s an added reference to page 303. The minions of EVIL got the index right this time, but were too lazy to roll the “399n” up to the earlier line. Take a look at the Hertz index entry for a comparison.” The entry for “Hertz” was followed by six numbers. “There’s no reason why the ‘399n’ should have been dropped to the next line in the ‘Heaviside’ entry,” Amit explained. “It’s clear that the 303 was deleted and the remaining numbers were spaced out.”

  “You have your smoking gun,” Mom observed. “It’s obvious that someone modified the book to remove that paragraph from nearly all copies of Professor Lodge’s book. They also removed the reference from the index. You even have an explanation of Mr. Heaviside’s paper, but what does it mean? Why is this so important that someone would kill to keep it secret?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dad confessed. “The physics actually seems basic, but it’s deeply counterintuitive.” I could see Dad disengaging from pondering the physics and gathering his thoughts.

  “They say all crimes require means, motive, and opportunity,” Dad observed. “We have a good start on the means: censorship of technical ideas, and potentially even the assassination of leading scientists. What’s the motive?”

  “Fear of technical progress?” Mom speculated. “But this doesn’t seem like some run-of-the-mill Luddite. It’s too specific. It’s the fear of some particular, narrow aspect of technical progress, not technical progress in general.”

  “We’ve discussed that idea,” Dad acknowledged, nodding in my direction, “but trying to nudge or perturb the course of technical development in a particular direction? You couldn’t do that unless you already knew the potential technical destination and you were trying to divert folks off some particular path and force them in a different direction.”

  “Some personal rivalry?” I suggested. “Someone who made a breakthrough, but kept their progress secret, and then wanted to deter or derail competitors? A company?”

  “Possibly,” Amit said, “but remember this is international in scope: publishers in New York and London were apparently altering books. Assume Maxwell, Hertz, and FitzGerald were actually murdered, Heaviside was harassed, and Lodge was distracted. Then you’re talking about EVIL working in Germany, England, Scotland, and Ireland, too, in additional to the US.”

  “That’s bringing us to the question of opportunity? Who could be responsible? I don’t have a clue,” Dad admitted. “It could be an international corporation, although those were much rarer a century ago than today. It could also be a government. You’ve found examples in the writings of American and British writers. If it were today, I’d assume the US and UK were in cahoots for some reason – that they regarded this as some classified technology with some great military significance. Back then, they were not always friendly rivals. Maybe the US was taking action against Britain or vice versa, but that seems unlikely. The more likely culprit would be Kaiser Bill.” Amit looked confused, so he explained. “I mean Kaiser Wilhelm. Imperial Germany. No other major power would have been likely to be starting something with the UK or US. The French were allied with Britain. Japan and Russia were too busy with each other – they fought a war in 1905. China was in turmoil and their last Imperial dynasty was on the verge of collapse. As you research the personalities, you need to also take a look at the geo-political context.”

  “What about Heinrich Hertz?” Mom insisted. “Why would the Germans kill their own scientist – Heinrich Hertz – at the peak of his powers while he’s making such wonderful discoveries?”

  “Maybe the Germans killed Maxwell and the British killed Hertz in retaliation?” Amit suggested.

  Dueling assassinations of a rival’s leading scientists? It didn’t make much sense to me. “Maxwell died in 1879,” I pointed out. “When did Kaiser Wilhelm appear on the scene?”

  Amit grabbed a different laptop, and did a quick search, being careful to route it to one of his virtual machines in another hotel. “Wilhelm II was proclaimed Kaiser of the Imperial German empire in 1888… oh, my…” His jaw dropped as he stared bug-eyed at the screen.

  “Well?” Dad asked.

  Amit plugged in his laptop to the projector so we could follow along. He continued reading aloud:

  “Wilhelm ascended to the throne upon the death of his father, Frederick III, whose 99-day reign ended prematurely due to his death from throat cancer at age 56. The moderate, progressive, Frederick opposed the more conservative and militaristic Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and spoke out against Bismarck’s policy of German reunification by force. Bismarck in turn aimed to instill Prussian militarism and turn the young Wilhelm against his father. Observers in both Germany and Britain had hoped that Frederick’s reign would liberalize the German empire and reduce military tensions. His death was widely considered a turning point in German history.”

  “That sounds almost exactly like how Hertz died, just a few years later,” Mr. Patel noted.

  We were all silent for a moment. “A turning point,” I said quietly. “Like a Nexus?” I felt overwhelmed by the potential implications.

  “And EVIL has a way to detect a Nexus.” Amit observed. “And then they send someone to investigate and take action to shape history, including killing people who might change history in ways they don’t like.”

  “What’s more, they must have been at this a very long time,” I noted. “Kaiser Wilhelm couldn’t have been the prime mover. He had to have been a tool. A tool in the hands of whoever killed Maxwell in 1879, Frederick in 1888, Hertz in 1894, and FitzGerald in 1901. Heaviside wrote a paper on wave interactions in 1905. It was unpublished but must have circulated among his professional colleagues, because it was mentioned by Franklin in 1909, by Whittaker in 1910, by Fleming in 1906, and here we have Lodge describing it in 1907. EVIL has systematically covered up all the evidence. They removed the original mentions in print, and they forced the publishers to modify their printings. although some copies of the originals still pop up now and then. EVIL seeks them out and buys them through at least one used book dealer – the folks in Houston. Maybe there are other book dealers in their program. Maybe there are other books. Heaviside published the third volume of Electromagnetic Theory in 1912, and talked a lot about electromagnetic waves, but he omitted – or was forced to omit – any mention of bouncing waves. And, who can tell what else EVIL was up to?”

  “You’re both missing the big flaws in this theory,” Dad pointed out. “Now EVIL not only induces cancers long before radioactivity was discovered, they also have a high-tech device that uses some kind of nuclear sensor to detect when and where the course of history is being changed – a good fifty or sixty years before the development of nuclear physics? Heck, there’s no technology known to this day that could do such a thing.”

  “Because it’s been suppressed?” Amit speculated. “Just like Heaviside’s work on electromagnetic waves?”

  “I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “Maybe the technology came first and the science later. Folks were using magnetic compasses for navigation for centuries before magnetism was understood. Maybe someone stumbled across a device of some kind, something like a compass, but instead of pointing north it points to where history is changing.”

  “An ancient fortune telling device that exploits some kind of nuclear phenomenon and points to the location where history is being made?” Dad was skeptical. I can’t say as I blamed him.

  “I thought Hertz died of granulomatosis, not cancer,” Mom said.

  “I don’t know about that,” I countered. “I found some older books that characterized Hertz’s death as due to complicatio
ns from a surgery for jaw cancer. So, we may have Maxwell’s stomach cancer, Frederick’s throat cancer, Hertz’s jaw cancer, and FitzGerald’s perforated ulcer – which might also have been correlated with cancer. I don’t think it would take a high tech x-ray machine to pull it off. If someone put a nasty enough concentration of some radioactive material in someone’s food, it might account for all these deaths.”

  “The Radium Girls!” I could see the lightbulb turn on for Mom. “Radium paint was used to make luminescent watches during the First World War,” she explained. “The women who did the painting would lick the paint brush to get a sharp point. With each lick, they got a little bit of radium in their mouths. In a few years many of them developed horrible jaw cancers from their exposure.”

  “Again,” Dad said patiently, “radium wasn’t isolated until…”

  “1910 by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne,” Mom conceded, promptly. “Although Curie actually discovered it back in the 1890s.”

  “Even supposing someone had access to radioactive poisons before then,” Dad continued, “which is highly questionable, there’s still the matter of motive and opportunity. If it wasn’t Imperial Germany, but rather some secret cabal acting behind the scenes, it could be anyone: the Illuminati, the Free Masons, the Catholic Church, the Rosicrucians, the Elders of Zion, the British Royal Family, the Knights Templar – pick your favorite conspiracy theory.”

  “The Deep State,” Amit added.

  “I’m not familiar with that one,” Dad said.

  “It’s the idea that there is a loose cabal of senior bureaucrats and officials calling the shots and running the show in the government, with the active collusion of the crony capitalists, contractors, and bankers who profit from it all,” Amit explained.

  “Oh,” Dad acknowledged. “I doubt there was much of a Deep State back in the 1870s when you’re supposing all this began. Again, there’s an international component to it all. We’ve seen British, German, and now even hints of a Chinese connection with this Xueshu Quan.”

  “Or the Deep State is just one more modern tool in the hands of EVIL?” I speculated. “I mean, someone is sending FBI agents after us who somehow aren’t ‘real’ FBI agents.”

  It hardly seemed possible, let alone credible. I could imagine conspiracy and counter-conspiracy everywhere, which was getting us nowhere. And yet, Heaviside’s paper was still out there, and someone with enormous resources had not only gone to great trouble to hide it a century ago, but also was actively trying to suppress it today. I kept going around in circles. The only conclusion I could draw was that we needed more evidence to get anywhere.

  “Let’s see what we have,” I summarized. “An organization we’ve dubbed EVIL, for lack of a better name…”

  “You have to admit that’s a great name for our villains,” Amit interrupted, smugly.

  “…has been operating for more than a century,” I continued, ignoring his interruption. “They appear to have a means or device for detecting a Nexus. We’re not sure what a Nexus is, but it might be considered some kind of turning point in history. EVIL may have been involved in the assassination of political and scientific leaders. They may have worked behind the scenes in nineteenth century Germany, in the UK, and they are definitely active today, perhaps with a Chinese connection as well. They are affiliated with or able to operate as agents of our own government. They are actively covering their tracks and suppressing certain hidden truths, like Heaviside’s ideas on wave interaction.”

  “This science stuff is all well and good,” Mr. Patel noted, “but the most important hidden truth is the fact that there is one, and someone is trying very hard to hide it.” We pondered Mr. Patel’s point.

  “That about sums it up,” Amit broke the silence. “Someone had the clout to not only suppress Heaviside’s paper, but also get all mentions of it removed from books in the US and Britain alike. And all those deaths are awfully suspicious, even if we don’t know exactly how they happened.”

  “That’s all awfully speculative,” Dad commented, “but I’m increasingly convinced we face an extremely dangerous enemy. They may well have killed before to keep their secrets. They’ve successfully hidden the truth for more than a century. Moreover, it looks like they’re killing people who get too close to their secrets. They must be very, very good at what they do if they’ve kept this thing a secret for so long. That suggests to me they must be absolutely ruthless. I’m beginning to regret encouraging you boys to run open loop on this.”

  I could see Mom frown, shooting him an “I told you so” look.

  “Perhaps we should just publicize what we know,” I suggested. “If we’ve already told the world, there’s no incentive to silence us.”

  “I’d be tempted,” Dad said, “but we’re dealing with experts in silencing people and suppressing information. It would have to go viral fast before it got shut down. And this business about bouncing waves sounds absolutely crazy, even before we add the bit about assassinated scientists. You finally have me believing that there’s something to it, but even I don’t think it makes any sense. No one would believe us. It would make a little splash, it would sound ridiculous, and it would be forgotten. And then, they’d make certain we never had a chance to try anything like that again.”

  “Amit,” Dad continued, “would you print off a copy of that text from Lodge on bouncing waves? Jim Burleson may have some ideas. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get a printout of this to share with him. I want to study it further and try to make more sense of it.”

  “Sure thing,” Amit replied. He opened a credenza in the conference room to reveal a printer and connected his computer. The laser printer that Dad donated to the cause hummed and out spat the paper. Dad grabbed the printout.

  * * *

  The eBay listing for the book was withdrawn before the book sold. The seller wrote back to Amit saying the book was no longer available, but it came with a Heaviside manuscript and would Amit be interested in purchasing it? Amit asked him to send a scan. The seller sent an executable zip file. Spooked, Amit didn’t open it. “I’m not logging back into either the email or the eBay account again,” he explained. “I’m sure they’re doing their best to arrange some kind of a trap if I do.”

  A few weeks later, Dad took Amit and me to meet Mr. Burleson for breakfast. He’d been puzzling over Lodge’s cryptic text for a few weeks, and was finally confident he had the meaning. “Radio waves really do bounce off each other,” he explained, “in a certain sense.” He drew a couple of pictures for us to help explain what happens when two waves collide or interfere with each other. An electromagnetic wave has an electric wave “E” coupled at a right angle to a magnetic wave, “H”. Both fields operate at a right angle to the direction in which the wave and the energy propagate, “S”. A collision is called “constructive” if the electric fields point in the same direction, and “destructive” if the electric fields point in opposite directions. But a very interesting thing happens when the two waves interfere with each other.

  He drew a couple of pictures for me to help explain what happens when two waves collide or interfere with each other.

  When the electric fields align constructively, the magnetic fields align destructively. When the electric fields align destructively, the magnetic fields align constructively. It’s fascinating how the balance of electric and magnetic energy in a wave gets disrupted, with electric energy transforming to magnetic energy or magnetic to electric. The total amount of energy is conserved – it’s just one kind changing to another.

  Waves must have both electric and magnetic fields in order for energy to move, so all the energy comes to a rest when either field cancels out. But, the waves keep on propagating through each other at the speed of light. The waves exchange energy with each other. In that sense, radio waves – or at least the energy associated with them – really do bounce off each other.

  It seemed like a basic concept, once I understood it. “This is stuff that should be in
any basic class on electricity and magnetism,” Dad acknowledged. “I’m amazed that something this simple and basic could have been overlooked. It all makes perfect sense. At the same time, I don’t understand why a fundamental concept like this would be deliberately suppressed. What possible threat could this basic physical concept pose to anyone’s interest?” Yet again, we’d peeled back another layer of the puzzle only to be left with more questions.

  * * *

  November rolled around. President Lieberman and Vice President McCain won re-election on a unity ticket. The first virtually unopposed presidential election since 1820 wasn’t nearly as important to me as my continuing concern that EVIL lurked, ready to pop up unannounced. On a more pleasant note, however, Mom and Dad were planning a second honeymoon of sorts to Nashville over the Thanksgiving weekend holiday.

  I tried to focus on my schoolwork and debate, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Although the debate season was in full swing, by November, Amit and I had both virtually dropped out. Amit’s time was consumed with his network administration software development. I was spending all my spare time reading and reviewing history and physics books to try to get a handle on what happened, and why Heaviside’s work on bouncing waves had prompted such an extreme reaction. Neither of us had time to prepare properly for debate. We didn’t want to let Mr. Stinson down, so we agreed to participate in a Student Congress event held in Knoxville. We introduced resolutions, debated them, and practiced parliamentary procedure. I’d been looking forward to an opportunity to have freewheeling public policy discussions, but it seemed the whole event was an exercise in horse trading, bribery, and vote buying – support our school’s candidate for speaker and we’ll back your bill – instead of open and objective discussion on the actual pros and cons of the measures we were discussing. I finally complained to Amit how disappointed I was in everyone else’s childish behavior – why couldn’t my fellow students discuss and analyze the issues like adults? “Dude,” he replied shaking his head. “Don’t you think this is exactly how the real Congress works?” That observation explained a lot about politics I hadn’t understood before.