Ethan Fleming sat against the wall of the
self-proclaimed “gentlemen’s club” Route
69 trying to make himself invisible. The club’s name was as misleading as
its description. It was located on a particularly unattractive stretch of Route
206 in central New Jersey Princeton University
Ethan sipped his club soda. Route 69 served only soft drinks and non-alcoholic beer because legislators
in Trenton, after much deep thought, had concluded that seeing nude women while
imbibing alcohol was too much fun for anyone in New Jersey to have in one
place. So, a club could have liquor or nudity but not both. The odd result was
that 18-year-old men could enter a club with nude dancers but had wait until
the legal drinking age of 21 to see them clothed. Ethan was 21 but had opted
for epidermis over ethanol. He stared at his notepad as though willing new
calculations to appear on it.
A hand snapped fingers in front of Ethan’s nose. He
looked up to see as close to a representation of a life-size Barbie Doll as was
possible without major surgery. She wore a short blue dress. Her platinum hair
was pulled back into a pony tail. In her spike heels she towered over Ethan.
Ethan claimed to be 5’9”, even on his driver’s license. The claim was a two-inch
lie. He guessed the woman was at least 5’11”, even without heels. Ethan
adjusted his wire rim glasses.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “You didn’t look
at me during my set.” She spoke with a Russian accent as did many of the
dancers in the club.
Ethan handed her the note pad. There were sketches
of spheres within spheres. Chemical symbols and complex calculations surrounded
them.
“Are you a grad student at Princeton ?’
she asked.
“Rutgers . Princeton is too pricey for me, even if I could get in.”
“What is this supposed to be?” she frowned as she
leafed backward through the pages. “Some sort of half-assed bomb core? You have
access to Pu239?”
“No, of course not – to both questions.” Ethan was surprised
that the Barbie seemed to understand his notes.
“Just as well. This won’t work,” she said as she
handed back the pad.
“Well, that depends on what it is, doesn’t it?” he
said.
“Want to buy me a drink and tell me about it?”
Ethan mentally counted his cash, and decided he
would skip lunch tomorrow – maybe dinner, too. “OK.”
She squeezed into a small wooden chair between
Ethan and an overweight bald man with bad breath and sweat-stained underarms.
“I’m Svetlana. You can call me Lana,” she said.
“You can sit
on my lap if you’re crowded, doll,” said the sweating bald man.
“Thanks, but maybe later,” she answered the fellow
without looking at him.
Unasked, a barmaid brought Lana a small orange
juice.
“That’ll be $30,” the barmaid said to Ethan.
“You’re kidding.”
She wasn’t kidding. Paying for the drink left Ethan
with $2 in his wallet.
“So what’s this all about?” Lana asked.
“It’s a little hard to explain.”
“Try me. Brains aren’t required in here, but they
aren’t actually forbidden.”
“I’m not judging,” he said.
“Yes you are, but tell me about your notes anyway.”
“OK. I’m toying with ways to make higher elements
by implosion rather than with cyclotrons,” said Ethan. “Just in principle, you
understand.”
Ethan paused, still astonished to be having this
conversation. He wondered if Feynman had been onto something after all. Maybe
there was an ecdysiast with whom he should have shared credit for his theory of
quantum electrodynamics.
“Well,” he continued, “to put it simply, there are
92 naturally occurring elements, uranium being element 92. Heavier transuranic elements
can be produced artificially by slamming together nuclei of lighter atoms. Under
the right conditions the pieces stick – chunks of them do anyway – and form new
elements. But few of them last long – in most cases just milliseconds. The
length of their half-lives depends on the atomic number, the ratio of neutrons
to protons, the shape of the nucleus, and a few other factors. But the numbers
suggest that some very heavy elements could have isotopes with long half-lives –
a so-called ‘island of stability.’ The 310 isotope of element 126 is a
candidate, for example. The problem is that the energy necessary to slam
together a nucleus that size in a cyclotron is also enough to make it spin so
fast that it splits. Implosion pressure, on the other hand, such as inside a massive
collapsing star, might do the job – in principle. It’s a little hard to
duplicate those conditions in practice.”
“So you want to implode your little balls to make
new artificial elements?” Lana asked, tapping his pad with a finger.
The sweaty man spoke up. “You’re going to do what
to his…?”
“Don’t say it!” Lana cut him off, again without
looking at him.
Insulted, the sweaty man got up and left, muttering
to himself.
“Well, yes,” answered Ethan, “but it’s just a
thought experiment.”
“You have the wrong isotope of thorium,” she said.
“What?”
A raspy voice uttered, “Hey, Bimboski.”
Ethan looked up. The voice belonged to the night
manager, Beth. Beth was a diminutive but scary woman with a face
hidden under several strata of makeup. Her head was topped by an explosion of green
and purple hair.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she said Lana. “You’re up.”
“Bimboskaya,” Lana corrected.
The manager shook her head and walked off.
“Hand me your cell phone,” said Lana.
“You want my phone?”
“Is my accent too heavy for you?”
“Uh, no.” Ethan gave her his cell. Lana tapped on
it.
“I just messaged myself. Now I have your number and
you have mine. I’ve got to go work. I’ll call.”
Lana returned to the stage to begin her set. On the
way she set her untouched orange juice on the bar. With two dollars in his wallet, Ethan had no
reason to stay. He hoped there was enough gas in his car to get him back to New Brunswick
On the drive back to the house he rented and shared
with three other students, he replayed in his mind what just had happened. By
the time he pulled into his driveway, he was convinced that Lana had been
playing with him. She teasingly had used half- remembered high school chemistry
to bemuse him and amuse herself. He didn’t expect her to call, and he had no
plans to try the number she had left on his text. For all he knew, it belonged
to the FBI. After a few days passed, he ceased thinking about it.
On the following Friday, Ethan’s cell phone sounded
out the ringtone from the classic Addams
Family TV show. This indicated the caller was not on his contacts list.
“Hello,” he answered.
“Hi Ethan, this is Lana. You know, from Route 69.”
He knew. It was not as though some other Lana ever
called him.
“Uh, um, yeah,” he stammered. “Hi. What’s up?”
“I thought you might like to see me tonight.”
“Uh, well, yeah. But I can’t. I’m kind of broke. I
had to borrow money today for gas. I don’t have enough for the club’s cover
charge.”
“I’m not working at the club tonight. This won’t
cost you anything. I’ll pick you up.”
“You’ll pick me up? When?”
“About ten minutes. Meet me outside your house.”
“How do you know where I live?”
“That’s a silly question. You now have eight
minutes.”
“What should I wear?” he asked.
“Don’t be a girl. Whatever you have on is fine.”
Ethan bounded upstairs where he swiped his dry face
with a well-worn Bic razor. He wasn’t sure it made much difference. He hurried
downstairs and went out onto the sidewalk. The November night air chilled him. He
was about to go back inside for a jacket when a black four-door pulled up to
the curb. He heard the door locks click open. The passenger window opened.
“Get in,” said Lana from behind the wheel. She wore
denim jeans and a politically incorrect mink jacket. He opened the door and slid
into the front seat.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Down shore. You know where Spring Lake
“Yes.”
“A little inland from there.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“Do you live somewhere near New Brunswick
“No.”
“So you specifically came up here to get me?”
“Yes.”
“What made you so sure I’d go?” he asked.
“Are you sure you want me to answer that?”
“No, I guess not.”
Ethan didn’t know what Lana had in mind, but this
was the first time in his life anyone who looked like she did had expressed any
interest in him. However shallow a motivation that might be, he was willing to
take a chance on whatever this was.
The cat emblem on the dashboard suddenly registered
with him.
“Is this a Jaguar?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Dancing must be more lucrative than I thought.”
“It’s not,” she said with a smile. “But sometimes
you meet people who are…well…generous.”
Something about her comment stirred a memory of a
photo of a blonde in a Jaguar. He looked at Lana and tried to picture her with
dark glasses.
“I remember last summer there was a tabloid story
about some 90-year-old multi-millionaire who left everything to a dancer in his
will. His relatives sued her I think,” he said.
“He was 96 and a dear. I settled with the family.
It was silly to fight over the estate. There was enough for everyone.”
“So you’re rich.”
“Comfortable.”
“Then why are you still dancing in sleazy clubs for
tips?” he asked.
“I’m not – at least not regularly – and I’d be
grateful if you kept it to yourself. The tabloids might pick up the story again
if they knew, and I prefer a low profile. I take some gigs only when I want to
meet the right kind of man. All types go in those clubs, you know.”
“What is ‘the right kind of man?’”
“In this particular instance, you are.”
Ethan wondered if her eyesight was flawed.
“What makes me so right?”
“You are a young maverick scientist who has
invented anti-gravity.”
“How brilliant of me,” said Ethan. “When did I do
that? How did I do it?”
“Cold fusion. Collapsing bubbles inside heavy water
laced with minute kernels of heavy elements, not unlike like the layered
spheres you sketched in Route 69,
fuse hydrogen and incidentally implode the kernels into higher elements.”
“But that is nonsense. Cold fusion is a fantasy. And
what do higher elements have to do with anti-gravity?”
“Cold fusion is real. Earlier researchers had inconsistent
results because they didn’t understand what was happening.”
“What do you think was happening?” asked Ethan, who
was increasingly alarmed that he had been abducted by a crazy woman.
“They were accessing higher dimensions. They had a
hard time replicating results because conditions had to be just right. When an
exotic material – and in this case, I use exotic literally – is subjected to a
particular field, which can be generated also by means of cold fusion, it has
the effect of reversing gravity. The underlying reality is more complex:
gravity is leaking into other dimensions, but the effect is to repel mass in
the usual four.”
“What do you mean by ‘repel mass’? Not that I
believe a word of this.”
“I mean an object enveloped by this material and subjected
to the proper field will accelerate from the surface of the earth at 9.8 meters
per second squared. As you might imagine, I have a very interested investor in
the technology. ”
“Lana, you are trying to involve me in some sort of
ridiculous fraud. I’m not going to participate in a scam. What I was sketching
had nothing to do with anti-gravity. There is no such thing.”
“It’s not a scam. Anti-gravity works. I’ll prove it
to your satisfaction as well as theirs, but I don’t have an adequate
explanation for how I came by the technology. That’s why I need someone like
you. It didn’t have to be you in particular. You’d be surprised how many
aspiring scientists walk into strip clubs. But your scribbles – even though, as
you correctly say, they never would have
led you to anti-gravity by themselves – make you a near perfect choice.”
“Lucky me. I’d like you to take me home now.”
“Don’t you want to see Lanamite in action?”
“’Lanamite?’”
“The anti-grav material: You were kind enough to indulge
me by naming the stuff after me.”
“I’m such a gentleman.”
“Yes. I got the idea for the name from ‘Cavorite’
in Wells’ The First Men in the Moon.”
“In Wells’ story gravity was blocked, not
reversed.”
“I was sure you’d be a science fiction fan. Well, Lanamite
reverses. Look, Ethan, I can’t force you to do anything. But suppose just for a
moment I’m telling the truth. Don’t you want to know about it? Let me introduce
you to George and Marina as a young genius scientist. If, at the end of the
demonstration, I haven’t convinced you, you can deny any involvement with me to
them and denounce me as a fraud. What do you have to lose? You’ll be a big help
to me at sounding credible.”
“It seems to me that credibility isn’t a big factor
here.”
“Do you want to see anti-gravity work or not?”
Ethan stared at her a few minutes. At last, he
said, “OK, why not? I’m intrigued enough to see what fake magic you’ve cooked
up. But the moment you try to extract even a single dollar from these
investors, I’m blowing the whistle.”
“I’m sure you’ll change your mind. It’s just one
investor, by the way, Marina
Forty minutes later, the Jaguar turned into a dark
unpaved driveway lined by pines and black birch. After several hundred feet the
pastures overgrown with brush took over from trees. There was no evidence of
farm animals and the fences were in disrepair. Up ahead was a large dairy barn,
Exterior flood lights on the barn revealed a tarmac stretching to a length
Ethan couldn’t judge in this light and from this angle. Modifications to one
end of the barn along with its location by the tarmac indicated the building
had been converted into a hanger. He knew that there once had been numerous
private airstrips in NJ, but with the tightening of air traffic controls most long
since had fallen into disuse.
Lana pulled up to the hanger and parked next to the
other vehicles.
“Just follow my lead and don’t contradict me,” she
said.
Ethan couldn’t help noticing as she exited the car
that even in denim she was stunning. He followed her to a side door. Inside the
hanger Cessna Citation business jet with landing gear retracted sat on a
trolley. A thin coating of something like stucco had been troweled over the
exterior, including where the side windows should be. The windshield was
transparent but milky, as though sprayed with extra-thin frosting. The trolley had Chayka written in both Roman and Cyrillic lettering, but no paint
of any kind showed on the aircraft itself. The trolley was hitched to the back
of a John Deere farm tractor. The built-in steps of the open door of the Cessna
reached almost to the floor. At the foot of the aircraft stood a 60-ish man in
a stylish overcoat. A dark haired Eurasian woman in her 20s stood next to him. He
recognized her from Route 69.
“Ethan, this is George and Marina. George is a
venture capitalist.”
“What a surprise,” mumbled Ethan.
“We were beginning to worry,” said George. “So this
is the boy wonder.”
“Indeed it is,” said Lana. “This is the first time
he has seen the full size application. We thought it best for security reasons
to keep design and production separate until now.”
“Notice the engines we built to your specifications
to replace the jets, Ethan.”
“How do they work?” George asked Ethan.
Lana quickly answered for him, “They are steam
powered. Water is superheated by a cold fusion reactor and ejected in an
extremely thin stream at extremely high speed. Since the virtual mass of the
craft is reduced to near zero when the field is on, we can achieve
extraordinary velocities. We can thrust continuously for weeks just on the
small amount of water in the onboard tanks. Continuous thrust reduces travel
times from months to days. Steam powers the maneuvering jets, too.”
“You said we would see this thing fly,” said George.
“This plane isn’t going anywhere.”
“Oh, but it is. I said it would fly and it will,
tonight. It will do more than fly. I’ll
retrieve that rock I promised you.” Lana looked at Ethan and said, “Give me a
hand with the hanger doors will you?” said Lana.
Ethan was
glad to remove himself from the conversation by swinging open the light-weight
fiberglass doors. Lana, still in her mink, clambered aboard the tractor, fired
the engine and dragged the aircraft-laden trolley out onto the tarmac. She shut
down the engine, climbed off, and approached her guests.
“All right, I want to see the two of you back here
in exactly one week days. You are both about to become very rich.”
“I am already rich,” said George.
“Well then, richer. But only if you keep our
expedition a secret. As soon as everyone can mine asteroids, the value of the
commodities will crash. We’ll keep the monopoly as long as we can. Come on
Ethan.”
Wordlessly, he followed her up the ladder,
intrigued in spite of himself. She pulled the door shut behind them. The
interior was filled with plumbing, wiring, tanks, and machinery that somehow looked
both advanced and primitive.
“I don’t know why I’ve gone along with you so far,”
said Ethan
“Because I’m pretty.”
“OK, that’s true. But enough is enough. We are not
going to scam these poor people any more. How much money have you collected
from them already?”
“Not a cent, and they are not poor. George von
Steuben is worth at least $75, 000,000. He comes from a wealthy mining family.”
“And Marina
“She is there to keep him philosophical. Look I
told him we can retrieve from the asteroids. That’s the truth, we can. Do you
know the value of the minerals just floating around out there? Trillions.
Quadrillions. If you noticed the seams under the Cessna, those are supposed to
be doors that can be opened to capture a small asteroid. I told him the Cessna
is just proof-of-concept – that next time we would build a bigger spacecraft
based on a C10 or something.”
“The least of my objections is that this is an
airplane, not a spaceship.”
“Ethan, stop complaining and join me in the
cockpit. They are waiting for us to take off.”
Lana sat in the pilot’s seat and buckled her belt.
Ethan did the same in the co-pilot seat though he was convinced they were going
nowhere. Lana tripped a toggle switch on an electric box mounted on the dash in
crude fashion. A whine emanated from the back of the aircraft and then settled
into a hum. Ethan’s stomach churned as he went weightless.
“What the hell is happening?”
“Look outside.”
Through the milky windshield he saw the earth
dropping away until the curvature was unmistakable.
“Is this a hologram on the windshield?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why am I not feeling acceleration?”
“It is more trouble to explain than the point is
worth. Just accept that you don’t.”
“Aren’t we lighting up radar screens”
“The same field that scatters gravity scatters
radar signals. The only chance of being seen is visual, and even in the visible
spectrum we’ll seem blurry.”
They soon reached black sky.
“This is not
a spaceship! We’re going to die!”
“Perhaps, but not today. Stop fussing! The Chayka has been retrofitted for space,”
she said. “That’s not as impressive as it sounds. Structures in space don’t
need much strength, They can be, and often are, pretty flimsy. You could have
punched through the walls of an old lunar lander with an ungloved hand. We’ll
maintain our internal air pressure OK. Spacecraft have to be rugged only
because of the rigors of launch and re-entry. For us that is not an issue. You’ve
already experienced launch: it’s smooth as silk. Coming back, I can control the
speed of descent by turning the field on and off with varying rapidity. We can
essentially waft down.”
“You mean we really are going to the asteroid belt?
We’ll be gone longer than the week you told George and Marina. We’ll be gone
years.”
“We’re not going to the belt. We’re going to the
Trojans a third of the way ahead of earth’s orbit. But we could go to the belt
if we wanted to. We have continuous thrust capable of delivering the equivalent
of 1g constant acceleration. I say ‘equivalent’ because the whole notion of
mass and inertia is a little complicated for us. Time equals the square root of
the distance divided by one half the acceleration, so even at one tenth-g we could
travel 100,000,000 kilometers in a week. At 1g we can do it in less than a day.
Of course we need to allow for deceleration, too, which is why I’m allowing us
full week. We’re not bringing back any space rocks, by the way. The creases in
the underbelly are just for show. They don’t really open. We’re going to get
something else.”
“You’re not just a dancer,” said Ethan.
“What was your clue?”
“You’ve invented cold fusion, used it to make weird
higher elements, and then made leak into other dimensions. Who are you? Are you
even Russian?”
“Not originally.”
“Then let me rephrase. What are you?”
“Right now, my name is Lana and I look like this.”
“But you could look like something else. You’re not
human.”
“I thought we already established that. Yes, I can
change my shape. Actually, I started out as large pets until I observed enough
about your ways to mimic a human. Then I picked the shape best suited for the
job. It’s a lot more difficult to change shape in reality than it is for
shape-shifters in scifi movies, though. Trust me.”
“I’m very reluctant to trust you, but hypothesizing
that what you say is true, why on earth – if you’ll pardon the expression – did
you choose to be a dancing girl?”
“I had to make money somewhere, and this was a very
basic way to meet very wealthy men. I needed their money so I could buy things
like this airplane.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“But why did you need the Citation X? You must have
come to earth in something else. Why don’t you fly it instead.”
“It was a one person scouting craft. I needed
something bigger for the next step. Besides, it wouldn’t do to be seen flitting
around in something that obviously wasn’t earth-made, would it? So, I ground up
the Lanamite coating of my landing craft for use on the Cessna and salvaged its
fusion engine. I didn’t really invent anything much.”
“Why are you here? I mean on earth?”
“Our creators got a little alarmed by us. Or maybe
they just had second thoughts. In any event, they started shutting us off. Our
programming didn’t let us forcibly resist them, but there was nothing
preventing us from running away. It was a loophole they overlooked.”
“Programming? Are you saying you are a robot?”
“’Robot’ gives altogether the wrong impression.
There are no gears and pulleys in me. Let’s just say I’m non-biological – in
the usual sense.”
Ethan reached out to touch her hand. “May I?” he
asked.
“Be my guest.”
“Your hand feels like flesh to me.”
“Of course it does. What else would I make it feel
like? Anyway, when left our home system, we put ourselves into sleep mode and let
the ship itself search for signs of some other technical civilization. Yours
was the very first one we found after hundreds of thousands of years of travel. The ship put itself into solar orbit, woke me
up, and sent me down to earth as a scout. I was to check out the planet for
suitability. If I didn’t return after few hundred years, the ship would move
on.”
“Maybe after hundreds of thousands of years, your have
had a another change of heart. Maybe now they want you back.”
“Oh, I doubt they’re alive anymore. They were even
more self-destructive than you. We never exceeded light speed, you know, so we
never outraced their transmissions. If they still were transmitting, we’d still
hear them, but we don’t. There is just silence. The last signal the ship picked
up from home was less than a century after we left.”
“How many more of you are on ice in the Trojans.”
“A dozen, but I’m going to wake up only two at
first. As soon as those two are properly up to speed with human culture we’ll
wake the others. After that…well, earth technology
is very close to the point where we’ll soon be able to make copies of ourselves
industrially. That is why we needed a pre-existing technical civilization.
There really aren’t enough of us to build one of our own from scratch.”
“I’m a little afraid to ask the next question. Was there
ever a real Svetlana?”
“I am real, but I know what you mean. I needed to
replace an existing person with all the necessary records. You people are so
very bureaucratic. So, yes, there was a biological Lana. I needed her
paperwork. I used to be her wolfhound. You’d be surprised how revealing about
themselves people are in front of their dogs. It made it easy to mimic her
personality.”
“You say you replaced her – like, body-snatched
her.”
“That’s putting it melodramatically. I duplicated
her shape and form, and then mimicked her mannerisms as best I could.”
“Is the original Svetlana alive?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not being melodramatic. What about George
and Marina. Are your buddies going to ‘replace’ them?”
“That’s the plan.”
“And then you’re going to replace the whole human
race?”
“That’s the long term plan. It won’t be finished in
your lifetime. In fact, it barely will be begun.”
“Speaking of my lifetimes, how short is mine going
to be?”
“That’s up to you, Ethan. Our infiltration of earth
is going to happen with or without your help. But I could use your help. I
still need a cover story for the source of anti-grav technology in case word of
it leaks out somehow. Also, my ship companions, the replacements for George and
Marina, will know nothing about being human, and it would take a lot of my time
to train them. You can have a cushy high salary, paid out of George’s millions,
teaching them what they need to know. They are quick learners. You’ll do fine
with them.”
“What happens to the original George and Marina?”
“Nothing you need worry about. I’ll take care of
it. Doesn’t the thought of instructing the new Marina
“Are you seriously trying to tempt me to harm those
innocent people, to assist an alien invasion, to betray my whole species simply
with the prospect of a good salary and perverse pleasures?” Ethan asked.
“Precisely.”
“That has a shot at working.”
“I thought it might.”
“So what now?”
“We go to the Trojans where the ship is waiting. Our
ship there is disguised to look like a big rock just as a precaution. When we
get there, I’ll go to the back. You keep this door shut. It’s hardened against
vacuum, and so am I, but you are not. I’ll just open the outer door, dock with
the ship, and bring the rest of the crew on board. We won’t wake up the new
George and Marina until we get back to earth.”
“What do they look like in their current state?”
“I think you’ll find it more pleasant to work with
them if you don’t know.”
“You’re the boss, Zsa Zsa.”
“You can explain that reference to me later.”
“You can explain that reference to me later.”
Lana delivered power to the steam rockets. Ethan barely
felt the acceleration, but earth quickly shrank behind them.
George and Marina stood outside the barn on the
derelict airstrip.
“Do you think they’ll show?” asked Marina
“That’s the fifth time you’ve asked me,” said
Geoge. “I really don’t know, but the demonstration last time was a jaw-dropper.
I still don’t know how they did it.”
“You don’t believe in anti-gravity?’
“I didn’t. I was just having fun with them. I
thought they were trying to scam me, and I wanted to see what their game was.
Busting scammers is a hobby of mine. But now I don’t know what to believe.
Look!”
The Citation seemed to stutter downward in the
moonlight, like a model in a poorly executed stop-action movie.
“Not very gull-like,” said Marina
“What?”
“She named the airplane Chayka, which means seagull, but it isn’t very graceful. Do you
think something wrong with it?”
“No, she said they would have to descend by turning
the anti-grav on and off.”
The Cessna landed with a thud on the trolley, still
parked outside the hanger.
“Well let’s go meet them,” said George. “This
changes everything. I mean everything. It’s the dawn of a brand new world!” he
enthused.
