-Caveat Lector-
http://mostlyfiction.com/excerpts/zeropoint.htm
The Hunt for Zero Point
By Nick Cook
Published by Broadway Books
August 2002; 0767906276; 256 pages
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Chapter 1
From the heavy-handed style of the prose and the faint handwritten 1956
scrawled in pencil along the top of the first page, the photocopied pages
had obviously come from some long-forgotten schlock popular science journal.
I had stepped away from my desk only for a few moments and somehow in the
interim the article had appeared. The headline ran: The G-Engines Are
Coming!
I glanced around the office, wondering who had put it there and if this was
someone's idea of a joke. The copier had cut off the top of the first page
and the title of the publication with it, but it was the drawing above the
headline that was the giveaway. It depicted an aircraft, if you could call
it that, hovering a few feet above a dry lakebed, a ladder extending from
the fuselage and a crewmember making his way down the steps dressed in a
U.S.-style flight suit and flying helmet--standard garb for that era. The
aircraft had no wings and no visible means of propulsion.
I gave the office another quick scan. The magazine's operations were set on
the first floor. The whole building was open-plan. To my left, the business
editor was head-down over a proof-page checking copy. To her right was the
naval editor, a guy who was good for a windup, but who was currently deep
into a phone conversation and looked like he had been for hours.
I was reminded of a technology piece I'd penned a couple of years earlier
about the search for scientific breakthroughs in U.S. aerospace and defense
research. In a journal not noted for its exploration of the fringes of
paranormality, nor for its humor, I'd inserted a tongue-in-cheek reference
to gravity--or rather to antigravity, a subject beloved of science-fiction
writers.
For some U.S. aerospace engineers, I'd said, an antigravity propulsion
system remains the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design. The
implication was that antigravity was the aerospace equivalent of the holy
grail: something longed for, dreamed about, but beyond reach--and likely
always to remain so.
Somehow the reference had escaped the sub-editors and, as a result, amongst
my peers, other aerospace and defense writers on the circuit, I'd taken some
flak for it. For Jane's, the publishing empire founded on one man's
obsession with the detailed specifications of ships and aircraft almost a
century earlier, technology wasn't something you joked about.
The magazine I wrote--and still write--for, Jane's Defense Weekly,
documented the day-to-day dealings of the multibillion-dollar defense
business. JDW, as we called it, is but one of a portfolio of products
detailing the ins and outs of the global aerospace and defense industry. If
you want to know about the thrust-to-weight ratio of a Chinese combat
aircraft engine or the pulse repetition frequency of a particular radar
system, somewhere in the Jane's portfolio of products there is a publication
that has the answers. In short, Jane's was, and always has been, about
facts. Its motto is: Authoritative, Accurate, Impartial.
It was a huge commercial intelligence-gathering operation; and provided they
had the money, anyone could buy into its vast knowledge base.
I cast a glance at the bank of sub-editors' workstations over in the far
corner of the office, but nobody appeared remotely interested in what was
happening at my desk. If the subs had nothing to do with it, and usually
they were the first to know about a piece of piss-taking that was going down
in the office, I figured whoever had put it there was from one of the dozens
of other departments in the building and on a different floor. Perhaps my
anonymous benefactor had felt embarrassed about passing it on to me?
I studied the piece again.
The strapline below the headline proclaimed: By far the most potent source
of energy is gravity. Using it as power, future aircraft will attain the
speed of light. It was written by one Michael Gladych and began:
Nuclear-powered aircraft are yet to be built, but there are research
projects already under way that will make the super-planes obsolete before
they are test-flown. For in the United States and Canada, research centers,
scientists, designers and engineers are perfecting a way to control
gravity--a force infinitely more powerful than the mighty atom. The result
of their labors will be antigravity engines working without fuel--weightless
airliners and space ships able to travel at 170,000 miles per second.
On any other day, that would have been the moment I'd have consigned it for
recycling. But something in the following paragraph caught my eye.
The gravity research, it said, had been supported by the Glenn L. Martin
Aircraft Company, Bell Aircraft, Lear and several other American aircraft
manufacturers who would not spend millions of dollars on
