Buck Rogers- A Life in the Future Page 5

  Caliburn studied the man. "Then why all the play-acting?"

  "Whenever we have visitors here," Ramirez said seriously, "from congress, or some government committee, we do our best to make them believe we're dealing with dangerous experimental systems. When they become too inquisitive, we release small amounts of radioactive gas into these chambers. It's enough to kick your rad badge into showing rising levels of radiation. Most people want out of here as fast as they can. It's our best protection against interference."

  "Interference with what?" Caliburn snapped.

  "The future" came the astonishing reply.

  Dr. Mjrron Packwood joined them. The laser scientist pointed to a final thick door. "Through there," he said, "is our bridge to tomorrow. I apologize for this sideshow. Once you cross through that doorway, you will understand. I promise we will hold nothing back from you."

  "Let's go," Caliburn said coldly. He wanted answers, not apologetic mumblings.

  Packwood stood before a security enclave. A mechanical voice, feminine and sultry, sounded from a concealed speaker. "State your name for voiceprint clearance."

  Buck Rogers

  "Dr. Myron Packwood."

  "Identification number, please."

  "Four two two seven nine five six. Clearance level triple-Q."

  "Look into the retinal scan, please."

  Packwood leaned forward; a soft light flashed into his eyes.

  "Thank you. Are you requesting group clearance?"

  "Affirmative. One new individual. Rex Caliburn, government inspector, data on file."

  "Dr. Caliburn is cleared. You may enter."

  "Wait a moment," Caliburn protested. "I didn't do any of those things you did, Packwood. How could that security system know enough about me to clear me through?"

  Ramirez smiled. "I'll answer for him, sir. Security is my responsibility here. Since the moment you stepped into this building, you have been fluoroscoped, X-rayed, and ultrasoni-cally scanned. Your eyes have been examined and your retinal pattern checked with data in our computer banks. Your physical build, walk, voice tone—everything about you—has gone through security scanning. Even the electromagnetic pattern of your brain waves, along the ELF frequency—"

  "ELF?"

  "Extremely low frequency. Approximately twenty-six hertz. It's what your brain broadcasts. We measure it down to eleven numbers beyond the decimal point."

  "Smart," Caliburn acknowledged. "But the best machines you can build can be fooled."

  "That's why three guard dogs have sniffed your body odor as you came in here. They aren't machines, and they passed you through. Before you ask the question, yes, the animals were taken to your apartment so they could smell the odor peculiar to your body. To a dog, that's an unmistakable pattern."

  "Enough," Caliburn said. "Open your Pandora's box and let's see what comes out."

  Blinding light flashed past his eyes. Caliburn stood stock-still, not knowing what to expect in the next moment. As fast as it had appeared, the light was gone. A new sensation came to him, deep thudding sounds that rumbled through the steel plat-

  A Life in the Future

  ing beneath his feet. Packwood motioned for his attention. "It's a power surge. You'll understand in a few moments."

  Caliburn nodded, suddenly angry with himself for going along so easily with these people. He had come here because of a dying man. The hopes for some sort of miracle had sustained him through all this hoopla, but he was rapidly getting tired of all the hints and muted assurances.

  A final doorway split down the middle to reveal a magician's keep of dazzling lights, a medley of musical sounds. He detected a tinkling as of glass crystals ringing against each other.

  There was another flash of light, but this time not into his eyes. A huge cylindrical shape stretched from his left for at least three hundred feet along the center of a vast domed facility. It reminded him of a great church he'd visited in Spain. But there was no church here; instead he saw a fantasyland of dazzling colors and hissing light beams, and he felt a sense of enormous power about them.

  Caliburn recognized what he was looking at as a laser-beam generator. They'd been testing laser-beam weapons for years in the Star Wars programs, but he'd never seen anything even remotely approaching the massive generator before him. Then he looked beyond to see that this was but the first of many such generators that stood in a long row at the far end of the cylinder.

  An entire wall glowed with the lights and data panels of a Mark Sixteen computer system that rendered even the great Cray computers outmoded. He saw thick cables, and more instrument panels that were completely strange to him. Light spasmed through the cylinder, and enormous solenoids clicked on and off with a sound of giant pincers opening and closing.

  Caliburn addressed the group, his words slow and hushed. "Out with it. What the hell is this place?"

  "We call it the Cyberdyne Dream Catcher," Ramirez said proudly. "It doesn't catch dreams in the literal sense, of course."

  "Of course," Caliburn answered with undisguised sarcasm.

  "But it can bring true one of the greatest and longest-lived dreams of mankind," Ramirez replied without missing a beat. "This, Mr. Caliburn, is a doorway. We said this before. It is a doorway to tomorrow. It is the means of sending selected human beings into the future."

  "How far into the future?" Caliburn didn't yet believe what he

  Buck Rogers

  was hearing, but his temptation to rake these people over the coals was tempered by the enormous complex surrounding him. Someone had put a tremendous amount of money, time, and energy into this . . . well, whatever it was. Maybe a time machine wasn't such a joke, after all.

  Dr. Nancy Reilly came to his side. "Officially, we call this the Physiological Bioelectromagnetic Test Facility."

  "Big name," Caliburn said, waiting for more.

  'Tou want to know why we call it both physiological and electromagnetic?"

  "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. You've just described the human being, except for his position in life as a cybernetics system. You know, what we like to call the ability to think creatively."

  "Precisely," Nancy Reilly responded, pleased that this man was a quick study. Before she could add to her explanation, a loudspeaker boomed through the area.

  "CLEAR THE TEST FLOOR. CLEAR THE TEST FLOOR. TEST NUMBER ONE NINE SIX SIX FIVE WILL COMMENCE IN THREE MINUTES." After a brief pause, the words sounded again.

  "Come with us, please," Packwood urged. "Into the viewing chamber. Just follow this row of green lights along the floor."

  They entered a high viewing room with a thick glass wall looking down into the experimental center. For the first time since they'd come into this crazy place. Dr. Arthur Bedford spoke to Caliburn. "Looking down from this view," Bedford explained, "gives you a better idea of how everything ties together. What you see here all feeds to the power banks by the long cylinder. Including the mirrors."

  "What mirrors?" Caliburn said sharply, but even as he spoke, walls slid away to reveal a bewildering array of mirrors, flat, curved, and gleaming, in a wild array of colors. Then Caliburn understood. The power banks would feed tremendous energy to laser beam transmitters. The laser beams would then be bounced through the array of mirrors, and—

  "THIRTY SECONDS," intoned the electronic voice. "ALL LIGHTING DIMMED TO POINT ZERO THREE INTENSITY."

  Gloom fell across the great chamber. Caliburn suddenly felt a touch of uncertainty. Laser beams as powerful as those that

  A Life in the Future

  could come from such power banks was capable of blinding a man. "No goggles?" he asked Bedford as casually as he could.

  "No need for goggles," the doctor answered smoothly. "The observation window before us will polarize the light before any harmful visible radiation reaches your eyes. Sort of automatic goggles."

  Caliburn nodded; he had no choice but to accept Bedford's assurances. The final seconds flashed away. Caliburn looked about t
he observation room. At least another twenty people had entered, standing close to the observation window to observe the events below.

  "TEN SECONDS."

  Power pulsed through the floor and walls. A thin, high-frequency squeal set Caliburn's teeth on edge and made him feel as if someone were stabbing tiny glass spears into his eyes. He barely felt Nancy Reilly's hand instinctively gripping his arm. A question flashed through his mind. Why would this woman, part of the team, feel apprehension at such a moment? It didn't make—

  A fusillade of events enveloped Caliburn, all virtually simultaneous. A searing emerald-green light burst into existence. One moment it wasn't there; in the next instant, faster than his eyes could blink, the light flashed through the entire complex. Still another instant later the reflected radiance yielded to a ghostly cranberry-hued glow. There were more colors, more lights, and an upward swell of energy he felt as much as heard. A thudding boom reverberated against the viewing window. Caliburn stepped back reflexively. He heard Nancy Reilly's voice, terse yet comforting. "Armored glass," she said, but it was enough to tell him the glass could absorb even gunfire without damage and that they were perfectly secure behind it.

  Another enveloping light appeared, this time deep blue, then changing swiftly through the colors of the spectrum. Finally it exploded silently, to be replaced by a single glowing tube of blue-white radiance, not nearly as bright but somehow more important than all the others, born from the coruscating radiance that had mesmerized them all.

  And even that light was but the precursor to what followed.

  Light stabbed in steel-hard beams and pulsating colors from the mirrors set at varying angles about the great room. The

  Buck Rogers

  lights seemed to appear out of nowhere; it took CaUbum several seconds to remember that all the eye-sundering laser beams were not separate light rays, but a single source being reflected from one mirror to the other at the speed of light. And anything that moves at 186,273 miles per second, even within a confined space as huge as this facility, seemed to appear all at once rather than to bounce from one mirror to another. All that had happened up to now was prelude to the final beam of incandescent fury. The beam seemed to be captured within the long cylindrical tube. It remained unmoving, solid as a mountain, glowing brilliantly from within. Now the sound itself settled to a deep infra-sonic rumbling, as if a stupendous thunder many miles distant had been reduced to the grumblings of a planet's stirring.

  Caliburn turned his attention to Myron Packwood. The laser scientist held aloft a powerful arm, fist clenched. His eyes shone with almost as much brilliance as the laser beams that seared the laboratory. Caliburn was a heavily muscled man, still strong from his conditioning as a special weapons officer with the Green Berets, a violent past few people in the sluggish diplomatic world knew about. In Packwood, he recognized tremendous physical conditioning, but even more an intensity that marks a man driving ahead with full mental and physical commitment. His bristling beard and dark horn-rimmed glasses had thrown Caliburn off Of all the people here, this was the one man about whom everyone and everything else surely revolved.

  Caliburn moved closer to Packwood, who turned with a smile on his face and inquiry in his eyes. "Mr. Caliburn!" he cried jovially. "What did you think of our light show?"

  Caliburn wasn't there to please anyone. "Nice," he said with an air of indifference. "Super special effects. But what does it do besides impress people?"

  Packwood's demeanor shifted from enthusiastic to serious. "Whatever we place within that cylinder," he said slowly, "with the laser system operating at full power, is suspended in time."

  Caliburn didn't respond immediately. Suspended in time? That made as much sense as the ancient alchemists and magicians trying to transform lead into gold. Caliburn was no stranger to laser systems, but his work had been with target identification and destruction, not suspension. "Tell me more," he said slowly.

  A Life in the Future

  "The laser beam is so powerful, and moving at such speed, that it disassociates molecular, cellular, and atomic structure into particles that move at the speed of light. If I place, let's say, a statue in the cylinder and we activate the system—no, hold it. Think of a clock inside the cylinder. We activate the laser system, the clock is reduced to disassociated atoms, right on down to subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. They remain what they were before the laser hit them, except that they no longer have rhoving parts. Because now all those parts are moving at the speed of light. They have infinite mass, and you can't go faster than the speed of light. So long as the laser stream is working, the clock keeps bouncing back and forth between the mirrors—or, rather, what was the clock. Now it's simply a collection of molecules and subatomic particles. Everything is reduced to the scale of photons, particles of light. Everything in that laser beam within the cylinder becomes quanta, or particles, and—"

  "Yes, I know," Caliburn broke in. "Get to the point."

  "You're both impatient and disagreeable," Packwood shot back at Caliburn. "Please don't try to throw around your weight as a government man here—not with me or my group. What we've done is far beyond money. If it were money that held our primary interest, we could sell this facility to the highest bidder, which"—Packwood smiled coldly—"would go well beyond a hundred billion dollars. So, in the vernacular of the younger generation, kindly knock it off, will you?"

  To Packwood's surprise, Caliburn laughed heartily and slapped the scientist on the shoulder. "Well said, sir," he boomed. "I've just learned more about you than all your fancy scientific descriptions could ever show. But let's have the rest of it. And I'll add 'please' to that request."

  Packwood smiled. "You must be like a pack of wildcats in a tight situation."

  "Let it go, let it go," Caliburn said gently.

  "All right. In its simplest terms, light is a wave, like ripples on a smooth lake when you toss a stone into the water."

  "Okay"

  "But light is also quanta . . . physical matter. A particle of matter. It is one and the same, always depending upon how you study that light. It's one of the most illogical things in the

  Buck Rogers

  universe, but it's also true. Light will be whatever you wish it to be as long as you stay within the limitations of waves or quanta."

  "And in the laser beam, it isn't waves, is it?"

  "No, sir, it isn't. It's strictly quanta. When we disassociate the various particles from one another, they're instantaneously accelerated to the speed of light."

  "Which means," Caliburn said slowly, "that they have infinite mass. They can't go any faster than the speed of light."

  "Yes," Packwood confirmed, "but even more important, they can't travel any slower than the speed of light. If they did, they would come apart like a clock in a time bomb . . . literally fly apart with tremendous force."

  "Would I be wrong in assuming you really don't care if the clock rips apart?"

  "You would."

  "But if you had a living creature in that thing of yours . . . ?"

  "Any disassociation of molecules, cells, or any other parts of that creature would mean instant death ... or something even worse," Packwood finished for him. "A man could come out of that cylinder with his body turned inside out."

  Caliburn had no comeback to that. He had already formulated the plan in his mind. These people were going to try to suspend Anthony Rogers in that crazy laser shock tube of theirs! Caliburn cut to the quick. "How many living creatures have you lost in that torture chamber of yours?"

  Packwood didn't even blink. "Animals? About three hundred before we had our first success."

  "I don't give a fig for the animals. How many people?"

  "We lost five out of the first seven."

  "That's a hell of a casualty rate."

  Packwood shrugged. "The first three men scheduled to fly an Apollo spacecraft died in a fire on the launchpad. That was a casualty list of one hundred percent. We still we
nt to the moon."

  "Point well taken," Caliburn replied. "But I've got to ask. From where did you—"

  "I'll save you the trouble, Caliburn. They were all volunteers. We also work with the federal prison system. Whoever takes the ride willingly and comes back is released, pardoned, brainwashed, and set free."

  A Life in the Future

  "Brainwashed?"

  "Yes, sir. Our techniques work very well. Successful volunteers are in no way harmed, but they remember nothing about ever being here. It's a new narcotic, a thousand times more powerful than morphine. Whatever they are told while they are under the drug, including orders of what to forget, they will follow."

  "What happens to those who come back . , . well, 'disassociated'?"

  "We preserve the body parts and organs for detailed study. Come with me." Packwood led Caliburn to another room, where they went through another security check. As accustomed as he had become to combat, secret operations, plane crashes, and bloody firefights, Caliburn felt the air rush from his lungs v/ith shock. Cold air washed over him; they kept this room at an even sixty degrees. On each wall, left and right, floor-to-ceiling shelves displayed jars containing human organs and limbs, kidneys, hearts, lungs, bladders, livers, eyeballs, sections of jaws, brains, intestines. . . . He shuddered. "Nice nightmare you have here," he said finally.

  "You know as well as we do," Packwood replied gently, "we use whatever we're offered for our work. We have, ah, somewhat altered these specimens. These are the parts of failures of both animals and five human subjects. By running extensive tests, we've isolated the problems that brought on each of our failures."

  "I want to see the equipment you've lined up for Anthony Rogers. Now," Caliburn appended in a no-nonsense tone.

  "All right," Packwood agreed. "In the next chamber. We—"

  The scientist's pager chimed softly. Packwood lifted a cellular phone to his ear. When he turned off the phone, his face looked ashen.