expect everyone to spend time in the room familiarizing yourselves with the target and other civilians who might be at the site. You will be expected to distinguish the good guys from the bad. If headquarters determines that intervention is need, this red light/siren will come on with details broadcast in the communication room.'
Felix took the lead. He was the best in the woods. The team had spent an hour going over aerial photographs and topographical maps of the area around the target's farm. Felix immediately went into stalking mode. Todd's and Sam's stumbling and noise pushing through the brush were an annoyance. He was having trouble scanning the near by woods. “Be quiet. The information we have is that the target goes into the woods frequently.” There was a snort in reply but the noise lessened.
They just waded through a muddy low spot when Felix felt eyes watching his every move. He raised his hand to stop the rest of the team and tried to find the source of his uneasiness. He found nothing but the sense of being watched finally quieted the rest of the team and in silence they made it to the edge of the field surrounding the target's farm. The team settled down to watch the farm trying to recognize any patterns that they could use to get close enough to plant their surveillance devices. Felix used a parabolic mike and his riflescope to examine the farm buildings while Sam used binoculars and Todd a specially designed long-range video camera.
There was a lot of activity at the farm. Five people were going in and out of a metal building. There were sounds of metal-working and a boombox playing rock. It was midmorning when the target Daniel Karpinen and his girl friend Tabitha Czeminski came out of the main house. They were halfway to the metal building when they stopped and looked right at the team. Their conversation had been muffled by the wind until they turned. Felix froze hearing, “Two or three?'
“Three.'
“What do you think?'
“Harmless so far but we will have to keep an eye out for them.'
“Right.'
They turned and continued to the building.
Felix hissed, “What the hell happened. How did they know?'
“What are you talking about?'
“They knew we were here. I picked them up talking about us on the mike.'
“God.'
“Todd. Sam. Check and see if we tripped any sensors. I will keep an eye on the farm.” It was fifteen minutes later when the others reported that there was nothing. The team moved to the other side of the field carefully searching the area for sensors or other watchers. Settling in the new location, Felix had Sam keep an eye at the surrounding woods while Todd and he watched the farm.
It was late in the day and the five other people at the farm had gotten into cars and driven away. Karpinen and his girlfriend paused to look at their new location before going into the farmhouse.
Sam, anxious to get the job done, “Should we go close and plant the bugs?'
“No, they know we are here. I don't know how they know but they know. We're leaving for now.
“The woods are going to be hard going in the dark. I will take point. Watch my steps.'
They were crossing the marsh again. Todd and Sam had become stuck in the mud and were splashing when a voice came out of the darkness. “You will have to do better than that if you are going to help my nephew. You need to step back and just follow their point.” The team pulled their weapons and donned their night vision goggles but found nothing.
When Felix reported in to Zimmerman, he recommended that they have one of the people working at the farm plant the bugs. Zimmerman told him that one of the workers at the farm was an agent but that they hadn't been able to get a bug operational in the house just in the metal building. Felix's team had to control access to the farm from the woods and try to get a device into the farmhouse. Felix agreed to try again at three in the morning to plant devices at the house.
The team was dropped off near the farm from the road. They crept up to the house. Tonight they would try to place button microphones on a few of the windows. Felix was just placing the mike. He glanced into the home and nearly screamed. A cat had its face up against the window watching. They finished planting the mikes and rushed back to the base.
Felix, Todd and Sam sat together in the communications room while Todd fiddled with the gain on the microphones. There were five monitors recording the night sounds at the farm—bedroom, computer room, kitchen, dining room, and living room. They hardly had an hour of tape before they heard a heavy rumbling and a crunch. The bedroom mike stopped. “The god-damn cat must have ate the mike. That rumbling had to be a cat's purr.” By eight o'clock, all the microphones were dead. Todd screamed and pulled the headphones he was using off when the kitchen mike was destroyed. Todd had increased the gain on the last microphone to maximum trying to catch the sounds of Karpinen waking up in the back of the house when a chickadee announced its presence at the window followed by the silence of a broken mike.
Chapter 12
Submarine
I am usually a little maudlin in the mornings eating breakfast. I couldn't believe what happened over the last few months since we were forced to kill that creature. The demonstration of the Contraption went too well. Everyone wanted more. Even my company told me to take a leave of absence and work on converting electromagnetic energy into gravity. Requests for information and offers of help and grants poured in.
It was two weeks after the demonstration and Tabitha had finally had her cast removed. We were parked in my pickup next to the video store. “Tabby, what should I do?'
“If you think you can handle the scrutiny of everyone looking over your shoulder at what you are doing, you should go for it. They are offering you anything you need. Why not see what will happen? No matter what happens, you still have shaken the scientific world.'
“Tabby.'
“Yes.'
“Could you handle staying with me through all of this?'
She leaned into me laying her head on my shoulder. “Yes.'
Tap. Tap. Tap. “Kids, not in front of the store. You will drive away customers.” Earl was smiling through the window he had just rapped.
We drove back to my home. I printed the research offers and spread them across the living room floor. Move-over immediately started to swat at the paper. The offers to work theoretical mathematics were the first to be wadded into balls and rolled to Move-over for attack. The energy and particle proposals were the next to go to the cat. We were finally left with two. The first was from the University of Minnesota and NASA. The U of M would supply graduate students and technical support for exploring the use of artificial gravity in space/transportation. The list of questions that they wanted answers to ranged from artificial gravity in spacecraft to the feasibility of using gravity in high speed trains. NASA would also supply monetary and technical help to the project. The second was from the Jet Propulsion Lab. They were offering an actual position at the lab to work on artificial gravity to counter the affects of low gravity on the physiology of astronauts.
“Dan. Take the U of M and NASA. We could work here.'
“Okay. Give me the phone number off the proposal and I will call them.'
Tabby smiled and stuck the paper down her blouse. “Why don't you just come and get it.'
I shook my head. Tabby and I had so little time to play since then. The half a dozen grad students were always around during the day. The original Contraption was relegated to the corner of the garage. Nearly immediately we received a tungsten steel sphere for the new experiments. The sphere made it possible to completely control what was occurring with the EM, electromagnetic, conversion to gravity but it also meant we needed an industrial drill press, diamond drill bits, and other industrial grade equipment. We received new transmitters from NASA specially made to withstand high stress forces. They had been originally designed for shuttle/satellite use. The first time we tried out the sphere we found two things. The gravity being produced was a hundred times stronger than with the original contraption and that the air being injected into the sphere to start the
