Morrison opened the Dodge's door and stepped out.
The van was six years old, but a Dodge, so it was good for years if he
took care of it. Not that he intended to keep it that long. Pretty
soon, he'd be able to buy a new car. A fleet of new cars, if he
wanted, with a ship upon which to transport the fleet, and a navy to
escort it, if he so wished.
He smiled at the thought. The air had that salty, seaweed tang to it,
and even though it was early and there was the passage wind blowing,
the day was already warm, and promised to be hot before it was done.
He worked his way across the hard rubber gratings toward the
railing--he was parked forward and on the deck under the sky, outside
of the superstructure enclosure where all the foot passengers rode.
Gulls flew past. It was a great morning.
Of course it was a great morning. The test had gone so well he
couldn't believe it. The Chinese had clamped down on it fast,
squelching the incident into official silence deeper than that in a
tomb, so there hadn't been any reports in the media, even in China.
Maybe especially in China.
Morrison had his sources, though, and he found out quickly enough. The
test had replicated the experiments with animals even better than
anticipated. Well within the cutoff that separated 'chronic' from
'acute.' It might not work on a battlefield with shifting troops, but
the device would definitely work on a permanent settlement.
He'd known that it would. Well, to be absolutely honest, he had been
almost certain. There was always the worry about field testing versus
the lab. One never got over that. It took only a few failures to keep
that anxiety alive forever, rather like Frankenstein's monster,
shambling around in the dark looking for a friend.
Failure, unfortunately, had no friends. Which was how Dr. Patrick
Reilly Morrison, with his Ph.D. in physics from MIT, had come to be
involved with the project in the first place. He'd had a spectacular
failure in his extremely low frequency experiments involving
chimpanzees, and he'd lost his grant and funding big-time and damned
fast. It was as if he had developed a sudden case of pneumonic
plague--the first sneeze, and every professional contact he knew
scattered as if they were parts of a bomb--ka-blamm!--leaving him
stinking of smoke and failure and very much alone. No rat leaving a
sinking ship had ever moved as fast as his grad students and research
assistants had bailed on him, bastards and bitches, each and every one
of them ... He smiled at his own bitterness. Well, it really was an
ill wind that blew no good, wasn't it? If the ELF simian protocols
hadn't gone south on him, he'd never have gotten the job in Alaska,
would he? And look where that had taken him. He could hardly be
positioned better, could he?
Well, yes, he supposed, academically he could be. And certainly in
pure scientific circles, with major universities begging him to come
and present papers? Well, he was not at the top of that list. Ah, but
if somebody just up and gave you five or six hundred million dollars,
maybe more, to fund whatever research your heart desired, no strings,
