Polar Shift

They went into the house, which was surprisingly well ordered in contrast to the haphazard nature of its surplus landscaping. Frobisher ushered them into a compact living room furnished with institutional leather-and- chrome office furniture. A metal desk and two metal filing cabinets were pushed against a wall.

'Everything in this house comes from the national lab,' Frobisher bragged. He noticed Trout looking at a radioactive warning sign on the wall and gave him a horsy grin. 'Don't worry. That's there to cover a hole in the wall. As president of the Lazlo Kovacs Society, I'd like to welcome you to the world headquarters. Meet our founder.' He pointed to an old photograph that hung on the wall next to the sign. It showed a fine-featured man in his forties with dark hair and intense eyes.

'How many members does the society have?' Gamay said.

'One. You're looking at him. As you can see, it's a very exclusive organization.'

'I noticed,' Gamay said with a sweet smile.

Trout gave his wife a look that said he was bolting for the door at the first opportunity. She was busy scanning the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that filled a good percentage of the wall space. Her female eye for detail had seen what Trout had not: judging from their titles, the books were on highly technical and arcane subjects. If Froby understood even a fraction of his reading material, he was a very intelligent human being.

'Please have a seat,' Frobisher said. He sat in the desk chair and swiveled around to face his guests.

Trout sat down next to Gamay. He had already decided that the best way to end the conversation was to begin it. 'Thank you for seeing us,' he said as a prelude to saying good-bye.

'My pleasure,' Froby beamed. 'To be honest, I don't encounter much interest in the Kovacs Society these days. This is a big deal. Where are you folks from?'

'Washington,' Trout said.

His baby blue eyes lit up. 'An even bigger deal! You'll have to sign my guest book. Now, tell me, how did you come to be interested in Lazlo Kovacs?'

'We're both scientists with the National Underwater and Marine Agency,' Camay said. 'A colleague of ours at NUMA told us about Kovacs's work, and said there was a society here in Los Alamos that had the most complete files on the subject. The national lab's library has very little on Kovacs.'

'That bunch over there thinks he was a quack,' Frobisher said with disgust.

'We got that impression,' Gamay said.

'Let me tell you about the society. I used to work as a physicist with the national laboratory. I played cards with a bunch of my fellow scientists, and invariably the work of Nikola Tesla came up. Some of us used to argue that Kovacs was overshadowed by Tesla's flamboyant style and deserved more credit for his discoveries than he had been given. We named our poker group the Kovacs Society.'

Trout smiled, but he was groaning inwardly as he thought about the time being wasted. He cleared his throat.

'Your society was named after a poker group?'

'Yes. We thought about calling it Poker Flats. But some of the fellows were married and thought a discussion group would be good cover to put their wives off.'

'So you never did discuss the Kovacs Theorems?' Gamay said.

'Yes, of course we did. We were bad poker players but good scientists.' He reached over to a shelf on his desk and pulled out two booklets, which he handed to the Trouts. 'We ran off these copies of the original article in which Kovacs discussed his revolutionary theories. This is an abstract of a conference on his work held here about twenty years ago. It was mostly a dump-on-Kovacs affair. They're on sale for $4.95 apiece. We've got biographies you can buy for a little more, to cover the cost of printing.'

Paul and Gamay perused one of the booklets. The dense text was written in Hungarian, and was heavy on long, incomprehensible mathematical equations. Trout gave his wife a 'That's it' grin and leaned forward, preparing to launch his tall body from the chair and out the door. Sensing his impatience, Gamay touched his arm.

'The books I see on the shelves are highly technical, and you said you were a physicist with the lab, so we'd value your opinion. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you must know that there has been a great deal of controversy over Kovacs and his theories. Was Kovacs nothing but a brilliant quack? Or did he have something?'

'He definitely had something.'

'But he never proved it by experiment, and refused to release details of his findings to the public.'

'That's because he knew the information was too dangerous.'

Gamay smiled. 'Forgive me, but that sounds like an excuse to hide his failure.'

'Not at all. It was a respect for mankind.'

Trout sensed that Gamay had a plan, and went along with it.

'If he cared about mankind, why did he work for the Nazis?' Trout said.

'He had to work for the Nazis. They threatened to kill his family.'

'I understand that's exactly what happened,' Gamay said. 'It's all such a shame, don't you think? The man's wife and children died for this.' She slapped her knee with the brochure. 'An empty theory about deadly extra-low-frequency electromagnetic waves.'

Frobisher's pale cheeks turned the color of boiled lobster. After a moment, the frown on his face dissolved into his big-toothed smile.

'That was a skillful job of baiting me.' He looked from face to face. 'Now, please tell me who you really are.'

Gamay glanced at Paul, who nodded his head.

'We're with NUMA's Special Assignments Team,' she said. 'Would you like to see some ID?'

'I believe you. What are a couple of people from the world's largest ocean studies organization doing in Los Alamos, far from the Atlantic and the Pacific?'

'We think that the key that will unlock the mystery of some unusual ocean disturbances can be found here in New Mexico.'

He furrowed his brow. 'What sort of disturbances?'

'Whirlpools and giant waves big enough to sink ships.'

'Please excuse me, but I still don't know what you're talking about.'

'One of the NUMA scientists we talked to suggested that the disturbances could have been caused by disruptions in the earth's electromagnetic flow. He brought up the Kovacs Theorems.'

'Go on,' Frobisher said.

Taking turns, they told him about the ocean disturbances, and the speculation that they were man-made.

'Dear God,' Frobisher said, his voice hoarse. 'It's happening.'

'What's happening?' Trout said.

'NUMA or not, you've blundered into something much larger than anything you could imagine.'

'We do that a lot,' Trout said. 'It's part of the NUMA job description.'

Frobisher stared at Trout and Gamay. Their calm expressions brought him back to earth, and he got a grip on himself. He went into the kitchen and returned with three cold bottles of beer, which he offered around.

'We've told you who we are,' Gamay said with her beguiling smile. 'Now perhaps you'd tell us who you are.'

'Fair enough.' He gulped down half his beer. 'Let me start with a little history. Most everyone knows about the letter Einstein wrote President Roosevelt.'

Trout nodded. 'Einstein said that with a controlled chain reaction a reality, an atomic bomb was possible. He suggested that the United State develop such a weapon before the Germans did.'

'That's right,' Frobisher said. 'The president appointed a committee to look into it, and the result was the work here at Los Alamos. Few people know that near the end of the war, Einstein wrote a second letter that has never been published. In it, he warned of the dangers of electromagnetic war, based on the theorems. But unlike Kovacs, who was considered by some to be a bit of a quack, Einstein's opinion had weight. Truman was president by then. He appointed a committee to look into Einstein's suggestion, and out of that came a research effort similar to the Manhattan Project.'

'We've heard that the Russians were pursuing the same line of research,' Gamay said.

'That's right. By the mid-sixties, we were neck and neck with the Russians.'

'How far did the research go?'