“With cutting-edge expertise and lots of money,” Josh said. He sat on the edge of the table, shaking his head. His excitement had waned and he looked as dejected as Aari and the others felt.
“It sounds like they’re unstoppable,” Tegan growled. “Whoever created them covered every single angle.”
A forlorn pause hung like a cloud in the small room until Aari broke it with a thump of his palm on the table. “I refuse to believe that! There’s
got
to be something we’re missing.”
The rest considered his comment in silence until Josh’s enthusiasm picked up slightly. “You know what, Aari? You’re probably right. Everything ever created by man can be undone by man. Let me take another look.”
“You should rest first, Josh,” Marshall said. “A fresher mind might open some locked doors.”
Josh closed his laptop and turned off the projector. “That’s true.”
They left the room and returned to the waiting area. Josh shook their hands again and said, “I’ll take a few hours’ nap then get right back on it, don’t you worry.”
Marshall shook his hand lastly. “We’ll be hanging around here, so if you find anything, give me a call and we’ll be right over. And thank you, Josh.”
The scientist smiled warmly. “Don’t even mention it. There has to be an Achilles heel somewhere on these things. We’ll find it.”
K
ody, Jag and Mariah sat in the living room, quickly gulping down their lunch so they could get back to work. Lady was curled up on a dog bed beside them, dozing; Kody had taken her out for a quick run that morning and she was now tuckered out. All the windows in the house were open to allow as much air circulation as possible—Concordia was just too hot for the trio this day. Jag had found a couple of fans that didn’t do much other than blow hot air at them.
They returned to the computer and maps within a few minutes. Mariah had been jotting down all the reports she’d found in chronological order and passing them to the guys, who would then shade in the map of the country. They’d tuned Jag’s grandfather’s radio to a news station while the television remained muted.
Going by Aari’s hunch, they were working on the assumption that there had to be an epicenter to the crop destruction for each region. With that in mind, the friends worked fervently to search, identify and chart every farm area that had been destroyed. No set pattern had emerged as of yet but they carried on, resolute.
Kody and Jag stood back to study the affected areas and noticed that six distinct zones had begun to appear. These were massive and stretched from Texas all the way to North Dakota, west into Montana, and reaching as far as Washington State. Some of the crop destruction spilled over the border into Canada from the northernmost zones. There was also a distinctly affected area in central California.
This is pretty extensive
, Kody thought.
They’re hitting our key crop-growing regions.
“We need more data, ’Riah,” Jag said, sticking his pencil behind his ear.
“Got a new batch, hold on.” Mariah quickly scrawled on a sticky note and passed it to Kody. “Here.”
Kody took the note and stuck it on the table between him and Jag. “Thanks.”
Together, they shaded the new locations onto the map but a clearer pattern remained elusive. “Still nothing,” Kody sighed once they’d finished.
“Yeah, but look at this.” Jag ran his fingers over the chart. “The rate of destruction at each of the six zones we’ve ID’d seems to be the same over time. It’s not like one zone gets hit one day then another zone gets hit the next, or that it spreads faster in one zone than another. Each day, about equal amounts are getting destroyed all over the country.”
“That’s something the authorities really should have noticed,” Mariah muttered, scrolling through a website.
“Maybe they have, but they’re looking at the wrong place for the cause,” Jag reminded her. “We’re the only ones who know that.”
They worked for another hour, shuffling between online reports and what they gathered from the radio and TV. Kody pressed his forehead against the map and stared at the state of Kansas where he was shading. His eyes began to hurt after a few seconds due to the close proximity, forcing him to sit up again. That was when he noticed something. He tapped Jag’s arm repeatedly. “Hey, hey, take a look. You see it?”
Mariah shuffled away from the computer and scanned the map with Jag. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s like a rough circle with wedges here and there that haven’t been destroyed.”
“Yet,” Jag added.
“Exactly,” Kody enthused. “It’s like a pizza with a few slices missing.”
Mariah and Jag quirked their eyebrows at him before Jag jabbed the map with his pencil. “Nice job, Kody. See if you can find what’s at the center of this.”
Kody picked up a ruler. He bent over the map for a minute, reviewing the roughly hundred-fifty-mile radius of Kansas farmland where crops had been destroyed. He made several lines extending from the tips of the “pizza slices”, then stabbed his finger at a spot. “Ransom.”
“A town called Ransom?” Jag asked.
“Yep. Wonder who named it. And why.”
“How far is it from here?”
Kody glared at him. “Ugh,
math
.”
The click-clacking of the old keyboard interrupted the inevitable banter as Mariah typed. “Got it,” she said. “It’s about a three-hour drive from here, but if we drive fast . . . ”
Jag slapped his knee. “Wonderful. What’s the weather like tonight?”
The keyboard click-clacked again. Mariah smiled. “It’s actually gonna be pretty cool tonight.”
Kody jumped up and pranced around, arms flailing, startling Lady awake. “I can’t wait!” he whooped. “I’ve been sweating like a turkey that knows it’s Thanksgiving!”
Jag grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him back down beside him. “Great, good to know.”
Lady got to her paws. She trotted to Kody and rested her head on his knee, yawning. He beamed down at her and patted her between her shoulders.
Jag stood up and arched his back. “Alright, you two. Dress warm.” He slowly broke into a victorious smile. “We leave for Ransom tonight.”
I
t was eight o’clock that night when the call came. Aari, Tegan and Marshall were sitting on a park bench drinking slushies, watching the Californians go about with a spring in their steps, as if nothing in the world was wrong. Aari had to admit that he envied their obliviousness.
Marshall answered his phone. “Hey, Josh.”
Aari’s attention turned to the Sentry immediately.
“Really? You sure? Holy—that was fast. No, we’re not too far out. We’ll be right over.” Marshall hung up, tossed his empty cup into a trash can and windmilled his arms at Aari and Tegan. “Come on, you two! We may have a breakthrough on our hands!”
The pair chugged the rest of their slushies, inevitably getting a brief but intense headache, then piled into the car. Marshall took every shortcut through Goleta that he knew and the trio found themselves back at Josh’s lab building twenty minutes later. Inside, Josh steered them into the same meeting room they’d been in earlier. The jubilant scientist wore bags under his eyes.
“Sit, sit,” he told them breathlessly. As they took their respective chairs, he added, “I think I’ve found the Achilles’ heel we are searching for. We know the nanomites’ molecular structure is quite similar to that of silicon, but it is a very distinct material. But I believe the process that was used to create the nanomites is not terribly different from the process for creating silicon chips, which is one of the things we do in this facility.
“You may have noticed that the suits we use in our cleanrooms leave little to no skin exposed. That’s to reduce the chances of contamination in the semi-conducting wafers. But sometimes, during production, tiny amounts of certain contaminants—we call them dopants—are intentionally introduced into the process. For example, a little bit of boron can give the silicon certain electrical properties, or a bit of phosphorous can make it act differently. I’ve been trying to figure out if we can take the same approach with the nanomites. In other words, to see if we can contaminate them by introducing a dopant into the matrix of the nanomites to render them harmless.” He paused for effect.
Marshall idly rubbed his tattoo. “What did you find?”
“Some good news and some bad news. First, let’s get the bad news out of the way. There is no known or readily available element that will fit into the matrix of the nanomite structure. So we can’t simply run out to a store or a lab somewhere and purchase a bagful of dopants.” He paused again, then said, “But—and here’s the potential good news—such an element might be available in a most unlikely place. It’s a long shot, but it may be the only chance we have.”
Marshall rested his forearms on the table and leaned toward the scientist. “Which would be . . . ?”
Josh sat on a chair facing the three of them. “Back in the spring of ’88, I met a brilliant scientist at a material science symposium in Reno. It was an interesting time because we knew the Cold War was coming to an end, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. Anyway, the scientist I met, Dr. Branson, worked for the government during and after the Second World War. He was in his early eighties but, boy, was he sharp as a tack.
“He was interested in the work I was doing at the time and we kept up a friendship that lasted until he passed away four years later. Call it fate or whatever you want, but before he passed, he called me and asked to meet him. He was living in Arizona at the time and I flew out to see him the next morning. What he told me that day seemed far-fetched and I foolishly dismissed it as maybe the ramblings of a dying man.”
The light in Josh’s eyes faded, as if he were reliving the moment. Tegan reached out and very lightly touched his wrist. “What did he say?”
“He said . . . he said that he had been involved in a project to create an element that didn’t exist in nature. Of course, that in itself isn’t unique. If you remember your high school science, several of the so-called trans-uranium elements such as neptunium and lawrencium were created in labs. But the purpose of creating this element was what blew me away. See, back in the day, with the end of World War Two, the expedient relationship between the Allies and the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The Cold War followed.
“According to Dr. Branson, a group of German scientists working on a secret semi-conductor project was abducted by the Russians. The project they were working on would have given the Soviets a very significant advantage over the U.S. in accuracy for their ballistic missiles. Dr. Branson and his team were asked by the Department of Defense, which back then was known as the Department of War, to come up with a means to counter that.
“This team quickly set out to find a solution and, building on some work that was done earlier in that field by scientists at Bell Labs, created an element that could act as a dopant to all forms of semi-conductors or semi-conductor-like material. Only five kilograms of the material was ever produced but it proved to be successful in a range of initial tests.”
“Seriously?” Aari exclaimed, throwing up his arms in jubilance.
“Where do we find it?” Marshall asked.
Joshua pinched his lips together. “That’s where the challenge comes in. During its final test, which was intended to assess its atmospheric reliability, the element was placed in a canister aboard a specially modified B-29. Unfortunately, on the final leg of the test flight, the aircraft crashed into Lake Mead. That was in the summer of 1948.”
Tegan slapped her hands over her face. “You can’t be serious!”
Aari was as devastated as she was, and by the looks of it, so was Marshall.
This can’t be true!
he raged.
Marshall, rubbing his fingers against his forehead, asked, “Why did Dr. Branson tell you all this, Josh?”
“Because he was extremely passionate about the discovery he made,” Josh answered. “He was totally crestfallen when the government pulled the plug on the project after failing to recover the canister from the bottom of the lake. The agency responsible had since moved on to other projects that met their objective. Dr. Branson wanted to pass the torch of his invention to me, hoping that, with my background in this field, I would find some groundbreaking application for it today. I regret not pursuing it . . . I regret having dropped that torch.”
Marshall patted the older man’s hand. “There’s a time and place for everything. Maybe this element remaining lost was not an accident. It could still prove its usefulness now.”
“Wait a minute,” Tegan said, drawing her hand back through her hair. “How’s this material supposed to help us if it’s been at the bottom of a lake for all these years? Surely the water would have destroyed it, even if it was in a canister.”
“Maybe not,” Josh replied. “Dr. Branson told me that the canister was specially designed and made of stainless steel, and all three feet of it was double-shelled.”
Tegan rested her cheek against her shoulder and scrutinized the scientist. “Are you saying this thing may still be in that wreckage?”
“I believe it to be.”
“The government didn’t search for it?”
“They did, but they never found the plane. It wasn’t until about a decade ago, when a private dive team using side-scan sonar found the B-29 wreckage in the northern arm of the lake. Because it lies inside a national recreation area, the divers couldn’t really do much. The national park services were the ones who had to take on the responsibility for the site.”
“Wait, they found it?” Aari asked. “Wouldn’t the government have tried to retrieve it?”
“It’s been over sixty years since they terminated the project. The government probably no longer considers it of any value since the world has changed so much in that field of science. The wreck site was closed off to public access to preserve the plane’s remaining integrity. And so, like a lot of other government projects that fall out of favor, this is likely locked away in the bowels of bureaucracy. Whoever was in charge of this whole thing back then is long gone.”
Aari blew out a long breath. “If it’s still in that wreckage at the bottom of the lake, how do we get to it?”