Core Beliefs - Chapter 64 - Fly

Core Beliefs – Chapter 64 - Fly

While the “Fantastic Four” and others accomplished miracles in Africa, Dr. Ellis Mandaville attacked the gravity manipulation theory with a new perspective and a fervor that his wife, Midge, had not seen in years.

As a result, when Suchet and Chris returned, there was an urgent message from the doctor.

“We need to talk,” Dr. Mandaville simply said.

“Do you feel up to flying to Wichita?” Chris asked. “We could facilitate a link with Lenny and the family?”

“I think that would close the deal,” Ellis chuckled.

The next day, the doctor and his wife were on a plane. Chris and Suchet met them at the airport and, after dropping their luggage at Armonia House, headed to the silo.

As promised, they made a satellite connection to the camp. Waiting were Lenny, Alicia, and Winston.

“Oh, my!” Midge exclaimed. “You all look so wonderful, so vibrant!” tears welled as Midge gazed at the smiling faces of Lenny, Winston, and Alicia.

The desert Mandavilles relayed that things were going well and that the work in the camp was the most fulfilling they had ever done.

“Pops, I’m finally building a city of dreams,” Lenny said. “Not the city I dreamed of, but a place where real dreams come true.”

“I am so happy for you all,” Ellis said, “and want you to know how very proud we are of you. We love you and look forward to sharing marvelous stories.”

“When are you coming home?” Midge asked.

“Patience, Grandma,” Winston chimed in, “it will be about four months.”

They terminated the connection. Midge emotionally thanked Chris for the chance to see her son and family. Chris drove her back to Armonia House, leaving Suchet and Ellis to get to work.

Returning to the silo, he found Suchet and Dr. Mandaville in an animated debate. Soon, the three were rattling through propositions, theories, and technologies. In the end, they had a plan of action.

Chris emailed Matt using encrypted text and advised that they had another key to unlock an extremely large door.

***

On the island, it took ten days to assemble the bulk of the prototype of the gravity manipulator.

The instructions from Chris and Ellis were more than a little cryptic. The design criteria were open to interpretation. Therefore, the thing on the lab table under the extinct volcano was amateurish, more like a seventh-grade electronics project. Wires dangled, and components were often held together with duct tape. It looked like anything but a dramatic breakthrough in science. The last components had been shipped from Wichita by express air to the South Pacific.

Allen and Teresa Benson picked the small crate up from the international airport on Rarotonga and spent two days racing across the ocean, using Charley’s speedboat, to reach their little island home.

***

There were other arrivals on the island. Joe and Cynthia wanted to contribute time. They also wanted to see the world their son Charles had envisioned and created.

Eldridge had coaxed Elvin and Emily to take a turn. They arrived two days after Joe and Cynthia, three days after the gravity manipulator, and four days before Suchet, Chris, Doug, and Ellie.

Ellie was thrilled when she discovered her brother and sister. It took some effort for Doug to coax her away from her siblings to help prepare the gravity device.

Returning from Wichita to Cambridge Port, Dr. Mandaville would remain in contact via satellite link.

It took three more days to complete the assembly and to add a power module. They encased the entire assembly in CH_2, an acrylic material shaped into a hollow sphere. They mounted a couple of mini cameras in the unit; one pointed at the interior and the other at the exterior.

***

Sunday, December 9, at 10:30 in the morning, Allen Benson and Joe Lehman loaded the sphere into the boat and sped eight miles from the island.

“Hey, this thing is pretty light,” Allen remarked as he carried the spere onto the 48’ speed boat modeled after an MTI ocean-going racer.

Joe gave him a frown, “Maybe twenty years ago. I’ll drive; you can be the cargo master.”

Both laughed. Allen cast off the lines, and Joe throttled up the antimatter-powered speedboat. Charley had taken the twin hull five-step design of the MTI racer and adapted it for more versatility. Normally, it had seating for eight, but on that day it was configured for four, with an open space behind the side-by-side seats, where the gravity manipulator sphere nestled in a foam cradle.

“Eight miles, right?” Joe said.

Allen brought up the navigation screen that had been programmed with the coordinates. “Once clear of the islands, we head northeast.”

“Chris said Suchet chose the distance because it was the midpoint of the transmitter range for the remote receiver.”

They reached the designated spot.

“Just dump it in the water?” Allen asked.

“It’s supposed to float,” Joe said.

Allen unceremoniously rolled the sphere over the side of the boat. “Let’s head home. I don’t want to be anywhere near this thing when they apply power.”

Joe ramped the power, the boat accelerated, and G forces pressed both men back in their seats. A silly grin filled their faces.

“136mile per hour?” Joe said.

“That’s nautical MPH,” Allen said. “It’s more like 155MPH in a car.”

***

The boat returned to the underground harbor, and everyone waited tensely inside the control room.

Chris checked and confirmed the communications links and various component functions.

With the sphere floating freely, they had to start quickly before ocean currents carried it out of range. After speeding through the checklist, Suchet directed Ellie to activate it. They instantly lost cameras.

“Cancel!” Suchet cried out.

Ellie hit the abort button, hoping it had been fast enough.

On top of the island, a telescopic lensed camera had been focused on the sphere’s last location.

Doug and Chris backed up the recorded data, hoping to see what had gone wrong. A strong concern permeated the control rooms that the unit had been destroyed.

Doug rewound the video file to the point where the activation occurred and hit the replay button.

The unit plunged out of sight beneath the ocean.

“Oh no!” Ellie cried.

“That explains the loss of signal,” said Suchet.

Minutes ticked by; the Fantastic Four were in deep conversation.

“I have it!” Teresa Benson shouted. Her job was to monitor the locator beacon on the unit. The room was silent, stunned, then people started scrambling.

It took several minutes to fix the coordinates. The sphere was only three miles off the island and had moved almost twenty degrees to the south.

Doug jumped on the calculations and came back with a startling statement. “My friends,” he said, “The gravity manipulator traveled down at a twelve-degree angle to a depth of four hundred sixty feet, traveling over two miles horizontally before the power terminated. I believe it disabled itself on the internal timer.”

“This means,” he excitedly read the figures from his notepad, “that it operated for 180 seconds and then floated back to the surface. The total time from disappearance to reacquisition was five minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The calculations indicate that it traveled at 46 feet per second and rose for 2 minutes and 27 seconds to reach the surface.

“Let’s have the boys retrieve our toy and bring it back,” Suchet said, obviously relieved.

Once back in the lab, they determined the sphere had remained intact. They spent two days running through the data and reprogrammed dozens of parameters to improve control.

Dr. Mandaville was ecstatic about the results and started making independent calculations back in Massachusetts.

***

On Tuesday the 11th, Allen and Joe ferried the sphere out again. Suchet had Ellie execute.

The sphere oscillated wildly. The camera on top of the island showed the sphere rising, spinning, and drifting towards the island. Suddenly, the sphere crashed into the ocean and floated dead in the water.

Joe and Allen were quickly on their way, and soon the device sat on a lab table. It didn’t take long to determine that a power cable had shorted. It was a sloppy connection, and Suchet knew he had made it.

Over the next week, they took a more professional approach, assembling the unit with proper supports and wiring harnesses.

They also upgraded the electronics, replacing the communications transceiver with a more powerful unit and putting a high-gain antenna on top of the island. Ellie and Doug spent hours revising the control program, hoping it would let them maneuver the unit.

They still hadn’t figured out how to manipulate speed, but hoped that if they could determine course, they could get enough data to solve the speed problem.

***

On December 17, Joe and Allen transported the updated sphere to the designated point and headed for the harbor. Suchet had Ellie activate. The unit started to rise with far less rotation. Doug tracked and said the speed was 46 feet per second. Chris sent a signal to change the direction. It worked. The unit was now ascending, but at a 55-degree angle from vertical. Chris quickly modified his inputs. The unit began descending at a 7-degree angle, mostly traversing horizontally. Suchet recommended they reverse direction before it slipped from radio range. Chris quickly input new settings.

The unit headed toward the island, rising on a one-degree incline. Chris quickly adjusted Doug’s plots. When Chris transmitted new data, the sphere zipped level and parallel to the island. They let it fly for three thousand feet.

Chris sent a new command. The sphere instantly reversed direction along the path it had just traversed. Chris wasn’t finished, and unless told to shut down, he was determined to gather all the information he could.

After multiple inputs, the sphere moved in a rectangular pattern around the island at an elevation of eight hundred feet.

It surprised Suchet that the unit changed direction instantaneously. He was also amazed that the change of direction hadn’t ripped interior components loose.

He asked Chris if it was possible to program a more gradual turn, like a circle.

“Yes,” Chris said, “but it would be best to bring it back to the lab and write a new control program.”

Suchet had one more thing he wanted to try. He had Chris center the sphere over the caldera and put it into a vertical ascent. He then had Ellie pulse the main power, sending it into a controlled fall.

The unit splashed gently into the water about two hundred yards from the entrance to the underground harbor.

Joe and Allen retrieved it quickly. The Fantastic Four stayed up late and reached Dr. Mandaville via satellite, giving him a complete update.

They watched as the doctor sat in the chair in his study, tears dotting his cheeks. It was obvious that the news had touched him deeply. His wife brought him a box of Kleenex.

“Thank you for making an old man’s dreams come true,” he blurted.

Suchet interrupted him, doctor, your work is not done. We can maneuver, but we still cannot control the speed. I also have a most important question.”

Mandaville focused and sat upright, “What is your question?”

“We put the sphere through a series of maneuvers that should have dislodged components inside, but none were dislodged. Can you explain this?”

The doctor smiled, “Once the sphere is encapsulated inside a gravimetric field, the contents would be isolated from the normal effects of momentum and mass. Basically, the environment inside is physics neutral.”

Suchet stumbled to a chair and sat.

“You didn’t see that one coming, did you, son?” Ellis chuckled.

Suchet, Chris, Ellie, and Doug all sat quietly.

“There are going to be a lot of things that will make everything you think you know obsolete,” Ellis said.

“With this as a preliminary verification, I have almost twelve hundred pages of additional concepts regarding time and space that will blow your socks off!”

They chatted for several minutes before terminating the transmission.

“I truly believe we have met someone who could rival Einstein.” Suchet faced the rest of the group.

Heads nodded in agreement.

***

On Wednesday, December 19, Matt called Joe on the island in the middle of the night.

“What’s wrong, Matt? Is it the camp? Are Charley and Charlie okay?” Joe panicked.

“Stop worrying, everything is fine,” Matt chuckled. “Joe, I wanted you to be the first to know that you are now in the independent nation of Dlrow Wen.”

“Thank you, Matthew,” Joe sighed. “I appreciate you letting me know. I’m going back to bed now, and we will figure out how to shoot off some fireworks tomorrow.”

Both laughed. Matt leaned back in his chair, smiling at Marcus and Senator Coldwell.

The senator had brought some interesting news. It seemed two reporters had made their way to ‘Well of Hope’ and blundered into the shield wall at night. They had to be rescued and immediately started asking questions.

The Dlrow Wen team took precautions, shutting down the visible above-ground technology. The reporters toured the fields, which had crops growing but none ready for harvest.

“It seems that one day, one of the reporters spotted a woman emerge from a tent with a huge batch of carrots,” Saulman explained. “When questioned, he told Lenny he couldn’t recall seeing any in the fields and got curious. He waited until no one was watching, slipped into the tent, and found the entrance to one of the underground hydroponics rooms. Imagine his surprise to see row upon row of fresh produce filling the growing trays,” Saulman chuckled. “It all seemed so out of place, wondrous tech beneath a refugee camp?”

“Alicia and some of the tribal men discovered him there,” Chris said. “They brought the reporters before the Elders, Aid Workers, and the sixteen of our Dlrow Wen members. The Elders spoke to the two reporters and asked what they would do with their knowledge. They both said they had an obligation to tell the world.”

“Charley asked what they would tell the world?” Saulman said.

“We will write about the marvelous and mysterious things here,” Saulman quoted one of the reporters, “that there are secrets here that the world needs to know about!”

“Here, listen to the recording,” Chris said, tapping a tab on his phone and adjusting the volume.

“What are you hiding?” a male voice. “Why not show the world the amazing things you can do?”

“What do you think would happen when your story was read?” Matt recognized Lenny’s voice.

“People from everywhere would come to see this place, to learn the mysteries,” the voice of the other reporter.

“Are you that naïve to think they would stop with just looking?” Winston shouted from somewhere in the meeting tent. “Do you not realize that powers would kill and destroy to seize and control the technologies that sustain this place?”

“That was when something significant happened,” Chris said. Charlotte told me that an obviously pregnant Charlie stepped to the two and spoke to their minds and the minds of the others present, ‘For the sake of my unborn child and all the children not yet in the world, I ask you to tell all you wish about these people, but do not reveal the technology. The world is not ready.’ Chris added, “With even more emphasis, she said, ‘If we have to, we will destroy it all, and then the hope of these people and many others will be gone.’”

“Lenny asked whether they would consider talking to Senator Coldwell before writing anything,” Chris said. “They promised they would.”

“They contacted me after leaving the camp,” Saulman said, “and after a lengthy discussion, they agreed to limit the content of their articles but wanted first rights to news of the technologies when they were released publicly,” the senator said. “I told them I could not speak for others, but did promise they could have my story first.”

Matt pondered the information, sighed, but in his gut felt they were doing the right thing.

***

Two weeks later, a team of US Special Forces showed up outside ‘Well of Hope.’ Charley and Lenny greeted them outside the camp and asked their purpose. They said they were on a routine training mission. Charley wished them well and started back to the city. The soldiers started following.

Lenny stopped, turned, and glared. “No guns and no military personnel are allowed in the city. This is an absolute. Well of Hope is a place of peace. Complete your training and leave.”

“Our training includes finding out what’s going on in there,” the leader of the troops threateningly said.

“Then I assume the local government doesn’t know you’re here?” Charley said, “and that the army has not reported this to the Senate Oversight Committee.”

“We could hold you until we get answers,” the leader of the unit threatened.

“How many military regulations would that violate?” Charley asked. “You would become permanent residents at Leavenworth.”

He and Lenny walked back to the city and watched as the soldiers disappeared.

It was a few nights later that the control center spotted a group moving from the desert toward the camp’s perimeter, and it didn’t take long to determine if it was the Special Forces team.

The shield was up. “How do we handle this situation?” Lenny asked.

“They need to be warned before they plunge into the shield wall,” Charlie said.

Others thought it might be best to let them get stuck.

“They know it’s there,” Lenny said, “they just don’t have any idea what it is. I agree with Charlie; let’s send someone to warn them. The rest is up to them.”

Alicia and Winston Mandaville made their way to the crop fields surrounding the camp and watched the soldiers approach.

The two quietly sat among rows of young wheat. The soldiers had night vision goggles. Alicia figured the men were probably equipped with the best the military could offer.

When the soldiers were 20 feet from the barrier’s effective range, Alicia spoke to their minds.

‘Do not come any closer. If you do, you will be entrapped in a barrier.’

The effects were mixed. All the soldiers heard her, but none was sure where the voice came from. Egos kept them from asking each other. The leader stopped, stared, and finally spotted Alicia and Winston sitting on the ground. Alicia read his thoughts.

‘Yes, we are here.’ She and Winston stood and moved forward.

One of the soldiers spotted Alicia and Winston, jerked his gun to his shoulder, and fired three rounds. Alicia and Winston continued forward, stopping just inside the shield wall.

“What did that prove except you are prepared to shoot unarmed women and men?” Winston shouted.

“Who are you?” the captain ordered.

‘We are people of peace and mean you no harm.’ Alicia said aloud and into their heads. ‘This is a place of peace. Violence, hatred, and fear do not abide in this place. We have come to protect you from harming yourselves. You should think carefully about what you will do next.’

Two of the soldiers lowered their weapons and started backing away. The captain ordered everyone to retreat. Alicia heard the panic in his voice and felt the fear in his mind. The squad disappeared into the dark, not to be seen again.

***

Lenny had completed the outer ring of dwellings encircling the city. The structures stood two stories high with a common roof that allowed one to walk around the outer perimeter of the city. More families moved from tents into what they felt was a dream come true.

The first phase of underground structures was also complete, and to top it all off, the city’s citizens harvested their first crops. The ensuing celebration lasted three days.

New refugees and others arrived almost daily. The African soldiers who had returned home told amazing stories, prompting people to seek this place of wonder.

Those who lived in the ‘Well of Hope’ understood despair and now realized with joy the fullness in their lives.

It was with sadness that, from time to time, they turned someone away because the individual could not understand the nature of the place or grasp the requirement for love of brother and, above all, love of self. Having Alicia read their minds helped cull troublemakers quickly.

***

From St. Louis, Matt communicated frequently with the island team. He could tell the Fantastic-Four had made real progress on the gravity manipulator.

The scientist wanted to stay on the island and continue their work. The idea was tempting, but Matt knew they needed to make some critical decisions and plans as a group. Sadly, he told the scientist to come home for Christmas. Only a skeleton crew remained on the island as everyone flew back to Wichita.

***

It was a good Christmas at Armonia House, but many familiar faces were missing. The crew in the desert stayed at ‘Well of Hope’ and continued to work miracles.

An entourage from Armonia House did go to the silo and, via satellite, connected with friends and family in ‘Well of Hope.’ It thrilled Joe and Cynthia to see Charley looking so well, and Cynthia was particularly thrilled to see Charlie glowing. Harry and Annabel promised that everything was fine, and it looked like a perfectly normal pregnancy.

Joe asked Ling, “What about the DNA? Will there be any problems like with you?”

“No,” Ling said, “it seems we have found that if both parents already have the regenerative DNA, then the child establishes its own, just as in a regular pregnancy.

It was Charlie at the other end, looking at Ling on the monitor, who shouted, “You’re pregnant too!”

Ling laughed, and Matt smiled. They both answered, “Yes.”

Lenny, Alicia, and Winston had marvelous stories for Ellis and Midge.

“We are going to expand the shield in the next week,” Charley said. “The city is growing. Dozens more come each week to join us. We need more farm and pastureland.”

They now had goats, sheep, and chickens. Milk, meat, and eggs were becoming part of the diet. Charley outlined plans for additional underground facilities. He would transmit the details to them so that they could review them.

The visit with their loved ones in Well of Hope was great, a Christmas gift better than any under the tree. They enjoyed a late Christmas dinner with Matt again, reading a delightful story to the children.

In the morning, Matt gathered everyone together. Much time was devoted to adding more security measures. This was particularly true regarding communications and data storage.

They agreed that the island needed to become the primary location for all research and fabrication technologies. They also reviewed the requirements for the island to become self-sufficient. They divided these and several other projects into groups to tackle and execute.

Once those tasks were done, Matt turned Dr. Mandaville and the “Fantastic Four” loose to pursue their work. They spent two days reviewing Dr. Mandaville’s expanded equations, working together as a group. They developed two approaches to total control of the gravimetric fields.

As Dr. Mandaville and Midge prepared to leave Wichita for Massachusetts, Matt had a private moment with them.

“Doctor, your work is phenomenal,” Matt said. “I truly believe we are on the brink of discoveries that will open worlds beyond our comprehension. I do, however, have something else with which I need your help.”

He spoke directly to the doctor’s mind. ‘We are very few in numbers, and yet have accomplished a great deal. I believe that for us to achieve what we are meant to, it will take more people with the same heart and spirit as you two. I would like you to help find those who can make contributions, and it matters not about age, race, faith, or any other aspect as long as they believe in our core values.’

Ellis and Midge boarded the plane knowing they had a greater role to play, which helped them focus on the world outside themselves.

Matt had passed the same challenge to Suchet and Chris and charged them with spending time finding people who could help.

A new crew headed to the island with some familiar faces. Allen and Teresa Benson begged to be allowed to go back. The island had become special to them in so many ways. Also returning were the Robertson family and Rubin Coruthers and his family.