Eyes of an Eagle a Novel of Gravity Controlled Read online

  I backed away from the boys and Tabitha. “I'll call the police,” I whispered. At the phone behind the counter, I dialed 911. One of the boys seemed to recover a little and tried to get up. Tabitha kicked him in the stomach so hard he slide a couple of feet across the floor. The boys stayed on the floor until the sheriff’s deputy showed up.

  When I drove into the yard, Move-over watched as I pulled past the windows of the house. His slitted eyes tracked me to the garage. I went into my workroom. Move-over was already there lying on the old computer his head above the cooling fan.

  I got to work on an article by a physicist on a new attempt at a Grand Unification Theory. My hands shook as I touched the keys. At first, my mind wouldn't leave the assault and the police questioning. But one thing about Quantum Mechanics is that you have to concentrate to follow the mathematics. Something about the equations fluttered at the edge of thought. The electromagnetic wave equations looked good. The predicted wave pattern with the addition of a gravity pulse looked interesting ... Something about the nuclear binding forces? What was implied by the equations? If I summarize the starting premises using fuzzy logic algorithms, what would change with...

  I woke to knocking at the front door. My head throbbed from lying against the computer chassis. I staggered to my feet. Touching my head, I felt the welt caused by the edge of the computer. Through a window, I saw a large man standing by the door. Living in Chicago for twelve years, makes you cautious. I slipped a wedge under the door when I opened it so it would only move a few inches.

  “Hello."

  “Mister Daniel Karpinen?” came the stranger's voice.

  “Yes.” I answered starting to get a little worried.

  “Mr. Blythe would like to know if you are alright."

  “Mr. Blythe? Who is he?" “His son was involved in the incident at the video store today. He requested that I stop and see if you needed anything. He is sorry if his son caused you any problems or misunderstandings. He would like you to know that if you need any help to get over this incident you can contact me.” He then handed me a card and left. The simple card read ‘John W. Jones Attorney at Law’ with a phone number at the bottom.

  I dropped the card on the table and stumbled into bed. The recoil of my body coming down from the adrenaline rush of the assault at the store had made me groggy. As I fell asleep, I felt safe. I knew that Move-over's eyes were watching.

  I woke to the sun streaming through the bedroom window and the force of Move-over jumping on my belly. He purred loudly as he worked his paws back and forth. His needle sharp claws penetrated the blankets, just touching the bare skin between my ribs. Move-over was hungry.

  I just finished feeding the cat and pouring myself a glass of orange juice when a faded blue Buick pulled up. A large older man lumbered out of the car and to my door. I waited till he knocked before opening it. He was wrinkled with a day's growth of facial hair. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. He reached out his hand and in a tired voice said, “Name's Earl Czeminski. Thank you for helping my daughter."

  Still half asleep, I hesitantly shook his hand saying, “Your welcome sir.” I flashed back in years to all the times my father formally shook my hands, graduation, grandma's funeral ... I couldn't understand how this man reminded me of my father. My father was a skinny dark man with whipcord speed. This man was large and soft looking with a lumbering movement. By my eighteenth birthday, I could look over my father's head. This man was at least twelve inches taller than me. Then I heard his voice again. My father and this man had grown up here, educated in the local schools, living their lives in this same area. If I closed my eyes, the voice could have been my Dad's.

  “Sorry sir. Could you repeat that? I wasn't listening. Yesterday and last night ... well I'm still not awake."

  He mumbled a little and tried to start his speech a few times before saying, “You need something you ask. Ahhh. And no charge when you come to the store.” He was my father. Dad would seldom talk. He would leave that to Ma, but when he did it would burst out of him. If something interrupted him, he would stammer and stutter until he got out just enough to understand what he was saying and then he stopped.

  He stayed for a while hemming and hawing, not really knowing what to do or say. We shifted back and forth from one foot to another as his confusion and embarrassment transferred to me. I have never been able to remember what we said to each other for those awkward minutes. Finally, we shook hands again and he left.

  With Earl gone, I was alone. I sat drinking my juice. In my mind I saw yesterday again. Tabitha standing over those two boys, chest rising and falling in deep breathes, vital, and alive. And then Earl's voice broke in and changed her into my sister!

  I had to do something! Ah yes. Last week I received a paper on the Grand Unification Theory. Really tough math should keep me from thinking. It had been the goal of scientists throughout the ages to find one equation or a single set of related algorithms that would summarize all of physical science. The Unification Theory seemed so close in the 1950's. Electromagnetic waves were summarized in a single equation. Einstein had quantified gravity. Nuclear forces were being examined. And then advancement slowed to a crawl as problems with it continued to plague every new attempt at unification. I could barely understand the simplified versions of the equations the physicist had been using. I knew any stray thoughts in my mind would be forced to leave.

  To really work through equations, I would need music. My CD player had a tray that would hold five

  CD's. I started by putting in something light to get started, Copland. The next three CD's would have to have math music, selections of Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Bach, Pachelbel, and Telemann. The last CD would have to pull me out of the intense math induced trance. Which one to put on? Ah, Bon Jovi.

  Fanfare of the Common Man blasted from the stereo speakers as I tried to understand the first set of equations the physicist was using.

  One of the problems that any unification theory needed to answer was whether a neutrino had mass and how much. Neutrinos are leftovers. When a nuclear reaction occurs, you have pieces of the atoms and energy released. Some of the energy seemed to disappear. In the 1930's Pauli hypothesized that the missing energy went into a particle. The particle was later called a neutrino by Fermi. It took till 1956 before the first type of neutrino was discovered coming from a nuclear reactor. Neutrinos are so small that they can travel through the earth between atoms never hitting anything. Neutrino detectors are normally put in deep mines just to eliminate the background noise of everyday energy sources. Neutrinos are very very strange.

  The problem with neutrinos and mass is that if they have it then all current theories would have to be changed. And the current theories seem to work! If they don't have mass, we don't know where they are going because we seem to be losing them. The detectors are not finding the numbers of certain types of neutrinos we know should be there. If they have mass, we know that the neutrinos are changing to a tau type neutrino, which we can't detect at this time thus explaining the low numbers.

  The physicist had taken the current information from both the Super-Kamiokande Experiment and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and refined his equations. He had written two equations that were used for two of the types of neutrinos. The equations were identical except for having different constants. The one constant was just a little more than 4.5 times greater than the first. The equations used imaginary numbers in such a way that the neutrinos would disappear from our plane of existence when they had mass. Imaginary numbers are just a technique of math that mimics how real things sometimes turn themselves on and off.

  I looked at those equations. They seemed so familiar. The 4.5 times greater and imaginary numbers. 4.5 and imaginary numbers. 4.5 and imaginary numbers. 4.66 and imaginary numbers! Chaos math and Feigenbaum's constant!

  This brought to mind three aspects of chaos math. One, all chaos equations with single hump curves bifurcate or split at intervals that are 4.66 apart. Two, chaos t
ype equations are usually written using imaginary numbers because they are easier to solve on computers. And three, there can be relationships between totally different problems if the underlying patterns are the same. In this case, I remember reading in a molecular biology paper, something about types of proteins that would disappear at one site in the cell and reappear as a partial mirror image.

  I hurriedly checked the hard drive on my computer and found the biology paper. There sat nearly identical equations. The proteins were doing the same thing as the neutrinos. In this case though the biologist was able to track what had happened and had found a set of ideal conditions. Some of the conditions were found in cells and some were not.

  Bach was now playing in the background. On the computer screen I placed both papers side by side. The equations, the music, a pattern, a rhythm, something was there in those sets of equations. My mind blurred as I tried to grasp what I was looking at. Slowly the pounding sounds of Bon Jovi brought me back to now. My head ached. Five hours of math, I needed a break! Just then Move-over yowled for attention.

  * * * *

  The Chameleon had a plan. Staking out a small rural highway at night, The Chameleon waited for a lone woman to drive by. A specially made focused flashlight rested in the Chameleon's hands.

  The prey sang with her radio as she hurried home through the dark night. She had driven for hours and was nearly home. Her thoughts were of family not seen in months. The trap was sprung. A hundred thousand lumens of light hit her dilated eyes. Hands went up trying to shield her from the blinding light.

  The car swerved. The front tires dropped off the edge of the tarred road. She grabbed the wheel and tried to turn it back on the road. The tires caught on the lip of tar at the edge of the road stopping the front end of the car. The momentum from the back flipped the car into the air. Five times the car turned end over end. The prey had her seatbelt on. She survived but barely conscious. Then the Chameleon came.

  The Chameleon had the best technology the Users could provide. Within minutes of searching the prey's purse, the Chameleon had copies of all the documents the prey had. Back at the base, the Chameleon, now a she, made perfect forgeries of the prey's driver license and other papers and photos. She changed everything to reflect her current facade. The forgeries added two inches to her height and subtracted fifteen pounds from her weight. The picture on the driver's license now was hers. With valid identity numbers and proofs, she was ready to infiltrate.

  Later that week, she used the prey's credit to purchase a car. On the last day of the week, she entered Chicago from the south. Her first objective would be to find a job.

  Chapter 4

  Learning

  The day was ruined. The arraignment for the two punks took until 5:00. The prosecutor seemed to be just going through the motions. The lawyer for Jordan Blythe and his friend John Jorgenson grilled me for hours trying to get me to make mistakes and correct myself. I finally got fed up with the harassment and called him an idiot, a pea brain. I asked him if the reason he couldn't remember what I said about who had the knife to Tabitha's back was because his elevator didn't go all the way up. That finally got a response from the prosecutor and the judge. I was threatened with contempt. The prosecutor even wanted my comments stricken from the record. I then lectured the lawyer about how he could remember by making a mnemonic out of the letters. The judge in exasperation finally told me I could go. As I left the courtroom, the spectators started to clap. The judge was throwing another hissy fit as I left the room.

  The drive home was even worse than the testifying. My brain and body were tired. I swerved onto the shoulder of the road when a large dark shape flashed in front of the windshield. Gulping for air, I looked in the rear view mirror and saw three crows picking at the carcass of some dead animal. I felt picked-over like that animal. I then noticed a bird circling above the road about a hundred yards ahead of the pickup. The hawk stayed circling until I got home and entered the house. There Move-over took over the watching.

  “Mr. Blythe?"

  “Yes John."

  “Both the Czeminski girl and Karpinen testified against your son. I did get both the prosecutor and the judge to agree to a plea bargain. Since both your son and his friend are seventeen, they will have clean records next year. Jorgensen will get sixty days in county jail with probation until he is eighteen and your son will have probation until his eighteenth birthday."

  “I thought you said you could make it all go away?" “I could have if Karpinen and Czeminski hadn't testified."

  “No one messes with my family and gets away with it. Hurt them. Hurt them bad. Start with the banks."

  “I think the girl has a college loan out. I'll start by having the loan called in. I think it is a federal loan so we will have to have it first transferred to another bank."

  “Stop bothering me with the details. You know your job Mister Jones. Just tell me when they are hurting."

  * * * *

  This was a bad day for the Chameleon. A supervisor just returned from vacation. He was deaf. The Chameleon's disguise worked because she overpowered all the senses. She was an average female secretary. Your nose said she smelled like a woman. Your eyes would say the same. She looked, tasted, walked, talked, and sounded like all the other women in the office. But being an imposter she wasn't quite perfect. The slightly different scent she gave off was offset by her voice. The throaty whisper in her voice could be ignored when contrasted with the popular make-up on her face.

  In other words, the supervisor without his sense of hearing to interfere had started watching her with a quizzical look to his face. She knew she had to disappear from this identity and start a new one. She liked the access she had gained by being female. She also noticed that the so-called security that was in place was more interested in her femaleness than in what she did. The Chameleon had heard talk about a lesbian bar downtown. She would go there. It should be easy to attract a new prey to exchange identities with. A new prey to destroy and place her current identification with. A new prey to be used to camouflage her infiltration.

  Her change of identity was easier than she imagined. She had dressed the prey with her clothing and purse, destroyed her face and hands by leaving her body on the train tracks. The changes the Chameleon had to make to fit the new prey's identity were minor, slightly different shade of skin tone and hair color. This prey had a better education than the last. The Chameleon could infiltrate the community at a higher level.

  * * * *

  Air on a G-String by Bach was playing in the background and I was looking again at the Grand Unification equations. I had proofed the article and sent it back to the office the day before but I couldn't stop thinking about the electromagnetic equations.

  I had decided to put the equations away but something made me look at them again using fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic assumes that you don't have accurate information. A strange thing happens when you assume inaccuracy. You can process more information with more accuracy than with common math, but it only works better on real life problems. I could still remember the first fuzzy math problem I proofed.

  A college math professor had his class write out the problem of when he would get to his office if he left home at 7:10 in the morning. The class spent 3 weeks timing the traffic lights and examining his morning route. They then wrote out the problem using standard mathematical methods and fuzzy logic. Using standard math, he would arrive at his office at 7:44 plus or minus 8.5 minutes. Using fuzzy logic, he would arrive at his office at approximately 7:48. The rest of the semester the class recorded the arrival time of the professor. Except for 3 arrivals, the professor walked into his office within the 8.5 minutes of 7:44 but for 3/4ths of the arrival times he arrived within 2 minutes of 7:48.

  Fuzzy logic had the more accurate answer because it accepts the fact that the things are never exact. The professor might leave home at 7:11 one day but the traffic lights will average the later time of that one-day so he still arrives at 7:44. Fuzzy logic
balances the inaccuracies by acknowledging that they are

  there. The more variations in a problem the greater the accuracy using fuzzy logic.

  A Japanese mathematician had taken a set of algorithms designed by a logician by the name of Kosko and applied them to radio transmissions. I had run across his article in Scientific American while proofing a story from IBM Labs on a new system of transmitting information between computers without using cables. Since radio waves are electromagnetic, I used the mathematician's algorithms on the Unification equations. And then it happened! Right there on the computer screen! The equations showed that just like the neutrinos electromagnetic radiation could convert to mass with gravity. You could use radio waves to make gravity!

  The conversion to gravity was so small that it was unnoticeable, but it was there in the equations. I started playing with the numbers on the screen. The equations stayed the same. I tried different combinations.

  Still the conversion to gravity was so small you couldn't even find it let alone use it. Suddenly a spike appeared in the numbers. Harmonics of different frequencies could add up to make noticeable gravity.

  I stared at the computer screen. Silence. I don't know how long I watched the same string of numbers. But Move-over stretched up my leg, inserted his claws through the fabric of my pants, and yowled. It was morning. He wanted food. I had worked through the night.

  I suddenly had to empty my bladder. The twelve hours sitting in front of a computer screen had made inroads in the balance between my kidney output and my bladder capacity. I ran to the bathroom to the accompaniment of my growling stomach and Move-over's hungry cries. During the long minutes standing in front of the toilet, I wondered if I actually found a way of making artificial gravity. Then I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I missed the stool. Wiping up the small puddle next to the toilet, I kept hearing the comment from an imaginary reporter that started my laughter. “Sir, what was the first thing you did after you realized you discovered artificial gravity?"