How Deep?

A government Ion-Craft set down in front of a building with title Gnomon Research Laboratories. A man in a suit and a panama hat strode up marble stairs. Whistling, he held the door for a woman in a dark blue pencil skirt that traced her curves, her dark hair up in an array of gossamer spikes. She paused in the door, her youthful face turning slowly toward him. Her eyes turned up and right to look at him and her brows shot quickly to their apex. He got the message and let his whistle slide down the scale as it dropped out of existence.

“More old-timey music?”

“You know music is the soul’s search for freedom, Ella.”

She just shook her head at the thought of freedom in this line of work.

On the 26th floor of the laboratories the debonair blue-suited DSC man picked up a blinking object and turned it over looking at it. “What did you say Dr. Whitney was working on?” Wallace asked the white lab coat in front of him.

“I didn’t—Mr. Wallace was it?” the tech said as he took the object from the agent’s hand. “His work is confidential.”

“What is it that Gnomon does in general?” Forrester asked.

“We are in time. Atomic clocks and the like,” the tech answered.

Wallace looked around at the various digital clock faces on the walls and nodded with a raised eyebrow.

“And what do you make of this?” Wallace asked pulling a pair of goggles from his breast pocket.

“The prototype—where did you get that?” shocked, he reaching for the goggles.

“Hold on there, buckwheat. This is evidence,” Wallace warned, pulling back.

“At least keep it in this,” the tech sighed, agitated, as he placed a metal suitcase on the table. It opened with a gasp. Inside was a molded pad that held the goggles perfectly in controlled humidity and temperature. When Wallace placed the goggles inside, the case sealed with a magnetic hum.

“What do the goggles do?” Wallace didn’t expect the tech to be forthcoming. He watched, with unavoidable revolting, the fleck of spit at the corner of the tech’s overly large and glistening lips. Some how those shiny lips wouldn’t let him go as he waited for them to part and answer his question. They made him more and more agitated. Wallace hated loosing his hard-won cool.

“Why so surprised to see them?” Forrester followed up.

“The prototype was stolen from the lab vaults two weeks ago.”

“Why didn’t you notify the Corps of the theft?”

The tech’s eyes bulged at something on the desk, as if to tell the agents that that speck was absorbing more of his attention than he would give them.

“Do you know why anyone would want to hurt Dr. Whitney?” Wallace asked.

The tech shook his head. Shrugging off any feeling of concern, he looked as disinterested and detached as possible. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

“I don’t like that guy,” Forrester said. “He is hiding something.”

“He’s hiding more than that,” Wallace said, looking at his pad. “Gnomon is classified G12.”

“Government research?”

“Yeah… Who knows how deep this could go? We may have more than we can chew here. Let’s check on the Ion-craft diagnostic.”

Ion-Craft Corp. was the world leader in Ionic shield vehicles. It was to Ions what Kleenex is to tissue. They were headquartered in a sleek building near Chicago. The two Corps agents wasted no time in arriving. They made their way to the all too familiar test facility.

“Jose, my friend, what do you make of the mystery Ion?”

“I don’t know, Eric. It looks flawless, or at least as flawless as you’d expect after becoming part of the Iowa landscape…. One odd thing, though: the craft’s chronometer is off a few hundredths of a second.”

“Doesn’t sound like much,” Wallace replied.

“It’s a whole hell of a lot when you consider that it is atomic.”

“Let me guess. Gnomon Labs?”

“Yeah… Oh-oh here comes the boss.”

“Wallace!” A sizeable man yelled as he waddled across the floor. His hair was slick and his cloths were as loud as his gruff voice.

“Bustamonte. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Pleasant my sweet behind! You know damn well that we have not had any fatalities since we introduced the Emergency Stasis Restraint system twenty years ago. What is the meaning of sending us this crapper?” Bustamonte jutted a cigar stub at the pile of twisted metal that was once the curved and shapely craft of Dr. Whitney.

“You know how it is, Bustamonte. Just have to rule out the global corporate giant as a murder suspect.”

“Murder? See, I knew it wasn’t our system that killed the man.”

“We’ll see,” Forrester said under her breath.

“Let me know if you find anything else, Jose,” Wallace said quietly as Bustamonte was walking away.

“You bet, Eric.”

***

Wallace put his panama on the hat tree in the corner of the office and sauntered to the banker’s box filled with the contents of Whitney’s car. Wallace riffled through the box; he found an empty coffee cup. Smelling it, he determined it was a cappuccino—dry, double. He picked up a gum wrapper.

“Probably chewed it after the coffee,” his young partner Ella Forrester offered, walking in the room. Though strikingly beautiful, behind glasses her eyes shone with the light of wisdom gained through fire.

“Not a chance,” Wallace responded waving the cup. “A man who orders his cappuccino dry would never follow it up with sweets.”

He picked up a black hardbound pocket-sized book; undoing the elastic clasp he flipped through pages of sketches and formulas.

“A Moleskine,” he explained. “Hemmingway carried one for his notes.”

“What are all those drawings?”

“Scribbling… there seems to be no logic to it,” He replied.

Then he turned to the back cover. There was a pocket there, and hidden within was a sketch of the archaic goggles that the doctor was wearing when he was found.

***

Hours later, Eric silently glided the Ion-Craft out of the Domestic Security Corps’ parking garage, floating a few inches above the pavement. Ella sat in thought looking out the passenger window. She watched the curves of the craft’s fenders, hood, and roof rise and fall in the reflection of other crafts they passed. Soon they cleared the garage doors on the upper level. The craft began to rise high above the city streets crowded with pedestrians wearing hats, their collars turned up against the wind.

Quickly the oblivious masses became part of the street, and the street part of a block as the city became skyline and flashing lights. The craft leveled its ascent and settled into a flight plan cleared with Central, to not interupt another Ion’s path. As the craft picked up speed the silence in the cabin was replaced by wind whistling over the form. Ella watched wisps of cloud swirl off the round fender. Eric had turned on the radio. He was tapped his hands on the steering wheel while singing along to “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” trying to get Ella to join in. She just laughed.

They traveled swiftly; plains of harvested fields gave way to rolling hills and farmland again. Though they only slowed slightly over the small towns Ella looked down on them with a smile. The rooftops of the downtown were painted with scenes from the town, trying to attract visitors. Here a rolling river framed with sidewalks and bridges with men and fishing poles. There the image of store fronts lined with smooth rounded Ions. A man sweeping his stoop. Children riding bikes on the walks. The rooftops spoke the good life of the people below with an invitation to join them for an afternoon. A few swift moving commuters had evidently set down at a local diner—one man in the parking lot waving his hat to another coming near.

It wasn’t long before that scene receded behind them and Ella joined Eric in his crooning.

The day had turned cold; a fresh air blew across a field, the amber grain rustling to an unseen presence. Jose Gerrera stood at a gravel crossroads leaning against his 1925 Cord waiting, taking in the breeze.

From the west he saw a glint and a silhouette. He straightened and peered trying to identify the approaching craft, the evening sun in his eyes. The doors opened and Wallace and Forrester found him in his uneasy stance. He relaxed back into his car.

“What have you got Jose?” Wallace asked.

“Time…” Jose said with a smirk. “I ran the chronometric readings from the Ion-Craft fleet and found that there were hundreds of Ions with chronometers off by seconds, even minutes.”

“I wonder why.” Wallace hummed.

“I thought you’d be wondering. So I did a little checking.” Wallace gave a smile and a wink. Jose continued, “I Googled the Ion-Craft computers and decrypted some interesting communiqués between Bustamonte and a certain lab tech at Gnomon labs-name of Clark. It seems the result was a tweak to the Ion-Craft GPS system, which reroutes thousands of commuters through a 100 acre space on the Missouri river.”

Wallace looked at Ella and found her eyes mirrored his look of concern.

“Eric?” Jose questioned his friend’s glance. After a pause he continued, “Well, I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m sure the intel is in good hands.”

“Yes,” Wallace responded, “and we’d better get back to Gnomon labs. Thank you, my friend.”

***

Wallace and Forrester took up position in front of the Gnomon labs building. The postmodern architecture illuminated in the darkness of the cool night. The agents sat in the darkness of their voluptuous Ion-craft, sipping coffee and occasionally checking on their surveillance equipment.

“The real question is how far up the lader does this go? That question crops up in any good investigation. Is there more than we can see?” Wallace plied to his young partner.

“Eric, do you ever wonder if there is more to life than this?”

“Than what El?”

“I don’t know, stakeouts and conspiracy?”

“Ella! Don’t you have enough mystery in your life?” Wallace scolded. “Take this place: classified G12. Here we are digging in where we don’t belong, uncovering the hidden mysteries of our time, and you want more?”

“Absolutely. Facing this stuff all the time forces me to think beyond the mundane routine the rest of the world faces.”

“You’ll grow out of it the longer you stay in this business,” Wallace said with a quizzical smile. “I’m going to have to stop taking you to the country. You always come back romantic.”

“Doesn’t it do anything to you? Don’t the flowers and grain and sky make you feel a part of something bigger?”

Eric looked into her eyes, finding there a life and depth he found attractive. His mind went back to days as a boy when he felt that kind of unlimited presence. Suddenly he was aware that his eyes were betraying his thoughts and he laughed it off. Returning to the surveillance there was, for a moment, silence.

“Justice,” Wallace said with enigmatic significance.

Ella waited for him to continue. “Justice?…”

“I guess that is where I feel most connected with something bigger than myself. That is why I started this job, but the Domestic Security Corps has less to do with correcting injustice than I had imagined in my more sentimental days.”

Ella returned her gaze out the windshield and smiled. After a moment of quiet reflection, her expression changed, “Oh-oh, look who we have here.”

She nodded toward a large figure waddling to the corner of the street. The man took off his fedora and waved it stealthily as he wiped his sweat drenched face. Out of the bushes came a man with slick hair parted in the middle, thick round glasses and a full-length double-breasted white lab coat that gave him the look of a mad scientist from a B-movie. It was the same tech they had met earlier. They listened.

“I told you not to come here.”

“I don’t take orders, Clark. I told you that when you offered our… partnership,” Bustamonte retorted. “Someone hacked the system, email isn’t safe.”

“Relax, we’re on track. Just stay calm. We have to be in for the long haul for this to work.”

“I don’t know if you have the cahones, Clark. You worry me. Are you sure your experiment isn’t going to be discovered?”

Clark stung from the condescension. “None of us wants that Bustamonte. Time isn’t something to play with, if the company found out that I was making something on the side by revealing secrets to a slime such as yourself, they would hurt you more than me.”

Bustamonte’s red face was stopped short when he saw two figures approaching. The silhouette of a man wearing a hat, light glinting from polished toes, and the curves of a woman’s dress, her hair creating a halo around her head, held pistols toward the two men.

***

“What are you getting from Gnomon labs Bustamonte?” Wallace questioned the man in a white room of blazing lights; his double-breasted blue suit and white carnation contrasting the captive’s disheveled clothes and nervous pallor. “We know you have been trafficking in classified information. That is a felony. A good prosecutor could make a case for treason. You had better start singing… Come on! How deep does this go?”

Bustamonte rested a sweaty brow in his hands and slumped, silent.

In another room, Ella Forrester’s eyes shone behind lenses illuminated by the bright lights.

“You weren’t forthcoming with us, Mr. Clark. It seems Bustamonte knows more classified information about Gnomon than we do. You will both rot for a long time, or worse.”

Clark let a nervous titter escape.

“Treason is nothing to laugh off, Clark.”

“It’s not that Agent Forrester. I’m willing to roll on that pig, Bustamonte. That is the word isn’t it? No matter. Bustamonte intimidated me into giving him any advantage. We arranged for thousands of commuters to pass through a Gnomon test area that is hidden.”

“Hidden?” Forrester repeated with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, it works by… let us just say, it bends time.”

“What would Bustamonte get out of it?”

“Each pass through the area would alter a Ion-craft’s chronometer. Over the course of a few years he would stand to make extra millions on early returns and maintenance. The impression on the stock holders was worth his compensating me handsomely.”

“Sound’s pretty damning for Bustamonte,” Forrester observed. “I have a feeling you are not so innocent, and the prosecutor puts a lot of weight into our report. I can make it go easy on you, or hard. Perhaps you can make a better impression yet.”

“How?”

“Tell me how you and Bustamonte murdered Doctor Whitney.”

“I don’t know… I mean we didn’t… I didn’t.”

“That is not a better impression.” Ella rose putting her papers in her folder.

“Wait… Wait, I’ll help you with your investigation—I can tell you what he was working on!”

Ella smiled and walked out of the room.

***

"Take me to Dr. Whitney's things," Clark, still arrogant, demanded.

"Not a chance," Wallace replied pulling from his breast pocket the moleskine Dr. Whitney used, a foil gum wrapper marking a page. "What do you make of this?"

Thumbing through the book Clark looked puzzled and a little angry. "Gibberish!" he exclaimed. "This is the only thing I can read."

He pointed to a Greek word. "anaximander." Wallace looked at Forrester who adjusted her glasses and after a moment replied, "Anaximander."

Clark took the foil up in his hands, turning it around, staring at it while the two agents talked.

"He was a presocratic philosopher," Ella said quietly.

Wallace cocked his head, his left eye asked “How do you know stuff like that?” his right, “Can you tell me more?”

"Well, he was a mathematician. He developed the sundial. He was also known for looking for the unified field theory of the sixth century BCE, the origin of the elements."

Again his eye brows asked how do you know this stuff? "What could that possibly have to do with this twenty-first century murder? Could Anaximander be an alias for someone?" Suddenly Wallace jumped at Clark. "What did you do with that gum wrapper?"

"Nothing," Clark replied, thrusting his hands in his pocket. Slowly he withdrew them, "I must have absentmindedly put it in my pocket. Tell me, is it yours or was it Dr. Whitney's?"

"It was his. There must have been a dozen of them in his car," Forrester answered.

Clark's eyes widened and then he made a conscious effort to put on what he thought was a poker face. "Ah, so that is where you got the goggles? Dr. Whiney had them?"

"Care to share what you know?" Wallace asked.

"I suppose you'll find out soon enough on your own. The goggles are designed to see through the loosely bound particles that make up matter. Only Dr. Whitney knows how they work, some how they create a field that bends time and isolates the particles, something to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Like I said, I don't know the science behind it, no one in this world does now."

"Didn't he leave any notes behind?" Forrester probed.

"Just this … Gibberish!" Clark growled.

"What does this have to do with that gum wrapper?"

"This, agent Wallace, is the first thing goggles could see through. It dissolved into a dull glow and our protective gloves became visible. Whitney always dreamed of taking the device out side and looking through organic material, but removing it was impossible."

"Apparently not," Wallace replied, and they left an agitated and quiet Clark in the interrogation room.

***

The night had emptied out the Midwest branch office of the Domestic Security Corps. Hallways were dark save the security lamps illuminating deco pillars up and down the hall. High celings stretched in repeating arcs of brass and steel. A walkway of steel adorned with many carvings and a mohogany railing connected second floor walkways. The marbled floors carried a herringbone pattern inlayed with thin steel lines. The pillars made up of a dozen smaller pillars joined block designs inlayed in the wall creating stairsteps topped with a deeply stained trianglular marquee. Through glass doors framed in brushed brass, a partly lit library with mahogany bookcases was home to the coffee and fatigue of agents Wallace and Forrester.

Eric Wallace growled as he looked up from a file rubbing his eyes. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere around square one," Ella replied without looking up from her stack.

Eric looked across the table at his colleague, tracing the curve of her jaw and neck with his eyes. Sitting back he asked "still nothing on this Anaximander?"

"No, Eric," she said suddenly looking up. "I've been thinking… maybe he was referring to the historical Anaximander."

Her enthusiasm and the light dancing in her eyes gave her such a powerful sincerity that Eric had to catch his breath. "How so?"

"Anaximander paints this image of the reality we know: the world, matter, everything, floating as a crust on an infinite sea he named the boundless. He called the true work of philosophy ‘seeing through the surface.’"

"So maybe Anaximander was Dr. Whitney's inspiration?"

"Maybe… Here is something you can relate to," Ella said with a coy smile. "The reason Anaximander looked for a boundless to be the source of everything is that if everything were made of just one of the elements, say water, it would mean that the world was founded on injustice. There had to be something greater, more primary behind it all."

"You thinking I’m more than meets the eye? That there is something more primary behind me?" Eric chuckled. "Now you really are getting out of your field of study. You know I pulled your file…"

"Is that supposed to surprise me?"

"I guess I can’t resist a mystery. Why did you do it Ella? Why join DSC anyway. You have a doctorate in Philosophy and another in Mathematics, and here you are playing damn, good detective."

"If you read my file you know the answer." Ella's voice held a tension that cooled their playful mood.

"I know you lost your dad in the Omaha bombing, but this is no place to get closure. You're smart enough to know that."

She twisted a smile, the light in her eyes retreating behind a cloud of some untold end-game. "I have my reasons," she said with a sigh throwing her head back. She stretched and took her hair down. "Lets get back to work."

She stood over Wallace's shoulder as they perused again the Moleskine of sketches.

***

Wallace’s mind rushed with memory, processed through the filter of a dream.

“Is the scene preserved?”

The policeman gave a nod.

Walking over to the investigators, Wallace strapped into one of their climbing harnesses and, with a quick “on-belay,” he was over the edge.

The wreck of the magnetic flying car was some twenty feet from the top of the bluff; the rushing Missouri was another thirty feet below that. He felt his stomach jump as he repelled down the rope at a quick clip, and stopping short he found himself face to face with the mysterious Dr. Ambrose Whitney. He was the first to see the doctor’s form in the driver’s seat of the crumpled mag-craft. The restraint system had deployed, leaving the doctor, several gum wrappers, some papers and a coffee cup deprived of inertia, suspened in mid air. The crash should not have harmed Whitney’s body.

His face was frozen in a look of wonder. There was a red glow to his cheeks, and his agape mouth turned up at the corners. The restraint system had stopped a single tear rolling down his cheek. Over his eyes were goggles— dark round lenses sheathed in brown leather.

Wallace was the first to deactivate the restraint system releasing all the evidence to laws of thermodynamics. Before deactivation, the computer in his carnation recorded the crash data and position of all the evidence in a three-dimensional rendering. Dr. Whitney’s body slumped forward when it was released from its suspended animation.

Wallace quickly felt for a pulse. The doctor’s heart, when stasis was deactivated, raced for a few seconds before stopping suddenly. He was dead.

Beep-Beep, Beep-Beep. The sound of the notepad’s red flashing indicator awoke Agent Forrester. She had fallen asleep, her head rested on her arm sprawled across the table. Wallace was on the rich leather of the couch, shoes kicked off, tie undone, collar open and white panama over his face.

Ella turned and whispered, "Eric, we have something."

***

Wallace, arrayed in a fresh suit, burst into the holding cell of the sleeping Gnomon lab tech throwing over a chair. Forrester also followed, fresh faced.

"You've been less than candid, Clark!" Wallace punched the words into the air.

"Gnomon labs sent over your computer contents," Forrester chimed in.

"Seems once they learned what you have been up to, they were more than happy to cooperate."

"Especially when they found that your work was simply the ravings of a mad man," the beautiful Forrester laughed in his face. "You crept your way into real scientists confidences so that you would have something to talk about. Does it make you feel important? Knowing all those secrets?"

"No, you just like wearing the lab coat. Isn't that right Clark?"

"No, No. I was Dr. Whitney's right hand man. I was his inspiration. He couldn't have done it with out me."

"I don't see it," Wallace said. "The good doctor did all he could do to get you transferred or fired, didn't he?"

"No! He needed me. He would never…"

"We found memos on your computer that you intercepted to save your own ass," Forrester lashed.

"I did that for him. He couldn't go on with out me. I am Anaximander. I am his Anaximander!"

"You'd like to think that wouldn't you? You’re pathetic," Wallace turned a disgusted face.

"That's what Whitney told you isn't it?" Forrester said coolly.

"Is that why you killed him?"

"No! No." Clark, shaken, sat sobbing, quieting as the moments went by. "I needed him. I needed the goggles. When he crashed I knew my life was over."

"Who were you scared of? Bustamonte?"

"No, these men are dangerous. Terrorists the lot of them. I knew they would kill me soon and that my life was worthless. That is why I came clean about Bustamonte."

"Not clean enough."

Ella followed Eric out the door. “What do you make of Clark’s story, Eric?”

“What I want to know is why Doctor Whitney would have piloted his craft directly into the bluff face.”

“If he were using the goggles, maybe he saw something through the bluff. Could he have been trying to fly into the hidden Gnomon facility?”

“No, it’s a good half mile down river. Could he have seen Clark’s terrorists in the bluff somewhere?”

“Did he even know about them, Eric?”

“Why else would he have taken the goggles? Perhaps if we could answer the age old question…”

“I know, how deep does it go?” Ella teased.

“Two things are clear to me. One, we should send Clark down to Hopper in anti-terrorism; and two, we have to see what Whitney was looking at.”

***

A cold rain fell. Wallace adjusted his panama as he stepped from his craft onto the bank of the Missouri facing the crash site. Forrester walked around the car, standing in contact with him, coveting his warmth. She pulled the collar of her jacket up around her cheeks.

Wallace put the stainless case on the hood and pressed the release buttons. The case opened with a gasp as the electric hum stopped. Carefully he lifted the goggles from their housing. He handed his hat to Forrester and situated the goggles on his face.

“The recorder is on,” Forrester announced. “Special agents, Eric Wallace and Ella Forrester. Case number 7272144, regarding goggle test at Whitney crash site. Agent Wallace testing; Agent Forrester, reporting.” As Ella dictated the information to the recorder, Eric turned the goggles on. All that he saw he dutifully reported to Ella and the record.

When he powered the goggles the gray landscape, yellowed by the tint of the lenses, burst into color. Greens were vivid. Bluff walls glowed with reds and browns. Raindrops became crystalline wonders. Eric’s breathing slowed and shifted draw from his nose to his lips.

“I am now adjusting the goggles to the setting we found them at on Dr. Whitney.”

The raindrops dissolved into a crystalline glow that served to shed light on the rest of the scene, enhancing the colors to ever increasing reality and life. Next the green of the grass dissolved away, revealing in living detail the soil, stone and bedrock beneath. Each layer gave way, enhancing the beauty of the next. The layers continued to melt away, until earth gave way to sky, sky to space, and space dissolved into a brightness that at first was blinding.

Eric blinked his eyes trying to adjust to the light. What could Dr. Whitney have possibly been trying to see? No bunkers, no tunnels, no secret labs, instead he was gazing beyond galaxy and universe.

“It is beautiful,” Wallace announced. His eyes no longer served him, but he felt. He felt with new senses that filled in the void in his mind. Slowly he turned looking around. “It is all around me a sea, an infinite ocean.”

“The boundless… I think you are seeing through to the boundless.”

Eric could feel his heart rate slowing and his natural senses were lost to him as he began feeling and seeing with new senses. He became aware of his own body and soul. He felt the sea, the ocean around him, teaming with life. Never was anything more real to him.

Wave after wave broke over his body and with it he felt the life enter him. His body felt strong his soul became just as real.

“Oh—Ella… love… live…l---.”

Ella watched him as his breath became shallow and his descriptions became labored, she watched him search for words language to express what he saw. She raised her hand to his flushed face now wet with tears. She touched his lips trying to quiet him. He relaxed and his disjointed rants became a song without words.

Her chin began to quiver. Something about his song pierced her soul she thought of her father, but for the first time in years the image was not his screaming face in the midst of an explosion, but of a lullaby. He seemed present. The life Wallace was describing to her was invading her through his song. It was familiar; her father was in that life, in that song.

Wallace was being overwhelmed by the beauty and power of life found in the boundless. His body began to quake. He felt as though he was falling, then he saw Ella’s beautiful face. He didn’t realize that she had pulled goggles from his face. His senses were all still heightened and her beauty struck him, as it never had before. He smiled, completely at peace.

Ella looked at his eyes; they seemed to be gazing through her. One rain drop splashed on his cheek cooling his tears, then another. She felt for a pulse, there was none. She lifted his head and pressed her lips to his, feeling a residue of the song of life he sang.

“Case file closed. No question what happened now,” she absently announced to the recorder through deep breaths. Her shaking hand reached her communicator. “Agent down…”

As she looked at his face, felt the life of the boundless on her lips, all the anger, bitterness and disappointment drained from her body. She felt her father and forgot her end game. With one hand she held Eric’s head, with the other she caressed his chest, and then removed her glasses. Slowly, and with breathless anticipation, she pulled the goggles over her head.