* * *
Morelli, Clifford, Aub, and a group of other scientists and senior personnel from Sudbury stood in front of a reserved landing pad in the Institute’s airmobile parking area and watched the steadily enlarging dot that was descending from the sky above them. Zimmermann was not present, having returned to Luna the previous week after spending a month with them. Three medium-size skybuses, painted white and carrying the words MASSACHUSETTS STATE POLICE DEPARTMENT, were lined up together along one side of the parking area. Their occupants had taken up positions around the landing pad, at various strategic points around the grounds of the Institute and at doors inside some of its buildings.
The dot gradually resolved itself into the snub-nosed shape of a Veetol Executive jet bearing the colors and insignia of the U.S. Air Force Transport Command. It slowed to a halt and hovered a hundred feet above the pad while the flight-control processors obtained final clearance from the landing radar and the pilot made his routine visual check to see that the site was unobstructed. Then the jet sank smoothly downward to come to rest amid the falling whine of dying engine noise. The door swung open and a short stairway telescoped down to the ground.
After a few seconds two men dressed in civilian suits, presumably FBI, emerged and stood on either side of the foot of the steps. They were followed by a powerfully built individual wearing the bemedaled uniform of an Army major general; it belonged to Gerald Straker, a Presidential adviser on strategic planning and an authority on advanced weapons systems. Behind Straker came General Arwin Dalby, U.S. Representative to the Coordination Committee of the Integrated Strike Command of the Allied Western Democracies; General Robert Fuller, of the Strategic Planning Commission; and General Howard Perkoffski, second in command of the North American global surveillance, early-warning, and countermeasures system. Next came two civilians, both from the Pentagon; one was Professor Franz Mueller, resident consultant on security of military communications systems, the other, Dr. Harry Sultzinger, the architect of ORBS.
General Harvey Miller, USAF, Deputy Chief of Orbital Bombardment Command, was followed by a trio of Air Force aides and then by a navy contingent headed by Admiral Joseph Kaine, chairman of a presidential advisory committee charged with investigating methods to improve submarine detection from satellites. Three more civilian technical advisers came hard on the heels of the Navy: Patrick Cleary, computer technology; Dr. Samuel Hatton, military lasers; and Professor Warren Keele, nuclear sciences. Finally there emerged the instantly recognizable, lean, balding but vigorous figure of William S. Foreshaw, Secretary for Defense of the United States.
When introductions had been completed, the two groups merged and made their way over to the Administration Building of the Institute where, in the Large Conference Theater, Morelli started off the program for the day with a presentation of the things his team had achieved to date.
“We’ve invited you here today to bring to your attention some new discoveries in science that can only be described as astounding,” he told them. “In our opinion, the work that we have done over the past couple of years represents a breakthrough in human knowledge that is possibly without parallel in history.”
He waited for the air of expectancy to rise to an appropriate level and then continued: “All of you gentlemen are, I’m sure, conversant with the notion that the universe in which we live exists within a framework of space and time. Everything that we know, everything that we see, even the most distant object that can be resolved by our most powerful telescopes or the tiniest event observable inside the atom—all these things exist within the same universal framework.” The rows of faces watched him expressionlessly.
“We now have not only a working theoretical model but also firm experimental evidence that this universe is only a tiny part of something far vaster . . . not merely vaster in size, but far, far vaster in terms of the conceptual entities that inhabit it and the new range of physical laws that govern the processes taking place inside it.” Interest began creeping into some of the faces in front of him as a few of the individuals present got their first inkling of where he was about to take them. Morelli nodded slowly.