Garner dropped his hand to a huge globe next to the window, resting in an ornate walnut floor mount. He spun it absently. Travis imagined it was something he did often, an unconscious habit.
“Audra came before the committee behind closed doors, with an unusual request. She wanted clearance to review certain restricted military documents, as part of the research for her doctoral thesis. In exchange, the thesis itself would be classified and available only to certain people. Our people.”
“What was she doing her doctoral work on?” Paige said.
“ELF radio transmissions. Extremely Low Frequency. What we use for communicating with submarines.”
“That doesn’t sound like something an aerospace candidate would be working on,” Paige said.
“It was, in her case. She was researching ways to transmit ELF signals using satellites.”
Paige looked somewhat thrown by that.
Bethany looked floored. Like she could almost laugh. “That’s ridiculous. ELF transmitters are over thirty miles long. How could you put something like that in orbit?”
“And why would you want to, anyway?” Paige said. “ELF has worked fine for half a century, just the way it is.”
Travis could see just enough of Garner’s reflection to make out a vague smile. Then the man finally turned from the window.
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” he said. “Audra wasn’t interested in using it for submarines. She was looking to use it on people.”
None of the vacant expressions in the room changed.
Garner crossed to the big chair before his desk. He swiveled it to face the coffee table and sank into it.
“We started working on ELF in the fifties, when it was becoming obvious that subs were going to play a major role in the Cold War. We built the transmitters in remote places. One well-known site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Another in northern Canada, not so well known. The technical hurdles to building the damn things were significant. Consider what they had to do: broadcast in all directions with enough signal strength to reach submarines anywhere in the world, hundreds of feet down in conductive saltwater. It’s amazing they worked at all. But even once they did work, there were . . . other problems. Health effects for personnel that worked and lived close to the transmitters, where the signals were highly concentrated. Cognitive issues in a few rare cases, but the most common problems by far were mood disruptions. Conditions that mimicked the symptoms of bipolar disorder, though with greater severity. Much greater, at times. There were personnel who had to be subdued because they were—for lack of a better word—high. That was how they described it themselves, after the fact. At the other end there was severe depression. There were suicides. Lots of them.”
“We still use ELF,” Bethany said. “Are those problems still going on?”
Garner shook his head. “They got a handle on it within the first decade. Isolated the causes. At high enough doses, certain wavelengths were trouble. Certain distances from the transmitter were trouble, because of harmonics. Like that. The engineers worked around it.” He offered something like a smile, though nothing about it looked happy. “But by then, certain people were thinking about the side effects in very different ways. Thinking about how to enhance them instead of eliminate them. How to control them. How to use them as weapons in their own right.”
“Christ,” Travis said. But he could already see the obvious appeal of that kind of technology. A tank battle or a naval engagement would be a hell of a lot easier to win if everyone on the other side was suddenly experiencing what felt like a crack high.
“They actually built systems like that?” Paige said.
“They tried. We tried, the Brits tried, Russia tried. Everyone worked out the useful frequencies easily enough. Even found ways to heighten the effects with on-off modulation, or rapid oscillation between frequencies. Scary stuff. Even test subjects, who were well aware of what was happening to them and who were exposed for as little as an hour, had severe reactions. It was a hell of a weapon. Two big problems, though: you couldn’t move it, and you couldn’t point it.” He nodded at Bethany. “Like you said, an ELF transmitter is huge. It’s not some dish you can swivel around toward a target. It’s a straight-line antenna between leads, dozens of miles apart. You basically just have an effective zone around the signal source. So unless you can talk your enemy into lining up right there, nice and neat, there’s not a hell of a lot you can do with a weapon like that. And that was about the extent of it. We kicked it around for a while in the sixties and seventies, looked for ways to make it selective, directional. Probably threw half a billion dollars at it. I’m sure the other guys did the same. But at some point, when you’re not seeing any results, you have to cut your losses. There are better things to spend the defense budget on.”