When Platt suggested that huge amounts of energy would be required for this to be remotely so, Podkletnov reportedly became irritated.
"We do not need a lot of energy," he'd snapped back. "We don't absorb the energy of the gravitational field. We may be controlling it as a transistor controls the flow of electricity. No law of physics is broken. I am not one crazy guy in a lab; we had a team of six or seven, all good scientists."
And that, for the next year or so, was that. It was only when an intermediary told Platt that Podkletnov had returned to Finland, where he was now set up as a materials scientist in a local company, that the American jumped in a plane and finally managed to confront the man who'd dared to claim he had shielded gravity.
What Podkletnov had been doing during his yearlong self-imposed exile in Moscow was never made clear, although the Russian soon hinted that he had not been idle. He was quick to explain to Platt that his original findings at Tampere had been meticulously charted using a mercury barometer. Immediately above the superconducting disc, it had registered a 4 mm drop in air pressure, because, the Russian said, emphasizing the point, the air itself had been reduced in weight.
When he'd taken the barometer upstairs, Podkletnov had found the same drop in pressure over the point where the experiment was taking place on the floor below. He went up to the top floor of the building and it was the same thing.
This showed that gravity reduction would not diminish with distance, that the effect had no limit. Podkletnov's gravity shield went on, extending upward in a 30 cm diameter column — forever.
And then, if that wasn't good enough, pay dirt. The two percent weight reduction in all the air above the disc meant that a vehicle equipped with gravity shielding would be able to levitate, buoyed up by the heavier air below.
"I'm practically sure," Podkletnov had told Platt, giving him an intense look, "that within ten years this will be done. If not by NASA, then by Russia."
During his year in Russia, he went on to reveal, he had conducted research at an unnamed "chemical scientific research center" where he had built a device that reflected gravity. By using superconductors, resonating fields and special coatings — and "under the right conditions" — gravitational waves had been repelled instead of blocked. Applied to an air vehicle, Podkletnov said, this "second generation of flying machines will reflect gravity waves and be small, light and fast, like UFOs. I have achieved impulse reflection; now the task is to make it work continuously."
Their meeting over, Podkletnov slipped back into the shadows and Platt returned home. While there had been sightings of Podkletnov in the years since — reports of his whereabouts had surfaced in Japan, Russia and Finland — he had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared again.
Back in the States, Platt canvassed the physics mainstream for its reaction to the Podkletnov claims. Most scientists laughed outright. Gravity shielding, they said, was simply inconceivable.
I made a note on the flight home to ask Marckus to keep his ear to the ground for signs of the Russian's whereabouts. It was tempting to believe that Podkletnov was by now working in the bowels of a crumbling military research institute somewhere deep behind the Urals, refining his experiments to the accompaniment of a howling Siberian gale. And maybe this wasn't a million miles from the truth.
But scientists had a habit of talking to one another, whatever obstacles seemed to separate them. And since Podkletnov had shown himself to be loquacious enough when it suited him, I thought he'd probably surface again before too long. When he did, I needed to be there. I was intrigued by the Russian's work. It echoed something that Professor Young had said in his lecture on antigravity — something that had sounded right at the time. If gravity control is ever to be discovered, Young had said, it would most likely be as an unexpected by-product of work in some completely different field. An accident.
Podkletnov hadn't been looking for an antigravity effect. He'd been playing around with superconductors. If he'd been working in a Western laboratory, his discovery might have forever gone unnoticed. But in Russia — and Finland, too, apparently — it was OK to light up a pipe in a room full of test equipment. And, bingo, the smoke had hit the column of shielded air and snaked straight up to the ceiling.
It struck me as not impossible that Podkletnov had discovered — in a million-to-one fluke — what Trimble et al had predicted theoretically in 1956. Had Podkletnov tripped over the answer and got in by the back door? If anyone knew, it was Dr. Hal Puthoff, the second of the two contacts passed to me by Marckus during our meeting by the estuary. Even in the cocooning environment of the aircraft, nursing a stiff drink, I felt anxious at the prospect of meeting him. Up until now, I'd managed to palm off my interest in NASA's advanced propulsion activities as a quirky sideline to my regular journalistic pursuits. I knew, though, that when I pitched up at Puthoff's door, a discreet address remote from any other legitimate aerospace business, there'd be no hiding what I was really up to.
Chapter 10
I reached Puthoff's offices after a drive through the industrial suburbs of the Texas state capital, parked and double-checked that I had the right address. I had expected the Institute of Advanced Studies to be housed in another windowless science block, a modern version of the concrete edifices at NASA, replete with clean rooms and scientists swishing around in white coats. But the IAS was a small glass-fronted office in a leafy business park. Several of the other lots were vacant and at least one was boarded up.
Puthoff's reputation as a scientist of vast repute went a long way before him. His papers on gravity and inertia were viewed as seminal works by the science community. He also sat on something called the Advanced Deep Space Transport group, ADST, a low-profile organization composed of people that someone had described as being "on the frontier of the frontier." Staffed by select NASA, Air Force and industry representatives, it was the real cutting edge, but you had to know where to look for it.
Puthoff's link to NASA was bound up in theoretical work that he had been conducting since the early 1970s into the zero-point energy field.
Before getting out of the car, I was beset with a rush of all the old doubts. Did I really want to declare my interest in antigravity to a man who had clear connections to the intelligence community?
I checked my watch. It was a little after five-thirty in the morning back in England, but I needed reassurance. I called Marckus on my cell phone.
He picked up on the second ring, sounding bright and alert. I wondered for a moment whether Marckus ever slept, then dispensed with the small talk and told him of my concerns.
Marckus, showing a tendency that would become familiar over the course of our acquaintance — a tendency to impart knowledge well after the time I needed it most — informed me that NASA, being a government institution, was, in effect, the outer marker of an elaborate but invisible security system. "How's that?" I asked. "You show up asking the kind of questions you asked at Hunts ville and Cleveland and, believe me, someone, somewhere will have registered the fact. I have little doubt that you began pulsing away on radar scopes at government agencies too numerous to mention the moment you even logged your requests to visit NASA. You've already crossed the threshold. It's too late to go back now."
I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten, but I said nothing. This propensity to unsettle was also a part of Marckus' act. I asked him instead, as casually as I could, for a data dump on everything that was known about zero-point energy (ZPE).