In 2018 I was feeling rather burned out and I decided to spend a couple of weeks hiking alone in northern Italy, at the southern edge of the Alps.
If I had lived a hundred years earlier they probably would have diagnosed me with neurasthenia. I was suffering from headaches, tiredness, exhaustion, and an aversion to noise and crowds. It seemed to me that what I needed was some time alone in nature, away from the maddening buzzing of modern society.
For a week I hiked along mountain trails, taking in the whole of the precarious “Road of 52 Tunnels”, where fellow hikers informed me two people had recently been killed by falling rocks, and the Big Trees Trail, which was spectacular, although I was informed it would have been much better in autumn, and the Sentiero del Ventrar by Lake Garda.
I was wandering about in the mountains somewhere near the lake when the weather began to turn nasty, and pretty soon I was caught in an enormous downpour. There wasn’t enough time to put my tent up, and I began to descend in the hope of finding trees to shelter under. Then I spotted a refuge, rather ugly and strewn with what I presumed to be mobile phone masts, but a welcome sight under the circumstances.
I ran in and was pleased to discover a small café, where I ordered coffee and sandwiches with ham and cheese.
The sky had become incredibly dark, although it was only three in the afternoon, and brilliant flashes of lightning began to streak the heavens. I settled myself on a covered terrace to watch the storm.
A man was already sitting there, watching the lightning with rapt attention. He greeted me when I sat down and I discovered he was a fellow Englishman. He seemed about sixty years old, with the deeply-lined, heavily-tanned face and wiry build of a serious lifelong hiker.
After a particularly vivid flash of lightning that resulted shortly afterwards in an enormous thunderclap, I happened to remark that it’s a shame we can’t harness all that energy.
“Must be at least enough to run a washing machine.” I joked, half-seriously.
“There’s plenty of energy up there.” he said, pointing at the sky with a bony finger. “Did you know the temperature of the upper atmosphere is fifteen hundred degrees?”
“I didn’t know that.” I replied. “How’s it even possible?”
“The air molecules are far apart and there aren’t many of them. The actual quantity of thermal energy is low. It’s just that they are moving fast. The temperature of a gas is just a measure of how fast the molecules are moving. But these molecules, they build up electrical charge because of radiation from the sun. If you can tap into that, you have a powerful source of electricity.”
“Didn’t Nikola Tesla find a way to tap into it?”
“No. That’s just a myth. But there is a man who found a way to do it.”
There was an enormous flash of forked lightning, as if on cue, streaking spectacularly across the sky, lighting up the mountain tops. It was followed almost immediately by a another huge thunderclap.
“Who?” I asked him.
“I heard about him from a friend who worked for a government department. A very secretive government department.” he said. “If you want, I’ll tell you the whole story. I’ve never told it to anyone else. You’d be the first.”
“I’d like to hear it. I’m not going anywhere till this storm clears up.”
The clouds were flickering with unholy energy as he began to tell his tale. It was a strange story and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“A part of what I’m about to tell you is only known because the intelligence officers involved were carrying audio recorders. Everything was recorded, and my friend was one of the people who analysed the recordings. He was so shocked by what he heard that he left government employment soon afterwards.
“Even so, this story has a happy ending, of a sort. It’s a story about how a man who was completely paralysed, was faced with four men who proposed to murder him in a most brutal and horrible fashion. And yet, less than an hour later, the paralysed man had killed three of the intruders and had the fourth completely at his mercy. These were tough men, mind you, and trained intelligence officers.”
“That’s impossible.” I said. “What could a paralysed man possibly do that could possibly hurt four healthy men? And trained intelligence officers, you say? Were they all incredible idiots?”
“On the contrary, they were all smart men, and nobody’s fools. Stupider men might actually have succeeded where they failed. The thing about intelligence is, it’s a double-edged sword. Smart people can figure things out faster, but their intelligence is also a vulnerability, opening them to certain kinds of manipulation to which less smart people are quite impervious. A smart man, faced with someone smarter than himself and skilled in manipulation, is easy prey, most of the time.”
The mountains in the distance had become wreathed in thick cloud, which flickered and flashed with electricity. The valley below us, also, was filled with fog, and it was as if we were looking down on the clouds instead of up at them.
Listening to this curious individual with his strange tale, I felt as if I’d entered a weird mystical realm, where the impossible might well become possible.
He continued: “There was a certain man, let’s call him Smith, who believed he had developed a kind of receiver that could somehow channel electrical energy from the ionosphere. With a unit the size of a small car, he could produce enough energy to power a village.
“There are powerful concerns that don’t want free energy machines made public. It’s not just oil companies. Energy is a fundamental tool of geopolitical and domestic control. Governments don’t want their people generating their own energy.”
“That sounds like something a complete crank would say.” I interjected.
“Complete cranks do say this.” he replied. “It just so happens that they’re right. However cynical you may be about politicians now, I recommend multiplying that by a hundred. It’s not even politicians, really, at least not the ones you see. There’s an entire state apparatus forming a shadow government. They hold the real power.”
It seemed to me, by that point, that I was dealing with an actual crank of the type I had mentioned, but the story sounded promising and the way he told it was engaging enough, so I allowed him to continue without further interruptions.
“What you have to know about Smith is, he contracted an illness when he was a teenager, and he spent two years in an iron lung. For two years the machine breathed for him and he was almost completely paralysed. He spent his time in the machine thinking about physics. He couldn’t read textbooks or attend lectures, so instead he took everything he already knew and thought it through in his mind. He kicked at the tires of physics and tested every theory to destruction. He boiled every theory down to its bare axioms and pulled those axioms apart.
“When he recovered, he was a different person altogether. He had given himself a mission: to tap the energy of the ionosphere.
“For three decades he worked patiently towards his goal. Everything in his life was directed towards that one aim. Everything else was secondary: where he lived, where he worked, whom he associated with; it was all subsumed to his private research.
“When the Schengen Zone was established, he spotted an opportunity and bought a disused mountain refuge out here for a song. Actually it’s a five kilometre walk from where we are now. It was uninhabitable by any normal standards, but he didn’t care. Its position, on top of a mountain, was exactly what he needed, and it was cheap. That was all he cared about.
“Eventually his work succeeded. He built a machine that opened a vortex of ionised air all the way to the ionosphere, bringing electricity down to the surface of the Earth. He could run it at maximum capacity for only fractions of a second, because he had nowhere to put all that energy.
“Then he began telling people about it. The internet then was primitive, and nothing like what we have today, but he began posting about his work on newsgroups.
“Our governments are very devious. They find ingenious ways of furthering the so-called ‘work’ of cranks in order to discredit anyone who hits upon a genuine free energy scheme, so Smith found his work, which was a work of genius, competing for attention with a lot of absolute nonsense. That’s the first line of defence they use, you see. They bury legitimate work with piles of drivel.
“Even so, they got worried, the shadow governments. I don’t know who discussed the matter or where, but eventually it was decided that Smith, being a British citizen, was the responsibility of the British government, and they decided to take him down before anyone important discovered his writings.
“They didn’t want to kill him, because that can attract attention. They wanted to scare him witless, so he’d abandon his work. Four British intelligence officers, in cahoots with AISI, the Italian internal security agency, went to his refuge in the middle of the night. They injected a very unique and specialised gas through the keyhole of his refuge. It’s called LS-59. This gas, it causes temporary paralysis in anyone who inhales it, then any left in the air quickly decomposes, rendering the air safe to breathe again.
“Smith awoke the following morning to find himself completely paralysed.”
“That’s horrible!” I said.
I wondered quite how dark the man’s story was going to get. I hoped none of it was true, but sitting there looking down at mountain peaks and banks of cloud in the middle of a thunderstorm, it sounded all too plausible.
“Don’t worry.” said the man, “They had no idea what kind of a person they were dealing with. They hadn’t troubled to look into his history. You see, back when he was a mere teenager, Smith had faced the horror of paralysis full-on, and he had made peace with it. He had lived his life ready to die, or to be paralysed for his whole life, and his mind had got beyond any torment mere humans could devise for him.
“When he awoke and found himself unable to move, he assumed the disease had returned and would likely kill him before anyone found him, so he closed his eyes and waited calmly for death to arrive. Instead of death, four men arrived. They broke into the refuge around ten in the morning, thinking that would give him plenty of time to terrify himself, but instead, when they appeared, he was in a state of deep relaxation.
“Needless to say, these four men were just about the worst kind of human beings available. Their leader, a man named Pike, was a tall, angular psychopath, devoid of human warmth and feeling. He was probably the worst of the bunch. Then there was Bartlett, a medical doctor no less, who had no regard for the Hippocratic Oath and in another life might have happily worked for Hitler or Stalin, extracting confessions.
“Scully was the youngest of the four at 27, and little more than an errand boy: a trainee in the most twisted arts practised by government agencies. Finally there was Benson, a muscle-bound brute and a sadist who positively enjoyed the suffering of others—unlike the rest of them, who had simply failed to develop a conscience.
“Smith was lying there with his eyes closed and a beatific smile on his face. Pike gave him a slap, jolting him out of his reverie.
“You might think they would have said to him then and there, ‘stop working on your research or we’ll kill you’, but that wasn’t enough for these sociopaths. Instead, Pike told him they had laid out a tray of surgical instruments by his side, and they were going to inflict upon him three days of the most intense and terrible suffering imaginable. In reality there were no instruments, but they wanted him to beg for his life.
“The drug had left him able to speak, albeit weakly. Their ploy didn’t have the effect they had anticipated. Instead, Smith said to them, ‘Perhaps you’ve noticed there is a large machine in the adjacent room. It must be around ten now. If I don’t tend to it, it will explode catastrophically in an hour at the most, and possibly a lot sooner. The explosion will make Hiroshima look like a firecracker. If you start running now, you might get far enough away to survive, at least if you can find shelter in a cave. Perhaps you’ve got a helicopter; that would also do the trick.’
“The funny thing is, Smith’s condition, which was supposed to be terrifying for Smith, now in effect turned around and bit them. They assumed, due to his paralysis, that he must be scared witless in spite of appearances and therefore must be telling the truth.”
“He wasn’t?” I asked.
“Not at all. The machine was perfectly stable, as they might have realised if they’d taken the time to properly understand the physics that Smith had already published, but none of these men were physicists or even dabbled in physics.
“They were faced with something of a dilemma, because they didn’t have an antidote to LS-59. The gas wears off after a few hours, and until it wore off, there was really nothing they could do to get Smith up and about, so that he could stop his machine exploding. Pike demanded to know how to stabilise the machine, and Smith said he’d tell them only if they undid his paralysis. That was a ploy, you see. Smith had already guessed that either the paralysis was permanent, or else it would wear off by itself, and either way he was prepared to face his fate, but he wanted them to think he was desperate and ready to bargain for his life.
“Pike told him he had better tell them how to stabilise the machine, otherwise they would start cutting him up right away. Smith bargained with Pike for some minutes, and eventually they arrived at an understanding that neither of them actually believed. That is, Smith would tell them how to deal with the machine, and in return they would allow Smith to live.
“Smith told them to go and pull a certain lever, and press certain buttons. They sent Scully to go and carry out these instructions.
“Scully toddled off to do the necessary and half a minute later there was an enormous bang, and the smell of roasted flesh drifted into the room. Bartlett went to look what had happened, and he returned shaking to announce that Scully had been burnt to a crisp, turned into a kind of charcoal statue.
“Smith had misdirected them to do something that he knew would likely have a fatal result, but he pretended it was an accident.
“Naturally Scully’s demise sparked a lively debate, and the three remaining men hurled a great deal in the way of abuse and threats at Smith. Smith, for his part, told them Scully must have messed up his instructions, and now they were in even more danger. It was possible, he said, that if Scully had misconfigured the machine, he may have exposed them all to dangerous levels of radiation.
“The men demanded to know how to shut the machine down. Smith told them it was easier to stabilise it than to shut it down, and that shutting it down carried its own risks. He pretended to be extremely scared himself, which was must have been quite easy under the circumstances, and he implored the men to do something, as though the state of the machine was more frightening to him than his own condition.
“They argued amongst themselves about who might make a second attempt on stabilising the machine, and it was clear that none of them were willing to go and try it. Then they argued with Smith about how best to shut the machine down, and Smith informed them it could be done, but the only way to do it safely would be to go down into the basement and attack a certain key unit with a blow torch.
“Of course there were more discussions about who was going to do that, then finally Pike, rattled by Smith’s assertions that they could be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation at any moment, pulled rank and told Benson he needed to go and get on with it.
Smith warned Benson that, when he deactivated the machine, alarms would sound. This, he said, was normal, and it was imperative that Benson finish completely incinerating the unit.
“Benson picked up a blow torch and went down into the basement, where he quickly identified the component Smith had told them about, which consisted of a small bundle of wires and electronic parts. He lit the torch and started burning it.
“Smith, you see, had been cunning. The basement was where Smith kept arrays of massive batteries to store energy. He had fitted it with a fire suppression system that flooded the room with carbon dioxide when fire was detected. The component to which he had directed Benson was, actually, only an unimportant part of the energy storage system, which he’d selected because he knew it would create a lot of smoke if Benson tried to incinerate it, thus triggering the fire suppression system.
“After less than a minute, the system triggered, an alarm sounded, and the entire room was flooded with carbon dioxide, displacing the oxygen. Benson promptly keeled over and died.
“When Benson failed to return, Pike and Bartlett began demanding Smith tell them what could have happened to him. They tried shouting for Benson and of course they received no reply. Smith told them there was absolutely no good reason for Benson’s failure to return, and suggested he may have had an unexpected heart attack. He informed them he would go himself if they would give him an antidote to the paralysing toxin. They didn’t have any such antidote, but Smith didn’t know that and they knew he didn’t know that, so his asseverations to the effect that he would gladly descend into the cellar himself did carry some weight with the remaining two men.
“Naturally, they threatened Smith with everything under the sun but, the fact was that he was paralysed and could do nothing himself, and as far as they could tell, he had no idea why Benson hadn’t returned.
“Eventually Pike sent Bartlett to check on Benson, urging caution, and informing the paralysed Smith that, if anything happened to Bartlett, it would be the worst for him. What do you think Bartlett did? He was a doctor; a naturally cautious and methodical man. He stood at the top of the cellar steps and shouted Benson’s name. Since he obtained no response, he took a few steps downward, still shouting.
“The steps were well-lit and he couldn’t see anything wrong, so he proceeded still further. The last thing to be heard on his recording is a faint groan, followed by the sound of him falling down the steps; probably he became suddenly dizzy, and then all at once plummeted into the invisible lake of carbon dioxide, which he had already inhaled far too much of.
“It’s a curious fact about the human organism that it cannot detect low oxygen in the air. Low oxygen levels rapidly cause confusion, apathy and, ultimately, unconsciousness, and this can happen very rapidly. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, as you probably know, so it would have stayed largely contained in the cellar. As he descended the steps, he began to drown just as surely as if he’d stepped into a pool of water, except he wouldn’t have been able to sense it. Perhaps if he’d known what to expect, he might have sensed a faint acidic sensation at the back of his nose, or an unusual stuffiness to the air, but one never expects cellar air to be particularly fresh.
“Once Bartlett had fallen still lower, down the steps, his brain would have rapidly suffered irreparable damage, and that was the end of him.
“That left only Pike remaining. After some minutes had passed and Bartlett too had failed to respond, Pike decided to look down the cellar steps from the top, but to avoid at all costs descending the steps. From there he spotted the crumpled body of Bartlett. He shouted to him, but Bartlett was already dead, or at least completely unconscious.
“Then he went back to Smith and began shouting at him.
“Smith shouted back, or as well as he could manage considering his weakened state. He told Pike there must be a radiation leak, exactly as he had feared. He said that in a way, that was good news, since if the machine was emitting radiation, then its normal operation must have ceased, and it was very unlikely to explode.
Pike began interrogating him about what that meant for himself, taking into account that he hadn’t entered the cellar.
“Then Smith concocted a quite delightful story, which surely would not have flown with anyone acquainted with even the rudiments of physics, but which he managed to sell to the smart but scientifically-illiterate Pike. He told Pike the ‘reactor’, as he called it, was likely emitting baryon particles, which he claimed could potentially happen if the usual morning maintenance procedures were not carried out. Then he began to laugh.
“Pike asked him what he was laughing about. You must remember, Pike knew nothing of Smith’s unusual history. Paralysis was no terror to Smith, on account of his extensive acquaintance with it, and the peculiar mental trajectory he had undergone in dealing with it previously, as a teenager. Very few other people, if anyone at all, could have managed to laugh under such circumstances, but Smith did so very convincingly.
“To Pike, he made the cryptic remark, ‘Well, it’s very ironic, isn’t it?’.
“Pike angrily demanded to know what he meant. He told Pike that baryonic radiation kills by inducing uncontrollable agonising muscle spasms, but that since he, Smith, was paralysed, he wouldn’t be affected by it, whereas Pike had likely been exposed to a fatal dose and would die just as surely as Benson and Bartlett. Pike’s spine, he said, would break due to the extreme muscle contractions caused by the radiation, and he would suffocate.
“I imagine Pike must have turned pale. On his recording there’s only an ominous pause. Then he began swearing, and he informed Smith that, if so, his last act would be to murder Smith, as painfully as possible.
“Smith told him that would be very unwise and it would be better to give him the antidote, since then he, Smith, would be able to reconfigure the machine to produce anti-baryonic radiation, which would be one of the few things that could save Pike’s life. Absolutely nonsense of course, but Pike didn’t know that.
“Imagine yourself in Pike’s position. He was there in an isolated mountain refuge, an enormous and dangerous-looking machine obeying unknown principles in the very next room; the machine had killed one of his colleagues and the other two had died mysteriously while trying to deactivate it, and now this paralysed man was apparently so deranged that he was actually laughing at the thought of Pike dying from the same causes as the last two of his associates, fully expecting to survive himself.
“And by the way, the machine was making ominous and disturbing sounds throughout the whole affair. The situation would have been enough to fill anyone with abject terror.
“Smith told Pike he ought to run, because he might get far enough away from the radiation that, although the agonising spasms would soon commence, it was still possible that he might survive long enough to be found by a passing hiker. Again he suggested, alternatively, that Pike should administer the antidote to the paralysing agent, so that Smith might help him.
“Pike began to scream at Smith, informing him there was no antidote, and demanding to know what he was supposed to do now, given that fact.
“Smith told him there was nothing to be done, and he would soon suffer indescribable agonies. He recommended that Pike descend into the cellar, where, he said, the higher radiation would finish him off far more rapidly and mercifully than if he remained distant from the source of the radiation.
“Everything he said to Pike was carefully calculated to lead Pike to an inevitable conclusion, and that was the very conclusion that Pike soon reached. Pike had another dose of paralysing agent available; these intelligence officers always carry spares in case something goes wrong with the first lot.
“He told Smith they had only intended to give him a bad scare, and really meant him no harm. He told him the paralysing agent they had injected him with would soon wear off. He said that he intended to inject himself with the paralysing substance in order to survive the radiation-induced spasms, and he begged Smith to help him once he was able to.
“Smith agreed, of course, and Pike proceeded to lie down on the floor next to Smith’s bed, and inject himself.
“As it happens, Smith was no sadist, and while he could very well have spent the next few hours scaring Pike witless, he declined to do so, instead reassuring him that everything would be fine.
“Gradually the agent wore off on Smith, and he was able to weakly rise to a sitting position. As soon as he was able, he crawled to the kitchen, dragged himself upright and made a coffee, because Smith was a terrible coffee addict, as are most of these amateur scientists, and he had missed his usual morning coffee.
“Then, he went back to look at Pike. Pike begged him to make the machine produce the anti-baryonic radiation, which didn’t exist.
“So there he was, with the fate of Pike, his torturer, in his hands. Imagine the questions that must have run through his mind! Did Pike deserve death for what he had done? To paralyse a man and threaten to cut him up, that’s a vicious form of torture in the opinion of most. On the other hand, Pike claimed quite credibly that he and his colleagues had not intended to murder Smith, and the other three men were dead.
“In the end, Smith dragged Pike outside. Then he went back into his mountain refuge laboratory and set fire to it. After all, he no longer needed the lab. He had refined and proven his theories to his own satisfaction, but the episode had convinced him that the world was not fit to receive his invention.
“Pike was found a few hours later, and taken to a hospital. Unfortunately, crows had pecked out his eyes, a possibility which hadn’t occurred to Smith.”
“Horrible!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” said the man, “but I’m quite sure Pike has murdered more than a few people who didn’t deserve murdering, and at least his blindness put a stop to that.
“The refuge was a smouldering wreck by the time investigators arrived. The recordings of Benson and Bartlett survived because they were protected from the worst of the fire by the pool of carbon dioxide, although I gather their corpses were pretty well cooked.”
“And Smith?” I asked. “What happened to him?”
“He found other people like himself. There exists an entire network of such people; great scientists, of the stature of Galileo or Faraday. If they were to inform the world of their work, our planet would be transformed. Instead, they live secretive lives, believing humanity as yet unfit to look upon their works.”
“An entire network?” I asked, incredulously.
“That’s what I said.” he replied. “A society. They have no name, but they exist. You’ll never know when you’re talking to one of them, because they consider secrecy among the highest of virtues.
“They first formed after WWII. When the nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, they pledged to hide all future fundamental research in physics, and all scientific findings that might hurt humanity, until such time as humanity’s leaders can be trusted.”
“They’ll be waiting a long time for that.” I said.
Again the lightning flashed, but in the distance there was a parting in the clouds, through which rays of sunlight were streaming. The rain had tailed off to a drizzle, and the worst of the storm had clearly already passed.
“And now,” said the man, “I must be on my way. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”
“You too.” I said awkwardly, thinking I’d like to ask his name, but he was already striding into the refuge.
I watched him descend the stairs, and then he went out through the front door. Soon he was walking briskly down the hillside, and I followed him till he disappeared behind an overhanging rocky outcrop.
A year later I happened to come across an article in an obscure magazine, detailing the work of a freelance scientist who sounded much like Smith, but at an earlier stage of his work than the one the man had described. A photograph was included with the article, and with a start I recognised the face of the very man I had been in conversation with. He himself was none other than Smith, although his real name was something else altogether.
I’ve often wondered about the society he mentioned. Is it really true, that the greatest advances in science are being hidden from us, because we are simply not worthy of them?
Perhaps. After all, many a great scientist has concealed his work for decades, before changing his mind and releasing it. Newton hid his work for two decades; likewise Darwin. How many great works must have been lost to us, kept hidden by scientists who simply never changed their minds; scientists who believed it encumbent upon them to protect us from ourselves?
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