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Chapter 1 - A Road to ConnectIt was still winter at our rock by the sea when I returned. Nothing had changed while I had been away. Ross seemed more alert though. Perhaps he had contemplated the great constitutional principle that we had to confront, in his own way. It may have been for that reason that he became the second person to notice the deep mote that had unfolded between Heather and I, that my trip to India only made deeper. I could sense that he didn't like what was happening. Maybe he felt that the blame for it all fell on him. Or maybe he also noticed that the growing tensions between Heather and I had soured the relationship between everyone else, too, which had been totally open at the beginning, including between Ross and I. In order to bridge that widening mote he proposed one day that a proper road should be built between our respective houses. He came to the house one day and suggested that a connecting road would cut the distance between us from thirty minutes going by trail, or seventeen minutes by driving out to the highway and back in, to two minutes by a direct road. He told me that Fred had already agreed to supply the materials for the road if we supplied the labor. I agreed, of course, and so did Sylvia. I was tempted to tell Ross about the closely knit family that Indira and I had set up in India, but I remembered that I couldn't do this since the model for what we had to achieve her had to be the principle itself. Our situation was different, the challenge so much greater. I could only talk to him about the principle that we had built on, which is still the same principle that we had discovered together on Christmas day. It seemed that Ross' proposal for building that road was as step towards implementing that principle. The way Ross finally arranged things, the entire cost of the road construction, from bulldozing, to grading, to gravelling, was paid for by the government in exchange for Sylvia and I agreeing that our attic would be used to house the latest scanning equipment. The equipment was designed to become massively linked up with Ross' equipment, via special cables. That's were the road was designed to come in. The cables would be placed into a channel that would be buried deep under the new roadbed. It was easy to agree to that arrangement, especially since I would have agreed to such a request anyway as there was a pressing need for expanding the coastal scanners. The new road was built in a week. The cables were laid a week after, and the equipment was installed in the week after that. The new scanning equipment turned out to be sensitive enough to detect the flight of a sea gull 20 miles way. The obtained information was electronically correlated with the data from Ross' scanners of the same type to be interpolated by a dynamic spatial mapper, a very fast computer that sees the world in a kind of spatial image that one would see if one's eyes were separated by a mile. With this super-stereoscopic 'vision' the fast computer could track hundreds of flight patterns simultaneously and automatically separate the flight patterns of birds from the fight patterns of any potential cruise missiles or low flying aircraft, or rockets of any kind. The new scanning system worked so well that not a sparrow could approach the coast now undetected, even though a sparrow would never trigger an alarm. The mapped spatial images were also automatically transmitted to the NORAD center in Boulder Colorado, where they were combined with the same kind of data coming from all the other stations up and down the coast. The end result was an impenetrable screening shield with which the people in Denver could detect and isolate potential targets for Ross to investigate, and this long before he could detect the slightest sign of them on his own. || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
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