THE EVERETT INTERPRETATION

CHAPTER 6

With the interior lights blazing, Colonel Kurtz could clearly see beyond the glass wall into the spacious warehouse below. He stepped closer, taking it in. The room stretched out in a long, white rectangle. It was difficult to get a sense of the rooms size. Perhaps 30 feet wide and 80 feet long. But the seamless design made it appear much larger. The room had no corners. Walls curved smoothly into one another—floor to wall, wall to ceiling—forming a continuous white surface that seemed almost artificial. From the control room where they were gathered, Kurtz looked down nearly twenty-five feet into the room.

For a moment he said nothing, struck dumb by the scale of it.

Doctor Davis took note. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, smiling like a proud parent. “The lack of corners confuses the eye. Most people think the room is twice its actual size.”

“So, this is SAM?” Kurtz asked, still transfixed.

Davis shook his head. “This is only part of SAM. The laboratory upstairs, this control room, the staging area below—they all work together. But what you’re looking at now,” he gestured through the glass. “That’s the heart of the system.”

The room was spare. Two transparent cylinders stood on opposite ends of the chamber on raised platforms. Each was roughly fifteen feet tall and perhaps ten feet across. Steel rings encircled the domed tops, giving them the appearance of an old-style vacuum tube—except on a massive scale. Slender steel cables were attached to the rings, extending upward to the ceiling. In front of each cylinder rose a highly polished stainless-steel structure resembling an oversized tuning fork placed on end, its curved arms stretching toward the ceiling.

Behind each cylinder sat a compact control console. Mounted above each console was a device that looked, at first glance, like a futuristic rifle aimed directly at the chamber.

Otherwise, the room appeared empty. The curved white surfaces, the polished stainless-steel instrumentation, and a cold fluorescent light that seemed to come from everywhere at once made the room look like a bizarre operating theater.

“Would you prefer to see it from the floor?” Davis asked.

Now Kurtz did look away, at Davis. “Yes! If that’s possible.”

“Oh, I’m sure the base commander will allow it,” smiled Dr. Davis. “They say rank has its privileges.”