Hippocampus (standard:science fiction, 850 words)
Author: Cyrano	Added: Oct 27 2006	Views/Reads: 3548/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Dr. Oliver Robinson discovers a connection between the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and underground nuclear testing on Amchitka during the late 60's and early seventies. Prologue only.

Hippocampus 

Prologue 

In the 1960's and early 70's three underground nuclear explosions were
detonated beneath the island of Amchitka. ‘Cannikan', in 1971, was the 
largest underground nuclear blast in U.S. history. The underground 
explosion caused the surface of Amchitka to rise and fall twenty feet, 
registering seven on the Richter scale; resulting in the formation of a 
crater a mile wide and forty feet deep. Oliver Robinson, a student 
studying Marine Biology at the University of Monterey Bay, California, 
was among the hundreds protesting outside the Whitehouse, with the 
dubious distinction of being arrested twice for incitement to cause 
damage. 

The Amchitka nuclear test program was all but forgotten by the time Dr.
Oliver Robinson had met Rebecca Schofield, a twenty-five-year old 
ballet-dancer living in New York. Two years later they married and on 
the eve of their first wedding anniversary Rebecca announced excitedly 
to her husband she was pregnant, initiating a move from their home in 
Yonkers, to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, where they bought a decaying bed and 
breakfast hotel, rimmed by craggy shores and sandy beaches. Rebecca 
immediately retired her classical dancing ambitions, while Oliver took 
up a teaching post in Maine, and over the next couple of years they 
restored the building to its former glory. 

Katherine grew up without the insult of poverty looking over her
shoulder. It wasn't a religious upbringing but it was proper. By age 
fifteen she never thought herself pretty; teased by boys in high school 
for lacking their ideal in breast size, but too bright academically to 
let those immature preferences affect her. Nevertheless, Katherine had 
indeed inherited her mother's genes when it came to good looks, single 
mindedness, and the integrity by which she sought to do everything 
well. Her father, with brilliant mind, was a genteel slob, wearing what 
was closest to hand, quite oblivious of coordination or the weather or 
how other people saw him, and it was exactly these genes Katherine 
inherited from him. 

Katherine loved the stories her mother told, anything that stretched her
imagination toward the sea, and the sea, in turn, made its calling. She 
was obsessed with photographing the waves, the shoreline, and so it was 
she learned the language of aperture; shutter speeds, macro settings, 
in her desire to capture its majesty. Her future looked bright until 
the day a cruel disease, called a cancer, came calling; came and bowed 
her mother's head with pain; but it could never bend her good spirits, 
or make them stoop. The great room downstairs became Rebecca's bedroom, 
never again climbing the old wooden staircase. 

Once a day, every day, Katherine wheeled her mother round the garden,
never speaking of illness, just nectarines and peaches, those her 
mother planted, persevered with and nurtured in a difficult climate. 
She watched her mother weaken from being a tall, graceful person to one 
who could barely hold her head up. Her father oftentimes looked 
awkward, frightened, his eyebrows shot with pain every time he looked 
at his wife. 

Rebecca died on April 29th, 2004. 

Speaking at his wife's funeral, Dr. Oliver Robinson said: “In facing
death some of us are only want to be what we might have been. Rebecca, 
well she was exactly what she wanted to be, a good wife, a loving 
mother, and never did she put her love of dancing before those two 
things.” He broke down.  For a couple of months he busied himself 
strolling among the melancholy-looking yew trees, or the firs picking 
up red berries, or fir apples; good for nothing but looking at. In 
March 2005, after ten years as head of the “Department of the 
Environment,” Dr. Oliver Robinson was appointed by President Bush to 
head Alaska's “Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.” Which he left two 
years later to take up a position as head the “Department of the 
Environment.” 

In his occupancy as head of DOE, Oliver Robinson made enemies in the
Whitehouse; most especially since 9/11; voicing publicly his skepticism 
that an airplane struck the Pentagon; an assessment made after he 
voiced concerns about the radiation levels recorded as distant as 
fifteen miles from the point of impact; and why those findings should 
have been kept from becoming public knowledge. Dr. Oliver Robinson, an 
unintentionally humorous man, controversially admitted that such 
findings pointed to, in his opinion, “...some kind of attack, but 
hardly one by a commercial airplane.” 

In a recent Scientific Paper, The Doctor again upset Whitehouse
officials, stating that three divers, all of whom had spent a weekend 
in July collecting blue mussels, octopus, and different species of fish 
in the waters around Amchitka, had become violently sick with 
radioactive contamination. Further interrogation revealed two other 
divers, on that same weekend, were checked out and the contamination 
was confirmed. But the water around Amchitka was not the only common 
denominator, for three of the divers worked at the Pentagon. Two others 
worked at the old military base on Amchitka. All complained of being 
easily fatigued, suffered joint and muscle pain, vision problems, nerve 
damage and a list of neurological symptoms. 

On September 26th, Dr Oliver Robinson disappeared. 


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