18 1/2

Chapter 4-6 of 34

UHER 5000 Counter 0004

2004 had been the last time anyone had attempted to analyze the 18 1/2 minute gap, and then all the audio-tech challengers failed, including Ed and Harry.

The challengers had been given a dummy tape by the National Archives Records Administration, made on the same-type Nixonian Sony TC-800 B, and the analysts who had the best results with it, who had managed to stabilize some of erratic frequency variations or wave length deviations around the "clicks and pops" were given copies of the original 0.5mm Tape 342. It ran at 15-16 inches/per second, half the speed of a cassette tape which explained the poor sound quality making the endeavour that much more difficult. To have been given even a copy from the N.A.R.A. was in and of itself a feat, as the original had only been handled half a dozen times in the forty plus years it had existed.

The F.B.I.'s PC APII high-end audio-filtering process had failed. Sure, the challengers managed to apply comb filters to eliminate the 60-cycle low hum which was from the power grid leak and the lower audible tones not related to speech but the 460 line spectrum analyzer, which was a voice map creator, didn't find any wave forms indicating speech.

The SH-MRM process had failed too - the acronym standing for Second Harmonic Magneto-Resistive Microscopy - which topographically scanned the tape for its magnetic field of the millions of particle points which made up the voice recording and then plugged those points into a computer imaging programme in an attempt to rebuild the vocal signal.

Ed had tweaked the SH-MRM process by applying a brand new chemical mix to his self-made copy of the N.A.R.A. copy, a compound Ed named "Spectrol". It comprised of one carbon less than that of the criminal forensic spray Luminol, the new process coined by the pair as "The Spectrol Method".

This process was pretty simple but incredibly effective, it merely high-lighted the topography of the film where the valleys and ridges of the particles were magnetized into their original positions, in other words, where they laid to create the original vocal sound, that ghostly image then seen under an ultra-violet light with a high-power optical microscope. All Ed had to do was take those particles and put them back into position to achieve the original wave length and summarily the original vocal recording. The process was surely innovative but an incredible long shot, taking Ed and Harry over a decade to achieve, literally sometimes over twenty-four hours of pains-taking reassembling for even an inch of tape. But on a late summer's night of 2018, Harry was ready to reverse the reassembled copy, don his headphones for the umpteenth time and listen....

The sound was rough, choppy, and in some places garbled, but it was of speaking voices, the quality of speech as one would hear under water but there all the same. You could decipher Bob's tenor voice, you could decipher Dick's baritone, and you could hear their words, understand their meaning, the entire conversation. The gap was no more, the dialogue breathing for the first time since it had been thought erased all those decades ago.

Ed and Harry were over-joyed to say the least, but as audio-tech nerds are, their joy was more for the development of a new scientific process than the mere awakening of history. Their heads were spinning with thoughts of copyrights and profit, maybe global scientific fame and an explosion of business at their electronics store. More clients from bigger firms, maybe even the CIA, the NSA and the FBI, would be knocking on Super Sound Stereo.

Could this scientific advancement amount to anything really sinister or dangerous?, the men would ponder.

Only if Ed and Harry got paper cuts off of the printed transcript they were making or got their fingers caught in the plastic reel-to-reels, nothing more.

Science junkies are a naive bunch.

UHER 5000 Counter 0005

The din of giggling, breakfast-gobbling kids was mind-numbing, syrup and butter splotches be-speckling a goodly part of the kitchen nook as Ed, the ever dutiful father, tried his best to wake up with his first cup of coffee, blithe to the familial melee which surrounded him.

Thinking daylight would erase the fog from his mind, he raised the blinds to let in the morning sun and with his first glance at the pleasant Washington DC late summer's morn, he noticed an unmarked black SUV parked out front, on the side opposite his front drive, all side windows blackened, an illegal configuration on civilian vehicles.

This was no civilian vehicle. This was Washington DC.

"Gloria, look at this SUV, will ya," said Ed, as he pulled on the sleeve of his wife's pink velour bathrobe to get her to the window.

"Yeah, what of it?"

"How long has it been there?"

"A while, I saw it when we got up, when I opened our bedroom curtains."

"All that time?"

"All that time. Problem?" asked Gloria.

"No, hun, just wondering," said Ed, not wanting to get his wife in a flap.

But Ed knew in his gut there was a problem. He slowly lowered the kitchen nook blinds.

UHER 5000 Counter 0006

"How's it goin', Harry, haven't seen your pretty face in here in a while."

"I know, been busy. Needed a stiff drink, the wife has been a slave-master today, making me do all the bloody errands, the damn groceries, the Post Office, heck, even the dry-cleaners. I said to myself, either head to The Lounge and visit Gord or have my head pop off it's shoulders from the stress."

"I hear ya, man, ain't marriage grand," said Gord, with such all-knowing panache. He was head bartender at Harry's watering hole and a veteran of many years of similar marital service.

With a second bourbon and coke ordered and drank with swank resolve, Harry McClellan slowly washed the day off his back. What he and Ed discovered, what he and Ed heard, by god, Harry's head was spinning and not just from the booze or the domestic errands. An hour away from the house was easily hidden, two hours and his better half would darn well call an All Points Bulletin on her hubby, so with that sobering thought, Harry swigged back his third tumbler and shuffled towards the door.

The stark, blinding daylight hit him straight in the eyes as he hit the steps outside The Lounge so it took a while for Harry to find his bearings on the street; yet, as the landscape slowly appeared and the colours and shapes filled in before him, an unmarked black SUV was caught in his peripheral vision, the engine idling, the driving lights lit. As Harry made slow tracks for home, similar tracks were made by the SUV, and as a shadow follows a walker in the afternoon sun, so did this unmarked vehicle follow Harry. No turns unless Harry turned, no slowing until Harry slowed, all the way home this dance was done and despite the warm, alcoholic buzz and his uncoordinated stride, Harry worked hard at getting home fast.

As he walked up to the front stoop of his modest two storey home and put the key in the front door lock, the SUV idled on the street awhile then sped away, all eight cylinders ignited in a fury, only steam exhaust emitted from the double tailpipe lingered as evidence that the menacing vehicle had ever been.

18 1/2 will continue...

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