George Washington's Ghost

It took Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena some minutes to get over what was probably a partial anxiety attack and to find a voice that was not a half-choked, gasping whisper.

Hernando de Soto, in academic life as in the Presidency of the Republic, had always made allowances for nervous students, or for visitors initially being more than somewhat over-awed in his presence. Strong coffee was brought in by Margarita, who swiftly scurried out again, leaving the great men to their deliberations.

The four men were sitting, informally in arm chairs around a low wooden table, very much as if they had been invited to Hernando de Soto’s tutorial room at Cuernavaca, or to his hacienda in the hills overlooking the campus.

“General Santa Anna and I have read your reports, gentlemen,” the President prefaced, his expression contemplative as if he was parsing some arcane philosophical proposition.

Rodrigo had only got back from northern Sonora six days ago, having despatched a provisional field survey report marked MOST CONFIDENTIAL AND SECRET – PRESIDENTIAL EYES ONLY under seal, by air as soon as his expedition passed through the lines.

He had been unwilling to trust the hundreds of soil, rock, vegetation and water samples he had collected to a small courier aircraft, and needed to warn Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, to prepare his laboratory in advance.

Those samples had been delivered to Cuernavaca by a Carlos Pérez de Guzmán escorted by a small guard detachment, while he had taken a train to the capital to brief Hernando de Soto and Santa Anna five days ago.

“Er,” the younger academic murmured, “my report was hurried, very provisional, lacking in the rigor normally expected by the University…”

The President of México smiled indulgently.

“You will have plenty of time to apply your customary rigor to subsequent papers, Professor,” he assured him, every inch the nation’s favourite grandfather. “It may be that you have already done your country a great service.”

Santa Anna nodded.

“Don Rodrigo will have briefed you on the findings of his field survey in the Colorado Country and the deserts of Sonora, Professor?” He checked, not a man to take anything for granted.

“Yes, General.”

“Forgive me, my University background was in mechanical engineering and ballistics,” Santa Anna continued, self-effacingly – a frequently demonstrated character trait that people who did not know him very well invariably found disconcerting in such a ‘great man’ – “and security considerations have prevented me from sharing the contents of your paper with specialists on my Staff who are better informed than I on these matters. Might I ask you, and Don Rodrigo to brief me anew on your findings.” He spread his hands. “In layman’s terms, perhaps?”

Understanding that his University colleague was still a bag of nerves, Rodrigo took the lead, giving Ortiz Mena a little more time to collect his thoughts. He began to recount his expedition’s trek north, climbing onto the great plateau bisected by the Colorado River and its tributaries, and what they had discovered beyond El Ojo del Diablo.

“We surveyed eleven separate sites where devices of varying explosive potential, and possibly, different types and configurations had probably been tested above and below ground. Common to each of the above ground sites were the remnants of a what may have been very tall towers or scaffolds of extremely robust steel construction. We also came upon several ‘crater sites’, the largest of which was six-hundred-and-twenty feet across and some sixty feet deep, with a rim of about fifteen feet in height above the surrounding desert. In two places we came across depressions of similar proportions, except, obviously, absent the elevated rims of the other craters. These, we assumed must have been the result of tests conducted underground…”

Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena had been fidgeting.

Suddenly, he interjected: “At some stage the idiots must have finally realised that the ground burst tests threw countless thousands of tons of heavily contaminated sand into the lower atmosphere likely to pollute the land downwind for many tens of miles!”

The other three men looked to him.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “This is all very… disturbing,” he apologised.

This, coming from the lips of the only man in the country who might, one day, qualify as one of the globe’s leading experimental physicists and was already, one of the brilliant minds beginning to explore the implications of the theoretical constructs of the latest quantum ‘Uncertainty Theories’ merging from British, German and French universities, was even more chilling than the stark descriptions in Rodrigo’s survey report.