The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [113]
Heal started collecting papers beside him on the seat. “We don’t even know everything it will do; it’s just started the trials,” he said. “First thing, though, it replaces conventional hailing devices. Second thing is, it has non-lethal capabilities. I have to give you a little class. All non-lethal agents are debilitating, not incapacitating. They don’t force you to leave an area; they just make it difficult for you to remain. Tear gas is weather-dependent, though. If the wind blows the wrong way, it affects everyone in the area; it’s dangerous to use around schools and hospitals. The human brain is susceptible to certain frequencies that have nothing to do with volume. Most people cringe when you scrape a fingernail on a blackboard. What if we create a repellent sound? Will it make people avoid an area? We don’t have a weather-dependency system, then, we don’t have collateral damage, and because we can do it with clarity and be specific in our target we have an advantage.
“The third thing with this is that, after we started working with them, they had a major technical breakthrough. They made it so you can throw a switch and turn it into a microphone. On rescues, we can point it at somebody and have them hear us, and then we can have him talk to us, even though there’s a helicopter, say. He can participate in his own rescue.”
Heal got out of the car, and I followed him to the company’s door. “First time I came here, I thought, My job is to encourage this guy, not crush him,” he said.
Vahan Simidian turned out to be tall, with dark curly hair. He took us into a warehouse that had a big garage door at one end which had been raised. On a tripod in the parking lot was a square block of speakers about four feet by four feet. Beside it stood Colich, who was a few inches smaller than Simidian and a little heavier. Simidian said that the membrane, which he called a diaphragm, vibrated like vocal cords. “The difference between our technology and the rest of the world’s is that our sound goes out in parallel beams,” he said. “It’s called a plane sound source.”
I asked what that was, and Simidian said, “Drag, how do you explain a plane source?”
“Big surface that vibrates and creates tones that project forward,” Colich said. “What you normally have is a single-point source, where everything radiates outward.”
“Conically,” Simidian said.
“Spherically,” Colich said.
It is as if a line of sound had left the magnet speakers and remained intact, Colich explained, instead of a wave in the shape of a V that became wider and weaker as it travelled.
Simidian walked us about a hundred yards across the parking lot and had Colich play a sound that he called a wobble tone, which was a little like a siren. I didn’t so much hear it as feel that I was in its way.
“Play the machine gun,” Simidian yelled. “The .50 calibre.”
The report sounded as if it had come from a weapon the size of a backhoe. All around us, birds took to the air.
Heal was grinning. “Did you hear the brass shells hitting the ground?” he asked.
“If there’s crowds around, and they hear that, they’re going to disperse,” Simidian said.
We walked across the parking lot and into the warehouse. At the far end of the room was a microphone. Simidian gave me a pair of headphones, then he walked outside, so that the microphone was about eighty feet away from him. I stood with my back to him while he crushed a dry leaf, and I heard it as if it were in