Tempus Fugit – Part 2

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

“Devon, what was your genius’s name?” I asked.  “Bertram McKenzie.  He was originally from rural Maine and all the rest of his family were working class people who labored in the fishing and lumber industries.  But he had always had a mind that looked at things differently.  When he looked at a landscape of hills and trees his mind saw curves intersecting in geometric figures.  Everything was a jigsaw puzzle waiting for him to find the missing pieces.” said Devon.

I could see he had lost focus and was stewing over whatever loss he had suffered.  I said, “Had he made any progress on your FTL drive?”  Devon startled, then nodded, “Yes, yes, he had figured out a way to produce tachyons and use them to freeze time while a vessel moving at normal speed was translated across any distance in almost no time at all.  It had to do with a particular juxtaposition of different atomic environments adjacent to an electron flow.  Very thin layers of complementary metallic elements produced a surface against which time slipped by without aging what was enclosed in the field within the surface.

He had performed thousands of tests to perfect the environment needed.  He’d been sending out orders to a firm that did atom thickness vacuum metal vapor deposition work.  He’d built small test units with a number of crazy metallurgies.  Various platinum metals with layers of gold, tantalum, niobium and several other exotic elements sandwiched between in various geometric shapes.  Finally, he identified the perfect metallurgy.  There were even hollow spaces designed to allow cryogenic liquid hydrogen and helium to be pumped in.  With these as walls he built his miniature ship, about three feet long.  Inside he installed various generators to produce electric current and a control system to run the programs that his machines needed to perform.  It was fascinating.  The test program was to place the ship on a platform at the top of a cell tower and then when it disappeared, to immediately inspect a spot fifty miles away that lay in line with the rotation of the Earth from that spot.  The first fifty-three times the experiment was run absolutely nothing happened.  The ship stayed completely still.  But Bertram doggedly retrieved his test vessel and changed some of the parameters of the equipment or the program.  On the fifty fourth run the vessel disappeared.  It did not show up at the site it was meant to reach.  A careful inspection of the ground in between found it embedded in a tree about half a mile south of the expected line of motion.  The tree had been knocked down and the vessel was a flattened hunk of junk.  But it worked.  The concept had been proven.

Bertram’s budget was expanded asymptotically.  No expense was spared.  We got to work on a prototype that would be a craft one hundred feet long and capable of flight inside and outside of planetary atmosphere.  The work was done under the highest level of secrecy.  But somehow the secret leaked out.  Intelligence agencies around the world were buzzing with news that we had a star drive.  Washington was livid.  But what could they do?

Once the vessel was built and its first few trials to the Moon had been successfully run it was decided that the first exploratory mission would be to Pluto.  After all that was a good tune-up for a stellar mission.  I insisted on being aboard and since Bertram was game, I made sure he would be there too.  And after all, he might be needed for repairs.  The takeoff was a traditional aircraft ascent into the upper atmosphere, no gee force, no rapid climb.  When we reached a cruising height the field was built up and the program was activated.  It was the strangest feeling when the ship energized.  I could no longer hear the rush of the air against the outer skin of the vessel.  All I could hear was the hum of the drive.  But I also felt some strange sensory effects.  It was as if my skin became numb and I had a feeling of depression settle on my mind.  But when the drive shut off all the effects ceased.

When we uncovered the viewing window there was the strange heart-shaped vista of Tombaugh Regio visible on the surface of Pluto!  An unforgettable sight.  I sat there and stared for half an hour before I could believe it was true.  We had a star drive.  I congratulated Bertram and realized he hadn’t heard me.  He was doing some calibration measurements for the journey home and was singing lowly what sounded like the “Ride of the Valkyrie.”  When I floated closer to where he was sitting, I could make out the words, “Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit.”  He really was a strange man.  But he was also the greatest genius of all time.”

Tempus Fugit – Part 1

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

He was the richest man in the world by quite a lot but he looked like he had seen a ghost.  I had interviewed him several times and had always gotten along better with him than the rest of the journalists around.  Maybe because I had treated him the same whether he was schmoozing the Democrats or the Republicans.  And that was because I found him interesting.  And that was because he actually did stuff that was interesting.  He made personal helicopters and robot servants and had invented a cure for baldness.  He was a Thomas Alva Edison for the 21st century and he was always surrounded by a bevvy of super models.  What wasn’t to like?

But when I showed up at his office for our appointment the man looked stricken.  His face was completely colorless and his eyes were blank.  I had been let into his office and he was sitting at his desk but he was looking past me at the wall behind me.  After an uncomfortable minute I said, “Devon, should I come back another time?”

His eyes slowly shifted to my face and he shook his head, “No, you’re here.  Let’s talk.  What do you want to talk about?”  I said, “Well, I guess I’d like to know what happened to you?  Was there a tragedy in your family or with your friends?”

He thought about that for a bit and said, “Yes, in a way there was.  A very sad story.  But I’ll have to tell you the whole thing for it to make sense.  Why don’t you sit down.”  He opened up a drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up and said, “For the last ten years one of my government contracts has been a research project into a faster than light (FTL) space drive.  For five years we looked at all kinds of reasonable and crazy ideas and we found exactly nothing that was even remotely possible.  I hired every physicist that graduated from MIT or Cal-Tech and every single one of them came up with nothing.

But eventually I heard about a brilliant theoretician who was wasn’t working on space travel but instead had been investigating the fundamental basis of time.  He was attempting to find the tachyon, the basic particle underlying the phenomenon we call time.”

I said, “But Devon what would this research into time have to do with faster than light travel?”  His face showed a glimmer of life for the first time, “Because in the general theory of relativity it is assumed that time is just another dimension along with the three spatial dimensions.  If you can control time, you can control the speed at which the other dimensions are traversed.”

I nodded my head with a somewhat confused look on my face and he continued, “This time researcher was a very strange man.  He was in a sense, self-taught.  He had attended a state college as an undergraduate and done exceptional work in physics but he didn’t have the money to continue on as a graduate student so he dropped out and somehow found himself at work in my company as a laboratory technician.  I discovered that one of my labs was using an inordinate amount of electrical power and I traced it back to this fellow.  He was running his own experiments off-hours.  When I told his boss to fire him, he confessed that they’d be lost without him.  He had an astounding collection of skills with the advanced electronic and high energy equipment that was needed for this faster than light research so replacing him would take months and require hiring five or six separate technicians.  I relented but ordered that the pirate report to my office for “orientation.”  I wanted to meet this strange man.

And strange he was.  He was about thirty years old.  He was about six feet tall, brown curly hair and very thick glasses.  He had an intense expression as if he wanted to ask a question but didn’t know how to say it.  This sort of intrigued me so I tried to put him at his ease so that I could delve into his peculiar circumstances.  It turned out he was incredibly well versed in almost every aspect of general relativity and particle physics.  He had a theory about the speed of light and how it related to the “viscosity of time.”  He said that photons were laminar flow phenomena and what he was investigating was turbulent temporal flow.  I at first assumed he was completely crazy.  I later discovered I was wrong.”

05MAY2025 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them; and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn.

William Penn

Real and Compelling

photog Current Events, Literature, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner , , , ,

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been smugly telling myself that because of the recent cold weather I wouldn’t have to cut the grass until June or July or something.  But recent walks through the fields revealed the absurdity of this notion.  There were a couple-a-three spots that I neglected to cut at the end of last growing season and those areas were horrendous.  And the rest of it was overgrown to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether those areas get more or less light.

So, when I heard that Saturday would be sunny in the morning and rainy in the afternoon, I resolved Friday night to get up early and cut it in the morning.  Well, of course I forgot all about that because as a special treat, Camera Girl was making pancakes and that along with a good cup of coffee is a holiday to me.  After all, pancakes and syrup are just plain carbohydrates with no redeeming quality other than human joy.  But at a quarter to eleven I realized that I’d forgotten the grass and ran outside and started doing the perimeter with the push mower.  And it was eighty degrees and I was sweating like a pig and my safety goggles (for mayfly prevention) were fogging up and I had to keep stopping to clear them with my handkerchief.  And then I did all the crummy areas that wouldn’t get done right by the sit-down mower and by then it was noon.  So, I had my lunch and then ran out and started around the yard trying to finish it before the rain came.  And I did, but just barely.  Then I took a shower and put on a movie I like watching whenever it’s on TCM; “A Man for All Seasons.”

And this movie always has the same effect on me.  It makes me serenely happy.  Not because the movie has a happy ending.  Because at the end Sir Thomas More is convicted of a crime based on perjured testimony by a former friend and in the final scene he has his head cut off.  And not because the story is exciting or the events change the course of history.  It’s not.  It’s a very small story.

It’s only because the acting and the dialog of the lead actor and several of the other cast members is remarkable.  The conversations between the lead actor (Paul Scofield) with his family, friends and even bitter enemies is altogether compelling.  The character displays a combination of intelligence, compassion, honesty, moral clarity and courage that I find inspirational.  Here is a man who is trapped between an egocentric and possibly unhinged absolute monarch and the toadies and sharks that act as his enablers, but remains faithful to his religious convictions.  As long as lawful means are employed, More is able to hold off a charge of treason.  But his most malevolent enemy (Thomas Cromwell, played ably by Leo McKern) finally employs perjury and this seals More’s fate.

But as interesting as the final duel at the trial is, the real payoff is More’s final meeting with his wife in the prison.  Seeing these two opposites, one a highly intellectual scholar and the other a woman who could not even read, is wonderfully moving.  As she scolds him for his failure to yield and he attempts to placate her we see the enormous affection and love between them and understand just how much he is sacrificing for his beliefs.

And as I was watching this familiar movie it occurred to me that here was a story that had none of the attributes that supposedly make a good piece of art.  It was backward-looking rather than forward.  It was basically a grievance story.  It lacked action, pacing or any of the other characteristics of a book or movie that makes them promising prospects.

What it did possess was human interest.  It showcased the noble characteristics of a man and allowed him to make a stand against the world.  So, in a sense, a book does not have to have the perfect plot and pacing.  What it needs are human beings who can make us believe they are real and make us care what happens to them.

And that way of writing a story seems clearer to me than the other ways of framing the process.  I think I’ll apply that same test to my own writing.  Seems about right.