CHAPTER 1 ALIVE WITH THE JOY

I am Professor Edgar Pelion and much alive with the joy of discovery. I have created a monster of sorts in my lab. Replicating a variety of things has been fun, but useless. The objects only last a few seconds, and then return to the place they came from, wherever that is. I need to be able to duplicate people and have them last. On the surface this seems pretty good, but nature has a way of teaching us not to meddle. This is my story.

It is morning and the window is open slightly.

The dining room window is open, there is a soft breeze and the sun has broken through the lacey curtains and is splashing on the table where I am drinking my morning coffee. A light gust comes through with just a whiff of lilac from the bush outside.

I mutter, “You just can’t keep your hands off that flower garden, can you, honey?”

Megan, sitting nearby responds softly, “I love living things and they are so beautiful.”

She stands and walks to the kitchen to prepare breakfast and I’m alone with my thoughts.

The brilliance of the sun plays on the white doily pattern in the tablecloth. Why do I hate the sun? It just seems to be overbearing somehow. The sun is too bright, too hot and always in my face, blinding me. Perhaps it’s because most of my life has been spent in laboratories, and as we call such people in the business of indoor sciences, I’m a lab rat.

I finish my coffee and join Megan in the kitchen. Even after all these years I look at her and the feelings of love come welling forth. How does a man come to deserve so much in return for so little?

Megan is a small woman standing just 5’ 3”. She has a shock of blond hair running through the black. This, in contrast with her bright blue eyes drives me with passion even just to look at her. I see her again and again as though for the first time.

Yet, I have another passion that drives me. I am consumed by the love of my work. These two passions do battle inside me creating a tempest in my heart. Two desires tugging at my life. How do I find time in a day to spend enough with both?

“I have to go, sweetie!” I shout on my way to the door.

She appears before me, intercepting my departure and throws her arms around my neck. She gazes into my eyes and I am melting inside. I do love her so.

She coyly smiles that innocent little princess smile of hers and says, “Can’t you stay for just an hour longer?”

I have a class to teach this morning and with an emotional storm front brewing inside of me, I head for work.

Being both a college Professor and a Scientist is one thing, but in the end, I’m just a guy.

Megan is a wonderful woman and being married to her has made my life complete. I’ve never told her how strange it is being a man in this frilly home she has created. In the end, she puts up with my quirks and I love her, so I just deal with the pinks and the laces.

I smile quietly to myself because it’s great being off the lecture schedule this week. I’m on the verge of success with my latest science project and feel that the lab is calling me. Sometimes I wish the classroom didn’t take up part of my morning. The students are waiting when I arrive and I can’t wait to get it over with so I can get back to the lab.

For several years I have theorized that all elements of time are not linear in nature. It’s a departure from the concept that the passage of time is a single linear event. My argument that time is fractural has been met with resistance by the science community. Now, at last, I have the proof I need to convert my theory into a repeatable physical effect.

Soon, the “Pelion Effect” will be added to the standard course material in physics.

I have created a machine that can take material objects and copy them to another location. Not like a teleporter that would move the object, but more like a replicator that would duplicate the object.

It turns out that duplicating an object in a replicator is more complicated than meets the eye, because in essence, there are more than three dimensions in play. The machine has to place the duplicate object in a specific point in time.

My colleges think I’m a bit off the wall with some of my opinions and that hurts. Still, I must keep my progress a secret until it’s completed. My career would be deeply impacted if someone else took my experiments and found the answers I am seeking before I do. Is anyone else working on replication? I don’t even know.

I find it a bit of a paradox that I open myself to sharing all I know with my students, and yet I’m guarded in the sharing of my knowledge with my peers. In one roll you’re a leader, while in the other you’re in competition.

Arriving in my lab, I slip into my lab coat. Sometimes I wonder why I wear a lab coat at all. The white smock doesn’t need to shield my clothing from contaminants. It isn’t cold in here.

It marks me as a lab-rat. It’s my lab-rat uniform. I laugh and look to see where I left off with my experiments yesterday.

Taking a small three inch brown clay pot, I placed it carefully on the dimensional refractor’s sample pedestal on the left side of the machine.

The receiver pedestal is identical to the sample pedestal and is on the right side of the machine. The dimensional replicator is my invention in progress.

It’s a mess of wires, project boards and electronics, but debugging the design has required constant modifications.

I flip the charger switch. The machine started to hum, indicator lights flickered and there is a loud bang. The bang is the sound made when an object displaces the air on the receiver pedestal.

There is the original brown clay pot on the sample pedestal, and an identical brown clay pot on the receiver pedestal. Now there are two clay pots and the scales mounted under the two pedestals confirm that the weight, or mass, is equal.

I have successfully sent a duplicate of an object twenty seconds into the future. And for twenty seconds, I have two objects, but the one that was advanced in time vanishes when the atomic structure goes unstable due to the time strains.

There is a loud thunder clap as air rushes to fill the void created as the vanishing duplicate of my clay pot on the receiver pedestal flickers and then vanishes.

“Damn!” I shout as the secondary pot disappears. The replicated object seems stable, as it appears twenty seconds after the transfer was initiated.

I turn to see the Dean standing behind me. I almost jump out of my skin.

“What the hell was that?” he asks.

“What was what?” I ask, answering a question with a question.

“Was there a pot on

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Robert Stetson
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 29.04.2015
ISBN: 978-3-7368-9219-4

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