Slip: Part 2

Perry waited in a small dim office with dark brown wainscoting walls. He sat on the other end of a wooden well organized desk in a chair that did little for his poor posture with a datapad on his lap. The room was decorated with military group photographs on a variety of air fields and launch pads. There was also a picture there of a lovely curly haired woman and a young blond haired boy smiling brightly.  He wondered if that was the general’s family; Helen refused to have children spouting excuses like widening hips and sagging breasts. Perry would have sawed off his right arm if it meant she would change her mind.

            He tapped his fingers against his pant leg, waiting. He had been in there for fifteen minutes already. Typical military meetings; they always made you wait. Perry wondered if it was an intimidation tactic.

            He flinched when the door finally opened and a tall bury man dressed in a dark blue officer’s uniform stepped inside. He took of his hat and placed it on the corner of the desk nodding to Perry, “My apologies, this place is a mad house.” He rounded the desk and took a seat rubbing his eyes. “I understand that you have a proposal you wish for me to see.”

            “Yes, General Law,” Perry said and took the reader off his lap, with the files already displayed on the screen, placing it on the desk. “I was cleaning up the central database and found some interesting files in the archives. They’re about twenty-five years old. If they’re right, I think they may solve the population problem here on Earth.”

            Law’s brow lifted then tightened, folding the lines on his forehead like waves.

            “These calculations may enable us to get to the proposed colonies faster than we ever thought possible, even before the seeder ships get there,” Perry explained. “The original notes were put together by someone named–”

            “Samuel Carter,” Law said.

            Perry paused staring across the desk. “You know the man?”

            “I knew him.” Law nodded.

            “This was brought up before? Twenty-five years ago?”

            “It was,” Law sighed.

            “Well–I mean–what became of it?”

            “It went under testing, and failed.”

            Perry gulped staring down at the folder. “But it seems so precise, the formulas are sound and–”

            “I was the one who buried it all those years ago,” Law remarked. “There was an accident. Carter was supposed to send a probe over, but, for some reason, he decided to go himself instead.”

            “And what happened?”

            Law shrugged palms up to the ceiling. “No one knows. He was sent with a small nullifier and was to send back word, but it never came. Samuel Crater disappeared. We probably won’t ever know what happened to him until the seeder ships get there and finally send back word. We won’t know for hundreds of years, if anyone is still alive by then.”

            “My God,” Perry breathed. “What of his family?”

            “Fortunately he didn’t have much besides work. He was married but they devoiced. The ex didn’t seem to care too much when she was told,” Law answered glancing at the photo on his wall a touch of sadness reflected in his eyes momentarily. “This happened just before I took over for my predecessor, General Hague. I buried the project and sent everyone onto new tasks. There’s no sense in wasting good minds like that.”

            “But–there’s no–no one knows what went wrong?”

            “Not as far as I know.”

            “But to bury this… If we could work out what went wrong, fix the errors maybe, we could make the impossible leap into space and grow.”

            “Don’t think that I don’t know that, but the risks are not something I wish to partake in.” Law said and jabbed his index finger at the notes. “Put these notes away and forget about it.”

            Perry sighed and reached forward to the datapad, switching it off.

*          *          *

            Once Perry returned to his office he reopened the file again; there was no way he was going to let this go. He wouldn’t make the same mistake Carter did; first he would send a probe.

Getting the equipment would be easy. A gravity nullifying field still wasn’t common technology, but it had twenty-five years to mature and constructing a smaller portable version than Crater had used was a simple affair in the lab; he had clearance to bring equipment home for diagnostics, so few eyes would notice him borrowing a few things.

            Helen was still mad at him when he got home, administering the silent treatment. She left as soon as he got in without a word, most likely to go for dinner with her snooty rich friends. All the better, now he could work free of nagging.

            He peered out the window as she got into the car with two of her girlfriends; there were two men in the back seat who smiled brightly as she stepped in. Perry had suspected that she was cheating on him for some time, but he tried not to reveal his suspicions. He was just some boring scientist after all; all she wanted a little excitement.

            He gulped back his pride and went down to the basement where he had a small makeshift lab. There he tossed the folder on his work bench, flicked on the lamp and pulled up a stool. He poured over the notes for several hours trying to determine what the problem was but came up empty handed. He tore himself away from the math and began setting up the null-field and designed a small probe to send to Grindious–C.

            He worked until daylight and opted to call in sick at the lab; his team was self-sufficient enough to operate without him for a day. He went upstairs for a coffee and noted that his wife’s heels weren’t at the front door; she hadn’t come home.

            He conducted a quick test of the null field and managed to launch an empty mug across the room accidently making it appear in mid air where it fell shattering on the floor. He stood over the mug and frowned. He thought for a moment that he had sent his favorite mug adorned with little grey alien faces but this one was adorned with flowers; one of Helen’s, he would have to make up a story to explain its disappearance.

            Perry went into the lab in the afternoon, zipped to the eyes with sugar laced coffee, and pretended to work on the mainframe while ducking out to collect components for his probe. He needed sampling tools, a camera and a simple AI core for running basic procedures. The equipment wasn’t bulky and he managed to stow it away in a small duffle bag. His tired red eyes helped people believe that he was fighting an illness and avoided much contact for the remainder of the day. By nightfall, most of his staff had left for the day making it easy for him to slip out with his borrowed gear.

            Helen had come home, the shoes she had worn the night before were in the front hall. Perry still wasn’t sure if she was in; she tended not to wear the same shoes more than once a month, but as he ventured into the kitchen she stood there smiling over her shoulder greeting him happily and began telling him about all these things she had seen in the shops that day. The conversation was very one-sided, in fact, Perry wasn’t sure if he got to say anything at all. He slid the duffle bag under the bar hoping that she wouldn’t notice it and sat down nodding periodically.

            She talked for about an hour about how she was doing and what she had been up to in the past day with elated energy. She must have been with one of those men last night to be in such a joyous mood; she seemed to even forget about their quarrel at the restaurant the other night. She finally retired into the den with a glass of cognac where she fell asleep from exited exhaustion. Perry slid a blanket over her wishing he was worthy enough to earn her affection then slid down to the basement to continue working.

             He assembled the probe by three AM and thought about going to bed briefly but realized he couldn’t bear the wait. He ate a few chocolate covered coffee beans and set up the experiment. He tested the probe, making sure everything was working, especially the null-field; without that, it wouldn’t be able to send back a data capsule.

            With everything in place Perry took a moment for several deep breaths and hesitated before the switch. He reached out and flipped on the null-field completely obliterating the probe’s mass, removing the superglue of the universe and opening the door to all things possible. The probe vanished.

            Perry sat at his desk wiping sweat from his brow. He glanced at the clock; ten minutes had passed. The probe should almost be done conducting its tests; it would need another fifteen minutes to prepare the data capsule.

            Half an hour ticked by and still Perry waited. The sun began seeping light through the small basement window.

He heard the door at the top of the stairs open. Helen yelled form above, “Have you been up all night again?”

            Perry almost jumped out of his skin. “Uh…N-no! I just got up. I just needed to get something down here for work, yeah…” he replied. He heard the faint hiss of cussing above as the door thumped shut.

            He lingered in the basement until she left to go pass judgment on someone’s living room decorations then kicked his stool to the ground. Where was the probe? It had been gone for four hours now. He rechecked the calculations but found nothing wrong. He spent an hour pacing the floor until the phone rang.

            Perry went upstairs and picked up the phone. “What?”

            “Sorry Doctor, we were just wondering if you were coming in today. Are you still feeling under the weather?”

            It was the lab. Perry blinked and stuttered, “Um…Yeah, uh…Sorry, it was a bad night. Yeah, I think I’m going to need the morning. I’ll try to come in this afternoon.”

            “Okay. General Law was looking for you, but I’ll tell him you’re home sick.”

            “Thanks.” Perry hung up. The General was not going to accept that he was home with a bug. Knowing military personnel, he was probably going to get a house call. If he was going to do something, he needed to do it quickly.

            He rushed back down to his work room and tapped at the desk thinking. He looked at the null-field. He needed another one, a portable one. He rummaged through his duffle bag for the spare he had taken from the lab and began modifying it so that it would fit in his pocket.

            As he worked, he wondered if this was what Carter had endured. Maybe he had sent a probe as well, met the same results, got fed up and went though himself…

            Perry completed the small handheld null-field and began programming coordinates. He paused blinking into space considering special relativity. If he instantaneously appeared at Grindious–C, he would be effectively be traveling back in perceived time. The light that fell to Earth from the Grindious system was hundreds of years old, its present-day status wouldn’t be known for three centuries. What if Grindious–C didn’t exist anymore? He would be appearing on either a dead world or in a vacuum.

            He shook his head. Such a thought was preposterous; the star was young and stable, it wouldn’t experience novae for billions of years. Something else was fudging the experiment, but what? What dangers lay three hundred light-years away?

            His hands were shaking. Perry was terrified. But then something happened that scared him more; there was a knock at the front door.

            Perry knew who that was; Law was here to check on him. Once he figured out what Perry had been doing in the basement behind the government and the military’s back, he was going to be brought up on charges, lose his job, probably be thrown in prison, and Helen would go off and find someone else with money, one of those goons she had been with the night before no doubt.

            Ruminating of a million possible catastrophes, his little trip didn’t seem as frightening. He activated the null-field and shut his eyes.