CHAPTER 7 - LEAP OF FAITH

BEFORE

Jessup, Maryland

Ansem signed off on the deal and they drove his truck away. He stood on his front lawn and took a deep breath. After they drove it off, he found that Rebecca had wandered over behind him.

Curious of what was happening to her neighbor she asked, “Where are they taking your truck, Mr. Weathers?”

“I sold it,” he said without a hitch. “And please,” he continued, now turning towards her, “call me Ansem.”

“What are you going to do now…Ansem..?”

“I bought my own warehouse in Montana, the largest shipping and receiving hub in the entire country.”

“Sounds expensive,” Rebecca tried to wrap her mind around it.

“Ought to….cost me about fifty million dollars.”

Rebecca’s jaw dropped so low it almost hit the grass. “I had no idea you were rich!”

“I’m not rich. I’m just a good saver.”

“How much have you saved up?”

“Close to a hundred million dollars.”

“Oh my god! You’re taking me out to dinner,” Rebecca demanded as she punched his chest playfully.

What?

Ansem started following her to the car. Rebecca turned around and laughed again, “Not right now; I’m going to work. But how about Saturday at eight?”

“Okay.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Rockefeller.”

“Oh, you can just call me, oh right– bye.”

Rebecca shook her head, still giggling as she got in her car and drove off.

Ansem stood in her front yard. He jumped up and down. Did he just? Was that? Did he really get a date for Saturday night with Rebecca, the love of his life? All he needed was a car. He had five days and millions of dollars to get a car before Saturday.

Ansem pulled into the restaurant with a brand new Mercedes-Benz. Rebecca loved it. For a second, on the car ride over to the restaurant, Ansem thought about giving her the car as a present. But in better judgment, he decided not to bring it up. Rebecca was having a good time so far on a date with her next door neighbor. The neighbor she knew practically nothing about. The guy who bought a brand new Mercedes for the date but wore the same old flannel shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans. Oddly enough she actually thought that was cute. Besides friendly banter and questions about the new Mercedes, they really didn’t have much to talk about.

“So, what ever happened to your parents? They were such sweet neighbors. I assumed they moved to Florida.” she began.

“My family-” Ansem paused. These words he could not put so easily into the air. “My parents are gone. My mother died of cancer and my father shortly after died of a heart attack.”

“Oh…” Rebecca gulped. “I’m so sorry to bring it up.”

“It’s okay. I decided not to have a service for them. They were only children. I’m an only child. No one would have come.”

“I would have come.”

“That’s true. I should’ve realized that. Well, in any case I’m glad you know about my past. Now you see me for who I am.”

Rebecca reached across the table of bread and water and held his hand. The top of his hand was patched with hair just as dark as the thick rug that claimed the top of his head and the brows above his eyes. Ansem had brown eyes to match his messy hair. His dark features were disarmed by an approachable demeanor, that plus the flannel shirt and blue jeans combo of course. Ansem’s fingers twitched and he looked at her like a lost puppy. Rebecca blushed. The surge of romantic awkwardness became too much for her to bear. She looked down at her white napkin, bright against the black of her dress. She looked back up at Ansem, into his eyes. The way he talked to her, it was as though they had been lifelong friends. Rebecca felt connected to Ansem, and it was only their first date.

They ordered dinner and enjoyed their meals. They chatted like old friends, enjoying each other’s company. The night was going quite nicely.

On the way home, Rebecca leaned back in her seat and moaned about how full she was. She arched her back, thrusting her chest forward in a stretch. It took Ansem every fiber of his being not to stare as he stole glances and started drifting the car out of lane. Rebecca noticed his perusal, and Ansem snapped his concentration back on the road and the car back on track.

“Easy tiger, don’t drive us off the road.”

“Sorry.”

“So, what really happened to your truck?”

“That’s a long story with a happy ending. What if I just told you that instead?”

“The ending?”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“It’s a really good one.”

“Okay.”

“I now own the biggest stake of manufacturing shares and the largest number of factories in the country. I’m worth over five hundred million dollars.” Ansem watched her reaction through the rear view mirror as he said it. He loved seeing people’s faces at the realization, not that there were many.

“Are you serious? I don’t buy it.”

“Oh, you don’t believe me? Marry me!”

Rebecca froze.

Ansem felt the room tense up. Maybe he had gone too far. What kind of rube mentions marriage on the first date? He had to play it off as a joke.

“I’m kidding.”

Rebecca did not look relieved.

“You should see your face right now.” He laughed.

Rebecca looked Ansem in the eyes. Ansem awkwardly looked away as he laughed until he realized he had to look back at her. They made eye contact and Rebecca laughed. She also quickly bit her bottom lip. It was subtle but Ansem saw it.

“Were you actually considering it?”

“Of course not,” said Rebecca, “You’re a crazy person.” She laughed nervously.

The door to Rebecca’s bedroom burst forth as they scrambled in, quickly making their way to the bed and peeling off each other’s clothes. Ansem was doing it. Living the dream he’d kept kindled in his heart for years. He was fulfilling his own desired destiny. This would go down as the best night of his life as he made love to Rebecca Pratt.

Manhattan, New York

Manhattan Tech looked closed for the night. The parking lot was empty. The timecards were sleeping in their holsters next to the clock. All for one slot. The one that matched the only window still lit.

Samuel had not left his laboratory for some time. His family was very much used to this by now. Both they and he knew he was on the verge of one of his breakthroughs. No intern or grad student could help him any further.

His co-workers had long given up on Dr. Chase’s theories. If it wasn’t for his small steps and pristine record, Samuel would have been kicked out of the scientific community years ago. After graduation, as he gained world renown for his proofs in nuclear physics , Samuel’s tastes had evolved. He had become fixated on theoretical physics. And then, overnight, he had gone from a scientist handling uranium to a professor pushing term papers.

He never lost his knack for the field though. Dr. Chase had only agreed to come to Tech because no other university would accommodate his demand for a lab. Although most of his work was done on his whiteboard, every so often the next step in his theories would call for a lab procedure or field experiment.

The first time Samuel had sat in his laboratory he’d a feeling. He knew this would be the place where he made history. Since then, he had faced much ridicule in the scientific community for his beliefs in tachyons and time travel. Everyone had considered the notions, but no one had ever tried to prove it. That was just career suicide. Once Samuel took up this mission, he knew he would have to sacrifice certain things, and so he had. He knew the last of them would be his integrity. Now that time was at hand and Samuel was pinched by his lurking failures to come up with a suitable formula.

Samuel sat up in his seat and stared down at his notes. It was an empty stare. Most of the equipment was off in the laboratory. He sat at his cluttered desk with only the light over him and the whiteboard turned on. The marker was almost spent, as most of it was on the board already in equation form. Samuel reached into the inner breast pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a golden pocket watch, an anniversary gift from his family. He clicked it open and admired the delicate motion of the hands. Even though he could not be with them as much as he wanted to, as much as they deserved, Samuel kept this memento close to him at all times, a reminder of their love, and everyone’s sacrifice.

Sam knew tachyons were integral in the equation, but he could not find a way to apply them without having the same effect as every other scientist who tested them. It was time to utilize his best tool, thinking outside of the box. Perhaps there was a second piece to this puzzle that he had never considered. What if the tachyons were nothing but a secondary effect?

The whiteboard was already busy with notes. With his sleeve, Same cleared some space and drew a circle. The squeaky marker etched ‘tachyons’ inside the circle. After a moment, he used his sleeve again to erase “tachyons” from the inside of the circle, then wrote it along the outside.

That’s it. He stepped back again and wondered what was to go inside the circle…

A week later, Samuel had completed schematics of what he named ‘the Tachyon Resonator,’ a device that turned the particles surrounding it into tachyons. The laboratory was now fully active in procedure mode as every available hand came in to help.

On the third day of manufacturing, the Tachyon Resonator was finished. In its prototype form it took up the majority of the laboratory. The only way they could successfully test it was by recreating Dr. Chase’s original sketch of a portable amplifier ring that turned everything inside the ring into tachyons.

The next step was to test the effect of the device on different items inside the room. They tried it on wood, metal, plastic, glass, meat, a fish, a mouse, even a chimpanzee. Nothing worked. The technicians shared their frustration and puzzlement at the failure, but Samuel knew what they would have to do to make it work as his theory predicted.

Dr. Chase waited until no one was looking, then accessed the automated features. He turned the locks off and started the tachyon reactor. Once it was charged enough he turned on the resonator. The particle rays started to filter into the room. Samuel abandoned the control panel and ran down the walkway toward the reactor’s entrance.

Alerted by their supervisor’s sudden sprint across the room, Samuel’sassistants and grad students looked around in confusion. Their confusion turned into terror when they realized what he was doing. Opening the doors to the test room would risk all their lives.

He slid inside and closed the doors just as the machine finished its start-up process and the vents opened to release the Tachyon Resonator’s sonic ring of ray-waves. Samuel stood in the center of the room, the only one within the rings, and this was what he saw…

A scattered grid of light, like a cascading graph aglow, vibrated as it approached him, netting his vision. It came at him slowly, gradually. When it touched him, the grid opened Samuel up from the inside and connected him to the outside. He was still in the Tachyon Reactor’s fishbowl, but now he could see both ends of the spectrum. Not the spectrum of colors but the wide array of what is seen and unseen in our scope of vision. Samuel saw everything from radio and gamma rays to the intrinsic fields that help atoms together. And then Samuel realized it was a reflection. He was on the outside looking in. Samuel was looking at his entire life in the confines of a cube. But when his eyes reached the present moment one great schism blocked his sight. Then everything went gray.

“Do I die?” he said from the floor as the vents cleared the room of particle rays.

Soon the doors opened, and his crew came in with the paramedics. Dr. Samuel Gordon Chase was rushed to the nearest hospital. By the time his wife arrived, he had slipped into a coma. The doctors were doing everything they could, but because of the unknown conditions of the accident they had little experience or knowledge on how to treat him.

Faced with the near-certain news that she was going to lose her husband, Vanessa demanded answers. When the fifth-year intern told her of the experiment, she broke into tears. She had always feared a day would come when her husband’s obsession with scientific understanding would make him put himself before his family.

Today, Vanessa’s worst fears had become reality. Samuel’s insatiable need to see and experience the fruits of his theory had endangered his own life and everyone around him, and she was helpless in the aftermath.

Please, Vanessa prayed, don’t let us lose everything.