7
Wednesday, April 25, 1792 – 11:23 p.m.
Fairhurst Castle, England
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The appearance of an unfathomable, indescribable seven-foot, color-changing, soundless, textureless, yet perfectly balanced and perfectly pressurized hovering bubble in an unknown, underground laboratory of Fairhurst Castle aroused the suspicions of no one since no one was around whose suspicions would be aroused. The castle sat on a hill overlooking the rocky cliffs of Penzance, Cornwall, England at the end of the eighteenth century. As had been the case in both Egypt and off the coast of Florida on two different occasions at two different times in history, the sudden materializing of this strange sphere once again occurred at a time and in a place in which no eyewitnesses were present to describe or analyze its’ strange composition and its’ ethereal presence.
The bubble, once again, hovered two feet above the floor and stayed in perfect harmony with its’ surroundings. Having changed color from a beautiful violet to crimson red, the glow of the bubble illuminated the room to such an extent that it looked like a dark room used to develop photographic film. As it hung there in midair, it suddenly began to shrink in size. The shrinkage occurred in perfect synchronization from all extremities. No portion of the bubble collapsed or shrank faster than another part. It all began to diminish in size at the exact same rate. The collapse of the bubble not only occurred in its’ diameter, but also in its’ volume. As it shrank, its’ entire substance shrank. It was as if it had been deflated, but not in such a way that it would collapse in on itself unevenly the way a basketball or volleyball might. Its’ collapse was completely equal and perfect when viewed from any angle. The strange sphere continued to collapse until it was the size of a marble at which point it simply ceased to exist. In an attempt to describe the collapse and the ultimate demise of the sphere, one might poorly compare it to the way a picture on the cathode ray tube of an early television set would shrink from a picture to a line and then ultimately to a dot in the middle of the screen before blinking out of existence. Although similar, the bubble was a three-dimensional object that collapsed. It wasn’t anything like the picture on a TV set that existed in a two-dimensional setting. The total period for the bubble’s collapse from its’ original seven foot diameter to the size of a marble took no more than five seconds.
When the bubble/marble disappeared from sight, a man suddenly appeared where the bubble had been. He didn’t hover like the bubble, but rather stood solidly on the stone floor of the ancient room. Unlike the bubble, this man had substance, he moved, he breathed, he lived. Looking quickly around the now darkened room, straining to see or hear any movement of any kind, the man cautiously and carefully removed a flashlight from his backpack and turned it on. As the beam of light cut a swath through the darkness, its’ energy in the form of photons was reflected off the surface of a myriad different objects. Scintillating spikes of colorful light filled the room as the light beam came in contact with test tubes and beakers filled with colored liquids, bright flashes of silver briefly illuminated the air as metal table tops and electronic equipment appeared and then disappeared from sight when the light beam passed over them and farther corners of the room devoured the light leaving only patches of inky blackness wherein the contents of such could not be ascertained or imagined. Having quelled his suspicions that someone else might be present, Mack Goddard moved across the room to the other side where he turned on the temporary lights which he had set-up on previous visits. Confident that his secret was still intact and that he was totally alone, Mack once again began working on his secret scientific experiment.
Working on science projects made Mack ecstatic. He was a real-to-life science buff. He always had been. In high school, he had gone above and beyond the requirements in his chemistry and physics classes, and in college, his ambitions didn’t go unnoticed by the other students or professors. His love of mathematics was as obvious as two plus two equals four and everywhere he went, he was always making some remark about the mathematics involved in some man-made object or naturally formed one. At times, his friends had to tell him to “shut-up” because they’d had enough. For Mack, though, this was his life. This is what relaxed him, kept him going, gave him meaning. His mind was always working, always racing. In fact, it’s doubtful that it ever rested. Even in sleep, Mack was working out math problems, dissecting scientific abnormalities and anomalies, re-working impossible-to-solve centuries-old scientific puzzles and trying to piece together what other scientists claimed were “impossible quirks of Mother Nature.” Mack thrived on mental exercise. Although he wasn’t fond of physical exercise, he nevertheless ate right and kept himself more fit than the average person. Because of that, his waking hours were usually 18-19 hours per day. His need for sleep was minimal, so staying up into the wee hours of the morning wasn’t uncommon. In fact, many times some of his best work both mentally and physically was done late at night or early in the morning. Consequently, his arrival in the underground lab at 11:23 p.m. wasn’t out of the ordinary.
Tonight, Mack was planning on perfecting and completing his secret experiment. He’d been working on it for more than a year, and now it was finally coming to fruition. This experiment was being funded and backed by the government as a new weapon to be used against the sudden and more apparent rise in terrorism. Because of this rise, the government was taking no chances in its’ ability to stop or prevent any enemy from entering its’ borders uninvited. Thus, they had secretly hired Mack as an independent contractor to carry out this experiment and to have it perfected within 18 months. Having come to know of Mack’s abilities, and having seen the work he had done in both high school and college, Mack had gained the respect of many high-ranking government officials as well as some of the top minds in the scientific world. Mack’s name among them was almost universal. Now, today, Mack smiled to himself knowing he was ahead of schedule and knowing that he was about to add the final touches necessary to complete his project.
Before Mack’s current endeavor, he had spent over 3 ½ years working on one of those “impossible quirks.” That quirk had been the ability to travel through time. In this endeavor however, Mack had had many failed experiments. He had lost or badly damaged many objects, including animals. Because of his inability to understand the molecular and atomic construction of living and non-living things around him and because he didn’t fully grasp the significance or relationships of the four basic forces of the physical world, Mack found that the outcome of his experiments often resulted in a pile of dead tissue rather than the reconstructed bodies of living or non-living things. Throughout the many months of experimentation, Mack often felt that he had taxed his mental capabilities beyond their limits. In the end, however, Mack overcame the many obstacles that prevented him from perfecting time travel and he finally triumphed. This greatest of all scientific discoveries, was one that he had told no one about. It was his and his alone. In fact, as far as the government was concerned, he was currently working on his newest experiment in an unknown and hidden laboratory in the Gobi desert. Little did they know that he was actually in England just a few years after the United States existed as a country. He wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t bother him, follow him or try to ascertain how he would accomplish the task they had asked of him. By his traveling through time, he solidified that desire.
Mack called his means of traveling through time his Bubble Chamber. He figured that that was an appropriate name since a scientific bubble chamber is a device for detecting charged particles and other radiation by means of tracks of bubbles left in a chamber filled with liquid hydrogen or other liquefied gas. In his case, however, he considered himself the bubble that was leaving tracks, not through some medium such as liquid hydrogen or liquefied gas, but rather through the vast and uncharted medium of time and space. Moreover, as he had proved repeatedly to himself, it worked. In fact, it worked so well, that he was undetectable to any current means of measuring time and space that scientist had come up with. His bubble caused no disturbance in the space-time continuum, affected no laws of physics in any detrimental way, distorted nothing that it came in contact with and left no trace of itself as having ever been wherever it had gone. Because it was a sphere, the outward pressure on the bubble’s surface was perfectly equal. Therefore, no matter where or when Mack would travel through time, the bubble was able to handle any differences or distortions that might occur because of his manipulating the fabric of space and time. In fact, his Bubble Chamber possessed the same characteristics as that of a neutrino. The neutrino’s ability to travel through any substance without affecting anything was another of those “impossible quirks of Mother Nature” that scientists were still trying to understand. As to the exact details of the Bubble Chamber’s construction that was a secret that Mack would keep locked away in the inner recesses of his mind. It was his secret, and his alone.
Getting back to his work at hand, Mack Goddard’s mind began to juggle and manipulate formulas and numbers, to analyze chemicals and their reactions to each other, to examine the laws of physics and human physiology, to dissect animal and plant life and to scrutinize the various space/time interactions which he was able to control and understand more and more each time that he traveled through time. His feverish pace and deep concentration of the matters at hand kept Mack occupied until well into the early morning hours. Yet, as he worked, he thought nothing of the castle that sat overhead nor of the woman who slept there.
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